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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
A two-year-old Nigerian boy who was found emaciated and riddled with worms after his family left him for dead has made an incredible recovery.

The picture of the starving toddler being given a sip of water by an aid worker broke hearts around the world when it was first published in January.

The boy, now called Hope, was abandoned by his family because they thought he was a witch and was found in the streets by a Danish woman living in Africa, on January 31. And now the care worker released a series of photographs showing Hope's miraculous recovery in just eight short weeks, and says he "is really enjoying life now".
PYONGYANG, April 2 -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Saturday denounced the UN Security Council for dismissing its call for convening a meeting to discuss ongoing U.S.-S.Korea joint military exercises.

The UN Security Council is "turning a blind eye to U.S. nuclear threats to the DPRK," the official KCNA news agency reported.

The DPRK presented a letter to the Security Council late March, calling for holding an urgent meeting on the U.S.-S.Korea annual joint war games code-named "Key Resolve" and "Foal Eagle," which, a spokesperson for the DPRK Foreign Ministry said Saturday, was ignored by the Security Council.

Pyongyang has said that the military exercises, with their large scale and aggressive nature, constitute a grave threat to the DPRK, disturb international peace and stability, and violate respect for state sovereignty.

The spokesperson also said that the DPRK will further strengthen its self-defensive deterrent "capable of frustrating U.S. nuclear threat, blackmail and provocation."

On March 7, South Korea and the United States began their joint annual war games of "Key Resolve" and "Foal Eagle." The "Key Resolve" exercise ended last month, but the "Foal Eagle" field training exercise is scheduled to last till April 30.

Pyongyang has repeatedly denounced the U.S.-South Korea military exercises as a dress rehearsal for northward invasion.
BEIJING, April 3 -- At the fourth and final nuclear security summit in Washington, world leaders have reached consensus on pushing ahead with a more robust global nuclear security architecture, vowing to make continued endeavors to tackle the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Friday that new threats and challenges keep emerging in the security field, that the root causes of terrorism are far from being removed, and that nuclear terrorism remains a grave threat to international security.

He said that a more robust global nuclear security architecture featuring fairness and win-win cooperation is the prerequisite for the sound development of nuclear energy.

Experts believed that the world has long recognized the need to stem nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism through international coordination, especially cooperation between nuclear powers.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM THREAT

Global nuclear security has become more challenging than ever as brutal attacks by the Islamic State and other organizations are on the rise, raising the specter of catastrophic nuclear terrorism if violent extremists get control of dangerous nuclear or radiological materials, said Sam Nunn, CEO of Nuclear Threat Initiative, an anti-proliferation watchdog.

Belgian police found a surveillance recording of a researcher at a Belgian nuclear center, when they searched the home of a suspected IS member after the Paris terror attacks in November. It was thought to be part of a plot to capture nuclear materials from the center.

"The threat of nuclear and radiological terrorism remains one of the greatest challenges to international security, and the threat is constantly evolving," reads a communique released at the end of the summit.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 442 incidents involving unauthorized acquisition of nuclear materials and related illegal acts and 714 cases of loss or theft of fissile materials have been reported to the UN nuclear watchdog by the end of 2014.

Moreover, the IAEA said recently that nearly 2,800 incidents involving radioactive materials out of regulatory control have been reported to the IAEA by member states since 1995.

ALL-WIN NUCLEAR SECURITY ARCHITECTURE

The summit communique pointed out that countering nuclear and radiological terrorism demands international cooperation and that international cooperation can contribute to a more inclusive, coordinated, sustainable, and robust global nuclear security architecture for the common benefit and security of all.

To promote international cooperation in nuclear security, Xi put forward a five-point proposal at the summit, including the building of a network for capacity building on nuclear security and supporting all countries in minimizing the use of highly enriched uranium according to their needs.

Jin Canrong, vice president of the School of International Studies at China's Renmin University, said international cooperation is needed to address nuclear security issues, and the key lies in cooperation between major countries.

He commended China-U.S. cooperation as a good example, referring to the Center of Excellence on Nuclear Security in Beijing, the largest of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, which will provide a forum for bilateral and regional best-practice exchanges, and serve as a venue for demonstrating advanced technologies related to nuclear security.

Ruan Zongze, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies, holds similar views, saying the most important thing is international cooperation and coordination, as one country alone could not block theft and trafficking of nuclear materials.

Back in 2014, Xi pointed out that "the amount of water a bucket can hold is determined by its shortest plank. The loss of nuclear material in one country can be a threat to the whole world." Therefore, he said that increased cooperation is beneficial to all nations.

Jin warned that double standards should be avoided in the cooperation of peaceful use of nuclear energy between developed and developing countries, adding that political fairness is important.

Participants from 52 countries and four international organizations support the essential responsibility and the central role of the IAEA in strengthening the global nuclear security architecture and in developing international guidance.

The leaders also promised to implement the five action plans attached to the communique in support of the IAEA, the United Nations and other three international organizations and initiatives that reflect the political will of participating states.

The consensus among world leaders on the role of the IAEA and other international organizations will help build an enhanced global nuclear security architecture, Ruan said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

When Azerbaijan tries to solve the Nagorno-Karabakh issue peacefully within the territorial integrity, Armenia always resorts to provocations, Rovshan Rzayev, Azerbaijani MP, member of the board of the "Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan" public association, told reporters April 2.

Rzayev was expressing his attitude to the recent ceasefire violation by the Armenian forces.

He said that despite the talks are underway as part of the OSCE Minsk Group, the Armenian side does not comply with the ceasefire regime.

"The conflict settlement is delayed as a result of the Armenian policy of occupation and aggression," he said. "Therefore, these attacks must be immediately prevented. The OSCE Minsk Group must intensify its activity."

"The peace talks must be continued," he said. "International organizations must express their attitude to this issue. The ceasefire regime must be restored. Otherwise, the conflict can escalate.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the morning of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

By Samir Ali - Trend:

Armenians have always resorted to provocations against Azerbaijan and continue the policy, Bakhtiyar Aliyev, Azerbaijani MP, told Trend April 2.

He said that whenever at the international events Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stresses the importance of the negotiations for achieving peace, Armenia resorts to such provocations.

"The recent provocation against Azerbaijan is an extremely brazen action," the MP said.

"Armenians fired on Azerbaijani civilians and then they began accusing Azerbaijan."

"Unfortunately, certain forces supporting Armenia's position also had an influence," he said. "I think that Azerbaijan must thoroughly inform the whole world and all international organizations about this provocation and urge to take serious measures against Armenia."

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the morning of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
The United States strongly condemns the violation of the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh region and calls on the conflicting sides to show restraint since the military approach is not an option to settle the issue, US State Secretary John Kerry said, according to Sputnik.

"The United States condemns in the strongest terms the large-scale ceasefire violations along the Nagorno-Karabakh contact line, which have resulted in a number of reported casualties, including civilians," Kerry said in a statement.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

British MP, member of the UK-Azerbaijan interparliamentary friendship group Bob Blackman made a statement in connection with the violation by Armenia of the ceasefire on the contact line in Nagorno-Karabakh, The European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS) told Trend.



He said that tension has been simmering on the contact line for many months. "Now it seems that full-scale fighting has broken out. The United Nations must step in and ensure that the Armenian forces withdraw from Azerbaijani territory as instructed by their own Security Council resolutions number 822, 853, 874 and 884", Blackman added.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 3

Trend:

The United States condemns in the strongest terms the large-scale ceasefire violations along the Nagorno-Karabakh Line of Contact, which have resulted in a number of reported casualties, including civilians, said in press statement of Secretary of State John Kerry on April 2.

"We extend our condolences to all affected families. We urge the sides to show restraint, avoid further escalation, and strictly adhere to the ceasefire. The unstable situation on the ground demonstrates why the sides must enter into an immediate negotiation under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs on a comprehensive settlement of the conflict", said in statement.

The US reiterate that there is no military solution to the conflict.

"As a co-chair country, the United States is firmly committed to working with the sides to reach a lasting and negotiated peace", said in statement.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 3

Trend:

The situation remains tense on the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops, Vagif Dargahli, spokesman for the Azerbaijani defense ministry, told Trend.

He said that the Armenian armed forces were firing on the positions of the Azerbaijani armed forces in the direction of Terter, Fizuli, Agredere districts and settlements with the civilian population April 2 night.

The Azerbaijani side suffered no losses, the statement said.

The Azerbaijani armed forces continue monitoring the situation on the contact line.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

Following reports of increased fighting along the line of contact in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Ilkka Kanerva (MP, Finland) and the OSCE PA Special Representative on the South Caucasus, Kristian Vigenin (MP, Bulgaria), called for an immediate cessation of hostilities April 3, a statement posted on the OSCE website said.

"This fighting must stop," the statement said. "The Nagorno Karabakh conflict has taken far too many lives for far too many years now. We call on all sides to immediately cease fire and to exercise maximum restraint to avoid any further escalations."

Kanerva and Vigenin reiterated their full support for the OSCE Minsk Group and their efforts to find a peaceful solution, the statement said.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

The Azerbaijani armed forces neutralized 10 Armenian tanks and killed many servicemen on the contact line between two countries' troops, the Azerbaijani defense ministry said April 3.

Armenia continues escalating the situation despite the agreement on the resumption of the ceasefire at Russia's initiative and mediation April 2 at 15:00 (UTC/GMT +4 hours).

"While Azerbaijan was complying with the ceasefire conditions, Armenia prepared more military equipment in the occupied territories and tried to return the positions and territories liberated from occupation," the statement said. "As a result, some 10 Armenian tanks, as well as many servicemen were neutralized."

As a result of preventive measures carried out by the Azerbaijani armed forces, Armenia's actions in this regard were prevented. The Armenian armed forces intensively shelled the settlements near the contact line of troops and non-military civilian facilities.

The Azerbaijani defense ministry ordered the armed forces' units to retaliate against Armenia's positions in the occupied territories if Armenia does not cease shelling the country's settlements.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces at night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

Taking into account the international organizations' appeals, Azerbaijan unilaterally suspended the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia, the statement posted on the Azerbaijani defense ministry's website said.

The Azerbaijani defense ministry decided to strengthen the defensive positions of the liberated territories.

"If the Armenian armed forces do not stop provocative actions and continue shelling the residential areas and combat positions, the Azerbaijani armed forces will continue offensive operations to destroy the Armenian forces to liberate the occupied lands," the statement said. "The offensive operations will be continued to ensure Azerbaijan's territorial integrity by using all available military equipment."

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces at night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

Azerbaijan calls for the international community to demand from Armenia to withdraw its troops from all occupied lands and to engage constructively in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement process, the Azerbaijani foreign ministry said.

On April 2, 2016 Armenia targeting civilians densely residing in the territories adjacent to the frontline area opened intensive heavy weapons fire at the positions of Azerbaijan's armed forces along the line of contact.

As a result of artillery attacks of Armenian armed forces a number of civilians were killed and seriously wounded. Substantial damages were also inflicted upon the private and public properties, the statement said.



The armed forces of Azerbaijan have taken the necessary counter measures within its internationally recognized borders to ensure the safety of civilian population, to stop the provocations of Armenia and to deter it from further acts of aggression. Currently, the situation remains tense. Shelling of Azerbaijan's positions along the contact line with heavy weapons, including with artillery continues.



Armenia in an attempt to reinforce its heavy artillery in the occupied territories deploys additional rocket and artillery forces and its military helicopters conduct intensive shuttle flights between occupied territories and Armenia, the statement said.



Over the past years such violations and armed provocations of Armenia by attacking and killing Azerbaijani military personnel as well as civilians with the use of mortars and large-caliber machine guns and artillery have become more frequent and violent.



Armenia's desperate attempts to blame Azerbaijan for the escalation of the situation in the frontline aimed at misleading its own people and the wider international community, the statement said.



Azerbaijan has repeatedly brought to the attention of the international community that the illegal presence of Armenian armed forces in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan remains a main cause for the escalation of situation and continues to pose threat to the regional peace and stability.

Armenia, by consistent provocations and escalation of the situation, strengthening of its military build-up in the occupied territories, illegally changing the demographic, cultural and physical character of the seized lands, engaging in unlawful economic and other activities, including transfer of Armenian population into these territories pursues an apparent goal of annexation of Azerbaijan's territories and consolidating the status-quo, which is unacceptable and unsustainable as it was also stated by the heads of states of OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, the statement said.

It is Armenia that also blocks all initiatives of OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, including the recent proposals of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to derail the negotiation process. It once again proves that the official Yerevan is not genuinely interested in seeking a political settlement of the armed conflict.



The fundamental basis for the settlement of the conflict is laid down in the United Nations Security Council resolutions 822(1993), 853(1993), 874(1993) and 884(1993) and the U.N. General Assembly resolution 62/243 (2008), which condemn the use of force against Azerbaijan and occupation of its territories and reaffirm the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and the inviolability of its internationally recognized borders, the statement said.

In those resolutions, the United Nations reaffirmed that the Nagorno-Karabakh region is an inalienable part of Azerbaijan and demanded immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces from all occupied territories of Azerbaijan.



The military occupation of the territory of Azerbaijan does not represent a solution and will never produce a political outcome desired by Armenia. The sooner Armenia reconciles with this reality, the earlier the conflict will be resolved and the countries and peoples in the region will benefit from the prospects of cooperation and economic development, the statement said.



Azerbaijan calls the international community to demand from Armenia to cease the illegal occupation of Azerbaijan's territories, to withdraw its troops from all seized lands and to engage constructively in the conflict settlement process in accordance with the requirements of relevant resolutions of the UNSC and the norms and principles of international law.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 3

Trend:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is concerned about the humanitarian impact of fighting along the line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh, which has seriously deteriorated on 2 April 2016.

Casualties reported on both sides included civilians.

"We are ready to assist and support those affected by the recent escalation of fighting, as well as to act as a neutral intermediary between the parties", said Patrick Vial, head of the operations for the region.

"All sides to the conflict have an obligation to respect the rules of international humanitarian law. As per these rules, the parties must ensure that civilian life and infrastructure is protected", he added.

The ICRC has been present in the region since 1992 in relation to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Through the delegations in Baku and Yerevan and the mission in Nagorno-Karabakh, the ICRC supports communities living along the line of contact and international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In addition, the ICRC works to clarify the fate of missing persons and help their families, visits detainees and acts as a neutral intermediary to facilitate transfer and repatriation of persons released on both sides of the border and line of the contact.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

An hour ago the Armenian side continues its provocations, shelling of Azerbaijan's positions along the contact line with heavy weapons, the head of executive power of Agdam district Ragub Mammadov told Trend.

According to him, at this point situation is relatively quiet.

"Mortar shells, which fell in the village Sarijali destroyed part of the school. In the same village a shell destroyed one another house. In the village Gadzhituraly shell destroyed another house. There were no casualties", Mamedov said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

Azerbaijani military shot down Armenian drone in the direction of Azerbaijan's Fizuli district, Azerbaijan's defense ministry said Apr. 3.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces at night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

Armenian armed forces have broken the ceasefire with Azerbaijan on the frontline in Fuzuli, Terter and Aghdam districts, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan told Trend.

According to the ministry, the fighting currently continues.

Earlier Azerbaijan unilaterally suspended the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia, in accordance with request of international structures.

On the night of Apr. 2, all frontier positions of Azerbaijan were exposed to heavy fire from large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns. In addition, Azerbaijani settlements near the frontline densely populated by civilians were shelled.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces at night of Apr. 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the shootouts.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 4

Trend:

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada Stephane Dion calls for restraint in Nagorno-Karabakh.

"Canada is concerned by the recent escalation of violence between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. We call on all sides to show restraint, immediately return to a true ceasefire, and actively resume dialogue within the framework of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group. Canada firmly believes that there is no alternative to a peaceful, negotiated solution to this conflict.", web site of the Ministry reported.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 4

Trend:

"I am extremely worried at the reports of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and deeply saddened at the loss of life yesterday", said Pedro Agramunt, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. "I call on both sides to honour the cease-fire and swiftly resume negotiations towards a peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict", PACE website reported.

Recalling that both Armenia and Azerbaijan committed themselves, when joining the Council of Europe in 2001, to use only peaceful means for settling their conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Agramunt urged both governments to refrain from using violence and welcomed the news of a unilateral cease-fire reportedly announced by the Azerbaijani authorities.

Agramunt also called for "the withdrawal of all Armenian armed troops from occupied Azerbaijani territories in compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions."

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

By Aygun Badalova  Trend:

French senator Nathalie Goulet calls for an immediate meeting of the UN Security Council to condemn the Armenian aggression aggression against Azerbaijan.

"I strongly condemn the Armenian provocation. And I strongly regret about

the lack of the Minsk Group co-chairs' attention to the conflict," Goulet told Trend on April 3.

Using the "frozen conflict" terminology is the reason for the status quo to remain in place, she believes.

And as a matter of fact the frozen conflict has a frozen solution, Goulet said.

"As a strong support of the people of Azerbaijan, I call for an immediate meeting of the UN Security Council to condemn the Armenian aggression," Goulet said.

"After so many years of occupation it's time to find a solution. The world doesn't need a new battle field in the South Caucasus," Goulet said.

"We may ask all the proxy involved, including Iran, to help to find a fair solution and stop the Armenian occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh," Goulet added.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

Armenia conducted another armed provocation against Azerbaijan April 2 overnight, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said at a meeting of the country's Security Council April 2.

The president added that the provocation has not been conducted for the first time.

President Aliyev said that such a provocation was carried out in the Qazakh district on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The president added that as a result, two Azerbaijani servicemen were killed.

"A deserving response was given to the Armenian armed forces," the president said. "Armenia was put in its place."

He further said that a proper response was given by the Azerbaijani army during a provocation from the Armenian side on April 2.

"Armenia suffered a devastating blow, and huge losses," said the president.

President Aliyev pointed out that moreover, Azerbaijani servicemen not only prevented the provocation, but also took more favorable military positions.

He said that Azerbaijan's superiority on the contact line has strengthened even more.

"As a result of the military operation, I would like to stress that it was carried out as a response to the provocation, Azerbaijan gained a great military victory," said the president. "On this occasion, I would like to congratulate Azerbaijani army and all people of the country."

President Aliyev expressed confidence that Armenia's further provocations will not remain unanswered and an adequate response will be given.

The president said that Azerbaijani servicemen protect and fight for the homeland, become martyrs, and memory of them will forever live in people's hearts.

"The reason for Armenia's actions is not a secret for me," the president said. "I have repeatedly expressed my opinion in this regard to the public of Azerbaijan, the mediators, the presidents of the mediating countries. Armenia does not want peace. Armenia does not want to withdraw its troops from the occupied territories. It is trying everything to maintain the status quo."

"A lot of evidence can testify to these words," the president said. "The negotiation process has been going on for over 20 years. Armenia always resorted to provocations in the decisive moments during these 20 years."

"The Armenian side always created tension on the contact line," the president said. "At the same time, a terrorist attack committed in the Armenian parliament at the end of the last century was aimed at preventing a possible agreement on the conflict and thus preserving the status quo."
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

If someone calls the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict "frozen", they are completely wrong, said in an interview with AzTV channel Novruz Mammadov, deputy head of Azerbaijani presidential administration, chief of the administration's foreign relations department.

The international community, all organizations, OSCE Minsk group co-chair countries should take steps to resolve the conflict, Mammadov said.

He added that Azerbaijan will not tolerate Armenia's provocations.

It's been 25 years since Armenia occupied Azerbaijan's territories, holds military exercises there and shells Azerbaijani villages, Mammadov said.

"This is unacceptable," he said. "This is no frozen conflict and this conflict must soon find its solution."

Mammadov noted that the OSCE and the international organizations are very passive in finding the solution to the Karabakh conflict.

"There are reasons for that," he said. "On one side, the co-chairs have monopolized the entire process, and what they do is send out open messages to other organizations and even countries not to get involved."

Mammadov said that the latest provocations of the Armenian side on the contact line once again show the shortcomings in the policy pursued by the OSCE Minsk group co-chairs.

"Armenia uses this, takes provocative steps, trying to attract attention," Mammadov said. "Once again, I repeat, our territories cannot remain under occupation forever. We will never settle for that, thus Armenia has to stop similar provocations."



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.
Tehran, Iran, April 2

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

The Iranian Offshore Oil Company (IOOC) signed 85 contracts in the past Iranian fiscal year (March 21, 2015 to March 19, 2016), according to the company's Contracts Affairs CEO Salman Khosravi.

He added the contracts included projects in operational, developmental, construction, and service areas and 70 of them were signed with Iranian partners, SHANA news agency reported April 2.

The 85 contracts plus 120 tenders were worth a total value of 6.4 trillion rials (about $212 million) and 700 million.

The tenders, 93 percent of which were held publically, saw a rise of 20 percent in number compared to the preceding year, he said, adding however that they experienced a decline of 45 percent in terms of the total value sold.

He said the decline can be attributed to the competitive nature of the tenders, plunging oil prices (which decreased the cost of some services), as well as lack of budget needed for some of the projects which kept them from being implemented.

The IOOC is a large offshore oil producing company which shares one third of Iranian oil export, operating in Iranian side of the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea.

The company has deployed most of its drilling rigs in Salman (shared with the UAE) and Foroozan (shared with Saudi Arabia) joint oil fields. Currently three of IOOC's drilling rigs are operating in Salman, Iran's joint oil field with Iraq.
Tehran, Iran, April 3

By Mehdi Sepahvand -- Trend:

Pakistan's relations with Iran are friendly and highly important, Pakistan's Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar said at a press conference.

Chastising some Pakistani news outlets for raising claims of espionage against Iran, Nisar underlined that Tehran has stood by Islamabad in harsh times, IRNA news agency reported April 3.

He warned that unfriendly statements by his country's media may endanger Pakistan's national interests.

On Thursday, Islamabad asked Tehran to hand over details of the arrested former Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, accused of sabotage and terrorism by Pakistan.

Pakistan claimed the arrested person was affiliated to Indian intelligence services but had been based in Iran's Chabahar Port to launch attacks on Pakistan.

But Chaudhry asserted that the arrested person is not related to Iran in any way, adding, "I ask the media not to tie this issue to the good relations that exist between Iran and Pakistan."

The Iranian embassy in Pakistan in response to the media claims had stressed friendly ties with Pakistan, adding that media controversy over the alleged origins of an arrested spy would disturb the existing atmosphere between the two neighbor countries.

"The embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran believes spreading of such news is the product of thinking which does not like further expansion of ties between the two countries," the embassy said in a statement on Thursday.

The accusations came a few days after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani paid an official visit to Pakistan during which the two countries signed numerous cooperation agreements.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan talked over phone with Azerbaijani and Armenian counterparts about the situation in occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.

Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan has called for a truce and resolving the existing dispute through negotiations, IRNA news agency reported.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

On the same day, responding to the Armenian aggression, Azerbaijani armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Later, taking into account the international organizations' appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has expressed his concerns over fresh fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia along their borders.

"The latest clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia have caused concerns in the region," ISNA news agency quoted Ali Larijani as saying.

He called upon the governments and parliaments of Azerbaijan and Armenia to resolve the dispute through negotiations.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

Later on the same day, Azerbaijani defense ministry announced that the country's armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

However, later on taking into account the international organizations' appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.3

By Emil Ilgar - Trend:



Landing several mortar shells fired during the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia is not a serious security problem for Iran, but in the long term the conflict can pose threats for Islamic Republic, Hassan Shariatmadari an Iranian politician told Trend on April 3.

Shariatmadari who is the son of Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Shariatmadari believes that Iran should leave the biased position and approach more to Azerbaijan. "At the same time, Baku should eliminate some remained tensions with Iran. Then Iran can help both neighbors to settle the conflicts and prevent the expansion of war, which can pose a serious threat against Iran's security," he said.



According to Shariatmadari, the remaining conflict in the Caucasus can lead to attracting terror groups in the region or involving other nations in the war between Baku and Yerevan. "The international community should attend more attention to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as soon as possible".

An Iranian provincial official has announced that three mortar shells fired during the recent fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan have landed in the territories of Iran's East Azerbaijan Province.

Saeid Shabestari-Khiabani, the deputy governor-general of East Azerbaijan Province for security affairs, said that the mortar shells dropped in a village near Khudaferin County, Tasnim news agency reported.

Shabestari-Khiabani further added that the mortar shells did not leave any casualties in the Iranian territory.

The Iranian official did not mention which country fired the mortar shells that hit the Iranian territory.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

Later on the same day, Azerbaijani defense ministry announced that the country's armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.



However, later on taking into account the international organizations' appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.



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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:

An Iranian provincial official has announced that three mortar shells fired during the recent fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan have landed in the territories of Iran's East Azerbaijan Province.

Saeid Shabestari-Khiabani, the deputy governor-general of East Azerbaijan Province for security affairs, said that the mortar shells dropped in a village near Khudaferin County, Tasnim news agency reported.

Shabestari-Khiabani further added that the mortar shells did not leave any casualties in the Iranian territory.

The Iranian official did not mention which country fired the mortar shells that hit the Iranian territory.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

Later on the same day, Azerbaijani defense ministry announced that the country's armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

However, later on taking into account the international organizations' appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.
On March 29, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the third piece possibly belonging to the Malaysian Boeing was found off the coast of South Africa.

"We do not know what it is yet. We have to wait until Mauritius aviation authorities take custody of the debris," Director-General Datuk Seri Azharuddin Abdul Rahman was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times Online web portal.

The fragment is located off the coast of one of the most outlying islands, so the authorities will need some time to get there, he added.

"Once we have better pictures of the suspected debris, we will decide on the next course of action," Abdul Rahman explained.

Flight MH370, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014, less than an hour after takeoff. There were 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board the Boeing 777 aircraft.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 3

Trend:

Azerbaijan's defense minister, colonel-general Zakir Hasanov held telephone conversations with the head of the Turkish General Staff Husuli Akar and National Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz, Azerbaijan Defense Ministry reported April 2.

During the talks the sides discussed the latest developments and the situation in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

The Turkish side expressed support to Azerbaijan and again noted that Azerbaijan's position is completely valid.

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.
Jeremy and Jacquelyn Carman with their kids. Jacquelyn gave birth twice in the country. (Photo : www.havingababyinchina.com)

The trials motherhood brings can be daunting, but the real challenge already builds up at the start of ones pregnancy.



For someone who will give birth in a foreign land, double the level of that challenge.



Pregnant foreigners in China, together with their hubbies, of course, face a series of challenges: from the choice of hospitals to communication problems to insurance concerns and even culture shock.



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The owner of the site China Expats offers two pieces of advice: Decide well in advance where the baby will be born; it matters a great deal later. And get insured.



The owner said that local insurance costs far less than those offered by foreign firms.



Health insurance experts at Expatmedicare.com said, Shanghais healthcare infrastructure is better compared to the second and third-tier cities.



Many international hospitals and clinics exist in Shanghai. These hospitals offer modern medical equipment and hygienic environment, according to Expatmedicare.com.



The site added that both the Western doctors and the English-speaking Chinese doctors and staff who will attend to ones needs are well-trained and sensitive to the cultural differences thus having better bedside manners.



For admission in local hospitals, it said that getting the services of a translator would be practical.



Some doctors at Guang Ci Memorial Hospital in Ruijin 2nd Road and Huashan Hospital in Changning can speak other foreign language aside from English such as Japanese and French.



Some international health insurance companies recognize these two hospitals.



For those policy holders of local Chinese health insurance, they can settle their insurance claim at a later time because some hospitals would require them to pay first, explained Expatmedicare.com.



A couple of expats found their childbirth experience in the country to be good, according to the Global Times.



Beijing-based American Lauren Williamson, married to a British, initially entertained the thought of flying back to their real home to give birth. They have been staying in the country for more than five years.



After they talked about it, they decided to have their baby delivered in Beijing.



Williamson said that she liked the services rendered by the Beijing United Family Hospital and expressed satisfaction with her experience of giving birth in China.



She also appreciated the country for being a really baby-centered culture.



Jacquelyn Carman, who resided in the country from 2004-2011, said that cash is king when giving birth in the country because majority of the hospitals would require a cash deposit.



She experienced giving birth at American-Sino Ob/Gyn Hospital in Chaoyang in 2009 and at the Qingdao Women and Infants Hospital in 2011 in Shinan.



She shares her personal experiences as an expat at HavingababyinChina.com.


Where have all the flowers gone: Garlands adorn the tombstones of this cemetery. Some foreigners chose to be laid to rest in China. (Photo : Getty Images)

Dying to go home?



Families of expats who passed away would most likely have the body be flown back to their native land.



For the close people left behind by an expat, mourning is done alongside a mountain of paperwork.



In the U.S., repatriation entails securing a communicable disease affidavit, embalmers affidavit and burial or transfer permit along with, of course, a copy of the death certificate, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.



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NFDA added that notarized versions of all original documents is a must and the remains of the person should be placed in a hermetically sealed casket.



In some countries such as the Muslim-dominated Qatar, local laws require employers to handle repatriation of their foreign employees dead body.



There were 13 million British passport holders in 2007 and each year, thousands of them would die, reported The Guardian.



According to U.K.-based Rowland Brothers International, which has been giving international repatriation services since 1971, every year the company makes it possible for the families of nearly 2,000 British residents who died abroad to bury them back home, reported The Telegraph in 2014.



The report also said that repatriation claims in China, South America and Japan could fetch as high as 17,000 pounds, according to Saga, a British insurance company.



A heart attack almost killed a British guy in 2015. That incident made the 63-year-old senior marketing consultant in Beijing to consider resigning next year and go back home for good in England, according to the Global Times.



The Ministry of Civil Affairs promulgated a regulation in 2008 banning the dead bodies of expatriates to be buried in the country, reported China Daily.



The peaceful grounds of Shanghai Wanguo Cemetery serve as the final resting place for more than 600 Asians and Westerners.



Repatriation of a dead body commands a steep price. That makes some families to have the body cremated first to lighten financial obligation.


Granting market economic status to China would help strengthen China-EU relations in the long run, an expert said. (Photo : Reuters)

In consideration of China's efforts for market-driven economic reforms and the importance of the China-EU relations, a global economic and policy analyst is urging the European Union (EU) to grant China market economy status (MES) as soon as possible, the Xinhua News Agency reported.



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"In Europe's view, the long-term benefits of China's MES would seem to outweigh the short-term costs," Dan Steinbock, the founder of consulting firm Difference Group, said in an article published by Brussels-based online newspaper EUobserver.



Steinbock also served as research director of International Business at the India China and America Institute and visiting fellow at China's Shanghai Institutes for International Studies and Singapore's EU Center.



Steinbeck said that since China's transition to consumption and innovation is expected to create new opportunities for EU companies, granting MES would strengthen EU's long-term relationship with China as well as support its quest for Chinese capital.



According to a 2001 agreement that EU and China signed on China's accession to the WTO, the EU, a WTO member, has to decide whether to grant China MES by December.



According to the report, some lobbyist groups in Brussels claim that granting MES to China will endanger the European labor market, especially the steel sector, and also weaken the EU's trade defense against imported Chinese products.



"But times are changing. Chinese growth no longer relies on net exports, but increasingly on consumption and services," Steinbock said. "Even more importantly, China has committed to reducing excess capacity drastically, even if it will require lay-offs of some two million employees in steel and coal sectors in the next three years."



The report said that most of those opposed to the MES are from struggling industries in southern Europe that are involved in ceramics, textile and steel.



"Indeed, much of the more competitive northern Europe--including the U.K., the Netherlands and Nordic countries--does support China's MES," he said.



Steinbock also commended China's efforts on economic reforms.



"Beijing, in contrast to Brussels, has argued that the state's presence in the economy has shrunk drastically in the past 15 years. Conversely, some Chinese observers add that the role of state has actually increased in several EU economies," Steinbock said.



The expert also noted that in terms of public sector size, the Eurozone average of 50 percent is far higher compared to that of the U.S., which is 35 percent, and twice as large as that of China at 25 percent.



"Moreover, after the global crisis, China has opted for market-driven structural reforms, which continue to linger in the U.S., Europe and Japan," Steinbock said, adding that the issue of Chinese competitiveness is more about innovation hubs than cheap prices. He also noted that China, on the average, is spending higher on research and development than the EU.



Steinbock said the decision for the EU to grant China MES is more of a political and legal issue than an economic one.



The report said that the arguments against the granting of MES to China is similar to what the U.S. said when it opposed the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) about a year ago.



Currently, China's status as a market economy has been recognized by more than 80 economies that included Russia and Brazil, as well as such advanced economies as Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Singapore, the report said.


Xinhua's April Fool's Day (Photo : Xinhua)

From Gmail to Descendants of the Sun, the world was having a fun day pulling pranks on Friday, April Fool's Day. The only exception to that is China which virtually banned Chinese from fooling around on April 1.



That day, Xinhua News Agency published a warning that April Fools Day is inconsistent with Chinas socialist core values, reported The Washington Times. It is also not in line with the Asian giants cultural tradition, Xinhua wrote on Weibo, Chinas largest microblogging site.



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Xinhua urged Chinese not to believe rumors, not to spread and not to pass rumors. However, Beijing News asked, whats wrong with giving people a holiday to express themselves, joke around and find some release?



On another website, Huanqiu, WuGang commented, News released every day makes a fool of ordinary people, so whats wrong with celebrating April Fools Day? Xie Xingsheng_Big Dipper Academy of Finance Research added, This must be Xinhuas April Fools Day joke, quoted The Wall Street Journal.



The message  like an April Fools Day joke  became viral on early Friday evening and was reposted more than 11,000 times. But because many Chinese netizens commented negatively on Xinhuas post, the news agency eventually disabled the comment section of the story.



Associated Press pointed out that the propagandists of China, made up of Xinhua, CCTV and Peoples Daily, are notorious at spotting a bad joke and lacks taste for humor. It cited as an example of a bad joke the 2012 article on The Onion, a satirical website, that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was voted the sexiest man alive. Peoples Daily published the article and a photo of the obese leader.






Baidu has launched a research project on artificial intelligence (AI) called the Verne Plan, and brings together scientists and science fiction writers to turn imagination into reality. (Photo : Reuters)

China's Internet giant Baidu has launched on April 1 a plan to set up a consulting team that included science fiction writers in its research on artificial intelligence (AI), China Daily reported.



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The report said that the Baidu Verne Plan is expected to bring together the world's best science fiction writers and leading scientists with the aim to help turn imagination into reality.



According to Baidu, they have already invited six people to be the first group of advisers in the team for the project named after the 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne, adding that some of Verne's ideas, such as helicopters, had been realized in the 20th century.



Some of the science fiction writers included in the team of five advisers are Liu Cixin, the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel last year for his book "The Three-Body Problem," and David Brin, an award-winning author from the United States. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief scientist, is also one of the advisers.



The company will send advisers updated information on how certain technologies are being developed by the company, and the advisers will communicate with Baidu's research and development team to turn some of the ideas into products through brainstorming, Baidu said in a statement.



"This is an innovative organization. Many ideas, along with innovative work, will be born here," Liu Cixin told The Paper in an interview. "The project will focus on artificial intelligence, and there will be an opportunity for us to work with scientists once the project is officially launched."



Baidu's project is highly exclusive and open only by invitation.



President Zhang Yaqin believes artificial intelligence as the foundation that would empower traditional industries and make them smart, in which the company has aligned its visions.



"Baidu has made some world-class achievements in the key subfields of artificial intelligence, such as image recognition, voice recognition, machine translation and self-driving cars," Zhang told China Daily.



Many other Chinese companies view artificial intelligence as the next "big thing," especially after the recent defeat of a South Korean world-class Go player by Google's AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program.



Humans are likely to be replaced by computers in a number of areas, industry insiders said.



Jimu.com, an Internet finance company based in Beijing, said that they are planning to launch a service that would use robots to offer wealth management advice to middle-class clients.



"Through deep learning, it is possible that the machines will be able to calculate investment risk, predict investment yield and offer tailor-made financial advice to individuals after analyzing a huge pool of data," according to Dong Jun, the company's chief executive officer.


China plans to mine the moon for its large deposits of Helium-3, a rare substance that can give enough power for 10,000 years and solve Earth's energy crisis. (Photo : Reuters)

Chinese scientists have announced plans to mine the moon for its rare substance called Helium-3, which is enough to provide energy for nearly 10,000 years and solve the Earth's energy crisis, according to a report by the Huffington Post UK.



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According to the report, China's claim was based on tests showing that huge deposits of the substance were found on the moon that can be used as fuel for clean nuclear fusion reactors.



An article published by PBS.org said that China views space as a potential source of energy security and this includes the moon, which has an abundant supply of Helium-3, a light and non-radioactive fusion fuel that cannot be found on Earth.



It is estimated that there are at least 1.1 million metric tons of Helium-3 on the lunar surface to supply human energy needs for up to 10,000 years, the article said.



China is highly aware that it would be a huge strategic advantage if it secures access first to Helium-3, as the U.S., through the Silicon Valley, also expressed interest in it, driven by the $30-million Google Lunar XPRIZE.



For billions of years, solar winds containing Helium-3 bombarded the moon, and since it has no atmosphere, the isotope freely hit its surface and bonded with the dust.



The dusts, which contain Helium-3, can be mined and extracted by heating it to 600 degrees, China claimed. The dust will then be shipped back to Earth where the precious fuel can be extracted.



As a fuel source, Helium-3, considered by scientists to be a "miracle fuel," has many advantages. It is an ideal fuel for clean fusion reactors because it is non-radioactive and can provide a powerful energy source even in small quantities.



It is estimated that 40 tons of the substance could power the entire United States for a whole year, as cited in a report by The Mail Online.



The report said that researchers in the U.S. have started calculating the cost for Helium-3 mining, while China has not announced plans to set up a mining colony on the moon.



Mining Helium-3 is considered an economically viable plan as each ton of the rare substance has an estimated value of $3 billion, while the total R&D cost for building a fusion plant and creating the necessary spacecraft would cost $20 billion.


China will take the leadership of the U.N. Security Council in the rotating presidency for April. (Photo : Reuters)

China has assumed on Friday, April 1, the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council for April, with Permanent Representative to the U.N. Liu Jieyi taking the reins from his Angolan counterpart Ismael Abraao Gaspar Martins, who held the council presidency for March.



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The Xinhua News Agency reported that the Council's planned work for this month will be discussed in a briefing to be presided over by Liu at the U.N. headquarters in New York.



The Security Council is primarily responsible for maintaining peace and security in the world at large, under the U.N. Charter.



The Council has 15 member nations and China is one of the five permanent members, alongside the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Federation. The U.N. General Assembly elects the Council's 10 non-permanent members in groups of five with two-year terms.



The 15 members take turns in assuming the presidency of the council on a monthly basis based on the English-language alphabetical order of the countries' names.



In the recent five years, China has headed the presidency of the Security Council and made some accomplishments.



In Feb. 2015, during China's presidency of the Security Council, 35 meetings were held which discussed more than 20 agenda topics, including Syria, Libya, South Sudan, Yemen and Ukraine. The council also adopted seven resolutions and issued two presidential statements as well as 15 press statements.



The council also held the 70th anniversary-themed debate, "Maintaining international peace and security: Reflect on history, reaffirm the strong commitment to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations."



China also introduced to the council some adjustment on working methods to encourage members to be more focused on identifying problems and analyzing situations, as well as finding solutions to these key problems. The move aimed to use the council time more efficiently and throw in the weight of the council behind solutions.



In Nov. 2013, with the Middle East and African issues on top of the Security Council agenda, the council, led by China, unanimously adopted a resolution and set up a framework that would enjoin the cooperation of members of the international community to combat piracy and armed robbery along the coast of Somalia.



In June 2012, with China at the helm again, major international hotspot issues, including Syria, Sudan, South Sudan and the Middle East, were reviewed by the Security Council, after which a resolution was adopted on June 29, requesting the U.N. Secretary-General to expand the 1540 committee which was set up in 2004 and was mandated to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery.



In Jan. 2010, through the initiative of China, the Security Council held an open debate on cooperation on international peace and security between the United Nations and regional and sub-regional organizations.


Tesla Motors founder and CEO Elon Musk said during launching that delivery for the Model 3 in the U.S. will begin in late 2017 while deliveries for China orders will start in 2018. (Photo : Reuters)

U.S. electric car maker Tesla Motors has presented to the public the long-awaited Model 3 at Teslas design studio in Hawthorne, California, on Thursday, March 31, with its sight set for the mass market in China. According to analysts, the success of the model is too early to predict.



The company said the starting price for the Model 3 in the U.S. market is $35,000. Market analysts estimated that the car would cost 350,000 yuan ($54,145) in China, including import duties and shipping costs.



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The Global Times reported that the pre-orders for the new model had already started in mainland China on Thursday, March 31, while online orders started the following day on April 1.



Elon Musk, Tesla founder and CEO, said during the unveiling that within one day, the global pre-order for the model has surpassed 115,000. In China, a company spokesman declined to disclose details of the pre-orders on Friday.



According to the company, the orders will first be delivered to the U.S. market as production of the car will start in late 2017.



Zhu Xiaotong, head of Tesla in China, said that deliveries to the Chinese market will begin in 2018.



Tesla is aiming to make annual sales of 500,000 units by 2020 and the success of the moderately price Model 3 is crucial to the company, the report said. Market analysts, however, said that predicting the performance of the Tesla model in the Chinese market is still premature.



Zhang Yu, managing director of consultancy Automotive Foresight (Shanghai) Co., expressed doubts about the Model 3's prospects in the mainland as he believed that 350,000 yuan is expensive for consumers.



"The price would be too much for China's mass-market consumers. Affluent consumers may also not be very interested, as the entry-level Model 3 would fail to serve as something that they can show off," Zhang told the Global Times.



Zhang added that another disadvantage is that Tesla is still not subject to government subsidies in the mainland. "The U.S. would still be the Model 3's major market," Zhang noted.



The report, however, said that one of the major selling points for Tesla cars is that owners are exempted from the license plate lottery in Beijing, part of favorable government policies that China granted to Tesla.



"But at the same time this also makes sales of the car very vulnerable to policy changes," Wu Shuocheng, a Shanghai-based independent auto analyst, told the Global Times, adding that a change in policy is yet to be seen before 2018 when the Model 3 is expected to arrive in the mainland.



Wu added that it may be difficult to convince Chinese consumers to buy an electric car like Model 3 as infrastructure and charging technology have not been fully developed in the country.


Anbang has cancelled its $14-billion Starwood bid. (Photo : Reuters)

Beijing-based Anbang Insurance Group has scrapped its plans to purchase Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. for $14 billion, which would have been the largest acquisition of a U.S. firm by a buyer from China.



Anbang had been caught in a tug-of-war with Marriott International Inc. to take over the popular lodging operator. On March 28, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese group offered to raise its stakes to buy Starwood for $82.75 per share, following Marriott's earlier offer of $79.53 per share.



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Anbang has made a name for itself worldwide with its track record of shopping for yield-producing firms.



In 2014, the auto and property insurer entered in a $1.6-billion deal to buy U.S.-based Fidelity & Guaranty Life. Additionally, it spent $1 billion on Tong Yang Life Insurance Co., a South Korea-based firm.



In its home court, the company owns stakes in China Minsheng Banking Corp. Ltd. and China Vanke Co.



Analysts said that the bid cancellation could shed some bad light on Chinese firms' attempt to acquire U.S.-based assets. CNBC reported that one of the possible reasons behind Anbang's decision to acquire Starwood at a seemingly overblown price is due to looming economic woes back at home.



"[B]eyond the prestige of owning so-called 'trophy' assets in the U.S., many have theorized that Anbang's offer was part of a larger trend of capital flight from China," said CNBC.



"China's economy has slowed over the last few years, and some have even contended that its period of impressive growth may be over," the report added.



Meanwhile, Anbang said in a statement, "We were attracted to the opportunity presented by Starwood because of its high-quality, leading global hotel brands, which met many of our acquisition criteria, including the ability to generate consistent, long-term returns over time."



The group cited "market considerations" as the reason for its withdrawal.


More HTC 10 details leaked: Top feature upgrades that will beat Google Nexus 2016 (Photo : Image Credit: @UpLeaks via 9to5Google)

While HTC 10 launch has not happened yet, HTC 10 Mini release is reported to happen in September and will pack the powerful Snapdragon 820 processor.



According to Android-news.at, HTC 10 Mini will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 823 processor that is clocked at 2.8GHz with 4GB of RAM. The handset will have a slightly smaller than its full-fledged counterpart. HTC 10 Mini will reportedly sport a 4.7 inch screen display.



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September could be an ideal release date for the handset since it will provide a cheaper alternative to the tech giants' offerings in the fall.



If these rumors proved to be true, HTC 10 Mini is a powerful smartphone that can go against other flagship handset. So far, there is no confirmation from the Taiwanese company whether it will release a miniature version with these specifications.



Meanwhile, HTC 10 release is on Apr. 12. Android Headlines reported that HTC 10 release will finally happen on the aforementioned date as various leaks has appeared over the weeks and gives consumers hint on what to expect on the upcoming smartphone. In addition, tipster Evan Blass leaked various photos of HTC 10.



The handset will include 5.15-inch screen display with quad HD resolution. 2K pixel resolution is more common now compared to full HD display. The smartphone will be powered Snapdragon 820 SoC from Qualcomm and Android operating system, although the version is still unknown.



Other purported features of HTC M10 are: ultrapixels camera, 4GB of RAM, microSD slot for additional external storage, dual SIM support, longer battery life, and wireless charging feature, according to TechRadar. The smartphone will be dustproof and water-resistant like most handsets. The handset will follow the cost of its previous handsets, which is around $650 to $800 depending on the storage variant.



However, HTC has confirmed none of the aforementioned rumors.


The Arab Mediterranean free trade agreement also groups Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia, and allows greater access to European markets

Lebanon and Palestine joined Sunday the Agadir free trade agreement, giving them access to Jordanian, Egyptian, Moroccan and Tunisian markets, according to a statement issued by Egypt's ministry of industry and foreign trade.

The Arab Mediterranean free trade agreement was inked in Aghadir, Morocco in 2001 and took effect in 2007. It allows Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia access to each others' markets, while linking all members to European markets.

The membership of Lebanon and Palestine was approved during the third meeting for Agadir member ministers of trade on Sunday in Cairo.

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The Italian Association for Responsible Tourism says all its members will suspend travel activities to Egypt

A non-profit Italian tourism association has decided to halt all its travel activities in Egypt until the murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni is solved, it said on Thursday.

"Egypt is a wonderful country that offers great cultural attractionsbut a vacation is not possible in the context of pain and indignation," the Italian Association for Responsible Tourism said in a statement published in Italian on its official website.

The association said it "has decided to suspend all activities in Egypt, in particular, the travel programme, until it clarifies the tragic story of the murder of Regeni."

The group, which promotes responsible tourism and provides links to tours organised by accredited partners, said all its tour operators had already suspended their activities in Egypt.

The body of the 28-year-old PhD student, who was in Cairo conducting research on independent trade unions, was found with signs of torture by a roadside on the outskirts of Cairo on 3 February. He went missing on 25 January.

Egypt has vigorously denied claims that security forces were involved in Regeni's murder.

Last week Egypt's police said they had killed four members of an alleged criminal gang it accused of robbing and kidnapping foreigners, and that they later found the student's passport and other belongings in the apartment of a sister of one of the suspects.

But the latest findings by Egyptian investigators have been met with scepticism by the Italian investigators and by Regeni's family.

"AITR hopes for quick clarification on what happened and [seeks] honest collaboration that will lead to the truth," read the statement, which was signed by the association's president Maurizio Davolio.

An Egyptian prosecutorial delegation is set to travel to Rome on Monday to update Italian prosecutors on their latest findings.

Egypt has been struggling to revive its tourism industry, a main source of foriegn currency to Cairo, which was hit hard due to political turbulence after the 2011 uprising.

The tourism industry took another hit recently after several countries suspended flights to the country following the October 2015 crash of a Russian airliner over Sinai that killed all 224 on board.

Italians are among the top groups of European tourists to Egypt, with over 400,000 Italian visitors according to 2013 figures.

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A US congressional delegation, which is led by Senator Lindsey Graham, has met with the Defence Minister Sedki Sobhi on Saturday before meeting with Sisi today

US Senator Lindsey Graham said at a press conference on Sunday after meeting with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah-El-Sisi in Cairo that Egypt's stability "is more important than any other time," the Egyptian state-owned MENA agency reported.

Graham, a member of the US senate's Armed Forces Committee and the head of a senate delegation on a two-day visit to Egypt, praised El-Sisi, saying "he was the right man at the right time to lead Egypt, the transitional process, and to consolidate the rule of law, human rights and the fight against terrorism."

The Republican senator said that the success of Egypt is fundamental for the world, pointing out that conditions in Libya and Syria have deteriorated since his last visit to Cairo and charged that Iran is working on shaking the stability of the region.

Graham said the series of meetings attended by the delegation in Cairo focused on security aspects.

On Saturday, the delegation met with Egypts defence minister Sedki Sobhi, where they "tackled the exchange of visions about the development of the situation in the region as well as international efforts in the war against terrorism," according to a statement by the Egyptian army spokesperson.

Egypt annually receives $1.3 billion in military aid from Washington.

The congressional delegation visited development projects by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which focuses on programmes in health, education and economic growth.

They also visited projects "designed to protect Egypt's cultural heritage and support its economic development," a US embassy in Cairo statement read.

The USAID programme in Egypt has totaled $30 billion since 1978, according to the agency's official Facebook page.

Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry visited Washington last week and met with his counterpart John Kerry.

Kerry praised on Wednesday Egypts critical role in dealing with regional challenges, including counterterrorism.

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Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry will meet Frances envoy for its Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative, Pierre Vimont, on Sunday in Cairo, a statement by the Egyptian foreign ministry said.

The two officials are expected to discuss the French initiative for an international peace conference to resume Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

Former French prime minister Laurent Fabius stirred Israeli anger in January by proposing an international conference to revive peace talks and saying that France would "recognise a Palestinian state" if peace talks failed.

However, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said in March that France would not "automatically" recognise a Palestinian state if the conference fails, AFP reported.

"Nothing is ever automatic. France will present its initiative to its partners. It will be the first step, there is no pre-requisite," Ayrault said in Cairo after a meeting with President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, who is backing the initiative.

France is calling for a greater role for the UN and the international community in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process to encourage both sides to conclude an agreement in the near future.



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Eight of the defendants have received preliminary death sentences on violence related charges

Related Egypt military court sentences 8 to death for targeting army personnel

An Egyptian military court postponed on Wednesday to April 24 its issuing of a verdict in the trial of 28 alleged supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi accused of planning attacks on military and police personnel.

In February, the court sentenced eight of the 28 defendants to death. The court did not issue sentences for the remaining 20 defendants.

The court referred its initial death penalty verdicts to the Grand Mufti of Egypt  the country's leading authority on religious edicts  for a non-binding consultation per Egyptian law.

In March, the court postponed issuing a verdict in the case till 3 April without stating reasons.

On Sunday, the court was set to confirm or reverse the death sentences and rule on first-degree sentences for the 20 remaining defendants. However, the judges have not disclosed the reason behind the postponement.

The awaited verdicts will be subject to appeal in the military cassation court.

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Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi bestowed on his Mauritanian counterpart Mohamed Ould Abdel-Aziz the 'Order of the Nile' medal during the latter's visit to Cairo on Sunday.

The medal, Egypt's highest state honor, is granted for exceptional services to the nation, and has been awarded to Nobel Prize winners Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency; prominent novelist Naguib Mahfouz; professor of cardiothoracic surgery Magdy Yaquob; and interim president Adly Mansour.

The medal may be granted to other heads of state and was awarded to Nelson Mandela as well as a number of other presidents and politicians.

Abdel-Aziz's visit aimed to discuss bilateral relations with Egypt, with the two presidents signing six memorandums of understanding relating to cooperation on health, culture, mining, population, livestock and maritime transport.

He is set to visit a number of Egyptian economic and investment projects and will meet with Egyptian businessmen to discuss ways of increasing economic cooperation between the two countries.

Abdel-Aziz was among the African heads of state who attended the inauguration ceremony of an extension of Egypt's Suez Canal in 2015.

Mauritania will host the 27th summit of the Arab League, which is headquartered in Egypt, on 26-27 July.

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27-year-old Mohamed Hassan died at a construction site after he was caught under a falling wall

The body of an Egyptian construction worker who died in Qatar on Saturday in a work-related accident will be returned to Cairo on Monday, Ahram Arabic news website reported.

The 27-year-old Mohamed Hassan died at a construction site after he was caught under a falling wall, which injured another Egyptian, according to Qatari news reports.

The Egyptian Ministry of Manpower said in a statement on Sunday that Hassans body will be returned after all the necessary legal procedures are completed.

Several human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, have expressed concern over safety conditions at Qatari construction sites.

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Syrian troops on Sunday seized the key Islamic State (IS) group bastion of Al-Qaryatain, dealing the militants a new blow in the country's centre a week after expelling them from Palmyra, state television said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group however said fighting was still raging in the east and southeast of the town, which is located in the desert in Homs province.

"The army with backing from supporting forces (pro-regime militia) brings back complete security and stability to the town of Al-Qaryatain, after crushing Daesh terrorists' last remaining positions there," state television said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

But the Britain-based Observatory said the army was still fighting the militants in the town.

"Clashes are still ongoing in the east and southeast of the town," it said.

The advance came after the Russian-backed Syrian army dealt IS a major blow on March 27 by seizing the ancient city of Palmyra, known as the "Pearl of the desert", from the militants.

Al-Qaryatain is located some 120 kilometres (75 miles) southwest of Palmyra.

Its recapture will allow the army to secure its grip over the ancient city, where militants destroyed ancient temples and executed around 280 people during their 10-month rule.

Once Al-Qaryatain returns to government control, "of the whole of Homs province, IS will only hold its bastion in Sukhna" northeast of Palmyra, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

"The recapture of Al-Qaryatain will also allow the army to reclaim the whole of the Syrian desert" spreading all the way south to the Iraqi border, Abdel Rahman added.

A ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia but which does not apply to the fight against militants has enabled the Syrian army to focus its efforts on IS.

The group has also lost a string of high-ranking commanders in recent weeks to strikes by the US-led coalition which launched an air campaign against the militants in Iraq and Syria in 2014.

A drone strike on Wednesday, likely by the coalition, killed Abu al-Haija, a Tunisian commander summoned by IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from Iraq.

Fifteen IS commanders accused of revealing Abu al-Haija's position have since been executed by the militant group, the Observatory said Sunday.

The fate of another 20 men accused of collaborating with the US-led coalition remains unknown, it added.

"This is the highest number of executions of security officials by IS," Abdel Rahman said.

The Observatory said on Sunday that 12 fighters from Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah were killed fighting the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front and allied rebels in the northern province of Aleppo.

They died "in shelling and fighting in the south of Aleppo province, during the fierce offensive by Al-Nusra... and rebels the day before yesterday (Friday)," the group said.

Hezbollah has since 2013 been openly fighting in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

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Israel's state-run electricity company has restored full power supply to the Palestinian city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank after reducing it over an outstanding debt, officials said Sunday.

The cut on Thursday led to blackouts, but full supply was restored later the same day, according to Mansour Nassar of the Palestinian Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JDECO).

The Israel Electric Corporation had reduced supply to Jericho over a debt of 1.7 billion shekels ($450 million, 397 million euros) owed by the private JDECO and Palestinian Authority.

An Israeli official said supply was reduced by half, while JDECO said it had been cut by two-thirds.

The Israeli official said the IEC could at any point renew the cut. It was not clear why Israel decided to restore power after the brief cut.

Thursday's cut had affected up to 30,000 people of a total population of around 50,000 in the city and surrounding area, according to Jericho governor Majed al-Fityani.

The Palestinian Authority is struggling financially and depends largely on foreign aid. It relies heavily on Israel for electricity supplies, which also provides electricity to the Occupied Gaza Strip.

Ongoing talks with the IEC and PA have so far not resolved the debt problem.

In January 2015, the IEC cut power to Palestinian cities for a number of hours every day over a similar debt, only to renew it a few weeks later.

Under an economic agreement signed with the PA in 1994, Israel collects around 600-700 million shekels each month in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports.

It transfers the mony after deducting approximately 100 million shekels for expenses such as Palestinian hospitalisations in Israel, sewage treatment and covering part of the electricity debt, which has remained largely stable in recent months.

The Israeli assault against Palestinians is escalating after six months of violence which has left 200 Palestinians and 28 Israelis dead.

*The story was edited by Ahram Online.

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Three civilians were killed in east Yemen on Sunday when rockets fired by Iran-backed rebels hit a government hospital, the facility's director and a local official said.

The attack wounded 17 other people, said the director of the Marib General Hospital Authority, Shawqi al-Sharjabi.

Pro-government forces, backed by a Saudi-led coalition battling the rebels for more than a year, have retaken most of the eastern Marib province from the Shia Houthi insurgents and their allies.

However, the rebels still control northern and western parts of the oil-rich province east of the capital Sanaa, which has been held by the Houthis since September 2014.

A government official in Marib city told AFP that rockets were fired by rebels from the Haylan mountains overlooking the provincial capital.

He said the attack, which killed a doctor, took place during a visit to the city by a government delegation.

The rebel advance on Sanaa forced Yemen's internationally-recognised government last year to declare main southern city Aden a temporary capital.

But President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and many government officials spend most of their time in Riyadh as they struggle to secure Aden and other parts of the country where Sunni jihadists have gained ground.

Sunday's attack comes as the warring parties prepare for a UN-brokered ceasefire on April 10 intended to pave the way for peace talks in Kuwait a week later.

The planned truce was only agreed by the two sides after months of shuttle diplomacy by UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed.

Previous UN-sponsored negotiations between the rebels and the government failed to make any headway, and a ceasefire announced for December 15 was repeatedly violated and abandoned by the Saudi-led Arab coalition on January 2.

The United Nations says about 6,300 people have been killed in the war, more than half of them civilians.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi King Salman agreed in Riyadh on Sunday to strengthen their cooperation in fighting "terrorism" and ro facilitate investments.

"The two leaders expressed strong condemnation of the phenomenon of terrorism in all its forms," said an Indian foreign ministry statement after their talks.

They "agreed to enhance cooperation in counter-terrorism operations" and cyber-security, "including prevention of use of cyber space for terrorism, radicalisation and for disturbing social harmony," it added.

The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in intelligence-sharing on money laundry and terrorism financing, said a statement on the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

Just days ahead of Modi's two-day visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and the US Treasury announced joint sanctions on four individuals and two organisations with alleged links to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) -- which India blames for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

Among those sanctioned was Saudi-based Muhammad Ijaz Safarash, who allegedly provided financial, material or technological support for the Pakistan-based militant group LeT.

"We affirm the importance of continued cooperation and coordination with your country's government in the field of fighting terrorism," King Salman told Modi, according to SPA.

Modi arrived in the world's largest crude exporter on Saturday and has held talks with top Saudi officials, his country's community in the Muslim kingdom, as well as Indian workers and local businessmen.

India, which imports around 80 percent of its oil needs, is keen to take advantage of low crude prices by signing overseas deals that will help secure supplies to meet its growing demand.

Indian foreign ministry official Shri Mridul Kumar has said ahead of the visit that almost 20 percent of the South Asian country's crude supplies come from Saudi Arabia and that New Delhi wants to ensure this supply continues.

The Indian foreign ministry statement on Sunday said that "the two leaders expressed satisfaction at their growing bilateral trade in the energy sector."

They agreed "to transform the buyer-seller relationship in the energy sector" to focus "on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries," it added.

They also discussed regional and international developments, including the security situation in West Asia, the Middle East and South Asia, and agreed to bolster defence cooperation and diversify trade.

Their investment authorities meanwhile signed a framework agreement to facilitate investments by the private sectors in the two countries.

Saudi Arabia is home to 2.96 million Indian expatriates who send home over $10 billion in remittances every year, according to India's foreign ministry.

Modi's right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power in 2014 promising to revive India's economy and create much-needed jobs.

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Several dozen Syrians are also expected to arrive Monday in France, Finland and Portugal, according to German government sources.

The deal has faced strong opposition from rights groups.

Amnesty International has accused Turkey of illegally forcing groups of some 100 Syrians to return every day, saying the alleged expulsions showed "fatal flaws" in the migrant deal agreed with the EU.

Turkey rejects the charge, insisting it still adopts the open-door policy that for the last few years has allowed any Syrian fleeing civil war back home to seek refuge.

There are over 52,000 refugees and migrants currently in Greece, according to official figures.

With most facilities already full, authorities are trying to create space for an additional 30,000 people in new camps.

Adding to the urgency, sporadic violence has broken out between ethnic migrant groups in the overcrowded camps.

But many migrants are reluctant to move to organised centres, fearing that they will not be allowed to leave.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, quoted by the Tagesspiegel am Sonntag weekly, voiced optimism on Sunday that the refugee influx had peaked.

But, he suggested, agreements with countries in North Africa may be needed to prevent mass arrivals in future.

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Two people were killed when a train carrying some 350 passengers and crew derailed early Sunday near Philadelphia, prompting officials to shut down service along a busy stretch of the northeast corridor.

Dozens of people were injured in the accident, which took place in the town of Chester, Pennsylvania shortly before 8:00 am (1200 GMT).

The accident occurred after "a vehicle was struck on the tracks," said Travis Thomas, fire commissioner for Chester, Pennsylvania, at a press briefing.

"There were two deceased, but they were not passengers on the train," Thomas said.

He declined to provide additional details about the accident or the victims.

However, news reports said the train, the Palmetto, en route from New York to Savannah, Georgia, struck a backhoe on the tracks and that the two fatalities were construction workers.

An Amtrak spokesman, Stephen Gardner, told reporters that officials from the National Transportation Safety Board were en route to the scene of the disaster to launch an investigation.

"The NTSB will provide all additional information about the crash," said Gardner, who added that workers would try to bring rail service back on line "as soon as possible."

Train service along a 30-mile (50-kilometer) stretch from Philadelphia south to Wilmington, Delaware was suspended, said Amtrak officials who did not give any indication as to when service would resume.

The accident caused the lead engine to derail on the train which was carrying 341 passengers and seven crew members.

"Initial reports are that some passengers are being treated for injuries," Amtrak said.

"Local emergency responders are on the scene and an investigation is ongoing," it added.

Thomas said later that 35 people received hospital treatment for "non-life-threatening" injuries.

"People are being re-routed back to Philadelphia to be reunited with their luggage," he added.

One passenger, 15-year old Wilson Holmes, was wrapping up a weekend visit with his mom and heading back to school in North Carolina, where he lives with his father, when the accident occurred.

"We were on the train and everything was going smoothly," he told reporters.

"We got off track and then there was a big explosion. Then there was a fire. The windows burst out. Some people were cut up... and then people started running," he said.

His mother, Monica Holmes, had dropped him off a half hour before the accident and sped back to the station when he called to tell her that there had been an accident.

"I dropped him off at 7:30 thinking he was on his way to his father," she said.

"He called and told me 'Mom, someone was killed on the train. It was a construction worker.' My heart just dropped," she said.

"I'm just thanking God that he's OK, and I pray for the other families that suffered the loss. I can't imagine it."

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The man accused of hijacking an Egyptian plane and diverting it to Cyprus did not enter the cockpit during the six-hour long ordeal, the pilot of the aircraft said Sunday.



Egyptian Seif El-Din Mohamed Mostafa is accused of using a fake suicide belt to force the Alexandria-to-Cairo flight to divert to Cyprus on Tuesday, and has been remanded into custody in Cyprus.



He said he acted out of desperation to see his ex-wife and children who live in the eastern Mediterranean island.



"Immediately after the hijacking, I asked the security officer to stay at the door of the cockpit and not leave," EgyptAir pilot Amr El-Gamal told reporters in a meeting organised by Egyptian authorities.



Systems that lock a cockpit door have existed since the 1980s and strict procedures became standard after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.



"Our main fear was that the hijacker may enter the cockpit, or that he knew how to fly a plane or use it to explode", said co-pilot Hamad El-Qaddah.



Mostafa released most of the 55 passengers soon after the plane landed in Larnaca, Cyprus. Hours later he surrendered to police.



Cypriot police say Mostafa -- described by officials as "psychologically unstable" -- faces possible charges of hijacking, kidnapping, reckless and threatening behaviour, and breaches of the anti-terror law.



For the crew it was an six-hour long emotional drama that saw a British passenger taking a photograph with Mostafa and a co-pilot escaping by jumping out of a window of the cockpit.



"The captain asked us to take a photo of the hijacker," said stewardess Nayera Atef El-Dabs, whose photograph with Mostafa wearing what appears to be a rudimentary suicide vest strapped to his chest has gone viral on the Internet.



She said she posed for a picture with Mostafa after a British passenger did the same.



"I was crying in the bathroom and I called my sister to tell her to take care of my three-year-old son. I was trying to look calm in front of the passengers," said Dabs, recalling Tuesday's ordeal.

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El-Aswany's novel was released on Wednesday in Hebrew without the author's permission, according to the writer's Twitter page

Renowned Egyptian novelist Alaa El-Aswany denied on Thursday giving permission to an Israeli publisher to publish a Hebrew version of his novel The Yacoubian Building.

El-Aswany said in a Twitter statement that he did not  at any time  sign a contract with any Israeli publisher to publish his works.

Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee announced on his Facebook page on Wednesday that El-Aswany's novel was translated into Hebrew by Bruria Horowitz and published by Tobi publishing house in Israel, with Adraee posting the cover of the Hebrew edition of the book.

This is not the first time an Israeli publisher released El-Aswany's works reportedly without his permission.

In 2010, El-Aswany said he would sue the Israel-Palestine Centre for Tolerance for publishing the same novel without his approval.

First published in Arabic in 2002, The Yacoubian Building  which was made into a film in 2006 and a TV series in 2007  shot El-Aswany to prominence and remains his most well-known work.

El-Aswany is one of Egypt's most well-known writers, with his books translated into English, French, Spanish and German, among other languages.

He is also a frequent commentator on Egyptian politics and is known for his opposition to the rule of ex-president Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted after mass protests in 2011.

El-Aswany also supported the toppling of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, and has been critical of sitting president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.

El-Aswany was included in the Jordanian Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre's list of the top 500 most influential Muslims in the world, and in 2012 he was awarded the Tiziano Terzani Italian literary prize for his book " Did the Egyptian Revolution Go Wrong?"

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Bolivian communications satellite starts to pay off

2016-04-03 10:29

A Bolivian communications satellite is launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center(XSLC), southwest China's Sichuan Province, Dec. 21, 2013. China successfully sent a Bolivian communications satellite into orbit with its Long March-3B carrier rocket at 0:42 a.m.(Beijing Time) Saturday. (Xinhua/Yan Yan)

LA PAZ, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Bolivia has collected 33 million U.S. dollars through the services of the Tupac Katari communications satellite after two years of operation, the Bolivian Space Agency (ABE) announced Saturday.

The satellite, which was launched by China, is currently using 60 percent of its capacity to benefit 25 Bolivian companies, according to ABE.

The income from the satellite had surpassed expectations and the 302-million-dollar investment would be recouped within 15 years of operation, ABE director Ivan Zambrana told a press conference.

"The satellite is beginning to bear fruit and we have many more contracts already set to meet the loan," said Zambrana.

He noted that this would allow the country to repay the loan China granted to build and put the satellite into orbit. In December 2010, the Bolivian government and the China Development Bank agreed on a loan worth 295 million dollars to finance the project.

Tupac Katari, named after an Aymara warrior who fought Spanish invasion in the 18th century, was launched three years later and began operating in April 2014.

Related:

China launches communications satellite for Bolivia, Xi voices congratulations

XICHANG, Sichuan, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- China successfully sent a Bolivian communications satellite into orbit with its Long March-3B carrier rocket from southwest Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 0:42 a.m (Beijing Time) Saturday.

Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma was present, the first time a foreign head of state has witnessed a satellite launch in China. Full story

Chinese-built Bolivian satellite tested in space simulator

LA PAZ, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese-built Bolivian satellite Tupac Katari is undergoing testing in a space simulator to determine whether it can withstand the extreme temperatures of outer space, the Bolivian Space Agency (BSA) said Thursday.

The testing phase aims to verify the satellite's various functions and detect any possible malfunction, said Ivan Zambrana, BSA director and supervisor of the Tupac Katari project. Full story
Chinese vice premier expects steady, healthy growth

2016-04-03 10:28

CHANGSHA, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli has urged positive action to deal with pressure on the economy and to pursue steady and healthy growth.

He made the remarks during a tour of central China's Hunan Province from Thursday to Friday.

China remains at a stage of industrialization and urbanization with great potential in a resilient economy, he said.

"There are more hopes than difficulties," said the vice premier. "We should do more to keep the economy within an appropriate range and improve the quality of growth while maintaining a medium-high speed," said Zhang.

He asked officials to push ahead with supply-side structural reform and address overcapacity and "zombie enterprises" in an active and steady way.

The vice premier called for more efforts to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship to foster new growth areas.

Zhang also asked officials to ward off systemic or regional risks and improve ordinary people's life.
China Voice: "Hong Kong independence," a dangerous absurdity

2016-04-03 09:25

BEIJING, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Any bid to seek "Hong Kong independence" is a blatant denial of history with no legal basis. If condoned, it will be greatly poisonous to the entire special administrative region.

Those who recently attempted to set up an organization advocating "Hong Kong independence" were pursuing their own political agenda and private interests at the expense of China's sovereignty and security, Hong Kong's prosperity and stability, and the wellbeing of the people.

Hong Kong is part of China and the founders of the so-called "Hong Kong National Party" are only making fools of themselves.

By promoting the "Republic of Hong Kong," they are in breach of the Constitution and the region's Basic Law, both of which explicitly emphasize sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity. Anyone who breaches the Constitution and the Basic Law becomes the enemy of all Chinese people, including the 7 million plus Hong Kong citizens.

Advocating "Hong Kong independence" is not a matter of freedom of speech. It jeopardizes the fundamental interests of the country and the region.

Those who have come up with "independence" have disregarded public sentiment and told an outright lie by saying that the Basic Law was never authorized by Hong Kong's citizens. Over the four years and eight months while the Basic Law was being drafted, the voice of Hong Kong's citizens was fully heeded. Among the 59 members of the drafting committee, 23 came from Hong Kong. Nearly 80,000 opinions on the draft were collected there. The Basic Law is the common will of all Chinese people, including Hong Kong citizens. There is absolutely no reason to challenge its authority and dignity.

Turning a deaf ear to the extremist remarks of the independence clique has helped them get away with illegal and violent activities, resulting in ideological confusion in Hong Kong, especially among teenagers.

The State Council Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office is resolutely opposed to any statement or action advocating "Hong Kong independence."

Constant vigilance is warranted.

Related:

Chinese authority voices resolute opposition to "Hong Kong independence" organization

BEIJING, March 30 (Xinhua) -- China's State Council Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office has voiced "resolute opposition" to an organization advocating "Hong Kong independence."

It also declared that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government's refusal to register such organization was "proper." Full story

"Hong Kong independence" organization unconstitutional: experts

BEIJING, March 31 (Xinhua) -- Advocating "Hong Kong independence" is unconstitutional, not a matter of freedom of speech, according to legal experts interviewed by Xinhua on Thursday.

The State Council Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office on Wednesday said it was "resolutely opposed" to such an organization advocating "Hong Kong independence." Full story
Xi calls for more national input, int'l cooperation to strengthen global nuclear security system

2016-04-03 09:25

WASHINGTON D.C., April 1, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington D.C., the United States, April 1, 2016. (Xinhua)

WASHINGTON, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday urged countries around the world to increase national input and expand international cooperation so as to further firm up the global nuclear security architecture.

In a speech delivered here at the opening plenary of the fourth Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), Xi recalled that he envisioned the building of a global nuclear security system featuring fairness and win-win cooperation at the third NSS in The Hague.

In order to realize that goal, which will "provide strong and sustainable institutional guarantee for mankind to benefit from nuclear energy with security," Xi laid out a four-pronged proposal for the international community to make fresh efforts.

Countries across the world need first to step up political input and stick to the direction of addressing both symptoms and root causes, said the Chinese president.

"As national leaders, we have the responsibility to ensure that nuclear security gets adequate attention," he said, adding that only with a solution that addresses both symptoms and root causes can the world "remove the breeding ground of nuclear terrorism at an early date."

The international community, Xi said, also should step up national responsibility and tighten up a line of defense that is sustainable.

Pointing out that as a country makes its own choice to develop nuclear energy, it bears unshirkable responsibility to ensure nuclear security, the Chinese leader suggested that day-to-day prevention and crisis response must go together as the threat posed by nuclear terrorism is highly asymmetrical and unpredictable.

Meanwhile, concerted efforts should be made to step up international cooperation and enhance the momentum of coordination for common progress, Xi proposed.

Citing the fact that "nuclear security incidents will have impacts that go beyond national borders," he said existing international organizations and mechanisms can serve as solid platforms for international cooperation on nuclear security in the future.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the world's nuclear watchdog, "can play a central role to coordinate and consolidate global resources for nuclear security, and use its professional expertise to serve all countries," he said. "As the most universal international organization, the United Nations can continue to play an important role."

In addition, the international community needs to step up the culture of nuclear security and create an atmosphere of joint efforts and shared benefits, he said.

"The awareness of the rule of law, the sense of urgency, and the spirit of self-discipline and coordination are central to the nuclear security culture," Xi pointed out. "It is equally important that the academic community and the general public also foster the awareness of nuclear security."

The NSS, a biennial event initiated by U.S. President Barack Obama, gathered leaders and envoys from 52 countries and four international organizations this year. The six-year-old mechanism would come to an end in its current format after the 2016 meeting.

In his speech, Xi noted that the NSS process has provided a major boost to international nuclear security, including developing common goals, establishing key priorities and mapping out the blueprint for the future.

However, he pointed out, new threats and challenges keep emerging in the security field, the root causes of terrorism are far from being removed, and nuclear terrorism remains a grave threat to international security.

"A more robust global nuclear security architecture is the prerequisite for the sound development of nuclear energy," he said. "The conclusion of the Nuclear Security Summit will not be the end of our endeavor, rather it will be the beginning of a new journey."

Related:

Spotlight: China, U.S. agree to expand common interests, control differences

WASHINGTON, March 31 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama, agreed here Thursday to deepen China-U.S. cooperation in various fields while controlling differences in a bid to consolidate and expand their countries' common interests.

The latest sign of a closer relationship between Beijing and Washington came as the two leaders met on the sidelines of the fourth Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), discussing an array of issues ranging from macroeconomic policies and nuclear security cooperation, to maritime issues and Korean Peninsula stability. Full story

China pledges further nuclear cooperation with U.S. in customs control

WASHINGTON, March 31 (Xinhua) -- China will continue to work with the U.S. in strengthening nuclear cooperation in terms of customs control, said Li Wei, deputy director-general of the Department of Customs Control and Inspection of the General Administration of China Customs (GACC), here Thursday.

Li made the remarks at a press briefing for the two-day 2016 Nuclear Security Summit from March 31 to April 1 in the U.S. capital.Full story

China, U.S. vow to boost nuclear security cooperation

WASHINGTON, March 31 (Xinhua) -- China and the United States on Thursday reaffirmed their joint commitment to global nuclear security and pledged to continue cooperation in this area beyond the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) process.

In a joint statement released as Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama met here on the sidelines of the fourth NSS, the two countries declared their "commitment to working together to foster a peaceful and stable international environment by reducing the threat of nuclear terrorism and striving for a more inclusive, coordinated, sustainable and robust global nuclear security architecture for the common benefit and security of all."Full story

1 2 3 4 >> 1 2 3 4 >>
China vows to strengthen nuclear security with new measures

2016-04-03 09:25

WASHINGTON D.C., April 1, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington D.C., the United States, April 1, 2016. (Xinhua)

WASHINGTON, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday announced a slew of new measures to shore up the nuclear security of China, the country with the fastest growth of nuclear power worldwide.

Addressing the opening plenary session of the the two-day fourth Nuclear Security Summit here, Xi said China has been committed to stepping up its own nuclear security while advancing international cooperation.

China, he said, will build a network for capacity building on nuclear security, by using the existing platforms, such as the Center of Excellence on Nuclear Security jointly built by Beijing and Washington in China, to carry out training of nuclear security professionals, exercises and exchanges regarding nuclear security technologies.

The president also pledged to support all countries in minimizing the use of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) according to their needs as long as it is economically and technologically viable.

China will promote the cooperation model for less use of HEU, Xi said, referring to his country's help for Ghana to convert an HEU-fueled research reactor to using low enriched uranium within the framework of the the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world's nuclear watchdog.

"We are willing to build on the Ghana model and help countries convert HEU-fueled miniature neutron source reactors imported from China under the principle of voluntarism and pragmatism," he told the plenary.

According to China's first white paper on nuclear emergency preparedness issued in January, as of the end of October 2015, the Chinese mainland had 27 nuclear power generating units in operation, with a total installed capacity of 25.5 gigawatts (GW), while another 25 units with a total installed capacity of 27.51 GW had been under construction.

The world's second largest economy plans to raise its installed nuclear power capacity to 58 GW with an additional 30 GW under construction by 2020 and build itself into a strong nuclear power country by 2030.

Commenting on measures to strengthen security of radioactive sources, Xi said that China will, in the coming five years, review the radioactive sources within the country, improve the security system and give priority to conducting real-time monitoring of high-risk mobile radioactive sources.

"We stand ready to share our experience with other countries and work with them to enhance the security monitoring of radioactive sources," he said.

Xi promised to launch the technological support initiative against crisis of nuclear terrorism, vowing that his country will carry out scientific research in the fields of civilian nuclear material analysis and tracing, actively organize mock exercises and jointly enhance capacity for addressing crisis.

He also said that China will promote its national security monitoring system for nuclear power.

China applies the most stringent security monitoring to ensure the safety and security of the nuclear power stations within China and those exported to other parts of the world, Xi underlined. "Nothing is left to chance."

China will help others enhance their capacity in security monitoring and contribute its share to enhancing nuclear power safety and security worldwide, he added.
Vignesh, a local leader of the Democratic Youth Federation of India, and his brother Vishnu were thrashed by cops at the police station on August 25.
#COVID-19 New COVID-19 cases post sharp on-week rise amid resurgence woes South Korea's new COVID-19 cases stayed below 30,000 for the fifth consecutive day Sunday, but the daily count recorded a sharp hike from the previous week amid rising concerns ove...

#illegal gambling China-based online gambling ring busted; 20 arrested Law-enforcement authorities here said Sunday they have busted an online gambling ring based in China for illicit operations in South Korea, worth a total of 5.7 trillion won (US$3....
As the starting date for filming on Blade Runner 2 draws closer, more and more news is leaking out from the set in various ways.

It's already been confirmed that Robin Wright will be joining the cast in an as-yet unconfirmed role, alongside Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling. Now it seems like another casting announcement has been made as former WWE star-turned-actor Dave Bautista dropped a less-than-subtle hint on his Twitter yesterday evening.

I can't wait to share some really exciting news... pic.twitter.com/fI2VjDjcXM  Dave Bautista (@DaveBautista) April 2, 2016

For those that don't know, the origami unicorn is a recurring visual in the first Blade Runner, something that Harrison Ford and Edward James Olmos idly made with matchsticks or paper and is meant to represent, well, nobody's sure. There's lots of theories.

Blade Runner 2 would be a huge get for Bautista, who's already starred in last year's Spectre and the excellent Guardians of the Galaxy from back when. Bautista could be playing a role similar to that of Leon from the original film; essentially the near-mute muscle of the group who just goes around killing people.

Likewise, Robin Wright certainly has a lot of similarities with Daryl Hannah so there's something in there as well.

Blade Runner's as-yet untitled sequel is due to commence filming in July for a 2017 release.
Charlie Cox says his return as Daredevil "still feels too good to be true"
First Saturday of every month, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and Fourth Saturday of every month, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Continues through Dec. 24

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Description

The Met: Live in HD brings all the excitement of a live Metropolitan Opera performance to Staller Center's big screen in the Main Stage Theatre.



You'll enjoy extras including introductions and backstage interviews. The rebroadcast of an opera captured at an earlier date is noted as an 'encore' in the schedule.



Regular Price $22.00

Senior (Age 62+) $20.00

Child (12 and under) $15.00

Synopsis: Japan, early 20th century. Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton of the U. S. Navy inspects a house overlooking Nagasaki harbor that he is leasing from Goro, a marriage broker. The house comes with three servants and a geisha wife named Cio-Cio-San, known as Madame Butterfly.
By Tom Westbrook SYDNEY (Reuters) - Adani Enterprises Ltd was granted approval by Australia's Queensland state government on Sunday to proceed with its proposed $7.7 billion Carmichael coal project in the Galilee Basin. Queensland Premier Annastascia Palaszczuk said the approvals gave Adani permission to mine coal reserves estimated at 11 billion tonnes and to build roads, workshops, power lines and pipelines associated with the mine. "Some approvals are still required before construction can start, and ultimately committing to the project will be a decision for Adani," Palaszczuk said in a statement. Adani said in a statement it would continue to finalise second tier approvals "with the clear aim of commencing construction in calendar year 2017". Progess would depend on resolving legal challenges from environmentalists, a company spokesman told Reuters. The company has battled opposition from green groups since starting work on the project five years ago. Environmentalists continue to fight Adani's project on numerous fronts and are lobbying banks not to provide loans. They cite potential damage from port dredging, shipping and climate change stoked by coal from the mine. Two legal challenges to the project are currently before courts. The Australian Conservation Foundation said in a statement the mine was "inconsistent with Australia's international obligations" to protect the Great Barrier Reef as coal from the mine would stoke global warming and drive coral bleaching. Several international banks have said they will not provide financing for coal mining in the Galilee Basin, while Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank of Australia pulled out of the project in August. Analysts say Adani will also find it tough to raise financing for the project due to a prolonged downturn in the global coal market. Adani's spokesman said that tough market should not put pressure on the project because most of its coal is already earmarked for Adani-owned power plants in India, rather than for sale on the open market. (Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Richard Pullin)
Paris (AFP) - A number of female Air France cabin crew are resisting an airline ruling that they should wear a headscarf while in Tehran, when flights to the Iranian capital resume on April 17, a union representative told AFP on Saturday.

"Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the headscarf," said Christophe Pillet of the SNPNC union, which is asking Air France management to make it a voluntary measure.

Company chiefs had sent staff a memo informing that female staff would be required "to wear trousers during the flight with a loose fitting jacket and a scarf covering their hair on leaving he plane", Pillet said.

According to Pillet, management has raised the possibility of "penalties" against anyone not observing the dress code.

Air France told AFP that all air crew were "obliged like other foreign visitors to respect the laws of the countries to which they travelled".

"Iranian law requires that a veil covering the hair be worn in public places by all women on its territory.

"This obligation, which does not apply during the flight, is respected by all international airlines which fly to Iran," the airline said.

Air France added that the headscarf rule when flying to certain destinations was "not new" since it had applied before flights to Tehran were stopped and also to crew flying to Saudi Arabia.

Air France announced in December the resumption of Paris-Tehran flights after they were suspended in 2008 when Iran was hit with international sanctions over its nuclear ambitions.
Tom Hill, vice chairman of The Blackstone Group, speaks at the Reuters Global Investment Summit in New York November 16, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Investment firm Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) on Sunday said it is not considering an acquisition of Brazilian shopping mall operator BR Malls Participacoes SA (BRML3.SA), denying a report published early in the day by newspaper O Globo.

"We are not actively engaged in acquisition discussions for BR Malls," Blackstone said in an emailed statement.

The Brazilian newspaper, without citing sources for its information, said early Sunday that Blackstone had hired JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM.N) to help it consider acquiring a controlling stake in BR Malls, which is based in Rio and is Brazil's biggest mall operator.

The paper said the acquisition would amount to Brazil's biggest-ever real estate transaction and would be valued at as much as 12 billion reais ($3.38 billion).

A spokeswoman for BR Malls, which is based in Rio and is Brazil's biggest mall operator, declined to comment on the report.

A spokeswoman for JP Morgan Chase also declined to comment.

(Reporting by Paulo Prada and Guillermo Parra-Bernal; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Andrew Hay)
By Anthony Deutsch and Thomas Escritt AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch voters will decide on Wednesday whether to support a European treaty deepening ties with Ukraine in a referendum that will test sentiment towards Brussels ahead of Britain's June Brexit vote and could also bring a boost for Russia. The broad political, trade and defence treaty is already provisionally in place but has to be ratified by all 28 European Union member states for every part of it to have full legal force. The Netherlands is the only country that has not done so. While a "no" vote in the non-binding referendum would not force the Dutch government to veto the treaty on an EU level the fragile coalition, which holds the rotating EU presidency, might find it hard to ignore with less than a year to general elections. Any rejection by Dutch voters or by the government would give Russian President Vladimir Putin, who opposes deeper EU-Ukraine ties and who many Dutch blame for the downing by pro-Russian rebels of a plane travelling from Amsterdam, a victory in his war of words with the West. An EU decision to push on with the treaty despite a "no vote", whether the government respects it or not, could be damaging for the EU and highlight EU problems ahead of the British vote. "If politicians ignore the Dutch no then it will be an even stronger signal than what the British have already received that there is no way to correct the European political class and that they should vote to leave," said Thierry Baudet, a "no" campaigner and one of the architects of the referendum that was triggered when activists gathered thousands of signatures of support. Many Dutch feel they are being asked to choose between two unattractive options: EU expansion plans dreamed up by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels or helping Russian Putin who they blame for the MH17 plane disaster which killed almost 200 Dutch citizens in July 2014. TURNOUT CRUCIAL Others are confused by the issues. "I'm not voting," said Gijs, a driving instructor in Amsterdam. "I can't understand what this referendum is about, and I can't understand why it was called." A poll by Maurice De Hond on Sunday forecast that 66 percent of people certain to vote, would back 'No' with only 25 percent in favour, with turnout likely to be decisive in shaping the final result. Pollsters TNS Nipo have forecast turnout of 32 percent, just above the 30 percent threshold that is needed for the referendum to be valid. The government, which supports a "yes" vote, fears it could turn into a protest vote like in 2005, when a majority of the Dutch electorate broke from a pro-European tradition and rejected the EU constitution. "I hope the Dutch can get over their chagrin and say: 'Yes, we are annoyed with Europe, we are annoyed with this Dutch government, but we will still support Ukraine," said Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem. While some parliamentary parties have said they would be bound by the outcome, "the government position is that we will follow the law, which simply says we will reconsider," said Dijsselbloem, lending weight to the view that the government will seek to preserve the treaty, or its essence, whatever the outcome. "PUTIN'S SHADOW" The government itself shied away from framing the vote in a Russian context but shifted tactic as the referendum approaches. The youth wing of Dijsselbloem's Labour Party, the junior party in the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, have run a poster campaign showing anti-EU populist Geert Wilders passionately kissing Putin. "Vladimir Putin's shadow is lurking fairly significantly over this treaty," said "yes" campaigner Joshua Livestro, arguing that a "no" vote will play into Putin's hands. "Are we now going to give Putin what he wants after all?" he said. Prime Minister Mark Rutte's cabinet initially stressed the treaty's economic benefits, but has since focused on its importance for Ukrainian reform in the areas of corruption, human rights and democracy. "Everyone who wants progress in Ukraine is asking us to vote 'yes,' along with 27 other countries. That's what the referendum is about and nothing else," Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher said on Friday. "No" campaigners say the treaty is a first step toward full EU membership. "Legal scholars call it quasi membership," said Baudet. Many Ukrainian politicians feel their country deserves the treaty and are keen to show they have made progress in aligning their country with EU standards since the 2014 uprising that toppled pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. In a Dutch television interview on Sunday, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin emphasized progress in areas such as gay and transgender rights where the Dutch have always viewed themselves as progressive leaders. "In the past 24 months since Maidan we've done more reforms than in the last 24 years," he said. (Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska and Toby Sterling; editing by Anna Willard)
Workers hold placards and banners as they wait for Britain's Business Secretary Sajid Javid to leave the Tata Steel plant in Port Talbot, South Wales, April 1, 2016. REUTERS/Ben Birchall/Pool

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Sunday that UK steel producers must be considered for infrastructure and other government contracts involving steel supplies, as part of plans to find a long-term solution to a crisis in the industry.

The government is looking for ways to support domestic steel producers after India's Tata Steel (TISC.NS) put its loss-making British plant up for sale on Wednesday, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said there was no guarantee of a buyer for Britain's biggest steel producer, which has been hit by high costs and Chinese competition, and a state takeover was not the answer.

Under its support measures, the government will create an approved supplier list for steel companies wanting to bid for public sector projects, such as Britain's 55 million-pound ($78.25 million) high-speed rail link, which will need two million tonnes of steel.

"By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," Business Secretary Sajid Javid said in a statement.

The introduction of measures to ensure British steelmakers are considered for government contracts could take six to nine months, a spokeswoman for Javid's department said.

The government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's decision to sell its UK plant in south Wales, which employs 15,000, with opposition politicians saying it was "asleep at the wheel."

The government has said it is working to broker a deal with potential buyers after Tata's decision to pull out of its almost decade-long venture in Britain.

Investment firm Greybull Capital is interested in buying Tata's Scunthorpe steelworks and could announce a deal as early as Wednesday, a source familiar with the deal told Reuters.

The deal is expected to be for 400 million pounds, with about half of the investment coming from Greybull and the other half from a consortium and maybe a government loan of up to 100 million pounds, the source told Reuters.

Story continues

A Greybull spokesman said talks were continuing constructively.

British newspaper the Telegraph first reported on Sunday that the Meyohas brothers are set to buy the Scunthorpe plant from Tata. [http://bit.ly/1qhju51]

Liberty House Group, which produces steel in Britain, has begun talks with the government over a potential partnership but does not want to buy all of Tata's UK operations, its executive Chairman Sanjeev Gupta was quoted as saying by the Sunday Telegraph.

Javid told the BBC he would not talk about specific offers but said he wanted to find a buyer for the whole business and the government would engage with any willing and serious buyer.

He said the government was looking at how it could help with issues such as Tata's pension burden and costly energy supplies.

"These are the kind of things we have already thought of, we have already started working on and what I hope is that you will have the offer document from Tata, overlay on top of that the help the British government can provide and then you have the makings of a successful deal," he said.

Cheap Chinese imports have hit Britain's steel industry. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the International Steel Statistic bureau.

Cameron has said he wants Britain and China to work together to tackle overcapacity in steel. Last week, however, China imposed anti-dumping duties of up to 46 percent on specialist steel products from Japan, South Korea and the European Union.

($1 = 0.7028 pounds)

(Reporting by Li-mei Hoang and Kylie MacLellan; Vishal Sridhar in Bengaluru and Freya Berry in London, Editing by Susan Fenton and Alan Crosby)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Sunday that all public sector contracts that involve steel supplies must specifically consider UK steel companies as part of plans to find a long-term solution for the country's steel industry. The government is looking for ways to support domestic steel producers after India's Tata Steel put its British plants up for sale, putting thousands of jobs at risk. Prime Minister David Cameron has said there was no guarantee of a buyer for Britain's biggest steel producer, but a state takeover was not the answer. Under its support measures, the government will create an approved supplier list specifically for steel companies wanting to bid for public sector projects, such as Britain's 55 million pound (55.00 million pounds) high-speed rail link, which will need two million tonnes of steel. Business Secretary Sajid Javid said on Sunday he was determined to secure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers and the wider community. "By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," he said in a statement. The introduction of measures to ensure British steelmakers are considered for government contracts could take six to nine months, a spokeswoman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills said. The government has said it is working to broker a deal with potential buyers after Tata Steel's decision to pull out of its almost decade-long venture in Britain, which employs 15,000 people, and which has been hit by high costs and Chinese competition. Cameron's government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's action, with opposition politicians saying it was "asleep at the wheel." The prime minister has said he wants Britain and China to work together to tackle over-capacity in steel and that the G20 could be a good forum to address it later in the year. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the International Steel Statistic bureau. Last week, China imposed anti-dumping duties of up to 46 percent on specialist steel products from Japan, South Korea and the European Union. (Reporting by Li-mei Hoang. Editing by Jane Merriman)
By Stanley White

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan is witnessing a record number of compensation claims related to death from overwork, or "karoshi", a phenomenon previously associated with the long-suffering "salary man" that is increasingly afflicting young and female employees.

Labor demand, with 1.28 jobs per applicant, is the highest since 1991, which should help Prime Minister Shinzo Abe draw more people into the workforce to counter the effect of a shrinking population, but lax enforcement of labor laws means some businesses are simply squeezing more out of employees, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Claims for compensation for karoshi rose to a record high of 1,456 in the year to end-March 2015, according to labor ministry data, with cases concentrated in healthcare, social services, shipping and construction, which are all facing chronic worker shortages.

Hiroshi Kawahito, secretary general of the National Defense Counsel for Victims of karoshi, said the real number was probably 10 times higher, as the government is reluctant to recognize such incidents.

"The government hosts a lot of symposiums and makes posters about the problem, but this is propaganda," he said.

"The real problem is reducing working hours, and the government is not doing enough."

The labor ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Kawahito, a lawyer who has been dealing with karoshi since the 1980s, said 95 percent of his cases used to be middle-aged men in white-collar jobs, but now about 20 percent are women.

Japan has no legal limits on working hours, but the labor ministry recognizes two types of karoshi: death from cardiovascular illness linked to overwork, and suicide following work-related mental stress.

A cardiovascular death is likely to be considered karoshi if an employee worked 100 hours of overtime in the month beforehand, or 80 hours of overtime in two or more consecutive months in the previous six.

A suicide could qualify if it follows an individual's working 160 hours or more of overtime in one month or more than 100 hours of overtime for three consecutive months.

Story continues

Work-related suicides are up 45 percent in the past four years among those 29 and younger, and up 39 percent among women, labor ministry data show.

TWO-TIER WORKFORCE

The problem has become more acute as Japan's workforce has divided into two distinct categories - regular employees, and those on temporary or non-standard contracts, frequently women and younger people.

In 2015 non-regular employees made up 38 percent of the workforce, up from 20 percent in 1990, and 68 percent of them were women.

Lawyers and academic say unscrupulous employers operate a "bait-and-switch" policy, advertising a full-time position with reasonable working hours, but later offering the successful applicant a non-regular contract with longer hours, sometimes overnight or weekends, with no overtime pay.

Refusing overtime pay and break time are illegal, and the applicant could refuse the job, but activists say companies tell them they will be given regular contracts after six months or so.

They say young applicants often accept due to lack of experience, while women trying to re-enter the workforce after childbirth often feel it would be difficult to get a foothold elsewhere.

Emiko Teranishi, head of the Families Dealing with Karoshi support group, said she hears lots of complaints about hiring tactics, with some companies telling new hires that their salary includes 80 hours of overtime, and they must reimburse the company if they work less.

Some people dont even make minimum wage under this system, said Teranishi, whose own husband committed suicide after working long hours.

Such abuses have become so common in the past 10 years that such companies have been dubbed "black" companies in the media.

Hirokazu Ouchi, a professor at Chukyo University, wrote a book last year about such companies when he realized some of his students were being treated illegally at their part-time jobs.

Ouchi said their hiring practices typically follow a similar pattern.

"Companies will hire someone for two to three years, but they have no intention of investing the time or the money to nurture that employee," said Ouchi.

He added that the labor ministry lacked the manpower to follow up on complaints.

A ministry official working in corporate surveillance acknowledged that his department was somewhat short-staffed but the government was taking steps to recruit more every year. He declined to give his name as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Japan's working-age population has been falling since the mid-1990s, which would normally lead companies to improve working conditions to attract workers, but Ouchi said it was not happening because they can get away with bending the rules.

"This is a way for companies to keep labor costs down, but it is also a path that leads to death by overwork," he said.

(This version of the story was refiled to correct typo in paragraph 16 to read employers)

(Editing by Will Waterman)
DES PLAINES, IL--(Marketwired - March 31, 2016) - Emergency healthcare workers in Utah will have more protection against workplace violence after Gov. Gary Herbert signed a bill today that increases the penalty for assault against healthcare providers or emergency medical workers when the assault causes substantial bodily injury.

The Emergency Nurses Association thanked the bill's sponsor, State Sen. Brian E. Shiozawa, MD, as well as Utah ENA State Council President Emmaline Newman, BSN, RN, CEN, and Utah ENA Government Affairs Chair Teresa Brunt, RN, for their hard work in pushing the bill, S.B. 106, through the legislature. It passed both houses unanimously.

ENA President Kathleen E. Carlson, MSN, RN, CEN, FAEN, noted the growing support among states to protect emergency workers.

"Utah is the thirty-third state to enact laws making it a felony to assault or batter an emergency nurse," Carlson said. "We applaud Utah, and particularly Sen. Shiozawa, for recognizing the serious threat emergency workers face every day."

A 2014 study published in the Journal of Emergency Nursing shows that more than 70 percent of emergency nurses encountered physical or verbal assault by patients or visitors while they were providing care in the emergency setting.

Brunt is one of those who have been attacked. She worked with the state legislature and ENA at the national, state and chapter level for two years to ensure the bill's passage. But her work is not done.

"I will now take this new law and educate nurses in emergency departments within the state of Utah," she said. "Underreporting is a huge problem and emergency department nurses need to understand that assault is not part of their job and definitely not in their scope of practice."

About the Emergency Nurses Association

The Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) is the premier professional nursing association dedicated to defining the future of emergency nursing through advocacy, education, research, innovation, and leadership. Founded in 1970, ENA has proven to be an indispensable resource to the global emergency nursing community. With more than 41,000 members worldwide, ENA advocates for patient safety, develops industry-leading practice standards and guidelines, and guides emergency healthcare public policy. ENA members have expertise in triage, patient care, disaster preparedness, and all aspects of emergency care. Additional information is available at www.ena.org.

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A farmer carries a Greek flag in front of the parliament during a protest against planned pension reforms in Athens, Greece February 12, 2016. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

By Lefteris Papadimas and David Lawder

ATHENS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde denied on Sunday that IMF staff would push Greece closer to default as a negotiating tactic on a new Greek bailout deal, which she said was "still a good distance away."

Lagarde said in a letter to Greece's prime minister that the debt talks should continue despite damage from reports of a leaked transcript suggesting that IMF staff may threaten to leave the bailout to force European lenders to offer more debt relief.

"Any speculation that IMF staff would consider using a credit event as a negotiating tactic is simply nonsense," Lagarde wrote to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

"My view of the ongoing negotiations is that we are still a good distance away from having a coherent program that I can present to our Executive Board," Lagarde wrote, adding that such a deal must put Greece on a path of robust growth and gradually restore debt sustainability.

Tsipras' office said on Sunday that he had demanded that Lagarde clarify the IMF's stance after Internet whistleblowing site WikiLeaks published what it said was the transcript of a March 19 conference call of three senior IMF officials.

The officials were discussing tactics to apply pressure on Greece, Germany and the EU to reach a deal in April. They were quoted as discussing a threat that the fund might not participate in Greece's third bailout programme as a way to force EU creditors, especially Germany, to reach a deal on debt relief before Britain's June referendum on whether to stay in the European Union.

EU/IMF lenders are due to resume talks on Greece's fiscal and reform progress in Athens on Monday, aiming to conclude a bailout review that will unlock further loans and pave the way for negotiations on long-desired debt restructuring.

The review has been adjourned twice since January due to a rift among the lenders over the estimated size of Greece's fiscal gap by 2018, as well as disagreements with Athens on pension reforms and the management of bad loans.

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The Greek government interpreted the leak as revealing an IMF effort to blackmail Athens with a possible credit event to force it to give in on pension cuts which it has rejected.

In his letter to Lagarde, Tsipras "expressed his concern about the credibility of the negotiations after the leaks," an official at his office told Reuters.

Lagarde said in her response that "the IMF conducts its negotiations in good faith, not by way of threats, and we do not communicate through leaks."

She reiterated her view that if fiscal surplus targets were lowered for Greece, then more debt relief would be needed.

German government and finance ministry representatives declined to comment on the leaked transcript.

Germany has in the past said the IMF is an important player in the Greek rescue but it does not support the debt relief demanded by the IMF. Some German officials also say that they believe there are different views on Greece within the IMF.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to meet Lagarde in Berlin on Tuesday.

The purported conversation on the conference call involved Poul Thomsen, head of the IMF's Europe department, Delia Velculescu, leader of the IMF team in Greece, and IMF official Iva Petrova.

They discussed whether Greece could apply more austerity as a condition for receiving more aid ahead of big debt repayments in July and voiced frustration at the European Commission's reluctance to side with IMF pressure on Athens.

If genuine, the transcripts suggest that Brussels is sticking to unrealistic assumptions about Greece's budget shortfall to minimize the need for debt relief, which is unpopular with Germany and other northern euro zone hawks.

If concluded, the review will unlock a fresh tranche of about 5 billion euros ($5.7 bln), which Greece needs to pay off state arrears and European Central Bank and IMF maturing debt. Greece has no major debt redemptions due until July.

Commenting on the leak, Tsipras told weekly newspaper Ethnos: "It seems that some people are playing games with an aim to destabilise us. We will not allow (IMF's) Thomsen to destroy Europe."

(Additional reporting by David Lawder in Washington, Madeline Chambers and Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Editing by Paul Taylor, Susan Fenton and Jonathan Oatis)
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The displaced population of Ramadi has started to return to the western Iraqi city that was recaptured from Islamic State militants in December, a provincial official said on Sunday. About 3,000 families have returned since Saturday to districts of Ramadi that have been cleared of mines and explosives, city governor Hameed Dulaymi told Reuters. Families are relying on electricity generators as the public grid has not been repaired, he said. Water for domestic use is being pumped from the nearby Euphrates river, he added. Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of Baghdad, is the first major success for Iraq's army since it collapsed in the face of Islamic State's lightning advance across the country's north and west about two years ago. Most of the city's population of nearly half a million fled before the battle, taking shelter in camps west of Baghdad. (Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli; editing by Jason Neely)
* U.S., Israel negotiating military aid extension

* Aid deal supposed to assure Israeli regional edge

* Israel warily eyes U.S. weapons for Gulf states

By Dan Williams

TEL AVIV, April 3 (Reuters) - Israel's neighbours are buying arms on a scale that threatens its regional military superiority, the deputy Israeli air force chief said on Sunday, in remarks that appeared aimed at helping secure more defence aid from a reluctant Washington.

U.S. military payouts to Israel, currently around $3 billion annually, expire in 2018, and Israeli officials have spoken of needing around $4.5 billion. U.S. officials have balked at such an increase.

At the heart of the dispute is how to perpetuate Israel's qualitative military edge - a guarantee that it gets more advanced U.S. weapons than Arab states get. Israel says it needs to bulk up its armed forces, not just upgrade their technologies, to keep ahead of potential foes.

"There are countries here which have plans that are being actualised for arms deals in the hundreds of billions of dollars, for the most advanced Western weaponry and the most advanced Eastern weaponry," Brigadier-General Tal Kelman told a conference to promote Israel's purchase of the advanced U.S. fighter jet the F-35.

Kelman did not specify countries other than Iran, which the Israelis fear will use sanctions relief from last year's nuclear agreement to build up its ballistic missile programme and arm Islamist guerillas like Lebanon's Hezbollah militia.

Some Israeli officials have privately voiced concern about U.S. weapons systems being supplied to Western-aligned Gulf Arabs, as well as Egyptian interest in advanced Russian arms, though in neither case are the countries openly hostile toward Israel.

"There is a very great danger here, because today's enemy can be tomorrow's friend, and today's friend could be tomorrow's enemy," Kelman told the forum, hosted by Israel Defense magazine and Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies.

Story continues

"There is a potential here for the erosion of the IDF's (Israel Defence Force) qualitative edge and the IAF's (Israel air force) qualitative edge."

Russia's military intervention last year in Syria's civil war has also worried Israel, given Moscow's dispatch of S-300 and S-400 air defence systems capable of seeing deep into its territory.

A slide projected at the conference by Gary North, a retired U.S. air force general now with F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin, showed Russian radars in Syria covering much of Israel as well as its Mediterranean training areas. The F-35 has stealth capabilities.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller, Larry King)
Myanmar military MPs on Friday said a plan to bolster Aung San Suu Kyi's power with a special advisory role was unconstitutional, as the new civilian government tussled with the army just days after taking office.

The Southeast Asian nation was dominated by the military for more than half a century until Wednesday when Suu Kyi and her pro-democracy party took power.

The Nobel laureate, whose party secured a landslide election win in November, has vowed to rule the country despite a constitutional block on her becoming president.

In a surprise early act of parliamentary business by the new government, Suu Kyi's party proposed a bill to grant her a special "state counsellor" position.

If passed it would give the 70-year-old a steering role over parliament, buttressed by the four ministerial posts she already holds in the new cabinet.

But in a sign of early turbulence between her party and the still hugely influential army, military MPs challenged the move in an upper house debate Friday that saw the bill pass its first legislative hurdle.

Colonel Myint Swe raised fears the plan would place the "president and the advisor at the same level".

"This is in opposition to the constitution. So I would like to suggest the bill be amended according to the constitution," he told lawmakers.

Another army lawmaker, Colonel Hla Win Aung, also decried the naming of Suu Kyi in the bill and warned it could "destroy" the balance of power between government branches.

The army is reserved a quarter of all parliamentary seats by a junta-era charter.

The bill passed the upper house vote but still needs approval from the lower house and combined parliament, which are similarly dominated by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD).

NLD MP Zaw Min, chairman of the upper house bill committee, dismissed concerns that the proposal was unconstitutional, saying that judgement lies with the newly formed Constitutional Tribunal.

Story continues

"It is too early to say that the bill is in opposition to the constitution," he said, without elaborating on whether it would be referred to the tribunal.

- Hurdles ahead -

Suu Kyi is the figurehead of a near 30-year struggle to end military domination that saw her locked under house arrest for years.

She is barred from the presidency by a clause in the junta-drafted charter disqualifying those with foreign close relatives. Her two sons are British, as was her late husband.

The veteran campaigner has pledged to rule through her longtime friend Htin Kyaw, who was sworn in as president Wednesday.

She is also taking on a huge workload in his cabinet, running the foreign affairs, education, energy and president's office ministries.

The new bill does not spell out specific powers for the proposed position, but it would enable Suu Kyi to maintain sway over the legislature she had to step down from to become a minister.

It also gives her a budget and authority to conduct any meetings deemed necessary.

Dozens of NLD supporters celebrated the historic week at a street fair in downtown Yangon Friday, where they served up traditional foods and sang as loudspeakers played old campaign songs.

"This is just a welcoming party to our president elected from the people. Now Myanmar has the chance to have a brighter future through the guidance of Mother Suu," said Myo Lwin Htay, who helped organise the event through a local NLD office.

The novice government faces a tough road ahead as it strives to tackle mammoth challenges in a nation scarred by decades of repressive and economically destructive army rule.

Analysts say it will need support from the military that retains huge political influence, including control of three key ministries.
President Barack Obama said he is disappointed that the United States and Russia have not made as much progress in nuclear arms reduction as he would've liked.

Speaking at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Obama addressed members of the media following his fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit of 2016. There, the president said that Russian President Vladimir Putin prioritization of defense is slowing efforts.

"Because Mr. Putin came into power, or returned to his office as president, and because of the vision that he's been pursuing of emphasizing military might over development inside of Russia and diversifying the economy, we have not seen the kind of progress that I would've hoped for with Russia," he said.

Putin, whose massive nuclear weapons stockpile is rivaled only by the U.S., refused to attend this year's summit. Moscow scoffed at what it deemed U.S. efforts to control the process and take power away from international agencies. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistani, another nuclear-armed country, canceled his trip following a bombing that killed 72.

Frustration over the slow pace of reducing nuclear stockpiles shadowed the final day of the summit, Obama's last major push on denuclearization. Though Obama planned to tout the Iran nuclear deal as evidence of progress, the absence of key players  especially Russia  underscored the lack of unanimity still confronting global efforts to deter nuclear attacks.

After six years of prodding by Obama and others before him, the global stockpile of fissile material that could be used in nuclear bombs remains in the thousands of metric tons. What's more, security officials warn that the radioactive ingredients for a "dirty bomb" are alarmingly insecure in many parts of the globe.

"We have not only great urgency around the nuclear issue, but eliminating generally the scourge of terrorism," Obama said during a meeting Thursday with French President Francois Hollande, as he reflected on recent attacks in Brussels and Paris.

Story continues

 The Associated Press contributed to this report.





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barack obama pointing

President Barack Obama is trying to leave his mark on the institution that helped launch his career as a national politician: the US Senate.

On Wednesday, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden waded into the Pennsylvania Senate race, endorsing Katie McGinty in one of the more high-profile state-primary contests in the country.

"I am proud to endorse Katie McGinty to be Pennsylvania's next United States Senator," Obama said.

"Katie is a true champion for working families," he added, "with a proven record of taking on big challenges and delivering for people."

McGinty, who has held multiple jobs in Pennsylvania state government, is locked in a tough primary fight with Joe Sestak, a former congressman and retired three-star Navy admiral. Braddock Mayor John Fetterman is also in the fray.

She wasted no time capitalizing the on the Obama endorsement. Her team quickly cut an ad featuring Obama heaping praise upon her. A person close to her campaign told Business Insider that the ad would go into rotation on Pennsylvania television stations beginning on Friday as part of a $1 million push to raise her profile before the April 26 primary.

The winner will go on to face incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in the fall. Republicans, who have 54 Senate seats, will need to win races like this one in order to thwart Democratic hopes of taking back the chamber.

Here's the Obama ad:

The Pennsylvania race is just the latest contest this election cycle that the president has inserted himself into.

In past cycles, the president has largely stayed on the sidelines during tough primary fights that did not feature Democratic incumbents. But this time, Obama has not hesitated to jump into Senate primary contests between two competing Democratic candidates.

Last month, Obama endorsed former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland in his primary race against an upstart rival. The president and vice president also endorsed Rep. Patrick Murphy in his Senate primary fight in Florida. Murphy is facing off against Rep. Alan Grayson, the outspoken congressman whose provocative statements have repeatedly made headlines and garnered him a cult following.

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For Obama, with little political risk and high favorable ratings among Democrats, part of the rationale this time around appears to be the opportunity to take back the Senate. Washington Democrats had previously signaled that they believe Obama's primary picks would be the strongest in the November general election.

Democratic strategist Holly Shulman told Business Insider that with Donald Trump appearing likely to clinch the Republican presidential nomination, Obama is trying to exploit Trump's unpopularity by making a big push in down-ballot races.

"Every day that Trump inches closer to the GOP nomination, Democrats are inching closer to retaking the majority in the Senate and quite possibly the House. For that to happen getting a head start and securing resources early for down-ballot Democrats will be key," Shulman said in an email.

She continued:

The president and vice president have been very active in working to build the Democratic Party over the last few years (many fundraisers for the DNC e.g.) so the fact that would want to support down-ballot candidates across the country too makes sense.

Though it's unclear whether Obama's nod has a direct impact on any state or local race, the president's high favorable ratings among Democrats certainly complicated races for candidates that he's snubbed.

Sestak  who lost a surprisingly close 2010 election to Toomey after beating party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary  actually led McGinty in polls. Sestak has also partially campaigned on his role in enacting Obama's policies.

obama joe sestak

In a Wednesday statement, Sestak touted his support for the Affordable Care Act and the Iraqi troop drawdown, issues on which he stood with the president.

"I have never asked the president  nor anyone else in a position of power  to have my 6, not even by asking for their endorsement," Sestak said, a military reference for supporting someone. "As a leader, it is only about having the people's 6, and because I have theirs, they will have mine."

For his part, Grayson argued that Murphy's numerous endorsements from Democratic Party leaders actually may hurt his establishment-backed opponent. Grayson said his campaign contributions doubled the month after Obama and Biden endorsed Murphy.

Grayson did not criticize Obama specifically, but he told Business Insider that the Democratic establishment had "more interest in throwing their weight around" than winning elections. The winner of the Florida race in November will replace outgoing Sen. Marco Rubio.

"My people are deeply annoyed that the party bosses are trying to dictate the outcome of a party primary. And so they respond by redoubling their efforts and making sure that they don't steal this election from us," Grayson said.

"Voters don't like being told who to vote for," he added. "They just don't. In fact, this year they hate it."

NOW WATCH: Here's how the Republican strategy created for Jeb Bush backfired and catapulted Trump into the lead





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Things are getting bad in Russia  so bad that the country is weighing sacrificing its future in order to survive its present.

A conflict is simmering in Russia as the country's Finance Ministry pushes for increased taxation of the country's oil industry in order to support its budget. A contracting economy and a persistently low oil price have severely hurt the country's budget, so officials are seeking to draw more revenue from domestic energy companies  instead of severely cutting costs, which Moscow fears could bring dire political consequences.



This plan likely makes short-term sense to the Kremlin, but it could cripple the oil industry  and by extension Russia's long-term growth prospects  for years to come, experts told CNBC.

"This would have decadeslong effects," Lauren Goodrich, a senior Eurasia analyst at geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor, said of a strong tax on the oil industry. If Russia's energy resources don't see new investments in the next two years, she said, then the country could experience lengthy declines in oil production  old Soviet-era wells drying up, without new ones coming on.

With sanctions keeping Western energy investments at bay, and with many Chinese investors likely tapped out, the domestic energy companies are Russia's best hope for maintaining production levels in the fiercely competitive global market.

"They really have to have investment money coming in, whether it's from foreign firms or Russian firms," Goodrich said. "The Kremlin is really, really in a tough spot."

Western sanctions, low oil prices, and high military and governmental costs have hurt the country: State statistics released Friday show that the economy contracted 3.7 percent in 2015 compared with the prior year. Meanwhile, the ruble has depreciated by about 55 percent since 2014.

Despite all that, Russian oil companies have been doing alright.

By virtue of earning profits in dollars and paying domestic costs in rubles, Russia's energy giants have fared better than many of their international peers. The Russian government, however, has tied its progressive tax collection to the price of oil, so its receipts are much lower at the current sub-$40 price than when a barrel exceeded $100.

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Oil-related taxes reportedly totaled nearly 50 percent of Russian tax revenue in 2014.

The progressive tax has allowed domestic firms to maintain a dollar or two of profit on each barrel of oil, Russian economic experts said, but that could dissipate with any new reforms.



"At the current oil prices, with the single-digit dollars-per-barrel profit, it raises the question of whether you're going to eat your seed corn or not in terms of growth later," said William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the Rand Corp. and a former U.S. ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan.

But not everyone believes Russian energy tax reform will cripple the country's future prospects.

Ildar Davletshin, a London-based oil and gas analyst at Renaissance Capital, told CNBC he sees the government seeking to raise those taxes if oil remains below $50  as many analysts expect it to. If that happens, the production decline from lost investment will be only a few percentage points, he said, and that would not have drastic effects on the economy.

In fact, Davletshin said, the slight decrease in production from such a major global supplier could push prices higher  bringing even more revenue to Moscow. That money could, in turn, be used to diversify Russia's economy away from oil dependence and into higher-value industries like technology.

But others said that scenario is only wishful thinking.

"That argument doesn't hold any water for me: Russia is an oil economy and has been even from the czarist days," Goodrich said.

The politically powerful energy lobby is likely to fight against any and all tax increases in coming months, although the government may attempt to sweeten the deal by opening up resource monopolies or picking sides in acquisition competitions.

Either way, the real fireworks are likely to come in the fall, experts said, when negotiations over the 2017 budget come to a head.

 Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.





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Stepanakert (Azerbaijan) (AFP) - Clashes between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces killed at least 13 people Monday in a third day of fighting over Nagorny Karabakh, as Turkey fuelled tensions following the worst violence in decades in the disputed territory.

Russia and the West have scrambled to call for an end to the fighting, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a firm ally of Azerbaijan, insisted that the Armenian-controlled region would "one day" return to Baku's control.

On the ground, the death toll since fighting erupted on Friday night rose to 46 after Armenia's defence ministry said five Armenian "volunteer" fighters were killed when a bus in which they were travelling was hit.

Earlier the Armenia-backed separatist authorities in Karabakh -- which claims independence but is supported by Yerevan -- said three civilians and two more soldiers were killed in fierce shelling.

Baku said three of its troops were killed overnight when Armenian forces shelled its positions using mortars and grenade launchers.

Azerbaijan has claimed to have captured several strategic positions inside Karabakh, which is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, in what would be the first change in the frontline since an inconclusive ceasefire ended a war over the region in 1994.

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian said a "ceasefire would only be possible if the militaries of both sides return to the positions" they held prior to the outbreak of hostilities.

His comment came a day after Azerbaijan announced a unilateral truce that failed to stop the fighting.

Azerbaijan's Defence Minister Zakir Gasanov instead ordered the army Monday to be ready to strike Karabakh's capital Stepanakert "in case of continued Armenian bombardment of civilian targets in Azerbaijan."

An AFP photographer in Stepanakert said the situation remained calm on Monday in the rebel capital with a population of around 50,000 people.

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Hundreds of volunteers were arriving in the city from Armenia to fight alongside separatist forces, while local authorities were busy organising shelters for the refugees from frontline villages.

- Erdogan backs Baku -

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, which has sold weaponry to both sides but has far closer economic and military ties to Armenia, has called for a ceasefire, a move echoed by Washington.

But Erdogan -- another regional power broker who has been at loggerheads with Putin since Ankara downed a Russian warplane near the Syrian border in November -- fanned the flames.

"We are today standing side-by-side with our brothers in Azerbaijan. But this persecution will not continue forever," Erdogan said in televised comments.

"Karabakh will one day return to its original owner. It will be Azerbaijan's".

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry discussed Karabakh in a phone conversation on Monday, Russia's foreign ministry said.

In an apparent reference to Erdogan's statement, the ministry said: "Lavrov and Kerry condemned attempts by certain external players to instigate confrontation around Karabakh."

State Department spokesman Mark Toner did not address Erdogan's remarks, but said both sides should resume the internationally mediated search for a settlement.

He deplored the "very high number of casualties, including civilians."

"And we urge both sides to stop using force immediately and to avoid any kind of further escalation," Toner added.

Mediators from Russia, the United States and France -- which have long spearheaded attempts to find a solution to the "frozen" conflict -- are to meet in Vienna on Tuesday.

- 'Geopolitical implications' -

Separatists backed by Yerevan seized control of mountainous Nagorny Karabakh, a majority ethnic Armenian region, in an early 1990s war that claimed some 30,000 lives. The foes have never signed a peace deal despite the 1994 ceasefire.

Energy-rich Azerbaijan, whose military spending exceeds Armenia's entire state budget, has repeatedly threatened to take back the breakaway region by force.

Sporadic clashes happen regularly along the front but the latest outbreak represents a serious escalation and analysts warned it risked spiralling even further.

"The Karabakh conflict has serious geopolitical implications," Sergi Kapanadze, a professor of international relations at the Tbilisi State University, told AFP.

The flare-up "threatens the stability of the strategic Caucasus region which is a transit route of Caspian oil and gas to European markets that bypasses Russia, reducing Europe's dependence on Russian energy supplies," he said.
Thai authorities have confiscated about 8,000 red bowls bearing a message from ousted ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, police said Sunday, in the junta's latest attempt to block the resurgence of the political party it toppled.

The raids followed the arrest last week of a woman seen posing with one of the bowls in photos on social media. She has been charged with sedition, a move slammed by a rights group as absurd.

The plastic scoops, used for pouring water in Buddhist ceremonies during Thailand's upcoming new year, bear a note signed by former prime minister Thaksin, whose political bloc has spent the past decade vying for power with a military-backed elite.

Thaksin was ousted in a 2006 coup and now lives in exile, while the government run by his sister Yingluck was toppled by the current junta in 2014.

The bowls -- cast in the Shinawatra's signature red colour -- were first distributed at a temple fair last week in the northern province of Chiang Mai.

The message printed on the side reads: "The situation may be hot, but brothers and sisters may gain coolness from the water inside this bucket."

On Saturday police and soldiers raided homes and offices of three former MPs from the Shinawatras' Puea Thai Party in the northern province of Nan to seize the bowls.

"If we allow these bowls to be distributed, it could benefit some political parties or result in losses to others," said officer Prayoon Chamnankong, who led one of the raids.

In a social media post Sunday, Thaksin urged the junta to focus on more important matters.

"I've done it (given out bowls) several times in the past and it never posed a problem to national security," he wrote, suggesting the junta spend its time tackling other issues such as an ongoing drought and a simmering Muslim insurgency in the far south.

The woman arrested last week could be jailed for up to seven years if convicted of sedition.

Human Rights Watch called the case evidence that the junta's "intolerance of dissent has reached the point of absolute absurdity".

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"When military courts try people for sedition for posting photos with holiday gifts from deposed leaders, it's clear that the end of repression is nowhere in sight," said Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director.

The junta has outlawed all political activities since its power grab, pledging to heal the kingdom's bitter divides.

But critics say the generals are chiefly bent on crippling the Shinawatra clan, who are wildly popular with their rural supporters in the north and northeast but hated by the Bangkok-centric military and royalist elite.

A similar attempt to quash the siblings' enduring popularity was made earlier this year when authorities banned a calendar featuring the pair in an embrace.

After keeping quiet for much of the past two years, the family's powerful political machine has recently become more vocal as the country gears up for the junta's promised elections in 2017.

But public criticism of the regime has landed many Shinawatra allies in brief spells of military detention, which the army describes as "attitude adjustment" sessions.
mark cuban

While companies like Uber are arguing to stay private for as long as they can, investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is taking the opposite approach.

He's arguing to his companies that it's worth the hassle to go public, he said in a "Closing Bell" interview on CNBC.

In 2015, many tech companies that went public didn't see many positive results. There's been a "down mood" around tech stocks Cuban argues because they are all companies that waited too long to go public.

The market used to be able to capitalize on the the hypergrowth of a company going public early and that's not happening anymore, he says.

"Companies are waiting seven, nine, 10 years or longer to go public, and their hypergrowth is typically gone," Cuban said. "And so that's why you're seeing a lot of IPOs underperform."

He's working to push his companies to go public early, instead of following the Uber path of wanting to stay private forever.

"Its something we have to work at. That when we hit 50 or $100 million in sales, and we think we can be a 500 or $750 million revenue and 10% net profit company, let's go public early," Cuban says.

The lack of exciting hypergrowth companies going public also gives bigger companies the advantage to swoop in and acquire smaller upstarts looking for capital. Cuban argued that's what happened with Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus. There's diminished incentives for companies to invest in their own R&D and fight it out with the upstarts.

"Because the problem is there's arent exciting growth companies coming and theres a reduction in competition for big companies because all those big companies have to do is sit back and wait and buy all these upstarts that are doing well," Cuban said. "Look at Facebook with Instagram and Oculus. In the past, those companies would have gone public..."

NOW WATCH: Heres Mark Cubans advice for whoever wins the $1.5 billion Powerball





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In this article I am going to explain twelve things you should know about the extreme-right hate group called Britain First. ...
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Jesse Brown' Canadaland (link is external) , the investigative website whose work allowed The Toronto Star to develop its series uncovering the Jian Ghomeshi scandal, is once again proving its worth in a landscape littered with corporate news media. This time it has discovered, thanks to a tip from a reader, the mysterious removal (link is external) by Global News of an investigative report into that right-wing cabal known as the Koch brothers and their connections to Canada.Last Thursday at 11:06am, an article titled "The Koch Stake in Canada" ran on GlobalNews.ca. The piece, by veteran investigative reporter Bruce Livesey summarized an upcoming investigative report titled "The Koch Connection," which, the article promised, was set to air two days later, on Saturday January 31 at 7pm. Global News promoted the item with a post on 16x9's Facebook page and a tweet from an official account, which was retweeted by Global's Washington correspondent Jackson Proskow.By Thursday night, the article had disappeared from GlobalNews.ca, the Facebook post and official tweet were deleted, as was Proskow's retweet.Fortunately, the original article, but not the promotion video, can be found on Google Cache (link is external) , and it certainly makes for some interesting reading.It explains how the Koch brothers have a vested interest in seeing the Keystone XL pipeline become a reality, given their extensive holdings in the Canada's tarsands. It also discusses well-known facts about the brothers, including the vast sums of money they direct to conservative politicians and climate-change denial groups.As well, and this is perhaps where the investigation might have earned unwanted attention, they fund the climate-change denying Fraser Institute think tank here in Canada. The cached document also observes the following:Multiple generations of Fraser Institute staffers and donors and board members have had links to the federal Conservative Party, says Rick Smith, executive director of the Broadbent Institute, a liberal think tank. And you know theres no doubt that the Fraser Institutesaggressive denial of climate change, the Fraser Institutes views on tax policy and on immigration  you can see resonating in Harper government policy.Yet the Kochs dont seem to need to spend much money in Canada: after all, the policies of the Harper government on energy, pipelines, climate change and the oil sands dovetailwith their own. In fact, the Harper government has taken measures against the environmental movement that benefit the Kochs directly or indirectly.So what is the official reason for pulling the expose?Canadaland conducted a telephone interview with Ron Waksman, Global News' Senior Director of Online News, Current Affairs, Editorial Standards & Practices, to try to get some answers. According to Waksman, it "was not up to scratch" and "had some holes in it."I'll take BS for a Thousand Alex.............
actress Lucy DeCoutere tweeted Saturday she was resigning from the show, only hours after her colleagues released a statement in support of actor Mike Smith, accused of domestic battery in Hollywood "If I find out that somebody is abusive, I cut them out of my life. It's very easy," DeCoutere tweeted earlier Saturday afternoon.In another tweet, she said her resignation was connected to Smith's arrest.Smith, 43, plays the character Bubbles on the popular television show that recently made its debut on Netflix with Season 10.Smith and his friend, Georgia Ling, described as the alleged victim, both disputed the charge in the statement."At no time did I assault her. I am not guilty of the misdemeanour charged against me," Smith said in the statement.Show manager Louis Thomas declined an interview about DeCoutere's resignation Saturday afternoon, but said the statement of support represented staff and the Trailer Park Boys three main characters, not all of the cast.Publicist Shelia Roberts said DeCoutere told the show's producer a few weeks ago that she would not be returning next season. "This does not come as a surprise to us," Roberts said in an email.
The Estonian carrier Nordica announces new direct flights between Vienna and Tallinn. Nordica will operate up to five weekly flights to the Estonian capital city in cooperation with Adria Airways.

We are pleased to further expand flight connection to Estonia together with Nordica, says Julian Jager, Member of the Management Board of Flughafen Wien AG, commenting on the new flight service from Vienna Airport. Tallinn is the former European Capital of Culture, and is an exciting travel destination featuring numerous sights as well as an important economic center.

Erik Sakkov, CCO of Nordica, also expressed his satisfaction with the new flight connection. The new flights between Tallinn and Vienna comprise an important step in our strategy of facilitating European access to Estonia. We are very happy to be able to connect these two historic capital cites.
What is the likely future pattern of cruise tourism development in China and what kinds of products and itineraries will appeal most to Chinese consumers? How can the Korean and other Asian economies maximise the benefits of cruise tourism? What is the nature and scale of the opportunity for Asian shipyards in cruise ship construction?

Answers to the questions above will be answered at the Seatrade Cruise Asia, taking place from 12  13 May 2016 in Busan, South Korea.

Taking place on the first day of discussions, key cruise industry professionals will be addressing hot trends and topics affecting Korea and the wider Asian market.

To ensure the industry stays at the forefront of developments, an expert-panel will answer the questions above and many more by many respected speakers from the industry. Speakers confirmed for this eagerly-awaited session include Buhdy BOK, President, Costa Group Asia, Costa Cruises Asia Pacific & China; Thatcher BROWN, President, Dream Cruises; Roger CHEN, Chairman, Carnival China; Lorenzo DIAMANTINI, Vice General Manager, Greater China, MSC Cruises; Bruce KRUMRINE, Vice President, Shore Operations, Holland America Group and Dr Zinan LIU, President, North APAC & China, Royal Caribbean International & Chairman, CLIA North Asia.

The opening session will be preceded by a series of welcome and keynote addresses presented by Professor JON Joon Soo, Chair Professor of Business School at Sogang University, Republic of Korea; Chairman of Commissioners of Busan Port Authority; Chairman of Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries and Dr Zinan LIU, President, North APAC & China, Royal Caribbean International & Chairman, CLIA North Asia.

For more information please log on to www.seatrade-cruiseasia.com
Italys Minister of Infrastructures and Transport Graziano Delrio attended the official handover ceremony of ms Koningsdam to Holland America Line.

The delivery took place with a luncheon and shipyard workers party aboard the ship Saturday, April 2, 2016, at the Fincantieri shipyard in Marghera, Italy.

Italian minister expressed his appreciation for the long-standing relationship between Carnival Corporation, including Holland America Line, and Fincantieri. Other speakers included Giuseppe Bono, chief executive officer, Fincantieri, and Arnold Donald, chief executive officer, Carnival Corporation. A video was shown of the Italian flag being changed to the Dutch flag, as flown by all Holland America Line ships. Fincantieri also presented ms Koningsdams Captain Emiel de Vries with a bottle containing the first water that touched ms Koningdams hull.

Invited guests at the Handover Ceremony also witnessed a contract signing between Fincantieri S.p.A. and Carnival Corporation to build five new cruise ships as part of a memorandum of agreement announced in 2015. The five new ships include two that will be built for Costa Asia for deployment in China, two ships for Princess Cruises and one designated for P&O Cruises Australia, with deliveries expected in 2019 and 2020.

Following the official ceremony, the shipyard employees who worked over the past two years to build Koningsdam were invited on board with their families to celebrate their accomplishment. Guests were treated to dinner in the Lido Market, and a performance in World Stage, showing off the venues 270-degree LED projection. A tour of the ship allowed the shipyard employees to share the final result of their hard work with their families.

The ship will sail from the yard Sunday, April 3, to make its way to Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy, for its Premiere Voyage departing April 8. Following a series of premiere Mediterranean voyages, Koningsdams official naming ceremony will take place in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, May 20.

For more information about Holland America Line, consult a travel professional, call 1-877-SAIL HAL (877-724-5425) or visit hollandamerica.com.
Until the opening of the Seychelles International Airport on March 1972 by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, travelers to these stunning islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean had to come by boat. Finally, Seychelles cabinet of ministers recently approved to open islands first maritime museum which will present the rich maritime heritage, dating back to long before the 17th century.

Seychelles Minister for Tourism and Culture Alain St.Ange made the announcement on Wednesday during a press conference at the National Cultural Centre in the presence of the principal secretary for culture Benjamine Rose and other members of the committee set up to oversee the project.

Speaking at the press conference, Minister St.Ange said that the Seychelles maritime history is a rich one and it is vital that it is preserved for the future generation. This is for Seychelles and for the Seychellois people, Minister St.Ange added.

The museum will be located on Ile Hodoul, an islet lying in the tidal basin of the Victoria harbour. The islet is named after Jean-Francois Hodoul, a French Corsair, who arrived in Seychelles in 1791 on his ship Les Deux Soeurs. The French government is supporting the project and work will continue to bring other countries on board for this project.

Minister St.Ange is appealing to anyone who has artefacts that can be collected and preserved in the museum to donate to the committee.

He also echoed words of thanks to all those who are supporting the project in one way or another.

Consultant and advisor at the department of culture who is also working on the project Richard Touboul said the project will be one which will mark the history of Seychelles as it will help us to know where we came from, depicting vital parts of our history.
FOREST CITY  A March 25 legislative forum was the first at the newly-renamed Waldorf University.

President Bob Alsop asked Sen. Dennis Guth, R-Klemme, and Reps. Terry Baxter, R-Garner, and Tedd Gassman, R-Scarville, if they would support increasing the Iowa Tuition Grant for institutions like Waldorf.

The grant is to entice Iowa students to stay in the state. It is around $6,000 for non-profit private colleges and $1,850 for for-profit schools like Waldorf, Alsop said.

Waldorf is a terrific value to students, Alsop said, adding the school is among the lowest in tuition rates in the state.

Even so, some students pick other institutions because they can qualify for the higher Iowa Tuition Grant amounts there, he said.

Im wondering what can be done to provide more equity, Alsop said.

Gassman recommended Alsop talk to Rep. Cecil Dolecheck, who is on the House Education Committee.

Baxter said he is disappointed in the disparity between colleges in Iowa, especially between the Regents schools and community colleges.

We need to quit picking winners and losers, he said. We need reform on the whole issue. "Im not sure where to go but feel we need to open up the conversation.

The conversation, Alsop said, should be about the students.

We need to compete with the private institutions on an even playing field. Its ultimately about the students and whats in the students best interest, Alsop said.

Another topic was raised by a member of the audience, Claudia Tillman, who wanted to know where the legislators stood on legalizing medical cannabis.

She said her adult daughter has ulcerative colitis and the last option to treat it no longer works.

She, along with so many others, they beg you to help by legalizing medical cannabis, Tillman said.

While Baxter said he is sympathetic to those needing medical cannabis, he said he has problems with the legalization process. Guth and Gassman agreed.

The problem, Guth and Gassman said, comes from marijuana still being a Schedule I drug. Drugs on that list either have a high potential for abuse or have no currently accepted medical use in the U.S., according to the U.S. Controlled Substances Act.

If we produced it in Iowa as a Schedule I drug, thats against federal law, Gassman said.

Baxter said medical cannabis would first need to be moved down to a Schedule II drug before it can be legally prescribed by doctors.

He has signed a letter to the Food and Drug Administration encouraging the move from Schedule I to II.

But Gassman said he had problems with expanding medical cannabis use in Iowa.

"I do not want to grow marijuana in Iowa," he said.
Tue, 10/26 (11:30am ET): MBA Essays - Talking About Your Past and Making Your Reader Excited About Your Future
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With anti-Trump rallies happening practically every week this spring, it might seem like New Yorkers have finally found something they can agree upon (besides the fact that NYC sucks and no one else should try to live here). However, it seems Donald Trump has a group of NYU student supporters who have hesitantly begun to vocalize their love for the least credible presidential candidate in modern history.

Shockingly, it seems that the overwhelmingly-liberal NYU might not be the most pleasant place for Trump fans: "Supporters generally try to keep it hidden from the rest of the student body," junior Dylan Perera told the Post today. "Theyre afraid of losing friends, being ridiculed in class, getting worse grades and are even afraid of being assaulted and physically hurt."

Perera, who was the only Trump supporter willing to let the Post publish his name, said he has been hounded by fellow students for his views: "[One woman] freaked out and started yelling and screaming in my face, calling me a racist and a fascist. It was impossible to even have a conversation," he said, which is basically the inverse of how many Trump supporters have embraced malignant stubbornness in the face of overwhelming evidence of Trump's unique stupidity.

Perera estimates there may be as many as 30 Trump supporters at the school, but there is no official group or meet-ups: "Its really decentralized," he told the Post, because "most people are too afraid to start an official group." One anonymous student told them he was ostracized by his "radical social-justice warrior" roommates ("Their hatred towards me started escalating after we had a few political discussions"); another said his professor made a Trump joke at his expense.

"There are definitely a decent number of Trump supporters at NYU that are hiding in the closet," a freshman, who wears his "Make America Great Again" hat around campus, told NYU News. "When I tell people Im a Trump supporter, they just laugh it off. They dont like to believe that there are non-white Trump supporters. But once you wear the hat, you accept the fact that people arent going to like you, but it feels pretty weird to hide my political beliefs in a place that is so diverse."

"Like me, most of [the other Trump supporters on campus] dont even support absolutely everything Trump says, like building a wall and deporting all 11 million illegal immigrants," he added, leaving one to wonder what exactly he agrees with Trump about. Is it his views on abortion, which have changed five times over the last week? Is it his foreign policy views, which our current president called stunningly ignorant?

"I know what the spirit of the campus is so I keep quiet about my views just because it makes the day go easier," junior Jillian Spataro, who is planning to vote for Trump, told NYU News. "I do hear the side comments and see the Facebook pages. As a registered Republican, its just easier for me to turn a blind eye instead of getting involved."

Last year, NYU alum Megan Powers took a job out of school to become a Trump campaign coordinator, and brought NYU Local on a tour of Trump's campaign offices in NYC. "Everyone has fans and everyone has people who arent fans," she said at the time. "Ive had a lot of my friends want to talk to me about it because they think its so interesting. They ask me kind of the same things youre asking me: whats it like and do you actually like him, do you actually think hes good? And I think Mr. Trump is fantastic."
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March 15 was National Agriculture Day. Across the country and at home here in Montana, many growers, organizations, government agencies, universities and families joined together to celebrate the abundance provided by American agriculture. We have much to be thankful for. Montana agriculture remains the cornerstone of the states economy. It continues to shape us in a state blessed with diverse and vibrant landscapes, dedicated people and rich natural resources.

We salute and honor the people across the state who are leading and delivering agriculture in Montana: from certified seed growers and sellers, large acreage and small acreage production, family businesses and those who continually endure the risk, challenge and uncertainties of the climate and markets. Thank you for your commitment to an industry and economy that demands an investment and dedication thats only second nature to most Montanans. Perhaps thats why Montana is comprised of 27,800 farms and ranches (65 percent of our land base), contributing $4.4 billion dollars a year to the United States economy.

Montana State University and its College of Agriculture will celebrate their 125th anniversary in 2018. We continue to see students from all walks of life enroll in our many programs, and were proud of our enrollment growth for the eighth straight year. We think the strong student interest in agricultural-related careers reflects the many ways in which agriculture is changing: young people are increasingly concerned with food production and safety, healthy economies, access to nutritional foods, environmental quality and public health  all of which stem from the products we produce and consume.

MSUs College of Agriculture continues to be recognized nationally for its curriculum, research, fields, farms and faculty. They are a force of people and programs committed to strengthening Montanas highest grossing industry, and they possess the ability to respond to world challenges. In addition to the college, faculty and staff at the eight research centers under MSUs Montana Agricultural Experiment Station are able to deliver agricultural solutions through relationships and support from many of you. Because of our sound partnerships with growers and production groups across Montana, we are able to focus on the most critical needs of the industry.

Of course, we in agriculture continue to face major challenges. Water remains a competitive commodity, new invasive pests and plants are making their presence known, and volatile markets and policies create pressure on those working their hardest. On a global scale, the world continues to face food insecurity while Americans at home are hungry even as vast amounts of food are wasted each year. The pressure on our communities and landscapes to meet the challenges and demands of 21st century agriculture is real.

Agriculture  on this national day of recognition and every day  is something that touches all of us. I challenge you to reflect on the role agriculture plays in your life. You shouldnt have to look far to do so. Perhaps this might be buying a Montana-made product, visiting a local market, asking a farmer or rancher about their successes and challenges, or thinking about the important role of food banks in feeding your community. Or, talk to an MSU agriculture student about their own vision for the future. You might be surprised and renewed with optimism.

The beauty of an agriculture community is that it takes everyone to ensure success -- whether thats your own hands in soil or learning more about the sources of your food and products.

Join me as we steward agriculture at MSU and across Montana, today and into the next 125 years.

***

Charles Boyer is the vice president of agriculture, dean and director of the College of Agriculture and Montana Agricultural Experiment Station at Montana State University. Boyer has a bachelors degree in biology from Eastern Oregon State College, and a masters and doctorate in genetics, both from Pennsylvania State University. MSUs College of Agriculture has approximately 1,028 students with 11 bachelor's degree programs, nine master's degree programs and four doctoral degree programs from five departments and one division.
President Obama recently nominated Merrick Garland, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, he could serve on the court for at least a decade and tip the balance in favor of the liberal block of justices who routinely side with government over employers.

The consequences for the economy, and especially for small businesses, could be harsh and long lasting. Thats why the National Federation of Independent Business, the countrys leading advocate for small-business owners, has been vetting Judge Garlands record for weeks. Our legal experts have been poring over his decisions, rulings and public statements related to hundreds of cases.

After studying his record, NFIB found that Garland has sided overwhelmingly with regulators, labor unions, trial lawyers and environmental activists. Small employers have been almost always on the losing end of his decisions.

For example, in NAHB v. EPA, Judge Garland in 2011 rejected a Regulatory Flexibility Act claim by the National Association of Home Builders against the Environmental Protection Agency. He did so despite the fact that the RFA is unambiguous. It requires certain agencies to analyze the effect of their actions on small employers. Thats an important protection for small businesses, who struggle with the costs of regulations. In fact, according to the SBA, the typical small business must spend $12,000 per worker annually to comply with federal regulations. Theres little doubt that Judge Garland would defer to regulators as a Supreme Court Justice.

In another case, Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton, in 2003, Garland argued that the federal government can regulate private property in California under the Commerce Clause because of the presence of a unique species of toad. The Commerce Clause applies to interstate commerce. The toad wasnt part of any interstate commercial activity. Nevertheless, Garland twisted the Commerce Clause into a pretzel in order to rationalize federal regulation. Would he be just as creative as a Supreme Court justice in giving regulators more power over private property? NFIB believes thats very likely.

On the Circuit Court, Judge Garland ruled in many cases involving the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of labor disputes. Often, however, it acts more as an agent of the labor unions. Thats been especially true under President Obama. Garland ruled in two cases that when employers are found guilty of violations, not only should their business assets be penalized but their personal assets as well. In other words, according to Garland, a business owners personal assets, like homes and retirement savings, are fair game for regulators.

In fact, in 16 major labor decisions, Garland ruled in favor of the NLRB in all but one case. In that case he voted with the union. Thats the pattern throughout his long tenure on the bench. He strongly favors government power over private enterprise. He has deep sympathies for labor unions over employers. And he is certain to bring those views to the Supreme Court, where big decisions affecting the economy are likely to be made in the future.

NFIB is a plaintiff in two very important cases that could land at the Supreme Court soon. It is challenging the EPA Waters of the United States rule, which would require local business owners to seek federal approval for even the smallest property improvements as long as there is water nearby. The applications will cost thousands; the delays will be endless; the threat of litigation will hang over every project.

The EPA Power Plan rule is just as potentially damaging. It forces states to switch from coal as a source of electricity to more expensive alternatives. Even the EPA predicts it will significantly increase the cost of electricity. That means higher fixed costs and lower profits for small businesses that are already struggling.

After examining his record, its a fair assumption that Judge Garland would readily side with the government in both of these major cases. Small business knows where he stands. NFIB is firmly opposed to this nominee.

***

Riley Johnson is Montana state director for the National Federation of Independent Business.
Made-in-Montana energy means good Montana jobs that on average pay two to three times more than the state average. Montanas ability to create more good-paying energy jobs is immense -- in fact, our state leads the nation in coal deposits. We are the nations fifth-largest producer of hydropower, with 23 hydroelectric dams across our state, and fifth in wind energy potential.

Montana is at the center stage of the national energy debate and provides the nation a template of a true all-of-the-above energy portfolio -- we have coal, natural gas and oil, as well as renewables such as hydro, wind, biomass and solar opportunities. What makes our state most valuable are the people who make our energy systems work, towns like Colstrip that build communities around livelihoods reliant on good-paying energy jobs: That is the good news.

The bad news: Montana energy jobs are under assault.

The past two weeks, Ive heard from thousands of Montanans about the future and importance of made-in-Montana energy and made-in-Montana good-paying jobs.

During my weeklong tour across our state, I saw once again our vast natural resources and our true energy potential -- from touring a wind farm near Baker to seeing the hydropower facility at Helena's Hauser Dam to hosting a town hall in Colstrip -- hearing directly from the community about the devastating effects President Obamas anti-coal regulations will have on hardworking Montanans.

My statewide energy tour culminated this week at Montana Energy 2016, where over 600 people gathered in Billings for a Montana family conversation about our states energy future.

During the two-and-a-half-day summit, we heard a consistent and powerful message about the need to maximize our opportunity for growth and expand made-in-Montana energy and the good-paying jobs it supports.

Montanans are leading American energy innovation -- Montanans like Chrystal Cuniff, a Montana Tech engineer from Choteau whos helped drill the deepest well in the Gulf of Mexico or Ryan Lance, a Montana native, whos leading one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world. Ashley Dennehey from Colstrip highlighted how the boilermakers, operators and other hardworking labor groups in her community are working hard to keep the lights on in the face of adversity.

We must continue investing in our two-year colleges that provide training in trades like welding and heavy machine operations, so we can keep our kids here with good-paying energy jobs. And, we can't forget that Montana coal provides tax revenues of $145 million year, which support our teachers and schools.

Montana should lead the world in developing clean coal technology. We must continue to develop renewable technologies that will store the power created by wind. We should not allow Washington, D.C., and the Obama administration to dictate and regulate coal and gas out of existence.

We need more made-in-Montana energy, not more made-in-the-Middle-East energy.

Make no mistake, President Obamas Environmental Protection Agency regulations are killing Montana energy. Our countrys future is bright if we can unleash the power of innovation and rein in the overregulation of Washington, D.C.

I couldnt agree more with what Chairman of the Crow Nation Darrin Old Coyote said in his keynote address at Montana Energy 2016, All of Montana citizens need to work together for a better tomorrow: renewable energy, fossil energy, conventional energy, Indian or non-Indian. Regardless of political affiliation, whether we are Democrats, Republicans or Independents.

Montanans can find better solutions than Washington, D.C., bureaucrats.

***

Steve Daines is one of Montana's U.S. senators.
Bridgit Bowden is Wisconsin Public Radios Mike Simonson Memorial Investigative Reporting Fellow who is embedded in the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalisms newsroom during her fellowship. The nonprofit Center (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders addresses the crowd Saturday, April 2, 2016, at a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)
Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley and state Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg say they will fairly and impartially apply the law, and neither will answer questions about their opinions on specific issues or cases.

But the candidates for Wisconsin Supreme Court acknowledge differences in judicial philosophy, and experts say voters going to the polls Tuesday will need to look at other cues to determine whos a better fit for a 10-year term on the states highest court.

Those cues include experience and background, judicial role models, and the political leanings of their supporters.

Youve got (Bradley who) has client-based experience and kind of a civil, business kind of background, whereas (Kloppenburg) has been in the public arena doing attorney general work and doing environmental work, said former Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske. I think their experience bases are different, their temperament is different.

Bradleys two decades of practicing law and implementing business transactions is a resume often not seen on the Supreme Court.

Bradley also has been a judge for about three years, on the circuit court in Milwaukee and on the states appeals court  a more typical route to the high court. She was appointed to those positions, and to the Supreme Court last fall by Gov. Scott Walker.

Kloppenburg has spent most of her time in the public arena as an assistant attorney general and doing environmental work and has been a state appeals court judge for three years, too. Geske said Kloppenburgs experience arguing before the court gives her that perspective of the importance of arguments.

In recent weeks, the campaign has focused Bradleys writings as a Marquette University student 24 years ago in which she called AIDS patients and homosexuals degenerates, compared abortion to the Holocaust and slavery, and wrote that an author legitimately suggested women play a role in date rape. Bradley has repeatedly apologized for what she wrote about AIDS patients and homosexuals.

Geske said though the comments were made a long time ago, they are relevant to the 2016 campaign because they revealed more than an opinion on those issues.

Still, Bradley holds a 5-point lead over Kloppenburg according to a Marquette Law School Poll released last week, slightly outside of the 4.1 percentage point margin of error. But the poll of 957 likely voters showed one in six are still undecided.

Voters are also being bombarded with millions of dollars worth of advertisements from the candidates and third-party groups. The conservative Wisconsin Alliance for Reform has spent more than $1.5 million backing Bradley, while the liberal Greater Wisconsin Committee has spent at least $345,000 on behalf of Kloppenburg, according to campaign watchdog group Justice at Stake.

Supreme Court races are nonpartisan, but contests generally fall along party lines.

Role models, support

Legal experts also cite the candidates differences in naming judicial role models.

Bradley has named former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and current justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, all of whom routinely have voted together as conservatives. Kloppenburg has named Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both reliably in the liberal wing of the Supreme Court, and Anthony Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee considered a swing vote on the court.

Scalia, Alito and Thomas adhere to a strict interpretation of the constitution and law based on the original intent as each was written, said Rick Esenberg, president of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Bradley would likely follow that philosophy, he said.

Madison lawyer Lester Pines, who frequently argues before the state Supreme Court and represented the unions that unsuccessfully challenged Gov. Scott Walkers Act 10 collective bargaining law, said many of the cases that come before the state Supreme Court are matters where the law is ambiguous.

So the broader issue surrounding the candidates is not their judicial philosophy but whether the candidates will make decisions in lockstep with their political backers.

Pines said in one recent case during negotiations of a settlement, the opposing side told him it would appeal the case to the state Supreme Court and have the states business lobby file amicus briefs on its behalf. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce has spent heavily in the past decade to help elect a more conservative court.

When lawyers are using that in the course of settlement negotiations, thats the perception on the ground  that the court as its currently constituted will respond to the outside interests who believe they control the court, Pines said.

Bradley has been appointed three times in as many years by Walker to judgeships. Kloppenburg also has applied for three judicial appointments under former Gov. Jim Doyle and under President Barack Obama.

Law enforcement endorsements

Law enforcement endorsements are considered key in Supreme Court races.

Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, said the groups decision to endorse Kloppenburg was, in part, because of Bradleys unwillingness to discuss cases that could have provided evidence of her judicial philosophy or knowledge of criminal law.

He said the board has historically placed greater weight on the candidates experience and knowledge of criminal law.

When Bradley appeared before our board, she proved herself totally incapable of offering anything to demonstrate her knowledge, experience, or her judicial philosophy, he said. Frankly, it was a little embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Kloppenburg performed exceptionally and was able to discuss the standards of law that are applied by the courts on various law enforcement and labor-related issues, said Palmer.

Andy Opperman, vice-president of the Wisconsin Fraternal Order of Police board, said his group endorsed Bradley because her views aligned quite significantly with the Fraternal Order of Police.

She talked about not legislating from the bench and she basically talked about her experience at every level of the justice system, he said.

Opperman said Bradley empathized with officers who feel law enforcement officers are under attack after high-profile shootings of unarmed black men by police officers, including two in Wisconsin since 2014.

Shes very in support of law enforcement as far as us being under attack as of the last year, he said.

She basically said she felt we were under attack and she was in support of law enforcement, and just saying that alone is huge.

He said Kloppenburg didnt respond to the groups survey that helped inform their endorsement.

Judicial rulings explored

Asked what cases provide evidence for their judicial philosophies, Kloppenburgs campaign pointed to a 2012 decision affirming a circuit court decision denying arbitration against a woman who was suing a nursing home where her husband died, and a 2015 decision in which she was part of a panel of judges that dismissed citations against protesters at the Capitol during Act 10.

Bradleys campaign didnt respond to a request for examples of decisions that provide evidence for her judicial philosophy. But Bradley said in a March forum that a 1989 opinion written by Scalia best exemplifies her approach.

In that case, Scalia upheld a persons right to burn the American flag despite Scalias personal opposition to doing so. Bradley often says her philosophy is to interpret the law as its written and not how she personally wishes it would read.
MILWAUKEE  Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton took a shot at state Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley in a speech to state Democrats on Saturday, saying Bradleys past comments about contraception disqualify her from the states highest court.

Referring to a column published in 2006 in which Bradley said opponents to a proposal that would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions including contraceptives because of their personal religious beliefs put womens convenience over pharmacists objections to being a party to murder.

She actually said  I had to read this three times, Clinton said at the state Democratic Party of Wisconsins Founders Day dinner, she actually has said birth control is morally abhorrent.

Bradley, who is seeking re-election to the court after being appointed last October by Gov. Scott Walker, came under fire in March after the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now unearthed opinion columns she authored as a Marquette University student 24 years ago in which she called AIDS patients and homosexuals degenerates, compared abortion to the Holocaust and slavery, and wrote that an author legitimately suggested women play a role in date rape.

Bradley has repeatedly apologized for what she wrote about AIDS patients and homosexuals.

Clinton said she was joining others who were saying no to discrimination, no to hate speech and no to Bradley. She said there was no place at all on any court for Bradleys dangerous rhetoric.

A spokesman for Bradleys campaign tied the comments to Bradleys opponent, state Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg.

Kloppenburgs claims of independence have fallen flat with the voters. Now that multiple polls show her losing, shes turned to one of the most partisan figures in the nation, Democrat Hillary Clinton, to carry on Kloppenbergs personal attacks, said campaign spokesman Luke Martz.

State Republican Party spokesman Pat Garrett also rejected Clintons remarks and tied them to Kloppenburg, referring to a recent Marquette Law School poll that showed Bradley with a slight lead over Kloppenburg.

Kloppenburg spokeswoman Melissa Mulliken declined to comment on Clintons remarks and denied asking the campaigns to make them.

Clintons comments came during a 32-minute speech in which she took aim at Walker and his signature legislation that all but eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public employees and his proposal in the last state budget to cut funding for higher education.

Opponent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also addressed the crowd Saturday as part of the presidential candidates final push before Tuesdays primary.

Sanders also told the crowd he would support unions who have experienced membership losses in Wisconsin after Walkers collective bargaining measure and recently-passed right-to-work legislation.

Gov. Walker thinks its a great idea to try to destroy the trade union movement. I think its a great idea to try to build a strong trade union movement, said Sanders.

Sanders said if elected, he would push to pass legislation that would make it easier for workers to negotiate contracts and to form a union.

He also drew a contrast with Clinton, saying the Democratic Partys future depended on young people and not establishment politics  referring to Clinton.

For the Democratic Party to succeed, we need a vibrancy and we need an energy and we need a level of grassroots activism that we do not have at this moment, Sanders said. We need to bring in millions of young people who have never voted in their lives and I am proud that many of those young people are coming to our campaign.

Sanders said the same old establishment politics and establishment economics could not solve the problems facing the country. We need a movement of millions of people to stand up, fight back and demand a government that represents all of us, he said.

Clinton and Sanders were two of a number of prominent Democrats speaking at Saturdays dinner. Congresswoman Gwen Moore, former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and state party chairwoman Martha Laning also addressed the crowd.

The dinner marks the last time Clinton and Sanders will appear on the same stage before Tuesdays primary. A Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday showed Sanders narrowly leading Clinton in Wisconsin, 49 percent to 45 percent; that lead falls within the polls margin of error.

Clinton has been steadily losing ground to Sanders over the course of several Marquette polls over the past year. In November she led Sanders 50-41.

Sanders has the largest lead in the Madison region, but he also has a slight advantage in the Milwaukee region. Clinton has performed better in states with large minority populations.

Sanders scheduled a rally at UW-Madisons Kohl Center for Sunday, which would be his third trip to Madison leading up to the primary. Clinton was in Madison on Monday, when she urged a crowd of invited guests to consider the future of the U.S. Supreme Court when choosing a presidential candidate.

Meanwhile, at rallies held on March 26 and on Wednesday, Sanders emphasized the gulf between himself and Clinton on support from special interests and their positions on free trade.

Both candidates made stops in Eau Claire on Saturday, and Sanders made another in Milwaukee ahead of the dinner.

Meanwhile, GOP candidates Donald Trump made stops in Racine, Wausau and Eau Claire. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stopped in Ashwaubenon and Ohio Gov. John Kasich visited Racine, Janesville and Madison.
Athens Macedonian News Agency: News in English, 16-04-03 Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/> CONTENTS [01] IMF: We do not comment on leaks and supposed reports [01] IMF: We do not comment on leaks and supposed reports ANA/MPA---"We do not comment on leaks and supposed reports of internal discussions" said IMF in an announcement referring to Wikileaks revelations. In its announcement the International Monetary Fund reaffirms its stable position which is the need for a durable solution for the financial challenges Greece is facing. A solution which puts Greece on the path of sustainable growth supported by a set of credible reforms matched by a debt relief from its European partners. The necessary reforms and targets (of the Greek programme) must be based on credible assumptions. As the IMF has already reiterated, says the Fund's announcement, there is a trade-off on what is feasible on reforms and the amount of debt relief needed. Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article
Self-Promotion: An Introverts Guide

DIY self-promotion is hard enough, but as an introvert the idea of aggressively marketing yourself and pushing your music on strangers becomes even more daunting. Here we look at some ways your more introverted tendencies can be used to your advantage.

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Guest Post by Casey van Wensem on the Sonicbids Blog

The common prescription for success in the music world these days goes something like this: hustle, hustle, and more hustle. Without a record label or publicist backing you (and even sometimes when you have their help), most promotion for DIY musicians turns into self-promotion. If youre an introverted musician, however, self-promotion is probably the last thing you ever want to do, and even saying the word "self-promotion" probably leaves you with a gross taste in your mouth.

We all know that self-promotion is essential for success, but for an introvert, the whole process of sharing your music with the world is typically exhausting at best and terrifying at worst. You may think that as an introvert, youre simply not designed for self-promotion, but the truth is, if you use your nature to your advantage, you can become just as comfortable when youre out promoting your music as when youre practicing at home or playing onstage.





Listen first

According to author Susan Cain, introverts "listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation." While you could see your tendency to listen first as a disadvantage when it comes to meeting people, think about it from the other persons perspective: while most people who engage in self-promotion only want to talk about themselves, youre actually willing to listen to what other people have to say. This makes you a welcome break from all of the other musicians out there who are only focused on their own agenda. Listening before you speak may not be the quickest way to get the word out there about your music, but its the best way to develop the sustainable relationshipsyou need.

Stop thinking of people as "contacts"

Marketing jargon tends to make a mess of our personal relationships. Instead of thinking of the people we meet online or out in the world as other people just like us, were told to think of them as "contacts" or "leads." If all youre looking for with each new relationship is a career boost or an opportunity to make a sale, then youre devaluing other people as well as yourself.

Instead of getting sucked into the idea of dehumanizing our interactions by constantly pushing a marketing agenda, focus on cultivating friendships first and pushing your agenda second. Seeing your interactions in the industry this way actually helps to take a lot of the fear and doubt out of self-promotion; its a lot easier to ask people how their day is going than it is to ask them to buy your album.

Ask permission

If youve never heard of permission marketing, go learn about it right now. It may just become your new best friend. In contrast to other marketing terms, permission marketing is a term that actually helps us think about other people as individuals. The golden rule of permission marketing is essentially to "market unto others as you would like to be marketed to." Basically, before you try to make a sale, make sure the people youre selling to are actually interested in what you have to say. You can do this by asking people to sign up to your email list, for example, or by contacting bloggers who have already written about your music.

"We tend to think that peoples default mode is not wanting to buy," says business strategist and Quiet Revolution author Tara Gentile. "Thats not true. Look around: our default mode is absolutely wanting to buy! The real problem is that people dont want to be sold to; they want to believe theyre in control of the situation." Permission marketing gives people control over what information they receive, and at the same time, gives you access to people who want to know more about you. This takes a lot of the pressure out of the self-promotion scenario: rather than cold-calling people, now youre offering them information about something theyre already interested in.

Embrace modesty

As an introvert, and a creative one at that, admitting success can sometimes be the hardest thing to do. Modesty drives introverts to do great work, but it can also be an impediment to sharing that work with the world. Some people try to compensate for this by boasting about their work, even when they dont feel satisfied with it. While some extroverts may be able to pull this off, introverts attempting this strategy usually come off as awkward or insecure. So instead of trying to brag about your music all the time, focus on making great music first, and then work on sharing it with the world.

Boasting also puts the attention on you, rather than your music, which is exactly the opposite of what most introverts want. Introverted musicians may have a hard time talking about themselves, but get them started on their favorite band, and they can talk for days. Similarly, you can become a better self-promoter by shifting any unwanted attention away from yourself and toward whats really important  your music. If you make your self-promotion more about your art than yourself, youll have an easier time putting yourself (and your music) out there.

All of this might not make self-promotion fun for you, but it could take a lot of stress out of the situation, and make you a better self-promoter in the process. By reshaping the way you think about sales and marketing, you can actually begin to see your introversion as a strength rather than a weakness in this field. Then, next time someone uses the words "self-promotion" or talks about "the hustle," you should be able to fight the urge to jump off the nearest bridge, and you may even be able to talk about your favorite methods of sharing your art with the world.

Casey van Wensem is a freelance composer, musician, and writer living in Kelowna, B.C., Canada. You can hear his musical work at birdscompanionmusic.com and read his written work atcaseyvanwensemwriting.com.

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Two-year-old Khusi, who was rescued from a borewell in Kanpur today was declared brought dead on arriving at a local hospital.

By India Today Web Desk: Two-year-old Khusi, who was rescued from a borewell in Kanpur today was declared brought dead on arriving at a local hospital.

"The girl died about three to six hours before being brought to the hospital. If she fell in the morning, by afternoon she must have died. The stiffness of the body indicts that she must have died before six hours," said professor GN Dwiwedi, a senior doctor of Lala Lajpat Rai hospital.

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Earlier, the Army and NDRF rescued the girl who fell in a 30 feet deep borewell. The rescue operation lasted 10 hours.

The locals have blamed the Kanpur Development Authority - which had dug up a borewell to examine the underground water and soil.

ALSO READ:

Toddler dies after falling in borewell





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Her final status message, tagged with a smiley, on Whatsapp read: "Marke bhi munh na tujhse modhna (I won't turn away my face from you even after dying)." Were those words meant for boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh, the person who found her hanging from the ceiling?

By Vinayak Chakravorty: The world knew her as Anandi. The word translates as 'the joyous one', and that fact would seem an irony if you consider her bleak departure from life. While the industry mourned the loss, it was also time for all secrets and allegations to come tumbling out. Actor Pratyusha Banerjee, who won a zillion fans playing Anandi in the popular soap Balika Vadhu, was found hanging at her flat in Harmony Apartments in the Mumbai suburb of Kandivali on Friday.

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She allegedly committed suicide and postmortem has revealed suffocation as the cause of death, clinically ratified by ligature marks in the front and sides of the neck. Pratyusha was just 24 when she was declared dead on arrival at Kokilaben Ambani Hospital. After post-mortem, the body was taken to Oshiwara Crematorium on Saturday evening. Even in death, however, she left a hint of the undying spirit of life her colleagues will always associate with her. Her final status message, tagged with a smiley, on Whatsapp read: "Marke bhi munh na tujhse modhna (I won't turn away my face from you even after dying)."

Were those words meant for boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh, the person who found her hanging from the ceiling?

The duo was reportedly facing relationship problems. As news spread, so did rumours. A website quoted a spotboy as having sighted Pratyusha and Rahul in a mall recently, where they got into an ugly fight. Then, Rahul reportedly slapped her hard. Whispers linking Rahul to a possible reunion with his ex-girlfriend Saloni Sharma have also surfaced. While Pratyusha planned to marry Rahul, some sites have suggested he had secretly gotten engaged to Saloni. It is too early to say if Rahul is innocent or guilty of abetment to suicide, but the police have not ruled out foul play.

The absence of a suicide note could suggest that Pratyusha acted impulsively. As such, the industry is shocked. She was known to be a lively person. "I can't even think what can drive a strong girl like Pratyusha to do something like this," actor Dolly Bindra, who was one of the first to visit the hospital, told the media. For all her reputation as a publicity moth, Dolly made several statements that garnered media attention. Dolly claimed Pratyusha's body had thick sindoor on the forehead. She added many industry colleagues, who were inside at that moment, were "aware of a lot of things".

Meanwhile, reports have started mushrooming to suggest that Pratyusha and Rahul's recent tiffs were happening over the question of marriage. After Bindra's declaration that the body had sindoor on the forehead, designer Rohit Verma claimed the Balika Vadhu actor had spoken to him a few weeks ago about styling her wedding dress.

"I last spoke to Pratyusha on March 22. She told me to design her wedding outfit. She was going to meet me today to discuss the colour palette," Verma, a close friend, told agencies. Other close friends, who turned up at the hospital, seemed too shocked. Among them were Gurmeet Choudhary, Rakhi Sawant, Sara Khan, Debina Bonnerjee, Kamya Punjabi and Ajaz Khan. Meanwhile, many B-Town celebrities took to social media to express grief.

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"We all live on the edge of disturbia, some fall in the abyss," tweeted Richa Chadha. "Such a lovely person shouldn't have committed suicide! Who knows the turmoil within her. RIP," tweeted Rishi Kapoor.

Rahul's statement to the police runs thus: "We (Pratyusha and Rahul) used to stay in a two-bedroom flat. We had two keys of which one key was with Pratyusha and another with me. When I entered the bedroom I found Pratyusha hanging from the ceiling. I got very scared. Immediately, I called the neighbours and with their help, I took her to Kokilaben hospital. We assumed that she was alive but she was not. I got so scared that I did not inform the police. It was the hospital authorities who informed them. After the doctors' declaration, I called up Pratyusha's family members and few of our closed friends."

According to Rahul, he had left the house at 10 am on Friday and found Pratyusha dead when he returned at 4pm.

Her body was taken to the crematorium after her parents arrived from hometown Jamshedpur on Saturday.

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Also read:

Pratyusha Banerjee cremated; postmortem report reveals suffocation as cause of death

10 things you need to know about Pratyusha Banerjee's death

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An employee with an IT firm, was tied to an electric pole and badly thrashed by a group of people for allegedly stalking a 25-yr-old woman.

By Mail Today: For an IT professional and a father of two children, a usual Friday turned out to be an unusual one after the public tied him to a pole, stripped him and thrashed him black and blue for stalking a married woman and passing lewd comments at her in the heart of the city.

The police rescued the engineer, who works for a reputed MNC firm, from the public and both parties refused to lodge a complaint in connection with the incident. The family members of the techie pleaded with the victim to pardon Sri Ramamurthy (the accused) and let him off, as he would lose his job if a formal complaint was filed against him.

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It was the first of such kind in west Bengaluru (Rajajinagar), which is considered a highly traditional and one of the oldest localities of the city. The incident occurred on the busy Chord Road when Ramamurthy allegedly stalked the 25-yearold woman, who works in a private firm, in the morning hours.

It is alleged that in the past too, the techie stalked her whenever she was on her way to the office and passed lewd comments at the woman.



Also read: Bengaluru: Robbers stab policeman, escape from autorickshaw

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After taking a pledge to abstain from alcohol to make Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's prohibition policy a success, legislators came forward to donate blood for the poor and needy patients at a cancer awareness camp organised in the Bihar legislative Assembly premises on Saturday.

Bihar Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav with Speaker Vijay Chaudhary donate blood for cancer awareness programme in Patna on Saturday. RJD leader Rabri Devi is also seen.

By Giridhar Jha: Bihar legislators may not have been known for espousing philanthropic causes over the years but they seem to be aspiring for an image makeover these days.

After taking a pledge to abstain from alcohol to make Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's prohibition policy a success, legislators came forward to donate blood for the poor and needy patients at a cancer awareness camp organised in the Bihar legislative Assembly premises on Saturday.

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The blood donation camp, organised on the occasion of the annual general meeting of the Bihar chapter of Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA), saw a large number of legislators from different parties, waiting for their turn to donate blood. In the first-of-its-kind initiative, members of both the state Assembly and the legislative council donated blood in response to an appeal by Speaker Vijay Kumar Choudhary and Council chairman Awadhesh Narayan Singh.

Choudhary said that all legislators were public representatives who had come to the House with their resolve to serve people. "In my opinion, nothing can be better than blood donation to serve the people," he said.

Deputy Chief minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, who was among those who donated blood, said that the participation of legislators would send out a positive message to the people.

"The legislators had recently taken a pledge to keep away from booze at the behest of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Now, they are sending out another positive message by participating in the blood donation camp."

Many legislators who took part in the camp, however, said that they had been donating blood on their own for long. "I have been donating blood at regular intervals for several years," Rashtriya Janata Dal legislator Bhai Birendra said. "I think this camp should be organised in the Assembly premises every year."

The blood donated by the legislators would be handed over to the Patna Medical College Hospital. The Nitish government has enforced partial prohibition in the state by closing all liquor outlets in the rural areas.

All varieties of alcohol would be banned in the next phase.

Also read: Partial liquor ban in Bihar: Some facts on alcohol ban in India



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By PTI: From Natasha Chaku

Melbourne, Apr 3 (PTI) A brawl erupted today at a Halal food festival here when a group of anti-Islam protesters clashed with anti-racism activists, marring the Australian citys reputation as a multicultural capital.

The brawl at the community event attended by several families at the Melbourne Showgrounds left one person with a suspected broken eye socket. He was admitted to a hospital.

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The fight came as hundreds of people filled Federation Square as a counter protest to the anti-Islamic movement, which was put back in the spotlight when a United Patriots Front "stop the mosques" banner was unveiled at the Collingwood AFL game on Friday night, the Age newspaper reported.

The brawl began in Ascot Vale suburb when about 30 far-left protesters wearing black clothing and balaclavas swarmed the far-right protesters and other anti-Halal activists, who had been picketing the Halal expo, it reported.

Demonstrators on both sides threw punches during the scuffle outside the venue before police moved in.

Multicultural Affairs Minister Robin Scott said everyone has the right to protest, but it had to be peaceful and respectful.

"Violent conduct is completely unacceptable and has no place in our community," he said.

The race and religion protests in Melbourne came only weeks after the Moomba festival was marred by rioting youths, which had triggered a debate about multiculturalism. PTI NC ABH

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By India Today Web Desk: Rumours had been doing circles that Mad Max Fury Road stars Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy weren't too fond of each other while they were shooting for the film, and now, the Oscar winning actor has opened up further on her issues with the British actor.



The 40-year-old actor spent nine months shooting for Mad Max, but her relationship with Hardy did not run smoothly, reported News.com.au.



In a recent interview with WSJ magazine, Theron said "From what I hear, he's not like that on every movie-I hear he's had good experiences," she said about Tom Hardy, laughing. "Maybe the movie is what it is because we struggled so much with each other, and those characters had to struggle so much with each other. If we were chum-chum, maybe the movie would have been 10 times worse."



The Italian Job actor has often spoken about her onset clashes with Hardy.



She told Esquire in April 2015 interview, "We drove each other crazy, but I think we have respect for each other, and that's the difference," she explained. "This is the kind of stuff that nobody wants to understand-there's a real beauty to that kind of relationship."



The apocalyptic action-packed film has grossed more than USD 500 million worldwide.



Mad Max Fury Road was nominated for Academy Awards this year in 10 categories, including Best Picture and won six. The film won four BAFTA awards this year.



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(With inputs from ANI)



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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 3 (PTI) Coal Indias Jharkhand arm Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL) posted a record production of 61.35 million tonnes (MT) in 2015-16, which was the second consecutive year of double digit growth for the company.

"This is the second consecutive year when Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL) has achieved double digit growth and achieved its target as well. The company produced 61.35 MT of coal, the highest ever, against the target of 60.60 MT," CCL CMD Gopal Singh told PTI.

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The growth in output was about 10.25 per cent and efforts are on to maintain double digit growth in future, he said.

Last year, the PSU had achieved 55.65 MT production.

During the period 2009-10 to 2012-13, the companys coal production was stagnating at around 48 MT.

"During a span of about three years from 2013 to 2016, six greenfield projects have been commissioned, which has no parallel in the coal industry," he added.

Last year in May, the Magadh Project under Magadh and Amrapali area of CCL was inaugurated. It has a capacity of 51 MT per annum, which can go up to 70 MT.

Under a unique initiative, a record 2,250 cases were redressed out of total 2,687 cases registered relating to employees as well as stakeholders problems, ranging from provident fund to land and other issues, he said.

A samadhan kendra was set up in CCL headquarters at Ranchi in February 2012. Singh said the PSU accorded top priority to becoming a zero grievance company.

On overburden removal front, the company could remove about 106.9 million cubic metre overburden during the fiscal, the highest ever, against the target of 100.0 million cubic metre.

Coal offtake too was at a record level of about 59.6 MT.

Out of the 11,684 acres of land authenticated in the last three years, 10,289 acres were authenticated in 2015-16 alone.

Talking about modernisation, he said while growth in washed non-coking coal production was about 29 per cent, "three new washeries are being set up. Tenders for two washeries Karo (3.5 MT) and Konar (7MT) have already been floated. It is planned that all new mines with a capacity of over 10 MT will have their own washery along with reject-based power plant."

During the 2014-15 fiscal, CCL became the first subsidiary of Coal India to achieve its production target by registering unprecedented growth of 11.2 per cent in raw coal output.

Overall, Coal India, the worlds largest miner of dry fuel, has achieved an 8.5 per cent growth in production at 536 MT in 2015-16, but missed its target of 550 MT.

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CIL, which accounts for 80 per cent of domestic output, has eight subsidiaries -- ECL (West Bengal), BCCL (Jharkhand), CCL (Jharkhand), SECL (Chhattisgarh), WCL (Maharashtra), NCL (Madhya Pradesh), MCL (Odisha) and NEC (North East).

The Centre has announced plans to boost Coal Indias annual production to the level of one billion tonnes by 2019 to meet growing fuel demand. However, the company has successively missed its output targets. PTI NAM ABM

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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 3 (PTI) Father Tom Uzhunnalil, who was abducted by a terror group in Yemen, is "safe" and efforts are underway for his early release, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told a delegation of Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI), the organisations spokesman said today.

Father Gyanprakash Topno, spokesman of CBCI, told PTI that a five-member delegation had yesterday met Swaraj who strongly refuted reports that the priest was not alive.

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"Father Tom is safe and efforts are on for his release as early as possible," Topno said quoting the minister who also told the delegation that "government will facilitate the priests safe return to India".

He said the minister told the delegation that more details cannot be divulged at this stage.

Father Tom Uzhunnalil, who hails from Kerala, was abducted last month by a terror group in Yemen, a conflict zone. He had gone missing in Yemen after the Islamic State militant group attacked a care home run by Mother Teresas Missionaries of Charity.

Gunmen had stormed the refuge for the elderly earlier this month and killed a Yemeni guard before tying up and shooting 15 other employees.

Four foreign nuns, including an Indian, working as nurses were among those killed. Father Tom was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old peoples home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis.PTI ANS VMN VMN

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The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India said a delegation met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj who said the government was working to secure the priest's safe return.

By Reuters: Indian priest Father Tom Uzhunnalil abducted by gunmen in Yemen last month is safe and could be released soon, a Catholic group said on Sunday, quoting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

Uzhunnalil was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old people's home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis.

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The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) said a delegation met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj who said the government was working to secure the priest's safe return.

"She has assured us Father Tom is safe and negotiations are on for his release which could happen very soon," said Father Joseph Chinnaiyan, deputy secretary of the CBCI.

Media reports last week said the priest was killed by Islamic State militants on Good Friday, although no one has claimed responsibility for last month's attack in which gunmen killed four Indian nuns, two Yemeni female staff members, eight elderly residents and a guard.

Father Chinnaiyan said the reports were inaccurate.

Aden has been racked by lawlessness since Hadi supporters, backed by Gulf Arab military forces, drove fighters of the Iran-allied Houthi group from the city in July last year.

International aid groups have pulled most of their foreign staff from Yemen due to security concerns.

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By PTI: Kolkata, Apr 2 (PTI) Forward Bloc today refuted state Congress president Adhir Chowdhurys allegation that the Left allies were creating hurdles in the alliance between them.

Forward Bloc general secretary Debabroto Biswas said had the Left allies not cooperated with the CPI(M), the Left Front-Congress alliance would never have been a reality.

"The Left-Congress alliance was the need of the hour as the people wanted it. That is why we have forged an alliance. If someone is saying that the Left allies are trying to throw a spanner, then it is wrong," he said.

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"Had the Left allies not supported, the alliance between Congress and Left would never have seen the light of the day," he said.

Lauding the "positive" role of CPI(M) in forging the alliance, Bengal Congress president Adhir Chowdhury had a few days back slammed the Left allies for creating hurdles in the path of alliance. PTI PNT MM TIR

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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 3 (PTI) With industry fearing excessive regulation in the wake of Maggi controversy, food regulator FSSAI has said it has taken a number of steps to check any "fear psychosis" among companies.

The Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has relaxed the product approval process for proprietary food products and nutraceuticals. It had also last week issued clarification about the standards of monosodium glutamate (MSG).

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After the ban on Maggi in June last year, the food industry had complained about inspector raj. Even Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal had said that the regulator has created an environment of fear in the industry.

When asked about whether there is any fear psychosis after the Maggi ban incident, FSSAI CEO Pawan Agarwal said that it has taken number of steps to ease approval process without compromising on the quality norms of the products in order to address any fear among the industry.

"... the fear psychosis has been curbed up to a large extent with various landmark initiatives taken by the FSSAI in easing the approval of food products and nutraceuticals,? Agarwal told PTI.

"But at the same time, utmost importance has also been given to ensuring quality of the food items," Agarwal said.

Maggi noodles was banned by FSSAI in June last year for allegedly containing lead beyond the permissible limit. It came back into the market in November 2015.

Elaborating on steps taken by the FSSAI, Agarwal said the food products for which standards were not laid down in the Food Safety and Standards Act but have approved ingredients, now may not require any approval.

He also mentioned that the restricted enforcement activity against nutraceuticals and health supplement companies to only testing of products till new standards are notified

To empower the consumers, Agarwal said FSSAI has launched an app through which general public can get information about the standards.

The authority has also started awareness and training programmes for the food business operators about how to implement the food safety standards.

As FSSAI has been streamlining its regulations to ease product approval process, Union Minister Harsimrat Badal had also said that there will more investment and innovation in the food sector. She has been raising industry and quality issues with the food regulator.

Welcoming the latest initiatives by the FSSAI, CII last week had said that the recent notifications by the regulator on proprietary food, and notice on harmonisation of Food Additives with Codex, mark the beginning of a new chapter in developing and promoting India as the global hub for food industry. PTI JTR MJH ABM

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By Srijani Ganguly/Mail Today: When director Abhishek Sharma said he wanted an epic feel to his film's soundtrack, music composer Dhruv Dhalla had only one figure in mind to turn to--Hans Zimmer. Dhalla being a huge fan of the Hollywood composer, who's worked on films like Inception, The Dark Knight and Interstellar, went to London to catch a concert of his.

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"I basically wanted to derive inspiration with the kind of music that he does because that was the soundscape for the film, Tere Bin Laden: Dead or Alive. My director wanted epic music. So I said let me go and understand how Zimmer creates powerful music. I went to London, saw him perform, and came back with fresh ideas," he says.

Once he had the ideas, the main challenge now lay in front of him. He explains, "Those guys have massive budgets for films. They make music with musicians from all over the world. My challenge was to create a similar effect with nothing but a computer. Abhishek told me, I know the budget's a challenge. I know we can't go to Europe and hire the best musicians. See if you can create music that is so big and real, that people can't tell if it's real or computer-generated.

Dhalla is currently working on another film with Sharma, and has three other projects as well. "The second film," he says, "is one by Omi Vaidya. He's directing for the first time. Then there's a Gurgaon-based mafia film. I was also doing a Sanjay Dutt film but that got shelved since he was in jail. Now that he's back, the movie should also be back to life."

In his own life, music has been a part of his life since he was a school student.



"I used to play keyboards my school band in Delhi. I hadn't learned music, I used to basically listen to a song on the radio or TV and play it on the keyboard. Then, I told my father to get me a professional keyboard work station. That developed my skills with music and computers, and I started putting music together on the keyboard."



When he was in college, he got a call from Euphoria and played on their live concerts for a year. That's when he really realised how suited he was for music, and decided to study music after that in the US.



"When I got back," he says, "I met Dibakar Banerjee and worked on Khosla Ka Ghosla. We cracked the song Chak De Phattey together. Then, the movie was delayed by a couple of years after which it finally got released. That was when I moved to Mumbai and I got Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. Then came the first Tere Bin Laden film."

--- ENDS ---

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A maid's daughter doing her schooling in a remote village in Jharkhand was figured by the Maoists in their list of children to be recruited. Madhup Mohta, the RPF and some senior officials from across departments helped rescue the 13-year-old terror-struck girl. Read to know how!

By Vivek Surendran: Social media platforms, especially Facebook, are full of share-worthy real-life incidents. Madhup Mohta shared one such story on March 31 on his Facebook profile and it has gone viral, with over 1,700 shares and 5,500 likes.

The post started saying he heard a story on the day of Holi this year from his maid, and such a story, he never expected to hear! His maid told him her 13-year-old daughter studying in a boarding school in tribal Jharkhand and that her name has been featured in the latest list of children to be recruited by the Maoists through a lottery. He says "motorcycle borne Maoists were carrying out a recce for her abduction". There was no two ways about the matter other than rescuing the girl, and brought to Delhi, even if it involved Commando style operation, he writes.



Question was how!

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Mohta says his first instinct was to get in touch with an IAS batchmate in Ranchi, but couldn't get through since he was busy attending to the Speaker of the Assembly. Mohta was then reminded of the Railway Protection Force and what the course director of an induction course at Railway Staff college in Baroda said about the RPF - "The Railway Protection Force is the only true all India force in the country as it has an effective presence and jurisdiction in every inch of the Indian territory" - and decided to contact the RPF.

A quick call to RPF IG Jaiaya Varmah explaining the situation helped Mohta get in touch with Sanjeev Kumar, the RPF Commander in Ranchi. Sanjeev's prompt action established contact with the child who was in a remote area by the name of Kolebira. Mohta says she was 'smuggled' on motorcycles through the Maoist infested territory, and after spending a night at a policeman's house in Ranchi, girl was brought to Delhi by train. A senior railway official, Suri Singh, helped securing a berth on a Garib Rath train for the child through ADRM Ranchi Vijay Kumar, and she was looked after by an IRCTC attendant Ravi Kumar.

Mohta writes, "RPF Inspectors ensured the security and well being of the unaccompanied and terrorised Child along the 1341 Km journey from Ranchi to Delhi with personal supervision at each major station on the way, Daltonganj, Dehri on Sone, Mughal Sarai, Allahabad, Kanpur and New Delhi."

The child is now with her mother, safe and sound, in Noida, Uttar Pradesh and she has been admitted to a school. Mohta hopes she'd grow up to be a doctor or an RPF officer.

What a brilliant effort by Madhup Mohta and the RPF! And never to forget the involvement and help from all those officials who helped facilitate such an operation!

--- ENDS ---
Five days after being slapped with a criminal notice for making a comment on dating the Pope, actor Hrithik Roshan took to Twitter to apologise for dragging the Pope into his personal life. The Bang Bang actor, who has been making headlines for his alleged relationship with Kangana Ranaut in the past, has landed himself in a legal soup after his infamous tweet.

By India Today Web Desk: Five days after being slapped with a criminal notice for making a comment on dating the Pope, actor Hrithik Roshan took to Twitter to apologise for dragging the Pope into his personal life. The Bang Bang actor, who has been making headlines for his alleged relationship with Kangana Ranaut in the past, has landed himself in a legal soup after his infamous tweet.

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ALSO READ: Hrithik Roshan slapped with criminal notice for Pope tweet

ALSO READ: After Hrithik Roshan names Kangana Ranaut in FIR, Kangana's lawyer has this to say



But junior Roshan has finally issued a public apology calling his comment "unintentional."

Seems my tweet about His Holiness has led 2misunderstanding. My apologies 4 hurt caused 2religious or other sentiments. Was unintentional. Hrithik Roshan (@iHrithik) April 2, 2016

The actor has apologised for hurting the religious sentiments. It all began when the Jodha Akbar actor made the comment on his social networking handle in reply to Kangana Ranaut's "silly ex" comment. Hrithik, on January 28, had tweeted.

A criminal notice was sent to Hrithik on Monday (March 28) for hurting the religious sentiments and feelings of majority of Christians across the world. The notice in discussion was sent by Abraham Mathai, All India President of the Indian Christian Voice, an organisation representing the larger interests of the Christian community, including Roman Catholics, in India.

Mathai has been quoted by Mid-Day as telling hitlist, "We demand Mr Roshan recants his statement and issues an unconditional apology. While we respect Mr Roshan's personal life including his right to choose who he wishes to be in a relationship with, we do take offense at dragging a religious head into it just so attention may be diverted, and the media glare move away. Such statements are irresponsible and not called for by a celebrity, thousands of whose fans are from the Catholic community and who believe that the Pope is their religious and revered head."

Mathai's lawyer Rizwan Siddiquee, who, incidentally is Kangana Ranaut's lawyer too, had asked the actor to apologise in seven days failing which he will proceed ahead with the matter and accordingly file a criminal complaint against Roshan.

For the uninitiated, the Hrithik-Kangana affair got nasty when Kangana gave an interview to Pinkvilla earlier this year in which she hinted as Hrithik being her 'ex' who was doing 'silly things to get her attention'. Following that, Hrithik tweeted that there were more chances of him having had an affair with the Pope than any of the women he was being linked with.

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After that, allegations and accusations followed from both sides, and finally reached this stage of a legal battle.

Hrithik and Kangana first worked together in the 2010 film Kites, the movie which is said to have been the beginning of the friendship between the two. After that, Roshan and Ranaut were seen together on the big screen in the 2013 film Krrish 3.

--- ENDS ---
India and Saudi Arabia today vowed to substantially boost investments and their trade ties as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited cash-rich Saudi firms to invest in infrastructure and form joint ventures for oil exploration.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi bidding adieu to Crown Prince and Interior Minister of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Naif in Riyadh on Sunday. (Photo: PTI)

By India Today Web Desk: Prime Minister Narendra Modi left Saudi Arabia for New Delhi on Sunday evening at the conclusion of his two-day bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

India and Saudi Arabia today vowed to substantially boost investments and their trade ties as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited cash-rich Saudi firms to invest in infrastructure and form joint ventures for oil exploration.

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A joint statement issued after the talks between Modi and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz said that both countries agreed to forge a deeper partnership in energy sector focusing on investment and joint venture in petrochemical complex.

"The two leaders emphasised the importance of expanding trade and investment ties to drive the strategic engagement forward. They directed their Finance and Trade Ministers to work together to find ways and means to substantially increase the flow of bilateral investments and growth of trade ties," the statement said.

There has been a steady increase in bilateral trade, which stood at USD 39 billion in 2014-15.

"The two leaders agreed upon the need to further strengthen these ties, particularly through diversifying non-oil trade," it added.

During the Prime Minister's two-day visit India showcased its initiatives at improving the ease of doing business and efforts to simplify and rationalise existing rules and relax the foreign direct investment norms in key areas, including railways, defence and insurance.

Saudi Arabia is India's largest supplier of crude oil.

The two countries also expressed satisfaction at the growing bilateral trade in the energy sector.

"The two leaders agreed to transform the buyer-seller relationship in the energy-sector to one of deeper partnership focusing on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries," the statement said.



India and Saudi Arabia signed 5 MoU's Agreement on Labour Co-operation between the Ministry of Labour of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Ministry of External Affairs of the Republic of India for Recruitment of General Category Workers. Technical Cooperation Program between the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and the Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality Organization (SASO). Executive Program for Cooperation in the Field of Handicrafts between the Export Promotion Council for Handicraft (EPCH) in the Republic of India and Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage. MoU between Financial Intelligence Unit - India and the Financial Intelligence Unit-Saudi Arabia concerning Cooperation in the Exchange of Intelligence related to Money Laundering, Terrorism Financing and Related Crimes. Framework for Investment Promotion Cooperation between Invest India and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA).

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Modi invited Saudi firms such as Aramco and SABIC to invest in the India's infrastructure sector.

Modi met on Sunday with King Salman and the two sides signed five agreements, including plans to cooperate in intelligence sharing and increase investments.

Soon after arriving Saturday, Modi was pictured eating a traditional South Asian dinner with Indian workers.



Also Read:

PM Modi conferred Saudi Arabia's highest civilian honour

PM Modi gifts replica of ancient Kerala mosque to Saudi King

Political stability behind India's growth, says PM Modi in Saudi Arabia

PM at Nuclear Security Summit: Drop notion that 'his' terrorist is not 'my' terroristModi's Saudi visit part of push to 'de-hyphenate' India from Pakistan

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Islamabad, Apr 3 (PTI) Iran is investigating whether an alleged Indian spy arrested last month in Pakistans troubled Balochistan province crossed the border illegally or was picked up from its soil, according to a media report here.

"Iranian authorities have directly and indirectly conveyed to Pakistan that they were investigating whether or not Kulbhushan Yadav crossed into Pakistan illegally," The Express Tribune reported, citing top government sources.

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Yadav, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was a serving Indian Navy officer.

India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.

India, which has already claimed Yadav was picked up from the Iranian soil, is putting pressure on the Islamic Republic to register a case against Pakistani agencies, the paper said.

India is also seeking to enlist support of the US, the UK and France to convince Iran to go by its claim that Yadav was kidnapped from the Iranian soil, it said, quoting sources.

Pakistan Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif also took up the matter with Iranian President Hassan Rowhani during the latter?s recent visit to Islamabad, the report said.

Iran has asked for the exact timing of Yadavs arrest ? which was readily provided, according to sources.

The Islamic Republic suspected Yadav had been missing for a few months ? and not since March 3 when Pakistan claimed he was arrested, the paper added. PTI ZH AKJ ZH

--- ENDS ---
As world leaders watched behind closed doors a video film of a dramatic but simulated scenario of such an attack by terrorists at the summit, Modi called for "proactive measures to tackle the threat of nuclear terrorism through international cooperation."

By Raj Chengappa: At the concluding session of the Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington DC, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made some telling interventions which underscored the need for the world to combat the growing threat of terrorists who may be trying to use improvised nuclear devices to carry out devastating attacks on cities.

As world leaders watched behind closed doors a video film of a dramatic but simulated scenario of such an attack by terrorists at the summit, Modi called for "proactive measures to tackle the threat of nuclear terrorism through international cooperation." A senior official present in the room told India Today the PM emphasised that "the only way to reduce the scope of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction was through greater cooperation including information sharing, intelligence exchange and developing human resources on a mass scale to tackle the threat". Modi suggested a unique way of starting the process of capacity building by "training the vast network of UN peacekeeping operations, which Indian troops also contribute to, in handling nuclear threats and attacks".

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Solutions

The Indian PM also offered other significant solutions at the summit. He pointed out that India had reduced the threat of medical radiological devices being misused by employing technology to make them less harmful or accessible. He also talked about the need to reduce the vast amount of radiological waste generated by power plants by using "reprocessing techniques to reduce the size of such nuclear stockpiles and reuse them". In the progress report that India submitted at the summit, the statement highlighted the growing threat of cyber attacks on nuclear plants and the need to build capacity and train people to counter such threats.

Earlier, during the various discussions especially at the working dinner, where Modi sat next to US President Barack Obama, the PM came out with some scathing observations of how the world had neglected tackling terrorism. Modi mentioned three main attributes of modern terrorists: their strategy of making a huge impact through massive attacks; that such terrorists no longer live in caves (alluding to Osama Bin Laden) but stay in cities and are technologically savvy; and that state actors working with nuclear traffickers and terrorists present the greatest risk (an indirect reference to Pakistan).

Technology

A senior Indian official present in the dinner said that Modi had pointed out that, "While terrorists are using 21st century technology, our responses are rooted in the past. While terrorists are globally networked we still act only nationally to counter this threat. That while their reach and supply chains are global, genuine cooperation between nation states are not." The PM also stated, "Without prevention and prosecution of acts of terrorism, there is no deterrence against nuclear terrorism." This was clearly directed at Pakistan which has footdragged on the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks and is showing similar proclivity after the recent Pathankot attacks.

Modi announced some significant Indian contributions during the summit to enhance nuclear security worldwide including giving the International Atomic Energy Agency $1 million towards its Nuclear Security Fund for training and review services. India also joined the core group of 35 nations who would carry forward the legacy of the summit by strengthening the implementation of nuclear security measures. To reduce risk of such terrorism in India, he said India had set up a counter nuclear smuggling team headed by the Department of Atomic Energy to strengthen the monitoring of movement of nuclear material in the country and prevent any attempts to misuse it.

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Also read:

PM Modi in Washington to attend Nuclear Security Summit, n-terrorism threat in agenda

PM Modi attends 4th Nuclear Security Summit in Washington

--- ENDS ---
Mohammed Tanzil Ahmad, who has been with the NIA ever since the organisation was formed in February 2009, had been investigating many cases especially related to the banned terror outfit Indian Mujahideen.

By India Today Web Desk: National Investigation Agency (NIA) officer Mohammed Tanzil Ahmad, who was shot dead by two unidentified motorbike-borne assailants in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor, has been given martyr status today.

NIA IG Sanjiv Kumar Singh announced that all provisions shall be provided to the deceased officer's family. The Border Security Force (BSF) has granted Rs 20 lakhs to Ahmad's family.

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Mohammad Tanzil's last rites were performed late in the evening amid Inquilab Zinadabad slogans, raised by locals. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal paid tribute to the NIA officer.

Six teams comprising of officials of the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) have been formed to probe into the brutal attack.

Click here to Enlarge Mohammad Tanzil's last rites were performed late in the evening. (photo: ANI)

The NIA IG refused to comment on Tanzil Ahmad's involvement in cases pertaining to terrorist outfits like the Islamic State, Indian Mujahideen or Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).

An assistant commandant with the BSF, Tanzil Ahmad was on deputation with the NIA. A Bijnor native, Ahmad was posted as an inspector-rank officer at the NIA headquarters in New Delhi.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that he has been apprised of the incident and that a comprehensive report is being prepared.

"Whatever's necessary is being done. We are talking (to NIA officials)," Singh said.

45-year-old Ahmad, who has been with the NIA ever since the organisation was formed in February 2009, had been investigating several cases related to the banned terror outfit Indian Mujahideen. His superiors termed him as a thorough professional in intelligence gathering as well as investigation.

Superintendent of Police (Bijnor) Subhash Singh Baghel said, Ahmad came to Bijnor on Friday to attend his niece's marriage. Ahmad's family lives in Sahaspur village in Bijnor.

At around 8.00 pm on Saturday evening, Ahmad and his family left their home for the marriage function organised at Bandhan Guest House at Sohara village, which is around nine kilometers from their residence.

"After attending the function, Tanzil and his family were returning home at around 1.00 am. When their vehicle was around 300 meters away from their residence, two youths on a motorcycle waved their hand. When Tanzil stopped his car, they fired several rounds and escaped. Tanzil and his wife were in the front seat, while his two children, 14-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old were in the back seat," the SP said.

Hearing the sound of gunshots, locals rushed to the spot and one of them informed the Bijnor police. A police team was rushed to the spot and the officer along with his wife were rushed to a nearby hospital, where doctors referred them to Moradabad. Tanzil Ahmad was declared dead by doctors upon reaching the Moradabad hospital while his wife was referred to Delhi.

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ALSO READ

NIA officer Tanzil Ahmad shot dead in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor, wife critically injured



--- ENDS ---
Sources said that he was reportedly shot 21 times, and his wife has sustained four bullets.

By India Today Web Desk: National Investigation Agency (NIA) officer Mohammad Tanzil Ahmed was shot dead today morning by unidentified assailants in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor.

The incident occurred when the officer along with his family was returning from a wedding ceremony in Bijnor in their car.

Sources said that he was reportedly shot 21 times, and his wife has sustained four bullets. The children were unhurt.

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While Tanzil was pronounced dead on arrival at a medical facility in Moradabad, his wife Farzana is critical and is currently admitted in All India Institute of Medical Science in New Delhi.

In New Delhi, NIA IG Sanjeev Kumar termed it as a "planned attack".

"One of our officers, very brave officer Mohammad Tanzil Ahmad had gone to his home to attend a function last night. When he was coming back from the function a planned attack took place on him and he was fired upon," Kumar said.

"He was killed in the firing while his wife was injured. He was an assistant commandant with BSF and was on deputation with NIA," he said.

Kumar said Ahmed was an "NIA inspector but back in BSF he was an assistant commandant".

Medical bulletin of Farzana from Fortis Hospital in Noida, wife of NIA official Tanzil.

He said the investigations into the killing are on.

"Investigations are on. Right now the UP Police, UP ATS, NIA, the DIG of NIA from Lucknow and his team all of them are there on the spot," he said.

On being asked about the possibility of terror angle behind the attack, ADG, UP Police, Daljit Chowdhry said, "Nothing can be ruled out."

"A very serious offence has taken place in the district and we have taken it very seriously. The body has been sent for post-mortem and details of what actually happened will soon come out," he added.

"Borders of the state have been sealed and checking is on in the nearby villages to trace those involved in killing of the officer. We are trying to find out the accused and the motive behind the murder," Chowdhry said.

Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) teams are at the spot.

"We are also trying to ascertain whether the 9 mm pistol used for the crime was country-made or factory-made. It is definitely a planned attack and not a robbery," he added.

The funeral of the deceased officer is likely to take place on Sunday evening.



--- ENDS ---

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By PTI: From Sajjad Hussain

Islamabad, Apr 3 (PTI) Pakistan government has cautioned the media against linking Iran with the arrest of an alleged Indian spy, days after Tehran warned that such reports could have "negative implications" on bilateral ties.

"Iran has nothing to do with the activities of Indian intelligence network. Pakistan and Iran are tied through decades long religious, social, cultural and political bonds, and nothing can come in way of our relations," Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan said here.

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Khan said media should be cautious while reporting on Pakistan-Iran "brotherly" relations.

"Our ties with Iran are by no means linked with the arrest of an Indian spy," he told reporters here yesterday.

He said the recent visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Pakistan was quite "productive but an impression was being given that Iran was involved in certain activities against Pakistan."

The Iranian authorities, he said, had expressed their concern over news proliferating in a certain section of the media portraying Iran in a negative manner despite the very positive visit of the Iranian President.

The minister also mentioned his meeting with Iranian ambassador Mehdi Honardoost, saying the two sides expressed satisfaction over President Rouhanis visit.

"Honardoost assured that Iran would extend full cooperation on all issues that ensured security and development in the two countries," Khan said.

He said "some vested interests" wanted to harm positive and historic ties between Pakistan and Iran.

The Iranian embassy here last week had issued a terse statement after several media outlets hinted that Tehran might have knowledge about Kulbhushan Yadhav, who was reportedly arrested by Pakistani authorities in Balochistan after he entered from Iran.

"During past days some section of Pakistani media has spread contents regarding detention of an Indian agent and the matter related to it, which could have negatives implications on the fraternal and friendly atmosphere of Iran and Pakistan," the embassy had warned.

Kulbhushan, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was a serving Indian Navy officer.

India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government. PTI SH PMS AKJ AKJ

--- ENDS ---
Prime Minister Narendra Modi spent around 40 minutes at the centre, where he even posed for selfies with the ladies and invited them to visit India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi poses for a selfie with IT professionals working in TCS all women IT & ITES center during his visit to the Complex in Riyadh. Photo: PTI

By India Today Web Desk: Prime minister Narendra Modi on Sunday visited an all-women IT & ITES centre set up by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Riyadh and hailed them as being the "glory of Saudi Arabia".

"For the world it is considered to be a main headline news that in Riyadh today I am meeting those IT professionals who I can say today represent the glory of Saudi Arabia," Modi said while interacting with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) women professionals in Riyadh.

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Modi spent around 40 minutes at the centre, where he even posed for selfies with the ladies and invited them to visit India.

"All of you must come to India, I assure you a very warm reception. The atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong message to the world," Modi said.

At the TCS Centre 1,000 women work in BPO Operations, 85 per cent of whom are Saudi nationals.

"In this very competitive world today, if we are to progress then all forces have to progress together and have to move ahead and in it when I say forces, we are talking not only natural resources but also human resources. And in human resources human power plays a very important role, if the capacity of the woman are built and they are linked with the development process, then development of any country is speeded exponentially," the Prime Minister said.

"I would also like to heartily congratulate TCS that in India they have set up a training centre which trains young men and women, and those trained men and women, go out in the digital world and empower the entire world," he said.



#WATCH:Employees of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) all women IT & ITES Centre in Riyadh take 'selfies' with PM Modihttps://t.co/48BgSvEShH ANI (@ANI_news) April 3, 2016

Modi stressed that in the IT profession, India has made its place in the world.



"I invite all of you to come together to India and you will see for yourself the impact you will make on Indians," he said.

"I have one suggestion, I have seen that in governance and for transparency, technology has a very big role to play and for me e-governance is easy, economic and effective governance. And I myself try my level best to update myself with technology and if you want any information in real time about India, me and the selfies that you took along with me today, and for all information, please download the Narendra Modi app," Modi said.

TCS established the first all-women Business Process Services (BPS) centre in Riyadh in 2013.

The centre brings a unique business model to Saudi Arabia and serves as a rich training ground for building new capabilities, skills and careers for women in the country.

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Modi will be accorded a ceremonial welcome on Sunday afternoon at the Royal Court by King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who will also host a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister. This will be followed by delegation-level talks and the signing of agreements.

--- ENDS ---
Pratyusha Banerjee's industry friends allege foul play claiming that she could not have committed suicide.

By India Today Web Desk: Late TV actor Pratyusha Banerjee's industry friends including Kamya Punjabi, Shashank Vyas, Adaa Khan and Vikas Gupta today held a press conference to reveal shocking details about the dead star's relationship with beau Rahul Raj Singh.

Kamya Punjabi reiterated the fact that Pratyusha could not commit suicide. On the other hand, producer Vikas Gupta, who had recently offered a role to Pratyusha, said that she wanted to end her relationship with Rahul.

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Here are a few shocking revelations by Pratyusha's friends.

They were not a couple in love. In reality, Pratyusha wanted to end the relationship: Vikas Gupta Rahul assaulted Pratyusha in public: Vikas Gupta Pratyusha told me Rahul was cheating on her: Kamya Punjabi Pratyusha was in a messy relationship. She didn't want to come out of it thinking I don't want people to think I am in a relationship and now I am getting out of it. She didn't want to give up: Vikas Gupta It is not possible that she committed suicide due to financial issues: Shashank Vyas Being so short at 5 feet 2 inches how can she hang herself: Kamya Punjabi Pratyusha charged very well for her roles. She was doing very well in her career: Vikas Gupta Saloni Sharma (Rahul's ex-girlfriend) used to visit Pratyusha and assault her. She used to threaten Pratyusha because of which she was disturbed too. When Pratyusha used to tell Rahul about this, he used to switch off his phone and not visit her: Vikas Gupta Pratyusha wanted to file a case against Rahul. She called a lawyer and then she wanted to speak to her (lawyer) the day the incident took place. On the very same day, she had an appointment with the lawyer and she had told many things about Rahul and finances and wanted to seek legal advice. Pratyusha wanted help legally because she was getting tortured someway or the other: Falguni Brahmabath, Pratyusha's lawyer in the case We are ready to give statement to the police: Falguni People are taking advantage of the situation: Adaa Khan

Meanwhile, Pratyusha's boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh was admitted to a Mumbai hospital today after he complained of chest pain and breathlessness. He was questioned by the police for about 14 hours on Saturday. The actor-producer had disappeared after admitting Pratyusha to the hospital on Friday evening but resurfaced on Saturday to record his statement with the police.

Most of the people are pointing fingers at Rahul citing Pratyusha's discomfort in the relationship of late. Rahul is said to be cheating on her with his ex-girlfriend and had reportedly mistreated Pratyusha on several occasions in the past.

However, the investigation is underway.

Also read: A call for help is all that was needed

Also read: Pratyusha Banerjee dressed as a bride for funeral

Also read: Rahul had another girlfriend, says society's security in-charge

Also read: Postmortem report reveals suffocation as the cause of death

With PTI inputs



--- ENDS ---
Late actor Pratyusha Banerjee's boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh was hospitalised after he complained of stress and breathing problems.

By India Today Web Desk: Pratyusha 'Anandi' Banerjee's boyfriend and live-in partner, Rahul Raj Singh has been hospitalised at Mumbai's Sai Hospital.

According to his lawyers, Rahul was under constant stress and was hospitalised after he experienced chest pain and breathing issues.

Rahul Raj Singh has been under the radar after his girlfriend, actress Pratyusha Banerjee was found dead at her Mumbai residence on Friday, April 1.

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Banerjee was discovered by Rahul, who then took her to the hospital where she was declared dead on arrival.

After Pratyusha was declared dead, Rahul left the hospital saying that he didn't inform the police as he was scared. He was later taken into custody by the police for interrogation.

Also read: 5 things you should know about Pratyusha's boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh

According to reports, Rahul's parents have quoted Pratyusha's 'acute financial problems' as the reason of her suicide.

Shivani Singh, Rahul's mother told Hindustan Times, "Pratyusha was earning in crores in her television career but she still had little money with her. We had deposited cash time and again on her request in the bank account jointly held by Pratyusha and her mother."



Rahul's advocates told the media that he was very shocked and under constant stress because of what has happened.

Speaking to Mid-day, Rahul had earlier said that he is innocent, while admitting to the fact that he would have frequent fights with Pratyusha.

"I was dating Pratyusha since November 2015 and wanted to marry her. I still believe that she is my wife. I take her as my wife. If I had not left home on Friday, she would have been alive."

Also read: Pratyusha looked tensed about Rahul's ex-girlfriend Saloni: Rakhi Sawant

But on the other hand Pratyusha's friend from the TV industry, Kamya Punjabi has something else to say. She has hinted at a case of domestic violence, saying that Pratyusha has injury marks on her cheeks and nose.

They are also willing to get their statements recorded by the police regarding Banerjee's personal life and her rapport with Rahul.

--- ENDS ---
Hollywood actor Jackie Chan is currently shooting for his upcoming film, Kung Fu Yoga, in Jodhpur.

By India Today Web Desk: Kung Fu master Jackie Chan is in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. The 61-year-old actor is currently shooting for Kung Fu Yoga in India.

Kung Fu Yoga is a part of the three-film agreement signed between the two countries during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to India.



The film also stars Bollywood actor Sonu Sood, Amyra Dastur and Disha Patani. The film has been shot in Iceland and is scheduled to be shot in Dubai, Beijing and some parts of India.

Hollywood actor Jackie Chan is currently shooting in Jodhpur

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Actor-director Farah Khan tweeted an image with choreographer Geeta Kapur as they took a flight to Jodhpur to choreograph a song for upcoming film, Kung Fu Yoga. She wrote, "En route Jodhpur wit@geetakapur to make Jackie Chan dance!! Thank u @SonuSood for chartering the whole flight 4 us! (sic)."

En route Jodhpur wit@geetakapur to make Jackie Chan dance!! Thank u @SonuSood for chartering the whole flight 4 us!??? pic.twitter.com/N5yfKs7Lzv Farah Khan (@TheFarahKhan) April 2, 2016

Model-turned-actor Disha Patani has also reached Jodhpur to begin shooting for the film. Her fan club posted an image of her on Twitter.

Jackie Chan with model-turned-actor Disha Patani

Actor Sonu Sood told reporters during TOIFA 2016, "Jackie (Chan) will be coming to India and will be coming to India on the 21st (of March)...He will be staying for 15 days. Jackie will be staying in Jaipur."



The Dabangg actor had said that Jackie Chan will be shooting a schedule in India and then he will be proceeding to Beijing.

"I am going to join him next week in India and then we are going to Beijing...October release. Fingers crossed." said the actor. Kung Fu Yoga is slated to release in October this year.

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By PTI: Mumbai, Apr 3 (PTI) Industrial explosives manufacturer Solar Industries India (SII) is planning to ramp up its manufacturing capacity and introduce new solutions for the defence sector to achieve revenue of Rs 3,300 crore by 2018-19.

The Nagpur-headquartered company manufactures explosives and accessories for mining and infrastructure sectors.

"With Coal India setting a target of 1 billion tonne production by 2020, we see this as a huge opportunity for our mining explosives as we are their largest suppliers.

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"Similarly, the governments focus on creating infrastructure will create a huge demand for our explosives and explosives accessories," the companys Chief Financial Officer Nilesh Panpalliya told PTI.

"This demand, along with our latest foray into the defence sector, gives us confidence that we will be able to achieve revenues of around Rs 3,300 crore by FY19," he said.

The company entered the defence sector four years ago and has set up Indias first HMX plant in the private sector, a large composite propellant plant and facilities for producing other products like pyros and war heads.

The company plans to invest up to Rs 175 crore every year for the next three-four years to enhance its manufacturing capacity.

"India still depends largely on import of explosives for the defence sector. But the Defence Procurement Policy and Make in India initiative have given more emphasis on private participation and we think we have the necessary components and solutions to meet the demand of the sector and reduce dependency on imports," he said.

The facility manufactures HMX and HMX-based compositions like Octol, Oma and Okfol for high explosive anti-tank ammunition and missiles like Akash, LR Sam, Invar and Konkur.

SII currently has a manufacturing capacity of 50 MTPA of HMX, which it plans to enhance to 300 MTPA.

"Earlier we required less quantity of HMX, but now with the defence sector opening up, we will increase the capacity to 300 MTPA.

"Similarly, we will increase the capacity of all other defence related products and also introduce some new solutions," he said.

Currently, the company exports to more than 25 countries and has manufacturing facilities in Nigeria, Zambia and Turkey. It is now setting up plants in South Africa and Australia as well. PTI PSK NRB ABM

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By PTI: London, Apr 3 (PTI) Britain today changed its procurement rules to encourage public sector bodies to use British steel products as part of efforts to revive the ailing steel industry and save thousands of jobs after Indias Tata Steel decided to sell its loss-making businesses in the UK.

Under the new decision, public sector bodies are to be encouraged to buy British steel for construction projects in an effort to help save the industry.

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The government said councils and NHS trusts will be asked to consider the economic impact of buying from abroad.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said he was determined to ensure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers.

"By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects, we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," the Pakistani-origin minister said.

The governments decision comes after Tata Steel announced last week that it was selling its loss-making UK plants, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The unions said the governments decision was "a small step in the right direction" but the measure should have been in place already.

Guidelines were introduced last year requiring central government bodies to take into account the "true value" of British steel.

Now the guidance is to be extended across the public sector and public procurements involving the supply of steel will need to consider "responsible sourcing, the training suppliers give to their workforce, carbon footprint, protecting the health and safety of staff and the social integration of disadvantaged workers".

Contractors working for the public sector will also be required to advertise their requirements for steel so that UK firms can compete for the business.

Authorities hope local steel firms could supply steel for huge projects like the 55 million pound high-speed rail link, which will need some two million tonnes of steel.

It comes after heavy criticism of ministers for failing to take more effective action to prevent the "dumping" of cheap Chinese steel, seen as one of the key reasons for the problems in the UK steel industry.

The government has played down the impact of new Chinese import tariffs of up to 46.3 per cent.

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community trade union, said the announcement was "a small step in the right direction" but said steelworkers "will be shocked to discover that these measures were not already in place".

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"These are bread-and-butter policies that should have been providing opportunities to UK steel producers already," he said.

Tony Burke, assistant general secretary of the Unite union, said the measure needed to compel British steel to be used in all infrastructure projects "otherwise, there will be no recognisable steel industry left in the UK to benefit". PTI AKJ AKJ

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By PTI: Himachal Cong leaders meet as party tries to keep its flock together New Delhi, Apr 2 (PTI) In the backdrop of toppling of its government in Uttarakhand, Congress today sought to put its flock together in Himachal Pradesh with all its state leaders pledging to unitedly fight attempts to destabilise the Virbhadra Singh dispensation. With factional feud in the partys Uttarakhand unit partly contributing to the exit of its government, Congress organised a meeting of the coordination committee of Himachal in Delhi where all its leaders in the state, including chief minister Virbhadra Singh, all ministers and MLAs were present. The meeting, that lasted over two and half hours, was chaired by AICC general secretary Ambika Soni, who is also incharge of party affairs in the state, and saw all Congress MLAs from Himachal putting their weight behind the state government.

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AICC general secretary Ambika Soni, who is incharge ofparty affairs in Himachal Pradesh, claimed "the Congress legislature party is fully united and there was not even an iota of possibility of a situation like Uttarakhand emerging in the state".

Soni said that there was "no crisis" in Himachal Congress and what happened in the Uttarakhand was an "attack on democracy". She alleged that the BJP-led central government was trying to destabilise the Congress government in the state but said its efforts would not succeed.

Congress in the state would protest at the block level against the "anti-democratic" approach and tactic of BJP.

Regarding on-going investigations by CBI and ED against the Chief Minister, Soni said "this matter is sub-judice, the investigation is going on since 2011 and we are going to face it and no one is going to evade the law."

Senior Himachal Congress leaders Kaul Singh, Vidya Stokes and PCC chief Sukhvinder Singh Sukkhu, who attended todays meeting, also said that there was "no crisis" in the party in the state and the government under the leadership of Virbhadra Singh was "strong and stable" and would not only last its full term but also return to power in the next assembly polls.

Sukkhu dismissed the claims of BJP leaders that some Congress MLAs were in touch with the party and said that on the contrary some disgruntled BJP MLAs were in touch with Congress. Sources said some of the state Congress leaders, who are known critics of Virbhadra, vented out their anger against him at the meeting and sought changes in the functioning of the state government. Sukhu said the party will fight unitedly any attempt to destabilise its government. "We are together. We will protest jointly against the Centres attempts to destabilise the Himachal government. We will oppose BJPs attempt to topple the Congress elected government in Himachal Pradesh," he said. Besides Vidya Stokes, Sukhu and Kaul Singh Thakur, other senior state party leaders like Mukesh Agnihotri, G S Bali, Asha Kumari and Rajya Sabha MP Viplove Thakur also attended the meeting. Some other state Congress leaders like Rangila Ram Rao, S S Pathania, Rakesh Kalia and Kuldeep Kumar were also present during the meeting. PTI SKC AMR SPG CORR PAL

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guest post about a recent decision of the Federal Court of Malaysia addressing geographical indications, Swiss chocolate, and not-at-all-Swiss chocolate pretending to be Swiss in Malaysia. According to Kim Poh:

The respondents appealed the first-instance decision. The Court of Appeal held that the first respondent had locus standi and allowed the claim for extended passing-off. After acknowledgintg that Maestro SWISS was a geographical indication under the GIA, the Court of Appeal dismissed the claim as the action was barred under Section 27(2), GIA, since the appellants had started using that sign before the GIA entered into force (that occurred on 15.08.2001).

The respondents appealed the first-instance decision. The Court of Appeal held that the first respondent had locus standi and allowed the claim for extended passing-off. After acknowledgintg that Maestro SWISS was a geographical indication under the GIA, the Court of Appeal dismissed the claim as the action was barred under Section 27(2), GIA, since the appellants had started using that sign before the GIA entered into force (that occurred on 15.08.2001).

the use of the words Maestro SWISS had not led, nor was likely to lead, Malaysian consumers to believe that those products were made in or imported from Switzerland. Further, the Court took the view that those words were not used as a geographical indication on the packaging of the products. In any event, the High Court held that the first respondent did not have standing to sue either as manufacturer or seller of chocolates, lacking the business interest or goodwill necessary to bring an action.

The action was dismissed by the High Court. In essence, the High Court ruled that

The action was dismissed by the High Court. In essence, the High Court ruled that the use of the words Maestro SWISS had not led, nor was likely to lead, Malaysian consumers to believe that those products were made in or imported from Switzerland. Further, the Court took the view that those words were not used as a geographical indication on the packaging of the products. In any event, the High Court held that the first respondent did not have standing to sue either as manufacturer or seller of chocolates, lacking the business interest or goodwill necessary to bring an action.

The respondents brought proceedings against the appellants (Maestro Swiss Chocolate Sdn. Bhd. et al.) in the High Court for extended passing-off and unlawful use of a geographical indication under Section 5, Geographical Indications Act 2000 ( GIA ). The dispute involved the appellantss use of the words Maestro SWISS in relation to chocolates and chocolate-related products in Malaysia, in particular bearing the brand Vochelle. In light of the reputation and goodwill for fine quality chocolates made in and exported from Switzerland, the respondents claimed that the use of the words Maestro SWISS would lead a significant number of Malaysian consumers to erroneously believe that those products were manufactured in Switzerland or by a Swiss manufacturer.

The respondents brought proceedings against the appellants (Maestro Swiss Chocolate Sdn. Bhd. et al.) in the High Court for extended passing-off and unlawful use of a geographical indication under Section 5, Geographical Indications Act 2000 ( GIA ). The dispute involved the appellantss use of the words Maestro SWISS in relation to chocolates and chocolate-related products in Malaysia, in particular bearing the brand Vochelle. In light of the reputation and goodwill for fine quality chocolates made in and exported from Switzerland, the respondents claimed that the use of the words Maestro SWISS would lead a significant number of Malaysian consumers to erroneously believe that those products were manufactured in Switzerland or by a Swiss manufacturer.

Kraft Food Schweiz AG and Nestle Suisse SA are two chocolates manufacturers, members of the Chocosuisse Union. They have been exporting to, and selling in, Malaysia, Swiss-made chocolates such as Toblerone and Nestle chocolates.

Kraft Food Schweiz AG and Nestle Suisse SA are two chocolates manufacturers, members of the Chocosuisse Union. They have been exporting to, and selling in, Malaysia, Swiss-made chocolates such as Toblerone and Nestle chocolates.

Chocosuisse Union Des Fabricants Suisses De Chocolat, the first respondent, is a co-operative society established in Switzerland. It is responsible for the protection of the worldwide reputation and goodwill of its members, which are Swiss chocolate manufacturers.

Chocosuisse Union Des Fabricants Suisses De Chocolat, the first respondent, is a co-operative society established in Switzerland. It is responsible for the protection of the worldwide reputation and goodwill of its members, which are Swiss chocolate manufacturers.

upheld the Court of Appeals finding that the appellants were liable for extended passing-off vis-a-vis the second and third respondents. The finding was primarily based on the survey evidence adduced by the respondents, which proved that some members of the public were likely to be confused by the words Maestro SWISS and led to believe that the products branded that way were manufactured in Switzerland or were Swiss chocolates.

Stressing that the test for extended passing-off was the same as that for traditional passing-off, the Federal Court

did not have locus standi to commence the action for passing-off due to its lack of a business interest or goodwill.

The Federal Court overruled the Court of Appeals decision on the issue of locus standi . Following the decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in

The Federal Court affirmed the Court of Appeals decision regarding the phrase Maestro SWISS as a geographical indication under Section 2, GIA (par. 70). Each of the respondents was held to have locus standi to bring action on that basis under Section 5, GIA (par. 71), as they each constituted an interested person under Sections 2 and 11, GIA [which include any  person who is carrying on an activity as a producer in the geographical area specified in the application with respect to the goods specified in the application, and includes a group or groups of such persons, as well as trade organization or association among those having standing to sue on the basis of geographical indication].





Based on the same reasoning that allowed the claim for extended passing off, the Federal Court held that the claim based on Section 5, GIA for unlawful use of a geographical indication was established. In this regard, the Federal Court held that:





(a) The appellants could not rely on their use in good-faith made before the entering into force of the GIA (Section 28(2), GIA; see par. 73). As the use of the Maestro SWISS sign and the marketing plans related thereto were intended to communicate a Swiss connection, such use could not be assumed as having been made in good faith, regardless of whether it started before or after the GIAs birth.





(b) The Court of Appeal erred in relying on Section 27(2), GIA, as the action was filed after the the GIA entered into force on 15.08.2001 (par. 76). In other words, Section 27(2), GIA only prevents action under Section 5, GIA if the contested conduct started and finished before 15.08.2001. In cases where conduct continues on or after 15.08.2001, GIA can well-base claims against it.

Beware of Switzerland know how!





Comment





This decision is an important development in the law of passing-off. It affirms the concept of extended passing-off in Malaysia, which prevents unscrupulous traders from misrepresenting their goods as belonging to a particular or definite class of goods with a valuable and recognised goodwill, and where the misrepresentation is likely to cause damage to traders who own the goodwill in relation to the class of goods.





Further, the decision is also a significant milestone as regards protection of geographical indications in Malaysia. It provides much-needed guidance on the applicable principles and interpretation of several important provisions of the GIA, which will bode well for owners of geographical indications and serve as a warning to potential infringers.





However, this decision concerns protection of a class of premium or superior goods (ie, Swiss chocolates) having a strong geographical connotation. Notwithstanding the fact that the Federal Court did not expressly lay down any limitation on the applicability of extended passing-off based on these two aspects, it is not straight-forward whether Malaysian courts will follow the approach taken by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in its recent decisions in the VODKAT case ( Diageo North America Inc & Anor v Intercontinental Brands (ICB) Limited and Ors [2010] EWCA Civ 920) and the Greek yoghurt case ( Fage UK Ltd & Another v Chobani UK Ltd & Another [2014] EWCA Civ 5) when dealing with cases involving common goods, or where the indications or names have no geographical significance or connotation.





Based on the decisions in the VODKAT case and in the Greek yoghurt case, extended passing-off not only protects premium or superior goods or brands, equally applying to any common goods having the necessary reputation and goodwill among the public, regardless whether the indications or names have any geographical significance or connotation per se. Stay tuned!




Agence France-Presse quoted Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as saying that it seems clear, based on recent statements from such figures as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, that the Obama administration plans to give Iran surreptitious access to the US dollar.

The Tower observed that these indicators stand in contrast to numerous assurances that the administration had given to reporters and critics both before and after the conclusion of the July 14 nuclear agreement. Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Kirk wrote a letter to Secretary Lew detailing these assurances, which they described as explaining that Iran would not be allowed direct or indirect access to the US financial system.

The letter went on to reiterate the concerns shared by these and numerous other American legislators, that doing business with the Islamic Republic would effectively constitute the US government allowing money to end up in the hands of a state that would likely use many of those funds for the sponsorship of terror, for increase of repressive domestic infrastructure, or other illicit ends.

AFP notes that Secretary Lew justified the administrations latest moves by suggesting that the overuse of sanctions could undermine our leadership position within the global economy. While the United States has held back from direct economic interactions with the Islamic Republic even in the wake of sanctions relief, a number of European economies have proven eager to reenter the Iranian market. At the same time, Iran has steadily expanded its oil exports to Asian markets, which purchases more oil in February than any month over the previous two years.

But at the same time that the expansion of Iranian trade relations around the globe have stoked concerns about the US falling behind, the continued enforcement of sanctions not lifted by the nuclear agreement has been a major factor in slowing down Irans acquisition of new foreign investment and expanded access to the global banking system.

International banks have been wary of carrying out transactions for the Islamic Republic, out of fear that they could face future sanctions enforcement by the US government. But that same governments moves to give Iran indirect access to the US dollar may help to alleviate some of those concerns.

At issue in the current controversy is the practice of U-turn transactions, which the Treasury Department banned in 2008 but now appears to be moving to reinstitute. It is these transactions that Dubowitz characterizes as clearly giving Iran access to the US dollar, although the Fayette Advocate provides a different description for the practice, saying that American financial institutions would only process transactions that neither began nor ended with dollars.

But this distinction is unlikely to assuage any of the concerns of the Obama administrations critics. The Tower quotes Dubowitz as saying that the loophole is a sort of bait and switch and that in any event the administration is going above and beyond what is required by the nuclear deal, in the interest of helping Iran to recover economically.

Regardless of the ultimate form of the transactions that Iran enters into with US-based businesses, most Republican and some Democratic congressmen will see the end result the same. A number of those senators wrote on Wednesday of the administrations moves, Any such efforts would benefit Irans financiers of global terrorism, human rights abuses, and ballistic missile threats while also ignoring the Treasury Departments finding under Section 311 the USA Patriot Act that Irans entire financial sector is a jurisdiction of primary money laundering concern, and undermining ongoing calls by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for countermeasures to protect worldwide financial sectors from Irans terrorist financing.
Last month, Pakistan said it had detained the suspected spy, Kulbhushan Jadhav, in the violence-plagued province of Baluchistan after he had illegally entered the country from Iran.

Pakistan says Jadhav was working for Indias main external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

India has confirmed that the man was a former Indian navy official but denied the man was a spy.

In video footage aired by the Pakistani government this week, Jadhav said he had set up an office in Chabahar in southeast Iran in 2003 and later worked for the Indian agency.

It was not clear if Jadhav made the comments on the video tape freely or under duress.

Pakistans interior ministry, in a letter to Irans ambassador in Islamabad, Mehdi Honardoost, said the Indian made had made startling revelations about an Indian spy network operating against Pakistan from Iranian soil.

His mission included spying and sabotage, in addition to fomenting insecurity and instability in the provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan, the ministry said in the letter, a copy of which was provided to Reuters by an Interior Ministry official.

Pakistan asked Iran to provide information about the Indian mans activities, and the people he interacted with there, the ministry said.

Honardoost was not available for comment.

The Iranian embassy in Islamabad issued a statement on the Friday on the detention of the Indian agent and said unidentified elements were not happy with good ties between Iran and Pakistan and were trying to undermine them.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visited Pakistan last week and signed an agreement to increase annual trade volumes between the two countries to $5 billion by 2021.
On Thursday, Agence France-Presse confirmed that at least some portion of the Iranian leadership is consciously exploiting this loophole. In quoted Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehqan as saying that he was certain the Security Council would not take action on the missile tests. This commentary comes in spite of the fact that Britain, France, Germany, and the United States all joined in writing a letter on Monday calling for such a response.

While Iran is no doubt aware of this support for punitive action, it is also aware of the defense that it enjoys from the Russian Federation, which, like the US, Britain, and France, has veto power on the Security Council. As long as Russia remains willing to exploit the vague wording of UNSCR 2231, the rest of the council is effectively powerless to take collective action.

In its coverage of Khameneis speech, Iran News Update also suggested that the perception that Iran would face no consequences for its provocative gestures may have also inspired Khamenei to further ramp up his already pronounced anti-Western rhetoric. And indeed, that rhetoric has continued and has arguably intensified in the circumstances surrounding Khameneis speech.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran noted on Thursday, for instance, that Iranian state media had taken advantage of the March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels in order to say that the Europeans only had themselves to blame for such attacks. In response to this commentary, a Brussels-based non-governmental organization called the Alliance to Renew Cooperation among Humankind issued a statement condemning the Iranian media for inciting the continuation of the Jihadi aggression against Europe.

The organizations statement represents only one small portion of the European activism currently being directed against Iranian rhetoric, aggressive foreign policy, and domestic human rights violations. Within this climate of abuse and corresponding activism, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani canceled a planned trip to Austria just before it was set to begin on Wednesday.

The NCRI reported that its supporters nonetheless went ahead with a rally that they had planned in coordination with the Human Rights Center for Victims of Fundamentalism. The Wednesday demonstration sought to keep attention focused upon Irans human rights record, which includes a rate of executions that has reached its highest level in more than 20 years.

The NCRI has seized upon these and related facts to dispel the notion, advanced by some Western policymakers, that the Rouhani administration is more moderate than its predecessors. The organization, a collective of exiled dissident groups, continues to call upon the governments of Austria and other Western nations to predicate expansion in trade and diplomatic relations upon the improvement of the domestic human rights situation.

Whereas the NCRI acknowledged that it was not certain of the reason for Rouhanis cancellation, The Tower reported that it was evidently a response to public knowledge of various protests scheduled to take place alongside those planned by the NCRI itself. Austria reportedly refused the Iranian governments demands for the cancellation or obstruction of these demonstrations, leading Rouhani to call off the visit.

The Tower adds that notwithstanding his moderate image, this sort of move is in keeping with Rouhanis record, considering that he rose to prominence in 1999 by opposing student demonstrations against the Iranian regime.

New reports of repression have continued to accumulate during his more than two and a half years as president, as highlighted by last weeks decision of the United Nations Human Rights Council to renew the mandate for Ahmed Shaheed, the special rapporteur for human rights in Iran.

The cancellation of Rouhanis trip may have prevented the international media from taking much note of the planned protests, but there are some media outlets that are focused either on Iran or on human rights and are keen to report upon ongoing violations. informed sources, for instance, ran an article on Thursday regarding the plight of husband and wife educators Peyman Kushak Baghi and Azita Farizadeh, who have been sentenced to five and four years in prison, respectively, for their participation in a project to provide higher education to the Bahai religious minority, which is barred from access to Iranian universities.

The article notes that the two defendants asked to serve non-overlapping sentences so that their five year old son would not be left without a caregiver. After initially imprisoning only Farizadeh, the Iranian authorities seized Baghi on February 28 and took him to begin his sentence without advanced notice after he arrived at his wifes prison for a visit, along with his son.

Notably, this story reports that the parents may have had time to flee the country before being ordered to begin their sentences, but were reluctant to abandon their efforts to defend the basic rights of the minorities . Such reports highlight the fact that foreign activism is far from the only action being taken to pressure Iran for improvement of its human rights record. Even the NCRI maintains an active network within the country, even though financial support for the organization has proven to grounds for application of the death sentence.

Further highlighting the overlap between foreign and domestic activism, Charisma News reported on Thursday that Pastor Saeed Abedini, the Iranian-American convert to Christianity who had been imprisoned in 2012 for his faith while in the country to help in the construction of an orphanage, told an Idaho news outlet that there was a chance he would still go back to Iran, despite the abuses that he suffered at the hands of prison authorities before being released early this year in a prisoner exchange that also set free three other American-Iranian dual nationals.
In October, while Iran was taking steps to comply with the previous summers Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and secure relief from US-led economic sanctions, the IRGC carried out the test-launch of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, in violation of UN Security Council resolution 1929.

The incident provoked immediate condemnation from a number of foreign powers, in the midst of which the IRGC carried out a similar test of a more advanced missile in November. Around the same time, Iranian state media broadcast images from inside Irans missile silos, with IRGC officials boasting of the size of the countrys stockpiles.

The Obama administration eventually responded to the first incident by imposing new sanctions on 11 individuals and organizations with ties to the Iranian ballistic missile program. That response, however, came only after the JCPOA was finally implemented in mid-January, and also after several weeks of urging by the US Congress.

Following the sanctions, Irans supposedly moderate President Hassan Rouhani responded by ordering Defense Minister Hossein Dehqan to greatly expand the countrys ballistic missile program. Figures in the Iranian military indicated to the media that such development was ongoing, and this commentary was followed up on March 8 and 9 by tests of three additional nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, at least two of which were painted with the message, Israel must be wiped out.

The US quickly asked the UN Security Council to take up this issue, but it has faced opposition from some supporters of the Islamic Republic, most importantly Russia, which shares permanent member status with the US, Britain, France, and China on the Security Council. In the midst of this opposition, American prospects for an international response to the latest tests have seemed dim.

Of particular issue is the fact that as of implementation of the JCPOA, the Security Councils resolution 1929 was abrogated by resolution 2231, which is based upon the same essential principles but uses decidedly softer language, calling upon Iran to avoid work on weapons designed to be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, as opposed to simply saying that Iran shall not test or develop any ballistic missile capable of carrying such a payload.

Khameneis latest remarks on the topic seem to suggest that the lack of enforcement options has emboldened the regimes rhetoric. Many Western critics of the July 14 nuclear agreement have expressed concern that the Obama administration might not be willing to take unilateral measures to punish Iranian misbehavior if it believed that doing so would endanger the longevity of the JCPOA. Tehran has repeatedly insisted that any new sanctions could be regarded as violations of the deal and grounds for Iran to cease its own compliance. In this context, Iranian provocations over the ballistic missile issue can be seen as essentially daring the US to put the agreement in peril.

As the ultimate authority in all matters of Iranian policy, Khamenei theoretically could have prevented the JCPOA from going forward. But most analysis of the agreement has maintained that he was compelled to allow limited concessions, for fear of prompting domestic unrest if he undermined what was apparently the only reformist platform that President Rouhani pursued after his 2013 election. Subsequent to the agreement, Khamenei has voiced extensive criticism of and skepticism about the JCPOA, albeit without directly undermining its implementation or continuance.

The supreme leaders speech on Wednesday continued that pattern. It reiterated a position he had taken when nuclear negotiations were being concluded, barring his subordinates from negotiating with the US over anything other than the nuclear issue. Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors, he said in his latest remarks.

Fox News suggested that this comment may have been a direct response to former President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, an ally of Rouhani who was a leading advocate for the political faction that was identified as primarily moderate and reformist in last months elections for the Iranian parliament and the Assembly of Experts, the body which could be tasked with choosing Khameneis successor.

But the supreme leaders decision to put missiles ahead of negotiations may also be a response to Rouhani himself, and an expression of a widely-recognized conflict within the regime regarding the future of Irans relations with foreign powers including the United States. On Monday, Al Monitor published an article indicating that Rouhani has expressed interest in pursuing a national agreement modeled after the JCPOA and focused upon a plan for Irans economic future.

Presumably, if that plan follows Rouhanis strategy it will include more engagement with the West, creating the sort of calm environment that he praised for allowing Iran to expand its nuclear program when he was the countrys lead nuclear negotiator. Khamenei, on the other hand, appears to remain intent on open defiance, even at the cost of further sanctions. This was underscored by his speech coinciding with the Iranian New Year, which began on March 20. In it, he declared the coming year the Year of the Resistance Economy, referring to the program of domestic development and regional commerce by which the Islamic Republic had attempted to weather its isolation from international trade.

The maintenance of this resistance economy can also be expected to preserve the status quo for state-affiliated institutions that have been enriched in recent years either in spite of the sanctions or even because of them. Many of these institutions are owned either in whole or in part by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has dominated the countrys black market trade in foreign goods and which the National Council of Resistance of Iran estimates as currently controlling more than 50 percent of the Iranian gross domestic product.

Predictably, the IRGC would also stand to benefit financially from the continued expansion of the ballistic missile program, owing to their connections to companies involved in the domestic production of those weapons. Meanwhile, as long as Russia continues to stand by the Islamic Republic, the latter will likely rely upon the former in order to gain access to missiles that are not currently produced domestically. This could deepen a political and economic relationship that gained strength during the period of economic sanctions, when Russia skirted those sanctions to continue doing business with Iran.

Khameneis speech may appeal to Russian as well as Iranian figures who are committed to open defiance of the West, although it will perhaps be poorly received by figures in both countries who are interested in managing that defiance over the long term. Meanwhile, the conflict between these two strategies is mirrored in the West by conflict between those who are committed to upholding the nuclear deal at most any cost and those who, like Middle East policy analyst Elliot Chodoff, believe the JCPOA shows incompetence and has hurt Americas image as a superpower.
Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the headscarf, said Mr Christophe Pillet of the SNPNC union, which is asking Air France management to make it a voluntary measure.

Company chiefs had sent staff a memo informing that female staff would be required to wear trousers during the flight with a loose fitting jacket and a scarf covering their hair on leaving he plane, Mr Pillet said.

According to Mr Pillet, management has raised he possibility of penalties against anyone not observing the dress code.

Air France told AFP that all air crew were obliged like other foreign visitors to respect the laws of the countries to which they travelled.

Iranian law requires that a veil covering the hair be worn in public places by all women on its territory.

This obligation, which does not apply during the flight, is respected by all international airlines which fly to Iran, the airline said.

Air France added that the headscarf rule when flying to certain destinations was not new since it had applied before flights to Teheran were stopped and also to crew flying to Saudi Arabia.

Air France announced in December the resumption of Paris-Teheran flights after they were suspended in 2008 when Iran was hit with international sanctions over its nuclear ambitions.
The idea of a Nebraska historical society started in territorial days but did not catch on. With statehood, an organization formed which moved through the years from the University of Nebraska to the Capitol and even to a covered basement on its way to a permanent purpose-built headquarters and repurposed museum structure.

Through the years location questions have persisted, once ending up at the Nebraska Supreme Court.

In 1858, when the territory was only 4 years old, the Nebraska Historical Society was proposed in Omaha with Dr. Gilbert Monell, an active organizer of the Union Pacific Railroad, as secretary. The proposed goal was to record and preserve the presence of the American Indian and form an appropriate library. Although nothing came from the concept, whatever records were kept were said to have been lost when the capital was moved to Lincoln with statehood in 1867.

The Capital Commission set aside Block 29, Ninth to 10th, Q to R streets, as the Historical Block to house the proposed library and ultimately a museum. The State Historical and Library Association did incorporate on Sept. 26, 1867, but no action was taken to utilize the land.

In 1875, the city of Lincoln asked the state legislature for permission to sell Market Square at Ninth and O streets, which had been given to it by the Capital Commission. The legislature agreed to the sale and gave the city title to Block 29 for a market square since the historical society had not utilized it.

In 1878, former Gov. Robert Furnas called for a meeting during the state fair to organize a state historical society. On Sept. 25, 36 (some say 20) men met at the Commercial Hotel at 11th and P streets and the following day officially formed the Nebraska State Historical Society with Furnas as president. The first meeting was held Jan. 23, 1879, in Library Hall at the University of Nebraska. Subsequent annual meetings were held at the university, usually in the chapel, and the university granted the use of one room in the original building for the society.

In 1883, as the State Historical and Library Association took the initiative in pursuing its right to Block 29, the question was pushed to the Nebraska Supreme Court. The court found that the society had done nothing to perfect the title, so the legislature had been correct in giving it to the city. On a more positive note, the society officially became a state institution that year and received an appropriation to publish reports and a smaller amount for maintenance of artifacts. The society also requested a room at the Capitol for its library.

While the society continued to hold its meetings at the university, in 1903 it proposed and designed a two-story building to be built on the university campus. Again in 1905, under Addison Sheldon, a proposal for a purpose-built museum/office headquarters was proposed but not funded.

In 1907 the legislatures House Ways and Means Committee, perennially short of funds, passed a motion to not only not fund a building but to completely eliminate the societys appropriation. Sheldon was surprisingly prepared and immediately countered with a proposition to restore $40,000 to the state if they would vote $25,000 for the first phase of a society building. Further Sheldon said he could show how to add $200,000 to the states revenue without raising the general levy.

Sheldon produced three bills, vetted and backed by law college Dean Roscoe Pound. The only stipulation was that Lincoln either cede Block 29 or provide a suitable alternative building site. The three bills were accepted by the committee, the revenue bills became law in 1907 and 1909 and work on the building began east of the Capitol at 16th and H streets. The basement was completed, but when subsequent construction funds were vetoed by the governor, a temporary roof was put up over the basement so it could be used for storage.

In 1915, the university asked the society to vacate their quarters there and yet another proposal for a society building on the university campus failed, but with the new, extant State Capitol, a museum and displays were completed on the lower level of the west wing with offices on the ninth floor, which they began to occupy in 1931.

Beginning in 1943 proposals for a university building at 1500 R St. began, with the legislature granting the society excess monies collected from a state school fund levy, and in 1953 the current building was dedicated as a museum, library and offices. In 1974, a new Historical Heritage Center was designed and proposed for the block south of the Capitol.

Ultimately, in 1979 the legislature appropriated $950,000 to buy the Elks Club building on the southwest corner of 15th and P, which had been put up for sale in 1975, not for a hoped-for Heritage Center but as a museum site, which opened in 1983.

After the Nebraska State Historical Societys total renovation of the museum building, it reopened Friday in time to celebrate Nebraskas statehood sesquicentennial in 2017. One is left to ponder what was buried at the 16th and H streets basement site that was paved over for a parking lot in about 1950.
Our state government voted to uphold the ban on for individuals with drug felony charges to continue to not have access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, LB 910 ("Food stamp measure withers," March 23). In the hearing for the bill, Senator Bill Kintner made remarks regarding hunger in Nebraska, including no one is going to go hungry, and By giving food stamps to drug dealers, we're just enabling them. Thats simply incorrect. According to the Kids Count 2015 report, approximately 106,000 households in Nebraska are considered food insecure.

Statistics and facts tell a vastly different story than the one that Senator Kintner claims. Yes, there are many food pantries across our state, but many fewer food banks. However, having access to food alone does not stop a person from being food insecure.

Nebraska is the 24th hungriest state in the nation. In 2014, SNAP lifted 4.7 million Americans, including 2.1 million children, out of poverty. Every $5 in SNAP benefits generates as much as $9 of economic activity. For children, food insecurity rates decrease by 33 percent after their family has been on SNAP benefits for at least 6 months.

Ensuring our citizens have access to food should not be in the political realm. It is a basic human right to have access to food.

Beyond just having access to food, I am sure all of us has a past that we would not want to have held against us. However, Nebraska is one of six states that continues to punish women and children because of a past transgression. These are not current drug dealers; these are people who are trying to create a better life and we continue to hold the past against them. I encourage Senator Kintner to contact us to learn how poverty and food insecurity affects all Nebraskans.

Rachel Olive, MSW, Executive Director, Hunger Free Heartland, Omaha
RACINE  Just days before the general election, spending on the Racine Unified School Board races by organizations seems to have dwarfed the amount candidates are spending themselves.

However, state officials say many of the ads and mailers received at local residences are not regulated, meaning there is little way for residents to tell who is trying to influence their vote or how much organizations are spending to do so.

Its dark money, said Kurt Squire, District 9 candidate, complaining of deceptive mailers he received supporting his opponent Bob Wittke Jr., paid for by Taxpayers 4 Safe Schools. To see this type of thing is a little disheartening to say the least.

With all nine School Board seats up for election Tuesday under a new state-mandated system of electoral districts, the contested races have largely boiled down to whether candidates are sympathetic to unions or to district administrators on various issues.

One group supporting six union-aligned candidates spent nearly $30,000 in March on mailers to residents in those candidates districts, according to state records. In comparison, Mike Frontiers campaign committee has spent about $3,300, the most any one candidate has used.

However, several series of mailers and advertisements backing candidates not aligned to the union  run in local media outlets, including The Journal Times  are not bound by state regulation and do not have to report their identities or expenses to the state, according to officials at the Wisconsin Government Accountability.

The difference is in the particular wording of each mailer and advertisement, specifically if the advertisement explicitly says to vote for or support a particular candidate, said Jonathan Becker, administrator of the GABs division of ethics and accountability.

Issue ads

Take, for example, District 2 in the southeast corner of Racine Unified where incumbent Dennis Wiser, a former School Board president, is facing fellow incumbent John Koetz.

An advertisement for Koetz in local media outlets tells residents to call board member John Koetz and tell him that you support his efforts to set a new tone for our schools and includes Koetzs phone number.

The ad indicates it is paid for by Taxpayers for Excellent Schools, which comes up with no results in the Wisconsin Campaign Finance Information System database.

After listening to the wording of this ad, Becker said this is an issue ad and it likely isnt subject to regulation because it technically does not say vote for a particular candidate.

So, theres no way of knowing how much money the group is spending on these  and no way to know where the group is getting its money, he said.

Because these ads are not subject to regulation, he said there is no limit on coordination between candidates and other organizations.

The ads for Koetz have appeared alongside similar ads supporting Kim Plache in District 4, Chuck Goodremote in District 5, Jim Venturini in District 6, School Board President Melvin Hargrove in District 8 and Bob Wittke in District 9.

All six ads have a similar font, layout and wording, and each gives a phone number to call the candidate and express support for them. However, all six are listed as being paid for by different organizations, none of which appear to be registered on the state campaign finance database.

Hargrove said he has not been contacted by the organization paying for the mailers and ads and is not certain who is behind them, but he said Ill tell you what, Im glad theyre doing what theyre doing.

I believe it is someone who believes in what were trying to do, and I will not speculate on who it is at all, Hargrove added.

The other five candidates promoted in these ads  Koetz, Plache, Goodremote, Venturini and Wittke  did not respond to requests for comment on the advertisements.

Vote for ads

On the other hand, a mailer obtained by The Journal Times supporting Wiser and five other candidates tells residents to vote for the candidates who will put our children first. The mailer goes on to list Wiser, Mike Frontier in District 3, Julie McKenna in District 4, Steven Hooper in District 5, Don Nielsen in District 7 and Matthew Hanser in District 8. The mailer states that it is paid for by the Wisconsin Working Families Party Independent Expenditure Committee.

The groups website indicates that it is part of a larger group in multiple states, and state records show the Wisconsin group has spent far more on the race for Milwaukee County executive than the race for the Racine Unified Board.

The Wisconsin Campaign Finance Information System database indicates that this group sent out two sets of fliers in those six districts last month, spending about $978 per district on March 3 and $3,909 per district on March 23. That total comes to over $29,000. Marina Dimitrijevic, executive director of the Wisconsin Working Families Party, confirmed that the Racine Education Association is a member of the party, but she did not say if the REA had contributed money to the party and instead deferred to state reports for the current filing period, which are not due until July. REA President Aaron Eick did not return requests for comment.

Wiser said he had no contact with the group beforehand, and he noted it would likely be illegal for an organization to coordinate that kind of advertisement with candidates.

He added that spending on untraceable advertisements has been happening for years and will likely become more prevalent in the future.

Its just part of the landscape at this point, he said.
WASHINGTON  When Rep. Paul D. Ryan took over as House speaker, it was supposed to signal a new era for Republicans  the arrival of a younger, more conservative visionary, who scrubbed the cigarette smoke stains from outgoing Speaker John A. Boehners Capitol office, and promised a fresh start.

Republicans craved the upbeat, button-down image the Wisconsin congressman offered. And his team served up the Ryan brand with marketing flourish  lofty speeches, a TV blitz and videos galore, including a cheeky snow-cam from the speakers balcony showing the winter blizzard over the National Mall.

But five months in, Ryan finds himself with a familiar problem. As Congress is careening toward another budget crisis and the Republican Party is ripping itself apart over Donald Trumps rise, the man best known as the architect of the GOPs austere spending blueprint is likely to miss an April 15 deadline to approve a new funding plan for 2017.

Hes been unable to overcome the same resistance from the conservative House Freedom Caucus that doomed his predecessor, and is so far similarly unwilling to use the power of the speakers office to force stragglers to fall into line.

On the top issue of the day, the turbulent presidential race, Ryan has refused to wade into the muck, fearful of alienating House Republicans who back Donald Trump, but also worried about tarnishing his own image in case the party needs his help at a brokered convention in July.

To some, Ryans repeated calls for Republicans to raise our gaze and his frequent attempts to position himself as the GOPs deep thinker are starting to give off an air of ivory tower insignificance. Conservatives wonder if hes still a young gun trying to shake up the party.

At a Trump rally in Ryans Wisconsin hometown of Janesville, the crowd booed the mention of his name.

Now we understand why he didnt want the job: Congress is broken and its hard for anybody to fix it, said John Feehery, a former Republican aide and now a GOP strategist. Jumping on the back of this tiger has not been easy.

Allies: Ryan is slow, deliberate

Allies see Ryan, who declined to be interviewed for this story, as a leader who is slowly and deliberately piecing back together a Republican Party that appears to have imploded during President Barack Obamas years in the White House.

In many ways, the speakers problems are of his own making, the result of a leadership strategy he helped forge to recruit the most conservative candidates to run for office and then, after Republicans won the House majority in the 2010 midterm election, reject almost all of Obamas initiatives.

Its led to all this anger, said Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They tried to make this entire process look ugly and illegitimate. It worked. In the process of winning these short-term victories in the midterms, they laid the groundwork for Trump.

Now, some of the same Freedom Caucus lawmakers who forced Boehners early retirement are bearing down on Ryan.

Many are scoffing at the higher government funding levels Boehner had accepted as part of a compromise with Democrats last year. That deal was supposed to clear the barn for Ryan by reversing some of the automatic sequester cuts that factions of both parties said were too severe. But many Republicans who didnt like the deal then dont like it any better now, and Ryan doesnt have enough votes to pass the budget without them.

Another shutdown is a possibility

Without an approved budget, it will be harder for Congress to pass the annual appropriation bills needed to fund government services. Ryan cant rely on Democrats, as Boehner did, because the proposed budget contains Republican priorities, like a Medicare overhaul with a new voucher program, that Democrats oppose.

Ryan initially escaped blame from conservatives for the deal Boehner made, but the honeymoon is now over and Congress risks a government shutdown if new money is not approved by Oct. 1.

Victory would be not shutting down the government, said Ron Bonjean, a former House Republican leadership aide who is now a strategist.

Some in the Freedom Caucus appreciate Ryans willingness to work with them, but see little change in the outcome. Paul was part of the Boehner entourage, said Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., a Freedom Caucus member.

Talking about ideas

Ryan is falling back on what he has always done best: talking about ideas.

This is how Ryan rose in Congress, as a skilled communicator of a conservative vision. Now, rather than using the biggest House majority in generations as a legislative factory that churns out bills, Ryan is turning it into a think tank to produce ideological position papers on taxes, national security, poverty and other issues to inform the eventual Republican presidential nominee at the partys convention in July.

What hes trying to do is provide an alternative to a presidential campaign that many Republicans are looking on with horror, Ornstein said. Hes trying to say, Look at me, Im a different kind of Republican.

Ryan has said flatly that he would not be the partys nominee. But his name is often mentioned as a last-minute alternative to Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, similar to the way he was drafted to take over as speaker.

Ryan is also working to ease the party in-fighting by rebuilding trust, little by little, giving detractors a seat at the table and throwing open decision-making to the troops, even if that means House Republicans cannot agree on a strategy that will pass a budget by the April deadline.

So far, the outcome has been a decidedly improved mood on Capitol Hill. Where previously the partys testy private sessions ended with Republicans lining up at microphones to fume at leadership, they now wait their turn to offer solutions in a more cooperative atmosphere.

Several bills have been signed into law under Ryans tenure, including a multiyear highway funding measure and an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind education law. The ones that Obama vetoed  including a repeal of the Affordable Care Act  have become a badge of honor for Republicans who pride themselves on forcing a showdown with the White House.

But the stalemate on the budget is a particularly frustrating setback for lawmakers who just a few years ago promoted a policy of no budget, no pay  blocking congressional paychecks until a budget was approved.

Detractors see Ryan squandering the House majority by failing to dig in and lead. Democrats roll their eyes at his inability to muscle his troops. And even rank-and-file Republicans say its tough trying to convince voters back home that the party deserves the White House when Congress is idling.

When push comes to shove, you have to be a leader, said Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., adding that leaderships inaction is fueling Trumps rise. Putting it in neutral is dumber than standing water. It isnt selling.
Name: James L. Neibaur

Age: 58

Current town/city of residence: Racine

Connection to Racine County: Racine native

Occupation: Film historian and writer (books, articles) on that subject.

Title of book and publisher: Butterfly in the Rain: The 1927 Abduction and Murder of Marion Parker. Published by Rowman and Littlefield.

Synopsis of book (plot): During the Christmas season of 1927, a man came to Marion Parkers school and picked her up, stating her father had been in an accident. He was a kidnapper and held her hostage, sending telegrams to her banker father with instructions where to meet for the payoff. Her father showed up at the destination, and handed the ransom over from his car to the kidnappers car. The kidnapper then dropped a sack out of his car and quickly sped off. Mr. Parker approached the sack cautiously, and opened it to find only his daughters head and torso. His screams alerted nearby merchants, the police were called, and soon there was a nationwide manhunt for her killer. His eluding the police, eventual capture, insanity defense at his trial and ultimate fate are all part of the book.

Is this your first book? No, my 18th  I already have a 19th completed, am working on my 20th and have a contract on the way for my 21st. I usually write about film history and have books out on everyone from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson. This is my first book in the True Crime genre, however.

Why did you write the book? Around a dozen years ago, I was researching for a book on silent movie comedian Buster Keaton when I was distracted by headlines about this kidnapping in the New York Times. I wanted to know if the girl was returned safely so I read further. When I saw what happened, I wanted to know if they captured the monster that did this terrible thing. Eventually I figured if I could be drawn in by this story, maybe others would also. So I gathered all the necessary research and wrote a book that is far outside my field. I actually dont like this sort of thing as rule, so this will likely be my only book in the True Crime genre.

How long did it take you to write the book? About a year. Once I finished, I secured an agent because this was so far outside my usual area, I wasnt sure which publisher to approach. It was turned down by every publisher the agent contacted because it was set too far back. So, I gave up and set it aside (the agent has since died). Well, 12 years later, I dusted it off and submitted it to the publisher that releases my film history books (they had recently expanded to include a True Crime division) and they accepted it.

Where is the book available for purchase? It is in stock at Barnes and Noble in Mount Pleasant and the usual online outlets like amazon.com.

Is the book available at the library? If it isnt it should be.

Website or Facebook page readers can visit for more information: I do have a Facebook page for the book: https://www.facebook.com/Butterfly-in-the-Rain-The-1927-Abduction-and-Murder-of-Marion-Parker-494421330721158/?fref=ts. The Facebook page has a link where you can order it directly from the publisher for a 30% discount.
MADISON  Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley is striving to solidify her place on the high court in the April 5 election, while Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg is trying to break through in her second attempt for the seat.

The race is officially nonpartisan, but has had a highly partisan tone in keeping with the courts increased polarization in recent years. Conservatives rolled out ads criticizing Kloppenburg and liberals unearthed opinionated writings from Bradleys history.

Both candidates have criticized the other for partisan ties, saying they wouldnt be impartial on the states highest court.

Yet whichever way the race goes, the court will continue to lean conservative. Bradley is widely considered part of the courts 5-2 conservative majority, which would shift to 4-3 with a Kloppenburg win.

The two candidates have been neck-and-neck in the race, according to a February Marquette Law School poll, but about 30 percent of registered voters were undecided.

Since then, the liberal group One Wisconsin Now brought to light opinionated writings from Bradleys college days in 1992 critical of homosexual AIDs victims, feminism and abortion. She has apologized repeatedly for the anti-gay writings, but its unclear what impact they will have on the swath of voters who know little of either candidate.

Bradley has the advantage of incumbency, although with only a few months on the court. Republican Gov. Scott Walker appointed her to the seat in October following the death of Justice Patrick Crooks in his chambers. Walker had previously appointed Bradley to two judgeships on the Milwaukee County circuit court and the state Court of Appeals.

Kloppenburg has gone after Bradley for those appointments in debates, arguing she advanced because of her political ties rather than her professional experience. Meanwhile, the Republican Party of Wisconsin has painted Kloppenburg as a biased liberal, noting her support for unions and her contributions to Democratic candidates.

Less outside money has been spent on the race so far compared to 2011, when Kloppenburg narrowly lost her challenge to conservative Justice David Prosser. Conservative groups spent about $2.2 million on Prosser and the liberal Greater Wisconsin Committee spent about $1.4 million on TV ads.

In this race, the Greater Wisconsin Committee has spent about $265,000 so far on pro-Kloppenburg ads and the Wisconsin Alliance for Reform has spent about $1.2 million on TV ads to help Bradley, according to an analysis of Federal Communications Commission records by campaign watchdog group Justice at Stake.
RACINE  About 30 people showed and voiced their opposition to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump outside of Memorial Hall Saturday afternoon.

While some Trump rallies have been marred by protests and violence  a 15-year-old girl was pepper sprayed at a rally in Janesville last week  the Racine Police Department reported a few ejections from the venue, but said the event was mostly peaceful.

The demonstrators gathered on Seventh Street and Lake Avenue, behind barricades on the west side of Lake. They carried homemade signs and chanted anti-Trump slogans, concentrating mostly on his statements on immigration and women.

They saved their loudest chants for people leaving Memorial Hall when the rally finished. Trump supporters on the east side of Lake Avenue raised their Trump signs and waved in response to the chants. Police officers stood in the middle of the street and kept the peace.

Juan Marquez, a 54-year-old Racine resident, quietly stood in the swirling snow holding a sign over his head.

Ive been a protester all my life, Marquez said. For education, for the rights of Mexican-Americans, for working families. I will always fight for people to have a fair shot at life. We wont get it with Donald Trump.

Thats for sure, said Racine resident and community activist Kelly Gallaher. She created an 8-foot portrait of Trump wearing a Nazi button with the word Hate on the bottom.

If you dont provide any counterpoint, people will think there is no counterpoint, Gallaher said. The things he says are not OK. And the things he says about women are just bananas. Its repugnant. I dont know why any woman in this world could vote for him.
Democratic presidential contender Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont delivered a rousing campaign address at Carthage College in Kenosha on March 30, underscoring both his radical reform message and the importance of the upcoming Wisconsin primary on April 5.

The candidate was introduced by local State Senator Bob Wirch, a labor union veteran and Democratic Party stalwart. Sanders spoke to a full house at the colleges large Tarble Athletic and Recreation Center. Vocal animal rights advocates briefly interrupted the proceedings, and were escorted out by police.

Sanders policy address was frequently interrupted by powerful applause. Much of his remarks addressed economic concerns, including in particular the income divide between the very richest and the rest of the population.

Inequality was described as greater than at any time since 1928. He cited dramatic contrasts between rich and poor, including the point that the richest twenty people  people, not percent  in the U.S. have as much wealth as the entire bottom half of our nations population.

The Senator attacked a rigged economy, where powerful financial and industrial interests dominate the system. He singled out the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which has ended any restrictions on political campaign funding by corporations, unions and other interests.

References to opponent Hillary Clinton were generally cast in economic policy terms. They included the point that she has received honoraria of $225,000 per speech by Wall Street groups. He urged that the transcripts of those speeches be released.

The Clinton campaign has fundraising super PACs while the Sanders campaign has none. Sanders received six million contributions over the past eleven months, at an average amount of $27.

Sanders touched on a range of additional reform topics. They include Medicare for all, equality regarding gender and race, and free university tuition. He contrasted his vote against invading Iraq in 2003 with support for the war by then-Senator Clinton.

The Wisconsin presidential primary historically has often been a good indicator of success in securing the party nomination. In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy emphasized the state. Wisconsin victory, followed by another big win in West Virginia, gave JFK clear front runner status. In 2004, Senator John Kerry received a boost from Wisconsin and went on to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. In 2008, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Barack Obama were nominated following Wisconsin wins.

Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower achieved an enormous gain through winning the 1952 Wisconsin primary. Ikes great popularity often obscures the fact that initially he faced an uphill battle to secure the nomination from Senator Robert Taft.

Defeat in Wisconsin, or fear of defeat there, has also significantly influenced presidential politics. Wendell Willkie, the Republican nominee who ran against President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, had similar aspirations in 1944  until his defeat in Wisconsin. President Lyndon Johnson, following a relatively poor showing in the New Hampshire primary against insurgent Senator Eugene McCarthy, decided to withdraw from the campaign and retire from the White House after polls indicated certain defeat in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin early in the 20th century established the first mandatory presidential primary, and one of the very first in the nation. Since then, primaries have become pervasive, yet Wisconsin continues to play often distinctive roles in the nomination process.

According to the Marquette Law School Poll, Sanders leads Clinton narrowly in Wisconsin going into this weeks primary election.
1995 murder of Italian: CIB arrests fugitive Tashi Gurung

The Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) has arrested one of the accused in the 1995 murder case of an Italian man Carraro David.
Altering course of global art history

The Solo Projects, numbering 17, held pride of place at the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) held in Bangladeshs capital city in February this year. Curated by DAS Director, Diana Campbell Betancourt herself, the Solo Projects were either special commissions for DAS or highly acclaimed and already existing works from artists working in South Asia, Europe and the US.
Asia-Pacific theatre

Great contemporary theatre is created out of the legacy of traditional theatre
Attention policymakers

Our education system is still imparting skills taught to our forefathers or grandfathers
Big country, small country

Nepals political crisis has to be resolved internally, not by leaders in Delhi or Patna
Brussels attacks: Flights resume at Zaventem airport

Brussels airport has reopened for three "symbolic" flights amid tight security controls, 12 days after an attack by suicide bombers killed 16 people there.
Dont suppress Madhes stir: Former Prez

Former President Ram Baran Yadav has asked the government not to suppress the agitation of the Madhes-based parties who have been demanding rights for the Tarai people.
Egypt asks Cyprus to extradite suspected hijacker

Egypt has asked Cyprus to extradite a man held by Cypriot police on suspicion of hijacking an EgyptAir plane on Tuesday and forcing it to land at Larnaca, Cypriot Attorney General Costas Clerides said on Saturday.
Four held with leopard hides

Police have arrested four suspected smugglers in possession with leopard hides from Sharada Municipality-1 in Salyan district.
MoFALD staff donate salary for Dharahara

Employees at the Ministry of Federal Affairs and Local Development have decided to donate a part of their salary for rebuilding the iconic Dharahara Tower in Sundhara which collapsed in the April 25 earthquake last year.
Mules fox cops with varied methods

An array of modi operandi employed by drug smugglers at the Tribhuvan International Airport, which the criminals are using to ferry the contraband to various European and Asian countries, has baffled security forces no end.
Nafea to press govt for recruitment fee revision

Free-visa-free-ticket is a low cost recruitment scheme introduced to end exploitation of prospective migrants
Nagorno-Karabakh violence: Worst clashes in decades kill dozens

Dozens of people have been killed in clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the disputed Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nepal faction ups ante against Oli-garchy

Says chairmans unilateral moves to sideline rivals do no good to party
Palmyra: 'Mass grave' in recaptured Syrian city

Syrian troops have found a mass grave containing about 40 bodies in the city of Palmyra following its recapture from the Islamic State (IS) group, state news agency Sana reports.
Quake survivors in Gorkha start building houses on their own

After failing to get any support from the government even 11 months after the devastating earthquake, villagers who were rendered homeless in the disaster have started building houses on their own for the fear that they might have to spend yet another monsoon under the flimsy structures.
Route inspected for chariot procession

Authorities in Madhyaur Thimi Municipality have inspected the route of the annual chariot procession on the occasion of Bisket Jatra.
Scientific forestry

Sustainable forest management in community forests is bearing its first fruits
Shortest road to China in two years, says Army

The Mailung-Syaphrubesi section of much talked about road connecting Rasuwagahi to Kathmandu through Galchhi will be completed in around two years provided government ensures adequate budget and construction materials.
Turkey violence: Five soldiers, one police dead in Nusaybin bomb

Five Turkish soldiers and one special forces police officer have died in a bomb attack in the country's south-eastern Mardin province, reports say.
Yes, its hard to to tell when one enters the city limits

Yes, they will make the city more inviting

Maybe ... does it really matter?

No, the signs in place are fine

No, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars

Vote

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Killeen, TX (76540)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun. Gusty winds diminishing during the afternoon. High 87F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Cloudy skies this evening. A few showers developing late. Low 71F. Winds SSE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
By Yezid Sayigh

WASHINGTON  Experience across the Arab world demonstrates that when it comes to security-sector reform, technocratic approaches are inadequate. Simply put, a technocratic focus on upgrading skills and operational capability, in the absence of improved governance of the security services, can be easily subverted by anti-reform coalitions, resulting in the continuation of regressive patterns of behavior.

This is especially true in polarized political and social environments  the most obvious cases today being Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, not to mention Bahrain and Syria. But even in countries where there is some degree of political pluralism and an absence of civil strife or domestic armed conflict  such as Lebanon and Tunisia, and potentially the Palestinian Authority and Algeria  incremental approaches can achieve only partial success. Creating a fully modernized and accountable security service requires more than technocratic tinkering.

Regardless of formal legal frameworks, barriers to effective audits prevent the monitoring of financial flows to and within the police and internal security agencies. Moreover, such institutions are often able to absorb formal anti-corruption training and yet continue with business as usual.

For effective security-sector reform in the Arab world to occur, the shroud of secrecy surrounding the sector must be removed. But among the Arab states, only Yemen drafted a Freedom of Information law after 2011. Conversely, several state institutions blocked a proposal by Egypt's Central Auditing Agency for legislation stipulating citizens' right to access information regarding corruption in any governmental agency.

The problem, as Egyptian researcher Dina El-Khawaga has argued , is that it may be impossible "to introduce reform on a structurally corrupt basis." What is needed is broad and effective oversight of public procurement, fuller transparency regarding budgets and routines, and substantially upgraded, multi-agency monitoring of national borders to dismantle illicit networks involving the security sector. Arab states like Jordan have shown that reducing corruption in the security sector enables significant improvements, even in a challenging environment comprising long borders, extensive black market trade fed by wars in neighboring states, and large refugee populations.

Effective governance of the security sector requires sustained political will at the top of the government, particularly a readiness to push reforms to sectors of the government and economy with which the security sector interacts. But change of this order of magnitude is highly contentious, and its path and outcome cannot be easily predicted or steered, no matter how determined the governmental leadership is.

There is a grim paradox at work here. The move toward more pluralist politics in Arab states has unleashed deep social divides over the nature and purpose of policing  divides that invariably complicate the reform process. For example, some demand that the security services should enforce religious values.

The specific dynamics of security-sector reform varies among states, depending on past modes of policing and the circumstances in which the authorities are challenged and forced to change existing structures. But, in most cases, people either look to the state and its officially mandated agencies to resolve problems and provide basic law enforcement, or would prefer to do so rather than resort  or just as often submit  to alternative, non-state providers. As a result, governments can claim a powerful legitimacy in embarking on reform efforts.

Despite support for the state as the ultimate arbiter of law, increasing social polarization in many Arab states over the last two decades has impeded consensus on how to restructure and reform policing. Marginalization of up to 40% of the population, who live at or below the poverty line, has fueled political challenges, in turn subjecting entire social segments to targeting by official security bodies.

Furthermore, the determination to crush dissent affects the urban middle classes, which might otherwise be the strongest proponents of security-sector reform in this area. Both Egypt and Syria are prime examples of this. The sectarian nature of Iraq's security sector and partisan polarization in the Palestinian Authority imply similar risks.

Severe political and constitutional breakdown, as well as extensive social and institutional fragmentation, also hampers  or, in cases like Libya or Yemen, blocks  reform. Even Egypt, with its highly centralized and bureaucratized state, has devolved certain policing and security functions in marginalized urban communities or rural areas to baltagiyyeh (thugs) and to former henchmen of the ruling party, village headmen, and clan elders.

Clearly, formalizing policing and adjudication on the basis of clan, sectarian, or ethnic identity as has happened with the revolutionary militias of Libya, the Shia Hashd militias in Iraq, or sectarian party militias in Lebanon  can be highly damaging . But the past emphasis on centrally managed security sectors has made them a crucial asset in political contests, enabling them to escape oversight and benefit from de facto legal impunity. So a better balance is needed to mitigate the concerns of diverse social and political actors whose participation is needed to renew constitutional frameworks, strengthen the rule of law, and revive national identity and state institutions in a context of democratic transition.

The bottom line is that security-sector reform cannot be undertaken in isolation from the wider process of democratic transition and national reconciliation. Today's Arab states in transition are discovering how difficult it is to replace deep-seated authoritarian practices and relationships with sustained democratization, a process that depends crucially on transforming their security sectors. The added focus on counter-terrorism is further impeding reform, though the failure of unreformed security sectors to fulfill this role effectively, such as in Egypt and Tunisia, should cause it to have the opposite effect.

Those who advocate both democracy and security-sector reform must show consistent unity of purpose, build societal consensus and political coalitions for their programs, and formulate coherent, sustainable policies. Only then might the political, economic, and social roadblocks to creating modern, accountable security services be overcome.

Yezid Sayigh is Professor of Middle East Studies at King's College London.
By Andrei Lankov

Resolution 2270, which the U.N. Security Council adopted on March 2, introduced many restrictions on the export of North Korean coal. Admittedly, the resolution is also equipped with several remarkably large loopholes that mean that exports can continue come what may. It is nonetheless interesting that this news produced much in the way of noise about the threat it poses to top policy makers in Pyongyang and the tonju (literally "lords of money").

The latter group is not supposed to exist in North Korea, but it does, and is remarkably powerful. These "lords of money" are actually rich entrepreneurs and investors who are running large private businesses. The operational capital of these people nowadays is counted in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Many may be surprised by this because the world media tend to repeat the outdated description of North Korea being the last redoubt of "Stalinism." Indeed, in a Stalinist country, private businesses (let alone large private businesses) are not supposed to exist. But the "lords of money" are rich, and play a major role in exporting coal and other minerals.

The tonju still cannot operate openly because the North Korean legal system, created in the 1950s and 1960s, leaves practically no space for private economic activity. When it comes to small-scale operations (like, say, running a food stall at a market), North Korean entrepreneurs do not worry too much about paperwork  a few bribes usually ensure that the business is not seriously threatened. However, if a private business gets bigger, other, more elaborate schemes are necessary for survival.

Fortunately, many North Korean officials are not averse to turning a blind eye  such activities help local and regional economies, while also providing a healthy revenue stream. They syphon off some of the revenue for themselves and pay their superiors a healthy amount too  they also understand that this situation, far from perfect, is necessary to ensure that people live and work. Mid and low-level functionaries are thus quite happy to participate in schemes that allow rich North Korean individuals to invest in de facto private enterprises operating under the cover of the state.

On paper, a significant part of North Korea's core exports are done by Foreign Trade Companies (FTCs). FTCs have been established by a wide variety of government agencies including those in the military, intelligence and party. FTCs operate enterprises including coal mines  that produce exportable items.

However, it is now an open secret that many such coal mines are actually run by the above mentioned tonju. They make deals with FTC management, effectively becoming franchise holders of the FTC brand. A lot of money is paid to gain direct control of a mine (usually one that was abandoned in the 1990s). The lord then hires personnel, including skilled geologists and engineers, and buys the necessary equipment to restart operations. Equipment is purchased with cash from non-operational mines, or imported from China. After preparations have been made, extraction can begin.

Coal produced from such mines is exported to China  very frequently through networks and connections of the lords themselves. After all expenses are paid, the remaining profits are usually split in three (unequal) parts with the exact proportions varying from case to case. Part of the money goes to the FTC, and onward to the central state budget. Another part is retained by the FTC's managers, while the rest is kept by the lord himself to invest as he (usually not a she, although sometimes) sees fit.

The income from such schemes is often counted in the tens of thousands of dollars a month  a small fortune by any standards, but positively obscene by North Korean standards.

Such co-operation between private capital and state agencies is quite typical in present-day North Korea. The schemes are widely used and virtually nobody sees them as problematic. At the same time, the old regulations remain on the books and are officially enforced. Thus, if a private entrepreneur becomes unruly and forgets his "proper station," his superiors can easily have the lord sent to prison forever or shot. It is not difficult  pretty much everything he (very seldom she) does goes against the letter of North Korean law.

The mighty "lords of money" have another reason to worry about their future, however  international sanctions. According to recent reports, the North Korean government has tried to assure them that China will not take the bans seriously for too long. This might indeed be the case; at least this is what North Korea's new rich are hoping for.

Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and teaches at Bookman University in Seoul. Reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
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CHICAGO (AP)  The first major research of its kind shows that cholesterol-lowering statins can prevent heart attacks and strokes in a globally diverse group of older people who dont have heart disease.

The results bolster recommendations in recent guidelines on who should consider taking the drugs.

The aim was to prevent heart problems using a statin alone, blood pressure drugs or a combination of the two. The three approaches are commonly used in high risk patients or those with evidence of heart disease. The patients in the study did not have heart disease and faced lower risks of developing it, and the statin approach worked best.

The research involved nearly 13,000 men and women from 21 countries on six continents. Most previous studies on heart disease prevention have been in white, North American patients with higher risks because of high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol levels or other conditions.

But with heart disease a leading global killer, causing 18 million deaths each year, there is a trend toward recommending preventive drug treatment to more borderline patients. The benefits of this strategy were seen in people from every part of the world, said study co-author Dr. Salim Yusuf, a professor of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. This is globally applicable.

The research was published online Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at an American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago.

Study sites included Canada, Europe, China, South America and South Africa. About 20 percent of patients were white.

Patients were at moderate risk because of age  men were 55 and older and women were at least age 60  and because they had another heart disease risk factor, including obesity, family history or smoking. On average, their cholesterol levels were nearly normal and blood pressure was slightly lower than the cutoff for high blood pressure, which is 140 over 90.

They were randomly assigned to receive one of the treatments in low doses or dummy pills for almost six years. The drug treatments all reduced cholesterol and blood pressure levels but other results varied.

Statin-only patients were about 25 percent less likely to have fatal or nonfatal heart-related problems than those given dummy pills. Those in the combined drug group fared slightly better and the researchers credit the statin for the benefit.

Blood pressure drugs alone worked no better than dummy pills at preventing these events, except in the fraction of patients who had high blood pressure. The drug doses used may have been too low to provide much benefit to low-risk patients, although longer follow-up may be needed, according to a journal editorial published with the research.

Heart problems and deaths were relatively rare in the three study groups. In the combined drug group, less than 4 percent of patients had those outcomes, versus 5 percent of those on dummy pills. Nearly similar results were seen in the statin-only group. Those outcomes occurred in about 4 percent of patients on only blood pressure drugs and in those on dummy pills.
LA CROSSE / HONOLULU, Hawaii  Imre L. Bard, 87, of La Crosse and formerly of Honolulu died Tuesday, March 22, 2016, at Mayo Clinic Health System in La Crosse.

He was born Nov. 5, 1928, in Budapest, Hungary. As a teenager he experienced both the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes, which made him a lifelong believer in social democracy. Imre left Europe, and became a citizen of the United States in 1960. That same year, he married Teri (Therese Bissen), a lady from Hokah, Minn., who shared his views about life, politics and academic ambition. They both earned Ph.D.s at the University of Washington, becoming university professors, and enjoyed 47 years of loving marriage. Imre retired as a professor of medieval European and World History.

The place Imre lived and worked the longest was in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, where he was lucky to enjoy the best climate in the world. He also worked as a senior lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji, from 1987 through 1988. Imre had students from the four corners of the earth; even a student from the Maldives Island. He also developed lifelong friendships in the Pacific region, especially his neighbors in Hawaii Kai, the Sandersons, Marshes, and Halletts. Imre and his wife, Teri, both retired from teaching in 1995-96. Teris illness in 2005, led them to return to her native upper Midwest. After Teri passed away in 2008, Imre returned to Hawaii, for a period in 2013 to 2014, until missing his family brought him back to Wisconsin.

Survivors include his brother and two sisters-in-law in Hungary; a niece, Katalin Bard of Hollywood, Fla.; the Bissen family of Wisconsin and Minnesota, too numerous to list, who provided companionship and help when needed; Keith Knutson, professor of history at Viterbo University, who shared his love of history and ethnic restaurants.

In addition to his wife, Imre was preceded in death by his son, Eric, in 2001.

Half of Imres ashes will be scattered in the waters of the Pacific Ocean off Maunalua Bay, Oahu, where he will join his wife and son. The other half will be laid to rest in a graveside service at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 21, 2016, in Mount Calvary Cemetery, Hokah, Minn. The Rev. Patrick Augustine, Rector of Christ Episcopal Church, La Crosse, will officiate.

Memorials may be given to The La Crosse Foundation.

Jandt-Fredrickson Funeral Homes and Crematory, Woodruff Chapel, La Crosse, is assisting the family with arrangements. Online condolences may be sent at www.jandtfredrickson.com.
Wisconsin voters have the chance to recast the presidential election Tuesday with the national spotlight trained exclusively on the Badger State.

All five candidates have something at stake.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz could derail Republican front runner Donald Trumps chances at securing a majority of delegates before the partys convention in July. A Trump win in Wisconsin would demonstrate his ability to overcome the strongest, most unified #NeverTrump movement yet. And Ohio Gov. John Kasich could assert his relevance before the race heads east.

On the Democratic side, a convincing win by self-described Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, could propel his case against Hillary Clinton, while a closer race allows Clinton to continue scooping up delegates and expand her lead toward the nomination.

Its possible well look back and say it was Wisconsin that changed everything, said Larry Sabato, director at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Its got the floor in a very messy show for a month and that gives it more influence than 10 states on Super Tuesday.

Cruz leads Trump by 10 points and Kasich by nearly 20 points in the latest Marquette Law School Poll released this week.

Political observers say Cruz has the momentum to win especially after Trump had perhaps his worst two-week stretch of the campaign season.

Trump engaged in a petty Twitter battle over Cruzs wife, faced antagonistic interviews on conservative talk radio in Wisconsin, and reversed himself on his statement that women who have an abortion should be punished. Trumps campaign manager also was charged with simple battery after an altercation with a female reporter.

Sanders also has momentum, having rallied thousands of supporters in Madison, the Fox Valley, and elsewhere as Clinton has already turned her sights on New York. Hes pulling even with Clinton in Milwaukee County, according to the Marquette poll, where she was expected to do well, and hes leading 49-45 statewide.

The race on both sides has highlighted divisions in the states political parties. Cruz is backed by conservative Republicans in control of state government, Kasich is the favorite of the more moderate Republicans and Trump has support among anti-establishment voters.

Given that Ted Cruz is certainly not a conventional establishment candidate based on his (voting behavior and relationship with his colleagues), its remarkable that voters who find themselves in that wing of the party have nevertheless gravitated to him and have separated him out, presumably because theyre so solidly against Trump, said Marquette poll director Charles Franklin.

Clinton has been endorsed by most of the states prominent elected Democrats  exceptions include U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan of Madison and Senate candidate Russ Feingold of Middleton, who have remained neutral  while Sanders is tapping anti-establishment liberals.

Issues divide voters

The political divisions among the supporters of each candidate were highlighted in the Marquette poll, which asked about views on free trade, immigration, taxes, wages, military intervention and the governments role in closing income inequality.

Trump, for example, draws more support than his opponents from those who oppose free trade and want to deport immigrants living in the country illegally. Cruz is leading among those who oppose raising taxes on the wealthy and those who say they are living comfortably.

Sanders has a 55-40 lead over Clinton among those who believe it is the responsibility of government to reduce income inequality. Hes also a strong favorite among those opposed to sending ground troops to fight Islamic militants.

Three in four Republicans said this country is a place where hard work and following the rules can lead to prosperity whereas a simple majority of Democrats said hard work and playing by the rules dont pay off. Trump and Sanders lead among those with the more pessimistic view.

What populism means is different between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, Franklin said. Thats why even though you might call Sanders and Trump populist in some sense, they are not appealing to the same set of voters.

Republicans battle over Trump

The central issue on the Republican side has become the emergence of Trump as the partys potential standard-bearer in November.

As establishment and conservative Republican forces have joined together to oppose the real estate mogul and reality television celebrity, Trump has dug in, even slamming Gov. Scott Walker during a campaign stop in Janesville the same day the governor endorsed Cruz.

Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, an early supporter of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio before he dropped out of the race, has been outspoken in advocating against Trump and has more recently endorsed Cruz. He highlighted Trumps criticism of Walkers resistance to raising taxes as something that doesnt sit well with the grassroots Republicans in Wisconsin who have helped secure a majority in state government and advanced a range of reforms.

Once Trump stepped foot into Wisconsin he kind of ripped off the mask and showed everybody what he would be like as a leader, Steineke said. It goes completely contrary to everything we believe in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is a high-stakes battle for Trump because if Cruz comes away with all of Wisconsins 42 delegates, it makes the hurdle to get to the 1,237 threshold before the convention that much higher. The next primary isnt for two weeks, so Trumps opponents could turn a crushing defeat into a narrative that its the beginning of the end, Sabato said.

If Trump doesnt win statewide, he could still salvage some delegates if he can win more votes in certain parts of the state. The statewide victor receives 18 delegates and the winner of each congressional district wins three apiece.

Kasich also could pick up three delegates in the 2nd Congressional District in the states south central media market, where the Marquette poll showed him leading Trump 37-33 and Cruz far behind.

In the western part of that district, former state Sen. Dale Schultz, a moderate Republican who is backing Kasich, said his sense is that Trump is doing well on the Republican side, but that Kasich is gaining ground.

This is a historically very independent place and people resent being pushed in the direction of a party, Schultz said. What its coming down to is the establishment versus the non-establishment. Theres a lot of people out here who resent that the establishment has closed ranks behind Ted Cruz.

Melissa Larson, 40, of Lake Geneva, attending last weeks Trump rally with her son and his friend who both plan to join the military, said after retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson dropped out of the race she decided to back Trump because she didnt like how Cruz sent out misinformation about Carson dropping out of the race shortly before the Iowa caucuses.

She said Trump will strengthen the military to the point where the world will see the country as a powerhouse again.

The world sees us as weak now, Larson said. People may not like the way Trump speaks and I was taken aback by his language at first, but maybe thats what we need to hear. Maybe thats what the world needs to hear.

A common theme among Trump supporters is that he is a political outsider who has no allegiance to special interest groups because he is mostly self-funding his campaign.

Trumps rival candidates and outside groups opposing him are slated to spend a combined $3.8 million in advertising in the state. That includes about $1.7 million from Our Principles and Club for Growth Action, a conservative group that has endorsed Cruz.

We always saw this as a reset period where it would be possible to slow Trumps momentum or reverse it, said Tim Miller, who works for Our Principles PAC.

So far, the billionaires campaign is slated to spend only about $430,000 on radio and television advertising leading up to the primary, according to data from Kantar Medias Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Sanders seeking big win

The Democratic primary in Wisconsin has the potential to shake up the national race if Sanders can pull off a blowout victory, but thats a tall order given how far ahead Clinton is among so-called superdelegates, a collection of elected officials and party insiders who are free to choose whichever candidate they want. Half of Wisconsins 10 superdelegates have said they will back Clinton, while the other five havent backed anyone yet.

UW-Stevens Point political science professor Ed Miller said there is a strong anti-establishment sentiment in the state that is fueling both Sanders and Trump, but it might not be enough to give Sanders the kind of margin he needs to go on to win the nomination.

He needs to win by a landslide to make a great dent, Miller said.

Democratic strategist Paul Maslin, who hasnt backed a candidate, said the expectation is that Sanders will win the state, but even if its by 10 points, his share of delegates wont be enough to alter the race.

A narrow loss in Wisconsin (for Clinton) is kind of what everybody figured already, Maslin said. Its going to be a 4 to 8 point Sanders win. Which is fine for him, but it wont affect her very much.
Last summer, Sandra Goodwin was sued by Jefferson Capital Systems for $5,562 in overdue debt. But Goodwin had never heard of or done business with the company.

The paperwork said I was being sued, said Goodwin, a former Madison resident who now lives in Stoughton. I mean, I panicked.

Goodwin sought free legal advice from Stacia Conneely, an attorney at the Madison branch of the nonprofit law firm Legal Action of Wisconsin. Conneely determined Jefferson Capital had purchased Goodwins debt  stemming from an online class she signed up for but never took  from LifeWay Credit Union.

Goodwins debt is a small part of the multi-billion-dollar debt-buying industry that recently won a legislative victory in Wisconsin. Such companies buy and sell the right to collect debt, but consumer advocates say the result is sometimes a bill that the consumer may not recognize for an amount that cannot be verified from a company they have never heard of.

Wisconsin consumers have filed more than 2,000 complaints over the past four years with the state Department of Financial Institutions against debt collectors, including such debt-buying companies, outstripping complaints against payday lenders and auto loan-title lenders combined, a Wisconsin Public Radio analysis found. Many of these complaints were about threats or other improper telephone behavior, and some were about attempts to collect debt from the wrong person.

When a creditor such as a credit card company decides it cannot collect, the debt can be sold for pennies on the dollar to a third-party debt buyer. Then, debt buyers try to collect through traditional methods, such as phone calls, or they can sue for repayment.

According to a 2013 Federal Trade Commission report, however, 90 percent or more of people sued never show up in court, even if they have a good defense, including that the debt is too old to legally collect.

Unlike most states, some consumer debt in Wisconsin is erased after six years. Nationally, the FTC found that slightly over 12 percent of the debt purchased was more than six years old, which would put it beyond the statute of limitations in Wisconsin.

If a defendant fails to show up for court, the judge often issues a default judgment, allowing the creditor to garnish wages and put liens on real estate or other property, which can tarnish a consumers credit rating for years.

Organizations including the FTC, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Consumer Law Center and Human Rights Watch have all called for stronger regulation of debt buyers, especially in court proceedings.

A bill signed into law March 1 by Gov. Scott Walker sends Wisconsin the opposite way, consumer advocates say. The law standardizes but in some cases lowers how much proof debt collectors must present in court at the beginning of a lawsuit.

It moves in the exact wrong direction, said Stoughton consumer attorney Mary Fons, who testified against the bill authored by state Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam.

The law is based on a nearly identical bill from the last legislative session, also sponsored by Born. Representatives from the Wisconsin Creditors Rights Association, which pushed the bill, did not respond to requests for comment by Wisconsin Public Radio.

Born also declined comment. In testimony late last year, he said the bill would help both merchants and debtors save time and money associated with litigation. He added that the change would make credit markets function more efficiently, which benefits us all.

Born's 2013 proposal marked one of the few times the state Department of Financial Institutions has opposed a bill during Walker's tenure, said Peter Bildsten, former secretary of the state Department of Financial Institutions.

I'm very concerned about the lack of protection here in Wisconsin for borrowers like that, he said in an interview. They don't have voices.

Conneely said consumers can fight such actions if they can show it is the wrong amount, charged to the wrong person or already settled through bankruptcy. Many people in debt, though, cannot afford an attorney, and unfortunately sometimes it takes a lawyer to figure it out, Conneely said.

The telephone game

Conneely said Goodwins situation is not uncommon. Debts can be bought and sold more than once. By the time someone is sued, how much is owed and to whom it is owed may be unrecognizable.

The FTC found that debt buyers often received very little information about the debts they purchased, usually packaged in one spreadsheet with many other debts. And the accuracy of the information is not guaranteed. The likelihood that the information is inaccurate grows as the debt ages.

It's sort of like the telephone game, Conneely said. It starts here, and by the time it comes around  years later, who knows what you're going to see and what information is available?

She said in Goodwins case, Jefferson Capital had purchased her debt, which originated from an online school called The College Network.

Goodwin said she never took the online course she signed up for, and she tried unsuccessfully to cancel it. Although she did sign a promissory note in 2011, Goodwin said she was legally blind at the time because of a stroke and did not know what she was signing.

The law firm representing Jefferson Capital did not return messages seeking comment.

Conneely said she is working on an out-of-court settlement.

A growing industry

The debt buying industry took off during the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, growing significantly in the early 2000s. The industry took a hit during the recession that began in 2007 when desirable debt was in low supply and more expensive.

The industry is thriving again: Third-party debt buyers recovered approximately $55.2 billion in 2013, earning close to $10.4 billion in commissions and fees, according to a 2014 Association of Credit and Collections Professionals report.

By the FTCs count, there are now hundreds, if not thousands of debt buyers. Although some are small, large players purchase most debt. In 2008, 76.1 percent of all debt sold in the United States was bought by nine large companies. Buyers in 2009 paid an average of 4 cents on the dollar, and older debt was generally cheaper than newer debt.

Beth Steelman of Clinton was sued by one of those big debt buyers last summer. She asked that the company not be named because she is afraid of getting sued again.

Steelman said she found out about the lawsuit when she was contacted by defense attorneys soliciting her business. She said she was never legally notified of the lawsuit. Online court records show the creditor attempted but failed to serve notice that she was being sued.

Once she confirmed that, Steelman asked the company to provide details about the debt, which was between $1,000 and $1,500. It provided the last six numbers of one of her old credit cards.

If I had tried to fight it, I could tell I was really up against Goliath, she said.

Steelman paid the company two installments of about $289 each, and the lawsuit was dropped. She continues to get collection letters and is not sure if she still owes the company money.

I'm very paranoid now, Steelman said, adding that she checks court records every week to ensure she is not being sued. She called the new law terrifying and heartbreaking.

And that means now I'll probably be checking daily instead of weekly, she said.

Sewer service

In some cases, alleged debtors are never notified of the lawsuit, ensuring a no-show in court and a win for the creditor. In a practice sometimes called sewer service, a collector falsifies records saying a summons was served when it was not, figuratively throwing the papers in the sewer. In 2010, New Yorks attorney general sued to throw out about 100,000 judgments that had been obtained this way.

According to a new study by Human Rights Watch, the debt buying industry is heavily reliant on litigation, and judges often rubber stamp judgments that can be filled with errors and enormous accumulations of interest.

Many debt buyer lawsuits rest on a foundation of highly questionable information and evidence, Human Rights Watch found. Debt buyers do not always receive meaningful evidence in support of their claims when they purchase a debt, and in some cases the sellers explicitly refuse to warrant that any of the information they passed on is accurate or even that the debts are legally enforceable.

Wisconsins online circuit court database shows that between 2003 and March 22 of this year, Jefferson Capital, the company that sued Sandra Goodwin, had filed 2,630 cases against Wisconsin consumers. Nearly 3,000 cases were filed by debt buyer Portfolio Recovery Associates since 1998. Another major player, Absolute Resolutions, has filed 535 cases against Wisconsin debtors since 2014. Hundreds more cases have been filed by companies including Unifund, Transworld Systems and Midland Funding.

Zombie debt

Once debts reach a certain age, they can be deemed no longer collectible. In Wisconsin, it is generally six years. Wisconsin and Mississippi are the only states where certain debts are completely extinguished once they are past that statute of limitations. Debt that is past that date but which creditors continue to pursue has been referred to as zombie debt.

In theory, the fact that a debt is no longer collectible should be a good defense in court. It is already a violation of the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to file an action in court to collect an expired debt. However, the National Consumer Law Center said most debtors do not know the laws exist and may not show up in court to contest it. The center recommends a federal ban on any efforts to collect zombie debt, including phone calls or letters.

Fons confirmed that creditors sometimes do secure judgments on these so-called zombie debts because they (companies) don't get caught very often.

Consumer concerns

From 2011 through 2015, the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions received 2,351 complaints about debt collectors, including third-party buyers, Wisconsin Public Radio found.

At the federal level, Wisconsin consumers have filed more than 1,100 complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since July 2013 about all kinds of debt collectors. Americollect, a Manitowoc-based collections agency that uses the slogan ridiculously nice collections, was the most complained-about company with 44 complaints. Debt was paid and debt is not mine were common reasons cited in the complaints.

Even with so many complaints, the FTC has found consumers dispute only 3.2 percent of cases in which debt buyers attempted to collect. The commission noted that this figure is likely to understate these problems.

Debate surrounds debt buyer law

The new law signed by Walker standardizes but in some cases loosens the required proof at the beginning of a lawsuit for these kinds of legal actions under the Wisconsin Consumer Act. Creditors and third-party debt buyers now must provide a single billing statement as proof at the beginning of a lawsuit.

Under the previous standard, they were required to show all documents evidencing the transaction, which could include the initial contract and a record of any charges and additional fees or interest. The law also was changed to make sure the new requirements apply to all creditors, including third-party debt buyers.

Born said in a press release after the Assembly passed his bill in November that the legislation closes a loophole that has been exploited by bad actors to avoid paying debts.

Streamlining litigation could hurt consumers, Fons said. We don't need it quicker, she said. We need more accountability, we need more accuracy.

University of Wisconsin-Madison finance professor Jim Johannes, who testified in favor of the bill, said it standardizes courts interpretation of what is required in order to sue.

It puts a fork in what you need as evidence when you approach the courts in the pleading stage of a case, he said. It provides clarity for the courts. Previously, before this the courts could interpret it any way they wanted to.

For Stacia Conneely, this was not a problem. That's what judges are for, is to review the law and decide what they think it means, she said.

Johannes said he believes the new law will protect consumers while preventing people from getting out of paying their debts.

I am all about consumers, he said. But I'm not going to sit there and allow somebody to get around paying a debt just because they found a loophole in the law that a judge can now define what they need at the pleading stage.

Conneely countered that the new law has created a different type of loophole  one that benefits creditors. Now, the required billing statement can be drawn up any time the creditor chooses. It may not include crucial information about the accounts history, she said.

So it doesn't provide the other information that people are going to need, such as how did it get to that amount, and that's often the question people have, Conneely said.

At the heart of the disagreement is who is responsible to prove a debt is accurate and can be legally collected  the consumer or the creditor.

In 2014, Georgia Maxwell, then-assistant deputy secretary of the Department of Financial Institutions, testified against Borns bill.

DFI would not support legislation that unduly shifts onto consumers the burden of determining the accuracy of the debt they may  or may not  owe, Maxwell told the Assembly Committee on Financial Institutions.

In 2015, the CFPB took action against two of the nations largest debt buying companies, Encore Capital Group and Portfolio Recovery Associates. The agency charged that the companies often did not verify the debt, collected payments by pressuring consumers with false statements and were churning out lawsuits using robo-signed court documents. The companies were ordered to pay refunds and fines totaling tens of millions of dollars and to halt collection efforts on another $128 million in debt.

Other states have taken steps to fix the system. In 2013, Minnesota started requiring creditors to show evidence including the terms of the original contract and the chain of custody of the debt. New York also enacted stricter requirements in 2014 by changing court rules.

Conneely is keeping an eye on the number of judgments obtained by debt buyers each month now that the law has changed. She expects to see more, adding, "We're just waiting to see how many more.
Parrot species in U.S. rival native Mexican population  SAN DIEGO  U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexicos red-crowned parrot  a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. The research comes amid debate over whether some of the birds flew across the border into Texas and should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Parrots in U.S. urban areas are just starting to draw attention from scientists because of their intelligence, resourcefulness and ability to adapt. There is also a growing realization that the city dwellers may offer a population that could help save certain species from extinction. Parrots are thriving today in cities from Los Angeles to Brownsville, Texas, while in the tropics and subtropics, a third of all parrot species are at risk of going extinct because of habitat loss and the pet trade.

Miami fugitive on run for 20 years found  MIAMI  A fugitive from Miami who has been on the run for almost 20 years is back in federal custody after he was arrested in Nicaragua. Robert Allen Lopez, 49, was arrested on Nov. 14, 2015, and deported to Miami on Saturday by a team of deputy U.S. Marshals. According to Barry Golden, who is a spokesman for the Marshals Service, Lopez was deported because he crossed into Nicaragua by foot and was in the country illegally. In December of 1995, Lopez pleaded guilty to federal Medicare fraud charges. Lopez established fake companies that filed false Medicare claims totaling more than $4.3 million on behalf of patients for services that were unnecessary or never provided. Lopez was released on bail on the condition that he would not leave the area without permission.

Driver in crash that killed 2 pays $800 fine  MILL HALL, Pa.  A delivery truck driver who crashed into a horse and buggy in Pennsylvania last summer killing a woman and 9-year-old boy has pleaded guilty and paid nearly $800 in fines. Prosecutors say an investigation found vehicular homicide charges werent warranted. Fifty-five-year-old Sherry Croak of Lock Haven originally sought a trial but instead entered the plea Friday. The fines were associated with charges including careless driving resulting in death.

Father charged with killing son for being gay  LOS ANGELES  A Los Angeles man charged with fatally shooting his 29-year-old son for being gay had repeatedly threatened to kill him over his sexual orientation, prosecutors say. Amir Issa, 29, was found shot to death just outside the family home on Tuesday. While the Los Angeles County district attorneys office charged father Shehada Issa, 69, on Friday with murder as a hate crime in the sons death, investigators on Saturday still were trying to determine responsibility for a second killing at the home discovered by police at the same time, that of Amirs mother, police spokesman Officer Mike Lopez said. The mother, 68-year-old Rabihah Issa, had been stabbed repeatedly, coroners Lt. David Smith said. Shehada Issa told police he shot his son Amir in self-defense after he discovered his wifes body in their house.

Trailer Park Boys actor arrested  LOS ANGELES  An actor who stars on the television series Trailer Park Boys has been arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of misdemeanor battery. Police and jail records show Michael Smith, who plays Bubbles on the show, was arrested in Hollywood around 1:15 a.m. on Friday. He was booked on suspicion of misdemeanor domestic battery and released hours later on $20,000 bail.
BEIRUT (AP)  Syrias partial cease-fire appeared to be unraveling Saturday as fierce fighting between government forces and opposition fighters, including members of the al-Qaida affiliated Nusra Front, erupted outside the countrys second largest city of Aleppo and other parts in the countrys north.

At least 25 pro-government and 16 opposition fighters died in the clashes south of Aleppo, where the Nusra Front and rebel militias captured a village overlooking a major highway, a Britain-based monitoring group told The Associated Press.

The fighting was the most serious in the area since the cease-fire, engineered by the U.S. and Russia, took effect Feb. 27. The violence in the north, along with heavy government airstrikes that killed more than 30 civilians near Damascus this week, threatened to completely dissolve the truce, which had sharply reduced overall violence across the war-ravaged country.

The rebel advances also risk drawing Russia back into the conflict after it shored up the governments position through a fierce bombing campaign that wound down nearly three weeks ago. The oppositions advances threaten to reverse some of the gains made by the government during the Russian campaign.

Russias Defense Ministry voiced complaints about cease-fire violations in Syria, saying that the Nusra Front has taken control over opposition groups around Aleppo.

A statement quoted Lt. Gen. Sergei Kuralenko, the chief of the Russian military coordination center in Syria, saying he informed his U.S. counterparts about the violations. He added that in the areas south and west of Aleppo, the Nusra Front has established full control over groups earlier listed among the legitimate opposition, referring to groups party to the cease-fire.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Nusra Front consolidated its control over the village of Tel al-Ais, which overlooks the Damascus-Aleppo highway, as fighting continued in the surrounding areas Saturday. Other militias, led by the militant Ahrar al Sham group, also seized government positions in heavy fighting in the northwestern Latakia province, leading to casualties on both sides, opposition activists said.

The coordinated rebel and Nusra Front offensive followed weeks of sporadic government air raids on opposition-held areas, despite the cease-fire. The government has also accused the insurgents of violating the truce by firing mortar shells on government-controlled areas.

The truce agreement, the first of its kind in Syrias five year war, excludes the Nusra Front and the Islamic State group. But the Nusra Front is embedded with other groups throughout the country. The government has taken advantage of this ambiguity to strike and besiege opposition-held areas across Syria.

Bombs fell near a school and a hospital in the eastern suburbs of Damascus Thursday, killing 33 civilians. The French foreign ministry accused the government of targeting civilians and deliberately violating the cease-fire.

These latest strikes appear to have caused some rebel factions to reassess their position on the cease-fire. A number of groups  including some nominally party to the truce agreement  acknowledged on social media that they were battling government forces.


Russian-speaking militants are the second-largest group of foreigners fighting for the Islamic State militant group.

Nearly 5,000 fighters from the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have joined IS, according to the Soufan Group.

The largest number of IS fighters  more than 6,000  came from Tunisia, Soufan said. Soufan provides intelligence services to governments and businesses.

The Russian-speaking fighters are among the Islamic States most brutal fighters. Some are part of the IS leadership.

They have settled mostly near the Syrian city of Raqqa, where IS has made its capital. Many brought their wives and children. They are raising their children to be future militant fighters, sources told VOA.

While their customs, race and ethnic background differ, these fighters have one thing in common -- they can read and write Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is the writing system used in Russia, which controlled the now independent Central Asian nations for decades.

In their homes in IS-controlled Syria, residents can hear Friday prayers in Russian. Children study math and the Koran at a Russian- language school. Products from their home countries are sold at a Univermag Russian store.

The men are experienced fighters, according to Salem al-Hammoud. He is a civic activist from the IS-controlled Syrian city of Deir Ezzor. He now lives in Turkey.

These fighters are very different from others in terms of discipline and military training compared to their Arab and African counterparts, Al-Hammoud said.

Some fought for Georgia in the 2008 war against Russia.

Given their combat experience, fighters from the North Caucasus are regarded as particularly strong fighters, said Edward Lemon. He is a researcher at the University of Exeter in Britain.

Some were drawn to the Islamic State by lack of jobs in their former Central Asian communities or in Russia.

Babajon Karabayev is a former IS fighter who returned to Tajikistan.

Karabayev was unhappy when he could not find work in Russia. Karabayev received money from IS. But he said left the group because he was not as committed as other fighters.

Many of the Russian-speaking fighters come from migrant worker communities in Russia.

Noah Tucker is managing director of registan.net, a website focused on Central Asia. He said Islamic State does a good job convincing Central Asian Muslims that their problems could be solved by joining the militant group.

He said IS tells potential recruits: You are Muslims, and your problems are caused by those who oppress Muslims.

Some experts said Russia encouraged militants to travel to Syria. Tucker said the Russian air force was able to bomb the Russian speaking fighters in Syria with a level of impunity, not possible in Central Asia.

I'm Christopher Jones-Cruise.

Mehdi Jedinia reported on this story for VOANews.com. Sirwan Kajjo, Fatima Tlisova, Firuz Bartov, Saeid Al-Kanassi and Mumin Ahmadi contributed to this story. Bruce Alpert adapted this story for Learning English. Kathleen Struck was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments or share your views on our Facebook Page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

brutal  adj. extremely cruel or harsh

de facto - adj. used to describe something that exists but that is not officially accepted or recognized

discipline  n. control that is gained by requiring that rules or orders be obeyed and punishing bad behavior

counterpart  n. someone or something that has the same job or purpose as another

combat  n. active fighting especially in a war

particularly  adv. more than usually

convince  v. to cause someone to believe that something is true

encourage  v. to tell someone to do something

impunity  n. without fear of punishment
For VOA Learning English, this is the Education Report.

The new SAT college entrance exam has arrived.

In March, hundreds of thousands of high school students took the redesigned test. The exam is getting some positive reviews from some early test-takers.

High school students who took the test said the new SAT is more straightforward.

The new exam focuses less on vocabulary words. It focuses more on everyday learning and analysis by students. On the old SAT, students lost points if they guessed the wrong answer. On the new SAT, students are not penalized for guessing.

The College Board is the organization that produces the SAT. It says more than 463,000 test-takers signed up to take the new SAT in March. This number is a small increase from a year ago.

For now, the College Board is only offering the exam to students applying for scholarships and financial aid. The exam will be open to all students in May.

Whats new?

The new SAT continues to test reading, writing and math, with an emphasis on analysis. Gone are some of those unusual vocabulary words. Test-takers will see more common words used in the classroom. Students will have to show that they understand meaning in different contexts.

In math, students will see more algebra and problem-solving. They will no longer be tested on a wide range of math concepts. But the use of calculators is limited to certain questions.

Overall, there are fewer questions  154 on the new test plus one for the essay. The old test had 171 questions.

Students will have a choice about whether to write the essay.

A perfect score goes back to 1,600 with a separate score for the essay.

Some early reviews

Brian Keyes is a third-year student at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C.

There arent as many questions where its trying to trick you  It was much more straightforward, he said

His classmate Isabel Suarez said, I liked it better than the old one. I thought that it was way more applicable to what weve been learning in school. The English was a lot easier for me than it was with the old one.

Suarez said she enjoyed the reading section.

My AP English class definitely really prepared me for it. I honestly enjoyed the grammar part because I like to pick out problems in writing. It was pretty fun actually.

AP stands for advanced placement. Students might test out of college courses if their grades and test scores from AP are high.

Why did they change the test?

This was the first change in the SAT since 2005. The head of the College Board says the new test has more familiar reading passages, vocabulary words and math.

David Coleman is the president and chief executive officer of the College Board.

The sum of the redesign of the test is to make it much more like the work that kids are already doing in high school, he said. Coleman added that the test was changed so that more students will feel like they have a chance to succeed.

With fewer questions on the new test, Coleman said, there is more time for each of the reading and math questions.

Tips from the experts

Lee Weiss is Kaplan Test Preps vice president of college admissions programs. He has some advice for students taking the new SAT.

If youve been preparing and putting in your study time, then you should go in confident. Its not the end of the world if you dont perform well, he said.

Weiss says students should not skip the essay. Many of the top universities look at the essay. It is an important part of their admissions process.

Make sure you are writing a good, structured essay that answers the prompt, said Weiss. Make sure that you are varying your word choice and your sentence structure.

Ned Johnson is the president of PrepMatters, an SAT preparation company. He said students should not be too creative or artistic in their writing. Students should write in a clear, analytical style.

Johnson says the math problems on the new test have a lot more words than before.

The College Board has teamed up with online educator Khan Academy to offer SAT practice with the new exam  for free  to all students through quizzes and practice tests. The tests are available online.

Im John Russell

Adam Brock adapted this story for Learning English from an Associated Press report.

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

straightforward  adj. easy to do or understand : not complicated

analysis  n. an explanation of the nature and meaning of something

penalize  v. to punish (someone or something) for breaking a rule or a law

context  n. the words that are used with a certain word or phrase and that help to explain its meaning

trick  v. to deceive (someone)

AP  adj. Advanced Placement, a college-level course offered in high school

prompt  n. a writing topic on a test

varying  adj. to be different or to become different


U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met this week over international security issues.

While they report slow progress over major disagreements, what do average citizens in those countries think about each other?

A study by the Pew Research Center offers some answers.

Only 38 percent of Americans said they have a positive view of China, according to a 2015 Pew survey.

And in China, only 44 percent of people surveyed gave the United States a positive rating.

Americans expressed concern about the large amount of U.S. debt held by China and the loss of jobs to China. Last year, the U.S. Treasury Department said China held $1.2 trillion in U.S. government debts.

People polled in China said they believe the United States is trying to prevent China from becoming as powerful as the U.S.

The views reflect some of the tensions between the nations leaders.

The United States has opposed Chinas construction of artificial islands and military facilities along the disputed South China Sea. And there have been disagreements over how to respond to recent North Korean nuclear and missile tests.

A joint statement from U.S. and China after Thursdays Obama-Xi meeting said both countries agreed to work together on nuclear security. The Obama administration said China has agreed to sanctions to protest recent North Korean nuclear tests.

But Xi expressed opposition to a new missile defense system for South Korea, according to Chinese media reports. Such a system is being considered by U.S. and South Korean leaders to protect South Korea from a North Korean attack.

At the start of his meeting with Xi, Obama said, Of great importance to both of us is North Koreas pursuit of nuclear weapons, which threatens the security and stability of the region.

Xi said China and the United States have a responsibility to work together.

As for issues dividing the two nations, Xi said both sides could seek active solutions through dialogue and consultation.

The two leaders met during a 53-nation conference on nuclear security in Washington, D.C.

I'm Bruce Alpert.

Bruce Alpert reported on this story for VOA Learning English. Kathleen Struck was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or share your views on our Facebook Page.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in this Story

survey  n. an activity in which many people are asked questions in order to gather information about what most people do or think about something

positive  adj. good of useful

poll  v. an activity in which several or many people are asked a question or a series of questions in order to get information about what most people think about something

reflect  v. to make known your opinion

artificial  adj. not natural or real

facility  n. a building or large piece of equipment built for a specific purpose

pursuit - n. seeking to get or do something

stability  n. the quality or state of something that is not easily changed or likely to change
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You dont fire 21 bullets at someone until you truly mean to kill them and leave nothing to chance.

The killing of NIA Deputy Superintendent of Police Mohammed Tanzil in his home town of Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh just a few days after the departure of the Pakistan JIT from Pathankot must be seen as suspicious. Why was he so dramatically eliminated, and what did he know that frightened some people so much that they would go to this extent?

The phrase he was investigating the terrorist attack on the air base does not particularly clarify the depth of his involvement.

There is a sinister possibility that the well co-ordinated attack and the targeting of officer was done to send a message to the National Investigation Agency: we can get to you.

Add to the killing the fact that the wife and child were also targeted as they returned from a wedding, which indicates that the killers meant business and were intent on sending out a very strong signal.

That is why there is the need to investigate this murder with immediacy. Such rage and yet, such meticulous planning could indicate that this is only the first link in a planned series of attacks on our security personnel. In that case, the perpetrators have to be tracked and caught and the effort has to be made an immediate priority. In the interim period, protection to vulnerable individuals in the NIA and other agencies has to be intensified. It is better to over-react than be sorry afterwards.

There are only two other possibilities for the way this brutal scenario has played out. In our country, disputes over land, love, caste and religion, our concept of dishonor and money can also trigger a response of such calculated bloodletting. If Mohammed Tanzil had an enemy locally and there was a dispute and somebody wronged was getting even, that has to be scrutinized. This angle cannot be ignored. If there is nothing of the sort, then the Pathankot connection is a strong possibility, and it has national ramifications. It indicates the presence of an organised cell.

The only other relatively absurd possibility is that someone wanted to make the Modi government look bad-- like really baaaad--for having allowed the team from Pakistan to saunter about for five days.

Suffice it to say that the Indian government, Modi aside, has a mountain of evidence and does not have to answer to anyone for a mere courtesy it extended. However, the claim that the invitation to the Pakistan investigating team to visit Pathankot now has blood on its corners puts the government squarely on the backfoot.

In capsule, the claim would be, "See, you guys needlessly invited Pakistan over and now one of the investigating officers has been murdered." Who is responsible? Somebody has to answer.

Coincidence? Only if you believe in such things.
A National Investigation Agency inspector was shot dead on Saturday night in his hometown in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district, sources said on Sunday.

Inspector Mohammad Tanzil was returning from a wedding along with his wife and children when they were accosted and shot at by unidentified assailants near Sahaspur town. The gunmen, who were riding motorbikes, had followed the family.

"He along with his wife was returning from the wedding of his niece when two unidentified bike-borne persons stopped his car and shot at him. He was declared dead at a nearby hospital," Rajkumar, SHO, Bijnor, said.

Sources said that he was reportedly shot 21 times, and his wife has sustained four bullets. She was rushed to hospital. The children were unhurt.

NIA Dy. SP Mohammad Tanzil who was shot dead in Bijnor(Uttar Pradesh) by unidentified gunmen pic.twitter.com/5z2P3uD9cC  ANI (@ANI_news) April 3, 2016

The NIA has rushed a team led by a deputy inspector general from Lucknow to probe the officer's murder.

The attack comes days after the Pakistan Joint Investigation Team looking into the 2 January attack on Pathankot airforce base completed the five-day long India leg of its investigation and returned home.

Hindustan Times reported that the Pakistan JIT requested NIA to share evidence in the case. NIA officials told the publication that the written request was made under Section 188 of the Pakistani CrPC. This section is used to prosecute Pakistani nationals for committing crimes in other countries, they said.

However, according to sources close to the JIT, New Delhi failed to provide evidence to Islamabad's Joint Investigation Team to prove their allegation that Pakistan based militants stormed the Air Force base.

The JIT members visited Pathankot airbase on 29 March where Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials briefed and showed them the route from where the attackers stormed the airbase.

Pakistani investigators were allowed to enter the military airbase from the narrow adjacent route instead of the main entrance and the duration of their visit was just 55 minutes, enough to take a mere walk through the airbase, Geo News quoted sources as saying, adding that the JIT could not collect evidence in this limited time.

With inputs from agencies
The stories of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad and Rajguru have fired our collective imagination for years. But what we know barely begins to scratch the surface, and has been shaped by representations of these heroes in pop culture, especially Hindi films.

In a new book called A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (Penguin), however, associate professor of South Asian and World History Kama Maclean provides a comprehensive look into the ambitions, ideologies and actions of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), formed by Azad and Bhagat Singh.

In an interview with Firstpost, Maclean tells us how she embarked on the project, and what were some of the most fascinating aspects she discovered about these brave men who played such a fundamental role in helping India become independent:

You've mentioned in the foreword to the book how the film Rang De Basanti (and your screening the film for your students) was a trigger in a sense for you to start writing about the revolutionaries in India. How did that happen?

RDB merges the historical and the contemporary, in an entertaining format that appeals to students, and so it provides an entry point into history. It merges the historical  in the youthful members of the HSRA, who were so heavily attuned to their political context and engaged in anti-colonialism  with the contemporary disillusionment of the Indian state, corruption and communalism. Watching the opening scenes of the film, in which Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev are hanged, which then cut to the scenes of a young filmmaker in London being told that she should make another film about Gandhi, because Gandhi sells to the West, resonated with my students.

However, after watching the film, I found that there was no scholarship readily available that elaborated on these themes, that contextualised the revolutionary struggle vis-a-vis the nonviolent Congress movement. There were many biographies of Bhagat Singh, in particular, but nothing that closely demonstrated how the revolutionary movement was enmeshed with Congress campaigns, and what they achieved. So that was what I set out to do. My book shows how revolutionary actions catalysed Congress programs, such as Civil Disobedience, but also that the fear of further attacks propelled the British into negotiating with the Congress, especially Gandhi, when otherwise they may not have been so inclined.

In the process of researching and writing A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, did you come across documents, oral accounts or findings that you were really surprised by?

Researching this book was extremely exiting; at times, it was absolutely enthralling. I was regularly surprised by the narratives, stories and allegations that I read, not only in the form of disclosures in oral history interviews, but even in the concessions of British administrators that I encountered in the colonial archive. There were jaw-dropping forms of evidence and many allegations that took a lot of time to substantiate against other accounts to form a viable historical narrative. The foremost among these has to be the level of engagement that emerged between the Congress leadership, especially Motilal Nehru  long presumed to be a moderate nationalist who supported non-violence  and the revolutionaries, mostly through intermediary Congress workers, but also directly. Motilal Nehru gave financial, legal and strategic advice to the revolutionaries, including to Chandra Shekhar Azad directly. All of this, of course, had to be kept secret from the British; accordingly it finds little mention in archives. But it comes out in multiple oral history interviews.

Among the perceptions that the book challenges is the idea that the revolutionaries and the Indian National Congress were completely antagonistic to each other. And you've shown that this wasn't really the case, and that while leaders like Mahatma Gandhi took great pains to say that they did not agree with the methods revolutionaries used, their patriotism could not be faulted...

The idea that the Congress and the revolutionaries of the HSRA were opposed to each other comes out of the written polemics between Gandhi and the revolutionaries in early 1930 (the Cult of the Bomb and the Philosophy of the Bomb, respectively), following the Lahore Congress, which the revolutionaries had such an impact on, and it ends of course with the allegations that Gandhi did not do enough to save Bhagat Singh. This is a debate which seems to have no end; and it has created a sense that the revolutionaries were opposed to the Congress as a whole.

I think its important to make a distinction between the elected Congress leadership  the key figures in this period are Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Presidents of the INC in 1928 and 1929, respectively  and Gandhi, who endeavoured to influence Congress developments during the period. There was a lot of ambivalence about nonviolence as a political strategy in the late 1920s, and both Motilal and Jawaharlal publicly expressed a sense of uncertainty about it, Jawaharlal in his Presidential Address at the Lahore Congress in 1929. To a degree, there was convergence in the interests of the HSRA and the Congress  to remove the British  but a fundamental difference about how to achieve it: through constitutional, agitational, or violent means. There were also debates about this within the Congress itself, in what was left in the late 1920s of the moderate/extremist divide that split the Congress in the early 1900s.

Gandhi realised the impact of the commitment of the revolutionaries, especially their suffering in hunger-strikes, that had popularised the anti-colonial struggle and heightened a sense of self-sacrifice among the masses. This also animated members of the Congress, in particular Jawaharlal Nehru, who went to visit the revolutionaries in prison, and Motilal Nehru, who visited them in court in Lahore. Gandhi was cautious of their support among Congress circles, and yet he wanted to exhort the importance of nonviolence in the struggle against the British. This led to a series of convoluted statements to the effect that the Congress appreciated the sacrifice of the revolutionaries, but did not endorse political violence, which at the time, was escalating. There is no doubt that this put Gandhi in a difficult position.

What did you find most striking about the revolutionaries you researched? What were the stories that seemed to illuminate an aspect of these men's (and women's) characters that we don't focus enough attention on?

The revolutionaries had individual personalities, which we have lost sight of, I think as a result of film narratives that are pressured to squeeze a complex narrative into two hours. The result is a rather two-dimensional rendering of the revolutionaries. In his memoirs, Bejoy Kumar Sinha, who was imprisoned for life for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, told the story of how, when he arrived in Rajahmandri Central Prison in Andhra in 1931 to serve his sentence, there was first excitement, and then disappointment, among other prisoners at meeting him. The prisoners, he wrote, had thought that as a northern Indian revolutionary, a colleague of Bhagat Singh and Azad, I would be a flaming youth of an austere face with red hot eyes, that I would be sullen and silent, would fly at a tangent at the least provocation from the authorities. In short they expected a revolutionary to be an uncommon creature an object of adoration and respect but inspiring positive fear and awe.

There was no one revolutionary personality in the HSRA: at times, they disagreed with each other on strategies. Each of them was different in their personal propensities, interests and inclinations, but they loved life, they had a hunger for knowledge, and above all, they yearned for fairness and equality. It was this that propelled them into political action. I have tried to bring some of this out in my book.

As for revolutionary women, there has not been enough attention on them, so I have a whole chapter devoted to Durga Bhabhi, who has been assigned only a walk-on role in the movies. I tell the story of what she did after, and for that matter before, she helped Bhagat Singh to escape Lahore in December 1928, disguised as his wife.

Could you recount an anecdote about one of the revolutionaries from the HSRA for us?

I was struck by an oral history account given by Jaidev Gupta, Bhagat Singhs firm childhood friend, who told his interviewer that while Bhagat Singh was in jail, European or British ladies and children of the officials at times used to come to see this brave man of India. He would meet them just as his own family members had come. No malice against them for their being European or British. And when some European or British officer came to see him as a representative of the imperialist power he was very cold and hard towards him and even would not greet him. His fight was against the capitalist and imperialist system and not against any individuals. Such was the nature which can be felt and experienced and not explained. Had you the fortune of seeing him, you would have never forgotten the broad charming smile and pleasing manners with which he would have received you.

We've had a few Bollywood films that attempted to bring the life of Bhagat Singh to the screen. What

have pop culture representations got right or wrong about him?

The first Bhagat Singh film came out in 1954, another followed in 1963 with Shammi Kapoor, and they have been I think four or five since then, depending on whether you would count RDB as a Bhagat Singh biopic. But I have generally avoided the films, because filmmakers have different objectives to historians. My main problem with the film genre is that, as the above anecdote suggests, the revolutionaries were not, by and large, the angry young men that they are often portrayed as in films. Yes, they were often incensed by the injustice of colonialism, and other entrenched and constructed social divisions. But they could also be reflective, thoughtful, bookish, and playful. Bhagat Singh for example enjoyed movies, and not just realist films, but also escapist cinema. HSRA member Jaidev Kapoor said in an interview that Bhagat Singh loved reading, writing, cinema and swimming. He was able to appreciate beauty and he sought it out. Whenever there was a [party] meeting in Agra he would schedule it for the Taj Mahal, because he loved its beauty.
As it happens with every election, there has been much political mud-slinging this time around too. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi threw themselves into the fray in support of the respective BJP and Congress candidates and verbally attacked each other. Heres the pick of the most notable statements:

Time to throw shade

Who is BadruddinAjmal?

This was Tarun Gogois response to a question on whether the party will ally with AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal.

Invoking Gandhi

The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) people have spread out in the entire state and are quietly campaigning for the BJP. The BJP is a communal party with people like Nathuram Godse, the killer of Mahatma Gandhi, becoming its inspiration. This is BJP's actual face," said Gaurav Gogoi in his public address in Tengajan.

Nagpur vs Italy

What does BJP want in Assam? First they will come and ask for your votes and then Assam will not be run from here, but will be run from Nagpur or the Prime Minister's Office, said Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi while addressing a poll rally in Karbi district.

Rahul Gandhi says that if BJP forms government in Assam, it will be run by RSS from Nagpur...What about 10 years of the UPA government which was being run from Italy? BJP president Amit Shah at poll rallies in Barak Valley.

Tarun Gogoi vs Narendra Modi

Tarun Gogoi will turn 90 soon...Some people came to me and said we have a problem with the alphabet I, and so from now on, they told me they would say Tarun Gogo..Go Go..

- Narendra Modi

Modi has become such a big dictator that he comes to Assam and insults me on my soil.

- Tarun Gogoi, who according to poll affidavits, is 80 years old
GAZA Israel on Sunday extended the distance it permits Gaza fishermen to head out to sea along certain parts of the coastline of the enclave, which is run by the Islamist group Hamas.

The fishing zone was expanded from six nautical miles (11 km) to nine (16 km) along Gaza's central and southern shores, a step that Israeli authorities said should result in a bigger catch in deeper waters, where fish are more abundant.

Israel, citing security concerns that include fears of Hamas weapons smuggling, maintains a naval blockade of Gaza, and the zone will remain at six nautical miles in northern areas near the Israeli border.

Palestinians have complained of frequent Israeli interceptions and arrests of fishermen who have strayed from the zone and of the confiscation of their boats and equipment.

Nizar Ayyash, chairman of the Gaza fishermen's union, called the expansion insufficient, noting that Israel's interim Oslo peace deals with the Palestinians call for a 20 nautical mile (37 km)zone in the Mediterranean.

Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the rival Fatah movement, and last fought a war with Israel in 2014, rejects the Oslo accords.

Ayyash said there are 4,000 fishermen in Gaza, home to 1.95 million people.

(Writing by Nidal Almughrabi; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Andrew Bolton)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
"Over the years Australia has really been a beacon for many good things  we cite what you've done with guns here constantly," he says. "But, and I would begin the sentence with 'sadly', you have copied too much of us.

"I hope this film in Australia is a warning to be careful what you wish for when it comes to emulating the United States. Hang on to the great ideas you've got  they've made you a better country; they've made you a better people. Yes, there's all these things that are wrong, all these flaws in the system, but the solution is not the kind of capitalism that America is practising."

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Moore's work over the years, though what may shock is that this is his first feature as director since 2009's Capitalism: A Love Story.

In the new film, the 61-year-old looks a little unsteady on his legs at times, and I wonder if he has been unwell. But he deflects my question about his health with "I'm fine, thanks for asking". In February, though, he did have a health scare, coming down with a bout of pneumonia that had him in intensive care for five days.

But really, my concern is of a slightly different order. After nearly three decades spent pointing out the flaws in America  the havoc wrought by globalisation in Roger & Me (1989); the bloodshed that could be averted through gun control (Bowling for Columbine, 2002); the links between the Bush and Bin Laden families in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004); the injustices that spring from leaving healthcare to the private sector (Sicko, 2007)  does he ever want to simply throw his hands up in despair?
Death Row: The dog kennels at Wagga pound. Credit:Laura Hardwick Skye Paproth received a letter advising that her lost, microchipped dog, Cindy, was safe and well and that, as per requirements under the Companion Animals Act, she had 14 days to collect the pet before it was put down. But it later emerged the dog was euthanised after one week. In a media release, Wagga Wagga mayor Rod Kendall said: "I know no staff member sets out to do the wrong thing ... but mistakes do happen from time to time." The wet floor in the dog kennels at Wagga Wagga pound in a photo from the council's website. Several weeks on from that scandal, retired school teacher and shelter volunteer Myriam Hribar wrote to the council, claiming the "welfare" of animals had become "the last priority on the rangers' list of duties".

Quoting from a diary she had been keeping, Ms Hribar reeled off a series of horror stories in which animals had allegedly been left to suffer, including one cat trapped inside a "crush cage" with no food or water for five days. Belinda Oakman with Saviour, who was rescued from a freezer at the Wagga Wagga pound. "It is very sad to see dying dogs just left to die," she wrote. "I am not a vet, but just like a parent knows it is time to take a child to the doctor or hospital, a dying dog should automatically have vet treatment. How can you see this and not do anything?" Other volunteers have accused some pound staff of an "overwhelming lack of compassion for animals". As evidence, they point to the council's own shelter website which in August last year, featured a post that mocked a surrendered, disabled dog which was days away from being put down.

Beneath a banner that read: "Where are all you rescue groups and bleeding hearts now", a photo of the deformed animal was uploaded, alongside the words: "Lovely Kelpie needs someone with a special heart. Badly misshapen but that doesn't stop him. Available now." In October last year, the RSPCA received a signed affidavit from a volunteer, Belinda Oakman, who during the course of weekend work at the pound last March, stumbled upon a kitten, approximately 12 weeks old, that had been dumped in a freezer while still alive. Several months earlier, volunteers photographed another cat in the same freezer. In a statement to the RSPCA last December, one of those witnesses, Simone Lieschke, wrote: "The cat was bleeding from the nose and there were blood stains all around the freezer walls. The position of the blood stains looked like they were from the cat trying to get out of the freezer. "The way the cat was crouching in the freezer struck me as strange - it did not look like a cat that had been euthanised normally."

Following mounting pressure for greater transparency, the council has since released "activity level" data for all incoming and outgoing animals at the pound. But statistical analysis of those figures only serves to raise further questions. During the past three financial years, 3165 dogs arrived at the pound. Of those,1330 were reunited with owners, 387 were sold, 940 were released to organisations for rehoming and and 395 were euthanised. When the 69 dogs that "died at the facility" are added to the tally, there are 44 dogs unaccounted for. When the corresponding figures are compiled for the 1318 cats received, 573 were destroyed, 23 died within the facility while 37 mysteriously fall off the grid altogether. After Fairfax Media presented those findings, Mr Eldridge responded by saying the "discrepancies" were the result of data having been "duplicated" during a transition to a new "electronic impounding system". He added the figures had now been "adjusted". "On a daily basis, staff are faced with the end result of irresponsible pet ownership," said Mr Eldridge, adding that despite the confronting nature of their daily duties, they "endeavour to act with the utmost professionalism".

RSPCA NSW Chief Inspector David O' Shannessy said following an extensive investigation, it was determined that "no proceedings" should commence as the RSPCA was not confident of proving "criminal charges beyond reasonable doubt". "It should also be noted that there is currently no pound-specific animal welfare code of practice in force. This presents challenges when the RSPCA investigates complaints relating to the management of council pounds," he said. 'I opened the freezer lid and there was a black kitten' Belinda Oakman, a volunteer worker at the Wagga Wagga animal shelter, spends endless hours cleaning cat litter trays, washing bedding, filling food bowls and topping up water dishes. She does so because many of the surrendered animals have lived miserable lives, are about to be put down and have "never once" felt the hand of human kindness.

She also claims that if volunteers never attended the shelter, routine neglect would pass unnoticed. In a signed affidavit to the RSPCA last October, Ms Oakman outlined how a routine day at the shelter was suddenly interrupted by a "muffled noise". "I opened the door to the cattery, and nothing. It sounded like it was over near the freezer area. I saw nothing. I went back to cleaning and heard it again. I thought 'no, it wouldn't be coming from the freezer'," she said. Ms Oakman then described the moment she slowly opened the freezer to reveal a kitten, no older than 12 weeks, slumped over a heap of black garbage bags. "I very slowly put my hand in and touched it. It let out a muffled cry. I was in total shock."
Live-music venues and well-managed bars, clubs and pubs should be exempt from the controversial 1.30am lockout covering Sydney's central business district and Kings Cross, the City of Sydney will recommend to the state's review into liquor regulations.

In a position that puts the council at odds with Premier Mike Baird, Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore said it also wants venues that had good histories of complying with liquor laws to be excused from the 3am "last drinks" rule.

The council believes a middle ground needs to be found to maintain the safety of the community while ensuring late-night venues remain viable.
A bake sale that will charge customers based on their gender for a 'Feminist Week' at the University of Queensland has sparked outrage online with some students calling it discriminatory.

University of Queensland Union posted a list of events for an organised 'Feminist Week' from April 4-8 to their website including a Gender Pay Gap Bake Sale at the campus on Tuesday.

The event welcomes anyone to come and purchase a baked good, but created cost divisions between men and women.

"Each baked good will only cost you the proportion of $1.00 that you earn comparative to men (or, if you identify as a man, all baked goods with cost you $1.00!)," the UQU outlined on their site.
One of the most pressing and mysterious questions for humans, the self-centered beings that we are, is what other people think about us. We expend a huge amount of time and mental energy wondering if our date finds us attractive, or if our co-workers noticed that stupid thing we said in the meeting last week. We agonise over our public speaking skills, our waistlines and our hair.

If you're wondering how you're perceived by others, research actually provides some clues. In a study first published in 2010 and discussed in a new book, Nicholas Epley, a behavioural scientist at the University of Chicago, and Tal Eyal, a psychologist at Israel's Ben-Gurion University, reveal a fascinating technique to help get inside the minds of the people around you.

The crux of this technique is that people think about themselves in very different ways than they think about other people. They tend to scrutinise themselves at an incredibly close level of detail, much more closely than they examine the actions or appearance of others.

That's in part because you have a huge amount of information about yourself - far more information than you have about other people. You know what your hair looked like yesterday, a month ago, and four years ago. You know whether you've put on weight recently, or if you look tired today. Compare how you evaluate yourself to how you evaluate a stranger: You might make judgments about their overall level of attractiveness, their outfit, their mannerisms, but not much else.
Cambodia's top government spokesman has admitted that Australia's $55 million agreement to resettle refugees from Nauru has failed and that his impoverished country does not have social programs to support them.

"You could say it is a failure but at least we relieved them from the camp," Phay Siphan said, referring to five refugees who agreed to make the journey from Nauru to one of Asia's poorest nations last year.

Mr Phay Siphan also admitted that Cambodia has not done much to help the refugees integrate into Cambodian society "because they are just temporarily looking for a third country to move to."
Mike and Charmaine when they first got together. Instead, the sole beneficiary was his new wife, Corrine, whom he had met on an internet dating site a few weeks after Charmaine's death. Other family and friends would inherit his estate but only if Corrine died before him. Tricia Phillips is challenging the will of her friend Mike Smith. Credit:Fairfax NZ Six weeks after signing the new will Mike died, aged 53.

The Pet Sitter Charmaine Smith was in a wheelchair towards the end of her life Tricia Phillips, 60, met Mike and Charmaine in 2001, when she answered their ad for a house and pet sitter. "We were so much alike with our love of animals. Probably for some people it was a bit crazy, because we were pretty over the top," says Phillips. She would house-sit for the couple at their 5-hectare spread near Ashburton on the South Island of New Zealand while they travelled overseas, taking time off work to care for the animals. Mike Smith died of cancer aged just 53.

In 2013 the couple bought a new property near Rolleston, Christchurch, to be closer to medical treatment. The couple invited Phillips to join them and she lived in a separate flat on the property, continuing to care for the animals and the couple as their health deteriorated. "It was really a case of who was gonna [die] first." Shortly after Charmaine's death, Phillips says, Mike told her he'd started talking to women on internet dating sites. "It seemed totally out of character for Mike, he was so devoted to Charmaine, and he knew he was dying."

One of the women he met was Corrine Hanna, from Hamilton, a city in the North Island. After a while she flew down to visit Mike. Property records show that in February last year Mike bought a property near Te Awamutu, near Hamilton, for $520,000, which Corrine's parents moved into. The following month, Mike and Corrine were married. Phillips says when Mike was first diagnosed with cancer in 2012 he was given only about a year to live. "It was already in his bones." But he was still alive in April, 2015 and emailed his lawyer saying he was travelling overseas and had better sign a new will.

Phillips believes the Mexican trip was a waste of time  that Mike was in the final stages of his life.

"Mike got this idea that juices ... and vitamin C treatments might cure him, but by that time he was critically ill." Fate of the Sheep According to Phillips, the day Mike and Corrine flew to Mexico, Mike came to her with some big news  he was leaving the Ashburton property where they had first lived, valued at $NZ820,000, and its contents to her. "He told me I never had to worry again because that was a home for myself, my pets and his pets." Phillips says she was stunned by Mike's generosity. "I was overcome and hugged him."

She emailed him after he left: "I can't believe that you would do that for me and the pets. I have been worried about where I would go ... as I've always said I would have to live in the car with the dogs etc as I couldn't ever part with them." Mike wrote back asking after his animals, saying he hoped to come home in "better shape than when I left" and saying he missed Phillips, his "special friend". The couple stayed in Mexico for about a month but the treatment was unsuccessful. The day after he returned to Christchurch, Mike was admitted to hospital and died a few days later. A picture taken at the funeral home shows his beloved "girls" - 13-year-old dogs Shiloh and Rocket, snuggling in the coffin. According to Phillips, Corrine and Mike's father, Ross, organised for a truck to come and pick up the sheep and for the other animals to be sent to various new homes. The contents of the Ashburton property were cleared out and items put on TradeMe, she says.

"They were going to take the sheep to slaughter. I said 'No, Mike and I had talked about it in the hospital and they'd be coming to [Ashburton] with me. Corrine said 'No, Ashburton's being leased out'." In a text message to Phillips around this time, Ross Smith wrote: "Don't bother with the sheep. We will look after them and arrange their departure. They are part of the estate and will be found a new home. No reply [to this message] will change the situation." Phillips insists the sheep were being sent to an abattoir and says she launched a desperate plea on Facebook. "A woman from an animal rescue place contacted me and said she would take them. I was so happy." After Mike's funeral Corrine gave Phillips the bad news  under the terms of the will, the Ashburton property would only have gone to her if Corrine had died first. "I was shocked, that's not what Mike told me," Phillips says.

The will appointed Corrine and Ross Smith executors and trustees. The estate was substantial, although mostly tied up in three properties. Together they were valued at $NZ2.33m, with mortgages totalling $NZ655,000. Mike also left $NZ77,000 in cash and shares. Phillips was served with court papers ordering her to leave the Rolleston property. . She has instructed a lawyer to investigate whether she can make a claim against the estate . A private investigator has been hired. Approached at the Rolleston property, which is now on the market, Corrine said she had no comment and referred questions to Day.

Bruce Day said Corrine regarded it as a private matter to be kept confidential. "The estate does not accept that there was any testamentary promise made," he said. He did not respond to questions about Mike's new will. Ross Smith believes Phillips has done "damage" with her actions. "It's just been chaotic. She's done everything she could to create problems. We had to have her evicted. I don't know how many dogs she had in that place  we've had to re-do carpets." He says Corrine and his son were in love. "She took him to Mexico. It didn't work but it gave him some additional time with Corrine  she was magic in looking after him." Charmaine's brother, Paul Hammond, indicated he was not happy with the way things had played out but declined to comment, as did Mike's brother Grant.

Sheryl Cooke, who sold the Rolleston place to Mike, says he told her he was renovating the flat on the property especially for Phillips, his wife's caregiver and companion. "He said there would always be a house for her." Phillips says she is not motivated by the property or money. "I'm a very independent person, I look after myself." She says Corrine and Ross Smith have tried to claim that she wasn't close to Mike and Charmaine, pointing out that she doesn't appear in photos and didn't attend family functions. That's because she preferred to stay in the background and look after the property while they were socialising or travelling, Phillips says. Charmaine told her on her deathbed that their fortune was to go to charity and animal organisations, Phillips says, and she's contesting the will in her friend's memory. "She trusted Mike to do what they had decided. She would be absolutely horrified and devastated."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused U.S. President Barack Obama of criticizing him behind his back over press freedom issues during a visit last week to Washington.

Erdogan's administration has been widely criticized for violating human rights, imprisoning journalists and taking over several media organizations in the country.

After the pair met for closed-door talks on the sidelines of the White House's nuclear security summit, Obama said Friday the "approach they have been taking toward the press is one that could lead Turkey down a path that would be very troubling."

'Behind my back'

The U.S. leader said he raised those concerns with Erdogan, who in turn on Sunday denied they discussed the issue, saying Obama made the comments "behind my back."

Erdogan added that Turkish media outlets called him "thief" and "killer" without being shut down.

We have never done anything to stop freedom of expression or freedom of press," he said in a separate interview with CNN last week.

"On the contrary, the press in Turkey had been very critical of me and my government, attacking me very seriously. And regardless of those attacks, we have been very patient in the way we have responded to those attacks," Erdogan said.

Press freedom report

Washington-based Freedom House, which publishes an annual report on press freedom around the world, indicates conditions for media in Turkey have deteriorated during the past five years. The organization calls the country "Not Free" in its 2015 assessment.

Reporters Without Borders also ranks Turkey at the bottom of its 2015 World Press Freedom Index: 149 out of 180 countries.

The anti-press accusations against Turkey flared in Washington last week, when Erdogan's guards clashed with protesters and media outside the Brookings Institution, where the Turkish president was speaking.

The physical altercation prompted local police to separate the groups.

Under state control

In early March, Ankara also drew international attention when a Turkish court ruled to place leading daily Turkish newspaper Zaman under state control.

This ideological and unlawful operation shows how Erdogan is now moving from authoritarianism to all-out despotism. Not content with throwing journalists in prison for supporting terrorism or having them sentenced to pay heavy fines for insulting the head of state, he is now going further by taking control of Turkeys biggest opposition newspaper," Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said in a statement by the organization.
Hours before the scheduled start of the deportation of hundreds of migrants from the island of Lesbos, Greek officials had yet to finalize their plans under a deal between the European Union and Turkey. Activists in Lesbos planned a protest for Monday when Greek authorities, with the help of hundreds of border police officers from EU countries, were to escort migrants from the Moria migrant detention camp outside the islands main city of Mytilini to a port where ferries were to take them back to Turkey.

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French President Francois Hollande said Monday France will launch an investigation into French tax evaders using offshore accounts to hide their wealth, as revealed in a massive leak of information on global figures.

A team of international journalists, working with leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm, has published some of its findings into the offshore financial dealings of the rich and famous, and politically connected, as well as the leaders of some countries.

The data has become known as the Panama Papers.

Hollande said, "Investigations will be carried out, cases will be opened and trials will be held."

An anonymous source provided the 11.5 million documents from Panama's Mossack Fonseca law firm to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.

WATCH: Related video on Panama Papers

The British government on Monday asked for a copy of the Panama Papers so it can do its own investigation, according to a Reuters report.

'A crime, a felony'

Ramon Fonseca, one of the founders of the Panamanian firm, told the French news agency AFP the leaking of the information to the journalists is "a crime, a felony."

"Privacy is a fundamental human right that is being eroded more and more in the modern world. Each person has a right to privacy, whether they are a king or a beggar," Fonseca said.

Parking money in offshore accounts is not necessarily illegal, and can be used to establish legal tax shelters or ease international business deals. But the report said "the documents show that banks, law firms and other offshore players have often failed to follow legal requirements that they make sure their clients are not involved in criminal enterprises, tax dodging or political corruption."

The international journalists organization, allied with the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations, said it has concluded from the documents that associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin moved as much as $2 billion through offshore bank accounts.

The Kremlin last week did not answer questions posed by the journalists about the transactions, and it publicly accused the group of preparing a misleading "information attack" on the Russian leader and people close to him.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, said Sunday it received the data from an anonymous source more than a year ago.



It said the amount of data it obtained is several times larger than the U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010, and the secret intelligence documents given to journalists by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Australia's tax office told Reuters Monday it is investigating more than 800 wealthy clients of the Panama law firm for possible tax evasion.

Along with the links to Putin, ICIJ says these documents:

Reveal the offshore holdings of 140 politicians and public officials around the world, including 12 current and former world leaders. Among them are the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the presidents of Ukraine and Argentina, and the king of Saudi Arabia.

Include the names of at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. government because of evidence that theyd been involved in wrongdoing, such as doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, or rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran.

Show how major banks have driven the creation of hard-to-trace companies in offshore havens. More than 500 banks, their subsidiaries and their branches have created more than 15,000 offshore companies for their customers through Mossack Fonseca.

The Panamanian firm told The Washington Post it follows "both the letter and spirit" of financial laws, which vary throughout the world. It said that in nearly 40 years of operation it has never been charged with criminal wrongdoing.

"This is really the shadow side of our global economy -- the money that flows around mostly unchecked, undetected," Michael Hudson, a senior editor at ICIJ, said in an interview with VOA's Michael Lipin Sunday.

"You can't say in every single case that someone is doing something wrong, or that they're hiding improper practices," Hudson said. "But it certainly raises lots of questions about transparency when you have politicians, and especially top leaders of countries, moving their holdings offshore and using offshore entities to obscure what they're doing."

The report lists the British Virgin Islands as the most popular offshore tax haven, with one out of every two companies in Mossack Fonseca's files being incorporated there.

Panama, the Bahamas and the Seychelles are next on the list.

ICIJ's report also sheds new light on a 1983 British gold heist that has been called the "Crime of the Century."

Robbers stole nearly 7,000 gold bars from the Brink's-Mat warehouse at London's Heathrow Airport, along with cash and diamonds. But the gold was smelted and sold, and much of the money was never recovered.

The report said a Mossack Fonseca document shows that an official at a company the law firm created 16 months after the robbery was "apparently involved in the management of the money from the famous theft from Brink's-Mat in London.

The company itself has not been used illegally, but it could be that the company invested money through the bank accounts and properties that was illegitimately sourced."

The law firm denied it helped conceal the proceeds of the London theft.
The partisan tug-of-war over a U.S. Supreme Court vacancy will overshadow Congress when the Senate gets back to work Monday after a two-week recess.

The battle simmered last week even as Capitol Hill was idle. Three senators journeyed to Washington to meet with President Barack Obamas Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. Most notable was Mark Kirk, the first  and so far only  Republican to sit down with federal appellate judge.

As the president put forward Judge Garland, we should give him advice and consent, said Kirk, who is running for re-election in Democratic-leaning Illinois. We need rational, adult, open-minded consideration of the constitutional process.

While more than a dozen other Republicans say they are willing to meet with Garland, only two are urging Senate consideration of the nomination. A third, Jerry Moran, called for hearings, then reversed himself two days later.

In initially breaking ranks with fellow-Republicans, Moran was pilloried by conservatives who form the base of his party. The episode illustrates the stakes involved for activists across the political spectrum in filling the seat left open by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

Democrats, meanwhile, stand united behind Garland.

"He is someone who is highly qualified, said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who met Wednesday with Garland. And I think it is the obligation of the Senate to not only have a hearing, but to vote on his nomination.

Were confirming, or deciding whether to confirm a member if the Supreme Court, said Democrat Al Franken. The Supreme Court should not be political.

But Republicans control the Senate. Unless they budge, Garland will remain in limbo.

Lets let the American people decide, said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell before the recess. The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be.

The high courts make-up and ideological center of gravity are issues in the presidential contest.

If Hillary [Clinton] is the next president, the Supreme Court is lost for a generation, and the Bill of Rights is lost, said Republican contender Ted Cruz at a recent campaign stop.

Opinion polls show majority backing for full Senate consideration of Garland. Democrats believe Republicans will bow to the publics will or suffer at the ballot box in November. Whatever the political calculations, the vast majority of Republican senators are holding firm.
South Africa's parliament will open debate Tuesday on an opposition motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma for violating the constitution.

The Constitutional Court ruled last week that Zuma "failed to uphold, defend, and respect the constitution" by failing to pay back some of the public funds he used to make improvements on his private home.

More than $20 million in remodeling included adding a swimming poll, an amphitheater and a fenced-in area for cattle.

The federal anti-corruption office ordered Zuma to repay the money spent on renovations unrelated to security.

Zuma said in a televised address to the nation last week that he "never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution, which is the supreme law of the republic."

He made no mention of the scandal during a rally Sunday to announce aid for drought-stricken areas.

Zuma's ruling African National Congress dominates parliament and any effort to impeach him will likely fail.

Previous efforts to impeach Zuma or force him from office were also voted down.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dedicated a Turkish-funded mosque near Washington on Saturday, saying he hoped the facility could help eliminate intolerance and Islamophobia that he saw coming from some U.S. presidential candidates.

Erdogan did not identify those candidates by name. But Republican front-runner Donald Trump has in recent weeks called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, while rival Ted Cruz has called for increased police patrols in Muslim neighborhoods across the country.

WATCH: Erdogan Delivers Remarks at Dedication of Mosque Near Washington

Erdogan called it "absolutely unacceptable" to blame all Muslims for terrorist attacks in the West. He further said that recent terror attacks in Brussels and Paris "cannot compare" with violence from militants in his country and in Pakistan.

Islamic State extremists have carried out four major bomb attacks in Turkey in the past nine months, which have killed about 150 people. The Ankara government has also fought a Kurdish insurgency that has claimed more than 40,000 lives since 1984.

Erdogan visited the United States to participate in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by President Barack Obama, although he did not have a one-on-one meeting with the U.S. leader. Instead he met with Vice President Joe Biden.

On Friday, Obama criticized Turkey's ongoing crackdown on press freedoms. While calling Turkey an "extraordinarily important partner" in the push against extremism, he said the media crackdown "could lead Turkey down a path that would be very troubling."

Erdogan's U.S. visit has not been without controversy. Ahead of his appearance Thursday at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, Erdogan's security detail clashed with protesters and journalists outside the venue.

Order was later restored when the Brookings president demanded that journalists be allowed to cover the talk.
Just weeks ago, thousands of migrants a day were streaming into northern Europe. Now the influx has been dramatically crimped and Austria is claiming much of the credit.

The small country at the heart of Europe traditionally is associated with schnitzel, Mozart and The Sound of Music. More recently, it has also gained a reputation for a hard-nosed migration stance that has shaped Europes response to the biggest migrant arrivals since World War II.

Austrias decision to shut down its border  the main transit route into the heart of Europe for most refugees  initially caused consternation among many in Europe. But senior Austrian politicians assert the decision helped forge last months agreement between the EU and Turkey that commits Ankara to start taking back migrants who pay smugglers to make dangerous sea crossings to the Greek islands.

I believe that we played a significant role in () finding a solution for the migration crisis, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz told The Associated Press ahead of the first expected migrant returns from Greece to Turkey on Monday.

The premise behind the deal is that Europe will send back to Turkey anyone from any country who doesnt qualify for asylum or has tried to evade a rigorous asylum application process. For every person sent back, EU countries would take in one person confirmed to have made a legitimate asylum request.

Austria  and other eastern European nations  argue that their decision to close their borders leading from Greece through the Balkans and into prosperous northern Europe enabled the deal with Turkey to happen by creating new facts on the ground.

Those facts include having over 50,000 migrants pile up in Greece, as borders further north closed and boatloads of people still poured across its vast Aegean Sea border daily from Turkey.

The Austrian decision meant there would be no more waving through of migrants as they sought to get to Austria, Sweden or Germany, which alone accepted more than 1 million refugees last year. As the Balkan route shut down, the sufferings of migrants trapped in makeshift camps in northern Greece, notably around the border village of Idomeni, laid bare the scale of the human misery and increased pressure within the EU to act.

The right measures were taken on the European level (only) after Austrias outcry, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann told reporters.

Others see a more nuanced picture. Anton Pelinka, a politics professor at Eotvoes Lorant University in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, says it was Hungary that played a big role in the EUs new approach. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was arguably the first to reject German-led attempts to allow the migrants free passage through Europe with his migrant quotas and his razor-wire border fences.

Hungary was in fact the initiator of what then consequently was put into force in the Balkans, he said.

Still, Austrias decision to impose daily caps on those seeking asylum at its southeastern border as of Feb. 19 sent ripples of alarm through countries along the migrant route, from Slovenia to Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia.

Austrian and Balkan route police chiefs on Feb. 18 called for the migrant flow to be reduced to the greatest possible extent. A day later, Austria imposed caps both on the number of asylum seekers it would accept daily and overall for the whole year. Five days later on Feb. 24, foreign and interior ministers from Austria and its southern neighbors made it formal  tightening border controls and announcing that a complete shutdown of the route was looming.

The move was initially met by harsh criticism. The EU said Austrias clampdown on asylum seekers contravened international law. Greece recalled its ambassador to Vienna and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the border restrictions are not in line with international law or with common human decency.

But the mood has changed. While declining to comment on Austrias role in the migrant debate, EU migration spokeswoman Tove Ernst echoed the language coming out of Vienna, saying all members must commit to ending the wave-through approach to those who indicate an interest in applying for asylum elsewhere.

The move to shut the Balkans route was drastic  but it worked. Figures provided Friday to the AP show the number of new refugee arrivals registered by German police dropped from an average of over 2,000 daily at the start of the year to several hundred from the middle of February. Currently, about 100 people are being recorded each day.

Kurz suggested other EU nations had just been waiting for an opening to fall in line. The fact that our path was the right one revealed itself after only a few weeks, he said, asserting that all 28 EU nations endorsed an end to the unfettered migration shortly after Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia also shut their borders.

I can stand criticism from here and there, particularly when it comes from those who after a few weeks agree to what we suggested, he said. George Jahn, Vienna, AP
Azerbaijans Defense Ministry announced a unilateral cease-fire yesterday against the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a claim that rebel forces there promptly rejected.

Fighting in what was a dormant conflict for two decades flared up over the weekend with a boy and at least 30 troops killed on both sides. Each side blamed the other for Saturdays escalation, the worst since the end of a full-scale war in 1994.

The defense ministry said, in response to pleas from international organizations, it will be unilaterally suspending a counter-offensive and response on the territories occupied by Armenia. The ministry added it will not focus on fortifying the territory that Azerbaijan has liberated. It did not elaborate.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994 with no resolution of the regions status. The conflict is fueled by long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris.

Armenian forces also occupy several areas outside Nagorno-Karabakh proper. The sides are separated by a demilitarized buffer zone, but small clashes have broken out frequently.

Officials in the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh promptly disputed the reports of Azerbaijans unilateral cease-fire. David Babayan, spokesman for the Karabakh president, told AP yesterday that they had not seen any signs that fighting was suspended. AP
It generates more revenue than Apple Inc. and Boeing Co. combined and serves one in seven people on the planet. Meet State Grid Corp. of China, a company that may be buying power assets near you.

While State Grid is hardly a household name, its geographic footprint extends from South America to Australia, where its a contender to acquire a stake in Sydney-based power network Ausgrid. Hungry to grow outside China, the company plans to develop a USD50 trillion global energy network that could enable electricity to be transmitted beyond continental boundaries.

If railway, road and Internet can link the whole world, why cant an energy network be built? Chairman Liu Zhenya said last week in an interview in Beijing. The problem right now is just that people need to embrace new ideas and not let the old thinking stand in the way of new innovation.

State Grids expansion ambitions will be limited only by the opportunities available to it, not by cash, Liu said. The Beijing-based company, which is wholly owned by the government of China, can help upgrade electricity grids and other infrastructure, and bring new power-transmission technology to the countries its targeting, he said.

The companys interest in Ausgrid comes amid a wave of Chinese investment in Australia, from cattle ranches to natural gas. Buyers from China announced about A$8.5 billion ($6.5 billion) in acquisitions of Australian companies last year, the most in at least 12 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While such investment is vital as Australia seeks new growth drivers following a decade-long mining boom, its stoked security concerns and community unease, particularly over sales of farmland and real estate.

State Grid, which says it has about 1.9 million employees and 1.1 billion customers, generated more than $50 billion in cash from operations in its latest fiscal year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Its annual sales of more than $330 billion make it the worlds biggest utility and put it ahead of Toyota Motor Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp.

Its an increasingly significant company and making some extremely sizable investments, said Joseph Jacobelli, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in Hong Kong.

Countries in which State Grid has bought power assets include Brazil, Australia, the Philippines and Italy, where it bought a stake in CDP Reti in a $2.8 billion deal in 2014. Youve got a brand new player in town and a new capital injection source, which you didnt have five or 10 years ago, Jacobelli said.

In Australia, State Grid owns stakes in electricity companies Jemena Ltd, AusNet Services and ElectraNet Pty. The 50.4 percent holding in Ausgrid, which the New South Wales state government is selling, could fetch more than A$10 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said in February.

State Grid will actively bid for Australias power assets, Chairman Liu told a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday, without identifying any targets.

Australia ticks an enormous number boxes for State Grid, said Jacobelli, adding that the company would be a logical buyer of Ausgrid. James Paton, Bloomberg
The American black civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King, has been assassinated.

Dr King was shot dead in the southern US city of Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a march of sanitation workers protesting against low wages and poor working conditions

He was shot in the neck as he stood on a hotel balcony and died in hospital soon afterwards. Reverend Jesse Jackson was on the balcony with Dr King when the single shot rang out.

He had just bent over. I reckon if he had been standing up he would not have been hit in the face, said Mr Jackson.

Police in Memphis were put on alert for a well-dressed white man who is said to have dropped an automatic rifle after the shooting and escaped in a blue car.

There were early signs of rioting in Memphis after Dr Kings death and 4,000 members of the National Guard were drafted into the city. A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been ordered to ward off disturbances.

The US President, Lyndon Johnson, has postponed a trip to Hawaii for peace talks on Vietnam. The president said he was shocked and saddened by the civil rights leaders death.

I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has taken Dr King who lived by non-violence, Mr Johnson said.

Dr King, 39, had previously survived several attempts on his life including the bombing of his home in 1956. The charismatic civil rights leader joined the crusade for equal rights for black people in America in the mid 1950s.

He first came to national prominence as one of the leaders of the Alabama bus boycott in 1955.

In 1963 Dr King led a massive march on Washington DC where he delivered his now famous I have a dream speech. Dr King advocated the use of non-violent tactics such as sit-ins and protest marches.

In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Courtesy BBC News

In context

Martin Luther Kings assassination led to riots in more than 100 US cities.

James Earl Ray was convicted of his murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison.

But he later retracted his confession and said he had been only a minor player in a conspiracy.

However, his appeals for a new trial were rejected and he died in prison in 1998.

Ray was supported by some members of Martin Luther Kings family who believed the US Government may have been involved in Dr Kings death.

Their case was strengthened in December 1999 when a jury in a wrongful death case brought by the King family, decided the civil rights leader was the victim of a murder conspiracy.

However, in June 2000 after an investigation the US Justice Department said it had uncovered no reliable evidence of a conspiracy.
Nearly three years into a crackdown overseen by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, allegations of human rights abuses including killings, torture and secret detentions are starting to bring an international backlash from the Egyptian leaders allies.

In the past month, Egypt was rebuked over its human rights record by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the European Unions foreign affairs arm, the European Parliament, the U.N. Council for Human Rights as well as several Western European nations, including key trade partner and EU heavyweight Germany.

The case of an Italian student kidnapped and tortured to death in Cairo has poisoned Egypts long close ties with Italy, amid suspicions that it was carried out by members of the security agencies. Egypt denies police were involved and last week announced that a criminal gang was behind the killing of Giulio Regeni  a claim that was derided in Italy.

Also raising alarm was Egypts reopening earlier this month of a criminal investigation into a number of non-governmental organizations  including rights groups  on suspicion of illegally taking foreign funds and aiming to harm national security. The two cases came under heavy criticism at a session of the U.N. Human Rights council last week, along with reports of torture and forced disappearances.

This looks like a clampdown on sections of Egyptian civil society and it must stop, the U.N. Human Rights High Commissioner Zeid Raad Al-Hassan said of the NGO case. Kerry raised concern over deterioration in Egypts rights situation and a wider backdrop of arrests and intimidation of political opposition, journalists, civil society activists and cultural figures.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, replied that Cairo rejects international tutelage on human rights. He said Egypt is keen to implement and put into action the constitution, which stipulates respect for and commitment to human rights. Shoukry and Kerry met Wednesday in Washington on the sidelines of a nuclear security conference in talks that focused on the conflicts on Syria and Yemen  though the State Department said Kerry underlined the need for Egypt to allow rights NGOs to operate freely.

Egypt often counters that it is fighting against Islamic militancy in the form of an insurgency based in the Sinai Peninsula that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers the past three years. Since coming to office in 2014, el-Sissi has presented himself as at the forefront of the battle against Islamic militants, calling for reforms to encourage moderate Islam. He has become a close ally of European states in fighting the Islamic State group, particularly in Libya.

So far theres no sign that Egypts Western allies will take any action beyond criticism. But some leading commentators in Egypt warn that the worsening rights reputation is damaging to a country that receives considerable international development aid and is struggling to repair a tourism sector vital to its economy.

In the final analysis, we need the world more than the world needs us, wrote Abdel-Monem Said, a respected analyst who for years led Egypts leading state-owned think tank, the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. He said the government cant keep shrugging off criticism.

Improving our reputation is not only the smart thing to do, but it is also possible.

Veteran rights campaigner Hesham Qassim warned in a column in the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper that governments and development agencies might eventually scale down their dealings with Egypt, which will gradually become  a pariah state.

Government supporters in the media have constantly depicted the U.S. and Europeans as trying to restore the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood or undermine Egypt. After an Egyptian man hijacked an EgyptAir flight to Cyprus this week, two prominent TV personalities argued that the hijacking was a plot  presumably by foreign powers  to pressure authorities to drop the NGO case.

Since he led the militarys July 2013 ouster of President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, el-Sissi has overseen the jailing of thousands of Islamists. Hundreds more were killed in clashes with police, mostly in 2013 and 2014. The crackdown has also targeted secular, pro-democracy activists. Hamza Hendawi, Cairo, AP
There is an imperative need for a new infectious diseases facility, according to a group of experts who were invited by the Health Bureau (SSM) to present opinions at a seminar on the preparation and practice for preventing infectious diseases. The seminar was held on Friday at the Tourism Activities Centre.

The event, attended by Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture Alexis Tam, gathered three experts from mainland China  Zhao Chi Hong, Xie Jing Xin and Jiang Rong Meng  to hear their opinions. Coming from Beijing and Jiangsu, they came to enhance the knowledge of local health professionals regarding the importance of the prevention and control of infectious diseases, as well as the methods for preventing and controlling these diseases, especially those of the respiratory tract.

Besides the health services professionals, a very large number lawmakers were also in the audience.

In the introductory speech, SSM director Lei Chin Ion focused mostly on the need to build a new facility that has been in [the] project [phase] for more than 10 years and should not be deferred any longer.

SSMs head of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Macau, Lam Chong, clarified the territorys concerns regarding the preparation and experience in terms of response to these diseases. Dr Lam highlighted the successful implementation of the vaccination programs that, he said, allowed the control of several infectious diseases from 1998 to 2014 and that awarded the Macau Health Service the recognition of a good level of control by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2008.

The same official also mentioned that the local authorities focus on the prevention and control of these kinds of diseases was clearly apparent when in 2003 the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) hit the neighboring regions, especially Hong Kong, causing around 300 deaths [there] while Macau only registered one case and [that] was an imported one.

Lam recalled that the regulations set by the government requiring a mandatory report from health services and schools of case of infectious diseases also helped to keep Macau and its population safe.

On the experts side, Zhao Chi Hong, deputy-chief of the Laboratorial Management of Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of China, painted a very serious and potentially catastrophic situation, citing Ebola, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome  Coronavirus (MERS) and Avian Flu as the greatest threats of our time.

To those diseases, Zhao also added the serious possibility of new resistant forms of those diseases appearing as well as forms of bioterrorism rising.

To fight all these threats and protect a vulnerable population, we must be able to isolate those people who are infected pointing the way to solve the problem by creating special facilities as well as administering safe vaccines.

Xie Jing Xin, senior engineer of the Institute of Occupational Health of the Jiangsu Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, oriented his technical assessment by electing air quality as the main issue to be addressed since it is through the air that most of the diseases are transmitted.

Xie explained in detail the necessary technical specifications for buildings to support effective treatments made in isolation.

Jiang Rong Meng, Department Chief of Beijings Ditan Hospital, focused his presentation on preventive measures and on the attitude of the medical staff attending the patients, also highlighting the need for a clean and monitored environment, which had been mentioned before by Xie. He also stated that for security reasons, an infectious disease building should have no more than three floors, giving the example of the facility at Ditan Hospital in Beijing.

Philip Chou, Coordinator of the Organizing Cabinet for the Construction of the SSM New Facilities, reviewed the plans for SSMs new facilities. The official mentioned that the isolation infirmary of the public hospital does not comply fully with the regulations, being a facility that was transformed from a general infirmary into an isolation unit.

Regarding the central location for the contested infectious diseases facility, Chou argued that there are two main factors to build downtown, namely the need to be close to the main hospital unit, as it needs support from other services and being close to the population, as the majority of the population lives on the peninsula.

He added that the location chosen will allow suspected cases to be treated immediately [in isolation], contributing to reducing the risk of further contamination.

During the Q&A session that followed the lectures, the secretary-general of Caritas Macau, Paul Pun, inquired about the staff training. Alexis Tam clarified that several SSM staff have been undergoing training in mainland China and at the WHO to be prepared to deal with the needs.

Tam also took the opportunity to advise that the [Pearl River] Delta region is one of the regions where there is a higher incidence of these diseases, concluding by saying that besides the damage to health and the risks to the population, there is also an economic risk attached. He recalled a figure presented earlier where it was stated that one case reported in China carried a direct loss of about RMB8 million.

building to start in q3 this year

I think after the summer and before the end of this year, it will be possible [to start the construction of the building for infectious diseases], said Alexis Tam on the sidelines of the seminar on the preparation and practice for preventing infectious diseases. We meet all the conditions to move forward with this project. The majority of the population is with us, the secretary concluded.
Indonesia will deploy U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to the Natuna islands to ward off thieves, the defense minister said less than two weeks after Chinese coast guard vessels clashed with an Indonesian boat in the area.

The move is part of a military buildup on islands overlooking the South China Sea that will see a refurbished runway and a new port constructed, Ryamizard Ryacudu said in an interview last week with Bloomberg News. It also involves the deployment of marines, air force special force units, an army battalion, three frigates, a new radar system and drones, he said. The planned stationing of five F-16s reflects a new level of Indonesian concern about territorial disputes in the South China Sea that are pitting Beijing against several of its Southeast Asian neighbors. Indonesia is not a claimant, but the clash with the Chinese coast guard last month over the detention of a Chinese fishing boat showed the potential for it to be drawn into conflict.

Natuna is a door, if the door is not guarded then thieves will come inside, said Ryacudu, a former army chief of staff. There has been all this fuss because until now it has not been guarded. This is about the respect of the country.

The minister also said he was considering introducing military conscription in Natuna and other remote areas of the 17,000-island archipelago, so if something happens people wont be afraid and know what to do.

China claims more than 80 percent of the South China Sea, bringing it into dispute with Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan. Beijings claims, which it has been pressing more assertively in recent years, are based on a so-called nine-dash line for which it wont give precise coordinates. In passports issued in 2012, Chinas line encroached on the exclusive economic zone that Indonesia derives from the Natuna islands.

The increased proximity of Chinese fishing boats and coast guard vessels to the ships of other countries has also caused unease in Malaysia. The countrys foreign affairs ministry summoned Chinese ambassador Huang Huikang to register concern over the alleged encroachment of Chinese-flagged boats in the South China Sea, it said late Thursday.

Aaron Connelly, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, questioned if stationing F-16s in the Natuna area would act as much of a deterrent or be of use combating illegal fishing.

It looks like a show of force, but its a meaningless one, he said. Indonesia has diplomatic cards to play but it doesnt have military ones. Its not going to scare away the Chinese military by putting a few F-16s on Natuna. These are items that cant be reasonably used to survey maritime activities.

Ryacudu also said he hoped to finalize a deal to buy between 8 and 10 Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets in a trip to Russia in early April. The government had been considering purchasing Lockheed Martin Corp.s F-16V, BAE Systems Plcs Eurofighter Typhoon or Saab ABs Gripen.

Asked if Indonesia intended to by any F-16Vs in addition to the Su-35 jets, Ryacudu said no, we have enough already. Still, he said Indonesia would continue looking to various countries for procurement.

We will buy from Europe and America, from Russia also, he said. We dont prioritize. The important thing is if we need them, and the research backs it up, we will buy. We are replacing old planes, not adding new ones. Chris Brummitt and Rieka Rahadiana, Bloomberg
Stuffed into a tiny room off an alleyway are items that Wang Jinming readily admits were put out with the garbage: Paper string, a needle holder, a metal pancake maker built for thrusting into a fire.

These objects all look quite old and shabby, he said. But they record real history.

Wangs Beijing Old Items Exhibition in the heart of old Beijing is one of dozens of private museums that dot the capitals backstreets and its suburbs. Their collections feature the grand and mundane  from items salvaged from the garbage to a limousine in which Mao Zedong once rode.

Entering these private museums is to peel off a largely forgotten layer of Beijings recent history.

While state-run museums seek mainly to legitimize the ruling Communist Party through its own highly selective interpretation of history, the capitals private museums are born from their founders hobbies and obsessions, along with a sense of duty to keep alive a little bit of history others might dismiss as trivial.

If you throw it on the street, people would say Whats this? and maybe think its useless and throw it away, said Wang, gesturing around the room packed with hundreds of household items and street objects dating from the 1900s to the 1970s. But we think its culture.

Wang delights in telling visitors to guess what the objects are in their hands. They might include a popsicle holder used by street vendors or a bucket-shaped iron heated by charcoal. All form part of the collection that Wang and two co-founders began in the 1980s after asking foreign visitors why they were so interested in buying old everyday items.

They said, To collect. Now if you go to someones home you probably cant find such things, Wang said.

Picking up a doughnut-shaped metal bell, Wang explained that before Beijing had many hospitals, itinerant doctors used to roam the streets. When you heard this sound, the doctor was walking in the street, available, ringing the bell, he said.

Liu Chen, 27, first visited the museum after reading about it on social media and has returned several times with friends.

Its not like big state-owned museums. You dont need to buy a ticket to enter some sort of grand hall and stroll through different chambers, he said. Here many of the old objects displayed might have been the kind of things used by Mr. Wang himself when he was a kid, so you can feel his enthusiasm, which is the key thing that distinguishes it from other museums.

As China grows richer, wealthy citizens, banks and private businesses have invested in Chinese art and started museums to display their wealth or patriotism. Others, such as Luo Wenyou, opened their collections after their pastimes evolved into callings.

In 1998, when he already owned about 70 old cars, Luo took part in an 800-kilometer rally from the northeastern city of Dalian to Beijing, his iconic Red Flag sedan the only Chinese car in the event.

Having learned about vintage car associations and museums outside China, and inspired by shouts of long live Red Flag as he pulled up to Tiananmen Square, Luo decided he was honor-bound to preserve the legacy of Chinas early motoring history.

I had a karting track, a transport company and a garage. After the rally I sold them off cheaply in order to immediately start a vintage car association and later found the museum, to fill the gap, said Luo. I felt this was my personal duty. His museum opened in 2009 and he now boasts more than 200 vintage Chinese and foreign cars.

Some of Luos cars have stories from Chinas recent history. They include a car Mao refused to ride in until the brands Romanized name on the hood was replaced with Chinese characters and a car found in an overgrown patch of grass that had been assigned to former President Liu Shaoqi. The latter vehicle still had broken windows from when Liu was pursued by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution after falling out of favor with Mao.

Luo lives at the site with his wife so he can open up outside normal hours for visitors traveling from afar. Even if just one person comes we will open, even though the entrance fee wont cover the electricity, he said.

Private collections like Luos offer a welcome alternative to state museums that seek to draw the visitor into a narrative about the greatness of China and the necessity of the Communist Partys leadership, said Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

You dont really find publicly supported pockets of weirdness, Tinari said.

Ma Weidu opened Chinas first private museum in 1996, filling it with antiques bought cheaply in the late 1970s and 80s from Beijing residents eager for cash to buy refrigerators, TVs and washing machines.

I could buy 10 average pieces of art for 65 yuan ($10), said Ma.

In those early days, his most valuable acquisition was a bowl made in an imperial kiln during the reign of the Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong about 250 years ago, Ma said. Purchased for just 6 yuan (less than $1) at the time, it could be worth as much as 600,000 yuan ($92,000) if sold today, he said.

Mas Guanfu Museum now has three branches across China with two more opening this year. Ma himself has become a TV personality, hosting programs teaching antique hunters how to discern between real treasures and fakes.

Ever keen to attract more visitors, Ma, a cat lover, recently named 20 felines as assistant curators.

A lot of people who come to the museum () are more interested in cats than culture, said Ma. But some may come here because of the cats and in doing so learn something about antiques. Louise Watt, Beijing, AP
The Macau Myanmar Friendship Association (MMFA) organized a business trip to Yangon and Bagan with the expectation of developing trade relations with the country, TDM reported.

MMFA perceives Myanmars new government as promoting a healthy environment for young companies from Macau that wish to expand their businesses to the country. The visit is seen as one step further in Macaus role as a platform of Chinas one belt, one road strategy. However, according to Jose Wong, President of MMFA, Myanmar has a lack of modern facilities.

Wong acknowledged the fact that Macau, through its three tertiary educational institutes, is accepting students from Myanmar, with the schools providing scholarships to these students. He noted that MMFA will talk with Aung San Suu Kyi, the newly appointed Myanmar Minister of Education.

Officials from the Chinese embassy in Myanmar have already met with the MMFA. According to the Chinese ambassador, Chen Chen, Myanmar has been full of great opportunities since the reform. Chen also claimed that, by supporting the development of Myanmar, Chinas main goal is simply to advance the country. Chen noted that China is also encouraging Myanmar to ease its policies towards expatriates. The Myanmar government can avail [itself of] the services offered by Chinese expatriated human resources, concluded Chen.
A man who killed nine people and injured nine others in a Chinese nursing home has been sentenced to death, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.

Luo Renchu had gathered bricks and pummeled residents at the home in the central city of Loudi following a dispute with the owners over allegedly unpaid wages, Xinhua said, citing a verdict handed down on Friday by the citys Intermediate Peoples Court.

Xinhua said the attack occurred on Feb. 19, 2015, after the owners failed to pay 40,000 yuan (USD6,150) owed to Luo and his wife. Calls to the court and local government offices rang unanswered Saturday

Retirement homes in China are drawing new attention as the countrys overall population rapidly ages, mainly as a result of a shrinking fertility rate exacerbated by rules limiting most couples to just one child. Smaller family sizes and increased mobility have challenged traditional notions that children should house and care for their parents into their old age. AP
The United States today is home to two huge but essentially invisible populations. Each of them is widely stigmatized and largely composed of people living in the shadows. The government does not know who they are, where they are or how well they are doing.

The first of these invisible tribesillegal immigrantsat least has attracted more than passing comment in politics. By contrast, Americas second invisible caste is almost never mentioned. Yet this group is far larger than the unauthorized immigrant population, and it is made up almost entirely of U.S. citizens.

I refer to our vast underground army of released felonsadult men and women convicted of serious criminal offenses for which they have been punished with prison time or probation, and who now form part of the general population. So hidden from public sight is this vast army, indeed, that many Americans are unaware of its existence.

Most well-informed readers know that the number of Americans behind bars has soared since the early 1980s and that the United States has a higher share of its populace in jail or prison than virtually any other country. But only a tiny fraction of Americans who have been convicted of a felony are incarcerated. Perhaps 90 percent of all sentenced felons are out of confinement and living more or less among us.

How can that be? To begin: Few felons are sent away for life. According to the Justice Departments Bureau of Justice Statistics, the average time that imprisoned first offenders serve in state penitentiaries is just more than two years. More than 600,000 convicts are released from prison every year, and despite high rates of recidivism, many do not return. In addition, many convicted felons are never confined in the first place; instead, they undergo community supervision (such as probation). Taken together, correctional release, parole and probation guarantee a steady annual flow of convicted felons into society.

What sort of totals are we talking about? Curiously, there seem to be no official estimates. Some researchers, however, have attempted to determine the approximate dimensions of this invisible populationand their findings may astonish.

In two studies on the demography of what they call our criminal class, professors Christopher Uggen, Melissa Thompson and five colleagues estimate that the cohort of incarcerated and released felons in the United States had reached nearly 20 million by 2010four times larger, in their estimate, than just 30 years earlier.

If this estimate is even roughly accurate, and if the United States total felon population has continued to grow at more or less the same tempo the researchers cited for 2004 to 2010, we would expect the number of convicted felons to surpass 23 million people this year. That would be roughly twice as high as the number of illegal immigrants in the country. And since the combined U.S. jail and prison population is about 2.2 million (including some non-felons sentenced to jail or awaiting trial there), these figures would suggest the number of non-institutionalized Americans with a felony conviction will almost certainly exceed 20 million by the end of the year.

If Americas non-institutionalized felon population today were a state, it would be the third largest in the countryabout the same size as Florida, and larger than New York. The adult population of this state would be the countrys second largestnearly tied with Texas. And its adult male population would be by far the nations biggestat least 5 million ahead of California. By the same token: If released felons were regarded as a minority, their numbers would well exceed the size of our Asian American population.

Given this reality, one might think policymakers would have an interest in knowing at least a little about this major segment of our population. Wrong: To judge by the data our democracy collects, the circumstances of this ex-con population are a matter of almost complete indifference to the rest of us. These individuals show up only in our statistics on crime and punishmentin other words, when they run afoul of the criminal justice system.

We dont know how many children they have, their marital status, who they live with, their housing situations. We dont know their mortality rates or life expectancy, their disease and disability profile, their mental-health status. We do not know their labor force participation rates, unemployment rates, jobs by sector or wages. Apart from broad generalities, we know roughly nothing about their education patterns, skills or training.

The irony here is not that felons who have paid their debt to society have need of a largely indifferent public: It is that this same public needs them, too. We need them to succeed: as fathers and mothers, as breadwinners, as citizensas people who make the most of a second chance. Our society cant hope to flourish with 20 million modern-day outcasts in our midst.

Given its sheer scale, the task of reintegrating reformed felons has never been more important than it is today. But thanks to officialdoms statistical neglect, we havent a clue about how well this task is working. And we cant gather evidence to learn what we could do to make re-entry work better either.

Our government is perfectly capable of compiling key facts and figures about conditions for Americans with felony convictions. Some of this could be done easily, quickly and at very low cost; other aspects would take more time, money and technical effort. But its all eminently doable. All we need is the political desireand social compassionto see it done.
For nearly a century, Idaho has maintained a strong concealed carry permitting system, requiring anyone who carries a concealed weapon to possess a valid concealed weapons license. This system was designed to protect the safety of all Idahoans. Many people in todays world carry guns. Some do it legally, and go out of their way to meet legal requirements and pay the government for permission to exercise the fundamental human right to self-defense. While others do it illegally, and are the main reason why some people choose to arm themselves.

Last week Gov. Otter opened a new door for Idaho citizens. After July 1, 2016, any citizen of Idaho who is 21 and older can conceal carry without a permit. While some may be in favor of this new law, it could put many people into danger. As a proud supporter of the Second Amendment, I urge all Idaho citizens to take a handgun course and learn how to protect yourself. The new law allows almost anyone to conceal carry without a background check or required course. I hope all Idaho citizens will look at this new law and start carrying a handgun to protect themselves.
By late last summer, the directors of wildlife departments in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana were becoming impatient.

Why was it taking the federal government so long to move toward delisting the greater Yellowstone grizzly bear from its threatened status under the Endangered Species Act? For years the grizzlies had exceeded all established recovery criteria, the directors wrote in an Aug. 28 letter to Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

With increasing conflicts, delisting delay is needlessly straining relationships vital to responsible grizzly bear management, the directors wrote. States and communities have little incentive to support species recovery if success does not end (Endangered Species Act) constraints and return species to state management.

The states would consider all available options, the directors warned, if Fish and Wildlife didnt take action toward delisting quickly.

Last month, state officials finally got what they wanted, as Fish and Wildlife announced it was formally starting the process of delisting the Yellowstone grizzly by publishing a draft rule and other documents online for public comment.

But the road to delisting  and likely hunting  of the apex predator is only just beginning as each state also must take public input on how it plans to take over management of the bears from the feds. And if a past grizzly delisting effort is any indication, the coming months also will include drawn-out legal battles between state and federal agencies and environmental groups who argue the animals still need protection.

Officials estimate the process of transferring grizzly management to the three states wont be finalized any sooner than the end of this year. That means grizzly hunts wouldnt happen any earlier than spring or fall of 2017.

This is a huge undertaking, and its one thats never really been done this way before, said Gregg Losinski, an Idaho Department of Fish and Game spokesman and member of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee. This is one time where were coordinating with neighboring states (on wildlife management). That doesnt happen with anything else.

Second delisting effort

Yellowstone grizzlies were first listed as threatened in 1975, when they numbered fewer than 150. In the decades since their population over the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has soared to more than 700, well past the minimum population recovery goal of 500, according to the most recent count. And state wildlife officials say the counting method likely underestimates how many there really are.

Population growth began to level off in the early 2000s. Scientists now say the 35,000 square-mile ecosystem may have reached its grizzly carrying capacity. As their numbers topped out in recent years, the bears have been traveling further and occasionally getting into trouble.

With the increased amount of bears weve got more conflicts, with humans and livestock, said Derick Attebury, an Idaho Fish and Game commissioner based in Idaho Falls. He said for that reason, most people hes talked to so far in eastern Idaho are supportive of the delisting proposal.

Grizzlies have wandered to places in Idaho the past couple years that they havent been seen in generations, Losinski said, a good indication they are ready to be managed like other big game.

But so far, one of the primary hurdles to delisting has surrounded the health of the whitebark pine. Whitebark pinecone seeds, a traditional grizzly fall food source, have been in short supply as the trees have been decimated by effects of climate change, such as pine beetles.

The trees were the key sticking point last time Fish and Wildlife moved to delist grizzlies in 2007. Environmental groups sued, and a district court ruled two years later that the federal agency hadnt considered impacts of whitebark pine decline on the health of the bears. Grizzly protections were restored.

More recent research, however, shows that the bears have learned to be less reliant on whitebark seeds as a primary food source, and have turned more heavily to more than 200 other types of food. Grizzly bears in the GYE do not seek out whitebark pine in years of poor seed production but make use of other foods within their home ranges instead, the Fish and Wildlife proposed delisting rule states.

Some people arent convinced. Andrea Santarsiere, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said she agrees Yellowstone grizzlies are highly adaptable. But she said grizzlies are increasingly losing out on two of their other food staples, too, which means protections should stay in place.

Due to climate change, fewer big game animals are dying in harsh winters. Those animals typcially make prime meals as grizzlies emerge from their dens, Santarsiere said. And over the years the Yellowstone cutthroat trout population, another traditional bear food source, also has decreased.

The decline of food sources equals more human-bear conflicts, Santarsiere and other environmental group representatives argue, as the bears wander farther afield in search of meals.

Another concern from Santarsiere and others is how grizzly hunting would be handled by the states outside the so-called demographic monitoring area  the approximately 20,000 square mile region where grizzly numbers would continue to be closely monitored under the delisting proposal. In that area, under the proposal, hunting couldnt take place if the population was below 600 in any given year.

States could potentially allow trophy hunting on an unlimited number of bears outside the (monitoring area), Santarsiere argued.

But Losinski said those concerns arent valid. If Idaho Fish and Game were to allow big grizzly hunts outside the monitoring area, it would impact the numbers inside, he said, as bears can travel great distances and dont pay attention to lines on a map.

The Yellowstone grizzly population is a model of how you do (species) recovery, Losinski said. If this is not enough  sorry, I dont know how youre going to get more, out of the Endangered Species Act process.

Weve seen multiple delays throughout this process, said Dustin Miller, administrator of the Idaho Governors Office of Species Conservation. Were ready to assume management of this population. Its time to reward the states for being excellent conservation partners and following through with their commitments.

Long

process ahead

A long, confusing process of planning and public comment is ahead before any grizzly delisting plan is finalized.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is taking public comments on its proposed delisting rule until May 10. There are already more than 500 digital comments submitted. The agency also is asking for comment on two other documents  a draft supplement to its 1993 Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan, and a draft conservation strategy.

Meanwhile, each of the three states must go through its own public outreach and planning process on how it will independently manage the grizzlies once they are delisted. Wyoming is the furthest along, and already has a 60-page planning document posted for public comment. Finally, the three states will have to approve a memorandum of agreement, which lays out a framework about how they will work together to review bear populations each year and divvy up hunting amounts for each state.

There are a lot of layers that will all connect together, Losinski said.

In preparation for delisting, Idaho has since 2002 had a 51-page, Legislature-approved Yellowstone grizzly bear management plan in place, though it hasnt been much use until now. It estimated the states grizzly bear management efforts after delisting would cost about $145,000 per year, which may be close to $200,000 in todays dollars.

It is unlikely that grizzly bear hunting seasons will be established immediately upon delisting, the Idaho document states. Establishment of grizzly bear hunting seasons will be conducted using the same process, including public meetings, as for other game species.

Some specifics about how Idaho will handle delisting likely will be discussed at Fish and Game Commission meetings scheduled next month, Attebury said.

Grizzlies definitely have adapted, populations have increased and are stable, he said. Theyre finding those food sources. Theyre surviving.
The arrival of the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli on Wednesday increased the number of governments claiming legitimacy and authority in Libya to three.

On Friday prime minister-designate Fayez Serraj made his first public appearance in Tripoli at a mosque for the Friday prayer before he met civilians at the martyrs square.

The tension between the GNA and the Tripoli-based government seems however to be dying down after the Tripoli Government published on its website that Prime Minister Khalifa Ghweils rejection of the so-called Presidency Council will be in a peaceful and legal manner without any use of force.

The UN Security Council and the European Union manifested their support to the GNA. The EU approved sanctions on Ghweil as well as on Presidents Agilah Saleh Issa and Nuri Abu Sahmain of the parliaments in Tripoli and Tobruk respectively.

French Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal described the sanctions as a first important step in support of the government of national unity and did not rule expanding them to other individuals who could prevent the installation of the GNA. The U.N Security Council said the presidential council should immediately begin its work in Tripoli to broaden the basis of its support and to tackle Libyas political, security, humanitarian, economic and institutional challenges, and to confront the rising threat of terrorism.

The Tripoli-based government stated that it will not cling to power, but warned that if this (presidential) council claimed power or assaulted state institutions, it would be considered a coup against the constitutional legitimacy and declaration.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans visit to the United States has been marred with controversies as the Turkish president, known for his outspokenness, alleged that Muslims are facing Islamophobia in Western countries and that none of these countries have experienced the vices of terrorism like Turkey did.

Erdogan was speaking at the opening of a Turkish-funded religious center in Maryland when he stated that since the 11 September 2001 attacks, prejudice was orchestrated against Muslims in the West, including in the US up to the point of considering every Muslim a terrorist.

Islam and terrorism have been matter of concern in the US presidential primaries campaign platform and Erdogan said he is surprised by the statements of some candidates.

Aspiring republican candidates Ted Cruz suggested that police should patrol Muslim neighborhoods while Donald Trump opined that a temporary ban should be introduced to stop Muslims from entering the country.

The Turkish president said Muslims are unfortunately being pushed to choose between being either Muslim or American as they continue to pay the price for the 2001 attacks.

Speaking about Turkeys experience against terrorism, Erdogan acknowledged that there is terrorism in Brussels and Paris now but he minimized it saying it is incomparable with the level of terrorism in Turkey. He said Turkey has been combating terrorism for the past 35 years, referring to the PKK labeled by Ankara as a terrorist group. He urged western countries to consider terrorist attacks elsewhere the same way they did for Paris and Brussels, arguing that the attacks against his country are worse than those committed in the West.

No other force could harm Turkey more than these groups, the Turkish president said before blaming European states for failing to extradite militants requested by Ankara.
After an internation competition encouraging the use of fitness technology, researchers found using pedometers and online tools with exercise helps people lose weight

A friendly international competition to encourage exercise using pedometers and online tools was successful in helping people lose weight and improve their fitness over the course of three months, researchers said Sunday.

The results of the studybased on self-reported data from 68,000 people who participated in the virtual event known as Stepathlonwere presented at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting in Chicago.

Stepathlon is run by a start-up company in Mumbai, India. The fee to participate is $62.50 per person. Often, corporations sponsor employees to join as part of a workplace wellness program.

Grouped into teams of five, people from 64 countries were given inexpensive pedometers "and encouraged to increase their daily step count through an interactive, multiplatform application that engages them with frequent emails, quizzes and social media communication," said the study.

The teams competed in a virtual international race that featured prizes for certain categories.

"The idea is to increase physical activity and wellness, but in a fun and social way that builds on teamwork and camaraderie," said lead author Anand Ganesan, associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

Researchers found that on average, "participants increased their amount of walking by more than 3,500 steps per day, exercised nearly one additional day per week, lost just over three pounds and reduced their time spent sitting by about 45 minutes per day," said the study.

Even though the data was all self-reported, the consistency across nations and groups of people over the three years studied (2012-2014) led researchers to believe the findings are reliable.

"To our knowledge, our study is the first to provide comparative data on the effectiveness of this kind of intervention in both the developed and developing world," said Ganesan.

Future research will aim to find out whether participants were able to maintain their fitness after the end of the 100-day competition.

"Physical inactivity, sedentary lifestyles and obesity are massive global problems," said Ganesan.

"Our study suggests that by using technology in a clever way, perhaps we, as a community, can devise solutions to this problem."

Explore further More steps a day keep the doctor away

 2016 AFP
On 26 November last year, what is today known as Constitution Day, home minister Rajnath Singh described the term secular" as the most misused word" in the countrys political discourse. Additionally, he claimed that the countrys founding fathers had found the need for inclusion of secularism as a specifically guaranteed tenet as superfluous to the sustenance of Indian democratic polity.

Singhs intentions, in making these assertions, were quite clear. This was really an effort at obfuscating what wereand aregrave concerns about the present Indian governments majoritarian policies, specifically its claim for an Indianness built on a supposed monolithic cultural edifice. The comments quite rightly drew the ire of the opposition.

But while Singhs goals may have been grossly flagrant, the idea of debating what Indian secularism really means must hardly be frowned upon. After all, secularism, much like equality or liberty, is an interpretive concept.

As it happened, during the early years of independence, and indeed, during the making of Indias Constitution, secularism and its real purport and meaning was a hotly contested topic. The debates during the time centred largely on important conceptions of what religion meant, what the governments role in religion ought to be, and whether India required a strict wall of separation between the state and religion. The answer to the final question invariably acquired a sense of reasonable consensus among the debaters.

It was clear to most that unlike western notions of the term, the Indian state, even if it adopted a commitment to secularism, simply couldnt afford to embrace a completely non-interventionist role towards religion. This was because, in India, religion tended to pervade society in a manner that often had serious implications for ones basic civil rights.

But to what extent must this intervention extend?

Typical debates on secularism today tend to bypass issues concerning the states intervention in religious matters, particularly in Hindu temples. Most discussions in popular conversation revolve around what are viewed as core political questionssuch as subjects concerning the guarantee from the state of equal co-existence of different religious faiths, the ability of government to bring forth social reform and welfare, and the protection of personal and private rights of minority groups.

Indeed, the manner in which we answer questions raised on each of these issues would inform us greatly on our ability to sustain ourselves as a liberal democracy. But the question of where governmental intervention in religion ought to begin, and where it ought to end, especially in the states management and administration of Hindu institutions, is critical to articulating the countrys approach to the freedom of conscience and religion.

For instance, in January 2014, in ruling on the validity of a seemingly perpetual takeover of the Sri Sabanayagar Temple in the town of Chidambaram by the Tamil Nadu government, the Supreme Court said, Even if the management of a temple is taken over to remedy (an) evil, the management must be handed over to the person concerned immediately after the evil stands remedied. Continuation thereafter would tantamount to usurpation of their proprietary rights or violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution in favour of the persons deprived."

This process of governmental takeover of Hindu temples is seen by some as a product of a power of supposedly secular management that has been arrogated by the Indian state.

Senior advocates Fali S. Nariman and Rajeev Dhavan once wrote that, through an exercise of this appropriated power, the government has overseen a practical nationalization of religious endowments and temples. This process, in their words, sits uneasily with both the guarantee of religious freedom and secularism".

Although, in many ways, the present-day intervention in matters of religious administration has its roots in the British rule, the more general practice predates even the colonial regime.

Numerous historical records attest to the fact that Hindu kings exercised a very particular supervision of Hindu temples. As the P.R. Ganapathi Iyer wrote in his 1918 treatise The Law Relating to Hindu and Mohammedan Endowments, there is little doubt that Hindu kings interfered when there were disputes pertaining to temple affairs.

In fact, in 1887, justice Raymond West of the Bombay high court specifically pointed to such interventions as being a part of the prevailing norm. Under the native system of Government, though it was looked on as a heinous offence to appropriate to secular purpose the estate that had once been dedicated to pious uses," the judge wrote, in a case titled Manohar Ganesh Tambekar vs Lakhmiram Govindaram. The State in its secular executive and judicial capacity habitually intervened to prevent fraud and waste in dealing with religious endowments." This power of superintendence was, therefore, really seen as being an incident of sovereignty.

Under Muslim administration, too, Ganapathi Iyer points out, the governments of the time saw it as the states duty to ensure that all endowments for the support of mosques, Hindu temples, and so forth were applied according to the real intent and will of the grantor".

The Mughal rulers, for example, appointed Qadis (Islamic judges) and nominated Mutawallis (trustees) for Wakfs. These Mutawallis were accountable to the Qadis, to ensure the proper management of Wakf property, which were endowments made by Muslims for religious, pious or charitable purposes.

Thus, a general, if not an overarching, power to administer and manage religious and charitable endowments was seen by both Hindu and Muslim rulers as an integral function of the sovereign. Long before 1810, when the British colonial government passed its first official notification assuming this supposed governmental role, the regime undeniably exercised supervisory functions over pious endowments.

Consider this observation by the Madras high court in an 1867 judgement: The duties of superintendence and the proper appropriation of the endowments of Hindu and Muhammadan temples and religious establishments, of the preservation of the structures of such temples and establishments, and of the management of their affairs, through trustees or managers, were without doubt, we believe," wrote chief justice Colley Harmon Scotland and justice L.C. Innes, exercised by the officers of the Local Government indiscriminately long before the Tanjore territory and temples were assumed by the Government."

This supposedly intrinsic power had further crystallized with the passing of the Bengal Regulation XIX [19] in 1810 and the Madras Regulation VII [7] in 1817. Through these laws, the general management of all endowments of religious establishments in these presidenciesapart from the duty to appoint properly qualified trustees and managers to these foundationswere made binding on the Board of Revenue. The Board, a 1781 creation of the East India Company, had been established to oversee the revenue and business of the institution.

Surprisingly, governmental interventions, at the time, in matters of religious administration were largely welcomed. These regulations were, according to Pran Nath Saraswati, the first Indian judge of the Calcutta high court, instrumental in saving many of the native endowments from ruin and misappropriation".

But around the middle of the century, the application of these regulations was withdrawn amid what Saraswati described as religious scruples". There were pressures, as it happened, from Christian missionary circles, both in India and in England, against what were perceived as express governmental support for idolatry.

Ultimately, in 1863, the Imperial Legislature enacted a comprehensive law with a view to continuing the fine work that the Board of Revenue had performed under earlier regulations.

But the new legislation proved highly ineffective. Its scope was rather more limited, and it relied not on executive powers over religious administration, but on the intervention by courts to set right any maladministration that had been brought to its attention. The result of this law was so disastrous, wrote Saraswati, that it became practically impossible to compel the managers of endowments to perform their allotted duties with honesty and faithfulness".

Over the course of the next few decades, several attempts were made by the colonial government to provide for itself a more far-reaching role in the administration of religious endowments. However, the British were deeply conscious of their limits. They didnt want to be seen as religious reformers, and, with Christian missionaries constantly on their heels, the government also didnt want to be seen as favouring the Hindus.

But, after the enactment of the Government of India Act, 1919, with purported constitutional changes bringing forth a stricter demarcation between central and provincial legislatures, there was a belief that reforms could flow from the acts of Indian representatives rather than through the British colonial government.

In 1927, as a product of this division, the Madras legislature enacted a religious endowments Act. Unlike earlier regulations that applied to both Hindu and Muslim institutions, the 1927 law was sanctioned with the sole view of overseeing, through a board of commissioners, the management of Hindu institutions. This board was vested with enormous powers; not only could it frame schemes for better administration of temples, it could also, in cases of mismanagement by existing trustees, take over altogether the management of a temple.

The upshot of the law was the commencement of what Nariman and Dhavan now describe as the nationalization of the Hindu religion. Once the state assumed control over the management of a temple, it was simply loath to privatizing this power.

Just over two decades later, when the Indian Constitution was adopted, the ability of the state to intervene in any purportedly secular affair of a religion, as had been the norm for several centuries, was seen not as antithetical to secularism, but as necessary for guaranteeing a more egalitarian society.

Unlike the American constitution, which prescribes a strict wall of separation, what Indias Constitution demands is, in political theorist Rajeev Bhargavas telling description, the maintenance of a principled distance" between the state and religion.

Therefore, when, in 1951, the Madras government introduced a new Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, the law was predominantly viewed by the Supreme Court as being in consonance with both the Constitutions bare text and its secular ideals.

This law, however, had accorded the state government exceedingly wide powers of interference. Unlike the earlier British-era enactments, which provided for a general supervision of Hindu endowments through a statutory board of commissioners, the new legislation virtually vested the administration of Hindu religious and charitable institutions in a governmental department.

The commissioner appointed by the government could, under the 1951 law, frame and settle a scheme", if he or she had reason to believe that a religious institution was mismanaging the resources placed under its care, or was being run contrary to the purposes for which it was founded.

It is no exaggeration," wrote Professor Donald E. Smith, an early chronicler of Indian secularism, to assert that the commissioner for Hindu religious endowments, a public servant of the secular state, today exercises far greater authority over the Hindu religion in Madras state than the archbishop of Canterbury does over the Church of England."

Smith also sought to brush aside the argument that the commissioner and his appointees merely exercised control over secular functions as being simply untenable". When a deputy commissioner sanctions the expenditure of surplus temple funds for the establishment of orphanages rather than for the propagation of the religious tenets of the institution, he is dealing as much religion as he is with finances," he wrote. Behind this preference lies a whole set of religious assumptions which are in effect being imposed on the temple trustees."

The imprimatur given to the Madras law by the Supreme Court saw the heralding of several new laws across India. In 1959, after the reorganization of the southern states, the Tamil Nadu government repealed the Madras law of 1951 and enacted a new law that today virtually serves as a model for the country.

At the time when the 1959 law was being debated, The Hindu newspaper claimed in an editorial that the proposed enactment sought to tighten further the hold of government over the temples and other religious institutions in the state, under the guise of better management and regulation, so that these stood virtually nationalised, functioning as a department of government and subject to all the vicissitudes of party politics in a secular parliamentary democracy".

The newspapers claims, some would argue, have since proved prescient. The collective result of the various laws establishing an overarching power to manage Hindu institutions has seen a staggering takeover by the government of virtually every Hindu temple of any reasonable note.

For example, as scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta has previously noted, the Andhra Pradesh government alone administers more than 30,000 temples, in 2003, with the scope of its endowments body extending beyond the simple governance of property rights to include the selection and appointment of priests and the proper administration of rituals.

Many see this intervention as a usurpation of Hindu endowments for the benefit of the government, and as being opposed to all tenets of what constitute a principled separation" between the state and the Hindu religion. At the same time, others argue that the singling out of Hindu endowments neither violates the Constitutions text nor the larger guarantee of a neutral form of secularism.

Bhargava, for example, maintains that principled distance allows for differential treatment", so long as state intervention can be justified on the grounds that it promotes freedom, equality, or any other value integral to secularism".

Most governments argue that, in taking over the management of a Hindu temple, their intentions are embedded precisely in these constitutional values; that their intervention is necessary to bring about social welfare and reform, to correct a history of social inequities.

Would the privatization, so to speak, of Hindu temples necessarily lead to better management? Would it ensure that these endowments are administered in a manner that conforms to the guarantee of basic civil rights of the various different followers of the Hindu religion?

The state would argue that its intervention in Hindu endowments and trusts is not aimed at reforming the religion out of existence, but rather at ensuring that the administration of the endowment stays true to both the will and the intent of the grantor and the countrys secular ideals. Should the state now leave religion alone? Has it ever?

Suhrith Parthasarathy is a lawyer and writer based in Chennai. His writings are collated at suhrith.net.

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Western Montana Lighting under new ownership

Western Montana Lighting, which has been a part of the Missoula community since 1917, has new ownership. Drew Mihelish, a Montana native, became the owner of Western Montana Lighting in January 2015. She brings years of education and experience in interior design and architecture to Western Montana Lighting's already established design team. Her talented team of designers is an experienced blend of expertise from legacy employees and new talent that creates a dynamic workforce, according to the company.

Western Montana Lighting wants to create more knowledge about lighting and the services the design team provides while bridging the gap between architects, contractors and designers. The strategy is working. In the last year Western Montana Lighting has been recognized by Hubbardton Forge with a Growth Achievement Award for a 69 percent growth in sales in 2015.

The Western Montana Lighting team can be reached by phone at (406) 543-7166, or by email at info@wmldesigns.com. The showroom is located at 3250 South Reserve Street in Missoula.

Sustainable Business Council to feature expert on plastic pollution

Join the Sustainable Business Council and the University of Montana School of Business Administration for the Sustainable Business Council's annual lecture on Tuesday, April 26.

Stiv Wilson, a UM graduate recently featured in a New York Times article on plastic pollution, will call on students, community members and local businesses to transform their insights into action and place social, environmental, and economic principles at the forefront of their decision making.

Wilson brings over a decade of experience in grassroots advocacy, systems innovation, and campaign strategy to The Story of Stuff Project. Wilson is an expert on waste and plastic pollution who frequently speaks about solutions to the vexing inefficiencies in the materials economy all over the world.

Wilson will highlight specific examples of business and consumer models existing within circular economy frameworks that are proven to be cost-effective and rewarding. Only businesses considering a triple bottom line are taking into account the full costs involved in doing business within our community.

The annual lecture will take place on Tuesday, April 26, at Room 106, Gallagher Business Building, and is free and open to the public. Doors open at 7 p.m. All are invited to a preceding business reception with refreshments from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Buttercup Market & Cafe, a five-minute walk from campus. Business reception tickets are free for SBC members, $5 for students and $10 for general public. Tickets are available at conta.cc/1M6MjLe.
Susan Aizenberg lives and teaches in Omaha, and the following poem is from Quiet City, published by BkMk Press. My father and perhaps yours, too, found a little pleasure in an early morning walk.

Mornings

Before the train screamed him through tunnels

to his windowless office, the idiots

he had to "sir," my father needed a space

without us, so in a crack of light from the bathroom,

he dressed, held his shoes by two fingers,

and left us sleeping. That walk

***

to the diner, the last stars fading out,

the sky lightening from black to blue to white,

was his time. He walked in all weather,

let each season touch him all over,

lifted his face to rain and sun. He liked

to watch the old houses stir awake

and nod to the woman in her slippers on 27th,

smoking as she strolled her little mutt.

To step back, smooth as Fred Astaire,

from the paperboy's wild toss.

***

Milk bottles sweated on doorsteps,

sweet cream on top, and once, he lifted a quart

from its wire basket, drank it down

beneath our neighbor's winking porch light,

and left the empty on the stoop.

***

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright  2015 by Susan Aizenberg, Mornings, from Quiet City, (BkMk Press, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Susan Aizenberg and the publisher. Introduction copyright  2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
Terrorism-related deaths are up 800 percent in the past five years, according to a new report. Thats nearly 30,000 people who are killed per year by terrorists. While suicide bombers and gunmen have been killing civilians around the globe almost constantly, it was the coordinated terrorist attacks by ISIS in Brussels that violently shook the world awake. I believe in the power of prayer for the victims and their families, but I also believe in the power of U.S. leadership against this evil. Its time for the U.S. to get serious about defeating ISIS.

ISIS is not the J.V. team, as President Obama famously claimed in 2014. They have attacked our allies, they have driven millions of people from their homelands and they have attacked us on our own shores in San Bernardino. Being the president is not an episode of Dancing With the Stars; the presidency is about being, above all, the commander-in-chief. Rather than dance the Argentine tango with stars in South America, President Obama and his advisors must come up with a detailed plan to defeat and destroy ISIS.

I recently introduced legislation with Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our bill, Comprehensive Strategy to Destroy ISIL Act of 2016, will require the presidentregardless of whom that may beto submit a report to Congress that details a strategy to destroy ISIS and its affiliates around the world. Codifying a biennial report to Congress will put pressure on the current and next president to develop and maintain a long-term strategy to wipe this enemy off the face of the planet.

I have long been a critic of the current strategy to combat ISIS, and even more so, Ive been a vocal opponent of the overly restrictive rules of engagement our troops are forced to navigate while trying to stay alive.

Right now the president believes the United States role is to provide a small sprinkling of Special Operations to advise and train local militaries and conduct some airstrikes (after weve dropped pamphlets telling militants to abandon the areas). As General Martin Dempsey said, theres not a snowballs chance that airstrikes alone will work. It will take a force package great enough to win decisively, and that means providing the right funding, tools and munitions, providing troop levels adequate for a quick reaction force to come in if our guys and gals get in trouble, and it means ensuring the right rules of engagement necessary to win and win decisively on the field of battle.

We also need to do more to develop intelligence and target combatants before they detonate themselves or other weapons like in Paris, Brussels and Pakistan. When creating an anti-terrorism plan, its important to think about more than just the person who pulls the trigger. A terrorist comes in all shapes and sizes: those who offer shelter, weapons and ammunition, as well as those who turn a blind eye to it, are all terrorists and bear the same level of responsibility. The network is as dangerous as the suicide bomber.

President Obamas policy in Iraq created power vacuums and is responsible for the rise and spread of ISIS and the refugee crisis. The continual terrorist attacks around the globe will not stop until the United States gets serious about defeating and destroying ISIS, and that requires a detailed strategy. The president has ignored ISIS since day one. If we dont get serious about the threats we face, its only a matter of time before they attack America again.
SEATTLE  Washington state's largest utility will be able to set aside money to pay for the future shutdown of two coal-powered electricity plants it co-owns in Montana under a bill Gov. Jay Inslee signed Friday.

However, before signing the bill, Inslee vetoed a section of the legislation that had said Puget Sound Energy, Colstrip's largest owner, couldn't use that money if it closed two aging units before Dec. 31, 2022.

As he prepared to sign the bill, Inslee said the measure "represents an important step towards ending Washington's reliance on coal-fired electricity and transitioning to cleaner energy sources."

Senate Bill 6248 lets Puget Sound Energy create a fund to cover future decommissioning and cleanup costs at the Colstrip plant in Montana. The Bellevue-based utility owns half of units 1 and 2, which were built in the mid-1970s.

"To be clear, no decision has been made on when the older Colstrip units might close," Inslee said in a written statement issued after the signing. He noted that the Utilities and Transportation Commission must conduct proceedings before they can approve any closure decision. Those proceedings have been delayed until next year, Inslee said, and Montana is welcome to participate.

The future of the oldest units at Colstrip has been a heated debate in Montana and Washington, and it is looming large in the governor's race in Montana.

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock last week asked Inslee to veto the bill over concerns about its effect on Montana. Republican candidate Greg Gianforte has used the issue to pounce on Bullock, a Democrat seeking a second term.

Montana lawmakers traveled to Olympia to testify against the bill this year, telling their Washington counterparts a partial shutdown would have dire economic consequences on the southeastern Montana community of Colstrip and on industrial users across the state that depend on cheap power.

In an emailed statement Friday, Bullock said he was disappointed with Inslee's decision to sign the bill. "Now we need to redouble our efforts to fight for Montanans whose livelihoods depend on coal and develop responsible, Montana-made energy that will keep our economy competitive and create more good-paying jobs," he wrote.

Colstrip, the second-largest coal-fired plant in the West, is under pressure from a weak coal market and increasing federal regulations.

The bill initially authorized Puget Sound Energy to file a plan to decommission units 1 and 2 and allowed the utility to buy additional ownership in one of the two newer units.

But the state Legislature ultimately passed a version dealing with setting up "a retirement account" to help pay for the future costs associated with closure. The bill does not require the units to be closed nor does it set a timeline for shutdown.

The bill's prime sponsor, Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, criticized the partial veto Friday. He said the vetoed section would have minimized impacts to workers and utility consumers by ensuring that a closure would not happen until after 2022.

Environmental groups applauded the measure as a crucial step toward moving away from coal-fired electricity.

"It provides an important tool for PSE to manage risks for the community and costs for consumers that will result in more timely closure and ensure responsible cleanup," said the Sierra Club's Bill Arthur.

Washington state currently gets only about 15 percent of its electricity from coal, but Inslee and others have pushed utilities in the state to phase out the coal-fired power they get from out of state.

Separately, Puget Sound Energy must tell Washington state utilities regulators in early January its plan for the Colstrip units, including "a narrow window of dates for the planned retirement of Units 1 and 2" as well as how much it costs.

"The data will speak for what the best next step is for Colstrip 1 and 2," said Grant Ringel, a company spokesman.

Puget Sound Energy has previously said shutting down the plants and cleaning them up would cost between $130 million and $200 million.
The Stillwater Mining Co. has donated an underground loader, MTI LT270 LHD, to Montana Tech. It was delivered on Friday, the first day of the International Mining Competition.

The loader is made for underground mining and will be used in the Mining Engineering Department's Practical Underground Mining Class held at the Underground Mine Education Center. The machine is a 2006 model and was refreshed in 2010 with the installation of a new Cummins QSB4.5 engine.

Stillwater Mining Co., with mining and processing operations in south-central Montana, is the only U.S. producer of platinum group metals (PGMs) and the largest primary producer of PGMs outside of South Africa and the Russian Federation, according to a news release.

Jason Palin, Stillwater Mine manager, Tech alumnus, and Industry Advisory Board member, helped in acquiring the donation.

"This LHD had very low utilization, and the Stillwater Mining Company thought it would be better utilized by Montana Tech for training the future leaders of our industry," Palin said.

Scott Rosenthal, Tech Mining Engineering Department head and instructor for the Practical Underground Mining Class, said the loader will give students hands-on experience in drilling, blasting, mucking (removing shot material using an underground loader), and set ground support.

Since the class started in January 2013, Tech has rented machines to muck with. The acquisition of the underground loader will reduce the program's costs.

Dale Andrews and Joy Global arranged for the re-painting and delivery of the machine.

Tech's Underground Mine Education Center is the only on-campus underground mine facility in the United States.
If Mayor Diana Broderson and the new mayor of Kislovodsk, Alexander Kurbatov, both attend a repeatedly postponed summit of U.S.-Russia sister cities planned for early 2017, it could signal a new chapter for the partnership begun in the waning days of the Cold War.

It was 27 years ago on March 4, 1989, when Mayors Viktor Beketov and Don LeMar signed the agreement in a ceremony at the Muscatine Art Center. Our towns became the first of several twinned cities established between Iowa and the Stavropol krai, our part in the diplomacy linking Iowa as a sister state with the corn-growing region which was the home of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Nine city pairs joined us in the following five years or so.

Our Russian sister city does not grow corn, however. Kislovodsk, population 130,000, is nestled amidst a spectacular forested park above the steppe on the northern slope of the Caucasus Mountains a thousand miles south of Moscow and midway between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Its name means sour water referring to the mineral springs that are the lifeblood of the towns health spas and the bottled water that is one of its best known products.

Student exchanges were common in the early years, thanks to an arrangement worked out by the Muscatine High School principal who was among the first travelers from our side. Several students and some teachers made multiple visits and extended stays in both directions. Participants experienced home stays and family life, forming friendships that continue.

We exchanged city delegations and professional counterparts, especially during the first decade, bringing together hundreds of citizen diplomats. We hosted musicians and artists, healthcare workers and entrepreneurs, business people, journalists and more.

Muscatines city finance director worked for a month in the Kislovodsk city hall, then hosted their officials here. Three Kislovodsk mayors visited here over the years, as well as several deputy mayors. Mayor Jeanette Phillips was the only Muscatine mayor to visit Kislovodsk, first as a teacher in a 1990 school exchange and again in 1994 when she took part in a Moscow conference of sister cities.

Taking a turn as local coordinator, I made six visits during the 1990s. My last sight of our friends was in 1998, just before the Russian economy went bust and not long before the rise of Vladimir Putin. Then John Schwandke took the lead for several years, culminating in an exchange of delegations in 2006 which yielded a second formal agreement pledging renewed efforts.

Visits continued through 2010 but with less frequency. The decline in exchanges was not unique to our two cities but was regrettably typical of what happened between our nations in the last 10 years or more.

Arrangements for the 2017 summit involve high-level negotiations to resuscitate the precious public diplomacy that once animated friendly contacts between the rival nations. As the saying goes, its deju vu all over again.

Muscatine and Kislovodsk are on the short list of cities whose mayors have expressed interest. If all works out, Mayor Kurbatov will meet Mayor Broderson, probably in Washington, D.C., and visit Muscatine afterward as her guest. Then its up to the rest of us.

For more information about Muscatine Sister cities, contact John Dabeet at johndabeet@ gmail.com.
After the terrorist violence in Brussels many people, including Barack Obama, said we should not change our way of life and live in fear because that is what terrorists want. Maybe, but is that all they want? It seems that something important is left out of the story. In the classical model of terrorism, instilling fear (along with causing death and injury) is not an end in itself. Its a means to an end.

Terrorists dont necessarily get a kick out creating carnage and fear (though it is possible). Primarily they want the survivors fear converted into action aimed at changing their governments policy. Thus terrorism, if it is to have any meaning, is a political, not a sadistic, act. In the paradigm case a weak nonstate group, unable to resist a states military or to change its policy directly, terrorizes the civilian population of that state in the hope it will demand a change in foreign or domestic policy. (Lets leave aside for this discussion that terrorism has been strategically (re)defined by the United States and its allies such that it can apply only to their adversaries, even when they attack military targets instead of civilians.)

Its not hard to fathom why the full story of terrorism is not acknowledged by officials and pundits: it would draw attention to what the U.S. government and allied states have long been doing to people in the Muslim world. Nearly all Americans seem to think its a sheer coincidence that terrorism is most likely to be committed by people who profess some form of Islam and that the U.S. military has for decades been bombing, droning, occupying, torturing, etc. in multiple Islamic countries. Or perhaps they think U.S.-inflicted violence is just a defensive response to earlier terrorism. (I might be giving people too much credit by assuming they even know the U.S. government is doing any of this.) When the U.S. military isnt wreaking havoc directly, the U.S. government is underwriting and arming tyrants like those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. And just to complete the picture, the U.S. government fully backs the Israeli state, which has oppressed Palestinians and occupied their land for many decades.

All this is what Islamist terrorists say they seek revenge for (more here), and the U.S. government acknowledges this. (That does not excuse violence against noncombatants, of course.)

But telling the full story about the terrorists objectives might inadvertently prompt a fresh look  maybe even a reevaluation  of Americas atrocious foreign policy. The ruling elite and the military-industrial complex would not want that.

Since questioning and changing U.S. foreign policy are out of the question, the pundits and terrorism experts look for other ways to prevent terrorism. Unsurprisingly, everything they come up with entails violations of our civil liberties. Discussions about profiling are featured on cable news channels almost regularly. Should we or should we not profile? Those few who say no are accused of political correctness, the handy put-down for anyone who is leery about violating privacy or gratuitously insulting whole classes of people.

But lets think about profiling for a moment. As acknowledged, when one hears about public, indiscriminate suicidal violence, such as occurred in Brussels, it is reasonable to wonder if the perpetrators professed some extreme variant of Islam. (That doesnt mean another group, say, neo-Nazis and white nationalists, couldnt be the perps, as in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.) But since Islamists come to mind first, that might give us a clue to how to profile. As part of the profiling, why not look for links to countries the U.S. government and its allies bomb, occupy, or otherwise abuse? The media inform us that many of the terrorists in Europe first went to Syria to try to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad (whom the U.S. government wants overthrown), but then came home angry after NATO countries started bombing the Islamic State there and in Iraq, with the inevitable civilian casualties. In some cases Syrian nationals sneaked into Europe through Turkey.

So the perpetrators of the next terrorist act are likely to be Islamists with links to or sympathy for people terrorized by the United States and its allies  namely, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. But if that kind of profiling makes sense, wouldnt it make even more sense simply to stop inflicting violence on the Muslim world?

I guess thats too simple for our experts.

Sheldon Richman writes for Center for a Stateless Society.
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 []
Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line have reason to celebrate while out in Las Vegas for the ACM Awards, even before the show takes place. The duo received word that its debut country single, Cruise, has been certified Diamond by the RIAA, making it the first country song to receive the certification.

Diamond certification is awarded to singles and albums that reach ten times Platinum status, meaning they have been sold or streamed ten million times. Streams were added to the calculation for certification earlier this year, making each on-demand audio or video stream equivalent to one track sale. Florida Georgia Lines Cruise remix featuring Nelly has been reported by Nielsen Music as having 7.48 million track sales, while the song has been streamed more than 155,000,000 times, according to Big Machine Records.

By achieving this honor, Florida Georgia Line joins artists such as Elton John, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and Imagine Dragons as the coveted Diamond-certified single holders.

Florida Georgia Line shared the news on social media, thanking fans for their support over the years:

Huge thank you to all of YOU. Its because of yall that Cruise is the first country song EVER to be certified Diamond! Meaning its gone Platinum ten times! This is beyond our wildest dreams and we feel so blessed. #countrymusic#bestfans

Congratulations to Kelley and Hubbard on this huge accomplishment!
After Nizamis counsel pleaded for more time on Sunday, the Appellate Division bench led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha deferred the hearing by a week.

We pleaded for six weeks, the court gave us one week. The matter will be heard after that, Nizamis lawyer S.M. Shahjahan told bdnews24.com after the hearing.

Nizami, 72-year-old president of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party, filed the petition on March 29 for review of the Supreme Court verdict that confirmed his death penalty for the 1971 war crimes.

In January, the apex court rejected Nizamis appeal to overturn the International Crimes Tribunals 2014 verdict.

As the head of the Jamaats student wing Islami Chhatra Sangha in 1971, Nizami commanded the Al-Badr, a militia known for its ruthless mass murders, rape, loot and the killing of Bengali intellectuals in support of Pakistan's campaign to suppress the Bengali freedom struggle.

Review is the last legal recourse for a death-row convict after all other judicial options have been exhausted.

On March 16, the death warrant issued by the tribunal was read out to Nizami after the Supreme Court published the full copy of its verdict on him.

Nizamis case is the sixth of the war crimes cases so far to reach the stage of a review petition after the publication of the full verdict.

--Indo-Asian News Service ksk/vt

( 265 Words)

2016-04-03-12:59:31 (IANS)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday described an all-women IT centre set up by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) here as the glory of Saudi Arabia. "I am meeting those professionals who are now the glory of Saudi Arabia," said Modi in the first engagement of the second and last day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia. "This atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong reply to the world." Modi was welcomed with cheers by the employees as he entered the centre. Some of them took selfies with the prime minister. The centre, opened three years back, initially had 80 people. The number has now grown to over 1,000. Eighty percent of the employees are local Saudi women. It is also the first BPO to be opened by any company in the world in Saudi Arabia and the significance is more so because it is run entirely by women. Over 60 percent of graduates in Saudi Arabia are women. Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C. In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama. This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Saudi kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010. Modi will be accorded a ceremonial welcome on Sunday afternoon at the Royal Court here by King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who will also host a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister. This will be followed by delegation-level talks and the signing of agreements. During the course of Modi's visit, ties between India and Saudi Arabia are expected to be further elevated from the current strategic partnership to a more broad-based one. The prime minister will leave for India late Sunday afternoon. --Indo-Asian News Service ab/vt ( 351 Words) 2016-04-03-13:15:31 (IANS)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday described an all-women IT centre set up by India's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) here as the glory of Saudi Arabia. "I am meeting those professionals who are now the glory of Saudi Arabia, said Modi in the first engagement of the second and last day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia. "This atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong message to the world." Modi said that in todays competitive world we have to unite our strengths, both natural and human, for optimum progress. He said that when women power becomes part of the development journey, it gathers fresh momentum. The prime minister said that the atmosphere he witnessed at the all-women's centre on Sunday appeared to be a harbinger of a positive force for the world. He invited the women IT professionals to visit India, and said their visit would make a huge impact even in India. Modi emphasised the role of technology in governance, and said e-governance, for him, meant easy governance, effective governance, and economic governance. He invited them to see the Narendra Modi App and even share their views on women empowerment in India. Vande Mataram. Matri Devo Bhavah (Salutations to Mother. Mother be the god) wrote the prime minister on the message board at the centre. Earlier, Modi was welcomed with cheers by the employees as he entered the centre. Some of them took selfies with the prime minister. The centre, opened three years back, initially had 80 people. The number has now grown to over 1,000. Eighty percent of the employees are local Saudi women. It is also the first BPO to be opened by any company in the world in Saudi Arabia and the significance is more so because it is run entirely by women. Over 60 percent of graduates in Saudi Arabia are women. Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C. In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama. This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Saudi kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010. The prime minister will leave for India on Sunday evening after talks with Saudi King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and signing of agreements between the two sides. --Indo-Asian News Service ab/vt ( 444 Words) 2016-04-03-17:21:41 (IANS)
Paving the way for a clampdown on militant outfit NSCN(Khaplang), an appeals tribunal has upheld Centre's order terming the group operation in the North East as terrorist organisation. In a detailed order passed by the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Tribunal, the Presiding Officer Najmi Waziri noted that the NSCN(K) has chosen to remain ex parte and unrepresented despite repeated sittings of the tribunal, was a sufficient indication that evidence was unassailable."There is no reason to doubt the evidence. Accordingly, the evidence stands proved and is accepted," the tribunal said. The ruling gives the security agencies sweeping powers to clampdown and criminalise funding, opening offices and abetting secessionist activities by the NSCN(Khaplang).Notably, the NSCN(K) had attacked an Indian army convoy in Manipur on 3 June last year in which 18 troops were killed. In a deadly reprisal five days later, Indian army commandos destroyed two NSCN(K) camps across the India-Myanmar border and killed more that 50 militants a cross-border strike. Myanmar, whose territory was being used by the insurgent group, chose to keep quite over the Indian army operation.Keen to bring all NSCN factions to the negotiating table despite attack, the Indian government said it was open to talks with Khaplang faction, but drew a blank. Instead, the group continued with its subversive activities, prompting government to declare it a terrorist organisation on 8 November.The Government had signed ceasefire earlier this year with the various factions of National Socialist Council of Nagaland. However, the Khaplang group unilaterally abrogated the ceasefire and resumed attacks on Indian forces. In August, the Government bought peace with major faction of NSCN(Isak-Muivah) by signing a historic peace accord signed with Isak Chishi Swu, the Chairman, and Thuingaleng Muivah.Given the warming up of India's relations with Myanmar, which has now a civilian government in place, the things would become more difficult for a largely Myanmar-based leadership of NSCN(K) as Naypyidaw is unlikely extend hospitality to the outfit declared terrorist in India. A Ministry of Home Affairs official said the insurgency in the North East seems to be on downslide, especially after a stern message sent to all group by the daring commando operation on Myanmar border, and also because NSCN(IM) entered into a peace pact with the Government.MORE UNI PRA CJ PR1015 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0384-665249.Xml
The new Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP),which was announced by the Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar whileinaugurating 9th edition of Defence Expo at Naqueri-Quitol in SouthGoa on March 28 last, has been hailed by defence equipment manufacturers.The industry leaders have welcomed the new policy which has amongother things a category called Indian-designed developed andmanufactured (IDDM) which is aimed at increasing indigenisation ofdefence manufacturing. However, Mr Parrikar had said that the policy was not a perfectdocument and would be examined after six months. "The policy willbe examined after six months and we are open for suggestion toimprove" Speaking to UNI, Ashok Atluri, Managing Director, Zen Technologies,said the new DPP is the biggest thing which has ever happened in thehistory of government procurement. The DPP will help companies likeZen Technologies. Many companies will come up with three years ofinvestment as now they would be assured of orders.'' Mr Zen, whose company provides simulation technology basedtraining solution, said "IP has to be in the country. If wecollaborate with foreign companies, we get certain portion of incomeand rest goes to the major company. But if we invest on researchand development (R&D) and develop our own products, we can get lotof orders.'' However, Mr Atluri said R&D was a culture and difficult for atrading company to become an R&D company. "It is not possible for trading company to become R&D companyover night but the companies which are already in the R&D will benefit tremendously from the policy. Now the companies will not be encouraged to partner with foreign companies but would start their ownR&D. Earlier, we were not manufacturing but now focus would be onmanufacturing. It is a brave step which would change the face ofIndian defence production sector,'' he opined. Shekhar Saredssai, whose company Kaneco Pvt Limited hasmanufactured a sonar dome, which has been designed by R&D Engineers,at DRDO Laboratory based in Pune, for Naval warships, said IDDM was aflagship clause of the new DPP because it encouraged local designand development which was never a priority. " If we are looking at Make In India in defence, we cannotremain just nut bolt assembler. If defence capability is to beimproved, we must have design, domain knowledge and IP. Now the governmentwill be supporting the companies which wish to manufacture. Earlier,we would design and develop something which would go into tendering. and all of a suddensomebody would come and offer the same kind of product at cheaperrates and we would lose. This happened again and again,but nowwe think the scenario will change,'' he told UNI. Mr Sardessai, who is also the Chairman of Goa chapter of Confederationof Indian Industries(CII) said through IDDM category governmentwould be extending support to small and medium scale industries. "The new DPP has laid great emphasis on small and mediumenterprises (SME) which have contributed to the defence sectoracross the world. The new policy acknowledges the role of SME,'' Sunil Raina, Managing Director, Rockwell Collins India, whichoffers communications and aviation electronics solutions, alsoechoed the same sentiment saying major change in the DPP was IDDMwhich was more focused towards indigenous design. ''We already have thought process going forward and we areworking towards this. We will see how we fit into the model,'' saidMr Raina. Last amendment in the Defence Procurement Policy (DPP) was madein 2013. UNI AKM SM CJ -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-665673.Xml
The new Pakistani woman is changing the face of the country and her status is undergoing a drastic makeover, says 24-year-old author Kanza Javed, who recently released her much acclaimed book, "Ashes, Wine and Dust" in the capital. Set in Lahore and Washington DC, the book traces the three stages in the life of the protagonist, Mariam Ameen, and it paints a matriarchal society. "The new Pakistani women bring new culture for us, and the position of women is changing for the better. Women are doing better than men in various fields like NGOs and other professions. It was also a woman who brought us our first Oscar," Javed told IANS in an interview. The author shot into the limelight after her book was nominated for the coveted Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. She has the distinction of being the youngest and the first Pakistani nominee for the award. Javed made headlines last October for releasing her debut book over Skype in India during the Kumaon Literary festival after failing to get a visa. Now, after releasing her book in Delhi for the second time, she harboured no qualms and asserted that visa hiccups are normal, given the strain between the two countries. "Why create a fuss about it?. It's normal as there is tension between the countries. I released the book in Delhi now after releasing it over Skype at Kumaon lit fest; so I had two releases in India," the author said. The book, published by Tara India Research Press, explicates how Lahore has changed from a city of old-worldly charm to a modern and rapidly evolving one. Javed said that the book is her tribute to the city and its changing life and people. "In the book, there are two Lahores I am familiar with. The first one where my parents and grandparents lived and the other, the new city, which is more cosmopolitan. They are making bridges, but it doesn't connect with you any more. It's not a cultural place any more. It's a frightening place to many," she added. She drew inspiration for her strong women characters from her family, Javed confessed. "My family is a matriarchal one. In my novel, there's a daadi, who, even without a job, has a strong sense of identity. There is a maid who hits her husband and leaves him to stay with her mother," she said, adding that her protagonist Mariam challenges the tradition and norms of a patriarchal society. The author said that she touches upon the human lives after violence, as she deliberately avoids dwelling into the politics of violence. "I don't talk about politics. I talk about the lives of the people who are affected by violence. In my book, I look at the life of a woman whose husband was killed in a blast. "You can't separate a person from politics in Pakistan. In Pakistan, everybody is a politician.. Everybody talks about it all the time. It becomes dull," Javed reasoned. Javed is being touted as one of the promising young writers in Pakistan after the book received rave reviews. For her, the intensity of the book comes from her life experiences. "I am often asked why it's a tragic book. As a child, I was displaced from social scenes and I used to interact more with maids, tailors and nannies who had intense stories. Then, in the US, I encountered the frightening stories of South Asian immigrants. I am made up of all the stories," she said. The author, who started writing the novel at the age of 17, also shruged off the age factor. "It's a preconceived notion that a teenager should indulge in shopping and dating only. I don't think age has to do with anything. I spent my teenage years reading and writing books," said Javed, who presents the idea of a home as a free-flowing concept in her book. It's the memories of Lahore that inspires her writing. "When I was in the US, I was scared that Lahore will fade away from memory. I was scared of what I will write if I forget Lahore, if I don't hear the rickshaws, if I don't smell chai, I will forget them. Who am I without all this?" Javed asked. The author, who has many friends and fans in India, believes that love will blur the differences between the two countries. "I felt at home when I crossed the border. People ask me how they can come to Lahore. They don't care about the politics at all," says Javed, who is planning her next book on depression as it's becoming a worrying trend. (Preetha Nair can be reached at preetha.n@ians.in) --Indo-Asian News Service pn/vm ( 804 Words) 2016-04-03-12:27:30 (IANS)
National Investigation Agency (NIA) Inspector General Sanjeev Kumar Singh on Sunday termed the attack on one of its officer, Mohammad Tanzil, as a 'planned' one. "One of our very brave officers, Mohammad Tanzil, had gone to his home to attend a function. Last night when he was coming out from that function, a planned attack took place on him. He was fired upon and in the firing, he was killed. His wife also got injured. She is getting treatment in the hospital," Singh told the media here. Singh said Tanzil was an assistant commandant with the Border Security Force and was currently on deputation with the NIA. "He was with us since last six and a half years. Right now, the investigation is on. The Uttar Pradesh police, Uttar Pradesh STF, ATS, the teams of NIA, the DIG of NIA from Lucknow and his team, a team from Delhi are there on the spot and they are doing the enquiry," he added. Tanzil, a Deputy Superintendent of Police, was returning home with his wife after attending a wedding function late Saturday night when assailants on motor bikes shot the couple from close range near Sahaspur town. Tanzil was pronounced dead on arrival at a medical facility in Moradabad, while his wife Farzana is battling for her life at Fortis Hospital in Noida. A medical report from the hospital said that doctors are providing the best medical treatment to Farzana. (ANI)
India has decided to lodge its strong protest with China, days after Beijing yet again scuttled New Delhi's move to put Maulana Masood Azhar of Jaish-e-Mohammad in sanctions list of the United Nations by putting it on 'technical hold'. This is for the second time in the past five years that China has stonewalled India's efforts to put Pak based terror mastermind on the 1267 sanctions list of the UN security council. China had also scuttled a similar move by New Delhi in case of the 26/11 mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi a year ago. Five years ago, Beijing had placed on 'technical hold,' India's request to name Masood Azhar and Abdur Rehman Makki and Azam Cheema of Lashkar on the sanctions list. "We will certainly lodge our strong protest with China. Beijing is trying to shield terror masterminds citing technical reasons at a time when the entire international community is united against terrorists," said an official of the External Affairs Ministry. The Indian side is set to convey its anguish on the issue as and when the special representatives of the two countries meet in the near future, sources in the MEA said. India also came out with a strongly worded statement on the issue. "We are disappointed that a technical hold has been put on India's application to designate terror leader Mohamad Masood Azhar in the UN Security Council Committee established under UNSCR 1267/1989/2253," the MEA said. "We find it incomprehensible that while the Pakistan based JeM was listed in UN Security Council Committee established under UNSCR 1267/1989/2253 as far back as 2001 for its well known terror activities and links to the Al Qaeda, the designation of the group's main leader, financier and motivator has been put on a technical hold," the statement said. It said that the recent terror attack in Pathankot on January 2, has shown that India continues to bear the dangerous consequences of not listing Masood Azhar. The UNSCR 1267 regime is an important building block of the UN global counter terrorism strategy that is aimed protecting all member states and their citizens from the activities of terror groups such as JeM and its leader Mohamad Masood Azhar. On February 26, India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Syed Akbaruddin wrote to the Chair of the 1267 Committee, who is the PR of New Zealand, asking for Masood Azhar to be listed by the 1267 Committee. He had pointed out that it is incomprehensible that while the Jaish-e-Mohammad was listed way back in 2001 as a terrorist organisation, the leader of this organisation Maulana Masood Azhar continues to remain outside the purview of the 1267 Committee and remains active in terror activities, directed towards India. The Permanent Representative also pointed out that Pathankot airbase attack has underscored the urgency of curbing the activities of Jaish-e-Mohammad and the danger that countries in South Asia continue to face, if only half measures are taken against such terror groups. The request had been submitted to the Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED), which was examine it from a technical point of view. After getting cleared by the CTED, the request reached to the full 1267 Committee, which consists of all 15 members of the UN Security Council where the members take a political call. Because the 1267 committee officially takes decisions by consensus, the five permanent members can exercise their veto by placing a proposal on 'technical hold', which delays the case for three months before it can come back before the committee. China had put the Indian request to question Pakistan on the release of 26/11 mastermind on 'technical hold', arguing that New Delhi has not provided sufficient information in support of the case. After Lakhvi was released from Adiala prison on April 10 last year, following Lahore High Court's dismissal of his detainment order, India's then Permanent Representative to the UN, Asoke Mukerji, had written to the chairman of 1267 committee, seeking an investigation into who had paid, or stood guarantee for, Lakhvi's bail, as he was on the sanctions list and has no access to funds. The issue could not be settled as the Chinese Permanent Representative to the UN raised technical points. UNI MK CJ SS -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0090-665701.Xml
The trial run of cargo vehicle on Kolkata-Dhaka-Agartala route under the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) sub-regional framework could not be made successful because of poor road condition yesterday, a state government official said today. Designated carrier of BBIN DHL Global dispatched a consignment of footwear and covered a distance of 640 km road in November last to test road conditions, border customs status and other procedures, but in test run carried out yesterday could not yield satisfactory result. "The BBIN road has reduced the road distance from 1550 km between Kolkata and Agartala through the chicken's neck of North Bengal via Dhaka, however, the road condition was found bad," official said quoting DHL Global officials. According to a report, in the trial many drawbacks were detected and which required improvements. The trial run tried to test the systems of prior electronic permission and GPS tracking feature of vehicle undertaking cross-border journey as well as infrastructure conditions and customs procedures. "As visa is still a problem, alternative drivers in India and Bangladesh parts can drive the vehicle up to border points," the officials said adding as a part of suggestions to make the cargo movement smoother.UNI BB KK CJ NS1240 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0212-665718.Xml
With an aim to exchange ideas on trade, commerce, hydro-power and tourism, a delegation from Bhutan's Royal Institute for Governance and Strategic Studies (RIGSS) recently attended an interactive meet in Guwahati. The 35-member visiting delegation of senior policy makers from Bhutan, led by Chewang Rinzin, Dy Chamberlain to the King of Bhutan and Tashi Wangyal, Member of Parliament from Bhutan, interacted with a select crowd at the Asian Confluence Center, comprising senior policy makers, artists, activists, media and heads of various institutions. "Given the close ties of friendship between the Bhutan and India, we thought it is important to get to know the northeast India state better to look forward for better collaboration, interaction. So, that the basic objective of this tour," said Rinzin. A presentation was also made on the upcoming connectivity projects under the auspices of Bhutan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal to forge institutional linkages to forge a "Third Space" that can lead to increased people-to-people contacts. A pan Northeast India delegation will visit Bhutan next month to discuss tourism development with stakeholders and policy makers in Bhutan. "Entrepreneur should go to Bhutan and explore it. Bhutan is now more develop in per capita terms in India much more than Assam. There is lot of opportunity, they have a good system. It's a democratic monarchy and corruption free. There is lots of opportunity entrepreneurship even they should come here and explore it," said Manoj Das, Director, IIE, Indian institute of Entrepreneur. India shares a 699-km-long border with Bhutan especially through the northeast region, and both governments have been working consistently to develop better infrastructure and connectivity so as to facilitate trade and development. The two sides are keen to further strengthen trade relations and explore the maximum potential to expand bilateral trade. (ANI)
Manipur Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh is expected to leave for Delhi on Monday morning to hold a crucial meeting with the Congress president Sonia Gandhi on the cabinet reshuffle demand. He would be accompanied by the new state unit Congress president, T.N. Haokip, and Deputy Chief Minister Gaikhangam. Since they are understood to have finalised the list of new ministers to be inducted, all they have to do is to get approval for it from Sonia Gandhi. Dissidents expect the swearing-in ceremony to be held on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the 10 ministers, expected to be dropped, are fighting a last-ditch battle, saying that as 13 dissident legislators have joined them, their camp has 23 Congress legislature party members. "Reshuffle is the prerogative of a chief minister and nobody should question or interfere with it," said Manipur Pradesh Congress Committee president Haokip. He has been one of the prominent dissidents who have sought cabinet reshuffle. Dissidents, meanwhile, held a victory dinner on Saturday night to celebrate the appointment of Haokip, the new party president. All the 25 dissidents were present at the dinner. Some legislators contemptuously brushed aside the ministers' claim that there are 23 members in their camp. "All the MLAs are intact with us. We know that all of us cannot become ministers. It was agreed that first-timers would be made ministers and those former ministers will make room for them," said one of the legislators on Sunday. In the 60-member House, the Congress has 48 legislators although it won just 42 seats in the last elections. Six legislators from other parties joined the party later. Out of the Congress legislature party members, as many as 25 are demanding reshuffle. --Indo-Asian News Service il/sd/vt ( 296 Words) 2016-04-03-13:07:02 (IANS)
With Mehbooba Mufti set to take oath as the first woman Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir on April 4, former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah on Sunday reignited the nationalism debate, saying he would look forward to PDP MLAs saying 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai'. "I look forward to seeing all members of the PDP-BJP alliance say this (Bharat Mata Ki Jai) as soon as they take their oath tomorrow," Omar said in a tweet. Earlier, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had said at a function in Nagpur, "It makes me wonder where are we heading? Why should I feel ashamed of saying "Bharat Mata ki Jai" in my own country. There is still a dispute over saying 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' and those opposed to say it, should not have any right to stay in India. Those living here should say 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai'." Shiv Sena, too had earlier asked whether Mehbooba Mufti would say 'Bharat Mata ki jai' in honour of displaced Kashmiri Pandits. "The most important thing is that Mehbooba Mufti and the BJP were never comfortable together. Mehbooba bai's anti-national statements, her association with the separatists, have always remained controversial. Bai sahib (Mehbooba) has been sympathetic towards those raising anti-national slogans in Kashmir," the Saamna article said. "Therefore, BJP would be happy that she is set to become the chief minister with their support, but the nation is worried...These days a debate is going on in the nation over nationalism. So, will Mehbooba Mufti say 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai'? Such questions are being asked," it added. The PDP-BJP alliance was formed after an almost two-month deadlock following chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's death on January 7. Mehbooba Mufti will be sworn in on April 4 at 11 a.m. She will be the 13th Chief Minister of the state. State Governor N.N. Vohra has issued invitation to her to form the new government. The swearing in ceremony will take place at Raj Bhawan in Jammu. Union Ministers Venkaiah Naidu and Jitendra Singh will attend the swearing-in ceremony tomorrow. (ANI)
Uttar Pradesh Police on Sunday said that they would nab the killers of National Investigation Agency (NIA) Deputy Superintendent of Police Mohammad Tanzil soon. The Additional Director General (ADG) of police (Law and Order) Daljeet Chowdhary told ANI that the post-mortem of Tanzil is underway. "The incident took place around 2a.m. last night when the NIA officer was returning to his residence after attending a wedding party. On his way back, at spot where the road was in bad condition he slowed his car and the attackers attacked and killed him. His wife is injured. However, both of his children are fine." "We have not yet identified the attackers. Both had covered their faces and were on a speeding bike. The inquest report has been filed and post-mortem is underway, after which things will become clear. The forensic scientists are inspecting all aspects carefully and collecting all evidences. Senior officers of Special Task Force (STF) and Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) will reach the crime spot soon. We are hopeful that we will find the culprit soon," he added. (ANI)
Rather than let these non-competition articles, poems and short stories fade away, I started to include some in the annual anthology.

In those early days the copyright rules for material on blogs were pretty fuzzy but no one seemed to object to their material being re-published, they were, after all, seeking the widest coverage.

This mostly included articles specifically written for the blog but there was also a sprinkling of material that Keith had picked up from other blogs and media and re-published, a practise he continues to this day.

AFTER the first couple of Crocodile Prize anthologies in 2011 and 2012 I began to notice that there was some very fine and incisive writing appearing on PNG Attitude that hadnt been entered in the literary competition.

It surprised a few people who picked up on it. Martyn Namorong was a prime source and when he realised what I was doing he was happy to let it continue.

At the moment the entries to the Crocodile Prize competition for 2016 seem pretty patchy. So far Ive only received a couple of small batches of entries for consideration and inclusion in the 2016 anthology.

As you might appreciate, I only select the best stuff for the anthology, so a lot of what comes in, maybe 95%, gets discarded.

In this sense I suspect that the 2016 anthology will be made up of mostly non-competition material pulled off PNG Attitude.

With that the case, and mindful that Keith plans to keep running the blog for a while yet, Ive decided to keep publishing the anthology until he calls it a day. And Ill continue using whatever sources are available.

At some stage I might also consider an anthology of the best writing from the Val Rivers Peace and Harmony Awards  depending on Vals okay.

So what does this mean for PNG Attitude contributors?

Well, if youve got something you think is pretty good, be it a poem, short story or essay, but which you havent entered in the Crocodile Prize competition, theres a good chance it might appear in the anthology.

PNG Attitude thrives on good writing from Papua New Guinean contributors, those I refer to as the PNG Attitude family in the upcoming history of the blog. There will be lots of good Papua New Guinean writing in there too by the way.

You wont get a prize for appearing in the anthology but youll have the satisfaction of seeing your work in a hardcopy book.

That must be worth the effort I reckon.
The stage is set for first phase polling for Assam Assembly election tomorrow, when over 95 lakh voters will decide the fate of 539 candidates, including 43 females, in 65 constituencies spread across eastern, northern and southern parts of the state. Polling will be conducted in 12,190 polling stations, with total electoral strength of 9511732 voters from 0700 hours to 1600 hours under tight security arrangements. ADGP SN Singh, who is the security nodal officer for state polls, said there would be fixed pickets at all polling stations, and central forces will be deployed to the extend possible. There would also be sectoral and zonal pickets, he added. Mr Singh said there was no specific threat in any of the poll bound constituency, adding that the runup to the polls has also been peaceful. Among the important candidates whose fates will be sealed in EVMs tomorrow are the two chief ministerial candidates in Assam polls, including incumbent Tarun Gogoi. While the Congress is seeking a fourth straight term in the state under Mr Gogoi, the BJP is leading an alliance of regional parties Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and Bodoland People's Front (BPF), under Union minister Sarbananda Sonowal as the chief ministerial candidate.Mr Gogoi will be seeking to retain Titabor constituency for a fourth term, while Mr Sonowal is contesting for the maiden time from Majuli, both in Jorhat district.AGP president Atul Bora's Bokakhat constituency will also go to the polls in the first phase. While the contest in northern and eastern Assam would be mostly be confined between Congress and BJP-led alliance, in southern parts the fight would be a three-cornered between Congress, BJP and AIUDF. Among other heavyweight candidates in the first phase are former Union minister Paban Singh Ghatowar of Congress (Moran), state Cabinet minister Gautam Roy of Congress (Katlichera), former BJP state president Ranjit Dutta (Behali), former AGP president Brindabon Goswami (Tezpur), AICC general secretaries Bhupen Bora (Bihpuria) and Rana Goswami (Jorhat), state Cabinet minister Khorsingh Engti (Howraghat).As many as 280 Independents are contesting the first phase polls, while party-wise, ruling Congress has fielded candidates in all 65 constituencies, followed by BJP in 54 and All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) in 27 seats. UNI SG KK ADG NS1347 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0212-665748.Xml
Following deaths of two students in two different road accidents in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Lt Governor of the UT, Lt Gen (Retd.) A K Singh has directed the DGP, to take rigorous action against the erringdrivers and also to enforce traffic rules against high speed anddangerous driving. Ritu Kumari, D/o Raj Kumar, a girl student of Mahatma GandhiGovernment College, Mayabunder, North Andaman had died in a roadaccident at Sippighat on 26, March 2016 while Master Saran, a sevenyear old student of Khalsa Public School, succumbed to his injuries ina road accident at Naya Gaon on 31, March 2016. The Lt Governor Andaman and Nicobar Islands has also expressed hisdeep condolences over the sudden and untimely demise of these twostudents.Meanwhile, the civil society is demanding stringent action againstprivate bus drivers and total safety for public on road. Twocondolence rallies were also organized to press these demandsrecently.UNI SKR KK CJ AS1420 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0212-665792.Xml
The Special Task Force of the Kolkata Police has arrested two dreaded Maoists who were close to Kishenji, the slain Naxal bigwig. Joint Commissioner of Police Vishal Garg said both were picked up from Brigade Parade grounds in central Kolkata yesterday and will be produced in court today. Following the tip-off from sources the Special Task Force of the Kolkata police arrested Mansaram Hembram alias Bikash and his wife Tara. One small firearm, live ammunition, two magazines and Maoist literature were also recovered with their possession. Bikash, who is being considered a prize catch, was the secretary of the state military commission of the Maoists and was in charge of the militant operations of the Maoists in West Bengal." Bikash was said to be behind many attacks like that on the camp of Eastern Frontier Rifles (EFR) in Silda in which 24 paramilitary jawans were killed. He had also declared that the Maoists wanted to assassinate then chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. The other arrested Maoist is Tara, a woman squad leader who abducted a police officer in 2009. The officer was released by Kishenji after days of captivity. In October 2009, the Maoists had kidnapped the then officer-in-charge of Sankrail police station Atindra Nath Dutta after killing two of his colleagues. The entire armory of the police station was looted.UNI.KDG KK CJ AS1506 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0212-665881.Xml
Singh told ANI that the government understood their concern and stands by them in this hour of pain.

"I would like to assure the students and people of Jammu and Kashmir that the government feels the pain of the residents of the state and is taking due cognisance of the case," Singh said.

"Today, I spoke to Governor N.N. Vohra and the Director General of Police in the same regard. All in all I would like to say that students of NIT should not get tensed and or feel neglected," he added.

Singh further said that the academy will start functioning once normalcy is restored in the state, as the Centre does not want any sort of communal tension to grip the campus.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had earlier assured that students of Srinagar's NIT would be protected.

Tension prevailed in the NIT after India lost the World T20 semi-final to the West Indies on Thursday night.

Some engineering students from outside the state claimed Kashmiri students had chanted anti-India slogans and burst firecrackers after India's loss.

To control the situation, officials closed the institute's entrance and did not allow anyone to enter.

The police had to be called in after efforts by the NIT officials to control the situation and disperse the crowd failed. The police baton charged the protestors and fired teargas to bring the situation under control. (ANI)
Working president of the National Conference (NC) Omar Abdullah today said that he was looking forward to see all members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance raising the slogans of " Bharat Mata Ki Jai" tomorrow when Mehbooba Mufti will take oath as Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Former Chief Minister Mr Abdullah was invited by Ms Mehbooba to attend the oath taking ceremony at Jammu. Taking micro blogging site Twitter he said " I look forward to seeing all the members of the PDP-BJP alliance say this as soon as they take their oath tomorrow". He was reacting to a tweet which reads that "If you want to live in this country then you have to say Bharat Mata ki Jai, otherwise you have no right to live here-CM Devendra Fadnavis". However, Mr Abdullah's tweet got mixed raction and one of them said " Don't we all refer to "kashmir" as "mauj" so is Bharat mata" while another asked him " first you tell, will you say or not". Another said "Bharat Mata ki jai saying is forbidden in Islam also in Hinduism". Besides Ms Mehbooba and Dr Nirmal Singh of BJP other ministers from the coalition government will take oath tomorrow in the winter capital, Jammu. Jammu and Kashmir is under Governor's rule since January 8, a day after Mufti Mohammad Sayeed breathed his last in AIIMS, New Delhi. It took about three months to PDP and BJP to iron out their differences to start the 'second inning' in the state.UNI BAS QAB ADG NS1635 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-665944.Xml
Body of a person, missing for the past two weeks, was recovered in the central Kashmir district of Ganderbal, official sources said here today. They said panic gripped in Sheikh Zoo area in Ganderbal when a body was found by some people in river Jehlum. The body was handed over to police, they said adding the deceased was later identified as Mohammad Altaf Sofi, a resident of Peerbagh uptown, Srinagar who was missing since March 21. The cause of his death was not known, they said adding, the body of the deceased was handed over to his legal heirs for last rites. UNI BAS QAB ADG NS1630 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-665965.Xml
Several purchasers turned up at the National Level Handloom Expo at the Purbasha ground where handloom products created by master weavers show cast their products. The fifteen days National Handloom Expo- 2016 that concluded here was held for the eighteenth time. Altogether some 60 stalls were opened where seven state including Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and home state Tripura have come together to showcase their creative crafts. Organised jointly by Development Commission for Handlooms, under Ministry of Textiles and Department of Handlooms, Handicraft and Sericulture of Government of Tripura where inimitable silk handloom items are being sold by the weavers, those who produce these products. Beside handlooms, handicraft items, ornaments and artificial decorative flowers were also on display. According to the organisers the main aim of this expo is to improve and facilitate the entrepreneurs to come together, create awareness, promote their products and exchange designs and skills through interaction in order to face uneven competition with the power loom industry. Moreover, the expo would help weavers from different states to explore the design and products of their neighbouring states. Again the producers also get best price of their products as they sell their products directly to the sellers. Handlooms products from different state of India are the main attraction as the customers generally do not get them here. "After taking training now some 20 people are engaged in weaving and we got this scope from the government to sell products which sold quite well," said Hiranmala Debbarma, Handloom Weaver from Tripura. According to the participants particularly those from outside, Tripura is one of the most peaceful state where the sale is very good and hence they wish to come here every time. The purchases expressed that the expo being organized is an opportunity for them to get the best products at their doorstep and at reasonable price and full of variety which is generally not a usual phenomenon in this state. "Tripura is a small state and this type of fair's where we find participants from outside here we get good products and local beautiful handloom products are also available here. It is not necessary that we are buying everything but also enjoying seeing them. I have bought few bamboo handicraft items and exploring the saris and other products. Till not bought anything but finding them, there is more time," said Nitya Deb Roy, a customer. Moreover, the huge gathering of people in the expo is a symbol of the well to do socio-economic condition of the people of the state. Besides, the unique collection of handloom the purchaser also got an opportunity to witness the entire process of handloom production and weaving of cloths. According to an estimate there are around 1.4 lakh handloom weavers in Tripura out of the total 76 lakh in India. (ANI)
Chairman of the Hurriyat Conference (HC) Mirwaiz Moulvi Omar Farooq has been formally invited by the Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Iyad bin Amin Madani to attend the 13th Summit to be held in Istanbul, Turkey from April 10 to 15, 2016. The OIC summit is held every three years, a spokesman of the amalgam said. However, Mirwaiz cannot attend summit as has not been issued the passport. Moreover he was unable to represent the HC in the last summit held in Cairo, Egypt due to the unavailability of his travel documents. Thanking the OIC and its Secretary General, Iyad bin Amin Madani for inviting him to the summit, Chairman said being an important forum of the Islamic countries, and OIC has the responsibility to play a role in helping the Islamic world get rid of the problems confronting it. Stressing that the Islamic world is facing with serious problems in places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Afghanistan and Kashmir and every day Muslims are being eliminated mercilessly while the menace of terrorism at the international level is being connected to Islam with a nefarious design, the Mirwaiz said. OIC member countries need to devise policies with vision and foresightedness to deal with these issues besides putting in efforts to bring Muslim countries closer. Thanking the OIC for its political and diplomatic support to the people of Jammu Kashmir, who have been struggling for their right to self-determination, the APHC Chairman said "peace and stability of entire South Asia was connected to the resolution of Kashmir Issue and the efforts of OIC and other International Organisations could play a positive role in the resolution of this issue." Expressing hope that during the 13th OIC Summit, the representatives of its member countries would lay emphasis India and Pakistan leadership to resolve Kashmir Issue as per the wishes and aspirations of the people of Jammu Kashmir, the Mirwaiz urged them to use their influence with both the countries to resolve the vexed issue. Meanwhile, a spokesman of the HC has demanded Government of India to provide travel documents to Mirwaiz so that he would be able to travel to Istanbul, and attend the Summit and other International Conferences.UNI BAS PS RJ VN1807 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-666021.Xml
A total of 21 bullets were pumped into the body of National Investigation Agency (NIA) Deputy Superintendent of Police Mohammad Tanzil, who was shot dead by unidentified assailants under Syohra Police Station area in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district last night. "A total of 21 bullets were pumped into the body, of which 12 have been recovered, nine pierced through the body, while three bullets missed the target leaving just scratch marks on the body," said Dr. N.K. Sharma, a medical officer at the Moradabad Jail, who was present during the post-mortem. "It cannot be said with certainty, but the bullets were of 9-bore. Two types of bullets were found, which point to use of two guns," he added. Moradabad Superintendent of Police (Rural) Sujata Singh told ANI that the assailants appeared to be professional killers as 9-bore bullets are either used by the police or other security personnel. After the post-mortem, the body of the NIA officer has been handed over to his kin, which will be cremated in Delhi. The police are trying to identify the assailants against whom a case has been registered at the Syohra Police Station and find out the motive behind the killing. Mohammad Tanzil was on his way back from the marriage ceremony of his niece, along with his wife and two children, when two armed bike-borne assailants shot at him and his wife. The NIA officer died on the spot, while his wife was rushed to Fortis Hospital in Noida where her condition is said to be critical. The police have started its probe to ascertain the exact reason behind the attack. NIA IG Sanjiv Kumar Singh, however, said Mohd Tanzil was killed in a planned attack, adding that the U.P. Police, STF and ATS are investigating the matter. (ANI)
: Andhra Pradesh Health Minister K Srinivas said that a cancer hospital is coming up in the city at a cost of Rs ten crore and steps were taken to improve the conditions in Primary Health Centres (PHCs) in the State.Talking to newspersons here today, the minister said the cancer hospital is being set-up here with the association of NATCO. The construction of the hospital would be completed by December 2016, he said, adding, cancer hospitals would also be constructed at Visakhapatnam, Nellore and Kurnool and VIMS in Visakhapatnam would be inaugurated on April 11. Mr.Srinivas said a medical equipment manufacturing plant 'Medi Tech' was being established in Visakhapatnam at a cost of Rs.225 crore. The minister said as part of improving the PHCs, Rs.101 crore had been released. So far 800 vacant posts of doctors had been filled-up and 500 more would be appointed soon. The mortality rate of mother and child could be reduced considerably, he claimed.UNI DP KVV ADB 1830 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-666226.Xml
POPLAR RIDGE  With the site of a historic Quaker home in Poplar Ridge having been demolished last December, Ledyard Town Historian Judy Furness and various community members met Saturday to discuss their plans for items salvaged from the demolition.

Since the demolition of the 216-year-old house, the community has decided to reach out to various museums around the area that may want to preserve the recovered 18th century artifacts. The remains of the house  timbers, beams, doors, and other smaller items like windows and handmade, wrought iron nails  are currently being stored in a barn in Scipio. Everything was made in the 1790s.

The building had been deteriorating and vacant for 35 years. It was finally demolished by Cornell University, its owner of 68 years, due to safety concerns. The house had stood on 450 acres of land occupied by the Cornell-operated Musgrave Research Farm, where soil and field crops are studied.

Benjamin Howland, the house's former resident, is credited with introducing the Quaker denomination to the area. A plaque marking the structure's history has been installed at its foundation.

At Saturday's meeting, community members agreed to form a committee to take inventory of all the salvaged items and decide what to do with the aging timber that dates back to the 18th century.

Since nobody owns the house, the community has to come together to decide what to do with the materials.
Bihar Governor Ramnath Kobind today said the state government had taken a historic step by enforcing a complete ban on the sale of country made liquor in the rural belt of the state from April 1. Inaugurating the fourth national human rights conference here, Mr. Kobind said the government`s decision to enforce a complete ban on sale the of liquor of all types, including IMFL, in a phased manner had been "well received" by other states too. He said that MPs, MLAs, MLCs and representatives of Panchayati Raj institutions should own their share of responsibility for the success of prohibition in the state. He also exhorted the people to play their role effectively for strict enforcement of prohibition. Speaking on human rights, the governor said that awareness should be created among the masses about human rights as the issue was related to very existence of human kind. He said that human rights could not be protected unless people rose above their selfish motives. Former CM Jagannath Mishra, while applauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said the PM`s emphasis on inclusive growth had been appreciated globally and it had improved the country`s stature in the world community. He said that Mr Modi was making concerted efforts for giving a new identity to the nation. UNI XC DH PL PL RJ BL1857 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-666222.Xml
Leader of the Opposition in Tripura Assembly Sudip Roy Barman today criticised the decision of Central leadership of Congress regarding electoral alliance with CPI-M in West Bengal. He said, "We have been opposing the move since the beginning and it will in no way help the party to achieve anything either in West Bengal or in other states. Congress always fought against Left parties for their anti-national and anti-development stands. Unfortunately, Congress came closer to CPI-M, anticipating political gain." He said this understanding in West Bengal with Leftists was not accepted by the party leaders, workers and supporters in Left-ruled state of Tripura and added that "Alliance with the CPM is totally against the Congress ideology. Being a Congressman, I cannot accept alliance with the CPI-M at any level. Referring to Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi sharing dais with the Left leaders of West Bengal, Mr Roy Barman said they never ever dreamt to witness such a tragic day. "Truly speaking, we were not at all prepared to witness Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi sharing dais with the Marxist leaders. We cannot accept the closeness of these two parties," he added. The coalition of these two opposite ideological political parties would leave a big impact in Tripura where the party is fighting against the CPI-M after creation of the state in 1972. Also, this development will change the political scenario in the state, he observed.UNI BB KK RJ AS1829 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0212-666062.Xml
The condition of Bhartiya Janata Yuva Morcha's (BJYM) Bijapur district president Murli Krishna Naidu, who was shot at by suspected Naxals at Bhairamgarh in Chhattisgarh's insurgency-affected Bijapur district has been stated to be "very critical." According to the Ramkrishna Care Hospital sources here, Mr Naidu, who was hit with three bullets in the stomach and shoulder late last evening, underwent a major surgery early today after he was airlifted here from Jagdalpur in a critical condition. Presently, he is under observation at the intensive care unit (ICU). The 27-year-old BJP youth wing leader, a close associate of Chhattisgarh Forest Minister Mahesh Gagda, was attacked with axe and fired upon by a group of 8-10 Naxals when he was offering prayer at a Durga temple along with a couple of friends in his home town Bhairamgarh block headquarters. Mr Gagda and other senior leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party visited Mr Naidu at the hospital. No one was arrested in connection with the incident so far. Meanwhile, Bijapur District Congress General Secretary Ajay Singh has demanded a high-level inquiry into the incident suspecting the involvement of some other elements other than Naxals in the brutal attack on Mr Naidu as BJYM leader was never in the hit list of the rebels. He claimed that this is the first suspected case of Naxal attack on a political party leader in the Bhairamgarh block headquarters in last 16 years.UNI SS PS PY RJ RAI1948 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0044-666337.Xml
Campaign for second phase polling in Assam has picked up with only a week left for voting day on April 11 next. Tripura CM Manik Sarkar is on a tour of the state to campaign for CPI(M), while Prime Minister Narendra Modi will return later this week to woo voters for BJP-led alliance as will Sonia Gandhi and Rahul on behalf of the Congress. Sarkar reached Guwahati yesterday and left for Bijni in western Assam by train last night, unlike taking the aerial route as done by other political leaders. He addressed rallies at Bijni and Sorbhog today, while he will be addressing two more tomorrow, traveling by road from one venue to another. For BJP, Mr Modi will once again lead the campaign for second phase also, after visiting the state for two days during campaign for the first phase. The PM is scheduled to visit the state on April 8 next. The Congress campaign will also be once again led by party national president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi. Mr Gandhi will be visiting the state tomorrow while Ms Gandhi Sonia will tour on April 7 next. Polling in 61 constituencies will take place on April 11, while first phase polling is scheduled tomorrow. UNI SG PL PY RJ RAI1955 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-666286.Xml
Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd (MCL) has become the number one coal producer in the country by producing a record 138 million tonnes of dry fuel in the financial year 2015-16, contributing 39 per cent to the incremental growth of Coal India Ltd. MCL which is celebrating the Silver Jubilee Foundation Day today has crossed several milestones in coal mining sector during its journey that started in 1992 as a 23 million tonne coal producing company and youngest subsidiary of Coal India. The financial year ended March 31, 2016, remained an eventful year for MCL as it has become the flagship subsidiary of Coal India. While MCL produced a record 137.9 million tonne coal at a growth rate of 13.6 per cent, it supplied 140.22 million tonne dry fuel to its consumers, registering an outstanding growth of 14 per cent compared to same period during previous financial year 2014 for evacuation of coal. Congratulating all members of MCL family, Chairman and Managing Director A K Jha expressed that the performance graph of company would continue to show a rising trend in coal production, dispatch as well as contribution towards growth and development of peripheral areas. Former CMDs of the company A S Prasad, S N Sharma, S R Upadhayay and A N Sahay, who had joined MCL's foundation celebrations, congratulated Team MCL for becoming the leading coal producer of the country. ''The dream we had for MCL, has come true,'' said Mr S N Sharma while addressing a gathering of MCL employees and their family members after the Run for Excellence this morning. Employees and their family members joined the Run for Excellence to mark the beginning of company's Silver Jubilee year and the winners of the 'Run for Excellence' were awarded by the dignitaries. UNI DP PL PY RJ RAI2000 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-666292.Xml
Hitting out at the Uttar Pradesh government, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh today said the government, which does not have time to listen to the woes of people, ''who earn their living by toiling through sweat and blood,'' has no right to continue in power. ''This is the most insensitive act of the government to neglect the poor, who earn their living through hard work. Government should honour their hard work and resolve the problems they are facing,'' Mr Singh said, while addressing the Parakh Mahasangh and Adhikar rallies, organised here. The rally was the brain child of Mohanlalganj MP Kaushal Kishore, where demand for regularisation of ad hoc employees was raised. BJP national president Amit Shah was also expected to address this rally, but he failed to make it.The Union Minister said the state government should show compassion and extend help to the employees. ''The government, which neglects these hard working employees, has no right to stay in power. This rally is a warning for Akhilesh Yadav government,'' Mr Singh said. He also criticised Akhilesh government for its frequent complaint that the Centre was not releasing funds. ''The allegations are false. The fact is that Modi government has increased state's share from 32 per cent to 42 per cent. Whenever state has asked for money, the Centre has released it,'' he said. ''Everything boils down to intention. If the intention of the government is clean, it can do tremendous work for the welfare of people. But, if there is fault in intention, the government will start cribbing and ultimately, people will suffer. That is what is happening in Uttar Pradesh,'' Mr Singh, who is on a three-day visit to his Parliamentary constituency, said.He said he had been Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and knows the ins and outs of the Government. ''I know UP treasury is like Kuber's khazana. The Chief Minister should know how to utilise that money and where,'' Mr Singh said.UNI MB RJ 2048 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-666453.Xml
The explosion took place in Kunatubba village under Katekalyan Police Station limits when a contingent of CRPF personnel was carrying out a search operation in the area.

Constable Ravindra, who was seriously injured in the blast, was shifted to Jagdalpur Hospital by a helicopter.

Meanwhile, a report from Sukma said Naxals stopped a passenger bus plying between Chintagufa and Burungpal and looted all rations meant for CRPF personnel deployed in the sensitive area. UNI XC-SS PS PY RJ VN2156

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0044-666506.Xml
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today faced opposition from an unexpected quarter when an RJD Minister took umbrage at the state government for putting a ban on sale and purchase of toddy. Muneshwar Choudhary told UNI that the ban on sale and purchase of toddy had been enforced in the state without any discussion in the state legislature when the budget session of both Houses were in progress. He said neither was any such proposal brought before any of the state cabinet meetings for taking its nod. "It is surprising how a ban on the sale of toddy has been put," he remarked. He said he had already apprised RJD chief Lalu Prasad of his view and would meet Nitish Kumar tomorrow to request him for reconsidering the decision on the ban. Meanwhile, former Chief Minister and Hindustani Awam Morcha supremo Jeetan Ram Manjhi also castigated the Kumar government for enforcing ban on sale and purchase of toddy under the new state excise policy. Mr Manjhi told mediapersons here that a large section of members of scheduled castes earn their livelihood by selling toddy and after the enforcement of ban, they would face serious financial hardship. He also demanded a re-consider of the decision. Earlier in September, 2014, Mr Manjhi as Chief Minister had courted controversy when he had advised members of schedules castes to drink alcohol in small quantity by treating it as medicine if they were unable to give it up. UNI DH PL PL PY RJ BL2101 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-666420.Xml
Tanzil Ahmad, an officer of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) died after unknown assailants pumped 21 bullets into him while he was returning from a wedding in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district after midnight on Saturday. Police termed the killing a planned attack. Ahmad, 48, known for undercover operations, joined the NIA in 2010. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, in Lucknow, said the death was being probed. The shooting in Bijnor district took place when the officer, an assistant commandant in the Border Security Force (BSF) and on deputation with the NIA as an inspector since 2010, was returning from a wedding with his wife and children. His wife Farzana received four bullet injuries, but his children were unharmed. Rajnath Singh, speaking on the sidelines of a function in Lucknow, said: "I have spoken to the officers concerned. Our teams have gone there to probe the matter and they will submit a comprehensive report very soon." The officer was laid to rest with full state honours in Shaheen Bagh area of south Delhi. NIA spokesperson Sanjeev Kumar said in Delhi that Ahmad was a "martyr". "He will be given all dues that is given to someone killed in service," Kumar told IANS. An official statement issued by the NIA termed the death a "great loss". "Tanzil Ahmed was an asset to the agency. His killing is a great loss to NIA. We take it as a challenge to bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. We will not rest until that happens," the statement said. "The assailants came on motorbikes and opened fire from a close range on Ahmad near Sahaspur town," Sanjeev Kumar told reporters earlier on Sunday. The Uttar Pradesh police said they were working "on all angles" to find out the motive behind the killing of Ahmad. His wife is undergoing treatment at Fortis Hospital in Noida. "Nothing can be ruled out now until and unless we get absolute concrete evidence. We have to work on all angles. We have to see it from all the sides and work out the case," Daljit Chowdhary, additional director general of police, Uttar Pradesh, said on Sunday. He said borders have been sealed, nearby areas are being searched and senior officials from Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) have been put on the job to track the assailants and probe the attack. "I am very hopeful that we will work out the case and arrest the accused. It looks like a planned attack. It was definitely not a robbery," Chowdhary said. The NIA termed Ahmad's killing a "planned attack". "A planned attack took place on him when he was fired upon and killed," NIA spokesman Kumar said. "He (Tanzil) was assistant commandant with BSF and currently on deputation with NIA. He was with us for last six and half years." The investigating agency is trying to find out how he was tracked by his assailants. "The patient has been brought in a critical condition. Our doctors are providing the best medical treatment to treat the patient. As a matter of patient confidentiality we cannot comment anything further," a statement from the Fortis Noida said. Ahmad was pronounced dead on being taken to a medical facility in Moradabad. His body was later brought to Delhi. Before joining the NIA, Ahmad was part of the in-house team of BSF, providing vigilance cover. He also held tenures as instructor at BSF Academy at Tekanpur, near Gwalior, and training centre at Hazaribagh. --Indo-Asian News Service team/rn/pm/ ( 592 Words) 2016-04-03-23:19:32 (IANS)
The international conference on Islam and World Peace, chaired by the Imam of Kaaba from Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Saleh Bin Muhammad Bin Ibrahim Aal Talib, has appealed to the Muslim youth not to be misled by organisations like ISIS and others, which spread terror and hatred in the name of Jihad.Held at Eidgah here tonight, the conference adopted a resolution, saying ''ISIS, under the cover of Jihad, is bringing a bad name to Islam as what they are doing is not Jihad, but strife and terror and the conference strongly condemns it. ''Islam is a religion of peace and harmony, it neither had anything to do with terror in the past, neither in the present and also in future, it will never have any link with terror."The conference appeals to the Muslim youth not to be misled by terrorist organisations like ISIS. This organisation has only killed thousands of Muslims and destroyed schools, colleges, hospitals and other state and community buildings in Islamic states,'' said the resolution. Urging the media to refrain from linking the acts of terror with Muslims, it said ''We appeal to the international community, political leaders and the media not to malign the image of Islam by linking the acts of terror with Islam. Asking the members of their community to live in harmony with people professing other faiths, the Imam of Kaaba said ''we appeal to the Muslims to live with love and compassion with their non-Muslim brethren in their native countries''. He appealed to the members of the community to make their best efforts for ensuring the best higher education to their children.Sheikh Talib urged the members to lead their life as per the path shown by the Allah and his messenger Prophet Mohammed and also impart religious education to their children so that they stay away from all kinds of un-Islamic customs and traditions.He appealed to the global community of Muslims to maintain the sanctity of holy place at Mecca 'Harmain Sharif' and close their ranks and all those forces, who were attempting to desecrate the holy shrine in Saudi Arab. Emphasising the need for unity among different sects of Muslims, the conference urged the community members to seek the redressal of their problems and grievances in a united manner.The Kaaba Imam also urged the government of Saudi Arab to consider the problems of migrant labours from India in a sympathetic manner.Earlier in the day, Sheikh Talib was received at the Amausi airport by Uttar Pradesh Education Minister Ahmed Hasan. The Imam led the evening prayers at the Eidgah, which was attended by over one lakh local Sunni Muslims. Sheikh Talib was schedules to arrive here yesterday, but his visit was rescheduled and he reached here today. The Imam of the Eidgah Maulana Khalid Rashid Firangi Mahali said during the last Haj pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia had declared that ISIS is un-Islamic and un-related to their religion. "Nearly 90 per cent of those killed by ISIS are Muslims and they have destroyed the infrastructure of several countries and the Muslims denounce them and shun the misconception of linking terrorism with Islam," said Maulana Rasheed Mahli.UNI MB RJ 2252 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-666523.Xml
100 YEARS AGO

Freight train conductor Tom Moss discovered a car that had been robbed early Saturday morning. Then a brakeman noticed a barrel by the track near Tunnel Springs. Having been contacted by the trainmen, Deputy Sheriff Murray carrying a sawed off shot gun and Santa Fe Detective Volmer with a six shooter travelled to the location of the barrel. When they arrived the thieves opened fire missing The Law entirely except for the wading in the shoulder of Volmers coat. Soon a posse of 8 men arrived and surrounded the site. In the meantime the thieves had slipped away leaving their loot behind.

Subsequently one of them was discovered at his sisters home bleeding desperately with 40 to 50 bullet holes in his body. The sisters husband is leader of the gang.

On Wednesday John Malpin was struck by a swinging log while working on loading at the A. L. & T. lumber camp.

He was rushed to the Milton Hospital. He perished later in the day. His brother came from the east and took him home for burial.

Do you want an auto that will carry you through mud, sand, and snow easily then climb the hills without laboring and straining every part?

Most cars cannot do these things. A Maxwell can. Touring Cars $655  Roadsters $635FOB Denver. Now Available at Flagstaff Mercantile the Maxwell Distributor.

75 YEARS AGO

Harold Huffer, popular resident and commercial agent for Shell Oil, has purchased Gable Auto Supply and Fuels Service from the Estate of Rex E. Goble who had been operating the station at 2nd St. on East Santa Fe since 1927.

He will personally be operating the station which is renamed Huffers Firestone and will be offering a full line of Shell products and a complete stock of Firestone Tires, tubes, batteries, radios and other accessories.

The Museum of Northern Arizona is now being fully heated and open to the public daily. 9 am  Noon and 1 to 5 pm. Dr. Harold Colton, Director.

FINES of Flagstaff held a grand opening beginning at 9 am on Saturday with orchids for the ladies.

Mr. Fine has taken over Nackards Ready to Wear.

You will always find something finer at FINES.

At their meeting with the Route 66 Association the State Highway Commissioners had disappointing little to offer for our highway.

H. 60 Sun. L. 25 M. Rain Tues and Wed. 0.52

50 YEARS AGO

The 13-day strike at the Ponderosa Paper Products Co. has ended. A full operating schedule is expected by Tuesday.

This is the first labor contract between local 909 United Paper Workers, The American Paper Workers of the AFL-CIO and the company.

The one year agreement approved by a vote of 53 to 23 provides for paid holidays and vacations, health and welfare programs as well as substantial increases in wages. Machine Room workers $2.06$3.75 per hour. Mechanics and Maintenance men $2.51$3.78 per hour. Unskilled women $2.00. Laborers $2.39$3.95 per hour.

All new wages are higher than have been previously paid. Both parties have expressed the intention to cooperate in full to improve the quality and increase production to make this plant a successful venture.

Arizona State Patrolman Harvey Cassidy was unhurt in a collision with a Santa Fe freight at the Diamond Trailer crossing on Tuesday morning.

His motor had stalled right on the crossing. The Patrol car was turned completely around. Damage was minimal. His seat belt saved his life.

Theres good skiing at the Snowbowl on this last ski weekend of the season. The Coconino National Forest reports only a few bare spots. The Whirly Bird area is closed. The road is clear.

H. 67 Wed. L. 31 Thurs. No rain.

25 YEARS AGO

In the past two years 21 portable classrooms have been added to our schools.

It is expected that more will be needed with an anticipated growth of 39 percent. Current student capacity is 13,025 with an enrollment of 11,377.

Four different options are being prepared for improving traffic flow between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. They include a total relocation around town as well as different arrangements for the realignment of Fort Valley Road.

At Andersons One Stop Garden Center, 29 S. Beaver between 8am and 6 pm Monday through Saturday, you will find Seed Potatoes @ $1.29 a bag, Onion Sets 99 cents a pound, 6 Gallon Junipers $12.95, 5 Gallon Quince, Forsythia and Lilacs $18.99 . Now is the time to plant.

H. 74 Sat. L. 23 Mon. & Wed. No snow  No rain. Cross Country Skiing Excellent.
Salah Abdeslam was arrested last month by the Brussels Police in connection with the Paris attacks in November last year in which at least 130 people were killed.

Salah Abdeslam was captured on March 18 by Belgian authorities after a shootout in Molenbeek, an impoverished suburb of Brussels that has also been home to several other terror suspects.

After his arrest, he told the investigators that he was meant to carry out a suicide bombing at the Stade de France stadium, but backed out at the last minute.

Four days after his arrest, the Belgian capital was struck by ISIS bombings at the airport and a metro station which killed 32 lives and injured over 300.

A Belgian court has ruled that he can be extradited to France.

The 26-year-old suspect, who is one of the 10 men accused of carrying out the deadly attacks in the French capital last year, is being held in Belgium under a European arrest warrant at the demand of French authorities. (ANI)
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump predicted that the United States is on course for a "very massive recession," warning that a combination of high unemployment and an overvalued stock market had set the stage for another economic slump."I think we're sitting on an economic bubble. A financial bubble," the billionaire businessman said in an interview with The Washington Post published yesterday.Coming off a tough week on the campaign trail in which he made a series of missteps, Trump's latest comments bring him back into the limelight ahead of Tuesday's important primary in Wisconsin where he trails in the polls.The former reality TV star said that the real US jobless figure is much higher than five percent number released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics."We're not at 5 per cent unemployment," Trump said."We're at a number that's probably into the twenties if you look at the real number," he said, adding that the official jobless figure is "statistically devised to make politicians - and in particular presidents - look good."Trump said "it's a terrible time right now" to invest in the stock market, offering a more bleak view of the US economy than that held by many mainstream economists.The interview was bylined by the Post's Robert Costa and famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.A real estate magnate, Trump has made appealing to blue-collar workers a hallmark of his bid for the Republican nomination for the November 8 presidential election, often blaming unemployment on the outsourcing of US jobs and facilities to countries such as China and Mexico.Trump vowed in the interview to wipe out the more than 19 trillion dollars national debt "over a period of eight years," helped by a renegotiation of trade deals."I'm renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that we're doing so badly on," he said.NATO AGAINAfter making controversial statements about abortion last week, Trump has shown little sign of heeding calls from fellow Republicans to adopt a more presidential tone so as to avoid alienating voters in the November general election if he wins the nomination.Yesterday, he questioned close U S ties to Saudi Arabia and again accused US allies of not pulling their weight in the NATO military alliance.Trump told a campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin that partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization "are not paying their fair share" and called the 28-nation alliance "obsolete.""Either they pay up, including for past deficiencies, or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO," Trump said.Tuesday's Wisconsin nominating contest could be a turning point in the Republican race. Trump, 69, trails his leading rival, US Senator Ted Cruz, 45, of Texas in the state.A Cruz win would make it harder for Trump to reach the number of 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination before the Republican national convention in July. The winner will get to claim all of Wisconsin's 42 delegates. REUTERS DS PM0739 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0139-665551.Xml
Gunmen seized four Malaysian crew of a tugboat off the coast of the eastern state of Sabah, a week after a similar attack on a Taiwanese tugboat in the southern Philippines, media reported today.The four were taken at gunpoint on Friday evening and brought by speed boat to the southern Philippines, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said, quoting an unnamed military official. Three other crew were left behind.The gunmen, suspected to be Abu Sayyaf militants, also took laptops, mobile phones and unspecified amounts of cash. The tugboat returned to Sabah when the gunmen left."We confirm receiving reports of this incident," military spokesman Major Filemon Tan told reporters. "We have coordinated with our Malaysian counterparts."It was the second attack in a week on tugboats in the waters that border of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Ten Indonesians were abducted when a Taiwanese tugboat was intercepted in the southern Philippines.The Abu Sayyaf, known for kidnappings, beheadings, bombings and extortion, has demanded 50 million pesos (1.09 million dollars) for the freedom of the Indonesian crew. The al Qaeda-linked group is one of the most hardline Islamist militant groups in the Muslim south of the largely Christian Philippines.REUTERS DS PM0740 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0139-665552.Xml
Australia said that a piece of suspected aeroplane debris found east of Africa on Mauritius will be examined to see if it is part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went missing two years ago in one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries.Australia has led the search for the plane, which went missing in March 2014 with 239 people on board on a flight from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing, and Transport Minister Darren Chester said the debris, reportedly found on Thursday, was an "item of interest"."The Malaysian government is working with officials from Mauritius to seek to take custody of the debris and arrange for its examination," Chester said in a statement.He did not say from what part of the missing Boeing 777 the debris was suspected to have come."...Until the debris has been examined by experts, it is not possible to ascertain its origin."The Malaysian government could not be immediately reached for comment.Last month, Australia said debris found in Mozambique was "almost certainly from MH370" and in 2015 French authorities said a wing part found on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion was part of the plane.Australia said that more than 95,000 square kilometres of a 120,000 square kilometre target zone had been searched and that the entire zone would be covered by June, when the search is scheduled to end.REUTERS CJ PR0929 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-665579.Xml
While Mr Jubeir assured that leading supplier of energy Saudi Aramco looked to India as its No 1 target for investment, Ms Al Falih underlined that energy and healthcare were high on the agenda during theirmeeting with Mr Modi.

Mr Jubeir called on the PM before the ceremonial welcome on his arrival here. This was thesecond meeting between the two -- the last being in New Delhi last month.

Earlier in his interaction with Saudi CEOs, the PM emphasised on the tremendous scope for Saudi investment in manufacturing medical devices and great potential for medical tourism that India offered.

Underlining that the proposed Goods and Services Tax Bill would ''be a reality soon'', Mr Modispoke to Saudi business leaders about investment opportunities in India and assured Saudi investors of a predictable and long-term tax regime.MORE UNI SD ADG

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The head of the European Parliament sharply criticised Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday for protesting against a satirical song on German television that mocked the president just as the EU needs Ankara to help solve its migrant crisis.The broadcast and Turkey's response has morphed into a diplomatic incident with Germany, France and the EU rejecting Ankara's protests, which included Germany's ambassador being to the Turkish foreign ministry.The two-minute song, shown on "extra 3" last month, poked fun at Erdogan for his authoritarian treatment of journalists.The spat is particularly awkward for German Chancellor Angela Merkel who led efforts to get a migrant deal between the EU and Turkey. Critics question whether the deal will make Germany and the EU go soft on Turkish human rights because they are so dependent on Ankara to stem the influx of migrants.In unusually strong language, European Parliament President Martin Schulz said it was "not acceptable that the president of another country demanded Germany limits democratic rights because he felt caricatured"."We must make clear to Erdogan: we have democracy in our country. That's the end of it ... politicians must live with satire, even the Turkish president," Schulz, a Social Democrat, told Bild am Sonntag."Dear Mr Erdogan, you have gone one step too far. You can't do this. Satire is a basic element of democratic culture."German newspapers have in the last week castigated Erdogan for trying to muzzle the media here.Under the headline "The dreadful friend", Der Spiegel weekly ran a cover illustration of a red-faced Erdogan shaking his fist with a newspaper folded into a paper airplane in his back pocket. Merkel, carrying a suitcase of EU cash, stands at his feet with her head in her hand.The deal, which is due to take effect on Monday, is aimed at stopping illegal migrants entering Europe in exchange for financial and political rewards for Ankara.Schulz denied accusations it makes the EU too reliant on Turkey, a candidate for EU membership. "The EU is not dependent on Turkey," he told Bild am Sonntag.Erdogan has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade and has been president since 2014. Popular at home, his critics accuse him of becoming increasingly authoritarian.Turkish state prosecutors have opened nearly 2,000 cases against people for insulting Erdogan since 2014, the country's justice ministry said last month. Defendants include cartoonists, academics, journalists and even schoolchildren. REUTERS PS RAI1647 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0421-666054.Xml
The Syrian forces backed by Russian warplanes stormed the city of Qaryatain from a number of directions, a day after Syria's boots on the ground stormed areas in the western parts of that key city, Xinhua newds agency reported.

A military source said that the army's entry into Qaryatain came after the bomb squads dismantled explosive devices and other booby-traps the IS terrorists had planted to thwart the advance of the Syrian army.

On Saturday, the Syrian forces unleashed a wide-scale offensive on the city, which has succeeded in breaking through the IS defences in the western part of that predominantly-Christian city.

The Russian warplanes are playing a significant role in helping retake Qaryatain, the source added.

The military campaign to reclaim Qaryatain came less than a week after the Syrian army captured Palmyra, which had been held by the IS for 10 months.

Meanwhile, the state news agency SANA said the Syrian air force struck the IS positions in the eastern and southern parts of the city.

Qaryatain is the last IS stronghold near the mountainous region of Qalamoun, north of Damascus and close to the Lebanese borders.

The IS militants who withdrew from Palmyra have holed up in Qaryatain, 85 km southeast of Homs.

The city is strategically important due to its proximity to the Syrian city of Qara, a stronghold of the Hezbollah Shia group, which is fighting alongside the Syrian army in key battlefields in the country.

--Indo-Asian News Service py/dg

( 289 Words)

2016-04-03-17:49:33 (IANS)
A fire ripped through a Russian Defence Ministry building in central Moscow today, sending plumes of smoke over the Russian capital as fire fighters battled to extinguish the blaze.Around 50 people were reported to have been evacuated from the administrative building, which dates from the end of the eighteenth century. Nobody was reported to have been hurt.Photographs from the scene showed fire fighters scaling ladders to access the building's upper floors with fire engines pumping water through hoses placed on the ground floor. Traffic through central Moscow was diverted.Major-General Igor Konashenkov, on the scene, told the Interfax news agency that the flames had been put out, but that work was continuing to extinguish parts of the building that were still generating smoke and smouldering.A source told Interfax the fire may have started as a result of a short circuit involving old electrical wiring. The Emergency Situations Ministry said the fire had covered an area of at least 50 square metres.The Defence Ministry told Interfax the fire would not hamper its operations. REUTERS PY VN1822 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0298-666212.Xml
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on the final leg of his three-nation tour in Riyadh will leave for New Delhi early on Monday morning.

During their discussions on regional issues, the two sides emphasized the importance of the principle of good neighbourliness, non-interference in internal affairs, respect of independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity and resolution of dispute through peaceful means.

The two sides also expressed their hope for achieving a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in accordance with the Arab Peace Initiative and the resolutions of international legitimacy, in a way that guarantees the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the establishment of their independent, united and viable state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Prime Minister Modi expressed his sincere gratitude to His Majesty the King for the warm welcome and gracious hospitality.

Earlier in the day, he held delegation-level talks with King Al Saud in a move to cement new momentum in bilateral ties between both sides and expand cooperation in diverse areas including trade, investment and counter-terrorism.

In the final call on's before his departure, the Prime Minister met the Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud.

Modi is the fourth Indian Prime Minister to visit Saudi Arabia after Manmohan Singh in 2010, Indira Gandhi in 1982 and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1956. (ANI)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today called for India and Saudi Arabia to look at working together in the field of cyber security.''Saudi investment in fertilisers, warehousing, cold chain facilities and agriculture would be a win-win partnership, as it would ensure good quality food products for Saudi Arabia,'' Mr Modi said in an interaction with 30 Saudi CEOs and Indian business leaders here. Calling for taking Indo-Saudi economic relationship beyond export-import to technology transfers and joint investment, Mr Modi assured Saudi investors that retrospective taxation was a thing of the past, and his Government believed in a ''predictable long term taxation regime''. Speaking about the health sector, he said there was tremendous scope for investment in the manufacturing of medical devices. He said India's health sector, which was globally extremely cost competitive, offered immense scope for health tourism. Indian nurses, present in large numbers in the Gulf, ''are a testament to our well-trained manpower,'' he added.Mr Modi spelt out several policy initiatives taken by his government over the past two years to spur growth, pointing out the country's ''unique combination'' of democracy, demography and demand. India and Saudi Arabia were ''old friends,'' ready to take bold new steps to a golden future, he added. Emphasising on the strength of ties between the two countries, he recalled King Salman mentioning that he was taught by an Indian teacher, an official statement here said.UNI SD RJ 2002 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0005-666397.Xml
Days before President Barack Obama made the first presidential trip to Cuba in decades, a group of Northern Arizona University design students completed the universitys first study abroad trip to the country.

Interior Design professor Melissa Santana led a group of nine students to the island nation to study the varieties of architecture that can be found in the buildings in Havana.

In 207 city blocks you can see 500 years of architecture in Havana, Santana said.

The trip was given as a one-credit special topics class, and students stayed in Cuba for seven days over spring break.

Santana has done many research trips to Cuba before, but NAU has never sent students there for a study abroad trip. While educational activities have been on the list of acceptable reasons to travel to Cuba for years, recently loosened travel restrictions made this the perfect time for the students to go.

Santana said they had begun planning the trip before the restrictions were loosened, but the announcement in September of 2015 made planning the trip easier.

The university had to write a letter that we had to keep on our person at all times showing we were there for educational reasons, Santana said. We also had to have a 40 hour per week itinerary to show we were not just tourists.

Santana said there is ample misinformation about travel to Cuba. She said many people she knew did not know that it is the United States that restricts travel to Cuba, not the Cuban government.

One of the main goals of the trip was to look at the repurposing of buildings in Havana, because the government does not have the funding to pay for new construction projects, so many buildings are refurbished inside.

Its really cool going into a building from the 1800s and its a restaurant or a hotel now, Santana said. I love the concept of keeping old buildings with new uses. It keeps the cultural heritage with architecture.

Old Havana is a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage site, meaning it is distinguished as a place with cultural and historical significance.

American-based companies are not allowed to open stores or branches in Cuba, so the country does not have the big-box chains that can be seen in the United States and much of the world. Santana said, as a result, the students had to bring most of their own supplies, like hygiene items, because in Cuba they cannot easily go into a store and buy the items.

However, Santana said, if or when the trade embargo is lifted, historical buildings could be torn down to make room for more modern hotels or other buildings that would change the historical landscape of Cuba.

Its kind of frozen in time right now, she said.

Much of the buildings and technology in Cuba has not changed since the 1950s, Santana said. Many of the cars are old fashioned, and most American technology, like cell phones, do not work there.

We actually had to have conversations face-to-face with everyone, Santana joked. Its refreshing in that way.

The students stayed in homes with Cuban families all in the same neighborhood, Santana said.

One of the best parts for me was to see the students get attached to the people and to the culture, Santana said. I think they were surprised at how welcoming and friendly the people in Cuba were. The kindness of people in Cuba was overwhelming, I dont think the students were expecting that.
A piece of debris thought to be from the Malaysian airliner that went missing more than two years ago over the Indian Ocean has been found in the island nation of Mauritius, media reported on Sunday. The debris suspected to be from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people on board, was found on Thursday on the coast of Rodrigues Island, an employee of the Mourouk Ebony Hotel, where the debris was stored for safekeeping, told CNN. Jean Josie Milazare said two hotel guests, Jean Dominique and Suzy Vitry, from La Reunion, found a piece of debris on the beach. Milazare said police now have the debris. Mauritius, a volcanic island nation in the Indian Ocean that is a bit over 10 times the size of Washington, is known for its beaches, lagoons and reefs. It lies about 700 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Debris thought to be from MH370 was found on Reunion, an island southwest of Mauritius, last July. And another piece of debris thought to be from the missing airliner was found on a sandbar off Mozambique in February. Dan O'Malley, a spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said Australian authorities were aware of the debris found on Rodrigues Island, but he expected Malaysian authorities to take the lead in the investigation. --Indo-Asian News Service ahm/dg ( 239 Words) 2016-04-03-22:41:31 (IANS)
The first visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Saudi Arabia today further bolstered the strategic partnership between the two countries as they decided to deepen their counter-terror, defence and security cooperation, and give a push to their bilateral investment and trade ties. In what is seen as an oblique reference to Pakistan, Mr Modi and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud called for dismantling terrorism infrastructures, ''where they happen to exist'' and to cut off any kind of support and financing to the terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states. A joint statement issued after the delegation level talks between the two leaders said that the two leaders called upon states to bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice. The anti-terror message jointly sent out today, assumes significance as Saudi Arabia is seen as a close ally of Pakistan.''The two leaders rejected totally any attempt to link this universal phenomenon to any particular race, religion or culture. They called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries,'' the statement said.The two sides agreed to work towards adoption of India's proposed Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism in the United Nations. Mr Modi invited Saudi firms to invest in infrastructure and form joint venture for oil exploration. He asked the companies to participate in projects creating mega industrial manufacturing corridors, smart cities as well as the Digital India and Start up India programmes. The two countries signed five Memoranda of Understanding, including ones for cooperation in exchange of intelligence related to money laundering, terror financing and related crimes. The other MoUs dealt with labour co-operation, investment promotion cooperation and cooperation in the field of handicrafts. The joint statement said the two leaders agreed to transform the buyer-seller relationship in the energy-sector to one of deeper partnership focusing on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries.'' The Saudi side expressed its interest in investing in infrastructure development in India, especially in priority areas such as railways, roads, ports, and shipping. The two countries agreed to intensify bilateral defence cooperation, through exchange of visits by military personnel and experts, conduct of joint military exercises, exchange of visits of ships and aircraft and supply of arms and ammunition and their joint development.Eds pls pick up here from line one, para one of DF 11 (PM-LEAD-SAUDI TWO LAST RIYADH) UNI XC NAZ RJ 2332 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-666570.Xml
So whats all the fuss about? If voters can cast ballots in secret, why should candidates and their financial supporters be held accountable to a standard that is any different?

Thats the question Gov. Doug Ducey seemed to be answering when he defended more secrecy in campaign finance by saying it provided more opportunity for participation in the political process and increased freedom of speech.

Our answer is 180 degrees on the other side, especially now that the Supreme Court has lifted the lid on the amount that can be spent by corporate and special interests on campaigns. Democracy is about equal access to accurate information to ensure an informed vote. Bigger spenders already hold more sway in elections over how voters get that information; holding them accountable to what they spend and how they spend it doesnt level the playing field, but at least it keeps them from tilting the field completely to their side.

ACCOUNTABILITY OF CRITICISM

Even the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who classified political spending as speech and therefore as unlimited, said that speech came with responsibilities: Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism.

And what might come of that criticism? As others have noted, partisan special interests with deep pockets already promote self-interest and extremist ideology over service and compromise  its the main reason Congress is so polarized and dysfunctional. If the money coming from those deep pockets cant be capped, at least force its owners to come out of the dark and engage and defend their positions. The resulting debate almost always serves to moderate the views of both sides and expose areas of common ground.

Some who favor less disclosure contend that populist resentment to wealth and power would expose them to personal harassment and business losses. But no one is forcing special interests to enter the world of electoral politics  if, as Scalia says, they cannot endure the accountability of criticism, maybe they shouldnt be entering the political arena.

DISTRUST AND

ALIENATION

Then there is the argument that voters should just ignore any message from an anonymous source. That is easier said than done, though, when special interests can pay for sophisticated negative ads at saturation levels that psychologists have determined raise immediate feelings of distrust of both the candidate and the process. It is hard enough to reel back that reaction even when more information comes out later, but especially when no one steps forward to take responsibility. Thus when the governor equates more secrecy with more participation, he is in fact supporting more negative campaign messaging and voter alienation from the process.

Are there, however, too many campaign rules that frustrate principled fundraising? We suggest that rather than start with an assumption that political speech is only express advocacy, simply assume that any ad that mentions a candidate or a ballot measure during an election cycle is campaign-related and subject to the immediate and full disclosure of who produced and paid for it. To make it easier for candidates running for lesser office, start the disclosure only after $10,000 has been spent by the campaign. Anything below that amount isnt enough to run a mass media campaign in most markets, and frankly that is how donors gain access and influence. When money really talks  as in moving the needle on voter opinion with TV ads  then that is when it should be talking openly with the public, too. The average voter certainly doesnt have the resources to shape a candidates position on issues or his media message, but she ought to at least know who does.

HOW DO VOTERS

BENEFIT?

Instead, the most recent campaign finance bill signed by the governor supports more secrecy, more shifting of money to make tracing the source more difficult, more unaccountable coordination with so-called independent committees and more hiding the value of in-kind services by lawyers and accountants. It will also allow unlimited spending by so-called social welfare organizations on ballot measures and outsource to the overworked IRS whether they are required to disclose donors. And donations can be shifted between candidates, thus encouraging party leaders to buy rank-and-file loyalty through re-election funding.

Coming so soon after the primary election fiasco in Maricopa County, the rush by Ducey to sign the bill was not only another blow to voter confidence but error-prone. The bill forgot to include any criminal enforcement for violations, supposedly an oversight that will be corrected later. We are not holding our breath.

FULL SUNLIGHT FOR APS

Why the rush? One big dark money campaign on the near horizon is the one for three seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission, where Arizona Public Service declines to say whether it donates to candidates. The most recent campaign for two seats saw $3.2 million in dark money spent on candidates favorable to the utilitys bid for sharply higher fees  as much as $50 per month per rooftop solar household.

APS is a monopoly business with a guaranteed rate of return. Commissioners should be above influence from special interests, especially by a utility whose rates and return they are evaluating. Instead, there is now a board majority with no interest in how much APS is spending on electoral politics  even though the money is indirectly coming from customers.

This is the kind of insider trading that erodes confidence in the system by customers and voters alike. The Republican majority might think it is building a scaffolding of campaign finance laws that hide its financial backers and mislead voters into voting against their own best interests. But the more likely outcome is an electorate fed up with both major parties and the subsequent rise of independent candidates whose chief campaign platform plank will be their lack of ties to any special, hidden interests. We have seen that trend in both the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns, and with varying results. Arizona Republicans can ignore it, but as their national counterparts have learned, it will come at their peril as a viable political party.
NAIROBI (Reuters) - The African Development Bank (AfDB) on Friday pledged half a billion dollar relief package to 14 Southern and Eastern African countries most affected by an El Nino-propelled drought. The $549 million package will help an estimated 36 million people needing food assistance as abnormally high temperatures and the worst drought the region has seen in decades scorches staple crops from South Africa to Zimbabwe. The drought response package consists of $5 million in emergency relief and $361 million in short-to-long term support from various windows of the banks financial instruments. "This amount represents new financial resources," the bank said in a statement. The bank will also ensure faster disbursements of funds in ongoing projects, which were designed to build the affected countries resilience to drought. This will see an additional amount of $183 million made available in 2016. (Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
BANGUI (Reuters) - The Central African Republic's new President Faustin-Archange Touadera has named his former campaign director as his prime minister, according to a decree read on national radio on Saturday. Touadera, a former prime minister and mathematics teacher, was elected president in February, ending a transitional government that has led the landlocked nation since early 2014. "The president of the republic, head of state, in light of the constitution of the Central African Republic of March 30, 2016 ... decrees Mr. Simplice Sarandji to be named prime minister, head of the government," the decree read. It was not immediately clear when Sarandji would name his cabinet but an announcement was expected in the coming days. Touadera has pledged to bring peace and development to the former French colony, which was seized by religious and inter-commununal conflict from 2013, when mostly Muslim Seleka rebels overthrew longtime ruler Francois Bozize. That prompted a counter-attack by majority Christian anti-balaka militia. The violence led to a fifth of the population fleeing their homes. (Reporting by Crispin Dembassa-Kette; Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Andrew Roche)
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The cast of HBO's Confirmation, including Kerry Washington, Wendell Pierce, Allison Wright, Eric Stonestreet and Zoe Lister-Jones, took to the carpet at Paramount Pictures on Thursday evening to celebrate the film's premiere.

"It's one that still resonates today. It had so many elements in terms of character and human drama on top of relevant issues like race, gender and politics," director Rick Famuyiwa told The Hollywood Reporter, referring to Anita Hill's sexual harassment testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.

Members of the cast were complimentary about Kerry Washington's work as a producer, citing her as heavily involved.

"She was absolutely around. I know she had a lot to say in casting and she definitely put together a great group of actors," said Stonestreet.

Gabrielle Union, a friend of Washington who was also in attendance, spoke highly of her producing role and described her as "passionate, knowledgeable and prepared."

Famuyiwa explained that the true-life story had plenty of drama on its own terms, saying, "There was so much about the story that you couldn't make up. You have to be respectful of history and fact."

Wright, a U.K. native playing Clarence Thomas' wife, Virginia, said she was unfamiliar with the case before the film.

"I think when everybody sees the film, they will be relieved," she added.

Confirmation debuts on HBO on April 16.

Read More: 'Confirmation': TV Review
BERLIN (Reuters) - The head of the European Parliament sharply criticized Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday for protesting against a satirical song on German television that mocked the president just as the EU needs Ankara to help solve its migrant crisis. The broadcast and Turkey's response has morphed into a diplomatic incident with Germany, France and the EU rejecting Ankara's protests, which included Germany's ambassador being to the Turkish foreign ministry. The two-minute song, shown on "extra 3" last month, poked fun at Erdogan for his authoritarian treatment of journalists. The spat is particularly awkward for German Chancellor Angela Merkel who led efforts to get a migrant deal between the EU and Turkey. Critics question whether the deal will make Germany and the EU go soft on Turkish human rights because they are so dependent on Ankara to stem the influx of migrants. In unusually strong language, European Parliament President Martin Schulz said it was "not acceptable that the president of another country demanded Germany limits democratic rights because he felt caricatured". "We must make clear to Erdogan: we have democracy in our country. That's the end of it ... politicians must live with satire, even the Turkish president," Schulz, a Social Democrat, told Bild am Sonntag. "Dear Mr Erdogan, you have gone one step too far. You can't do this. Satire is a basic element of democratic culture." German newspapers have in the last week castigated Erdogan for trying to muzzle the media here. Under the headline "The dreadful friend", Der Spiegel weekly ran a cover illustration of a red-faced Erdogan shaking his fist with a newspaper folded into a paper airplane in his back pocket. Merkel, carrying a suitcase of EU cash, stands at his feet with her head in her hand. The deal, which is due to take effect on Monday, is aimed at stopping illegal migrants entering Europe in exchange for financial and political rewards for Ankara. Schulz denied accusations it makes the EU too reliant on Turkey, a candidate for EU membership. "The EU is not dependent on Turkey," he told Bild am Sonntag. Erdogan has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade and has been president since 2014. Popular at home, his critics accuse him of becoming increasingly authoritarian. Turkish state prosecutors have opened nearly 2,000 cases against people for insulting Erdogan since 2014, the country's justice ministry said last month. Defendants include cartoonists, academics, journalists and even schoolchildren. (Reporting by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Susan Fenton)
- After a year of disappointment, the McLaren Honda team unexpectedly had every reason to smile on Friday thanks to rookie Stoffel Vandoorne and former world champion Jenson Button. In the absence of injured two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, reserve driver Vandoorne received a late call to fly overnight from Japan to take part in the Bahrain Grand Prix. It was, he admitted, a daunting task and a major challenge - and an unusual way to celebrate his birthday. But after a flight spent reading and preparing for his Formula One debut, the Belgian rookie impressed by clocking the 11th best time in second free practice. "I turned 24 on Saturday," said Vandoorne. "So, this is a very good birthday present! Today has been great. I wasnt expecting to drive this weekend, but Im very happy for this opportunity."

AFP
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made the rounds of all five major Sunday talk shows today, selling the line that all is going swimmingly in the GOPs primary elections, with delegates selected through an orderly process that will lead to the ultimate decision on a nominee at the national convention in July.

However, outside the set of the Sunday shows, the picture was very different. Backroom deal making in Tennessee saw delegates loyal to other candidates selected to fill seats won by Donald Trump. The North Dakota State convention was roiled by arguments over how its delegates would vote. And Trump surrogate Roger Stone continued to promise Days of Rage style demonstrations in Cleveland if his candidate is deprived of the nomination by intraparty scheming.

Related: Cruz Could Win Big in Wisconsin as Trumps Numbers Drop

Priebus, meanwhile, also had to address the issue of the leading candidates electability, after a scandal-filled week involving his campaign managers arrest, and his own controversial statements about issues from abortion to nuclear weapons. According to the latest polling, Trump is wildly unpopular with key demographic groups, including women, Hispanics, and African Americans.

Look, every candidate has positives and every candidate has challenges that you have to overcome in the general election, Priebus said, before giving Trump credit for what he called historic voter turnout numbers.

I understand that weve got some drama on our side of the aisle that were going to have to contend with, and well be prepared to like never before, he promised.

But the drama within the party itself is going to play out long before the general election gets underway.

Related: More Legal Trouble for Team Trump as Protesters File Suit

Over the weekend, the Trump campaign accused the Tennessee Republican Party of giving at least five delegates won by the New York billionaire to people who are actually supporters of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator currently in second place. Those delegates will be bound by state rules to vote for Trump on the first two ballots. But in a convention that looks more and more likely to go to multiple ballots, they would be allowed to vote their own preference after that.

Story continues

Trumps campaign director for the state, Darren Morris, told The Tennessean newspaper that delegate slots that were supposed to go to people nominated directly by the Trump campaign were instead being filled by establishment picks and said similar shenanigans are taking place across the country to steal a vote here, steal a delegate there, to affect the outcome of the convention in July and take the nomination away from Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, in North Dakota over the weekend, the state Republican Party convention ground to a halt in a dispute over whom its delegates would support. North Dakota sends 28 delegates to the national convention, but there is no primary election. Instead of voting for a candidate at the polls, party members vote for individuals, who go to the convention with no obligation to support a specific candidate.

In a raucous session on the floor, the state party beat back a movement to force individuals named to a slate of delegates to declare their preferred candidate. It remained unclear Sunday afternoon just who would benefit from the confusion in North Dakota, but there was concern among some Trump supporters that the state partys insiders would try to engineer an outcome more favorable to an establishment candidate than to a brash outsider like Trump.

Related: The Worst Political Ad Ever Gets nosy with Ted Cruz

The complaints about Tennessee and North Dakota came just days after it was revealed that despite losing to Trump in Louisiana, Cruz would come away with more delegates than his rival because of post-primary horse-trading in which his representatives outmaneuvered Trumps.

On Sunday, Priebus tried to make the point that this was business-as-usual for a presidential primary, and made it clear that part of the job of a serious candidate is to develop a ground game in each state with skilled representatives familiar with their individual rules and idiosyncrasies.

However, thats not likely to fly with Trumps most ardent supporters. Stone, trumps former campaign manager who has retained close toes to the billionaire, has called for massive protests in Cleveland against what hes calling the Big Steal. He repeatedly referred to the demonstrations as comparable to the Days of Rage Vietnam War protests that roiled Chicago in October 1969.

Come to Cleveland, Stone urged Trump supporters in an appearance on the radio show hosted by conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter Alex Jones. Dont let the big steal go forward without massive protest. Peaceful, nonviolent protest. So, as they used to say, dont wait for orders from headquarters. Ride to the sound of the guns.

I dont mean to imply violence on that. I mean, ride to where the action will be. We have to let the Republican bosses and the kingmakers and the insiders and the lobbyists know that were not going to stand for the big steal. So if you are a Trump supporter, make plans now. Take a bus! Hitchhike! Carpool! Take a train! Fly, if you can afford it. We need you in Cleveland.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek lawmakers on Friday passed an asylum amendment bill needed for the implementation of a European Union agreement with Turkey for the return of refugees and migrants from Greek islands to Turkey starting on Monday. The deal aims to end the uncontrolled influx of refugees and other migrants after more than one million people crossed into Europe last year. Both Greece and Turkey had to amend their legislation to permit the start of the scheme - denounced by the U.N. refugee agency and rights groups for lacking legal safeguards - to send back all migrants who reached Greece after March 20. The bill was passed by 169 lawmakers in the 300-seat parliament. The legislation does not explicitly designate Turkey as a "safe third country" - a formula to make any mass returns legally sound. The European Commission sees this as not essential, provided rules are in place to allow people to be sent back to a "safe third country" or a "safe first country of asylum", with each case examined individually. EU officials have said the formula was devised to get around unease among lawmakers in Greece's ruling Syriza party to declare Turkey safe when it is waging a military crackdown on Kurdish separatists and is accused of curbing media freedom and judicial independence. The Greek government has said it will ensure human rights of asylum seekers are protected under international law. "A blame-game against our country is starting, that based on the new agreement we will encroach on human rights," Migration Minister Yannis Mouzalas told lawmakers before the vote. "I assure you  and I believe this will relieve everyone  that we will strictly adhere to human rights procedures as stipulated by international law and the Geneva Convention," he said. (Reporting by George Georgiopoulos and Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
MUMBAI (Reuters) - An Indian priest abducted by gunmen in Yemen last month is safe and could be released soon, a Catholic group said on Sunday, quoting the Indian foreign minister. Father Tom Uzhunnalil was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old people's home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) said a delegation met Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj who said the government was working to secure the priest's safe return. "She has assured us Father Tom is safe and negotiations are on for his release which could happen very soon," said Father Joseph Chinnaiyan, deputy secretary of the CBCI. Media reports last week said the priest was killed by Islamic State militants on Good Friday, although no one has claimed responsibility for last month's attack in which gunmen killed four Indian nuns, two Yemeni female staff members, eight elderly residents and a guard. Father Chinnaiyan said the reports were inaccurate. Aden has been racked by lawlessness since Hadi supporters, backed by Gulf Arab military forces, drove fighters of the Iran-allied Houthi group from the city in July last year. International aid groups have pulled most of their foreign staff from Yemen due to security concerns. (Reporting by Himank Sharma; Editing by Nick Macfie)
April is shaping up as possibly a defining moment for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the primary season. Here is a look at how those races break down.

clintonsanders536

Unlike the Republicans, who use a complicated system of winner-take-all, winner-take-most, loophole and proportional primaries, the Democrats have a more straightforward system. Most Democratic primaries are proportional, where the candidates divvy up elected delegates based on their share of voting within a state or territory.

Related Link: The numbers behind the April primaries: The Republicans

The bigger difference from the Republicans is the importance of so-called Super Delegates in the Democratic races. These are party leaders are unpledged delegates who get to attend and vote at the party convention in Philadelphia, and they can vote for anyone on the ballot. They are not elected. In 2008, Barack Obama used his advantage over Hillary Clinton to secure the nomination, even though Clinton had more elected delegates.

But as of March 31, Clinton is leading Sanders in both categories, despite three recent wins in western states by Sanders.

The winner in Philadelphia will need 2,383 delegates to secure the nomination. Clinton has 1,266 elected or pledged delegates, compared with 1,038 for Sanders. However, Clintons estimated advantage in unpledged delegates is 471-31, giving Clinton an almost 700-delegate lead heading into April.

And also unlike the Republicans, with just two candidates in the race, there will be no chance of a contested convention in Philadelphia, unless the candidates tie on the first ballot.

Heading into April, 56 percent of delegates will have been chosen for the Democrats, and at the end of the month, 75 percent of the primary race will have concluded.

Here is a look at the eight primaries at stake in April.

Tuesday, April 5: Wisconsin (86 pledged, 10 unpledged)

Polls: Clinton leads by one point over Sanders

Tuesday, April 12: Wyoming (14 pledged delegates, 4 unpledged)

Polls: Not available

Story continues

Tuesday, April 19: New York (247 pledged, 44 unpledged delegates)

Polls: Clinton up by 35 points

Tuesday, April 26: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware

The five states have a total 463 delegates, including 79 unpledged delegates. Pennsylvania is the big prize here, with 189 pledged delegates at stake.

Polls: Clinton up 34 points in New York, 27.5 points in Pennsylvania and 31.4 points in Maryland

The Bottom Line: Sanders could take Wisconsin, but if Clinton wins big in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, she will be in striking distance of the nomination. Currently with 1,737 delegates, Clinton could take a big share of the new 531 pledged delegates at stake in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, leaving her closer to the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination. Sanders will need a strong April showing to slow the Clinton momentum, and he will keep winning to force a showdown on June 7 in the last, huge primary day.

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By Clement Uwiringiyimana KIGALI (Reuters) - Two former senior Rwandan military officers have been sentenced to up to 21 years in jail on charges of inciting the public to cause an insurrection and links with exiled critics of President Paul Kagame. The two were arrested in 2014 and charged with what the prosecutor said was links to Patrick Karegeya, a Kagame opponent, former spy chief who was killed in 2014 in South Africa. The prosecution also accused them of having links with another exiled opponent of Kagame, former Rwandan army chief General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, who survived an assassination attempt in Johannesburg in 2010. The military court in Kigali handed Colonel Tom Byabagamba, who once served as the head of Kagame's security detail, 21 years in jail and 20 years to Frank Kanyambo Rusagara, a retired brigadier general. Rusagara and Byabagamba denied the charges throughout the trial. They said they planned to appeal against the sentences. The court found Byabagamba was guilty of inciting the public to insurrection, tarnishing the image of government while holding an official position, obstructing a criminal investigation and disrespect to the national flag, Major Narcisse Cyubahiro Nsengiyumva, one of the three judges giving the ruling, said late on Thursday. It also found Rusagara guilty of inciting the public to insurrection, tarnishing the image of government while holding an official position, as well as illegal possession of firearms. The court also found Rusagara and Byabagamba guilty of spreading the message of the Rwandan National Congress, an opposition group in South Africa, among whose members were Nyamwasa and Karegeya. Exiled Rwandan opposition members have in the past accused Kagame and his government of being responsible for Karegeya's death and for attacks on Nyamwasa and other overseas-based critics. Karegeya fled to South Africa in 2007 after allegedly plotting a coup against Kagame with Nyamwasa. Kagame and senior Rwandan officials have also denied any involvement attacks on exiled opponents, but have called them traitors who should not expect forgiveness or pity. The court also sentenced Rusagara's driver, retired Sergeant Francois Kabayiza, to five years in jail and a fine of 500,000 francs ($662) for obstructing a criminal investigation. ($1 = 755.0300 Rwandan francs) (Reporting by George Obulutsa; Editing by Alison Williams)
By Jim Finkle (Reuters) - U.S. hospitals should brace for a surge in "ransomware" attacks by cyber criminals who infect and shut down computer networks, then demand payment in return for unlocking them, a non-profit healthcare group warned on Friday. The Health Information Trust Alliance conducted a study of some 30 mid-sized U.S. hospitals late last year and found that 52 percent of them were infected with malicious software, HITRUST Chief Executive Daniel Nutkis told Reuters. The most common type of malware was ransomware, Nutkis said, which was present in 35 percent of the hospitals included in the study of network traffic conducted by security software maker Trend Micro Inc <4704.T>. Ransomware is malicious software that locks up data in computers and leaves messages demanding payment to recover the data. Last month, Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles paid a ransom of $17,000 to regain access to its systems. This week, an attack on MedStar Health forced the largest healthcare provider in Washington, D.C., to shut down much of its computer network. The Baltimore Sun reported a ransom of $18,500 was sought. MedStar declined to comment. HITRUST said it expects such attacks to become more frequent because ransomware has turned into a profitable business for cyber criminals. The results of the study, which HITRUST has yet to share with the public, demonstrate that hackers have moved away from focusing on stealing patient data, Nutkis said. "If stuff isn't working, they move on. If stuff is working, they keep doing it," said Nutkis. "Organizations that are paying have considered their options, and unfortunately they don't have a lot of options." Extortion has become more popular with cyber criminals because it is seen as a way to generate fast money, said Larry Whiteside, a healthcare expert with cyber security firm Optiv. Stealing healthcare data is far more labor intensive, requiring attackers to keep their presence in a victim's network undetected for months as they steal data, then they need to find buyers, he added. "With ransomware I'm going to get paid immediately," Whiteside said. Frisco, Texas-based HITRUST's board includes executives from Anthem , Health Care Services, Humana , UnitedHealth and Walgreens. (Reporting by Jim Finkle; By Tiffany Wu)
Washington (AFP) - Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko expressed confidence Friday that Dutch voters next week will not reject his country's cooperation deal with the European Union.

The Netherlands is to hold a referendum on Wednesday on the accord, which puts Ukraine on the path towards eventual EU membership, after a grassroots eurosceptic campaign.

Poroshenko met Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington on Friday, and afterwards stressed the friendship between their countries.

He accused the campaigners who demanded the vote of having exploited the Ukraine question in order to strike a broader blow against the European project.

"The real purpose was an internal Dutch discussion about the future of the European Union and internal political clashes," Poroshenko told reporters.

"This is very dangerous, that a 45-million-person country could become the victim of this."

Poroshenko said Ukrainian officials were in the Netherlands to point out the benefits of welcoming a new member to the union and a large new market.

"We're absolutely sure that European integration and the implementation of our association agreement will not be stopped," he said.

The vote is seen in the Netherlands as an opportunity for the Dutch to express broader concerns about the European project, but it could have deep geopolitical consequences.

Russia, which backs separatist rebels in Ukraine's east, resents Kiev's tilt towards the West and would relish a vote to prevent it from developing ties with Brussels.

Separately, the United States also urged Dutch voters to back Ukraine.

"Like any referendum the decision is for the Dutch people," State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said.

"But we believe that an association agreement is in the best interests of Ukraine, the Netherlands and Europe as a whole."

The accord that the Netherlands will vote on came provisionally into effect on January 1, 2014 but could still be blocked by any of the 27 EU member states.
This is tracking poll for 1980 Presidential election between Reagan and Carter

This is 1980 election result:

The lesson to be learnt here in 2014? Never underestimate American electorate.

Trump's voter demographics is very similar to Reagan's, white working class, a sizable democrats crossovers and minority votes.

You may argue that today's racial demographics is different from 1980. You may be right. Trump will never have Reagan's size of win by electorate. If he wins states like Ohio, Michigan , Florida, Pennsylvania or even New York, the election is over for Hillary

Trump can win most non-while votes compared to other GOP candidates.

The most important factor in 2016 is momentum(the number of voters participating in voting). Its on GOP side. Almost of all those GOP voters who sat on 2008 and 2012 will come out to vote. Only 70% of democrats will come out to vote for Hillary

For candidates themselves, Hillary is horrible campaigner compared to Obama. Its widely known that she does not know how to speak or debate. At this stage where primary is ongoing within each party, she can enjoy protection from Democrat Party. Once primary is over, I believe Trump will skin her.

This year is about Establishment versus outsider. No one in the country is closer to the core of Establishment than Hillary Clinton. Oh, do not count on Bernie's voters. At least 30% of them have already pledged not to vote for Hillary in ANY WAY

Everyone in US knows her being liar and an living, breathing and walking American Scandal Musuem.

All of these assume that FBI Director James Comey(nickname Elliot Ness) not make recommendation to Department of Justice for prosecution in Hillary email server case.

The last news on the regard is that FBI is set to interview with subjects. Comey will interview Hillary himself
Road-rage beater cries in court

Last Tuesday, the Gasparillo man pleaded guilty to assaulting the young woman when he appeared before a magistrate in the Couva Court.

He was arrested and charged on Good Friday (March 25) with the offence.

Speaking to Sunday Newsday yesterday the road rage victim, a student of the Arthur Lok Jack School of Business, expressed her relief saying that justice was served.

I hope he never hits another woman again in his life, she said.

I almost felt sorry for him when he turned around in the court and began crying, begging and pleading with me to have mercy on him because he has a wife and a son. She added: But then I remembered what he did to me and all I could say to him was that he showed me no mercy to any of us (mother and sister) that day, so why should I. The man however pleaded not guilty to two counts of assault on two other female relatives who were also passengers in her car at the time of the incident and will reappear in court on April 26.

According to reports, Ramdoolar was driving along Southern Main Road, California, Couva in the vicinity of Savonetta Fire Station when she was given a bad drive. It is alleged that the male driver tried to run Ramdoolar off the road before stopping his car abruptly and exiting the vehicle.

It was further reported that he proceeded to pull her out of her car and beat Ramdoolar and two other women who were passengers in her vehicle.

WPC Redhead laid the charges.
Action must follow talks

However, he said greater efforts must be made to implement the recommendations of previous committees that had been set up to examine the operations of the nations prisons service .

The consultations by the Attorney General (Faris Al Rawi) are quite timely but there must be a public commitment to implement the many useful recommendations which have been made before as well as acting expeditiously on any new concerns or proposals emerging from these consultations, Deosaran told Sunday Newsday .

Deosaran, a former independent senator and chairman of the Police Service Commission, observed that one of the debilitating psychological deficits in Trinidad and Tobagos development since Independence has been the frequency with which government agencies raise public expectations only to have them broken time and time again. This has been a feature of prisons reform in this country since 50 years ago, he added .

Asked if he had any faith that the upcoming consultation would bear fruit, Deosaran would only say: We can only hope. He recalled, though, that some 36 years ago, retired Anglican cleric Bishop Clive Abdullah, headed a commission of enquiry into the countrys penal system, which found several shortcomings in the operations of the prisons. Most notably, the Abdullah commission recommended that the Carrera Prison be shut down primarily because of high maintenance costs .

I hope that those reports can help the Attorney General create the platform for those consultations, Deosaran said .

Contacted by Sunday Newsday, Abdullah, too, welcomed the consultation .

However, he noted that while there have been new developments in the prisons system, the issues which his commission had unearthed, more than three decades ago, still remained .

Saying that overcrowding was one of the major issues, Abdullah said items contrary to the law also were entering the prison .

The commission, Abdullah said, found that prisons officers, apart from being overworked, were poorly trained to keep order within the prisons walls .

The retired clergyman said the commission also found that the general aura of the prisons was not conducive to hope .

It was as though the prisoners were just thrown there, he said, adding there was a general feeling that the prisons were just to lock people up and not to have them rehabilitated for the community. Asked if he felt the upcoming consultation will bear fruit, Abdullah told Sunday Newsday: I am rooted in Christian theology which is based on having a sense of hope. I know that there is hope .

What has happened is that we are not getting alongside the path of hope to make it a reality, so we end up like John, the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness, he added .

Abdullah said governments appeared to be reinventing the wheel on the issue of prisons reform .

Inspector of Prisons Daniel Khan, who reported on the condition of the nations prisons in a 2012 presentation, described the system as failing. He said the physical conditions in the prisons were appalling, wretched, repulsive and hideous. In the 2012 report, Khan said the system of rehabilitating inmates also was wanting .

Within recent times there seems to be a focus on rehabilitating offenders as a greater effort in reducing crime levels, Khan said in a 47-page executive summary to the report. However, as evidenced in this report, the prisons are failing in their efforts to rehabilitate although judicial officers are sentencing on the basis that the offender will be rehabilitated. Khan, in the report, pointed to an increasing trend of persons who have served time in prison simply return to crime when they come out. He said approximately 98 percent of the prison population was released back into society over time .

For the year 2010, the re-offending rate was 47 per cent of released prisoners. However, this rate rose to 61 percent for the year 2011, an increase of 14 percent .

As of February 2012, Khan reported that the total prison population was 3,656, with 5.2 percent of this prison population being young offenders .

Khan said the judicial findings over the years on the state of prisons remain true to date .

The prison conditions within Trinidad and Tobago are unabatedly appalling, he had said in the report. Yesterday, Khan, who has served as the Inspector of Prisons for the past five years, said the consultation was timely .

As an advocate for prisons reform for the past five years, I think the public consultation is an excellent opportunity to share information on the best approach to prisons reform and an open forum is an excellent idea for those responsible to implement reform, to hear the views of the public on the impact of the deteriorating criminal justice system has had on our citizens .

The very airing of this consultation shows the Governments dedication to address this issue, Khan said .

According to the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs website, the public consultations on prisons reform, which begins at the City Hall in Port-of-Spain on Wednesday, seeks to address the overall correctional system. The consultation, the website said, will address prisons legislation and rules, physical facilities, health services, rehabilitation of offenders and security for prisons officers .

Al Rawi regarded the upcoming forum as something which hasnt been done before. But yesterday, Deosaran said while there has been some response to the recommendations of the committee he headed two years ago, much more still needed to be done .

He mentioned the committees request for some 300 beds in the Remand Yard of the Golden Grove Prison in Arouca, which he said, was delivered .

There also has been some improvements in plumbing and lighting, Deosaran said .

Deosaran noted that the problems confronting the prisons system were well-documented: the poor accommodation for prisoners; internal surveillance; safety of prisoners and officers and procedures for dispute resolution .

Regarding the criminal justice system, Deosaran noted the inordinate length of time it takes for inmates in the Remand Yard to hear cases, describing the issue as a a legendary concern. You cannot have an inmate not yet convicted but spending over ten years waiting for a trial or not having his or her lawyer given prompt and regular attention, he said, adding that the country has to address the issue of judicial sentencing .

Deosaran said if the existing conditions in the prisons service were allowed to persist without quick and effective relief we might well be facing some troubling results. That is why the enthusiasm shown by the AG is quite welcomed but on this occasion both the prisons system and the public expect proper relief, he said .

Ceron Richards, president of the Prisons Officers Association, meanwhile, said while consultations were always a positive way to gauge the publics response to issues, many of the recommendations of previous consultations and commissions of enquiry into the prisons service should have been implemented .

There were recommendations from the Deosaran committee, the Inspector of Prisons Daniel Khan and Justice Carol Gobins assessment of the conditions of the Portof- Spain prison in 2008, but what became of them? he asked .

Richards, who has been leading the association fight to get housing for prisons officers living in highrisk communities following the shooting death of Fitzalbert Victor in February, said the answers to the problems confronting the prisons service were all contained in previous reports .

But, I will not discount the consultation and I am most eager to hear what would be the outcome. I hope it will achieve its objective but the main thing has to be implementation, he said .
Review policy on abortion

The debate broke out after the Health Ministry on Friday confirmed the first case of a pregnant woman contracting the mosquito- borne Zika virus, which, based on cases in Brazil, appears to put unborn children at the risk of developing microcephaly, a brain disorder. Some medical experts believe a pregnant woman should have the option to abort in medical circumstances where the child is at risk,

Brown said for the past 28 years she has been calling for a national gender policy which would review the laws governing the termination of a pregnancy,

Women have the right to choose (to have an abortion) we were born with the right to choose and in any case who is going to stop them (from back-door abortions)? she asked. She said a review of the gender policy would bring important matters to the fore: the economic costs, human rights costs and the psychological costs,

Brown scoffed at Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Harris stand, in one report, against abortion saying he is merely doing his work. That is his doctrine, he is doing what he is supposed to do, if the Archbishop could have gotten pregnant then he will say those things? she said,

She also took issue with former health minister Dr Fuad Khan calling on Government to start the discussion on abortion saying he had an opportunity to do so and did not. While the womens rights activist is firm on her position, especially on the religious views, the Catholic Archbishop is being supported by some religious leaders,

The Koran teaches that we must not kill our children, Sidiq Nisir, Amir of the Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Institute in San Fernando, said yesterday,

Nisir was adamant that moral positions must not be reversed on contingencies. He said Islams position is that it is wrong to kill children,

He also said it has not been scientifically established that Zika causes microcephaly. He cited a recent test (foreign) in which 200 babies were born with microcephaly and only about six of the new mothers had Zika. He is also advising people to not over-react as with the swine flu virus when persons began wearing masks to protect themselves,

Nisir is further calling on the authorities to set the facts straight,

It has not been scientifically established that Zika causes microcephaly, let us get these things scientifically established first. We dont want to reverse moral positions based on contingencies or to call for abortion to be legalized because of the current scenario. He said the position adopted by Islam is only when the mothers life is in danger, a pregnancy may be terminated. He further stated that based on teachings of the prophet Muhammed, it is wrong to kill an unborn child after 120 days because the soul is infused into the foetus during that time, even as it is still wrong to kill a baby before 120 days,

Secretary General of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha Sat Maharaj, yesterday said in principle he opposed abortion. He adds, however, if the mothers life is in danger then medical experts must protect the mother.
Zika in Belmont, Belmont worry

Sunday Newsday spoke with a few residents at Norfolk Street to get their views on the latest case.

Resident Anthony Holder described the case as a scary situation.

He noted that Belmont is an area with water problems and because of the lack of water supply by the Water and Sewerage Authority people have to use tanks and drums to store water. He stressed the residents have to do this and they cannot really be blamed if this resulted in mosquitoes breeding.

To combat the threat of Zika, he called on the Insect Vector Control and the Port-of-Spain City Corporation to step up their efforts.

He noted the corporation has been passing around and telling people to cut their land. He stressed, however, that the public can only do so much.

Elderly resident John Holder said they do not have mosquito problem on their street and the residents keep the area clean, though there was a garbage issue due to the removal of a bin. Asked if he was concerned about the latest Zika case in Belmont, Holder responded he must be concerned, Zika dont spare you. He expressed his hope that there would be increased spraying on the street.

A concerned resident, who asked not to be named, said residents are obviously concerned about the Zika case in their area.

He said that due to the mosquito problem he has spent a lot of money on insecticide and Bugmat.

He noted they were also concerned about a lot of land with overgrown bushes on Cadiz Road where he lives and stressed there were a number of children on that street. He reported that the neighbours have been keeping the land under control but there was a need for the Corporation to do something.

He reported that on Friday, the corporation sprayed the area and he knows they are doing their best.

He also noted that Port-of-Spain North/St Anns West MP Stuart Young has been speaking with residents and has been doing what he promised to do.

Young yesterday said the recent case also his him quite concerned and reported that he will be in conversation with Ministry of Health and in particular the Insect Vector Control department.

He noted he will also be speaking with the corporation to find out what efforts are being made to combat the habitat where mosquitoes breed. He said he will be calling upon all citizens to do what they can to stop the breeding of mosquitoe
St Anns escapee captured at Small Boats

Thomas who has been on the run since Tuesday was nabbed in Chaguaramas, near the quay popularly known as Small Boats, by police officers of the Western Division at about 9 pm last evening.

Thomas was one of six patients who broke out of the St Anns Psychiatric Hospital. The other five were quickly found but Thomas remained at large until last night when police got a tip-off that he was liming with people he knew in Chaguaramas. He was taken to the Carenage Police Station.

Following the escape of the six patients from the Forensic Ward at the St Anns Hospital, the North West Regional Health Authority (NWRHA) began the process of implementing 10 recommendations to reduce the risk of this happening again.

The information, provided as part of a media kit during Fridays weekly media conference at the Health Ministry, features a presentation by the NWRHA on the escape on March 29.

The NWRHA noted that the patients  Thomas, Keon Lewis, Gabriel Solomon, Andre Harvey, Michael Thomas and Mikie Hendrickson  escaped St Anns at approximately 2.15 am. The five who were quickly caught appeared in the Port-of-Spain Magistrates Court last Friday, charged with escaping lawful custody and were remanded to the Port-of-Spain State Prison to reappear on April 29.

The NWRHA noted that the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service is in full control of that investigation. The Authority reported that, in an effort to ensure that the risk of such incidents occurring again is further mitigated, the following 10 recommendations would be implemented over the next few weeks: 1. To issue guidelines on television privileges for patients on ward.

2. To repair all the doors with the appropriate locking mechanisms (completed).

3. To reconfigure the current use of the two nursing stations to facilitate improved monitoring of patients on the ward.

4. To review and reconfigure the current placement of the CCTV cameras.

5. To create a purpose built access window in the first nurses station (completed).

6. To raise level of outer wall at Forensic unit and install razor wire at the top of the perimeter wall.

7. To further communicate through the Office of the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Health with the Ministry of National Security again requesting a police post within the Forensic unit of this hospital.

8. To improve communications with the judicial department with regard to high risk persons being transferred.

9. To work with the security companies to sensitize the security officers of their role and functions specifically within the forensic unit.

10. The complement of security officers assigned to the St Anns Hospital was 17 during the day, and 13 during the night with two Canine Officers. As of Tuesday night, one additional officer and one canine officer was reassigned to the Forensic Ward bringing the total strength to five Officers at that unit verses the usual three.

NWRHA noted that the implementation of these recommendations will be carefully monitored.

Further, the management and staff of the Authority remain fully committed to the provision of a safe environment and to maintaining high quality patient centered services, the release concluded.

Thomas, also as Sheldon Henry, was admitted on March 7, for observation based on an order issued by a High Court judge. He had been on remand at the Maximum Security Prison, Arouca, since being charged with the murder of Anthony Lemessy of Plaisance, Mayaro, on August 19, 2004.

Henry, 31, had last known addresses at Upper Lanse, Mitan, and Mt Plaisance, Carenage.

Apart from the murder charge, police said Henry faces 14 other charges including possession of a firearm, possession of ammunition, robbery with violence, robbery with aggravation, wounding with intent and possession of cocaine.
Young: SSA no cocktail

MINISTER in the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs, Stuart Young, on Friday dismissed claims from Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar that the combination of the Strategic Services Agency (SSA) Amendment Bill 2016 with the Whistleblower Protection Bill 2015 and the Interception of Communication Act was a deadly Molotov cocktail that was an onslaught against the privacy of citizens in TT.

Speaking in the House of Representatives during debate on the SSA Bill, in the absence of Persad-Bissessar (who did not attend the sitting), Young said the population has no reason to be fearful , of any cocktail, Molotov or otherwise. Underscoring the need for the countrys law enforcement agencies to have proper intelligence in the war against crime, Young said the only persons who needed to be afraid of the expanded scope of the SSA were those, engaged in serious criminal activity. Identifying corruption, terrorism, money laundering and human trafficking as some of the crimes which the SSA will now be empowered to deal with, Young said the facts was that all of the concerns raised by Persad-Bissessar were already addressed in legislation passed under her watch as prime minister.

Declaring the ruling Peoples National Movement (PNM) had no intention of fettering the arms of law enforcement by fear-mongering, Young said there are oversight mechanisms for the SSA from the Auditor- General all the way to the Parliament.

In response, Opposition Chief Whip Ganga Singh described Young as the fireman minister. In making this description of Young, Singh charged that Young had no business going to the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) head office in St Joseph last year, when a fire damaged a section of the building which contained information pertinent to an ongoing audit of WASA.

Singh later withdrew his remarks against Young on the instruction of Speaker Bridgid Annisette- George.

Commenting on the SSA Bill, Singh said neither the Government nor the Opposition could claim to be paragons of virtue with respect to the SSA as both sides engaged in political interference in the agency. He questioned whether SSA Director, Colonel George Robinson would be a ventriloquist dummy serving the will of the Government.

Public Utilities Minister Ancil Antoine said Robinson was well qualified for his post, as he had a background in intelligence.

Antoine, a former Chief of Defence Staff, said the Opposition failed to understand the difference between information and intelligence.

Agreeing with statements made by Attorney General Faris Al Rawi and Young on the legislation, Antoine expressed confidence that once enacted into law, the legislation would allow law enforcement agencies to reach further afield and touch people who feel that cannot be touched at this time. Mayaro MP Ruston Paray reiterated the Oppositions call for the legislation to be sent to a joint select committee.

The House next sits at 1.30 pm on April 8 for the Mid-Year Review.

Prior to this, the Houses Standing Finance Committee will meet at 1.30 pm on April 6.
Beneath northern Indias irrigated fields of wheat, rice, and barley  beneath its densely populated cities of Jaiphur and New Delhi, the groundwater has been disappearing. Halfway around the world, hydrologists, including Matt Rodell of NASA, have been hunting for it.

Where is northern Indias underground water supply going? According to Rodell and colleagues, it is being pumped and consumed by human activities  principally to irrigate cropland  faster than the aquifers can be replenished by natural processes. They based their conclusions  published in the August 20 issue of Nature  on observations from NASAs Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

If measures are not taken to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, consequences for the 114 million residents of the region may include a collapse of agricultural output and severe shortages of potable water, said Rodell, who is based at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Groundwater comes from the natural percolation of precipitation and other surface waters down through Earths soil and rock, accumulating in aquifers  cavities and layers of porous rock, gravel, sand, or clay. In some of these subterranean reservoirs, the water may be thousands to millions of years old; in others, water levels decline and rise again naturally each year.

Groundwater levels do not respond to changes in weather as rapidly as lakes, streams, and rivers do. So when groundwater is pumped for irrigation or other uses, recharge to the original levels can take months or years.

Changes in underground water masses affect gravity enough to provide a signal, such that changes in gravity can be translated into a measurement of an equivalent change in water.

Water below the surface can hide from the naked eye, but not from GRACE, said Rodell. The twin satellites of GRACE can sense tiny changes in Earths gravity field and associated mass distribution, including water masses stored above or below Earths surface. As the satellites orbit 300 miles above Earths surface, their positions change  relative to each other  in response to variations in the pull of gravity. The satellites fly roughly 137 miles apart, and microwave ranging systems measure every microscopic change in the distance between the two.

With previous research in the United States having proven the accuracy of GRACE in detecting groundwater, Rodell and colleagues Isabella Velicogna, of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California-Irvine, and James Famiglietti, of UC-Irvine, were looking for a region where they could apply the new technique.

Using GRACE satellite observations, we can observe and monitor water changes in critical areas of the world, from one month to the next, without leaving our desks, said Velicogna. These satellites provide a window to underground water storage changes.

The northern Indian states of Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana have all of the ingredients for groundwater depletion: staggering population growth, rapid economic development and water-hungry farms, which account for about 95 percent of groundwater use in the region.

Data provided by Indias Ministry of Water Resources suggested groundwater use was exceeding natural replenishment, but the regional rate of depletion was unknown. Rodell and colleagues had their case study. The team analyzed six years of monthly GRACE gravity data for northern India to produce a time series of water storage changes beneath the regions land surface.

They found that groundwater levels have been declining by an average of one meter every three years (one foot per year). More than 109 cubic km (26 cubic miles) of groundwater disappeared between 2002 and 2008  double the capacity of Indias largest surface water reservoir, the Upper Wainganga, and triple that of Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the United States.
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Frances Foreign Minister Jean Marc Ayrault Friday urged Libyas friends to be ready for intervention even militarily if the Government of National Accord (GNA) calls for such intervention.

Jean Marc Ayraults comments came as GNA led by Prime Minister-designate Faiez Serraj is trying to impose its authority in capital Tripoli, reportedly deserted by its former rulers.

Libya is a concern shared by all the countries of the region and beyond, Ayrault told a French newspaper.

The chaos which prevails there today aids the rapid development of terrorism. It is a direct threat to the region and to Europe, he added.

For the French top diplomat, the unity government cannot fully assume power in Libya if terrorist groups, chiefly IS, still control Libya. IS is establishing its new base in the North African country as it is being defeated in Iraq and Syria.

We must be prepared to respond if the national unity government of (prime minister-designate Fayez) al-Sarraj asks for help, including on the military front, Ayrault said.

He specified that military intervention could come as soon as the GNA requests it, but it is out of the question to launch a military intervention outside the political process.

Meanwhile the GNA and its Head Serraj are basking in mounting support of Libyans. After receiving the backing of 10 key Libyan coastal cities as well as all Tripoli municipalities, Prime Minister-designate Serraj took a walk at Tripolis Martyr square where he was greeted by people chanting bye bye to former Tripoli-based Administration Prime Minister Khalifa Ghwell.

Serraj arrived by sea in Tripoli on Wednesday flanked by some of his close collaborators of the Presidency Council. He has established a temporary headquarters at Bu Sitta naval base.

Libya slid into chaos following the overthrow and killing of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 in a NATO-backed revolution.

The United Nations snatched in December, after lengthy peace talks in Morocco, a peace agreement between rival camps which accepted to form a unity government. These camps later on dodged to endorse the government formed by Serraj.
Andrew Sullivan Photo: Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan

New York Magazine editor-in-chief Adam Moss announced today that writer Andrew Sullivan is joining the magazine as a contributing editor covering politics and the larger culture. He will write features throughout the year, and cover the 2016 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He begins his new role today.

I have had the privilege of working with Andrew from the beginning of his career (mine too). He is a major (deep and elegant) thinker and writer whose work has had tangible consequence, and he has written some of the more influential essays I have ever had the honor to publish. He also happens to be a true innovatorone of the first and best political writers online, says Moss. Since he stepped away from his blog in 2015, his voice has been greatly missed in our national dialogue. Im grateful that he will return to writing at New York.

Sullivan began his pioneering blog the Daily Dish in 2000, eventually hosting it at publications including Time, The Atlantic, and the Daily Beast before launching the Dish as an independent, subscriber-funded website in early 2013. In January 2015, he announced his decision to close the site and retire from daily blogging.

Sullivan was editor of The New Republic from 1991 to 1996, and a writer for The New York Times Magazine from 1996 to 2002. He is the author of several books, including The Conservative Soul and Virtually Normal. A graduate of Oxford University, he received an MPA and PhD from Harvard University.

Sullivan joins a robust political team covering the 2016 election at New York, including daily columnists Jonathan Chait and Ed Kilgore; national affairs editor Gabriel Sherman; writers-at-large Frank Rich, Rembert Browne, and Rebecca Traister; contributing editors Marin Cogan, Annie Lowrey, and Jason Zengerle; and Daily Intelligencer writers Margaret Hartmann and Eric Levitz.
Taste of Chaos is a live music tour featuring some of the best names in emo, post-hardcore, and metalcore. Started in 2005, it toured across North America, Europe and Asia, featuring acts like The Used, Saosin, Rise Against, and many more.



In 2015, Taste of Chaos announce its return, holding a one-off event in California, with The Used, Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, The All-American Rejects and others on the bill. A full US tour is now set for 2016, co-headlined by Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Suday, with the pop-punk party also set to feature Early November and Saosin.

The tour is nationwide and including Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday. The festival is in San Bernandino Festival.

The Taste of Chaos Festival Lineup will include:
Energy subsidies combined with price control can reduce supply when producers do not have a profit incentive to increase supply.

Fuel subsidies and price controls can reduce supply

Venezuela has a nationalized oil company that is legally required to supply gasoline priced at extremely low levels but despite abundant crude oil reserves cannot profitably refine and distribute sufficient gasoline to meet domestic demand. Chinese price controls have caused fuel rationing and shortages in the past. The United States created the Federal Energy Administration in 1974 after the OPEC oil embargo to implement federal oil allocation and pricing regulations. The unhappy result was long lines at gasoline stations and limited supply throughout most of the United States.

Indias oil demand increases after fuel subsidies were eliminated

Oil demand in India has expanded sharply in the last several years despite the removal of oil product subsidies. The increased demand surprised analysts because excise duties were simultaneously imposed on product sales which did not allow as great a price decline as had been anticipated by the drop in the global price oil that began in late 2014.



Related: Saudi Policy Tied to Weak Economy

Fuel Subsidies may hinder low income families climbing the energy ladder

While not precisely and directly correlated, rising income levels generally allow households to climb the energy ladder by increasing use of energy generally, and cleaner energy specifically. However, fuel subsidies as described by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) Global Subsidies Initiative, exhibit what economist Gordon Tullock has called the transitional gains trap which can lock consumers into a particular spot on the energy ladder that limits opportunities for advancement to a healthier lifestyle. The IISD describes the related political phenomenon that parallels the lock in: Subsidies themselves create a pool of money out of which recipients can influence the very political process than channels money to them in the first place. In many instances subsidies redistribute wealth from a large number of unknowing contributors to a smaller number of beneficiaries. The latter lobby vigorously to defend their handouts; the former seldom bother, or are empowered, to prevent them.



Related: Oil Falls As Saudi Arabia Questions Freeze Deal

In their paper Energy Subsidies in the Arab World published by the United Nations Development Programme in 2012, Bassam Fattough & Laura El-Katiri argue that Energy subsidies distort price signals, with serious implications on efficiency and the optimal allocation of resources. Energy subsidies also tend to be regressive, with high-income households and industries benefiting proportionately most from low energy prices.

Conclusion  fuel subsidies and price controls can hurt the people most meant to help

According to the International Monetary Fund, energy subsidies cost the world almost a half a trillion U.S. dollars in 2011. The IMF noted that these subsidies aggravate fiscal imbalances, crowd-out priority public spending, and depress private investment. Inevitably these market distortions create disincentive for producing energy that cannot be profitably sold while redirecting previous resources away from households who need to move from using dung and biomass for cooking and heating to cleaner hydrocarbon fuels while also robbing the free market transportation sector from the fuel needed to create and sustain global economic growth.

By Tom Morgan via DrillingInfo

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Walking into a 15,000-square foot space stocked with more than 4,000 clocks of all shapes and sizes  and all set to different times  makes for a surreal experience. Such was the case when, after years of wondering about the place, we walked inside Hawkins Clock Center, 7301 W. Greenfield Ave., and were greeted by ticking, tocking, binging, bonging, chiming and chirping.

"We set the clocks to all different times so they dont go off at the same time, which would be too loud," says Gloria Hawkins, who co-owns the family business with her husband and in-laws. "I dont even hear it anymore. Its secondary noise."

Hawkins Clocks opened 45 years ago in the Jackson Park area, but moved to its current location 40 years ago. Originally, it was owned solely by Hawkins in-laws and specialized in antique clock sales and repairs.

In 1983, the current building  which the Hawkins family now owns  caught fire and much of the stock was damaged. Since then, the business has run as smoothly, dare we say, as a Swiss watch.

For decades, Hawkins sold primarily grandfather clocks, and remains the largest grandfather clock store in the Midwest, with more than 600 on display in the showroom. Hawkins manufactures their own line of grandfather clocks, under the name Stoneybrook, which are replicas of 18th and 19th century models. All of the Stoneybrook dials are hand-painted by an artist in South Carolina.

"We make them in the same fashion they made them in the old days," says Hawkins.

Grandfather clocks range in price from $2,000 to $20,000. It is mostly the movement  or "guts"  of a clock that determine its value and price. Many clocks in the shop are very affordable, but there also many that cost $5,000 or $10,000. Although this sounds like an incredible amount of money for a clock to most Americans, Hawkins informs us that there are two very separate clock markets: an American and a European market.

"There is a big difference between these markets. Americans buy many less expensive clocks for their homes and over the course of their lives, whereas Europeans often buy one very good clock that will be the only clock in their home and last for their entire life and beyond," she says. "In that case, it is not unusual for someone in Germany or Italy to buy a clock for $10,000."

To appeal to younger customers, Hawkins also has a large selection of contemporary clocks, some of which look more like pieces of modern art than time pieces. Theres also a fun selection of Kit Cats  popular Felix-the-cat-type cat clocks originally manufactured in the 1930s.

"At one time, grandfather clocks were the thing and every home that was built had a grandfather clock. It was the finishing point of a home. But the millennials are not looking at grandfather clocks. Theyre not even looking at clocks at all. Theyre looking at their phones," says Hawkins.

Hawkins has a large selection of cuckoo clocks which remain coveted today and many are purchased around the holidays. Because the majority of cuckoo clocks have to be hand-wound daily or weekly, they are what Hawkins calls "the least accurate clock you can imagine."

"They don't have a way of timing," she says. "They are more of a novelty than anything else, but people love them."

There are three styles of cuckoo clocks: the chalet style, the traditional style featuring birds and leaves and the hunter style.

"In the hunting-style cuckoo clocks, there are traditionally dead animals, but the bleeding heart liberals didn't like that, so a lot of cuckoo clock makers now put dead animals on a swivel and you can just turn them around if you want them standing up rather than laying down dead," says Hawkins.

All of Hawkins cuckoo clocks come from the Black Forest area in Germany and are made by the Schneider company.

"Schneider is the oldest and largest cuckoo clock company in Germany," says Hawkins. "We still repair clocks that are in good shape that were made by Schneider 100 years ago. They are the very best."

Hawkins has traveled the world, including Holland, Germany, London and the Far East, investigating clock makers and manufacturers.

"I have visited the factory of everyone I do business with," says Hawkins. "Rather than go with the cheaper clocks, I go with the most reliable."

Whereas at one time there were many clock shops in Milwaukee, Hawkins is now the only one left near the city. The business employs five clock repair people.

"Our oldest repair person is 92 years old and still going strong," says Hawkins. "He recently completely restored a clock that came to us in pieces that was dated 1750 from Connecticut."

Hawkins, who was born in Singapore, came to Milwaukee on a United Nations fellowship to attend UWM where she met her husband. The two received degrees in economics and went on to pursue other careers before taking over the shop full time from Hawkins in-laws a few years ago.

Today, Hawkins' daughter and granddaughter work in the shop as well. Business isnt what it once was, but as long as life is measured in hours and minutes and seconds, there will be a market for clocks. Also, the massive yellow sign on the outside of the building has intrigued and lured in passers-by for four decades.

"People love to come in here and walk around," says Hawkins. "And of course, walk in and say, any chance you know what time it is?"
Reprinted from Mondoweiss

As attention turns to the NY primary, the Democratic candidates are beginning to separate on the Israel issue. Let's hope that their very real differences on the Palestinian question become politicized over the next three weeks, and voters are urged to choose between reflexive Israel support (Clinton) and criticism of the occupation (Sanders). Let's hope the media points out that Clinton is to the right of even Donald Trump on this issue.

Some news on the New York race. The Times of Israel reports on a private gathering of rabbis with Bill Clinton earlier this week:

"Former President Bill Clinton met with over 20 leading rabbis in the New York area to discuss his wife Hillary's presidential campaign. "The meeting Tuesday in Midtown Manhattan was off the record and lasted for two hours, twice the amount of scheduled time. Participants would not discuss the content."

Bernie Sanders told a New York TV station that "we cannot continue to ignore the needs of the Palestinian people." (Thanks to Jewish Insider).

"I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, I have lived in Israel, I'm a strong defender of Israel," he told NBC 4. "But let me also say this, I think we cannot continue to ignore the needs of the Palestinian people and I would hope very much that I could move us forward in what has been so intractable over the years, bringing Palestinians, bringing Israelis together, bringing peace finally to the Middle East."

Two days ago Clinton sat down with Rachel Maddow and threw in a gratuitous Israe l reference, and an Iran one too, in repudiating Donald Trump's bigoted idea of barring all Muslims from coming to the United States:

"We know if we're going to defeat ISIS, which is a very high priority for us, for our partners in Europe and the Middle East, especially Israel and others. We have to form coalitions with predominantly Muslim nations. "I know how hard it is to form a coalition, I formed the coalition that imposed the sanctions on Iran. Got Russia, and China, and others to be part of it."

PS -- Israel is not all that concerned about ISIS; ISIS just confirms its contention that it lives in the most dangerous neighborhood in the world, and it compares Hamas to ISIS frequently.

Clinton has a high-profile downtown surrogate: playwright Tony Kushner is supporting her and defends her appearance at AIPAC. He appeared on Chris Hayes's MSNBC show, and Hayes prompted Kushner, saying he has been "quite outspoken on Palestinian self-determination" and that Clinton's AIPAC speech was "hawkish." Kushner:

"It was pretty much the speech that I would expect a Democratic serious nominee for the presidency to give to AIPAC. I suppose she might have not shown up as Sanders did... It's enormously important I believe for the Jewish American vote to stay 75 percent Democrat, as it has for many many many decades, and I think that this is an enormously fraught issue and she is avoiding getting caught up in a debate that might do damage to her candidacy. I think she believes in diplomacy and she'll pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis in the Middle East."

(Kushner expresses an interesting idea of Jewish political solidarity. I would guess that Kushner thinks that the liberal Jewish political presence on countless domestic issues, which has helped change the country in the last 50 years, outweighs its reactionary effect on Middle East policy. Many in the Palestinian solidarity camp would disagree, and would welcome a new left coalition of great diversity.)

Now here are two great attacks on Clinton's pandering. Sandy Tolan in Truthdig says Clinton has gone "radical right" on Israel, to Donald Trump's right. Some of his items, familiar to folks on our site but worth repeating:
By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune

A new film called Dear President Obama that is narrated by Mark Ruffalo begins very gently, sympathizing with President Obama's supposed need to please his funders and corporate lobbyists. But the story it then begins to present of what the frack president has done to the United States with fracking is absolutely devastating -- as severe and tragic in its way as what the drone president has done abroad, and no doubt parallel with what the Secretary of State for Wars and Fracking Hillary Clinton did by imposing fracking on other countries that did not want it.

Dear President Obama explains that fracking damages the earth's climate rather than protecting it, as had been the lie. But then the film focuses on the stories of some of the 17 million people in the United States who live within a mile of oil and gas drilling. We meet families with these climate destroying, earthquake creating, water poisoning, air polluting disasters in their backyards and next to kindergartens. We meet people who suddenly have cancer, their teeth falling out, their health deteriorating in similar ways everywhere that fracking is ruining what was left of undamaged rural landscape, or where fossil fuels are being sucked out of the ground right in Los Angeles, but in a lower income neighborhood about which elected officials apparently do not care. Most people have had fracking imposed on them, not by choice, but by complete surprise, with no input, and have had their land devalued or actually taken from them.

After showing us the localized human damage, Dear President Obama circles back to show us how the profiteers have corrupted federal and state governments. We see Dick Cheney joking about global warming, which is quite fitting, because Cheney's wars are widely understood to have been based on lies. But those lies were blatantly obvious to numerous experts and ordinary observers who hadn't been paid to believe them. The same can be said of lies about "natural gas." They were quickly exposed, debunked, documented, abandoned, and retold in other forms. But people not paid to believe that "natural gas" was good for us didn't believe the lies to begin with and have gone right on not believing them for years now.

Beyond dispute now is, what many have understood for years, that fracking creates earthquakes. It may even have caused an earthquake that damaged the Washington Monument and National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., not to mention a nuclear power plant in Virginia -- thereby bringing together two major fraudulent energy policies. Earthquakes and water contamination and other damage from fracking has outstripped most, if not all, predictions, while predictions about the amount of energy available to be fracked (like claims that Iraq would pay for its own bombing, or Mexico for its own walling off) have been successfully exposed.

While President Obama promised 100 years of energy from "natural gas," the stuff is already running out and the profiteers abandoning their boom towns. The insanity of damaging the earth's future and poisoning children for 100 years of gas is being exposed as something people may understand a lot better: the insanity of doing that for 10 or 20 years of gas. But if the fracking stops, the damage will continue to spread like the air from burn pits, the depleted uranium, or the agent orange left behind after a war. Ground water has been contaminated in locations all over the United States from fracking. And fracked water full of oil and volatile chemicals is being used to irrigate farms, including farms growing fruit that will be sold to us without any indication of what went into it

Some local governments have tried to resist fracking and in some cases been prevented by states, in other cases succeeded thus far. In Dear President Obama we meet a small town mayor who discovers that the promised economic benefits to his town were "smoke and mirrors" and that his local laws had no power to prevent getting fracked. Other towns and counties have banned fracking, and many others are trying to do so. There's a website where you can set up a petition for wherever you live in support of a ban on fracking. The film shows us the activist movement that created a ban on fracking in the state of New York. This is inspiring and an excellent example of what to do. And I say that despite having heard serious concerns from New Yorkers about the limitations of the ban, and despite all the work that remains to be done.

Renewable energy is growing fast but it cannot succeed far enough and fast enough without government support, just exactly as fossil fuels needed government support to succeed. This means that we must push on with bans on fossil fuel and nuclear energies, press for their enforcement, monitor that enforcement with eternal vigilance, and think locally but act nationally and globally in creating sustainable green energy.

In Dear President Obama, people interact with their elected officials, including Congress members, who tell them lies and advise them, at best, to sell out and move. If ISIS tried that, can you imagine the uproar. Who dare someone poison our land and then tell us the get out? When President Obama claimed to know that Bashar al Assad had poisoned children, that was supposedly grounds for bombing other children. What about when frackers do it? These polluters of our land, water, and air have shortened many more U.S. lives than ISIS. Their victims are tearful, traumatized, and indeed terrorized by the threat to their families and communities and our world as a whole.

Those benefitting in the extremely short term from fracking, as from bombing, are the profiteers and those they offer temporary, dangerous, and soul-stunting employment. Their fracking day in the clouded-over sun won't last long -- unless they can create a new variation, a new method of raping the earth, and unless we let them get away with it again.

One activist in Dear President Obama notes that there's a big focus in U.S. public discourse around the environment on changing light bulbs and putting solar on your roof, even while U.S. and states' policies continue to pump every possible drop of oil and gas out of the ground -- oil and gas the consumption of which scientists say we cannot survive. This is like applying Geneva Conventions to nuclear war or asking for "transparent" reports on everybody murdered with drones. The U.S. government subsidizes fossil fuels and clears the way for their extraction and consumption. That has to change or we have to die.

Should we praise reductions in coal while gently regretting increases in the burning of gas and protesting the damage done in the extraction process? Should our position begin with the words "Dear President Obama"? Or should we perhaps yell something like this: Frack! Obama, you are threatening all we hold dear. End it now! Admit to the damage! Halt the program! Move the money to solar and wind. Or this planet's in danger and your legacy is up in flames.
Today's gospel relates the story of "Doubting Thomas." The picture is familiar. The apostles have locked themselves in the Upper Room, cowering in the very place where they recently shared a Last Supper with their beloved Yeshua.

Even in that hallowed space, FEAR is the watchword of their days and nights. The apostles are afraid of the Temple authorities. They're afraid of the Romans. In the light of Judas' betrayal, they might even be afraid of one another.

Then suddenly, Yeshua materializes in their midst. His message: "Why all this fear? Be at peace instead."

Thomas, of course, is absent. When he hears the tale of the risen Master, he refuses to believe.

So Yeshua materializes once again -- this time for Thomas' benefit. As in his first appearance, the risen one identifies himself by his wounds. He makes the doubter probe the gashes with his hand and finger. It's Yeshua's reminder that his peace is based on vulnerability, not on the security of locked doors.

"My God, it is you after all!" Thomas realizes.

"Yes, it is," Yeshua affirms.

Then he turns his attention to us. "Blessed are you," he says across the centuries, "who believe without the proof I've just offered Thomas."

Next Page 1 | 2 | 3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Reprinted from Gush Shalom

Israel is in the position of this illicit sweetheart. Arab countries are having an affair with her, but don't want to be seen with her in public.

Too embarrassing.

THE MAIN Arab country in question is Saudi Arabia. For some time now, the oil kingdom has been a secret ally of Israel, and vice versa.

In politics, national interests often trump ideological differences. This is so in this case.

The area referred to by Westerners as the "Middle East" is now polarized into two camps, led respectively by Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The northern arc consists of Shiite Iran, present-day Iraq with its Shiite majority, the main Syrian territory controlled by the Alawite (close to Shiite) community and Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Southern bloc, led by Sunni Saudi Arabia, consists of the Sunni states of Egypt and the Gulf principalities. In a shadowy way, they are connected with the Sunni Islamic Caliphate, a.k.a. Daesh or Isis, which has lodged itself between Syria and Iraq. Except for Egypt, which is as poor as a mosque mouse, they are all stinking rich with oil.

The northern arc is supported by Russia, which just now has given the Assad family in Syria a massive military boost. The southern bloc has been supported until recently by the US and its allies.

THIS IS an orderly picture, as it should be. People around the world don't like complicated situations, especially if they make it difficult to distinguish between friends and enemies.

Take Turkey. Turkey is a Sunnite country, formerly secular but now ruled by a religious party. So it is logical that it quietly supports Daesh. Turkey also fights against the Syrian Kurds, which fight against Daesh, and who are allied with the Kurdish minority in Turkey, which is considered by the Turkish government as a deadly menace.

(The Kurds are a separate people, neither Arab nor Turkish, who are divided between Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, and generally unable to unite. They are mostly Sunnis.)

The US is fighting against Assad's Syria, which is supported by Russia. But the US is also fighting against Daesh, which is fighting against Assad's Syria. The Syrian Kurds are fighting against Daesh, but also against Assad's forces. The Lebanese Hezbollah strongly supports Syria, a traditional enemy of Lebanon, and keeps the Assad regime alive, while fighting against Daesh, side by side with the US, a deadly enemy of Hezbollah. Iran supports Assad and fights against Daesh, side by side with the US, Hezbollah and the Syrian Kurds.

Can't make sense of this? You are not alone.

Recently the US has changed its orientation. Until then, the picture was clear. The US needed the Saudi oil, as cheaply as the King could supply it. It also hated Iran, since the Shiite Islamists threw out the Iranian Shah of Shahs, an American stooge. The Islamists captured the American diplomats in Tehran and held them as hostages. To get them out, the US provided the Iranian army with weapons, via Israel (this was called Irangate). Iran was at war with Iraq, which was under the Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The Americans supported Saddam against Iran, but later invaded Iraq, hanged him and effectively turned Iraq over to Iran, their deadly enemy.
by Wim de Vriend

An awful lot of people, those for Coos Bays Jordan Cove LNG project and those against it, were surprised by the March 11 decision of the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), denying approval of the terminal and its 232-mile gas pipeline. Or rather, of the pipeline first, with the terminal as an afterthought; for as the FERC noted, without the pipeline there could be no Jordan Cove, anyway.

That pipeline, which would have been partly owned by Jordan Cove/Veresen, was known by the name Pacific Connector. Veresen, a Canadian gas company, is Jordan Coves corporate parent.

In order to approve Pacific Connector, the FERC had to find that the public benefits of the pipeline exceeded the public harm it would cause: the sort of balancing test that a lot of courts engage in. And the Commission had equated each of those concepts, public benefits and public harm, with very simple notions  though some people might find simplistic a more apt term.

According to the FERC, public benefits meant substantial commercial use of the pipeline, caused in turn by substantial demand for Jordan Coves LNG production.

And public harm consisted of the harm inflicted on private property rights by Pacific Connectors forcible acquisition of a right-of-way across hundreds of parcels of privately owned land. That was because FERCs approval would give a green light to Pacific Connector to using eminent domain for its purely private venture. By the FERCs count, on its 232-mile route, Pacific Connector would impact 157.3 miles of privately-owned lands, held by approximately 630 landowners.

By August 2014 only 38 had agreed to grant easements to Pacific Connector, the vast majority were outright hostile, and 54 had intervened with FERC, lodging protests and arguments. Many of the holdouts were substantial landowners, like Bill Gow who has a 1,400 ranch south of Roseburg.

This way Pacific Connector became the linchpin of the entire Jordan Cove scheme, even though the anticipated sales volume of the Jordan Cove terminal at its western terminus was the linchpin of that linchpins viability.

(please click here to continue and read the full article)
Pakistan-Iran Sensibilities 03 April, 2016 By Asif Haroon Raja

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Gul slams US intelligence agencies' report on Pak Iran is a brotherly Muslim country with which Pakistan has enjoyed, geographical, cultural, religious and historical ties. Both had best of ties during the rule of Reza Shah Pehlavi. Iran supported us during the 1965 and 1971 wars with India and provided helicopters in 1974 to defeat Baloch insurgency. Pakistan also has extended all sorts of help. The biggest was when it let Iran to retain its fleet of tanks sent there for upgradation after Iran was declared a pariah by the US, UN and west after 1979 Islamic revolution led by Imam Khomeini.



Throughout the period when Iran remained under the black star, Pakistan has remained on friendly terms and never carried out anti-Iran propaganda or any hostile act. 1979 revolution was welcomed and eulogised in Pakistan. Many in Pakistan still say that Pakistan need a leader like Khomeini to sort out the mess. Pakistan never drummed up Iran's proxy war in support of Shias, although it is a fact that from 1980 onward, both Iran and Saudi Arabia have been involved in fomenting sectarianism in Pakistan and this problem had peaked in mid nineties.



Pakistan also didn't complain when Iran began to veer towards India in early nineties when Taliban gained power in Afghanistan; and Northern Alliance soldiers were trained and equipped by Indian military trainers in Iran. Pakistan also didn't object when India in its bid to encircle Pakistan started building North-South Corridor, linking Mumbai port with Bandar Abbas port and developing Chabahar port and linking it with Afghanistan and Central Asia by rail and road. This is being done to undermine Gawadar Port, which is an eyesore for Iran as well.



Whenever Iran had any complaint against Pakistan, Pak govt, public and media took serious note of it and tried to allay it to the best of their abilities. Jundulah group was used by CIA from Balochistan (Shamsi airbase) against Iran. ISI handed over Jundullah chief Abdul Malik Regi to Iran, who was then executed. Dr AQ Khan helped Iran in its covert nuclear program and Pakistan to this day has been suffering for it since Iran handed over the proofs of Pakistan's complicity to IAEA in 2004. Pakistan has been denied civil nuclear technology by USA owing to this lapse, which was not at the state level. Pakistan didn't jump into the Yemen war in which Iran is supporting the Houthis, merely not to antagonise Iran, but earned the resentment of GCC states. Pakistan has helped in defusing tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The latter is wary of expanding Shia arc around it and Iran's ambition to dominate Middle East.



Pakistan has been subjected to a massive covert war together with propaganda since 2003 and is still not come out of it despite losing 60,000 people and sustaining economic loss of $107 billion besides immense social trauma. Afghan soil has been in use by RAW and other agencies to destabilise and denuclearise Pakistan.



It has now come as a rude shock to learn that RAW has also been using Iranian soil to support Baloch separatist movement and to make Karachi lawless. Arrest of RAW officer Kal Bhushan Yadav and his detailed confession has left no doubt in this regard that he has been operating a network from Chahbahar since 2003. Indian consulates in Zaidan, Mashad and Embassy in Tehran are also involved in covert operations against Pakistan. Mekran coast has been used for supplying arms and funds to terrorists. Several naval facilities and seaports along the coast were marked as targets. Sectarianism was instigated in Balochistan under the guidance of Yadav as disclosed by him.



This development is alarming and has added to the woes of Pakistan. it was rightful on part of Pakistan to raise this issue before the President of Iran Rouhani, since arrest of Yadav coincided with his visit to Isbd. It is not altogether correct on part of Iran's Ambassador in Isbd to complain that a segment in Pakistan is willfully trying to spoil Pak-Iran relations by undermining Rouhani's visit under the garb of Yadav's issue. It is India, which is adept in creating misgivings among friends of Pakistan. It has been quite successful in Afghanistan, and is now working hard to mar the relations of Gulf states and Iran with Pakistan.



We must not forget that Iran has been lodging strong protests against Pakistan alleging that its border of Siestan province was violated by terrorists and that if Pakistan didn't take any action, it will be forced to send its troops across to chase and kill them. Moreover, it is surprising that Iranian media has never uttered a word in favor of Pakistan, but has given bad press to it off and on.



Notwithstanding Chabahar/Gawadar clash of economic interests, Iran must be made to realise that the two ports instead of becoming rivals should complement each other geo-economically with the help of CPEC. It must also be told that India is a Hindu country where Hindutva fever is on the rise, and it is not the neighbor of Iran and cannot guard the vital flank of Persian Gulf as Pakistan does by virtue of its location. Iran's strategic relationship with India must not be at the cost of Pakistan. Iran must help in dismantling RAW infrastructure on its soil and hand over Rakesh as demanded by Pakistan.



In conclusion, I will say that it is geo-strategic necessity and compulsion for Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan to remain friendly since the security of the trio is interlinked. It is however unfortunate that the leadership of three countries consider India a friend and harmless and want to promote ties ignoring its track record. While closeness of Iran and Afghanistan with India is understandable, what is not comprehensible is infatuation of Pakistan's leaders with India which halved Pakistan in 1971 and then inflicted thousands of cuts on the body of Pakistan. It is high time for Pakistan policy makers to expose the ugly face of India which is bent upon fragmenting Pakistan.



At the same time, relations with Iran to be deepened and construction/operation of Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project expedited. It must be taken into account that the real power rests in the hands of Walayat Faqih and associated clergy and not Rouhani.



The writer is a retired Brig, defence analyst/columinist/author of five books, Director Measac Research Centre, Director Board of Governors Thinkers Forum. He takes part in TV talk shows and holds seminars/delivers talks on current issues. asifharoonraja@gmail.com
Demands of the pro-Qadri protestors were invalid: Chaudhry Nisar Ali

ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Khan, while addressing a press conference on Saturday, stated that there had been a general consensus that the demands of the pro-Qadri protestors, staging a sit-in at D-Chowk, were invalid.



A few individuals were making wrong use of the notion of the finality of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) for personal political gain, and it was decided that the area had to be cleared promptly, said the interior minister.



The interior minister added that the consensus had been achieved in a meeting with the prime minister.



"We decided on Monday to remove them with as little violence as possible. A few ministers raised the point that there should be negotiations with them, but the opinion of an overwhelming majority of the leadership decided that they should be removed ", said Nisar.



Nisar explained the government decided to call in extra security forces Tuesday evening in order to have six personnel for each protestor, which reduced the risk of force being used due to the large number of security personnel present as they outnumbered the much smaller group of protestors.



"When a mob  yes, that was a mob  of 5,000 to 8,000 are gathered, no police force in the world can stop them without fatalities."



Nisar conceded that there had been a lack of coordination between the provincial and capital authorities during the sit-in.



"The inquiry is ongoing as to why there was an administrative fallout."



Addressing those who had gathered at D-Chowk, the Interior Minister criticised their destruction of public and private property and causing inconvenience to the public as contradictory to the Prophet's (PBUH) example.



The Interior Minister also addressed widespread criticism the government has received since former president Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf left the country for medical treatment abroad, complaining about accusations the present government is not serious regarding prosecuting the former president.



The minister read out clauses from Islamabad High Court (IHC) and Supreme Court's (SC) observations, declaring that the government cannot impede Musharraf's travel, and promised to present the complete "truth" from the court decisions on Monday.



"In 2011, Musharraf's name was included in the FIR for the [Benazir Bhutto murder] case, but even then his name wasn't placed in Exit Control List (ECL)," said Nisar, referring to the slow pace of progress in Musharraf's prosecution during the previous government's tenure.



"Where was the government then? We appointed a public prosecutor, had a special court made in the Supreme Court, and within five months completed prosecution."



The minister was emphatic that the government is not responsible for the delays.



"During the last stage, the special court decided, at Musharraf's request, to include three additional names of the law minister, prime minister, and the Chief Justice of the time. This wasn't a government decision, but a special court decision."



"Where is the government's non-seriousness in this matter? We reconstituted our committee and launched investigations."



The Interior Minister also criticised the publicity given to the Iranian displeasure in relation to the arrest of Indian spy Kulbushan Jadhav.



"Iran was insulted. It was made to appear as if Iran is not a friendly and a brotherly country. The good feel factor between Iran and Pakistan after President Rouhani's visit has been damaged immensely, but we are trying to address it."



"The issue of the spy will be followed through, but that issue is with India, not with Iran."



He also requested the media to not relate the issue of cooperation with Iran with Jadhav's arrest. "Please lend some caution to your voices and your pens. This is a very sensitive issue of relations between two brotherly countries and there are vested interests trying to hurt them."
Indian authorities failed to provide evidence to JIT

ISLAMABAD - Indian authorities failed to provide evidence to Pakistans Joint Investigation Team (JIT), visiting India to probe into Pathankot Airbase attack.



The JIT members visited Pathankot Airbase on March 29 where Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials briefed and showed them the route from where the attackers stormed the airbase.



Sources said the lights along the 24-km perimeter wall of the Pathankot airbase found to be faulty on the eve of the attack. The Pakistani investigators were allowed to enter the military airbase from the narrow adjacent routes instead of main entrance and their duration of the visit was just 55 minutes, enough to take a mere walk through the airbase, sources said and added that the JIT could not collect evidence in this limited time.



However, the team was only informed about the negligence of Boarder Security Force (BSF) and Indian forces, sources added. It was said that at the time of the attack the BSF was sleeping even though they had been alerted of a possible attack 48 hours earlier, sources said.
Iranian ambassador called on Nisar Ali Khan

ISLAMABAD: Iranian ambassador in Islamabad called on Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan to assure his countrys full support in stemming incursion of Indian spies into Pakistani territory using Iranian soil.



Government of Iran will extend full cooperation on all issues that ensure security and development in Pakistan, Mehdi Honardoost told Nisar at a meeting at the Punjab House. However, in the same breath, the Iranian envoy expressed his serious reservations over what he called attempts by section of media to negatively impact relations between the two countries. Certain attempts in sections of media to negatively impact relations between the two countries in spite of highly successful visit of President of Iran recently are just deplorable, he said.



The interior minister said that media in Pakistan was independent of the government control but that does not mean that we can allow anybody to affect our relations. He said that all sections of Pakistani society are unanimous in their support for stronger Pak-Iran relations. On Thursday, Islamabad, in a letter issued by the signatures of Federal Interior Secretary Arif Ahmed Khan and addressed to Iranian Ambassador Mehdi Honardoost, asked Tehran to immediately arrest and hand over an individual identified as Rakesh, alias Rizwan, for interrogation; verify activities of Kulbhushan Jadhav along with records of visits to Iran; provide a record of his stay in Iran including cities visited and the duration of these visits; provide a record of people he interacted with and purpose of these interactions; share details of RAW networks on Iranian soil and share any other details related to the matter above.



The ambassador further said good relations between the two countries should result in tangible improvement in bilateral trade and development. We have to remove hindrances in the way of further strengthening of our bilateral relations, he said. Nisar said Pakistan and Iran were tied in decades long religious, social, cultural and political bonds and that nothing could come in the way of their brotherly relations. Expressing satisfaction over the recent visit of Iranian president to Pakistan, the minister said, The momentum created by the recent high-level visit should be fully utilised for further deepening of bilateral relations in all possible areas. We need to build on the gains of the past and work hand in hand to overcome our shared challenges and achieve common objectives for the mutual benefit of the people of the two countries.



The interior minister said that Pak-Iran joint stance on various issues in the region and at international forums will deter their foes from any malice against the two countries. It was for the first time that Pakistan has arrested a serving officer of the Indian security forces working for RAW inside its territory. In past, Pakistan did arrest many an operative of the RAW but never ever a serving officer of the rank of a lieutenant colonel had been nabbed. Kulbhushan Yadav is said to be originally from Indian Navy where he served as a commissioned officer. He is claimed to have entered Pakistan via Iran and is also reportedly having a valid Iranian visa. In Pakistan, he operated under fake identities and is alleged to have been working with separatist and sectarian organisations in Balochistan.



The government has asked the neighbouring country to arrest and hand over Sub Inspector Rakesh alias Rizwan, who is known to be a key RAW operative assisting Kulbhushan Yadav. Jadhav was covertly based in Chabahar, Iran, under the pretext of being a jeweller/businessman. He had an Iranian visa along with an Indian passport. He was assisted by RAW Sub Inspector Rakesh, alias Rizwan, a key operative who was also working undercover as a businessman dealing in jewellery. And he crossed over to Balochistans Mashkhel area from Saravan, Iran, the letter written by the Interior Ministry to the Iranian embassy had maintained.
Obama urge Pakistan India to develop military doctrines

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama has urged India and Pakistan not to continue moving in the wrong direction as they develop their military doctrines.



In his concluding remarks at the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit, Mr Obama said that leaders from across the globe had gathered at the two-day event to discuss one of the greatest threats to global security  terrorists getting their hands on a weapon of mass destruction.



At a news briefing after the summit, Mr Obama identified various regions that deserved special attention for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and enriched materials and South Asia was top on this list.



The other area where I think we need to see progress is Pakistan and India, that Sub-continent, making sure that as they develop military doctrines, that they are not continually moving in the wrong direction, he said.



President Obama also expressed concern over a rapid increase in tactical or small nuclear weapons, although he did not name the countries that were doing so.



Global stocks of plutonium are growing, nuclear arsenals are expanding in some countries, with more small tactical nuclear weapons which could be at greater risk of theft, he said.



The US media, however, interpreted this statement as a reference to Pakistan. They claimed that in the days leading to the summit several US officials had identified Pakistan as the country making small nuclear weapons.



Mr Obama said that because of this continuous increase in tactical nuclear weapons, the summit tried to build an international architecture that can continue the efforts to curb this proliferation, even though this was the last formal meeting of world leaders from this platform.



He said the conference devoted an entire session to consider how to prevent the militant Islamic State (IS) and other groups from carrying out major terrorist acts like whats happened in Brussels, in Turkey, Pakistan, and so many other countries around the world.



In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr Obama once again warned that groups like Al Qaeda and IS would use nuclear weapons if they ever get hold of it.



Fortunately, because of our efforts so far, no terrorist group has yet succeeded in obtaining a nuclear device or producing a dirty bomb using radioactive materials, he said.



We know that Al Qaeda has tried. IS has already used chemical weapons in Syria and Iraq. And, if they ever got hold of a nuclear weapon or nuclear material, we have no doubt they will use it, the US President said.



He said thats why the United States was leading a global effort to secure the worlds nuclear materials. Working with other nations, we have removed or secured enough nuclear material for more than 150 nuclear weapons that will now never fall into the hands of terrorists, he said.



Mr Obama said that the entire South America was now free of these deadly materials and Central Europe and Southeast Asia would be free of them later this year.



Mr Obama said that at the summit, he and other world leaders agreed to further strengthen nuclear facilities from cyber attacks and improve intelligence sharing to ensure dangerous materials stay out of the hands of terrorists.



He noted that more than a dozen nations had disposed of their entire supplies of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium  the radioactive elements necessary to build nuclear bombs.



Mr Obama also met a smaller group of nations closely involved in last years nuclear agreement with Iran. He told the so-called P5+1 group the deal with Iran had achieved a substantial success and focused on the dangers of nuclear proliferation in a real way.



Mr Obama said that so far world leaders had made 260 specific commitments to improve nuclear security, both at this years summit and their previous sessions. And so far, the president reported, three-quarters of these steps have been implemented.



Mr Obama said that for the first time in a decade, the United States was also providing a public inventory of its stockpiles of highly-enriched uranium.
Officers and officials are national heroes: Shahbaz Sharif

LAHORE - Punjab Chief Minister Muhammad Shahbaz Sharif described officers and officials as national heroes who made all out efforts to save the lives of their injured sisters and brothers after Gulshan-e-Iqbal park tragedy.



On the occasion, the chief minister offered Fateha and led prayer for those who lost their lives in terror attack. He prayed that Allah Almighty might rest the departed souls in eternal peace and grant courage and strength to the bereaved families. He also prayed for safety of the country and people.



He said that today great heroes are gathered here, who served their injured sisters and brothers with national spirit in very difficult time and prayed that Allah Almighty might give them more courage and strength. He said that officers, officials and citizens present in the function had set an unprecedented example of public service.
In this Wednesday, March 30, 2016 photo, parrots interact at SoCal Parrot, a parrot-rescue center, in Jamul, Calif. U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red crowned parrot - a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red-crowned parrota species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country.

The research comes amid debate over whether some of the birds flew across the border into Texas and should be listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Parrots in U.S. urban areas are just starting to draw attention from scientists because of their intelligence, resourcefulness and ability to adapt. There is also a growing realization that the city dwellers may offer a population that could help save certain species from extinction.

Parrots are thriving today in cities from Los Angeles to Brownsville, Texas, while in the tropics and subtropics, a third of all parrot species are at risk of going extinct because of habitat loss and the pet trade.

Most are believed to have escaped from importers or smugglers over the past half-century, when tens of thousands of parrots were brought into the United States from Latin America.

Scientists only now are starting to study them.

After doing most of his research in places like Peru, Donald Brightsmith is concentrating on the squawking birds nesting in Washingtonian palms lining avenues and roosting in the oak trees in front lawns in South Texas.

In this Wednesday, March 30, 2016 photo, a parrot flies from a palm tree in a San Diego neighborhood. U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red crowned parrot - a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

"Parrots in urban settings are of great interest to me," the Texas A&M University biologist said. "I see these as kind of future insurance policies."

Brightsmith has received a two-year grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to get an official count on the state's red-crowned parrot population and determine whether threats against them are increasing.

The loud, raucous birds have been shot at by angry homeowners and their young poached from nests.

In this Wednesday, March 30, 2016 photo, Brooke Durham, who runs a parrot-rescue center, called SoCal Parrot, holds a parrot at her home turned parrot sanctuary, in Jamul, Calif. U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red crowned parrot - a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In San Diego, a $5,000 reward is being offered for information on the killings of about a half-dozen parrots found shot this year.

The research could help drive ways to maintain the population that prefers the cities and suburbs.

"It's more of an urban planning, landscape, ecology issue and not so much how do we protect an area of pristine nature," he said. Brightsmith would like to team up with scientists in California.

In this Wednesday, March 30, 2016 photo, a parrot sits on an apartment roof in San Diego. U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red crowned parrot - a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Researchers want to someday study the gene pool to determine whether there are still genetically pure red-crowned parrots that could replenish the flocks in their native habitat.

"We could have a free backup stock in the US," Brightsmith said.

In Mexico, biologists are working on getting an updated count. The last study in 1994 estimated the population at 3,000 to 6,500 birds, declining from more than 100,000 in the 1950s because of deforestation and raids on the nesting young to feed the pet trade.

In this Wednesday, March 30, 2016 photo, a parrot sits inside the home of Brooke Durham, who runs a parrot-rescue center, called SoCal Parrot, in Jamul, Calif. U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red crowned parrot - a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

"We suspect the population in South Texas could rival the number found in the wild in Mexico," said Karl Berg, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who received a grant to study the red-crowned parrot in Brownsville.

Biologists estimate the population at close to 1,000 birds in Texas and more than 2,500 in California, where they are the most common of more than a dozen parrot species.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in 2011 listed it as an indigenous species because it is thought the parrots flew north across the border as lowland areas in Mexico were cleared in the 1980s for ranching and agriculture, though ornithologists debate that.

In this Wednesday, March 30, 2016 photo, Brooke Durham, who runs a parrot-rescue center, called SoCal Parrot, gives a treat to a parrot at her home turned parrot sanctuary, in Jamul, Calif. U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red crowned parrot - a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that same year announced that the red-crowned parrot warranted federal protection because of habitat loss and poaching for the pet trade. It remains a candidate, and the agency reviews it annually.

Some in the pet trade fear that a listing under the Endangered Species Act could prevent them from breeding the birds and moving them across state lines.

Conservationists question whether any of the birds are native to Texas and should be listed when there are so many species in need of protection in the United States.

In this Wednesday, March 30, 2016 photo, Brooke Durham, who runs a parrot-rescue center, called SoCal Parrot, right, stands inside a rehabilitation area alongside her husband Joshua Bridwell, in Jamul, Calif. U.S. researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red crowned parrot - a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

"It seems odd to me," said Kimball Garrett, a parrot expert at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. "I don't know that there is enough evidence to show the birds flew for hundreds of miles from their native range and went across the border."

Brooke Durham said the birds need more protection. Durham runs a parrot rescue center called SoCal Parrot in the town of Jamul, east of San Diego, and treats up to 100 birds a year.

Recently at her sprawling home-turned-sanctuary, dozens of birds were being nursed for broken bones and pellet gun wounds. Most were red-crowned parrots.

Animal cruelty laws offer about the only protection for the birds in California, because they are not native to the state or migratory.

"People complain about the noise, but they're just not educated about the birds," she said. "They don't realize these birds are endangered."

Explore further Australian parrots need more protection

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This October 29, 2014 image taken from NASA TV shows the Russian Progress 57 Cargo Ship arriving to dock with the International Space Station

The Russian unmanned cargo ship Progress successfully docked with the International Space Station on Saturday, resupplying the crew with food and fuel, Russia's mission control centre said.

The docking procedure "took place at the scheduled time," the Russian TASS news agency quoted mission control as saying.

The Progress-63 brought with it around three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies to Russian cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko, Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin, NASA's Tim Kopra and Jeff Williams and British astronaut Tim Peake.

It was the second successful docking for a Progress cargo ships, from Russia's Baikonur space base in Kazakhstan, since one of the craft failed in April 2015 and was lost as it burnt up upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

Russia is currently solely responsible for manned flights to the International Space Station, but resupply missions are also carried out by the United States.

A previous cargo vessel was disconnected from the station on Wednesday and will slowly descend to Earth before plunging into the Pacific Ocean on April 8.

On March 26, the Cygnus cargo ship packed with science and research equipment plus food, water and clothes successfully docked at the International Space Station after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Explore further Russia launches cargo ship to space station

 2016 AFP
This Sept. 30, 2015 aerial photo provided by Cypress Creek Renewables, shows a commercial solar farm built on farmland by Cypress Creek Renewables in Catawba County, N.C. Less than a year after New York banned fracking, dashing the hopes of farmers who had hoped to reap royalties from natural gas leases, the commercial solar industry is courting landowners for energy production. Gov. Andrew Cuomo administration's initiatives aimed at promoting local renewable energy generation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and generating 50 percent of the state's energy from renewable sources by 2030 are bringing solar developers to the state like Cypress Creek Renewable. (Cypress Creek Renewables via AP)

Less than a year after New York banned fracking, dashing the hopes of farmers who had hoped to reap royalties from natural gas leases, the commercial solar industry is courting landowners for energy production.

Buoyed by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo's renewable energy plan and the extension of the 30 percent federal tax credit in December, solar companies in recent months have blanketed rural areas with mailings seeking leases on farmland for solar arrays spanning 20 acres or more. While some farmers welcome the opportunity to earn up to $2,000 an acre annually for the next 20 years or so, some agricultural advisers, community leaders and lawyers are urging caution.

"These are complex business transactions masquerading as lottery tickets," said Chris Denton, a southern New York lawyer who helped landowner groups negotiate oil and gas leases during the Marcellus Shale gas rush in 2009. "There are unexamined risks and environmental impacts. That's why landowners are banding together again to formulate leases that will protect their interests."

Manna Jo Greene, environmental director for the nonprofit Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, said the developing solar boom is welcome but only if it's done right. While a solar development is a beneficial use for a former landfill, it might not be appropriate for prime farmland, she said. And there are many questions concerning zoning, agricultural tax benefits, effects on farm operations, and the eventual decommissioning and disposal of the solar components.

"A lease promising $20,000 or $40,000 a year is tempting to farmers who are struggling," said Greene, who is also an Ulster County legislator. "But we're trying to get the word out to be cautious and not let a developer strip them of their property rights."

The Cuomo administration's initiatives aimed at promoting local renewable energy generation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and generating 50 percent of the state's energy from renewable sources by 2030 are bringing solar developers to the state. One company, Santa Monica, California-based Cypress Creek Renewables, has mass-mailed lease offers to hundreds of upstate landowners.

"We expect to have operational projects in every utility load distribution zone in New York by the end of 2017," said Cypress Creek spokesman Jeff McKay. The company already has operational sites in North and South Carolina, Texas, Indiana, Missouri, Minnesota, Oregon and Georgia, he said.

"New York's solar industry is growing at unprecedented levels," said Department of Public Service spokesman Jon Sorensen. He said that the state doesn't have figures on solar leasing activity but that energy and agriculture agencies are developing information to help farmers make leasing decisions.

"It's happening so fast, it's caught people off-guard," said Elizabeth Higgins of the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Ulster County.

Several New York towns, including the Orange County town of Goshen, have enacted moratoriums on new solar farms to allow officials to consider any zoning changes that might be necessary.

A similar solar boom has been going on in North Carolina for about four years, driven by state-mandated rules for utility power purchases that favor solar developers. At least 200 commercial solar farms have been established in North Carolina, mostly around 5 megawatts but ranging to up to 80 megawatts, said Tommy Cleveland of North Carolina State University's Clean Energy Technology Center.

Objections similar to those being raised in New York were raised in North Carolina.

"There has been concern about taking prime land out of farm production," he said. "In the last two years, we've installed more than any state other than California, and it's still only a tenth of a percent of our farmland."

For some farmers in New York, the leases could mean salvation. Marginal land could become productive, and prime cropland could produce income without labor and other costs during a 20-year lease, with the potential to one day return to crop production.

"I've been looking for anything and everything to get some other income for my farm," said Mike Athanas, a retired electronics technician who has a 184-acre farm in Hyde Park in the Hudson Valley. "The taxes are killing me. My vegetable business doesn't have much profit margin. And some of the soil isn't the best for planting."

Athanas recently signed an option with Boston-based Omni Navitas Holdings to lease two 20-acre parcels where he used to grow hay. He hopes to get at least $2,000 per acre annually after the solar panels go up this summer.

"I've always wanted to have a vineyard," Athanas said. "This may give me the extra capital I need to while away my hours growing grapes for local wineries."

Explore further Market intelligence group sees boom year for US solar market

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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ABC/Randy HolmesMumford & Sons have scheduled a show at the Vintage Vinyl record store in St. Louis. The performance will take place on Record Store Day, April 16.

To get tickets, you'll have to go to Vintage Vinyl and pre-order Mumford & Sons' Record Store Day release: a seven-inch single featuring a new song called "There Will Be Time ."

The Vintage Vinyl show will arrive in the middle of Mumford & Sons' U.S. An Arrow Through the Heartland tour, which begins April 3 in Houston, Texas.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
A statement from the Interior Ministry said on the advice of the Ashanti Regional Security Council and by Executive instrument, the curfew now starts from 11 pm to 4 am effective April 1.

The curfew hours were imposed after violent clashes between some youth in the area killed one person and injured many.

The sector Minister, Prosper Bani, added that the ban on all persons in the township and surrounding areas from carrying arms, ammunition or any offensive weapon is still in force and anyone found with such weapons will be prosecuted.

Meanwhile, the Ministry has also renewed the curfew hours on four other areas, that is, the Alavanyo/Nkonya townships in the Volta Region, Bunkprugu, Bimbilla and Kpatinga in the Northern region.

The curfew hours in the Alavanyo/Nkonya area, now begins from 11:00pm and ends at 5:00am while that of Bunkprugu is from 8:00pm to 6:00am all effective April 5.
He also called on District Assemblies to continue to reflect on how the LED Policy could serve as an effective tool to local assembly development.

The future of local authorities rests essentially on resources around them, we cannot have local authorities whose success solely rests on the national cake, Dr Darimani said in Accra at a Public Lecture organized by ILGS.

He said the lecture which forms part of a series of internal lectures held by the Institute monthly, seeks to create a platform on public education.

It is also a forum aimed at building the confidence of the young and intellectual as well as to share information, he said.

Dr Darimani said over the years, ILGS had seen the lectures as a training grounds for academic research and it was the Institutes primary goal to build on it, have different kinds at the national level where high profile persons, academicians and seasoned lecturers as well as politicians would lecture on Local Government and Decentralization.

He said it was the hope of the ILGS faculty to build on the internal lecture where assessment would be made on the three departments of the Institute, which are the Local Economic Development, Environmental Science Policy and Management and Local Government Administration.

Presenting findings on a study dubbed, Implementation on the National LED Policy: Key Challenges and Prospects, Ms Grace Simpson, Head of LED Centre, ILGS, said the main objective of the study was to examine the state of implementation of the LED Policy in the various Metropolitan Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs).

She said the study which was conducted in the 57 MMDAs in the Ashanti and Brong Ahafo Regions, was targeted at Coordinating Directors, Planning Officers, Business Advisory Officers, and the private sector s in the various districts.

Ms Simpson said the study revealed that MMDAs were aware about the national LED.

However, they have not fully incorporated aspects of the policy into their District Medium Term Development Plans though they are implementing some activities in their localities, she said.

She said the study also showed that the LED activities implemented at the various MMDAs levels were helping to create sustainable jobs, increasing household incomes, reducing household poverty and enhancing economic growth.

Lastly, the study revealed that MMDAs are faced with the challenge of inadequate funding and identification of right stakeholders in the implementation of the LED activities in their jurisdictions, Ms Simpson said.

LED is defined as the process by which local governments, local businesses and other actors join forces and resources to enter into new partnership agreements with each other or other stakeholders to create new jobs and stimulate economic activity in municipalities, towns and villages to build up the economic capacity of a local area in order to improve its economic status and the quality of citizenry.
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He argued that in the case of the three South African ex-Police officers who were arrested in the country, either the Inspector General of Police (IGP) or the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) boss should have spoken to the matter and not the Interior Minister.

Contributing to a panel discussion on Citi FM, the IMANI boss said: The moment a political figure makes statements that the opposition could read meanings into them, then it defeats the entire process.

Three South African ex-Police officers were brought into the country by the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) to train the private security of the partys flagbearer and running mate.

The three were later arrested by the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) and charged with conspiracy to commit crime and unlawful training.

They were subsequently repatriated back to South Africa.

Various government officials defended the actions of the BNI, while the opposition NPP accused the government of acting unlawfully.

According to Mr. Cudjoe, in this era of terrorism, the absence of any statement from the top hierarchy of the relevant security agencies on the issue is symptomatic with the way we have treated our security services.

I dont think as a state, we have de-politicized the way we handle security issues, he said, stressing that You would expect that a security capobecause this is what happens in most civilized countries.
The President pointed out that the call for peace is important due to the surge in global terrorist activities.

Speaking at a ceremony to celebrate the birthday of Prophet Mohammed at Aboabo in Kumasi, President Mahama said: It is important that we in Ghana guard against complacency and ensure that no one sows the seeds of discord, of rebellion among our youth through questionable teachings and indoctrinations.

He maintained that Islam is a religion of peace but unfortunately, some misguided elements have desecrated its beautiful image in order to promote their wicked, terrorist agenda.

These fundamentalists do not discriminate in their choice of victims. They kill children, women and men, young and old and they attack people of all religious persuasions, he added.
Dr. Ani was picked up by the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) on Friday for alleging that the governing NDC was rebranding vehicles meant for the National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE) for campaign purposes.

He is said to have taken the photos at a mechanic shop near his office on the Spintex Road in Accra.

In an interview with Joy FM, the National Security Advisor insisted that the photos which were published on social media could have compromised his security.

He thus declared his intention of dragging Dr. Ani to court on Monday for him to explain the basis of his allegations.
He indicated that unlike the New Patriotic Partys (NPP) flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo, President Mahama is focused and determined to better the lives of Ghanaians.

Unlike Bawumia and Nana Akufo-Addo, President John Mahama is so well focused on a certain transformational agenda that we can all relate to, Lawyer Tamakloe said during a panel discussion on Radio Gold.

He accused the NPP of attaching corruption to every major infrastructural development the NDC government is undertaking, including the Ridge Hospital project and the Kasoa Interchange construction.

I am not surprised that the NPP has adopted a campaign strategy of knowing very well that we need certain critical infrastructure, they have leaped into the second gear  that is to undermine the economic benefit of these projects by attaching corruption to it, he remarked.

Lawyer Tamakloe further accused the NPP of always defending the indefensible when their corruption propaganda backfires.

What the NPP hates is to admit that they are wrong. They will defend it even if it will take their head; that is the kind of political party we are having to deal with.
The 39-year-old looked exquisite in a floral print turtleneck gown as she made an elegant show-up at the candle lit soiree.

In the magazine interview, she said that she admires the real life Olivia Pope, the role she plays on the hit drama "Scandal".

"Even though Olivia Pope has obviously made the decision that she is not a mom, playing her made me feel like I could be a mom. Because she knows there's always another way- there's always a way to fix it, there's always a way to solve it, to win."

She continued: "And I feel like playing her made me feel like, All right, I can do it. I will figure out how to juggle it all."

The beauty also singled out creator of "Scandal" , Shonda Rhimes, for praise.
"The suspect broke into the house of his victim with intent to steal but the owner of the house returned suddenly and met him.

"When she tried to scream, the suspect grabbed her and strangled her neck until she grew weak and fell to the ground.

"As he tried to runaway, she regained her strength and pursued him to the street and her distress call alerted neighbours and passersby who apprehended the hoodlum.

Amina was later rushed to the General Hospital. He added that the case had been transferred to the Borno Police Command for further investigation.

In an unrelated crime, Ibrahim also said that NSCDC arrested a 20-year-old man, Alsami Galadima, in connection with alleged vandalism of amoured cables.

The commandant said that the suspect was arrested near the FERMA office also in the state capital.

He said that the suspect had sold some length of armoured cable at the rate of N9,000 which attracted suspicion.
Spokesman, DSP Zubairu Abubakar, in a statement said one Akim Samuel has been arrested in connection with the crime, while efforts have also intensified to ensure the arrest and arraignment of the fleeing suspects.

The statement read; On April 1, 2016, at about 19.30 hours, Pastor Yusuf Joseph and Mrs. Juliana Adebayo of Cherubim & Seraphim Holy Michael, and Agbara Oke Church of Ugwan Boro, reported at the Sabo Tasha Police Station that on the same date, some unknown youth, numbering about 15, who normally come to swim at Firoro Dam, stumbled on their churches, beat them up, destroyed the glasses of the window and destroyed some parts of church buildings.

The scene of the crime was visited by the DPO for on the spot assessment. One Akim Samuel of ECWA Good News church, Ungwan Boro was arrested.
Mr. Shah was attacked as he was returning to his home, stabbed and his head bruised under feet in what police described as a 'religiously prejudiced' killing.

Tanveer Ahmed, 32, from Bradford in West Yorkshire, has appeared in court charged with murder.

Local politicians including MPs Alison Thewliss and Carol Monaghan and MSP Sandra White were among those who attended the hour-long service.

Abdul Abid, president of the Ahmadiyya community in Scotland, said after the service: "We are sad that a very popular man of our community is not with us any more."

Mr. Shah's casket was carried into the mosque by relatives and by friends from the Armadiyya Muslim community.

The words: 'Love for all, hatred for none' were boldly written on the walls of the mosque.
A statement from the army spokesman, Col. Sani Usman in Abuja on Saturday described the report as false and misleading.

He said that at no time did soldiers block the convoy of the General Officer Commanding 7 Division, Brig.-Gen. Vincent Ezugwu, who visited the troops in the Alagarno forest.

Usman said though the troops had experienced some logistics challenges, they never behaved in the manner reported by the online medium.

"While acknowledging that indeed troops that captured the strategic forest of Alagarno experienced some logistics problem that included water shortage, which is normal in war situation, it is not true that the troops behaved in the manner reported.

"If Alagarno is truly inaccessible, how did the gallant troops rout out the Boko Haram terrorists from the forest?

"The concoction of this story and the release of yet another video by some remnants of Boko Haram terrorists could be more than mere coincidence," the army spokesman said.

Usman said that contrary to the report, the GOC on his visit to the troops' location took water and other items to them.

He added that the GOC joined the troops in one of the clearance operations in the forest.

"For the avoidance of doubt, the Acting General Officer Commanding (GOC), 7 Division, Brig.-Gen. V.O. Ezugwu indeed visited the troops and also supplied water to them.

"The GOC did not leave the troops as insinuated. Rather, the troops hailed the GOC for his passion and empathic disposition toward the soldiers.

"As a matter of fact, he actively participated in clearance operations along Bulablin-Alargano axis with the troops and was with them in their defensive location throughout."

Usman called on journalists to always cross check their facts before filing their stories to avoid such factual errors.
Irabor disclosed this when he spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Maiduguri on Sunday.

``When you see a troop that is fighting and making the kind of progress we have made from January to date, it means that the troop is motivated.

``If the troop is not motivated it will not give you that type of result, he said.

``In January when my predecessor Maj.-Gen. Hassan Umaru, took over the command, his maiden briefing was on the delay in payment of allowances to soldiers.

``Some soldiers were owed allowances and the reason for that was the introduction of the Treasury Single Account by the Federal Government, he said.

Irabor said that ``those issues were comprehensively addressed and all our troops were paid their allowances.

``Let me say that the problem was caused by some factors and not because the money was not available.

He pointed out that the introduction of the Bank Verification Number (BVN) also contributed to the delay in payment of soldiers allowances.

``For reasons of the nature of environment and where our troops were deployed how they have been engaged in operation, it is not easy to have them provide the necessary bank details in the correct format on time.

``The introduction of BVN was also a factor, it was not possible to have all our troops to come out to places that they could register and so we were not able to send money directly to their account, he said.

Irabor expressed joy that the troops had been motivated after receiving all their entitlements.

According to him, all the troops are happy now after getting all their allowances.

``I can assure you that the motivation has translated in the victory in the operation we are carrying out here.

Irabor said that the leadership at the theatre will continue to strive toward improving the welfare of soldiers with a view to sustaining the current achievements.

``Every effort is being made to increase welfare issue that will boost the morale in terms of logistics, allowances and kitting.
This is contained in a communique issued at the end of a two-day National Conference on New Blueprint for Prevention, Resolution and Management of Conflicts.

The communique was signed by Mr Hassan Anka of Trade Union Congress (TUC) and Mr Nneka Ikelionwu of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Resolution, among others.

`` We call on all citizens to support the war against corruption, abuse of office and general mismanagement of the economy which are major causes of serious conflicts.

``Critical stakeholders, especially the education sector, should actively support the effort to neutralise the misinformation by looters with a view to securing comprehensive buy-in of citizens for eradication of corruption.

It called for the establishment of inter-disciplinary and multi-sectoral Country Research Team (CRT) for comprehensive and sustainable national institutional framework for early resolution of conflicts.

The communique stated that stakeholders, individually and collectively, should be committed to early and peaceful resolution of conflicts in their workplaces in the spirit of patriotism and self-preservation in line with industrial relations.

It called for the establishment of conflict resolution centres in tertiary institutions with designated competent desk officers.

The communique also advocated inauguration of Multi-Stakeholder Harmony Action Committees in tertiary institutions for pro-active intervention to prevent avoidable conflicts.
Speaking in an interview with Punch Newspaper, El-Rufai stressed that the need for the bill is to checkmate radical preachers that preach intolerance in the state.

In his words, "I have not seen anyone talking about Islam actually. Most of the people that say I would die, as if I would not die, are people who call themselves Christian clergy. Of course, I will die. If that apostle is truly an apostle, he should mention the day I will die."
The DPRs Controller of Operations in charge of Akwa Ibom and Cross River, Mr Bassey Nkanga, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Eket on Sunday.

Nkanga said that the filling stations had been reopened after meeting other conditions apart from the licence renewal.

``Some of them have operated for between five and 10 years without renewing their licences and some dont even have operating licences at all, he said.

He said that the department usually considered some environmental and safety factors before giving approval to construct filling stations across the state.

The controller of operation added that some of the petrol stations were sealed for their improper location.

``We take into consideration so many environmental and safety factors. We do not grant approval for citing filling stations where it is not suitable.

``Even if approval was given in error in the past, we dont waste time in withdrawing such, he added.

The controller further warned against build filling stations without DPRs approval.

Nkanga said that the department was partnering the Akwa Ibom State Urban Development Authority to ensure proper citing of filling stations in the state.

He said the Federal Government was doing everything possible to ensure that petroleum products were available to consumers.

The controller said the department was doing its best to discourage diversion and hoarding of petroleum products in the state.

``The volume of petroleum products supplied to Akwa Ibom and Cross River has been in the increase in the past few days.

``We are ensuring that the products supplied get to filling stations, he said.
The NSCDC Commandant, Mr Abdullahi Ibrahim, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Maiduguri that the suspect was arrested at Jidari Polo Area in the state capital.

``The suspect broke into the house of his victim with intent to steal but the owner of the house returned suddenly and met him.

``When she tried to scream, the suspect grabbed her and strangled her neck until she grew weak and fell to the ground.

``As he tried to runaway, she regained her strength and pursued him to the street and her distress call alerted neighbours and passersby who apprehended the hoodlum.

Ibrahim also said that NSCDC arrested a 20-year-old man, Alsami Galadima, in connection with alleged vandalism of amoured cables.

The commandant said that the suspect was arrested near the FERMA office in the state capital.

He said that the suspect had sold some length of armoured cable at the rate of N9,000 which attracted suspicion.

``The suspect was arrested following a report on his activity and we have directed our men to go after the other culprits who bought the stolen cables from him, he said.
The NSCDC Commandant, Mr Clement Adeuyi, made the disclosure in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Calabar.

Adeuyi said the corps also recovered 90 drums of oil from the hoodlums within the first quarter of the year.

He said that the suspects were arrested in different locations across the state.

``The Cross River Command of the NSCDC has recorded some successes this year. In the last three months, we have arrested 15 suspected oil bunkerers and recovered 90 drums of oil.

``We will continue to work with other security agencies in the state to end oil bunkering, diversion of petroleum products and other crimes, he said.

Adeuyi said that the command was making efforts to ensure that the solid minerals and other natural resources in the state were fully protected.

He said that solid minerals were essential resources of the Federal Government hence the need to protect them.

He said: ``one of the core objectives of the corps is the protection of national asset and critical infrastructure.

``We have a formidable team on ground that will ensure the protection of solid minerals across the 18 local government areas of the state.

``We must support the Federal Governments efforts in diversifying the nations economy and exploitation of the solid mineral is part of the diversification.

Adeusi appealed to the federal and state governments, corporate organisations and individuals to assist the command by providing it with operational vehicles.

The commandant said that such facilities would help the corps effectively carry out its functions in the state.
Channels Television reported that during a surveillance on Sunday, April 3, 2016 in Minna, the DPR sealed off the affected filling stations for hiking the price of fuel, hoarding, syphoning and diverting of petroleum products.

It was also reported that about 40,000 litres of fuel were diverted by the filling stations to black marketers.

Following the action by DPR, the State Controller, Abdullahi Jankara, warned that defaulters would be dealt with accordingly.

The NNPC mega filling station at the Western bypass Minna was handed a one week ultimatum a week ago to put its fuel pumps in perfect condition during an unscheduled visit.

While admitting that there is shortage in the supply of products, Jankara noted that it should not be a leverage for filling stations to hike prices or hoard fuel.

The affected stations, it was reported, have between 100,000 Naira and 1 million Naira fine to pay for defaulting.
This is contained in a statement signed by Alhaji Ismael Alli, a former Secretary to the State Government and leader of the government delegation and made available to newsmen in Ibadan on Saturday.

"We urge labour leaders to embrace dialogue and consultation instead of issuing threats and ultimatum of strike.

``As stakeholders they should brainstorm on how to bail the state out of its financial predicament," it said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that labour leaders and the Joint Negotiating Council had on March 29 issued a seven-day ultimatum to the government to meet with them over unpaid salaries and pension.

Alli said in the statement that both parties had agreed that the 10-month-old agreement subsisted.

``At the meeting on Friday, the state government reaffirmed its compliance with the subsisting agreement with labour whereby 90 per cent of allocation from the Federation Account is devoted to payment of salaries and wages of workers on monthly basis," he said.

The former SSG also observed that the present conduct of labour was at variance and in total disregard to due process, labour law and practices.

According to him, government believes that the labour leaders are being insensitive and confrontational.

``The labour leaders used the opportunity of the meeting to apologise to Gov. Abiola Ajimobi.

They denied the allegations and apologized accordingly. They assured the government of cooperation and maintenance of industrial harmony in the state, the statement quoted Alli as saying.

He said that the labour leaders painstakingly explained that the ultimatum was misunderstood, denying any attempt to ridicule the governor or imperil the pervading industrial harmony in the state.

He said that the apology had been accepted by the government and the governor, who had directed that the subsisting agreement be adhered to pending the exploration of avenues to improve the revenue of the state.

Alli said that both parties had agreed to explore regular consultations, dialogue and due process as they jointly seek solutions to the poor position of the states finance, attributed for the five months salary owed workers.

The former SSG disclosed that a consultative committee comprising labour and government representatives had been set up to harmonise the current available revenue allocation.

The committee would also recommend the best way forward in the face of the states dwindling revenue, he said.

"We need to jointly and urgently employ strategies of eliminating ghost workers from the salary bill of our workers as well as identification, arrest and prosecution of fraudsters within the system.

"In the spirit of collective responsibility, both parties have agreed to collaborate and evolve ways of blocking all financial leakages in the system with a view to jacking up the internally generated revenue of the state.

"A more positive and creative disposition is critical for turning around these times of adversity.

"It was resolved that all concerned should have learnt some lessons after this brief period of unnecessary and avoidable altercation," he said.

Meanwhile, Mr Waheed Olojede, Oyo State Chairman, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the negotiation was ongoing and that a committee had just been set up to meet regularly over the matter.

"The last paragraph of the agreement stated that the Memorandum of Understanding was subject to review from time to time at regular meetings.

"This is why we issued an ultimatum for a meeting between the government to review the agreement in line with the prevailing economic situation and the dwindling federal allocation to the state," he said.

The NLC chairman denied that labour leaders apologised to government on the matter, saying that the ultimatum issued was a tool of industrial practices.

``The claim by government that labour has agreed to the 10 month MoU as subsisting was false.

``I wish to state that much as another round of negotiation between government and labour has commenced, it has negated the one under reference.

``Let it be noted that negotiation is ongoing and it resumes on Monday as agreed by government and labour as at the last adjournment last Friday.
The Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Sanusi Amiru, told newsmen on Saturday in Gusau that the killing of the 13 followed a meeting held in the village head's house on March 24 by members of the outlawed 'Yansakai group.

He said that sources in the village told the police that some 'Yansakai members suspected to have come from Bena in Kebbi held a meeting at the village head's house before moving to Tungar Wabi for the attack.

Amiru said that consequently the police swung into action and arrested the district head and four others suspects namely: Basiru Lawali, Sakke Sada, Ibrahim Muhammad and Umar Muhammad.

The police spokesman said that items recovered from the suspects included six guns, swords and arrows, fifteen cartridges, axes, knives, charms and 10 motorcycles.

He warned that the police would continue to carry out covert operations as well as use credible information from members of the public against all criminals and their gangs in the state.
Mbu, an Assistant Inspector General, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday that the recruitment would be worthless without better facilities in training schools.

NAN recalls that President Muhammadu Buhari recently approved the recruitment of 10,000 policemen in the country.

The commandant also decried inadequate teaching and non-teaching staff in the colleges, which according to him, remains a major problem.

``Our police colleges, both senior and junior are in very bad state. Most of the structures you see there are dilapidated and the issue of poor staffing is also there.

``Recruitment exercise into various cadres in the force has begun, but the major lacuna will be where to train the recruits;

``We need good facilities and atmosphere to make them better policemen.

``You cannot start exposing recruits by making them pay money indirectly for one thing or the other when ideally the government is supposed to provide everything for them.
The NULGE National President, Mr Ibrahim Khaleel, gave the commendation in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Maiduguri on Sunday.

Khaleel said in spite of the strangulating security challenges, the state government had always paid workers salaries as at when due.

He said that workers in the state had never complained of belated salaries, except in Chibok, Hawul, Askira Uba and Kala Balge councils yet to benefit from the N18,000 minimum wage.

``We believe that the recent verification going on in the state will enabled the government to reach out to those areas that are yet to benefit from the N18,000 minimum wage, he said.

``In view of this, the union had constituted a three men committee to liaise with the state government to fish out ghost workers in the state.

``The committee will also work with government of Adamawa, Yobe and Borno to ascertain the number of loss of lives recorded under the local government to enable us know where to assist.
An exclusive screening of the series held hosted by TV personality Ebuka Obi-Uchendu yesterday April 1, 2016 at Four Points by Sheraton in Lagos.

The star-studded event saw celebrities in attendance including Richard Mofe Damijo, Rita Dominic, Toke Makinwa,Michelle Dede, Uti Nwachukwu, Linda Ejiofor, Toni Tones, Meg Otanwa, Daniel K. Daniel, Adesua Etomi, amongst others.

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Guests at the event were given the opportunity to view the new series at the event.

A tale of fashion, politics and ambition which follows different members of high society as they collide, the story of "Hush" revolves around Bem and Arinola, power-players in fashion and politics respectively.

Bem, played by Richard Mofe-Damijo, is one of Africas biggest designers based in Lagos State, Nigeria, and Arinola, played by Thelma Okoduwa, is one of the states fastest rising politicians. The intrigue begins when Bem proposes marriage to Arinola, an action that sets in motion a chain of events propelled by the secrets in their respective lives, secrets that run through the backrooms of secret societies, the corridors of the judiciary and on social media.

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Regional Director, M-Net West Africa, Wangi Mba-Uzoukwu said the series holds a lot of excitement.

""Hush" is our exciting new telenovela which promises a lot of excitement, intrigue, suspense and romance. The show features a blend of Nollywood veterans and exciting new talents, and promises to be an exciting watch for our viewers across Africa," Mba-Uzoukwu said.

"Many of our viewers remember our last telenovela, "Hotel Majestic", and all the excitement that show brought to their screens - "Hush" promises to exceed that level of excitement".

The new series which will air weeknights at 8PM West African Time, also stars Olu Jacobs, Baj Adebule, Rotimi Adelegan and Meg Otanwa.

"Hush" premieres on April 4, 2016, on Africa Magic Showcase (DStv channel 151).
Gov. Rauf Aregbesola of Osun announced the return while briefing journalists after a closed door meeting of leaders of the APC at the residence of Osoba in Ikoyi, Lagos.

``A time was when Osoba switched to another party, he was a foundation member of the APC and he was in the APC throughout my election.

``Yes, he was for a time with the SDP, but with what we have just done today, Akinrogun Osoba, the Aremo himself is back with the progressive leadership of the Yoruba race," Aregbesola said.

``As such we are happy to tell the world that the leadership of progressive politics in the Western part of Nigeria is united.

``We are ready to jointly prosecute the agenda for growth, purposeful leadership, development, good governance in the Western part of Nigeria.

``The progressive leadership of the Yoruba race is now fully united and are ready and charged to lead our efforts to reposition our land and integrate with others nationwide to put Nigeria in its proper footing," he said.

Also speaking, the national leader of the APC, Chief Bola Tinubu said it was very crucial for the party to strengthen its front.

``I am an unapologetic progressive and I will remain one and that is the only principle I abide with.

``Wherever the progressives are, they must be united with their vision. Nobody is left out, it is all progressives and no one is left out, no matter your insinuation," Tinubu said.
The results of the air strike, which was carried out on Thursday, were still being assessed, it said.

The target of the operation, Hassan Ali Dhoore, played a direct role in al Shabaab's Christmas Day 2014 attack on the Mogadishu airport in which one American was among those killed and an attack on a Mogadishu hotel in 2015 that killed 15 people, including a Somali-American, the Pentagon said.

"Removing Dhoore from the battlefield would be a significant blow to al-Shabaab's operational planning and ability to conduct attacks against the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia, its citizens, U.S. partners in the region, and against Americans abroad," the Pentagon said in a statement.

That operation, using both manned aircraft and unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones, targeted al Shabaab's "Raso" training camp, a facility about 120 miles (190 km) north of the capital Mogadishu.

Al Shabaab was pushed out of Mogadishu by African Union peacekeeping forces in 2011 but has remained a potent antagonist in Somalia, launching frequent attacks in its bid to overthrow the Western-backed government.

The group, whose name means "The Youth," seeks to impose its strict version of sharia law in Somalia, where it frequently unleashes attacks targeting security and government targets, as well as hotels and restaurants in the capital.
Issoufou was re-elected to a second five-year term in March polls boycotted by the opposition and was sworn into office on Saturday, vowing in a speech to continue the West African nation's fight against terrorism.

The president named Brigi Raffini, his current prime minister, to serve again in office. The prime minister submitted the cabinet's resignation to Issoufou after his inauguration ceremony.

"The resignation was accepted," the statement read. "While waiting for the nomination of ministers, the secretaries-general of the ministers are responsible for current affairs."
South Africa's constitutional court ruled on Thursday that Zuma had failed to uphold the constitution by ignoring orders from the public protector that he repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent to renovate his private residence at Nkandla.

Since Thursday's ruling, opposition party leaders, ordinary South Africans and even an anti-apartheid activist jailed alongside Nelson Mandela have called on Zuma to step down.

Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition party Democratic Alliance (DA), tabled the motion to have Zuma impeached, and Mbete told reporters on Sunday "the debate on that motion has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon."

The Africa National Congress majority in parliament will almost certainly give Zuma political cover against the attempt to impeach him. But the judicial rebuke may embolden anti-Zuma factions within the ruling party to mount a challenge.

The unanimous ruling by the 11-judge constitutional court also criticised parliament for passing a resolution that purported to nullify Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's findings on the state spending on Zuma's private residence.

DA Parliamentary Chief Whip John Steenhuisen said on Sunday that Mbete should also resign for her and parliament's complicity in the Nkandla matter.

Mbete said she would not step down, but acknowledged the issue could have been handled differently in parliament.

On Friday, the 73-year-old president gave a televised address to the nation in which he apologised and said he would pay back some of the money, as ordered. He said that he never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution.

The president travelled to his home province of Kwazulu-Natal on Sunday to launch a relief programme as part of government efforts to support areas affected by South Africa's worst drought in more than a century.
DES MOINES  A half-year after it was created, the governors anti-bullying office already has helped produce legislation that soon will become law, helping bullied Iowa students who transfer schools and wish to participate in extra-curricular activities.

The offices director hopes it can continue to make an impact but says accomplishing some of its goals will require state funding that is not yet in the pipeline.

After three years of pushing anti-bullying measures that never passed the Iowa Legislature, Gov. Terry Branstad in September 2015 struck out on his own, creating via executive order the Governors Office for Bullying Prevention, housed within the University of Northern Iowas Center for Violence Prevention.

The centers director, Dr. Alan Heisterkamp, was tapped to head the anti-bullying office. Heisterkamp previously worked with the Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention, and before that, he spent 22 years in various roles with the Sioux City Community School District.

Heisterkamp and the offices charges:

 Provide anti-bullying training for educators.

 Develop a uniform bullying incident reporting procedure.

 Collect data on bullying incidents.

 Develop guidelines for schools to address online bullying.

Heisterkamp already has set out to accomplish some of those goals and has even crossed another off the governors checklist. Legislation working its way through the Capitol with widespread bipartisan support would allow bullied students who transfer schools to immediately play sports or participate in other extra-curricular activities. Currently, transfer students must sit out a prescribed amount of time before participating.

Heisterkamp cautioned, however, that achieving some of the other goals set out by the governors executive order will require more resources. Heisterkamp has requested $250,000 to fund two full-time staff members.

Right now, my plate is full, Heisterkamp said. "What we (at the center) are doing is supporting, kind of serving as a landing pad for the governors office."

Branstad did not specify funding for the office, saying it would be up to the Board of Regents to determine whether to fund the office within its budget.

A spokesman for the Regents said the board has not yet made any spending plans as it awaits state funding.

Heisterkamp said he also has spoken to lawmakers about securing funding, although he has received no promises.

Why dont we value the social and emotional pieces (of a students education) just as much? Heisterkamp asked. "I think we can do that, but we need some bottom-line resources to create that."

Meantime, Heisterkamp said he will do what he can without funding.

One of his hopes is to encourage more schools to use an anti-bullying program he implemented in Sioux City in 2001 shortly after the shooting at a high school in Columbine, Colo. Heisterkamp said one problem with bullying is too few schools have programs or curriculum that address the issue.

Mentors in Violence Prevention, or MVP, trains students to mentor each other  typically older students mentoring younger students  about violence and bullying. Some Iowa schools already use the program.

Coming from the kids, its more powerful than coming from the adults, said Susan Langan, a counselor at Cedar Falls High School, which has roughly 80 students in its MVP program. Thats where its been powerful, and I hope it gets even more powerful.

Langan and Heisterkamp praised the student leaders who volunteer to serve as mentors in the program.

That is done specifically and is aimed specifically to utilize the influence and leadership of students in high school that can send the same message that an adult can but it lands differently on youngsters ears, so to speak, Heisterkamp said. These 17- and 18-year-old high school students that are mentors, theyre just amazing.  In that process, they really become student ambassadors for positive school culture and healthy relationships. The younger students look up to these (older) students. They see them as resources.

Branstad lauded student mentoring programs, including the MVP-inspired ones in Sioux City and Cedar Falls. Those programs were a key element of the legislation he had hoped to sign into law.

A lot of schools have really stepped forward on their own, and a lot of students are learning how they can stand up to bullies and how they can be effective mentors, Branstad said.

Langan cautioned the MVP program is not a cure-all.

Some days, I think its working, and some days I think its not, she said. But she thinks at the very least it has created a conversation and made it easier for students to talk about and stand up to bullying.

I think what MVP has done is it has given kids the courage to stand up and say, You know what? Thats not OK, Langan said.

Heisterkamp said he also hopes to establish an advisory board comprised of stakeholders  administrators, teachers, students, parents  to sustain an ongoing discussion of bullying issues and make recommendations to the anti-bullying office.

Its an important part of education, and its just overdue. It needs to be taken seriously, Heisterkamp said. Some people get that and others dont, so its about educating everybody: legislators, parents, community leaders, school staff. 

You know who gets this a lot, are law enforcement and juvenile court. They see with a little more focus on prevention we could prevent a lot of expenses, a lot of heartache, a lot of trauma.  Its not our job (as educators) entirely, but its something we are skilled enough to do.
LINCOLN  Exactly 20 years ago Sunday, the little town of Lincoln suddenly found itself at the center of one of the most sensational media stories in the world.

A quiet, unkempt loner living in a derelict shack outside town was arrested April 3, 1996, on charges that he was a serial terrorist  the infamous Unabomber. He was the homicidal apparition the FBI had been chasing without success for nearly two decades, and he finally had been tracked down.

People in Lincoln knew him simply as "Ted."

To them, he was the odd recluse who ate rabbits, lived without power and rode his bike into town to check out books from the local library.

But Theodore J. Kaczynski would eventually confess to murdering three people and injuring 23 more during a nationwide bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995.

Some of his homemade explosives included razor blades and nails to increase the damage done. Most were sent through the mail, but others were planted on site. The widely circulated sketch of a hooded man with sunglasses came from an eyewitness in Utah who saw him briefly in 1987.

His victims were random, but most were connected to technology, timber, advertising and psychology in some way. His motive appeared to be rage against the impacts of the Industrial Revolution on nature, but his journals contained many contradictions.

Some of those who unknowingly opened one of Kaczynski's packages lost their eyesight or hearing when they exploded. Others had their fingers torn away by shrapnel or suffered severe burns. Those were the lucky ones.

The body of Gilbert Murray, Kaczynski's final victim, was so badly mutilated that his family was allowed to see only his feet and legs below the knees for their final goodbyes, according to a New York Times article.

Kaczynski was caught only because his brother's wife recognized his writing in a 35,000-word manifesto published in the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995 that he believed justified his attacks.

The revelation that the Unabomber had been "hiding in plain sight" all those years in the mountains of western Montana rattled the nerves of the nation, and the people of Lincoln were no less stunned.

Kaczynski's picture in an orange jumpsuit was plastered on every magazine and newspaper in the country. Some say the age of sensational, nonstop journalism dawned two years earlier with the arrest of O.J. Simpson, but on April 3, 1996, America had a new "story of the century"  at least for a couple of weeks. And it was all happening an hour and a half east of Missoula.

Within hours of Kaczynski's capture, media from Los Angeles, New York, the United Kingdom, Italy and everywhere in between arrived in Lincoln with a swarming intensity that shocked residents of the tight-knit community. Their lives were disrupted and their privacy was invaded as thousands of reporters and television news crews bombarded them with calls and hounded them at their doorsteps.

The media were all scrambling to find out essentially the same thing: "What do you know about this bearded madman who had been living among you all these years?"

Residents didn't have easy answers to questions like that. Some who rarely saw Kaczynski were eager for their 15 minutes of fame and stepped up to the cameras and microphones. Others who knew him  as well as a person could, at least  tried to hide from the spotlights. Helicopters buzzed overhead, phones rang off the hook. It was a media circus that reverberates in the memories of people who live there two decades later.

***

"Lincoln went from a population of 1,100 to more than 7,000 overnight," said Wendy Gehring, who lived with her husband Butch just down the road from Kaczynski for more than a decade. "It was insane."

It was Butch's dad who sold Kaczynski the dark, secluded patch of land he called home and where he built a lookout tree. The Gehrings operated a sawmill a few hundred yards away from his shack. They saw him come and go, and interacted with him often but briefly.

"There would be times he would come up to the house and peek through the windows at me and ask what time it was," Wendy Gehring said. "He was a creeper and he was rude. I would tell him, 'It's time to buy a watch because you stink.' I was a woman, you know, and he didn't respect women, I don't think."

They often heard explosions that seemed to come from the mountains nearby, but Butch Gehring always chalked it up to "sonic booms" from airplanes overhead. Looking back, they simply couldn't explain something as illogical as the spooky, long-haired neighbor making bombs with black powder and stolen car parts.

"After Ted was arrested, I never heard any more sonic booms," Wendy Gehring said. "Like I said, you just don't put two and two together. My husband being a pilot, he just assumed they were sonic booms."

After Kaczynski was arrested, Gehring kept a logbook of everyone who called, filling dozens of pages. There was the BBC, there was CNN, there was ABC's "Nightline."

"Larry King was relentless," she said. "It would blow your mind. It was such a circus that we just decided to barricade ourselves in our house and told the FBI guys not to let anyone up there."

They lived on Stemple Pass Road, where Gehring said they "never" saw cars.

"To see both sides of the dirt road lined with vans with satellites on top, hundreds of people, going through barricades to get to our house, it was crazy," Gehring said. "It took simple folks and threw them into this media circus. I was pregnant, and my twins were born premature in August. The excitement of Ted moved things along a little faster than we wanted."

Gehring has vivid memories of the afternoon when Kaczynski was arrested. The staging area for the FBI team sent to execute a search warrant on his property was located on the Gehrings' mill site.

"The air was so thick you could cut it with a knife," she said. "The tension was just there, and it was just quiet. It took forever for the FBI to get into position. Finally, they gave the OK, they made the arrest, and our mill erupted with FBI agents. We went from six people standing on the mill waiting to hear, and they yelled, 'We got him, he's in custody,' and it went to 300 people. There were trucks and RVs and people walking out of the woods. It was insane. People were cheering."

For the next two weeks, while Kaczynski was held in jail in Helena, hundreds of journalists began scouring Lincoln, begging for interviews. Their editors back in Atlanta and Denver and San Francisco were desperate to tell the world anything they could find out about the mysterious recluse.

"The FBI kind of gave us a heads-up, because they said, 'This ain't our first rodeo,' " Gehring said. "The only thing I thought was the weirdest was you got to see how backstabbing the industry is to get a story. I had a gal from 'Good Morning America' proposition my husband right in front of me. She was like, 'Anything to get a story.' A CNN helicopter tried to land in our driveway. But I'm pregnant and there's gravel pieces shooting at our window, and I have a 3-year-old girl. So I had to go out with a shotgun and let them know they're not here for coffee. I was on CNN a couple times for not behaving nicely. So it was crazy."

Gehring said it was the media's portrayal of Lincoln as a backwoods breeding-ground for shaggy, antisocial lunatics that really irritated her and her neighbors.

"I think they thought we were all kind of a dirty, punk, stupid hillbilly kind of deal," she said. "That was not the case. I remember when we did the interview for the 'Today' show, our friends called and said, 'Thank you for not making us look like idiots.' All we did was just dress up nice. But everybody and their brother, whether they knew Ted or not, was doing interviews."

***

Sherri Wood, the local librarian, probably knew Kaczynski as well as anyone could in town.

He would tell her blonde jokes, then joke that she might need to have her husband explain it to her.

"And you know what, there were times I had to have my husband explain a joke to me," she said. "I thought, 'Jeez, you know me so well.' He has a fantastic sense of humor."

She was shocked by his arrest, but she was also disturbed by the behavior of the big-city TV crews that wore fancy shoes in Montana's springtime mud while they stalked her every movement.

"It was just every day it seemed like there were 10 or more that would come in here, some new ones that I didn't know," she said. "And then they would get really mad at me because I wouldn't talk bad about Ted. I mean, he had just barely been arrested and they wanted me to say, 'Oh he's so horrible, he killed all those people,' and all I kept saying was, 'I like him, and he has a great sense of humor.' And they said he was a murderer. But I said 'Well, he's not the first person to get arrested as the Unabomber and they had to let the other ones go. So let's wait and see.' They'd get really snotty and act like I was a stupid country hick. They were really rude."

Wood remembers her photograph being taken at the grocery store by someone hiding behind a car and being baffled about how it could be of interest.

"This whole town was just full of reporters," she said. "I mean you could not go to the grocery store, you could not go to the post office. Every building was filled with reporters asking people questions. If you went and had a cup of coffee and you were a tourist, they'd sit down and start asking the tourists, 'How do you feel about this?' That's kind of how it went the whole time they were here."

The only interviews she gave were to the New York Times and to the Library Journal  a trade publication for librarians  to talk about a woman who was impersonating her to get attention.

To Wood, Kaczynski was always friendly  he even befriended her son. Kaczynski asked to see her while he was in jail in Helena, so she and her son were escorted in a back entrance to avoid detection by the swarm of reporters outside.

"They stuck around until Ted was moved, and then the whole horde followed him like zombies down to California," she said. "And then it got quiet and then it was nice. Except then the tourists started coming  because they wanted to come be in the library Ted had been in. Sit in the chair Ted sat in. We had to take all the books Ted had donated to the library and hide them. Because they would just tear (them) off the shelves."

One woman wanted Wood to give her a chair and she refused.

"Then she got mad and went all over town and said I was a horrible person," Wood said. "It just went that way the whole time. People came from Canada and would say, 'We want to be in Ted's library.' And I would say, 'This is not Ted's library, this is the community's library.' Here we don't gawk at accidents. We don't watch somebody's house burning down. So I was totally unprepared for people driving from California and all these places to come in here. And I'm thinking that's crazy."

Two decades later, Wood still gets a random tourist here or there who wants to touch a shelf that "Ted touched."

"I really would like to put that to rest," she said. "It was a crazy time in our lives. I don't want to revisit it. And I'm glad they'll never let him out again."

Today, the 73-year-old Kaczynski resides in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, known as Supermax.

Wood said before Kaczynski was convicted in 1998, she tried to convey to the victims' relatives that being imprisoned was a punishment worse than the death penalty for Kaczynski because he liked being outside so much.

***

Jerry Burns was a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer in the Lincoln area who was recruited by the FBI several weeks before the arrest to help. His wife knew about his role, but he couldn't tell anybody else as he quietly monitored Kaczynski's activities.

The afternoon of April 3, Burns walked up to Kaczynski's cabin with two FBI agents to serve a search warrant for his property. A tactical team was hiding in the woods, surrounding the cabin in case the suspect tried to make a getaway.

"I started yelling up to Ted, 'Ted, are you home?' And we got up to the door and heard him scuffling around in there," Burns said. "He was pretty scruffy-looking. Our idea was if we got hands on him, we could take him down. We wanted him to come out of the cabin, but he was going to be detained either way."

When Kaczynski saw the men coming, he tried to duck back inside, but Burns had other ideas.

"Poor Ted had been eating snowshoe rabbits and didn't weigh much, and the adrenaline was flowing in me so I had to grab at his wrist at the door, and out he came," Burns said.

The FBI agents asked Kaczynski if there was anything dangerous inside.

"And Ted said, 'I don't want to talk about it,' and he was struggling," Burns said. "And I said 'Ted, you act like a gentleman and we will, too.' I could feel the juice going out of him. He asked to go inside and get better shoes and we said no. We walked him to the interview room. Ted said 'I'll talk about anything non-controversial.' "

Inside the cabin, authorities found a loaded pistol by the opening of his door and a "suicide ring" that was supposed to be attached to a bomb so it could be pulled easily. They also found extensive bomb-making equipment and journals documenting Kaczynski's murderous activities.

"It was probably 50 minutes went by and they said 'Bingo, everything's here,' so they placed him under arrest," Burns said. "It worked out good. For a person who wanted a lot of secrets, he kept lengthy diaries of day-to-day activities and bombings. Some were written in code that the FBI took to the CIA, and they said they hadn't seen anything like that since the Cold War. He was pretty much a cowardly assassin."

Teresa Garland worked for many years in her family's mercantile-type store, Garland's Town and Country. Kaczynski would come in and buy odds and ends and talk to Garland and her sister.

"Nobody knew Ted, and if they tell you they did, they didn't," she said. "That wasn't his M.O. The girls at the library knew more of him or what he read or his mannerisms. But a lot of people who talked to the media didn't know him."

Garland said she didn't find the swarm of journalists to be as intrusive as everyone else in town did, but she acknowledged it was a little overwhelming.

"I did not have the same feelings as most people in the community," she said. "I was, of course, surprised and bummed out and disappointed that Ted duped us all. But I was trying to enjoy all the people in town. It was a big deal."

The thing that bothered a lot of Lincoln residents, and Garland as well, was the portrayal of their town in the media as a backward hideout that had attracted a psychopath.

"Here's the deal," she said. "There's zillions of small towns all over the U.S. I tried my very level best to keep saying that, to keep everybody centered on the idea that Ted could have gone anywhere. Of all the little towns in Montana, Ted had chosen to buy that property with his brother David. It was a collision of the stars why it was Lincoln."

Garland said she's Lincoln's No. 1 cheerleader.
George Parrot, aka Big Nose, was a member of a gang of road agents, horse thieves and cattle rustlers, who operated mainly in the Powder River area of Wyoming.

In August of 1878, this band of bandits planned to rob a Union Pacific train near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. However, this would be no ordinary robbery, as the gang intended to adjust the tracks so that so that the train would derail. But, despite their careful plans, a section crew happened along and discovered the tampered rails.

While the crewmen repaired the track, a railroad foreman contacted the approaching train and also informed the law of the attempted derailment. With their robbery plans ruined, the gang was forced to ride off empty-handed.

A posse was quickly formed to apprehend the would-be train robbers. Two lawmen soon tracked the gang to Rattlesnake Canyon at Elk Mountain, where the outlaws shot and killed them. The gang then split up, heading in various directions.

In 1880, while in Miles City, Montana, a very drunk Big Nose boasted about the botched train robbery and the murder of the two lawmen. A telegraph was quickly dispatched to the sheriff in Rawlins, Wyoming.

Big Nose was found guilty at his trial and was sentenced to hang in April of 1881. About a month before his hanging, George decided he didnt care much for the idea of being hung and attempted an escape. After bashing the skull of jailer Robert Rankin, his get-away was thwarted when the jailers wife suddenly appeared, brandishing a pistol in her hand, and forcing Big Nose back into his cell.

Upon hearing of his attempted escape, a mob of masked men soon formed and stormed the jail. They dragged Parrot from the jail and hung him from a telegraph pole.

Up to this point, the short life of Big Nose Parrot was a not all that unusual fate for outlaws in the old West. However, it was what happened after the death of Big Nose that makes his tale a unique one. Local doctor John Osborne took possession of Parrots body, so he could study the outlaws brain to determine if there might be a reason for his criminal behavior. Assisting the doctor was a 15 year-old girl named Lillian Heath. After the top of the skull was awkwardly sawed off, the doctor examined the brain and determined it was no different than a normal one.

It was at this point that Dr. Osbornes activities took a strange twist. The doctor carefully peeled the skin from the dead mans chest and thighs and sent it to a tannery in Denver, along with very bizarre instructions - the skin was to be used to make him a pair of shoes and a medicine bag. Talk about one-of-a-kind items!

Osborne proudly wore the shoes for many years. When he became the first Democratic Governor of Wyoming, the good doctor reportedly wore his outlaw-skin shoes at his inaugural ball in 1893.

At some point, the young miss Heath came into possession of the skullcap. After she became the first female doctor in the State of Wyoming, the skullcap was said to have been used as a penholder, an ashtray and a doorstop in her office.

The infamous shoes, along with the bottom part of Big Noses skull, can be viewed at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.
Legendary Bob Marshall packer Smoke Elser will lead a pack clinic on Sunday, April 17, hosted by the Selway-Pintler Wilderness Back Country Horsemen.

The clinic will provide hands-on training for a more luxurious wilderness experience, said Kathy Hundley, Back Country Horsemen State Director and Chair of the SPWBCH Education Committee.

A lot of people backpack, but packing with horses and mules allows you to go farther into the back country with more comfort, Hundley said. It adds this historical western dimension once used by miners and mountain men. It provides camping in comfort and style by bringing in more food and useful equipment. Youre not rouging it as much if youre packing with stock.

The clinic will cover horse and mule safety, understanding and fitting the Decker pack saddle, cargoing (mantying), loading the basket and barrel hitches, and the use of panniers (panyards) and the Decker diamond.

Elser will lead the clinic and share his knowledge of packing and the backcountry.

Smoke is such a legend and weaves his 50 plus years of experience throughout the day, Hundley said. He brings it home with fun stories and experience.

The clinic will be a great way for people to learn how to pack for personal fun such as hunting and recreation, Hundley said.

Elk hunters and other big game hunters can benefit from learning to pack, she said. Its a whole lot easier packing out 300 to 400 pounds of game on a mule than on your back.

Hundley said Back Country Horsemen provides pack support in the summer for the Forest Service and other organizations such as the Selway-Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation, Bob Marshall Foundation and the Continental Divide Trail of Montana, under the umbrella of Montana Wilderness Association.

We drop camp gear for their trail crews while they are in the backcountry clearing trail, and then come back in usually a week later and bring the gear back out, she said. Using five or six mules or horses we can take in most of their tools, bear boxes of food, kitchen/camp equipment, coolers, propane and some personal gear.

A barbeque pulled pork luncheon will be provided in addition to the packing-skills training and storytelling.

Hundley said the clinic would be a day with good food, good conversation and lots of learning from an expert.

It will be a day spent with Smoke and learning horse safety and packing skills, Hundley said. Its just fun to hear Smoke talk - hes a treasure who will educate you and entertain you all at the same time. Dont miss this rare opportunity to learn from the best.

***

The clinic is $30 per person or $40 per family and will be from 9 a.m. to

5 p.m. at the CMAX Stable and Equestrian Center, 657 Bass Lane, Corvallis.

To register for the clinic or receive more information, contact Hundley at (406) 363-8230.
Hamilton Middle School civics students traveled to the East Coast to learn more about history from March 22-26. The group of 21 kids and four chaperones kept a grueling schedule that covered Washington, D.C., Gettysburg and Fort McHenry.

At Hamilton Middle School, all students are required to take civics.

T.J. Pool teaches eighth grade U.S. History, and Chad Williams teaches seventh grade civics and Montana history.

This is the sixth year students have taken this trip, and Pool said they make the most of their time in Washington, D.C.

The students dont wait in lines, the time is spent learning, Pool said. The people there know us and cater to our classroom lessons.

Each day of the trip has a learning theme.

For the theme, Freedom is Not Free, students visited the Iwo Jima Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, the Robert E. Lee Mansion, the gravesites of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and the Vietnam, Lincoln, Korean and World War II Memorials.

Student Quoia Anderson said she had never traveled so far or learned so much about history.

I think the going to all of the memorials was the best, Anderson said. It was great to learn about the Lincoln Memorial, World War II Memorial and Vietnam Memorial.

The trip helped Anderson learn history rather than just read about it, she said.

Arlington was a beautiful cemetery, and I learned so much about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Anderson said. It is cool how they guard it 24/7 and especially during the daytime it is very formal. It is amazing how they do it for an hour. I dont know how they do it, but I love it.

Students visited the U.S. Capitol, Library of Congress, Supreme Court, Smithsonian Museum of American History and visited the presidential memorials of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson and the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial.

Student Gus Courchesne said his favorite part of the trip was the Air and Space Museum.

It was cool to see how man progressed in making different airplanes and flying, he said. They went from the original Wright brothers airplane to fighter jets that can go the speed of sound.

Courchesne said he loves biology and enjoyed the Natural History Museum.

I liked the Ocean Hall the best, he said. It is a big open room with exhibits. It had different fish species and levels of the ocean, getting deeper and deeper. It went from dolphins to angler fish at the very bottom.

Courchesne said the trip was fun.

I learned a lot and got worn out, he said.

Pool said the students averaged 20,000 steps a day.

Depending on what Fitbit we were using we were averaging eight to 12 miles per day, he said. It was a lot of walking. We have long days from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., and you have jet lag the entire five days. The third day was the hardest, with 12 miles.

On the third day, the students saw the Smithsonian, the Jefferson Memorial, the Air Force Memorial and the White House.

They did not take the official tour but walked around it to learn about how the house was given to the district, the history of Lafayette Square, the constituents that stay as guests at the White House and the First Infantryman Memorial.

The students saw the Gettysburg National Cemetery, the Gettysburg Battlefield and Fort McHenry outside of Baltimore Harbor. Fort McHenry is most famous for defending Baltimore during the War of 1812 where Francis Scott Key was inspired to write our national anthem. While at Fort McHenry, the middle school students received the privilege of helping to retire the flag.

Students on the trip were Dylan Berglund, Logan Busa, Gus Courchesne, Oliver Holmes, Clay Keller, Drew Lehtola, Owen Lint, Tylin Olsen, McKenna Rausch, Emily Tuck, Quoia Anderson, Josh Dickemore, Catharine Frederick, Bodie Hansen, Delaney Higurea, Brock Jones, Grace Parker, Sarah Passey, Kaeli Valla, Kale Wanner, Rylee Wiediger and Rebekah Stamp.

Williams said the civics focus was a two-year process.

We have seventh- and eighth-grade civic classes, Williams said. In seventh grade we talk about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights the founding fathers and how government works; that preps them for eighth grade. They learn more in Mr. Pools class.

Williams said the trip is the capstone event.

Its one thing to read about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights but they make a huge impact when students are within inches of the original document, he said. Now it is not just something in a book, they see the real thing and it comes alive. It is a classroom without walls.

Williams said the students are intelligent, receive a solid foundation and take the citizenship exam.

By the time they take senior government class in high school they are well prepared and ready to go, he said.

Pool said school support is vital to the program.

None of this would happen without support at home, Pool said. School board, Tom Korst and Mr. Lewis are vital to us continuing this program and expanding our civics and history programs. To provide these kids the opportunity to go is why we volunteer and expand beyond the classroom and beyond any textbook.

Principal Marlin Lewis said, The trustees and the goals of the school district emphasize civic instruction.

Two years ago they decided to require students in seventh and eighth grades to take civics, Lewis said. This is an optional trip that ties to their history class and civics curriculum. This trip is encouraged by the school but no school funding goes toward the trip.
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Here's where to get a pumpkin in central Kansas for fall

Local farms are preparing for the upcoming pumpkin harvest. Here's where to go pumpkin picking in the greater Salina area.
Shirley Contreras lives in Orcutt and writes for the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society. She can be contacted at 623-8193 or at shirleycontreras2@yahoo.com. Her book, The Good Years, a selection of stories shes written for the Santa Maria Times since 1991, is on sale at the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society, 616 S. Broadway.
CLOSER LOOK

The Guadalupe County Childrens Advocacy Center served 393 children in 2015. Of those 393, 307 received a first time forensic interview. The statistical breakdown for these 307 is below. The remaining 86 were either children who were receiving counseling only during this time or who had an interview not for the first time.

AGE:

62 were 0 to 5 years old

109 were 6 to 10 years old

136 were 11 years old and older

GENDER:

183 were female

124 were male

PRIMARY TYPE OF

VICTIMIZATION

154 for sexual abuse allegations

69 were at risk of abuse (usually at risk of Sexual Abuse)

34 were for physical abuse allegations

25 were a child witness of a crime

13 were for concerns of drug endangerment or kidnapping

6 were for concerns of serious neglect

6 were brought to the center for sexual and physical abuse allegations

ETHNICITY:

16 Black

144 Hispanic

56 Multi-racial

2 Native American

89 White
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If you think about it, its a metal structure that was put in place in the 20s, compare that to tractors. How many tractors do you know that are still running that were built in the 20s? Not very many. Rebuilding, refurbishing and fixing is not as simple; it is complicated.

Bill West, GBRA General Manager
125 years ago

TRAIN CARS DERAILS: Three carloads of packed meats, hauled by a Sioux City and Northern engine, became derailed near the oatmeal mills. One of the cars went over a six-foot embankment and burst open. The other two cars were badly damaged.

JAMES SALOONS: The Good Templar lodge at James, just north of Sioux City, has found an efficient way to close the saloons there. It notified one saloonkeeper that his life insurance company would be in less danger of a loss if he were to leave town. He was given three days to comply, and before the time was out, he closed up shop.

STALLION AUCTION: Clydesdale, English Shire, Coach and Hackney are all registered in their respective Stud Books and will be sold under a full guarantee. They range in age from 3 to 6 years. All have been purchased from the best breeders in Europe. Sale at Union Stock Yards, 1 oclock sharp, April 7, 1891. W. M. Catto, 325 Fourth street, Sioux City.

100 years ago

NURSING SHORTAGE: Sioux City faces a nursing famine because of the amount of illnesses here and surrounding territory, as reported by physicians and hospitals. At the nurses club, 1100 Pierce street, 35 calls for nurses were made last Saturday, which could not be supplied. The main illness is pneumonia, as well as an epidemic of scarlet fever and measles in some sections.

SOCCER LEAGUE: The military company of Davidson Bros. has decided to put a team in the field. The Sons of St. George also will field a team. There is some talk of Clan Gordon entering a team. Efforts will be made to get three other clubs to take up soccer to form a six-club league.

FRENCH RETURN: Two representatives of the French army are expected to arrive in Sioux City Friday from St. Joseph, Mo., to inspect horses for army service in the European war. The foreign horse purchasing business has been dull for the last few months across the country. No large contracts are expected here.

50 years ago

EMBELLZER FREED: Washington (AP) -- The federal parole board granted freedom to Burnice Geiger, a bank cashier from Sheldon, Iowa, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the embezzlement of $2.1 million. Mrs. Geiger, now 63, was caught in 1961, taking the money for more than 20 years while working at the Sheldon National Bank. She gave away much of the money -- to her church, organizations and college students. The bank subsequently failed. She is incarcerated at a federal womens reformatory in Alderson, W. Va., and will be freed July 1.

IN THE NEWS: John Irelan, 36, Marshalltown, Iowa, will become executive vice president of the Sioux City Chamber of Commerce on May 16. Andrew Karantinos, 3552 Douglas St., mathematics instructor at the University of South Dakota, has been awarded a $1,040 scholarship to attend a National Science Foundation summer mathematics institute in New Jersey. He previously taught at North Junior High and Central High schools in Sioux City.

FOOD STAMPS: Monday marked the opening of the food stamp program in Woodbury County. During the first two hours, 27 low-income persons, mostly elderly, purchased stamps to expand their food-buying power.

25 years ago

GOVERNORS HERE: Govs. Terry Branstad of Iowa, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and George Mickelson of South Dakota are receiving an overview of the interstate cooperative efforts as practiced in Siouxland. They announced that Siouxland will host the Midwestern Governors' Conference in October for the first time in 20 years. Governors from 13 states will attend.

ALLIED VICTORY: Siouxlanders are joining people around the nation in celebrating the allied victory over Iraq. President Bush asked Americans to set aside April 5-7 as "National Days of Thanksgiving." A number of programs will be held in Siouxland. Many employees are wearing red, white and blue clothes.

MAKING NEWS: St. Luke's Gordon Recovery Centers employee Flora Lee has been appointed director of the Iowa Board of Substance Abuse Certification. ...Sioux Cityan Shirley White has been promoted to manager of the Subway Deli in South Sioux City. ...Nancy Metz has been named chairman of the United Way of Siouxland's 1991 campaign. ...Chuck Olsen, a purebred Yorkshire producer who farms near Irene, S.D., has been named South Dakota's 1991 Pork All-American.

These items were published in the Journal April 3-9, 1891, 1916, 1966 and 1991.
NEW YORK | The sigh of relief a business owner heaves after filing an income tax return may be quickly followed by an unsettling thought: What if I'm audited?

Owners dread an audit not just because they might get a big bill for unpaid taxes, interest and penalties. Audits can also be time-consuming and expensive, in some cases lasting months or even years, distracting owners from running their companies and requiring them to pay accountants or lawyers to deal with the government. But companies that keep good financial records can make the process easier.

The IRS audited less than 1 percent, or nearly 1.4 million, of the nearly 192 million tax returns filed in 2014. That included business and personal returns and audits conducted either by letter or in person, according to the most recent available IRS figures. The audits resulted in an additional $25 billion in taxes recommended by IRS agents, and more than $7 billion in refunds, the IRS says.

In a typical business return audit conducted in person  the kind business owners fear the most  IRS agents examine a company's ledgers, bank statements, invoices and receipts to see if it reported all its income and if the expenses it claimed are legitimate.

In-person audits often take place at a company's offices. Tax professionals advise owners not to handle an audit on their own, to instead ask an accountant or lawyer to do the talking to the IRS, a service that can run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on how much an accountant or attorney charges and how long the audit takes. An owner still needs to be prepared to answer questions that an IRS agent has, says Todd Simmens, a managing partner with the accounting firm BDO.

"You need to be making sure you're able to explain your business, what you do," Simmens says.

Robert Barrows learned from three audits in the 1980s and '90s that good records were critical. He had to pay $180 in back taxes because of a mathematical error, but his company's books supported everything on his return. He's still making sure he has meticulous records.

"I'm too afraid of getting audited, so why take a chance?" says Barrows, who owns an advertising and public relations business in San Mateo, California.

Business returns can be selected randomly by IRS computers if they deviate from what's considered the norm, the agency says. For example, does the return claim an amount of expenses that seems too high? A company or owner can also be audited if the IRS discovers they haven't reported all their income; this can happen if the IRS has received a 1099 form reporting income that wasn't included on the business return. If one partner or investor in a business is audited, other partners may be audited too.

Companies also may be audited if they don't pay their taxes, says Amy Vetter, an accountant and vice president at software maker Xero. Companies that run up a tax bill attract the notice of the IRS, which will want to know why the government isn't getting its money.

A DISPUTE LEADS TO AN AUDIT

Attorney Steven Lesavich was audited because the IRS had no record of monthly tax payments he made over five years. The agency sent him a letter in 2008 demanding payment and warning that his bank accounts could be seized. Although his accountant provided documentation that the payments were made, the IRS didn't accept the proof. The agency said Lesavich, who practices in Kenosha, Wisconsin, would have to agree to an audit if he didn't want his accounts frozen, and he said OK, hoping it would resolve the dispute.

The accountant handled most of the audit, but the agent had questions for Lesavich: Had he paid a vendor but not sent a required 1099 form? Did he pay people in cash and not keep records? The answers were no and the questions were unnerving.

"You start to wonder if we missed something," he recalls.

About two months after the audit, Lesavich got a letter saying the IRS had located his payments. But the experience, which lasted about six months, cost Lesavich a total of $15,000 for his accountant's fees and revenue lost when he spent time on his tax problems, not with clients. The accountant's fees were deductible as a business expense, but the tax code doesn't allow lost revenue to be deducted for service providers like lawyers.

PERSONAL RETURNS MATTER TOO

Many owners, including sole proprietors, partners and shareholders in companies known as S corporations, report business income when they file their personal 1040 forms. If there are questionable items in the personal portion of an owner's return, the business part can also be audited. And vice versa.

Shelley Armato, her husband and their construction software company, MySmartPlans, were audited in 2010 after the couple took a deduction for a $500 donation to a funeral home. The IRS questioned the donation because it hadn't been made to what's called a qualified charity; the couple gave the money to help a family who couldn't afford their child's funeral.

On the day of the audit, which Armato calls "a stressful time, to say the least," two IRS agents arrived at the Armatos' Kansas City, Kansas, office and began examining a year's worth of personal and business papers. The couple's accountant handled most of their questions; there were no problems with the company's income or expenses. In the end, the Armatos got a $600 refund because they'd overpaid their taxes. They had to pay their accountant $10,000  and were relieved that it was all over.

"It's one thing you could check off the list and say, the big bogeyman isn't coming to eat us," Shelley Armato says.
The March 24 edition of The Journal reported on population estimates in the region from the U.S. Census Bureau. The article noted that the Sioux City metropolitan area population increased very slightly over the past five years. This is part of a much larger trend.

States across the region experienced modest population gain. The small increase in each was concentrated in a few urban counties.

Iowas estimated population from 2010-2015 increased by 77,000. Polk County (Des Moines) alone accounted for 37,000 of this, with another 23,000 in its neighboring counties. Before some use this to beat up on Des Moines, similar situations arose in neighboring states. Nebraska saw a net increase of 66,000 people, with counties in or around Omaha and Lincoln accounting for all of that increase. South Dakota had an increase of 42,000, with 31,400 of that coming in the Sioux Falls and Rapid City metro areas.

Unstated is that much of the population growth is due to people living longer. Nebraskans over 65 years old represented 13.8 percent of the population in 2010, while 14.6 percent of South Dakotans and 14.9 percent of Iowans fell in that age group. By 2030, those numbers are projected to rise to 20.6 percent in Nebraska, 22.4 percent in Iowa and 23.1 percent in South Dakota. For perspective, this represents an increase of 214,000 Iowans over age 65 between 2010 and 2030. Iowans under age 18 are projected to decline by 48,000 during the same time frame. In all three states, population under 50 is projected to decline, while those over 60 will have double digit increases.

What happens when people start reaching the age where they are no longer working? If those who are aging depart the workforce but remain in the region, there will be a greater demand for health care and other aging-related services. Without an increase in working age population, what happens to existing non-health related companies?

Businesses in these and other industries will need to find ways to attract more employees, get more production from fewer employees, move to where they can get employees, or go out of business. Attracting more employees will likely require higher wages, greater benefits and/or finding ways to develop those presently not in the workforce. Attracting new workers from outside the region may increase tensions.

To get greater productivity will require not just investment in machinery and processes, but training and education for those operating the machinery. Iowa Workforce Development projects an annual need for 185 transportation workers, 175 production workers, 95 health care workers and 70 construction workers in the five counties nearest Sioux City. Last year, the Iowa Legislature increased funding for every level of public education except community colleges, reducing enrollment by 700 students. The states post-secondary education policies are clearly not in line with its employment needs.

Providing higher wages and benefits may help, but competitors of area businesses will likely be doing the same. Employing people not presently in the workforce will involve challenges ranging from adapting to physical or learning disabilities to accepting greater risk from those who have had criminal or drug offenses.

Attracting and retaining a skilled workforce will also require amenities that enhance a high quality of life. As noted, the areas gaining population across the region are in or near major metropolitan areas.

Growing our economy will require policies that help keep people here, attract newcomers, and continually developing the skills of all. The census report is not just a snapshot of where we are, but a guide to where we will be, unless we plan on reshaping our future.

Next week: Charese Yanney

A Sioux City resident, Steve Warnstadt is government affairs coordinator for Western Iowa Tech Community College and a former Democratic state senator. He and his wife, Mary, are the parents of one son and one daughter.
NORTH SIOUX CITY | Whenever he want to be alone with his thoughts, Bob Lawrence can often be found at the Adams Homestead and Nature Preserve.

"Sometimes I'll just come out with a tape recorder and simply record whatever comes to mind," said Lawrence, of McCook Lake, South Dakota. "This is a great place to do that."

Lawrence would walk Adams' trails while writing "Billy Wilde," a suspense novel set inside the luxurious mansions of Georgia's Golden Isles during the Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s.

An e-book, "Billy Wilde" is available for purchase by download from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and iTunes.

"Billy Wilde is a 21-year-old party boy who became ensnared by Lee Anne McNight, a mysterious and dangerous heiress," Lawrence said. "Billy had the same types of girlfriends as me, attended the same types of parties as me, and got into the same sorts of scrapes as me. In many ways, he was my alter ego at a much younger age."

This is quite a switch for Lawrence, who grew up in a middle-class Atlanta household following World War II.

Youthful intrigue seemed far removed from Lawrence, a Vietnam War veteran who would eventually become an anchorman for KCAU-TV, a mass communications professor at Morningside College, as well as the owner of a Dakota Dunes-based public relations firm.

"I was very happy working in journalism and public relations," Lawrence said. "It was only after the economy took a hit that I decided to try my hand writing fiction."

Initially, he made an attempt to write a movie screenplay.

"I remembered something (novelist) Stephen King said in an interview," Lawrence said. "(King) said write what you know. So, my first screenplay attempt was called 'The Anchorman,' which was a mystery set in the TV industry."

Although this screenplay (and a few subsequent ones) didn't sell, Lawrence refused to give up. Instead, he decided to write novels based upon his own experiences.

When I heard you were calling your book "Billy Wilde," I immediately thought of legendary film director Billy Wilder ("Double Indemnity," "Sunset Boulevard," and "The Apartment"). Was he your inspiration?

"No, the name was just coincidental. My original thought was simply that Billy has a pretty wild life. Hey, why don't I create a book that would allow Billy to live up to his last name of 'Wilde?'"

Also, Lee Anne McNight seems like a fascinating character. A multimillionaire with a murky past, she puts Billy in grave danger when he becomes a pawn for both the FBI and CIA. Was there a real Lee Anne in your life?

"Yes, there was. In real life, the character wasn't as extreme, but there were girls like Lee Ann in my past. With her golden blonde hair and her beautiful Jaguar convertible, Lee Anne turned Billy's life outside down. While he was intrigued by her lifestyle, Billy was also truly in love with her."

As a former journalist, was it difficult to switch to fiction?

"Not really. It was actually fun being in control of your characters. The only tough part came from research. Both the time frame and location were very important to the novel and I wanted both to be as accurate as possible. I didn't want the readers to suspend their belief by introducing something that couldn't happen."

But that won't be a problem with your next novel, which is much more fanciful, right?

"That's correct. 'Daydreamer: The Amazing Adventures of Raymond Semple' (which is due to be release this summer) literally revolves around the daydreams of a boy getting ready to graduate from high school. It's fun since no research was needed."
Western Iowa is an amazing place. The Loess Hills, the Missouri River and its floodplain, fields of tallgrass prairie, the Wabash Trace Nature Trail, the Iowa Lakes, Storm Lake and Little Sioux River Valley, the list goes on and on. Such western Iowa treasures provided sustenance for our regions native societies and early settlers and have impressed and entertained explorers, artists, recreationalists and nature lovers for years.

These landscapes continue to impress and sustain us today. The rolling prairies and deep ravines provide habitat for wildlife that attracts hunters from around Iowa and the rest of the country. The geologic wonder and picturesque Loess Hills attract photographers, motorists, birders, cyclists, campers and countless visitors seeking a peaceful hike or drive. The Iowa Lakes provide Iowans and visitors a much-needed break from the summer heat.

It is for all these reasons that we believe the Iowa Legislature should delay no longer and fund the Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust.

The Trust was created by Iowa voters via a ballot initiative over five years ago. Sixty-three percent of voters, a remarkable majority, voted to create the Trust and dedicate 3/8 of a penny of a future sales tax increase to funding it. The onus is, and has been, on the Iowa Legislature and the governor to identify an approach that will get us there.

Calls to fund the Trust have been frequent since its creation. Numerous opinion pieces have been written by dedicated citizens and an ever-growing number of private businesses, interest groups, service organizations and municipalities have added their names to the Iowa Water and Land Legacy Coalition - a diverse group formed specifically to advocate for funding the Trust.

Much attention has recently been paid to water quality concerns throughout the state and the Legislature has dedicated a significant amount of time to debating an appropriate vehicle to fund practices that will improve water quality. While the attention focused on water quality is certainly warranted, the optimal solution has and continues to be Iowas Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust. The permanent and constitutionally protected funding will be distributed to existing state agencies and will make significant and immediate progress toward meeting the goals of Iowas nutrient reduction strategy with at least 60 percent of the Trust available for water quality.

However, in the recent focus on water quality, we believe some of the benefits of the Trust are perhaps being overshadowed. The Trusts formula will ensure that additional resources are allocated to the conservation of the aforementioned attributes that make our part of the state so special.

The growing Siouxland economy is welcome and exciting. New workers and families are coming to western Iowa. What better way to secure this economic vitality than to make an investment in the quality-of-life features that existing and future residents will enjoy.

Iowas Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust has the potential to conserve habitat for our first-class hunting; conserve and restore tallgrass prairie that capture western Iowas frontier nature; and to build, connect and maintain recreational trails that welcome families to get out and explore.

We urge our elected officials to make an investment in Iowa and fund the Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust.

Graham McGaffin is Loess Hills project director for The Nature Conservancy in Iowa. Rick Schneider is director of the Woodbury County Conservation Board.
As more and more business owners turn to content marketing strategies, the demand for talented writers is rising. But finding the cream of the crop isnt always easy.

To find out where other businesses are sourcing their content writers and editors, we asked 15 entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question.

What is a great marketplace to find skilled freelance writers to support your company?

Heres what YEC community members had to say:

1. Stay-at-Home Moms

Stay-at-home moms have been a saving grace to RTC. They are oftentimes highly educated, incredibly organized and looking for part-time work that can be completed on their own schedule. These women are a godsend. ~ Corey Blake, Round Table Companies

2. LinkedIn Groups

Try posting a part-time job offer in the LinkedIn Groups for your industry. While not everyone spends a ton of time in the groups, very often those looking for work are participating and looking for just this kind of opportunity. ~ John Rood, Next Step Test Preparation

3. Textbroker

Ive used Textbroker many times to find writers for Web content. The thing that I like about Textbroker is the consistency of its service. Articles are always delivered in a timely fashion. The main problem I had with hiring independent writers I found from other places was that there was no level of redundancy. If a person was out sick, then my project had to wait indefinitely. ~ Lawrence Watkins, Great Black Speakers

4. The Local Business Paper

The best freelance writers arent using freelance hiring sites. Thats because the quality writers wont be the cheapest. If you cant write 500 words, why would you pay just $5 for that service? Instead, look in the pages of the local business paper. A Google or Twitter search should reveal if those writers are freelancers. Then reach out! ~ Rakia Reynolds, Skai Blue Media

5. Published Articles

We actually hired a freelance writer because of an article we saw on her in Entrepreneur magazine. When we were looking for someone to help us with content, we kept our eyes open for blog posts, business journals, magazines and social media. All of these avenues can bring super talented people into the mix. We recently hired this writer and brought her on full time from contract work. ~ Parker Powers, Millionaire Network

6. Content Runner

Content Runner is a great service for finding freelance writing talent. The company maintains a favorites list of its top writers, and you can submit topic ideas to that pool of freelancers instead of tracking one writer down for every article you need. Thats an invaluable feature for time-strapped content managers. The administrative team is also highly responsive to client needs and questions. ~ Phil Laboon, Eyeflow Internet Marketing

7. Guru

Guru is our preferred freelancer marketplace because its easier to connect directly with real individuals. Many other sites are flooded with companies that turn around to re-farm your project. Our experiences are much better when we deal directly with writers rather than a middleman trolling a marketplace. ~ Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net

8. Zerys

Weve used Zerys for several years. It has a great selection of writers, and you can post either for bid or by a direct rate. You can also post jobs on Elance, oDesk and other job sites, but they are not as specialized. ~ Gideon Kimbrell, InList Inc

9. Craigslist

Its amazing how many people I know have found terrific freelancers, collaborators and help via Craigslist. Dont shy away from using a platform just because its ugly! ~ Derek Flanzraich, Greatist

10. ODesk

Weve successfully used oDesk to find many capable and talented writers at affordable rates the past few years. ~ Josh Weiss, Bluegala

11. The Local Honors College

The local honors college in your town is an often overlooked and underutilized way to find freelance writers. Offering an internship to honors students ensures theyll be decent at writing, eager to learn and willing to follow instructions. Plus, they will work for decent wages due to their lack of work experience. ~ Brett Farmiloe, Digital Marketing Company

12. Elance

You can search for exactly what you need and do it all virtually. Elance is a great service for businesses that need support but cant hire someone on a full-time (or even part-time) basis. ~ Alexis Wolfer, The Beauty Bean

13. ProBlogger

I like the writers on the ProBlogger job forum because theyre more trained in writing great headlines, organizing posts with subheaders and bullet points where necessary, and more. The prices are reasonable, and its been tough for me to find this level of quality elsewhere. ~ Eric Siu, Single Grain

14. Contributor Blogs

More and more high-end sites such as Forbes and Fast Company are publishing the work of (often unpaid) contributors in exchange for exposure. Pay attention to the bylines following your favorite columns to see if their authors are on the market. ~ Sam Saxton, Salter Spiral Stair and Mylen Stairs

15. Scripted

Scripted will deliver writing sourced from its vetted pool of freelance writers who have been approved to write for relevant topics. I am a big fan of Scripted because it helps minimize internal resources spent by providing you with account management services for creating writer guidelines, editing submissions and monitoring submission timelines. ~ Ryan Stoner, Freelance
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
ASTER Image NASA/JAXA

Beginning today, all Earth imagery from a prolific Japanese remote sensing instrument operating aboard NASAs Terra spacecraft since late 1999 is now available to users everywhere at no cost.

The public will have unlimited access to the complete 16-plus-year database for Japans Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument, which images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet. ASTERs database currently consists of more than 2.95 million individual scenes. The content ranges from massive scars across the Oklahoma landscape from an EF-5 tornado and the devastating aftermath of flooding in Pakistan, to volcanic eruptions in Iceland and wildfires in California.

Previously, users could access ASTERs global digital topographic maps of Earth online at no cost, but paid METI a nominal fee to order other ASTER data products.

In announcing the change in policy, METI and NASA cited ASTERs longevity and continued strong environmental monitoring capabilities. Launched in 1999, ASTER has far exceeded its five-year design life and will continue to operate for the foreseeable future as part of the suite of five Earth-observing instruments on Terra.

We anticipate a dramatic increase in the number of users of our data, with new and exciting results to come, said Michael Abrams, ASTER science team leader at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, home to ASTERs U.S. science team. ASTER data are processed into products using algorithms developed at JPL and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. A joint U.S./Japan science team validates and calibrates the instrument and data products.

ASTER is used to create detailed maps of land surface temperature, reflectance and elevation. The instrument acquires images in visible and thermal infrared wavelengths, with spatial resolutions ranging from about 50 to 300 feet (15 to 90 meters). ASTER data cover 99 percent of Earths landmass and span from 83 degrees north latitude to 83 degrees south. A single downward-looking ASTER scene covers an area on the ground measuring about 37-by-37 miles (60-by-60-kilometers).

ASTER uses its near-infrared spectral band and downward- and backward-viewing telescopes to create stereo-pair images, merging two slightly offset two-dimensional images to create the three-dimensional effect of depth. Each elevation measurement point in the data is 98 feet (30 meters) apart.

The broad spectral coverage and high spectral resolution of ASTER provide scientists in numerous disciplines with critical information for surface mapping and monitoring of dynamic conditions and changes over time. Example applications include monitoring glacial advances and retreats, monitoring potentially active volcanoes, identifying crop stress, determining cloud morphology and physical properties, evaluating wetlands, monitoring thermal pollution, monitoring coral reef degradation, mapping surface temperatures of soils and geology, and measuring surface heat balance.

ASTER data are now available via electronic download from NASAs Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) at the U.S. Geological Surveys (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and from AIST. To access the data, visit: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/dataset_discovery/aster or https://gbank.gsj.jp/madas/

NASA uses the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earths interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.

For more information about ASTER, visit: http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/

For more information on NASAs Terra mission, visit: http://terra.nasa.gov

For more information about NASAs Earth science activities, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/earth
The entire Fly Your Satellite delegation ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/M. Juvela (U. Helsinki, Finland)

Once upon a time, only world superpowers could launch satellites. Now university students can do it as well!

The ESA Education Office Fly Your Satellite! (FYS) programme is designed to train the next generation of aerospace professionals. This years campaign is entering a critical stage, as the three chosen student teams get their satellites ready for launch in April.

The satellites designed and built by the student teams, arrived in French Guyana on Friday 25 March. Upon arrival, they were given a security escort from the airport to the Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG), Europes spaceport near the town of Kourou. The student teams arrived in the French Guyana on 28 March.

The satellites themselves are CubeSats. This class of small satellites have helped revolutionise access to space. Made of standard components, as the name suggests they come in modular dimensions of just 10x10x10cm in size. As part of the FYS! Programme, three university teams were chosen by ESAs Education Office and have been working hard to perfect their spacecraft.

OUFTI-1 from the University of Liege, Belgium, will test a new communications subsystem; e-st@r-II from the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, will demonstrate an attitude control system using measurements of the Earths magnetic field; and AAUSAT4 from the University of Aalborg, Denmark, will operate an automated ocean vessel identification system.

The students themselves have been made to work to professional standards, giving them the experience of what it is like to work on a real space mission. This helps build the expertise that Europe needs to continue as a world leader in space.

The FYS! CubeSat teams met in the early hours of 29 March for the security check-in procedures necessary to access the Centre Spatial Guyanais. They were then given the mandatory safety briefing offered to all those that work on the CSG site. Then they set to work preparing their satellites contained in their P-POD the device that will release them into orbit after launch. Meanwhile, the details of the fit-check operations were coordinated among all involved parties, and the mechanical and electrical fit-checks were performed successfully, confirming that the P-PODs mechanical and electrical interfaces fit perfectly with its mounting location onboard the Soyuz launcher. The lateral access ports of the P-POD were then removed, and all 3 CubeSats were inspected successfully by all student teams.

The day ended with an agreed working plan for the upcoming three working days and a post fit-check meeting with Arianespace.

One of the students commented: It is amazing to learn that we are in one of the huge high bay clean rooms at CSG with our small satellites, the same room that is used for the final launch preparation activities of big satellites. To see the CubeSat being readied for launch directly at the launch site is worth the long and tiring journey to Kourou.

On 30 March the students removed the so-called Remove Before Flight pins and successfully verified that the CubeSats were ready for launch. Afterwards, the lateral access ports of the P-POD were put back in place. The next time the students will have contact with their respective CubeSats will be through the communication link after the satellites are deployed into orbit. The next activities consist in completing the application of a special thermal-optical tape on the outside of the P-POD, which will ensure the unpowered CubeSats are shielded from extreme thermal radiation during the launch phase. Finally, the planning for the next weeks will consist in integrating the P-POD with the rest of the launcher.

Launch is scheduled for 22 April, when the Soyuz rocket will carry the satellites into space. The student teams will be in Europe, at their university, where they will be ready to receive the first radio signal of their CubeSats from space.

We are now entering the most critical phase of the mission. Everything must be made ready for orbit. For the teams, it is the most intense but also the most rewarding time  the experience of a lifetime. They have designed and built their satellite, and have interacted in long reviews, meetings, and test sessions with ESA specialists to confirm the suitability of their satellites to perform the mission for which they were designed. Now these students are experiencing the full immersion of working at Europes Spaceport in Kourou  the equivalent of 100% pure adrenaline that will accompany them for many years. I am certain that decades after they start working as space professionals they will still have strong memories of their visit at Europes Spaceport, and of their being a part of an important launch! said Piero Galeone, Head of Tertiary Education at ESA.

More information:

Fly Your Satellite! is an ESA educational programme run in close collaboration with European universities and aimed at complementing students academic education. It provides university students across Europe with the unique opportunity to gain practical experience in key phases of a challenging, real satellite project a CubeSat from integration, test and verification, launch and operations. Through Fly Your Satellite! and other educational projects, ESA inspires, engages and better prepares students to undertake scientific and technological careers, particularly in the space sector. Fly Your Satellite! is part of the newly established ESA Academy programme.
The deputy foreign minister of Armenia said the actions of Turkey fit into the policies of its current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who seeks to "spread the waves of instability, terrorism and bloodshed" both in Turkey and in neighboring countries.

In the past, government sources in Azerbaijan revealed joint defense initiatives were signed between Ankara and Baku, such the TurAz Qartali program, aimed at establishing military partnerships in the event of aggression from a third party. As for Azerbaijan, a third party aggressor could only mean Armenia, Italy's Il Giornale reported.

Furthermore, one should keep in mind the close ethno-cultural ties which exist between Turkey and Azerbaijan.

At the same time, Ankara's relations with Yerevan have always been strained as a result of Turkey's refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire. Back in 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 over its support for Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Meanwhile Armenia has been getting closer with Russia over the recent years. In late February, Moscow gave Yerevan a preferential loan for the purchase of Russian military equipment worth $200 million. That really made Azerbaijan concerned and it even sent an official protest to Moscow over its actions.
However, another Turkish newspaper Haberturk reported that Celik, in fact, refused to confirm the killing of Peshkov during an interrogation process.

According to the Hurriyet Daily News, Celik and 13 others were having dinner at a restaurant in Izmir's Hatay district when they were arrested by local police on March 30.

Interestingly, Celik and his friends were arrested not due to their suspected involvement in the killing of the Russian pilot or fighting in Syria, but because they showed up to a restaurant in Izmir with their guns. Understandably, people got scared and someone called the police who arrived and seized a Kalashnikov assault rifle and two pistols during the arrest.

The Russian Su-24 bomber was shot down by a Turkish F-16 fighter jet over Syria on November 24, 2015 and fell four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the Turkish border. The crew of the plane ejected and one of its pilots, Peshkov, was killed by fire from the ground, while the second pilot survived and was later rescued.
"US banks has especially insisted on these terms because they are very interested in buying Russian bonds," one of the sources said.

Another source said that the terms were proposed to bypass restrictions imposed by the US Treasury Department. It warned banks off buying Russian bonds.

Washington explained that buying Russian debt would breach the policy of sanctions against Moscow, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"Banks and the Russian Finance Ministry discussed the guarantees. Officials were ready to include them in the deal," the Russian banking source said.

The terms of the negotiations and the issue date have been kept confidential. It was reported that in February the Russian government sent offers to 25 foreign and three Russian banks. On February 24, the ministry closed the application window.

Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak said that many American and European banks did not answer to the proposal. However he underscored that there were many other possible partners for Russia.
In 2014, Chinese ports have ousted American and Japanese harbors from the top 10 ranking of the worlds largest ports in terms of cargo volume, according to a report by the American Association of Port Authorities.

Over the past 10 years, Chinese ports outperformed other global harbors in terms of cargo traffic. In 2003, the global top 10 ranking included Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhou. In 2014, six Chinese harbors were included in the ranking, with a total cargo volume of 2.86 billion tons.

Particularly, Shanghai was ranked first, with a cargo volume of 678 million tons, and toppled Singapore from the first place. Among other leaders are Singapore, Port Hedland (Australia), Rotterdam (Netherlands), and Busan (South Korea).
Earlier the representative of the administration of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic told Sputnik Armenia that

active operations take place in the south-east and north-Karabakh, despite the earlier statement made by the Ministry of Defence of Azerbaijan on the termination of a shootout in the conflict zone.

"The situation is stable and under control of the Azerbaijani armed forces. There is no fighting at the moment," Dyargahly stated.

A new spate of violence broke out in the disputed region on Saturday as the sides traded accusations over violations of the ceasefire that has been in place since May 1994. Both Azerbaijan and Armenia reported casualties in the flare-up.
President Erdogan had earlier slammed senior diplomats of several European countries who attended the trial of Can Dundar, the editor of Cumhuriyet, a secularist daily, and Erdem Gul, the paper's Ankara bureau chief, who face life in prison for documenting covert Turkish arms shipments to Syria in a series of articles published last summer.

Sevim Dagdelen urged the German government to give a clear-cut response to Ankaras attempts to put a damper on German press freedoms.

President Erdogan apparently wants to constrain press freedom in Germany just like he restricts them in his own country by calling on radicals to storm the offices of newspapers which dare to criticize his policies and by arresting journalists. And it looks like he is having his way in Germany as well, now that the Foreign Ministry and the government are cozying up to Erdogan and keeping mum about all this, Dagdelen said in an interview with Radio Sputnik.

She added that Berlins silence had much to do with the recent agreement between Brussels and Ankara whereby Turkey agreed to accept some of the illegal migrants, who had earlier entered the EU, in exchange for financial assistance.

I was present at the trial of Can Dundar and Erdem Gul  the journalists who are accused of espionage because they shed light on Turkish arms deliveries to terrorists in Syria and laid bare the war crimes committed by Erdogan and [Prime Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu. Erdogan believes that he can do exactly the same thing here in Germany, the MP noted.

She said that the EU should reconsider its attitude towards the Turkish leadership.

Erdogan is not and should not be seen as a partner. He will wind up in the prisoners box of the Hague Tribunal for the support he keeps on giving to the terrorist groups in Syria. I also believe that part of the blame for this is shared by those who make deals with the Turkish government. I believe that the EU-Turkey agreement is a shame and must be annulled, Sevim Dagdelen said in conclusion.
According to Mueller, most migrants coming to Europe are not refugees from the war-torn zones, but rather economic migrants in search of a better life.

"The vast majority of refugees coming to Germany aren't refugees, [they] have been living in refugee camps in Turkey [and] don't come from war areas. These people only seek a better life," Mueller argued.

The politician stressed that economic migrants and those who really needs help should be separated from each other and dealt with in a different way. He advocated for helping "real refugees" and restricting the inflow of those illegally entering the German border for economic reasons.

"Alternative for Germany is the only party that really cares about these people," Mueller said. "But in order to really help refugees we have to sort them out, bring in real refugees, care about them and feed them. But this is impossible if they're [confused] with economic immigrants," he added.

Mueller also stressed that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's policy of open doors violates the country's constitution and the Dublin Convention.

"To protect the constitution, it is necessary to protect our borders. They are to be shut down, and those who illegally entered the country should be deported," Mueller concluded.
"And even if it were, 250 American tanks and 4,500 troops would play only a symbolic role taking into account the military capacities of President Vladimir Putin. Moscow can move up to 30,000 troops to the border within days," the newspaper wrote.

At the same time, Die Freie Presse stressed that NATO's decision to increase its military presence in Eastern Europe could contribute to the deterioration of the global security situation, which is already very unstable.

"Sustainable diplomatic initiatives that would bring Russia back to the negotiating table would be more important than the demonstration of military strength," the article said. "We do not need a new Cold War, but rather a serious return to foreign diplomacy which is not based on confrontation, but seeks for ways to balance different interests."

The German newspaper WAZ mentioned that NATO activities are inefficient and counter-productive. The trust between the US and NATO is already destroyed and a new cold war has become quite a likely opportunity.

According to the newspaper, an increased US military presence in Eastern Europe could lead to a further rise of nationalism in these countries. Taking into account the current migration crisis, NATO's move may further destabilize the situation in the European region.
He added that in a critical situation, any country should rely on the people living in it and any course of action to resolve a crisis should take into account people's customs and traditions.

"Another thing is, if this or any other crisis should happen in any country, the first thing any statesman should know is that the people are the countrys defenders. And when choosing a plan of action to resolve the crisis it is necessary that it meets the customs and traditions of the nation, its history and its essential aspirations. The solution cannot come from overseas. Friends can come to you from abroad to help, as it has happened today: from Russia and Iran. However, if there is no internal will and good relations between the people and the state, it is impossible to find a solution," Assad said.

Syria has been torn by a civil war since 2011, as government forces have been fighting opposition groups and extremists operating in the country. The West has been vocal about wanting Assad to step down as the Syrian leader, a view not shared by Moscow.

As a result of the war, 13.5 million Syrians have been left in need of humanitarian assistance, according to UN figures. Over 6.5 million are internally displaced, while 4.8 million have fled the country among hostilities.
"A ceasefire agreement was reached with the elders of one community in the Hama governorate. The total number of communities where ceasefire agreements have been reached with elders has come to 57," the center said in a statement published on the Russian Defense Ministry's website.

Preliminary ceasefire agreements were reached with two more communities in the Hama and Damascus provinces, while ceasefire talks were held with commanders of two armed groups in the Hama province, the statement added.

A US-Russia-brokered ceasefire came into being on February 27 across Syria. It was supported by Damascus, as well as by dozens of opposition groups on the ground. Daesh and al-Nusra Front terror groups are not part of the deal.

Six civilians died and four were injured after militants opened fire at a district of the northern Syrian city Aleppo, the Russian reconciliation center at the Hmeimim airbase said.

"The Liva Sultan Murad grouping in al-Sakan al-Shababi district twice opened fire from self-made multiple rocket launchers and machine cannons at the district of Sheikh Maqsoud in the city of Aleppo. The shelling killed 6 and injured 4 civilians," the Russian military said in a bulletin.

The Sultan Murad armed group is an ethnic Turkmen militant group operating in northern Syria. It is not part of the existing ceasefire agreement.
He underscored that if Syria had collapsed and there was anarchy, it would have affected the entire region but he managed to preserve it.

"That's how I would like to go down in history," Assad said.

After overcoming the crisis, the Syrian society will see improvements, and positive changes have already started, Assad said.

"We have huge ethnic, religious and social diversity. For Syria to exist, if we really want it to exist, we should live together with each other, in real love, not in feigned [sentiment]. We are beginning to notice this now in the Syrian society. I think that if we are able to overcome this crisis, the Syrian society will be improved from a social point of view," Assad said.

According to the Syrian president, changes in the country's society have been taking place over the past few years.

"At first, the war was a blow for a large number of Syrians, and led them in very dangerous directions due to the media that invented stories, and due to the inability to comprehend the reality that was obscured. Today, the picture is clear, and I believe that the change that has come about proceeds from the idea, which I have just mentioned  that, first of all, fanaticism is impossible in a country as diverse as Syria," Assad said.
DAMASCUS (Sputnik)  After an end of civil war, Syria will be able to influence the Islamic and Arab world and must play an important role in the Middle East, Assad said.

I think that if we are able to overcome this crisis, Syrian society will be improved from a social point of view. And Syria will be better able to play its historic role in this region. This role, open to the public, will influence other nations, because it is a single region, the same people with similar traditions. We influence each other as Arab states, as Islamic countries. In this regard, Syria should have a very important role [to play].

We see two main points that could lead to tangible results in protecting the country: the first is the fight against terrorism, and that is an axiom, the second is the political work with an aim of stopping what is happening in Syria. This includes political negotiations, on the one hand, and the negotiations with the militants, who want to return to the bosom of the state and a normal life. In this dimension, we have achieved a lot in the past two years, Assad said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  A delegation of US lawmakers is visiting Moscow for the first visit in three years.

"There would have been no Russian aggression, no uprisings in eastern Ukraine, no massacre in Odessa. These things would not have happened if those people who opposed Yanukovych policies in Ukraine waited until the next elections where he would have certainly been defeated. Our European allies helped to instigate the overthrow of Yanukovych which created the problem," Rohrabacher said at a session of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Moscow.

The member of the US House of Representatives stressed that the United States has an inaccurate view of the events in Ukraine, adding that there is little understanding of the significance of Yanukovych's overthrow in the subsequent violent events that led to a civil war.
The author underscored that in the current situation the progress, especially in the peace talks, should be preserved and developed.

"Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his US counterpart John Kerry are doing well. This is an example of a win-win partnership. The US pressured Syrian opposition groups to send their representatives to Geneva. In turn, Russia guarantees the observation of the ceasefire by Damascus," the article read.

According to the author, despite the fact that the current ceasefire is fragile, significant progress has been made by joint Russian and US peace efforts.

"The Russian withdrawal from Syria was a signal to Bashar Assad to find a political solution to the crisis. After Palmyra was liberated Russia reaffirmed its commitment to the fight against terrorism," the article read.

After Moscow and Washington got involved in the process the situation got off the ground. The US has abandoned calls for Assads resignation. At the same time, Russia is more interested in preserving Syrias territorial integrity than keeping Assad in power. The US now shares this approach.

Moscow and Washington are ready to consider the decentralization and federalization of Syria. However, this idea was rejected by both Damascus and the opposition.

"However, this doesnt matter. Moscow and Washington like acting together. This means Russia has returned to the club of great powers, like in the old days," the author pointed out.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The United States has been pulling troops to Eastern Europe since Russia reunified with Crimea in spring 2014, which strained US-Russia relations and raised security concerns in Europe.

"This is a total insanity that they want to increase the military presences for the United States in Europe," the Republican said at the Valdai discussion club in Moscow.

"I'm afraid that what is going to happen is that it will cost us a lot of money, and we are borrowing money already. Now we will have to go deeper into debt, and if we do that the Europeans would never be able to increase their own level of defense, which is what they should do," he added.
GROZNY (Sputnik)  The construction of the international center for training special forces in the Chechen Republic's town of Gudermes is financed by private investors from Russia, Chechnya's acting leader Ramzan Kadyrov told Sputnik.

"The financing comes from private investments Private funds. Why would we need Arab or European money? It's Russian. It's a delicate matter  a military training facility. We can build an international university, hotel, industrial facility. And such a complex should wholly belong to Russia," Kadyrov said.

He noted that there were investors from other countries already who wished to send their troops over for training.
According to Donovan, the United Nations has been deliberately concealing the information about sex crimes committed by peacekeepers for the sake of its reputation, leaving thousands' of victims without hope.

"The United Nations by being so slow and so secretive and so careful about their reputation, they're actually culpable in these crimes," she argued.

Donovan said that documents in the recent case were leaked to her organization by an insider, and that the data they received included correspondence and notes from meetings that imply that the victims were interviewed two weeks before the information was released and that the UN was notified but  for unknown reasons  never informed the civilian population or the governments involved.
Both countries have been involved in airstrikes against terrorists in Syria, but conducted their aerial campaigns separately. Unlike the strikes of the US-led international coalition, Russia's anti-terrorist operation in Syria was approved by Damascus.

Rohrabacher praised Russia's role in preventing Syrian President Bashar Assad from being replaced by jihadists.

"It is a very good thing that Assad is not being replaced by a radical Islamic jihadist regime, and that the Russian intervention in this conflict perhaps prevented Assad from being replaced by a jihadist regime," Rohrabacher, who chairs the US Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats, said.

He cited Libya and Iraq as examples of the states where the overthrow of the regimes had led to chaos.

Moreover, Rohrabacher said that he hoped the next US president would take a less hostile approach to Russia, unlike the current one.

"Whoever the next president is, [the new US president] will have a new policy towards Russia and hopefully it will be one that is much more aimed at cooperation rather than trying to be confrontational and standoffish. We were aggressively vilifying Russia for the last few years when there are lots of things that we could have been doing for mutually beneficial activities," Rohrabacher, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, said.

According to the congressman, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump is expected to "be much more inclined toward full cooperation with Russia on a broad scale. And the other republicans who are running are openly hostile towards working with Russia."
Fancy Creek Elusiv crept closer to the $500,000 earnings plateau on Saturday night (April 2) at blustery Miami Valley Raceway by capturing the $20,000 Gerald Justice Memorial Open Pace.

The six-year-old Sportsmaster gelding is now on a three-week win streak, including two straight Opens, and has banked $492,137 on the strength of 24 victories in 102 trips to post.

Driver Josh Sutton was in the sulky for trainer Billy Farmer and owner Todd Rosenberg on a night when wind gusts were reaching 40 to 60 miles per hour and temperatures were falling fast. Although Miami Valleys leading dashman had won four of the first five races on the program, all in come-from-behind style, Sutton chose to gun Fancy Creek Elusiv right to the front in the featured sixth race, sticking a nose in front of Bettor Than You (Derek Watiker), who held firm for a close second-place finish, at the :27.3 initial quarter-mile clocking. The winner was never headed through subsequent fractions of :56 and 1:25, but Bettor Than You did rally to make it close at the 1:54 finish. Can He Go (Peter Wrenn) skimmed the pylons to secure a show finish.

A pair of first leg $12,500 divisions of the Tom Tharps Memorial Series were also contested to open the program. Sutton swept both halves of the Daily Double with winners Keystone Memphis and K Ryan Bluechip. Keystone Memphis topped Arti Gras (Kyle Ater) and Ardie B Speed (Chris Page) for Hinchcliff Racing and trainer Kris Hinchcliff. K Ryan Bluechip bettered Prince Bayard (Jason Brewer) and SOS Justified (Kayne Kauffman) for owners Carl Howard, Bruce and Trish Soulsby and Alan Weisenberg. The four-year-old Art Major gelding was making his first 2016 start for conditioner Virgil Morgan Jr.

Sutton strengthened his stranglehold on the dash derby lead with a total of seven victories on the night. In addition to Keystone Memphis (1:55.3, $34.80), K Ryan Bluechip (1:58.2, $4.40) and Fancy Creek Elusiv (1:54, $7.00), he also scored with Rockin Finish (1:56.2, $7.60), Hasty Western (1:57.1, $4.60), Come And Get Em (1:54.2, $6.80), and Our Dragon King (1:53.1, $2.40).

Dan Noble notched a natural hat trick when he guided three straight winners in races eight through 10. His trips to the winners circle came behind Stonebridge Cowboy (1:55.3, $7.20), Finnish First (1:56.2, $19.80) and Real Winner (1:54.4, $16.40).

Jeremy Smith matched Nobles hat trick with three of his own wins. He scored with Doctor Carter, Saulsbrook Astrobo and Go Both Ways in the finale.

(Miami Valley Raceway)
MILTON, W.Va.  At Blenko Glass, you can watch glass being handcrafted the way its been done for more than 100 years.

The companys famous glassware has been bought, collected and recognized around the world. Blenko stained glass was used in New Yorks St. Patricks Cathedral. Blenko tableware is in the White House as well as in various museums. Blenko also designed the trophy for the Country Music Awards.

The Blenko factory, located in Milton, West Virginia, a few minutes off Interstate 64, has an onsite museum displaying some of its innovative designs, along with an observation area. Here visitors may watch, up close, as workers heat, shape, blow and cut colorful glass pieces into vases, bottles and other items.

A series of signs explains the process. There are several jobs involved in producing a piece. One worker is responsible for gathering just the right amount of hot glass. Another blows, shapes and molds the glass. Then the piece is removed from the blowpipe, and a finisher completes the piece by cutting off ragged edges and working with the soft glass so that it matches a master design. Because each piece is made by hand, no two pieces are exactly alike.

The company was founded by William J. Blenko, an immigrant from England. He set up his first factory in Indiana in the 1890s but was not initially successful. In that era, Americans did not want domestically made glass; they wanted glass made in Europe.

After several ups and downs, he moved to Milton in the early 1920s partly because of the abundance of cheap, local natural gas, used to fuel the furnaces. Blenko eventually expanded from producing sheet glass and stained glass to tableware. The switch was prompted by the Great Depression, when a downturn in cathedral and church-building ravaged the market for stained glass.

In the mid-20th century, the companys innovative craftsmen began to be recognized with design awards for their handcrafted tableware. Despite that recognition, the company has not always prospered. It recently emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The onsite gift shop offers many types and colors of vases, bottles, glasses, bowls and other items. Youll also find handmade Christmas ornaments, small statues and even a bit of jewelry. Most of the items are made by Blenko, but a few (such as jewelry items) are produced by others. Vases are priced $30 to $100. The museum displays are upstairs from the gift shop.

I purchased one of my favorite bowls at Blenko, a dark blue piece that looks beautiful with strawberries in it. The variations in color remind me that its handmade.

The company also hosts monthly events focused on glass. A paperweight collectors meeting takes place onsite March 11-12, and an annual glass festival is scheduled for Aug. 5-6. The events are free, with vendors and demonstrations. Classes are often offered during the events for a fee.

Blenkos biggest annual event is keyed to the anniversary of the date West Virginia became a state, June 20, 1863. The company creates a unique commemorative glass piece in a numbered limited edition to mark the event each year, and the sale of the pieces is held on the Saturday nearest the anniversary (Jwune 18 this year). Collectors begin camping in the company parking lot the Monday before the sale just to get a space in line. The number of pieces and their price is determined by the year of the birthday: This year, on the 153rd celebration, the company will produce 153 pieces priced at $153 each.
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Egypt blocked Facebook Inc's Free Basics Internet service at the end of last year after the U.S. company refused to give the Egyptian government the ability to spy on users, two people familiar with the matter said.

Free Basics, launched in Egypt in October, is aimed at low-income customers, allowing anyone with a cheap computer or smartphone to create a Facebook account and access a limited set of Internet services at no charge.

The Egyptian government suspended the service on Dec. 30 and said at the time that the mobile carrier Etisalat had only been granted a temporary permit to offer the service for two months.

Two sources with direct knowledge of discussions between Facebook and the Egyptian government said Free Basics was blocked because the company would not allow the government to circumvent the service's security to conduct surveillance. They declined to say exactly what type of access the government had demanded or what practices it wanted Facebook to change.

A spokesman for Facebook declined to comment. Etisalat did not respond to a request for comment.

Mohamed Hanafi, a spokesman for Egypt's Ministry of Communication, declined to comment specifically on the allegation about surveillance demands but cited other reasons for Free Basics to be blocked.

"The service was offered free of charge to the consumer, and the national telecommunication regulator saw the service as harmful to companies and their competitors," he said.

Free Basics, which is available in 37 countries that have large populations without reliable Internet service, is central to Facebook's global strategy. The company does not sell ads on the Free Basics version of its website and app, but it aims to reach a large group of potential users who otherwise would not be able to create Facebook accounts.

Facebook said more than 3 million Egyptians used the service before it was suspended, and 1 million of them had never had Internet access. The main Facebook site and app are still available in Egypt, which has a population of about 90 million.

The conflict over Free Basics highlights the delicate balancing act that global Internet companies face in responding to the demands of governments while protecting the privacy of their customers, especially at a time of heightened concerns about Internet surveillance and censorship worldwide.

It represents one of the few known cases in which a global Internet company has received and rejected a government demand for special access to its network and been forced to shut down a service, Internet privacy experts say.

Free Basics has come under fire from Internet activists across the globe, most notably in India, for violating net neutrality by allowing free access to a select group of websites and businesses, thus putting others at a disadvantage.

Indian regulators issued new rules in February that effectively barred Free Basics after a two-month public consultation process.

Hanafi cited the India example in explaining Egypt's move, but there has been no public debate or regulatory proceeding over net neutrality or the competitive impact of Free Basics in Egypt.

STRONGER SECURITY

Facebook in September strengthened the security protections for Free Basics after criticism from privacy advocates that it did not do enough to prevent spying. In part, the problem was that users could not seamlessly connect over encrypted channels to the secure websites marked by addresses beginning HTTPS.

That meant that customers using web-based email might have their messages exposed. Authorities might also be able to watch who was visiting particular websites.

Now, those using the Free Basics mobile app can connect directly with encryption to secure sites. Those connecting via the Free Basics website can connect securely to Facebook, which decrypts and then re-encrypts user traffic before sending it along to partner sites.

It is not known whether the new security measures were a factor in Egypt's decision to block Free Basics. It is also not known if the government has asked other social media companies or Internet service providers for security back doors.

When Free Basics launched in Egypt, there was no mention of a temporary permit or concerns about competition or net neutrality, according to people who were involved in the discussions.

At the time of the suspension, Facebook said it was "disappointed" and hoped to "resolve (the) situation soon."

Some former Facebook employees said the company has reason to be especially vigilant in defending its customers in Egypt.

A Facebook page started in 2010 by a Google employee in Dubai about the death of an Alexandria man at the hands of police played a direct role in fomenting the protests that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

In January this year, amid a crackdown on dissent in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of the uprising, Egyptian security forces arrested two people for managing Facebook pages that they said were used to support the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and encourage protest.

The two are still in jail pending investigations on charges of inciting violence and disseminating and publishing false news.

Any move to shut down Facebook completely in Egypt would likely bring a harsh popular backlash, said Ramy Raoof, a digital security researcher and consultant. But blocking Free Basics can crimp Facebook's growth among lower income people, without alienating middle-class Internet users and businesses.

"Shutting down Facebook completely is an idea that is far-fetched and would lead to great consequences," Raoof said.

Reuters
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Digital privacy advocates and users of Reddit expressed their alarm on Friday over a change in the forum's transparency report that suggested it may have been asked to give customer data to FBI investigators under a secretive government authority.

The annual report lists a variety of requests the site has received for information on users and for removal of content. On Thursday, Reddit deleted a paragraph known as a "warrant canary."

The paragraph had said that Reddit had not been subject to national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval, or "any other classified request for user information."

Privacy advocates have long contested the letters, saying they are not subject to sufficient judicial oversight or transparency safeguards.

Brett Max Kaufman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said on Friday that authorities were possibly seeking the IP address, or an identifying number that corresponds to a specific computer, of an anonymous user on Reddit. Private messages between users could also be subject to search.

Reddit collects relatively little customer data that could be subject to a national security letter and useful for investigators, Kaufman said. Reddit does not require users to reveal their identities and stores less customer data overall compared to email or other social media such as Facebook, he said.

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who gave classified documents about U.S. spying to journalists in 2013, expressed concern on Twitter.

"Is dissent a threat to national security?" tweeted Snowden (@Snowden), whose leaks prompted a vigorous international debate about digital privacy and surveillance.

The leaks helped popularize the use of "warrant canaries" by tech firms eager to display resistance to government attempts to obtain access to user data.

"When you ask someone 'Are you helping authorities in investigations?' and they say 'I'm not allowed to discuss that with you,' I think the question has been answered," wrote Reddit user khegiobridge.

National security letters are almost always accompanied by an open-ended gag order barring companies from disclosing the contents of the demand for customer data, making it difficult for firms to openly discuss how they handle the subpoenas.

That has led many companies to rely on somewhat vague warnings. Apple previously had a "warrant canary" but removed it in 2014.

"I've been advised not to say anything one way or the other," Reddit Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman, who goes by "spez" on the site, said in a thread discussing the change. Even with the canaries, we're treading a fine line.

The FBI can use national security letters to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over a wide range of customer data, including web browsing history and records of online purchases.

San Francisco-based Reddit did not respond to a request for comment. The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not respond to a request for comment.

National security letters have been available as a law enforcement tool since the 1970s, but their frequency and breadth expanded dramatically under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States by Islamist militants.

Several thousand of the letters are now issued by the FBI every year. At one point more than 50,000 such letters were issued annually.

In 2014, Twitter sued the U.S. Department of Justice on grounds that the restrictions placed on its ability to reveal information about government surveillance orders violates free speech rights. Reddit and others have filed friend of the court briefs in Twitter's lawsuit.

Reuters
tech2 News Staff

Samsung may soon unveil a game-changing device for consumers in 2017. The company is reportedly planning to introduce a 5-inch smartphone, which when folded, can turn in to a 7-inch tablet!

According to a report by ET News, a prototype of foldable display is finished with development and the company is hoping to mass-produce the device starting from second half of this year. Currently, the device is being referred to as 'smartlet.'

The device can bend a screen in half by using OLED Display and one can simply carry it like a wallet and use it by opening it. "Although mass-production cannot be concluded hastily since Samsung Electronics still has few other major tasks to complete, Ive heard that Samsung Electronics had made considerable amount of results in the time being," said a representative of an industry that is familiar with development of Samsung Electronics foldable smartphone.

A previous report pointed out that Samsungs foldable phone was expected to debut in January this year. Citing a source from China related to the matter, it was pointed out that the project dubbed Project Valley was undergoing testing.

The foldable device was being tested in two configurations  one featuring Snapdragon 620 processor and the other with a Snapdragon 820 chipset. Some other specs include microSd card slot, 3GB RAM and a non-removable battery.
Volleyball results from Thursday

Friday, Oct. 7, 2022, 8:34 a.m. -- LAPEER COUNTY -- The Almont varsity volleyball team beat Madison Heights Lamphere and New Lothrop in a triple header at Almont Thursday. Dryden beat Bay City All Saints...

Golf and tennis regional results

Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, 5:41 p.m. -- LAPEER COUNTY -- Boys' high school tennis regionals and girls' golf regionals took place yesterday. Lapeer girls' golf placed 11th at the Div. 1 regional hosted by Oxford...

Friday night football scores

Friday, September 30, 2022 10:15 p.m.  LAPEER COUNTY  Lapeer beat Grand Blanc 39-17 at Lapeer to remain undefeated at 6-0. Almont upset Croswell-Lexington 37-26 North Branch routed Richmond 62-10 Imlay City/Dryden fell to Yale...

Summer sports camps/clinics

Wednesday, June 15, 2022, 4:40 p.m. -- LAPEER COUNTY -- Below is a list of the summer sports camps and clinics that will take place through early Aug. The regular sports update posting of high...
SC defers Nizami`s review petition hearing for 1 week

The Supreme Court (SC) on Sunday deferred the hearing for a week on the review petition of condemned war criminal Jamaat Ameer Motiur Rahman Nizami against its verdict upholding the International Crimes Tribunals judgment that had sentenced him to death. A three-member bench of the Appellate Division, led by Chief Justice SK Sinha, passed the order when Nizamis lawyer SM Shahjahan submitted a petition seeking six weeks time. The hearing will be held in the next week, the court said in its order. Nizamis counsels on Sunday filed the petition seeking six weeks time for hearing on the review plea. Attorney General Mahbubey Alam represented the state while Barrister Khandker Mahbub Hossain and Barrister Najib Momen moved for Nizami. The matter was included in the Supreme Courts cause list for Sunday. Earlier on March 30, the prosecution filed an appeal with the Appellate Division for a quick hearing on the review petition of Nizami. The prosecution filed the appeal with Chamber Judge of the Appellate Division Justice Mirza Hossain Haider who later sent it to the regular bench of the division, fixing April 3 for the hearing. Deputy Attorney General Ekramul Haque Tutul, who argued for the state during the hearing at the Chamber Judges court, told reporters that they have appealed for a quick hearing on condemned war criminal Nizamis appeal and the Chamber Judge has sent it to the regular bench of the division for hearing. On March 29, Barrister Najib Momen, son of Nizami, submitted a 70-page review petition with the Appellate Division. The review petition mentioned 46 grounds seeking release of the convict in the war crimes case, Barrister Najib told reporters. On March 15, the ICT issued a death warrant for Nizami for his crimes against humanity during the Liberation War in 1971 after the apex court released the full text of its verdict upholding his death penalty. On January 6, a four-member bench of the Appellate Division, headed by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha, upheld the death sentence of the Jamaat Ameer for his crimes against humanity during the war. The Supreme Court upheld the ICT-1 order sentencing Nizami to death for the wartime crimes, including genocide and murder of intellectuals. On October 29, 2014, the ICT-1 sentenced Nizami to death for committing crimes against humanity during the Liberation War. The tribunal sentenced Nizami, the 1971 commander-in-chief of Al Badr, a secret killing squad of Jamaate-e-Islami, the capital punishment each on four counts of charges of war crimes, terming Al Badr a criminal outfit. Nizami filed an appeal with the SC on November 23, 2014 challenging the death sentence and claimed himself innocent and sought to be cleared of the charges. -- Dhaka, Apr 3 (UNB)
Trump`s ratings at all time low

Republican President candidate Donald Trump giving interview interview with Washington Post on Saturday.

Dawn.Com, New York :Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's ratings have plunged to an unequalled low and he may lose election to a Democratic nominee in November, according to pollsters.On Friday, Trump was ridiculed by President Barack Obama over his position on nuclear weapons. He has recently said that countries like Japan and South Korea should be allowed to have their own nuclear weapons. His position on abortion calling for punishing women who have the procedure even to save their own lives has landed him in a heap of trouble.A report in the Los Angeles Times said among scores of major political figures measured in polls over the last 30 years, Trump's numbers were the worst.If Trump were to win the Republican presidential nomination with his current public image, he would be the most unpopular nominee in the history of US opinion surveys.The share of Americans with an unfavourable view of Trump is extraordinary: 68 per cent in the most recent Bloomberg poll, 67pc in the CNN/ORC survey, 67pc in the ABC/Washington Post poll, 65pc from Gallup. The 57pc unfavourable rating he received in the most recent CBS/New York Times survey looks mild by comparison.Former vice president Dick Cheney briefly hit a 60pc unfavourable rating during the closing years of the George W. Bush administration. Newt Gingrich's unpopularity exceeded 60pc briefly during his unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.With popularity ratings in general so low, it is quite likely Donald Trump will lose Republican nomination to one of his rivals, Senator Ted Cruz or Governor John Kasich. Meanwhile, republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump predicted that the United States is on course for a "very massive recession," warning that a combination of high unemployment and an overvalued stock market had set the stage for another economic slump."I think we're sitting on an economic bubble. A financial bubble," the billionaire businessman said in an interview with The Washington Post published on Saturday.Coming off a tough week on the campaign trail in which he made a series of missteps, Trump's latest comments bring him back into the limelight ahead of Tuesday's important primary in Wisconsin where he trails in the polls. The former reality TV star said that the real US jobless figure is much higher than five percent number released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. "We're not at 5 percent unemployment," Trump said."We're at a number that's probably into the twenties if you look at the real number," he said, adding that the official jobless figure is "statistically devised to make politicians - and in particular presidents - look good."Trump said "it's a terrible time right now" to invest in the stock market, offering a more bleak view of the US economy than that held by many mainstream economists.The interview was bylined by the Post's Robert Costa and famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.A real estate magnate, Trump has made appealing to blue-collar workers a hallmark of his bid for the Republican nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election, often blaming unemployment on the outsourcing of US jobs and facilities to countries such as China and Mexico.
Uncertainty reigns a day before migrants are to be returned to Turkey

Reuters, Lesbos :

Less than 24 hours before Greece is due to begin returning migrants to Turkey, little sign of preparation is evident on Lesbos, the island through which hundreds of thousands of people have poured into Europe since last year.

More than 5,600 migrants have been registered on Greek islands since March 20, the date on which the agreement takes effect. Returns are due to begin on Monday, but where they will take place from and how many will be returned remains unclear.

"Planning is in progress," said George Kyritsis, a Greek government spokesman for the migration crisis.

The returns are a key part of an agreement between the European Union and Turkey aimed at ending the influx into Europe of migrants and refugees fleeing poverty and war in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Under the agreement, migrants who cross into Greece illegally from Turkey from March 20 will be sent back to Turkey once their asylum applications have been processed.

The Athens News Agency reported over the weekend that the returns would begin on Monday morning on two Turkish passenger ships chartered by Frontex, the EU border agency. The ships will sail from Lesbsos across to the Turkish coastal town of Dikili.

Some 250 people would be returned each day through Wednesday, it said, without citing sources.
High import duties bar local cos to make LED chip

Economic Reporter :

The local entrepreneurs are showing reluctant to make investment in the establishment of LED chip manufacturing unit in Bangladesh, as there is discrepancy in the import duties' structure between complete LED chip and its necessary raw materials.

LED (Light Emitting Diode) chip is one of the prime raw materials for manufacturing various sorts of LED technology based products like LED TV, light, bulb, mobile, tab, computer monitor and so on. About eight sorts of raw materials are required to make a complete LED chip. These are: LED fream, phosphor, carrier tape, plastic reel, cover tape, gold wire, die attach material/adhesive and encapsulation/resin.

Analyzing the import duties' structure, it was found that the local manufacturers of LED technology based products have to pay less duty for the import of finished LED chip compared to the duty paid on the import of necessary raw materials for manufacturing LED chip.

Shamsul Arefin Sohel, chairman of Suntex Electronics and Engineering Ltd, said, the government should remove the high import duties on the raw materials for making LED chip for the countries greater interest.

Mentionable, the incumbent Finance Minister AMA Muhith always encourages the local entrepreneurs for making investment in the country's various industrial sectors. During a pre-budget discussion meeting with secretaries of different ministries, Muhith said the government will emphasize more on the protection of local industries in the imminent budget for the fiscal year 2016-17.


Reduce prices of all petroleum products

THE government has reduced furnace oil price by Tk 18 per litre or 30 percent to sell it now at Tk 42 per litre. It has been put into effect from March 31 while users of other petroleum products like Octane, petrol, diesel and kerosene suffer renewed shock from such discriminatory decision. Since the big oil price plunge at global market over the past two years consumers of petroleum products in Bangladesh were demanding their downward price adjustment. The Finance Ministry also made periodic pledges in this respect when almost all countries at global level already implemented similar downward adjustment in the prices of petroleum products. People in Bangladesh paid exorbitant oil prices when it sold at higher cost. Now they deserve the lower price when the government buys it at lower cost to benefit in their real life activities. But the latest decision reducing only the price of furnace oil came as a big shock to the nation. It is not clear why the government has decided to offer the benefit only to industries and power sector, which run factories and power plants with fuel-fired generators. As it stands most users of furnace oil in the power sector are owners of rental power plants which means they will pay less now for furnace oil. But users' electricity bills will remain unchanged, as the government decision said raising question why power producers should not lower the unit cost as they sell electricity to the government to lower users' electricity bills at the end. Financial analysts said the cost of per unit power generation in fuel-fired electricity plants will go down by Tk 4 but if users remained deprived of the benefit, it clearly shows a highly discriminatory move to serve the vested interest quarters in big businesses. Only a government not properly elected and having no accountability to the people can take such decision ignoring the expectations of the common people. It is an open secret that Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) is now earning handsome profit overcoming past losses. So there is no justification to continue the highly exorbitant oil prices. We know that the Finance Ministry has approved the proposal to reduce prices of all petroleum products but the move has been shelved at the last moment allowing only the reduction of furnace oil prices. It appears that the government wants to continue the profit from petroleum products to finance the high cost of new pay scale of the government servants. But it is an unfortunate decision to penalize the common users while it allows only the rich to benefit from lower furnace oil prices. In our view the government should immediately lower the prices of all petroleum products to benefit the common people without being selfish to serve the interest of big business.
BD victims in Mumbai brothel

TRAFFICKING of Bangladeshi women to Mumbai brothels is rising making safety of poor women, especially younger ones in the country highly vulnerable. Reuters reported the story carried out by national dailies on Saturday. Human traffickers are at large in the country with collaboration of local political agents and law enforcers who are freely alluring poverty-stricken women in rural areas for better jobs in the cities. Once they leave their home apparently for Dhaka, traffickers transport them to Indian brothels, the largest being in Mumbai.

Despite a fencing wall along Bangladesh-India border, traffickers freely trespass women by managing Border Security Forces on both sides -- a fact which is holding the lifeline of human traffickers unimpeded. The rising tide of human trafficking puts to question the government's ability to curb the trafficking, besides more questions why and how the fenced border is allowing traffickers to push the victims out of the country.

There is no doubt our border must be made foolproof by more training and motivating the BGB forces while at the domestic level law enforcers must arrest the culprits and destroy their network. Most important is that the government must take up scheme to create local jobs at local level to give income-generating activities to poor women so that they don't fall into the trap and become victim in the hands of human traffickers. Public awareness at rural level must also grow to alert people against the heinous human trade.

Quoting an India NGO source the Reuters report said out of 213 children of sex workers enrolled at a night care centre in Mumbai from 2010-15, 128 had a Bengali speaking mother. The trafficked Bangladeshi women in Mumbai are too afraid of seeking help from police. The NGO official said trafficked Bangladeshis are also reluctant to bring charges against traffickers after being rescued by Mumbai police as the traffickers maintain a reign of terror in their locality in Bangladesh threatening safety of their families.

South Asia is the fastest growing region for human trafficking. More than 150,000 people are trafficked within South Asia every year, but the trade, worth $2 billion a year in Asia, is underground and the real number is likely to be much higher.

As it appears India and Bangladesh recently signed an agreement to strengthen cooperation and information sharing to ensure speedier investigations and prosecutions of human traffickers. It has no doubt made easier the rescue and repatriation victims. In our view the government must do everything to rescue our ill-fated women now languishing in Mumbai brothels and at other places and bring them in safety at their home. Local traffickers should also be sternly dealt with so that further victimization stops.
PM's intervention on increase of pilgrims quota sought

A meeting of Hajj Pilgrims Welfare Council was held at a posh hotel in Chittagong on Friday.

Chittagong Bureau :

Increase of quota for Hajj Pilgrims from the Bangladesh is the demand of the hour. It is witnessed that about 40 thousand of pilgrims under govt quota intend to perform hajj this year.

In this situation, Hajj Pilgrims Welfare Council ( HPWC) urged the Saudi Government to withdraw imposition of 20% quota curtail on Bangladesh following the renovation and expansion work of Masjidul Haram .

As such more than 20 thousand hajj pilgrims will get chance to perform hajj under govt management, a sources of HPWC said. These opinions over hajj pilgrims was disclosed at a meeting of HPWC held at Hotel Paramount International auditorium in city on April 1 last duly presided by its President Alhaj Ahmadul Islam Chowdhury in the chair.

Principal Dr. Abdul Karim delivered the address of welcome and it was conducted by Dr. Saleh Ahmed Suleman.

Among others, Vice President Prof. Dr. Md. Ismail Miah, Principal Allama Shakawat Hossain, Md. Mumtaz Kamal chowdhury, Abu Md. Nurul Islam, Nurul Alam chowdhury, Ahmed Hossain chowdhury, Shafiqur Rahman, Kazi Md. Faizullah, Alhaj Imdadullah, Alhaj Alamgir Alam, Principal Dr. Md. Nurul Amin, Moulana Kazi Md. Shihabuddin, and Advocate Md. Elias spoke on the occasion. The speakers said, good relations prevailing with Saudi Arab and the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina may resolve the hajj quota issue if the initiatives are taken .

The speakers urge the concerned authorities to ascertain the real hajj pilgrims so registered with the Hajj agencies to avoid the fake hajj pilgrims and the fake agencies must be liable for manpower trafficking in the name Hajj or Omrah . The chair of the meet concluded the meeting with thanks to all present, a HPWC sources said.


Youth stabbed to death in Bogra, 2 held

Staff Reporter :

After the killing of a further of Hindu community in Narayanganj 17 days ago, another Hindu youth was hacked to death for allegedly protesting harassment of females at Horibashor temple in Gonogram village under Shahjahanpur upazila in Bogra district on Sunday.

The deceased has been identified as Shonaton Chondro Promanik, 28, a local of Shahjahanpur, police said.

Police detained two persons in this connection. They are Razib Sarkar, 25, hailing from Rangpur

town, and Rafiul Islam Roni, 22, son from South Gondagram of Shahjahanpur upazila in Bogra.

Shahjahanpur Officer-in-Charge (OC) Alamgir Hossain said, "A gang of four to five people beat up one Roton Biswas when he protested the harassment of women during a programme at the temple in Adikalibari area on Saturday night. The miscreants stabbed Roton's brother-in-law Shonaton when he also protested the incident."

Later, Shonaton was admitted to Shaheed Ziaur Rahman Medical College Hospital where he died while undergoing treatment, the police official said.

The victim's father filed a case over the incident in the morning, the OC said.

Meanwhile, the killing triggered protests from the local Hindu community. They handed a memorandum to the offices of Bogra Deputy Commissioner and Police Superintendent demanding justice.

The cremation was completed in the village in the evening.

In Narayanganj, a man was stabbed to death by miscreants while trying to foil a bid to kidnap his daughter in Sadar upazila on March 16 this year. The deceased is Manindra Chandra Adhikari,, 52, was a day-labourer.

In Bagerhat, a young man was stabbed to death by some young men as he protested eve teasing of his sister by them at Shaltala in Bagerhat town on April 18 last year. The deceased was Sohel Howladar.

In capital, a youth was beaten to death by some stalkers for protesting eve-teasing with his sister in the city's Bhashantek area in October of 2014. The victim was identified as M Nasir Hossain, 25, a resident of the city's Bhashantek.
Militants attack feared

Staff Reporter :

Following intelligence reports that militants might be trying to attack a major Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) establishment or a mosque inside DMP premises, police high-ups have instructed all units to stay alert against allowing unknown persons or vehicles access inside cop zones.

The instructions from the Police Headquarters included keeping an eye on Muslim devotees before they enter mosques inside DMP areas for Friday's Juma prayers.

Directives were also included to beef up security at all police establishments in the capital like the DMP Headquarters, the Crime Command and Control Centre, and the police lines of Rajarbagh and diplomatic security. In instructions issued last week, the DMP further asked its personnel to secure all its arsenals, and to note down phone and vehicle numbers of any outsider who enters DMP establishments.

A senior DMP official, requesting not to be named, said the instruction followed intelligence reports suggesting the possibility of DMP establishments being attacked by a terrorist or militant outfit.

Officials at all 49 police stations in the city have been instructed to stay alert about any suspicious activities by a Muslim devotee - as they might be militants in disguise - before they enter mosques.

Orders have also been issued to remain vigilance during big gatherings such as Juma prayers.

However, DMP Additional Commissioner Monirul Islam assured that Muslim devotees had no reason to be afraid when they come to Juma prayers. The initiative to beef up security at mosques has only been taken out of concern for the safety of the devotees, he added. The latest militant threat comes after several mosques came under attack in recent months, a pattern of terror not common in the country.

In December last year, two youths entered a mosque in Rajshahi's Bagmara and set off a bomb that killed one person. The same month also saw six persons being injured when hand bombs exploded inside a mosque in the Navy's secured Isha Khan Base in Chittagong's Patenga. In November last year, gunmen opened fire on devotees at a Shia mosque in Bogra's Shibganj upazila during Maghrib prayers, killing the muezzin and injuring three others.
EC under fire

87 AL 'chairman' candidates win without contest: BNP, threatens to boycott polls after 3rd phase. AL says EC responsible to check violence

Sagar Biswas :

The Election Commission [EC] is now facing heat from ruling Awami League and its alliance partners for its failure to check gross irregularities and widespread violence in the first and second phases of Union Parishad election.

The ruling party leaders and ministers on Sunday categorically made the EC responsible for the 'mismanagement and violence' which claimed 38 lives so far and injured over 2,000 in the electoral clashes in different parts of the country.

"It is the sole responsibility of EC to hold a free, fair and peaceful electionThe EC is fully independent. The EC can take any step, whatever it wants. We have requested the EC to take tough action against the law breakers. Hope, the EC will take legal action to resist violence," Awami League joint-general secretary Mahabubul Alam Hanif said putting blame on the shoulder of EC.

Expressing deep sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives, the Awami League leader further said, "Social feud is the root cause of violence and killings in the ongoing UP election. The government is trying its best to restrain the violence. Hope, violence will be under control in the next phases."

Echoing the same view, Civil Aviation and Tourism Minister Rashed Khan Menon also expressed dissatisfaction over the activities of EC. "After observing two phases of UP elections, it seemed there was a grand festival to occupy polling centres. The voting centres were occupied openly in front of general people," Menon, who is also president of Bangladesh Workers Party, said after holding a meeting with Chief Election Commissioner Kazi Rakibuddin Ahmed yesterday.

Detailing the incidents of violence, Menon said, "Our party candidates are facing severe obstaclesThey are beaten and abandoned in the crop field. However, we have told the EC that we want to continue. If the EC cannot assure us about the safety of candidates, the people will lose trust in EC." Meanwhile, BNP has also demanded cancellation of both the first and the econd phases of the UP elections for massive irregularities and violence. BNP may boycott the polls after the third phase if overall situation does not improve. The decision in this regard would be taken by the party high command soon, party insiders said. "People have already rejected the elections under the current incumbent EC for widespread violence, vote rigging and irregularities. We demand immediate cancellation of the elections [first and second phases]," Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, senior joint-secretary general of BNP, said on Sunday. Terming the election as 'vote dacoity', Ruhul Kabir Rizvi further said, "The electoral system has no guardian. It seems, the EC has deposited it's clothe [to hide its shame] to the museum..We also demand immediate resignation of the entire EC."

The BNP leader further said, "Among the victims in the electoral clashes, there was a child.who will be shameful for this? Police were caught while stuffing ballot . who will be shameful for this?"

Raising questions about the 'outcome' of UP polls, BNP standing committee member Nazrul Islam Khan said, "The fake voters are casting votes in front of the real voters at the polling centres. In several areas, ballot papers were snatched away from the voters. The ruling party men are killing one after another centering the election. Is there any profit for BNP to keep connect with the voting process?

Eighty seven ruling party men have been elected in two phases apparently without any contest. Not only that, five Awami League men have reportedly won without contest till filing of nomination papers for the third phase polls.

The number of 'elected uncontested candidates' would be increased obviously after finalization of nomination papers for next phases. There is widespread speculation that record number of candidates would be elected 'chairman' unopposed this year.

According to information provided by EC, highest number of [100 'chairman'] candidates became winners without contest in 1988 UP election during the tenure of HM Ershad. At that time, 600 'member' candidates also had won without any voting. The first phase election was held in 712 unions on March 22 and in 11 unions on March 23. Besides, the second phase was held in 639 unions on March 31. Election in one UP was halted due to death of a chairman candidate. Of the 724 unions in first phase, the Awami League-backed candidates won in 540 UPs and BNP won in 47 UPs. In the second phase, out of 628 unions Awami League men won in 444 UPs while BNP won 'chairman' posts only in 61 unions.

Out of 1,352 UPs in two phases, the Awami League - led candidates have won as 'chairman' candidates in 984 UPs while BNP nominated contenders won in only 108 UPs.

The independent 'chairman' candidates have won in 116 unions in the second phase where voters turnout was 76.21 per cent. Interestingly, most of them are rebel candidates of Awami League. Besides, the 'chairman' candidates of Jatiya Party won in three, JSD in two and JP in two UPs, according to EC.
Tannery industry in deep crisis

Joynal Abedin Khan :The tannery industry owners are unwilling to shift there factories to the Savar Tannery Park (STP) mainly due to absence of common facilities for processing rawhides, insiders said. Five factories only out of 155 are prepared to process the leather-based raw materials, they said. On the other hand, 30 units will go for production within a month while construction work of 84 factories is in underway.It may take two years more for making the park into fully operative. The construction work of 29 factories is under long-term processing and the work at12 factories could not begin due to legal complication. Besides, work on the Central Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP), crucial to control pollution from the relocated tanneries, has stopped a month ago. "How can we shift our factories from Hazaribagh to Savar when construction work of the park is still underway?" Sakhawat Ullah, Secretary General of Bangladesh Tanners Association (BTA) told The New Nation on Saturday. We are ready to go to the STP if the government pays shifting cost of our industries, the BTA leader said. He claimed that police would allow the rawhide-trucks in Hazaribagh factories by taking toll from owners."If someone fails to pay the police demand, they will miss the chance of business," the leader alleged. "The relocation process will take time. About 50-60 units will be able to start production at the industrial park by June this year as over 70 percent work have been completed," he said."We have got assurance about electricity connection, but the matter of gas connection is still undecided," he said, adding that the construction of the CETP was not ready yet.Sakhawat said that they would sit with the government to resolve the issue once the association president returns from abroad. The government has taken a firm stance to transfer the tanneries from Hazaribagh amid pressure from local and international rights groups and environmental activists, and buyers because of their hazardous effects on public health and environment. According to sources, a three-year construction work project had started at the park in 2003 and 70 percent estimated work have done in the due time. But the rest 30% work, including the ETP, has yet to finis. As a result, the expenditure of the project. Ekramul Sheikh, Executive Engineer responsible for the CETP, told The New Nation on Saturday that work has been stopped due to the paucity of funds."The CETP was to be set up in four stages. Forty percent of the work has been completed in the first two stages. But now we are short of funds."Meanwhile, thousands of workers are facing to lose their jobs in the wake of ban of rawhides to the Hazaribagh factories. Requesting anonymity, a worker of Mizan and Sumon Tannery says, "The government and the owners only think about themselves while we lose our work.""I have been working in this industry for 15-20 years. What am I supposed to do now?"Md Nurul Hossain, a rawhide trader, brings up several issues that small traders like him might now face.Abul Hossain, who brings rawhides from Comilla, is upset with the government that 'is making the situation all the more confusing'. "I have rawhides worth Tk 20 million at Hazaribagh. I could not sell those, hence I have begun to process those in some factories," he says. "I owe almost Tk 10 million to some parties there". A factory in-charge told The New Nation on condition of anonymity, "The government is giving one ultimatum after another, but it is not going to solve the problem.""Foreign buyers have lost interest here. They will be doing business with us only if we can give them the supplies they need. But that's in jeopardy now."We would relocate right now, but if we cannot start production there (at Savar), then what is the point of doing all these?" he asked. The Industries Ministry earlier extended the deadline several times, with warning to go tough against the errant tanners recently considering environmental damage."As per the instruction of the Industries Ministry, we have set up check posts at four entry points of Hazaribagh so that no one can bring rawhides to the tannery," Mir Alimuzzaman, said officer-in-charge of Hazaribagh police."We sent back two trucks carrying rawhide as they were trying to enter Hazaribagh area through the Beribandh entry point near Gabtoli," he said.The surveillance would continue until further instruction from the government, the OC said. "Not a single rawhide will be allowed to enter Hazaribagh. But the factory owners can transport the finished goods and other products," he said.It has allocated plots to 155 tannery owners through Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation (BSCIC) at the industrial park established on a 200-acre land in Savar.
Verdicts must be signed within six months

Staff Reporter :The judges of the Supreme Court will have to sign the copy of verdicts on all cases within six months from the date of delivery unless the case is exceptional. The information was known from the code of conduct provided to the judges of the Appellate Division.The SC has prepared the code of conduct after the disposal of the suspension case of High Court's additional judge Syed Shahidur Rahman. Amidst the raging debate signing judgements after retirement, the apex court's observation has come in the full verdict that upheld a HC's verdict about the 2004 presidential decision to remove judge Shahidur Rahman. A four-member bench of the Appellate Division headed by Chief Justice SK Sinha delivered the verdict on September 16 last year and said that the 2004 presidential decision was illegal. The 103-page full verdict in Shahidur Rahman's case was published on the Supreme Court's website on Thursday. It includes several points on how judges should maintain the court's code of conduct. The substance of the points-- "A Judge should dispose of promptly the business of the court including avoiding inordinate delay in delivering judgements/ orders. In no case a judgement shall be signed not later than six months of the date of delivery of judgement in exceptional cases." Urging the judges to sign the verdicts they deliver as soon as possible, Chief Justice SK Sinha last month said that signing judgements after retiring was unconstitutional. His comments had created a debate in both the judiciary and political arena.Syed Shahidur Rahman was appointed an HC Division additional judge in April 2003. That year, a woman named Nasim Sultana accused the judge of having taken Tk 50,000 in bribes to grant bail to a person implicated in a Woman and Child Repression Case.She informed the matter to Rokanuddin Mahmud, the then president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, who then informed the then Chief Justice KM Hasan in October 14 same year. Six days later, KM Hasan wrote about the matter to the then President Iajuddin Ahmed.Ten days later, the President ordered investigation into the allegation of the accusation in a Supreme Judicial Council. The Law Ministry had issued a circular to that end.Chief Justice KM Hasan, Justice Ruhul Amin and Justice Md Fazlul Karim submitted their investigation report on January 26 in 2004, which said the charge against Syed Shahidur Rahman had not been proved beyond doubt but could not be dismissed as entirely baseless. It also suggested that Syed Shahidur Rahman should not continue as an additional judge.The President then removed him on April 20 in 2004. The High Court on February 2 in 2005, after Syed Shahidur Rahman had moved it challenging the presidential decision, declared the move illegal. Later, Supreme Court lawyer Idrisur Rahman filed a petition for permission to appeal against the High Court verdict. The Appellate Division on April 25 stayed that verdict for six months, granting the appeal. After nine years, the verdict on the appeal came in September last year.
Pre-purchase property inspection is a relatively new thing in the United Kingdom. Its not something that most people have heard about, but it has become increasingly popular over the last few years with the rise in property prices and increased demand for high quality homes.

What are the benefits of pre-purchase building inspection? What can you expect to find out when you pay someone else to inspect your home before you buy it? And what should you look for during an inspection?

Many people want to know if theyre buying a house thats been well maintained or if its had any serious problems. If youve found a place on the market that seems attractive, but then discover some issues after moving in, you may not be as excited about buying it as you thought you were.

Its important to do your due diligence when looking at properties. A lot goes into making a property appealing to potential buyers, from the landscaping to the flooring to the kitchen appliances. The same applies when inspecting a property  there are many things that need checking over to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Here are some of the benefits of performing a pre-purchase inspection:

You get to see exactly what will happen to your money

When you go shopping for a new car, youll probably be shown several different models. You might even be shown one that looks like a great value, but doesnt fit around all of the extra features that you want. When it comes time to actually buy the vehicle, however, you wont have seen how your money will be spent on it once you drive it off the showroom floor.

Likewise, when you shop for a new home, you dont really know what youre getting yourself into until you move in. In order to get a feel for whether the home youre considering is what you want, you normally have to spend quite a bit of time inside it. This allows you to learn more about everything that youre going to be spending your hard-earned cash on.

A pre-purchase building inspection gives you much the same kind of experience without having to spend thousands of dollars. Since youre paying for the service, you can expect to see exactly what youre paying for, instead of just seeing a vague idea of what you might end up with.

You find out about potential major repairs

Some buildings are very expensive to maintain, which means that owners often neglect them for the sake of saving money. While youre paying for a building inspection, youre also paying for a professional who knows how to spot signs of trouble and repair work that needs doing.

If you notice that a particular area of your new home needs fixing right away, you can call in an expert to take care of it quickly. If you find that theres something wrong with your boiler, you wont have to wait weeks for a plumber to come over and fix it. Instead, youll have access to a solution immediately.

You can save hundreds of pounds by finding out about potential problems early on

One of the biggest expenses when you first buy a home is the cost of moving in. Many people dont realize this until its too late. Buying a home involves not only paying for the actual house, but also for moving costs, furniture, and other items that have to be moved along with the home.

Having a good idea ahead of time of what youre likely to encounter can help you avoid these kinds of costs. If you know youll need to replace the plumbing system, for example, youll be able to put together a budget for the expense and plan accordingly.

You can protect your investment by finding out if the homes been well cared for

While there are plenty of people who think that houses always look better when theyre newly built, youd be surprised at how well maintained older residences can still look nice. Sometimes, though, those homes need some additional maintenance to keep them looking their best.

This could involve repairs that arent so noticeable or small improvements that you wouldnt consider otherwise. Even worse, some houses have fallen into disrepair without anyone noticing. This is why having a professional perform a building inspection prior to purchasing a home is such a big benefit.

Not only will it give you insight into the state of the property, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing youre not getting taken advantage of. As long as youre aware of the potential pitfalls, youll have less reason to worry about the state of your new home.

You can use information gathered during a building inspection to negotiate a lower price

If youre worried about buying a home because you suspect that it may need extensive renovation work, you may already have a rough idea of how much work youll need to do to bring it up to scratch. That knowledge can come in handy if you decide to buy the home.

You can use all of the details that you gather during a building inspection to present a realistic picture of what the home is worth to prospective buyers. If a potential buyer thinks that the home is worth more than what you paid for it, you can try negotiating a lower price.

You can sell your home faster and for more money

If you decide to list your home on the market soon after buying it, youll need to price it accurately in order to attract buyers. But if youve already done a thorough building inspection, youll know exactly what work is needed and what the current market conditions are.

In other words, youll be able to make a more accurate estimate of the amount of money youve invested in the home and how much its worth. If you find that youre selling your house for close to its full market value, you can use this information to convince the potential buyer that your home is worth the asking price.

Even if youre planning to stay in the home for a while before you decide to sell, the fact that you did a thorough building inspection will give you more confidence when listing it. Prospective buyers will know exactly what theyre paying for.

Your home will hold its value longer

As mentioned earlier, the value of a home depends heavily upon the condition of the building itself. If your home is in bad shape, potential buyers wont be interested in buying it. On the other hand, if youve performed a thorough building inspection and know what sort of repairs are necessary, you can offer your prospective buyer a compelling reason to invest in your property.

When you buy a home, youre essentially agreeing to have it inspected periodically to ensure that it stays in top shape. Not only does this allow you to avoid expensive repairs down the road, but it can also increase the value of your home.

You can make smart decisions about property investments

Buying real estate isnt as simple as just driving a couple of minutes to pick up a house. There are lots of considerations involved, ranging from location to cost. The same is true when youre investing in property.

If you find a house that meets all of your requirements, youll want to make sure that you have a solid understanding of where it stands with regards to the rest of the market. If you havent spent enough time researching the area, you could inadvertently end up with a bad deal.

There are lots of resources available online that can help you determine the overall level of competition in your area. They can also help you figure out if there are any properties that meet your requirements that you didnt know about.

If you own rental property, you can use the information to identify tenants who might cause damage

If you own rental property and youve noticed that certain tenants consistently cause damage, you can use the results of a building inspection to identify them. You can then contact them directly to let them know that youre watching them closely and that you dont appreciate the problem theyre causing.

They might start taking better care of their homes, which would be good news for everyone. It could also be the case that youll find out that theyre responsible for previous damages that werent caught during a previous visit.

You can make smarter decisions about hiring contractors

If youve hired contractors to build or repair your home, you might want to ask them for references. However, unless you perform a thorough building inspection, you might not know exactly what to look for.

For instance, maybe you only checked the roof for leaks or the walls for cracks. You might not have looked underneath the foundation for anything that could cause a future issue. By performing a building inspection, you can ensure that you hire reputable contractors who will be trustworthy with your money.

You can avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition

Of course, the main benefit of structural inspections perth is that it helps you avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition. Before you make the decision to buy a home, you should do whatever you can to find out about the state of the building.

You can also ask your realtor about what sorts of inspections are typically recommended. Some agents say that its standard practice to check the heating system, the roof, the electrical wiring, and the floors. Others will tell you that they recommend that you check the entire structure.

Either way, if you choose to hire an inspector, youll find out exactly what needs to be fixed and how much it will cost to do so.

As a result, it can be concluded that a pre-purchase building inspection is highly important for the buyers because it provides transparency regarding the current conditions of the structure. Additionally, the building owner is made aware of any upgrades or repairs that are required, which could lead to a fair deal throughout the purchasing and selling process.
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.
The heath fair, which will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. will feature lab screenings at a reduced rate of $30 (cash only). All lab testing will be done before the health fair from April 16 to 23. Lab testing hours for the health fair will be from 6 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday (April 18-22), and from 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, April 16 and April 23.
SPRINGFIELD  The Illinois Capitol has been quiet for the past couple weeks during the General Assemblys spring recess, but the volume  and the pressure  will be turned up this week when lawmakers return to face the states intractable budget impasse.

Time may be running out for the Democratic-controlled House and Senate and Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner to end the standoff, now in its 10th month, before it claims its highest-profile victim to date. Chicago State University officials have said the predominantly black South Side school only has enough money to make payroll through months end.

Like every other public university and community college across Illinois, Chicago State hasnt received any state funding for the fiscal year that began July 1. Eastern Illinois University has laid off hundreds of employees, and faculty members have agreed to forgo a portion of their paychecks until funding comes through. Officials at Southern Illinois and Western Illinois universities have also announced significant cuts that would result from the lack of support this year and potential cuts next year.

Social service programs that, like higher education, arent covered by the court mandates or state statues that have kept money flowing to most areas of the budget are similarly strained.

Despite the deepening crisis, there have been no public signs that Democratic leaders and the governor are any closer to reaching a deal. The House and Senate each passed a budget bill before the break, but Rauner has indicated that he wouldnt sign either one.

The governor said last week that the situation at Chicago State is an outrage.

I believe that the supermajority in the Legislature is using Chicago State and many other service providers in Illinois as leverage to try to force a massive tax hike, he said.

As they have all along, Democrats countered that Rauner is responsible for the situation because he vetoed all but the elementary and secondary education portion of this years budget.

John Patterson, a spokesman for Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, noted that it was Rauner who last year spoke of using a crisis as leverage.

Crisis creates opportunity. Crisis creates leverage to change  and weve got to use that leverage of the crisis to force structural change, Rauner told the Chicago Tribune editorial board in April 2015 while lawmakers were working on the budget.

The structural changes Rauner is pushing for remain the sticking point for Democrats, who say the governor has held up a budget deal by tying it to issues that arent related.

Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill, said ending the impasse will require two things: face-to-face conversations between administration officials and lawmakers -- both leaders and rank-and-file members -- and Rauner coming to terms that his turnaround agenda shouldnt stand in the way of a balanced budget.

Until those two things happen, unfortunately, I dont think well have a solution, Manar said.

Rauner argues that hes shown a willingness to compromise, paring down his original list of 44 agenda items to just six: changes to the way legislative districts are drawn, term limits for lawmakers, workers compensation reforms, new restrictions on civil lawsuits, a property tax freeze, and giving local governments control over what subjects are included in contract negotiations with workers.

Im willing to take a lot less than six, he added last week.

Rauner also says his request for a one-on-one meeting with House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, has gone unanswered. Madigan spokesman Steve Brown said Rauner has mischaracterized the interaction, which actually involved an offer for staffers to meet to discuss whether the governor and the speaker should meet.

Sen. Dave Luechtefeld, R-Okawville, said lawmakers return to Springfield should increase the pressure on leaders to get together.

Unless that happens, well have nothing, Luechtefeld said. My hope is that there can be a sit-down meeting between the governor  and Madigan and (they can) come to some sort of agreement.

Luechtefeld said he thinks Madigan hasnt felt the need to compromise because the speaker believes hes winning the PR battle.

Rep. Dan Brady, R-Bloomington, said ending the impasse is going to take continued pressure from rank-and-file legislators to the governor, to the speaker and the other leaders.

There is so much depending on us bringing this to a resolution, Brady said.

Just because lawmakers havent been in Springfield doesnt mean they havent been working behind the scenes, he said.

For example, Brady, who serves on two House higher education committees, said hes been working with Rep. Kelly Burke, D-Evergreen Park, on a compromise to fund higher education.
BAMBERG  Very few companies can say they made it through both the Great Depression and the Great Recession  and even fewer can say theyve successfully transitioned through four generations of family ownership.

But thats exactly the story of Bambergs Phoenix Specialty.

The company was recognized by the South Carolina Department of Commerce in early March by receiving the 2016 Rural Manufacturer Award during the annual South Carolina Rural Summit. The conference was held at the Madren Conference Center at Clemson University.

We like to think we are a good community-based company and we are glad to be here, Phoenix Specialty owner and President Robert Hurst said. We felt good about being recognized by the Department of Commerce. We are here and are trying to bring jobs to this region of the state.

Hurst, who is involved in rural economic development for the Southern Carolina Regional Development Alliance, said rural communities are important in South Carolina and the company is honored to be able to play a role in rural South Carolina.

Hurst accepted the award on behalf of the company.

It is the 26th year of the summit, which allows community leaders, economic developers and state officials the opportunity to come together and hold collaborative discussions on ways to improve rural South Carolina.

Phoenix Specialty has been manufacturing components such as specialty washers and other custom parts that go into other companies assembly lines since 1907. The company now ships more than 9,000 different parts to more than 2,000 clients each year.

In 1966, Phoenix Southern Washer & Gasket was incorporated in Bamberg, having come from New York.

The companys move was in an attempt to increase production.

Major customers included automotive (ITT Industries, Fram), office equipment (Pitney Bowes, Xerox, Kodak), and aerospace (General Electric, Sperry, Honeywell, Bendix, Plessey). In 1976, Phoenix relocated all manufacturing to Bamberg.

Its important to recognize the tremendous members of Team South Carolina, DOC Secretary Bobby Hitt said. In economic development, we all play a role, and the individuals and organizations we honored today are vital to the advancement of both their respective communities and our state as a whole.

Phoenix Specialty was among five honorees at the summit. Others were the City of Hartsville, South Carolina Manufacturing Extension Partnership, Haleigh Philips of Abbeville County and South Carolina Department of Commerce Senior Project Manager Ted Campbell.

Last year, Phoenix Specialty received national attention from Deluxe Corp.s Small Business Revolution documentary project.

The Small Business Revolution, which also features Shark Tank star Robert Herjavec, is a yearlong campaign that celebrates the vibrancy, variety and community impact of small businesses across the country.
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The fourth Nuclear Security Summit was held in Washington DC, and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attended the event.

Speaking at the event, the president expressed gratitude for inviting Azerbaijan to the summit.

"We consider this as a sign of friendship, partnership and recognition of the role, which Azerbaijan is playing in the region. For us it is a big honour to be present at such an important international gathering. We fully support the activity and efforts of President Obama to strengthen nuclear security in the world," President Aliyev said in his speech.

The president added that in turn, Azerbaijan attaches great importance to non-proliferation.

"In the face of emerging proliferation threats and due to our geographic location we attach utmost importance to the prevention of possible use of our territory as a transit route for illicit nuclear trafficking," he said.

"In close cooperation with our international partners we have developed a comprehensive national export control system with the solid legislation basis in line with international standards. Up to date our national export control system has proved itself as a reliable mechanism in preventing illicit nuclear trafficking. But due to the fact that we do not control hundred percent of our territory it is not possible for us to implement full scale programs," Ilham Aliyev said.

He further went on to remind that Azerbaijan's territories are still under occupation.

"Twenty percent of our territories is under Armenian occupation. Occupation lasts for more than twenty years. Also, part of our internationally recognized border is under occupation. United Nations Security Council adopted four resolutions demanding immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian troops from our territory, but these resolutions remain on paper. I repeat that these resolutions demand immediate and unconditional withdrawal. But more than twenty years had passed since our lands are under occupation," Azerbaijan's president said.

He said that unfortunately Armenia always puts conditions in order to liberate the occupied territories.

"We will continue our efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, but the conflict must be resolved based on the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan," President Aliyev noted.

Further on, President Aliyev drew attention to the issue of the functioning of the outdated Armenian nuclear power plant which was built in 1976.

"It is situated in the very seismic zone with a shortage of water to cool its ageing reactor and poses a direct threat to the region. Instead of decommissioning the power plant Armenia plans to extend its operation until 2026. That means that the whole region, including Armenia itself will live under threat for another decade," Ilham Aliyev said.

"I would like to urge the international community to influence Armenia to stop the activity of this power plant and to comply with the rules and procedures which the international community is expecting," he added.

The fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) took place between March 31 and April 1 in Washington D.C.
President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a phone call to President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on April 2.



The Turkish president expressed his support and solidarity over the events on the line of contact of the Armenian and Azerbaijani troops. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the Turkish people had always stood by the people of Azerbaijan, and extended condolences over the killing of Azerbaijani servicemen as a result of Armenian provocation.

President Ilham Aliyev thanked for the condolences. The head of state expressed gratitude for the constant support of Turkey with respect to the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. President Ilham Aliyev voiced his respect to the brotherly people of Turkey.



The head of state said Armenia carried out another provocation on the line of contact and attacked the positions of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan`s armed forces repulsed the attack and the opposite side received an appropriate response, said the President of Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan's defense minister, colonel-general Zakir Hasanov held telephone conversations with the head of the Turkish General Staff Husuli Akar and National Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz, Azerbaijan Defense Ministry reported April 2.

During the talks the sides discussed the latest developments and the situation in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

The Turkish side expressed support to Azerbaijan and again noted that Azerbaijan's position is completely valid.

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.
Armenian armed forces have broken the ceasefire with Azerbaijan 130 times by using 60, 82, 120 mm caliber mortars in various parts of the contact line between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies in the last 24 hours, Azerbaijani defense ministry said April 3.

Armenian armed forces located in the nameless heights, Berkaber and Paravakar villages of Armenias Ijevan district opened fire at the positions of the Azerbaijani armed forces located in the nameless heights, Gizilhajili village of the Gazakh district, Kohneqishlaq village of the Agstafa district.

Armenian armed forces located in Voskevan village of Armenias Noyemberyan district opened fire at the positions of the Azerbaijani armed forces located in Qushchu Ayrim village of the Gazakh district.

Armenian army also opened fire from positions near Gulustan village of the Goranboy district, Goyarkh, Yarimja, Chilaburt, Chayli villages of the Tartar district, Shikhlar, Bash Garvand, Javahirli, Sarijali, Kengerli, Novruzlu, Nemirli villages of the Aghdam district, Kuropatkino village of the Khojavend district, Horadiz, Gorgan, Qarakhanbayli, Ashagi Seyidahmadli villages of the Fizuli district and Mehdili village of the Jabrayil district.

Armenians also opened fire upon the Azerbaijani army positions from nameless heights in the Goygol, Goranboy, Khojavend, Fizuli and Jabrayil districts.

Azerbaijani armed forces inflicted 137 strikes upon Armenian positions.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Iran's Foreign Ministry urged Azerbaijan and Armenia to show restraint and avoid any move that can escalate their tensions, Irna reported.

'We invite both of our northern neighbors to restraint and avoiding any action than can turn the situation more difficult,' spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari said.

'Hearing of escalation of clashes in Nagorno Karabakh region between Azerbaijan and Armenia is source of deep concern for the Islamic Republic of Iran,' he added.

'We urge Azerbaijan and Armenia to cease clashes promptly and use all their might to restore tranquility and peaceful settlement of differences within the peace groups and under the United Nation,' the spokesman said.

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.
British MP, member of the UK-Azerbaijan interparliamentary friendship group Bob Blackman made a statement in connection with the violation by Armenia of the ceasefire on the contact line in Nagorno-Karabakh, The European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS) told Trend.



He said that tension has been simmering on the contact line for many months. "Now it seems that full-scale fighting has broken out. The United Nations must step in and ensure that the Armenian forces withdraw from Azerbaijani territory as instructed by their own Security Council resolutions number 822, 853, 874 and 884", Blackman added.

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
The United States condemns in the strongest terms the large-scale ceasefire violations along the Nagorno-Karabakh Line of Contact, which have resulted in a number of reported casualties, including civilians, said in press statement of Secretary of State John Kerry on April 2.

"We extend our condolences to all affected families. We urge the sides to show restraint, avoid further escalation, and strictly adhere to the ceasefire. The unstable situation on the ground demonstrates why the sides must enter into an immediate negotiation under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs on a comprehensive settlement of the conflict", said in statement.

The US reiterate that there is no military solution to the conflict.

"As a co-chair country, the United States is firmly committed to working with the sides to reach a lasting and negotiated peace", said in statement.

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.
Following reports of increased fighting along the line of contact in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Ilkka Kanerva (MP, Finland) and the OSCE PA Special Representative on the South Caucasus, Kristian Vigenin (MP, Bulgaria), called for an immediate cessation of hostilities April 3, a statement posted on the OSCE website said.

"This fighting must stop, the statement said. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict has taken far too many lives for far too many years now. We call on all sides to immediately cease fire and to exercise maximum restraint to avoid any further escalations."

Kanerva and Vigenin reiterated their full support for the OSCE Minsk Group and their efforts to find a peaceful solution, the statement said.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.
Azerbaijan calls for the international community to demand from Armenia to withdraw its troops from all occupied lands and to engage constructively in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement process, the Azerbaijani foreign ministry said.

On April 2, 2016 Armenia targeting civilians densely residing in the territories adjacent to the frontline area opened intensive heavy weapons fire at the positions of Azerbaijans armed forces along the line of contact.

As a result of artillery attacks of Armenian armed forces a number of civilians were killed and seriously wounded. Substantial damages were also inflicted upon the private and public properties, the statement said.



The armed forces of Azerbaijan have taken the necessary counter measures within its internationally recognized borders to ensure the safety of civilian population, to stop the provocations of Armenia and to deter it from further acts of aggression. Currently, the situation remains tense. Shelling of Azerbaijans positions along the contact line with heavy weapons, including with artillery continues.



Armenia in an attempt to reinforce its heavy artillery in the occupied territories deploys additional rocket and artillery forces and its military helicopters conduct intensive shuttle flights between occupied territories and Armenia, the statement said.



Over the past years such violations and armed provocations of Armenia by attacking and killing Azerbaijani military personnel as well as civilians with the use of mortars and large-caliber machine guns and artillery have become more frequent and violent.



Armenias desperate attempts to blame Azerbaijan for the escalation of the situation in the frontline aimed at misleading its own people and the wider international community, the statement said.



Azerbaijan has repeatedly brought to the attention of the international community that the illegal presence of Armenian armed forces in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan remains a main cause for the escalation of situation and continues to pose threat to the regional peace and stability.

Armenia, by consistent provocations and escalation of the situation, strengthening of its military build-up in the occupied territories, illegally changing the demographic, cultural and physical character of the seized lands, engaging in unlawful economic and other activities, including transfer of Armenian population into these territories pursues an apparent goal of annexation of Azerbaijans territories and consolidating the status-quo, which is unacceptable and unsustainable as it was also stated by the heads of states of OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, the statement said.

It is Armenia that also blocks all initiatives of OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, including the recent proposals of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to derail the negotiation process. It once again proves that the official Yerevan is not genuinely interested in seeking a political settlement of the armed conflict.



The fundamental basis for the settlement of the conflict is laid down in the United Nations Security Council resolutions 822(1993), 853(1993), 874(1993) and 884(1993) and the U.N. General Assembly resolution 62/243 (2008), which condemn the use of force against Azerbaijan and occupation of its territories and reaffirm the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and the inviolability of its internationally recognized borders, the statement said.

In those resolutions, the United Nations reaffirmed that the Nagorno-Karabakh region is an inalienable part of Azerbaijan and demanded immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces from all occupied territories of Azerbaijan.



The military occupation of the territory of Azerbaijan does not represent a solution and will never produce a political outcome desired by Armenia. The sooner Armenia reconciles with this reality, the earlier the conflict will be resolved and the countries and peoples in the region will benefit from the prospects of cooperation and economic development, the statement said.



Azerbaijan calls the international community to demand from Armenia to cease the illegal occupation of Azerbaijans territories, to withdraw its troops from all seized lands and to engage constructively in the conflict settlement process in accordance with the requirements of relevant resolutions of the UNSC and the norms and principles of international law.
Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan has held talks over phone with with Azerbaijani and Armenian defense ministers on the situation in Azerbaijans occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan has called for a truce and resolving the existing dispute through negotiations, IRNA news agency reported.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

On the same day, responding to the Armenian aggression, Azerbaijani armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Later, taking into account the international organizations appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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/




Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has expressed his concerns over fresh fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia along their borders.

The latest clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia have caused concerns in the region, ISNA news agency quoted Ali Larijani as saying.

He called upon the governments and parliaments of Azerbaijan and Armenia to resolve the dispute through negotiations.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

Later on the same day, Azerbaijani defense ministry announced that the countrys armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

However, later on taking into account the international organizations appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.

/By Trend/




An Iranian provincial official has announced that three mortar shells fired during the recent fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan have landed in the territories of Irans East Azerbaijan Province.

Saeid Shabestari-Khiabani, the deputy governor-general of East Azerbaijan Province for security affairs, said that the mortar shells dropped in a village near Khudaferin County, Tasnim news agency reported.

Shabestari-Khiabani further added that the mortar shells did not leave any casualties in the Iranian territory.

The Iranian official did not mention which country fired the mortar shells that hit the Iranian territory.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

Later on the same day, Azerbaijani defense ministry announced that the countrys armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

However, later on taking into account the international organizations appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.
Payfort, a leading online payments company, and Sadad Payment System have launched a new facility that enables merchants using Payforts payment gateway to allow Saudi consumers to pay for purchases directly from their bank accounts.



Sadad facilitates and streamlines consumer bill payment transactions via Saudi banks, simplifying payments bank account holders. Sadad was established by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) to be the national Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) service provider for Saudi Arabia.



Using the Sadad account with the Fort, Saudi enterprises will be able to offer online payment options to a dramatically expanded consumer base, said Omar Soudodi, managing director of Payfort. Sadad offers consumers a convenient way to pay via their own bank accounts, while Fort integrates tightly with Sadad, providing an easy way for merchants to offer the Sadad account as a payment option.



Sadad makes bank account payments manageable and efficient for the ecommerce world, reducing the challenges of managing payments for banks, merchants and consumers. Sadad already facilitates a wide range of high-volume bill payments in the Kingdom, such as utility bills and phone bills.



More and more Saudi businesses are beginning to rely on online payment processes, added Muteb Alobeiwi, Payfort country manager for Saudi Arabia. The addition of Sadad account to the Fort will provide businesses with the means to accept payments from an even wider range of consumers. Sadad connects all Saudi consumers to modern payment channels, regardless of their payment preferences.



The addition of the Sadad account to the Fort means that merchants only have to integrate one API (Application Programming Interface) with their online stores in order to add bank account payments to the choice of payment methods offered to online customers. Fort is easy to integrate and comes with a powerful dashboard to help enterprises optimise their payment processes and increase conversions.



By integrating PayForts Fort system, merchants can also make online payment available to shoppers through credit/debit card payment, through globally recognized payment leaders including Mastercard, Visa, American Express and CASHU.  TradeArabia News Service
Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) is hosting some of its key local, regional and international customers and suppliers to give them an experience of Bahrains top sporting event  the 2016 Formula One Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix.



The F1 event which kicked off on April 1, will conclude today (April 3), at the Bahrain International Circuit (BIC), Sakhir.



Albas invitees were invited to watch the three-day international sporting event as well as meet with the company officials to further develop business relations, said a statement from the company.



A key aspect of the visit was the tour of the smelter for the guests, held today (April 3), which gave them an insight on the companys operations, its production processes and safety, health, and environment systems, it added.



Ali Al Baqali, chief financial officer, Alba, said: The Formula One Grand Prix is not only an international sporting event but also provides an opportunity to showcase the kingdoms attractiveness as a commercial and leisure destination.



It is our pleasure to host our clients during this prestigious sporting event and further strengthen our relationship with them, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
Jasim Khadijah, an Islamic State member believed to be responsible for a deadly attack by militants on US troops in northern Iraq, has been killed in a drone strike, a spokesman of the anti-IS coalition said in Baghdad on Sunday.



"He was a rocket expert, he was controlling these attacks," the spokesman, US Army Colonel Steve Warren, told reporters, referring to the shelling last month of a base used by US troops in northern Iraq in which a US Marine was killed and several others were wounded.



It was the second death of a US service member in combat since the US first struck the militant group in 2014. - Reuters
Kuwait hopes that coordination among oil producers inside and outside Opec will help to stabilise the market, acting oil minister Anas Al-Saleh told reporters on Sunday.



"As long as there is coordination among major producers in Opec and outside Opec, that will certainly help stabilise prices," he said.



Saudi Arabian Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said on Thursday that Riyadh would not join an output freeze without the participation of Iran and other major producers, Bloomberg reported. A meeting to discuss the production freeze has been scheduled in Doha on April 17.



Asked on Sunday whether Kuwait's position was the same as the Saudi stance, Al-Saleh said: "We have announced our position before: we will attend the meeting and see. We think that a consensus is a positive thing and will serve stability of markets." - Reuters


Etihad Airways, the national airline of the UAE, has welcomed Fatma Al Mehairi as the new general manager for Canada.



Al Mehairi is the first female Emirati to be named general manager of a region at the airline. In total, more than 130 Emirati women are employed in various management development programs as part of the airlines workforce.



Based in Toronto, Al Mehairi will lead the further development of the airlines commercial strategy in Canada. She will also be responsible for further growing Etihad Airways relationships with its travel trade and corporate customers and will report to Martin Drew, senior vice president of The Americas for Etihad Airways.



She joined Etihad Airways in 2010 as part of the airlines Graduate Management Programme, where she was trained in multiple aspects of Etihad Airways fast-growing operations.



After successfully completing the programme, she accepted a post in Paris, where she spent three years in commercial operations as a business development manager and subsequently as a corporate account manager. Al Mehairi was then appointed as assistant general manager, where she has been responsible for executing sales and marketing strategy; driving team performance; and maintaining business development.



As the national airline of the UAE, Etihad Airways is committed to developing a successful Emirati leadership team and we value the important roles that Emirati women have at our airline, said Drew. We are especially pleased to announce the appointment of Fatma to this key leadership position. Fatma has a wealth of experience with Etihad Airways and her dedication to our company makes her an invaluable addition to the team in Toronto and in The Americas.



Etihad Airways currently operates three flights per week between Abu Dhabi and Toronto on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.



Al Mehairi, who assumes her new role this week, replaces Craig Thomas, who has been appointed vice president - US for Etihad Airways.



As a proud graduate of Etihad Airways Graduate Managers Development Programme and now a part of the Americas team, I look forward to further increasing our already strong commercial ties within Canada  an important market for our airline  and raising awareness among corporate customers about the unmatched world-class product and hospitality offerings we provide for our guests, said Al Mehairi. - TradeArabia News Service
Emirates today announced several management changes in its commercial operations team to strengthen its market position in Africa, the Middle East and North and South America.



Orhan Abbas has been appointed as senior vice president commercial operations Africa, and will lead growth efforts across the continent. He will report directly to Thierry Antinori, executive vice president and chief commercial officer. Since joining Emirates in 1998 as a management trainee, he has held senior positions in Tanzania, Iran, South Africa and the Middle East as well as the position of Vice President for India and Nepal. In 2012, he was appointed senior vice president, commercial operations, The Americas, and in August 2013 was later appointed as senior vice president commercial operations - Latin America, Central and Southern Africa.



Adil Al Ghaith is the new senior vice president commercial operations Gulf Middle East & Iran and will lead a number of Emirates markets in the Middle East. Having been with Emirates for 17 years, Al Ghaith is a seasoned commercial executive in this region, having led markets like Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen for several years. He also previously held the position of vice president in Pakistan and senior vice president in North and West Africa.



Rob Gurney is taking an additional responsibility for Latin America as he becomes the senior vice president of commercial operations (The Americas). He joined Emirates in October 2014 as a divisional vice president Australasia following an extensive career in aviation, travel and tourism; and was promoted to senior vice president commercial operations for North America in 2015.



Thierry Antinori, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of Emirates Airline said: The industry is constantly evolving and we remain committed to looking at new ways at developing our services and expanding our commercial footprint across a number of regions, including Africa, the Middle East and the Americas. With an excellent track record in growing our business, I am confident that Orhan, Adil and Rob will excel in their new roles so we stay competitive in a new year of growth. - TradeArabia News Service
Park Regis Kris Kin Hotel Dubai has received the Green Globe Certificate for the third consecutive year after having met the strict requirements set by Green Globe Standard 1.7.



The hotel achieved an exceptional score of 80 per cent in 2016 improving from 75 per cent in 2015 and 72 per cent in 2014.



It was made possible by strategic operational changes that helped to reduce energy and water consumption significantly during the period. The initiatives resulted in considerable energy savings exceeding the targeted amount by 5.1 per cent in the 12 months, from January to December, last year.

Energy consumption was reduced by 865,476 kWh resulting in a saving of Dh363,499 ($98,967.8) while CO2 emissions were reduced by 424.50 tons which is equivalent to the planting 15,302 tree seedlings grown for 10 years or by 498 acres of forest in one year.



Scott Butcher, general manager, Park Regis Kris Kin Hotel Dubai, said: Since embracing the Green Globe programme, we have seen massive savings in terms of electricity and water consumption. We are delighted to receive the certification for the third consecutive year and would like to thank all our team for their commitment and dedication to the conservation of environment.



Green Globe is an international certification for sustainable tourism. The Green Globe Standard is a structured assessment of the sustainability performance of travel and tourism businesses and includes 44 core criteria supported by over 389 compliance indicators. Park Regis Kris Kin Hotel Dubai has been utilising the services of energy supervisors from UAE-based Magenta Technical Services to provide real time data to the engineering team thus bringing about continuous sustainable improvements. - TradeArabia News Service
The bars open early in Gillette, and when most people are starting on their coffee and eggs, you can get a Budweiser and sympathy from a bartender that knows your face, knows your name.

April Fools Day was no different. A crew of laid-off Black Thunder workers sat around a table at Lakeside Lounge trading stories, venting their frustrations, avoiding what was coming next and focusing instead on what could have been.

They blamed Washington. They blamed regulations. They blamed change.

They didnt blame the coal company. They didnt blame one another.

On Thursday and Friday, the Black Thunder coal mine near Wright laid off 15 percent of its workforce. So did North Antelope Rochelle, south of Gillette.

Combined, about 460 people lost their jobs at Americas two largest coal mines.

Kim Riggen is one. She used to drive haul trucks for Black Thunder. Her phone buzzed all morning with messages from people who still have jobs.

Sorry to hear the news.

Riggen said she was glad others were still working. Life wasnt great, but shed deal with it, she said. Shed find something else.

Its just luck of the draw. Thats all I can say, she said.

A familiar refrain repeated in this bar and in others in the heart of Wyomings coal country.

Theres no rhyme or reason, the miners said. None that they can see, anyway.

Their mines, their jobs, seemed untouchable. Now, it seems like anything could crumble.

***

Pat Avery lived in Gillette during when the bust hit hard in the 1980s. The real estate broker said its too early to tell what will happen this time.

This is home to a lot of people, Avery said. So theres a nucleus of people that it may not affect or if it affects them, theyre still going to stick around.

There are more homes on the market this year compared with last, figures show. But the number of homes actually being sold is down.

But Jim Engel, chairman of the Wyoming Workforce Development Council, downplayed what he saw as the doom-and-gloom reaction to the cuts.

The losses are significant, but the coal companies are still running, said Engel, a real estate broker.

As far as the real estate aspect, yeah, there is going to be a little bit of a downturn, he said. I think the reason that were seeing a lot more homes available on the market is because people were being proactive months ago trying to get ready for whatever may happen.

Yeah, there is going to be a downturn in our market. But is it going to be a devastating blow? I dont think so.

The layoffs may not affect the local real estate market until about a year from now, said Chad Friedt, a realtor with Team Properties Group in Gillette.

Theres never been a time where oil, gas and coal have all been down at the same, he said, because even if one starts lagging, another industry has been able to keep Gillette afloat.

Weve never been in a situation like this, he said. The crash of 08  nobody knew whens the end, whens everything going to come around. Nobody knew. Here, theres a slight glimmer of hope, you know, that if we get a Republican in office, we wont have this war against us no more. And maybe things will be ah, OK, lets go. Everybodys on edge, waiting for that to happen, wondering.

***

Kori Koester, the manager at Eastside Liquors, said there hadnt been a fight in the bar in almost two years. The night the layoffs started, employees had to break up scuffles.

Koester told her children that losses like this can affect the whole community, not just the workers. A parents anxiety can be higher during difficult times, and that can trickle down to the kids. If they can help another kid by giving them a compliment or buying them lunch, do it, she told them. Shell pay for it.

Thats their job right now, she said. Thats what they need to watch out for as being part of the community.

Even before last weeks layoffs, Campbell Countys unemployment rate was rising. It hit 6 percent in January and now, its likely to grow further.

The bars business is down about 10 to 15 percent compared with this time last year. Theyve cut hours here and there, and her father, Zeke Retzlaff, who owns the bar, has picked up shifts to save money.

There are rules during the bust. Dont over-pour; make sure to count back change.

Retzlaff has been here since 1974, and hes seen the citys fortunes rise and fall. Koester, his daughter, was born and raised here. No matter how bad it gets, she wont leave, she said.

***

The resounding sense, from the folks that still have their jobs to the ones whove lost them, is that the last seven years have led to a week like this.

They dont say President Barack Obamas name, just the administration. They dont care who becomes president in November, as long as its a Republican, as long as its someone they feel is friendly to coal, as long as its not Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Gibby Barnett, who works for North Antelope Rochelle, pulled out his phone and looked at a recent picture of himself on a ruby red motorcycle. For now, he had a job. Without one, perks like the bike would become rare. And if the pink slip did arrive, he could always head back out on the road, eyes to the sky, and follow the construction cranes to the next place.

Its scary right now, Barnett said. All I can do is cross my fingers and hope for the best.

At the end of the day, hed have to make a living.

***

Shane Younger can remember a little over a dozen homes being for sale during the boom. He said you could count on two hands how many apartments there were for rent. Hed worked in a copper mine in Arizona before moving here and said hed never known that Wyoming had coal before he decided to come to the Cowboy State.

Hed been in mining, in some form or another, for all his life. Hed moved his family out here to be with him. Everything had been good until this week.

This isnt the kind of thing Younger does very often, he said, passing an evening at Lakeside in Gillette. And on the day he lost his job as a production technician at North Antelope Rochelle, there he was, in a place he didnt come often at all, talking about what his final meeting was like and reflecting on what brought him here.

Hed really like to stay in the area, try and find a job. His kids are here. He might have to start driving trucks so his wife and kids can stay put and hell try and get home whenever he can. And if he cant do that, he knows hell have to go somewhere where he can support himself.

He doesnt blame the energy companies for the cuts. He doesnt feel any ill will to the folks that showed the workers the door. By the time it was over, Younger felt like he was just a number, one of the 235 unemployed at days end.

You could see the writing on the wall, he said.

***

Even before the shock subsided, there were small acts of kindness, of a community caring for its own.

Back at Lakeside, the bartender slid another drink toward Kim Riggen.

No, no. No need to pay. Someone had already bought this one. Theyd heard what had happened and picked up the drink for the crew of laid-off workers.

Sometimes, its all you can do to say thanks, to say were sorry, to say good luck.
SALT LAKE CITY  A Utah man has been sentenced to nine to 15 years in prison for shooting a shopper at a West Valley City Wal-Mart for looking at his girlfriend.

Cole Ronald Shields, 31, was sentenced Friday for felony counts of discharge of a firearm. He was also ordered to pay more than $11,800 in medical restitution.

According to court documents, Shields accused the victim of eying his girlfriend inside Wal-Mart on Oct. 14.

Shields allegedly followed the man to his car and pulled out a gun.

Police say Shields kicked the victim, who punched him in response.

Shields then allegedly opened fire, hitting the victim's feet.

Authorities say the victim will be unable to walk for six weeks.
Wyoming needs Liz Cheneys strong, knowledgeable voice in Congress. Most people have heard Liz speak as a Fox News contributor, but even as a young girl Liz was interested in public affairs and eager to learn everything about her home state. She often accompanied her father, then-Congressman Dick Cheney, on his travels around Wyoming to visit with his constituents.

I remember Liz at about 14 years old when she and her father came to Gillette when I was chairman of the Campbell County Republican Party. It was the day of our Pink Elephant Ball. To show our appreciation for the hard work preparing the event we invited the committee for lunch at our house. Cheney and daughter Liz joined us. Even then I was impressed by how much Liz enjoyed the other guests and how interested she was in everything they had to say. She was poised and knowledgeable even as a teenager. Since then Liz has practiced law, served in the State Department, gained national recognition as a conservative spokesperson, and raised five children with her husband, Phil Perry.
High courts targeted

About half the states will have elections for seats on their supreme courts this year. The high courts also are being targeted in a number of state legislatures. Some of those proposals:

ARIZONA

 House Bill 2537 would expand the Arizona Supreme Court from five to seven justices. Pending.

GEORGIA

 House Bill 927 would expand the Georgia Supreme Court from seven to nine justices. Approved and sent to the governor.

 House Bill 808 and House Resolution 1113 would provide for a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to dissolve the existing Judicial Qualifications Commission, which has the power to discipline and remove judges. The legislature would establish a new commission in its place. Approved and sent to the governor.

KANSAS

 Senate Bill 439 would expand the rules allowing for the impeachment of state Supreme Court justices. The guidelines would include "attempting to subvert fundamental laws and introduce arbitrary power" and "attempting to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branch of government." Pending.

MISSOURI

 House Joint Resolution 108 and Senate Joint Resolution 42 would provide for a constitutional amendment to be decided on the November ballot or during a special election. It would outline the procedures a court must follow when the government seeks to limit a person's constitutional rights. It also provides for impeachment when a judge fails to follow such procedures. Pending.

OKLAHOMA

 House Joint Resolution 1069 would provide for a constitutional amendment allowing voters, through a referendum, to overturn Oklahoma Supreme Court opinions on the constitutionality of a law. Pending.

___

Sources: Associated Press research, National Center for State Courts.
When talk turns to trade in Arizona, Mexico tends to dominate the conversation, but we shouldnt forget the importance of our neighbors to the north, officials say.

Canada is the states No. 2 trading partner, with $3.7 billion in bilateral trade in 2015.

And Canadians roots in Arizona go deep, said Glenn Williamson, honorary consul of Canada for Arizona and head of the Canada Arizona Business Council.

Douglas is named after a Canadian mining engineer, he noted, and Chandler was named after a veterinary surgeon from Quebec.

Historically, many Canadian farmers would spend their time in Southern Arizona after harvest season, Williamson said.

They would pull their crops in and then come down, spend four or five months and then go back and do their thing, he said.

Maricopa County has since supplanted Southern Arizona as the destination for many Canadians winter homes, with Canadians owning more than 20,000 houses in that county, about 94 percent of all residential foreign-owned properties.

While not as many Canadians make their home here, Pima County has benefited from Canadian-owned companies such as Bombardier, Stantec and Oracle Mining, said Patrick Cavanaugh, business services coordinator for the county.

Bombardier is Southern Arizonas top aerospace industry employer and has been a major provider of jobs since it acquired Gates Learjet in 1990.

Its Tucson Service Center offers full maintenance of business and commercial aircraft, along with modification, refurbishing and paint services. The company employs about 850 people and plans a $1.5 million renovation of its aircraft interior refurbishing and customization shop, officials said.

And Canadas presence in the region continues to grow, Cavanaugh said.

Fortis Inc., Canadas largest investor-owned utility, bought Tucson-based UNS Energy Corp., the parent company of Tucson Electric Power, in a $4.3 billion deal in 2014.

Mattamy Homes recently purchased 173 acres of city-owned land near South Houghton and East Irvington roads for $8.2 million, and Walton International Development and Management has become one of the largest landowners in Pinal County, officials said.

Overall, there are about 350 Canadian companies operating in the state, with about 146,000 Arizona jobs depending on trade and investment with Canada.

Along with trade and direct investment, Canadian tourism is also big business for the state, with Arizona ranking in the top 10 U.S. destinations. More than a million Canadians visited in 2015, spending about $1 billion.

Theres a reason why going to Toronto is important to the (Arizona) governor, or why the Greater Phoenix Economic Council has five sales trips to Canada going on, Williamson said.

Different strengths

Still, its not hard to see why Arizonas focus tends to be on Mexico.

Though the number of Canadian companies in Arizona is much stronger than Mexicos  more than 300 compared to fewer than 30  in exports ($2.2 billion versus $9.1 billion) and tourism ($1 billion versus $2.6 billion), Mexico dominates.

Were a border state, so its no different than a border state like Michigans relationship with Canada, Williamson said. You tend to go geographically.

And, as in other things, there seems to be a split between Southern and Central Arizona.

Out of the more than $2 billion spent by Mexican visitors, about $1 billion is spent in Pima County alone, officials said, while almost three-quarters of Canadian tourism dollars are spent in Phoenix and Central Arizona. Tucson International Airport does not offer any direct flights to or from Canada, while Sky Harbor has multiple daily flights from several regions there.

Canadian companies account for about 4,000 jobs in Pima County, twice that of jobs from Mexican companies, but Mexico is still the second largest foreign employer. Compare that to Maricopa County, where Mexico barely makes a top 10 dominated by more than 16,000 jobs attributed to Canada.

But its not an either/or situation where resources should be dedicated to the country that does more for the state or a region, officials said. Instead, they said, its about learning how these countries contribute the most to Arizonas economy and directing efforts accordingly.

For Arizona to grow, you have to make decisions based not on who yells the loudest or what proximity is, but what does the data show us, Williamson said.

Last year, the Maricopa Association of Governments and the Canada Arizona Business Council set out to compile a list of international companies doing business in the state.

Pima County officials said they are building off that list and are in the process of compiling data on all the Canadian companies operating in the county.

That gives us an advantage in terms of trying to make sure that were doing outreach with them and seeing if theres opportunities for other Southern Arizona companies that might fall into their supply chain, Cavanaugh said.

Enhancing the countys relationship with Canada is part of the Pima County Economic Development Plan for 2015-17, which includes action items such as determining the impact of Canadian real estate investment, expanding air service to Canada, growing tourism, and finding development opportunities for Canadian companies wanting to do business with Mexico.

Although Tucson does not have a formal Canada strategy, Mayor Jonathan Rothschild said the county and the citys goals are aligned.

Along with the presence of Canadian businesses in Southern Arizona, he pointed to CAID Industries, Raytheon, Sargent, Securaplane, Universal Avionics and Breault Research as important companies in the area that export to Canada.

More can be done to attract Canadian business, he said, but part of that involves the regions continued focus on Mexico and the citys reputation for building relationships there.

We have to remember that three-way relationship between the United States, Mexico and Canada, Rothschild said. Canadians Ive spoken with have commented that our willingness to work across the border makes them more interested in investing here, because they see us as that gateway into Mexico.
Wells Fargo: The company announced that it donated more than $ 8 million in 2015 to support Arizona schools and nonprofits. Visit stories.wellsfargobank.com for more information.

UnitedHealthcare: The company is expanding its partnership with the 4-H Youth Development Program at the University of Arizona by promoting budgeting and nutrition education in underserved communities with the 4-H Food Smart Families program. UnitedHealthcare has donated $55,000 to UA Extension, which administers 4-H programs throughout the state.

Green Valley Pecan Co.: The company has named Sahuarita Unified School District as beneficiary of its Fourth Annual Nut Run 5k, to take place at 8 a.m. Saturday, April 16, at the Green Valley Pecan Company. SUSD will get a portion of the funds raised through race registrations. For information or to register, see taggrun.com/event/nut-run-5k-2/ .

Mobile Meals of Tucson: On March 30, Mayor Jonathan Rothschild and Lea Marquez Peterson, president/CEO of the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, joined Mobile Meals All-Star Driving Team to highlight the persistent issues of hunger and isolation that affect many homebound adults.

The Tucson Police Foundation: The nonprofit foundation is asking for community participation in the Eighth Annual Canine Walk for Cops, sponsored by the Pima County Attorneys Office. The walk starts at 8 a.m. Saturday, April 9 at Brandi Fenton Memorial Park. For information or to register, see tucsonpolicefoundation.org/canine-walk-for-cops/.

Cenpatico Integrated Care: The company was a premier sponsor of the Southern Arizona NAMIWalk on Saturday, April 2, to support the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
PHOENIX  A new federal court ruling means there will not be full-blown gambling at a new Glendale casino for months  if not longer.

U.S. District Judge David Campbell said the Tohono Oodham Nation waived its immunity from lawsuit when it filed suit itself against state Gaming Director David Bergin. The tribe wants Campbell to force Bergin to issue the necessary certifications to let the tribe conduct Class III gaming, complete with slot machines, blackjack and poker.

What that means is Campbell will now consider Bergins claim that tribal officials engaged in fraud in hiding plans for a new casino ahead of a public vote in 2002 giving tribes the exclusive right to operate casino gaming in Arizona in exchange for sharing some revenues with the state.

Tohono Oodham Tribal Chairman Edward Manuel dismissed the ruling as no big deal.

He pointed out a federal appeals court has said, as recently as earlier this week, the compact the state signed does, in fact, allow the tribe to open a casino in Glendale. And he said a federal appeals court already has rejected arguments that anything tribal officials may have promised or stated is irrelevant to the validity of the compact.

But the issue before Campbell is whether Bergin has the authority to declare that those statements amount to fraud and therefore permit the gaming director to declare the tribe unfit to operate the new casino.

Some of those claims go to the question of whether voters, in being asked to approve the gaming compacts, were misled.

Foes of the casino cite a brochure of common questions distributed ahead of the election.

One asks whether the measure would limit the number of tribal casinos in Arizona. The answer: Under Prop. 202, there would be no additional facilities authorized in Phoenix, and only one additional facility permitted in Tucson.

Attorneys for the Tohono Oodham conceded they helped pay for the brochure. But they said it was inaccurate because it was drafted by public-relations consultants who did not necessarily seek to depict the compact with legal precision.

Jane Hull, who was governor at that time, made similar statements in supporting the ballot measure, including one which said the plan ensures that no new casinos will be built in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

And Bergin has cited notes from the Oodham Tribal Council at meetings before the 2002 vote that not only suggest buying land west of Phoenix but putting it in a shell company to keep it quiet while negotiations with the state over the gaming agreement were taking place.

The battle traces its roots to the 1960 construction of the Painted Rock Dam on the Gila River, near what had been the San Lucy District of the Tohono Oodham Reservation. A series of floods from the dam made the nearly 10,000 acres economically unusable.

In 1986 Congress gave the tribe $30 million to buy replacement land in Pima, Pinal or Maricopa counties, with the option of having it become part of the reservation.

Then, in 2002, voters approved the initiative, promoted with promises gaming would be limited to existing reservations and specific limits on the number of casinos each tribe could have.

In 2003, the tribe, using a corporate alias, bought the parcel near Glendale. Its true ownership did not become known until 2009 when the tribe asked the Interior Department to make it part of the reservation.

That has been done. But absent approval from the state, it can operate only Class II games, generally considered analogous with what is legal elsewhere.

That includes things like bingo. So what the tribe has done is install slot machines into what is eventually to be a warehouse. They essentially operate as connected and instantaneous bingo games, technically qualifying.

But tribal officials have made no secret they see full-blown gaming as crucial to their plans for a larger development on the parcel, including a resort.
PHOENIX  Less than a month after publicly declaring ballot harvesting an opportunity for fraud, Secretary of State Michele Reagan offered to do just that for staffers at the governors office.

Reagan acknowledged Saturday she told a gubernatorial staffer on Arizonas Presidential Preference Election Day, March 22, that she and her staffers were available in case anyone had forgotten to mail in their early ballots. Reagan told Capitol Media Services she does not know whether a staffer, who went to follow up, actually collected any ballots.

Reagan said she did nothing wrong, pointing out that the law she got legislators to approve and Gov. Doug Ducey to sign making ballot harvesting a felony does not take effect until later this year.

Anyway, Reagan said it would not matter. She said the law exempts election officials engaged in official duties, which she said includes her, even if she is not working at a polling place.

Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, said thats stretching it.

Shes not doing this as part of her official duties, he said. Shes doing it because shes helping out somebody thats a friend, the very thing the legislation will make into a crime, Farley said.

Reagan countered that everything she does is part of her official duties. She said she and others in her office all are certified as election officials, which allows them to be around ballots and have access to the counting equipment.

Were the very same people that went and, prior to the election, checked all the equipment, sealed all the equipment, had them all on live video feeds so that we could watch all the equipment, she continued. So I would say if theres a group youre going to trust it would be the very same people that just verified the equipment as accurate and working properly.

Reagan was the prime force behind the legislation that will make it a felony to collect voted or unvoted early ballots from another person, with a presumptive sentence of one year in state prison.

Last month, speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference before the bill was approved, Reagan decried the outrageous loophole in Arizona law that would make it easy to cheat. Reagan, a Republican, said it is the radical left who uses ballot harvesting.

Farley said even if he accepts her argument that she and her staffers can collect ballots around the Executive Tower where she, the governor and other state employees have offices, her actions are no more acceptable.

The fact thats legal for her and illegal for everyone else makes it just as bad as if she was illegal herself, he said.

Most telling, to Farley, is that Reagan felt compelled to seek out unmailed early ballots. It just points out the fact that there are many situations in which people want to be able to vote. And then the time passes them by and all of a sudden its too late and they cant make it. Why not have somebody else bring it in?

Farley also said that while proponents of the legislation could cite many instances of people dropping off multiple ballots, there was zero proof of fraud.

When the measure was first debated in the House, Rep. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, brushed aside that lack of evidence. What is indisputable is that many people believe its happening, he said in voting for the measure. And I think that matters.

When the bill was debated in a Senate committee, Sen. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, said he got an email from someone claiming to have evidence of and witnesses to fraud.

Ive been told the way they do it is they collect the ballots early, they put them in a microwave with a bowl of water, steam them open, take the ballots, he said. If they like the way its voted they put them back in. If they dont like the way its voted, they lose that ballot.

Questioned about what happened, Shooter said it was reported to law enforcement, which reported it to the Secretary of States Office, which investigated.

Nothing really happened other than the fact that they did a press release, I think, or something to that effect, he said.
Nearly two weeks after Arizonas Presidential Preference Election, questions remain about why some voters were disenfranchised.

The Arizona Secretary of States Office and the Pima County Board of Supervisors have launched separate inquiries into problems at the county-operated polls. The biggest complaint locally involves voters who said their registration was improperly changed from either Republican, Democrat or Green to party not designated. Only voters who belong to a party may participate in the Presidential Preference Election.

The size of the problem is unclear, but it appears to involve voters who did business with the state-run Motor Vehicle Division. Arizonans can register to vote when they obtain a drivers license or change something such as their address with the MVD.

County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez told the Star last week that some citizens leave their political affiliation blank when they fill out a form with the Arizona Department of Transportation  the parent organization for the Motor Vehicle Division.

When that information is eventually forwarded to the county, Rodriguezs office checks whether the person has a history of voting in a specific party primary. If so, the voter remains registered with that party, she said.

Her office has not kept an official tally of how many times that situation has occurred, Rodriguez said.

The Arizona Department of Transportation says voter registration is entirely in the hands of its customers.

The departments website shows customers the data they have entered and asks them to verify it before the information is transmitted to the secretary of state and then to the County Recorders Office, said Timothy Tait, communications director for the Arizona Department of Transportation.

For customers who visit an ADOT office, one question on the paper form is specific to party affiliation. If a customer is newly registers to vote but leaves party affiliation blank, the ADOT customer service representative is directed to enter blank into the computer system, based on guidelines developed by the secretary of state.

It is up to the county Recorders Office to reach out to the new voter to determine if they want to choose a party or to become party not designated, commonly known as independent.

For those who have been previously registered and are just updating information but fail to check a box for a specific party, counties are directed to default to their previous party selection, Tait said.

The blank designation, Tait explained, signals to county elections officials not to make a change to the voters party preference.

Based on input from Pima County, there is a claim that some customers are having none entered on their file last month. Statewide, only 327 instances of none were found and many of those may have been entered directly by the customer, a written statement from Tait said.

ADOT does not designate customers as PND or Party Not Designated unless that is what the customer inputs. ADOT does not register voters or change party preference  ADOT only conveys customer information, at their request, to the Secretary of State, Tait wrote.

While the county and state agree on how forms left blank should be handled, what still hasnt been explained is how voters in Pima and Maricopa counties who said they were longtime Democrats or Republicans suddenly lost their party affiliation.

The secretary of states investigation will look at that issue and various other election problems, including the long lines at polling places in Maricopa County, said Matt Roberts, the spokesman for Secretary of State Michele Reagan.

The Pima County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the canvass of the March 22 election at a special meeting last week.

At that meeting county officials said they believe the party registration problem can be traced back to the MVD, not the County Recorders Office.

Supervisor Richard Elias asked his staff to check on problems with some of the registrations being changed from a specific party affiliation to an independent via a snafu with motor vehicle divisions.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said he would contact ADOT and the Arizona secretary of state about any processing glitch that would have changed party affiliations involuntarily.

I think we need to act on that quickly, Elias said, noting he heard from many frustrated voters.

Elias lauded the county for deciding in January to spend about $1.1 million on the election, which he said was necessary due to the state Legislatures decision to not fully fund this election.

I think looking at the snafu that took place up in Maricopa County showed us that this Board of Supervisors made a good decision, Elias said.

Maricopa County operated 60 polling places, compared with 200 in 2012.

Pima County had 124 polling places, Elections Director Brad Nelson said.

Supervisor Ally Miller asked the County Attorneys Office to investigate various election irregularities reported by the Recorders Office.

The Recorders Office said 92 voters cast ballots by mail and then tried to vote again at a polling place. Those incidents will be referred to the County Attorneys Office.

Also, three voters tried to cast multiple ballots. Seventy-one would-be voters were not registered in Pima County and 35 others were under the age of 18.

Miller said those cases seem similarly egregious and requested they also be referred to the County Attorneys Office.

Supervisor Ramon Valadez asked that the Election Integrity Commission be involved in the investigation and report back to the supervisors.

The Recorders Office said 8,466 provisional ballots were cast and 5,674 of those were subsequently determined to be valid. A press release from the office further detailed why so many people had to be given provisional ballots on election day.

It said 4,289 voters requested mail-in ballots but showed up at a polling place. Except for the 92 who had sent back the ballot and then tried to vote again on election day, the rest were people who did not return their early ballot and therefore were eligible on election day.

The recorder also reported that 1,856 people who were not registered with a party went to polling places. The Presidential Preference Election is for party members only.

Another 204 people tried to vote but had registered after the Feb. 22 deadline for the March election, while 107 people were given provisional ballots because they asked for one that didnt match their party registration record.

Additionally, 72 voters registrations were in canceled status.
In 1975, Rodolfo Arriaga, a Tucson firefighter for about 20 years, was in a serious car accident. During his recovery he reignited his love of art.

Arriaga healed, retired from the Tucson Fire Department in 1982, and a year later earned a bachelors degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona. He was 53 years old.

Then he went to work. Primarily creating etchings, Arriaga recreated scenes from the beloved downtown barrio where he was born. He also etched churches in towns and cities where he and his wife traveled. He created still-life images, captured buildings and did a self-portrait.

His artwork flowed with his passion and imagination.

He didnt do it for money, said his widow, Brunilda Arriaga. He loved it.

Arriaga passed away in 2014 at the age of 84, and left a trove of works. Others are in homes in Tucson and other U.S. cities.

Some of his works will be on display and auctioned Friday, April 15, at the Sosa Carrillo Fremont House, 151 S. Granada Ave. The event is sponsored by Los Descendientes del Presidio de Tucson and the Arizona Historical Society.

Rudy, as he was known to his family and friends, was a humble and quiet man who loved to dance with his wife, and was a hard worker. While he worked as a firefighter, he operated a commercial arts and sign painting business at their midtown home on Silver Street, near Salpointe Catholic High School, where the Arriagas raised their three children, Carlos Arriaga, Celina Gallagher and Leticia Arriaga-Shrank. In his later years he worked for Sunnyside Unified School District.

Among Arriagas clients were Tucson International Airport and political candidates, including the late governor Raul H. Castro and former U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, said Brunilda Arriaga.

He always had two jobs, said his widow.

His work ethic started when he was a kid, growing up in the barrio and later on the small family ranch on the far north side of town.

Arriaga was born on West 17th Street near North Main Avenue. He was the youngest of six children born to Roberto and Josefina Arriaga. Several years later the Arriaga family lived on small acreage and farmed the land between the Santa Cruz River and the railroad tracks.

When he was about 8 years old, Arriaga went to work at Choice Market, one of many Chinese-owned corner markets dotting the old downtown barrio. He learned some Chinese.

He also learned to love Tucson and made lifelong friends, Brunilda said.

In 1949 he graduated from Tucson High School and not long after joined the U.S. Marine Corps. He went to war in Korea with Easy Company, a local reserve unit made up mostly of Mexican-American young men. In Korea, Arriaga fought in the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in 1950.

He returned to Tucson in 1951 and began courting his future wife, who was a student at the old nursing school at St. Marys Hospital on the west side. They had met before he shipped off.

He chased me, said Brunilda, who met Rudy when he showed up at the hospital with a minor injury. They werent able to date because the hospital nuns did not permit the students to date patients, she added.

While he was away at war, Arriaga wrote numerous letters to his favorite nursing student, who had gone to Los Angeles to further her studies. She still has those letters.

And she has much more. In the time since his passing, Brunilda has found letters from his former clients, including from elected officials, and artwork in the garage where he worked, and in the house. Recently she found a surprising letter from the UA: his acceptance to the masters program in the School of Fine Arts.

I didnt expect all that, said Brunilda.

The family is beyond pleased that they continue to discover reminders of a husband, father and grandfather. He continues to give and reveal his talent and passion. Their memories of a softspoken man are refreshed.

His renderings of the barrio are special to the family. It was where he would return to visit old friends, said his daughter, Celina Gallagher.

He loved the whole culture of the barrio, she said. We always went back to look and to reminisce.
PHOENIX  A top Senate Democrat is walking back statements he made during debate that a proposed new law will allow Arizonans to own everything from silencers to automatic weapons and hand grenades.

It turns out they already can have them  if you comply with federal laws.

In a floor speech earlier this week, Sen. Steve Farley of Tucson, the assistant minority leader, urged colleagues to defeat HB 2446. Farley said he read the measure to essentially forfeit to the federal government the right to decide what weapons Arizonans can possess.

Were talking about bombs, grenades, rockets having a propellant charge of more than 4 ounces and that is explosive, and incendiary or poison gas, Farley argued. And he said the measure also would legalize silencers, automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns.

Not true.

Farley said he misread the briefing he got from staffers on the effect of the legislation.

It looks like its ultimately a technical change that aligns (Arizona law) more closely with federal law, he said.

Thats also the assessment of Todd Rathner. He lobbies for the Arizona State Rifle and Pistol Association, the local affiliate of the National Rifle Association.

He said state law refers to weapons that are registered in the national firearms registry maintained by the Treasury Department.

The reason were changing the law is the registry and transfer records are now maintained by the Department of Justice, not the Treasury Department, he said. So this is really a pretty boring technical correction.

As far as things like sawed-off shotguns, automatic rifles and suppressors  the formal name for what are commonly called silencers  Rathner said theyre already in Arizona. Its just that those who want them have to jump through some more hoops than are necessary just to buy a regular handgun, rifle or shotgun.

And Charles Heller, one of the founders of the Arizona Citizens Defense League, said thats just the beginning of what Arizonans already can legally have.

It could be a tank with a cannon on it, said Heller, who now heads Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

You can own anything you want, he continued. You can own a fighter plane with machine guns on it.

But be prepared to come under some government scrutiny. And be prepared to be patient.

It starts with the purchase, at least on paper. Both Rathner and Heller said most dealers will want their money upfront.

Then theres the application process that includes a form, a fingerprint card and some photos. Those are submitted to what the federal government considers the chief law enforcement officer for the area.

Rathner said federal law has some wiggle room. So, for example, someone living in Tucson could seek permission from the police chief, the county sheriff or even the county attorney.

They certify two things: that the weapon being sought is not illegal under state law and that there is no reason to believe that the person seeking the weapon is a prohibited possessor under the law.

Rathner said that can take 30 to 60 days, depending on the agency.

But it also can take less: He said the Yavapai County Sheriffs Office provides same-day certification.

All that, along with a $200 check, is then sent to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Heller said it could take nine months for a deep background check.

And if everything checks out, ATF sends a tax stamp for the weapon to the dealer.

Once your dealer says, Your stamp came in, you can pick up your weapon, Heller said.

Farley said he now understands the process. But that doesnt mean hes totally convinced that the legislation is a good idea.
OPINION: "While it is important to take on cutting edge programs for an institution, Best Practices would dictate a thorough analysis of the costs of a new program versus the proven effectiveness of that new program. After all, these are taxpayer funds we are dealing with," writes Nick Pierson, candidate for the Pima Community College Governing Board.
Bernard Bunny Fontana, a renowned scholar and prolific author in the field of Southwestern history and archaeology, died early Saturday. He was 85 years old.

Fontanas career stretched six decades. He was a cultural anthropologist, field researcher, archaeologist, historian, writer and co-founder of Patronato San Xavier, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the restoration of Mission San Xavier del Bac.

He helped create the Southwestern Mission Research Center at the University of Arizona in 1965 to support borderlands research and education. That led Fontana and others, beginning in 1974, to organize tours of Spanish colonial missions in Sonora, Mexico, following the Pimeria Alta trail of Jesuit missionary explorer Eusebio Francisco Kino.

Fontana wrote vibrant histories of the indigenous populations of the Southwest, including the Tohono Oodham in Arizona and Sonora and the Tarahumara in Chihuahua, Mexico, and he was the leading expert on Mission San Xavier.

I cant comprehend a Tucson without him. Hes been a voice for the history and the culture of the area for so long, said noted UA anthropologist Thomas E. Sheridan, a longtime friend and colleague.

Anthropologist and folklorist Jim Griffith, a one-time student of Fontana and a next-door neighbor, said his mentor had a tremendous effect on anyone in this part of the world whos interested in history, interaction between cultures and anthropology. On top of that, he was a person of great charm.

Fontana, a humble and humorous man, was generous with his time and research with other scholars, students, journalists and the public.

Sheridan said, He not only published for scholars and the informed public.  He was always thinking of a bigger audience, rather than thinking of an academic audience. Sheridan called Fontana, who was on his doctoral dissertation committee, the go-to guy on everything related to the Mission and the Tohono Oodham.

Fontana told the Arizona Daily Star for a 1990 profile that he wanted to be remembered as a good father to my children. Otherwise, it doesnt really matter to me whether Im remembered or not.

In 1960, Fontana received a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Arizona. He spent 30 years at the UA in roles including field historian with the library, ethnologist in the Arizona State Museum and lecturer in the department of anthropology. He retired from the UA in 1992, but continued to write and research tirelessly.

Because of his work on the Oodham and his residence adjacent to the San Xavier Reservation, he was in a unique position, said Ofelia Zepeda, a UA Regents Professor of linguistics and American Indian studies, and also a Tohono Oodham.

The Oodham at San Xavier were his friends and neighbors, and he was very respectful of them, she added.

He was such a friendly, open person, Zepeda said.People were willing to share their stories and history with him.

Born in 1931 in Oakland, California, Fontana grew up in Yuba City, where he developed an interest in the Maidu indigenous people. His career in anthropology began with an elective course at the University of California at Berkeley. Fontana realized the subject, which became his undergraduate major, touched on his lifelong interests: people, along with natural and cultural history.

It turned out that all the things that interested me as a child were encompassed by that rubric of anthropology, he told the Star.

After college, while stationed at a U.S. Army post in Alaska, he married his high school sweetheart, Hazel Ann McFeely. While there, he met an anthropologist who suggested he consider graduate school at the University of Arizona.

So in 1955, Fontana and his wife moved to an adobe home just outside the reservation so he could attend the UA. There, the family attended Mass at the nearest Catholic church: Mission San Xavier del Bac.

The next year, Fontana decided to focus his research on the neighboring indigenous community  then known as the Papago Indians  living on the San Xavier Reservation, part of the Tohono Oodham Nation.

To do so would require a knowledge of previous research concerning Papagos, and the compilation of an annotated bibliography seemed to be a good way to begin, Fontana wrote in the 2004 introduction to the bibliography.

The work is likely the most comprehensive compilation of research and first-person accounts related to the Papago people. The scope of the bibliography also included work related to Mission San Xavier, which he described as one of North Americas great architectural and art treasures.

Throughout his career, Fontana collected everything he could find in print about the Oodham people and amassed an extensive collection at his home.

In the 1950s, along with fellow graduate student Bill Robinson, Fontana excavated west of the San Xavier Mission and discovered the foundation of the first church built at San Xavier in 1757. Construction of the current church began about 1783.

Starting in the late 1980s, Fontana advocated for and then organized a five-year restoration of the mission, weathered by two centuries of water and sun damage, graffiti and faulty earlier restorations. Fontana brought in international experts on art conservation to head up the interior restoration.

We decided that if we were going to do this, why not go for the very best people in the world? Fontana told the Star in April 1990.

The work needed is not an overnight emergency were dealing with. But if something isnt done, the damage will be irreversible, Fontana said. Restoration and maintenance of the church continues to this day under the guidance of the Patronato group he helped found.

Fontanas personal ties to the church were even stronger than his professional ones: His three children were baptized and later married at the mission, and the funerals of one of his sons and his wife were held there, the Star reported in 2010.

He was preceded in death by his wife, who died in 2009, and their son, Geoffrey Earl Francis, who died in 2000. He is survived by his son, Nicholas Anthony Fontana, and his daughter, Francesca Ann Fontana.

He devoted 10 years to painstakingly cataloging the Christian art at Mission San Xavier with photographer Edward McCain. The resulting 9-pound, 376-page work, A Gift of Angels: The Art of Mission San Xavier del Bac, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2010.

What Im hoping, Fontana said then, is itll awaken other people that we have a real treasure here that transcends place.

When the Star asked about a turning point in his life, he said, Being born. I dont think there really are such things as turning points. Life is a series of little twists and turns, and mine has been blessed by a lot of continuity.

A memorial service will be held Friday at San Xavier at 10 a.m., followed by a reception in the mission patio.

The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Patronato San Xavier, P.O. Box 522, Tucson, AZ 85702.
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Patna : The Imam of Islams holiest shrine Kaba in Mecca in Saudi Arabia on Saturday denounced terrorism in the name of Islam, making it clear that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism.

Holy book Quran and Hadish  saying of Prophet Mohammad are against violence and terror. Islam has nothing to do with terrorism or terror acts, said Sheikh Saleh Bin Muhammad Bin Ibrahim Aal Talib at a crowded press conference at a posh hotel here amid tight security.

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He said violence has no place in Islam. Islam is what Quran and Prophet Mohammad stand for, it is not what terrorists or terror outfits claim.

Without naming terror activities by the Islamic State (IS), Al Qaeda and other terror organisations, Sheikh Saleh said Islam is against the killing of innocent people and creating terror.

These days some terror outfits have been killing innocent people and using suicide bombers to kill people are wrong and have nothing to do with teaching and preaching of Islam, he said.

Sheikh Saleh said that killing of innocent people and use of suicide bombers to kill people are haram in Islam. What happened in Brussels and other places, where innocent people were killed, Islam has nothing to do with it.

Stressing on the need for peace and harmony across the World, he said: Muslims are the main victim of terrorism. Large number of Muslims in Muslim countries have been killed.

Sheikh Saleh said Islam is a religion that guarantees security of life of the people. Islam stands to protect five things including human life,irrespective of regions and religions across the World.

He said that the name of God means peace, safety and security. But some people are trying to defame Islam. Even there is no force permissible in Islam in the matter of religion. There are no words to use force to convert people to Islam.

Sheikh Saleh said that Saudi Arabia is working to end terrorism is accepted by western countries also. The country is facing terrorism for the last 20 years. Terrorism has harmed Saudi Arabia.

Earlier, Sheikh Saleh addressed a gathering of people, mostly Muslims, on Islam and World Peace.

He was slated to visit Patna on Friday but his visit was postponed after as he was denied a visa by the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia.


Help India!

New Delhi : Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti on Saturday said the central government was ready to face any water crisis in case this years monsoon proves to be disappointing.

Government is ready to face any kind of drought situation (in any part of the country) if monsoon fails, the minister told a press conference here.

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She also announced that the fourth India Water Week with a theme of Water for all: Striving together will be held here from April 4, with Israel as the partner country and all water-related issues will be discussed.

We will learn from Israel how to deal with all sorts of water problems. It has many success

stories related to water, she said.

The minister said that many states have been becoming partner states in the whole scheme of water conservation and its judicious usage and the central government will pay incentives to those of them who will complete water projects within the specified deadline.

The minister also called upon the Congress to help the central government in getting the water projects implemented smoothly in the states it rules.

I appeal to (Congress president) Sonia Gandhi we need support from you, she said, calling for the opposition party to be pro-development.

About the Narendra Modi governments river-linking programme, she said that it was on and she along with other stake holders was working hard to make it a reality.

She also urged people to think about innovative ideas to save and use water judiciously.

Rain water harvesting and other water saving methods and waters judicious use would help us deal with water-related problems, the minister added.
Help India!

By Mohd Asim Khan

New Delhi : A day after influential Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband issued a fatwa that it was not proper for Muslims to chant Bharat Mata ki Jai, the Indian Muslim leadership stood divided on the issue.

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While most leaders and religious scholars agreed with the edicts basic premise  that Muslims cannot worship India as a deity despite their deep love for the country, some questioned the timing and political relevance of the fatwa, while one took a contrary stand.

Without commenting on the fatwa, Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind president Maulana Arshad Madani took exception to the view that it was improper for Muslims to chant the slogan.

I dont think there is anything wrong in chanting Bharat Mata ki Jai as this is similar to saying Jai Hind, which Muslims do without hesitation, Madani told IANS from Deoband.

Elaborating on his contention, he said: See, this is about perception. The Hindus perceive India as a deity, a devi. Muslims should not see it as a deity and see Bharat Mata as their motherland. Then there is nothing wrong in saying Bharat Mata ki Jai.

Madani, a widely-respected Islamic scholar who teaches hadith (Prophets traditions) at Darul Uloom, argued what would be the position of Muslim scholars if Hindus make a picture of Allah and start worshipping it.

Would you stop calling Allahu Akbar then? he said.

However, other Muslim scholars and leaders did not take Madanis arguments kindly.

Firstly, I dont understand what Maulana Arshad Madani is saying. To me calling Bharat as Mata  a deity  is shirk (polytheism). Secondly, I find the whole debate around this issue unnecessary and uncalled for, said Jama Masjid Delhis Shahi Imam Maulana Ahmed Bukhari.

Bukhari also questioned the timing and politcal relevance of the fatwa.

Although I agree with the jist of this fatwa, its timing is ill-conceived. The Darul Uloom muftis should have weighed the ramifications of it. It comes when a number of crucial states are in the midst of elections. And this fatwa can be used to polarise the electorate in the poll bound states, Bukhari told IANS.

Slamming Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi for his irresponsible statement on the issue, the he said that Muslim religious scholars and leaders should guard themselves from being dragged into unnecessary and uncalled for arguments on this issue.

Nevertheless, many others agreed with the fatwa.

The fatwa is right and we support it. Muslims cannot worship anyone but Allah. Those who are raising questions on Muslims patriotism, let me say that Muslims are far more patriotic than they are, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind president Maulana Jalaluddin Umari told IANS.

We love India as it is our country and we need not prove it before anyone. Chanting Bharat Mata ki Jai cannot be the only benchmark for patriotism. We can love our counrty without making it a deity and worshipping it, he said.

All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat president Naved Hamid too agreed with Umaris views.

Please note that we are not Muslims by compulsion but by choice. We have ourselves chosen India to be our country. So there is no question of proving our loyalty to this country through a slogan that goes against our religious beliefs, Hamid told IANS.

Secondly, it is not just about Muslims but also about other monotheistic faiths such as Sikhism. Will Sikhs agree to worship Bharat as a deity? he added.

Hamid also said that doubting Indian Muslims love for their motherland was only an attempt to create divisions in society.
Help India!

New Delhi : A National Investigation Agency inspector was shot dead while returning from a wedding in Uttar Pradeshs Bijnor district, sources said on Sunday.

Inspector Mohammad Tanzil and his wife were shot at by unidentified assailants on motorbikes who followed the couple near Sahaspur town on Saturday night.

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His wife was critically also injured and was rushed to Cosmos Hospital in Moradabad.

Tanzil Ahmad, deputy superintendent of police, was returning with his wife after attending the wedding function late Saturday night when the assailants on motor bikes shot the couple from close range near Sahaspur town.

Sources said that he was reportedly shot 21 times, and his wife has sustained four bullets. The children were unhurt.

While Tanzil was pronounced dead on arrival at a medical facility in Moradabad, his wife Farzana is critical and battling for her life, a senior official told IANS.

She is admitted at a hospital in Noida.

NIA officials from Lucknow has rushed to the scene to further probe the incident.


Help India!

By Amit Kumar for Twocircles.net

South Karimganj: Imagine if your party manages to win, with sizeable margins, all five assembly seats in an area where there is no limit on the kind of development that can be delivered. Imagine a situation where voters of the entire constituency, across religions and caste, showed faith in you and believed you would make their respective areas a better place to live.

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Now, stop imagining: this is precisely what the voters of the five constituencies of Karimganj districtRathbari, Karimganj North, Karimganj South, Patharkandi and Badarpurgave to the Congress in 2011.

Five years later, when the Congress leadership in the area are left with asking people to vote for them because the central government led by the BJP failed to deposit Rs15 lakh in every citizens account, you know the Congress is treading a thin line. No wonder, then, that the BJP and the AIUDF smell blood, and for good reasons.

An ITI centre, a railway line that has yet to take off in half the constituency, a road system that is virtually non-existent in large parts, and a crumbling health system where people find it difficult to avail even the basic medicines: the Congress promised much and has delivered little, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among its citizens. After more than15 years, if they are saying that an ITI centre is the best that they can do, then how long will they take for us to see engineering or a medical college of repute? Why should minorities aim only to get employed via ITIs. Is that all we can aim for, asked Shoaib Khan, a 20-year-old unemployed from the Badarpur constituency. He said he would consider voting for the AIUDF because The AIUDF will work for the minorities and the poor in this area as they are its core voters.

Why AIUDF and BJP believe they can win

It is no wonder that a party that has been in power for 17 years is bound to face a strong wave of anti-incumbency and what is happening in Karimganj is no different. The district, a minority concentrated district, has seen power change hands regularly among different parties and even the current MP of Karimganj is from AIUDF. However, if this was meant as an indication to the Congress to work harder, the party seems to have missed the trick. People mostly expressed disappointment at the work of the existing MLAs, alleging that any work that has happened has been to ensure that the Congress party members are kept happy. In Badarpur, if you notice, the inner lanes are in a better position than the bypass. This is not a bad thing, but the problem is, even that contract went to a Congress voter, says Abdul Salim, a pan-shop owner from Karimganj South. To get your work done, you have to be working for them, he added. When asked if he could prove that the Congress gave contracts to its own members, his simple answer was, ask anyone.

But beyond blame games lies a larger story. Unlike other parts of Asaam, Karimganj does not rely heavily on agriculture and in fact, just a little over one-third of its population is directly involved in farming. Most jobs, or at least the ones that still remain, exist in the small industries that dot the district: cold storage, wire netting, brick kilns and bamboo products.

However, this is not turning out to be enough for the people and over the past two years things got worse for the youth in this area: the Congress had initially said that clearing the Teacher Eligibility Test would guarantee a job, only to later back track and say that the Test meant that a person was merely qualified to teach, not be guaranteed of a job. When the people who qualified in the Tests protested in Guwahati, they were lathicharged. The people in our area (North Karimganj) put our faith in Congress even though the BJP leader Mission Ranjan Das had won on a couple of occasions in the past and had done some work. I shifted to Congress because I thought that their candidate, Kamalakhya Dey Purkayastha, because I believed he would work better, said Tapan Das, a school teacher. However, I regret my decision and will vote for Mission Ranjan (BJP) this time. With Modi at the centre, I believe it is right to give mandate to BJP for a strong government, he added.

However, while this might sound like music to the BJPs ears, it is unlikely that they are guaranteed their seat. Even if the anti-Congress wave in North Karimganj turns out to be true, it is unlikely that the BJP will surf alone; the AIUDF can see its chance too. On March 31, in a show of strength, the party organized a massive rally in Badarpur, attended by the Party supremo Badruddin Ajmal and the JD(U) President Sharad Yadav. A crowd of about 10,000 heard Ajmal and Yadav talk about how voting for the BJP or the Congress would potentially endanger the communal harmony in the region.

Among the five seats, the AIUDFs strongest chance seems to be in South Karimganj, which has created a record of sorts by having the maximum number of candidates in the fray-25. Given the demographics of South Karimganj, it is unlikely that the BJP will be able to challenge the top two contestants-sitting MLA Siddique Ahmed of the Congress and Abdul Aziz Khan of AIUDF. However, in Sipra Goon, the BJP has put up a face familiar to the local people as Goon has contested, and lost, from the same constituency in the past.

The one dampener for the Congress and the AIUDF, and thereby the only ray of hope for the BJP in this area, is that of the25 candidates from this area, 23 are Muslims, which is likely to cut the share that the Congress and the AIUDF might have received. For Goon, her vote from the Hindus is almost guaranteed, but is unlikely to prove to be enough. A senior leader of AIUDF, who wished to remain anonymous while speaking to Twocircles.net, said that the party was almost sure of a minimum of two seats from the Karimganj areaSouth Karimganj and Badarpurwhile it expects a good fight in the remaining three seats. One thing is sure: there is no way the Congress will retain all the five seats, he said, before conceding that there was a good chance that the North Karimganj seat might go the BJPs way. Irrespective of how Karimganj votes, it is clear that the den of Congress is most likely to be breached.
Help India!

By Amit Kumar, Twocircles.net

Hailakandi: The district of Hailakandi, Assam, has been a hotspot of political activity in the past few weeks, and understandably so. The three constituencies in this areaHailakandi, Katlicherra and Algapurare up for polling in the first phase of elections on April4, and given that currently, the three sitting MLAs are from the Indian National Congress, the opposition parties are trying their level best to break into this area.

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While Indian National Congress Gautam Roy is the MLA from Katlicherra, his wife Mandira Roy represents Algapur and Abdul Muhib Mazumder represents Hailakandi. In what is proving to be a common theme across Assam, the Congress and its trust in dynastic politics sees Gautam Roys son Rahul Roy contesting from the Algapur seat this time, in place of his mother. However, unlike Dima Hasao, where GD Langthasa has been replaced by his son Nirmal Langthasa who is contesting for the first time, the case with Rahul Roy is slightly different. He has experience in contesting elections and had represented the area between 2006 and 2011. In 2011, however, he lost to Assam Gana Parishads Sahidul Islam Choudhury, but after Choudhurys death in2013, Mandira Roy won the bypolls in 2013.

Rahul Roy is banking on what he called the development model to come back to power. On what was to be the last rally before the area went to polls on April 4, Roy stressed on the work done by his mother, and by him before that, and assured the people that should he come to power, he will ensure that the areas development continues. Like all Congress leaders, he too did not miss a chance to take potshots at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and said that the BJPs politics of communalism would find no takers in this area. To the credit of the Roys, however, given the general lack of roads in the Barak Valley, Algapur and Hailakandi in general presented a welcome change. It is not as if the roads are perfect, but compared to the situation in the neighbouring district of Karimganj, it is a huge improvement.

The condition in Hailakandi is different, however. Here, the BJP candidate Soumyajit Dutta Choudhury has been gaining momentum and enjoys a huge support among the locals. He seems to be a hard-working man and given how inefficient the Congress has been, I would like to vote for the BJP because they too deserve a chance, Shib Sunder Das, a pan seller, told Twocircles.net. Unlike Algapur, the town of Hailakandi has seen progress stalled in some ways, with no new avenues of employment coming up in the last few years. Unlike Algapur, we are not into farming. This is a town and we need jobs, but we are not seeing any and as such, the local youth has to either go to Silchar or Guwahati to work, or remain unemployed, said Abdul Karim, a 24 year old resident of Hailakandi. Congress chances have not been helped by the fact that its candidate, Anam Uddin Laskar, was involved in a spat with a traffic cop last year and was accused of attacking the cop, which greatly damaged his reputation.

The issue of unemployment, in fact, is one of the biggest issues that can dent Congress chances in the elections across the state. From 1 lakh unemployed youth in 2001, the state now has over 26 lakh unemployed youth, and for this section, a vote for Congress means that the status quo is unlikely to change, and the Congress party members are well aware of this. Yes, there is a strong resentment against the Congress among the youth, conceded a senior member of the Congress state unit of Hailakandi, but we are working towards addressing the issue, he added without getting into the details of how exactly do they plan to do so.

More importantly, the challenge to both the Congress and BJP will come from AIUDF, although residents are giving a much lesser chance to Badruddin Ajmals party in this area. The AIUDF candidate from Hailakandi, Anwar Uddin Laskar, does not enjoy a huge base in this area and will not be helped by the fact that the Muslim vote will be split among the AIUDF, Congress and 11 other Muslim candidates. Muslims would be much better off voting for the Congress than the AIUDF since the Congress has a much higher chance of winning, explained Mir Uddin Barbhuiya, a senior citizen of Hailakandi who retired as a school teacher about 10 years ago.

The only seat among the three which the Congress is almost sure of winning is the Katlicherra constituency, but that is understandable given that Gautam Roy has been representing the area for over 30 years. In fact, his voters credit him with bringing peace to the area and building bridges and colleges and given that none of his rivals have the same presence in the area, he is likely to sail through. The same cannot be said for his son, however.


Dan Bilzerian and Samantha Abernathy Complete Vegas-To-L.A. Bike Rides

April 03 2016 Donnie Peters

Prop bets and poker players go hand in hand, and recently both Dan Bilzerian and Samantha Abernathy completed some pretty massive ones. Both bets involved riding a bicycle from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, a trek of over 300 miles.

Bilzerian Completes Ride, But Bets Under Arbitration

Bilzerian took off on a bicycle from Las Vegas on Tuesday, March 29, shortly after 3:30 p.m. PT. Less than 33 hours later, he had arrived in Los Angeles. His bet was reportedly worth $600,000 against Bill Perkins.

Bilzerian was also said to have a big bet against Rick Salomon. Following the completion of the ride, the wagers involved have now gone to arbitration, according to Perkins. Perkins did inform PokerNews that Bilzerian is insured against an unfavorable ruling in both arbitrations.

The following video is from the start of Bilzerian's ride, including visual of the Nevada police escort and halting of traffic on Las Vegas Blvd. for several minutes while Bilzerian got up to speed.

The terms of the bet were such that Bilzerian must complete the ride in 48 hours or less and that he had until the end of March 31, 2016. If Bilzerian was to get arrested along the way, the bet would be considered a wash. If Bilzerian was to get pulled over and delayed, time would be added to the clock. There could be no motor or assist added to the bike.

According to Perkins, various posts on social media, and the website dedicated to Bilzerian's bet, 48hourbet.com, Bilzerian had five weeks to train and had the help of none other than Lance Armstrong. When the day came, Bilzerian was well prepared with a convoy that would travel with him, a police escort for the Nevada portion of the ride, and several different bikes he would use at different portions of the trek.

The initial cruiser bike Bilzerian began on

Nevada police escort prepared for first portion of ride

One of the vans in Bilzerian's convoy

According to 48hourbet.com, Bilzerian spent over $125,000 in equipment and preparation for the ride.

Bilzerian also put to use a piece of advice from Armstrong in regards to drafting. It was said that Armstrong "offered up some advice to Dan about drafting behind vehicles on the highway," and Bilzerian did just that, riding for a great amount of time behind a van that look designed as a drafting element. This raised complaints from Salomon, who, according to Perkins, put up $250,000 against Bilzerian's private jet that Bilzerian "would die or become braindead attempting his bike ride."

The "drafting van" in question

After arguments ensued involving the van Bilzerian was riding behind, the van was removed.

Samantha Abernathy Did It, Too!

Just over two weeks before Bilzerian took off for Los Angeles on a bike, Samantha Abernathy completed her bike ride to the City of Angels from Las Vegas. Her bet was with Bilzerian for $10,000, but she was on a freeroll, having to put up no money herself.

The terms of Abernathy's bet were similar to Bilzerian's, but she had 72 hours to complete the ride. Although some might say her accomplishment wasn't nearly as strong as Bilzerian's because of the added 24 hours she had, Abernathy didn't have the assistance of a police escort, a convoy, multiple bikes, a drafting van, and the training of Armstrong to help her get through it.

Samantha Abernathy

*Lead image courtesy of Samantha Abernathy's Twitter.

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Sharelines Dan Bilzerian and Samantha Abernathy complete Vegas-to-L.A. bike rides.
Huawei helps Brazil cities smarten up Updated: 2016-04-04 03:55 By MAO PENGFEI and ZHAO YAN in Rio de Janeiro(China Daily Latin America)

Leading Chinese telecommunications company Huawei this week geared up to bring cutting-edge urban development to Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil's industrial powerhouse state, Rio Grande do Sul.

In conjunction with the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS), Huawei on March 31 launched the Smart City Innovation Center, a testing ground for smart electronic and digital solutions for better urban living.

The partnership combines Huawei's technological capabilities with the university's research capacity to generate innovative answers to increasingly complex urban problems in the areas of mobility, safety, public services and management, among others.

Rio Grande do Sul Gov Jose Ivo Sartori, who was on hand for the ceremony, stressed the importance of technology and innovation as a means to overcome the economic crisis affecting Brazil.

"A lot of creativity can always overcome hardships and difficulties," said Sartori, adding "the crisis is also an opportunity for growth, and science and technology are essential, as is innovation".

Smart cities need smart energy, smart mobility, smart public services, and smart buildings and homes to sustainably meet the economic, environmental and social needs of residents, institutions and companies, and these are the challenges that the research and development center, located at the PUC-RS Scientific and Technological Park, will tackle, according to promoters.

Liu Wei, vice-president of Huawei Brazil, said "the official launch of our center marks a new beginning", which aims to turn the concept of a smart city into a reality.

"We want to turn technical and technological successes into benefits for Brazil's society and economy," said Liu, adding the smart city concept "has already borne fruit in China and Europe, but is still in the theoretical stage in Brazil.

"We hope that Huawei, PUC-RS, the city of Porto Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul can work together to turn the concept into a reality," he added.

The win-win alliance provides Huawei with an ideal venue for testing smart solutions to logistical challenges. PUC-RS extends over nearly 55 hectares and bustles with an average of 60,000 people a day, according to local news website Baguette.

The state capital hopes the partnership will also help revitalize the city's Fourth District, home to its industrial zone.

"Porto Alegre can serve as a great laboratory for all these challenges, starting with the Fourth District," said Jorge Audy, president of a national association of innovation promoting agencies and a professor at PUC-RS.

Well-managed cities can improve their residents' quality of life by providing intelligent transport systems that can reduce accidents, fatalities and injuries, and boost fuel efficiency and conserve energy, according to Audy.

Intelligent networks can also improve safety and cut down on crime, he added.

Huawei's Global Safe City Summit, held in mid-March in Hanover, Germany, highlighted the importance of safety to thriving modern cities, and the increasing role that information and communications technology (ICT) plays in protecting lives and property.

"New ICT technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile broadband, cloud computing, Big Data, and big video, are connecting environmental, transportation, energy, electric power, finance, and manufacturing systems in cities," Yan Lida, president of Huawei's Enterprise Business Group, said in a speech to summit participants.

"They are not only enabling the connection between networks and information, but also the connection between objects, between people and objects, and between people and ideas. These connections help cities build comprehensive protection systems, prevent incidents before they occur, and implement rapid, accurate decision-making through interdepartmental collaboration," said Yan.

As part of its Safe City project, Huawei helped the East African nation of Kenya devise and implement a comprehensive anti-crime solution that integrated a call-taking and dispatching system, video surveillance, and intelligent analysis (license plate recognition and violation detection) to improve the country's incident management and crisis management capabilities.

The solution was used to successfully manage Pope Francis' visit to Kenya in 2015, and has helped to cut crime by 46 percent in areas covered by the Safe City solution, the company said, citing an annual report from the Kenyan police.

In Hanover, Germany, Huawei also launched a Smart City lighting solution that connects street lamps to the IoT and adopts a GIS-based management system to "enable cities to enhance the control and performance of street lamps,"the website RCR Wireless News reported.

"The solution provides municipal managers with status information on each lamp, and enables control of switches and brightness of individual street lamps, allowing on-demand lighting and a claimed 80 percent reduction in energy consumption," the site said.

"Using this solution, Huawei claims one person can manage thousands of lamps in different streets. When a street lamp malfunctions, the system is automatically alerted and sends a message to notify maintenance personnel," it added.

Today, half the world's population lives in cities and as that figure grows it should lend more weight to Huawei's Smart City initiative.
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Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh held talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington, DC on March 31.  VNA/VNS Photo Thanh Tuan

Washington, DC (VNS)  Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh held talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington, DC on March 31 to discuss measures to strengthen the two countries comprehensive partnership and prepare for President Barack Obamas visit to Viet Nam.

Minh affirmed that Viet Nam attaches great significance to its co-operation with the US, and appreciated both countries efforts to realise the agreements reached by their leaders.

Vietnamese leaders welcomed the upcoming visit by President Obama, he stated, suggesting that the two countries prepare well and intensify exchanges in order to reach specific agreements during this visit.

Kerry said he hopes the two countries will step up collaboration to deepen their comprehensive partnership in strategic areas, including economy, trade, investment, education, climate change response, science and technology.

He said they should aim for the early establishment of mechanisms to intensify people-to-people exchanges, including an agreement related to the Peace Corps teaching of the English language in Viet Nam.

The US indicated it will continue efforts to support Viet Nam in addressing war consequences, particularly detoxifying dioxin-contaminated areas, and in improving the capacity of law enforcement and marine police forces.

Kerry referenced the negative impacts of climate change that Viet Nam and other countries in the region are suffering from, confirming that the US will carry out more specific measures to help Viet Nam deal with drought and saltwater intrusion.

Referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), he said the Obama administration appreciates Viet Nams efforts in how it worked with other countries to conclude negotiations on the deal, affirming that the US is now canvassing the Parliament to approve the agreement in 2016.

The US will continue efforts to accelerate recognition of Viet Nam as a market economy, and provide technical assistance to the nation during its implementation of the TPP, Kerry added.

At the talks, the two sides also exchanged opinions on regional and international situations, including the East Sea issue.

The US affirmed that it backs efforts to ensure maritime security and safety, and that disputes should be handled through legal processes and by peaceful means on the basis of international law.

On Wednesday, Minh received leaders from the Boeing company and the Asian Coast Development Ltd (ACDL), during which he pledged to continue facilitating operations of foreign enterprises in Viet Nam.

He asked Boeing to provide continued technical assistance to help Viet Nam gain a Category 1 rating in aviation safety as soon as possible, as it will allow the country to establish a direct air route to the US.

Minh is in the US to attend the fourth Nuclear Security Summit.  VNS
by Nguyen Viet Thanh

Parentless at six, Nguyen Ba Tinh was nurtured in the pagoda. Seven years had gone by. Today monk Yen Trang took Tue Tinh to Giao Thuy region. Sitting on a boat, they both found Heaven and Earth so immense; the water of the Nhi Ha River was red. Tue Tinh was sent to study Han script with Dung Nhue from a well-known scholar.

It took them only one day to reach the destination. The two students had learnt both Buddha sutras and Han script. In the study room, there were two kinds of books arranged on two separate shelves. During their stay there, the two students often visited the pagodas where there were young Buddhist nuns who still had long hair. It was rumored that Tue Tinh had fallen in love with nun am Thanh from Ha Pagoda. And the monk and the teacher heard the rumor.

When there was the death anniversary of the ancestor of Giao Thuy Pagoda, monk Yen Trang came a few days in advance. One morning they called their students to come and talk. Monk Yen Trang asked:

Tue Tinh, do you know why I sent you here?

I remembered the day when you took me here, you told me that I should together with Dung Nhue strive to become a Buddhist monk. Doing or learning requires a friend.

What have you learnt from Confucianism?

To keep the correct name, teacher!

Have you any difficulties?

After a moment, Tue Tinh answered:

We are meeting with pieces of slander. To overcome it, we have to do a lot of good things. We have to devote ourselves to following the right path.

The two teachers found that Tue Tinh was honest.

Teacher Yen Trang looked to Dung Nhue:

What do you think, Dung Nhue?

Teacher, my friend is correct in saying it.

Now you live near Tue Tinh, now you live far from him, so how can you be sure about it?

Teacher, if we say Buddhism is at heart, what we think, the outsider cannot tell it, but the Buddhists know it. My friend always says it!

The two teachers nodded their heads. The interrogation was over. Tue Tinh thanked Dung Nhue in silence. They were of the same age, but Dung Nhue always called Tue Tinh his brother. Although Dung Nhue was stronger and good at martial arts, Dung Nhue always said Tue Tinh was superior to him.

One day, while going to Thanh Hoa to sell traditional medicine, they met the highway men. Thanks to his good martial arts, Dung Nhue beat the highway men away.

Teacher Giao Thuy and teacher Yen Trang followed Buddhism together when they were small. They had practiced Oriental medicine by exploiting medicinal herbs to treat diseases and save people. They taught Tue Tinh and Dung Nhue to follow their careers.

Tue Tinh had passed the first-degree provincial examination and became famous, because living in the pagoda, he could learn both Buddhism and Confucianism. It was quite rare. On the other hand, he also practiced Oriental medicine. It was also rumored that he had an affair with a nun in Ha Pagoda. Ha Pagoda was situated on Son Nam Thuong area. Mulberries were grown and silkworms were raised there. There were ancient mulberry trees with mistletoes on them. Mistletoe was used to cure joint inflammation. The mistletoe was harvested and dried. When Tue Tinh came to get the medicinal herbs, the nun of the pagoda was very solicitous. They became close. She had an oval face, two black eyes and a sweet voice.

One day she said to him:

My home village was in oai County. I was forced by my family to marry a guy from a rich family, but he was stupid. I ran away down here and lived in the pagoda. I was very happy to see you here. I know you are not entirely devoted to living a religious life; you still do medical work and learn, and particularly you are yet to be tonsured. I know that you live in the pagoda so as one day you would become successful in your examinations. I could live only with a man who loves me, who respects me.

Tue Tinh was still confused when the nun embraced him, sobbing violently. In the end, he calmed down and read the sutras. The nun quickly walked back. Tue Tinh said slowly:

If you are yet to separate from the predestined affinity, youd better give up the frock. For me, I am yet to get tonsured, I am already a proselyte.

I can return to the secular life when I meet a person as perfect as you. Until now, I know there is nobody like you. You are the closed door. I thank you anyway.

When they were talking with each other, it seemed they were being followed. From then on, Tue Tinh never came to Ha Pagoda. Actually he had contained himself. After that meeting, the image of the nun of Ha Pagoda had always been in his mind. He felt moved and missed her. One night, her image entered his dream.

Dung Nhue was partly different from Tue Tinh. He was a frank person who could get angry easily.

When winter just came, monk Yen Trang wanted to meet him. Tue Tinh quickly packed and took a boat back to the pagoda. It took him two days to get back. Having just seen the teacher, Tue Tinh was startled. It seemed that the teacher was going to tell him something serious. The next morning, Tue Tinh was asked to meet the monk.

Ive felt something wrong inside me for these days. Teacher Giao Thuy and I have taught you for more than thirty years and I am glad that you can follow my way. In the near future you will take charge of this pagoda. The pagoda has got the job of making traditional medicine, so you should expand it. I know you are capable of doing it; that is why I am yet to get you tonsured, you see. You have to do charity work better, giving medicine and curing diseases for poor people. The country is now in difficult time. We should help the country. You have to think about human love and help people in these difficult times.

Tue Tinh cried and said:

I have great gratitude for you, teacher! I promise I will do everything I can to return my gratitude to you by practicing traditional medicine much better.

The monk did not eat anything for a few days. He only sat and meditated. In the end of the day, he passed away at 80. Teacher Giao Thuy and Dung Nhue stayed back for seven days to care for the incense burning and preaching. Finally teacher Giao Thuy said to Tue Tinh and Dung Nhue:

My brother has gone and it will be my turn sooner or later. He told you everything before he went to the other world. What I want is for you two to live like us.

Tue Tinh and Dung Nhue could not say anything. They embraced each other, crying. It was true that teacher Giao Thuy passed away one month later. Tue Tinh and Dung Nhi cared for everything for the teachers funeral.

Tue Tinh came back to Yen Trang Pagoda. He gathered all the beggars and gave jobs to them. They started doing the field work, reclaimed the land and collecting medicinal herbs. Tue Tinh thought hard about how to build Buddhism in the heart and mind of the people. He started to go to the remote areas to mobilise people to build pagodas. Over about 10 years, Tue Tinh built a dozen pagodas. He was busy teaching and practicing medicine. He also continued to study hard so as to be able to sit for the examinations. Twenty years had gone by since he succeeded in passing the provincial examinations and now in old age, he passed the first-rank doctorate court feudal examinations. His clan members wanted him to leave the cloister and become a court mandarin.

A ceremony was to be held in the pagoda to congratulate him. Dung Nhue came a few days in advance to together with the Buddhist monks and nuns to prepare. The nun from Ha Pagoda was also present to cook vegetarian food to treat the guests. Tue Tinh got slightly startled upon knowing that the nun from Ha Pagoda was here. The welcome-home celebration was organised ceremoniously. Tue Tinh remembered that it was 20 years since he had a stormy time in Ha Pagoda.

At this time, the country was being invaded and Tue Tinh was recruited for a year. During this time he had gone to many places and understood the peoples plight. A lot of people had fallen ill without medicine. When he returned home from the soldiers life, he was determined to write books on traditional medicine, on the experience in treatment of diseases and on medicinal plants that could help cure a lot of fatal diseases. Particularly, he had tonsured and become a monk. Within five years, he had completed two books: Nam duoc than hieu (Marvellous efficacious Vietnamese medicine) and Hong Nghia giac tu y thu (Hong Nghia Medicine Book).

One day, he was warranted by the King to be an ambassador in the northern country. It was lightning news for him. He was stunned by it. A lot of questions were in his head. He wondered if the northern country wanted him to come and serve it. He felt a presentment that this trip had no day for him to return home. A lot of people advised him to pretend to be a stupid person. But he thought if there was a sick person who needed him, could he help the person?

***

He suddenly woke up at the crow of a cock. Tue Tinh was meditating. He remembered that in the past few days, he had received guests and taken leave of his dear ones. Then he had prepared luggage to hit the road to be an ambassador in the foreign land. At the age of 55, he had experienced so many ups and downs and learnt a lot of lessons in his life. He walked out and enjoyed the fresh air. He inhaled deeply the air of his homeland so as to keep it for good in the exotic land. He came in and burnt incense and preached. In the middle of it, tears were running down his cheeks, and he sobbed:

Oh, my teacher!.... My teacher!.

Translated by Manh Chuong
Almost shut out of India's expanding solar-panel market, the US won a ruling against domestic-production requirements, but Indian companies are overwhelmingly choosing Chinese products over US and Indian.

US solar-panel exports to India-which doubled its solar capacity over 22 months ending January 2016-fell 83 per cent since 2011, while Chinese exports grew 90 per cent over the same period, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of Indian commerce ministry data.

Plunging US exports led that country to successfully dispute a "make in India" requirement for solar panels and modules used in the country's solar-power programme. That requirement was inconsistent with international trade norms, the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled late in February.

Domestic-content requirements (DCR) were imposed in 2011 for government solar-power projects.

India's import of solar panels from across the world increased 60 per cent, from $821 million in 2014-15 to $1.3 billion in 2015-16 (April-December), despite the DCR, and it has been reported that India will contest the ruling.

The US ranks fifth in terms of India's imports of solar panels, based on data for 2015-16 (April-December). Over the last five years, India has imported solar panels worth $298 million from the US. India's imports of solar panels from the US declined 83 per cent, from $120 million in 2011-12 to $21 million in 2015-16 (April-December).

Chinese panels are cheaper by Rs 5 to Rs 6 each than those produced domestically. In addition, there are quality issues with locally made panels and cells, according to this The Economic Times report. While a consignment from China takes 30-45 days to be delivered, there are few customers for domestically produced solar panels.

Why the US wants a slice of India's solar market



India's solar-power market is growing rapidly, and the US has complained against what they call "discrimination against imported products" from accessing this market.

For instance, the installed solar-power capacity in India grew 100 per cent over the last 22 months, according to government data, from 2.6 GW in March 2014 to 5.2 GW in January 2016. Similarly, installed renewable capacity grew 25 per cent over the same period.

crossed the milestone of 5 GW in January 2016 and is expected to achieve the government's target of generating 100 GW by 2021-22. If the 2022 solar target is met, it will become India's second-largest energy source, IndiaSpend reported recently.

The decline in tariffs has encouraged a growing number of consumers to bypass India's creaky electricity grid and directly go solar. The price of solar energy has fallen by half over two years, from Rs 10-12 per unit to Rs 4.63 per unit in 2015, IndiaSpend had reported earlier, edging closer to coal.

The government plans to achieve 20 GW through ultra-mega solar parks, and has approved 33 solar parks in 21 states at a cost of Rs 374 crore ($58 million).

The government auctioned 375 MW of solar PV projects in 2013 under Batch-I Phase-II of Jawaharlal Nehru Solar Mission and 500 MW under Batch-II Phase-II in 2014, which must use domestic modules, according to the DCR.

India's installed power capacity stands at 289 GW, of which renewables account for 14 per cent. Wind energy with 25 GW installed capacity accounts for nine per cent, while solar constitutes two per cent. Thermal energy accounts for 70 per cent of India's installed capacity, with coal cornering 61 per cent share.

India's solar-power prices are now within 15 per cent of coal, which will decline by another 10 per cent than domestic coal by 2020, based on current trends, according to this CNN report.

Reprinted with permission from IndiaSpend.org. Indiaspend.org is a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit
Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended his two-day visit to Saudi Arabia on Sunday, his second to a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state in as many years, with promises from Riyadh of greater investments in some of his government's key infrastructure projects.

The visit yet again highlighted the Modi government's efforts to strengthen relations with GCC countries, and comes in the backdrop of New Delhi's sustained outreach to Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

On Sunday in Riyadh, the Indian PM led his side to delegation-level discussions with the Saudi side and later had restricted talks with the Saudi King. The two sides signed five agreements, including an agreement to strengthen cooperation in the exchange of intelligence related to money laundering and terror financing and another framework agreement for investment promotion cooperation between Invest India and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority to facilitate investments by their respective private sectors in the two countries.

ALSO READ: Modi highlights investment opportunities

If the highlight of the PM's visit to the UAE in August was his address to a stadium packed with non-resident Indians in Dubai and sundry commitments of investments, in Riyadh, Modi announced a helpline for the 2.96-million Indian workers in that country. He said India would set up workers' resource centres in Riyadh and Jeddah. Indian workers in Saudi Arabia send remittances to the tune of $10 billion every year. In addition, as many as 134,000 Indians visit Saudi Arabia each year to perform Haj.

During a busy day, the PM interacted with Saudi women IT professionals at the first-of- its-kind all-women TCS training centre in Riyadh. He spent around 40 minutes at the centre and posed for selfies. At the TCS Centre 1,000 women work in business processing outsourcing operations, with 85 per cent of whom being Saudi nationals.

Later in the day, Modi interacted with a group of 30 top Saudi CEOs and Indian business leaders at the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce. He invited Saudi Aramco, SABIC (Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corporation) and other Saudi companies to invest in the infrastructure sector in India and to participate in projects creating mega industrial manufacturing corridors, Smart Cities as well as the Digital India and Startup India programmes. Saudi Arabia is planning to set up the world's largest sovereign wealth fund of around Rs 132.46 lakh crore.

Aramco, the world's largest oil firm with crude reserves of about 265 billion barrels, said it had plans to make a major investment in India's petroleum sector as it considers India the most preferred destination to invest at a time when the global economy is in distress.

Talking about his government's initiative in "high temperature deep sea offshore exploration", Modi invited Saudi investment in the sector which has been opened up for foreign direct investment from this month. He said a 'most transparent' policy framework has been put in place and that a market-driven revenue-sharing model would be adopted for such project. He pitched for Saudi investments in rail, housing, ports, and the defence sector.

The Saudi side expressed its keenness to establish a Saudi bank in India. The State Bank of India already has a branch in Saudi Arabia, but no Saudi bank has operations in India. Indian officials said the issue was being looked at by the Reserve Bank of India as the Saudi bank would function on the principles of Islamic banking or interest-free banking.

Saudi Arabia is India's biggest supplier of crude oil to India and the fourth-largest trading partner. Both sides agreed that the two-way bilateral trade at Rs 2.6 lakh crore (in 2014-15) was healthy, but there was a need to diversify to non-oil trade.

India sought Saudi investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries. Modi and the Saudi King expressed the need for regular meetings under the umbrella of India-Saudi Arabia Ministerial Energy Dialogue, a joint statement issued after the talks stated.

The joint statement also talked about the intent of the two countries to cooperate on issues of terrorism and cyber-security. "Affirming that the menace of extremism and terrorism threatens all nations and societies, the two leaders rejected totally any attempt to link this universal phenomenon to any particular race, religion or culture," it stated. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has deported several terrorists wanted by India.

Without reference to Pakistan or any other country, India and Saudi Arabia "called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries; dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist and to cut off any kind of support and financing to the terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states; and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice".
Prime Minister Narendra Modi being received by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz at the official welcome ceremony at the Royal Court, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz today briefed Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his initiative in bringing together 34 countries to form a powerful Islamic military coalition to combat terrorism, as the two leaders agreed to strengthen cooperation in fighting the menace.

Modi, who is here on a two-day official visit to the Kingdom, and Salman held wide-ranging talks and agreed to strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism, both at the bilateral level and within the multilateral system of the UN.

King Salman briefed Modi on the Kingdom's "initiative in bringing together Islamic Alliance against terrorism," said a joint statement issued after their talks.

"The Prime Minister lauded Kingdom's efforts at fighting terrorism in all its aspects and its active participation in international efforts towards this end," the statement said.

It said the two leaders called upon the international community to strengthen multilateral regimes to effectively address the challenges posed by terrorism.

The two sides also agreed to work together towards the adoption of India's proposed Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism in the United Nations, it added.

In December, Saudi had announced the formation of the 34-state Islamic military coalition to combat terrorism.

The coalition includes nations with large and established armies such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt as well as war-torn countries with embattled militaries such as Libya and Yemen.

Other members are Saudi Arabia's five partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council, as well as Jordan, Nigeria, Egypt, Chad, Mali, Malaysia, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Tunisia.

Saudi Arabia's regional rival, Iran, is not part of the coalition. Iraq and Syria whose forces are battling the Islamic State terror group are also not in the coalition.

According to Saudi officials, the members of the new "anti-terrorism" coalition would share intelligence, combat violent ideology and deploy troops if necessary.
Chinas former leader mysteriously removed A rare public spectacle has drawn attention at the closing ceremony of China's Communist Party's National Congress, as President Xi Jinping prepares to be handed a third term in office.

Zelenskys diplomacy masterclass outpacing dour, grey Putin in battle for hearts and minds When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 this year, there was no room for jokes or play acting, and Zelensky needed to step up. He did.

Megyn Kelly fires up at Meghan Markle over her deceptive nature Sky News Australia contributor Megyn Kelly has slammed Meghan Markle over her "abject dishonesty" after the Duchess of Sussex took a swipe at Deal or No Deal in her latest podcast episode which featured Paris Hilton.
Plane lands on freeway again, kills 1

LOS ANGELES (AP)  A small plane that made headlines when it landed safely on a Southern California freeway years ago crashed on the same stretch of road Saturday, slamming into a car and killing a woman in the vehicle.

Five others, including the pilot and his passenger, were injured in the crash on a stretch of Interstate 15 that has been the scene of several emergency landings.

Witnesses said the single-engine plane appeared to be having problems before it banked and came down, the California Highway Patrol Officer said.

The Lancair IV landed on its belly and skidded about 250 feet before striking the rear of a black Nissan Altima sedan that was stopped on the shoulder of the road in San Diego County near Fallbrook. The driver had pulled over to synchronize the Bluetooth device on his phone.

Dad allegedly kills son for being gay

LOS ANGELES (AP)  A Los Angeles man charged with fatally shooting his 29-year-old son for being gay had repeatedly threatened to kill him over his sexual orientation, prosecutors say.

Amir Issa, 29, was found shot to death just outside the family home Tuesday. Prosecutors charged father Shehada Issa, 69, on Friday with murder as a hate crime in the sons death. Investigators Saturday still were trying to determine responsibility for a second killing at the home discovered by police at the same time, that of Amirs mother. Rabihah Issa, 68, had been stabbed repeatedly, coroners Lt. David Smith said.

Mom arrested for kids walk to school

WHITWELL, Tenn. (AP)  A Tennessee woman is facing child neglect charges after deputies found her driving ahead of her young daughters while making them walk to school.

Marion County Sheriff Ronnie Bo Burnett said the mother, Lisa Marie Palmer, 32, told deputies her daughters were being punished for missing the bus.

Sheriffs deputies said they spotted the two girls with a dog walking the fog line and a gold Cadillac parked on the shoulder, engine running.

Both girls are under age 10.

Palmer appeared as if she was driving ahead of the children and allowing them to walk and catch up to her vehicle and to proceed with that action until the children reached the school, the deputies report said.

The girls had walked about a mile and a half and had about two more miles to go.

Runaway bull caught at N.Y. college

NEW YORK (AP)  A bull that escaped from a holding area and darted through the streets of New York City has been captured and taken to greener pastures by Jon Stewart.

The black and white Angus was spotted Friday in Queens. The bull was soon corralled at York College, where students snapped pictures and took videos.

It was later taken to an animal shelter by the former Daily Show comedian and his wife, who are animal advocates.

In Florida, dead

cat sent voter info

SANFORD, Fla. (AP)  A Florida election official is working to help confused voters after one person reported a registration flier had been sent home for her dead cat.

Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Michael Ertel said Thursday he has set up a website to vet election mailings. He says he was motivated by the cat incident, in which a voter told him a Washington-based advocacy group had sent the mailing.

Ertel says the website will educate voters about which fliers are legitimate and which arent.
Man allegedly abducted wife

ANKENY (AP)  A 33-year-old Nevada man has been accused of a kidnapping and sexual assaulting his estranged wife.

Ankeny Police said the man has been jailed on charges of first-degree kidnapping, third-degree sexual abuse and domestic abuse.

Police said shortly after midnight March 12, the woman was walking home when she was taken against her will by her estranged husband after they had argued earlier in the evening.

Police said the man then physically and sexually assaulted her.

Inmates death draws protests

DES MOINES (AP)  Activists are seeking more answers in the death last week of an Iowa inmate.

More than 30 protesters gathered near the Des Moines police station Friday night to demand more information on the March 25 death of 38-year-old Lamont Walls. He was found unconscious in his Polk County jail cell.

Calvetta Williams with Mothers Against Violence said there was not enough transparency from officials after Walls died.

An autopsy revealed nine plastic baggies containing heroin were in Walls stomach. A drug screening during the autopsy indicated there was heroin present in Walls system.

Dubuque man shot to death

DUBUQUE (AP)  A man was shot to death at a mobile home park south of Dubuque, police said.

Police believe several men forced their way into a trailer home early Saturday and fired shots, fatally injuring a 21-year-old man.

Police have not released the identity of the man shot.

Police were called to the home around 2 a.m. The wounded man ran to a neighbors home, where he collapsed. He was taken to a Dubuque hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Former mayor faces charges

NORTHWOOD (AP)  A former northern Iowa mayor faces fraud charges in connection to his former lumber business.

Court documents say fifty-two-year-old Randy Severson was arrested Wednesday and is charged with defrauding $300,000 from Northwood State Bank between 2011 and 2014, while he was the president of Northwood Lumber.

Severson, who is the former Northwood mayor, is accused of using the names of family members, customers and acquaintances without their knowledge to make phony invoices that were submitted to the bank to create lines of credit.

He resigned as Northwood mayor in November 2012.

Mom allegedly hit boy with can

SIOUX CITY (AP)  Police in northwestern Iowa have arrested a woman they say hit her 10-year-old son with a metal trash can as she fought with her mother.

The 32-year-old woman was arrested Thursday. Police said she was involved in a fight with her mother around 1 p.m. at her home. When the boy attempted to separate the women, his mother hit him in the head with the trash can.

Police said the boy suffered a large cut on his head and had to be taken to a hospital.

His mother faces a felony charge of child abuse causing injury.
Over 900 years ago, Pope Urban II urged European Christians to go to war with Muslims holding the Holy Land. He had some other military and political reasons closer to home for doing this, but the religious angle seemed to be the best reason so he pushed it. This became the beginning of the Crusades and lasted for almost 500 years. While there were many pauses in the hostilities and objectives varied over time, religious differences always remained a main pillar of the conflicts.

I was reminded of this as I watched the protest events in Brussels following yet another brutal terrorist attack against innocent people by ISIS. A right-wing gang of hooligans shouting Death to Arabs and Nazi slogans disrupted a mourning vigil honoring the dead. The gang of about 350 was finally driven off by police using water cannons, but their message was sent. They are intolerant of Muslims and are trying to rally support for their position.

In Pakistan on Easter Sunday, the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist movement, launched an attack at an amusement park popular among Christians. Seventy-two people were killed and several hundred injured as the attackers deliberately targeted Christians and vowed more attacks forthcoming.

I fear we are edging closer to the unthinkable: religious war. That would be a disaster not only for our society but for our world. While we have had religious wars before and since the Crusades, and not always between Christians and Muslims, we have never had them in a time of weapons of mass destruction nor readily available devices that can so quickly kill so many people. Neither have we often seen a war that didnt target armies but rather where the killing of civilians was the primary goal. Savage, mindless murder by unspeakably evil people.

ISIS and other religious fundamentalist groups seem to display no signs of letting up. If not, an ever-increasing Christian backlash seems inevitable. This can lead to nothing good and it is incumbent on all people everywhere to work to prevent it. Last December 70,000 Muslim clerics in India took a strong stand by condemning ISIS terrorist activities. This is welcome, but what of other Muslim clerics? Do any promise rewards in heaven for killing innocents? If so, they should be silenced by the Muslim community itself. Islam is a peaceful religion, and in this time of increasing Islamophobia, Muslims must act. Far better for Muslims to do this than outsiders.

Christians must also be proactive in this battle against ISIS. Islam is not the enemy, crazed fanatics are. Our Muslim friends and neighbors, co-workers and associates need our support. They are as upset over ISIS activities as anyone. Perhaps even more so since in our country they are a minority and fear retaliation.

My historian friends tell me there were never any Golden Ages, only golden memories. Human history is a long string of conflicts over so many different issues we cant think of anything that wasnt once a cause of dispute. Our times are different but in many ways the same. There is a clear, defined enemy. We must all come together to rise above past mistakes and increase efforts to avoid violence. The cost of failure is simply too high.
A pair of bodies discovered in Kentucky Lake this week
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If youre looking to try out an online casino, there are several things that will help you make a decision. Heres what you should look for when choosing an online casino

 Are they regulated? A lot of the larger ones have licenses issued by the authorities in their respective regions, so its worth checking this first.

 Do they offer games from different software providers? Some casinos just use one software provider and limit your selection. This is fine if you like playing those types of games but you may want to check other casinos as well.

 What does their payout percentage look like? The payout rate refers to how much money you can expect to win after every bet. A high payout rate means youll be able to play more often without having to worry about losing all your money. Its also important to know the minimum and maximum bets allowed on each game. If youre going to play roulette, for example, then you probably dont want a casino with a minimum bet of less than $2.50 or even lower than that.

The players used to play the game slot online in the land based casinos in the past time. But now with time after the invention of the online casinos players play the game slot online. Online platform provide the players with the convenience in playing and even better winning. Even after keeping a good percentage of the profits, they distribute good funds to players.

 How many games do they offer? There are lots of different types of games to choose from. Roulette, blackjack and poker are some of the most popular options, but you might find slots, video pokers, video bingo and others as well. You can usually filter these games down to only show the ones that interest you best, so make sure that your list isnt too long!

 Is there a bonus offer? Many online casinos offer free bonuses as part of their welcome package  which includes new players being awarded 100% up to $10 instantly, for example. These offers are great but not everyone has access to them all the time (and some require you to deposit real money). If youd prefer to avoid paying a fee, some casinos offer no-deposit bonuses where you can get a certain amount of funds before you need to put any actual money into the account. These are usually offered alongside welcome bonuses, so make sure you read both parts of the terms and conditions carefully before signing up.

 Does it offer live dealer games? Live dealers are much preferred by many over regular virtual versions, so it pays to check this option out too. Most online casinos now offer live dealer games in addition to their regular offerings, allowing you to experience the thrill of the real thing without needing to leave home.

Now that youve got an idea of what to look for when choosing an online casino, heres some tips for making the right choice

It really comes down to personal preference. No two people are exactly alike, so everyone has an opinion on what they like and dislike about each casino. That said, here are some things to consider in order to narrow down your choices

 Popularity. Check out reviews, forums and Facebook pages to see what other people think of the casino. Also, ask around at work or friends houses who they would recommend to you. You could always take a look at the casinos website too, to see what kind of information they provide about themselves.

 Reputation. Find out what the general public thinks about the casino. Check out any customer reviews on sites like Trustpilot, Amazon and Google Play to find out more. As far as gaming goes, you can also check out the Better Business Bureau to see whether there have been any complaints against the casino.

 Security. Make sure the casino uses SSL encryption to secure its transactions, meaning that your private data stays safe during transactions. Other than that, look for security seals on the site itself and verify that theyre legitimate. You can also check out the casinos privacy policy to see how they handle confidential information.

 Payment methods. Its good to have multiple payment options available, especially if you plan to play frequently. Its also nice to find a casino that accepts cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. If youre worried about safety, you can always opt for a credit card or PayPal instead.

With all those criteria in mind, heres our top picks

Betway:

Betway is a relatively new UK casino offering online gambling to residents of the United Kingdom and European Union. They offer hundreds of games across both land based and digital platforms, with plenty of top software providers like Net Entertainment, Microgaming and Yggdrasil Gaming Network. With a generous welcome offer that gives players 100% up to 100, you really cant go wrong with Betway.

Coral Casino:

Coral Casino is operated by the same company that runs the famous Caribbean casino, Grand Reef. Like many casinos, Coral Casino offers a wide variety of games, including plenty of video slots and table games. New players can benefit from a huge 100% match bonus up to 1000, while existing customers enjoy 25% cash back on deposits made within 48 hours of opening an account.

Ladbrokes Casino:

Ladbrokes Casino is owned by the same company as the famous bookmaker that started life in 1921. With more than 500 games from leading software providers such as Amaya, NetEnt and Microgaming, you wont be disappointed by the quality of the games here. New players get a 200% match bonus up to 500, while existing customers can claim 35% cashback on their first three deposits.

Paddy Power Casino:

Paddy Power is another Irish-owned casino that operates throughout Europe. Not only does Paddy Power Casino offer traditional casino games like blackjack, roulette and slots, but it also provides a full range of sports betting, including football, tennis, boxing and horse racing. New players can receive a massive 100% match bonus up to 200, while existing customers can claim 35% cashback on their first three deposits.

William Hill Casino:

William Hill Casino is one of the biggest names in the industry, operating in Europe, Asia and North America. Founded in 1984, this online casino has more than 400 games to choose from, including slots and table games, with a wide array of software providers like WagerLogic, Big Time Gaming and Rival.

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If youre interested in trying out an online casino but arent quite ready to commit to one, why not try out one of the many no deposit casinos weve reviewed? You can test drive various casinos completely risk-free, so you can feel confident about your choice before you make a single penny deposit.
LIMASSOL, CYPRUS, April 03, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The world of binary trading is ever-changing and fast-paced with market participants across the globe constantly looking to bid, sell and make the most profitable moves. The industry also has two main ways of organising the financial markets, with exchange trading in the US operating differently to over-the-counter (OTC) techniques used in other countries.



O-SYSTEMS to consider signing vendor agreement with Cantor Exchange



As the very first technology company and market maker to enter the US binary options market last year, major platform provider SpotOption announcement to pull out from the US and terminate their agreement with Cantor Exchange. While the news that they would no longer accept traffic from US traders it has made way for O-SYSTEMS - a boutique, experienced, binary options software provider - to take their place.

Leading the way with advanced, user-friendly binary options and marketing tools, O-SYSTEMS has the determination, software and knowledge necessary to replace SpotOption and break into the US market with ease. Their innovative, modern and user-friendly trading approach which is technologically brilliant yet easy to comprehend makes them stand out from the crowd and brings a fresh, ground-breaking perspective to US traders.



What is binary options in the US and how does exchange trading compare with OTC?



The concept of binary trading is simple to understand which is why it's notoriously popular across the globe. Essentially, it's a way to trade markets with a capped risk and capped profit potential based on a yes or no proposition. Every option settles at either $0 or $100 in the US, however, the way binary trading is carried out in the States differs from the rest of the world in that the provision of over-the-counter binary options is prohibited. This means that all industry participants must provide binary options via an exchange and not a de-centralised market where two parties can communicate directly with one another without supervision or specific guidance as is seen with OTC trading.



The concept of exchange trading first started when people would go to a specific space to buy and sell commodities. Thanks to the development of innovative software and trading platforms, however, exchange trading has now been catapulted into the 21st century and can be executed remotely via a set of instituted rules which govern trading and the surrounding information about particular trading moves and deals. In short, an exchange centralises the communication of bids and offer prices to all direct market participants who can then respond by selling or buying at the quoted price or return with a different offer.



With open exchange binary trading, the price at which a transaction will be executed is also revealed to all market participants allowing them to buy as high or low as anyone else, so long as they stick to exchange trading rules. The idea is that everyone is 'kept in-the-know' and on a level playing ground which is in direct contrast to OTC where broker-dealers negotiate directly with one another and can present an array of different quotes to fellow broker-dealers and customers at any given time. OTC markets are often considered less formal and, although well-organised and popular in countries outside of the US, do not have the supervision of an exchange.



Moving all systems into the US market is a bold move for O-SYSTEMS but one that's perfectly within their capabilities thanks to the wide range of comprehensive services and technological benefits they offer. O-SYSTEMS is, after all, renowned within the industry for their expertise and will take their vibrant trading perspectives overseas to assist US traders.



O-SYSTEMS is a leading binary options platform software provider company that have brought together high end experts in the financial arena.



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Mohammed Hanif in The New York Times:

Karachi, Pakistan  IN the world we live in, there is no dearth of pious men who believe that most of the worlds problems can be fixed by giving their women a little thrashing. And this business of a mans God-given right to give a woman a little thrashing has brought together all of Pakistans pious men. A few weeks ago, Pakistans largest province passed a new law called the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act. The law institutes radical measures that say a husband cant beat his wife, and if he does he will face criminal charges and possibly even eviction from his home. It proposes setting up a hotline women can call to report abuse. In some cases, offenders will be required to wear a bracelet with a GPS monitor and will not be allowed to buy guns. A coalition of more than 30 religious and political parties has declared the law un-Islamic, an attempt to secularize Pakistan and a clear and present threat to our most sacred institution: the family. They have threatened countrywide street protests if the government doesnt back down.

Their logic goes like this: If you beat up a person on the street, its a criminal assault. If you bash someone in your bedroom, youre protected by the sanctity of your home. If you kill a stranger, its murder. If you shoot your own sister, youre defending your honor. Im sure the nice folks campaigning against the bill dont want to beat up their wives or murder their sisters, but they are fighting for their fellow mens right to do just that. Its not only opposition parties that are against the bill: The government-appointed Council of Islamic Ideology has also declared it repugnant to our religion and culture. The councils main task is to ensure that all the laws in the country comply with Shariah. But basically its a bunch of old men who go to sleep worrying that there are all these women out there trying to trick them into bed. Maybe thats why there are no pious old women on the council, even though theres no shortage of them in Pakistan. The councils past proclamations have defended a mans right to marry a minor, dispensed him from asking for permission from his first wife before taking a second or a third, and made it impossible for women to prove rape. Its probably the most privileged dirty old mens club in the country.

More here.
How to watch and what to know about South Dakota State at North Dakota
A roundup of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

New York: CPA Stuart Becker, 72, has been arrested and charged with seven counts of criminal tax fraud, one count of grand larceny and two counts of offering a false instrument for filing.

Through his business, Becker CPA LLC, Becker withheld payroll taxes from his employees and from 2012 to 2014 allegedly stole $71,517 in withheld tax. In addition, Becker is charged with failing to pay $41,406 in personal income taxes owed for 2012 through 2014.

If convicted, he faces a maximum of 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $50,000. He was released on his own recognizance.

Southfield, Mich.: A U.S. court has permanently barred preparer Mia Jordan from preparing federal returns for others.

According to the complaint, Jordan, who consented to the civil injunction order, operated a tax prep business under the name MIA-FILE as recently as 2014. The complaint states that Jordan prepared some 371 returns for tax years 2013 and 2014. IRS examination of 94 of the returns prepared by MIA-FILE resulted in additional tax assessments of 87 of them, the complaint alleges.

Many of the returns allegedly contained false deductions and credits, including inflated deductions for charitable contributions, home mortgage interest and real estate taxes. The complaint also states that the returns manipulated taxpayer data to claim the EITC, for which the client would otherwise be ineligible.

The U.S. alleged in the complaint that the actual purpose of MIA-FILE was to permit Jordans cousin, Nataki Davis, formerly known as Nataki Barnes, to continue to prepare returns herself and together with Jordan, despite an IRS investigation into Daviss own abusive prep practices: In 2013, Davis was enjoined for five years from preparing returns either individually or through any individual or entity working with her; in January, a federal court entered an agreed injunction order permanently barring Davis from preparing returns.

Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Preparer Samuel Gentle, 59, has been charged with 50 counts of aiding and assisting the preparation of false and fraudulent U.S. individual income tax returns.

According to the allegations in the indictment, Gentle operated the tax prep business GenGen Inc., which from 2009 through 2012 prepared and submitted to the IRS an average of 3,400 returns each year. Some of these returns contained various inflated deductions for business expenses and gifts to charity, according to the allegations.

As part of the investigation, an undercover IRS agent posed as a client and provided Gentle with a W-2. Despite seeing no records to support any other deductions, Gentle included false and fraudulent deductions for business expenses and gifts to charity on the return he prepared for the agent, generating a phony refund.

According to the indictment, the loss from Gentles conduct exceeded $630,000. Each of the counts of aiding and assisting the preparation of false and fraudulent individual income tax returns carries a maximum of three years in prison.

Lynn, Mass.: Preparer Claudia Carredano, 46, has pleaded guilty to charges of one count of wire fraud and one count of ID theft in connection with a scheme to file fraudulent returns without her clients knowledge and pocket the excess refunds.

Carredano co-owned the tax prep business Maya Multi Services, and from 2008 to 2011 devised and executed a scheme to file dozens of false returns for clients by including fraudulent dependents to inflate refunds. She then directed the refunds to be deposited into her bank account.

To conceal the scheme, Carredano gave her clients versions of their returns that did not reflect the fraudulent dependents and sought smaller refunds than the returns she actually filed with the IRS.

The charge of wire fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain to the defendant or loss to the victims, whichever is greater. The charge of ID theft carries a maximum of 15 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain to the defendant or loss to the victims, whichever is greater. Sentencing is June 23.

Douglasville, Ga.: Preparers Frederick Jenkins, 43, and Willie Jenkins, 46, have each been sentenced to more than six years in federal prison after a jury convicted them last fall of preparing and filing false federal returns.

According to authorities, the charges and other information in court, between 2009 and 2012 the two prepared and filed thousands of returns at Global Tax Service, which they managed together. They created fictitious, unprofitable businesses that they listed on clients returns to generate fraudulent deductions to lower taxable income and inflate refunds. The clients were left to resolve their situations with the IRS and state authorities while the defendants kept the tax prep fees.

The pairs activities resulted in a tax loss exceeding $3.5 million.

Frederick Jenkins received six years and six months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release and was ordered to pay a special assessment of $1,100 and $3.5 million in restitution to the IRS. Willie Jenkins was sentenced to six years and three months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, and was ordered to pay a special assessment of $700 and restitution of $3.5 million to the IRS.
Syrian Army Prepares to Retake Assyrian Minority Town From ISIS

After the liberation of Palmyra the Syrian Army, backed by National Defense Forces, is pushing on to recapture the strategic town of Al-Qaryatayn -- the home of a large Christian minority, which has been under Islamic State terrorists' control since August last year. By the end of Saturday, after fierce fighting with jihadists, the Syrian army managed to capture the Suniyat-Homs mountain range, that lies two kilometers away from the strategic town in the Homs countryside. Al-Qaryatayn will become a major strategic loss for Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) because of the town's location along the Damascus-Homs highway. According to social media reports, the elite army units have now secured at least five neighborhoods on the city border. Syrian army divisions 11 and 18 have now reportedly started approaching the town from the south, southeastern and northwestern directions.

The army's ground offense is being aided by the aerial bombardment of terrorists' targets carried out by Syrian and Russian warplanes. According to Syrian officers who have spoken with RIA, over 30 militants have been killed, while at least seven personnel were injured. The army's engineers are now seeking out explosives and mines left behind by ISIS. The storming will be impossible until all roads that lead to the city are cleared. For now the artillery are shelling targets of the outskirts of the town, from the liberated mountain range where the heavy military hardware and the bulk forces are now concentrated. IS captured the town last August. Immediately after the terrorists established control of al-Qaryatayn, they abducted some 230 civilians, including at least 60 Christians. In late August IS released images showing their demolition of 1,500 years old Monastery of St. Elian. According to reports the jihadists have imposed the so-called Dhimma rules on Christians in al-Qaryatain, under which IS offered the right to live, provided that they follow strict Islamic rules, and pay tax. Al-Qaryatain had a pre-war population of around 18,000, predominantly Sunni Muslims, Syriac Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Editor's note: When ISIS captured Qaryatain on August 6, 2015 it captured 250 Assyrians; 71 have been released, 179 are still being held (AINA 2015-08-07).
March 31, 2016

In the corridors of power in Jerusalem, one can detect a sense of satisfaction lately. Ministers and senior officials believe that the world is coming closer to Israel in policy and values in the aftermath of the March 22 Brussels terror attacks and the migration crisis in the European Union and the United States.

When Minister of Transportation and Intelligence Yisrael Katz chastised Belgians for eating chocolate rather than fighting terror, he represented a prevalent view in the government that the Europeans are about to see the light and understand that the real problem in the Middle East is Islamic terror, not the Palestinian issue, and that terror in Paris and Brussels is not different from terror in Tel Aviv.

The immigration crisis in the EU and the United States is also seen by the leaders of Israels right as leading to an ideological rapprochement between the West and Israel. Muslims threatening San Bernadino and the Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels are the same Muslims that threaten Middle East stability and Israel.

A senior Foreign Ministry official in charge of Israels public relations campaigns told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that, following the instructions of the prime minister, the ministry is enhancing an international campaign to delegitimize Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority for inciting jihadist terror. The campaign also aims at demonstrating that the same terror plaguing Europe is striking Israel on a daily basis. The official also claimed that European governments are approaching Israeli ambassadors to consult Israel on its anti-terror policies. We hope to become a model of how to deal with terror in many European countries, he said.

The crux of Israeli reactions to the Brussels terror attacks is the hope to divert international attention away from the Palestinian issue and to stall initiatives in favor of a two-state solution. To have terror replace the occupation as the central issue to contend with in the region.

That may be the case among more right-wing segments of European and American public opinions. Also the US Republican candidates, in their speeches to the March 20-22 American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, made the equation between terror in Europe and terror in Israel with latent anti-Islamic sentiments. Donald Trump and Ted Cruzs speeches were surely music to the ears of the Netanyahu government. Yet, this is not the case when it comes to governmental leaders of the EU.

A senior EU official in Brussels close to Federica Mogherini, the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that while the leaders of the EU empathize with Israeli suffering over civilian casualties from Palestinian terror, they do not equate Palestinian terror with Islamic State (IS) terror. IS is a fundamentalist fanatic movement engaged in mass killings and aspiring to establish an Islamic caliphate; the Palestinian interest is to establish an independent state, which is also our interest. We disagree and condemn the use of violence by Palestinians, but also recognize the efforts that President Abbas is investing to curb it. The two issues are very separate and have to be tackled in different ways. The EU is enhancing intelligence efforts to prevent the type of terror attacks that took place in Paris and Brussels and is participating in the US-led coalition fight against IS in Syria and Iraq. On the Palestinian issue, there must be a diplomatic process leading to a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines, the source said.

The Brussels official pointed out that EU leadership was taken aback by the Israeli government lecturing Europe about how to fight terror and insulting the Belgians as well as Mogherini  namely, the statement by Katz on Belgians eating chocolate and the accusation by Minister of Science and Technology Ofir Akunis blaming Mogherini for crying after the Brussels attacks rather than leading. The official claimed that, given the Israeli reaction to the Brussels terror attacks, relations with Israel had in recent days taken a turn for the worse: This was the time to express solidarity with Belgians and the EU rather than lecturing and criticizing us.

The Israeli governments aspiration that the fight against fundamentalist terror will lead to changes of attitude in Europe on the Palestinian issue is mistaken. Europe will continue to support the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and to object to Israels occupation and settlement policies. This aspiration/attitude is also self-defeating for Israel; the occupation is something that Israel must put an end to within a two-state solution for its own interest. Not only will a two-state solution process not harm the struggle against Palestinian terror, it will actually help.
March 31, 2016

Dismissed Fatah leader and former member of Fatahs Central Committee Mohammed Dahlan has been active on the regional and international levels in the past few months. Surprisingly, Dahlan has been more present on the regional and international scenes than any other Palestinian leader. While these activities are not directly linked to the Palestinian issue, it is important to note that Dahlan was dismissed from Fatah in 2011.

On March 13, Dahlan attended the founding conference of the opposition Ghad al-Suri (Syria's Tomorrow) movement led by Ahmad Jarba in Cairo. During the conference, the movements spokesman, who did not reveal his name, thanked Dahlan for his efforts in helping to solve the Syrian crisis.

On Jan. 18, the Turkish paper Gercek Hayat spoke about a multinational plan to conduct a coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, presumably led by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), backed by Russia and Iran, and supervised by Dahlan.

Prior to that, on Dec. 12, 2015, Dahlan participated in a meeting held by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian city of St. Petersburg for the opening of UNESCOs World Culture Forum.

In addition, Dahlan gave a lecture Nov. 18 during a security conference held in Brussels under NATO auspices. During the lecture, Dahlan attacked the Islamic movements and accused Turkey of supporting the Islamic State.

In April 2015, Newsweek talked about the major role Dahlan played in the agreement on the Renaissance Dam project signed between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan in March 2015.

In this context, Abdel Hamid al-Masry, member of Fatahs Revolutionary Council and close friend of Dahlan, told Al-Monitor, Dahlan has a regional and international [role] in resolving some thorny issues in some countries. He has wide-range relations in the region and the world and is respected by many Arab and world leaders as he is considered a part of the regional leadership. Leaders in the Middle East assign to him [specific] missions; for instance, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had assigned to him the Renaissance Dam negotiations file. Dahlan also assumed a role in bringing the Tunisian national powers together and unifying the Syrian national oppositions discourse.

For his part, a prominent Fatah leader told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, The political regional and international activities of Dahlan are not related to the fact that he is Palestinian. Rather these activities are because he has tight relations with the UAE, which tasks him with political and security files and allows him to establish ties he couldnt have established as a Palestinian leader only. This is following his arrival to the UAE in 2011, where he has been treated as a VIP. However, this does not necessarily allow him to assume a Palestinian leadership post, as he has been officially dismissed from the Fatah movement since 2011.

The most important world capitals that provided Dahlan with this regional and international network are Cairo and Abu Dhabi, where Dahlan enjoys undeniable influence since he is considered the security adviser of UAEs Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. This position has provided Dahlan with influence that many UAE officials may not enjoy within the state.

Dahlan also enjoys considerable influence in Egypt through his direct ties with Sisi, which allows him to influence Egyptian media. In addition, he has been deploying efforts to buy some news websites in Jordan.

Ahmed Youssef, former political adviser to former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, told Al-Monitor, Dahlan is welcomed on the regional and international levels. As long as elections are not the only criterion on the Palestinian scene  in light of regional and international pressure to export this leader and sideline others  Dahlan may have better chances at accessing high Palestinian positions than others. This is considering Israels [relative] satisfaction with him and his special ties with the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Syrian opposition. The international relations that a Palestinian official has may allow him to climb to rungs of the leadership ladder.

He said, Also, Dahlan is welcomed among the Fatah youth, especially in Gaza, and has strong ties with Palestinian symbols such as Marwan Barghouti, a member of Fatahs Central Committee who has been detained in Israel for 14 years, and Salam Fayyad, former Palestinian prime minister, and with members of Fatahs Central Committee.

On Jan. 16, former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin said that he sees Dahlan as the next Palestinian president because he is pragmatic and intelligent and is prepared to replace Abbas as president.

On the other hand, Dahlans relations with Saudi Arabia do not seem to be at their best following the scathing comments by Saudi academics and analysts against him, accusing him of threatening the security of Saudi Arabia and attacking its religious scholars.

Dahlan may be well-aware that the most important factor for any Palestinian leaders success is to have a network of regional and international relations that help him fulfill his ambition to become the president of the Palestinian Authority or the Fatah movement. It is worth noting that Dahlan also spends money on his supporters and followers spread across the Arab world. He does so in the Palestinian territories and among Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon through charity projects worth millions of dollars, mostly UAE money, in order to gain influence among Palestinians.

In this regard, the editor-in-chief of Jordans Al-Mustaqbal paper, Shaker al-Jawhari, who follows up on Dahlans movements, told Al-Monitor over the phone from Amman, Dahlan has the support of regional actors like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. His influence even reached Lebanon and Europe thanks to the funds he is distributing to his supporters there. This makes him a strong and real competitor to Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas]. As Dahlan has a presence outside the Palestinian territories, he is protected from Abu Mazens [criticism], knowing the latter attacks anyone who opposes him [Abbas] in Fatah.

It is worth mentioning that many of those who have lashed out at Abbas and who live inside the Palestinian territories have faced sanctions on his orders. The sanctions include exclusion from leadership positions, cutting salaries and threatening to dismiss them from Fatah. Most recently, in February, Abbas has clashed with Abbas Zaki, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, and there was the 2014 clash with two other members of the committee, Mohamed Ghoneim and Tawfiq al-Tirawi. Thus, Dahlan has been keeping his distance from Abbas to avoid any sanctions of this sort.

Jawhari added, These regional parties supporting Dahlan also benefit from him on the security level to confront the Muslim Brotherhood.

Dahlan appeals to Arab countries with his fight against the Muslim Brotherhood, as this is the main concern for these Arab states that fear the Islamist influence. In September 2015, Dahlan said his hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood dates back to 1981, when he was a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, thus presenting himself as the leader of the fight against the Brotherhood in an attempt to get closer to the capitals of political influence in the region.

Besides Dahlans foreign activities and international influence, his internal role is no less important. This is especially true given Hamas position and the long history of hostilities between the movement and Dahlan. When Dahlan was head of the Preventive Security Services in Gaza, he had hundreds of Hamas members arrested in 1995-2000 because they were involved in armed operations against Israel.

Masry said, Hamas has a pragmatic [approach] when it comes to its relations with Dahlan despite the past hostilities. I do not think that Hamas has the final say concerning Dahlan, and it can reach with him a certain formula to preserve its own interests.

For his part, Jawhari said, Dahlans relations with Hamas are not bad, as they share a common adversary, namely Palestinian President Abbas.

Youssef added, Hamas considers that all options are on the table in politics and that Dahlan may be seeking Hamas approval so that it would not oppose him, because he [Dahlan] knows that whomever Hamas opposes, his options of winning in any upcoming elections are slim.

Hamas might turn the page on its historic hostility toward Dahlan should it reach certain agreements with him, which is possible in the Palestinian political arena, where no alliances or hostilities are unending as common interests might push adversaries to meet halfway.

Dahlans chances to access high Palestinian leadership positions all the way to the presidential seat are likely to be higher should he manage to gradually gain recognition at the regional and international levels. This may contribute to his gradual success in eventually becoming the successor to Abbas despite the internal obstacles, which are reflected in the divide within Fatah about him and in Hamas historical hostility.
March 31, 2016

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah's recent rhetoric reveals he is trying to draw parallels between his Lebanon-based movement and Russia, while not sounding too cozy.

In a March 21 interview for Al-Mayadeen TV, Nasrallah went so far as to say he feels Russia has common goals with the axis of resistance  Hezbollah, Iran and Syria  against Israel and its Western allies' interests.

Nasrallah said he "feels" that Hezbollah, Iran and Russia are on the same page when it comes to the overall battle in Syria. He used "feels instead of confirms, and refrained from using the affirmative oratory that has always marked his speeches. In doing so, he actually called attention to the ambiguous characteristics of the relationship between Russia and Hezbollah. Nasrallah even said, bluntly, Describing [Iran, Russia, Syria and Hezbollah] as one axis is inaccurate.

Pointing to the increasing cooperation between Russia and Israel as a main point of divergence between Hezbollah and Russia, he said, Some political analysts and writers in Lebanon or in the region were trying to [embarrass] the resistance axis [by saying] that Russia is part of the resistance axis and is communicating and coordinating with the Israelis.  Who from the resistance axis said that Russia has become part of the resistance axis?

Although Nasrallah differentiated Hezbollahs desire for unity in Syria from that of Russia's support for a federal system, one question has been preoccupying the Lebanese: Will the Russian withdrawal lead to a similar Hezbollah retreat from Syria?

However, Nasrallah straightforwardly ruled out that possibility by bringing up its ongoing military involvement in Syria.

Talking about a political solution was also new in Nasrallahs speech this time. He said that the withdrawal of many Russian forces is a step to a bigger solution in Syria, and he added that Russia wants a political solution.

More importantly, Nasrallah did not comment on the federal proposal Russia had launched March 3 through Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. The latter sees a possibility of establishing a federal republic in Syria if all parties participating in the negotiations agreed. Ryabkov spoke out a few days after Russia and the United States announced their Feb. 22 agreement to halt the military hostilities in Syria.

It is noteworthy that the federal proposal scared key players in Lebanon, mainly Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who tweeted March 18, The Syrian Kurds announcement of a federation is the beginning of Syrias division.

Former Lebanese President Michel Suleiman said in a message he sent to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the latters March 24 visit to Beirut, Our main concern is the emergence of unilateral political, ethnic or religious entities as a substitute to the united Syrian state, and this threatens Lebanons pluralism and structure.

Suleiman was directly indicating the concerns stemming from the rise of a Shiite canton along the northeastern borders of the Latakia coastline reaching Mount Hermon, which is one of Hezbollahs deployment areas.

On another note, along with Russias withdrawal announcement, there was a Russian openness to the Sunni community in Syria and the Middle East. Saudi Arabia welcomed Russias decision to withdraw from Syria, and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said March 15, The partial Russian withdrawal from Syria is a very positive step.

The Syrian opposition also welcomed the Russian decision, calling it "a good step that depends on its implementation on the ground.

In Lebanon, Future Movement parliament member Ammar Houri told Al-Monitor, Russia withdrew from Syria at its convenience. He added, The Future Movement supports a political solution that would lead Syria to a civil, democratic rule.

Regarding Russias federation proposal as a solution, he said, The federation is out of the question, in Lebanon and the region alike. We support Syrias unity, as we do Lebanons.

Although the federation proposal voiced by Russia stirred concerns in Lebanon, Russia has undoubtedly gained ground in the Sunni and Arab circles in the region, following its withdrawal and the positive Arab reactions to it. This will allow Russia to play the role of mediator between Iran, which is still supporting President Bashar al-Assads regime in the defense battle, and Saudi Arabia, which applauded the withdrawal. Russias potential role might allow it to shift the ongoing negotiations in Geneva regarding Syria, or to reach a settlement in Lebanons two-year-long presidential vacuum.

Future Movement head and former Prime Minister Saad Hariri seems keen to build on Russia's repositioning in Syria. After meeting March 30 with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Russia, Hariri said, We appreciate the great role that Russia is playing in the region, and we look forward to a Russian role in Lebanon as well.

According to Houri, Hariris visit aimed at urging [the Russians] to help Lebanon elect a president. After his meeting with Lavrov, Hariri talked about interventions taking place in the region, especially in Lebanon to prevent the election of a president.

From Lavrovs offices, Hariri avoided directly accusing Hezbollah or Iran of obstructing elections. However, Lebanese Minister of Interior and Municipalities Nouhad al-Mashnouq, who was present at the meeting with Lavrov, had been more explicit the week before. As Machnouq visited the Royal Institute of International Studies-Chatham House during his March 24 official visit to London, he said, It is Iran and Hezbollah that are preventing the election of a Lebanese president.

From Moscow, Hariri expressed his readiness to cooperate with Russia on the military level. That announcement came after Saudi Arabia canceled aid worth more than $3 billion to the Lebanese army in February. Hariri did not give any further details on how military cooperation with Russia would materialize or how it would be financed, or if what he was hinting at would replace the Saudi deal.

Hariri did not miss the opportunity to rebuke, before meeting Lavrov, the federal-state solution in Syria. He said before meeting with Lavrov, Syria must remain a united state. Meanwhile, Hezbollah continues with its military involvement in Syria, while other parties such as Suleiman, Jumblatt and the Future Movement are concerned about a solution that might entrench Hezbollahs deployment further along the Lebanese borders with Syria.
April 3, 2016

Iranian newspapers have come back from a two-week Nowruz vacation ready to renew old partisan fights with new talking points. While websites and news agencies continued to cover the significant stories of the country, it is the print media where the partisan divide is the most obvious. This year it seems that the US presidential elections have sparked an early row.

The wisest plan of crazy [Donald] Trump is tearing up the nuclear deal, Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, told Fars News Agency when asked about the Republican front-runners opposition to the nuclear deal. Shariatmadari called the nuclear deal a golden document for the United States but insisted that for Iran it has caused nothing but damages, humiliation and deception. Instead of making proclamations, Shariatmadari invited the administration to show one achievement of the nuclear deal.

While the director general for political affairs of the Foreign Ministry, Hamid Baeidinejad, responded that Shariatmadaris comments were surprising, it was Reformist Arman Daily that compared Shariatmadari to Trump, who is sometimes simply referred to as crazy Trump in Iranian media. In the front-page story titled What Shariatmadari and Trump have in common, Arman Daily wrote that Trumps opposition to the nuclear deal has made domestic critics happy, and that Shariatmadari once again become one voice with American extremists.

Two and a half months after the implementation of the nuclear deal, there still continue to be serious disagreements within Iran over its achievements. In an interview with Iranian television April 2, Abbas Araghchi, deputy foreign minister and chief of staff for the implementation of the nuclear deal, appears to also be tasked with the job of asking Iranians to be patient to see the results of the deal.

Araghchi said all the sanctions that were planned to be removed have been removed, but warned it would take time for Iran to get back to where it was pre-sanctions, given that they went from selling 2.5 million barrels a day to 1 million barrels. Perhaps showing frustration with domestic criticism, Araghchi said, The West promised to lift oil sanctions  they did not promise to find us oil customers.

While there have been questions over other countries seeking to do business with Iran fearing the remaining US sanctions not related to the nuclear program, Araghchi also addressed other concerns that foreign businesses may have, saying, Sometimes we fuel distrust a little bit and if we want to solve problems quicker we have to create this trust.

While the administration is hoping that the results of the nuclear deal improve the economic situation, a number of Iranian media looked domestically toward Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneis slogan for the year: "Economy of Resistance: Action and Implementation." The Iran newspaper, which operates under the administration, dedicated four articles to the topic. Most of these articles had a positive spin, with Economy Minister Ali Tayebnia suggesting that the implementation of the resistance economy had already begun. Hard-line Vatan-e Emroz, which has been opposed to many of President Hassan Rouhanis policies, dedicated four of the six articles on its front page to the economy, perhaps suggesting that this is where they will be able to apply the most pressure on the administration in the upcoming year.

One interesting topic raised in the Iran newspaper was whether or not Iranian newspapers should take a two-week holiday for Nowruz. On April 1, many newspapers published their first papers since March 18, two days before the Iranian New Year. The author wrote, A two-week media holiday in a world where the media says the first word is unacceptable in every way. The article continued, Any country that can have no newspapers for two weeks can go all 52 weeks of the year without a newspaper.

The author conceded that the biggest obstacle is the distribution networks to newsstands during the holiday schedule, when many kiosks are closed. According to the author, only a few voices each year raise this issue. However, the author believes that it would not be difficult to change the holiday schedule to only the four official days that are given for Nowruz. The article asked readers to write in and ask the newspaper owners and editors to change this policy.
April 3, 2016

Erdogan not backing down on US support for Syrian Kurds

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed the Obama administrations support for Syrian Kurdish rebels battling the Islamic State during a visit to Washington last week.

Erdogan met with US President Barack Obama on the margins of the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31, after having been previously rebuffed in his request for a private meeting. US Vice President Joe Biden, in a separate meeting with Erdogan, reiterated that the United States considers the PKK [Turkey's Kurdistan Workers Party] a designated foreign terrorist organization, and the two leaders pledged to deepen cooperation in the fight against all forms of terrorism, including the PKK.

The Turkish president made his case against the Obama administrations Syria policies at other forums around the US capital, including a dinner hosted by the Turkey-US Business Council for think tankers and former US officials, as well as at events at the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council and in a meeting with American Jewish leaders.

Washington got a taste of the Erdogan experience when the Turkish presidents massive security entourage pushed, threatened, and kicked both Turkish and Western journalists and protesters prior to his speech at Brookings. As reported by Foreign Policy, Brookings President Strobe Talbott told a Turkish official that the organization was prepared to call off the visit even though Erdogans motorcade was already en route to the event. The Turkish official intervened to de-escalate the confrontation outside Brookings to allow the speech to proceed.

Obama later said, I think the approach that they [the Turkish government] have taken towards the press is one that could take Turkey down a path that is very troubling.

The spectacle on Massachusetts Avenue brought home to Washington policy elites the Turkish presidents anti-democratic and increasingly personalized approach to politics, which will be familiar to readers of Al-Monitors Turkey Pulse.

Metin Gurcan reports this week on a speech by Erdogan at the War Colleges Command, the most prominent educational institution of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). What raised eyebrows among the listeners, Gurcan writes, was Erdogans deviation from the established practice of treating the commander in chief designation as symbolic, in practice allowing the prime minister and the general staff chief to handle security issues. For the first time, Erdogan used the term 'executive commander in chief'  in other words, a functioning commander in chief. Last year, Erdogans darts were aimed at the Gulenist movement. This year, the prime target was the West. He spoke of the hypocrisy of Western countries in combating terror. No matter what we said, how much we warned, they didnt listen. At the end, snakes started to bite them and the mines began to go off under their feet. Now you can see how those who chatter about democracy freedoms, rights and laws forget all about them when they get into trouble, he said.

Semih Idiz writes that Erdogan unleashed on foreign diplomats covering the trial of two Cumhuriyet reporters by saying, This is not your country. This is Turkey. You can only act within the consulate building or its borders; the rest is subject to permission.

Idiz adds, Erdogan was not happy to see US Vice President Joe Biden meet [Cumhuriyet editor Can] Dundars family during his visit to Turkey in January, especially after Biden reportedly told Dundars son that he had a very brave father he must be proud of. Washington continues to stress that this case and other developments that undermine democracy in Turkey concern it deeply. The EU is being criticized for appearing lenient toward Turkey because it needs to cooperate with Ankara over the flood of refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. However, none of this has prevented EU diplomats from actively following certain cases in Turkey. The German ambassador and the consuls general of key EU countries as well as Australia, the United States and Canada were present at last weeks hearing in Istanbul over the case against Dundar and [Cumhuriyet journalist Erdem] Gul.

Syrian Kurds establish governance structures

Fehim Tastekin this week examines the declaration of the Federal Democratic System of Rojava and Northern Syria, [which] would have a population of about 4 million and would incorporate Rojava's three cantons  Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin  as well as Tell Abyad and areas in northern Aleppo province that have been recaptured by Kurdish forces.

Tastekin explains, This structure is being worked out by the Kurdish political movement despite Turkeys threats. The Kurds are leading the creation of popular assemblies in places where Kurds are in the majority and the creation of constituent assemblies (councils of elders) elsewhere. For example, the first congress of the Sheba region convened Jan. 28 and declared that it only recognizes the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) set up by the People's Protection Units (YPG), Arab and Turkmen groups, and the Democratic Syrian Assembly that was formed to send a delegation to the Geneva peace talks. Also, after ridding Tell Abyad of IS, the Kurds established a 113-member assembly and an executive council made up of seven Arabs, four Kurds, two Turkmens and one Armenian.  Despite its enmity toward the PYD, the Kurdish National Council, supported by Iraqi Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani, is pro-federalism for a model.

Tastekin adds, Kurds under PYD leadership are confident of their future in Kurdish-majority areas. The Kurds have long debated the concept of democratic autonomy formulated by Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan. But this is not a subject familiar to Syria's tribal Arabs. Kurdish sources say they have switched to federalism because many people could not understand what democratic autonomy and a cantonal system entail. The Kurds are an organized community that can handle the democratic autonomy institutions. They have acquired significant local governance experience over the past five years, starting with grass-roots committees in neighborhoods and villages. Women play a major role in Kurdish self-rule. Kurdish cantons have promoted a 40% quota for women's participation in public affairs. Can this be done in regions where women are denied public roles?...The Kurds are not insisting on including locations that the YPG wont be able to control in the federation. That is why, if liberated from IS, Raqqa could form a separate federal entity. The same goes for El Bab, Menbic and Azaz, where Kurds are in the minority and YPG control is out of the question. They are aware that any attempt by the YPG to impose its rule over heavily Arab- and Turkmen-populated areas would be suicidal. There are already worrying signs of collective Arab tribal resistance to the Kurdish federal move. In those areas, the SDF made up of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens promotes itself as the core of the future Syrian army and tries to prove that it is in charge. In short, the freshly introduced federal system will go through a series of serious tests because of international considerations, the attitude of the Syrian regime and the ethnic-sectarian fault lines of the region.

Hamas-Iran tensions surface again

Adnan Abu Amer explains how the March 11 decision by Hamas to close down the Al-Bakyat El-Salehat Society charity, which is affiliated with the Harakat al-Sabireen Movement headed by Shiite Hisham Salem, is a sign of another difficult patch in Hamas-Iran relations.



The decision to shut down Al-Bakyat El-Salehat Society in Gaza, Abu Amer writes, might seem administrative and legal, but its political dimensions cannot be ignored as it coincides with the ebb and flow in relations between Hamas and Iran. The Ministry of Interior in Gaza officially informed the association of the decision three months after it was issued in December 2015. While Hamas is trying to patch things up with Iran, the latter does not seem satisfied, and perhaps Iran wants Hamas to settle its political options and side with it against Saudi Arabia. But it seems this is not what Hamas wants.

Ali Hashem reports on a recent meeting in Tehran between a Hamas delegation and Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps foreign operations branch. Soleimani advised the movement to keep its distance from all the chaos in the region and pledged Irans continued support, although [Hamas international relations officer Mousa] Abu Marzouk, in a leaked phone call, accused Iran of lying about its claims of supporting the movement. Marzouks accusation prompted Soleimani to say at the meeting, Iran never lied, and we wont lie. We sent several ships full of arms to the resistance, [but] some were intercepted. We wont leave you alone. Whenever theres a new technology that we can send, we wont hesitate to. This is our duty. Whoever says the contrary should remember that this is all [taking place] before Gods eyes. An Iranian military source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Abu Marzouk has tried to contact Tehran to arrange a visit for the Hamas delegation set to travel from Cairo to Doha, but the Iranians have responded in the negative  not to the delegation, however, but to Abu Marzouk. If hes sure he wants to come to Tehran, then he has to apologize, the Iranian source said.
April 2, 2016

ADEN, Yemen  The Yemeni island of Socotra offers diverse and unique scenery. It is a place where history and culture meet in a magnificent natural setting with high levels of biodiversity. The island is home to a rich flora and fauna that includes rare species of birds not found anywhere else in the world.

The islands geographic location has a strategic importance. Located on the international sea lane that links the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Sea through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and just 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the southern shores of Yemen, the island grabbed the attention of colonial states. It was occupied by Portugal from 1507 until 1511 and by Britain from 1886 to 1967, along with other cities in south Yemen.

The Soviet Union also had a military presence on Socotra during some of the Cold War, when the island belonged to South Yemen.

Historically, the island was known for the production and export of sacred goods. It was famous for the trade and production of agarwood, which is a variety of incense used in religious rituals of ancient civilizations.

Socotra is described as one of the most exotic areas in the world, which prompted UNESCO to classify it as one of the worlds natural reserves and one of the most important human heritage sites.

Dragon's blood trees (L) and Socotran "desert roses" stand on a hillside in the protected area of Homhill on Socotra Island, Feb. 1, 2008. (photo by REUTERS/Alistair Lyon)

Ramzi Mahrous, governor of Socotra archipelago, told Al-Monitor, Socotra is among the wonders of the world, as it features a spectacular nature rich with rare trees and other unique flora, not to mention the clearest beaches in the world.

He added that the island includes various touristic locations and attraction sites, which represent substantial financial resources for the states budget and underscore the islands significant economic role.

Socotra Island is the largest island of the Socotra Archipelago, which also includes the islands of Samha, Darsa and Abd al-Kuri.

Mahrous further added that Socotra is currently witnessing harsh and bitter circumstances, despite being relatively isolated from the ongoing conflict in the country. It was hit by two consecutive cyclones, Chapala and Megh, at the end of 2015, which inflicted human and material damages.

He also pointed out that since the island is relatively far away from the Yemeni mainland, many of the citizens find it hard to have all their needs met. Flights to and from the island have been suspended in the wake of the countrys ongoing turmoil.

On the other hand, Socotra Island is one the four most important islands in the world in terms of biodiversity and vegetation, as it is home to thousands of endemic plants, animals and birds.

An Egyptian vulture flies on Socotra Island, March 27, 2008. The population of the Egyptian vultures is over 1,000 in Socotra, making it the most concentrated population of the endangered bird in the world. (photo by REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah)

Ismail Mohamed, an independent researcher who has studied and written about Socotra, told Al-Monitor, The island of Socotra has a dense vegetative cover, with more than 850 species of plants, 40% of which are rare and endemic, and 11 species of birds that do not exist anywhere else in the world.

According to Mohamed, there are three valuable endemic plant varieties in the island, including the following:

Boswellia sacra tree, from which frankincense used in churches and temples is derived, is one of the most important exports of the island and was a highly valued commodity among the peoples of the ancient civilizations.

Socotrine aloe, a plant used for therapeutic purposes, with a high demand from the Socotrine community, is a source of income for many segments of the island's population.

The Socotra dragon blood tree is an umbrella-shaped tree producing a red sap used for various purposes, most notably clay. Women in Socotra use this substance to treat a common skin condition called melasma.

Mohamed explained that the island is known for its religious diversity. He pointed out that before the 15th century, three churches were built, but today only their ruins remain.

He also noted that there are archaeological sites dating back centuries, bearing Sabaean and Himyarite inscriptions and others bearing ancient Syriac inscriptions that have yet to be deciphered.

The island of Socotra is characterized by the diversity of its economic resources, as one of the important areas for fishing and a center of tourism because of its enchanting natural landscapes. The island is also rich with various types of soil, such as histosols, composed mainly of organic materials, floodplain soil, laterite soil and others, which contribute to the revitalization of the agricultural sector, especially the cultivation of dates. This is in addition to the favorable climate for beekeeping

The marine life of Socotra also has a great diversity, with 352 species of corals, 730 species of coastal fish, and 300 species of crabs, lobsters and shrimp.

The cultural customs and traditions of the island are perhaps similar to those of the eastern and southern areas of the coast. The Socotran society uses within the island a special language, Socotri, alongside Arabic.

Although the island is far from the raging conflict in Yemen, the United Arab Emirates has shown particular interest it. In the wake of the two successive cyclones that wreaked havoc in the island, the UAE intensified its relief activity by sending aid to the island.

Some Yemeni media outlets even speculated that Abu Dhabi is providing aid and relief based on its intention and ambitions to take over the island, which has a huge natural reserve, and turn it into an investment destination under its influence.

The people of Socotra want the island to regain its position as a strategic island, taking advantage all of its resources to serve the national economy and achieve broad development. This would turn the bitter reality of the islands residents into a bright one.
Michelle Matthews | mmatthews@al.com

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Michelle Matthews | mmatthews@al.com

SEE THE DOCTOR

Six-time Grammy Award nominee and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Dr. John, known for embodying the legacy of New Orleans music, is returning to the Saenger Theatre, along with local favorite Ryan Balthrop and Friends. Dr. Johns colorful musical career started in the Crescent City in the 1950s and evolved into his trademark blend of voodoo mysticism, funk, rhythm and blues, psychedelic rock and Creole roots.

Dr. John and The Nite Trippers, April 5 at 7 p.m., $20-$45, Saenger Theatre, 6 S. Joachim St., http://www.ticketmaster.com/dr-john-mobile-alabama-04-05-2016/event/1B00504FB7A9559B?artistid=734955&majorcatid=10001&minorcatid=1, (251) 208-5600.

At left, New Orleans legend Dr. John will perform with his band, The Nite Trippers, at the Saenger Theatre on April 5, along with Ryan Balthrop and Friends. (Courtesy Saenger Theatre)

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Dr. John will bring his distinctive sound to the Saenger Theater this week.

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Michelle Matthews | mmatthews@al.com

MUSIC AND MORE

Since it was founded in 2011, SouthSounds Music and Arts Festival has been held the second weekend in April in venues and free public stages throughout downtown Mobile. Among the performers in this years lineup: The Weeks; Col. Bruce Hampton and the Madrid Express; Futurebirds; Banditos; Los Colognes; Kristin Diable; Great Peacock; and many more. In addition to free music in Cathedral Square and other venues, the festival coincides with the April LoDa ArtWalk, the years biggest, and the Mobile Food Truck Fair, from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday; the Mobile Arts Council Art Market on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in Cathedral Square; the inaugural LoDa Square Sidewalk Art Competition on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Cathedral Square; and the first-ever SouthSounds Podcast LIVE on Saturday from 2 to 6:30 p.m. at Mobile Arts Council.

SouthSounds Music and Arts Festival, April 8 at 6 p.m.-April 10 at 11 p.m., downtown Mobile, $25 general admission, $75 VIP admission or $120 for two VIP passes, www.southsoundsfest.com.

At left, the Blow House Brass Band performs outside Alchemy Tavern during the opening night of last year's SouthSounds Music and Arts Festival on Friday, April 10, 2015, in downtown Mobile, Ala. (Mike Kittrell/mkittrell@al.com)

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Michelle Matthews | mmatthews@al.com

'DISPATCHES FROM THE GULF'

GulfQuest/National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico will host the Alabama premiere of Dispatches from the Gulf, a new documentary that follows teams of scientists as they investigate the Deepwater Horizon oil spills effect on the worlds ninth largest body of water. The GulfQuest screenings are being offered in advance of the documentarys April 20 debut on Alabama Public Television and other PBS affiliates nationwide. Museum members only screenings will take place Thursday, April 7, at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., followed by panel discussions and Q&A sessions; reservation required.

"Dispatches from the Gulf," April 9 at 1 p.m., 2:15 p.m., 3:30 p.m. and 4:45 p.m., free with admission, GulfQuest, 155 S. Water St., www.gulfquest.org, (251) 436-8901.

At left: Produced by Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Marilyn and Hal Weiner and narrated by Academy Award winner Matt Damon, Dispatches from the Gulf examines the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on local communities, from members of the tourism industry to families who rely on seafood such as shrimp and crabs for their livelihood. (Courtesy GulfQuest)

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Produced by Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Marilyn and Hal Weiner and narrated by Academy Award winner Matt Damon, Dispatches from the Gulf examines the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on local communities, from members of the tourism industry to families who rely on seafood such as shrimp and crabs for their livelihood. (Courtesy GulfQuest)

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Michelle Matthews | mmatthews@al.com

DISCOVER DAUPHIN ISLAND SEA LAB

Dauphin Island Sea Labs annual Discovery Day is an open house for the public, with tours of the research facilities as well as tours aboard the research vessel Alabama Discovery. Visitors will learn about our coastal ecosystem and why its so important to preserve our precious and unique environment. DISL will also screen the new documentary Dispatches from the Gulf in Shelby Auditorium starting at 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.

Discovery Day, April 9 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Dauphin Island Sea Lab, 101 Bienville Blvd., Dauphin Island, admission free to all exhibits outside of the Estuarium, reduced admission to the Estuarium for adults and free admission for children, www.disl.org/estuarium/discoveryday, (251) 861-2141.

At left: Children look for creatures along the Dauphin Island shoreline. Dauphin Island Sea Labs annual Discovery Day will be held on Saturday, April 9. (Mike Kittrell/mkittrell@al.com)

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Michelle Matthews | mmatthews@al.com

SEE HOW THEY RUN

B&B Pet Stop invites kids of all ages to bring their pet hamsters and gerbils to the annual Hamster and Gerbil Races, with all registration and rental fees donated to Mobile County Public Schools. As the crowd cheers them on, the pets race inside their plastic balls on a 16-foot, five-lane racetrack. The fastest ones make it to the finals, with great prizes for the winners. Hamsters and gerbils are also available for rent for $10, including plastic ball.

Hamster and Gerbil Races, April 9 at 1:30 p.m., registration is $5 per pet in advance, $8 per pet on race day, B&B Pet Stop, 5035 Cottage Hill Road, www.bbpetstop.com, (251) 661-3474.

At left: Hampsters race at B&B Pet Stop during last years event. (Facebook photo)
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A man and a toddler were shot and injured Saturday evening while traveling on Warrior Road in Ensley.

The shooting occurred on Warrior Road near the Mystik gas station at Avenue L at around 6:10 p.m., according Birmingham police Sgt. Bryan Shelton and a witness at the scene. A Buick occupied by three adults and a young male child sustained the gunfire.

Farris Ahmed, a clerk at the Mystik, said the gunfire erupted between two vehicles traveling on Warrior Road past the gas station and towards 40th Street and Pike Road. None of the shooting occurred in the parking lot, he said.

"When I heard the shots, I went down," Ahmed said, illustrating how he ducked below the counter.

The Buick stopped less than a mile away at Spur Groceries on Pike Road where police and two ambulances responded.

Shelton said the child is in stable condition at Children's of Alabama. The man was transported to UAB Hospital. His condition is unknown.

Anjelica Williams, 25, walked out of her house on Pike Road and saw the commotion across the street. The Buick and only one police car was there at the time, she said.

"I was coming out of the house to sit on the porch and eat and just enjoy the weather," Williams recalled.

But, instead of enjoying the weather, Williams saw a father fighting to save his young son's life.

"The dad had the child on the trunk of the car doing CPR on his baby," Williams said, adding that she heard the toddler cry. "(The dad) was holding the wounded area."

She said the dad, who wasn't injured, was hysterical.

"(The dad) completely broke down," Williams said, adding that the father's hands were covered in blood, and he was sobbing over his child.

She said he was telling emergency personnel, "Man, they shot my baby."

The man who was shot was slumped inside the car when she first walked outside, Williams said. She later saw him move.

Shelton said investigators don't yet know the motive behind the shooting, and if the men were targeted.

Police were unable to provide any information on a possible suspect vehicle while at the scene early Saturday evening.

Ahmed said witnesses at the scene saw a gray Dodge Charger.

Williams said the scene across from her house was "very scary.

"It makes you think of your loved ones," she said. "We as a community have to do better."
Belgium Attacks

An airport worker helps a passenger at the temporarily check in terminal at Brussels Airport, in Zaventem, Belgium, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Under extra security, three Brussels Airlines flights, the first for Faro in Portugal, were scheduled to leave Sunday from an airport that is used to handling about 600 flights a day. (Benoit Doppagne/Pool Photo via AP)

(Benoit Doppagne)

The Brussels Airport has reopened today following the deadly terror attacks two weeks ago, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The attacks destroyed the departure hall, so the airport is using a temporary departure area until the hall can be rebuilt.

Three flights, all operated by Brussels Airlines, will leave toady and return this evening, the Journal reported.

Eight flights are scheduled for tomorrow.

The temporary departure hall can only hold 800 passengers, so the airlines will gradually increase the number of flights in the next few days. This will put the airport at 20 percent of its normal operations.

A new departure hall is scheduled to be finished in June or July.

"These flights are the first hopeful sign from an airport that is standing up straight after a cowardly attack," the CEO of Brussels Airport, Arnaud Feist, told the newspaper.

Upon arriving for departures, passengers will have to undergo new security checks at the airport entrances. The airport has advised travelers to arrive three hours before their scheduled flight.

Delta Air Lines Inc. said that they will suspend flights from Atlanta to Brussels until next year, but will continue flights from New York City to Brussels.
An Austin, Texas, police officer was shot late this morning, according to Texas news station WFAA.

The officer was shot in the parking lot of a pizza restaurant, where he was having lunch.

He responded to a call of a disturbance in the lot, where he was shot.

The wounded officer, who has not been identified, is in "stable condition," according to Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo.

The suspect was shot and killed in gunfire exchange on the scene.

He asked in a tweet for prayers for the officer and his family during this time.

Our officer is in stable condition after sustaining gunshot wound. Suspect is deceased at scene.  Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo) April 3, 2016
There is no luxury of the moment for some, no time to linger in the agony and despair that defined April 27, 2011.

Not for National Weather Service, not for the utility company with thousands of customers not only without power but without the immediate infrastructure to restore it, not for the mayor whose downtown was in shambles and not for the office charged with overseeing emergency operations across the state.

For these agencies, there is always the thought about "...the next time." However good today may be, tomorrow must be better.

"It just so happened that on April 27, many people did the right thing and, unfortunately, they still died," said Chris Darden, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service forecasting office in Huntsville.

So, yes, there must be lessons learned. There must be a way to do things better.

"Sometimes from a negative can come a positive," Darden said. "And we're definitely using this as a learning tool."

So what did we learn from Wednesday, April 27, 2011?

Weather warnings

Not just the tornado warnings announced minutes before the storm hits but the warnings, or cautions, provided days in advance of a significant weather event are invaluable.

After all, the 2011 tornadoes caught no one by surprise. The community of meteorologists and forecasters knew days ahead of time that danger was imminent and didn't keep it a secret. If you were paying attention, you knew it, too.

Chris Darden (red shirt), meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service forecast office in Huntsville, surveys tornado damage in Limestone County following the 2011 storms. (AL.com file photo)

"It's important to provide warnings to the public to get that information out," Darden said. "We also learned that it's important to work with our partners in the media and the emergency management community, the first responders, to get the message out early.

"And I mean days in advance if we expect there's going to be a big event coming."

Five years later, weather technology has improved. There are also ongoing efforts to learn more about tornadoes, such as the Vortex Southeast study taking place this spring. Based at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, it's bringing together the nation's top tornado researchers.

Maybe you even contributed to the growing effort to learn more about tornadoes.

"Certainly 2011, although it was a tragic day, a horrible day, we learned a lot. We learned a lot actually because we had a lot of video," Darden said. "A lot of people took video of the tornadoes, which is unusual in the southeast.

"We were able to take that video and look at the radar data and do a lot of comparisons and we have learned a lot about how the terrain affects the tornadoes, how the local environment affects the storms that produce the tornadoes."

There are efforts to be even more exact in forecasts, in issuing tornado warnings, in anticipating how a storm will behave by understanding the storm itself. An example? The theory that a rotating supercell thunderstorm typically produced a tornado has been dispelled, Darden said. The reality is that only about 5 percent of those storms produce tornadoes.

"April 27, those high-end tornadoes, those are not overly difficult to warn for," he said. "Those are sort of the ones that are obvious on radar. But the morning storms that day (the weaker tornadoes by scale), those were the more challenging storms to warn for.

"So we're learning a lot more about those and we're learning what types of environments - the wind shear in the atmosphere, the instability, the balance within the atmosphere that help produce these tornadoes - we're constantly learning about those."

Keeping the power

With the bulk of the April 27 tornadoes centered in north Alabama, the electricity provider for the region absorbed crushing blows to its ability to deliver power to its customers. With transmissions towers mangled, more than 850,000 customers of the Tennessee Valley Authority lost power.

TVA linemen work on a transmission tower near the Mallard-Fox Creek sub-station near Decatur to restore power to Madison County. (AL.com file photo)

According to TVA, 108 transmission lines were out of service and 75 TVA local power companies were affected. The government-owned utility also reported that 98 percent of its customers had power restored within a week even though 25 percent of the structures and 40 percent of the lines were repaired.

It took more than two months to fully restore the system smashed by the tornadoes.

"What you saw from Russellville up through the Trinity area outside Decatur and East Limestone and on up toward Tennessee, it basically looked like somebody had cleared a straight line for an interstate," said Clayton Clem, TVA's vice president for transmission engineering.

The recovery job was so massive for TVA that Clem said the utility moved 441 tractor trailer loads of material.

"From a lessons learned standpoint, we reviewed our steel stocking plan and our emergency material plan, that worked pretty well considering the amount we were able to restore quickly," Clem said. "We have made some improvements to that in how we handle some of our energy supplies that give us a little more flexibility. We've worked on what we consider a broader threat front with grid resiliency where we're looking not only at storms like this but other events that can cause impacts to the grid.

"One of the pieces of that is we have workforce support focus going on where we're looking at additional mutual assistance agreements with neighboring utilities that would help us bring workforce into the area more easily in the event of a storm to help support us. Some of the lessons learned from this scale event was just how important the ability to carry your own diesel, your own aviation fuel and your own gasoline with you. As you mobilize the amount of equipment we did, having those supply lines well thought out. So we've built that into our emergency planning."

The recovery effort was not unlike mobilizing an army, Clem said. And that creates logistical issues beyond the task of getting equipment where it needs to go.

"Even the fact that you've got to feed that mass of people you bring in," he said. "You've got to feed them, find a place to put them to bed and keep them working."

Emergency response

As the director of the state's emergency management agency, Art Faulkner's job exists for bad days. By definition, the state EMA is the coordinating agency for disaster, preparedness, response and recovery.

Faulkner had all of that on April 27, 2011 - certainly the disaster, the subsequent response and the first hours of recovery. He also had preparedness until the plans blew up by sunrise that morning.

Alabama EMA Director Art Faulkner.

"I'm not quite sure we were prepared for the severity of the storms that hit the state right around sunrise that Wednesday morning," Faulkner said. "So very quickly, we had to readjust our plan that we had for the day."

Indeed, the largest storms weren't expected until later in the day. That early-morning wave of tornadoes, however, scrambled the plans that were in place for the rest of the day.

Faulkner even used the word "chaos" to describe the reaction and response to the unexpected morning storms. Emerging from that chaos, though, was efficiency. Put another way, Faulkner said instinct kicked in.

"The way we were able to respond is because we have a good emergency operations plan," he said." And that plan is tested. We continually update that plan and we exercise that plan. So when there was such mass chaos going on, people - especially first responders - they are going to do what they are trained to do and what they have practiced to do.

"That's one of the biggest lessons we learned - that you have the prepared you have to be trained and exercise your plan and be prepared."

So those plans today get continual exercise and the instinct of efficient response is groomed.

That's not to say, however, that there haven't been changes in operational plans. Faulkner said that instead of all emergency calls being funneled into the statewide operations center in Clanton, seven geographic regions within the state have been established to help triage situations.

Faulkner described those centers as "mini-state EOCs" and they are staffed by employees of "all the critical agencies in the state emergency operations plan."

"What the purpose of that is that a majority or initial requests are able to be handled at that division setting a lot better than all coming to the state EOC," he said. "You've multiplied your forces from just having a representative from each one of these state agencies in Clanton to a representative here and seven others throughout the state."

The mini-EOCs in those regions coordinate with county emergency management agencies, which are schooled in the capabilities - and limits - of the regional EOC.

Meanwhile, the state EMA has lost about 20 percent of its workforce since the 2011 tornadoes - shrinking from more than 100 employees that day to about 85 today. It prompts the obvious question: Is Alabama's emergency management team adequately staffed to handle a statewide emergency?

"It's our job to take the resources that we have and make it work," Faulkner said. "We are making it work. Certainly, as with any other state agency, could we use more funds and personnel? Absolutely we could. But we're going to make it work with what we do have."

'Phoenix rising'

By nature, mayors are proud of their cities. But perhaps no mayor can top Cullman's Max Townson when it comes to touting his town.

"We have actually been thriving since that tornado," Townson said.

Revitalized downtown Cullman, which was devastated by a direct hit from an EF-4 tornado on April 27, 2011. (Photo courtesy of David Warren)

Cullman was one of the state's largest cities that absorbed a direct blow from a severe tornado - an EF-4 that seemingly dynamited downtown. In still one more remarkable detail from that day, the only casualty in Cullman was a woman with a broken leg and broken hip.

As Townson put it, his town shook off the effects of the tornado and blossomed.

"On April 27, we got hit with an EF-4 tornado that devastated the downtown area, that destroyed churches, businesses, homes, historical area, everything," he said. "But that tornado woke up a sleeping giant. We became phoenix rising. In the past five years, we have not ceased."

Now the town in north central Alabama has a bevy of popular chain restaurants and well as booming retail business, the mayor said. There are also capital plans in place to build a new fire department as well as new facilities for the road department and water department.

Downtown businesses, gutted by the tornado, experienced renewal in part through a financial incentive program the city council approved to encourage those business to invest in their property.

Cullman is "growing by leaps and bounds," Townson said.

While the story of Cullman's rebirth is perhaps dramatic, the town's handling of the tornado may seem mundane by comparison. When Townson became mayor in 2008, he was urged by the Cullman County EMA to take a class it was offering about dealing with natural disasters.

In wake of that class, the city designed a response plan and then put it into action.

"We had it all planned out and it went very smooth," Townson said. "Our street department, they jumped in there and they started clearing immediately even before FEMA got here. It was devastating but sometimes from these disasters, you learn things and improve."

Then Townson detailed the backbone of his city, praising the people of Cullman with words that could echo across the state and apply to virtually every community affected by a tornado.

"We saw the true character of the citizens of this community," he said. "It was neighbor helping neighbor, schools giving out food, churches giving out food, doing laundry for the National Guard that was here. It was an inspirational experience."

Throughout the month of April, AL.com will be looking back five years later at the April 27, 2011 tornadoes. If you have photos, memories or stories to share that you'd like us to consider for publication, please email Paul Gattis.
Lego robotics competition

The Variables in action at a recent competition (Contributed by Jackson Carr/BBVA Compass)

Jackson Carr went to school to be physicist, not a software engineer.

But it's his work helping three Birmingham area middle schoolers rise to the World Festival of the FIRST Lego League robotics competition that makes me Alabama Proud.

Jaye and Toby Conn and Noah Warren, all students at Altamont School in Birmingham, placed first in the Birmingham regionals and the 35-team state finals to make it to the FIRST Lego League World Festival in St. Louis April 27-30. They are one of 108 teams culled from over 29,000 in 80 participating countries headed to the competition.

Jackson Carr with The Variables, from left to right, Jaye Conn, Noah Warren and Toby Conn. (Contributed by Jackson Carr/BBVA Compass)

"The Variables," as they call their team, not only built and programmed a robot that performs complex maneuvers autonomously (his name is Points 2.0), but they also took on a worldwide problem as part of the Lego League competition.

This year's Lego League challenge is "Trash Trek," so competitors had to come up with a project to help the world deal with its trash problem.

Jaye, Toby and Noah chose K-cups, those wonderful little Keurig one-cup coffees that we all love, but are pretty much unrecyclable.

At first, their plan was to urge people to reuse K-cups as little planter pods and the like, but going into the world competition, The Variables upped their game.

"They decided (reusing K-cups) didn't really solve the problem. The kids wanted to go much bigger than that and make a bigger effect on the world," said Carr, who actually now works as a software engineer for BBVA Compass in Birmingham.

That's why they call their team "The Variables," Carr said. Their goal is to always consider every variable in a situation, whether it be a software or mechanical or less tangible challenge, and adjust to deal with those variables.

"Our core strategy is to try to eliminate all the unknown variables that we can," Carr said.

The biggest variable in the K-cup challenge was Keurig itself. So they went straight to Keurig Green Mountain with a grassroots social media campaign, urging the company to come up with an environmentally friendly K-cup.

And CEO Brian P. Kelley took notice, and responded with a video message for The Variables.

"He said they admired our efforts and they acknowledged that they are working to create a fully recyclable K-cup pod," Carr said.

This story makes me Alabama Proud for several reasons. First, it highlights 11- and 12-year-old kids who are making a difference in society and learning real-world skills in science, math, robotics, teamwork and communication.

It also highlights the businesses that step up and help these kids, who will be their employees (and probably bosses) one day. Hats off to BBVA Compass for taking on sponsorship of Carr's team, and to Keurig Green Mountain for validating their work.

Setting high expectations for our Alabama children, especially with the bad rap our education system gets, is something we all should do.

"They are really, really bright kids who put in a ton of effort, a ton of work, to get things done and really, really affect change," Carr said. "It's a privilege to work with these kids. Every time I work with them they surprise me.

"Sometimes we just need to get out of their way and let them do it."

Haskins takes a weekly look at points of pride statewide. Email your suggestions to shaskins@al.com, or tweet them to @Shelly_Haskins using #AlabamaProud
Sen. Richard Shelby

U.S. Senator Richard Shelby greets his supporters at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Tuscaloosa, Alabama after winning the Republican Primary. (Joe Songer/jsonger@al.com).

By Ron Crumpton, Democratic Nominee for United States Senate

In 2010, Republicans took control of politics in Alabama by advocating for increased transparency and an end to government corruption; but instead of ending it, they have raised the level of corruption to the point that the stench of dishonesty fills the air, decadence drives policy and bribery is the norm in Montgomery.

The Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives is under indictment for 23 counts of public corruption, we have a governor on the national hot seat after allegations that he used his office and state funds to further his affair with a member of his staff, ordered a law enforcement official to break the law, then fired him when he refused, and used his position to end law enforcement investigations into his office and the office of a prominent Republican state senator. Unfortunately, this corruption is not limited to our elected officials in Montgomery, it extends all the way to Washington D.C.

Richard Shelby has a long history of sponsoring legislation that would only benefit his largest contributors, for trading earmarks of pork-barrel politics, and personal favors in order to benefit himself, his campaign war chest, political action committee and former members of his Senate staff.

Richard Shelby likes to brag about visiting all 67 Alabama counties each year, but the purpose of traveling the state and meeting with constituents is to learn about issues facing our communities and then addressing those issues when you return to Washington. The primary way a senator does this is by sponsoring legislation, or signing on as a co-sponsor to existing legislation that addresses the issue, but Senator Shelby sponsors fewer bills, co-sponsors fewer bills and has the least co-sponsors for his bills than any other member of the United States Senate. Why is this?

We live in a state where we have 45 percent of single parents living in poverty, 380,000 children receiving food stamps and we are ranked 49th in education, but the senator does not sponsor any legislation aimed at reducing poverty or improving education.

Instead, he sponsors legislation aimed at reducing regulations on the largest banks and financial institutions in the country. Even though these banks continue to engage in the same risky behavior that caused the recession, they receive unstated government subsidies that provide an unfair advantage, and they have proven that they are willing to throw out the law and regard for the greater good in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

In addition to their risky investments, the big banks have a history of breaking the law whenever it suits their purpose, which is to make more money. Over the last several years, they have been found guilty of manipulating foreign exchange rates, dealing with countries that they are prevented from dealing with by law (countries listed as rogue or terrorist regimes - Iran, Sudan, Libya, Burma, etc.), and laundering money for drug lords and discriminating against black and Hispanic borrowers.

In other words, they are only interested in their bottom line, they are not worried about the economy, or the American people.

This is not an industry that needs less regulation, it is an industry that needs more regulation.

Richard Shelby has received more than $2.1 million in campaign contributions from the industries that would be directly affected by this legislation.

A 2010 report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a non-partisan watchdog group, lists eight staffers to Sen. Shelby that left his office to join or create lobbying firms: Ray Cole, Stewart Hall, Richard Roberts, Wesley Ryan Welch, Amelia Blackwood, Phil Rivers, Jennifer Bendall and Geoffrey Gradler. Between 2008 and 2010, Shelby earmarked $266,524,500 to clients of his former staff. In return, these firms and their clients have donated $999,471 to Shelby's campaign and leadership Pac, and the companies that employ former Shelby staffers have made more than $10 million from the clients they represent.

In emails between Riley and Hubbard that were released by the Attorney General's office as evidence in Hubbard's corruption trial, Hubbard and Riley discuss copying the "shakedown racket" employed by Shelby and former staffer Ray Cole. According to Hubbard, Cole has made millions, and Shelby has banked over a million in campaign contributions from this racket.

His history with earmarks is compounded by the fact that he earmarked more than $100 million dollars to renovate a section of Tuscaloosa that houses an office building that he owns. That property has seen a significant increase in value due to those renovations.

Alabama does not need a Senator who is more interested in doing whatever it takes to fund his personal campaign war chest than working to address the issues facing the people of Alabama.

The people of Alabama deserve a Senator that is true to Alabama and will work as hard for them, as Shelby works for the political fat cats that fund his campaign.

It is time for the people of Alabama, regardless of their political affiliation, to realize that an honest Democrat, working in their best interest, is better than a Republican that sold his soul a long time ago.

It is time for new leadership, new direction and new results in Washington D.C. and that is why I am running for United States Senate.
Mogadishu residents left in the dark amid price hikes from private electricity companies that many cannot afford.

Mogadishu, Somalia  It is 12.45 pm. The call to prayer is blaring from the loudspeakers atop the minarets of the citys mosques, and in the Medina neighbourhood of Mogadishu, a lady in a long red jilbab sits with her two daughters in front of her two-bedroom house. It is March, the height of the dry season, and the air is hot and humid.

In the familys living room, the fan which used to offer respite from the punishing heat and humidity is off, its cable dangling from the electricity socket.

The children cannot sleep after lunch because it is too hot. I cannot give them cold water to cool them because I have switched the fridge off. If we use the fan or the fridge, the electricity company will send us a large bill that we cannot pay, Muhubo Abshir Farah tells Al Jazeera, sitting beneath the shade of a tree in front of her house.

Expensive electricity

The East African country of some 10 million people has electricity that is among the most expensive in the world. A kilowatt of electricity in the Somali capital can cost as much as $1 an hour. That is five times more expensive than in neighbouring Kenya and 10 times more than in the United States.

Somalias energy sector was completely destroyed following the collapse of the central government in 1991. Residents were forced to depend on privately owned diesel generators while many were left in the dark. Currently, more than seven electricity companies operate in the city  all owned by private individuals.

City officials told Al Jazeera that the companies operate without a licence and pay no taxes. Customers accuse the electricity companies of charging them any price they want, an accusation the companies deny.

With thousands of people returning to the seaside city because of improving security after the withdrawal of the armed group al-Shabab in 2011, business has never been better for those in the energy sector. The companies use diesel generators and the low oil prices globally are leaving them with ever higher profits.

The capitals residents are, however, publicly complaining. More than half of the countrys population, those between 15 and 64 years of age, is unemployed, and 40 percent of Somalias population lives below the poverty line, according to the UN.

Electricity is a luxury that thousands of families in the city can only dream of. Many households in the Horn of Africa country depend on remittances from relatives living abroad and cannot afford the expensive electricity.

Each month, they charge me between $35 and $40. I cant use it [the electricity] as I want because they will charge me a lot more, says Farah. And if you want to change companies, they will charge you disconnection fees which we cant afford to pay, so they force us to stay with them. They are all the same.

Alternative sources of energy

With the return to normality, investors are back and putting their much-needed money into the countrys fragile economy. But with high electricity bills, many investors have resorted to alternative measures.

In the same part of Mogadishu, at an ice-making factory, business is booming at this time of the year thanks to the heat and humidity.

Many families depend on this factory because they cannot use their fridges at home because of the high energy bill.

The turn in the factorys fortunes has also been due to a decision taken by the owner. Abshir Maalin Abdi bought a diesel generator to power his factory after all his profits were gobbled up by the hefty electricity bill.

The electricity offered by these companies can also be erratic, according to Abdi.

They give you electricity when they want and stop it when they want, he says as he inspects blocks of freshly made ice before they were dispatched to customers.

And in terms of cost, it is impossible to use these companies. If I were to use them, my electricity bill would increase by more than 80 percent. I would be working just so I can pay the bill they send me. Im better off having my own generator, Abdi adds.

Cheap and affordable electricity

But the electricity companies deny they are only interested in maximising their profits while ignoring the welfare of their customers.

In the Kilometre Four area of the city, more than 30 workers in bright orange uniforms are in a rush. It is not yet 7am, but the workers are on a tight schedule because of the queue of people waiting to be connected to the electricity grid  demand for their services has never been higher.

The company, which uses a meter system, claims to offer the cheapest electricity in the country and says its prices are affordable.

We charge everyone for what they use. We use a meter system that calculates what the customers use. Our electricity is the cheapest in the country, Ahmed Abdishakur Omar of Mogadishu Power Supply tells Al Jazeera.

Today, electricity is the cheapest it has been in the last two decades. And we believe our customers can afford our price, Omar adds.

The Somalia government, which has its hands full fighting the rebel group al-Shabab, says it is aware of the customer complaints and is looking into the matter.

The only thing we can do and the only thing we want to do is to bring about a legislation that will monitor these companies that provide electricity. We hope that these legislations, once passed by parliament, will affect the price of energy and trickle down to the public, Abdihakim Egeh Guled, deputy minister of energy and water resources, told Al Jazeera. Currently the country has no laws regulating the industry.

The electricity companies, following pressure from customers and with low global oil prices, say they are working on reducing the prices and hope to make an announcement soon.

The residents of the city hope the price reductions come sooner rather than later.

I pray they start to charge us a fair price. They have made enough money from us, says Farah, the mother of two.

It is time they charge an honest price.

Follow Hamza Mohamed on Twitter: @Hamza_Africa

READ MORE: Somalias forgotten soldiers

READ MORE: Somalias Sufi revival
Casualties on the rise in Afghan conflict, but EU plans to deport 80,000 refugees back to the wartorn country.

Berlin, Germany  After making the hazardous journey with her family from Afghanistan to Germany, 17-year-old Niloofer fears being sent back.

Her concerns are not divorced from the reality of her circumstances. On Thursday, the European Union (EU) drafted a plan to send 80,000 Afghan refugees back to their wartorn country.

While the Afghan government formally opposes the plan, President Ashraf Ghani called on Afghans to remain in the country rather than seek refuge abroad.

Yet, as the refugee crisis erupted in 2015, more than 150,000 Afghans arrived in Germany, fleeing the ongoing bloodletting in their homeland.

Last year, more than 11,000 civilians were killed or wounded in Afghanistan, marking the highest number of civilian casualties since the US invaded the country in 2001.

Though she and her younger three sisters were born in Tehran, Niloofers family was forced to relocate to Kabul, like many Afghan refugees in neighbouring Iran, owing to legal problems they faced from the Iranian government.

In Afghanistan, there is no security, the teen told Al Jazeera, sitting a table in the crowded refugee shelter in the Prenzlauer Berg area of Berlin. When the Taliban finds out that people come from Iran, they try to attack and kill them.

As she spoke, refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere moved about in the shelters cafeteria, some eating and others playing cards to pass the time.

Ahmad Shuja, an assistant researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said that the move to deport Afghans is worrying.

All trends of violence across Afghanistan point toward further deterioration in the foreseeable future and not to improvement, he told Al Jazeera by telephone from Kabul.

Explaining that statistics published by the UN and EU confirm that even the capital is no longer as safe as it was just a few years ago, Shuja said. That indicates that the vast majority of Afghans  by EU standards  are fleeing serious threats and have no choice but to leave their conflict-ridden country.

Among the immediate dangers are suicide attacks, bombings and kidnappings, according to HRW. Civilian casualties inflicted by both the Taliban and the Afghan government have both increased.

Child bride

The real reason we left is that the Taliban wanted to take young girls for marriage. by Niloofer, 17-year-old Afghan refugee,

Having already endured so much, Niloofer fears being killed by the Taliban if her family is deported back to Kabul.

In 2015, the Taliban approached her father and demanded that he hand her and her younger sister over to be married to fighters.

The real reason we left is that the Taliban wanted to take young girls for marriage, she recalled, her voice trembling.

The Taliban told my father that my sister and I were going to be taken for marriage. It was difficult for him, so we left and came to this country.

Arriving in early March, Niloofer, her parents and sisters are among more than 164,000 refugees and migrants who have made it to European shores by boat so far this year, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency.

More than one million refugees and migrants braved the dangerous Mediterranean waters to reach the continent in 2015.

Afghan refugees account for 24 percent of those who have made it to Europe so far this year.

READ MORE: Refugees in Bulgaria face extortion, robbery, violence

The young girl often looks back on her familys seven-month trek to Germany.

Crossing from Afghanistan back into Iran, they then passed the mountainous terrain on the Iranian-Turkish border, dodging gun-toting border guards along the way. The mountains were so tall. It was very dangerous.

From Turkey, they took an overloaded dinghy carrying 60 refugees  men, women and children  to a Greek island. I was crying the whole time because I had a bad feeling, she remembered, explaining that the wintry waves splashed over the boats sides and filled it with water.

My sisters were crying, too. When I think about the journey that we passed, especially late at night, I still cry. I dont like to remember it.

Then my misery started

Niloofer is not alone in her fear. Mohamed, 25, worked for a German company as an IT specialist back in his home province of Nangarhar, large swaths of which is controlled by the Taliban.

To make matters worse, local fighters loyal to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have also taken arms, hoping to establish a foothold in the war-stricken province.

Also working as a teacher, Mohamed tried to keep his employment with the German company a secret. Working as a teacher is not a crime for the Taliban, he told Al Jazeera. But if youre working with foreigners, then thats a crime.

But in June 2015, Mohamed came to Berlin for work training and local members of the Taliban found out. The Taliban went to our home, and then my misery started.

READ MORE: Checkpoints & roadblocks  stuck on the refugee trail

The Taliban accused him of being a spy for the Germans, demanding that his parents bring him back to stand trial in one of the groups courts. My older brother called me and told me I had 15 days to come back. Its impossible to go back  the trial is death.

When he didnt arrive within that period, his family had to relocate to the capital after the Taliban caught and killed his 12-year-old brother as he walked home one day.

I dont think there are any safe places in Afghanistan, Mohamed said, tears welling in his eyes. How can Germany or other European governments say Afghanistan still has some safe places?

Now, he shares an impromptu room  a small area cordoned off by cardboard walls  in a refugee shelter in the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood as he waits to find out whether he will be granted asylum.

Deported from Germany

In Germany, right-wing politicians have urged Chancellor Angela Merkels government to extradite the deportation of refugees and migrants they argue do not need asylum.

Back in late February, German authorities sent 125 Afghans to Kabul after their asylum applications were rejected. They were voluntarily deported, according to German officials.

Among those calling for more deportations is the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a hardline right-wing party that emerged as the countrys leading anti-refugee voice and made landmark gains in regional parliamentary elections last month.

Those people who do not have a right for asylum have to go back. Point, period, said Georg Pazderski, the AfDs Berlin chairman, arguing that even those who obtain asylum should be sent back after three years or when the reason for asylum is no longer present.

READ MORE: An Afghan refugee in Europe  All I can do is pray

Yet, Stefan Reinecke, an editor at the Die Tageszeitung newspaper, rejected Pazderskis calls to expel asylum seekers fleeing war.

He said accepting refugees is good for this country. It made Germany better in many ways.

Reinecke explained that accepting refugees is not without its challenges, however. The people who have fled Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, come with the experience of wars, of violence. And some of them are without their families. So, they feel [very] alone here.

The editor argued that it will be a long way to integrate them, even without groups like the AfD and other German political parties pushing for them to be evicted from the country.

Back in the shelters cafeteria, Niloofer said she hopes the German government will not send Afghans back.

Most of the time I think to myself: I cant live in my country because of the war. In Iran, we have many limitations, she said.

Some people tell us that Germany wants to send Afghan people back to our country. I dont know about my sisters, but I am thinking and crying about this all the time. Im worried about it. I want a good future.

Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_

READ MORE: Afghan refugees arent fleeing by choice
Renewed fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh risks becoming an opportunity for Russian involvement in the region.

Richard Giragosian is the founding director of the Regional Studies Centre, an independent think tank in Yerevan, Armenia.

With much fanfare, the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents seemed pleased by the welcome as participants in US President Barack Obamas Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. Joining more than 50 world leaders at the opening of the summit on March 31, both leaders met with US Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice-President Joseph Biden.

Yet for these two rivals, their own dispute and divide over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict followed them to Washington. And that was also evident by the fact that their meetings with US officials were delicately choreographed as separate but equal events.

Further frustrating diplomatic protocol, recent attempts by the US side to facilitate a direct meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents failed.





And that failure was especially painful, particularly as the US is a co-chair of the mediating Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE) Minsk Group, the sole diplomatic body responsible for the Karabakh peace process.

Tarnished summit

At the same time, the success of Obamas summit was much more harshly tarnished by the behaviour of other leaders.

First, Russian President Vladimir Putin belatedly announced that he was boycotting the summit, leaving no chance for salvaging cooperation between the US and Russia over proliferation and nuclear security issues.

READ MORE: Azeri-Armenian enmity and citizen diplomacy

For the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents, the summit was an important opportunity to demonstrate and display the strategic significance of their respective countries, while also garnering a greater degree of legitimacy.

Moscow may now argue that the collapsing ceasefire may only be remedied by a deployment of Russian peacekeepers. by

For Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian, the Washington summit was an opportune chance to deepen his countrys ties with the US. It was also a chance to meet and greet the sizable and politically well-organised Armenian-American community.

But most importantly, in the face of a Russian boycott of the event, Sarkisian was able to demonstrably defend Armenias independence and sovereignty despite its close security ties to Moscow.

But for the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, the summit was even more significant. It was seen as a chance to reaffirm the strategic importance of Azerbaijan, especially crucial in the wake of a serious crackdown on civil society and an economic downturn driven by the slump in oil prices.

At the time, it was perceived as a way for Aliyev to improve his image and, after a recent release of political prisoners, a way to rebuild ties with the West.

Demise of diplomacy

The launch of the Azerbaijani military offensive in the pre-dawn hours of April 2 means that the presidents decision to proceed was made either in Washington or on the flight back to Baku.

That timing only suggests that the Washington visit was in many ways a last chance, or an ultimatum, by the Azerbaijani leader to the US to move more forcefully on the Karabakh conflict.

And perhaps, although it was not clear to the Americans at the time, the Azerbaijanis sense of frustration over the lack of progress in the peace process may have reached a dangerous tipping point.

Such frustration and willingness to use force to change the calculus over Karabakh has also been mounting, and was evident in the deeper trend of escalation over the past several years.

But it may also hold much wider, more dangerous implications. It may actually present a fresh opportunity for Russian involvement. Although Russia is more directly engaged in Armenia, who hosts the sole Russian base in the region, Moscow has emerged in recent years as Azerbaijans main weapons provider.

Fragile ceasefire agreement

And as this recent surge in hostilities has intensified, the inherently fragile ceasefire agreement, first brokered in May 1994, is now dubious at best. Even the announcement of a truce by Azerbaijan late in the fighting on April 3 was not followed on the ground.

OPINION: Nagorno-Karabakh: Rehearsal for an upcoming war?

Azerbaijani artillery units remained engaged and even expanded their firing, expanding a new front. This only reaffirmed the challenge of returning to a seeming sense of normality in abiding by the terms of the ceasefire.

For Moscow, however, which has long relied on the Karabakh conflict as an instrument for power and influence, the fragility of the ceasefire may become the key re-entry point. Moscow may now argue that the collapsing ceasefire may be only be remedied by a deployment of Russian peacekeepers.

Such a scenario is clearly a threat to all parties in the Karabakh conflict and may add a new, ever more destructive element to the difficult and challenging equation of resolving this conflict.

It may also mean that no matter what the outcome of military operations on the ground will be, the death of diplomacy may also become the demise of the West as Russia returns as the ultimate determinant of security and stability. And that is a strategic threat ironically shared by Armenia, Azerbaijani and Nagorno-Karabakh itself.

Richard Giragosian is the founding director of the Regional Studies Center, an independent think-tank in Yerevan, Armenia.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
The trajectory of the recent clashes hints at what the next war between Azerbaijan and Armenia would look like.

Can Kasapoglu is a defense analyst at the Istanbul-based think-tank the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies.

Recent clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh region  an occupied Azerbaijani territory according to four United Nations Security Council resolutions  have claimed the lives of more than 30 from both sides. At the time of writing, Azerbaijan declared a unilateral ceasefire.

In military terms, it would be fair to say that Baku and Yerevan would not go into an all-out war.

However, a warlike rehearsal through skirmishes and the trajectory of the recent clashes hinted at what the next war between Azerbaijan and Armenia would look like.

In such a case, the Azerbaijanis would rely on rapid combined-arms offensives to achieve decisive results swiftly, while the Armenian defence planners would attempt to hold on to their topographically advantageous defensive lines and launch small-scale counter-offensives to regain lost positions immediately.

Russia would pretend to be a peace-mediator, while supporting the Armenian defence through the back door.

Finally, Turkish public opinion would strongly side with Azerbaijan, and Ankara would play a supportive yet cautious role.

Beyond the usual tensions

Apparently, the recent round of skirmishes presents a different case from the usual tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Although casualty reports of the two parties officials differ, they overlap on the military equipment that was used. Both sides reported helicopters, main battle tanks, and other armoured vehicles with artillery support being involved in the engagements.

Baku's actions are stemming from the very fact that the Nagorno-Karabakh and occupied territories issue remains well beyond realpolitik-driven parameters. by

From a military standpoint, the clashes are tantamount to what modern doctrines call combined-arms operations. The course of action is based on a sophisticated use of different military assets through a simultaneous and synchronised operational way in order to achieve what each arm could not accomplish separately.

Therefore, arms on the battleground compensate for each others vulnerabilities, while providing unique advantages to advance.

In a simplified tactical scenario, tanks provide manoeuvring and protection advantage to infantry, while the infantry protects tanks from anti-tank systems. Simultaneously, artillery pins down enemy formations while attack helicopters hunt down enemy tanks to pave the ground for an armoured offensive.

Notably, combined arms operations cannot be compared with sniper fire-exchange over contact lines. They are conducted to achieve decisive and destructive results swiftly. Clearly, at strategic level, this type of operation aims to change control of terrain.

Severity of the military option

A key detail about the strategic balance in Nagorno-Karabakh came into the picture when the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan announced casualties, without specifying whether the fallen troops belonged to the local militia of Karabakh or the Armenian military.

This was a small but critical detail, as for some time Azerbaijani military analysts have been focusing on distinguishing the Armenian casualties resulting from the border clashes. In this regard, Azerbaijanis argued that the majority of the Armenian losses were from Armenia rather than the local armed elements.

OPINION: Is war imminent in the Caucasus?

Therefore, Baku anticipates a significant decrease in available manpower of the de facto Armenian administration in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Moreover, the Armenian army  mainly relying on conscription and having severe shortages to finance its armement  has been facing significant modernisation problems in recent years.

Coupled with the manpower problems of the Armenian side, the overall military balance has been shifting in favour of Baku in recent years. The only exception in this regard would be the decreasing oil prices that would affect Azerbaijani military modernisation.

On the other side of the border, the Azerbaijani National Security Concept, which was approved by President Ilham Aliyev in 2007, openly states that a settlement with Armenia could be achieved only under a complete withdrawal of Armenian forces from the occupied territories and full restoration of Azerbaijans sovereignty.

OPINION: Nagorno-Karabakh: The death of diplomacy

In tandem, the current military doctrine of Azerbaijan, which was adopted in 2010, underlines the right to exert military force to regain Nagorno-Karabakh.

Thus, Bakus actions are stemming from the very fact that the Nagorno-Karabakh and occupied territories issue remains well beyond realpolitik-driven parameters.

Rather, it constitutes a vital component of the Azerbaijani strategic culture as the top security agenda and matter of pride for the nation. In other words, the military option is really on the table for Baku.

Russia and Turkey factor

At this point, the primary drawback of the Aliyev administration is stemming from the risk of igniting a regional conflict in which Russia would support Yerevan.

Russia has a formidable bastion in Armenia equipped with strategic weapon systems. Furthermore, Moscow and Yerevan have recently signed a joint air defence agreement.

From a broader perspective, the Russia factor appears more complicated than simply a military alliance with Armenia.

For a long time, Moscow has been exploiting protracted conflicts, be it Nagorno-Karabakh or South Ossetia, to maintain grounds for its military presence in the former Soviet Union territories, while these deployments prolong the protracted conflicts, generating a vicious cycle.

Moreover, although Russias lucrative arms sales to Azerbaijan and its military alliance with Armenia might seem contradictory, such a course of action even bolsters the aforementioned situation.

During the clashes, Turkish public opinion showed a strong solidarity with Azerbaijan due to the shared national identity. Yet, it seems, Ankara would still avoid a regional war, and opt for capacity-building measures to support its ally.

Can Kasapoglu is a defence analyst at the Istanbul-based think-tank the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM).

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
National Assembly set to debate on Tuesday an opposition-tabled motion to impeach President Zuma over spending scandal.

South Africas parliament will debate a motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma, the National Assembly Speaker said on Sunday, days after the countrys top court ruled the president had violated the constitution.

The debate on that motion has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, Baleka Mbete said a day after anti-apartheid veteran Ahmed Kathrada joined opposition leaders in calling for Zumas resignation.

The South African president had ignored orders from the public prosecutor to return some of the $16m in state funds that he used to renovate his mansion in Nkandla, situated in KwaZulu-Natal province.

On Friday, 73-year-old Zuma, in a televised address, apologised and said he would pay back some of the money, as ordered. He said that he never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution.

READ MORE: Anti-apartheid veteran urges Zuma to resign

Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition party Democratic Alliance, tabled the motion to impeach Zuma, who is facing arguably the biggest scandal since he took office in 2009. He has fended off accusations of corruption, influence peddling and rape in the past.





The impeachment proceedings are unlikely to be successful because of the Africa National Congress partys strong majority in parliament, but the judicial rebuke may strengthen anti-Zuma factions within the ruling party to press for change.

The unanimous ruling by the 11-judge constitutional court also criticised parliament for passing a resolution that purported to nullify Public Protector Thuli Madonselas findings on Zumas private residence.

The judgement makes sound, balanced and critical findings, Speaker Mbete told journalists.
Announcement comes after fighting with Armenian forces in disputed region killed at least 30 people.

Azerbaijan has said it is unilaterally ceasing fire in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a day after fighting with Armenian forces killed at least 30.

But Armenias defence ministry almost immediately rejected the ceasefire, describing the Azeri defence ministrys statement as an information trap.

This statement does not mean the halt of military action, the defence ministers press secretary, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, said on Facebook.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994.

The Armenia Defence Ministry said Azerbaijani troops started an offensive with tanks and artillery on Saturday. Azerbaijan denied those allegations, saying its soldiers were reacting to heavy attacks from the Armenian side.

Armenia said 18 of its forces were killed and Azerbaijan reported it had 12 dead.

Analysts say the conflict is fuelled by long-simmering tensions in the region between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris.

Al Jazeeras Rory Challands, reporting from Moscow, said the dispute between the two nations had the potential to spiral into a serious regional conflict.

The trigger for the surge in fighting still seems to be local but the reasons still appear to be quite murky, he said.
First passenger flight headed to Portugal as airport opens 12 days after bombings killed 32 in Belgian capital.

A passenger flight headed to Faro, Portugal, took off from Brussels Airport on Sunday, the first passenger flight to depart from the airport 12 days after suicide bombings killed more than 30 people in the Belgian capital.

According to the airports website, flights to Turin and Athens were also due to take off later in the day, with a longer list of departing flights scheduled for Monday.

The three flights were a test run for a European aviation hub that used to handle 600 flights a day and plans to slowly climb back to normal capacity.

Security at the airport was tight with new check-in procedures for passengers in temporary structures.

Arnaud Feist, the CEO of Brussels Airport, said that Belgiums biggest airport would gradually climb to 20 percent of capacity in the coming days, able to process 800 passengers an hour  maximum capacity for the temporary structures.

The airport has been closed since March 22, after suicide bombings hit the airports departure hall and a Brussels subway train, killing 32 people and wounding 270.

Feist said at a Saturday news conference that the three flights were a sign of hope following the darkest days in the history of aviation in Belgium.

On Sunday, he thanked employees for their courage, solidarity and the impressive work carried out in so little time.

We are more than an airport  We are a family more bound together than ever, he said at a ceremony at the airport.

The attacks, in which three suicide bombers also died, were claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group.

Since then, new security measures have been ordered at the airport, including spot checks of vehicles before they arrive and the closing of a drop-off parking area outside the terminal, according to Belgian Federal Police spokesman Michael Jonniaux.

He said that all passengers would be screened along with their travel documents and baggage before they were allowed to enter the facility.

The bombers entered the airports check-in area with suitcases packed with high explosives and nails, and the resulting blasts caused the ceiling to collapse, shattered windows and caused massive damage.

There will be no access by rail or public transport to the airport for the foreseeable future, the airport CEO said.

Brussels Airport served about 1.5 million people in February, the month preceding the attack. Feist said he hoped full service could be restored by the end of June or the beginning of July, in time for the summer holiday season.
Faustin-Archange Touadera, the Central African Republics new President, has named his former campaign director Simplice Sarandji as the countrys prime minister.

The president of the republic, head of state, in light of the constitution of the Central African Republic of March 30, 2016  decrees Mr Simplice Sarandji to be named prime minister, head of the government, a presidential decree released on Saturday said.

It was not immediately clear when Sarandji would name his cabinet but an announcement was expected in the coming days.

Touadera, a former prime minister and mathematics teacher, was elected president in February, replacing a transitional government that had held power since early 2014.

Touadera has pledged to bring peace and development to the former French colony. The country was hit by religious and inter-commununal conflict in 2013, when a mostly Muslim rebel group, Seleka, toppled longtime ruler Francois Bozize.

That prompted a counter-attack by a Christian militia known as the anti-Balaka. Three years of bloodshed and the displacement of nearly one million people from their homes have since disrupted harvests and sent food prices soaring.

In March, the World Food Programme (WFP) said that at least half of the population  or 2.5 million people  were facing a hunger crisis.

Bienvenu Djossa, the WFP country director in CAR, said the number of people battling hunger had doubled from 2015.

It is serious, Djossa said in a statement.

The WFP said it had secured only about half the $89m it needs until the end of July to respond to the needs of 1.4 million people in CAR and neighbouring countries hosting refugees from there.
At least two dead and dozens wounded when train hit a backhoe on the track, fire official says.

Two people have died after a train with 341 passengers on board derailed near Philadephia, forcing officials to close down the service along the busy stretch.

Dozens of people were wounded in the accident that took place in the town of Chester on Sunday shortly before 8:00am (12:00 GMT), news agencies reported.

The accident occurred after a vehicle was struck on the tracks, said Travis Thomas, fire commissioner for Chester, Pennsylvania, at a press briefing.

There were two deceased, but they were not passengers on the train, Thomas said.

Thomas said later that 35 people received hospital treatment for non-life-threatening injuries. He declined to provide additional details about the victims.

Amtrak  the company that operates the train, did not confirm the casualties but said the train had derailed after hitting a backhoe on the track.

Company spokesman Stephen Gardner told reporters that officials from the National Transportation Safety Board were en route to the scene of the disaster to launch an investigation.

Train service along a 50km stretch from Philadelphia south to Wilmington, Delaware was suspended, said Amtrak officials who did not give any indication as to when service would resume.

At least five people were killed in May last year when an Amtrak train derailed in the Frankfort section of Philadelphia.
Iraqs PM presented his new cabinet line-up to parliament, but political crisis is unlikely to go away.

On March 31, members of Iraqs parliament gathered in the assembly building at the fortified Green Zone for an urgent matter. They were tasked with endorsing Prime Minister Haider al-Abadis list of new ministers he was scheduled to present in keeping with a deadline set by the legislature earlier in the week.

The mood was tense. Powerful Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters have besieged the Green Zone where the prime ministers offices are located, had issued an ultimatum to Abadi to announce his reform plans and a new ministerial council by the end of the month.

Sadr also threatened to escalate the campaign in order to uproot corrupt and inefficient officials if the protesters demands were not met by the set deadline.

Overnight, tight security was imposed and hundreds of soldiers were deployed to police the Green Zone as Sadr followers blockaded its main entrances and vowed to remain there until Abadi concedes to their leaders conditions.

READ MORE: What are the reasons behind Muqtada al-Sadrs return?

The weeks before the parliaments session, leaders of the Iraqi political factions failed to agree on a proposal by Abadi to form a new cabinet of technocrats as part of his reform package to meet pressing public demands after months of nationwide anti-corruption protests.

The government was stalemated as the country remained embroiled in a war to drive the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL, also known as ISIS) from towns they have been seizing since summer 2014.The two conflicts were made worse by a crushing economic crisis triggered by low oil prices.

When Abadi finally showed up at the assembly on Thursday afternoon he gave a sealed envelope containing the names of 16 ministerial candidates to parliament speaker Saleem Al-Jubouri following a speech to chamber.





They were chosen on the basis of professionalism, competence, integrity and leadership ability, Abadi said of his list of the proposed candidates.

Abadi said he will keep the defence and interior ministers in place for now owing to the countrys ongoing battle against the ISIL jihadist group.

Abadi also pledged to start reshuffling other top government jobs and lay off at least 100 senior managers. Abadis move showed easing tensions.

Sadr voiced support for the new cabinet, though not without conditions. He called off the sit-in but insisted that weekly demonstrations for reform will continue until parliament approves the new cabinet.

That said, it remains to be seen if reshuffling Abadis cabinet will end the impasse and make room for a lasting solution for Iraqs chronic government crisis.

OPINION: How Iraq recaptured Ramadi and why it matters

The lawmakers have now 10 days to agree on Abadis nominees. That is not a foregone conclusion, however. The issue is unlikely to pass without hard bargaining, and it could fall victim to factional politics.

The biggest hurdle for the reshuffle is the parliament. In order for Abadi to form a new government, his current ministers should offer their resignations.

If any minister in Abadis present cabinet refuses to resign, an impeachment by an absolute majority of members becomes necessary. At least two key cabinet members, Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Finance Minister Hoshyar Zibari, have reportedly been dragging their feet.

Under Iraqs constitution at least 165 members, or 51 percent of the legislatures 328 members, have yet to endorse the deal. Serious objections could be a key hurdle.

Though Abadi did not disclose the names of his new ministers, a list leaked to the press showed that most of the candidates are not seen to be loyal to Iraqs existing political blocs that dominate the parliament.





Skepticism about their professional skills as well as their political independence was also raised.

But the most serious sticking point remains the existing power-sharing formula introduced after the US invasion in 2003 which ousted the regime of Saddam Hussein and empowered both Shia and Kurds.

The rationale behind forming a government of qualified professionals is to get around the ethno-sectarian quota system in order to push reforms stalled by governments inefficiency, corruption and power struggles.

This seems to be impossible as long as the power-sharing arrangements which only benefit the ruling ethnic and sectarian class remain in place.

To underscore this challenge, a Kurdish geologist, nominated to be Iraqs new oil minister, turned down the offer a day after his name appeared on the list of Abadis candidates. He apparently did that under pressure from Kurdish parties.

READ MORE: Fallujah crisis  We are being left to slow death

Even before going to the parliament, Abadi received a high-profile snub from self-ruled Kurds. Kurdish lawmakers said they will not support a government formed without prior consultation with their leadership.

Kurdistan Region President Masoud Barzani, who is seeking full statehood from Iraq, had threatened that his autonomous administration would consider the reshuffle as irrelevant.

There is increasing fear that Barzani wants to exploit the government crisis to further his independence agenda and hold a planned referendum for breaking away from Iraq.

Sunni blocs, strident critics of what they see as the exclusiveness of the post-Saddam political process, will most likely feel they stand to lose out. Some Sunni politicians have voiced concern that a non-political cabinet will increase their communitys marginalisation.

Perhaps the big winner in this game is Sadr himself, who has emerged with a competitive edge over other Shia leaders. By showing a striking ability to mobilise masses flooding the streets of Baghdad and other cities against the government, Sadr has proved to be Iraqi Shias most prominent political leader.

His drive for reform has apparently won a blessing from Iraqs most prominent Shia spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has demanded that Abadi gets serious about tackling corruption after a wave of protests swept across Iraq last summer.

Many believed that Sadr would bow to Irans pressure, yet he succeeded to whither Tehrans influence.

With his grass-roots Sadrist Movement and its powerful military wing, the Peace Brigades, Sadr has become the strongest single force for change in Iraq.

As for the deal to end Abadis cabinet crisis, it could only be enough to stop the government collapsing, at least until the next parliamentary elections due in 2018.

This explains why there was little sense of celebration on the streets, where the main feeling was exasperation that the compromise had come only after such a tortuous and tedious process.

The best solution for Iraqs fundamental problems may be a complete overhaul of its dysfunctional governance system to give the country a long-term stability.

At the heart of Iraqs impasse is the ethno-sectarian political system that was forged by the American occupation authority and gave rise to the ethno-sectarian oligarchies who want to keep the status quo.

Unless Iraqs ruling elites drop their distorted communal and regional agendas for the sake of rebuilding their battered nation, Iraq will remain particularly vulnerable to recurrent turbulence rattling its fragile political system and its broken state.
Journalists held after police fire pepper spray at group outside presidential office demanding more media freedom.

Maldives police arrested 16 independent journalists while breaking up their demonstration against an alleged crackdown on freedom of speech in the politically troubled nation, private media outlets reported.

Police on Sunday used pepper spray and roughed up reporters who were staging a sit-in protest outside President Abdulla Yameens office in the capital Male, according to several outlets including the Maldives Independent website.

The journalists were released on Monday.

The protest was aimed at forcing the government to withdraw its draft criminal defamation bill, which protesters fear will be used against private media as well as political opponents of the government.

Government spokesmen Ibrahim Hussain Shihab said the protest was broken up because the journalists had gathered in a protected zone near the presidents office and scaled the barricades. He said only 11 demonstrators were arrested.

Photos shared on social media showed journalists dousing themselves with milk to ease the effects of having been pepper-sprayed.

READ MORE: Maldives police in violent crackdown against opposition

Ongoing political unrest in the Maldives, a nation of 1,192 tiny coral islands, has dented its image as a peaceful paradise for well-heeled honeymooners and upmarket tourists.

The latest protest follows a series of moves by the government and the judiciary to restrict free speech and media freedom in the archipelago, a journalist from the Haveeru newspaper told AFP on condition of anonymity, adding that six of his colleagues had been detained.

The Maldives Independent said five of its journalists were arrested, while three taking part in the protest were pepper-sprayed at close range and had to be taken to hospital. Private TV stations also said five of their reporters had been arrested.

The state controls the main radio and TV stations but not the newspapers.

OPINION: Internet freedom in Myanmar  a curse or an opportunity?

Meanwhile, police on Saturday confirmed for the first time that Ahmed Rilwan, the journalist who went missing in 2014, had been abducted. Rilwan worked for a pro-opposition website at the time of his disappearance.

Police said security camera video showed a man identified as a member of a criminal gang following Rilwan as he was returning home from work.

Western leaders have said there are worrying questions about freedom of speech, rule of law and the governments commitment to democracy in the nation of 340,000 Sunni Muslims.

Many opposition political leaders have either been jailed or forced into exile by Yameens government, which faces mounting international criticism over its treatment of dissidents.

Political unrest has escalated since the toppling four years ago of the countrys first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed, in what he claimed was a coup.

Nasheed, whose conviction and jailing last year on terror-related charges has been widely criticised, is now in the UK for urgent medical treatment after being given prison leave.
Worst outbreak of violence in decades continues for second day despite declarations of ceasefire.

Clashes between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces rumbled for a second day, despite Baku announcing a ceasefire after the worst outbreak of violence in decades over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region sparked international pressure to stop fighting.

Azerbaijan said on Sunday it had decided to unilaterally cease hostilities and pledged to reinforce several strategic positions it claimed to have captured inside the Armenian-controlled territory.

The Armenia-backed authorities in Karabakh  which claims independence but is heavily backed by Yerevan  said they were willing to discuss a ceasefire but only if it saw them regain their territory.

Both sides accused each other of continuing to fire across the volatile frontline that has divided them since a war in which Armenian separatists seized the region from Azerbaijan ended with an inconclusive truce in 1994.

Armenia has violated all the norms of international law. We wont abandon our principal position. But at the same time we will observe the ceasefire and after that we will try to solve the conflict peacefully, President Ilham Aliyev said at a security council meeting broadcast by Azeri state TV.

Sporadic shooting

An AFP news agency photographer in the Azerbaijani town of Terter  around 10 kilometres (six miles) from the frontline  reported hearing sporadic shooting on Sunday afternoon.

Men carried a coffin draped in Azerbaijans flag through the streets as the funeral of an Azeri soldier killed in the clashes was held. At least three houses were destroyed by shelling and women and children had been evacuated.

READ MORE: Dozens killed in Nagorno-Karabakh clashes

Fierce clashes left at least 18 Armenian and 12 Azerbaijani soldiers dead on Saturday after the two sides accused each other of attacking with heavy weaponry across the volatile frontline.

The Karabakh authorities said one boy was killed in the fighting, while Azerbaijan said two civilians died and 10 were wounded.





Armenias President Serzh Sarkisian called the clashes the largest-scale hostilities since a 1994 truce ended a war in which Armenian-backed fighters seized the territory from Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan said one of its helicopters was shot down as its forces took control of several strategic heights and a village in Armenian-controlled territory.

Karabakh forces on Sunday claimed they took back the strategic Lala-Tepe height in Karabakh which was captured by Azeri troops on Saturday.

Baku denied the report, saying that the height remained under its control and that rebel troops sustained serious manpower losses.

Appeals for calm

Both Russia and the West appealed to all sides to show restraint, with key regional power broker President Vladimir Putin calling Saturday for an immediate ceasefire.

Moscow has supplied weaponry to both sides in the conflict, but has much closer military and economic ties to Armenia and Yerevan is reliant on Russias backing.

US Secretary of State John Kerry urged the arch foes to return to peace talks under the auspices of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), reiterating there is no military solution to the conflict.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, meanwhile, vowed to back traditional ally Azerbaijan to the end in the conflict.

Ethnic Armenian separatists backed by Yerevan seized control of the mountainous Nagorny Karabakh region in an early 1990s war that claimed some 30,000 lives. The foes have never signed a peace deal despite the 1994 ceasefire.
Protests against the presence of refugees take place in Greece and Turkey as EU deal is about to get implemented.

A plan to send back refugees and migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries, two days before the deal brokered by the EU is set to be implemented.





At the same time, refugees stranded at a makeshift camp in a small town on Greeces border with Macedonia staged a protest demanding that the border be opened and that they be allowed to continue their journeys to central and northern Europe.

Al Jazeeras Zeina Khodr, reporting from Lesbos, said the arrivals are continuing despite the fact that the EU-Turkey deal came into force on March 20.

Greek officials are saying that undoubtedly arrivals have slowed but they have not stopped. Once they see the deportations happen then people will not be relying on hope but will be seeing for themselves that Europes gates have been shut, Khodr.

The returns are a key part of an agreement between the EU and Turkey aimed at ending the uncontrollable influx into Europe of refugees and migrants fleeing war and misery in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Under the deal, those who cross into Greece illegally will be held and sent back once their asylum applications are processed. For every Syrian returned, one Syrian will be resettled to Europe directly from Turkey.

Residents protest

The refugees continued presence led several dozen local residents to stage a protest on Saturday.

They blocked a road for about an hour to demand the evacuation of more than 11,000 stranded refugees to transit centres across the Greek mainland.

The police know what they must do  they must be issued orders, said Georgios Georgantas, a politician with the conservative opposition New Democracy party, who joined the protesters.

He called for the immediate evacuation of the Idomeni camp using violence, if necessary.

Idomeni residents alleged that some refugees had broken into empty homes in the town and said they no longer felt safe.

Refugees stuck at Idomeni: Questions but no answers

In the coastal Turkish town of Dikili, hundreds demonstrated against the prospect of hosting people expelled from the nearby Greek islands, especially Chios and Lesbos, where there were more than 5,000 refugees on Saturday morning.

Turkey is due to receive the first batch of returned refugees and asylum seekers on Monday. A plan to build a reception centre in Dikili is unpopular with locals.

We definitely dont want a refugee camp in Dikili, said the towns mayor, Mustafa Tosun.

Demonstrators expressed concern over the effect the EU deal could have on the economy, tourism and security in their town.

The deal aims to break the lucrative smuggling operations that now operate out of Turkey.
Assad forces, backed by Russian strikes, take over al-Qaryatain after besieging it for days, state media reports.

Syrian forces, backed by Russian air strikes, fought the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group out of the town of al-Qaryatain after gradually surrounding it over the past few days, state media said.





Surrounded by hills, al-Qaryatain is 100km west of the ancient city of Palmyra, which government forces recaptured from ISIL last Sunday.

Al-Qaryatain had been held by ISIL since late August. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been trying to retake al-Qaryatain and other pockets of ISIL control to reduce the groups ability to project military power into the heavily populated western region of Syria, where Damascus and other main cities are located.

State news agency SANA said the army and its allies fully restored security and stability to al-Qaryatain after killing the last remaining groups of Daesh terrorists in the town, using the acronym of ISILs Arabic name.

Government forces entered the town from a number of directions, SANA reported. A Syrian military source told SANA that the army had cleared areas northwest of the town of explosives planted by ISIL.

READ MORE: Mass grave discovered in Syrias recaptured Palmyra

ISIL fighters retreating from Palmyra laid thousands of mines which the Syrian army is now clearing before civilians can return.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government forces had taken over half the town and that fierce fighting continued between Assads army and ISIL to the north and southeast of al-Qaryatain.

The observatory, which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of activists on the ground, said more than 40 air strikes by Russian and Syrian planes hit areas near the town on Sunday.

ISIL still has complete control over the city of Raqqa, its de facto capital, and it controls most of Deir Ezzor province in eastern Syria, which borders Iraq.

Aleppo offensive





Syrian rebels and al-Nusra Front have mounted an offensive against Syrian government forces and on Saturday took a strategic hill south of Aleppo from government control, the observatory reported on Saturday.

The offensive began on Friday, and Syrian government and allied forces were fighting to take back control of the territory and repel further attacks.

A fragile cessation of hostilities truce has held in Syria for more than a month as the various parties try to negotiate an end to Syrias five-year-old civil war.

But the truce excludes ISIL and al-Nusra Front, and air and land attacks by Syrian and allied forces continue in parts of Syria where the government says the groups are present.

More than 250,000 people have been killed during the war in Syria and millions have fled the country.
Engineer-turned-perfumer left his home on the outskirts of Damascus in search of a better life in West Africa.

Its a lonely life, far from home, for Husam al-Din, a Syrian who sells perfume at a market in Senegal.

Three years ago, the engineer-turned-perfumer left his home on the outskirts of Damascus, where the war and the smell of death had become too much to bear.

But unlike the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who fled to Europe, Husam travelled more than double that distance  to West Africa.

He came to the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to work as an engineer at the airport. But when his contract was up, opening a perfume shop seemed his best chance to stay in the country.

READ MORE: Why on earth would anyone do this?

I am not a refugee. I have my job here, the immaculately dressed Husam told Al Jazeera in front of his shop on a bustling street.

The moment I feel my country is fine I will definitely go back. I hope all Syrians can return to their country.

Hundreds of other Syrians have come to West Africa since the war erupted. Their entry point has often been Mauritania, a country that Syrians can travel to without a visa.

In Senegal, Husam says he is free, which is not how he sees those who go to Europe.

I imagine Europe as a big prison. You cant move freely, he says. Every move needs permission from governments. They also have restrictions imposed on refugees in Europe. Life is tough for them.

Last year, more than one million refugees arrived in the EU by boat from Turkey to Greece. More than 143,000 have landed on Europes shores this year alone, according to the International Organization for Migration.
President Mansour Hadi sacks current prime minister and names new vice president and prime minister, reports say.

Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi appointed a new vice president and prime minister, sacking current prime minister Khaled Bahah, sources told AFP news agency.

In a major shake-up of senior officials, Hadi named on Sunday as the new vice president General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a politically powerful army general who split violently with former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011 during the Arab Spring protests that eventually ousted Saleh.

The new prime minister, Ahmed Obeid bin Daghr, was a former official in Salehs General Peoples Congress party before joining Hadis camp.

There was no immediate explanation behind Bahahs dismissal, which comes just a week before a UN-brokered ceasefire planned between Yemens warring parties, which is expected to pave the way for peace talks in Kuwait on April 18.

WATCH: Can the dream of Yemens revolution be salvaged?

But government sources have in the past spoken of differences between the president and Bahah, who had served as Yemens envoy to the UN before Hadi appointed him as foreign minister and then prime minister.

In December, Hadi reshuffled his cabinet, naming new foreign and interior ministers in a move that was understood to be aimed at smoothing his relations with Bahah.

Hadi has also recently been involving Ahmar more actively in decision-making, appointing him in February as armed forces deputy commander in an effort to rally support from tribes and troops in the rebel-held region around Yemens capital.

Ahmars troops played a prominent role in the 2011 uprising that ousted strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose loyalists are now allied with Iran-backed Shia rebels in control of Sanaa.
The case against Assange is as political as it is legal; where does it go from here? Plus, Kenyas election influencers.
On March 4, 2012, Vladimir Putin was elected to serve as Russias president for another six years, and he is set to take up office following his inauguration on May 7.

To his supporters, such as those we encountered celebrating at an election night government rally in Moscow, Putin is a hero, the strong man who brought order to Russia after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. They love his carefully cultivated image: the horse-riding, judo black-belted, stand-for-no-nonsense action man who has taken the country back to its rightful place on the worlds stage.

But elsewhere in Moscow that night, under the watchful eye of state security and police, Putins political opponents gathered to express their disapproval. Disappointed by the result after enjoying a surprising late surge in the anti-Putin camp in the weeks before the poll, many of them said that his years at the top of Russian politics had seen the countrys reputation become synonymous with cronyism and corruption, and that with Putin at the helm inner cliques have been allowed to run Russia for their own benefit and personal gain.

Their language was far from diplomatic. Putin, thief! they chanted and promised to return to the streets in the weeks and months ahead.

Such abuse may not bother Russias president-elect very much  after all he has just been returned to power  but it does reflect wider rumours about Vladimir Putins personal finances, business dealings and his relationship with some of the richest and most powerful businessmen in the land; the oligarchs who run its major companies and have accumulated fabulous wealth as a result.

Stories about the extent to which Putin may have personally benefited from these friendships and his years in office have been the currency of international and diplomatic gossip for years, fuelled by claims made by exiled political opponents about vast multi-billion dollar fortunes in offshore bank accounts. They even surfaced on WikiLeaks on 2010 when a quarter of a million secret memos from American diplomats were published on the internet. In one of them, Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state, quotes a Russian opposition figure as saying that Vladimir Putin is nervously trying to secure his future immunity from potential law enforcement investigations into his alleged illicit proceeds.

So is there any substance to these stories? Is Putin the modest man of the people as his supporters declare  a leader who eschews wealth and privilege, as honest as the day is long? Or is he the owner of a vast but secret fortune and at the centre of a web of intrigue and financial wheeler-dealing as his critics allege?

For this edition of People & Power, reporter Sarah Spiller and a team from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism set off to find out. In a journey that takes them from central Moscow to a judo club in St Petersburg, from country dachas to a mysterious palace on the shores of the Black Sea, they assemble an intriguing story of an enigmatic leader who enjoys a lavish lifestyle somewhat at odds with his official public persona.
April Showers Bring May Flowers and it's raining.... Women singers...yes it is.Lina OrfanosEssentially EllaBabinis Productions2016is HOT, HOT HOT!. And if Jane Monheit's The Songbook Sessions: Ella Fitzgerald (Emerald City Records, 2016) was just the beginning, then Lina Orfanos' Essentially Ella indicated the start of a trend. Orfanos' approach differs from that of Monheit's in that she sticks strictly to the middle-of-the-road, giving perfectly mainstream performances from the heart of the Ella songbook. And you know what? That is just fine. Peachy, in fact. The First Lady of Song was exactly that and Orfanos captures the invention and sheer power of Fitzgerald in this well-crafted baker's dozen from Ella's songbook, which is America's songbook. Filled out with a functional band that includes bassistand pianist, Orfanos even does "My Funny Valentine" proud, having the guts to provide us with one more performance. Good show and good luck, Lina Orfanos.Wendy PedersenWendy Pedersen & Jim Gasior: We TwoSelf Produced2015Sporting an impressive resume of artists worked with and academic positions held, South Florida mainstays Wendy Pedersen and Jim Gasior team up to deftly survey the Great American Songbook in the friendly and intimate confines of the jazz duo. Pedersen's well-balanced and broad vocal range is more than a match for the material while Gasior is perfect accompanist: chops galore and the sense to know when to use them. The pair's simpatico is readily evident on this collection of a baker's dozen (plus one two-song medley) of time-tested songs. Spanning the spectrum of ballads, burners, and swinging for the fences, Pedersen and Gasior hit perfect pitch on a medley of "If I Should Lose You/ If Ever I Would Leave You," a pairing that boasts an obvious intelligence and creative vision. Add a sweet "Besame Much" and a smoky "'Round Midnight" and the ballads are well covered. The pair approach a coda on a progressively upbeat note, using "My Favorite Things," "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning," and n "Exactly Like You" to remind us what is great about American Songcraft.Joyce MorenoJoyce Moreno & Kenny Werner: PoesiaPirouet Records2015This quiet an elegant recording was mostly overlooked last year for reasons well beyond me. Vocalist Joyce Moreno is no stranger to the international music community and pianist Kenny Werner is in a class by himself. Poesia is a collection of 13 ballads more carefully selected that any ballad collection of the past several years. Charlie Chaplin's deceptively warm "Smile" and Bruno Martino's shimmering "Estate" are the best known here. Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" and Jobim's "Olha Maria" pit Moreno and Werner's sharp lyricism against one another, creating a quiet heat beneath a cool exterior. Abbey Lincoln's "Throw it Away" juxtaposes against Noel Coward's "Mad about the Boy" slyly, this the well developed sense of humor and song that is Moreno's modus operandi. Poesia is a soft, reflective survey of some of the politer and discreet corner of the international Songbook.Letizia GambiBlue MondayArtist Share2016Italy produces brilliant and edgy musicians who stretch and break the boundaries of musical genre with an uncommon ease. Who first comes to mind is Laura Furci, whose provocative musicality may be heard on her releases: Think Con La Tua Cabeza (Self Produced, 2013) and PaCiencia (Self Produced, 2015). Pushing the envelope in a slightly different direction is Naples-native Letizia Gambi, who brands her musical approach as "Cultural Fusion." That it is, from the urban grind of a transformed "Sweet Georgia Brown" (think Anita O'Day's performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival to the power of infinity) to the traditional "Perche Domani." In between are written by Letizia and Lenny White, new arrangements of Jazz standards like Joe Henderson's "Recordame" with White and Gambi lyrics, retitled "True Love, Remember Me," "But Not for me," inspired by Ahmad Jamal's brilliant 1958 performance from At the Pershing: But Not for me (Chess, 1958) Most inspired is the pairing of Amy Winehouse ("Back to Black") and Doris Day ("Que Sera Sera"). This disc brims with surprises and delights, sure to satisfy the fussiest of listeners.Mala WaldronDeep ResonanceSoulful Sound Music2016New York City vocalist/pianist/composer Mala Waldron is who you might think, daughter of Mal Waldron. She is also an internationally-known artist and educator whose bright life experiences are generously sifted into this brief collection of mostly original compositions, save for somber and reflective "Jericho." Waldron is supported by an assortment of rhythm and melody formats, ranging from the pastoral "Free as the Wind (Margot's Song)" featuring's bass flute and's percussion to Waldron's duet with bassist's elastic, fretless electric bass on the searching "I know." Richly crepuscular and emotive, Deep Resonance frames Waldron in full possession of her composing and performance facilities ready to take on the world.
The Real Dixieland BookRobert Rawlins378 PagesISBN: 978-1-4234-7694-82015Saxophonist, who is also Professor of Music Theory at Rowan University (New Jersey) has done jazz a great service by producing The Real Dixieland Book and Tunes Of The Twenties. While they obviously serve different audiences, and can be enjoyed separately, they are really meant to supplement each other.Jazz is a living art, and its past should not be forgotten or relegated to mere historical study. The music presented here represents the beginnings of jazz as players struggled to develop and implement the concept of improvisation. The invention of recording, at first crudely acoustic, but by 1925 greatly improved by the electronic microphone, allowed jazz to spread and greatly sped up the rate of change. Listening to recordings of the twenties in chronological order makes it clear how rapidly jazz was changing, seemingly almost monthly.Performers will naturally gravitate to the Real Book, where Rawlins has gone to great lengths to present "definitive" versions of the tunes as he heard them played on records, which are not just those associated with "Dixieland." As a wonderful side benefit, Rawlins provides the words, and many times multiple verses for most of the tunes. What might jump out to many is that what is familiar on a lot of the tunes is the chorus, while the verse is not. Anyone with a modicum of music theory and reading ability will easily get lost in the thickets of such terrific tunes.Tunes Of The TwentiesRobert Rawlins294 PagesISBN: 978-0-9965949-0-5Rockwood House Publishing2015Tunes Of The Twenties is a bit of a misnomer in that a goodly number of the tunes were written before 1920 and after 1929. As Rawlins states in the preface, "[the title] refers to a style, an attitude, and a mindset, not necessarily a decade." Furthermore, the players who made the tunes popular were those who came into their own in the twenties. Rawlins writing style combines seriousness and deep knowledge of the subject with much humor, making it easy to read while being highly rewarding.One interesting bit of information gleaned is that a song's success was measured not just in record sales, but also in sheet music sales, which many times reached into the millions. At the time, the piano was a much more common household item than today (see here ). Rawlins has included pictures of as many of the covers of the sheet music as he could, and this further enhances appreciation of the time period.The reader will get to know the composers and lyricists of Tin Pan Alley, as well as the players. Here also Rawlins has done yeoman work, since when he lists those players who recorded the tune, he not only mentions the well knownor(to name but a few), he also refers toover forty times, making it clear how important Whiteman was to jazz at the time, despite his untoward reputation now.The connection to the Real Book is made clear when Rawlins describes something unique about the musical structure of a particular tune in that now can be looked up.Together, Tunes Of The Twenties and The Dixieland Jazz Book are invaluable to anyone remotely interested in Early Jazz, which really ought to be everyone interested in jazz at all, period.
By this point, you've likely heard of Marie Kondo's magical tidying method or applied some of its principles to your rooms, drawers, or even your heart. But did you know that feng shui is really the OG when it comes to creating a joy-inducing space?

Feng shui is the ancient Chinese art of harmonizing your surroundingsthink more along the lines of "create energy flow," rather than "tidy up." In the recently revised edition of Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui, space-clearing guru Karen Kingston revisits her original 1998 guide with fresh eyes, sharing even more foolproof, practical tips for effectively getting rid of clutter, whether it's in your home, yard, workspace, body, or mind.

According to Kingston, the most importantand until rather recently, often overlookedstep in the feng shui practice is getting rid of clutter. And not all clutter is created equal. It actually falls into four categories: things you don't use or love, things that are untidy or not organized, an excess of things that don't fit into a space, and unfinished things.

More clutter, Kingston says, means more stuck, depressed energy in your spaceand that can negatively affect your personal energy, mental state, and overall wellness big time. Clutter can also be a reflection of what's going on in your life (which might explain why that pile of clothes on the chair seems to get bigger as you feel more stressed and out of control).

On the flip side, a clutter-free space filled with things that are loved and used regularly allows positive energy to move fluidly, not just through the space but also through you.

"If you have a clear focus in your life and you surround yourself with things that have this marvelous free-flowing energy, you will have a correspondingly happy, joyous, free-flowing life," Kingston explains.

In that spirit, here are seven clutter-cutting tips even those of us drowning in stuff can embrace.

1. Don't clear clutter because you should. "In this book, I'm not telling you that you should' do this or should' do that," writes Kingston in a chapter on how to start clearing out your clutter. "Should' is one of the most disempowering words there is. When you use it, you feel guilty and obligated. My advice is to dump the word from your vocabulary forever. Use could' not should' from here on in[it] empowers you, gives you a choice, and later allows you to take the credit for a job well done."




A military official said that a number of Saudi-paid mercenaries were killed at the hands of the army and popular forces in al-Jazami Hill in al-Kadaha area in al-Ma'afer district.

The army and popular forces carried out on Monday unique military operations in Taiz province.A military official said that a number of Saudi-paid mercenaries were killed at the hands of the army and popular forces in al-Jazami Hill in al-Kadaha area in al-Ma'afer district.
On March 24th, the Miami Herald quoted Pope Francis saying, Muslims, Christians, and Hindus are brothers, children of the same God. The Pope was not speaking ex cathedra, so he can be forgiven for the plethora of errors in this unbiblical statement. Following Muslim violence in Belgium, and with Good Friday imminent, the Bishop of Rome doubtless wanted to play peacemaker, pouring oil on troubled waters. But evisceration of Christian orthodoxy isnt fruitful, since sentimental whimsy has no cathartic value.

Do Muslims, Christians, and Hindus worship the same God? Irreconcilable differences indicate not. Although Hindus worship many gods and goddesses, Hindus claim there is only one God. But, that one God is not the God of Abraham. And, within the bounds of their theology, Hindus do not know Jesus of Nazareth, much less believe he is God incarnate. Muslims and Christians believe in a monotheistic God although they dont share belief in the same God. Muslims believe there is one person, Allah, in the godhead, while Christians believe in a Trinitarian God of three persons of a single essence. Christians believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three in one. Contrarily, the Koran maintains the sin of shirk, assigning partners to God, is the greatest sin. While Muslims believe in the virgin birth by Mary of Jesus, Muslims dont believe Jesus is the Son of God. In the Bibles First Commandment, God wills each person worship Him as He has revealed Himself. Otherwise, a god of preference has been created which is just an idol. Only one of these three religions is worshipping the one true God. Possibly the most divisive statement Jesus made was, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6, NKJV)

Unique among these three religions, Hindus believe in reincarnation. However, the Bible teaches, It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment (Heb 9:27, NKJV). In judgment after death, Muslims believe Allah weighs in balance each persons good and bad deeds. But Christians believe, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us, (1John 1:6, NKJV) we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags, (Is 64:6, NKJV) and the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 6:23, NKJV) Through substitutionary atonement, Christians believe not only that their sins are transferred to the account of Jesus through his sacrificial death, but the righteousness of Jesus, the only man who never sinned in his life, is transferred to their account. In this way, Christians are saved from Gods wrath and inherit eternal life. Muslims disbelieve Jesus was crucified, much less that he rose from death.

Hindus are pantheists in that they dont believe God is distinct from nature. But, Muslims and Christians believe God created the universe. The creator and creation are separate. The Bible warns against those who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. (Rom 1:25, NKJV) Distinguishing themselves from Muslims, Christians believe of Jesus that All things were made through Him, and without Him, nothing was made that was made. (1John 1:3, NKJV)

Who are children of God? The Bible teaches everyones inclination is to rebel against God. Martin Luther spoke of the unholy trinity of our own sin nature, worldly temptations, and Satan. These work through sin to separate us from God. The Bible teaches, Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christs physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation -- if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. (Col 1:21-23, NIV) Through Gods grace trusting in Jesus, believers are adopted as children of God. The Bible teaches, As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name. (John 1:12, NKJV)

Are Muslims, Christians, and Hindus brothers? Since the Pope referenced different religions, the context for common ground must be theological. But Jesus made a sharp distinction of members in the family of God, Whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother. (Matt 12:50, NKJV) The Koran teaches against universal brotherhood in Sura 5:54, O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Those of you who make them his friends is one of them. God does not guide an unjust people. Consistently, Sura 48:25 teaches, Muslims are harsh against the unbelievers, merciful to one another.

Brotherhood implies commonality of beliefs. Islam and Christianity are imperialistic religions mandated to proselytize. But, these differ radically about conversion to belief. A major contribution of the sixteenth-century Reformation was underscoring the Biblical teaching of justification by faith through grace. It is impossible to convert someone by the sword, i.e. by threats or coercion. For by faith you are saved by grace and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. (Eph 2: 8-9, NKJV)

However, as fundamentalist Muslims for the last 1400 years know, the Koran, not some corruption of Islam, advocates violence. Sura 9:73 instructs, O Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites. Be harsh with them. Their ultimate abode is hell, a hapless journey's end. Sura 9:123 exhorts, Believers! Make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Let them find harshness in you. From Sura 47:4, When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds, then set them free, either by grace or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens. And, in Sura 48:29, Muhammad is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another. Through them, Allah seeks to enrage the unbelievers. Sura 66:9 declares, Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal sternly with them. Hell shall be their home, evil their fate.

Another major Reformation contribution was turning to Biblical teachings requiring separation of state from church while recognizing separation of state from God invariably brings bad consequences. Sixteenth-century Protestants undermined the Holy Roman Empire by advocating the Roman Catholic Church had no authority wielding the sword. But Muslims believe there should be no separation of state from mosque and that Gods law, i.e. sharia law, is the only legitimate law.

Pope Francis made a fatuous and naive statement projecting habitual lawbreaker Rodney Kings question, Cant we all just get along? There is no theological basis for the Popes wishful thinking. Its disappointing such unhelpful and misleading appeasement is offered up from such quarters instead of an honest assessment whether peace even is possible through tolerance.
One thing I ardently desire is that America continue to be great. This natural and wholesome sentiment is born of a patriotism of which I am not ashamed. I am proud to be an American and so I desire the best for my country.

Contrary to the prevailing conventional wisdom, I do not believe America has lost its greatness. However, like everyone, I realize that this greatness is seriously threatened by the course we have set for ourselves. Its survival hinges on the decisions that we will now make.

The key question before us is determining what we mean by greatness. There are those who associate greatness with bigness, power, or quantity. Thus, America is great because of her vast size, massive economic production or unmatched military might. These can truly be characteristics of great nations but they are not what make a nation great.

There are others who believe the foundation of our greatness is based on the many opportunities to enjoy life in America. They point to our American way of life in which people are encouraged to enjoy life to its fullest. Still others interpret greatness as the freedom to do whatever one pleases. All these goals often reflect legitimate self-interest, but do not necessarily confer greatness upon a nation.

If our greatness is measured by money, pleasure or self-aggrandizement, then our striving for greatness, no matter how vigorous, will inevitably fall short. For the greatness of nations is not found in things, quantities, or delights, but in the character of its people.

Indeed, true greatness -- that which endures the test of time -- is born of a willingness to go beyond the common and ordinary. It calls us to excel, to take heroic action and to serve causes that take us beyond ourselves. It asks us to resist the temptation to sink into soft mediocrity.

America is great because there have always been, and still are, those who are willing to take up the challenges of going beyond the easy and comfortable. As long as such Americans may be found at all levels in society, we will continue to be great.

And so I believe America is great because there still exists dedicated fathers and loving mothers who sacrifice together to give their children strong character and instill in them the difference between right and wrong.

That quintessentially American can-do attitude still exists, propelling society to strive toward excellence. Scratch the surface of the towns and cities across our nation, and one will find those Americans who overcome obstacles, take risks, and set our standards high.

America will be great as long as there are those generous self-sacrificing American who step up to the plate, assume responsibility and become leaders in their communities, businesses, and institutions.

As long as honor holds a place in our hearts, we will produce heroes with the courage to fight for what we know to be true and right. We will even have those who will make the sublime sacrifice of offering their lives for their country.

America will be great as long as we strive to be truly good. True goodness means placing God in the center of society, holding to His commandments as the rule of life and defending this higher law in the public square. We can be great -- and expect Gods blessing -- only if we remain faithful to a God that is almighty and great.

Such Americans are what makes the nation great. For them words like courage, honor, justice, and duty still resonate in their hearts. They still hold dear their ties to God and His law. They grieve over the course the nation has taken.

However, the number of these Americans is fast dwindling as everything is being swept away by the frenetic intemperance of a society that thrives on instant gratification and spectacle. They are replaced by gaggles of shallow people, devoid of honor and character, who seek only to turn life into a huge carnival of fun and delights.

In these perilous times, many caricatures of greatness appear. The rule of honor is usurped by the rule of money. Greatness comes to signify vulgar displays of wealth, pleasure and power. A great person is one who does whatever it takes to keep the grand party going. Tragically, it can even mean severing our link with God when it obstructs the easy pursuit of whatever.

I ardently yearn for America to be great, but if that greatness be not true, and comes at the price of virtue, duty and honor, I prefer that we as a people say no. And if our no brings upon us the fury of those who promise the false greatness of the world, then so be it. For in that act of collectively saying no, America will have achieved a true greatness.

The questions that need to be addressed today are not those of taxes, jobs, economy or benefits. Although they are all important issues, they can more easily be resolved when sanity returns to the nation. We now enter a critical time when we must choose the path of true greatness over false, honor over money, God over the world. If we ardently desire a return to order, then we must be convinced that America can only be great if she is good and Godly. What will decide Americas future will be what has always decide her future -- the character of her people.

John Horvat II is a scholar, researcher, educator, international speaker, and author of the book Return to Order, as well as the author of hundreds of published articles. He lives in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania where he is the vice president of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property.
The secular extremism characterizing much of the contemporary political scene sometimes makes it hard to realize Christianity was once the primary motivating force behind the great human rights movements of America.

Men and women of faith fought for decades to achieve victory over the great human rights issue of the 19th century -- freeing the slaves. The issue of slavery had festered from the time of its introduction into the colonies in 1619. It would be Pennsylvanian Quakers, who believed in the inner light of conscience, who filed the first formal protest against slavery in 1688.

Abolitionists fought ferociously because of their unyielding and undying belief that all human beings were made in the image of God and were entitled to equal protection under the law. Bolstered by the constitutionally guaranteed rights stated clearly in the first amendment of the American constitution, they fought to end slavery and to guarantee equality of all human beings before the law.

The roots of that great reform movement as well as many of the continuing reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries -- including the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s -- were profoundly Christian.

How radically things have changed.

Now, at the inception of the twenty-first century, constitutionally guaranteed rights of the exercise of faith and religious freedoms are jeopardized by a sex cult that has borrowed but completely distorted the underlying principles of the abolitionist movement and its heir, the Civil Rights movement.

The radical fringe of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s coincided and was parallel with the Civil Rights movement, gradually poisoning and then determining to kill outright the Christian religious conscience that was and still is the backbone of reform in America. The radicals behind the sexual revolution substituted in the place of Christian conscience answerable to God a militant view of self-determination that held to no god but the inner god of human will and power.

In an astonishing perversion of the Quaker idea of the inner voice of conscience answerable to God, the inner voice of the individual human being was determined to be infallible in matters of sex and practice -- If it feels good; do it. What any individual believed to be his or her inner voice granted unqualified authority to remold the world according to the latest revolutionary fatwa concerning sexual freedom.

Over a period of a few decades, activists for the LGBT movement transitioned steadily from their initial demands for equal protection under the law to demands for gay marriage, to denaturing the very construct of humanity by insisting on a gender free society, to promoting the right to force society at large to accept as infallible an individuals ability to discern and to declare ones self to be whatever sex one chooses.

To put it another way, the LGBT agenda will brook no contradiction from the rest of us mere mortals to argue about the inerrant inner light of the gods and goddesses who declare themselves to have divine ability to transform themselves into any sex they wish to be. The right to be or not to be man or woman resulted in the fanatical demand that bathrooms must be retrofitted to conform to gender free standards, meaning that in practice either sex could use public facilities as they wished, including those who are physically men but believe themselves to be women.

But even victories in the bathroom bill fights have not been enough for radicals. Encouraged by the recent decision of the Supreme Court ratifying a pillar of the LGBT movement; namely, the constitutional right of same sex couples to marry, the movement has set its sights on destroying Christianity itself. By insisting that no minister or priest can refuse to marry gay couples, and by asserting no organization or institution, including churches, can refuse to hire people diametrically opposed to Christian beliefs, the LGBT movement reveals itself to be a cult radically and viciously antithetical to Christianity.

And, yes, it is a cult.

A basic definition of a cult is an organization whose beliefs are so far separated from the real world, that if society were to incorporate those beliefs, it too, would go mad. Therefore, insane beliefs completely divorced from the ground of being can only be established by force of law and strategies utilizing persecution aimed at eventual elimination of entities in opposition to those beliefs.

The result is that open war has been declared on Christianity in America.

For proof of that war, we need only to look at the mad consequences we now observe in Georgia, where the governor of that state has vetoed a bill that would have offered absolutely minimal protection to ministers and churches. World Magazine reports:

Claiming the bill would give rise to state-sanctioned discrimination, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal today vetoed a law that would have provided legal protection for pastors, faith-based organizations, and business owners who, in good conscience, refused to service gay weddings. The veto leaves Georgians with no statewide religious liberty protection and vulnerable to lawsuits over belief in the biblical definition of marriage.

Apparently completely ignorant of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitutions clear statement of religious protection, the governor added: In light of our history, I find it ironic that today some in the religious community feel it necessary to ask government to confer upon them certain rights and protections.

Let that sink in.

In an era in which our Secretary of State has finally admitted genocide is being committed against unprotected Christians in the Middle East, the governor of Georgia says religious communities dont need the government to confer rights and protections on people of faith.

Irony of ironies, Nathan Deal is a Southern Baptist -- a Southern Baptist who just gave over his own denomination to corporations for thirty pieces of silver. That his own church holds such retrograde and discriminatory positions as marriage being a covenant between a man and a woman and that the scriptures hold very pronounced views on sexual behavior seem to come as a surprise to Governor Deal.

But they do not surprise Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Seminary, and stalwart defender of orthodox Christian views on the sexes and marriage. One wonders if Deal -- what a perfect name -- is prepared to see Dr. Mohler sued and hauled away to jail for advocacy of orthodox Christian doctrine concerning marriage and sexual mores.

Certainly Deals capitulation to corporations and the LGBT radicals helps explain why a plurality of Georgian evangelicals, among them Southern Baptists, voted for shameless secularist Donald Trump. Apparently neither Deal nor the plurality of so-called evangelicals think faith and Christian doctrine have anything to say about the character of candidates who wish to lead a nation or about radical policies antithetical to and aimed directly at Christians.

The leftist rage directed at American Christians should come as no particular surprise.

Historically, the Left has always sought to eviscerate and even to eliminate Christianity. The all-out assault on Christians in America by the Left resembles the wars socialism and communism waged against Christianity, the most obvious example being is the attempt of the communist Soviet Union to bury Russian Orthodoxy.

A less noted example, yet a clear provider of an almost exact pattern of what is happening here in the U.S., is the persecution of Mexican Roman Catholics by radical socialists during the Cristero war of the 1920s. During that war, Mexican socialists sought to eliminate Christianity from Mexico, which at the time was 95% Catholic.

For over 70 years, from about 1917 onwards, the Roman Catholic Church was actually outlawed. It was not allowed to own property, run parochial schools or convents or monasteries. Foreign priests were deported, and many native priests killed outright. The Church was not allowed to defend itself publicly or in the courts.

As Catholic Gene writes:

[The Church] was hardly allowed to exist. According to historian Jim Tuck, This was not separation of church and state: it was complete subordination of church to state. It was not until 1992 that the Church was restored as a legal entity in Mexico. During the period of the strictest enforcement of these draconian laws beginning with the rule of President Calles in the late 1920s, Mexicans were often imprisoned for wearing religious items, saying Adios in public (which literally means with God), or even questioning the laws. Public worship was a crime punishable by hanging or firing squad.

The Mexican Constitution of 1917 included the following restrictions on Catholics:

According to the religious liberties established under article 24, educational services shall be secular and, therefore, free of any religious orientation. The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance's effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice All religious associations organized according to article 130 and its derived legislation, shall be authorized to acquire, possess or manage just the necessary assets to achieve their objectives... The rules established at this article are guided by the historical principle according to which the State and the churches are separated entities from each other. Churches and religious congregations shall be organized under the law.

The new constitution obligated the registration of all churches, declared all priests and ministers were ineligible to hold state office; and stated they could not advocate on behalf of any political parties or candidates. The State would regulate the number of priests in designated regions and no priests could wear religious garb in public. Nor could religious ceremonies be conducted outdoors without strict regulation by the State.

One needs only to read the restrictions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 to recognize a similar pattern of persecution and restrictions against churches and people of faith in the United States, land of the free.

In retrospect Christians, at least partially, have only themselves to blame, as they have yielded time and again to state intrusions and restrictions with only sporadic guerilla warfare. On the whole, Christians have reacted to anti-Christian decrees and restrictions such as the SCOTUS decree on abortion, the elimination of Christianity from public schools, and the muzzling of priests and pastors concerning politics by retreating into a subculture.

As the attacks ratchet up, Christians urgently need to understand continued capitulation to the demands of the radicals who are pushing for the fringe demands of the LGBT movement means the death of religious freedom in America. It also means a cults radical doctrines replace Christian mores.

Are Christians in America prepared to see their pastors sued and/or sent to jail, their children continued to be subject to indoctrination in public schools, their state and federal governments continue to kowtow to extremists determined to eradicate the influence of religion; the free exercise of religion in the public square eliminated; Christians consigned to what would essentially be a caste system, with people of faith considered untouchables who are not worthy of public office or even employment?

If they are not prepared to strongly confront a cults takeover of Americas governments, churches, and major institutions; if they wish to see Christianity once again regain its status as a major influence for societal reform; if they want to once again see Christianity as salt and light in the society in which they live, they have no choice but to stand and fight.

Otherwise, the Church in America will die.

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her its prize for excellence in systematic theology. A frequent contributor to American Thinker, her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines, including RealClearReligion, National Review, CNS, Fox News and Russia Insider. She has discussed matters of church and state and other conservative issues on television and radio talk shows, and is available for speaking engagements. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.
There is an old joke about Belgium that goes something like this:

The problem with Belgium is that there is almost no unity. The Walloons hate the state because it is not French enough. The Flemish hate the state because it is not Dutch enough. The Muslims hate the state because it is not Islamic enough. Only the Jews love Belgium. The only thing that unites the others is they all hate the Jews.

Like all decent jokes this one has more than a kernel of truth, though I added the part about Muslims -- in its original form it dealt only with the Walloons, the Flemish, and the Jews. But since Muslims now make up 6% of Belgiums population (much more than Jews at about 0.5%) and their views of the state and Jews mirror that of the other two major groups, the joke still works -- though it is clear that Belgiums increasingly threatened Jews love it a lot less today. But the jest mostly points to Belgiums fundamental existential problem, which now threatens to create a failed state in the heart of Western Europe, and therein a sanctuary for the worst radical Islamists.

I was reminded of the joke and Belgiums precarious predicament not only because of the recent terror attacks there, but because Ive been reading Bernard Cornwalls take on the most famous of many battles to take place in Belgian territory, Waterloo. Belgium was the creation of Waterloo and the Napoleonic struggle that it culminated. Created in 1830, the new state was intended (at the time) to box in France, but Belgium also came to be seen also as a buffer state between France and an increasingly powerful and aggressive Germany. The cobbled together state was divided roughly equally between Dutch-speaking Flemish areas in the north, and French-speaking Walloons in the south, with a few German speakers near that border.

For a time, it seemed like this arrangement -- regardless of what the people of the new state felt about it -- was beneficial to European peace, though that was largely an illusion. The supposed century of peace between Waterloo and 1914 was actually marked by several European wars, including one between France and Germany (the Franco-Prussian War) though that fight did not involve Belgium.

Arguably, in the end, the creation of Belgium made things worse. Britains guarantee of Belgian neutrality forced it into World War I at the ultimate cost of nearly one million dead, and its empire -- a decision that still provokes debate and rancor today. Britains entry into the war guaranteed a costlier and bloodier conflict for all parties and set the stage for World War II. Belgium also became a trap for the British in that war, because the French, concerned about offending the Belgians, left the Maginot Line uncompleted and easily outflanked. French and British forces north and west of the Maginot did not deploy into Belgium before Germanys May 1940 offensive for fear of violating Belgian neutrality, forcing them to meet Nazi tanks without prepared defenses when they finally rushed forward. Nonetheless, a competently led and hard fighting French army actually stopped the German panzers cold at the Belgian town of Gembloux, but when the French line collapsed to the south at Sedan the British and French forces in Belgium became trapped, forcing the Dunkirk evacuation.

After World War II, Belgiums geopolitical raison detre expired. Western powers effectively tried to paper this problem over by making Brussels the headquarters of both the European Union and NATO. In essence, they used Belgium again as a convenient neutral headquarters site, while at the same time propping up the Belgian elites in the capital who were and are the primary party with an actual interest in preserving the country.

The people of Belgium have never been and are not invested in the concept of a Belgian nation. In reality the state is the failed artifact of early 19th-century power politics, and this fundamental weakness makes Belgium today a problematic security risk for the West. Flemish areas speak Dutch and pretend as if the Walloons dont exist, and vice versa. As a consequence, the Belgian federal authorities are weak, confused and riven by factional and linguistic conflict.

Still, as Belgium is a wealthy country mostly made up of comfortable bourgeois citizens, it likely could have continued in this way indefinitely. Separatism is mostly discussed in wealthier Flemish areas, but it has been much easier (and in the end probably less expensive) to put up with the status quo than go through the messy -- and possibly violent -- process of separation, which the poorer French-speaking areas do not want since they are subsidized by their unhappy Dutch-speaking countrymen.

What nobody counted on was a third force made up of unhappy Muslims who now constitute a substantial and exponentially growing minority. Unlike their complacent French and Dutch-speaking neighbors, many Muslims are quite keen to impose their will on their countrymen through societal disruption, political agitation, and violence. Belgiums weak system of federal and local control which features the abdication of responsibility by authorities in both realms, allowed the growth of practically sovereign ghettos like the Molenbeek area of Brussels that is now at the center of European-based Islamist terror. Successive mayors of Molenbeek ignored or encouraged (via fashionable political correctness) Islamic separatism, and/or failed to act when confronted with the reality of violent jihad.

American and European counter-terrorism officials have reportedly been stunned by the sloth and incompetence of their Belgian counterparts, whom an American official famously likened to children. This is actually too kind, since these Belgian functionaries are certainly not innocent children but grown men and women who consciously have failed to act in a normative and reasonable fashion to protect their nation, in large part because they have no emotional or political interest in doing so.

Belgium unfortunately is a poor excuse for a country, made up of people who would mostly rather not be Belgian. And yet, just as European powers two centuries ago found it necessary to create Belgium, they (and we) ought to now see it in our mutual immediate interest to preserve the state. Left on its own, Belgium could very possibly become a true failed state as the pressures of radical Islamists fracture the already tenuous Belgian system, turning it into an even more inviting area for Islamist radicals and further weakening European defenses against Islamist takeover.
Fact checking Donald Trump's outrageous assertions is a full time job. But in an interview with Bob Woodward, Trump topped his most incredble claims by saying he could eliminate our $19 trillion debt in 8 years.

In outlining his bare bones plan, Trump makes some startling assumptions that anyone with two brain cells working would recognize as preposterous.

First and most important, the national debt will grow by nearly $7 trillion over the next 8 years. So Trump wouldn't be trying to eliminate a $19 trillion debt, but rather a $27 trillion debt.

Washington Post:

First of all, the federal budget is already running a deficit. So before Trump can start paying down the debt, he needs to eliminate the deficit  which year after year, is adding to the deficit. According to a January projection by the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government will run an additional $6.8 trillion in additional deficits between 2017 and 2024. So the task is not $19 trillion, but nearly $26 trillion over eight years. Why are deficits expected to climb? Thats because the baby-boom generation is retiring, running up the cost of mandatory spending programs, such as Social Security and Medicare. Alone among Republican hopefuls, Trump has pledged not to touch entitlement spending. So unless he wants to start breaking some campaign promises, one presumes he would not seek to change the laws governing most mandatory spending. That leaves discretionary spending, which Congress votes on year after year and funds the basic functions of government, such as defense, homeland security, highways, and so forth. In the eight years of a putative two-term Trump presidency, the CBO projects a total of $10 trillion in discretionary spending. So even if Trump eliminated every government function and shut down every Cabinet agency, hed still be $16 trillion short.

Trump says he won't raise taxes or touch Social Security or Medicare. How does he plan to eliminate the debt? Renegotiate trade deals.

Of all the wildly impossible assertions made by Donald Trump, the notion that he could eliminate the nations $19 trillion in debt in just eight years ranks near the top. Trump suggests he can manage this feat simply by cutting better trade deals. If only it were that easy. As we have noted repeatedly, eliminating a trade deficit does not mean the money ends up in government coffers. (Morever, Trump is wrong to say the trade deficit with China is $505 billion; its $366 billion, according to the Census Bureau. The trade deficit with all countries is $531 billion.))

The problem with fact checking Trump is that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is exaggerated, made up, or a bald faced lie. That his worshipful fans fall for his baloney is indicative of a lack of critical thinking skills among a large share of the populace.

But many Republicans don't seem to care. It's enough that Trump plays to their anger and fear of the future. On that, they would elect him president despite his zero knowedge of the issues and of government itself.
Ted Cruz was the only GOP presidential candidate who bothered to appear before the state convention in Fargo yesterday, and it appears that he wowed the crowd on the eve of delegate selection. Jeremy W. Peters of the New York Times reports:

North Dakota is not accustomed to being one of the way stations on the path to the White House. Given its meager number of delegates and its tiny, remote media markets, it is rare for a presidential campaign to give this state the time of day. But here was Senator Ted Cruz on Saturday, addressing the states Republican convention and leading the crowd of several thousand to a standing ovation with a thunderous appeal to North Dakotas sudden relevance. It is entirely possible the men and women gathered here will decide this entire primary, will decide this nomination, he said. Mr. Cruz also dispatched Carly Fiorina, a former rival who has endorsed him, to warm up the crowd before he spoke. Ben Carson worked the convention floor on behalf of Donald J. Trump, shaking hands and posing for pictures. Gov. John Kasich of Ohio sent Gordon Humphrey, the former two-term Republican senator from New Hampshire, to do his bidding.

North Dakotas delegates will officially be unbound, which makes it crucial for each candidate to identify and push for the selection of personally-committed political activists as delegates. Ad has been the pattern elsewhere, the Cruz campaign appears to have been far more methodical than its rivals at this sort of blocking and tackling.

I am familiar with the culture of North Dakota, which emphasizes niceness and cooperation (qualities Cruz is said to lack), but which also really, really appreciates favorable attention from national figures and national media. The fact that Cruz has been on the ground personally and organizationally, counts for a lot.

But because of the unbound nature of the delegates, they will also be subjected to the attentions of the campaigns after selection and before the first vote in Cleveland. Who knows what blandishments might be offered them? Its perfectly legal, to invite delegates to a luxury resort, a private jet ride, or other incentives for a favorable vote.

I have to guess that after todays delegate selection, the advantage will be with Cruz, but it is not in the bag for the crucial first vote.
Air France stewardesses, furious at being ordered to wear headscarves in Tehran, say they will refuse to fly to the Iranian capital when the airline resumes the service later this month.

Female members of flight crews have been ordered to cover their hair once they disembark in Tehran and unions are demanding that the flights be made voluntary for women.

The resumption of a thrice-weekly service between Paris and Tehran, planned for April 17 after an eight-year break, follows a thaw in relations since Iran agreed to dismantle large sections of its nuclear programme.

Iranian women have been forced by law to cover their hair or face stiff fines since the 1979 Islamic revolution. In staunchly secularFrance, however, public signs of religion have been frowned upon since a 1905 law separating church and state.

French women see Islamic headscarves and veils as an affront to their dignity. Headscarves are banned in French state schools and offices, and it is illegal to wear the full-face Muslim veil in public.

Flore Arrighi, head of the UNAC flight crews union, said: It is not our role to pass judgement on the wearing of headscarves or veils inIran. What we are denouncing is that it is being made compulsory. Stewardesses must be given the right to refuse these flights.

She added that female staff were entitled to exercise individual freedoms.

The financially ailing French airline, which sees the resumption of Tehran flights as an excellent business development, pointed out that other airline staff were obliged to comply with Iranian rules. Tolerance and respect for the customs of the countries we serve are part of the values of our company, a spokesman said.
Hindsight is 20-20 and examining events from the perspective of what could have or should have happened is usually an exercise in futility.

Except when the stakes are high and the path that wasn't taken could have altered our current history.

We've known for years that the CIA was urging President Obama to arm the largely secular Free Syrian Army to give them a chance to overthrow President Bashar Assad of Syria. This was before Syria's use of chemical weapons, before Islamic State broke away from al-Qaeda, and before the refugee situation that led to a mass exodus from the Middle East.

In August of 2011, President Obama called on President Assad to "step aside" for the good of the Syrian people. Over the next several months, Obama repeated that call for Assad's ouster. Now, a book to be published this week, reveals a plan supported by most of the intelligence community to overthrow the Syrian dictator and make good the president's words.

But eventually, the president refused and the plan was rejected.

NBC News:

It's long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator's ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News. In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA's Syria task force, he says. Laux, an Indiana native who joined the CIA in 2005 at age 23, says he wrote an "ops plan" that included all the elements he believed were necessary to remove Assad. He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he writes that his program "had gained traction" in Washington. His boss, the head of the Syria task force, regularly briefed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on what Laux was seeing, hearing and suggesting. A former senior intelligence official said Laux's ideasmany of them shared by other members of the CIA's Syrian task force--were heavily represented in the plan that was ultimately presented to Obama. But the president, who must approve all covert action, never gave the green light. The White House and the CIA declined to comment. The White House and CIA leaders "had made it clear from the beginning that the goal of our task force was to find ways to remove President Assad from office," Laux complained. "We had come up with 50 good options to facilitate that. My ops plan laid them out in black and white. But political leadershiphadn't given us the go-ahead to implement a single one."

A couple of caveats:

* Any attempt to overthrow Assad could have resulted in Russian intervention.

* It wouldn't be enough to overthrow Assad. The entire Ba'ath party political and government structure would have to have been rooted out as well - a possible super-Libya with chaos that would have resulted in all the problems we're experiencing today.

* The civilian opposition council was, at that time, 70% Muslim Brotherhood. Handing the country over to them would have been disastrous.

Would we be better off today if Obama had approved the plan? In all likelihood, ISIS would have split from AQ anyway. Their differences had little to do with the Syrian civil war. The refugee problem may not be as bad today, but it would still be a humanitarian crisis. And armed Islamist militias would be fighting for control of small slices of Syria - much the same situation we are seeing today.

But Assad would be gone and at least the possibility would have existed for some kind of settlement. That's not much to hang your hat on if you favored overthrowing Assad, but it highlights the poor options we've always had in dealing with the Syrian civil war.
Displaying the mastery of the political ground game tat has been his trademark this cycle, Ted Cruz shut out his rivals in Colorado yesterday, picking up the first six delegates awarded in that state, at Congressional district-level conventions. John Frank of the Denver Post reports:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz took the first six national delegates awarded in Colorado, winning all the seats elected at two congressional district conventions Saturday. Of the six delegates and six alternates elected, 10 pledged support to the Texas senator and two is [sic] unpledged. Donald Trump supporters made loud noise [sic] at the conventions and John Kasich put formed [sic] a three-delegate slate  but both candidates were shut out.

As has been true elsewhere, the Cruz campaign has done its homework, and in American politics that has always made a difference:

The overwhelming win showcased the Cruz campaigns months-long efforts behind the scenes in Colorado, led by U.S. Rep. Ken Buck with help from grassroots organizations, Gun Owners of America and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Former House Speaker Tip ONeills most famous aphorism was, All politics are local, meaning that in a federal republic such as ours, national issues are determined from the ground upwards, with local level operations, often highly personal, combining to produce national level results. (When I was living in ONeills district in the 1960s-70s, I had multiple opportunities to meet him and have my hand shaken by him, as did all my neighbors. He really meant it about local being dominant over national concerns, despite his high national profile.)

The remaining 34 Colorados delegates will be chosen through a similar ground game-intensive process,

forcing the campaigns to fight through the caucus process for candidates who may remain unbound to the national convention. Each of the states seven congressional districts elect three delegates to Cleveland and the final 13 are picked at the state GOP convention April 9 in Colorado Springs.

By operating with foresight and organizing a detailed and focused effort at the local level, Cruz is playing by the rules and gaining a large advantage over Trump in the fight to get to 247 delegates. I expect Trump to complain that party bosses are determining the outcome But the act is that such a fight was open to his efforts, but he chose not to do the grunt work of organizing at that level.
When Donald Trump announced his team of foreign policy advisors, he named Carter Page, a business consultant and reputed fellow billionaire as his energy advisor. It is an appointment very much in line with Trumps announced desire to have business figures, people who actually make deals, on his team. But as Bloomberg and the Daily Caller News Foundation both report, Pages deep financial ties to Russian entities, including state-controlled oil giant Gazprom, ties his personal financial welfare to Russias energy fortunes.

As Zachary Mider of Bloomberg reports,

Pages interest in Russia dates to his youth in New Yorks Hudson Valley. Watching a TV news program on arms control talks, he says he noticed that the adviser sitting behind President Ronald Reagan wore a Navy uniform. A few years later, Page enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy. He later worked in arms control at the Pentagon and completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Over his career, he's earned three graduate degrees, including a Ph.D from SOAS University of London. In 2000, Page took up investment banking, getting a job at Merrill Lynchs capital-markets group in London. After impressing a colleague with his relationship with Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire, he says he was dispatched to help open the firms Moscow office in 2004. In Russia, Page developed relationships with executives at Gazprom, the former Soviet gas ministry that was partially privatized in the 1990s. By the time Page arrived, Putin was consolidating his grip on the country's economy, and in 2005 the government boosted its stake so that it again owned a majority of the stock. Page says he advised Gazprom on its largest deals during this period, such as buying of a stake in the Sakhalin oil and gas field in the Sea of Okhotsk. He also helped the company court Western investors, assisting in setting up the first regular meetings with shareholders in New York and London. Before he moved back to New York in 2007, he says, many of its top officials showed up at his going-away party, at a restaurant near the Kremlin. Page gets mixed reviews from former bosses. Bernie Sucher, Merrills country head in that era, said Page has a nuanced and subtle appreciation of the interplay of politics and energy. But Sergey Aleksashenko, another top Merrill executive in Russia at the time and now an outspoken Kremlin critic, described him as a junior banker with little understanding of the country. I could not imagine Carter as an adviser on foreign policy, Aleksashenko said. It's really surprising.

When Page left Merrill in 2007, he set up his own company in New York, Global Energy Capital Advisors, LLC, and:

traveled to Turkmenistan that year, talking about raising a $1 billion private equity fund to buy assets in the former Soviet republic, and meeting with top government officials. The fund never materializedthe global financial crisis struck later that yearand since then, Page says hes mostly done low-profile advisory assignments, such as counseling foreign investors on buying assets in Russia. In some of the deals, hes worked with Sergey Yatsenko, a former deputy chief financial officer at Gazprom who is now an official adviser to Pages firm. (snip) Yatsenko says he worked with Page on helping a Russian investor explore an oil investment in Iraqi Kurdistan, and advising a Chinese investor looking to buy Russian oil assets in Eastern Siberia. Page wouldnt discuss specific deals. Another project involved developing natural-gas-powered vehicles in Russia, possibly in partnership with Gazprom, Yatsenko says. But the sanctions put those talks on hold.

The sanctions mentioned are the 2014 sanctions applied to Russia after it annexed Crimea, which have had a major impact on Gazprom. Page holds a stake in that company, and blames the trade restrictions for helping drive down the stock.

Trump has already indicated that he favors much closer ties to Russia, including the reduction of the American commitment to NATO, and admires Vladimir Putin. So Pages personal financial interest in the health of the Russian energy sector may not be a conflict of interest in his mind.

But it does raise the question of crony capitalism, something Trump and his supporters generally tend to criticize. It appears that Page has leveraged ties to Russian and other ex-Soviet officials into lucrative deals for himself.
This is an incredible story that sounds like some kind of trashy political thriller - except the documents have been revealed by Wikileaks.

European elites in the IMF have been working behind the scenes to engineer several crisises in order to amass power and influence. Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge Blog:

One of the recurring concerns involving Europe's seemingly perpetual economic, financial and social crises, is that these have been largely predetermined, "scripted" and deliberate acts. This is something the former head of the Bank of England admitted one month ago when Mervyn King said that Europe's economic depression "is the result of "deliberate" policy choices made by EU elites. It is also what AIG Banque strategist Bernard Connolly said back in 2008 when laying out "What Europe Wants." To use global issues as excuses to extend its power: environmental issues : increase control over member countries; advance idea of global governance

: increase control over member countries; advance idea of global governance terrorism : use excuse for greater control over police and judicial issues; increase extent of surveillance

: use excuse for greater control over police and judicial issues; increase extent of surveillance global financial crisis: kill two birds (free market; Anglo-Saxon economies) with one stone (Europe-wide regulator; attempts at global financial governance)

kill two birds (free market; Anglo-Saxon economies) with one stone (Europe-wide regulator; attempts at global financial governance) EMU: create a crisis to force introduction of European economic government This morning we got another confirmation of how supernational organizations "plan" European crises in advance to further their goals, when Wikileaks published the transcript of a teleconference that took place on March 19, 2016 between the top two IMF officials in charge of managing the Greek debt crisis - Poul Thomsen, the head of the IMF's European Department, and Delia Velkouleskou, the IMF Mission Chief for Greece. More to the point, the IMF officials say that a threat of an imminent financial catastrophe as the Guardian puts it, is needed to force other players into accepting its measures such as cutting Greek pensions and working conditions, or as Bloomberg puts it, "considering a plan to cause a credit event in Greece and destabilize Europe." According to the leaked conversation, the IMF - which has been pushing for a debt haircut for Greece ever since last August's 3rd Greek bailout - believes a credit event as only thing that could trigger a Greek deal; the "event" is hinted as taking place some time around the June 23 Brexit referendum. As noted by Bloomberg, the leak shows officials linking Greek issue with U.K. referendum risking general political destabilization in Europe. The leaked transcript reveals how the IMF plans to use Greece as a pawn in its ongoing negotiation with Germany's chancelleor in order to achieve the desired Greek debt reduction which Germany has been pointedly against: in the leak we learn about the intention of IMF to threaten German Chancellor Angela Merkel to force her to accept the IMF's demands at a critical point.

The Brits were already skeptical of European economic integration and this only adds fuel to the fire. For very good reasons, British nationalists and many conservative politicians don't want to put their economy in the hands of these pirates.

The IMF, as well as the European Central Bank, have improverished Greece with their debt reduction demands. While the situation in Greece is almost completely their own fault, there are solutions that wouldn't have bankrupted the country and sent the economy into the worst depression in modern history.

The Euro elites have seized upon the Greek debt crisis and are using it as a club to get what they want. Can they be resisted? Like cockroaches, shining a light on them sends them scurrying for cover. The leak of these documents may have scuttled their plans.
Madeleine McCann: six months more police work

The Sunday Express has set a deadline: Six Months To Find Maddie. And then..?

The paper says the Home Office has set a budget for this year of just under 95,000, which will pay for only half a year of investigations by the team of four working on the case. So, not six months to find the Madeleine McCann, then. Six months until the latest tranche of cash runs out. And then..?

Once the money runs out in the autumn, Scotland Yard will almost certainly shelve Operation Grange, their five-year review and investigation, which has cost close to 12million but has failed to bring anyone to justice or discover what happened to Madeleine.

The paper had us right up to almost. Almost certainly is another way of saying definitely uncertainly. We then get to the missing childs parents:

Soon the childs parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, face the emotionally daunting prospect of paying for a new private investigation with a war chest of some 750,000, raised largely through sales of Kates widely praised book on the enduring mystery.

They have paid for private detectives before. Having speculated on the money, the police hunt and the McCanns state of mind, the Express has a few facts:

At the height of the Yards inquiries more than 30 detectives and support staff were working on Operation Grange, based at Belgravia police station in central London. When the inquiry was in full swing a team of specially trained officers carried out detailed searches of carefully chosen scrubland near where Madeleine was taken at Praia da Luz on the Algarve on May 3, 2007.

And that is it. Although we do get to hear from the Home Office:

A Home Office spokeswoman said: Following a request from the Metropolitan Police Service, we have agreed to provide nearly 95,000 of further funding. The funding reflects the reduced scale of the investigation, which was announced by the force last year.

Such are the facts.

Anorak

Posted: 3rd, April 2016 | In: Madeleine McCann, Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink


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The current PP government has failed to deliver on one of its main election promises: to sort out Spains public finances and keep the countrys public deficit in check, after it soared towards the end of the Zapatero administration.

Yesterday we learned that Spains public deficit will be a point higher than the goal set by Brussels: 5.2 instead of 4.2 per cent. The culprits of this deviation must be found, cried out Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro, as he accused the regional governments in general and Catalonia and Valencia in particular of overspending.

Once again, minister Montoro dodges his own responsibility and conceals the true reasons why Spains deficit is spinning out of control. What are they? First and foremost, the 7bn income tax cut approved by the Spanish government before the elections, in a desperate attempt to entice voters. The second cause is the failure to streamline Spain's central administration, which is looking to create 13,500 new public service jobs in 2016, a 62 per cent increase from last year. Last but not least, there are the spending cuts imposed on Spains regions, which are not only unfair and disproportionate compared to the central governments, but entirely unrealistic if you do not wish to jeopardise the welfare state and risk a collapse of regional devolution in Spain.

Regions such as Catalonia and Valencia (whose contribution to Spains coffers is much greater than the funding they receive from Madrid) had no choice but to ignore the deficit objective and challenge the State. Montoro has got a taste of the same medicine as the EU leaders who watched as Spain failed to meet its deficit target, even with a pro-austerity party in office.

Still, Europe should understand that this is simply not true. Spains PP only believes in budget austerity when it comes to the countrys regional finances rather than the central governments. It is precisely this obsession with reclaiming devolved powers and adding heft to the central administration coupled with electioneering tax cuts that has led to the failure of Montoro, a minister who was so naive as to think that putting pressure on the regions would be enough to make ends meet.
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The collection wanted by the Pope, aims to help especially the elderly and children affected by the violence that has caused thousands of deaths and a million refugees. Perhaps a gesture of reconciliation with the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, after disagreements following the meeting between Francis and the Russian Patriarch Kirill, with which Ukrainian Catholics felt "betrayed". An appeal also against landmines.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - Pope Francis has called for "a special collection in all Catholic churches of Europe on Sunday, April 24 next" to express my personal closeness and solidarity as well as that of the entire Church to Ukraine". The appeal was voiced at the end of the Mass of Divine Mercy, presided by the Pope this morning in St Peter's Square, before the recitation of the Regina Caeli, the Marian prayer that replaces the Angelus during the Easter season.

"On this day - said the Pope - which is like the heart of the Holy Year of Mercy, my thoughts go to all the people with the greatest thirst for reconciliation and peace. I think, in particular, of the drama of those who suffer the consequences of violence in Ukraine: of all those who remain in those lands devastated by the hostilities that have already caused several thousand deaths, and those many - over a million  who were driven to leave by the serious persistent situation. Those most affected are the elderly and children. In addition to accompanying them with my constant thought and with my prayer, I have decided to promote humanitarian support in their favor. To do this, there will be a special collection in all Catholic churches in Europe on Sunday, April 24. I invite the faithful to join this initiative of the Pope with a generous contribution. This act of charity, as well as alleviating material suffering, aims to express the my personal closeness and solidarity and that of the entire Church [ with Ukraine]. I fervently hope that it will help promote, without further delay, peace and respect of rights in that land, which is so tried".



Faithful to the Vatican line, Pope Francis is silent on the question of the Crimea, which split - with the help of Russia -from Ukraine, as well as the war that continues for two years, with the territories of the East Ukraine declaring independence from Kiev. This position has created a discreet discontent in the Greek-Catholic Church of Ukraine, which instead denounces the open and heavy-handed influence of Moscow.

Moreover, Pope Francis meeting with Patriarch Kirill in Cuba and the Joint Declaration, which speaks of overcoming the "Uniate" solution to the problem of the ecumenical relationship between Catholics and Orthodox and of the war in Ukraine as a conflict between two "parties", has created resentment among Eastern Catholics, who instead talk about "Russian aggression". The Major Archbishop of Kiev, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, has even said that the Declaration was full of "half-truths" and that the Greek-Catholic Church felt "betrayed" by the Vatican.



The collection personally launched by Francis appears somewhat to be a gesture of reconciliation.



The Pope also mentioned that tomorrow is World Day against landmines. "Too many people - he said - continue to be killed or maimed by these terrible weapons, and brave men and women risk their lives to reclaim the mined land. We must renew our commitment for a mine-free world".
On Divine Mercy Sunday, Francis asks all the faithful to become "living writers of the Gospel" by practicing the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, "the hallmarks of the Christian life. To be "apostles of mercy" by touching and soothing the wounds "also present today in body and soul of so many brothers and sisters". The Church is "the bearer of peace" of the Risen One, a peace "that does not divide but unites."

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - The Gospel, "Book of Mercy," is an "open book" where the disciples of Christ "need to keep writing" with "concrete acts of love, which are the best witness of mercy". This is why Christians are called to be "apostles of mercy", touching and soothing the wounds that today afflict the bodies and souls of many of our brothers and sisters...." It also means the entire Church must be "bearers of peace" "instruments of reconciliation".

These are some of the themes that Pope Francis highlighted in his homily at Mass celebrated this morning in St. Peter's Square on the occasion of Divine Mercy Sunday. This feast, desired by John Paul II, which is celebrated on the second Sunday of Easter, has an important value in this year of the Jubilee of Mercy and rallied in front of St Peter's basilica at least 40 thousand faithful who adhere to the spirituality of Divine Mercy spread by the mystic St. Faustina Kowalska.

Yesterday the Pope participated in a prayer vigil of Divine Mercy, where he invited every diocese to launch a work of mercy as a "monument in memory of this Jubilee. Below, the full text of the Pope Francis homily:

Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book (Jn 20:30). The Gospel is the book of Gods mercy, to be read and reread, because everything that Jesus said and did is an expression of the Fathers mercy. Not everything, however, was written down; the Gospel of mercy remains an open book, in which the signs of Christs disciples, which are concrete acts of love and the best witness to mercy, continue to be written. We are all called to become living writers of the Gospel, heralds of the Good News to all men and women today. We do this by practicing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, which are the hallmarks of the Christian life. By means of these simple yet powerful gestures, even when unseen, we can accompany the needy, bringing Gods tenderness and consolation. Thus continues the work of Jesus on Easter day, when he poured into the hearts of his fearful disciples the Fathers mercy, bringing them the Holy Spirit who forgives sins and brings joy.

At the same time, the story we have just heard presents an evident contrast: on the one hand, there is the fear of the disciples, who gathered behind closed doors; on the other hand, there is the mission of Jesus, who sends them into the world to proclaim the message of forgiveness. This contrast may also be present in us, experienced as an interior struggle between a closed heart and the call of love to open doors closed by sin. It is a call that frees us to go out of ourselves. Christ, who for love entered through doors barred by sin, death and the powers of hell, wants to enter into each one of us to break open the locked doors of our hearts. Jesus, who by his resurrection has overcome the fear and dread which imprison us, wishes to throw open our closed doors and send us out. The path that the Risen Master shows us is a one way street, it goes in only one direction: this means that we must move beyond ourselves to witness to the healing power of love that has conquered us. We see before us a humanity that is often wounded and fearful, a humanity that bears the scars of pain and uncertainty. Before the anguished cry for mercy and peace, Jesus confidently exhorts us: As the Father has sent me, even so I send you (Jn 20:21).

In Gods mercy, all of our infirmities find healing. His mercy, in fact, does not keep a distance: it seeks to encounter all forms of poverty and to free this world of so many types of slavery. Mercy desires to reach the wounds of all, to heal them. Being apostles of mercy means touching and soothing the wounds that today afflict the bodies and souls of many of our brothers and sisters. Curing these wounds, we profess Jesus, we make him present and alive; we allow others, who touch his mercy with their own hands, to recognize him as Lord and God (Jn 20:28), as did the Apostle Thomas. This is the mission that he entrusts to us. So many people ask to be listened to and to be understood. The Gospel of mercy, to be proclaimed and written in our daily lives, seeks people with patient and open hearts, good Samaritans who understand compassion and silence before the mystery of each brother and sister. The Gospel of mercy requires generous and joyful servants, people who love freely without expecting anything in return.

Peace be with you! (Jn 20:21) is the greeting of Jesus to his disciples; this same peace awaits men and women of our own day. It is not a negotiated peace, it is not the absence of conflict: it is his peace, the peace that comes from the heart of the Risen Lord, the peace that has defeated sin, fear and death. It is a peace that does not divide but unites; it is a peace that does not abandon us but makes us feel listened to and loved; it is a peace that persists even in pain and enables hope to blossom. This peace, as on the day of Easter, is born ever anew by the forgiveness of God which calms our anxious hearts. To be bearers of his peace: this is the mission entrusted to the Church on Easter day. In Christ, we are born to be instruments of reconciliation, to bring the Fathers forgiveness to everyone, to reveal his loving face through concrete gestures of mercy.

In the responsorial Psalm we heard these words: His love endures forever (Ps 117/118:2). Truly, Gods mercy is forever; it never ends, it never runs out, it never gives up when faced with closed doors, and it never tires. In this forever we find strength in moments of trial and weakness because we are sure that God does not abandon us. He remains with us forever. Let us give thanks for so great a love, which we find impossible to grasp. Let us ask for the grace to never grow tired of drawing from the well of the Fathers mercy and bringing it to the world: let us ask that we too may be merciful, to spread the power of the Gospel everywhere.
Hi all!I successfully went through the Partner Visa process here in Australia. My friend asked me for advice since she is flying to America to live with her American boyfriend and they will be going through the same process there... except I know nothing about American Immigration.Would anyone here be able to explain the partner visa process for America, in laymen's terms? I've looked at the American immigration website for her but it's not really clear if the process (time-wise and standard-wise) is comparable.Any advice would be greatly appreciated, also if you want to DM me instead of replyingShe is only considering options, and she saw how much time, money and effort mine took, so she wants to know what the process there is actually like... as she may also consider a working visa instead.Thank you!Nelly
Hello all

My name is Mehran khan I am from Pakistan, I applied for my Australian student visa sub class 573 on 12th of Feb and received an interview call from Australian high commission Islamabad on 8th of March. It has been 26 days after the call but I have not heard anything from them yet, is it normal do they take this long after interview call? I replied to every question that was asked during interview and felt that I did good with interview.

By the way I have done Bachelors of Engineering in Mining with first division in November 2014, after that I did job in the relative field for almost a year, got 7 bands in IELTS and then applied for masters of environmental engineering and pollution control in Griffith university. What are my chances of getting visa now???? Please reply I am really tensed.
When he grew up, he enrolled as a student at the Technical University of Munich, graduating with a degree in Engineering. Hans started out in employment with various small engineering works, before joining Benz & Cie. in Mannheim as an engineer on March 1, 1904. There, he witnessed and contributed to the companys rise into one of the worlds leading carmakers.Nibel was soon promoted to deputy office chief, and in 1908 was appointed the head of the design department, at just 28. Numerous vehicles were created with his participation and under his leadership, including smaller models that placed the company on a broader commercial footing, such as the 6/14 hp Benz introduced in 1910, but also luxury-class vehicles that acted as global ambassadors for the outstanding automobiles from Mannheim.Another vehicle closely associated with the name Nibel was the Blitzen Benz, the most powerful and fastest car in the world at the time. First unveiled in 1909, it established a new world speed record for a car in 1911, namely 228.1 km/h, a mark that would remain unbeaten until 1919.Nibel joined the board of management of Benz & Cie. as a deputy member in August 1917, becoming a full member of the board five years later, in the same month. Also in 1922, Nibel worked with Max Wagner, head of the chassis design office in Mannheim, to develop the first streamlined racing cars with individual suspension, an innovation that would soon lead to international racing success.In addition, he was to prove a significant influence on the use of diesel powerplants in road vehicles - in 1922 Benz & Cie. introduced an agricultural tractor equipped with a self-ignition engine, the worlds first diesel-powered road-going vehicle. That same year, Nibel was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Technical University, Karlsruhe, in recognition for his services as a designer and engineer.When Benz & Cie. and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft formed a community of interests in 1924, Nibel also joined the board of management at DMG. He worked in the same design office and on an equal footing alongside Ferdinand Porsche, although Porsche carried ultimate responsibility.Nibel was a staunch supporter of the merger between the two companies that followed in 1926 - after which he joined the board of management of the new Daimler-Benz AG.That same year, 1926, he switched his workplace once and for all to the Unterturkheim design office of the new company. As an engineer, but also as a member of the companys board of management under the leadership of chairman Wilhelm Kissel, Nibel was a key protagonist in the events that brought about the successful merger between the worlds two oldest carmakers.In the very first day of 1929, Nibel succeeded Ferdinand Porsche as Technical Director. He refined his predecessors vehicle designs, his improvements, for example, transforming the success of the 8/38 hp Mercedes-Benz Stuttgart 200 (W 02 series), a car that rewarded the brand during the years of the Great Depression with remarkable unit numbers.Nibel also improved the sporty S, SS, SSK and SSKL models (W 06) and the elegant Nurburg series (W 08), enabling these vehicles to achieve their full impact - whether on the international sporting scene or in the global luxury car market.And the first Grand Mercedes 770 model (W 07) anchored Mercedes-Benz in the collective consciousness as the brand that built some of the worlds finest cars - another of Nibels achievements, for as chief engineer he always answered for and understood the vehicle in its entirety.Among the technical innovations of the Grand Mercedes was a light alloy crankcase with cooling fins and a chromium-nickel steel crankshaft mounted on nine bearings and with integrally forged counterweights.The W 25 racing car, designed by Nibel for the 750-kilogram formula, was another vehicle to cause kind of a stir. With drivers such as Rudolf Caracciola at the wheel, the car brought the company numerous landmark racing successes between 1934 and 1937 - and also launched the tradition of the Silver Arrows. Nibel also left his mark on numerous Daimler-Benz aero engines from the 1930s.On November 25, 1934, Hans Nibel was about to board the express for Berlin at the main railway station in Stuttgart, to begin preparations for the 1935 motor racing season. His life was suddenly cut short by a heart attack, robbing the world of one of the most talented engineers of the pre-war era. Daimler-Benz AG lost its chief engineer - but in subsequent years the company was nevertheless able to build on the rich technological legacy that Nibel left behind.The vehicles in which Hans Nibel had a hand influenced the positive image of the Mercedes-Benz brand for many years, both before and after his death. Many of his designs remained relevant until well after the Second World War. As such, he can be regarded as one of the most influential automotive engineers, not just of Mercedes-Benz, but of the automotive industry as a whole.
Its barely April, and some parts of the East Coast woke to snowfalls this morning, but in Lakeland, Florida, its time for an early start to flying season with the opening of Sun n Fun. The show has been tweaking its dates for several years, trying to satisfy fly-in pilots in search of perfect weather and vendors who juggle the shows schedule with the Aero Friedrichshafen general aviation event, in Germany. Last year, by comparison, the show didnt start until April 21. This year it runs April 5 to 10, Tuesday through Sunday. According to local weather reports, it should be mostly clear and dry all week, with temps around 80 and just a chance of showers on Thursday. AVweb staffers are now arriving at the show and will provide daily coverage to your inbox starting Tuesday morning.

Among the news expected this week from Sun n Fun are new product announcements from engine and avionics manufacturers, updates on new airplanes in the works and all the latest details from the big airplane companies. Aviation experts and advocates have had a chance now to look over the FAAs proposed new rules for certifying Part 23 airplanes, so thats expected to be a major topic of discussion. An update on the FAAs progress toward approving a lead-free avgas also is expected. And there will be plenty of airshow acts as well, with a demo by Red Bull pilots Michael Goulian and Kirby Chambliss on the agenda, plus the Brietling Jet Team, and a night airshow on Saturday. The F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter will visit the show for the first time. Also exhibiting at Sun n Fun for the first time will be Icon, with their A5 light sport aircraft on display. AVweb will be there and bring you daily reports, with stories, videos and podcasts, all week long.
3 April 2016 11:20 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijan's defense minister, colonel-general Zakir Hasanov held telephone conversations with the head of the Turkish General Staff Husuli Akar and National Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz, Azerbaijan Defense Ministry reported April 2.

During the talks the sides discussed the latest developments and the situation in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

The Turkish side expressed support to Azerbaijan and again noted that Azerbaijan's position is completely valid.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 11:23 (UTC+04:00)

French senator Nathalie Goulet calls for an immediate meeting of the UN Security Council to condemn the Armenian aggression aggression against Azerbaijan.

"I strongly condemn the Armenian provocation. And I strongly regret about

the lack of the Minsk Group co-chairs' attention to the conflict," Goulet told Trend on April 3.

Using the "frozen conflict" terminology is the reason for the status quo to remain in place, she believes.

And as a matter of fact the frozen conflict has a frozen solution, Goulet said.

"As a strong support of the people of Azerbaijan, I call for an immediate meeting of the UN Security Council to condemn the Armenian aggression," Goulet said.

"After so many years of occupation it's time to find a solution. The world doesn't need a new battle field in the South Caucasus," Goulet said.

"We may ask all the proxy involved, including Iran, to help to find a fair solution and stop the Armenian occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh," Goulet added.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 12:33 (UTC+04:00)

The situation remains tense on the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops, Vagif Dargahli, spokesman for the Azerbaijani defense ministry, told Trend.

He said that the Armenian armed forces were firing on the positions of the Azerbaijani armed forces in the direction of Terter, Fizuli, Agredere districts and settlements with the civilian population April 2 night.

The Azerbaijani side suffered no losses, the statement said.

The Azerbaijani armed forces continue monitoring the situation on the contact line.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 12:40 (UTC+04:00)

The Azerbaijani armed forces neutralized 10 Armenian tanks and killed many servicemen on the contact line between two countries troops, the Azerbaijani defense ministry said April 3.

Armenia continues escalating the situation despite the agreement on the resumption of the ceasefire at Russias initiative and mediation April 2 at 15:00 (UTC/GMT +4 hours).

"While Azerbaijan was complying with the ceasefire conditions, Armenia prepared more military equipment in the occupied territories and tried to return the positions and territories liberated from occupation, the statement said. As a result, some 10 Armenian tanks, as well as many servicemen were neutralized.

As a result of preventive measures carried out by the Azerbaijani armed forces, Armenia's actions in this regard were prevented. The Armenian armed forces intensively shelled the settlements near the contact line of troops and non-military civilian facilities.

The Azerbaijani defense ministry ordered the armed forces units to retaliate against Armenias positions in the occupied territories if Armenia does not cease shelling the countrys settlements.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces at night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 12:40 (UTC+04:00)

Following reports of increased fighting along the line of contact in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Ilkka Kanerva (MP, Finland) and the OSCE PA Special Representative on the South Caucasus, Kristian Vigenin (MP, Bulgaria), called for an immediate cessation of hostilities April 3, a statement posted on the OSCE website said.

"This fighting must stop, the statement said. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict has taken far too many lives for far too many years now. We call on all sides to immediately cease fire and to exercise maximum restraint to avoid any further escalations."

Kanerva and Vigenin reiterated their full support for the OSCE Minsk Group and their efforts to find a peaceful solution, the statement said.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 10:11 (UTC+04:00)

OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier expressed his attitude in connection with the aggravation of the situation in the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

"Worried at developing situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. Sides should cease military operations and return to negotiating table", he wrote on his Twitter account on April 2.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 14:47 (UTC+04:00)

Armenians have always resorted to provocations against Azerbaijan and continue the policy, Bakhtiyar Aliyev, Azerbaijani MP, told Trend April 2.

He said that whenever at the international events Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stresses the importance of the negotiations for achieving peace, Armenia resorts to such provocations.

"The recent provocation against Azerbaijan is an extremely brazen action, the MP said.

Armenians fired on Azerbaijani civilians and then they began accusing Azerbaijan.

Unfortunately, certain forces supporting Armenias position also had an influence, he said. I think that Azerbaijan must thoroughly inform the whole world and all international organizations about this provocation and urge to take serious measures against Armenia."

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the morning of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 15:46 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijan calls for the international community to demand from Armenia to withdraw its troops from all occupied lands and to engage constructively in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement process, the Azerbaijani foreign ministry said.

On April 2, 2016 Armenia targeting civilians densely residing in the territories adjacent to the frontline area opened intensive heavy weapons fire at the positions of Azerbaijans armed forces along the line of contact.

As a result of artillery attacks of Armenian armed forces a number of civilians were killed and seriously wounded. Substantial damages were also inflicted upon the private and public properties, the statement said.



The armed forces of Azerbaijan have taken the necessary counter measures within its internationally recognized borders to ensure the safety of civilian population, to stop the provocations of Armenia and to deter it from further acts of aggression. Currently, the situation remains tense. Shelling of Azerbaijans positions along the contact line with heavy weapons, including with artillery continues.



Armenia in an attempt to reinforce its heavy artillery in the occupied territories deploys additional rocket and artillery forces and its military helicopters conduct intensive shuttle flights between occupied territories and Armenia, the statement said.



Over the past years such violations and armed provocations of Armenia by attacking and killing Azerbaijani military personnel as well as civilians with the use of mortars and large-caliber machine guns and artillery have become more frequent and violent.



Armenias desperate attempts to blame Azerbaijan for the escalation of the situation in the frontline aimed at misleading its own people and the wider international community, the statement said.



Azerbaijan has repeatedly brought to the attention of the international community that the illegal presence of Armenian armed forces in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan remains a main cause for the escalation of situation and continues to pose threat to the regional peace and stability.

Armenia, by consistent provocations and escalation of the situation, strengthening of its military build-up in the occupied territories, illegally changing the demographic, cultural and physical character of the seized lands, engaging in unlawful economic and other activities, including transfer of Armenian population into these territories pursues an apparent goal of annexation of Azerbaijans territories and consolidating the status-quo, which is unacceptable and unsustainable as it was also stated by the heads of states of OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, the statement said.

It is Armenia that also blocks all initiatives of OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, including the recent proposals of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to derail the negotiation process. It once again proves that the official Yerevan is not genuinely interested in seeking a political settlement of the armed conflict.



The fundamental basis for the settlement of the conflict is laid down in the United Nations Security Council resolutions 822(1993), 853(1993), 874(1993) and 884(1993) and the U.N. General Assembly resolution 62/243 (2008), which condemn the use of force against Azerbaijan and occupation of its territories and reaffirm the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and the inviolability of its internationally recognized borders, the statement said.

In those resolutions, the United Nations reaffirmed that the Nagorno-Karabakh region is an inalienable part of Azerbaijan and demanded immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces from all occupied territories of Azerbaijan.



The military occupation of the territory of Azerbaijan does not represent a solution and will never produce a political outcome desired by Armenia. The sooner Armenia reconciles with this reality, the earlier the conflict will be resolved and the countries and peoples in the region will benefit from the prospects of cooperation and economic development, the statement said.



Azerbaijan calls the international community to demand from Armenia to cease the illegal occupation of Azerbaijans territories, to withdraw its troops from all seized lands and to engage constructively in the conflict settlement process in accordance with the requirements of relevant resolutions of the UNSC and the norms and principles of international law.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 15:48 (UTC+04:00)

When Azerbaijan tries to solve the Nagorno-Karabakh issue peacefully within the territorial integrity, Armenia always resorts to provocations, Rovshan Rzayev, Azerbaijani MP, member of the board of the "Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan" public association, told reporters April 2.

Rzayev was expressing his attitude to the recent ceasefire violation by the Armenian forces.

He said that despite the talks are underway as part of the OSCE Minsk Group, the Armenian side does not comply with the ceasefire regime.

"The conflict settlement is delayed as a result of the Armenian policy of occupation and aggression, he said. Therefore, these attacks must be immediately prevented. The OSCE Minsk Group must intensify its activity.

The peace talks must be continued, he said. International organizations must express their attitude to this issue. The ceasefire regime must be restored. Otherwise, the conflict can escalate.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces on the morning of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 16:49 (UTC+04:00)

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan has held talks over phone with with Azerbaijani and Armenian defense ministers on the situation in Azerbaijans occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan has called for a truce and resolving the existing dispute through negotiations, IRNA news agency reported.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

On the same day, responding to the Armenian aggression, Azerbaijani armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Later, taking into account the international organizations appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 17:05 (UTC+04:00)

Armenia conducted another armed provocation against Azerbaijan April 2 overnight, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said at a meeting of the countrys Security Council April 2.

The president added that the provocation has not been conducted for the first time.

President Aliyev said that such a provocation was carried out in the Qazakh district on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The president added that as a result, two Azerbaijani servicemen were killed.

"A deserving response was given to the Armenian armed forces, the president said. Armenia was put in its place.

He further said that a proper response was given by the Azerbaijani army during a provocation from the Armenian side on April 2.

"Armenia suffered a devastating blow, and huge losses," said the president.

President Aliyev pointed out that moreover, Azerbaijani servicemen not only prevented the provocation, but also took more favorable military positions.

He said that Azerbaijan's superiority on the contact line has strengthened even more.

"As a result of the military operation, I would like to stress that it was carried out as a response to the provocation, Azerbaijan gained a great military victory, said the president. "On this occasion, I would like to congratulate Azerbaijani army and all people of the country."

President Aliyev expressed confidence that Armenias further provocations will not remain unanswered and an adequate response will be given.

The president said that Azerbaijani servicemen protect and fight for the homeland, become martyrs, and memory of them will forever live in people's hearts.

"The reason for Armenias actions is not a secret for me, the president said. I have repeatedly expressed my opinion in this regard to the public of Azerbaijan, the mediators, the presidents of the mediating countries. Armenia does not want peace. Armenia does not want to withdraw its troops from the occupied territories. It is trying everything to maintain the status quo."

A lot of evidence can testify to these words, the president said. The negotiation process has been going on for over 20 years. Armenia always resorted to provocations in the decisive moments during these 20 years.

The Armenian side always created tension on the contact line, the president said. At the same time, a terrorist attack committed in the Armenian parliament at the end of the last century was aimed at preventing a possible agreement on the conflict and thus preserving the status quo."

---

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3 April 2016 17:57 (UTC+04:00)

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has expressed his concerns over fresh fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia along their borders.

The latest clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia have caused concerns in the region, ISNA news agency quoted Ali Larijani as saying.

He called upon the governments and parliaments of Azerbaijan and Armenia to resolve the dispute through negotiations.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

Later on the same day, Azerbaijani defense ministry announced that the countrys armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

However, later on taking into account the international organizations appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 April 2016 17:58 (UTC+04:00)

An Iranian provincial official has announced that three mortar shells fired during the recent fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan have landed in the territories of Irans East Azerbaijan Province.

Saeid Shabestari-Khiabani, the deputy governor-general of East Azerbaijan Province for security affairs, said that the mortar shells dropped in a village near Khudaferin County, Tasnim news agency reported.

Shabestari-Khiabani further added that the mortar shells did not leave any casualties in the Iranian territory.

The Iranian official did not mention which country fired the mortar shells that hit the Iranian territory.

On the night of April 2, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars, grenade launchers and guns.

Later on the same day, Azerbaijani defense ministry announced that the countrys armed forces launched counter-attack operations against Armenia that led to the liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

However, later on taking into account the international organizations appeals, Azerbaijan announced unilateral suspension of the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

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.

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3 April 2016 20:08 (UTC+04:00)

Armenian armed forces have broken the ceasefire with Azerbaijan on the frontline in Fuzuli, Terter and Aghdam districts, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan told Trend.

According to the Ministry, the fighting is currently continues.

Earlier Azerbaijan unilaterally suspended the counter-attacks and response measures in the territories occupied by Armenia.

The counter-attack was made following provocations of the Armenian armed forces at night of April 2, which resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians.

Six Armenian tanks, 15 gun mounts and reinforced engineering structures have been destroyed and more than 100 servicemen of the Armenian armed forces were wounded and killed during the fights, the ministry said.

Twelve servicemen of the Azerbaijani armed forces heroically died, one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and one tank damaged by a mine, according to the ministry.

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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3 April 2016 20:13 (UTC+04:00)

An hour ago the Armenian side continues its provocations, shelling of Azerbaijans positions along the contact line with heavy weapons, the head of executive power of Agdam district Ragub Mammadov told Trend.

According to him, at this point situation is relatively quiet.

"Mortar shells, which fell in the village Sarijali destroyed part of the school. In the same village a shell destroyed one another house. In the village Gadzhituraly shell destroyed another house. There were no casualties", Mamedov said.

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3 April 2016 22:43 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijani President`s Assistant for Public and Political Affairs, Ali Hasanov has said official Yerevan ignores all calls and remains loyal to its non-constructive position.

"In response to the calls of the presidents of the Minsk Group co-chairing countries, Azerbaijan ceased fire. But Armenia disregards these calls and continues its attacks," he told Anadolu Agency.

"It is the provocative action of the Armenian armed forces that prompted the recent clashes on the line of contact. As always, with these provocative attacks the Armenian armed forces attempted to spoil positive steps taken by the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group in order to solve the problem."

"They made similar provocative actions on the front line when French President Francois Hollande and Russian President Vladimir Putin increased their efforts to find a solution to the problem in 2014 and 2015 respectively. And they again did this, this time when President Ilham Aliyev visited the USA and met with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry," he said.

"Armenia continues to fire on Azerbaijani positions, and Azerbaijan is forced to repulse these attacks."

"Azerbaijan fulfills all its commitments with respect to the settlement of the conflict. Baku wants the problem to be solved peacefully and in compliance with international law," Hasanov added.

Armenia occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions, after laying territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor that had caused a lengthy war in the early 1990s.

As a result of Armenias military aggression, over 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed, 4,866 were reported missing, almost 100,000 were injured, and 50,000 were disabled.

Large-scale hostilities ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994 but Armenia continued the occupation in defiance of four UN Security Council resolutions calling for immediate and unconditional withdrawal. Peace talks mediated by Russia, France, and the U.S. have produced no results so far.
3 April 2016 22:46 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov has had a phone conversation with OSCE Chairperson-in-Office and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Special Representative of the EU for the South Caucasus Herbert Salber.

"The Foreign Minister briefed them about the tension on the line of contact. He mentioned that targeting civilians in the territories adjacent to the front line area, Armenia opened intensive heavy weapons fire at the positions of Azerbaijans armed forces," the ministry said in a statement.

"The Foreign Minister emphasized that the armed forces of Azerbaijan have taken the necessary counter measures to ensure the safety of civilian population, to stop the provocations of Armenia and noted that violation of the cease-fire by Armenia is still ongoing. He added that the illegal presence of Armenian armed forces in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan remains a main cause for the escalation of situation."

"Minister Elmar Mammadyarov stressed that the Armenian forces must be withdraw from all occupied territories of Azerbaijan according to the relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions with the demand of international community to achieve progress in the conflict settlement," the ministry said.
3 April 2016 13:14 (UTC+04:00)

An Air France passenger aircraft en route from Amsterdam to Riyadh made an emergency landing in the Egyptian capital of Cairo due to a technical issue, Sputnik reported with the reference to local media.



A total of 193 passengers were on board the plane that was forced to perform the emergency landing, the Al-Yaum Al-Sabia newspaper said.

The issue has already been fixed and the aircraft will continue its flight to Saudi Arabia soon, the news outlet noted.

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Police have identified the two people who were found dead early Thursday morning following a SWAT situation in St. Petersburg.

Asst. Chief Jim Previtera said the bodies of Christal Anderson, 34, and Michael Brown, 37, were found in the home at 3328 21st St. N following the standoff.

Police say they found Anderson's body in a closet, and it appeared as though she had been dead for several days.

Anderson was on approved furlough from her work-release assignment at the Suncoast Community Release Center when the Florida Department of Corrections received a cut-bracelet alert from her monitor on Sunday.

FDC officials contacted police, who immediately began investigating.

Police went to the house to speak to Brown about Anderson, and they say he told them they had gotten into a fight and she left. They say they caught him in a couple of lies and became suspicious, so they set up surveillance at the house.

While they were staking out his house, his relatives went in and said Brown was in the house with Anderson. That's when the SWAT standoff took place.

About 10 hours later, the situation had quieted, police say, so they attempted to enter the house. When they entered, Brown, who was under a bed, shot himself.

But not before authorities say he sent text message saying they would find his girlfriends body in a closet.

"We're confident he killed her based on the text message he sent...more likely than not on Sunday, probably after an argument, why he held her like he did, we'll probably never know, said Privetera.

Brown, who has a history of domestic violence, also sent text messages to his sister that night, asking her to take care of the couple's 6-year-old son. Brown's sister had visited just hours before the standoff and noticed something odd inside the house.

"Yesterday, I went in there and there was I could smell, I thought maybe dirty garbage or something, said Lisa Maria Brown.

Anderson's body was in the closet, and it appeared as though she had been dead for several days. Investigators do not yet know the cause of death, but they believe Brown killed her.

"My nephew has lost his parents in the blink of an eye...mom and dad, Brown said.

As for the couple 6-year-old son, he was with relatives at the time of the standoff. But since they don't know exactly when his mother was killed, authorities are not certain that he didn't witness the violence.

There were no obvious signs of trauma to Anderson's body, the medical examiner will have to determine how she was killed.

Statement from Florida Department of Corrections

Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of Christal Anderson who, this morning, was identified as the victim of an apparent homicide. Anderson had been on a Department approved furlough from her work release assignment at the Suncoast Community Release Center.

"With approximately five months remaining on her sentence, Andersons furlough was approved to assist in the re-entry process and help her gradually reintegrate back into the community. On March 27, 2016, after receiving a cut-bracelet alert from Andersons GPS monitor, FDC notified the St. Petersburg Police Department, per standard procedure, who immediately initiated an investigation.

"FDC is proactively working with the St. Petersburg Police Department, who is the lead investigative authority, to provide assistance. Please contact the St. Petersburg Police Department with any questions regarding this investigation.
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Construction recently began on a Twin Peaks sports bar and restaurant at 3805 Interstate 10 South, just off of the access road near the Tinseltown movie theater.

The chain eatery, located at the site of the former Carino's Italian restaurant, is expected to open later this year.

Twin Peaks was founded in 2005 in Lewisville, a Dallas suburb. The restaurant's menu features items like burgers, salads, steaks and a variety of draft beers.

There are currently 71 locations throughout 24 states, according to the company's website.

Each chain offers a ski lodge atmosphere and attractive female servers, according to Twin Peaks.

More: twinpeaksrestaurant.com

n Newk's Eatery, a casual restaurant that offers soups, salads, pizzas and sandwiches, announced late last month that it plans to open 15 locations in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana over the next seven years.

Newk's owners said in a prepared statement that the company is particularly interested in "locations along Interstate 10 heading toward Houston and in Louisiana's Gulf Coast region."

The Jackson, Mississippi-based restaurant chain will open its 100th location on Monday in Lake Charles.

Newk's Eatery currently has locations in 13 states, and the company wants to expand to more than 200 stores by 2019, according to the prepared statement.

More: Newks.com

n Brightwood College, formerly known as Kaplan College, will host a rebranding party from noon to 2 p.m. Wednesday at the campus, 6115 Eastex Freeway.

The community is invited to tour the campus and meet with faculty. Drinks and hors d'oeuvres will be available, according to a news release.

Brightwood College has 27 locations across the United States, according to the college.

More: brightwood.edu/beaumont-tx

n Postal Connections, which provides packing, shipping and business services, announced plans this past week to open a location inside the Walmart Supercenter off Dowlen Road.

Postal Connections has several dozen stores in 16 states. The company began offering franchises in 1996.

More: postalconnections.com

Have an In the Works tip or question? Email LocalNews@BeaumontEnterprise.com
Some 44% did not know what the full rate of the new state pension will be from April 6, research show

Many people approaching retirement are still in the dark about aspects of the new state pension, according to research from Which?

From Wednesday, the new state pension system will take effect, which will affect people reaching retirement age on or after April 6 and aims to be easier to understand.

Which? found that more than two-thirds (68%) of 50 to 64-year-olds are aware the changes are coming in, rising to 80% of those aged between 60 and 64.

But many people were unclear on the details of how the new system will work. Some 44% of people did not know what the full rate of the new state pension will be from April 6.

The full new single-tier state pension will be 155.65 a week. Usually people will need at least 10 years of qualifying National Insurance (NI) contributions to get any state pension.

And o nly 18% of the 1,000 people surveyed knew if they had ever been contracted out of the state pension. Being contracted out for even a short period of time could leave people with a much smaller pension than they were expecting.

Which? has produced a state pension guide to explains how the changes will impact people currently receiving or soon to be receiving their state pension and includes a state pension age calculator.

Which? executive director Richard Lloyd, said: "Next week sees major changes to the state pension, which forms a core part of many people's retirement income.

"While it's promising to see that awareness of the upcoming changes is high, we're only half way there. More needs to be done to make sure that people understand what the changes are and what they mean for them."

Pensions Minster Ros Altmann, said: "It is vital that people check what their state pension is likely to be, especially when planning their future later life income.

"The Government is introducing a new state pension system which will be easier to understand and a new digital online individual state pension forecast will be available to make things much easier.

"This is in public testing now and in the meantime anyone over age 50 can get a written statement showing their estimated state pension. I'm delighted that Which? is highlighting the new system and the need for more people to find out how the new rules will affect them."

Gareth Shaw, head of consumer affairs at Saga Investment Services, said: "T he current system is horribly complicated, and the new single-tier will eventually wave away this complexity.

"But today's generation of state pensioners need more help understanding what they're entitled to."

The Which? state pension guide can be found at www.which.co.uk/money/retirement/guides/whats-happening-with-the-state-pension-in-2016/.
Is there an uglier garment than the 49.50 Marks and Sparks swimsuit burkini? This voluminous garment might appear modest on dry land, but - as Nigella Lawson demonstrated a couple of years back by emerging from the Sydney surf in a full length black version, cleverly foiling the paparazzi - once wet, the swimsuit burkini can make the wearer resemble a badly stuffed sausage.

Like other crimes against fashion - the poncho, mid-calf length culottes, stretch denim jeans and prissy pie crust frilled blouses - the burkini bathing costume offers nothing except acres of coverage.

It's hardly a compliment-magnet, far from it, but there's a good reason why high profile international designers like Dolce and Gabbana are offering shapeless clothing which covers the flesh in costly fabrics (they've launched a range of Muslim robes and veils) and why Marks & Spencer, alongside their latest trendy Alexa Chung range, are making burkinis: it's cash, nothing more or less.

The international Muslim clothing market is said to be worth billions annually and you only have to step inside the M&S flagship store at Marble Arch in London to see queues of burkha-wearing customers spending thousands of pounds every five minutes.

In France, the trend to exploit this market is seen as unpatriotic and has attracted much hostile comment. The Minister for Families has claimed that fans of the burkini and designers who pander to it are "like negroes who support slavery", adding "when brands invest in this Islamic garment market they are shirking their responsibilities... promoting women's bodies being locked up".

Fighting talk - and Pierre Berge, who as Yves St Laurent's business partner built a global empire, was equally dismissive, announcing "we must teach Muslim women to revolt, to take their clothes off, to learn to live like most of the women in the rest of the world".

The French government has passed laws protecting their secular state by banning the headscarf in schools (and other clothing which denotes religious affiliations) and the wearing of the full veil, the niqab, in public.

Both decisions have been upheld by EU courts, although there are few prosecutions. In a recent poll, more than 85% of the public supported the laws.

Nevertheless, the number of women wearing the veil in France and in the UK grows every year. For many, it is not merely an expression of their religion (though the Koran simply advocates that women dress modestly), but their right as feminists to wear whatever they want.

Reluctantly, I have to accept this, although I find the sight of women enveloped in the shapeless black garment deeply depressing. Wearing modest clothes, or a burkha, doesn't signal you are devout, or a feminist. You could just as easily be wearing the headscarf or the burkha because of social, or family pressure.

Some young women will have no choice. Many Muslim women abhor the wearing of the veil and the inference that women who wear more revealing clothes are somehow more promiscuous, or less spiritual.

But the intemperate language of Monsieur Berge and the French minister is yet another sign that we live in intolerant times, when the simple matter of what you wear in public can have unpleasant and threatening connotations.

In the US, a black female student at San Francisco State University has just denounced a white male student for having the temerity to wear dreadlocks, because they "belonged" to her culture - presumably because the hairstyle is associated with Jamaican Rastas. Can a hairstyle be the exclusive property of one particular ethnic group? How many of us have boarded flights home from holidays in the sun and seen small girls with their hair braided in corn rows?

Presumably, this zealot would have berated them for appropriating a black tradition. Last Christmas in Australia, every farmers' market I visited in Northern New South Wales was run by shoeless white men and women sporting dreadlocks, the 30-something children of the original Sixties dropouts, now earning a living as farmers selling their home-grown organic vegetables and designer coffee.

As for pandering to women who cover themselves, Dolce and Gabbana have form when it comes to faith - they stuck the Virgin Mary on T-shirts which sold for almost 300 a pop. Like all designers and pop stars, they will plunder anything for good source material if it sells.

Ironically, it was Yves St Laurent who put women in trouser suits, which covered a great deal more flesh than mini skirts which had preceded them.

And, if he was still alive, rich Muslims would probably be his best customers.
Before any of you get any ideas about my, ahem, close and personal relationship with rock god-like chef Marco Pierre White and his anointed representatives on earth, Mandy and Eddie Patrick, let me declare that I was involved on a professional basis with the launch of their new restaurant last year.

I was glad to be involved, because a lot of sniffiness emerged around the more upmarket parts of Belfast (including around the bigger houses in the east) as news filtered out that the greatest chef on the planet, the man who had secured Michelin stars before he could walk, the curly-haired Adonis for whom the term "Chefs are the new rock and roll stars" was first coined, was to come to Belfast and open a restaurant. In the Park Avenue Hotel.

Some people fainted in disbelief. Others said they had never been to the east: where was it? But, mostly, there was jubilation, because no matter what happened, or where he chose to go, Belfast was going to be a better place now that he was here.

Except that he wasn't really here. His name was going over the door, but it would be down to chef Eddie Patrick to make it work. (Marco Pierre White didn't come over until 10 days ago to host a dinner and check things were up to scratch and take a diva's guided tour of Belfast and the sights. No photographers, no interviews please, unless you're Stephen Clements.)

Eddie embarked last autumn on a secret and intensive training course in England, which required him to use his two days off each week so nobody would notice. This went on for weeks until Marco Pierre and his people were satisfied that Eddie could deliver the standards required of the brand.

Eddie's wife, Mandy, and her family own the Park Avenue and they had decided last summer that what they needed to do after spending millions in recent years upgrading the rooms to four-star status was to enter a new phase. The place was always renowned for its steaks. Now it would be super-steaks.

And they are. Eddie passed with flying colours and very quickly the new Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar and Grill has worked its way into the soul of east Belfast.

This area is foodie heaven. It's in Strandtown, so neighbours include Baker Street, Bennett's and Slim's. In nearby Ballyhackamore are Graze, Il Pirata, Bistro Este and Neill's Hill, plus a good sprinkling of Chinese, Indian and Mexicans.

People around here know their food, so the pressure on Eddie to deliver has been intense. The meat comes from Rodgers' in Carryduff and is excellent. Hannan Meats and Carnbrooke are not the only butchers in the country and Rodgers do the job very well.

Sirloins, ribeyes, fillets and other cuts are fine quality. The flavours are powerful, the textures are just right and whether you like yours nuked or blue, the steaks here are always right. I know this, because I pop in from time to time and people who know tell me.

But what is more impressive in many ways are the starters. There are rillettes, pates and all sorts of charcuteries that match the best I've had (Petit Ormeau) in Belfast; the French onion soup is textbook, boiled jellied ham with parsley, homemade piccalilli and sourdough toast is wonderfully salty and stays with you like a friend and my favourite - smoked trout tartare with melba toast, capers, shallots and pickled cucumber - is something straight out of Gordon Ramsay.

There are some service issues and once in a while a steak might turn up overdone. But they know how to deal with errors and mistakes beautifully - always the sign of quality.

The value for money is better than any other Marco Pierre White and this one beats the two Dublin outlets hands down for quality. When he was here, I had the roast rump of lamb, two generously ample pieces, which came with the most outstanding potato dauphinoises this side of the Dauphine and soft, crunchy green beans. This was under 20. By the way, all steaks come served with a grilled tomato, watercress, onion rings, triple-cooked chips and a choice of sauce.

When the great man visited last week, his charisma and star quality were instantly palpable. He did a good turn at Belfast Met with the catering students there and then over at Elim Church, where he spent time with a group Eddie devotes a lot of time to.

Marco Pierre White, for all his commerciality, is still one of the greats. He will go down in history as the man who fundamentally changed the way we eat out.

And what did he make of Eddie's efforts? "My name is in the hands of an outstanding, professional and talented chef."

The bill

Smoked trout tartare 7.95

Fritto misto of calamari and shrimp 7.95

10oz ribeye 26.95

Lamb rump 19.95

Glass of Gavi (250ml x2) 21.50

Glass of Pinot Noir dOc (x2) 12.90

Total 97.20
Video posted by Willie Frazer as an April Fool shows him putting on a black balaclava and army combat

Video posted by Willie Frazer as an April Fool shows him putting on a black balaclava and army combat

He then puts on a balaclava and combat jacket and asks would that be acceptable?

Im just one of the boys Mr Frazer quips before being allowed to proceed

Mr Frazer is stopped by a bogus policeman... who tells him: Put your flag away, good man'

Mr Frazer is stopped by a bogus policeman... who tells him: Put your flag away, good man'

Northern Ireland victims campaigner Willie Frazer has caused a storm online after posting a skit about how to "blend in" while travelling in south Armagh.

He is shown driving along a country lane before a person who appears to be posing as a police officer stops the car and asks him where he is going.

The best way for me to travel in South Armagh, thanks to ACC Martin for the advice. Posted by William Frazer on Friday, 1 April 2016

The bogus officer warns him not to display a Union flag in the area, and tells him no flags in public, adding: put your flag away, good man.

Frazer is filmed asking why not, and says its the flag of the country, before setting the flag out of sight.

He then reaches into his car and pulling out a black balaclava and army combat jacket which he puts on, and is then allowed to proceed.

Frazer asks: "Would that be acceptable", and is told, "oh yes, yes ... that ticks every box".

He then quips, "I'm just one of the boys" before driving on.

The video was posted as an April Fool and has gone down a storm online with over 122,000 views and almost 1,000 shares.

It comes after police were criticised for an incident on the Ormeau Road where CS spray was used during a Junior Orange parade after officers had not been seen to tackle a number of dissident parades in Belfast, Lurgan, Londonderry and Coalisland over the Easter weekend.

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At the dissident republican parade in Lurgan, marchers wore masks over their faces before one read out a statement from the Continuity IRA which contained a threat against British forces.

As he posted the video on April 1, Mr Frazer commented: The best way for me to travel in south Armagh, thanks to ACC Martin for the advice.

The PSNI has defended its policing of parades and on Friday Assistant Chief Constable Stephen Martin said parades are policed in an impartial way.

I can tell you that I police those [parades] in an impartial, consistent way, he said.

Yes I have to make different decisions based on different contexts, unfortunately we are a divided society where often it comes down that if Im celebrating, you will condemn, and vice versa, these are difficult decisions.

First Minister Arlene Foster said last week that she did not believe there is a two-tier policing in Northern Ireland.

She said the PSNI need to get to the bottom of issues causing concern but it had a very difficult job to do.

Willie Frazer regularly posts video on his Facebook page reacting to various news stories.
A list of all those who died in the 1916 Easter Rising, including rebellion leaders and British soldiers, has been unveiled in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin.

Almost 500 people were killed in the uprising, the majority of them - 268 - were civilians caught up in the violence.

There has been some controversy about the inclusion of British soldiers on the "Necrology Wall" and a number of protesters gathered outside the historic cemetery in the north of the city to demonstrate as the interfaith service took place inside.

A significant Garda presence monitored the protest events.

The 488 names of those known to have died in the rising are listed in alphabetical order.

The names of 119 British soldiers, some of whom are buried in Glasnevin, are engraved on the reflective black granite stones.

The Glasnevin Trust has insisted the memorial is an attempt to present the historical facts, without hierarchy or judgment.

John Green, chairman of Glasnevin Trust, told the service the wall reflected modern Ireland.

"Behind each and everyone of these lost lives is a story of heartbreak, no matter what side the person served on or indeed for those innocently caught up in the conflict," he said.

"One hundred years on we believe this memorial reflects the time we live in, with the overwhelming majority of the Irish people wishing to live in peace and in reconciliation.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close The Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Gerry Adams Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Picture - Kevin Scott / Presseye Gerry Adams Belfast , UK - March 27, Pictured is the Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye ) Kevin Scott / Presseye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The parade began at Divis Tower at noon and made its way to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery. Those marching are we aring period dress, and the parade includes horse-drawn carriages, uniforms, memorabilia of the time and flute bands. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast Photo by Kevin Scott/Presseye Kevin Scott / Presseye Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th March 2016 Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. Hundreds of people line the streets of west Belfast for a parade marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Picture by Jonathan Porter Press Eye. / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Centenary 1916 Easter Commemoration parade as it makes its way along the Falls Road in Belfast on March 27, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland ( Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye )

"But it is for each visitor to take from the wall what they wish."

Senior church figures from a range of faiths and humanist representatives were among those to speak at the ceremony.

The project has drawn inspiration from an international memorial near Arras in France that lists the names of 580,000 people killed in fighting on the western front in the First World War.

Acting Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny attended Sunday morning's service.

Mr Kenny laid a wreath after a number of local school children were invited to unveil the new memorial wall. A minute's silence was observed before the last post was sounded and the Irish Tricolour raised from half to full mast.

The service concluded with the playing of the Irish national anthem, Amhran na bhFiann.

Some minor scuffles broke out at a protest line outside the cemetery.

Gardai said a 15-year-old boy was arrested and taken to Mountjoy station.
Michaella McCollum Connolly with rugby star Tommy Bowe while doing promotional work at an official Ulster Rugby event

Michaella McCollum Connolly with reality TV star Mark Wright at a promotional night hosted by Belfast's M Club

Police escort Michaella McCollum Connolly (right) and Melissa Reid (front) in handcuffs as they are moved from the National Police anti-drug headquarters to a court to be formally charged for drug trafficking in Lima, Peru, Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013

Michaella McCollum Connolly arrives to court for her sentencing in Callao, Peru (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

Michaella McCollum Connolly, handcuffed, arrives for a court hearing in Lima, Peru, clutching the book 'Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment' (AP Photo/Karel Navarro)

Michaella McCollum Connolly in one of the Ibiza clubs where she worked as a dancer

CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Michaella and Melissa caught on CCTV loading bags into a car in Peru

Michaella McCollum Connolly in one of her club hostess outfits

Michaella McCollum during her first interview release from prison in Peru

Michaella McCollum during her exclusive first interview with the Irish broadcaster RTE (RTE/PA)

A drugs mule released from prison in Peru has insisted she is a good person who made a bad decision in a moment of madness.

Michaella McCollum, from Northern Ireland, was freed on parole on Thursday after serving more than two years in South American jails.

McCollum and Melissa Reid, from Scotland, were imprisoned in 2013 for six years and eight months after admitting trying to smuggle cocaine worth 1.5 million from Peru to Spain.

In her first interview since being released, the Co Tyrone woman said: "I've forgotten the things that everybody takes for granted in life.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Michaella McCollum during her first interview release from prison in Peru PA Dungannon drugs mule Michaella McCollum Michaella McCollum Connolly, handcuffed, arrives for a court hearing in Lima, Peru, clutching the book 'Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment' (AP Photo/Karel Navarro) AP Michaella McCollum Connolly arrives to court for her sentencing in Callao, Peru (AP Photo/Martin Mejia) AP Police escort Michaella McCollum Connolly (right) and Melissa Reid (front) in handcuffs as they are moved from the National Police anti-drug headquarters to a court to be formally charged for drug trafficking in Lima, Peru, Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013 AP Michaella McCollum Connolly with reality TV star Mark Wright at a promotional night hosted by Belfast's M Club Michaella McCollum Connolly with Brad Houston from England Michaella McCollum Connolly Michaella McCollum Connolly with rugby star Tommy Bowe while doing promotional work at an official Ulster Rugby event / Facebook

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Whatsapp Michaella McCollum during her first interview release from prison in Peru

"Seeing the sun, seeing the darkness, seeing the moon and the stars, things I haven't seen in almost three years."

McCollum was freed under new legislation on early prison release introduced in Peru last year.

She had served two years and three months.

It is anticipated she will have to remain in Peru for a considerable period as part of her parole conditions.

Reid remains in prison in Peru.

She has been seeking to serve the remainder of her sentence closer to home in Scotland.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Michaella McCollum Connolly in one of her club hostess outfits Michaella McCollum Connolly in one of the Ibiza clubs where she worked as a dancer PARTY SCENE: Michaella in Ibiza Michaella McCollum after her arrest AP Photo/Martin Mejia CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Michaella and Melissa caught on CCTV loading bags into a car in Peru Michaella McCollum's mother Norah McCollum and sister Samantha McCollum vist the Peru prison Melissa Reid Michaella McCollum and ex-boyfriend Dwayne Mullan Dungannon drugs mule Michaella McCollum Michaella McCollum Connolly, handcuffed, arrives for a court hearing in Lima, Peru, clutching the book 'Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment' (AP Photo/Karel Navarro) AP Michaella McCollum Connolly arrives to court for her sentencing in Callao, Peru (AP Photo/Martin Mejia) AP Police escort Michaella McCollum Connolly (right) and Melissa Reid (front) in handcuffs as they are moved from the National Police anti-drug headquarters to a court to be formally charged for drug trafficking in Lima, Peru, Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013 AP Michaella McCollum Connolly with reality TV star Mark Wright at a promotional night hosted by Belfast's M Club Michaella McCollum Connolly with Brad Houston from England Michaella McCollum Connolly Michaella McCollum Connolly with rugby star Tommy Bowe while doing promotional work at an official Ulster Rugby event / Facebook

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Whatsapp Michaella McCollum Connolly in one of her club hostess outfits

McCollum has been interviewed in Peru for a documentary that will be aired on RTE One on Sunday night.

In it, she acknowledged the potentially devastating consequences if she had successfully smuggled the drugs back to Europe.

"I probably would have had a lot of blood on my hands," she said.

"I potentially could have filled Europe full of a lot of drugs.

"I could have potentially killed a lot of people, not directly but I could have caused a lot of harm to people."

She added: "I made a decision in a moment of madness. I'm not a bad person. I want to demonstrate that I'm a good person."

McCollum, from Dungannon, and Reid, from Glasgow, were caught with the haul at Lima airport on August 6 2013 attempting to fly to Spain.

They had claimed they were forced into carrying the drugs but pleaded guilty to charges later that year.

The pair were caught trying to board a flight with 24lb (11kg) of cocaine in food packets hidden inside their luggage.

McCollum and Reid faced the prospect of a maximum 15-year prison term but struck a behind-closed-doors plea bargain to secure a shorter sentence.

The pair had previously been held at Lima's Virgen de Fatima prison but were moved to the Ancon 2 prison, where McCollum was reportedly crammed into a cell with 30 other prisoners with poor sanitation and toilet facilities.
Unions are stepping up their campaign to save thousands of jobs in the crisis hit steel industry with a new plan which needs Government support.

An emergency meeting of union representatives from Tata Steel plants across the UK was told of frantic efforts to stop the industry collapsing.

The plan will be presented to the Government tomorrow.

The unions set out their demands of Government, including helping to secure the customer base and guaranteeing production of Tata's UK steel operations so that customers are not lost following the company's shock announcement to sell its UK assets.

The Government was also urged to work to ensure the integrity of the business is guaranteed, because allowing Tata or other investors to cherry-pick assets will put steelmaking at risk.

Union officials said Tata's plants are viable but they require investment.

The business needs the investment originally planned by Tata - understood to be 1.5 billion over 10 years.

"This level of investment should be achievable given that any buyer would be gaining control of assets worth 4 billion," said a union statement.

"But Government support is needed to bridge the 2-3 years it will take to get back to self-sustainability."

The unions have engaged steel industry advisers Syndex UK to help develop its plans.

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of Community, said: "It was clear from our meeting today that steelworkers are the guardians of their industry and they know what action is needed to secure the future of steelmaking in the UK.

"There needs to be a step-change in the level of Government involvement with Tata, its customers and the unions and this is why we have set out our demands.

"The Government needs to reassure the customer base, they need to make it clear to Tata that the integrity of the business must be maintained, and the Government must invest in our steel industry to give it a future."

Harish Patel, national officer of Unite, said: "Steelworkers are united in their view of what the Government must do. This business should have a future but it needs immediate action to reassure customers and protect the integrity of the business. We don't want to hear more warm words from ministers. We want Government to work with us to deliver this plan, invest in the future of steelmaking and protect the jobs of thousands of steelworkers across the UK."

Dave Hulse, national officer of the GMB, said: "There is no time for further delay from this Government. They need to be loud and clear to instil confidence in customers and steelworkers that this business will have a future.

"Government must hold Tata to being a responsible seller. You can't rush selling off the UK steel industry. Everybody needs to work together in the best interests of our industrial security and steel communities across the UK."

Union leaders are hoping to present their plan to the Government on Tuesday.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid met with a Tata official on Monday, while contact continued to be made with potential buyers or investors.

Business Minister Anna Soubry will appear before the Welsh Affairs Committee on April 12 to answer questions about the future of steel production in Port Talbot.

Speaking outside the Business Department before the meeting, with Tata, she said that while talks were ongoing regarding the planned sale of Tata's Scunthorpe plant, the future of the Port Talbot steelworks was a "different kettle of fish".

"In that sense that is where we are losing a lot of money, well Tata is. There's a big job to be done there."

Ms Soubry again defended Government policy towards helping the industry, adding: "We've been implementing a compensation scheme, and we'll be exempting steel from two of the green tariffs from December 2017.

"So we're doing all of these things, along with the tariffs as well."

TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said: "The next few days will be crucial for UK steel. Ministers need to show British steelworkers that they are on their side.

"Other EU governments have acted to support their steel industries, ours must do the same.

"Securing a future for Tata's UK steel plants is a crucial first step. But the Government also needs to ensure that British manufacturers can compete in the global market over the longer term and retain their highly-skilled workforces.

"This means standing up to China over steel dumping and developing an industrial strategy that places UK steel at its heart."

Shadow business secretary Angela Eagle said: "The future of British steelmaking is hanging in the balance.

"Labour has been demanding action for months to address the growing crisis in this vital strategic industry. The Welsh Assembly has been recalled and the steel unions are working hard to find a way forward.

"Yet the crisis continues to grow and the Government is still missing in action. They have refused to recall Parliament and their response has been utterly chaotic. They need to get a grip fast. We've had enough of warm words, now is the time for concrete action."

Sanjeev Gupta, head of the Liberty Group, said he had "very encouraging" talks with the Government and raised the possibility of taking over the Port Talbot steelworks without huge job losses.

Mr Gupta told the BBC he believed jobs at Port Talbot could be saved if at least 700 workers in its blast furnaces were retrained.

"We've never undertaken anything which requires redundancies - I won't undertake something which will require mass redundancies," he said.

Mr Javid tweeted: "Just held productive meeting with senior Tata executives to discuss UK #steel sales process. Progress is being made."
Syrian troops and their allies have captured another town controlled by the Islamic State group in central Syria, according to state media reports.

The push into the town of Qaryatain took place under the cover of Russian air strikes and dealt another setback to the IS extremists in Syria.

An activist group that monitors the Syrian civil war said that government forces are in control of most of the town after IS fighters withdrew to its eastern outskirts.

The advance came a week after Syrian forces recaptured Palmyra from IS and is strategically significant for the government side.

The capture of Qaryatain deprives IS of a main base in central Syria and could be used by government forces in the future to launch attacks on IS-held areas near the Iraqi border.

Qaryatain used to be home to a sizeable Christian population and lies midway between Palmyra and the capital, Damascus.

Activists said last summer that Qaryatain had a mixed population of around 40,000 Sunni Muslims and Christians, as well as thousands of internally displaced people who had fled from the nearby city of Homs. Many of the Christians fled the town after it came under IS attack.

Dozens of Qaryatain's Christians and other residents have been abducted by the extremists. While the town was under IS control, some were released, others were made to sign pledges to pay a tax imposed on non-Muslims.

While IS extremists blew up and destroyed some of the world's most precious relics at Palmyra's archaeological sites during their 10-month reign there, the ancient Saint Eliane Monastery near Qaryatain was also bulldozed and destroyed shortly after IS took the town in August.

Christians make up about 10% of Syria's pre-war population of 23 million people.

The Syrian army command said in a statement that troops have "restored security and stability to Qaryatain and farms surrounding it". The statement, read by an army general on state TV, said the oil and gas pipelines in the area will be secured and IS supply routes between eastern desert and the Qalamoun region will be cut.

A Syrian army general, speaking live from Qaryatain with the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV, said troops are now dismantling bombs placed by extremists and will prepare to launch fresh attacks on areas held by IS.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said intense fighting was under way in Qaryatain as government troops fight to capture all parts of the town. The observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said that IS fighters are still in control of small areas east of the town but "are on the verge of collapse". He added that the extremists are withdrawing towards eastern parts of the mountainous Qalamoun region.

The observatory reported later in the day that IS fighters have withdrawn from much of the town toward the eastern suburbs of Qaryatain.

IS has suffered major defeats in Syria in recent months amid intense air strikes by Russian warplanes.

Earlier, the observatory reported that fighting in northern Syria the previous day killed several fighters belonging to the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group. Hezbollah has been fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's troops in Syria's civil war.

The observatory said 12 Hezbollah fighters were killed and dozens were wounded in Saturday's attack by militants led by al Qaida's Syria branch - known as the Nusra Front - on the northern village of al-Ais.

In southern Lebanon, social media postings on Sunday carried photos of seven Hezbollah fighters said to be among those killed in al-Ais.

Though Nusra Front is not part of a US-Russia-engineered truce between the Syrian government forces and Western-backed rebels, the fighting has threatened to undermine the ceasefire that has largely held for over a month.
The editor of Egypt's top state newspaper is calling on authorities to seriously deal with the case of an Italian student tortured and killed in Cairo, saying officials who do not realise the gravity of the case are risking a break in Egyptian-Italian relations.

In a front-page column, Al-Ahram's editor-in-chief Mohammed Abdel-Hadi Allam suggested that Cambridge University student Giulio Regeni's killing might have the same impact in Egypt as the 2010 beating to death by police of an Egyptian youth in the coastal city of Alexandria.

The brutal death of Khaled Said helped ignite a popular 18-day uprising that began on January 25 2011 and toppled the 29-year regime of autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

"The Khaled Said case, despite its circumstances, did not go away like some thought at the time," he warned. "The naive stories about Regeni's death have hurt Egypt at home and abroad and offered some a justification to judge what is going on in the country now to be no different from what went on before the January 25 revolution."

Mr Regeni's death has roiled Egyptian-Italian relations. Last month Egyptian authorities implied that Mr Regeni had been killed by a criminal gang specialising in kidnapping foreigners. Authorities said all members of the gang had been killed in a shoot-out and that Mr Regeni's passport and several personal items had been found in the gang leader's home.

The announcement was immediately rejected by Italian media and by Mr Regeni's family, who have publicly stated a belief that Mr Regeni was killed by Egyptian security forces.

Premier Matteo Renzi has insisted Italy will settle for nothing less than the truth.

Mr Allam, in his column, charged that Egypt was embarrassed and placed in a "very grave situation" by officials who did not understand the "value of truth" and the priority given to human rights in Europe.

A "moment of truth" between Egypt and Italy over what happened to Mr Regeni may be fast approaching, he said, adding that "futile dealings" and "gross exaggerations" may not be useful.

It is unusual for an editor in chief of a state-owned newspaper, particularly the traditionally cautious Al-Ahram, to be so outspoken on a sensitive issue, something that speaks to the enormity of the crisis in Egypt's relations with Italy - its biggest European Union trade partner and a key market for its now-battered tourism sector.

Mr Allam's counsel that the truth must be brought to light seemed to support the contention that the official criminal gang explanation is not the true story.

"The lack of understanding by some officials of the value of truth, to say nothing of the priority given to human rights in European societies, places the Egyptian state in an embarrassing and extremely grave predicament," he wrote. "Before the moment of truth is upon us, we appeal to the state to handle the case with the utmost seriousness and bring the culprits to justice."

He added: "Those who don't appreciate the danger posed to Egyptian-Italian relations by the incident and the edginess in Rome are pushing toward a break in diplomatic relations with Italy."

Egyptian authorities insist they are cooperating fully with Italy and a team of Egyptian prosecutors is headed to Rome later this week to review the case with their Italian counterparts.

Significantly, a private Italian tourism group promoting "responsible tourism" announced over the weekend the suspension of all activities in Egypt, including organising travel packages, "until the tragic event of Regeni's murder is clarified".

The Italian Responsible Tourism Association said "a trip and a vacation are not possible in the context of pain and indignation". AITR said its tour operators had agreed with the move and that members, which number just over 100, had already suspended all their activities regarding Egypt.

Mr Regini disappeared on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the anti-Mubarak uprising.

His brutally tortured body was found nine days later by the side of a road in a Cairo suburb. Egyptian authorities have since offered several explanations for his death, including a road accident and a crime of passion, before producing the criminal kidnapping theory.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 03/04/2016 (2394 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO  Premier Kathleen Wynne has agreed to meet this week with Ontarios opposition leaders to talk about reforming the provinces political fundraising rules.

After a week of intense criticism over fundraising quotas for Liberal cabinet ministers, Wynne sent a letter on Sunday to Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath saying she wants their input on finance reform.

I am committed to phasing out corporate and union donations to political parties and reducing the amount that individuals can donate, she wrote.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne speaks to reporters as she arrives at the First Ministers meeting at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa on Monday, Nov. 23, 2015. Wynne is asking for a meeting this week with Ontario's opposition leaders to talk about reforming the province's political fundraising rules. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

My government remains committed to enhancing the integrity of the election finance system and protecting the public interest.

Wynne also said she would give the Tories and New Democrats time to come up with their own suggestions before the new rules are drafted.

After we meet, and once you are able to consult within your parties, I am very interested to receive your formal input on a responsible way forward to reform the current system, including your ideas on legislative and non-legislative mechanisms we could use to develop recommendations to assist us in making these important reforms, she added.

The premiers letter came after both opposition leaders said they dont want the governing Liberals coming up with new political financing rules on their own.

Its time to put an end to the undue influence of big money in Ontario, Horwath said in a statement Sunday reacting to Wynnes open letter.

We are looking forward to the meeting, and are hopeful we can begin mapping out a process that engages all political parties and broader civil society.

Brown welcomed Wynnes offer of a meeting in a statement Sunday, and repeated his request for a legislative committee to examine the issue.

We hope shell agree to strike a select committee with equal representation from all parties, where all deputations and consultations are made in public and not behind closed doors, wrote Brown.

Wynne denies accusations that lobbyists are buying access to her and Liberal cabinet ministers at expensive and exclusive dinners and receptions, but promises to come up with new rules by this fall.

However, she said there will have to be a phase-in period, so not all the proposed changes to the political fundraising rules will be implemented before the next election in 2018.

Wynne said she wants to follow the federal model and phase out corporate and union donations and reduce the amount individuals can contribute to parties and candidates, but she hasnt said if Ontario taxpayers would subsidize parties under the new rules.

The question now becomes how are we going to finance our democratic process, said Horwath.

Federal contribution rules allow individuals to contribute a maximum of $1,525 to each party annually, plus another $1,525 in total to all the registered associations and candidates of each party.

In Ontario, individuals, companies and unions can donate $9,775 to a party each year, another $9,975 to the party for each campaign period, plus $6,650 annually to constituency associations of any one party. They can also donate $6,650 to candidates of any one party in a campaign, but no more than $1,330 to a single candidate.

Ontario also has no limits on contributions to political leadership candidates. Former Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Christine Elliott received a single donation of $100,000 in 2014.



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By Daniel McConnell Political Editor

Minor scuffles broke out outside Glasnvevin Cemetery today resulting in two arrests after efforts were made to set a British flag alight.

More than 100 protesters, many brandishing hard-line Republican logos and slogans, had gathered outside the cemetery to protest at the inclusion of British army and police names on a 1916 Remembrance Wall.

According to reports, there were efforts to burn a Union Jack, the British flag, but the inclement weather made this impossible.

A number of protestors used fireworks and it has also been claimed that a banger was hurled towards gardai. This led to the breakout of scuffles for a short period.

Having failed to ignite the flag, protestors then chose to throw it on the ground.

The solemn occasion continued inside the cemetery amid heavy security, with the surrounding roads were closed by gardai.

Gardai clashed with the protesters with one 15-year-old youth arrested for an alleged breach of public order. The youth was taken to Mountjoy station nearby.

A second arrest was later confirmed.

The solemn occasion continued inside the cemetery amid heavy security, with the surrounding roads were closed by gardai.

Among the dignitaries present at the event were Acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Arts Minister Heather Humphreys and British Ambassador to Ireland Dominick Chilcott.

The inclusive memorial wall has been the subject of severe criticism from so-called republicans who have objected at the inclusion of names of British forces who died during Easter Week 1916, alongside the names of Irish men and women killed 100 years ago.

The Wall bears the names of all those who died - listing Irish, British, military and civilian alongside one another. The names will be presented in a chronological order without distinction between the different categories.

According to organisers, the Glasnevin wall was inspired by the International Memorial of Notre Dame de Lorette in France.

The Ring of Remembrance lists in alphabetical order without any distinction of nationality, rank or religion, the names of the soldiers from all sides who died in the battlefields of Northern France between 1914 and 1918 in the Great War.

Sinn Fein has criticised the inclusion of British names on the Memorial Wall, describing it as totally inappropriate.

It is totally inappropriate for a memorial wall to list indiscriminately together Irish freedom fighters and members of the British crown forces, Dublin South Central TD Aengus O Snodaigh said.

Everyone should have the right to remember and honour their dead, whether they were Irish republicans, members of British crown forces or civilians. That is catered for already within Glasnevin Cemetery with its many and diverse memorials and graves, said Mr O Snodaigh.

Acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny at the ceremony today. Picture: LENSMEN

Engraved on the stones

Press Association

The 488 names of those known to have died in the Rising are listed in alphabetical order.

The names of 119 British soldiers, some of whom are buried in Glasnevin, are engraved on the reflective black granite stones.

The Glasnevin Trust has insisted the memorial is an attempt to present the historical facts, without hierarchy or judgement.

John Green, chairman of Glasnevin Trust, told the service the wall reflected modern Ireland.

"Behind each and everyone of these lost lives is a story of heartbreak, no matter what side the person served on or indeed for those innocently caught up in the conflict," he said.

"One hundred years on we believe this memorial reflects the time we live in, with the overwhelming majority of the Irish people wishing to live in peace and in reconciliation. But it is for each visitor to take from the wall what they wish."

Senior church figures from a range of faiths and humanist representatives were among those to speak at the ceremony.

The project has drawn inspiration from an international memorial near Arras in France that lists the names of 580,000 people killed in fighting on the western front in the First World War.

Acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny laid a wreath after a number of local school children were invited to unveil the new memorial wall. A minute's silence was observed before the last post was sounded and the Tricolour raised from half to full mast.

The service concluded with the playing of Amhran na bhFiann.
Update 10.25pm: Michaella McCollum, the drugs mule from Co Tyrone released from prison in Peru last week has insisted she is a good person who didnt understand the consequences of a bad decision.

In an interview in Peru last night, she did acknowledge the potential damage the drugs could have on others. But she also made much of the impact the situation had on her.

McCollum was freed on parole last Thursday after serving more than two years in South American jails. It is anticipated she will have to remain in Peru for a considerable period as part of her parole conditions.

Tonight at 9.30pm on #RTEOne, Michaella McCollum speaks for the first time about her time in a Peruvian prisonhttps://t.co/REPjCJ2mc2  RTE News (@rtenews) April 3, 2016

During the interview she acknowledged the potentially devastating consequences if she had successfully smuggled the drugs back to Europe.

I potentially could have filled Europe full of a lot of drugs. I could have potentially killed a lot of people, not directly but I could have caused a lot of harm to people.

But she appeared to defend herself by saying: In life everybody makes mistakes. When people make mistakes it doesnt general mean they are a bad person.

It means they are human. I didnt understand the consequences of a bad decision. I didnt understand exactly what i was doing. I was very naive.

She also claims she was targeted by the drug gang.

I am 100% sure they knew I was alone and vulnerable because during the whole experience I was freaking out a lot and unsure of everything. They were kind of putting a little bit more work on me.

She said she felt sick with nerves, sick with worry the night they were due to depart Peru with the drugs.

I was too scared to walk away. I was worried if I walked away what was going to happen to me, said McCollum.

Where can I go? Then I was right, lets do this, get it over.

EarlierPeru drugs mule Michaella McCollum has said in her first interview since her release from prison that she wants to show she is a good person, not a bad person.

McCollum, from Co Tyrone, and Melissa Reid, from Scotland, were imprisoned in 2013 for six years and eight months after admitting trying to smuggle cocaine worth 1.5m from Peru to Spain.

McCollum was freed earlier this week under new legislation on early prison release introduced in Peru last year. She served two years and three months.

In an interview with the RTE Factual team tonight, she says taking part in the scheme to smuggle the drug was "a moment of madness", that she was young, insecure and naive at the time, and had found it difficult to say no to people.

She says: I made a decision in a moment of madnessIm not a bad person.. I want to demonstrate that Im a good person."

McCollum, from Dungannon, and Reid, from Glasgow, were caught with the haul at Lima airport on August 6 2013 attempting to fly to Spain.

They had claimed they were forced into carrying the drugs but pleaded guilty to charges later that year.

The pair were caught trying to board a flight with 11kg of cocaine in food packets hidden inside their luggage.

Tonight at 9.30pm on #RTEOne Michaella McCollum speaks for the first time about her time in a Peruvian prison. pic.twitter.com/mB96tmizNy  RTE One (@RTEOne) April 3, 2016

McCollum says in the interview that she thinks about the damage that could have been done if she had successfully smuggled the drugs.

If the drugs had of got back [to Europe] what could have happened? I probably would have had a lot of blood on my hands," she says.

I potentially could have filled Europe full of a lot of drugs...I could have potentially killed a lot of people - not directly, but I could have caused a lot of harm to people.

McCollum and Reid faced the prospect of a maximum 15-year prison term but struck a behind-closed-doors plea bargain to secure a shorter sentence.

The full interview is being broadcast on RTE One at 9.30pm tonight
Thousands of Poles have taken part in street demonstrations to protest a possible tightening of the country's abortion law, already one of the most restrictive in Europe.

The rallies in Warsaw and other cities were held under the slogan "No to the torture of women" and came as the influential Roman Catholic Church launched a campaign for a total ban on abortion, something supported by Prime Minister Beata Szydlo and ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
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Medicinal cannabis supporters are pushing forward with plans to establish a dispensary in the ACT, similar to those found in some states of the United States where the drug is freely sold from shopfronts.

Launching advocacy group The Med Shed at the Hellenic Club in Woden on Sunday afternoon, group co-ordinator Matthew Holmes said a large number of pain, nausea and seizure sufferers were forced to break the law to seek relief. Despite overseas evidence of the drug's effectiveness, the medical community in Australia remained slow to accept it as a viable treatment option.

Laura Bryant spoke to the group about her illness and what cannabis oil had done for her. Credit:Melissa Adams

By establishing the group they wanted to take advantage of the October ACT election to pressure candidates and parties to change the law and make cannabis use legal for medical purposes in the ACT.

In February the Senate passed changes to the Narcotic Drugs Act that will allow cannabis to be grown legally for the first time in decades. A national body will be established that can issue licences to growers and regulate local crops of medicinal marijuana, however possession and use remain illegal. Federal Health Minister Sussan Ley said in February that the Department of Health and the Therapeutic Goods Administration were well advanced with plans to help lower barriers that prevented cannabis access for those with a genuine medical need.
Concerns about a "toppy" housing market and lower growth in China are reasons for Australia's banks to continue to hold capital buffers higher than the minimum levels set by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a senior executive at the Australian Prudential and Regulation Authority says.

Ahead of the visit to Sydney this week by Bill Coen, secretary-general of the Basel Committee, for The Australian Financial Review Banking & Wealth Summit, APRA's executive general manager of supervision and support, Charles Littrell, said on Friday that the concentration of lending by the big four banks into property markets is a "perpetual concern" for the prudential regulator.

"It is a significant issue of concern to us that close to two-thirds of [the big four banks'] balance sheets are exposed to propertymainly housing loans," Mr Littrell said.

"It is fair to say in the past year we have worried about it a bit more because of the point we are at in the cycle."
One time lobbyist for the retail wealth management industry, John Brogden, now reckons the big four banks should scrap their "vertically integrated" business models, citing conflicts of interest and flawed pay policies.

"Vertical integration and flawed remuneration policies are plaguing the banking and financial services industry," Mr Brogden said.

John Brogden thinks the vertically integrated wealth management model is flawed. Credit:Jesse Marlow

"If I was on the board of one of the big four banks at the moment I would be telling the executives to look at selling their wealth management arm."

In his current role as chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Mr Brogden is the torchbearer for good corporate governance and strong boards. His stance against the "vertically integrated" selling practices of the retail wealth management industry is a dramatic u-turn from advocating for it in his former role as head of the Financial Services Council for five years until October 2014.
The firm is one of the world's top five creators of shell companies, which can have legitimate business uses but can also be used to dodge taxes and launder money. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, left, with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Moscow. Credit:AP More than 11.5 million emails, financial spreadsheets, client records, passports and corporate registries were obtained in the leak, which was delivered to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in Munich, Germany. In turn, the newspaper shared the data with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Several McClatchy journalists joined more than 370 journalists from 78 countries in the largest media collaboration ever undertaken after a leak. Details of holdings of companies related to Chinese President Xi Jinping's family are also in the papers. Credit:AP

The document archive contains 2.6 terabytes of data. As a registered agent, the Mossack Fonseca law firm incorporates companies in tax havens worldwide for a fee. It has avoided close scrutiny from US law enforcement officials. Mossack Fonseca denied all accusations of illegal activity. "We have not once in nearly 40 years of operation been charged with criminal wrongdoing," spokesman Carlos Sousa said. "We're proud of the work we do, notwithstanding recent and willful attempts by some to mischaracterize it." The law firm's co-founder, Ramon Fonseca, in an interview last month on Panamanian television, said blaming Mossack Fonseca for what people do with their companies would be like blaming an automaker "for an accident or if the car was used in a robbery."

Yet plenty of criminals are named in the documents, like drug traffickers and convicted fraudsters. "The offshore world is the parallel universe of the ultrarich and ultrapowerful," said Jack Blum, a white-collar crime attorney and an architect of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The archive, which dates to the late 1970s and extends through December 2015, reveals that 14,000 intermediaries and middlemen bring business to Mossack Fonseca. The most extraordinary allegations in the archive revolve around Putin's closest associates, including Sergey Roldugin, a close friend since the late 1970s when Putin was a young KGB agent.

Roldugin is a cellist for the St Petersburg orchestra, yet his name appears as the owner of offshore companies that have rights to loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A Russian news service report in 2010 disclosed that he owned at least three per cent of Bank Rossiya, Russia's most important bank. When Mossack Fonseca helped open a bank account in Switzerland on behalf of Roldugin, the application form asked if he had "any relation to PEPs (politically exposed persons) or VIPs." The one-word answer was, "No." Yet, Roldugin is godfather to Putin's daughter Mariya. "Roldugin is, by his proximity to a serving head of state, clearly an exposed person," Mark Pieth, a former head of the Swiss justice ministry's organized crime division, told the ICIJ team. The documents show how in 2008 a company controlled by Roldugin had influence over Russia's largest truck maker Kamaz, joining with several other offshore companies to help another Putin insider acquire majority control of the company. They wanted foreign investment, and German carmaker Daimler later that year bought a 10 per cent stake in Kamaz for $250 million.

The offshore company that connects many Putin loyalists is Sandalwood Continental Limited in the British Virgin Islands. Roldugin was a shareholder until 2012, as was Oleg Gordin, a little-known businessman whom incorporation documents describe as linked to "law enforcement agencies." The files also mention a company co-owned by Putin friend Yury Kovalchuk, the largest shareholder of Bank Rossiya. Kovalchuk was among those targeted by US sanctions in 2014 in retribution for Russia's invasion of Crimea. Another friend, Arkady Rotenberg, Putin's judo partner and a billionaire construction mogul, openly obtained companies through Mossack Fonseca. The US Treasury Department, when sanctioning him in 2014, suggested that the oligarch acted on behalf of "a senior official." That was widely believed to mean Putin, whose fingerprints were not on any offshore company. "When you are the president of Russia, you don't need a written contract. You are the law," said Karen Dawisha, an academic, former State Department official and author of the acclaimed 2014 book Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said last week that ICIJ was publishing a "series of fibs" that amounted to a media "attack" on Putin. Peskov suggested that unknown "organizations and services" were behind the media reports.
If Annastacia Palaszczuk and her ministers were smacking their lips at the heroic prices her southern neighbours have just won in privatising NSW electricity, their ambitions for a truckload of cash from the sale of Powerlink will have been quickly tempered by the state treasury.

So lavish are the dividends which the Queensland government derives from Powerlink that Treasury is loath to bid it farewell. You can't blame them; we are talking about a total return on equity of 23 times over 15 years.

To put it in perspective, this return is akin to the profits to be had from a tearaway speculative mining company but with all the risk, that is no risk, of a public utility.

In a recent energy market presentation, Hugh Grant  not that Hugh Grant  consumer advocate and 30-year electricity industry veteran Hugh Grant, pointed out the Queensland utility typically delivers a 20-30 per cent annual return on equity whereas most ASX companies have struggled to deliver five per cent.
Adani's proposed mine and rail lines. "The granting of a mining lease helps deliver the company certainty with respect to timelines, while moving to the next phase of the project, subject to the resolution of legal challenges by politically-motivated activists," he said. "Adani has consistently said that what is required for its projects to proceed is certainty on approvals. "This key approval helps provide that with respect to Carmichael." The Adani spokesman said the mine's approvals were the "strictest of their kind" for a major Australian resources project.

"It is for this reason that conclusion of second tier approvals and resolution of politically-motivated legal challenges is the company's principal focus, prior to a final investment decision being made," he said. "Having previously sought to progress to the construction phase in 2015, Adani is keenly aware of the risks of proceeding on major works in advance of the conclusion of these matters. "Delivering low ash, low sulphur, lower emitting coal to thermal generators in India, while delivering jobs in regions crying out for them, and taxes and royalties to Queensland, is paramount." No dredging Dr Lynham confirmed no dredging at Abbot Point would take place until Adani had demonstrated financial closure.

The Premier said "stringent conditions would continue to protect the environment, landholders' and traditional owners' interests and Great Barrier Reef". More than 200 conditions apply to the project which, if it goes ahead, would be the largest coal mine in Australia. "The mine's environmental authority had about 140 conditions to protect local flora and fauna, groundwater and surface water resources, as well as controls on dust and noise," Dr Lynham said. "A further 99 stringent and wide-ranging conditions apply to the rail and port elements of the project." Three levels of government

The project now has 19 permits and approvals at all three levels of government, including nine primary approvals from the state and federal government. "A number of other steps have to be completed before mine construction can start," Dr Lynham said. "They include secondary approvals for rail, port facilities, power, water, roadworks and the airport and a financial assurance with the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection. "The independent Coordinator-General will continue to work with Adani to progress the project." Conservation groups dismayed

Numerous conservation groups have hit out at the approval, saying it will jeopardise the state's future and destroy national treasures like the Great Barrier Reef. Climate action lobby group 350 Australia is planning a protest outside Queensland's parliament tomorrow over Indian mining company's $16.5 billion Carmichael mine. Campaigner Moira Williams says in a statement today, as global temperatures hit terrifying levels and the Great Barrier Reef turns a deathly white, the absurdity of Ms Palaszczuk's government approving what she called "this monstrous coal project" cannot be understated. The Australian Conservation Foundation's chief executive Kelly O'Shanassy says the project poses an enormous threat to the reef, amid one of its worst coral bleaching events on record. Lobby group GetUp! says Dr Lynham is signing a death warrant for the reef if the state government approves it.

The Greens' environment spokeswoman Larissa Waters, a Queensland senator, said the proposed mine was "a disaster by every metric" and accused Labor and the Coalition of making "hollow promises" to protect the reef. "Right now our reef is getting cooked," she said. "Crying crocodile tears about coral bleaching while giving this dangerous mega mine the all-clear is both hypocritical and irresponsible." A spokeswoman for federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt, who last year granted his conditional approval for the mine, said the project had been promoted and approved by Queensland Labor, and the licensing decision was a matter for them. The project's financial merits have been the subject of sustained debate with Adani playing up the thousands of jobs that it claims would be created. But the Queensland Treasury described the project as unbankable and late last year the Commonwealth Bank's role as a financial adviser to the project ended. Several other banks have also ruled out lending to the project.
Environmental groups have slammed the Palaszczuk government over its approval of leases for Adani's Carmichael coal mine, labelling the timing as "indefensible" given the Great Barrier Reef's recent coral bleaching.

But Queensland's peak resources body hailed the approvals as an "important step forward" in securing thousands of jobs in a sector that had been hit hard by recent declines.

Queensland Mines Minister Anthony Lynham announced the approval of three mining leases in the Galilee Basin on Sunday, with the company hopeful it could start construction of the $21.7 billion mine next year.

Greenpeace Australia Pacific reef campaigner Shani Tager said there was "no question" the Great Barrier Reef was suffering and the Carmichael mine would only exacerbate the damage.
Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting expects iron ore prices to remain above $US50 a tonne this year with robust demand from China boosting returns from the mining magnate's $US10 billion ($13 billion) Roy Hill project.

Mrs Rinehart and senior Hancock executives will attend a ceremony in China's largest iron ore port, Caofeidian, in the Hebei province, on Thursday to mark the first supplies of ore to the country from Roy Hill.

From right: Roy Hill CEO Barry Fitzgerald; Gina Reinhart; and daughter Ginia at the ceremony noting the first shipment of iron ore from Roy Hill Mine at the port facilities at Port Hedland, WA. Credit:Philip Gostelow

The billionaire's most trusted lieutenant, Hancock Prospecting executive director Tad Watroba, told Fairfax Media the iron ore market was likely to stabilise at current levels  after hitting a record low of $US38 a tonne in December  as recent volatility subsides.

"We are hopeful it will stay around the $US55 to $US60 a tonne range for the rest of the year," Mr Watroba said.
Investa Property Group has expanded its core office sector presence in Sydney by buying a 75 per cent stake in 420 George Street from Fortius for $442.5 million.

The deal was done on a tight yield of 5.3 per cent. The central property is 100 per cent leased

Investa has taken a 75 per cent stake in 420 George Street, Sydney. Credit:Tyrone Branigan

The A-Grade, 31-level building, with an area of 37,688 square metres, sits atop the MidCity Centre, which is being sold to a private investor in a separate transaction.

Tenants include AECOM, State Street and JLL, and Australian Prime Property Fund, an associate of Lendlease, which will retain its 25 per cent stake in the office tower.
Stephen Dank is no stranger to the court room. He's fought media organisations for defamation, been banned for life by an AFL anti-doping tribunal and faced investigation for medicare fraud.

But this time there are no needles, pills or questionable supplements. Only blue gums, olive trees and grape vine plantations.

Stephen Dank leaving the Federal Court in 2014. Credit:Justin McManus

The controversial sports scientist has been caught up with thousands of shareholders in the collapse of forestry managed investment scheme Great Southern, with unpaid debts that threaten to compound the legal woes of the Essendon injecting program architect.

A writ has been filed in the County Court by a subsidiary of the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank seeking that Mr Dank repay debts and legal costs of more than $90,000 for a loan taken out to invest in Great Southern nearly 10 years ago.
Glazier Joanna Tsakiridis Credit:Steven Siewert Glaziers and floor installers are among skilled workers in growing demand. When Ms Tsakiridis bought her business, she knew all she needed to know about sales. But she felt the need to learn more about the trade. The business was installing ready made products, but it now makes its own windows at a factory Ms Tsakiridis established in Kingsgrove. "I thought I should learn more about the business and how to cut glass," she said. In 2014, she completed a course at Lidcombe TAFE where she learned how to cut glass, manufacture windows, timber sides and small security doors.

"I did my training at the same level as the guys. I loved it," she said. "The only restriction was lifting things into place, but we have machines for that." GLAZIERS: In its submission to the government review which determines Australia's future skills needs, the Australian Glazing and Glass Association says the building design industry is making much greater use of glass in new constructions. "Glass is being used a lot more in building than ever before," says the association's national training manager, Patrick Gavaghan. "It is such a good flexible product to work with. "Architects and designers just love it. We can make it reflect or contain heat and it looks very good.

"The more technical the glass gets, the more technical the skills are required by the glazier." Mr Gavaghan said there are about 22 female glaziers in Australia. "Glazing now is a really good trade for females because they have a good eye for detail," he said. FLOOR COVERING INSTALLERS: The Carpet Institute of Australia has also identified growing demand for carpet and floor covering installers who are in short supply around the country.

In its submission to the government review it says employers have reported that a "chronic and worsening shortage of floor finishers is adversely impacting their businesses in various ways". "Independent skilled migration has a role to play in reducing the magnitude of the chronic under-supply of suitably qualified floor finishers, which affects flooring contractors, the residential housing and construction industries, flooring retailers, flooring manufacturers and distributors and consumers," the submission says. ACCOUNTANTS: The accounting industry will also welcome overseas students who have provided a boon to the Australian economy. Organisations representing accountants say there are more than 39,000 international students enrolled in accounting degrees contributing more than $1.7 billion to the economy.

The Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand warns that "if significant changes were to be made to eligibility of foreign accountants for migration to Australia this would have undesirable impacts on universities and the economy". The Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand says there are shortages of experienced accountants which can be "dealt with through employer nominated entry 457 visas". "In the medium term of 10 or so years, openings for accountants in accountant jobs of around 11,000 per annum appear likely," the submission says. But some medical organisations, which have in the past been the subject of Australian Competition and Consumer Commission scrutiny into "closed shop" practices, are seeking removal from the skilled occupation list. DOCTORS AND NURSES:

GPs and other medical professionals are seeking to close the door to skilled migrants on the basis that they will be oversupplied with domestic graduates. Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president Frank Jones said the number of medical graduates has almost doubled in the past decade. "Due to these increases, the RACGP has recommended close monitoring not only of general practitioners, but non-specialist international medical graduates in Australia providing general practice services," he said. "The RACGP believes that an opportunity exists to utilise the increasing number of local graduates, thereby reducing Australia's reliance on international medical graduates to fill service gaps in general practice." The Australian & New Zealand College of Anaesthetists predicts an oversupply of anaesthetists in 2016 and a balance in supply and demand by 2025.

The College of Intensive Care Medicine of Australia and New Zealand also says it represents an occupation "very likely to be in a position of oversupply in the medium to long term". And the college representing obstetricians and gynaecologists says it is well positioned to meet demand over the next five to 10 years. However, surgeons say there is an increasing need for their skills in rural and regional areas. Psychiatrists also report an acute shortage in rural and remote parts of the country. There is also a maldistribution of speech pathologists and demand for specialists. Nursing and aged care associations have identified significant shortages in the next 10 years, linked to the ageing population and the increasing complexity in health needs. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation says that while rural and remote areas are struggling to fill positions for nurses, there is hot competition for specialty jobs including nurse managers, researchers and educators.

DENTISTS: The Australian Dental Association reports that newly graduated dentists are having trouble finding full-time work. OPTOMETRISTS: Optometrists also say their profession will be oversupplied in the short term. COMMUNITY SERVICE WORKERS AND AGED CARE PROVIDERS:

The long-term projections for aged and community care services suggest major growth in the need for these skills. BUILDERS: Master Builders Australia says that demand for managers and workers in construction will "significantly exceed domestic supply over the medium-to-long-term". The Housing Industry Association also reports "widespread shortages of appropriately skilled trades workers in the construction industry". The number of job openings for electricians is also expected to be high over the next five years, according to Master Electricians Australia.

BRICK LAYERS: Generations Y and Z are steering away from bricklaying and towards higher education, according to The Australian Brick & Blocklaying Training Foundation. "We have seen a consistent trend away from the trade through our regular contact with students, parents, career teachers and employment agencies," its submission says. "There is evidence of shortages of brick and blocklayers across the country." The foundation says skilled workers from overseas are still needed and brick laying should remain on the skilled occupations list.

ELECTRICIANS: The number of job openings for electricians is expected to be high over the next five years, according to Master Electricians Australia. ARCHITECTS: Demand for architects is also expected to remain strong in coming years. FARM WORKERS:

The dairy industry is reporting a "chronic skilled labour shortage" of skilled and experienced farm workers. TEACHERS: Teacher unions and school principals have reported a continuing oversupply of primary school teachers and an undersupply of secondary maths, science and technology teachers. There is also a shortage of special education and language teachers. A spokeswoman for the Federal Department of Education and Training said The Skilled Occupations List identifies occupations that would benefit from independent skilled migration to meet the medium to long-term needs of the country's economy. The Minister for Immigration and Border Protection  on advice from the Department of Education - will decide any changes to the list.
Last Wednesday, the Prime Minister announced the biggest shake-up of Australia's federal funding system in decades. But by Friday, Malcolm Turnbull's proposal to give the states income tax powers and have the Commonwealth withdraw from public school funding had been dumped after resistance from the premiers and claims of "double taxation" by the Opposition.

According to Turnbull, his proposal is now dead and not going to return. In its place is $2.9 billion to offset the $57 billion cut from federal funding for hospitals over the next decade, and no movement on the $23 billion that is to be cut from education.

Some political pundits described it as a "humiliating backdown". Others speculated that the Big Idea was perhaps all just a ploy to distract attention from federal funding cuts. Either way, it made for depressing viewing for anyone who cares about quality education for the 3.5 million children in Australia's schools or about the stretched-to-breaking-point hospitals that every single one of us relies upon.

COAG (the Council of Australian Governments) is meant to be the top table of decision-making in this country. But after its 42nd meeting on Friday, we are still no closer to a serious proposal for sustainable funding for our health and education systems.
It should not be beyond the wit of governments to find responsible and equitable solutions. But the study by the Grattan Institute demonstrates that the least justifiable of all influences has skewed decision-making in grotesque ways. It is called pork-barrelling.

But what of the smaller communities strung across often vast distances? Just as the infrastructure requirements of  and between  smaller and far-flung population and agriculture-based economic centres cannot be ignored for reasons of national equity, the more-complex and evolving requirements of the big centres of economic and social activity cannot be sacrificed, either.

Australia is the largest island continent on Earth but is also the most urbanised nation and, with immigration to the cities driving population growth, becoming more so. With most of its population, and most of its economic activity, gathered within a handful of large cities, the purely rational decision might seem to be to concentrate the big spending within those cities and on the major arterials that link them.

Australia has long faced a delicate juggling act in choosing appropriate projects for major infrastructure spending, which suggests public stewards of taxpayer money should have grown more accomplished with experience. A study released today, however, shows that Australia's governments are regularly failing their nation-building challenges, often for the most venal of reasons.

To the imperatives of geography, demography and economic activity has been added the appropriation of government spending for questionable local projects and votes in marginal electorates. The result, at a time of stress on public budgets, is confronting. Fully 60 per cent of the nation's economic activity is generated within four of Australia's largest cities: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. Yet only 43 per cent of new infrastructure spending, predominantly road and rail, is within those cities. Alarmingly for Victorians and other Australians, the bulk of new money has gone to just two states: NSW and Queensland. The apparent reason? Queensland and NSW have more marginal electorates than elsewhere.

Governments, both federal and state, have been willing to try to prop up their electoral fortunes by entering infrastructure bidding wars.

Victoria has not been immune, as the Grattan Institute's case study on the duplication of the Princes Highway between Geelong and Colac demonstrates. The entire section being duplicated falls within the federal electorate of Corangamite. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent and promised has occurred during the decade the electorate slipped from the grasp of the Liberal Party and its predecessor and became contestable for the first time since 1934. Labor and Coalition governments have tried to outbid each other. The duplicated highway will proceed no further than Colac, at the edge of Corangamite. The next electorates  the federal Wannon, which extends to the South Australian border, and the state seats of Polwarth and South-West Coast  remain staunchly Liberal and apparently do not require pork.

The highway duplication to Colac is not considered a priority by Infrastructure Australia, and does not meet key criteria for the National Roads Network. The Grattan Institute's figuring shows it is the second-most-expensive road project in Australia on a cost-per-kilometre-travelled basis. Every time a vehicle has travelled the distance between Geelong to Colac for the past decade, that journey has cost the taxpayer $12.20.

In a state still recovering from the billion-dollar political debacle that is the unbuilt East-West Link, taxpayers have every reason to demand better of the stewards of their money. And taxpayers everywhere must recoil at the knowledge that more than half of federal infrastructure money spent since 2011 went on projects that do not have a published project evaluation.
COMEDY

JOEL CREASEY: THE CROWN PRINCE 

Max Watt's, 125 Swanston Street, city, until April 17

If you ever need a good defamation lawyer, ask Joel Creasey who he uses; the way this young comedian spills the beans about the celebs he's met in his role as TV host, he must be confident of his legal defence.

Joel Creasey makes the audience his confidants.

He's basically a big gossip, "Working really hard to be famous" as he grabs Instagram opportunities with every moody star and reality TV cast member who crosses his path.

Likeable and irreverent, the performer makes the audience his private confidants as he relates his Twitter spat with Russell Crowe; his dissing by Julie Bishop; and the Parisian fixations of Tina Arena.
But Charles is also driven by deeper feelings. What begins as a principled and sympathetic stand against censorship has roots in more ancient concerns  nothing less than the right of a king to rule as he sees fit. Charles will not yield. The parliament will not back down. Chaos radiates outward and the nation is gripped by uncertainty. Before you know it, there's a tank parked outside Buckingham Palace, its gun pointing down the Mall. King Charles III reverberates with references to Hamlet, Henry IV, Lear and Macbeth. The plot is Shakespearian in its scope. Bartlett goes one better, however, writing almost everything in blank verse. He does it very deftly, too, in dialogue and in soliloquy, with appropriate shifts in tone for the high and low born. It brings richness and a sense of tragic import to what is being said, and, when spiked with modern turns of phrase from the young royals, can be very funny, too.

Bartlett's language lacks the pungency of the Bard, you could argue, but it has colour, urgency and flow. It's a remarkable achievement. Goold's production, which arrives in Sydney after a British tour, is expertly composed and free of extraneous fuss. Scenes are created for maximum impact with minimal effort. Set dressing is kept to an absolute minimum (a bench, a microphone). Actors stand and deliver with complete confidence in what they say and do. King Charles III looks terrific, too. Designer Tom Scutt's chamber of naked industrial brick pierced with dark doorways sits beautifully in this theatre. It almost seems a part of it. Jon Clark's lighting is superb. Jocelyn Pook's score mashes ancient and modern to punctuate and propel.

The performances are very fine, led by the still glamorous Powell. His Charles is very much his own (save for a couple of mannerisms) yet we immediately accept him as the man himself. He brings palpable depth of feeling to Bartlett's voicing of Charles's inner conflicts and in the king's creeping monomania he leaves just enough of a window open to suggest that all might not be entirely well with the king. Carolyn Pickles is a hilarious Camilla, tone deaf to matters of state. Richard Glaves is raffish yet fragile as Prince Harry, driver of a strong subplot that has him fall for feisty art student Jess (Lucy Phelps) and go mixing it with commoners and kebab shop guys. Looking every inch the postcard Young Royals, Ben Righton and Jennifer Bryden morph William and Kate from fluffy Sloanes to media-savvy Macbeths. Treloar's PM channels the fiery former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock to excellent effect. Giles Taylor's Tory Opposition leader seems to have sauntered directly from the Carlton Club straight on to the stage.
Perth's endless Indian summer was the perfect setting for a water-based obstacle course at Gloucester Park on Sunday that tested the endurance of the thousands that tackled the event.

The ROC Race (Ridiculous Obstacle Course) is a 5-kilometre course that features a number of wacky obstacles, including the wrecking ball, the sweeper, jump balls and the world's largest inflatable water side.

Roc Race Perth Credit:Brendan Foster

Hundreds of competitors donned quirky and crazy costumes as they battled and splashed their way through larger-than-life obstacles.

The barometer hit 30 degrees just before noon, with temperatures set to head slightly more south early this week.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has rebuffed suggestions that Tony Abbott will impede the Coalition's election campaign, saying he is "utterly undistracted" by the ousted former leader's ability to generate headlines.

Mr Turnbull also ruled out establishing a national anti-corruption body to help pass the government's Australian Building and Construction Commission bill, which could form the trigger for a double-dissolution election.

Asked how confident he was that Mr Abbott would not disrupt the campaign, Mr Turnbull said on Sunday: "I expect all of the members and candidates to be supportive and disciplined in the course of the campaign and generally in the lead up to it."

Mr Abbott has spoken out a number of times from the backbench since he was defeated in a leadership spill last September, when he vowed there would be "no wrecking, no undermining, no sniping" going forward.
The federal government has celebrated the release of the last children from Australia's mainland immigration detention centres, despite lingering questions over how much freedom some families have been awarded.

On Sunday, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said he felt "a great sense of achievement" at having moved into the community the final 43 children who were held in onshore detention at the end of February. About 50 children also remain in detention on Nauru.

He rejected a report published by Guardian Australia suggesting the government had simply reclassified sections of detention centres as "community detention" in order to make the claim.

"The same definitions apply today as they did before," Mr Dutton said. "There are certain characteristics that need to be met in relation to all these definitions, but that's all beltway stuff."
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection says it supports its staff's right to strike, despite forcing the Community and Public Sector Union to can its planned industrial action.

Strikes in Australia's airports scheduled for Monday were called off after the Fair Work Commission approved a federal government bid to suspend industrial action due to a possible threat to national security.

Airport workers have remained without a new employment agreement and pay rise for almost three years. Credit:Joe Armao

The CPSU will fight the interim order in a hearing on Tuesday, after the federal government lodged an urgent application to the industrial watchdog late on Friday to avert industrial action on national security grounds.

The injunction prevents customs and immigration staff from striking from 12.15am on Monday.
Bulldozers demolishing the shanty town at Paga Hill, Port Moresby. PHDC was later granted a 99-year lease in 2000 and, shortly after leaving politics, Mr Nali took up shares in the company, which he no longer owns. When the bulldozers entered Paga Hill in May 2012, Dame Carol, the then PNG Opposition Leader, stepped in front of them. Papua New Guinea police leading Dame Carol Kidu away. Credit:The Opposition Footage from the time shows her pleading with policemen to stop the destruction. "This is not an eviction, it's a demolition," she insists.

"Stop the demolition. Just ask them [the bulldozers] to leave and they can take their houses down because they will sue the company, I tell you, this unacceptable." A press release issued at the time by Dame Carol said the Australian-backed company had no "fundamental rights to this prime real estate" and its resettlement plan for the settlers was "disgusting" Ms Fifer filmed the demolition with Dame Carol's blessing at the time. The filmmaker's 2013 funding pitch describes Australian-born Dame Carol, who moved to PNG at 19 and married Buri Kidu, the man who would become the country's first indigenous Chief Justice, as an "unlikely hero" and "one of Australia's most mobile and active freedom fighters". "When Port Moresby policemen are paid 10,000 Kina to bulldoze the Paga Hill settlement ... Dame Carol places herself in the line of fire to save the people. Her fight to stop the construction of the next five-star hotel will lead her into dark places and the murky world of international finance and corruption," according to the pitch.

But within months, the landscape had changed dramatically. Months after retiring from politics, Dame Carol established a private company, CK Consultancy Ltd, which was later engaged by PHDC to advise and champion its resettlement scheme. In a letter to Mr Fridriksson in July last year, Dame Carol "formally clarified" criticisms she made of PHDC in 2012 and 2013 and said she had always accepted the inevitability that the settlers would be relocated. "I went to the scene as the local member of parliament because of my concern for the welfare of the women and children. I went there on humanitarian grounds," she wrote. She told the company she had formed opinions on "assumptions and incorrect information" and pointed to the decisions of the National and Supreme Courts that had agreed with the PNG Government that PHDC's lease was legal.

"After working closely with the company during the relocation exercise, I realise now with the benefit of hindsight, that Paga Hill Development Company's efforts to achieve harmonious resettlement have been genuine," she wrote. "Please accept this letter as my formal notification that I no longer stand by my 2012-2013 statements which were based on the limited information at the time." Her change of heart stunned Kristian Lasslett, an expert in state corruption in PNG whose report for the International State Crime Initiative cast doubt on the process that awarded Mr Fridriksson's company the lease. The report found "serious question marks" over a web of Fridriksson companies that have done business with the PNG Government. In 2012, Dr Lasslett spoke alongside Dame Carol at an event to raise funds for the community's attempt, led by settler Joe Moses, to protect their homes from the bulldozers. "Dame Kidu had very publicly led the charge against the Paga Hill Development Company in 2012. She accused the company of having obtained the land through fraud, and worked tirelessly to help the community raise funds for their legal case," Dr Lasslett told Fairfax Media.

"Dame Kidu was instrumental in helping me gain access to vital records relating to the contentious land deal. "However, our exchanges ceased in 2013 when Dame Kidu informed me her company CK Consultancy had been contracted by the Paga Hill Development Company to relocate Paga Hill residents. It came as a huge surprise, in light of her vocal past stance." Dr Lasslett, supports the release of The Opposition which has been selected for North America's biggest documentary fim festival, Hot Docs, and likely other film festivals in Europe and Australia. Dame Carol, who has engaged Australian law firm Kennedys, is seeking to prevent the film showing in any forum. In a statement, Mr Fridriksson said Dr Lasslett's research was flawed. "Formal complaints have been raised with the International State Crime Initiative and the universities that sponsor him, including an in-person meeting in London, and I understand he is under investigation," the statement to Fairfax Media said.

"Lasslett's report persists in quoting outdated findings to suit his pursuit, ignoring the fact that these have been overturned by PNG Courts, Government authorities and its Executive Council." The film's producers have agreed not to show the documentary until at least April 4 ahead of an expected hearing in court in mid-April. In a statement, they said the documentary is "thoroughly-researched, considered and checked both legally and journalistically by professionals with extensive experience in PNG culture and politics". They have offered to insert a line in the credits that Dame Carol has disassociated herself completely from the project. In an interview with Fairfax Media, Dame Carol said she believed the film makers wanted a "David and Goliath" story line and they have failed to understand the complex nature of the Paga Hill eviction and the "pragmatic reality" that the settlers were always going to have to vacate the land, in her view.
Mystery surrounds the identity of a woman who died after being pulled unconscious from Bondi Beach in Sydney at the weekend.

The woman, who is thought to have been in her late 20s or early 30s, was found floating face-down in the surf at the southern end of the beach just before 9.30pm on Saturday.

Several witnesses pulled the woman from the water and tried to revive her on the beach, before paramedics and police arrived. However, the woman could not be saved, and she died at the scene.

A woman, identified only as Payan, said she was walking along Bondi Beach with her daughter on Saturday night when she saw a person in the water close to the shore.
Dale Tolliday, a clinical advisor to the public service New Street, wants more clinics to stop children sexually abusing children. Credit:James Brickwood Yet the greatest risk factor, according to Mr Tolliday, is witnessing domestic violence between parents. "Most of these boys are carrying quite strong misogynistic, heterosexual stereotypes about entitlement and sexual behaviour," he says. These children go far beyond normal sexual play. "Normal is 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine'," says Freda Briggs, a child protection academic from the University of South Australia.

Problematic sexual behaviour, in contrast, includes penetration and oral sex. It is often characterised by secrecy, bribes and threats. "They are not easily distracted and they are angry when they are stopped," Professor Briggs says. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard last year the majority of child sexual abuse in out-of-home care was likely committed by other children. It is also a problem among children years away from puberty, as recognised by new NSW Health guidelines for treating under-10s. Forensic psychologist Ian Nisbet says international and Australian research suggests children commit 30 to 50 per cent of child sexual abuse and 14 is a peak age.

"When you're a 14-year-old you have a lot of regular access to younger kids," he says. Although only a small minority go on to abuse as adults, some children are already acting out violent impulses. "I once saw a 14-year-old guy who was eventually convicted of three ... rapes," Mr Nisbet says. "He was carrying around gloves and a mask and ties in his school bag." To convict someone under 14 of an offence, prosecutors must show the child understood their actions to be seriously wrong. Most cases never reach trial, often because the victims are too young to give evidence. In cases of sibling abuse, many parents are reluctant to press charges against their own children or even make a report.

Public treatment services cannot begin to keep up with reported cases. Police reports of sex offences by juveniles in NSW have increased by 10 per cent a year for the past five years. Mr Tolliday told a recent Legal Aid conference that more than 800 children aged 10 to 17 were identified in NSW each year as causing serious sexual harm. The free rehabilitation services in Sydney, Newcastle and Dubbo only treat about 80 children a year. Another service is slated for the Illawarra region. But Mr Tolliday says the Sydney clinic has three times as many referrals as places and large parts of NSW lack free treatment.

"If we had a waiting list we would never get to the end of it," he says. "We need a service in each part of the state." A 2014 KPMG report found that after counselling and home intervention, fewer than 2 per cent of New Street children re-offended sexually. The report recommended the government build new sites in Sydney, Bourke, Orange and Taree. Opposition community services spokeswoman Tania Mihailuk said the existing services were clearly not enough. "The government must reassess the limited support that they are currently providing and ensure free treatment services are expanded throughout the state and properly resourced," Ms Mihailuk said.. Health Minister Jillian Skinner, whose department funds New Street, declined an interview.

A department spokeswoman said consultation for "NSW's first whole-of-government sexual assault strategy" was underway. But government agencies say they lack data on the prevalence of child-child sexual abuse. The NSW Ombudsman does not need to be notified of child abuse committed by a child, unless the victim has a disability. The Department of Family Services could not say how many children were reported for causing sexual harm in out-of-home care. "Work has commenced between the Office of the Children's Guardian and FACS to establish enhanced reporting arrangements," a spokesman said.

Jacob's story Last year, Erin noticed changes in her four-year-old son Jacob*. On coming home from kindergarten he would hide under the bed and scream. He lost a lot of weight. One night Erin found him trying to inappropriately touch his brother in the bath. "I said to him, 'You know we don't do that sort of stuff. You don't touch other people's parts and you don't let anyone touch yours.' And he said, 'But so and so does it at kindy'." A boy at Jacob's rural kindergarten in South Australia had been molesting him and other children. "We didn't believe him at first," Erin says. But then Jacob said the same thing to his teacher, who gave him a picture of a kitten for his bravery. The allegations were passed on to Erin but the abuse continued.

"They misdiagnosed what had happened to my child as age appropriate," she says. "It wasn't age appropriate. It was actually deemed quite serious and concerning. It involved penetration." Erin says the boy with problematic sexual behaviour continued to attend the kindergarten until the end of the year and the number of alleged victims grew. A Department of Education spokesman would not answer specific questions because of the "extreme sensitivity of the issues" but said they were taken seriously from the beginning. Jacob now goes to school in a different town and attends counselling sessions. "Our biggest fear was that our son would eventually become a perpetrator," Erin says. The counselling sessions have progressed well but the family has struggled with the taboo of child-child sexual abuse in a small town. "We've been outcast completely," Erin says.
The president of a Queensland motorcycle club is dead after a horror three-bike crash on the Bruce Highway north of Brisbane.

Sons of the Southern Cross president Steve "Towball" Fitzsimons died on Sunday afternoon after coming off his bike at Elimbah, north of Brisbane.

Tributes were pouring in on Monday morning for the rider, "riding ahead of the pack now in the forever chapter".

"Its with a broken heart I inform you all we lost our Prez Towball today in a freak accident," the club's Facebook page posted on Sunday evening.
The Queensland premier has hinted that a review of anti-bikie laws could spark an overhaul of legislation to better target anyone involved in organised crime.

The review of the former LNP government's Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment laws has been handed to Annastacia Palaszczuk's government.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

She said the government would offer an interim response after cabinet meets on Monday.

A more detailed response will follow once the government has fully digested the 400-page report produced by retired Supreme Court Justice Alan Wilson and his review taskforce.
It sounds like an April Fool's joke: firing lasers into space to disguise Earth from the wandering eyes of hyper-intelligent blood-thirsty aliens.

But that's just what two astronomers at Columbia University in New York have suggested.

A laser-guided telescope is tested at the Allgau Public Observatory in Bavaria, Germany. Two astronomers at Columbia University believe lasers could be used to disguise Earth from aliens. Credit:ESO

David Kipping and Alex Teachey study planetary transits  periodic dips in the light coming from distant stars that indicate they have planets orbiting them. It's the most common way that astronomers have identified what are known as "exoplanets"  rocky or gaseous satellites travelling around stars light years from Earth. So far, more than 1000 such exoplanets have been detected from data gathered from NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Dr Kipping and Mr Teachey have flipped that idea on its head. If we can detect planets orbiting distant stars, then surely Earth could be detected using the same technique by alien astronomers.
Parents are paying thousands of dollars for street art to be painted in kids' bedrooms, in a new sign graffiti is going mainstream.

Ashley Goudie, who as a teenager tagged trains on the Lilydale line, now makes a living creating pieces on everything from garages, trucks and cafes.

His business, KIL Productions, short for Keeping it Legal, has charged up to five figures to custom-graffiti walls of kindergartens, resorts and cafes, and $800 to $2500 for street images and tag-style kids' names on bedroom walls.

Mr Goudie, 42, who also guest lectures at primary and secondary schools, says in 1986, when he was 14, graffiti meant self-expression when there were few other outlets.
A man has been arrested over a double stabbing on the Mornington Peninsula that has left a man fighting for life and a woman with serious injuries.

A 30-year-old Dromana man was arrested after he was located in a car in Frankston about 11.20am.

A man and woman were stabbed in a Dromana street early on Sunday morning. Credit:ABC News

Leading Senior Constable Kendra Jackson said all three people were known to each other.

Police and ambulance were called to Monaco Parade in Dromana shortly before 3am on Sunday.
Five people, including two young girls, have been hospitalised after a stolen car crashed into two other vehicles in Melbourne's west early on Sunday morning.

Police believe the driver of the stolen Ford Falcon ran a red traffic light at the Tullamarine Freeway on-ramp on Mickleham Road shortly before 1.30am.

Five people were injured in a collision involving a stolen car in Tullamarine. Credit:Courtesy of Nine News

The 23-year-old Rochester driver suffered upper body injuries in the crash and remains under police guard in The Alfred hospital.

A 30-year-old Epping woman driving a Mercedes also sustained a hip injury and was taken to the Northern Hospital.
It's third time unlucky for Federal member for Tangney MP Dennis Jensen as former Liberal state director Ben Morton was all but endorsed by the party.

Mr Morton was preselected on Sunday for the blue ribbon seat, which Dr Jensen had held since 2004.

The State Council is expected to officially endorse Mr Morton on Saturday, a decision which will almost certainly end Dr Jensen's political career.

Dr Jensen had twice survived an attempt by the Tangney committee to boot him out.
Kandalaksha, Russia: Compared with the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war or hardship who made the trek to Europe last year through Turkey to Greece, the flow of refugees and migrants on the Arctic route through Russia  first into Norway and later into Finland  is tiny.

But the stop-go traffic has added a hefty dose of geopolitical anxiety, not to mention intrigue, to a crisis that is tearing the European Union apart. It has sent alarm bells ringing in Helsinki, Finland's capital far to the south, and in Brussels, where EU leaders, at recent crisis meetings on migration, discussed the strange and ever-shifting Arctic route through Russia.

Migrants from African countries in the lobby of a hostel where they stay waiting to cross Finland's border in Kandalaksha, Russia. Credit:New York Times

The intrigue flows from a growing suspicion in the West that Russia is stoking and exploiting Europe's migrant crisis to extract concessions, or perhaps crack the European unity over economic sanctions imposed against Moscow for its actions in Ukraine. Only one of the EU's 28 member states needs to break ranks for a regime of credit and other restrictions to collapse.

"Unfortunately, this looks like a political demonstration by Russia," said Ilkka Kanerva, Finland's former foreign minister and now the chairman of its parliamentary Defence Committee. "They are very skillful at sending signals. They want to show that Finland should be very careful when it makes its own decisions on things like military exercises, our partnership with NATO and European Union sanctions" against Russia.
Moscow: Heavy fighting broke out on Saturday in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian separatist enclave in Azerbaijan and a long-time ethnic tinderbox in the South Caucasus region.

As the fighting escalated through the day it was unclear whether the use of tanks, artillery and aircraft was merely a flare-up in a long conflict or the start of a new phase.

Remains of a downed Azerbaijani forces helicopter lies in a field in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region. Credit:AP

Artillery barrages began early Saturday, threatening a breakdown of a fragile 1994 truce agreement. Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, blamed each other for the violence. By evening, both sides spoke of dozens of dead, and Azerbaijan claimed that its military had advanced to capture territory, a move that seemed to bode ill for a quick resolution.

The ethnic war that began in the late Soviet period between Armenians and Azerbaijanis claimed more than 20,000 lives and ended in a cease-fire but no final settlement. The region became one of the so-called frozen conflict zones in the vast area of the former Soviet Union, with sporadic episodes of violence since the 1994 truce.
Lesbos: There was little sign of preparation on either side of the Aegean less than 24 hours before Greece was due to begin returning migrants to Turkey, and Greek and Turkish officials gave conflicting information on the logistics of the plan.

The returns are a key part of an agreement between the European Union and Turkey aimed at ending the uncontrollable influx into Europe of refugees and migrants fleeing war and misery in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Under the deal, those who cross into Greece illegally will be held and sent back once their asylum applications are processed. For every Syrian returned, one Syrian will be resettled to Europe directly from Turkey.
A small plane that made headlines when it landed safely on a Southern California freeway years ago has crashed on the same stretch of road, slamming into a car and killing a woman.

Five others, including the pilot and his passenger, were injured in the crash on a stretch of Interstate 15 that has been the scene of several emergency landings.

Witnesses said the single-engine plane appeared to be having problems before it banked and came down, California Highway Patrol Officer Chris Parent said.

The Lancair IV landed on its belly and skidded about 80 metres before striking the rear of a black Nissan Altima sedan that was stopped on the shoulder of the road in San Diego County near Fallbrook.
Phillies bash Padres in wild Game 4 to move to brink of World Series

Philadelphia hit four home runs in the win, overcoming a 4-0 deficit before they even came to bat against San Diego.
The Worshipful Company of Builders Merchants (WCoBM) hosted its fifth City & Awards luncheon last month at the Citys historic Saddlers Hall.

The luncheon has become an important event in the WCoBM's calendar, recognising achievements of individuals in the industry and within organisations the Company supports.

The WCoBM Master Leo Martin and Guest of Honour Sheriff Dr Christine Rigden presented the prizes to all of the winners. These included four BMF merchants for their achievements in MOL modules, three of whom are from MKM Building Supplies. Gerard Hull of MKM won first prize with 10 MOL points and two distinctions. He received a tankard and cheque for 1,000, which was accepted by MKM chief executive officer Philip Johns on Mr Hulls behalf.

The second prize of a tankard and 500 cheque went to Matthew Cobb of MKM who had eights points with one distinction and one credit. Joint third with five points and one distinction was Mark Withall of MKM and Rebecca Hill of Howarth Timber. Both received a cheque for 300 with a tankard for Mr Withall and a goblet for Ms Hill.

The event also celebrated the success of Andrew Harries of LBS Builders Merchants as the BMF Campus Winner. Based in LBS Pembroke Dock branch, Mr Harries registered on BMF Campus in September 2015 and has completed 128 e-learning courses with an average passing score of 82%. The award was accepted by the BMFs managing director John Newcomb on behalf of Mr Harries.

Other individuals and organisations to benefit from the support of the WCoBMs charitable fund included Private Daines and Private Stockle of The 3rd Battalion, Princess of Waless Royal Regiment who were awarded prizes for Best Recruit and Best Soldier respectively; Ordinary Cadet Kyle Mclellan of the Beckenham & Penge Sea Cadet Unit who progressed from Junior Cadet; Stone Carver Lawrence Dennison nominated by the City & Guilds of London Art School; and resident Pianist Jinah Shim who is in the final year of her Masters at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

The Master of the WcoBM said: We congratulate all the winners on their achievements. They work extremely hard and it was a pleasure to recognise and reward their focus and determination. It was a successful afternoon in superb surroundings and a special thanks to our guest of honour Sheriff Dr Christine Rigden for contributing to an important event.

Picture caption: BMF students with their prizes at the WCoBM City & Awards Luncheon.
State-owned is gearing up to launch 4G services in 14 telecom circles where it has 20 MHz liberalised broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum.

The company, which has already soft launched 4G services in Chandigarh, is exploring two methods -- revenue sharing model and capex model -- for the 4G rollout.

The company has 20 MHz liberalised spectrum in 2,500 MHz band which allows it to rollout 4G services without any licensing hurdles.

A senior official said will be installing 4G base tower stations (BTS) in the existing GSM sites, which means there will be no additional expenditure on towers.

Regarding the device ecosystem for 2,500 MHz band, the official said sufficient number of 4G handsets makers like Apple, Motorola, Lenovo, Google, Nokia are already available in the market.

"By considering all the facts, it appears that launch of 4G services in 2,500 Mhz band is feasible and commercially remunerative," he added.

However, the company is yet to finalise a timeline for the launch.

In January, the company demonstrated speed of 35 Mbps during the soft launch in Chandigarh.

will be the latest entrant in the 4G space, which has seen in action recently with the top mobile operators including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular commencing services in various circles.

Also, Reliance Jio Infocomm is set to commercially launch 4G services soon, which will further intensify competition in the market.

Elaborating on the models for 4G rollout, the official said in revenue share model, BSNL will be extending passive infrastructure and its BWA spectrum and other elements like BTS will be arranged by the vendor or franchisee.

"This model is best suited as BSNL will not incur expenditure and much of the investment required will be borne by the vendor. This can be initiated in all 14 service areas. 4G customers will be owned by BSNL and billing will be done by BSNL," the official said.

On the capex model, the official said procurement of essential LTE (long-term evolution) elements can be initiated in some select cities of one circle on experimental basis. However, this model involves procurement cost and also integration cost.

The company will explore both the methods before taking a final call on the rollout.

BSNL had paid Rs 8,313.80 crore for 2,500 MHz spectrum in all its service areas but later returned airwaves in 6 of them which include Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kolkata.
India Ratings has downgraded Shree Ltd's (SRSL) long-term rating to D  default grade  from BB- on delays in repayment on loans by end of March 2016. The Outlook on rating the was Negative.

The Sugar company had to pay Rs 410 crore in Fy16 and has obligation to pay Rs 220 crore in Fy17. It is negotiating a restructuring package with lender's.

India ratings has also downgraded rating for non-convertible debemtures (NCDs) to "D". This downgrade reflects the impaired debt servicing capability currently.

There is to a significant deterioration in the consolidated earnings amid poor profitability in its domestic milling and overseas Brazilian operations. This coupled with depreciation in the Brazilian currency (real) has resulted in an increase in debt levels and affected SRSLs consolidated credit profile.

The companys operating cash flows and its repayment capabilities have been affected due to muted sugar realisations in FY15, because of a sharp correction in international and domestic sugar prices.

The ratings continue to reflect the vulnerability of sugar to government policies relating to cane pricing.

SRSL remains exposed to the cyclicality risk of the sugar industry, climatic conditions. The comparative prices for other remunerative crops also has bearning om company as they determine acreage and sugar production, it added.

The ratings are underpinned by around 20 years of operating experience of SRSLs founders and its proximity to the sugar producing belt of Maharashtra and Karnataka with high recovery levels (11-12 per cent).
The closure of Tata Steel's operations in Britain would leave a hole in manufacturers' supply chains, dealing a blow to thousands of smaller firms across the country and creating a logistical headache for the car industry.

India's Tata Steel, Britain's biggest producer, put all of its operations up for sale, including the country's largest steelworks at Port Talbot which is losing $1.4 million a day due to depressed steel prices and high costs.

As the government searches for a new buyer, some of Tata's customers are already looking for new sources of steel which is used in everything from car roofs to Heinz baked bean cans, cladding on Ikea buildings and some of the country's coins.

While bigger names have the luxury of a global supply chain to fall back on, smaller - which account for around 95% of British manufacturing firms - face a tougher task if Port Talbot in south Wales closes.

Tata sells around half of its products into the domestic market, the firm said in 2014.

"It would be entirely undesirable from my point of view," said Tony Mullins, executive chairman of QRL Radiators Group, a customer that makes heating radiators near the Welsh town of Newport, employing around 150 staff.

Looking abroad for steel would leave firms like QRL that use British steel exposed to swings in the currency exchange rate and higher transportation costs. It might also need to hold more stock if it is buying from the other side of the world, having an impact on working capital.

"We have to be competitive, we have to produce quality products, and historically, with Tata that has been possible for us," Mullins said.

DRIVING FORCE

Britain, the birthplace of the modern steel industry, has been struggling to compete since its post-war heyday and has shed thousands of jobs in recent years.

Since 2001 imported supplies have met more than half of its domestic demand, according to the International Steel Statistics Bureau (ISSB), as local producers struggled with high energy costs, green taxes and fierce competition.

Germany is the biggest foreign supplier of steel to British manufacturers and construction firms, followed by China, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, the ISSB said.

The government maintains that the main problem is the collapse in the price of steel. China has flooded European markets with relatively cheap steel as a result of its own falling demand.

Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to industry data.

According to the ISSB, China has produced more steel in the last three years than Britain has since the industrial revolution.

Those British steelmakers that remain have been kept going by local manufacturers, a resurgent car industry and foreign demand.

"Hot-rolled coil is produced (at Port Talbot) and that predominately goes into the automotive sector, that's the bodywork," Dominic King, head of policy and representation at industry group UK Steel, told Reuters.

Five carmakers built almost 99% of Britain's 1.6 million cars last year and all source steel from Port Talbot, with some already looking for alternatives should the site shut.

The country's biggest carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which made just under a third of national output last year, gets around 30% of its steel from the site while Nissan, which operates Britain's biggest single car plant in northern England, buys 45% from there.

Showing the cost constraints within the industry, John Leech, who heads up the automotive team at KPMG and works with some of the country's biggest carmakers, said JLR could not afford to give preferential treatment to a more expensive product even though it is owned by Tata Motors - part of the same family of as .

"To compete against BMW and Mercedes, Jaguar Land Rover needs to makes sure its cars are cost-competitive and that means using materials that are sourced cheaply and competitively."

JLR said: "Like all other independent businesses, we make our own purchasing decisions based on the right commercial reasons." The firm said it continued to use and did not see any short term impact on its business.

A spokesman at General Motors-owned Vauxhall, which uses Tata's high-strength lightweight steel in its Astra hatchback model said it was "considering the scenario of UK steel plant closures on supply sources".

"There are a number of sources of steel in Europe that are used by our plants in Spain, Germany and Poland," the spokesman said, when asked whether the firm was looking elsewhere.

Leech said timing could be key, with Tata Steel saying it wants to exit Britain as soon as possible.

"It will mean a lot of fast footwork behind the scenes but... the ability to get the same steel from other European or Chinese plants in (a one to three-month) time frame is a possibility," he said.

BUY BRITISH

For many of the workers leaving the Port Talbot plant at the end of their shift this week the has come as a shock, given the investment made under Tata's ownership.

"Tata certainly have influenced training more than the old regime..." said Dave Bowyer, 59, a steelworker for 40 years and Unite union representative, whose ancestors were steelworkers.

"The workforce itself has become far more technical. Our craftsman and production guys, even the guys on the shop floor - a number of them have got degrees."

UK Steel's King said there were many advantages to the British product which continue to attract buyers.

"One is customer service, that you have that close link with the manufacturer... you know in the UK that they are going to be meeting the energy targets, the environmental targets that are out there (and) that engineering skill," he said.

The industry is also known for its highly-skilled flexible workforce with no strike action in 30 years.

Rollo Reid, technical director and grandson of the founder of REIDsteel, one of Britain's largest steel construction which sources almost 90 percent of its steel from Tata, worries that if Port Talbot closes, prices will rise.

"There will be one less competitor and when the other European ones go out of business, there will be less competitors and then the price will go up and we'll be completely within the hands of the Chinese."
Toyota, the world's largest car manufacturer, is setting up a separate sales network to sell its Lexus range of luxury vehicles in India.

The Japanese car maker is learnt to have identified dealers in the national capital region and Bengaluru to set up independent Lexus sales outlets. A person familiar with the developments said only existing dealers are eligible for Lexus dealerships. Last year, the country's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki had set up a separate sales network called Nexa to sell premium cars. Only existing Maruti dealers were allowed to set up such outlets.

"At the moment, we are only studying and looking at the feasibility of introducing Lexus in India. We cannot set a definite timeline to it, but we are eager to bring Lexus to India," a spokesperson said in response to e-mailed query.

GEARING UP had considered bringing Lexus to India in the past

In 2012, it was exploring options to launch Lexus here, but it was dropped due to the sluggish market

Toyota has not launched any new product for about a year now

It is critical for Toyota to set up a distinct sales network for Lexus since positioning of these cars and the target buyers are quite different from buyers of existing Toyota models such as Etios and Etios Liva.

Sources say the company will bring Lexus cars from Japan as completely knocked down (CKD) units to be assembled in India. By doing it, the company can avoid the 100 per cent basic customs duty that a completely-built unit attracts. CKD units attract an import duty ranging from 10 to 30 per cent. While Lexus prices for Indian market will be known once the vehicles are launched, industry experts said the range could begin around Rs 30 lakh.

Toyota had considered bringing Lexus to India in the past. In 2012, the company was exploring options to launch Lexus here, but it was dropped due to the sluggish automobile market. Lexus is sold in major markets outside India by Toyota.

The Indian luxury car market has seen impressive growth in recent years. In 2015, top player Mercedes-Benz recorded its best ever sales of 13,502 units, growing 32 per cent over 2014. The Indian luxury car market, with vehicles priced upwards of Rs 20 lakh, is estimated at about 3,000 units a month. Other than Mercedes, leading players in this segment include Audi, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo.

Toyota, the sixth largest player in the domestic passenger vehicle market, has not launched any new product for about a year now. Its sales in the April-March period declined 5.6 per cent to 120,857 units. The company has been severely impacted by the Supreme Court ban on diesel vehicles with an engine capacity of 2,000cc and above in the national capital region. Sales of its popular models Innova and Fortuner have declined.
Apparently bowing to pressure from ally Akali Dal ahead of next year's Punjab polls, BJP has lifted travel bans imposed on a number of overseas Sikhs, who were allegedly involved in subversive activities in 1980s, 1990s and kept in watch list.

The blacklist, which was prepared at different levels by security agencies, has been maintained by government on mostly Indian-origin people allegedly involved in subversive or anti-India activities abroad.

Such people, whose names figure in the blacklist, are barred from visiting India.

Some names have been removed from the blacklist after detailed discussions among various stakeholders, a Home Ministry official said.

The blacklist has been pruned, reportedly following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention after Akali Dal supremo and Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote a letter urging him to remove names of 36 settled overseas from the travel ban.

Though the exact number of people whose names were removed from the blacklist is not known, officials said it was quite a sizeble number.

The move bears significance as assembly elections in Punjab are due early next year.

BJP is part of the Badal government while Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal is the Akali Dal representative in the Modi Cabinet.

The Punjab Chief Minister had urged Modi after he became Prime Minister in 2014 to direct the Home Ministry to evolve a mechanism for a regular review of all such cases.

Badal had said he wanted removal of the names of persons from the list against whom no cases or legal proceedings were pending.

Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal too had written a letter to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to review the blacklist of and delete names of the persons who were not wanted in any criminal case in the state.

A delegation of British too had urged the Prime Minister for removing the names of Sikh individuals from the list.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a large number of Sikh families had migrated to the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and other countries seeking political asylum.

Many of the asylum seekers were booked in cases in India and have not been allowed to visit India in the past decades.

Officials said the blacklist contains several thousand names.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended a round table conference with top business leaders at the Saudi Chambers of Commerce in Riyadh on Sunday.

The conference was attended by around 30 top-notch Saudi CEOs and Indian business leaders, along with Saudi minister of commerce and industry Tawfiq bin Fawzan Al Rabiah

Speaking at the event, Prime Minister Modi said his government has taken several policy initiatives to spur growth and progress in India, and assured the business leaders that Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill would be passed soon

" will happen. Retrospective tax is a matter of the past," he said.

In a bid to woo the investors, Prime Minister Modi said that India's thriving economy and availability of skilled workforce can help the businesses gain a competitive edge in the global market.

"India's health sector which is globally extremely cost competitive can emerge as a bright spot in health tourism...Indian nurses, present in large numbers in the Gulf, are a testament to our well trained man power...In a sector driven by tech changes, India's low cost tech devices have gained global renown," he said.

Further describing the meeting as an 'important' one, he said that 3Ds - Demographic dividend, Demand and Democracy - set Indian economic scenario apart from the rest of the world.

"From Petroleum to renewable energy, infrastructure, defence and agriculture, there is a tremendous opportunity for expanding our cooperation, India and Saudi Arabia should look at working together for building a dynamic global management sector for the cyber world," he said

Concluding his speech, the Prime Minister said, "India and Saudi Arabia are old friends and we are ready to take bold new steps into a golden future."

The Prime Minster is on a two-day official visit to Saudi Arabia. He will be meeting Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud's son, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who many feel could be the future monarch, later today.

Modi will also be accorded a ceremonial reception at the Royal Palace where a Luncheon will also be held in his honour later today.
Laghu Udyog Bharti, Madhya Pradesh, has decided to intensify protest against the unfavourable policies of the state government for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME).

The organisation will stage a Dharna in Bhopal on April 4.

According to Laghu Udyog Bharti members, the state and central government are ill treating the MSMEs and the sector is being overburdened with increased rates and levies.

One of the major oppositions is against the implementation of MP state Industrial Land/Bhawan Management Rule 2015 which has increased the lease rent and maintenance charges by 10 times, said traders.

We have been protesting against the unfavourable polices of the state government for the last 3 years. The state government has not taken any step apart from assurances, said Mahesh Gupta, President (Indore wing), Laghu Udyog Bharti.

Many major traders association are supporting Laghu Udyog Bharti in their protest.

Traders feel that MSMEs contribute around 90 per cent of the total tax paid by the businesses and 94 per cent of the total employment provided but the sector still remains ignored.
Uttar Pradesh police are working "on all angles" to find out the motive behind killing of officer Tanzil Ahmad, who was shot 21 times in an attack by unidentified assailants post-midnight on Saturday.

The shooting in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district took place when the officer was returning from a wedding with his wife and children. His wife Farzana got four bullet injuries, but his children were unharmed.

Ahmad, 48, known for undercover operations, joined the Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2010.

"The assailants came on motorbikes and opened fire from a close range on Ahmad near Sahaspur town," spokesperson Sanjeev Kumar said earlier Sunday. "He was inspector with but back with BSF he was assistant commandant."

Tanzil Ahmad's wife is undergoing treatment at Fortis Hospital in Noida.

"Nothing can be ruled out now until and unless we get absolute concrete evidence. We have to work on all angles. We have to see it from all the sides and work out the case," Daljit Chowdhary, additional director general of police, Uttar Pradesh, said on Sunday.

He said borders have been sealed, nearby areas are being searched and senior officials from Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) have been put on the job to track the assailants and probe the attack.

"I am very hopeful that we will work out the case and arrest the accused. It looks like a planned attack. It was definitely not a robbery," Chowdhary said.

The NIA has also termed Ahmad's killing as a "planned attack".

"A planned attack took place on him when he was fired upon and killed," NIA spokesman Kumar said. "He (Tanzil) was assistant commandant with BSF and currently on deputation with NIA. He was with us for last six and half years."

The premier investigating agency is trying to find out how he was tracked by his assailants.

"The patient has been brought in a critical condition. Our doctors are providing the best medical treatment to treat the patient. As a matter of patient confidentiality we cannot comment anything further," a statement from the Fortis Noida said.

Ahmad was pronounced dead on being taken to a medical facility in Moradabad. His body is being brought to Delhi.

Before joining the NIA, Ahmad was part of the in-house team of BSF, providing vigilance cover. He also held tenures as instructor at BSF Academy at Tekanpur, near Gwalior, and training centre at Hazaribagh.
As the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government pads up to enter its third year in office, its focus would be on key areas such as banking, defence, retail, manufacturing, infrastructure and job creation.

If the first two years were about announcing signature schemes and campaigns, and setting the agenda for the NDA, the next three are going to be about getting results from the schemes such as Make in India, Swachh Bharat, Smart Cities or Digital India.

Consolidation of what has already been announced, rather than any new big-bang scheme, is expected to be the way forward, senior government officials told Business Standard.

Boost for banking

Consolidation in the banking sector is high on the priority list of the government, because of the accumulating non-performing assets (NPAs).

Due diligence is in progress and the government is giving it a big push, said a source. Banking has been a weak link in the first two years of the NDA rule and the sector must show results in the remaining three years.

Direction to defence

In internal assessments by the government, defence is also a sector that must pick up speed.

The pace of defence acquisitions has been a cause of worry, an official pointed out. At the centre of concern is an estimated $10-billion (Rs 66,000 crore) deal to buy 36 French-built Rafale frontline combat aircraft - the agreement was signed but it is yet to be finalised over issues such as pricing and determination of life-cycle costs and liabilities.

Prime Minister Modi had visited Paris last year and had announced India's plans to buy the fighter jets directly from the French government.

Retail reform

Retail sector reform is likely to continue too, officials indicated.

The government could even drop its hard stand on foreign investment in multi-brand retail or supermarket chains such as Walmart and Tesco, though not immediately.

While the preceding United Progressive Alliance government in 2012 permitted 51 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, subject to approval by state governments concerned, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA has been opposed to it.

There are ideological differences on FDI in multi-brand retail over fears of job losses in neighbourhood stores, but the government is open to the idea of change.

As a test case, 100 per cent FDI was permitted in marketplace e-commerce a week ago.

Even as companies funded by marquee international investors have operated in the e-commerce sector for several years, there was no policy so far. While the conditions that came with the e-commerce marketplace policy said platform owners (Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and others) should not influence pricing of products directly or indirectly, a senior officer pointed out that pricing was driven by the market and the government was unlikely to dictate norms on discounting or deals offered in the online space.

Job generation

While job creation had been a focus area for the BJP even during 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign, major results are yet to be seen. In fact, 134,000 jobs were created in eight labour-intensive industries during July to September 2015 according to the latest Labour Bureau survey. It was the lowest compared to same quarters in the earlier years since 2009. The government is keen to deliver its poll promise on job creation - BJP had said its goal was to create 250 million jobs in a decade.

Focus on infrastructure

Even as quicker environment ministry nods has reduced the number of blocked road and infrastructure projects, the government has to stay focused on the growth of projects, according to a senior civil servant. In fact, this government's concern linked to the banking sector is also because of its thrust on infrastructure. "Banks' inability to finance big infrastructure projects is a worry," an official said.

Eye on manufacturing

Along with infrastructure, another area which will continue to remain in the limelight is manufacturing.

Modi government's Make in India has been a high-pitch campaign in the recent past, including an event in Mumbai where company heads gathered from across the world.

While some promises have been made and pacts signed, serious investment is yet to come into manufacturing. The defence sector is crucial for Make in India as well, and that hasn't gained traction yet, according to an official.

"We need results in job creation, manufacturing and infrastructure to clock double-digit growth," an official said while summing up the mood of the NDA government as it readies to complete two years in office in May.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud led delegation-level talks on Sunday, during which the entire gamut of the strategic partnership between India and Saudi Arabia was reviewed.

"Examining the full spread of a Strategic Partnsership. PM and King lead delegation level talks," external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Fighting terrorism, energy cooperation and trade and investment were high on the agenda in Sunday's talks.

Apart from being India's largest crude oil supplier, accounting for one-fifth of its imports, Saudi Arabia is also India's fourth largest trading partner with bilateral trade reaching $40 billion.

There are nearly three million Indians in Saudi Arabia, a large number of whom are blue-collar workers involved in the kingdom's various infrastructure projects.

The delegation-level talks were preceded by a restricted meeting between Modi and King Salman.

The Saudi monarch also hosted a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

Modi leave will leave for New Delhi on Sunday evening.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday invited oil-rich Saudi Arabia's top business tycoons to invest in India's key sectors like defence, insurance, railway and oil as he projected his country as an attractive investment destination even in the face of a global economic slowdown.

Saudi Arabia is planning to set up world's largest sovereign wealth fund of about Rs 132.46 lakh crore and India was eyeing a major investment from the country which is India's fourth largest trading partner.

Listing policy initiatives taken by his government to boost economic growth, Modi said his government was looking for major investment in defence production, railways and deep sea off-shore oil exploration in coal gasification to produce clean energy.

The Prime Minister made the pitch while interacting with a group of 30 top Saudi CEOs and Indian business leaders at the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce here.

The Saudi business honchos, who attended the interaction, collectively account for a major share of the Saudi GDP.

Talking about his government's initiative in "high temperature deep sea off shore exploration", Modi invited Saudi investment in the sector which has been opened up for FDI from this month.

He said "most transparent" policy framework has been put in place and that market driven revenue sharing model will be adopted for such project.

The Prime Minister said India plans to build a staggering 50 million low cost housing, a mega project requiring huge investment which will create massive economic opportunities besides creating jobs. "I want to give house to every poor Indian. I think every year a new Saudi Arabia has to be built in my country. That is a huge requirement," he said.

Modi said railways and food processing sectors have been opened up for 100 per cent Foreign Direct Investment and that there is huge investment opportunity in building cold storage network as well as in manufacture of equipment for generation of solar power.

Pitching for Saudi investment in the defence sector, Modi said India's biggest import bill after petroleum products is defence equipment and asserted that the government now is focusing on indigenous production.

"We are importing everything. Why not we develop defence equipment in India. Your investment can play a major role in this," he said.

Talking about cyber threats, the Prime Minister said major investments will be required to ensure cyber security and Saudi Arabia can invest significantly in the sector.

The Prime Minister also faced range of questions at the interaction relating to retrospective tax, proposed Goods and Services Tax, non-performing assets of Indian banks and whether India will allow Islamic banking.

Referring to specific sectors, Modi said India plans to go for coal gasification in order to be able to produce clean energy and invited Saudi companies to invest in the sector. "I think your companies can do a great deal in this regard." Seeking investment in railways, he said, "Today, India's railway is world's second longest network and I wish to double that. I wish to upgrade it. We have 50 cities in the country where we wish to build metro network."



He said the insurance sector has been opened up and that there is huge scope in it. The Prime Minister also invited Saudi investment in agriculture and medical tourism sectors.
Tamil Nadu government has said that 45 projects worth around Rs 22,595 crore has so far been initiated from the investment memoranda the government has entered with the companies in the Global Investors' Meet, 2015. The government has taken all steps to support the companies, which signed memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the State government during the GIM, to set up their facilities without delay, said Industries Minister P Thangamani.

Responding to the allegations of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) Supremo M Karunanidhi, arch rival of the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the minister said that the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa has inaugurated or layed foundation stone of projects worth Rs 15,112 crore from 14 companies in January 29, 2016. Further Rs 6,539 crore worth projects from 19 companies has started industrial units and another 12 projects worth Rs 953 crore are ready to start operations, he added.

The State government, in a two-day GIM conducted in September, 2015, has entered into MoU with 98 companies for investments worth Rs 2,42,160 crore and has promised necessary approvals to be issued within 30 days.

In the last five years, the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board has given approval to 4,059 companies to invest Rs 1,57,475 crore to start projects and the state electricity board has provided 1,834 MVA of additional power to the high tension customers. In the last five years, around 5,32,819 approvals were given related to start micro, small and medium units and the MSME has invested around Rs 88,354 crore to start units. The government has signed 33 MoUs to brin in 31,706 crore, while the previous government lead by DMK has only attracted Rs 21,126 crore through MoUs during their tenure, he added. Karunanidhi, in the interim budget of 2011, has said that his government has attracted around Rs 52,195 crore investment to the State and claimed that this was higher than the investments made during the AIADMK government's tenure.

DMK chief has raised allegation that the government has failed to convert investment proposals into tangible investments.

Karunanidhi, refering to a comparison between the investment proposals under the Industrial Entrepreneur Memorandum (IEM) filed with the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Government of India, and the actual investments reported in the same data, which was comparitively miniscule.

Responding to this, the minister said that most of the industries which file IEM s do not update their actual investments as they have no compulsion to do so in the liberalised era after 1991. Even if they file their intention to invest, many of them do not update the actual investments, he said citing examples.

For instance, German automobile major Daimler has announced investment of Rs 4,000 crore, which was reflected in the DIPP document, whereas the company has not updated the DIPP that it has invested Rs 5,289 crore in Tamil Nadu till 2015. Similarly, Japanese automobile major Yamaha has announced plans to invest Rs 1,500 crore, in an MoU with the State government on May, 2012, and has so far has invested around Rs 1,260 crore, but has not updated the DIPP. The central government owned Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd has entered into MoU with the State government during the GIM, to invest around Rs 2,740 crore, and has invested around 1,600 crore so far and it has not informed DIPP about this, he added.

The same DIPP data shows that from April 2000 to March 2011 has seen Foreign Direct Investment inflow of $7.3 billion and from April 2011 to Dececember 2015 it has went up to $13.94 billion, which at current conversion rate, is equal to Rs 83,766 crore. Between a short period of April 2015 to December 2015, the State has attracted $4.3 billion FDI, it claimed.

According to a report of National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in March, 2016, Tamil Nadu is in third position after Gujarat and Delhi NCR, based on various parameters including the skill availability, infrastructure and political stability.

The Minister also said that according to the same data of DIPP, which Karunanidhi relies on, states that during 2007, when his party was ruling the State, the IEM intentions filed was for Rs 27,102 crore and the actual investment was Rs 1,561 crore. In 2008, the intentions filed was Rs 24,506 crore and actual investment was Rs 1,365 crore, in 2009 the intentions filed were of Rs 66,864 crore and the actual investment reported was Rs 1,267 crore, and in 2010, the intentions filed were for Rs 38,595 crore, while the actual investment reported was of Rs 1,374 crore. He asked whether Karunanidhi will accept these actual investment numbers as the total investments made during those period.
Voting for the first phase of in 18 constituencies in West Bengal and 65 in Assam have begun today. This phase, the first, of elections is crucial for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam, as these areas, largely in upper Assam, are mostly populated by the Hindu majority in a state that has the second highest Muslim population in India. Most of the constituencies in West Bengal that will go to polls are in areas affected by Naxalite violence, called the Jangalmahal areas.
and financial institutions are fighting cases across the country to recover at least Rs 1.86 lakh crore from defaulters who owe more than Rs 1 crore each.

While handing over information in a sealed cover, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had asked the Supreme Court not to disclose the data on defaulters in public.

But the database on cases where have already started legal proceedings is maintained by credit information companies to which all member and financial institutions are required to report this data periodically. This data is shared in public under RBI's instructions.

Business Standard reviewed the database of one the largest such credit information companies, CIBIL, for data up to December 2015 and found the banks and financial institutions were fighting in courts to recover at least Rs 1.86 lakh crore.

There are three other recognised credit information companies.

Financial institutions can be a member with any or all of them. CIBIL and other information companies reveal not just gross numbers but the name of companies and their directors for each case reported and the amount outstanding against them.

The RBI in its master circular on disclosure requires that banks check against these databases before lending.

Business Standard reviewed some of the other databases as well.

Take the example of Abhyudaya Co-operative Bank Ltd. It is a member of the Equifax database, and is fighting in courts to recover at least Rs 1,160 crore from defaulters and wilful defaulters who owe the bank more than Rs 1 crore each.

This data is not reflected in the CIBIL records.

Similarly, Barclays Bank is registered with Experian, a third credit information company, and is trying to get back Rs 747 crore from defaulting clients who owe the bank more than Rs 1 crore each.

Reviewing the databases, it became clear that even when banks report such cases to multiple credit agencies, at times, their data on number of cases and the total money involved, as disclosed by the credit information companies, does not match.

For example, Andhra Bank reported 303 cases for Rs 5,725 crore to the Equifax database, and 298 cases for Rs 5,309 crore to the CIBIL database.

Second, the RBI requires banks and financial institutions to disclose data for only defaulters above Rs 1 crore and willful defaulters above Rs 25 lakh where suits have been filed.

BAD & UGLY 2015 August: Govt launches Indradhanush to revamp public sector banks through capital infusion and board appointments

Govt launches Indradhanush to revamp public sector banks through capital infusion and board appointments 2016: Profits of public sector banks (PSBs) plunge as they create provisions for non-performing assets in the December FY15 quarter results

Profits of public sector banks (PSBs) plunge as they create provisions for non-performing assets in the December FY15 quarter results PSBs have written off Rs 1.14-lakh-crore bad debt over the past three years

Bank stocks plunge, as details of the NPA problem emerges

February 29: Minister Arun Jaitley proposed Rs 25,000 crore for recapitalisation of PSBs in the Budget

Wilful defaulters are a subset of the "defaulters". The banks do not have to report the rest.

The Rs 1.86-lakh-crore includes those cases where wilful defaulters owe the banks more than Rs 1 crore and have been taken to court. So, the number also does not reflect the cases of wilful defaulters - only defaulters-between Rs 25 lakh to Rs 1 crore.

In other words, the CIBIL database of cases where banks have filed court cases against defaulters is not reflective of the entire banking sector. But it is one of the biggest database, explain banking experts.

Dwelling deeper in to the database one finds the public sector bank fighting most number of cases in the courts.

State Bank of India has a 1,972 litigations on-going with the sum involved being Rs 36,105 crore. Punjab National Bank is next up, fighting 1,032 cases against borrowers of more than Rs 1 crore that collectively owe the banks Rs 16,730 crore.

Canara Bank is arguing more cases in the courts (1,220) but the sum involved (Rs 10,017 crore) is less than that of SBI.

The top 10 list on the basis of cases and the volume of money involved is made up of public sector banks.

Of the private sector Kotak Mahindra Bank is found pursuing the most cases through the courts to recover its money. It has filed 404 suits against borrowers of more than Rs 1 crore adding up to Rs 7,144 crore.

However, as Kotak Mahindra clarified to another newspaper, it has an Asset Reconstruction Department that buys stressed and non-performing assets from other banks, and the list of willful defaulters reported CIBIL include the stressed and NPAs they have purchased from other banks.

Life Insurance Corporation, one of the few financial institutions that reports to CIBIL has merely 71 cases but each case locks up much higher investments of the bank. It is trying to recover Rs 8,297 crore from its big borrowers.

Of the foreign banks that report to CIBIL, Citibank is the one fighting to recover the largest sum from its big borrowers. It has filed 70 cases to recover Rs 1,333 crore from its borrowers who have defaulted.

What does this number signify in relation to the overall stress and challenge the banks face from defaulting borrowers?



It is difficult to get a full estimate of the scale of the problem as the RBI refuses to disclose the data on total stressed assets - where borrowers are defaulting on their repayments.

But, the Rs 1.86 lakh crore caught in litigation is the visible tip of the strain banks are facing from the non-performing assets - where repayment of loans has been delayed for more than a fixed period.

As the RBI told the Supreme Court recently, non-performing assets, or NPAs (where repayment of loans has been delayed for more than a fixed period), are classified as Sub-standard, Doubtful and Loss Assets.

For the standard and sub-standard and doubtful loans the banks have various options to deal with it - all of these do not end up in courts. The banks can try to restructure loans by taking some financial hit within the range the RBI prescribes or it can write off some of the losses from its balance sheet.

The overall NPAs for public sector banks in December 2015 stood at above Rs 3 lakh crore, the state minister for told Parliament recently.

The Supreme Court will now decide if it wants the full picture of the stress facing banks revealed to public including names of all defaulters and non-performing assets.

Kotak Mahindra and associates hold a significant stake in Business Standard Pvt Ltd
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The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, today visited the All Women IT and ITES Centre of Tata Consultancy Services in Riyadh. .

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The Prime Minister was given an overview of the operations, and interacted with the all-women workforce, who enthusiastically welcomed and greeted him. .

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Speaking on the occasion, the Prime Minister said that it is a big message for the world that he is meeting with the people who are, in a way, the pride of Saudi Arabia. .

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Shri Narendra Modi said that in todays competitive world we have to unite our strengths both natural and human, for optimum progress. He said that when women power becomes a part of the development journey, it gathers fresh momentum. He said that the atmosphere he is witnessing at this Centre today, appears to be a harbinger of a positive force for the world. He invited the women IT professionals to visit India, and said their visit will make a huge impact even in India. .

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The Prime Minister emphasized the role of technology in governance, and said e-governance, for him, means easy governance, effective governance, and economic governance. .

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The Prime Minister invited them to see the Narendra Modi App" and even share their views on women empowerment in India. .

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Vande Mataram. Matri Devo Bhavah" wrote the Prime Minister on the message board at the Centre. .

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The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, today interacted with 30 Saudi CEOs and Indian business leaders in Riyadh. He described India and Saudi Arabia as old friends, ready to take bold new steps to a golden future. .

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Emphasizing the strength of ties between the two countries, he recalled King Salman mentioning that he was taught by an Indian teacher. .

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He said India had a unique combination of democracy, demography and demand, and several policy initiatives had been taken over the last two years to spur growth and progress. .

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Speaking about the health sector, he said there was tremendous scope for investment in the manufacturing of medical devices. He said India's health sector which is globally extremely cost competitive, offers immense scope for health tourism. He added that Indian nurses, present in large numbers in the Gulf, are a testament to our well-trained manpower. .

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He called for taking the economic relationship beyond export and import, to technology transfers and joint investment. .

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He assured Saudi investors that retrospective taxation was a thing of the past, and his Government believes in a predictable long term taxation regime. He mentioned petroleum, renewable energy, infrastructure, and defence manufacturing, as possible areas for Saudi investment. He said Saudi investment in fertilizers, warehousing, cold chain facilities and agriculture, would be a win-win partnership, as it would ensure good quality food products for Saudi Arabia. .

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He said India and Saudi Arabia should look at working together in the field of cyber-security. .

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Union Human Resource Development Minister, Smt Smriti Zubin Irani to Participate in an International Conference on the Zero at UNESCO Headquarters

The High Level segment of the International Conference on the Zero, will be addressed by Smt Smriti Zubin Irani, Minister of Human Resource Development, Government of India and Ms. Irina Bokova, Director General UNESCO on 5th April 2016. .

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The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, through the Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO, and together with the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, will host an International Conference on the Zero on 4-5 April, 2016 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. The International Conference will share the rich and remarkable history of mathematics, through the participation of some brilliant minds, resonating with the UNESCOs mandate to advance, transfer and share knowledge for the greater global good. .

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The International Conference in Paris will open on 4th April at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, with a session by Professor Manjul Bhargava, Fields Medalist and Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University on Gems of Ramanujan and their lasting Impact on Mathematics". Session 2 at UNESCO on Negative Numbers, Zero, Infinity and Beyond" will be addressed by Dr. Shailendra Mehta from Auro University, Gujarat. There will also be a Panel Discussion on the Arabic Traditions in Mathematics". Special Session by Professor Manjul Bhargava on Mathematics in Indian Music" will be a high point of the Conference. .

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Through the length of the event at UNESCO, there will be visual and interactive sessions, including films on Mathematics and Science, and interactive problem solving events designed for a young audience. In this category, the highlight will be Zero: Infinity and Set Theory" conducted by Mr. Romain Attal from the Palais de La Decouverte in Paris. .

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The event will formally close with the unveiling of a bronze bust by the Minister of Human Resource Development, India and the Director General, UNESCO of the ancient Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata which is a gift from India to UNESCO, as its tribute to the world of Mathematics and Science. The Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Smt Smriti Zubin Irani participated in the high level segment, the Leaders Forum, held at UNESCO Headquarters, Paris on November 16-17, 2015 as a part of the 38th session of the UNESCO General Conference. .

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During this visit, the Minister also held a meeting with the Director General of UNESCO, Ms. Irina Bokova, to discuss the full range of India's cooperation with the organization. As a follow up to the discussions held during the bilateral meeting, for the first time, both the leaders issued Joint Statement on the occasion of the National Mathematics Day, i.e. 22nd December, which is the birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the great Indian intellectual and mathematician. Both the leaders agreed to organize in 2016 a Conference on Zero" at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. .

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Greece called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Saturday to explain whether it was seeking to usher Athens toward bankruptcy ahead of a pivotal referendum in June on Britain's membership in Europe. Greece's comments came after IMF officials raised questions in a private discussion published by WikiLeaks about what it would take to get Greece's creditors to agree to debt relief.

The transcript, which captures what WikiLeaks said was a teleconference conversation in March between Poul Thomsen, the head of the IMF's European operations, and the IMF's Greek bailout monitor, underscored a widening rift between the IMF and Greece's European creditors that could jeopardise Greece's new Euro 86 billion bailout. It also exposed the fraught behind-the-scenes political machinations that have led to a deadlock on how to deal with a country still regarded as Europe's weakest link.

The IMF declined to comment on the WikiLeaks transcript, but said in a statement that Greece needed to be put "on a path of sustainable growth" supported by reforms and further debt relief. The document touched off a fresh political frenzy inside Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's government, which accused the IMF of trying to "politically destabilise Europe." Nearly a year after creditors granted Greece the new bailout, after a drawn-out financial tempest that pushed the eurozone to the edge of a breakup, the Greek government is blaming the IMF for delaying a review of the progress Greece has made in carrying out its harsh austerity terms.

The review is needed so that Greece can receive financial aid and avoid a possible default on looming debts just as Greece has largely been left to fend for itself in dealing with Europe's migrant crisis.

Privately, however, the fund has discussed pulling out of the bailout deal unless European creditors agree to reduce Greece's mountain of debt, without which Greece could be dealt a new economic blow.

An IMF exit would put the bailout in jeopardy and raise the risk of a Greek default in July, when Athens must repay a large loan. But the European creditors, especially Germany, have resisted, and are pushing the fund instead to soften the austerity terms it is trying to wrench from Greece.

In the transcript, Thomsen suggests that only a precipitous event might push the Europeans to give in on debt relief and keep the IMF from leaving the bailout.

"What is going to bring it all to a decision point?" Thomsen asks, according to the WikiLeaks document. "In the past, there has been only one time when the decision has been made and then that was when they were about to run out of money seriously and to default. And possibly this is what is going to happen again," he said.

Thomsen added that the June timing of the British referendum on whether to exit the European Union was crucial, because European leaders would be preoccupied with it for at least a month before then and would not want to return to discussions about the Greek bailout until after the vote.

That could pose problems for whether Greece receives financial aid from the bailout in time to meet its July debt repayments.

Tsipras's government met in an emergency session on Saturday to discuss the implications. "The Greek government asks the IMF for explanations whether pursuing the creation of bankruptcy conditions in Greece, just before the British referendum, is the fund's official position," Olga Gerovasili, a Greek government spokeswoman, said in a statement.

As a condition for it to stick with the bailout, the IMF has pressed Germany hard to agree to Greek debt relief. The IMF has leverage because the German Parliament might not agree to release funds to Greece unless the IMF participates in the programme. But Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's finance minister, has said he sees "no argument" for acceding to the IMF's demands.

The IMF has countered that debt relief is needed not only to help the economy, but also because the Greek government is politically constrained in carrying out all the austerity needed to begin improving its tattered finances. Those frustrations boiled over in the private discussions published by WikiLeaks.

"These guys agree on something and then they give it up the next day," Delia Velculescu, the IMF's mission chief for Greece, is reported to tell Thomsen in the transcript. "We have said this time and again, we know that they don't do what we say," she added. "It just doesn't function. For them, everything is subject to change - if the authorities want it."



Thomsen said he had expected that the refugee crisis in Greece might have pushed creditors to reach an agreement on debt relief quickly. In less than two months, Greece has become Europe's de facto holding pen for more than 50,000 migrants since European countries shut their borders, preventing asylum seekers from reaching their preferred destination of Germany. Greece has been scrambling to manage a deteriorating situation, including riots in refugee camps and the beginning of a European Union program requiring the mass deportation of refugees from Greek islands starting on Monday.

"I am surprised that it has not happened, is that, because of the refugee situation, they take a decision, that they want to come to a conclusion," Thomsen said of the creditors, according to the transcript.

If a conclusion does not come rapidly, he added, the IMF would use the threat of quitting against the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who cannot afford for Greece to spiral downward at a time when it is keeping the bulk of new refugees from reaching her country.

"You face a question," Thomsen suggests the fund could tell Merkel. "You have to think about what is more costly: to go ahead without the IMF," he said, "or to pick the debt relief that we think that Greece needs in order to keep us on board."

2016 The New York Times News Service
A decade ago, the industry in India was riding a wave of optimism. There were talks of global giants considering investments in India. Leading domestic retailers had positioned themselves for exploring strategic partnerships with global players. Wal-Mart formed a joint venture with Bharti Enterprises in August 2007 with plans to open wholesale stores and build a supply chain network. In 2010, Carrefour, the world's second biggest retailer, started operations in India. The going seemed good for a while, until three years ago.

By the end of 2013, Wal-Mart had parted ways with Bharti Enterprises and Carrefour had announced it was shutting shop in India. Any other partnership plans that global retailers or their Indian counterparts may have harboured have since met with a political and regulatory impasse. It will be interesting to see where the Indian retailers concerned go from here, but first it is essential to examine why the situation today is as it is, starting with the considerations that drive foreign retailers to explore new markets abroad.

The lure of globalisation is almost irresistible. Many companies in the developed world are keen to follow in the wake of corporations such as Boeing, Coca-Cola, DuPont, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Unilever and Disney that appear to have succeeded in going global. Globalisation is no panacea, however. Overseas success varies widely and it's often tough to boost profits by investing overseas. A closer look at the grocery retailing industry, for instance, reveals that, with a few exceptions, globalisation's benefits had not accrued to retailers.

In contrast to other industries, grocery is still dominated by local players in most countries. International players are almost entirely absent from even the largest retail markets. Every grocery retailer that has ventured overseas has failed as often as it has succeeded. It could be argued that the grocers' failures are due to differences in consumer tastes, particularly for food products. However, companies like Mars, Nestle, Kraft, P&G, Danone and Unilever have succeeded in creating global food brands over many long years, so the unsuccessful attempts must be attributable to other factors.

In emerging markets such as India, only a few chains have large networks of stores. Retailing is usually of a local nature, and the industry is highly fragmented. Consumers perceive foreign retailers to be premium players, not offering the services that local grocers do, such as free delivery, credit and custom packaging. In addition, in many parts of the world, including the otherwise open market of India, laws protect local retailers from foreign competition.

The challenges of doing business in India, especially, are well-documented. In the World Bank's 2014 Ease of Doing Business index, India was placed 134th out of 189 countries, behind even Pakistan and Yemen. Persistent corruption compounds challenges. Foreign investors are influenced as much by fear as by optimism, compelled by the belief that they must invest in India to achieve ambitions, although they know the risks are great and the outcome is highly uncertain.

Let's consider the facts. The accumulated losses of India's top 10 food retailers, who account for about 40 per cent of the organised retail sector's revenue, stood at Rs 13,000 crore in 2013-14 on revenue of around Rs 23,500 crore, according to a May 2014 report by Crisil ratings. The supply chain, too, has its share of problems. The fragmented agri-supply base coupled with an inadequate legal framework make it difficult for retailers and food processors to procure quality produce at competitive costs directly from farmers. The small size of the food processing industry further limits the supply options. Rentals account for 7-7.5 per cent of the total costs for organised retail in India against global benchmarks of less than three per cent. Complex and changeable rules governing foreign direct investment have made it tricky for rich world chains to set up shop.

India's home-grown supermarkets account for only two per cent of food and grocery sales and are struggling to make a profit. Revenues have not kept pace with rising rents. Supermarkets are not a compelling draw in terms of price and service. Most shoppers in India buy dairy products, vegetables and fruit either daily or every two to three days, and conventional trade has a strong hold on these frequent purchases. Even affluent consumers, in general, prefer traditional stores, because they are closer to home, usually open longer and offer credit. Many deliver free of charge. That supermarkets offer a greater variety of groceries than the neighbourhood store is not considered as big a competitive edge as it may seem.

On the whole, it would appear that incentives for foreign investors, while they may or may not have diminished, have certainly not brightened either. Indian retailers would do well to park optimism awhile and focus on reviving growth in key local markets through re-inventing or re-structuring their business or operating models. One way to do this could be to achieve the optimum balance between margins and volumes. The food business is largely what generates the volumes; high margins are derived from consumer durables, apparels and other goods. The trick is for retailers to select the product categories carefully and offer a value proposition that will drive consumer preference for their respective formats. It's easier said than done, but it would be a prudent way forward while the industry hopes for the next winds of globalisation.

Rajiv Lal

Stanley Roth, Senior professor of retailing, Harvard Business School
When Coke announced the launch of its flavoured milk brand, VIO, many expected a marketing blitzkrieg of sorts, as it did for its green mango Fanta, targeted at typically Indian palates. But, both brands have moved in to shop shelves without much fuss; a far cry from the high decibel advertising the company usually indulges in, in the country.

Is Coke wary, given the tepid reaction to VIO in international markets and the hue and cry that Coke fans raise when the brand does anything new? Or is it just smart marketing strategy?



The company does not take either view. For one, it is not keen to compare its strategies in other markets with India. What it does say is that dairy, is the next growth pillar after sparkling, water and juices. "We aim to build higher brand recall and awareness. This will be followed by a strong communication plan which includes digital and print campaigns. We expect VIO to set the trend in making out of home, on-the-go milk consumption in vogue for consumers for different age groups across the social strata," said a Coca-Cola spokesperson.

Global brands, local tastes



The introduction of the two new products is also an indication of the increasing importance of India as a market. From 19 in 2006, on Coke's list of markets ranked by size, India has moved to sixth spot. No doubt, the company wants to leave no stone unturned when it comes to wooing the Indian customer.

The cold beverages market in India is valued at Rs 50,000-60,000 crore while the fruit juice market is about Rs 8,000 crore according to industry estimates. It has seen a spate of new brands and new launches from old brands. Dabur and Pepsi's Tropicana have come up with a slew of flavours and Paper Boat, one of the most recent entrants into the category, has been disruptive with its products, packaging and marketing strategies.

Milk beverages, on the other hand, is a niche market, but shows great growth potential. It is currently estimated to be a Rs 1,500-1,600 crore market. "Flavoured milk is the next big milk beverage category globally only after fresh milk," says S Misra, founder of Milk Mantra, which churns out milk beverages under the MooShake brand.

Industry experts say that milk beverages could grow into a billion dollar category over the next five to seven years at the current growth rate of 25-30 per cent as more discerning consumers increasingly prefer healthier on-the-go drink options compared to traditional soda.

Coke is, thus, rooting for this segment. A Coca Cola spokesperson said, "Dairy is a category, which is firmly rooted in Indian tradition and enjoyed greatly by consumers. The company's intent is to make VIO easily accessible to the consumer." When it was launched, the product was first made available exclusively across 500 Reliance Retail outlets across the country primarily as part of the Republic Day 'Big Day' extravaganza. "Reliance Retail also set up special 'VIO Dairy Zones' across 9 stores," says a company spokesperson. VIO today is available in all major retail outlets and Coke has come out with Indian flavours such as saffron, pistachio and almond.

Catering to the health-conscious



VIO and mango flavoured Fanta have been developed at Coca-Cola India's research and development (R&D) centre in Gurgaon with inputs from the R&D centres in Atlanta and Shanghai. Many see these brands as an attempt to position the umbrella brand Coca Cola as a total beverages player and not just an aerated drink.

With VIO, Coke is clearly trying to position it as a healthy drink as it claims that the product contains no preservatives and promises. Further, the company has priced it competitively at Rs 25 for a 200ml pack. Vadilal's managing director Rajesh Gandhi, which sells flavoured milk under the Power Sip brand, said, "It is always good for the consumers when new players enter a segment, as increased competition means they have more choice. Also, when someone with the distribution might of Coca Cola enters the milk beverages segment, it would only expand the market in India." Gandhi added that as Coca Cola would promote its new brand through its above-the-line (ATL) and below-the-line (BTL) promotions, it would create more consumer awareness and demand for the category on the whole.

Coke has been pushing the ball in its non-aerated beverages category for some time now, as the overall consumer preference (at least in urban pockets) has been towards non-soda drinks. Soda, across the globe, has come to be associated with an unhealthy positioning, and sales have dipped in one of its biggest markets, the US. While Coke did not wish to share the details of its revenue share from the aerated drinks and other non-aerated beverages, analysts feel the growth rate of aerated beverages has definitely come down for Coke.

Coke's focus on non-aerated beverages is evident from the fact that the company recently announced its intentions to make Maaza - the country's largest mango beverage - the world's first billion-dollar juice brand (in retail sales) from India. The resource infusion behind Maaza is a part of the $5 billion investment plan of The Coca-Cola Company and its bottlers in India, between 2012 and 2020.
The Union finance ministry has asked market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to probe the alleged "dark fibre links" between the BSE and the NSE, and has been informed, in turn, that a "preliminary fact finding" exercise is already underway.

The BSE and the NSE have also been asked to provide inputs.

When asked about the issue, the former declined to comment, and the latter said the allegations were baseless.

Business Standard has reviewed the letters sent by the finance ministry to the over the past few months, along with the internal notes, which were obtained under the Right to Information (RTI).

The documents showed that the ministry swung into action after receiving, in November, a whistle-blower account that talked about the "dark fibres" and other issues in high frequency trading (HFT).

According to the ministry note sent to the Sebi, "The recent letter from the whistle-blower dated October 3, 2015, talks about 'dark fibre' links between the NSE and the BSE that is available to select investors. This puts ordinary investors as well as large institutional investors at a serious disadvantage. It also opens the stock exchanges to unknown and unforeseen risk during periods of extreme price volatility."



The ministry note added "proper investigation" is needed "to help save ordinary investors from 'risks and dangers' due to HFT or algo trading".

The whistle-blower's letter describes a dark fibre as "a dedicated fibre link, which has no switching equipment in its path". In tech parlance, a dark fibre is an unused, surplus optic fibre line with a service provider, who leases it out for private use. The October letter is the third the Singapore-based anonymous whistle-blower has written on algo trading since January last year.

The first one alleged manipulations in the NSE between 2011 and 2014. It led to circulars, tightening regulations on collocation servers and became the subject of a Bombay High Court case. The second letter in August talked about the steps should take to prove the alleged manipulation and take action. The letters were addressed to Sebi and senior financial journalist Sucheta Dalal.

In response to an email seeking comments about the probe, the NSE spokesperson said, "As you know we avoid giving comments to any matter that is being heard legally."





FROM SINGAPORE, A WHISTLE-BLOWER

A letter from an anonymous whistle-blower in Singapore has prompted the authorities to investigate alleged dark fibre links between BSE and NSE: 2015: Jan 14: First letter from whistle-blower, alleging manipulation in the NSE collocation centre

First letter from whistle-blower, alleging manipulation in the NSE collocation centre Aug 10: Second letter; focusing on steps to be taken by the Sebi to prove manipulation

Second letter; focusing on steps to be taken by the Sebi to prove manipulation Oct 3: Whistle-blower writes about dark fibre links between the BSE and the NSE

Whistle-blower writes about dark fibre links between the BSE and the NSE Nov 18: Joint secretary of financial writes to Sebi chairman

Joint secretary of financial writes to Sebi chairman Dec 14: Reminder sent from ministry to Sebi

Reminder sent from ministry to Sebi Dec 30: Sebi replies; says fact-finding exercise underway. Matter discussed in Technical Advisory Committee

Sebi replies; says fact-finding exercise underway. Matter discussed in Technical Advisory Committee 2016: Feb 17: Another reminder from the ministry Sources: RTI documents, whistle-blowers letters

The NSE spokesperson added the exchange and market participants used standard protocols as might be available from time to time. "Regarding your query with regard to our reply to the regulator, we always have clarified issues whenever asked for. Since such communications are bilateral, the same cannot be revealed. We have told you earlier also that NSE has always implemented fair practices and allegations as indicated in your email are baseless."A BSE spokesperson declined to comment.

According to the whistle-blower, a trading firm called AlphaGrep Securities benefitted from this 'dark fibre' link and managed to treble its market share in a few months.

AlphaGrep describes itself a proprietary trading firm focused on high frequency algorithmic trading in asset classes across the globe. It has offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Singapore and Hong Kong. "We are one of the largest firms by trading volume on Indian exchanges, and have significant market share on several large global exchanges as well," the firm claimed on its website.

The whistle-blower said, "AlphaGrep figured out that major telcos would not be able to give faster access. It found a cable operator who had a fibre optic network a was willing to provide a 'dark fibre'. A dark fibre is a dedicated fibre link which has no switching equipment in its path.

HOW DARK FIBRE ALLEGEDLY HELPED In the cash market segment, the BSE is a clear follower of prices at the NSE. It has less than 15 per cent volume of the NSE, and as a result all price changes first happen at the NSE, and are subsequently reflected at BSE.

If a trader can know the price at the NSE before others at the BSE collocation, he could benefit immensely.

AlphaGrep was able to achieve this by hiring a service provider who could provide this fibre optic link between Bandra-Kurla Complex, where the NSE is located, and Fort, where the BSE is housed.

According to the whistle-blower, this dark fibre link between Fort and BKC (about 15 km) helped Alpha trade at a fifth of latency as the rest of the market helping it treble market share to 15 per cent between April and August 2015.

"In this case they found Sampark Infotainment which was willing to provide a near 'dark fibre' with minimal switching equipment. Sampark was, however, not a regular ISP and hence could not technically have access to NSE colo. It is NSE policy that they allow links to be terminated only by approved vendors (i.e ISPs) on dedicated MUX equipment at NSE colo. AlphaGrep with its muscle of volume and good contacts managed something no one is supposed to. It got its near 'dark fibre' terminated across NSE and BSE colo without Sampark being an empanelled vendor in April/May 2015. "At the BSE end their job was even easier as BSE does not own its collocation which is managed by a third party which does not have to follow any standards for link termination. The order of latency which they could get across the link was around 400 micro seconds. This was one fifth of what all others were having. If they could trade at one fifth the latency of the market the benefit is not hard to fathom.

"From April to August 2015, the market share of AlphaGrep rose from around five per cent to 15 per cent of BSE turnover. This speaks for itself," the whistle-blower wrote.

The arrangement was legitimised post facto through an agreement with another empanelled service provider after other algo traders cried foul, the whistle-blower added. The AlphaGrep website claims that it has experience in development of low latency systems. "We are a team of curious engineers, mathematicians, and statisticians who like to solve challenging problems. We have past experience in quantitative trading and low latency trading system development at global proprietary trading firms and investment banks." When contacted, Mohit Mutreja, managing director, AlphaGrep, said he was not aware of the letter.

In an emailed response to queries, Mutreja added five-year old AlphaGrep's average daily traded volumes over the past one year represented two to three per cent of daily BSE volumes.

"AlphaGrep does not have any commercial relationship with Sampark Infotainment. AlphaGrep only contracts with exchange-empanelled vendors for exchange connectivity," Mutreja said.

An email seeking comments sent to Prakash D'Souza, managing director, Sampark Infotainment, did not elicit any response.

The RTI documents showed the first letter to Sebi was written by the ministry in mid-November.

After a reminder from the ministry a month later, Sebi on December 30, 2015, informed that a "preliminary fact finding exercise is already underway". The matter has also been discussed in the Technical Advisory Committee of Sebi, the regulator told the ministry.

On March 19, Business Standard had reported that the TAC had submitted a report on the matter, which some people described as "hard-hitting."


Keshav Kantamneni, who comes from a global financial services background, is now managing a struggling Chennai plywood company.

When he acquired Uniply a year ago, the company had a large accumulated loss, product returns were high, accounts with most dealers lay unsettled, professionals were missing, the business had plateaued, and the big daddies had such an extensive grip on the sector that it was difficult to grow further.

Kantamneni did something different. Before he acquired, he researched. He worked on the shopfloor (with the erstwhile promoter's consent), comprehended the manufacturing process, spoke to employees, interacted with the trade, called customers, and examined global trends.

Gradually, the picture cleared. India was the second most populous market. The country was one of the most under-consumed for plywood. Indian interiors were pathetic (which means the moment aspirations increased, off-take would rise). India's organised manufacturers accounted for only 30 per cent of the market (India's two largest plywood brands make up for 20 per cent of the sector). India's consumption was moving from unorganised to organised (projected to accelerate following the introduction of goods and services tax). India was buying more of branded products.

Gradually, people began to whisper the positives. Uniply was a national brand. The company's dealers paid on time. Its products were considered world-class. Following the acquisition, Kantamneni restructured the product mix (towards plywood over veneers). He also widened the plywood mix, focused on value-added varieties, invested in brand-building, recruited a president to manage operations, and controlled the sales and finance functions.

Ho-hum. I mean most entrepreneurs would have done no different. Except that Uniply reduced working capital sanction by 70 per cent from Rs 155.5 crore (pre-acquisition); inspired bankers to moderate average debt cost; rationalised the 450-decorative veneer inventory to just 40 (addressing 80 per cent of pan-India projects demand); rationalised 20 per cent of the plywood manufacturing team; eliminated bad debts; repaid long-term debt down to virtually nil; graduated the plywood from E3 guidelines to the globally-respected E1 standard; and, offered to compensate dealers 300 per cent of product value in the event of product under-performance. All in the first 12 months of acquisition.

And, here is where the Uniply story gets interesting. Because, even as the company is still finding its feet, Kantamneni is seeking to buy plywood assets twice Uniply's size (effectively trebling capacity), entering adjacent business segments, automating the Chennai plant and extending from product sales to solutions delivery.

My first reaction: oh no, looks like Uniply might go bust the second time round. But wait, sales are rising based on quarterly results, the greenhorn has turned the company around and his miscellaneous growth agenda appears financially closed.

My second reaction: most entrepreneurs would have preferred to go sequentially into the turnaround - one thing patiently following another. At Uniply, the movement is Brownian; a number of things are transpiring concurrently that can radically alter scale, portfolio, margins and brand within the space of the coming year.

If he pulls it off, Uniply could well emerge one of the most celebrated corporate transformations in recent times.

The author is a stock market writer, tracking corporate earnings and investor psychology to gauge where markets are not headed
Tripura is all set to transmit of 100 megawatts of power to Bangladesh from the Palatana power project, months after the Prime Minister of India and Bangladesh Prime minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the supply of power and internet bandwidth between both countries via video conference.

Bangladesh will also give Tripura access to 10 gbps high-speed data connectivity through the submarine cable internet network.

This is the second such cross border transmission interconnection system between India and Bangladesh.

"The export of 100 MW of power from India to Bangladesh will further boost development. On the other side we are getting access to a new gateway to enter the digital world, a facility we had in the west and the south but the east was left. Since I want to move ahead with the 'Act East Policy' hence for me this gateway at the east is very important," said Prime Minister Modi.

"Bangladesh opening the eastern gateway of digital world is a vital step and this will create an inspiration for the youths of the eight northeastern states including Assam, Tripura and Sikkim," he added.

"By this cooperation of exchange of power and bandwidth between Bangladesh and India we have set another milestone. Importing power will help to solve our power crisis and the access to bandwidth will help in improving the digital connectivity to Tripura and the Northeast India besides helping in improving the socio-economic condition of the people of the region. Our friendship will further strengthen," said Bangladesh Prime Minister Hasina.

The importing of power will help to solve the power crisis and the access to bandwidth will help to improve digital connectivity in north east India.

Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar has said that the new internet-power bandwith supply will take Indo-Bangladesh ties to new heights.
Imtiaz Ali, known for creating a niche for himself in Bollywood, is all set to roll his next and this time it's the 'Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi' couple who has given their arms to it, according to a leading web portal.

It was already known that the 'Tamasha' director had roped in Shah Rukh Khan for his film, and now reports suggest that Anushka Sharma will be starring opposite him.

The 'Fan' actor will be playing a turbaned Sikh tourist in the yet-to-be-titled comedy. His interactions with the locals and his adventurous return to his home country forms the crux of this laugh riot.

Reportedly, the shooting will be carried out in London and Punjab.

This is the third time the 27-year-old actress and the 50-year-old actor will star together after 'Rab Ne Bana De Jodi' and 'Jab Tak Hai Jaan.'

King Khan is now busy shooting for Gauri Shinde's next and Anushka is completing the last leg of 'Ae Dil Hai Mushkil' and YRF's 'Sultan.
Authorities in Belgian capital Brussels have banned a far-right European youth group from mounting an anti-Islam demonstration in anticipation of clashes in the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Molenbeek.

According to a US Today report, the new French political movement, Generation Identitaire, had called for a an "anti-Islamists" demonstration on its website recently, and described Moleenbeek as "a real Islamist breeding ground."

The Generation Identitaire is promoting a clear and simple message "Islamists out of Europe!"

Last week. hundreds of black-clad youth shouting Nazi slogans disrupted a memorial at Brussels' Borse Square that had been called on behalf of 32 people killed in the March 22 terrorist attacks at Brussels airport and subway system.

The protesters, who were driven out by police using water cannon, helped prompt authorities to ban Saturday's demonstration in Molenbeek.There was no sign the group would heed the ban.
India and Saudi Arabia have agreed upon the need to intensify bilateral defence cooperation, through exchange of visits by military personnel and experts, conduct of joint military exercises, exchange of visits of ships and aircrafts and supply of arms and ammunition and their joint development.

"Prime Minister Modi acknowledged that the MoU on Defence Cooperation signed during the visit of His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to India in February 2014 as the then Crown Prince, Deputy Premier and Defence Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was an important milestone in strengthening the strategic partnership between the two countries," said a joint statement issued after the talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

They also welcomed the decision for convening of the second meeting of Joint Committee on Defence Cooperation in Riyadh to follow up on the visit of Prime Minister Modi.

Both leaders agreed to enhance cooperation to strengthen maritime security in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean regions, vital for the security and prosperity of both countries.

They further agreed to promote bilateral collaboration for humanitarian assistance and evacuation in natural disasters and conflict situations.

"Prime Minister Modi acknowledged that the MoU on Defence Cooperation signed during the visit of His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to India in February 2014 as the then Crown Prince, Deputy Premier and Defence Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was an important milestone in strengthening the strategic partnership between the two countries," the joint statement said.

The two leaders agreed upon the need to intensify bilateral defence cooperation, through exchange of visits by military personnel and experts, conduct of joint military exercises, exchange of visits of ships and aircrafts and supply of arms and ammunition and their joint development.

They also welcomed the decision for convening of the second meeting of Joint Committee on Defence Cooperation in Riyadh to follow up on the visit of Prime Minister Modi.

The two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation to strengthen maritime security in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean regions, vital for the security and prosperity of both countries.

They further agreed to promote bilateral collaboration for humanitarian assistance and evacuation in natural disasters and conflict situations.
With Mehbooba Mufti set to take oath as the first woman Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir on April 4, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister on Sunday reignited the nationalism debate, saying he would look forward to PDP MLAs saying 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai'.

"I look forward to seeing all members of the PDP-BJP alliance say this (Bharat Mata Ki Jai) as soon as they take their oath tomorrow," Omar said in a tweet.

Earlier, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had said at a function in Nagpur, "It makes me wonder where are we heading? Why should I feel ashamed of saying "Bharat Mata ki Jai" in my own country. There is still a dispute over saying 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' and those opposed to say it, should not have any right to stay in India. Those living here should say 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai'."

Shiv Sena, too had earlier asked whether Mehbooba Mufti would say 'Bharat Mata ki jai' in honour of displaced Kashmiri Pandits.



I look forward to seeing all the members of the PDP-BJP alliance say this as soon as they take their oath tomorrow. https://t.co/R6rWYHzUww  (@abdullah_omar) April 3, 2016

"The most important thing is that Mehbooba Mufti and the BJP were never comfortable together. Mehbooba bai's anti- statements, her association with the separatists, have always remained controversial. Bai sahib (Mehbooba) has been sympathetic towards those raising anti- slogans in Kashmir," the Saamna article said.

"Therefore, BJP would be happy that she is set to become the chief minister with their support, but the nation is worried...These days a debate is going on in the nation over nationalism. So, will Mehbooba Mufti say 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai'? Such questions are being asked," it added.

The PDP-BJP alliance was formed after an almost two-month deadlock following chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's death on January 7.

Mehbooba Mufti will be sworn in on April 4 at 11 am. She will be the 13th chief minister of the state. State Governor N N Vohra has issued invitation to her to form the new government.

The swearing in ceremony will take place at Raj Bhawan in Jammu.

Union Ministers Venkaiah Naidu and Jitendra Singh will attend the swearing-in ceremony tomorrow.
One of the female stars of 'Trailer Park Boys,' Lucy DeCoutere has quit the show after the arrest of Mike Smith, who plays Bubbles.

Lucy DeCoutere, who plays Lucy on the show tweeted on March 3, "If I find out that somebody is abusive, I cut them out of my life. It's very easy," reports TMZ.com.

A few hours later she wrote, "I have resigned from Trailer Park Boys."

This announcement comes just a day after Mike Smith's arrest for getting physical with a female after an argument at The Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles.

Reportedly, the show's publicist claimed that Lucy made it known a few weeks ago she would not be returning for TPB's next season.
Investigation Agency (NIA) Inspector General Sanjiv Kumar Singh on Sunday announced that Mohammed Tanzil Ahmad, who was shot dead by unidentified assailants in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district, has been given martyr status.

Singh further said that all provisions shall be provided to the family members of Ahmad.

"His family would be given all compensation and the appointment on compassionate ground. The family would be getting the extraordinary pension and all possible compensation has already been confirmed to his family. In addition, the Border Security Force (BSF) has granted Rs. 20 lakh to Ahmad's family," Singh told the media at the last rites of the slain officer.

Tanzil Ahmad, an Assistant Commandant with the BSF, was on deputation with the NIA.
Former home secretary R.K Singh on Sunday described the recent visit of a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) from Pakistan to probe the Pathankot terror attack as eyewash.

"If media reports are true, then it is a very serious matter. It shows that it was just an eye-wash from Pakistan by sending the JIT to India. It also shows that Islamabad is not willing to do anything in this matter," Singh told ANI.

"It also gives strength to our doubt that Pakistan would not do anything, because Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) is a proxy of their army and ISI. Whatever actions take place in India, it takes place on the command of the JeM. The Pakistani Army and the ISI would never want to take any action against its proxy," he added.

He also said that Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not in a position to overrule the army or the ISI.

According to Pakistani media reports, Pakistani investigators were allowed to enter the Indian air force base from narrow adjacent routes instead of the main entrance and the duration of the visit was just 55 minutes, enough to take a mere walk through the military facility.

On Friday, the JIT returned to Pakistan after their five-day visit to India during which all evidence pertaining to the January 2016 attack was shared with them, including the DNA of four terrorists, their identities as well as call records showing involvement of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

The JIT had on Thursday examined 13 witnesses, including former Gurdaspur Superintendent of Police Salwinder Singh.

The Investigation Agency (NIA) handed over some more documents, including DNA reports and call details of the four terrorists killed in the attack, to the JIT.

The NIA handed over to JIT statements of witnesses including doctors who conducted the postmortem, call records of Superintendent of Police Salwinder Singh and his jeweller friend Rajesh Verma, whose phones had been snatched by the terrorists and allegedly used by them to speak to their contacts in Pakistan, serial number of weapons seized, besides forensic and ballistic reports.

Pakistani terrorist attacked the Pathankot Air Force Station, part of the Western Air Command of the Indian Air Force in which four attackers and two security forces personnel were killed in the initial battle, with an additional security force member dying from injuries hours later.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said that he took up the cases of Indians, who were serving sentences for minor offences in Saudi Arabia with King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

" Took up with His Majesty the cases of Indians who are serving sentences for minor offences," he tweeted.

The Prime Minister further said the Saudi Government has agreed to look at the cases sympathetically.

"The Saudi Government has agreed to look at the cases sympathetically & constitute a review mechanism with immediate effect," he said.

According to reports, thousands of Indians are languishing in the prisons of United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia over the past three years for various offences, including violation of national frontiers of these countries.
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday assured that students of Srinagar's Institute of Technology would be protected.

"Spoke to Governor J&K & DGP regarding situation in NIT Srinagar. I assure students that they should not worry about their security," Singh said in a tweet.

He further said that he has instructed Deputy General of Police K. Rajendra to send a team of officers to the institute to assure the students of their safety and security.

Dr. Rajat Gupta, the director of NIT, yesterday assured the students, faculty and parents that the present situation arising out of tensions has been overcome.

The situation in the campus and at the hostels was restored to normal and academic activities would resume on Monday.

The district administration and local authorities had extended their cooperation to bring the situation under control.

All programmes in the institution will take place as scheduled, including the ' Research Scholar Conclave' to be held on April 2 and 3 respectively.

Earlier, tension was simmering in the NIT after India lost the World T20 semi-final to the West Indies on Thursday night.

Some engineering students from outside the state claimed Kashmiri students had chanted anti-India slogans and burst firecrackers after India lost.

To control the situation, officials closed the institute's entrance and did not allow anyone to enter.

The police had to be called in after efforts by the NIT officials to control the situation and disperse the crowd failed. The police baton charged the protestors and fired teargas to bring the situation under control.
Saudi Arabia on Sunday expressed appreciation towards the initiative taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi leading to the formation of International Solar Alliance and acknowledged the importance of this alliance in advancing new solar technologies worldwide.

In a joint statement issued by Prime Minister Modi and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud following their bilateral talks, both leaders emphasized the importance of continued promotion of scientific and technological collaboration, including in the areas of renewable energy including solar, Information and Communication technology, space technology, sustainable development, arid agriculture, desert ecology, urban development, healthcare and bio-technology.

Recognizing the vibrant people to people contacts that provided strong bonds between the two countries, the two leaders also lauded the valuable role of the Indian community in Saudi Arabia and its contribution to the progress and development of both India and Saudi Arabia.

Welcoming the signing of an agreement on labour cooperation for recruitment of General Category Workers, Both sides also agreed to the establishment of a Joint Working Group on Consular issues under the umbrella of the India-Saudi Arabia Joint Commission to discuss consular issues on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, Saudi King Al Saud today accepted Prime Minister Modi's invitation to pay an official visit to India at a mutually convenient time.

In the final call on before his departure, the Prime Minister met the Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud.
Union Minister of Human Resource Development Smriti Irani will address the high level segment of the 'International Conference on the Zero', an event celebrating the rich and remarkable history of mathematics, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 4-5 April.

Irani along with the Director General, UNESCO will also unveil a bronze bust of the ancient Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata, which is a gift from India to UNESCO, as its tribute to the world of Mathematics and Science.

The Government of India, through the Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO, and together with the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, will host the International Conference on the.

The International Conference will share the rich and remarkable history of mathematics, through the participation of some brilliant minds, resonating with the UNESCO's mandate to advance, transfer and share knowledge for the greater global good.

The International Conference in Paris will open on 4th April at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, with a session by Professor Manjul Bhargava, Fields Medalist and Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University on "Gems of Ramanujan and their lasting Impact on Mathematics".

Session two at UNESCO on "Negative Numbers, Zero, Infinity and Beyond" will be addressed by Dr. Shailendra Mehta from Auro University, Gujarat.

There will also be a Panel Discussion on the "Arabic Traditions in Mathematics". Special Session by Professor Manjul Bhargava on "Mathematics in Indian Music" will be a high point of the Conference.

Through the length of the event at UNESCO, there will be visual and interactive sessions, including films on Mathematics and Science, and interactive problem solving events designed for a young audience. In this category, the highlight will be "Zero: Infinity and Set Theory" conducted by Mr. Romain Attal from the Palais de La Decouverte in Paris.

Irani participated in the high level segment, the Leaders' Forum, held at UNESCO Headquarters, Paris on November 16-17, 2015 as a part of the 38th session of the UNESCO General Conference.

During this visit, the Minister also held a meeting with the Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, to discuss the full range of India's cooperation with the organization.

As a follow up to the discussions held during the bilateral meeting, for the first time, both the leaders issued Joint Statement on the occasion of the Mathematics Day, i.e. 22nd December, which is the birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the great Indian intellectual and mathematician.

Both the leaders agreed to organize in 2016 a Conference on "Zero" at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Turns out tanning is your skin's way of trying to protect itself from ultraviolet (UV) radiation, but the increasing pigment blocks vitamin D synthesis, limiting the skin's ability to produce more vitamin D.

A new study from Brazil found that even people exposed to high levels of sunlight may be deficient in serum vitamin D because it is mainly induced by UV irradiation and synthesized in the skin.

Lead author Francisco Bandeira from the University of Pernambuco said that the research showed that, in a large sample of individuals living in a tropical region located 8 degrees south of the equator with very high rates of sun exposure and extremely high UV irradiation, most people had serum vitamin D below 30 nanograms per milliliter, the cutoff for normal.

Bandeira added that the findings suggest that skin tanning, which is a natural protection against the harmful effects of UV irradiation, limits the progressive rise in serum vitamin D towards optimal concentrations.

The team evaluated 986 people between 13 and 82 years of age, with roughly equal numbers of males and females, living in the city of Recife, Brazil. All study participants had high rates of daily sun exposure and did not regularly use sunscreen or take vitamin D supplements.

Although the individuals with greater sun exposure had skin that was more tanned and less vitamin D deficiency than other participants, most of those with very high daily exposure had serum vitamin D levels below the normal cutoff.

The results are presented at ENDO 2016, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, in Boston.
A four-year old girl fell into a 25-feet borewell in Nawabganj area of Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur district on Sunday.

"The girl was coming towards her mother when she fell into the borewell. The army and the MLA have come here. The administration is helping to rescue the girl," said a local.

The victim, Khushi, is still stuck inside the borewell, while the army has launched a rescue operation.

"The rescue operation is going on since 8 a.m. in the morning. The borewell is 25-feet deep. We will soon be able to rescue her," Additional District Magistrate Avinash Singh told ANI.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy on Sunday lashed out at the 'disgraceful' storming of the inner sanctum of the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra by women activists, saying there was nothing democratic about it.

"This is an old custom and we all support that women should be allowed, like men, in all religious places, but the behaviour of trying to provoke an incident, shows that these people (women activists) are not democratic agitators. They seem to have an agenda," Swamy told ANI.

"The proper thing would have been that if these people were objected, they should have quietly gone back, take an appointment with the Chief Minister, say this is what the court has passed, and then, if you (Chief Minister) don't take an action, we would file a contempt petition. This is the orderly way of doing things. But the behavior of those activists yesterday was disgraceful," he added.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said yesterday that no one must disturb law and order for mere publicity but added that there was no place for discrimination in Hindu culture.

Bhumata Brigade leader Trupti Desai, who was on her way for a medical check-up, criticised Fadnavis for saying that the purpose of their movement was to gain attention.

Nearly 100 volunteers of Bhumata Brigade marched towards Shani Shinganapur temple, a day after the Bombay High Court said that prohibiting women from entering places of worship is against fundamental rights bestowed upon them by the Constitution.

The temple attracted attention in November 2015 after a lady offered prayers in "breach" of an age-old practice of prohibiting entry of women.
A total of 18 Armenian soldiers have been killed, 35 wounded in border clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops on the Karabakh conflict zone, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said on Saturday.

During the National Security Council meeting, Sargsyan called Saturday's clash one of large scale since the ceasefire in 1994. "Due to the coordinated defensive actions, Armenian troops managed to take control of the situation," Sargsyan added.

He also called for the need to sign an agreement with Karabakh on mutual military assistance and gave a number of orders to prevent further escalation of the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops, Xinhua reported.

Earlier, the Armenian defence ministry reported that Azerbaijan launched attacks in the Nagorno-Karabakh region along their borders on Friday night, using heavy weapons, tanks and artillery, according to the press service of the Armenian defence ministry on Saturday.

The ministry said the Azerbaijani troops were repelled and sustained serious losses in the counter-attacks by the Armenian side.

According to reports from the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh ministry of defence, two helicopters, three tanks and two unmanned aerial enemy unit were destroyed, with casualties amounting to 200 people.

A 12-year-old was reportedly killed in a missile attack by the Azerbaijani armed forces, and two other children were wounded. On the same day, Azerbaijan's defence ministry dismissed reports of an Azerbaijani helicopter having been downed by Armenian armed forces, as the two countries blamed each other for an escalation of tension along their borders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday urged parties in the conflict to "observe an immediate ceasefire and exercise restraint in order to prevent further casualties," according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a bitter dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh seized by Armenia- backed forces from Azerbaijan in 1991. Peace talks have been held since 1994 when a ceasefire was reached.
Pakistani military killed 252 terrorists over the past two months and cleared more areas in the remote mountainous North Waziristan region in the final phase of the major offensive, it was officially disclosed on Sunday.

Hundreds of troops, backed by fighter jets, have been chasing the remaining militants in Shawal Valley where they are hiding, the Inter-Services Public Relations said in a statement.

"During the last phase of operation in Shawal, 252 terrorists have been killed, and reportedly 160 were severely injured. In the last two months, valiantly fighting in Shawal, eight soldiers of the Pakistan Army embraced shahadat (martyrdom) while 39 injured," the statement said.

The statement issued by the ISPR spokesman said that major terrorist hubs of Mana, Gurbaz, Lataka, Inzarkas and Magrotai have been cleared.

"The battle to clear last pocket close to Pakistan-Afghan border continues. The ongoing operation is being conducted in extremely hostile terrain and harsh weather conditions," the statement said, adding that the Shawal heights were fully covered with snow and visibility was very poor on the mountains.

The security forces have cleared all heights over 9,000 feet, while the terrorist camps were destroyed and huge cache of arms and ammunition was recovered.

"Since the launch of the last phase in February 2016, army troops have been fighting valiantly and have cleared 640 square km of Shawal area," the spokesman said.

During the last phase of Zarb-e-Azb, return of Temporarily Displaced Persons was progressing according to plan, as 37,012 families in North Waziristan Agency -- 36 percent of such persons -- have returned to their homes, the statement added.

Military operation Zarb-e-Azb was launched in North Waziristan nearly two years ago after a brazen militant attack on Karachi's international airport and the failure of peace talks between the government and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan negotiators.

The number of attacks in Pakistan has fallen around 70 percent, due to a combination of the military offensive against Taliban bases along the Afghan border and government initiatives to tackle militancy, recent reports have revealed.
India's Adani Enterprises may soon start work on the mega Carmichael coal project in Australia after securing leases following the final environmental clearance by the government.

Australian Natural Resources and Mines Minister Anthony Lynham approved the grant of three individual mining leases for the $21.7 billion Carmichael coal, mine and rail project, media reports said on Sunday.

The three approved leases are 70441 Carmichael, 70505 Carmichael East and 70506 Carmichael North, which are estimated to contain 11 billion tonnes of thermal coal, theage.com.au reported.

The approvals come after Adani secured final environmental approval and reached an agreement on compensation with a landholder last month.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the approved leases have undergone "extensive government and community scrutiny" and were a step towards securing jobs for the region.

Adani has said that more than 5,000 jobs are expected to be generated during construction and more than 4,000 during operation of the project.

According to the report, Adani's job creation figures had been the subject of debate since last year after revelations in court found the mega mine would create only 1,464 jobs per year, and not the 10,000 figure that was commonly associated with the project.

"I know the people of north and central Queensland will welcome this latest progress for the potential jobs and economic development it brings closer for their communities," said Palaszczuk.

Welcoming the premier's announcement, Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani said: "This final key approval reflects the confidence both sides of politics, at both the national and state level, have in our commitment to delivering major projects that will help drive exports and jobs in Australia, while delivering energy security in India."

An Adani spokesman said that with the leases approved, the company hopes to start construction on the mine sometime next year.

"The granting of a mining lease helps deliver the company certainty with respect to timelines, while moving to the next phase of the project, subject to the resolution of legal challenges by politically-motivated activists," he said.

The spokesman added that the mine's approvals were the "strictest of their kind" for a major Australian resources project.

"It is for this reason that conclusion of second tier approvals and resolution of politically-motivated legal challenges is the company's principal focus, prior to a final investment decision being made," he said.

"Delivering low ash, low sulphur, lower emitting coal to thermal generators in India, while delivering jobs in regions crying out for them, and taxes and royalties to Queensland, is paramount," he said.

First proposed in 2010, the Carmichael project will dig up and transport about 60 million tonnes of coal a year for export, mostly to India.

The mine, which will cover an area seven times the size of Sydney Harbour and includes a railway project, was first approved by the government in 2014.

Last year, the Australian federal government gave fresh approval for the project, but soon faced a fresh legal challenge from an environmental group seeking its cancellation on grounds that it would damage the ecologically sensitive Great Barrier Reef.
The appellate court here has deferred the hearing on a petition of Motiur Rahman Nizami, chief of Bangladesh's largest Islamist party, to review the Supreme Court verdict upholding his death sentence.

After Nizami's counsel pleaded for more time on Sunday, the Appellate Division bench led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha deferred the hearing by a week.

"We pleaded for six weeks, the court gave us one week. The matter will be heard after that," Nizami's lawyer S.M. Shahjahan told bdnews24.com after the hearing.

Nizami, 72-year-old president of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party, filed the petition on March 29 for review of the Supreme Court verdict that confirmed his death penalty for the 1971 war crimes.

In January, the apex court rejected Nizami's appeal to overturn the International Crimes Tribunal's 2014 verdict.

As the head of the Jamaat's student wing Islami Chhatra Sangha in 1971, Nizami commanded the Al-Badr, a militia known for its ruthless mass murders, rape, loot and the killing of Bengali intellectuals in support of Pakistan's campaign to suppress the Bengali freedom struggle.

Review is the last legal recourse for a death-row convict after all other judicial options have been exhausted.

On March 16, the death warrant issued by the tribunal was read out to Nizami after the Supreme Court published the full copy of its verdict on him.

Nizami's case is the sixth of the war crimes cases so far to reach the stage of a review petition after the publication of the full verdict.
A violent brawl erupted outside the community event at the Melbourne Showgrounds on Sunday when a small group of anti-Islam protestors clashed with anti-racism activists.

The fight came as hundreds of people filled Federation Square as a counter protest to the anti-Islamic movement, which was put back in the spotlight when a "stop the mosques" banner was unveiled at the Collingwood AFL game on Friday night, the Australian Age reported.

Multicultural Affairs Minister Robin Scott said everyone had the right to protest, but it had to be peaceful and respectful.

"Violent conduct is completely unacceptable and has no place in our community," he said.

The brawl began in Ascot Vale when about 30 far-left protestors wearing black clothing and balaclavas, believed to be part of the anti-fascist Antifa group, swarmed the far-right protestors, including members of the United Patriots Front, Reclaim Australia and other anti-Halal activists, who had been picketing the Halal expo.
Brussels airport plans to partially reopen on Sunday with new security controls, 12 days after it was attacked by suicide bombers.

Zaventem airport authorities said three Brussels Airlines' flights would depart for European destinations on Sunday.

Zaventem has not handled passenger flights since March 22 attack on its departure hall claimed by the Islamic State militant group, BBC reported.

The attacks on the airport and a Metro station left 34 people killed, out of which 15 were foreigners, one an Indian techie.

In another development, Belgian authorities charged a third suspect -- named only as Y A -- with terrorist offences linked to Paris attacks.

The charges come in the wake of the arrest of Frenchman Reda Kriket in a Paris suburb on 24 March.

Brussels airport chief executive officer Arnaud Feist said that "from Sunday morning, Brussels Airport should be partially operational."

He said he was expecting to receive official authorisation for the reopening later in the day.

The first flight is expected to take off in the early afternoon for the Portuguese city of Faro. The others will be bound for the Greek capital Athens and Turin in Italy.

Passengers will only be able to get to the airport by car or taxi -- the terminal is still closed to trains and buses.

Late on Friday, Belgian officials reached a deal with police unions on enhanced security at the airport.

Feist said he hoped the airport would get back up to full capacity in time for the start of the summer holidays at the end of June.
Actor Sharad Kelkar is not playing any role in the second instalment of the "Baahubali" franchise. However, he is still excited about the film as he will get to dub for actor Prabhas for the Hindi version of "Baahubali: The Conclusion".

Sharad had also dubbed for Prabhas in the Hindi version of "Baahubali: The Beginning".

"I'm really looking forward to start dubbing for 'Baahubali 2'. It was an honour to be part of the first part where I dubbed for Prabhas. It's not every day you get to be part of a project that raked in over Rs.600 crore worldwide," Sharad told IANS.

Sharad, a popular television star, is looking forward to the release of his Telugu debut "Sardaar Gabbar Singh".

"I have fans in Hyderabad and Vishakhapatnam, thanks to the popularity I've gained through my Hindi serials which get dubbed into Telugu. My association with 'Baahubali' has also earned me wide recognition. All this, I hope, will work in my favour ahead of the release of 'Sardaar Gabbar Singh'," he said.

In Bollywood, Sharad awaits the release of the film "Irada", which also stars Arshad Warsi.
Eyeing to make inroads in Uttar Pradesh, the Lok Janshakti Party on Sunday drew up a roadmap for next year's assembly elections and appointed party chief Ram Vilas Paswan's son and MP Chirag Paswan as poll in-charge for the state.

Chirag's appointment was announced by his father, who is also the union food and consumer affairs minister, at the party's meeting in Varanasi, LJP sources told IANS here.

The LJP meeting in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's constituency is considered politically important as Paswan's party, which has its base primarily in Bihar, could ask for seats to contest the 2017 assembly polls as a National Democratic Alliance constituent.

"Paswan is an important Dalit leader and, therefore, the LJP will be useful to take on the Bahujan Samaj Party led by Mayawati," said a LJP source.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which prefers to go alone in Uttar Pradesh, had an understanding with Apna Dal, a caste-based party catering to Kurmi community, in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Speaking on the occasion, Chirag Paswan, who is MP from Bihar's Jamui, hailed Modi as a "matured youth leader" and, in a veiled attack on UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, said a leader is judged as youth or otherwise based on the basis of his thinking and not by mere age, the source said.

He said a leader is judged on the basis of his thinking and not by his age and termed Modi a "genuine youth" of the country who encouraged lakhs of people to rise on their feet by introducing several schemes like Standup India, Startup India and Skill India to cater to youth welfare.
Exposure of common plastic chemical on the developing mammary gland in the womb is likely to spurt the growth of breast cancer in women, reveals a new study.

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a well-known endocrine disruptors chemical found in a variety of food containers, including polycarbonate plastic water bottles and can linings.

It can have numerous adverse health effects in humans and studies have proved that it can cross the placenta in the womb.

"The exposure in the womb to endocrine disruptors such as BPA may be a main factor responsible for the increased incidence of breast cancer in women," said lead researcher Lucia Speroni, research associate at Tufts University in Boston, US.

The findings of the animal study showed that BPA directly affects the mammary gland of mouse embryos.

The change to embryonic mammary tissue occurs at a dose that is comparable to that of humans' environmental exposure to BPA.

The team extracted mammary buds, the early developing form of the mammary gland, from 14-day-old mouse embryos.

They then grew the mammary buds in culture dishes for five days and the investigators observed its development in real time.

The researchers tested various BPA doses and compared the effects with estrogen and found that BPA increased the growth of the mouse mammary bud at doses, which were environmentally relevant.

The researchers also hope to test other hormonally active chemicals that potentially cause breast cancer.

"We now have a way to test the impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on the development of the mouse mammary gland at different doses and obtain results in less than a week," Speroni said.

The results were presented at the ongoing Endocrine Society's 98th annual meeting in Boston.
The Congress on Sunday said it will boycott the swearing-in ceremony of PDP president Mehbooba Mufti as Jammu and chief minister on Monday.

"We will boycott the oath-taking ceremony for two reasons. Firstly because we oppose a government which is ultimately backed by the RSS.

"And secondly, Mehbooba Mufti's grandstanding for three months cost the state," Congress state president G.A. Mir told IANS here.

Mehbooba will head an alliance of her Peoples Democratic Party with the Bharatiya Janata Party, like her late father Mufti Muhammad Sayeed did after the 2014 assembly elections.

Jammu and was put under Governor's Rule on January 8, a day after Sayeed passed away in New Delhi and she had not been keen to succeed him initially.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday said imposition of excise duty on jewellery items will bring back Inspector Raj in the country.

"The excise duty is sought to be introduced without consulting the jewellers. I have written a letter to the prime minister that the government is not going to benefit by this tax. Rather, it will give rise to corruption. The excise inspectors will ask for bribes from the jewellers," Kejriwal said while addressing the protesting jewellers at Jantar Mantar here.

He said he met President Pranab Mukherjee to discuss the issue.

"When the United Progressive Alliance government was in power, Pranab Mukherjee as the then union finance minister had also introduced the same tax in 2012. However, the then Congress-led government had to roll back the tax after resistance from the jewellers. The president also agreed with the view that it will bring the Inspector Raj back in the country," Kejriwal said.

The chief minister said Modi himself had opposed the excise duty on jewellery when he was Gujarat chief minister. "In 2012, Modi also wrote that the excise duty will bring Inspector Raj. But now, as prime minister, Modi has imposed the same tax he opposed as the chief minister. What has changed now?"

Kejriwal said if the central government was so keen on increasing its revenue it should recover the money lent to big corporate houses.

"The banks have failed to recover Rs.7.3 lakh crore lent to 10 big corporate houses in the country. Those businessmen were not even paying any interest. The government will not have to impose unnecessary taxes on the common man if it manages to recover the money," he said.

Taking a dig at Jaitley, the chief minister advised Modi to leave the union finance minister's company.

"Jaitley doesn't have to contest any polls; but Modi ji, you have to face the people again in future. You are more experienced than me, but still I'd advice you to leave his (Jaitley) company or he would land you in trouble," Kejriwal told the gathering.

Lakhs of jewellers across the country have been protesting the budgetary proposal to impose one percent excise duty on non-silver jewellery. Their strike continued for the 33rd day on Sunday.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday said imposition of excise duty on jewellery items will bring back Inspector Raj in the country.

"The excise duty was introduced without consulting the jewellers. The government is not going to benefit with this tax. Rather it will give rise to corruption. The excise inspectors will ask for bribe from the traders," said Kejriwal while addressing the protesting jewellers at Jantar Mantar here on Sunday.

Kejriwal also said he met President Pranab Mukherjee to raise the issue with him.

"Mukherjee also agreed with us that the excise duty will give rise to Inspector Raj. When he was the finance minister in 2012, the UPA government also introduced excise duty on jewellery items but rolled it back in 22 days after facing resistance from jewellers," said Kejriwal. He added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself opposed the excise duty when he was Gujarat chief minister.

Thousands of jewellers across the country have been protesting against the imposition of excise duty since last month.
Three consecutive explosions rocked an industrial zone near the southwestern French city of Bordeaux early Sunday, local media reported.

There were no immediate reports of casualties and damage.

The blasts, along with strong fire, broke out at around 6.40 local time (0440 GMT) in a company specializing in chemical products transportation in the industrial zone in Bassens, near Bordeaux, French radio France Bleu Gironde reported on its Twitter.

Firefighters had already been on the scene to conduct rescue operations, Xinhua news agency reported.

"The situation seems under control," Mayor of Bassens Jean-Pierre Turon told news channel iTele, adding that two firefighters were slight injured in the rescue operations.

The outbreak of a fire may have caused the explosion of two or three tankers filled with gas, he said.
India has secured the release of four Indians arrested in Syria for entering the war-torn nation without valid travel documents.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj welcomed the freed Indians home and expressed gratitude to the Syrian government for their release.

"I had requested Deputy Prime Minister (Walid Al Maoulem) of Syria for their release during his visit to India in January this year. Thank you, Syria," Sushma Swaraj tweeted.

"Welcome home Arun Kumar Saini, Sarvjit Singh, Kuldeep Singh and Joga Singh," the minister wrote on the micro blogging site, adding that she appreciated "the officers who facilitated their journey from Syria to India".

The Syrian government arrested the four Indians on the suspicion of joining the Islamic State terror group after crossing "over from Jordan to Syria".

However, the Indian government in February denied that the arrested Indians wanted to join the Islamist group that rules large parts in Syria and Iraq.

The government in reply to a Rajya Sabha question said the four travelled to Syria without a valid visa and were arrested as "illegal immigrants".

They had gone to Jordan and entered Syria on their way to Lebanon for employment, the government said.
Assuring Saudi and Indian business leaders that his government is working to set up a predictable long-term taxation regime, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said the long-awaited Goods and Services Tax (GST) would soon be implemented in India.

"Don't worry...GST will happen, it will be a reality soon," Modi said, addressing the gathering at Saudi Arabia's Chamber of Commerce here.

"Retrospective tax is a matter of the past. My government will continue to work towards establishment of a predictable long-term taxation regime," he added in a reference to recent disputes involving Indian tax authorities and multinationals like Cairn and Vodafone.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, to implement a pan-India tax for a complete overhaul of the extant indirect tax regime, has been approved by the Lok Sabha.

It is currently stalled in the Rajya Sabha, where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) doesn't enjoy a majority.

The government hopes the next biennial elections in the Rajya Sabha will give it enough seats in the upper house to pass the GST Bill.

Modi, who is undertaking a three-nation tour, landed in Saudi Arabia on Saturday on the last leg.

He urged the audience to move beyond the traditional bilateral trading relationship.

"Let us move beyond merely the export-import relationship. Joint investment, technology transfers are areas that we should explore," Modi said.

Listing petroleum, renewable energy, infrastructure, defence and agriculture, as areas ripe for expanding cooperation, the prime minister said: "India and Saudi Arabia should look at working together for building a dynamic global management sector for the cyber world."

"India and Saudi Arabia are old friends, but we are ready to take bold new steps into a golden future," he added.
The Indian Air Force (IAF) is all set to participate in an advanced aerial combat training exercise 'Red Flag-Alaska' with eight of its frontline fighter jets taking off from the Jamnagar airbase on Sunday all the way to Alaska.

Four Sukhoi 30-MKI fighters and four Jaguars, along with two military transport C17 Globemasters, and two IL 78 mid-air refuellers will represent India at the exercise.

The aircraft fleet is accompanied by around 200-member team, flying to Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska in the US, via Bahrain, Egypt, France, Portugal and Canada, an official said.

India last participated in a similar exercise in 2008, when the joined Red Flag exercise at the Nellis airbase in Nevada, US. The Indian participation at that time cost around Rs 100 crore.

Red Flag-Alaska is a 10-day air combat training exercise of the US Air Force which is held up to four times a year.

It is held at the Eielson and Elmendorf Air Force Bases in Alaska.

The first exercise of this year is set to be held from April 28 to May 13 as per the website of the Eielson Air Force Base.

Originally named 'Cope Thunder', the exercise was moved to the Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska from the Clark Air Base, the Philippines, in 1992 after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991, forced the curtailment of operations.

'Cope Thunder' was re-designated Red Flag-Alaska in 2006.
An Air Arabia Sharjah-Chennai flight made an emergency landing at Goa's Dabolim international airport on Sunday morning after a 70-year-old woman passenger complained of chest pain. The woman later died of cardiac arrest at a private hospital, an official said.

Airport director K.S. Rao told IANS that the plane landed around 4.30 a.m.

"The plane landed here after the pilot reported that a woman passenger was suffering from sudden pain in the chest," Rao said.

A spokesperson for Goa Police said the passenger, Leena Abraham, a resident of Coimbatore, died after suffering a heart attack soon after she was admitted to the casualty ward of the Salgaocar Medical Research Centre after being brought in by an ambulance.
In a reflection of deepening bilateral ties, India and Saudi Arabia on Sunday agreed to further strengthen cooperation in the fight against terror and Prime Minister Narendra Modi assured Saudi and Indian businessmen that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will be rolled out soon.

Modi was also conferred with the Gulf kingdom's highest civilian honour, the King Abdulaziz Sash.

"The two leaders agreed to further strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism, both at the bilateral level and within the multilateral system of the UN," said a joint statement issued after delegation-level talks here led by Modi and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Sunday was the second and final day of Prime Minister Modi's visit to the Gulf kingdom.

"The two leaders called upon the international community to strengthen multilateral regimes to effectively address the challenges posed by terrorism," the statement said.

Both leaders totally rejected "any attempt to link this universal phenomenon to any particular race, religion or culture".

Modi and King Salman called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries and dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist.

Modi and King Salman discussed regional and international issues of mutual interest, including the security situation in West Asia, Middle East and South Asia.

"The two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation to strengthen maritime security in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean regions, vital for the security and prosperity of both countries," the joint statement said.

Modi and King Salman also agreed to promote cooperation in cyber security, including prevention of use of cyber space for terrorism, radicalisation and for disturbing social harmony.

In the field of energy cooperation, both leaders agreed to transform the current buyer-seller relationship to one of deeper partnership focusing on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries, according to the statement.

On bilateral trade, Modi and King Salman expressed satisfaction at the $39 billion trade in 2014-15.

King Salman also lauded the strong growth shown by the Indian economy and expressed appreciation for Modi's remarkable vision for the future of the country.

"He commended Prime Minister Modi's worthy initiatives of 'Startup India', 'Make in India', 'Smart City', and 'Clean India', noting their strong potential to provide Indian economy a positive thrust for growth," the statement said.

Earlier on Sunday, addressing the Saudi Chambers of Commerce, Modi assured Saudi and Indian business leaders that his government was working to set up a predictable long-term taxation regime and said the long-awaited Goods and Services Tax (GST) would soon be implemented in India.

"Don't worry...GST will happen, it will be a reality soon,"he said.

"Retrospective tax is a matter of the past. My government will continue to work towards establishment of a predictable long-term taxation regime," he added.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, to implement a pan-India tax for a complete overhaul of the extant indirect tax regime, has been approved by the Lok Sabha.

It is currently stalled in the Rajya Sabha, where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) doesn't enjoy a majority.

Modu urged the audience to move beyond the traditional bilateral trading relationship.

"Let us move beyond merely the export-import relationship. Joint investment, technology transfers are areas that we should explore," Modi said.

Ahead of Sunday's bilateral talks, Khalid bib Abdul Aziz Al-Falih, Saudi health minister and chairman of Saudi oil major Saudi Aramco, met Modi and said that India was the number one target for investmen for his company.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir also called on the prime minister.

Five agreements were also signed between the two countries, including ones on labour cooperation and sharing intelligence on terror financing and money laundering.

Modi started his second day in Saudi Arabia by visiting the Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) all-women IT centre here.

"I am meeting those professionals who are now the glory of Saudi Arabia," Modi said after he was welcomed with cheers by women at the centre.

"This atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong message to the world."

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.
India and Saudi Arabia on Sunday agreed to further strengthen cooperation in the fight against terror and called upon all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries.

"The two leaders agreed to further strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism, both at the bilateral level and within the multilateral system of the UN," said a joint statement issued after delegation-level talks here led by visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Sunday was the second and final day of Prime Minister Modi's visit to the Gulf kingdom.

"The two leaders called upon the international community to strengthen multilateral regimes to effectively address the challenges posed by terrorism," the statement said.

Both leaders totally rejected "any attempt to link this universal phenomenon to any particular race, religion or culture".

"They called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries; dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist and to cut off any kind of support and financing to the terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states; and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice," the statement said.

Both sides agreed to work together towards the adoption of the India-initiated Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT ) in the UN.

The Indian side was also briefed on Saudi Arabia's initiative in bringing together an Islamic alliance of 34 countries against terrorism .

Acknowledging the strong bilateral security cooperation, the two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation in counter-terrorism operations, intelligence sharing and capacity-building and to strengthen cooperation in law enforcement, anti-money laundering, drug-trafficking and other transnational crimes.

Modi and King Salman discussed regional and international issues of mutual interest, including the security situation in West Asia, Middle East and South Asia, in the light of their common interest in the regional and global peace, security and stability.

"The two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation to strengthen maritime security in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean regions, vital for the security and prosperity of both countries," the joint statement said.

Modi and King Salman also agreed to promote cooperation in cyber security, including prevention of use of cyber space for terrorism, radicalisation and for disturbing social harmony.

In the field of energy cooperation, both leaders agreed to transform the current buyer-seller relationship to one of deeper partnership focusing on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries, according to the statement.

On bilateral trade, Modi and King Salman expressed satisfaction at the $39 billion trade in 2014-15.

"Taking note of the excellent trade and economic engagement, with the two countries being among the top trading partners for each other, the two leaders agreed upon the need to further strengthen these ties, particularly through diversifying non-oil trade," the statement said.

"Both leaders expressed satisfaction at the growing presence of Indian and Saudi companies in each other's market and agreed to further encourage trade promotion measures and participation in fairs and exhibitions," it stated.

King Salman also lauded the strong growth shown by the Indian economy and expressed appreciation for Modi's remarkable vision for the future of the country.

"He commended Prime Minister Modi's worthy initiatives of 'Startup India', 'Make in India', 'Smart City', and 'Clean India', noting their strong potential to provide Indian economy a positive thrust for growth," the statement said.

The Indian side also highlighted the key initiatives taken to improve the ease of doing business in the country and its key efforts to simplify and rationalise existing rules and relax the foreign direct investment norms in key areas, including railways, defence and insurance.

Inviting Saudi Arabia to be a partner in India's growth story, Modi encouraged Saudi Aramco, SABIC and other Saudi companies to invest in the infrastructure sector in India.

Modi invited King Salman to pay an official visit to India at a mutually convenient time, which was gladly accepted, the statement said.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.
Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan reiterated that Iran was not working hand in glove with Indian intelligence agency RAW to stoke instability in Islamabad.

"Iran has nothing to do with the activities of Indian intelligence network. Kite flying regarding arrest of Indian spy and his links with Iran must stop now," he told reporters at a press conference here on Saturday.

The minister said that an impression was being given in a section of media that Iran was involved in certain negative activities against Pakistan, the Daily Times reported.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said some elements wanted to damage positive and historic brotherly relations and create misunderstandings between the two countries.

Nisar Ali Khan said the matter of relations between the two countries must not be linked with arrest of the Indian spy.

"I appeal to media not to create an impression as if Iran is facilitating RAW's activities in Pakistan. Pakistan and Iran are tied in decades-long religious, social, cultural and political bonds and nothing can come in way of our relations," he said.

The issue of arrest of RAW agent was taken up by Pakistan Army chief General Raheel Sharif with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

"There is one concern that RAW is involved in Pakistan, especially in Balochistan, and sometimes also uses the soil of our brother country, Iran," the army chief told the visiting dignitary.

"I request, they should be told to stop these activities and allow Pakistan to achieve stability," the army chief said, according to a release issued by the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) after their meeting.

However, President Hassan Rouhani at a press conference held later in the day denied that the issue of Indian spy agency's involvement in Pakistan was discussed during his meeting with the Pakistani Army chief.

"Whenever Iran comes closer to Pakistan, such rumours are spread," he said.

--Indo-Asian news Service

ksk/vt
Iran has conveyed to Pakistan that it is investigating whether an alleged Indian spy arrested last month in Balochistan crossed the border illegally or was picked up from its soil, the Express Tribune reported on Sunday.

Kulbhushan Jadhav, said to be a RAW agent arrested on March 3, was reportedly deployed in Iran's Chabahar port before crossing into Balochistan to meet some separatist leaders.

Iranian authorities have directly and indirectly conveyed to Pakistan that they are investigating whether or not Jadhav crossed into Pakistan illegally, the daily said.

India, which has already disclaimed Jadhav as a spy, has alleged that the Indian national was picked up from the Iranian soil. It was putting pressure on Tehran to register a case against Pakistani agencies, the daily quoted sources as saying.

India was also seeking to enlist support of the US, Britain and France to convince Iran to go by its claim that Jadhav was kidnapped from the Iranian soil, it said, adding that New Delhi has even threatened Tehran to choose between Pakistan and India, leaving Iran in a quandary.

India was investing billions of rupees in the Special Economic Zone in Chabahar, a port New Delhi has partially built and developed. Lying in the Gulf of Oman, Chabahar port gives India access to Afghanistan and Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan, to conduct trade.

Moreover, India also buys a large share of its oil from Iran.

Pakistan has already handed over evidence regarding Jadhav's arrest to key world powers, including the US and Britain, but they have yet not responded, the daily said.
Activist Medha Patkar, who was on Sunday denied entry into Hyderabad university, said students should lead a wider national movement on various issues.

She said students of various universities and colleges should come together by not only forming a joint action committee but should devise a joint strategy to take up various issues including discrimination in educational institutions on the basis of caste and religion.

She advised students to take up issues like privatisation and corporatisation of education, for free from KG to PG, the Narmada movement, against atrocities on women and other social and economic issues.

Patkar was stopped by security personnel at the main gate of University of Hyderabad as she wanted to enter the campus and address students demanding justice for Rohith Vemula, the Dalit research scholar who committed suicide in January.

Condemning the restrictions imposed on entry of activists, media, academics and others in the campus, she demanded that Vice Chancellor P. Appa Rao be immediately removed for the worst kind of handling of the situation created by action against Vemula and four other Dalit students and for the police brutalities on protesting students on March 22.

She claimed that Vemula's "martyrdom" has given voice to all those facing discrimination and it inspired the students' movement.

Voicing concern over the current unrest in various universities across the country, she said students were only agitated but also ideologically committed as evident from Jawaharlal Nehru Students' Union leader Kanhaiya Kumar's speeches.

She said Kanhaiya Kumar and Vemula in absentia were showing leadership qualities by bringing up their vision.

"They are defining what is justice, rashtrawad (nationalism), freedom and education," she said.

Patkar noted that the message has reached all campuses, whatever may be happening in social media.

She alleged that the situation created at the universities through casteism and communalism was a conspiracy to divert public attention from the real issues of life and livelihood and for the government to continue its agenda of globalisation and handing over of state resources to corporate.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan activist said the rulers through student organisations like ABVP were using caste and communal factors to create divisions within universities.

She said the ABVP could never occupy whole of the students' movement space because "there are radically thinking and ideologically committed students who want true freedom, true development and truly equitable and sustainable society in this country".

Pointing out that the sector was already suffering due to wrong policies and privatisation, commercialisation and corporatisation, she said the new "Brahminist" attitude will aggravate the situation, hitting hard Dalits and other disadvantaged sections of the society.

She said a situation was deliberately created at JNU because the BJP did not like domination of student organisations having Left to central-left ideology.

"There has been many incidents of violence, corruption and sedition but no arrests have taken place. But now when students are agitating, immediate action is being taken because the state wants to add fuel to the fire, instead of resolution of conflicts," she said.

She said Kanhaiya Kumar and other students were arrested and jailed before conducting an inquiry as to what slogans were raised and who raised those slogans.

Asked about the allegation that some students in universities were supporting anti-national activities, Patkar said the BJP, which has an alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, has no right to say this.

On parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, she said many organisations were opposed to death penalty.

"We are against terrorism, against all forms of violence and also against death penalty," she added.
A city court here on Sunday sent top Maoist leaders Bikas Hembram and his wife Tara to 14 days police custody.

Claimed to be once close to now slain rebel chieftain Kishenji, Bikas alias Manasharam Hembram and Tara alias Thakurmani Hembram were arrested on Saturday by the Special Task Force (STF) of the Kolkata police from city's Brigade Parade Ground area.

Charged with several offences, the duo was presented before a city court which remanded them in police custody till April 17.

A state committee member of the banned Communist Party of India-Maoist, Bikas, along with his wife, were involved several acts of violence including the 2010 attack in a Eastern Frontier Rifles (EFR) camp in Silda in West Midnapore district in which 24 paramilitary personnel were killed.

Police also seized a pistol, two magazines, and nine rounds of live cartridges from the duo and based on theit interrogation, raided a hideout in Mogra area in Hooghly district and recovered an AK-47 rifle and Maoist literature from there.
Maoist insurgents on Sunday said they lobbed a grenade at the residence of a medical college professor here to express their disgust with "rampant corruption" in the institute.

The attack on Friday night on the residence of M. Amuba Singh, professor in the department of biochemistry and medical superintendent at the central government-run Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) here, resulted only in some damage to the parked vehicles.

The professor's residence on the campus of RIMS, which is a medical college-cum hospital, is guarded by armed paramilitary personnel.

"There had been corruption in the appointment of nurses. There was also question paper leakage. Though an inquiry committee was instituted, the finding was not made public," said the Maoist Communist Party in a statement, claiming responsibility for the attack.

It blamed RIMS' director S. Rita Devi, deputy director Y. Rajendra Singh and Amuba Singh for the alleged corrupt practices in the instititute.

The Maoists said it was against "rampant corruption" in the RIMS and that its grenade attack should not be seen as an extortion bid.

RIMS sources, however, said the inquiry committee had established that there was nothing wrong in the appointment of the nurses. These new nurses have joined duty.

The employees, including director Rita Devi, on Saturday staged a sit-in protest against the grenade attack in the hospital premises.

"A fear psychosis should not be created among the patients," Rita Devi said.

The institute did get linked with a corruption scandal in 2014 when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered cases against some top administrators for irregularities in procurement of dental chairs.

Following the scandal, S. Sekharjit Singh was relieved of his directorship, and was replaced by Rita Devi.

Given the Maoists' resolve to "purge" the RIMS of the alleged corrupt practices, police told IANS that security measures have been beefed up.

The government is preparing to strengthen the security detail of the director, the medical superintendent and the administrative block.
Actor Martin Freeman, who loves clothes and shoes, says that he likes people who have an affinity for good clothes and immediately tends to trust them.

"I like people who like clothes. I immediately trust men who are into clothes, even though they could turn out to be horrible people. There is an intelligence about caring about what you wear," The Times newspaper's Luxx menswear supplement quoted Freeman as saying, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

"I was always into fashion and, as I've got older, it's got worse. I know there are more important things in the world. Outside my normal life, aside from music, it's where most of my energy goes. I'm not very proud of that. Some people's energy goes on saving Syrian refugees. Mine goes on shoes," he added.

The 44-year-old actor described his fashion addiction as a "sickness", and shared that it infuriates his partner of 16 years, Amanda Abbington.

"I can't leave the house unless I'm happy with my appearance. It's a sickness. It's a nightmare for Amanda," he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on Sunday, the second and final day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia, accorded an official welcome by King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

King Salman received Modi and his delegation at the Royal Court here.

The Saudi monarch is hosting a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister.

This will be followed by delegation-level talks and signing of agreements between the two sides.

Fighting terrorism, energy cooperation and trade and investment are high on the agenda in Sunday's talks.

Apart from being India's largest crude oil supplier, accounting for one-fifth of the imports, Saudi Arabia is also India's fourth largest trading partner with bilateral trade reaching $40 billion.

There are nearly three million Indians in Saudi Arabia, a large number of whom are blue collar workers involved in the Gulf kingdom's various infrastructure projects.

Earlier on Sunday, Modi visited the Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) all-women IT centre here and then addressed the Saudi Chambers of Commerce.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

Modi leave will leave for New Delhi on Sunday evening.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday described an all-women IT centre set up by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) here as the "glory of Saudi Arabia".

"I am meeting those professionals who are now the glory of Saudi Arabia," said Modi in the first engagement of the second and last day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

"This atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong reply to the world."

Modi was welcomed with cheers by the employees as he entered the centre.

Some of them took selfies with the prime minister.

The centre, opened three years back, initially had 80 people. The number has now grown to over 1,000.

Eighty percent of the employees are local Saudi women.

It is also the first BPO to be opened by any company in the world in Saudi Arabia and the significance is more so because it is run entirely by women.

Over 60 percent of graduates in Saudi Arabia are women.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Saudi kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

Modi will be accorded a ceremonial welcome on Sunday afternoon at the Royal Court here by King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who will also host a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister.

This will be followed by delegation-level talks and the signing of agreements.

During the course of Modi's visit, ties between India and Saudi Arabia are expected to be further elevated from the current strategic partnership to a more broad-based one.

The prime minister will leave for India late Sunday afternoon.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi left here for New Delhi on Sunday evening at the conclusion of his two-day bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

During delegation-level talks earlier on Sunday, India and Saudi Arabia agreed to strengthen cooperation in the fight against terrorism and boost bilateral trade.

During his stay here, Modi also interacted with members of the three million-strong expatriate Indian community, including blue collar workers involved in the Gulf kingdom's infrastructure sector.

Saudi Arabia was the third and last leg of Modi's five-day foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. In Washington, he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This was the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.
Saudi Aramco, the world's leading oil producing company with around 10 million barrels per day output, is looking at India as its number one target for investment. This was conveyed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by Saudi Aramco head Khalid Al Falih during their meeting here.

"Minister Al Falih to PM: @Saudi_Aramco looks to India as its No. 1 target for investment," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup with a picture of their meeting on Sunday.

The Dhahran-based company, which owns a stake in a refinery in China's Fujian province along with Exxon Mobil Corp. and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, was reported to be planning to establish a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund by offloading a stake of less than 5 percent in the company.

The $2 trillion fund, estimated to be more than double Norway's wealth fund, is reported to be used for investments in strategic financial and industrial assets abroad.

Saudi Arabia has been badly hit by a plunge in oil prices - from $114 a barrel in June 2014 to currently around $38 a barrel - over the last few years, which has pummeled its economy heavily dependent on oil.
Nepal's intelligence agency, the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB), has arrested a person accused in the 1995 murder here of an Italian national.

A gang of 13 men, led by Tashi Gurung, had killed Carraro David at the Thamel-based Reggae pub following a dispute after they harassed his girl friend on October 13, 1995, The Kathmandu Post reported.

Police on Sunday said Gurung -- who holds a US Green Card and had been on the run -- was arrested a week ago from Kathmandu. He came back to Kathmandu around three years ago.

"The members of Tashi's gang had been absconding following David's murder," said CIB Chief Director Inspector General Nawa Raj Silwal.

"As many as eight accused are still on the run," he said.

It was found that Tashi had flown to the US one-and-half years after the incident.

The number of Italian tourists dropped sharply following David's murder as the incident sent a bad impression about Nepal in that country.
Uttar Pradesh Police are working "on all angles" to find out the motive behind the killing of NIA officer Tanzil Ahmad, who was shot 21 times in an attack by unidentified assailants post-midnight on Saturday.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh, in Lucknow, assured that the death will be probed while NIA spokesperson Sanjeev Kumar said in Delhi that Ahmad was a "martyr".

The shooting in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district took place when the officer, an assistant commandant in the Border Security Force (BSF) and currently on deputation with NIA as an inspector since 2010, was returning from a wedding with his wife and children. His wife Farzana received four bullet injuries, but his children were unharmed.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh, speaking on the sidelines of a function in Lucknow, assured that the murder will be probed.

"I have spoken to the officers concerned. Our teams have gone there to probe the matter and they will submit a comprehensive report very soon," he said.

The officer was laid to rest with full state honours in Shaheen Bagh area of south Delhi.

"He is a martyr," Kumar said referring to Ahmad.

"He will be given all dues that is given to someone killed in service," Kumar told IANS.

An official statement issued by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) called it a "great loss".

"Tanzil Ahmed was an asset to the agency. His killing is a great loss to NIA. We take it as a challenge to bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. We will not rest until that happens," the statement said.

"The assailants came on motorbikes and opened fire from a close range on Ahmad near Sahaspur town," Sanjeev Kumar told reporters here earlier Sunday.

Ahmad's wife who also received bullet injuries is undergoing treatment at Fortis Hospital in Noida. A neighbour meanwhile said that the children escaped unharmed because Ahmad instructed them to hide under the seat when the firing started.

Uttar Pradesh's Additional Director General of Police Daljit Chowdhary, meanwhile, said it appeared as a planned attack, and the police was working out on all angles.

"Nothing can be ruled out now until and unless we get absolute concrete evidence. We have to work on all angles. We have to see it from all the sides and work out the case," he said, adding the borders had been sealed, nearby areas were searched and senior officials from Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) have been put on the job to track the assailants and probe the attack.

"I am very hopeful that we will work out the case and arrest the accused. It looks like a planned attack. It was definitely not a robbery," Chowdhary said.

The NIA has also termed Ahmad's killing as a "planned attack".

"A planned attack took place on him when he was fired upon and killed," Kumar said.

The premier investigating agency is trying to find out how he was tracked by his assailants.

Doctors at Fortis Noida, where Ahmad's wife is being treated, meanwhile said she is being given the best treatment.

"The patient has been brought in a critical condition. Our doctors are providing the best medical treatment to treat the patient. As a matter of patient confidentiality we cannot comment anything further," a statement from the Fortis Noida said.

Ahmad was pronounced dead on being taken to a medical facility in Moradabad.

Before joining the NIA, Ahmad was part of the in-house team of BSF, providing vigilance cover. He also held tenures as instructor at BSF Academy at Tekanpur, near Gwalior, and training centre at Hazaribagh.
A man was killed in a bomb blast in Al Kharj area near here, the Saudi Interior Ministry said on Sunday.

The blast targeted a police vehicle in the region on Saturday night, the ministry's spokesperson was quoted by Saudi Press Agency as saying.

The explosion left two other patrol vehicles damaged. The nationality of the victim was yet unknown.

Saturday's blast was the latest in a string of bombings the kingdom has been witnessing since last year.

All the previous blasts were planned by the Islamic State group through its sleeper cells in the country.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday, the second and final day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia, gifted King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud a gold-plated replica of the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kerala.

Situated in Thrissur district, the Cheraman Juma Masjid is believed to be the first mosque built in India by Arab traders around 629 AD, and symbolic of active trade relations between India and Saudi Arabia since ancient times, an official statement about the gift said.

According to oral tradition, Cheraman Perumal was the Chera king and a contemporary of the Holy Prophet who went to Arabia and embraced Islam after meeting the Holy Prophet at Makkah.

Some years later, he sent letters to his relatives and the ruling chieftains of Malabar through his friends Malik bin Dinar and Malik bin Habib who, along with their companions, were then given permission by the local rulers to build the mosque at Kodungallur.

The mosque has an ancient oil lamp that is always kept burning and is believed to be over a thousand years old. People from all religions bring oil for the lamp as an offering.

King Salman on Sunday received Modi and his delegation at the Royal Court here.

"A truly Royal welcome. PM @narendramodi is welcomed by His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at the Palace," external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

The Saudi monarch is hosting a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister. This will be followed by delegation-level talks and signing of agreements.

Modi will leave for New Delhi on Sunday evening.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday described an all-women IT centre set up by India's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) here as the "glory of Saudi Arabia".

"I am meeting those professionals who are now the glory of Saudi Arabia," said Modi in the first engagement of the second and last day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

"This atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong message to the world."

Modi said that in today's competitive world "we have to unite our strengths, both natural and human, for optimum progress".

He said that when women power becomes part of the development journey, it gathers fresh momentum.

The prime minister said that the atmosphere he witnessed at the all-women's centre on Sunday appeared to be a harbinger of a positive force for the world.

He invited the women IT professionals to visit India, and said their visit would make a huge impact even in India.

Modi emphasised the role of technology in governance, and said e-governance, for him, meant easy governance, effective governance, and economic governance.

He invited them to see the "Narendra Modi App" and even share their views on women empowerment in India.

"Vande Mataram. Matri Devo Bhavah (Salutations to Mother. Mother be the god)" wrote the prime minister on the message board at the centre.

Earlier, Modi was welcomed with cheers by the employees as he entered the centre.

Some of them took selfies with the prime minister.

The centre, opened three years back, initially had 80 people. The number has now grown to over 1,000.

Eighty percent of the employees are local Saudi women.

It is also the first BPO to be opened by any company in the world in Saudi Arabia and the significance is more so because it is run entirely by women.

Over 60 percent of graduates in Saudi Arabia are women.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Saudi kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

The prime minister will leave for India on Sunday evening after talks with Saudi King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and signing of agreements between the two sides.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, now on a visit to Saudi Arabia, will on Tuesday launch a scheme to promote entrepreneurship among the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes and women with loans in the range of Rs.10 lakh to Rs.100 lakh, official sources said here.

Named the "Stand up India Scheme", the prime minister will launch it and a web portal for it on Tuesday in suburban Noida.

The function will be also attended by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, union Minister for Culture and Tourism Mahesh Sharma and union Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, among others, and Uttar Pradesh Governor Ram Naik.

"The scheme is expected to benefit large number of entrepreneurs, as it is intended to facilitate at least two such projects per bank branch of scheduled commercial banks on an average, one for each category of entrepreneur," an official said.

The scheme will also facilitate refinance window through Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) with an initial amount of Rs.10,000 crore, the official announcement said.

The overall intent of the proposal is to leverage the institutional credit structure to reach out to these under-served sectors of the population by facilitating bank loans in the non-farm sector, sources said.

The prime minister on August 15, 2014, launched the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) for Banking for the Unbanked scheme.

Similarly, Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) was launched by Modi on April 8, 2015 for "Funding the Unfunded" by facilitating loans up to Rs.10 lakh.
A policeman was critically injured when he was fired at by separatist guerrillas on Sunday in Pulwama district of Kashmir.

"A head constable of police identified as Muhammad Shafi was injured when militants fired at police in Muran Chowk," a senior police official told IANS here.

"The injured policeman has been shifted to hospital for treatment," the official said.

The area has been cordoned off and the police was searching for the militants.
With "Baahubali: The Beginning" continuing its success story by winning a National Film Award, actor Prabhas has been urged to pay a visit by some theatre owners who are still running the movie.

The movie has won the Best Feature Film at the 63rd National Film Awards, and Prabhas is overwhelmed.

He was also pleasantly surprised to receive special requests from the managements and owners of many theaters across India, who are still running the film in a matinee show. The owners have written to the actor, asking for his visit to the theatre, said a source close to the actor.

Prabhas shared: "Appreciation pouring in after so many months of the release of 'Baahubali' is an overwhelming feeling. Theatre owners are an important part of the industry and their acknowledgement means a lot."

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Tawang monastery on Shahid's mind

Actor Shahid Kapoor, who has recently finished a gruelling shooting schedule for "Rangoon" in Arunachal Pradesh, is keen to visit the famous Tawang monastery in the state.

On his first visit to Arunachal Pradesh, Shahid was awestruck by the beauty and the nature of the state. However, because of the extensive shoot and the schedule, Shahid couldn't get a chance to visit the monastery.

"Shahid is mesmerised with the beauty of the state and he loved every bit of it. The schedule was tight and so he hasn't got a chance to explore the state well," said his spokesperson.

However, once the film's shoot is over, he plans to take some time out and visit the place.

Shahid has already begun the film's next shoot in Mumbai. The actor has gone through an extensive look journey for his character in "Rangoon".

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Kabir Khan shares comfortable working bond with Salman

Director Kabir Khan, who has delivered blockbusters like "Ek Tha Tiger" and "Bajrangi Bhaijaan" with superstar Salman Khan, says he shares a comfortable working relationship with the actor.

"I share a comfortable working relationship with Salman. Moreover, after two major hits, I am definitely going to make another movie with him. However, right now I cannot tell if it will be my next film or not," Kabir said here.

He also disclosed that apart from Salman, he is teaming up with another star, Hrithik Roshan. Kabir is working on the final draft of the script.

"We are discussing with Hrithik for another project. As soon I will be finishing my script, we will be working on that."

The "Kabul Express" director thinks that though a story is considered as a backbone of a film, it does not get much importance.

"I am sure there are some great writers out there but they do not get good opportunities. While a story should be a backbone of a film, unfortunately, scripts are not given much weightage. Also in terms of money, it does not make sense while you are making Rs.50 crore film, and paying a writer only Rs.25 lakh."

However, the director feels there is a shortage of good scripts at a time when directors are turning into scriptwriters.

"I don't get a good script to make a movie. I have to write my own script and it takes three to four months to finish the story. Someday I hope to get a script which I feel like making a movie immediately after reading. However, that has not happened until now."
President Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday extended his greetings and to the West African nation of Senegal ahead of their National Day, which is on Monday.

President Mukherjee, in a message to Senegalese counterpart Macky Sall, wished him on behalf of people of India and noted how the engagement between Indian and Senegal has "expanded steadily in recent years", particularly in the areas of trade and development cooperation.

"Your participation in the Third India-Africa Forum Summit held recently in New Delhi, provided a valuable opportunity for us to discuss ways to further strengthen our multi-faceted engagements. I am confident that our close and friendly cooperation will continue to expand and deepen in the years ahead," Mukherjee said.

Senegal, a former French colony, became independent on April 4, 1960.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Sunday, the second and last day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

"Last month in Delhi, now in Riyadh. Saudi FM @AdelAlJubeir calls on PM @narendramodi before the ceremonial welcome," external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted along with pictures of the two leaders.

Jubeir had come to New Delhi early last month as part of the preparations for the prime ministerial visit and held meetings with Modi as well as External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

Modi will be accorded a ceremonial welcome on Sunday afternoon at the Royal Court here by King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who will also host a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister.

There will be a restricted meeting between Modi and King Salman followed by delegation-level talks and the signing of agreements.

The Saudi crown prince and deputy crown prince are also scheduled to call on the prime minister.

During the course of Modi's visit, ties between India and Saudi Arabia are expected to be elevated from the current strategic partnership to a more broad-based one.

Earlier on Sunday, Modi visited the Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) all-women IT centre here and then addressed the Saudi Chambers of Commerce.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

Modi leave will leave for New Delhi on Sunday evening.
The Saudi-led Arab coalition on Sunday launched fresh airstrikes against several military bases controlled by Al Qaeda militants in Yemen's southeastern province of Hadramout, a security official told Xinhua.

"More than five Saudi-led airstrikes targeted the Air Defence Base, the Coast Guards base and other military camps controlled by Al Qaeda members near the port city of Mukalla, the provincial capital of Hadramout," the local security official said on condition of anonymity.

"The fresh air bombings hit Al Qaeda positions in the eastern parts of Mukalla, leaving dozens of terrorists killed and injured and at the scene," the local source said.

Meanwhile, local residents confirmed to Xinhua that Saudi-led fighter jets struck the presidential compound held by Al Qaeda members in Mukalla.

However, a government official based in Hadramout said that there is no information yet whether the strikes were launched by warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition or by US drones.

The Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) seized the coastal city of Mukalla and used several government compounds and military bases as training centres for new recruits.

Yemen, an impoverished Arab country, has been gripped by one of the most active regional Al Qaeda insurgencies in the Middle East.

The AQAP, also known locally as Ansar al-Sharia, emerged in January 2009. It had claimed responsibility for a number of attacks on Yemen's army and government institutions.

It took advantage of the current security vacuum and the ongoing civil war to expand its influence in Yemen's southern regions.

Security in Yemen has deteriorated since March 2015, when war broke out between the Shiite Houthi group, supported by former President Ali Abdullash Saleh, and the government backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition.

More than 6,000 people have been killed in ground battles and airstrikes since then, half of them civilians.
Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani will address an international conference on the concept of 'zero' at the Unesco headquarters in Paris, officials said on Sunday.

The event is being organised by the HRD ministry through the permanent delegation of India to Unesco, in collaboration with the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, on April 4-5.

The high-level segment of the conference would be addressed by Irani and Unesco Director General Irina Bokova on April 5.

"The conference will share the rich and remarkable history of mathematics, through the participation of some brilliant minds, resonating with the Unesco's mandate to advance, transfer and share knowledge for the greater global good," an official said.

The conference would open on April 4 at Pierre and Marie Curie University with a session on "Gems of Ramanujan and their lasting impact on mathematics" by professor Manjul Bhargava from Princeton University in the US.

The second session on "Negative numbers, zero, infinity and beyond" will be addressed by Shailendra Mehta from Auro University in Gujarat.

A special session by Bhargava on "Mathematics in Indian music" will be a high point of the conference," the official said.

The event will close with the unveiling of a bronze bust by Irani and Bokova of the ancient Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata, which is a gift from India to Unesco.
Sri Lanka looks forward to further strengthening its relations with China when Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe undertakes an official visit to the communist country next week, a statement released by his office said here on Sunday.

Wickremesinghe will be leaving for a state visit to China on April 6. This will be his first visit to the country as the prime minister since the government of President Maithripala Sirisena was formed in January last year, Xinhua reported..

The statement said that high-level discussions to be held during the visit are expected to take the China-Sri Lanka relations to a new level.

"Undertaken with a view of strengthening the relations between China and Sri Lanka, this visit is expected to promote co-operation mechanisms between the two countries in the spheres of economic affairs, investment and technology," the statement said.

"It is also expected to bolster cooperation in science, sports, tourism development, financial services and water resources management along with initiation of mobile clinics for kidney patients."
China's meteorological authority on Sunday continued to issue a blue alert, the lowest in a four-tier warning system, as rainstorms will hit most parts of the country's southern regions.

Parts of Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang provinces and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region will see torrential rains, strong winds or hail on Sunday, the National Meteorological Centre (NMC) said.

The rainfall is expected to reach 50 to 90 mm in the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan and Fujian, Xinhua news agency quoted the NMC as saying.

The NMC suggested people affected by the rainstorms take precautions against possible mountain torrents, mud-rock flows and landslides and avoid outdoor activities.

China has a four-tier colour-coded warning system for severe weather, with red being the most serious, followed by orange, yellow and blue.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra MOdi has said strengthening the strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia was a priority of India.

"Building further on this strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia is one of the foreign policy priorities of our government," Arab News quoted Modi as saying in an interview on Saturday.

Modi's visit to Saudi Arabia is a part of his three nations tour which also include Brussels and Washington.

Modi, who is on a two-day visit to Saudi Arabia, has described Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud as a visionary leader.

"King Salman has led Saudi Arabia with great maturity and foresightedness during one of the most challenging times," Modi said.

King Salman has taken personal interest in building the Indo-Saudi relationship and further strengthening bilateral cooperation and engagements in diverse fields, he said.

Replying to a question, Modi termed terrorism as the enemy of the entire humanity. "Both India and Saudi Arabia have been victims of the acts of terror resulting in the loss of innocent lives. The recent cowardly acts of terror in Lahore, Brussels, Paris, Iraq and the continuing violence in Afghanistan have shown that terrorists recognise no boundaries."

"They have no caste, colour, creed or religion. We need to delink religion from terrorism."

Modi acknowledged and appreciated Saudi Arabia's role in eradicating the scourge of terrorism. "We deeply appreciate the leadership role being played by Saudi Arabia in the region to fight this menace," he said.

Modi thanked the Saudi leadership for hosting a large Indian community and for ensuring their continued welfare and wellbeing.

"I have heard immense praise of our community for their educational and technical achievement; for their integrity and sense of discipline; and for their honesty and devotion to work. Such praise fills me with great pride," he said.
Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester confirmed on Sunday that another piece of debris, found in Mauritius, will be examined in connection to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Chester said the Malaysian government was working with officials from Mauritius "to seek custody of the debris and arrange for its examination".

"This debris is an item of interest. However, till the debris has been examined by experts, it is not possible to ascertain its origin," Xinhua reported Chester as saying.

He did not mention whether or when the suspected piece of debris would be sent to Australia for examination.

Since the beginning of the year, a number of such pieces were found along the eastern coast of the African continent, including along the coasts in Mozambique and South Africa.

Experts in Australia have confirmed that the two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were "consistent" with panels from a Boeing 777 jetliner, and, therefore, these are "almost certainly" from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Last year, a flaperon washed up on a beach on La Reunion island off Africa has also been confirmed to be from the aircraft.

"That such debris has been found on the east coast of Africa is consistent with drift modelling performed by CSIRO (the Commonwealth of Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) and further affirms our search efforts in the southern Indian Ocean," Chester said last month when talking about the two Mozambique pieces.

The governments of Malaysia, Australia and China have been conducting a joint search operation in the southern Indian Ocean, where the flight presumably had ended its journey.

So far, more than 95,000 square km of the 120,000 square km search zone have been completed.

"As we continue the search in the days and months ahead, we remain hopeful the aircraft will be found," Chester said.

The Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, soon after take off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board.
A piece of debris thought to be from the Malaysian airliner that went missing more than two years ago over the Indian Ocean has been found in the island nation of Mauritius, media reported on Sunday.

The debris suspected to be from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people on board, was found on Thursday on the coast of Rodrigues Island, an employee of the Mourouk Ebony Hotel, where the debris was stored for safekeeping, told CNN.

Jean Josie Milazare said two hotel guests, Jean Dominique and Suzy Vitry, from La Reunion, found a piece of debris on the beach. Milazare said police now have the debris.

Mauritius, a volcanic island nation in the Indian Ocean that is a bit over 10 times the size of Washington, is known for its beaches, lagoons and reefs. It lies about 700 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.

Debris thought to be from MH370 was found on Reunion, an island southwest of Mauritius, last July. And another piece of debris thought to be from the missing airliner was found on a sandbar off Mozambique in February.

Dan O'Malley, a spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said Australian authorities were aware of the debris found on Rodrigues Island, but he expected Malaysian authorities to take the lead in the investigation.
The Syrian army on Sunday fully captured a key city in the central province of Homs near the ancient city of Palmyra, following intense battles against the Islamic State (IS) militant group.

The Syrian forces backed by Russian warplanes stormed the city of Qaryatain from a number of directions, a day after Syria's boots on the ground stormed areas in the western parts of that key city, Xinhua newds agency reported.

A military source said that the army's entry into Qaryatain came after the bomb squads dismantled explosive devices and other booby-traps the IS terrorists had planted to thwart the advance of the Syrian army.

On Saturday, the Syrian forces unleashed a wide-scale offensive on the city, which has succeeded in breaking through the IS defences in the western part of that predominantly-Christian city.

The Russian warplanes are playing a significant role in helping retake Qaryatain, the source added.

The military campaign to reclaim Qaryatain came less than a week after the Syrian army captured Palmyra, which had been held by the IS for 10 months.

Meanwhile, the state news agency SANA said the Syrian air force struck the IS positions in the eastern and southern parts of the city.

Qaryatain is the last IS stronghold near the mountainous region of Qalamoun, north of Damascus and close to the Lebanese borders.

The IS militants who withdrew from Palmyra have holed up in Qaryatain, 85 km southeast of Homs.

The city is strategically important due to its proximity to the Syrian city of Qara, a stronghold of the Hezbollah Shia group, which is fighting alongside the Syrian army in key battlefields in the country.
The Syrian army on Sunday stormed a key city in the central province of Homs near the ancient city of Palmyra, following intense battles against the Islamic State (IS) militant group, a military source said.

The Syrian forces backed by Russian warplanes stormed the city of Qaryatain from different directions, a day after Syria's boots on the ground stormed areas in the western parts of that key city, Xinhua quoted the source as saying.

The source said that the army's entry into Qaryatain came after the bomb squads dismantled explosive devices and other booby-traps the IS terrorists had planted to thwart the advance of the Syrian army.

"The military offensive is ongoing till fully recapturing Qaryatain," the source said.

On Saturday, the Syrian forces unleashed a wide-scale offensive on the city, which has succeeded in breaking through the IS defences in the western part of that predominantly-Christian city.

The Russian warplanes are playing a significant role in helping retake Qaryatain, the source added.

The military campaign to reclaim Qaryatain came less than a week after the Syrian army captured Palmyra, which had been held also by the IS for 10 months.

Meanwhile, the state news agency SANA said the Syrian air force struck the IS positions in the eastern and southern parts of the city.

Qaryatain is the last IS stronghold near the mountainous region of Qalamoun, north of Damascus and close to the Lebanese borders.

The IS militants who withdrew from Palmyra have holed up in Qaryatain, 85 km southeast of Homs.

The city is strategically important due to its proximity to the Syrian city of Qara, a stronghold of the Hezbollah Shia group, which is fighting alongside the Syrian army in key battlefields in the country.
Representatives from Thailand, Egypt, South Africa, Bangladesh and Myanmar and traders from 15 Indian states will showcase their products at the first Manipur Industrial Expo 2016 that begins near the state capital on MOnday.

Officials told IANS that the commerce and industries department shall organise the event along with the ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), Indian Chamber of Commerce, International Chamber for Service Industry.

The industrial expo at Lamboikhongnangkhong near Imphal will conclude on April 10.

Besides, the North Eastern ASEAN Business Summit will be held at the City Convention Centre in Imphal from March 7 to 9, said chief secretary Oinam Nabakishore.

"The theme of the expo is 'Make in Manipur for Employment Generation' and there will be a good chance to showcase handloom and handicraft products," state Commerce and Industries Minister Govindas Konthoujam said.

Nabakishore said representatives from countries like Thailand, Egypt, South Africa, Bangladesh and Myanmar "shall be coming to showcase their products during the expo. Besides 15 states shall participate in it".

There will be 650 stalls, of which 90 will be for food items.

Nabakishore said the North Eastern ASEAN Business Summit "will go a long way in promoting industry".

The Jewel Queen fashion show will be held on the last day of the expo.

MANIDCO, an agency of the Manipur government, was looking into the infrastructure for the expo.

However, critics said Manipur was "ill-prepared" for hosting such an international event.

Reports in the media said preparations were slow, and much work remained to be completed after being hit by heavy downpour.

The weather forecast says there will be rain and hailstorms on the inaugural day of the expo.
Azerbaijan on Sunday unilaterally ordered ceasefire in the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azerbaijani defence ministry said.

"In response to persistent addresses from international organisations and as a result of the country's peace policies, Azerbaijan's armed forces unilaterally suspended the counter-attacks and response measures against the enemy in the occupied territories," Xinhua quoted a defence ministry statement as saying.

If the Armenian side continues "the provocative actions and fire on settlements and on positions of the Azerbaijani army, the forces will continue attack operations to liberate the territories", the statement said.

On Saturday, the parties to the Karabakh conflict accused each other of violating truce along the front line. The claims came from defence authorities of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan are in conflict since the late 1980s because of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory that had been part of Azerbaijan before the breakup of the Soviet Union but was mainly populated by Armenians.
A US school teacher accused of calling at class 7 student a terrorist during a class discussion on India has been sent on leave following a demand for her ouster from the student's family.

The student, Waleed Abushaaban, who is of Middle Eastern descent, stood and gave his input regarding the subject matter.

According to students, the teacher told him to sit down and referred to him as a terrorist. Some students then laughed and threw themselves to the floor screaming: "He's got a bomb!".

Abushaaban left the classroom and called his father.

Standing in agreement with the family, Minister Quanell X has asked for cultural sensitivity training to be implemented and for the removal of that particular teacher.

Earlier, the Abushaaban family demanded that the teacher should be fired, and the school removed the English and Language Arts teacher from the classroom while it investigates the incident. However, Waleed's family want her permanently dismissed.

"Just because my son is a Muslim doesn't mean he is a terrorist," said Malek Abushaaban, Waleed's father. "He's an American. He's as American as anybody else. He was born here... that's all he knows is how to be an American."

The Abushaaban family says Waleed will stay enrolled at First Colony Middle School and, in addition to firing the teacher in question, would like religious sensitivity training for both students and teachers.
For the first time in India's judicial history, a judgment has dealt head-on with the highly complex issue of Competition Act vs Patent Act. The judgment by a single judge bench of Vibhu Bakhru, in the case of Ericsson vs Micromax and Ericsson vs Intex, has clearly demarcated the boundaries between the Competition Act, 2002, and the Patents Act, 1970.
Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union President Kanhaiya Kumar's visit to Pune later this month is causing some flutter in Maharashtra's political circles. After accepting an invitation from a students' group in the city, Kumar called for unity against "forces like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha to safeguard the Constitution". The Bharatiya Janata Party and its students' wing outfit, ABVP, have warned Kumar from entering colleges in Pune, saying his visit would be countered with a strong mobilisation of their members. While the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party have extended their support to Kumar, the All India Students' Federation, of which he is a leader, has said it does not want any representatives from either of the two parties on the dais when he speaks.
With reference to T N Ninan's piece, "An illiberal democracy", the issue facing the country isn't but liberalism. If India never had a truly liberal system, no other country, too, can claim to be perfect in this respect.

Regarding the Centre putting forward a formal proposition that criticism of the nation should not be permitted, this could simply mean that the nation is supreme and above the aspirations of all individuals and groups and with no affinity to any political ideology.

The writer is too harsh on the present government. However, with respect to Uttarakhand, former chief minister Harish Rawat has none to blame but himself for being unable to rein in dissident legislative Assembly members in his own party, the Congress. To top it all, Rawat was caught on the wrong side in a sting operation conducted by a television news channel. That the entire issue, including the dismissal of his government, is sub judice is another matter altogether.

I differ with the writer's observation that "shouting a slogan has been made a test of one's nationalism". In all fairness, raising slogans against the motherland can't be taken lightly, as it indicates shady intentions.

Allowing dubious or inflammatory sloganeering under freedom of speech could mark the beginning of a deep-seated conspiracy against the country.

What does the writer have to say about the frequent incidents of some youth hoisting the Pakistan flag in Jammu and Kashmir? Does he support them? Would he want to "redefine" nationalism in his own way as they have done?





S Kumar New Delhi

can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:The Editor, Business StandardNehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar MargNew Delhi 110 002Fax: (011) 23720201E-mail: letters@bsmail.in
A land acquisition row of 1945 vintage from West Bengal reached the Supreme Court last month and there remains just one legal question, which has to be decided finally. Since there are conflicting decisions of the court, the problem has been referred to a larger bench to be set up by the Chief Justice. The curtain will fall only after the legal question is settled and the principle is applied to the case.
The collapse of an under-construction flyover in the highly congested Burra Bazar area of Kolkata, killing 27 people, has highlighted the hurdles in the way of building new infrastructure capacity not just in West Bengal but in all of India. The tragedy comes at a particularly sensitive juncture when India, led by a very active and peripatetic prime minister, is seeking global investment for building both its infrastructure and its productive capacity. Given that a trillion dollar-plus infrastructure gap has to be financed, and that various methods of implementing this infrastructure plan are being discussed at the moment, it is vital to dispassionately judge what has gone wrong in this case - and to identify the more general malaise. But the surcharged political atmosphere in West Bengal, which is currently in the midst of assembly elections, has led to all political parties engaging in a blame game. A final call should only be taken when all the facts are known.
When might consider letting the oil price rise? Plans to list its state-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco might offer a clue. Mohammed bin Salman - the influential deputy crown prince and driving force behind Aramco's initial public offering - has now said the sale of a small chunk of the company could happen as early as 2017. Although investors would probably pile into such a rare asset anyway, it's reasonable to think the kingdom's rulers would prefer to stage a sale when the oil price is higher than it is today.

Aramco can produce over 12 million barrels per day of crude and has exclusive access to 18 per cent of the world's oil reserves. Its valuation still depends in large part on energy prices, which Saudi as the swing producer heavily influences. Listing even less than five per cent in the company when prices are hovering near 10-year lows makes little sense, especially if Aramco is to be the cornerstone of a new $2-trillion sovereign wealth fund, as the prince told Bloomberg on March 31.

Saudi's rulers have given no indication of giving up the price war. The prince said that Riyadh would only agree to participate in a coordinated production freeze if Iran also played ball. That's unlikely to happen. So it leaves unable to cut its production without also losing market share - and leaves the oil price stuck in the doldrums.

But the pain of losing market share might be overstated. Saudi's own demand for oil used in power generation and transport is growing at a rapid clip. Aramco expects domestic demand to reach eight million barrels per day by 2030, almost equal to 80 per cent of current output. Instead of worrying about losing access to customers overseas, the kingdom's bigger problem by then might be supplying enough for the home market. If the Aramco initial public offering really is on course for 2017, and Saudi takes a rational approach to getting a good deal, the outlook for oil just got better.
RIGHTFUL HERITAGE

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America

Douglas Brinkley

Harper/HarperCollins Publishers

744 pages; $35



Franklin D Roosevelt was many great things: the US' greatest economic president, pulling the United States out of the Depression; greatest foreign policy president, leading the country to victory during World War II. But he was something else, too: the greatest environmental president, leaving a larger mark on the warp and weft of the American landscape, for good and ill, than any chief executive, before or since.
There is Koffee with Karan, a celebrity chat show on television; then there is Prime Minister Narendra Modi's chai pe charcha. Now, Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh has launched "Coffee with Captain", an interactive forum. The idea is to offer people an opportunity to interact with Singh, who will answer their questions and share his ideas over a cup of coffee. In the first edition of the forum held last week, Singh interacted with students from the state. While the Bharatiya Janata Party was quick to dub the forum a copy of its programme in the run-up to the 2014 general elections, the Aam Aadmi Party said it was a strategy to divert people's attention from the income-tax probe into Swiss bank accounts allegedly belonging to Singh's son.
Pune has become renowned for its strongly-entrenched information technology (IT) culture, and this has led to the rapid growth of IT-centric precincts in and around the city, with a direct correlation to demand for . The Hinjewadi IT Park has been a particularly strong growth generator for certain precincts. While Aundh was the first area to gain significantly from the IT boom in Pune, its development potential diminished rapidly under the onslaught of a relentless spate of projects. Prices also stopped appreciating. Soon, the limelight shifted and neighbouring Wakad has become one of the new high-interest investment locations for mid-income housing on the city's western periphery.

Located in the highly-developed PCMC area, Wakad has a host of positive market drivers to keep its market vibrant. With proximity to the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and the thriving IT hub of Hinjewadi, as well as accessibility from the PCMC industrial area, Wakad now attracts end users in the age group of 30-40 years.

Residential property prices in Wakad are currently range Rs 5,500-6,300/sq ft, and a host of developers such as Kalpataru, Rohan, Kolte-Patil, Pristine, Kasturi and Javdekar are catering to the demand for homes from the mid-income segment. Wakad has seen annualised appreciation of 15-18 per cent and continues to benefit from demand drivers such as good civic infrastructure and vast improvements in connectivity to the city's key pockets.

While the absence of social infrastructure and a shortfall in public transport still provide a negative contrast, demand for housing in Wakad has been overtaking supply and prices have soared. Benefiting from the spill-over demand from Wakad, adjoining areas like Tathawade, Punawale, Ravet and Rahatani are also gaining momentum.

Wakad offers great connectivity to the industrial pockets of Chakan, PCMC and Talegaon. The key industries which have witnessed consistent and accelerating growth in Wakad and other key parts of Western Pune are IT, education and manufacturing. The demand for housing is driven by both the local industries and investors from Mumbai who are purchasing residential housing in this corridor.

The writer is managing director, Pune, JLL India
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), led by Parkash Singh Badal and son Sukhbir, was in a dilemma a year before the 2012 Assembly elections in Punjab. The Akalis had ruled Punjab since 2007 but no party had ever returned to power for a second spell since Punjab was created as a Sikh majority state in 1966. The Badals mulled whether they should flirt with their sectarian "panthic" agenda, the politics of Sikh religious identity or focus on development.

The predicament faces the Badals yet again. Five years earlier, they'd defeated anti-incumbency by opening the government's purse strings - pumping money into rural areas. With elections to the state Assembly barely 10 months away, and the Akalis faced with not only a resurgent Congress but the increasingly visible Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as well, the Badals have plumped for their tried and tested strategy to arrest the 10-year anti-incumbency amid allegations of having run a corrupt government.

The strategy involves wooing their predominantly rural Sikh-Jat-peasant support base by announcing a slew of promises. By taking strict action against radical Sikh groups for holding a Sarbat Khalsa and the events in the aftermath of the "desecration" of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Akalis have continued with their non-panthic secular politics.

Last September, they had also supported a pardon for Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim by the Akal Takht, the highest temporal body of the Sikhs. He had angered Sikhs by appearing in an initiation ceremony wearing clothes associated with Guru Gobind Singh, which had led to violence in several parts of Haryana and Punjab. This acceptance of apology and pardon to the godman has kept the party attractive to Dalit Sikhs. Its non-sectarian agenda has also allowed its Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ally to remain credible among its core support base of urban Hindu-Khatris-traders.

Rural rot

However, the biggest push by the SAD-BJP government to repair its image has come in the agrarian sector. The peasantry in Punjab faces a crisis. In the Budget session of Parliament, junior Agriculture Minister Mohanbhai Kundariya stated in a written reply that Punjab had the second highest number of farmer suicides in 2015, after Maharashtra, 449 against 720, respectively. Other states on this list are Telangana, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Barring Punjab, all the others have featured regularly on the list of states with the highest number of farm suicides. The suicides were attributed to the presence of large unirrigated area, poor response to cultivation of cash crops and the traditional systems of farming.

Punjab, known as the country's grain bowl, with 80 per cent of its land under irrigation, is a surprise inclusion. Two consecutive drought years, interspersed with unseasonal rain and pest attacks, a rapidly falling water table, falling farm export and near-stagnant minimum support price (MSP) growth in paddy and wheat, and overall slump in farm commodity prices seem to have broken the back of India's grain country.

So much so that farmers in Punjab and also adjoining Haryana, perhaps for the first time, sold a variety of basmati rice (PUSA 1509) to the Food Corporation of India for the Public Distribution System (PDS). The price of PB 1509 crashed from Rs 4,500 a quintal to a mere Rs 1,700 a quintal, despite a fall in sown area.

Even the usually robust kinnow farms in Punjab were not spared. There were reports that in the past two years, farmers uprooted kinnow orchards as prices remained static while input costs kept climbing. The state had around 42,795 hectares under the citrus fruit.

All this points to a systemic failure in Punjab's rural hinterland. With agriculture and farming the backbone of the state's economy, and one with national repercussions, the ruling SAD-BJP government is expectedly rattled, with elections scheduled for early 2017.

There have been numerous peasant protests for higher compensation for damaged crops. Allegations of corruption have flown thick and fast. In the whitefly episode, when hectares and hectares of farmland in the state were wiped out in days, fingers were pointed at the state administration for failing to control the spurious pesticide mafia, which not only gave farmers wrong instructions about effectiveness of the chemicals but also lulled them into complacency. The Rs 1,700-crore scam claimed the head of the state's agriculture director, Mangal Singh Sandhu.

A friendly government at the Centre after years of acrimony with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was of little assistance. The Narendra Modi government's push for ill-thought amendments to the Land Acquisition Act and low MSPs nailed the perception of both the Centre and state government being pro-rich.

PUNJAB 2016-17 BUDGET FOR FARMERS Interest-free crop loan of Rs 50,000 per crop to small and marginal farmers having landholding up to five acres

Bhagat Puran Singh Sehat Bima Yojna to provide insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh to a farmer family in case of death or disability of head of the family and the family will also be entitled to free medical facility up to Rs 50,000 per year; approximately 1.1 million farmers to be benefitted

Provident Fund-cum-Pension Scheme for farmers to provide secure and stable income

Kisan Vikas Chamber in Mohali district to bridge the gap between farmers and policymakers, and to redress their problems

Abolish VAT on raw honey and bee-keeping equipment, which currently attract tax rate of 6.05 per cent. Pig feed, which attracts tax rate of 6.05 per cent, is proposed to be exempted from VAT

To showcase the innovative initiatives of farmers and to motivate others, Punjab to start suitable awards PUNJAB 2016-17 BUDGET FOR WOMEN Swasth Kanya Yojna: Provide free school bags containing stationery items to girl students. Bags will contain benefit eligibility card, showing benefits being provided to girls under various schemes

Special women safety initiatives like extensive patrolling and a new women safety app-Shakti

Mai Bhago Women Empowerment Scheme to provide loan at subsidised rate of five per cent per annum to women members to establish small business enterprises PUNJAB 2016-17 BUDGET FOR YOUTH Unemployment allowance of Rs 1,000 per month

Free sports kits to youth

Interest-free education loan up to Rs 5 lakh for the duration of the course to the economically weaker

In recent months, the Badals have attempted to change this perception and reach out to its peasant support base. The state Assembly passed a contentious Bill that paved the way for returning of land acquired from farmers in the 1960s and 1970s for the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) Canal to the original owners. This meant the canal would need to be filled, leading to massive repercussions in neighbouring Haryana and in Delhi. The Badal government was unrelenting. Intervention by the high court and formation of a high-powered committee might have put the lid on the issue for the time being, but the message has been conveyed.

Then, the state government passed the "Punjab Settlement of Agricultural Indebtedness Bill", which not only provided for a one-time settlement for debt-related disputes of farmers with arhtiyas (commission agents) but also created a comprehensive mechanism to the district level through which farm debt could be settled. The Act empowered the state government to fix a maximum rate which non-institutional creditors (moneylenders and arhtiyas in this case) could charge from debtors. The Act covers non-institutional debt of up to Rs 15 lakh and only those taken for agricultural purposes. The state government, in one stroke, has tried to address the big issue of growing indebtedness in rural Punjab, singularly blamed for several of the farm suicides.

A survey on indebtedness among farmers and farm labour in rural Punjab, done for the Indian Council for Social Science Research sometime earlier, had pegged the debt on state's farmers at Rs 69,355 crore. Other estimates put the figure at a little over Rs 36,000 crore, including Rs 12,000 crore of non-institutional loan advance given by arhtiyas.

According to reports, the Punjab government is also planning to raise of the compensation to be given to cotton farmers for the damage to their standing crop in 2015. The state has asked officials to go to the fields to assess damage to the standing rabi wheat and mustard crops from the recent rains, though the intensity of showers this year was much less than in 2015.

Punjab is also among the first states to start implementing Prime Minister Modi's pet crop insurance scheme, though 80 per cent of its farmland is under irrigation and crop loss due to water shortage or drought is among the lowest in the country.

The SAD-BJP government's 2016-17 Budget is devoted to the welfare of farmers and rural youth. Among the measures are a Rs 5-lakh insurance cover with annual free medical facility of up to Rs 50,000, interest-free crop loan of Rs 30,000 to small and marginal farmers, a provident fund-cum-pension scheme for farmers, Rs 1,000 monthly allowance to 100,000 youths for vocational training and allocating money for creating "smart villages".

Competing populism, cynical voters

These sops have become par for the course in Punjab politics in the past decade and a half. In 2002, the Congress led by Amarinder Singh defeated the incumbent Akalis with the promise of free electricity to farmers and removal of octroi. The Congress manifesto committee was, then, chaired by Manmohan Singh. However, after coming to power the Congress government backtracked on its electoral promises and announced a number of initiatives towards reform, including imposing electricity rates on agriculture. The party did poorly in Punjab in the 2004 Lok Sabha Elections.

When it went into the 2007 Assembly elections, Manmohan Singh, the then prime minister, opposed some of the sops that Amarinder said should be announced. The Akalis, however, outdid the Congress by not only promising free electricity but also atta at Rs 4 a kg and pulses at Rs 20. Incidentally, it was the Amarinder-led Congress government that had ensured passage of the Punjab Termination of Agreement Act of 2004 on the SYL canal. The Akalis beat anti-incumbency to return to power in 2012 on the back of constructing canals and delivering several other sops.

Observers of Punjab politics say the state has entered into a non-ideological phase, with the relationship between its politicians and voters being increasingly transactional, more than anywhere else in India. This also stems from a deep cynicism for the political class. "Chitte bagule, neele more, eh vee chor te oh vee chor", is a saying from the 1970s still popular in rural Punjab. In English it loosely translates as cranes are white and peacocks are blue but all politicians are thieves. In Punjab politics, traditionally Congress workers and leaders tie a white or sky-blue headgear, while the Akalis wear a deep-blue one.

According to Pramod Kumar, who heads the Chandigarh-based Institute for Development and Communication, the situation in Punjab is fluid, with all three contestants - SAD, Congress and AAP - changing their responses from one event to another. And, each such new event suggests somehow one or the other party has become more acceptable to the public. The "events" of the past 12 months include holding of a Sarbat Khalsa, "desecration" of the Guru Granth Sahib and the consequent by-poll to Khadoor Sahib, farmers' protests over crop damage and finally the SYL canal controversy.

"This phenomenon is being witnessed because none of the major political players has any ideological heft. Since people no longer connect with these political parties, they have been wise enough to hire event managers to connect with the people," Kumar says.

It would seem the Akalis, with the reins of government in their hands, are trying to make the best of what looks like an uphill electoral battle, by assuaging their rural support base. They have done it before in 2012 but against a Congress plagued by infighting. This time they have to contend with not only a more united Congress but also the formidable freshness of the AAP.
A city court today remanded two top Maoist leaders, who were arrested yesterday, in 14-days' police custody.

Bikash alias Manasram Hembramand his wife Tara alias Thakurmoni Bancharam were sent to police custody till April 17 by Metropolitan Magistrate 18th Court Eden Lamasaa.

The two, reportedly close to slain Maoist leader Kishenji, were arrested from the city by a Special Task Force of Kolkata Police yesterday ahead of the first phase of Bengal Assembly polls on April 4.

Both of them have been charged under IPC sections 120 (Punishment of criminal conspiracy), 120(B); 121, 121A, 122, 123 and under the Arms Act.

One 7.6 mm pistol, two magazines, nine rounds of live ammunition and letters written in tribal language were seized from them during a raid at the couple's rented accommodation at Chaparui village in Hooghly district yesterday.

Bikash was the Secretary of the so-called "West Bengal state military Maoist Commission" and also member of other wings of the Maoist groups and Police were looking for him for a long time.
Over 250 have been killed in Pakistan in army operations in the last two months along the porous Pak-Afghan border, the military said.

"The battle to clear the last pocket close to the Pak-Afghan border continues," the Inter-Services Public Relations said, adding that all heights over 9,000 feet have been cleared.

"Major terrorist hubs" in Mana, Gurbaz, Lataka, Inzarkas and Magrotai areas have been cleared of militants, it added.

"Terrorists' hideouts were destroyed, a cache of arms and ammunition recovered and there was virtually no communications infrastructure remaining in the Shawal area once the operation was launched in Feb this year," Dawn quoted the statement as saying.

Hundreds of troops, backed by fighter jets, have been chasing the remaining in Shawal Valley where they are hiding, the statement said.

The have been killed under the Zarb-i-Azb military operation which was launched in North Waziristan nearly two years ago after a brazen militant attack on Karachi's airport and the failure of peace talks between the government and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan negotiators.

The operation entered its last phase in February this year.

"During the last phase of operation in Shawal, 252 terrorists have been killed, and reportedly 160 were severely injured. In the last two months, valiantly fighting in Shawal, eight soldiers of the Pakistan Army embraced shahadat (martyrdom) while 39 injured," the statement said.

"Since the launch of the last phase in February 2016, army troops have been fighting valiantly and have cleared 640 square km of Shawal area," it said.

During the last phase of Zarb-e-Azb, return of Temporarily Displaced Persons was progressing according to plan, as 37,012 families in North Waziristan Agency -- 36% of such persons -- have returned to their homes, the statement added.
Sporadic fighting between Azeri and Armenian forces was reported today, a day after Russia and the West appealed for calm following clashes that killed some 30 troops in the worst violence in decades over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region.

Both sides said there had been intermittent clashes overnight and today as well, accusing each other of using heavy weapons, tanks and artillery and of pulling the trigger first.

"Armenian armed forces violated the ceasefire 130 times during the night. They were shooting from mortars, grenade launchers, and large-calibre machine guns," Azerbaijan's defence ministry said in a statement.

"The shelling was carried out from both Armenian territory and from Armenian-occupied Karabakh," the statement said. "The Azerbaijani army returned fire."



Armenian defence ministry spokesman, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, told AFP that "fighting continued this morning in the southern direction of the (Karabakh) frontline."



"Azerbaijanis are attempting to attack but are being repelled," he said. "The situation is tense, but there is no panic."



The Armenian-backed rebel defence ministry in Karabakh meanwhile said that "Azerbaijan renewed shelling its positions this morning from rocket-propelled artillery and tanks."



Fierce clashes left at least 18 Armenian and 12 Azerbaijani soldiers dead yesterday and reportedly claimed the lives of two civilians after both sides accused each other of attacking with heavy weaponry across the volatile frontline.

Armenia's President Serzh Sarkisian called the clashes the "largest-scale hostilities" since a 1994 truce ended a war in which Armenian-backed fighters seized the territory from Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan said one of its helicopters was shot down as its forces took control of several strategic heights and a village in Armenian-controlled territory, but Yerevan denied Baku had made any advances.

Both Russia and the West appealed to all sides to show restraint, with key regional power broker President Vladimir Putin calling for an "immediate ceasefire".

US Secretary of State John Kerry urged the arch foes to return to peace talks under the auspices of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), reiterating "there is no military solution to the conflict".

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meanwhile vowed to back traditional ally Azerbaijan "to the end" in the conflict.

"We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties," he said, blasting the longstanding failure of the Minsk Group -- which spearheads efforts by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to find peace -- to resolve the conflict.
BSF today seized 3.5 kg of heroin smuggled from Pakistan having street value of Rs 17.5 crore near Uddhar Dhariwal border outpost here.

BSF DIG Punjab Frontier R S Kataria said suspicious movement was observed ahead of border security fence Border Out Post Uddhar Dhariwal shortly past midnight.

A search operation was carried by BSF troops and they recovered four packets weighing 3.5 kg of the contraband near the fence, he said.

The drug consignment was smuggled to India from Pakistan, Kataria said



Meanwhile, police in Phagwara arrested a drug peddler and seized 255 gram of heroin, with street value of Rs 1.25 crore, from him.

Accused identified as Satinder was arrested during a routine checking near Maheru village here last night.

A case under relevant sections of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, was registered against accused.
A three-year-old child in the UK has been probed by the police for allegedly sexually abusing other children, according to a media report today.

Police launched the investigation after allegations emerged that the child took part in sexual activity with two other children.

The two other children were aged five and seven. Durham Police were the force that interviewed the child, Telegraph reported.

A study recently reported a raft of cases that involved children being quizzed by police officers regarding illegal sexual activity with other children.

The number of cases has doubled in just three years. In 2015, 1,047 children were interviewed by police regarding illegal sexual activity, the report said.

"They're getting distorted ideas from images online or, tragically, because they've been abused themselves." said Barnardo's chief executive Javed Khan.

Former police officer Jim Gamble who runs child protection firm said, "I suspect the figures are the tip of an iceberg".

"Children are now at risk not only from online predators and street grooming gangs but from other children too," Gamble said.

In addition to the three-year-old in Durham, children under five were identified as suspects by three other forces - West Yorkshire, South Wales and West Mercia.

South Yorkshire Police, which investigated the Rotherham child grooming scandal in which an estimated 1,400 children were sexually abused over 16 years, had the biggest number of investigations into illegal sexual activity between children in 2015, with 172.
(AOL) Foundation has moved the Green Tribunal seeking its nod to accept the fine, slapped for allegedly damaging Yamuna's biodiversity, as bank guarantee instead of payment of balance amount.

The tribunal had refused to prohibit the 'World Culture Festival' held between March 11 and 13, but slapped a fine of Rs 5 crore on the foundation for damaging biodiversity of Yamuna.

On March 11, AOL moved a plea seeking four weeks time for depositing the amount after which the tribunal allowed the foundation to deposit Rs 25 lakh on that day and granted three weeks time period to pay the balance amount.

"The applicant submits that the present application is being filed for modification of the order dated March 9 and March 11 to allow for submission for security by way of a bank guarantee in lieu of payment of balance amount as directed, the plea said.

AOL has also sought to submit a proposal for laying down methodology for collection of scientific data regarding assessment of actual environmental damage and requested the tribunal to grant 45 days for the same.

Recently, Manoj Mishra of Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan filed a review plea challenging the NGT order which had dismissed his petition on the ground of "delay and laches on the part of the applicant in approaching the tribunal".
is believed to be seeking legal opinion over punishment to a few students in connection with an event against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti- slogans were allegedly raised.

According to sources, the Chief Proctor's office is seeking legal opinion on the quantum of punishment to the students in connection with the controversial February 9 event. If the authorities decide to press ahead with penal action against the students, it is likely to kick off a fresh round of protests.

While the university panel probing the issue had submitted its report on March 11, the varsity is yet to take a final call on the issue.

"It is a sensitive issue and the university doesn't intend to be unfair to anybody. Keeping the discipline norms in mind the quantum of punishment will be decided but it has to be made sure first that the penalty should be legally justified," sources said.

After a high-level committee of the university found them "guilty" of "violating university norms and discipline rules", show-cause notices were issued to 21 students on March 14, asking them to explain why disciplinary action should not be initiated against them.

The students had earlier refused to depose before the probe committee, demanding that the enquiry be started afresh.

The varsity, however, turned down the demand and maintained that the students will be given three chances to appear before the disciplinary committee and, if they fail to do so, the panel will finalise its recommendations on the basis of evidence available, eyewitness accounts, students' deposition, if any, and other material available on hand.

The students, who had refused to accept the findings of the probe panel, had sent "token" replies to the administration saying they cannot respond to "undefined" charges.

The administration had also communicated to the students that if they do not reply to the show-cause notice, "it will be assumed that they did not have anything to say in the matter and the office will proceed further in the matter".

The report of the five-member panel has pointed at lapses on part of the students as well as the administration. However, no explanation has been sought from any of the administrative officials.
AIADMK workers, including women, today staged a black flag demonstration against DMDK leader Premalatha near here for her reported remarks against the state government and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa.

They also organised a 'road roko' agitation in front of the hotel where she was staying but police pacified and asked them to disperse.

Later, Premalatha told reporters she had only highlighted the government's failure to implement its poll promises during her election meetings and never made any personal attacks.

Condemning the protest by AIADMK, CPI(M) which is People's Welfare Front (PWF) constituent, said the AIADMK had protested against Premalatha as it was "unable to tolerate" her critical remarks against the AIADMK government made at a meeting in Salem on Saturday.

"This is against democratic politics and poll code. It is a violent attempt at preventing opposition campaign," CPI(M) State Secretary G Ramakrishnan said in a statement at Chennai.

He urged the state police and Election Commission to take action on this matter.

PWF, whose other constituents are MDMK, CPI and VCK, has inked a poll pact with Vijayakant's DMDK, alloting it 124 of the 234 Assembly seats in Tamil Nadu for the May 16 polls.

Meanwhile, police said a case has been registered against DMDK MLA Mohanraj and 40 other activists for conducting a meeting here beyond the specified time of 9 PM yesterday.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has digitised all the decided cases for safekeeping for posterity.

Chairman of Computer Committee Justice Rajesh Bindal said this while speaking at a regional discussion regarding the e-courts project at the Chandigarh Judicial Academy (CJA) here.

The discussion was presided over by Justice Madan B Lokur, of the Supreme Court and In-charge, e-Committee, SC, an official release said.

"The e-committee, Supreme Court, in consultation with the Central government, had introduced the computerisation project 'e-courts Phase-I' with a total outlay of Rs 900 crore to computerise the subordinate courts across the country to facilitate litigants and advocates," Justice Lokur said.

The e-courts Phase-I project culminated in the National Judicial Data Grid, on which till date, 2.3 crore pending cases and 2.7 crore decided cases are available.

The e-committee has extended the e-Court programme to Phase-II with a total outlay of Rs 1,670 crore, out of which a sum of Rs 200 crore was released for the purchase of hardware in 2015-16, he said.

Elaborating various citizen-centric services introduced by the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Justice Rajesh Bindal said that the digitisation exercise had resulted in scanning of 15.90 crore pages and disposal of 225 tonnes of waste papers, which generated a revenue of Rs 22 lakh and freed valuable space of 15,000 square feet.

He said that the court had also prepared e-Filing and e-Diary software for the convenience of litigants and advocates, who could file cases online from the comfort of their home.

An advocate can save his case and browse the case information real time along with judgement and orders passed by the courts using this feature, he said.

Digitisation of court records has allowed sharing of soft files with the Advocate General's Office, Union of India counsel and other departments, thereby enhancing quality of assistance offered by government counsel, he added.

Also, a demonstration of e-Filing module which enables the advocates and litigants to file cases online round-the-clock as per their convenience from their home by paying court fee online was also held.

This e-Filing software is likely to be launched for general public in August, 2016.

Discussions were also held on introduction of solar energy



in district and subordinate courts and implementation of improved version of Case Information System.

Dissemination of information regarding cases through SMS, e-mail services, display boards and kiosks installed in courts was discussed and recommended to be implemented at all levels.

The categorisation of cases, as carried out by the Punjab and Haryana High Court to facilitate expeditious disposal of cases pertaining to senior citizens and crime against women, was also discussed at the meeting.

Those present included judges heading the computer committees of four high courts, including Justice Arun Palli and Justice Amit Rawal from Punjab and Haryana, Justice Tashi Rabstan from Jammu and Kashmir, Justice Dharam Chand Chaudhary and Justice Tarlok Singh Chauhan from Himachal Pradesh and Justice V S Siradhana from Rajasthan, among others.
Apollo Sugar, a JV between healthcare major Apollo Hospitals and global drug major Sanofi, plans to open 30 clinics in five new cities in the country during the current fiscal.

At present, Apollo Sugar has 44 clinics providing diabetes care in 17 cities.

"We plan to open 30 clinics in five new cities in the current fiscal," Apollo Sugar Clinics CEO Gagan Bhalla told PTI.

The cities that the company is looking at are Gwalior, Kanpur, Cuttack, Vijayawada and Coimbatore, he added.

"The focus now is to expand our presence in tier-II cities to provide quality diabetes care. Right now, we are present in metros and other big cities," Bhalla said.

When asked about the company's plans to fund the expansion, Bhalla said: "It will be done through internal accruals and the capital that is already available with Apollo Sugar."



The specialty diabetes chain is looking at setting up smaller clinics going forward.

"We plan to open more number of smaller clinics as with them we can reach more and more people expanding our reach. It is also capital efficient," Bhalla said.

Going forward, the government has to play a more proactive role preferably in the PPP mode to tackle diabetes in the country. As per the International Diabetes Federation, there were 69.1 million cases of diabetes in India in 2015 which are bound to grow, he added.

Apollo Sugar has clinics in 17 cities including Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Indore, Pune, Tiruchirappalli, Raipur, Mysore, Visakhapatnam and Madurai.

Apollo Sugar Clinics is a part of Apollo Health & Lifestyle Ltd, retail healthcare arm of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise.
The Army Medical Corps (AMC), which has also been extending service to civilians during disasters and natural calamities, today celebrated its 252nd anniversary at the headquarters of Northern Command in Udhampur.

"The Corps has come a long way from its modest beginning as the 'Bengal Medical Service' on January 1, 1764, to become a comprehensive medical service in the country providing health services to the servicemen, veterans and their dependents," an army spokesman said.

The Bengal Presidency Medical Service, which was the first of the military service of the three Presidencies in India, was established on January 1, 1764.

The Indian Army Medical Corps (IAMC) came into existence on April 3, 1943 by the amalgamation of the Indian Medical Service (IMS), Indian Medical Department (IMD) and Indian Hospital Corps (IHC).

After independence, IAMS was rechristened as Army Medical Corps.

The then President of India Dr S Radhakrishnan had presented the Presidential Standards to AMC on its raising day on April 3, 1966, he said.

"The corps has a glorious history of serving the Indian Armed Forces in war and peace as well as in missions abroad. The Army Medical Corps is known for its dedication and professionalism," he said.

He said that the Corps has been in the forefront of rendering yeoman service to the citizens during disasters and natural calamities as also extending medical care through "Operation Sadbhavana' in the remote areas of Jammu and Kashmir.

The motto of the AMC is 'Sarve Santu Niramaya (may all be free from disease and disability).

"Dedicated to the primary role of maintaining the medical fitness of the service personnel to the highest levels at all times, be it during peace or war, AMC has always performed with utmost professionalism and ardor in a wide spectrum of hostile terrains within the country and without," he said.

Armed with a strength of about 13,200 doctors, dentists and nursing staff and more than a lakh paramedics and civilians spread across the length and breadth of the country, the 'healers' are also adequately equipped to provide some of the best medical services in this region of the world, the spokesman said.

On the occasion, Lt Gen DS Hooda, GOC-in-C (Army Commander) Northern Command, appreciated the services rendered by AMC in looking after troops and their families.
Syrian troops today seized the key Islamic State group bastion of Al-Qaryatain, dealing the jihadists a new blow in the country's centre a week after expelling them from Palmyra, state television said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group however said fighting was still raging in the east and southeast of the town, which is located in the desert in Homs province.

"The army with backing from supporting forces (pro-regime militia) brings back complete security and stability to the town of Al-Qaryatain, after crushing Daesh terrorists' last remaining positions there," state television said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

But the Britain-based Observatory said the army was still fighting the jihadists in about half the town.

"Clashes are still ongoing in the east and southeast of the town," it said.

The advance came after the Russian-backed Syrian army dealt IS a major blow on March 27 by seizing the ancient city of Palmyra, known as the "Pearl of the desert", from the jihadists.

Al-Qaryatain is located some 120 kilometres southwest of Palmyra.

Its recapture will allow the army to secure its grip over the ancient city, where jihadists destroyed ancient temples and executed 280 people during their 10-month rule.

Once Al-Qaryatain returns to government control, "of the whole of Homs province, IS will only hold its bastion in Sukhna" northeast of Palmyra, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

"The recapture of Al-Qaryatain will also allow the army to reclaim the whole of the Syrian desert" spreading all the way south to the Iraqi border, Abdel Rahman added.

A ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia but which does not apply to the fight against jihadists has enabled the Syrian army to focus on efforts to crush IS.
Australia opposes Donald Trump's suggestion that Japan and South Korea should develop nuclear weapons since this would "add considerably" to the risk of regional conflict, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said today.

The Republican presidential front-runner had declared he would withdraw US troops from both countries and allow them to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

But Turnbull said regional power Australia, a US ally, was "opposed to the further proliferation of nuclear weapons".

"That is absolutely not the view of Australia," the prime minister told Sky News of Trump's nuclear policy comments.

"We would not support, in fact we would strenuously oppose, I think, as a global community, the further proliferation of nuclear weapons.

"Clearly... It would add considerably to tensions and the risk of conflict in the region."



South Korea and Japan last week offered muted reactions to Trump's comments. There are nearly 30,000 US troops permanently stationed in South Korea and 47,000 in Japan, with little appetite for nuclear weapons in either nations.

The White House on Friday said Trump's policy would shatter doctrine held for decades with "catastrophic" consequences.

Turnbull in February unveiled a major new investment in Australia's defence capabilities.
Australia's transport minister said new debris found on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius would be examined to see if it belonged to MH370, just weeks after two Mozambique fragments were linked to the missing flight.

The debris was found on the Mauritius island of Rodrigues by a vacationing couple, news.Com.Au reported citing Reunion island website Clicanoo.

"The Malaysian government is working with officials from Mauritius to seek to take custody of the debris and arrange for its examination," Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester said.

"This debris is an item of interest however until the debris has been examined by experts it is not possible to ascertain its origin."



However, it remains unclear which country would examine the debris.

Aviation expert Don Thompson told the Australian news website the fragment could be the internal bulkhead from the Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 business or economy class cabin.

The latest discovery came less than two weeks after Australian and Malaysian authorities said two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were "almost certainly from MH370".

Another fragment picked up near Mossel Bay, a small town in Western Cape province in South Africa, would also be analysed to see if it came from MH370, South African officials said last month.

Before the latest discoveries, only a wing part recovered from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, which lies east of Mozambique and neighbours Mauritius, had been confirmed as coming from the jet that disappeared two years ago.

Australia is leading the search for in the remote Indian Ocean, where the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight is believed to have diverted when it disappeared on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

Chester added that authorities "remain hopeful the aircraft will be found". More than 95,000 square kilometres (36,700 square miles) of the target zone of 120,000 square kilometres has been scoured so far, but no crash site has been found.

The governments of Australia, China and Malaysia have said they will end the hunt when the target area is fully searched unless new, credible information emerges.
Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad will meet DMK President M Karunanidhi here tomorrow for seat-sharing talks for the May 16 Assembly polls where a "good decision" is expected, DMK Treasurer M K Stalin said.

Azad is slated to meet the DMK chief tomorrow morning, Stalin told reporters here.

"Most likely, a good decision is expected to be arrived at," he said in an indication that the two parties, which renewed their alliance after a three year break, could strike a seat-sharing deal.

After joining hands for 2004 Lok Sabha polls, DMK had walked out of the Congress-led UPA in 2013 over the vexed Sri Lankan Tamils issue.

However, the two revived the alliance on February 13, with Azad, incharge of Congress affairs in Tamil Nadu, holding the first round of seat-sharing talks with Karunanidhi on March 25 here.

Faced with a reported low offer by its Dravidian ally, the Congress' Tamil Nadu unit is eyeing at least 45 seats and had conveyed its view to the party's central leaders negotiating seat-sharing with DMK.

Congress had contested 63 seats in the 2011 elections in alliance with the DMK.
Azerbaijan today announced a unilateral ceasefire after the worst violence over disputed Nagorny Karabakh in more than two decades, but Armenian forces said clashes were continuing despite international appeals to stop fighting.

"Azerbaijan, showing good will, has decided to unilaterally cease hostilities", Azerbaijan's defense ministry said in a statement, warning it would "liberate all (Armenian-) occupied territories" if Armenian forces "do not stop provocations."



Baku also pledged to "reinforce" several strategic positions it said it had "liberated" inside the region, which is controlled by Armenia but internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan.

But spokesman for the Armenian-backed rebel defense ministry in Karabakh, David Babayan, told AFP that fighting has never been halted along the frontline.

"Fierce fighting is under way on southestern and northeastern sectors of the Karabakh frontline," he said.

Earlier on Sunday, Karabakh forces claimed they took back the strategic Lala-Tepe height in Karabakh which was captured by Azeri troops on Saturday.

Baku denied the report, saying that the height remained under its control and that rebel troops sustained "serious manpowewr losses."



On Saturday, fierce clashes left at least 18 Armenian and 12 Azerbaijani soldiers dead and reportedly claimed the lives of two civilians after both sides accused each other of attacking with heavy weaponry across the volatile frontline.

Both Russia and the West appealed to all sides to show restraint.

Ethnic Armenian separatists backed by Yerevan seized control of the mountainous region in a war in the early 1990s that claimed some 30,000 lives.

The foes have never signed a peace deal despite a ceasefire in 1994.

The region is still internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan and the two sides frequently exchange fire, but the latest episode marked a surge in violence and sparked frantic appeals for peace from international powers.

Energy-rich Azerbaijan, whose military spending has in the past exceeded Armenia's entire state budget, has repeatedly threatened to take back the breakaway region by force if negotiations fail to yield results.

Moscow-backed Armenia says it could crush any offensive.
Bangladesh's beleaguered former Prime Minister will surrender before a court here on Tuesday and seek bail in a case against her for instigating a deadly petrol bomb attack on a bus during an anti-government protest last year, her lawyer said on Sunday.

"Khaleda will surrender before the Court of Metropolitan Sessions Judge on April 5," Sanaullah Mia, one of her lawyers, told reporters here.

"We will submit a petition seeking her bail in the arson case after her appearance in the court," the lawyer added.

The development came four days after the Metropolitan Sessions Judge's Court on March 30 issued an arrest warrant against the 70-year-old chairperson of the main opposition outside parliament Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and 27 others from her party after accepting police's chargesheet in the case.

Judge Kamrul Hossain Mollah, after accepting the charges against 38 people, including the 28, ordered Zia's arrest in connection with the arson attack in Jatrabari area here in January last year when her party spearheaded a violent nationwide campaign to topple Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's Awami League government.

An official of the Metropolitan Sessions Judge's court said Judge Mollah passed the order and asked police to execute the warrant and submit the compliance report by April 27.

Last year, Zia was charged by police with masterminding the arson attack on the bus that left one person dead and 30 others injured, nine critically, days after Hasina said the former premier could be put on trial for recent violence.

The incident was one of many bomb attacks that Bangladesh witnessed in the three months since early January last year when the BNP-led 20-party alliance started an indefinite blockade.

The arrest order was another blow to the embattled two- time former premier, who has described previous cases, including corruption-related, against her as politically motivated and aimed at keeping her out of the country's .
Bangladesh Supreme Court today deferred the review of petition of Motiur Rahman Nizami, chief of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, against his death sentence for committing war crimes during the 1971 independence war against Pakistan.

After Nizami's counsels pleaded for more time, the Appellate Division bench-led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha of the Supreme Court deferred the hearing by a week.

"We pleaded for six weeks, the court gave us one week. The matter will be heard after that," Nizami's lawyer said.

On March 29, the 72-year-old Jamaat-e-Islami chief filed the petition seeking review of the Supreme Court verdict, which confirmed his death penalty for 1971 war crimes.

The next day, the State moved the Supreme Court's chamber judge to expedite the hearing, when it forwarded the matter to a regular appeals bench and fixed Sunday for the hearing.

In January this year, the top court rejected Nizami's appeal to overturn the International Crimes Tribunal's 2014 verdict.

Nizami admitted in to have committed war crimes during the 1971 independence war against Pakistan but sought commutation of his death penalty to life imprisonment because of his old age.

The ICT had sentenced Nizami in October, 2014 to death after he was found guilty in eight of the 16 charges brought against him, and had noted in its verdict that the crimes he had committed intended to "demean the human civilisation."



According to official figures, three million people were killed during the nine-month-long independence war against Pakistan.
A Supreme Court woman lawyer was among 33 people charged today with terror-financing activities by Bangladesh's elite anti-crime unit.

Shakila Farzana, 39, was charged by the Rapid Action Battalion for allegedly funding militant outfit Shaheed Hamja Brigade with Tk 1.08 crore (USD 1,37,878)for weapon procurement.

"RAB submitted the charge sheet against Barrister Shakila Farjana and 32 others saying they are linked to (militant outfit) Shahid Hamza Brigade (SHB)," Chittagong police's court inspector Mashiur Rahman said.

A case was filed under anti-terrorism act-2009 with the local police station this year.

Earlier Farzana and 27 others were charged with another case filed under arms act.

The development came more than a month after the Supreme Court scrapped a High Court order granting bail to Farzana and another two lawyers as investigations were underway for their alleged involvement in terror financing.

The crime busting RAB had arrested Farzana and two of her lawyer associates in Supreme Court on August 15 last year on charges of financing the SHB.

The trio, however, claimed that they had deposited the amount to an account which was taken as advance and that they were unaware of the owner of the account.

RAB said the account was owned by top SHB leader Moniruzzaman Don, who too is now in jail.

Bangladesh identified SHB only in April this year finding them active in southeastern port city of Chittagong after four of their members were arrested with weapons including five AK22 rifles.

Security officials earlier said relatively a small group SHB was formed in 2013 with a mission to stage an armed revolution against the "oppression against the Muslims" at home and abroad.

Farzana is the incumbent joint general secretary of the Supreme Court wing of Jatiyatabadi Ainjibi Forum, a grouping of lawyers who support main opposition party Bangladesh Nationalist Party of ex-prime minister Khaleda Zia.

She is the daughter of a former BNP lawmaker from Chittagong during 2001-2006 tenure of the BNP-led four party coalition government with fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami being its major partner.
Eighteen seats in Maoist-affected areas in West Bengal will go to Assembly polls tomorrow in the first of the six-phase elections.

One-hundred-and-thirty-three candidates will try their luck from the constituencies falling under the districts of West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura.

Out of these, 13 have been roughly classified as Left Wing Extremism-affected areas by the Election Commission where voting will end early by 4 pm due to security reasons.

In the remaining five constituencies of Purulia, Manbazar, Kashipur, Para and Raghunathpur voting will go on for two hours extra till 6 pm.

The ruling Trinamool Congress has been highlighting how peace has returned in the Maoist-hotbed Junglemahal area. It finds a mention even in the 'Trinamool anthem' song in Bengali which is being played across TV channels, radio stations and even through social media.

The last 2011 assembly polls, which ended the 34-year-long rule of the Left, had Trinamool and Congress on the same side. The Congress, which broke its alliance later on, has forged alliance with the Left.

The Left-Congress alliance has been a subject of mockery for both the BJP and the Trinamool.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has called this alliance an "unholy" one while Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who attended an election rally in Kharagpur town, mocked at it saying "dosti (friendship) in Bengal and kushti (wrestling) in Kerala".

In poll rallies and meetings, opposition parties have



been harping upon major issues like the Saradha chit-fund scam in which thousands of investors from all over the state lost their hard-earned savings and the recent Narada sting operation which purportedly showed TMC leaders accepting bribe, and "lack of industrialisation" in the state.

The 'Ma Maati Manush' government led by Banerjee is however, confident of retaining power on the basis of all-round development work and the success of its developmental schemes like the 'Kanyashree' in the state during their five-year rule, ruling party leaders and supporters insist.

All the three -- Trinamool, Left-Congress alliance and BJP -- have fielded candidates from all 18 seats in the 1 (a) phase.

Gobordhan Bagdi is the only one fighting on two seats of Para and Raghunathpur on a JMM ticket.

Total number of voters in the constituencies are a little over 40 lakh (40,09,171) out of which 20,47,202 are males.

The third gender category list shows only a handful of 16 voters.

There are total 4,945 polling stations out of which 1,962 have been classified as critical ones by the Election Commission.

Voter Verifiable Audit Trails (VVAT) are being done in 562 polling stations.

To monitor the polling process, 14 general observers and 676 micro observers will be the part of the 22,000-strong team of polling personnel.

High-tech monitoring will be done through digital cameras, video cameras, CCTVs and live webcasting.

In all Left-wing extremism affected polling stations, the EC has decided to deploy a minimum of one section of force, which has around ten security personnel.

There will be a minimum of three security layers including sector forces and a quick response team.

Central forces will be present in every polling booth and depending on the requirement the deployment of forces can increase.

For aerial surveillance, two helicopters will conduct regular sorties and inform forces on the ground if they notice any undesirable activity.
A Spain-bound Ryanair flight had to make an emergency U-turn to Manchester, forcing it to fly over the city for an hour to burn fuel, after suffering a bird-hit.

The Flight FR3445, was travelling from Palma, Manchester to Mallorca in Spain on April 1, when the pilot had to abandon the journey shortly after taking off and return to Manchester airport.

The plane declared emergency over the city after 6pm. It was forced into a holding pattern spending an hour total in the air, burning fuel as it circled around 3,500 feet over north Manchester and Rochdalein to make it light enough to land again, the Daily Express reported.

The plane, was due to arrive Palma at 8.50pm, but it instead landed in Manchester at around 7pm.

"Flight FR3445 was able to land normally and passengers departed safely. This flight from Manchester to Palma returned to Manchester shortly after take-off following a minor bird strike. To minimise delay, customers boarded a replacement aircraft which departed to Palma," Ryanair spokeswoman said.

Ryanair apologised to affected customers for any inconvenience caused. The aircraft landed normally and customers disembarked, she added.
The BJP today demanded IPS officer SMH Meerza be suspended by the Election Commission as his name had figured in the Narada sting operation.

"We ask the Commission to order the suspension of the officer from police service or put him on compulsory wait during the poll process as he is an important officer having very close proximity to TMC leaders and can influence the poll process," BJP national secretary and West Bengal in-charge Siddharth Nath Singh said.

He placed this demand before Sunil Gupta, Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, in a meeting today.

The party has also demanded removal of Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar for his alleged involvement in sending two Kolkata Police personnel to "bribe" BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha in return for helping smuggle out cows to Bangladesh.

"He is very influential and will also be intimidating the voters, as such once again we demand his immediate removal," Singh said.

He expressed satisfaction over the security measures taken by the Election Commission for free, fair and peaceful conduct of elections beginning tomorrow.
Amid controversy surrounding chanting of 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai', BJP MP and actor Paresh Rawal today said his party never coerced anyone to raise the slogan and it is "inappropriate" to compel people to do so.

Reacting to the fatwa issued by Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband asking Muslims to refrain from chanting the slogan, Rawal said, saying 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' is about expressing the feeling of patriotism.

He said people should follow lyricist Javed Akhtar, who retired as Rajya Sabha MP last month, on the issue.

"This is all about how much you love your motherland. Those who want to issue fatwa can do so. Otherwise, people should follow Javed Akhtar, who said in the Parliament that 'it is my right to say Bharat Mata Ki Jai'," Rawal told reporters here during a brief interaction.

"BJP never forced anyone to chant the slogan and it is also not appropriate to force someone to do so. It is all about expressing the feeling of patriotism," the Ahmedabad (East) MP said.

Commenting on China's role in blocking India's move in the UN to ban Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief and Pathankot terror attack mastermind Masood Azhar, Rawal said the action was expected of the neighbouring country.

"Everyone knows that China and Pakistan are very close. Thus, it was very much expected from China. However, countries like the US, France, Russia and Britain are still with India in our fight against terrorism," he said.
A brawl erupted today at a Halal food festival here when a group of anti-Islam protesters clashed with anti-racism activists, marring the Australian city's reputation as a multicultural capital.

The brawl at the community event attended by several families at the Melbourne Showgrounds left one person with a suspected broken eye socket. He was admitted to a hospital.

The fight came as hundreds of people filled Federation Square as a counter protest to the anti-Islamic movement, which was put back in the spotlight when a United Patriots Front "stop the mosques" banner was unveiled at the Collingwood AFL game on Friday night, the Age newspaper reported.

The brawl began in Ascot Vale suburb when about 30 far-left protesters wearing black clothing and balaclavas swarmed the far-right protesters and other anti-Halal activists, who had been picketing the Halal expo, it reported.

Demonstrators on both sides threw punches during the scuffle outside the venue before police moved in.

Multicultural Affairs Minister Robin Scott said everyone has the right to protest, but it had to be peaceful and respectful.

"Violent conduct is completely unacceptable and has no place in our community," he said.

The race and religion protests in Melbourne came only weeks after the Moomba festival was marred by rioting youths, which had triggered a debate about multiculturalism.
The government will do all it can to keep Britain's biggest steelworks running, Business Secretary Sajid Javid said today, in the face of a crisis threatening the country's steel industry.

Indian steel giant Tata Steel announced Tuesday it was putting its loss-making British business up for sale, including the Port Talbot plant on the south Wales coast.

Javid said he thought there was time to find a buyer for the plant and Tata Steel's other UK assets.

"Tata will issue an offer document very soon," he told BBC television.

The government is "also going to have to offer support to clinch that buyer and give that steel plant a long-term, viable future".

Tata Steel employs around 15,000 staff in Britain.

However, Port Talbot is reportedly losing 1 million pounds (1.3 million euros, USD 1.4 million) a day in the face of high energy costs and plunging prices caused by a chronic global oversupply of steel and a glut of cheap imports, particularly from China.

The facility is Wales's biggest single employer.

"It wouldn't be prudent to rule anything out at this stage, but I think that nationalisation is rarely an answer in these situations," said Javid.

"I do feel, though... That there will be enough time to find the right buyer working with the government and being able to take this forward.

"We will look at everything we can do to allow a sale going ahead."



Metal processing company Liberty House is looking at some of Tata's British assets.

The group's president Sanjeev Gupta was quoted by The Sunday Telegraph newspaper as saying he was not interested in all of Tata's British assets but was prepared to enter negotiations.

"We would need a proper partnership with the government. I don't know what that would entail at this stage," he said, adding that he was heading to Britain on Monday.

"We are in the process of starting a discussion with Tata.

"If the company, its people, its workers and the government would be willing to consider my suggestions, then I'm willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that.
The British Government today pledged its support for steel plants facing a crisis in the country, saying it is ready to support a buyer to save the Port Talbot plant which is facing closure after the Indian giant Tata Steel decided to sell its loss-making businesses in the UK.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said that he did not think nationalisation was the solution but did not rule it out.

"It wouldn't be prudent to rule anything out at this stage, but I think that nationalisation is rarely an answer in these situations," Javid told the BBC television.

He said that any buyer would want to look at "plant, pensions and power supply", which ministers were "working on".

"I do feel, though... That there will be enough time to find the right buyer working with the government and being able to take this forward. We will look at everything we can do to allow a sale going ahead," he said.

Javid said he thought there was time to find a buyer for the Port Talbot plant and Tata Steel's other UK assets.

"Tata will issue an offer document very soon," he told BBC television.

Indian-origin steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta, president of Metal processing company Liberty House, is understood to have been in touch with the government over a potential purchase.

A source close toGupta said the discussions had not been substantive yet but he would be seeking further talks when he arrives back in the UK tomorrow.

"If the company, its people, its workers and the government would be willing to consider my suggestions, then I'm willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that," Gupta was quoted as saying by The Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

Gupta wanted to discuss possible government help to replace Port Talbot's traditional blast furnaces with modern electric arc furnaces and energy costs.

Extra relief from carbon tax was another important issue.
Weeks after being slapped with a Rs 29,000 crore 'retrospective tax demand', British oil explorer Cairn Energy today said international investors want the Modi government to walk the talk on resolving retrospective tax issues and send a clear signal that things are changing.

Cairn, which gave India its biggest onland oil discovery that now accounts for a fifth of the country's oil production, said it will continue to press ahead with the arbitration challenging use of a new legislation to tax internal business reorganisation with retrospective effect and will seek $1 billion in damages.

"The international investment community wishes to see India doing as it has stated in looking to resolve the retrospective tax issue with actions which would send a positive signal to global investors that things are changing under this current government," Cairn Energy CEO Simon Thomson told PTI in an interview here.

The Income Tax Department in February slapped on Cairn Energy a tax demand notice of over Rs 29,000 crore, including Rs 18,800 crore in back dated interest.

The Department had on January 22, 2014, issued a draft assessment order of Rs 10,247 crore on alleged capital gains the company made in a 2006 reorganisation of its India business. Two years later, it issued a final assessment order.

The actions of the Income Tax Department have been hugely detrimental to Cairn's business and its UK and international shareholders, Thomson said.

"The issuing of a retrospective tax assessment is very disappointing and follows a long period of engagement with the Government of India which has repeatedly given public assurances that it would not resort to retrospective tax measures, introduced by the previous government, given the negative message it sends to the international investment community," he said.

Thomson said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had earlier this year stated that retrospective tax is a matter of the past and he was ensuring that this government and future governments cannot open this chapter.

Modi, he said, had stated that "We have clearly articulated that we will not resort to retrospective taxation and demonstrated this position in a number of ways."



"However, Cairn Energy's outstanding retrospective tax case is yet to be resolved and the matter has been ongoing for more than two years and is having a major detrimental impact on our business and to our UK and international shareholders," Thomson said.

He said the tax issue was a very unfortunate conclusion to a 20 year investment in India where "Cairn Energy has been a model corporate citizen and created a legacy asset which is seen as an example of what can be achieved through India and UK cooperation".

(REOPENS FGN 9)



The Rajasthan discoveries generates huge value for India, with revenues of multi-billions for the government, he said.

Asked about the government offer to waive interest and penalty if facing retrospective tax demand paid the principal tax due, he said Cairn strongly contests the basis of the tax assessment order supported by detailed legal advice on the strength of the protections available to it under international law.

"As such, Cairn has a high level of confidence in its case under the UK-India Investment Treaty and is seeking to use the international arbitration process in a non-confrontational manner.

"We wish to resolve the issue as swiftly and amicably as possible following a long period of engagement with the government which has repeatedly given public assurances that it would not resort to the retrospective tax measures of the previous government," he said.

Stating that the international arbitration process has begun with the arbitration panel being appointed, he said Cairn welcomes the Indian government's positive engagement in the process.

"We would hope that, like us, the Government of India wants to achieve an outcome as soon as possible in order that this issue is cleared up once and for all.

"The preliminary hearings will take place shortly and the formal process will continue from there. There is no pre-set fixed timetable for the arbitration process but it is unlikely to be less than 12 months," he said.

He said the company has had robust legal advice that the action of the government in seeking to apply tax retrospectively to its internal group reorganisation in 2006 and in freezing Cairn's assets in the country are a breach of the fundamental position of the Treaty which protects against expropriation and ensures a fair and equitable investment environment for British investors in India.

"Cairn is claiming full compensation for the about $1 billion value of which its shareholders have been deprived," he said.

He said one major US investor in Cairn stated that "It is now time for India to send a message to all international investors that retrospective tax is dead and buried once and for all. Many investments needed to finance India's growth will not happen if retrospective laws are possible.

"Repudiating retrospective laws and adopting international norms would allow the international investment community to see that the Modi government is delivering on its pre-election promise to eradicate so called tax terrorism.
The prestigious Cambridge University is set to abandon its centuries-old tradition of putting exam results on public display after students complained that it "damages" their welfare and denies them privacy.

The university is preparing to end the practice of posting students' results on boards on the wall of the Senate House in the town centre, The Sunday Times reported.

The decision will make it impossible for outsiders to draw up academic league tables of colleges.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the Varsity, the Cambridge student newspaper, show that the university's general board of the faculties has agreed to draw up plans "proposing the abolition of the practice of public display of class lists in any location".

The decision comes after Cambridge University students' union voted last year to oppose the publication of the lists, saying, "The current system denies students privacy with their results and is damaging for the welfare of many."



In a survey by the union, one student complained, "It is unfair, pressurising and completely out of order that our names and grades are published and stuck up outside Senate House."



Priscilla Mensah, the union president, told Varsity: "We're very encouraged by the progression of the campaign to eradicate the negative culture created by league tables and public class lists in Cambridge."



Kwasi Kwarteng, the Tory MP for Spelthorne and a Cambridge graduate, said, "If modern students can't get through what people have gone through for centuries, I'm a bit worried about the standards of Cambridge and the sort of people they are letting in."



"They clearly have no character whatsoever. You can't hide from moments like this in life," he was quoted as saying.
The government plans to amend a law to reduce the separation period for Christian couples seeking to file for divorce by mutual consent, a move which comes against the backdrop of a Supreme Court ruling and demands by the community.

The Law Ministry has drafted a Cabinet note to amend the Divorce Act, 1869 to halve the separation period for couples from the present two to one year before they can file for divorce by mutual consent to bring it at par with laws governing other communities.

The separation period under Hindu Marriage Act, Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act and the Special Marriage Act is one year.

Section 10A(1) of the Divorce Act, added through an amendment in 2001, says that a couple seeking divorce should be living separately for a period of "two years or more".

Against the backdrop of a Supreme Court order delivered in April last and demands by members of the community, the Law Ministry has decided to move the proposal to reduce the separation period.

Questioning the existing law, the Supreme Court had urged the Centre to make necessary amendments.

"Should Christians stay separated for minimum two years when the period prescribed for others is one year? It does not make sense to us. It is a pure question of law and you (government) should have acted on your own," a bench of Justices Vikramjit Sen and A M Sapre had observed.

Some High Courts have also struck down the provision of two-year separation.

The bench was hearing a petition filed by a Delhi-based person while delivering the order.

Law Commission on the past several occasions has also recommended amendments to the Divorce Act to make it more women-friendly.
Opting to go solo in its ambitious Chandrayaan II project, India has decided not to take Russia on board and keep the mission completely indigenous with "minor" help from the US.

chairman A S Kiran Kumar said Chandrayaan II, having an indigenously built Lander and Rover, will be launched by December 2017 or first half of 2018. The spacecraft will also have instruments that will collect samples and send the data back to earth.

Chandrayaan, the country's Lunar Exploration Programme, is an ongoing series of outer space missions by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

In its Chandrayaan Mission I, was able to make the important discovery of water on the earth's sole satellite. India has now jettisoned Russia in the Chandrayaan II project and would be embarking upon an indigenous venture but with a bit of help from the United States.

During 2010, it was agreed that Russian Space Agency ROSCOSMOS would be responsible for lunar Lander and for Orbiter and Rover as well as Launch by GSLV. Later, due to a shift in the programmatic alignment of the mission, it was decided that the Lunar Lander development would be done by ISRO and Chandrayaan-II will be a totally Indian mission.

"There were issues with the Russian Lander and they had said it would need some more testing. In the meantime, we decided to develop it indigenously," said a senior ISRO official.

Although indigenous, ISRO will be taking services of NASA for the project.

"You cannot track satellite from one location...Because of that you need support from other locations. With NASA the collaboration is restricted to its services from the Deep Space Network for Chandrayaan purpose. We are not using Russian help in this project," Kumar said.

ISRO's space cooperation with NASA has been growing over the past few years. Interestingly, the collaboration between the two agencies had come to a halt after nuclear tests done by India in 1974 and 1998. But with relations between the two countries improving, the cooperation between the space agencies too have increased.

The two are also collaborating on their project on Mars.

On the other hand, although India is going solo in the Chandrayaan project, it has been collaborating with Russia on different projects.

"In future, for semi-cryogenic engine some facilities are required to carry out the tests. So we are still looking at possibilities of working with them. All space agencies have realised that unless we work together many of the missions cost cannot be shared," Kumar said.
Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy today described as 'baseless' reports that Congress high command had 'succumbed' to pressures from him and cleared the candidature of his five confidants, including three Ministers, to contest the May 16 assembly polls.

"High command does not succumb to any pressures from any quarters. After listening to everyone, they take appropriate decision. To describe this as succumbing to pressures, is not right," he told reporters at Vakathanam in Kottayam District after attending a ruling UDF poll convention.

Chandy had locked horns with KPCC President V M Sudheeran, over the candidature of two ministers-- K Babu (Tripunithura) and Adoor Prakash (Konni), who had faced corruption charges besides NORKA Minister, K C Joseph (Irikkur), and two MLAs -- Dominic Presentation (Kochi) and Benny Behanan (Thrikkakara).

Sudheeran insisted that those facing corruption allegations and had contested more than four times should make way for fresh faces, party sources had said.

However, this was not acceptable to Chandy.

Chandy, Sudheeran and Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala had been in Delhi for the past one week to finalise the list of the candidates from the state and holding discussions with the party high command and returned to Kerala today.

Earlier on arrival at Kochi airport, Chandy replying to a question by reporters whether he would be in the fray, said "let the list be out first, then I will respond."



He also said the list was expected later today. However, it was now expected to be released tomorrow.
Amid continuing tension in Kerala Congress over giving candidature to tainted leaders, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy today arrived here after nearly week-long hectic parleys in New Delhi with party leaders, including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, to iron out the differences.

Chandy, who is said to be unhappy over KPCC Chief V M Sudheeran's uncompromising stand against giving tickets to Ministers K Babu and Adoor Prakash, merely said the final list of candidates for the May 16 polls would be announced by high command this afternoon.

Adopting a wait and watch stand, he refused to divulge details about the meetings he and other state leaders including Sudheeran and Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala had with party high command late evening yesterday.

Meanwhile, Chandy held a brief meeting with his close associates Excise Minister Babu, Culture Minister K C Joseph and MLA Benny Behannan, on his arrival at Nedumbassery airport here.

Babu, who faced corruption allegations in bar bribery scandal, had said yesterday that he would be able to retain the Thrippunithura seat, if given a ticket.

"If I am fielded again as candidate from Thrippunithura seat, I have no doubts about my victory. It is 100 per cent certain I will win the polls," Babu had told a Malayalam TV channel.

His comments came amid the continuing stand-off between Chandy and Sudheeran over his candidature besides that of three others in the Congress-led ruling UDF.

Chandy, Sudheeran and Chennithala had been staying in New Delhi for nearly a week to iron out the differences among them in finalising the Congress candidates for the May 16 Assembly polls.

Even after several rounds of meetings of screening committee and discussions with senior leaders, including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, a decision was delayed due to the stand-off between Chandy and Sudheeran over candidature of Babu, Culture Minister K C Joseph, Revenue Minister Adoor Prakash and Benny Behanan.

According to party sources, Sudheeran is against giving tickets to the four, arguing that all those who had faced corruption charges and those who had already contested four times should be excluded from the list.

While Babu, Joseph and Behanan are close confidants of Chandy, Prakash is a key leader in the 'I' faction of the Congress, owing allegiance to Chennithala.
Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE will replace three top executives, the WSJ reported, in an apparent bid to see US restrictions on its business lifted after it was accused of violating sanctions against Iran.

Washington slapped restrictions on ZTE and three linked companies last month for illicitly re-exporting controlled items from the United States to sanctioned countries, including Iran.

The curbs require ZTE to have specific licences before shipping US-made items to the parent company or the other three named firms.

ZTE's chief executive Shi Lirong, in place since 2010, and executive vice presidents Tian Wenguo and Qiu Weizhao are expected to step down, pending approval from the ZTE board, the Wall Street Journal said yesterday.

The board is scheduled to meet on Tuesday and Wednesday to green light the management changes, and also discuss the company's financial results for 2015, the newspaper said.

Chief Technology Officer Zhao Xianming is expected to take over as the CEO and chairman of the company, the newspaper added.

According to documents published by the US Department of Commerce, Tian and Qiu were in charge of ZTE's plans to allegedly avoid the US export rules starting from 2011, by setting up shell companies to circumvent the US sanctions, the WSJ said.

The newspaper added that as part of a deal between the US Department of Commerce and ZTE to temporarily remove the sanctions, the company executives involved in the alleged violations should be removed from senior roles.

Washington in January eased several restrictions on doing business with Iran following an international agreement over its nuclear programme.

But sanctions linked to accusations that Tehran supports terrorism remain in force, still largely blocking US companies from doing business with Iran.

ZTE is China's second-biggest telecoms equipment maker with customers in more than 160 countries.
Coal India's Jharkhand arm Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL) posted a record production of 61.35 million tonnes (MT) in 2015-16, which was the second consecutive year of double digit growth for the company.

"This is the second consecutive year when Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL) has achieved double digit growth and achieved its target as well. The company produced 61.35 MT of coal, the highest ever, against the target of 60.60 MT," CCL CMD Gopal Singh told PTI.

The growth in output was about 10.25 per cent and efforts are on to maintain double digit growth in future, he said.

Last year, the PSU had achieved 55.65 MT production.

During the period 2009-10 to 2012-13, the company's coal production was stagnating at around 48 MT.

"During a span of about three years from 2013 to 2016, six greenfield projects have been commissioned, which has no parallel in the coal industry," he added.

Last year in May, the Magadh Project under Magadh and Amrapali area of CCL was inaugurated. It has a capacity of 51 MT per annum, which can go up to 70 MT.

Under a unique initiative, a record 2,250 cases were redressed out of total 2,687 cases registered relating to employees as well as stakeholders problems, ranging from provident fund to land and other issues, he said.

A 'samadhan kendra' was set up in CCL headquarters at Ranchi in February 2012. Singh said the PSU accorded top priority to becoming a 'zero grievance company'.

On overburden removal front, the company could remove about 106.9 million cubic metre overburden during the fiscal, the highest ever, against the target of 100.0 million cubic metre.

Coal offtake too was at a record level of about 59.6 MT.

Out of the 11,684 acres of land authenticated in the last three years, 10,289 acres were authenticated in 2015-16 alone.

Talking about modernisation, he said while growth in washed non-coking coal production was about 29 per cent, "three new washeries are being set up. Tenders for two washeries Karo (3.5 MT) and Konar (7MT) have already been floated. It is planned that all new mines with a capacity of over 10 MT will have their own washery along with reject-based power plant."



During the 2014-15 fiscal, CCL became the first subsidiary of to achieve its production target by registering unprecedented growth of 11.2 per cent in raw coal output.

Overall, Coal India, the world's largest miner of dry fuel, has achieved an 8.5 per cent growth in production at 536 MT in 2015-16, but missed its target of 550 MT.

CIL, which accounts for 80 per cent of domestic output, has eight subsidiaries -- ECL (West Bengal), BCCL (Jharkhand), CCL (Jharkhand), SECL (Chhattisgarh), WCL (Maharashtra), NCL (Madhya Pradesh), MCL (Odisha) and NEC (North East).

The Centre has announced plans to boost Coal India's annual production to the level of one billion tonnes by 2019 to meet growing fuel demand. However, the company has successively missed its output targets.
The much delayed Congress candidates' list for the May 16 Assembly polls in Kerala, which had seen bitter bickering among state leaders over inclusion of certain ministers facing corruption charges, is likely to be announced by the AICC at Delhi later today.

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who was the first to return to the state this morning after a week-long discussions with Congress President Sonia Gandhi, vice president Rahul Gandhi and other leaders maintained that the list will be out today.

Read more from our special coverage on "KERALA ASSEMBLY POLLS" Kerala unit of Shiv Sena slams BJP; announces 24 candidates

Asked by reporters at Kochi airport if he would be in the fray, Chandy said "let the list be out first, then I will respond."Chandy, KPCC President V M Sudheeran and Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala had been in Delhi for the past one week to finalise the list of the candidates from the state and holding discussions with the party high command.

The chief minister is reportedly peeved that his confidants-- Excise Minister, K Babu and Revenue Minister, Adoor Prakash, were being targetted by the KPCC President. Chandy had reportedly made it clear that if they were not in the list, he would also keep away from the elections.

Chandy, who left for his home town Puthpally soon after arriving from Delhi, also held discussions at the airport with Babu, minister K C Joseph and MLAs, Dominic Presentation and Benny Behanan.

Sudheeran told reporters at Delhi that his suggestions regarding certain names in the list "was not out of any personal vendetta, but to enhance the winning prospects of the Congress-led UDF."



The procedures for the final preparation of the candidates list was completed yesterday only and the high-command would declare the list at the earliest, he said.

"Several suggestions had been submitted to the high command to enhance the winning prospects of the Congress and UDF, to widen the party base at the grassroot level and increase the people's support...It is to make the poll result more favourable to the party and the front and not out of any personal vendetta against anyone," Sudheeran said.

The whole effort is to ensure the continuation of UDF rule in the state, Sudheeran added.

Asked if his name was in the list, Sudheeran said he had earlier itself made it clear that he would not contest in the coming polls.

"Ghulam Nabi Azad and Mukul Wasnik had asked me after my Jan raksha yatra if I wanted to contest and I had replied in the negative," he said.

Meanwhile, Ramesh Chennithala, said the Congress list



had been prepared in a 'democratic manner' and all party workers and people will welcome the list.

"Congress is a democratic party and there is bound to be differences of opinion. However, after the list is out, everyone will work unitedly for the party candidates."



"There is need for UDF to return to power. We have to work hard to transform the goodwill into votes, whatever decision, the congress high command takes, everyone should work for the party and ensure the front's sucess.In the given situation, the list was the best we could prepare," he said.

"There is a possibility of UDF coming to power once again and it is our historic responsility to ensure that everyone works unitedly to achieve this.In this election, victory is essential, and we need to do everything to achieve that," he said.
Senior Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP Mullappally Ramachandran today threw his weight behind Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, saying power in Kerala can be retained under his able leadership.

In a letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi, he emphasised the need for standing solidly behind Chandy for winning the May 16 Assembly polls.

Power can be retained in Kerala "provided AICC should, under the given circumstances, stand by the Chief Minister Oommen Chandy," Ramachandran said.

Amid strong differences between Chandy and PCC Chief V M Sudheeran over fielding tainted Ministers in the polls, the former Union Minister noted that as of now Chandy's popularity is at a high level and any attempt to weaken him will lead to disaster in the forthcoming elections.

"All studies go to show that Chandy is most popular not only among Congressmen but among the public at large. The latest study by AXIS My India conclusively prove that the people of Kerala prefer Achuthanandan first (35 per cent) followed by Chandy (34 per cent). This is in the backdrop of all the recent allegations against the government," the letter said.

Strongly backing Chandy, he said the chief minister has always been with the common man and he enjoyed their support.

"His mass contact programme has evoked great response among the weaker and vulnerable sections and he has become the darling of the masses, regardless of political affiliations," Ramachandran said.

He also cited development works done by his government including Kochi Metro project and Vizhinjam port, claiming it was "uppermost in the minds of the people of the state."



"With elections so close, the message of weakening the Chief Minister will dampen the prospects of our party and it would ultimately lead to our defeat.

"I therefore submit that the prospects of our party in the forthcoming election can be ensured only by getting Chandy to actively involve and lead the election campaign from the front," the letter said.

"I reiterate that any attempt to weaken the chief minister at this moment will not augur well for the party in the state of Kerala. My interest is only the overall interest of the party alone," he said.

Urging the party leadership to make sincere efforts to assuage the feelings of the chief minister before announcing the final list of candidates, he said "I am sure Chandy will be an ace campaigner for our party.
ABC/ Ida Mae Astute(NEW YORK) -- Gov. John Kasich says he isn't worried about Trusted Leadership PAC, which supports Ted Cruz, ramping up its attacks against him ahead of Wisconsin's primary.



"I think it's funny," Kasich told George Stephanopoulos on "This Week." "It's what you put up with in a campaign and of course that distorts virtually everything."



The group released a 30-second ad titled "Kasich Won't Play" that accuses the Ohio governor of having a "liberal record."



Kasich and Cruz have been strengthening their attacks against each other ahead of the Wisconsin primary, as they fight to be the alternative to current Republican front-runner Donald Trump.



"I've spoken out. I've said what I want to say, but frankly, I'm interested in talking about my record of job growth, of creating security for people in the workplace, getting better wages and making sure our kids have a better future and a better tomorrow," Kasich said.



The Ohio governor looked ahead, past Tuesday's Wisconsin primary, to contests in New York and Pennsylvania where the he believes he'll be successful.



"Were very excited about heading to New York," the Ohio governor said. "We're virtually tied with Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. We're starting to get to more home turf for me."



Kasich's hopes of winning the Republican nomination rest on a contested convention, but under the last [or 2012] convention's rules, the Ohio governor would not be eligible.



The party's rule 40(b) requires a candidate to win a majority of delegates in at least eight states in order to be nominated on the floor of the convention. So far Kasich has only won his home state of Ohio.



The rules for the GOP's 2016 convention will be written at the start of the convention this summer, so there is a possibility they could change. But it will be a difficult battle for Kasich to get them revised. Sen. Ted Cruz has already argued that the rules from the 2012 convention should not change.



"I'm not going to spend time on process," Kasich said, dismissing the rule. "We just have to keep going and we're going to have an open convention. It's going to be so much fun."



Kasich reinforced why he believes he'll come out on top in a contested convention.



"There's two strong things I have going for me. Number one, I beat Hillary Clinton in virtually every poll. I'm the only one that does it on the Republican side," he said. "Secondly, when they look at the record - when they look at the record of job growth, the record of international foreign policy knowledge and experience, I believe that a convention will look at somebody like me and thats why I think Im going to be the nominee."



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Upset over the 'feeble' protests on the Anar Patel issue, Congress high command has warned party MLAs in Gujarat that their renomination could be in jeopardy if they failed to act as "real opposition" to the Prime Minister in his home state.

Assembly elections in the state are scheduled towards the end of next year and the main opposition party is sensing an opportunity following its success in the local bodies polls four months back.

A central leader, who declined to be identified, said ahead of the just-concluded session of the state Assembly, the high command had asked the MLAs to take up the Anar Patel issue in a big way.

The issue concerns controversial land allotment to entities associated with Anar Patel, daughter of Chief Minister Anandiben Patel.

AICC has also been using the issue to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi accusing him, time and again, of "blatantly plundering" public land when he was Gujarat Chief Minister. It has been demanding a Supreme Court-monitored SIT probe.

The party also wanted Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel to resign or be sacked immediately to ensure a fair probe.

Its stand is that allotment of 250 acres of government land next to 'Gir Lion Sanctuary' "without following any procedure or valuation or price determination for a pittance" was in gross violation of all norms, procedures and regulations governing allotment of public land.

Party sources said AICC was not happy with the way party MLAs were "lukewarm" to its direction in the initial days of the Assembly session and were made it known that their working was being monitored and it could have a bearing on their renomination.

The Congress high command's direction bore a belated result towards the end of March when 55 of the party's MLAs present in the Gujarat Assembly were suspended for the rest of the session after they shouted slogans in support of Patel quota agitation and waved placards on the Anar Patel issue. The suspension on March 30 took place just a day before the session was to conclude.

They displayed banners with 'Hardik ne Jail, Anar ne



Mehel' (Hardik in jail, Anar Patel in palace) written on it and engaged in aggressive slogan-shouting. Hardik leads the pro-Patel quota stir and is in jail on charges of sedition.

Incidentally, the AAP is also raising the issue as part of its attempt to make inroads into the western state where the politics has, by and large, been bipolar for the last many years.

Out of power for 20 years, the Congress made a stunning comeback in the rural areas in December last year by winning 21 of the 31 district panchayats. The BJP had won 30 district panchayats in the previous elections in 2010.

The loss in Panchayati Raj bodies in Gujarat had come more than a year after Modi, who ruled the state for 12 straight years, shifted to Delhi in May 2014.

The Congress was virtually obliterated from all tiers of power structure in the state after losing almost every election to the BJP in the 12 years before that when Modi helmed the state.
An inspector was booked here for allegedly sending obscene messages online to a woman, police said today.

Dayakar Reddy, circle inspector, CID wing, Karimnagar was booked under relevant sections of IPC on the basis of complaint lodged by a woman, Deputy Superintendent of Police J Rama Rao said.

In the complaint, the woman alleged that the officer used to send her obscene messages on social media websites.

"We are verifying the messages received and sent. Reddy has not been arrested yet. Once the offence is established, we will arrest him," Rao said.
The Delhi government has been directed by a court here to prepare modalities to create legal recharging stations for e-rickshaws to stop electricity theft in the national capital.

Additional Sessions Judge Swarana Kanta Sharma asked the Power Secretary of Delhi to file compliance report within 15 days regarding the steps taken in this regard while noting that there were no authorised recharging stations for e-rickshaws which leads to theft of electricity causing heavy loss to the state revenue.

"In Delhi, theft of electricity is being committed at various places for recharging the batteries of e-rickshaw by tapping LV (low voltage) mains, causing heavy loss to state revenue. Such cases of theft of electricity by unscrupulous persons result in passing on the burden of enhanced tariff on the honest electricity consumers of Delhi," the court said.

"I deem it appropriate to direct Secretary (Power), Delhi to prepare plan and modalities to create legal recharging station for recharging e-rickshaws to stop the theft of electricity in the state of Delhi," the judge said.

In its order, the court also noted there were innumerable cases pending before it where it has been found that illegal charging of e-rickshaw batteries was going on in Delhi at places which were unauthorised for this purpose.

It further noted that unlike petrol filling stations for other vehicles, there were no authorised recharging stations for e-rickshaws here.

The court passed the order in an electricity theft case against Titu, a resident of Jahangir Puri, who was held guilty of committing theft of electricity through NDPL LV mains in 2014.

It was alleged that no electricity meter was found installed at the site and a load of 15.790 KW was connected for commercial purpose during the inspection.
Undeterred by the deadly Naxal attack that killed seven of their colleagues last week, troops of the 230th CRPF battalion have nabbed six Maoists from the worst Maoist violence-affected Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

Officials said a special squad from the unit apprehended the Naxals identified as Madvi Muka (22), Madkami Deva (24), Madkami Ganga (24), Chinga (25), Budram (30) and Sanna (28) from the Nelavaram and Chichor villages of Sukma, located on the southern-most tip of the forested Bastar area.

They said all the six were wanted by the state police for various crimes and had warrants pending against them.

"They have been nabbed by the troops of the same Central Reserve Police Force unit whose seven men were ambushed by Maoists last week. All six Maoists have been handed over to state police," an official said.

Seven personnel of the 230th battalion were killed in the landmine ambush when they were travelling in a civilian vehicle to transport a cooler for an ailing sniffer dog of the force named 'scout' on March 30 in the neighbouring Dantewada district.

The unit was brought in deployed here last November for special anti-Naxal operations along the Sukma-Dantewada axis which is notorious for the movement of armed Naxal cadres as it borders Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

CRPF Director General K Durga Prasad had recently said that the unit was instrumental in effecting a number of Maoist surrenders in the area and that they helped local police in apprehending 18 'warantee' ultras in the last few months.
DDA has not been able to make any headway in implementing its crucial Land Pooling Policy, as it still awaits the notification by Delhi government declaring several villages as development areas or urban villages.

The Union Urban Development Ministry had on May 26 last approved the regulations for operationalisation of the policy with five amendments following which the then Vice-Chairman of DDA Balvinder Kumar had said, "The ball is in Delhi government's court".

"The ball is pretty much still in Delhi government's court as there has been no further progress on this front from their (government) side. The policy seems to be stuck right now," a senior DDA official told PTI.

The actual implementation of the policy hinges on the city government's decision on declaring 95 villages as development areas and 89 of them as urban villages. The housing authority had earlier requested to it to issue a notification in this regard.

After Centre's approval of the regulations, Kumar had said, "Both these requests are pending with the government in advanced stages. We hope it will soon issue the notification on it."



Another top DDA official said, "We have already sent reminders to Delhi government but received no response from them. But, we are working on resolving the issue and getting that policy implemented."



Land Pooling Policy seeks to make landowners partners in the development and is divided into two categories of pooling -- Category I for land 20 ha and above and Category II for 2 ha to less than 20 ha. In the first category, the developer entity will have 60 per cent share, while DDA will retain 40 per cent. In the second category, DDA will retain 52 per cent while rest will go to developer.

The policy is applicable in the proposed "urbanisable" areas of the urban extensions for which zonal plans have been approved. The 'urban village' status to 89 villages will nullify the provisions of Delhi Reforms Act governing them.

The policy's implementation assumes significance as the DDA's Master Plan Delhi (MPD) 2021 proposes construction of 25 lakh housing units by 2021 for which 10,000 hectares of land will be required. As per DDA estimates, 2.5 lakh houses, including 50,000 EWS units, will require 1,000 hectare of land.

Relief to small farmers, self-penalty on DDA for delays, and flexibility allowed to farmers to trade their land or tie up with developers for land pooling are some of the important features of the Land Pooling Policy.
Delhi Government has approached the Economic Offences Wing of police asking it to investigate the complaints of alleged illegal transactions of over Rs 50 crore with fake companies and individuals by two branches of Maxfort Schools in the national capital.

Following complaints of charging of donation and increased fee from parents and withholding of results of the students over non-payment, the Directorate of Education (DoE) has also directed the Pitampura and Rohini branches of the school to refund the amount and release the result.

"It is alleged that Maxfort Schools are indulged in illegal transaction of huge sums of money to fake companies and individuals; illegal transfer of funds from collection accounts of schools to different trusts/societies, estimated amount of which is over Rs 50 crore till date," DoE said in a letter to principals of the two schools.

The other allegations include misappropriation of cash, making payments from school payment accounts to vendors for the services/materials and also collecting the same amount from parents in cash.

"The matter has been referred to Economic Offence Wing of Delhi Police to register a case and take necessary action in the matter under intimation to the directorate.

"The schools are meanwhile directed to refund the donations or capitation fee charged from the parents while admitting their ward; not to demand any arrears from the parents and to declare the results of various classes at predetermined dates unconditionally without insisting to pay the hiked fee," the letter further read.

Repeated phone calls and emails to the two branches of the school for their reaction on the issue went unanswered.

The complaints were raised by the Maxfort School Parents Association in two separate representations sent to the Chief Minister's office.

"The matter was examined and it is observed that Maxfort Schools, Rohini and Pitampura, Delhi have not refunded the amount collected from the parents as donation/capitation fee.

"Further, it is held that on the alleged non-payment of hiked fee by the parents, the Maxfort schools have struck off the names of the students and withheld the issuance of admit cards to the students appearing for the Board examinations. On the intervention of the department, the school has readmitted, the students and issued admit cards to the students concerned," the letter sent by DoE to the school management read.
In order to promote the national capital's heritage and culture on foreign soil and attract more international tourists, the Delhi government has proposed to participate in a number of events which will be organized in London, Berlin and other cities of the world this year.

Besides, the Arvind Kejriwal government has also plans to participate in about 28 exhibitions and marts across India to promote Delhi's rich and diverse cultural heritage.

Unveiling its plan for the current financial year, Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation (DTTDC) said it has proposed to participate in 'World Travel Mart (London), 'International Tourism Bourse (ITB - Berlin)', 'Council for Promotion of Tourism in Asia (CPTA), PATA International and International ATTA (Adventure Travel Trade Association Convention).

In its manifesto, the Aam Aadmi Party had promised that it would make Delhi a tourism hub after coming to power. In July last year, Chief Minister Arvnd Kejriwal had said in the coming five years, his government would work towards developing the national capital into a tourism hub at par with global cities.

"National and international tourism fairs, conferences, travel marts and travel exhibitions are important for interaction with travel industry, media, airlines and other opinion makers. Further, this is helpful in direct marketing of tourist products and services to the consumers by direct interfacing.

"Presently, DTTDC participates in limited national tourism fairs and international fairs. No major conference has been arranged in Delhi in the last more than 25 years. It is, therefore, necessary that these interactive activities be organized in Delhi and simultaneously Delhi should also participate in such exhibitions, marts and conferences within India and abroad," DTTDC's plan stated.

Since the new government has been formed, several steps have been taken to boost tourism and for ease of doing business in the national capital which include single window clearance system for organizing cultural events.
A day after being denied entry into the inner sanctum of Shani Shinganapur temple in Maharashtra, Bhumata Ranragini Brigade president Trupti Desai today said she is planning to file a "contempt of court" case against Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and state government.

"It was the CM who, in January, had extended his support to our cause and failed to protect us yesterday. Now we have already given a complaint to Supa police station against the police (who failed to protect women activists yesterday), local administration and trustees and demanded that a contempt of court case should be filed against CM and Maharashtra government," said Desai.

She alleged that whatever happened yesterday was a premeditated ploy to kill them.

"When villagers unleashed an attack on us and started beating us, police were standing as mere spectators and did not oppose them," she further alleged.

Desai claimed that she and other activists sustained bruises during the attack by villagers.

"We will wait till tomorrow as we feel that court will initiate a 'suo moto' action against Maharashtra government in yesterday's incident and if it does not happen, we are planning to file a contempt of court case against the CM and Maharashtra state for failing to implement the High Court ruling," informed Desai.

Desai and her 25 supporters, who were escorted till Pune district boundary by the Ahmednagar police, reached to the city in the wee hours today.

"After the contempt of court procedure, we are also planning to head to Trimbakeshwar temple in Nashik," she said.

The Maharashtra BJP had yesterday slammed Desai, saying her agitation to force entry into the inner sanctum of the Shani Shinganapur temple was nothing but a "political stunt" seeking publicity.

Desai termed it as an irresponsible statement. She said instead of taking stern action against police, trustees and local administration for failing to give the women protection and implementing the court order immediately, such wrong statements were being made.

Armed with a Bombay High Court order to end gender discrimination at temples, women activists yesterday made a determined bid to storm the inner sanctum of Shani Shinganapur temple, but were stopped by villagers and later detained by police.

The HC had on Friday ruled that entry to temples was a fundamental right of women and it was the state's fundamental duty to protect it.
The editor of Egypt's top state newspaper has called on authorities to seriously deal with the case of an Italian student tortured and killed in Cairo, saying officials who don't realize the gravity of the case are risking a break in Egyptian-Italian relations.

In a front-page column, Al-Ahram's Editor-in-Chief Mohammed Abdel-Hadi Allam subtly yesterday suggested that Guilio Regeni's killing might have the same impact in Egypt as the 2010 beating to death by police of an Egyptian youth in the coastal city of Alexandria.

The brutal death of Khaled Said helped ignite a popular 18-day uprising that began on January 25, 2011 and toppled the 29-year regime of autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

"The Khaled Said case, despite its circumstances, did not go away like some thought at the time," he warned. "The naive stories about Regeni's death have hurt Egypt at home and abroad and offered some a justification to judge what is going on in the country now to be no different from what went on before the January 25 revolution."



Regeni's death has roiled Egyptian-Italian relations. Last month Egyptian authorities implied that Regeni had been killed by a criminal gang specializing in kidnapping foreigners.

Authorities said all members of the gang had been killed in a shootout and that Regeni's passport and several personal items had been found in the gang leader's home.

The announcement was immediately rejected by Italian media and by Regeni's family, who have publicly stated a belief that Regeni was killed by Egyptian security forces.

Premier Matteo Renzi has insisted Italy will settle for nothing less than the truth.

Allam, in his column, charged that Egypt was embarrassed and placed in a "very grave situation" by officials who didn't understand the "value of truth" and the priority given to human rights in Europe.

A "moment of truth" between Egypt and Italy over what happened to Regeni may be fast approaching, he said, adding that "futile dealings" and "gross exaggerations" may not be useful.

It is unusual for an editor in chief of a state-owned newspaper, particularly the traditionally cautious Al-Ahram, to be so outspoken on a sensitive issue, something that speaks to the enormity of the crisis in Egypt's relations with Italy its biggest European Union trade partner and a key market for its now-battered tourism sector.

Allam's counsel that the truth must be brought to light seemed to support the contention that the official criminal gang explanation is not the true story.
Italian luxury interior firm Fendi Casa is looking to open 3-4 new showrooms over the next five years as part of its expansion plans in the country.

"We plan to open 3-4 Fendi Casa showrooms across the country in the next five years. While we want to expand and make the brand reachable to more customers, it is a premium luxury brand so we cannot open too many showrooms," Ace Maison MD Seetu Kohli told PTI. Ace Maison represents Fendi Casa in India.

"India is an attractive market and Fendi Casa is registering 150 per cent growth year on year in the country... while the furniture market is very disorganised here, we are seeing a good demand," Kohli added.

The Fendi Casa is a lifestyle brand under LVMH group.

At present, there are two Fendi Casa showrooms in India in Delhi and Mumbai.

The company is participating in the ongoing 'The Luxury Festival' in New Delhi.
A scuffle broke out between the supporters of a BJP MP and Congress workers today over the laying of the foundation stone of a power sub-station here following which an FIR was lodged against the legislator and 12 others.

Additional Superintendent of Police Ramji Singh Yadav said the incident took place when Jaunpur BJP MP KP Singh went to the site of the proposed power sub-station in Sipah area accompanied by electricity department officials.

Around 15 Congress supporters led by district Youth Congress president Satyaveer Singh reached the spot and started raising slogans against BJP.

They said that since local Congress MLA Nadeem Javed got the sub-station approved during the previous UPA regime, he should lay the foundation stone.

Thereafter, a scuffle ensued between the two groups in which KP Singh and other Congress workers sustained minor injuries, ASP Yadav said, adding that, on the basis of a complaint by Youth Congress members, an FIR has been lodged against 12 people, including KP Singh, Parvinder Chauhan and Santosh Tripathi of BJP.
Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) will be able to invest an additional Rs 14,000 crore from tomorrow in various government securities, including those of the states.

The cap has been now raised to Rs 2,00,500 crore from the current Rs 1,86,500 crore.

The limits would be enhanced further by another Rs 13,500 crore from July 5 onwards.

Read more from our special coverage on "MARKETS"

This follows decisions by RBI and Sebi, late last month, to allow greater foreign fund flows into the government securities, which are generally favoured by FPIs over corporate bonds in India.

FPIs can invest up to Rs 1,40,000 crore in central government debt from Rs 1,35,400 crore now, limits for long term FPIs (sovereign wealth funds, multilateral agencies, insurance funds, pension funds and foreign central banks) will be increased to Rs 50,000 crore from the existing Rs 44,100 crore.

They can also invest up to Rs 10,500 crore in state development loans from current amount of Rs 7,000 crore.

The incremental limit of Rs 5,900 crore for Long Term FPIs will be available for investment on tap with effect from tomorrow, while the separate additional limit of Rs 3,500 crore for State Development Loans (SDL) will also be available on tap.

Any limit remaining unutilised by the long-term investors at the end of a half-year would be made available as additional limit to the investors in the open category for the following half-year.

Earlier, the limit for overseas investors in securities was hiked to Rs 1,29,900 crore from October 12 last year, and it was further increased to Rs 1,35,400 crore from January 1, 2016.

Prior to the October limit, they were allowed to invest up to Rs 1,24,432 crore in government debt securities through auction.
Fresh from acquiring US-based Strength of Nature LLC, homegrown FMCG major Ltd (GCPL) expects overseas markets to account for more than half of its total sales.

The company had announced acquisition of the haircare firm Strength of Nature LLC last week for an undisclosed sum.

Read more from our special coverage on "GODREJ CONSUMER PRODUCTS" GCPL to increase shareholding in its JVs: Adi Godrej

"Post this acquisition, the contribution of the international business to GCPL's overall revenues will be 50 per cent or slightly more," GCPL Managing Director Vivek Gambhir told PTI.

At present, domestic sales contribute 53 per cent of GCPL business and 47 per cent is from international business.

However, he added: "India will continue to be a big focus for us and our largest market."



GCPL has a total consolidated income of Rs 8,367.87 crore for the year ended on March 31, 2015.

The company said Strength of Nature LLC (SON) acquisition would take two to four weeks to close. The acquisition would make GCPL, a market leaders in dry hair care and hair colours, entry into wet hair segment.

However, Gambhir declined to share the value of the deal, which is reported to be around Rs 1,000 crore.

He further said the acquisition will be "funded through low cost USD denominated debt".

GCPL will first focus on the African market through the newly acquired brand and would cater the US market in the second stage.

"Our phase one focus in the first one-two years is on Africa. We see disproportionately higher growth coming from the African market. Then, in phase two, we will evaluate the US market," he said.

SON has a strong presence in the US market and the company sees potential to bring its dry hair care business.

"We will evaluate the potential of a further growing presence in the US market... Our focus in the US market will be on hair care for women of African descent," Gambhir said.

SON had a revenue of USD 95 million (around Rs 630 crore) in 2015 in which over 40 per cent revenue is from outside the US, 9 per cent from the Middle East and Europe and another 9 per cent from the Caribbean islands.

The company is looking at Africa as one of the biggest growth opportunities, which is a sixth of GCPL's total business.

"The acquisition fits in very well with GCPL's priority to accelerate our growth in Africa and be the leading player to serve the needs of women of African descent. As part of our 3 by 3 strategy of international expansion, Africa is one of our main focus areas," Gambhir added.

GCPL has a strong history of acquisitions in global markets.

These include buying of Nigeria's Tura soap brand, Indonesia's household care firm Megasari Group, Argentinian hair care firm Argencos and Issue Group, a market leader in hair colour in Argentina, Peru, Uruguay and Paraguay, among others.
UK-based Indian steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta has come to the rescue of the troubled by opening discussions with owners of the steel giant to acquire its plants at Port Talbot, Britains largest employing some 4,000 people.

The 44-year-old founder of steel, commodities and property group Liberty House, who has already saved a number of UK plants from closure, has said he is ready to discuss with the British government to rescue the plants where thousands of jobs are at stake. He will return here from Dubai on Monday to meet government officials and Tata to gauge their support for a proposal to keep Britain's largest steel plant open.

On the question of acquiring the State Steel plants at Port Talbot, Gupta was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph saying: We would need a proper partnership with the Government. I don't know what that would entail at this stage, Weve started the discussions... we are in the process of starting a discussion with Tata.



He has submitted preliminary proposals to the government to replace Port Talbot's traditional blast furnaces with modern electric arc furnaces, used to produce raw steel by melting scrap.

According to Gupta, the problem with Port Talbot is its size and the fact that it is built around blast furnace making liquid steel from ores. The model that Liberty is building at Newport and elsewhere is built around melting down scrap metal - two million tonnes a year at Newport - using modern electric arc furnaces.

Gupta, who is best known in Wales for buying the former Alphasteel works in Newport in 2013 and re-opening production there last autumn, has recently bought Tata's two rolling mills at Clydebridge and Dalzell in Scotland, facilitated by a temporary 'nationalisation' by the Scottish Government.

stated yesterday that although there was "no fixed timeline" for the sale process, "it needs to be implemented urgently as there are severe funding requirements affecting the UK operations.

Gupta said: "I haven't made a proposition that I want to buy all of ( UK) because that's too big an undertaking to even put on the table at the stage. If the company, its people, its workers and the Government would be willing to consider my suggestions then I'm willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that." Tata Steel UK is losing more than 1 million a day and on Tuesday, the firm's parent company announced it would try to sell all or parts of its operations around the country.

The government, which has been fiercely criticised for its slow response to the crisis, is against nationalising the assets.

Gupta, who currently lives in the UK, was born in Punjab where his father owned a number of businesses including Victor cycles. Since 1992, he has grown Liberty House into a business with a 4.2 million dollars turnover, employing more than 2,000 around the world.
Actress Gwyneth Paltrow has arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, just days ahead of ex-husband Chris Martin's Coldplay concert.

Paltrow, 43, was seen arriving in Buenos Aires on Tuesday reportedly with her two children, Apple, 11, and Moses, 9, in tow, reported People magazine.

While Paltrow and Martin flew into the country separately, they've been seen at the same hotel.

Martin, 39, kicks off his Head Full of Dream tour with his band Coldplay on Thursday, with another concert to follow on Friday.
Identifying India as an important part of its global expansion plan, Swedish fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) says it will not restrict itself to metros here and will look to grow its store chain in new markets.

The company, which has plans to invest 100 million Euros (about Rs 700 crore), also said it sees "a great potential for future growth in the online space" in the country.

"We do see India as an important part of our global expansion. We aim to grow with our business concept of 'fashion and quality at the best price' in a sustainable way," Country Manager for H&M Hennes & Mauritz Retail, India, Janne Einola, told PTI.

The chain has opened four stores in India and plans to add four more this year.

When asked about the company's network expansion strategy, he said: "At H&M we believe there is a lot of room for growth and we do not limit our selves only to metros, we are constantly looking at new possible markets to open in.

"The availability of attractive business locations is the major deciding factor in our expansion, whether it's a mall or high street."



Einola, however, said H&M will only focus on opening company-owned stores as "franchising is not part of our India expansion strategy".

When asked about e-commerce in India, he said: "Online shopping is a natural expansion of our business. We see a great potential for future growth in the online space."



However, H&M would focus on brick and mortar retail store format for the moment, he added.

H&M is also open for Indian designers and online sale channels in coming years.

The company, which operates 3,900 stores in 61 countries, sees India as an important part of its global expansion drive.

He said H&M is fully confident that it would fulfil the 30 per cent local sourcing in next five years as required under retail FDI policy.

"H&M has had production in India since 1993. With our growing expansion rate, we see that we will increase the sourcing from all markets including India, we will comply with the sourcing requirements of the FDI policy," Einola said.
The Delhi High Court has pulled up the National Commission for Women (NCW) for adopting "procedures not sanctioned in law" and exceeding its jurisdiction, while dealing with a matrimonial dispute, resulting in the man losing his job.

It also imposed a fine of Rs 30,000 on NCW.

NCW, on the basis of the woman's complaint against her husband, had written to the High Commission of Singapore directing it to advise the man's employer not to post him outside India, which Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw found to be "illegal and beyond its jurisdiction".

The man was working in Singapore as a marine engineer with a Japanese maritime transport company and as a result of the advisory lost his job, prompting him to move the high court seeking withdrawal of the advisory and compensation of Rs 75,49,958 jointly and severally from NCW and his wife.

The court declined to award compensation to the man as it was a matrimonial dispute.

However, since NCW, "acted beyond its jurisdiction", the court deemed it appropriate "to award costs of this petition of Rs 30,000 to the petitioner payable by the NCW within four weeks of today (March 31)".

The court also observed that role of NCW was to act as a co-ordinating agency "to ensure that the women in distress are guided to appropriate agencies/authorities empowered and constituted to take action on their complaints, and such agencies act on the complaint and that the orders/directions issued by such agencies/authorities are in turn implemented by other agencies/authorities empowered/constituted/required to implement the same".

"However, NCW appears to have abrogated to itself the task of the judge as well as of executing its own decisions and which it is not entitled to... NCW chose to adopt a procedure not sanctioned in law.

"The apprehensions of respondent No.2 (wife) on which NCW acted thus, had no basis and appear to be guided by desire to cause harm to the petitioner and in which NCW appears to have played along," the court observed while disposing of the man's plea.
Noted social activist Medha Patkar was today prevented from entering the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) campus by the varsity security personnel.

University security personnel, locked the main entrance gate and did not allow Patkar into the campus this evening, HCU Chief Security Officer T V Rao told PTI.

On March 23, the varsity authorities had decided not to allow any outsider, including media persons and politicians, on the campus.

Addressing the students, who gathered on both sides of the gate, Patkar wondered why she was not being allowed to go inside the campus saying she was neither from media nor a politician.

"Aaj sabhi kisano ke jaise hatyaein ho rahi hain... aatmahatya nahi (farmers are being killed and are not committing suicide)...Vaise hi Rohith ke bare main kahana padega (similarly it is to be said about Rohith)," she alleged.

She further said universities (in the country) are being made into battlegrounds which she opined was a very serious matter and said "we need to fight this out."



On March 31, HCU security personnel had stopped entry of three Kerala MPs and social activist Teesta Setalvad into the campus and had also prevented Swaraj Abhiyan leader Yogendra Yadav and others from entering the campus on April 1.

In a bid to intensify their on-going agitation demanding removal and arrest of HCU Vice Chancellor Appa Rao Podile (who resumed as VC on March 22), the varsity's Joint Action Committee for Social Justice has given a call for a protest march 'Chalo HCU' on April 6.

Since the university administration has imposed a blockade on the campus preventing students to contact anyone from outside, 'Chalo HCU' call is also against the imposed blockade on the university, the JAC earlier said.

HCU is on the boil since January this year after Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide in the hostel campus.
The man accused of hijacking an Egyptian plane and diverting it to Cyprus did not enter the cockpit during the six-hour long ordeal, the pilot of the aircraft said today.

Egyptian Seif al-Din Mohamed Mostafa is accused of using a fake suicide belt to force the Alexandria-to-Cairo flight to divert to Cyprus on Tuesday, and has been remanded into custody in Cyprus.

He said he acted out of desperation to see his ex-wife and children who live in the eastern Mediterranean island.

"Immediately after the hijacking, I asked the security officer to stay at the door of the cockpit and not leave," EgyptAir pilot Amr Al-Gamal told reporters in a meeting organised by Egyptian authorities.

Systems that lock a cockpit door have existed since the 1980s and strict procedures became standard after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

"Our main fear was that the hijacker may enter the cockpit, or that he knew how to fly a plane or use it to explode", said co-pilot Hamad al-Qaddah.

Mostafa released most of the 55 passengers soon after the plane landed in Larnaca, Cyprus. Hours later he surrendered to police.

Cypriot police say Mostafa -- described by officials as "psychologically unstable" -- faces possible charges of hijacking, kidnapping, reckless and threatening behaviour, and breaches of the anti-terror law.

For the crew it was an six-hour long emotional drama that saw a British passenger taking a photograph with Mostafa and a co-pilot escaping by jumping out of a window of the cockpit.

"The captain asked us to take a photo of the hijacker," said stewardess Nayera Atef al-Dabs, whose photograph with Mostafa wearing what appears to be a rudimentary suicide vest strapped to his chest has gone viral on the Internet.

She said she posed for a picture with Mostafa after a British passenger did the same.

"I was crying in the bathroom and I called my sister to tell her to take care of my three-year-old son. I was trying to look calm in front of the passengers," said Dabs, recalling Tuesday's ordeal.
The HRD Ministry is working on an initiative involving student exchange programmes between large and reputed city schools and those in villages to raise standards of learning in the latter.

The Ministry has already sought a list of "willing" schools from organisations like the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan and CBSE, so that around 100 rural and urban schools can be clubbed in the initial phase, it is learnt.

The Smriti Irani-led Ministry has also written to state governments asking them to identify some urban and rural schools for the student exchange programme and is planning to begin "pilots" in some of the states like Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and West Bengal.

Under the scheme, students from rural schools will visit those in urban areas for a week and vice versa, while both institutions may also execute projects, which could range from story-telling to problem solving in various fields together.

It is envisaged that the better functioning schools would be able to identify areas in which they can support those in the countryside to help raise their standards, officials told PTI.

"The idea is to link well functioning private or government schools in urban or semi-urban areas for interaction and exchange of experience. Besides providing a new kind of learning to students, it will also create a support system for schools," a senior official said.

The official added that the idea for devising a scheme that encourages partnerships among students had been first mooted at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It was suggested that the Department of School Education (DSE) should formulate such a programme.

"While one school may be better placed in terms of infrastructure, facilities or teachers, the emphasis of the partnership is on equality, ensuring that the facilities of the better off school are accessible to its counterpart," officials said.

Even research in this field indicates that inter-school collaboration has a positive influence on learning, he added.

Improving education in schools, especially those in rural areas, is high on the priority list of the government.

"The ministry is also working to see if young professionals entering the field of teaching can do internships in schools that don't run too well," a senior official said.

The HRD Ministry is also conducting a study based on the demand and supply of teachers in all states.
HRD Minister Smriti Irani will participate in an international conference on the 'zero' in France this week.

The idea for holding an event on the relevance of "zero" was conceived when Irani participated in a Leaders' Forum at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in November last.

"The HRD Ministry together with the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, will host an International Conference on the Zero on April 4-5 at the UNESCO headquarters.

"It will share the rich and remarkable history of mathematics through the participation of some brilliant minds," an official statement said here.

The concept of zero as a digit in the decimal place value notation was developed in India, presumably as early as during the Gupta period (5th century) with the oldest unambiguous evidence dating to the 7th century.
Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan has apologised for hurting "religious or other sentiments" caused by his reference to the "Pope" in his tweet in January, saying it was "unintentional".

The 42-year-old actor was sent a legal notice on March 30 by former Vice-Chairman of Maharashtra Minority Commission Abraham Mathai, who said Hrithik has hurt sentiments of the Christian community by making a reference to "Pope" in a tweet directed at actor Kangana Ranaut.

According to the notice, the actor was asked to apologise within seven days failing which a criminal complaint will be filed.

"Seems my tweet about His Holiness has led to misunderstanding. My apologies for hurt caused to religious or other sentiments. Was unintentional," Hrithik posted on Twitter.

Seems my tweet about His Holiness has led 2misunderstanding. My apologies 4 hurt caused 2religious or other sentiments. Was unintentional.  Hrithik Roshan (@iHrithik) April 2, 2016

The notice also said that by making such a statement on a public platform Hrithik has not only willfully challenged the chastity of the respected Pope but has also shown him in poor light.

The "hurtful" remarks were made on Twitter after the "Bang Bang" star's alleged ex-lover Kangana apparently referred to him as her silly "ex".

Hrithik, on January 28, had tweeted: "There are more chances of me having had an affair with the Pope than any of the (I m sure wonderful) women the media has been naming. Thanks but no thanks (sic).
Union Minister for Urban Development M Venkaiah Naidu today said he had met Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalithaa twice and discussed issues related to his ministry, his remarks coming after two of his cabinet colleagues claimned that she was "inaccessible".

"That is their experience. I have met her twice and discussed issues related to the ministry", Naidu told reporters over remarks made by Union ministers Piyush Goyal and Prakadh Javadekar.

Goyal had reportedly during a speech at a conference in New Delhi on March 25 had said he was unable to meet the Tamil Nadu chief minister or state ministers during the last 22 months of his tenure.

"What Piyush Goyal has said is true. That is the experience of people (of the state)," Javadekar, who is also the BJP's poll-in-charge for Tamil Nadu, also said in Delhi on March 29.

On the BJP's prospects in the coming assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, Naidu said the party would reach out to the voters with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's achievements in various fields as they have seen the rules of both AIADMK and DMK.

"You have seen Aiyya (Karunanidhi), Amma (Jayalalithaa) and now see Bhaiyya (Modi)", Naidu said.

To a question on protests by farmers in the region over laying pipeline for GAIL, Naidu said the Centre, while deciding the issue, would not definitely go against the interests of farmers.
Shraddha Kapoor may be playing a rebellious girl in her upcoming film "Baaghi", but the actress says she will only go beyond and break the norms for something she believes in.

The 27-year-old actress, who will be sharing screen with her childhood friend Tiger Shroff for the first time in the Shabbir Khan film, said she doesn't endorse the idea of being a rebel for no reason.

"I am a rebel in some ways, but I would like to be rebel for a cause. That could be any cause I believe in. Being rebellious unnecessarily is something I don't prefer or endorse," Shraddha told PTI on the sidelines of ongoing Lakme Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2016.

The "ABCD2" actress turned showstopper for celebrity designer Masaba, whose collection was inspired by the iconic works of Matthieu Venot (ace French photographer) & Katrin Bremermann (celebrated German artist).

The collection was aimed at bridging the gap between Indian and modern wear curated for a travel enthusiast and the designer dressed her muse in new version of saree made of stretchable wetsuit/scuba suit fabric.

Known for her quirky and catchy prints Masaba incorporated chaap tilak, sliced garlic and chillies in her clothes this time.

"When it comes to my prints, I rely on a lot instinct and what I am feeling at that particular time while creating my collection. This time I wanted to do something which is very Indian but with a twist. Chaap tilak as a motif is beautiful and apart from it I wanted to do something that is a little organic," the designer said.

Masaba also modernized contemporary Indian handloom like Ikkat patterns on fabrics ranging from fluid natural crepes and coarse cottons.

Other celebrities, who attended the show, were Sanjay Dutt along with wife Manyata, Mira Rajput, Sonakshi Sinha and Sophie Chaudhary. Ali Bhatt's mother Soni Razdan was also present.
India has "secured" the release of four Indians from Syria, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Sunday.

The four Indians were arrested by the Syrian government in January this year, when they were on their way to join Islamic State (IS).

"We have secured the release of four Indian nationals from Syria," Swaraj said in a tweet.

In a series of tweets regarding the development, the External Affairs Minister said: "Welcome home Arun Kumar Saini, Sarvjit Singh, Kuldeep Singh and Joga Singh. I appreciate the officers who facilitated their journey from Syria to India."



She said: "I had requested (the) Deputy Prime Minister of Syria for their release during his visit to India in January this year. Thank you Syria.

We have secured the release of four Indian nationals from Syria.  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) April 3, 2016

I had requested Deputy Prime Minister of Syria for their release during his visit to India in January this year. Thank you Syria.  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) April 3, 2016
A 29-year-old Indo-Canadian Sikh was viciously assaulted by four men in Canada in an alleged racially motivated attack, drawing strong condemnation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Supninder Singh Khehra, an Indian citizen from Patiala and a resident of the Toronto suburb of Brampton, was verbally abused and beaten by a group of men who seemed to be drunk by who targeted him because of his brown skin and turban.

Khehra who is still recovering, said he was out with friends in Quebec City after dark and trying to hail a cab when a car full of men approached and started shouting at him in French, swearing and pointing at his turban, CTV reported online.

"I was punched in the eye and fell to the ground, where I was kicked repeatedly. It was all because of my race, my colour and the headgear I was wearing," he said.

He said his turban "went flying off."



"I'm really worried about the safety and wellbeing of young kids of my community who wear turbans," Khehra added.

The incident has been condemned by Trudeau while he was speaking to reporters in Washington, where he was attending the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

Trudeau was quoted as saying that such "hateful acts" had "no place in Canada". He said, "We stand clearly against the kind of discrimination and intolerance that represents."



Trudeau had a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the summit in Washington.

Jaskaran Sandhu, a director of the World Sikh Organisation Canada, said he believes the men should be charged.

He added he is "positive that the Canadian society...Will come together and say that this is completely against the fabric of this country."



Two men were arrested after the incident. One was let go without a charge, police said.

The other, a 22-year-old, faces charges of assault and uttering threats to a police officer. They said they are still investigating and more charges are possible.
Together with their new American friends, a group of students from Kolkata have developed prototypes to absorb excess CO2 emission, remove pathogens from hospital air, and purify waste from tanneries.

As part of a student-exchange programme to learn how innovations developed originally for space travel could solve environmental challenges, a group of 12 school students from America are in the city to work on collaborative projects.

"Most of the hospitals have closed environments fitted with air conditioners. The closed circulation of air there are contaminated with pathogens and spread infection. We've developed a prototype to purify the air, which may be used inside a hospital to keep the patients safe from more infections," said class XI student Sukanya Majumder of Delhi Public School, Ruby Park, Kolkata.

Another team 'Wacky Earthlings' has developed a prototype to purify tannery waste and generate power in the process.

Tannery waste contains chromium ions which are highly toxic. The prototype removes ions by precipitating the waste with Sodium Hydroxide and the resultant solution is used to produce electricity.

Another team has designed a device that can be installed in almost every source emitting CO2, from exhaust pipes of cars, buses to factory chimneys and everything in between, to reduce air pollution by adsorbing the excess emission.

The 'Hacking Space: A Museums Connect program' is funded



by the US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Science City in Kolkata and Chabot Space & Science Centre, America are working with the young talents on this programme.

"Personally I love this kind of programme that allows students and citizens across the globe to delve into issues impacting their local communities and to work together to address some of humanity's most pressing challenges like climate change," the US Consulate's Public Affairs Officer Andrew Posner said.

Science City Director Arijit Dutta Chowdhury said many innovations like solar energy, water purifiers, etc were originally made for space travel but they are already finding use in our daily lives here on earth.

"We want to find out more such innovations which can provide solutions to our environmental and sustainability challenges we face in Kolkata and in California," he said.

A batch of Indian students will travel to Chabot Space & Science Centre in California next month.
Iran's oil exports have surpassed 2 million barrels per day following the lifting of sanctions under its nuclear deal with world powers, Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said today.

"Iran's oil and gas condensate exports are now at more than 2 million barrels per day" after rising by 250,000 bpd since March 1, the ministry's Shana service quoted Zanganeh as saying.

Iran has doubled exports since its nuclear accord took effect on January 16.

Iran, an OPEC member, has the world's fourth-largest oil reserves but its exports were long hampered by sanctions over its nuclear programme.

It has moved ahead with an increase in exports despite global concerns over a supply glut that has pushed oil prices to below USD 40 a barrel, from more than USD 100 a barrel in mid-2014.

Top exporter Saudi Arabia has said it is willing to consider an output freeze to help shore up prices.

But in an interview published Friday, Saudi deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman reiterated Riyadh's position that other major producers, including Iran, would need to do the same.

His remarks drove down oil prices, with US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for delivery in May sliding USD 1.55 (4.0 per cent) to USD 36.79 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Major oil producers led by Russia and Saudi Arabia are to meet in Doha on April 17 to discuss measures to stabilise prices, including a proposal not to pump out oil above a certain level.

But Tehran rejects any output freeze - first mooted by Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in February - until it regains its pre-sanctions market share.

Zanganeh described the proposal in late February as a "very funny joke", as production levels vary widely among oil producers.

Under more than a decade of sanctions, Iran witnessed crucial global ties cut from its economy, including its lifeblood oil markets.

In January 2012, under hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, the European Union stopped buying oil from Iran and global banking networks blocked the Islamic republic from the SWIFT system.

Hope only returned after president Hassan Rouhani's election in 2013 that culminated in ending the nuclear standoff after two years of negotiations.

Since the nuclear deal's implementation, Tehran has resumed exporting to the European market.

But Asian countries China, India, Japan and South Korea remain the main customers of Iranian oil.
Iran is investigating whether an alleged Indian 'spy' arrested last month in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan province crossed the border illegally or was picked up from its soil, according to a media report here.

"Iranian authorities have directly and indirectly conveyed to Pakistan that they were investigating whether or not Kulbhushan Yadav crossed into Pakistan illegally," The Express Tribune reported, citing top government sources.

Yadav, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was a serving Indian Navy officer.

India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.

India, which has already claimed Yadav was picked up from the Iranian soil, is putting pressure on the Islamic Republic to register a case against Pakistani agencies, the paper said.

India is also seeking to enlist support of the US, the UK and France to convince Iran to go by its claim that Yadav was kidnapped from the Iranian soil, it said, quoting sources.

Pakistan Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif also took up the matter with Iranian President Hassan Rowhani during the latter's recent visit to Islamabad, the report said.

Iran has asked for the exact timing of Yadav's arrest - which was readily provided, according to sources.

The Islamic Republic suspected Yadav had been missing for a few months - and not since March 3 when Pakistan claimed he was arrested, the paper added.
An Islamic State affiliate in Saudi Arabia claimed today that its militants detonated two explosive devices in front of a police station in the city of al-Dalam, setting fire to three police vehicles.

A statement issued by the Islamic State group's Najd Province affiliate said the explosions took place a day earlier. It did not give further details.

Some Saudi websites published images of the aftermath late yesterday night, showing police jeeps and SUVs on fire outside the police station in al-Dalam, located 62 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of the capital Riyadh.

No deaths or injuries were reported. Local police spokesman Fawaz al-Mayman, quoted by the Almowaten website, said the incident is still under investigation and that police would issue a statement soon.

There have been several attacks in Saudi Arabia over the past year carried out by local Islamic State group affiliates. The Najd Province affiliate is the kingdom's most active. It claimed responsibility for two major bombings in eastern Saudi Arabia and one in Kuwait that killed 53 people at Shiite mosques last May and June. Najd Province is the traditional name for the central heartland of the peninsula and the homeland of the ruling Al Saud family.

Another IS-inspired group, calling itself the Hijaz Province affiliate, said it was behind a mosque bombing inside a police compound that killed 15 people in August. The Bahrain Province affiliate claimed responsibility for a shooting in eastern Saudi Arabia that killed five worshippers in October.

A similar attack in late January outside a Shiite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia killed four people, though no group claimed responsibility. Last month, Saudi police killed six men they said were wanted for the murder of a counter-terrorism security officer, whose death was filmed and posted online by the suspects who declared their allegiance to the IS group.

Saudi Arabia is part of the US-led coalition bombing the IS group in Iraq and Syria. IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has called Saudi Arabia's Western-allied rulers "apostates" and has encouraged attacks against the Sunni-ruled kingdom.
A man, held guilty of stealing visa stickers in 1997 from Canadian High Commission and illegally using them in documents to travel to Toronto, has been awarded a month of rigorous jail term by a Delhi court which modified the sentence considering his family background.

Special judge Poonam Chaudhry partly allowed the appeal of convict Amit Verma and modified the jail term awarded to him from three months to one month but doubled the fine to Rs 1 lakh saying the allegations against him were grave.

"I am of the view that the allegations against the accused are of grave nature as he attempted to cheat the airline on the basis of stolen visa stickers to induce the airline to allow him to travel from Delhi to Toronto, however, as he was found to be an unfit passenger, he slipped away.

"Appellant had dishonestly and fraudulently used as genuine the Canadian visa sticker on his travel documents. I uphold his conviction," the judge said.

The court reduced the jail term after 40-year-old Verma prayed for a lenient view and submitted that the sentence awarded is harsh. He had also said he needed to take care of his family comprising his mother, wife and two children.

"In the facts and circumstances, the sentence is modified to the extent that appellant (Verma) be sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for one month for the offences under sections 420 (cheating), 411 (dishonestly possessing stolen property) and 471 (using forged document as genuine) of the IPC, and fine of Rs one lakh," the court said.

A complaint was lodged in 1997 by the then liaison officer of the Canadian High Commission alleging that on January 15, 1997, Verma had stolen visa tickets from the High Commission in the national capital.

It said the then Immigration Control officer of the high



commission was contacted by the airline authorities who told him that Verma attempted to board a flight to Toronto without possessing an authentic Canadian visa.

Itwas alleged that Verma committedtheftandsubsequent saleofblank Canadian visitor visa stickers for monetary consideration.

The accused had pleaded guilty before a magisterial court, after which he was convicted and sent to three months in jail.

However, in his appeal, he contended that he did not understand the meaning of pleading guilty and its consequences as he was in a disturbed state of mind due to compelling circumstances.

The court rejected this contention saying he had studied up to class XII therefore the claim that he did not understand the implications of pleading guilty is without merits.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will tomorrow inaugurate the annual session of industry chamber CII.

The session is based on the theme Building National Competitiveness and would discuss ways to strengthen national, human and industry competitiveness for a more resilient and accelerated economy.

Commenting on the Annual Session 2016, CII President Sumit Mazumder said India remains a 'bright spot' in the global economy with an expected GDP growth rate of 7.6 per cent for 2015-16 and strong macroeconomic indicators.

"It faces several challenges including a fragile global ecosystem, rural distress after two years of drought and a moderate investment rate.

Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu, Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Power Minister Piyush Goyal and Congress leader Anand Sharma would also attend the two-day convention, which will host about 4,000 delegates.

As always, CII Karnataka has a very significant agenda in



the coming year and we will pursue the same tirelessly, especially to build the capacity and capability of our membership, engage with other stakeholders to advocate win-win policy interventions, so as to create a distinct Brand India," said Mr Bali.

About AB Volvo Group



The Volvo Group is one of the world's leading manufacturers of trucks, buses, construction equipment and marine and industrial engines. The Group also provides complete solutions for financing and service. The Volvo Group, which employs about 100,000 people, has production facilities in 18 countries and sells its products in more than 190 markets. In 2015 the Volvo Group's sales amounted to about SEK 313 billion (EUR 33.4 billion). The Volvo Group is a publicly-held company headquartered in Goteborg, Sweden. Volvo shares are listed on Nasdaq Stockholm. For more information, please visit http://www.Volvogroup.Com.

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Former "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart and his wife Tracey have rescued a runaway bull in New York City.

Farm Sanctuary posted on Facebook on Friday, April 1, a video of Jon feeding the bull, who ditched out of a truck from a slaughterhouse in Jamaica, New York to the campus of York College, reported Ace Showbiz.

"Everyone likes hay," Jon said in the video.

Farm Sanctuary wrote, "Breaking News: We are happy to report that the bull who was on the run earlier today in Queens is safe and on his way to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY.

"Jon and Tracey Stewart picked up the individual whom we are calling Frank this afternoon from Animal Care Centers of NYC (ACC). Special thanks to our colleague Mike Stura of Skylands Animal Sanctuary And Rescue who drove out to assist with the transport. More info to come."



The runaway bull was transported to the Animal Care Center in Brooklyn before Jon brought it to his animal sanctuary.

Sylvia Moskovitz with the Watkins Glen shelter in New York told the site that members of Farm Sanctuary negotiated with the organization a voluntary release for the bull.

After spending the weekend at the Stewart family farm, the bull will be transported to Cornell University Hospital for Animals and becomes a steer.
Filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj says he will never make a sequel to his acclaimed caper thriller "Kaminey", as he does not want to repeat the characters.

"'Kaminey 2' will never happen. I want to grow as a filmmaker. I don't want to just make money. I don't make money, I make films. I don't want to repeat characters," Bhardwaj told PTI.

Released in 2009, "Kaminey" starred Shahid Kapoor in a double role and he won accolades for his performance from all quarters. There have been speculations about its sequel since quite sometime.

Presently, Bhardwaj is busy with "Rangoon", starring Saif Ali Khan, Shahid Kapoor and Kangana Ranaut.

"I am busy in completing the film. It is very taxing. I am happy and content with the film so far. I am very excited about the film," he said.

The "Omkara" director has worked with both Saif and Shahid earlier. However, it is the first time that he is working with National award winning actress Kangana Ranaut and is all praise for her.

"She is a very fine actor. She is very hard working and prepares a lot (for the role)," he said.

"It was easy working with her as she is very hard working. My work became easy as she is a very intelligent actress," he said.

In the the period-romance-drama "Rangoon" set against the backdrop of World War-II, Shahid plays the role of a soldier while Kangana essays a 1940s actress.
Ace designer Rohit Bal along with his muse Kareena Kapoor Khan gave an astonishing closure to the Lakme Fashion Week 2016, with his line stunningly portraying the essence of life and existence.

Bal, who is celebrating his silver jubilee in the fashion industry this year, turned the finale designer for the fashion week after 2012.

This was also the first time the Delhi-based designer was collaborating with Kareena, who is the face of Lakme.

The 34-year-old "Ki & Ka" actress looked every bit of a diva, dressed in royal blue lehnga choli with golden 'chaand' motif's, as she walked the ramp with historical St.Xavier's College in the backdrop.

"I love the chand motif on the lehenga. It is something special. I would love to keep this for coming fifty years for my family. I love Rohit's clothes. His clothes show his personality. He puts his heart in it," Kareena said.

"It's been a wonderful experience. For the first time Lakme done fashion show of this level at such a great monument like St.Xavier's. It's been great.

"Poornima and the whole team have tried to do something different this time. It was the best finale," she added.

Titled "Koroshini", which is an Urdu word for illuminate, the collection was Bal's expression of subtle and gentle grace.

From yards of mulmul to hues of gold, ivory, the creations had a presentation of hand made cut works and lattice.

The designer used organic fabrics throughout his range and used ancient techniques of embroidery crafted by artisans of the country.

"The collection is called 'Koroshini,' which in Urdu means illuminate. For me this whole association with Lakme, Kareena and the whole team is been about illumination," Bal said.

The show was a spectacular melange of creativity and beauty. Bal, who enjoys a great celebrity clientele and has a lot of friends in Bollywood was all praise for his muse.

"Kareena is a vision. She really is a goddess. It's not just about how she looks. It's about the person she is, understanding, sharp and intelligent.

"I have a lot of friends in Bollywood, but this girl, despite being so young, she understands fashion, she understands inner beauty, she understands spirituality," he said.

The models were dressed in royal anarkali's, long jackets, lehengas, sarees, sherwanis crafted on pure hand spun silks and rich silk velvets.

Time when the audience were all into the show, a moment of nostalgia suddenly hit everyone, when supermodel of 90's Sheetal Malhar walked down the runway wearing a black floor-length anarkali along with a golden heavily embroider jacket.

Amid all the beauty and designs, the thing that made the biggest highlight of the show was the hauntingly beautiful background created on the building through 3D mapping.

The fields of poppies and blooms of hibiscus that were seen on the clothes were amazingly put on display at the walls of the historical institute.

The LFW finale was nothing less than a visual treat for the people present at the venue.

"The backdrop was done with 3D mapping. It was the idea by Lakme team and Hitesh, who is the best person in the field did it. It was the first time something like this was done in any fashion week in India. I feel the whole concept blended well with the designs. We as creative person, a designer, an actor or an entrepreneur try and do something new and set an standard for others to follow," Bal said.

Poornima Lamba, Head of Innovation, Lakme praised the designer and the showstopper 'Illuminate' came alive in the most beautiful form.

"Rohit is pure genius. From the venue to his clothes to the backdrop everything was hauntingly beautiful and when Kareena came out it took my breath away," she said.

The only thing the otherwise perfect finale was missing on were the Bollywood celebrities in the front row.

Among popular faces, actress Huma Qureshi was the only one spotted. Former 'Bigg Boss' contestant Imam Siddqui was also seen at the venue.
Fashion conscious Kate Middleton will reportedly be packing 12-15 outfits for her six-day visit to India and Bhutan after an advance team completed a recce of locations, including the iconic Taj Mahal.

Kate, 34, and Prince William, 33, will fly into Mumbai next Sunday for the trip and the Duchess of Cambridge will be packing alongside her daytime dresses and evening gowns, a surprise addition -- a pair of hiking boots.

Kate will take 12-15 outfits for the six days of official visits, the Telegraph reported.

Whilst the Royal couple are in Bhutan they will go on a six-hour trek to Tiger's Nest monastery said to require peak physical fitness and hiking gear, likely to be the 106 pounds Hillmaster boots the Duchess last wore when she visited Borneo's jungle.

The official tour starts in Mumbai on April 10, and the Duke and Duchess will travel to New Delhi, the Kaziranga National Park and Thimphu, capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, apart from their visit to the Taj Mahal.

A small team have made a rehearsal trip to India and Bhutan, on which Kate's private secretary Rebecca Deacon made notes on factors to consider about the locations the Duchess will visit, so that she has an idea of what outfits will and won't work, the daily said.

The team took a photograph of every place the Duchess will visit, so that she can use these images as a guide to determine how formal she needs to dress and what colours will look best against the backdrops.

"She is in charge of it herself and takes an interest in paying tribute to the host country with nods to their culture and local style on at least a few of the engagements," a royal source was quoted as saying.

"The important factor on this tour is the heat, so that's an issue that plays a big part in the choice of outfits," the source said.

On previous royal tours Kate has made a point of dressing diplomatically -- wearing a dress by Canadian born designer Erdem Moralioglu to touch down in Montreal, for example.

She wore a dress by Australian label Zimmermann whilst on Australia's Manley Beach, and on her three-day trip to New York in 2014 she wore two pieces from American designers, a Tory Burch coat and J Crew jeans.

Just a few days after it was announced the Duke and Duchess would be travelling to India, Kate wore a dress by Indian designer Saloni for a function in London, hinting perhaps that she will also rely on the designer's print and colour filled collection for the upcoming tour.

The Duchess' personal assistant, Natasha Archer, will accompany her on the royal tour, as will her hairdresser Amanda Cook Tucker.
Haryana Chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar today praised the people of Odisha calling them "hard-working" and launched a mobile application for the Odia population in the NCR through which they can connect with each other.

Khattar spoke at the 'Pravasi Odia Utsav' organised by Kalinga Bharti Foundation in association with Pravasi Odia organising committee in Om Shanti Retreat Centre, Bhora Kalan here.

Applauding the skilled people from Odisha who work Haryana, Khattar said, "unhone Haryana ki pragati me yogdaan diya hai (They have contributed in the development of Haryana)."



He also announced that the Haryana government is soon going to open the first Efficiency Development College in the state for skill upgradation.

The Chief minister also spoke in Odia language during his address at the event in which people hailing from Odisha and residing in NCR-- Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida, Ghaziabad-- participated.

Union Minister Dharmender Pradhan later made a reference to Khattar's address in Odia language and said," the Haryana Chief Minister speaking in Odia, what else can be a better example of cultural exchange than this?."



Drawing similarities between Haryana and Odisha, Khattar said the war of Mahabharta was fought in Haryana where in Lord Krishna gave the eternal message of Gita to the mankind which teaches us the way to live life while war of Kalinga was fought in Odisha which changed the heart of King Ashoka and he adopted Buddhism.

"Odisha is called the soul of India. It is known for its culture and heritage," he said.

Governor of Odisha, Dr S C Jamir, who was also present at the event, said the Odia Utsav gives opportunity for introspection that how much has the state progressed after it came into existence.

He hoped that Odisha and Haryana will further work together in service sector.

Pradhan, who also hails from Odisha, said that for people present here Odisha is their 'Janambhoomi' (birth place) but Haryana has become their 'Karmbhoomi' and he can assure that the Odia people will work more hard and contribute in the progress of Haryana as well as the nation.

He said that a temple of Lord Jagannath has been constructed in Faridabad of Haryana which is perhaps the biggest Jagannath temple in the country.

Pradhan said that the Odia people think more in "scientific way", that is the reason the Sun Temple in Konark constructed at the sea shore hundreds of years ago, still stood magnificently without any sign of damage on its walls.
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West took home nearly USD 200,000 from her charity eBay sales in 2014, tax records have revealed.

The "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" star has been auctioning off a number of items on the online auction site to raise money for various charitable organisations but has also been taking home a tidy sum for herself too.

Tax records show that the 35-year-old television personality earned USD 190,000 from the sales of the various items in 2014 whilst 10 per cent of the sale price - around USD 21,000 - went to charity, reported Radar online.

During the auctions, Kim has been supporting a selection of organisations, most recently the VOUS Church in Miami, Florida and the Life Change Community Church in Agoura Hills, California.

In 2013, she took home a whopping USD 400,000 whilst in 2012, it was approximately USD 180,000.
State Bar Council of Madhya Pradesh (SBCMP) has exempted advocates in lower courts from wearing black coats, part of their dress code, during peak summer.

Such relief is given to lawyers of lower courts in summer according to Bar Council of India's (BCI) guidelines and rules.

"In a bid to provide relief to more than 60,000 advocates from sultry heat we have exempted them from wearing black coats from April 15 to July 15," SBCMP secretary Mukesh Mishra told PTI today.

He said a circular was recently sent in this regard to different advocates' bodies across the state.
Taking a dig at ruling BJP over the contentious issue of excise duty on non-silver jewellery, Delhi Chief Minister today asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to "leave" Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's side if he did not want to lose the support of traders.

Gold traders, jewellers and artisans have been observing strike since March 2, demanding roll-back of the budgetary proposal that has impacted the trade.

Addressing a gathering of jewellers at Jantar Mantar here, Kejriwal warned BJP of "erosion" in its support base among traders and wondered if Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Modi had any differences at all as the ruling BJP was "implementing" the policies of the UPA dispensation.

"The notion was that BJP is a party of traders. Then what has happened now? I want to tell the PM that Jaitley ji will not have to gather votes or contest elections. You need votes so please be a little careful. If jewellers are cheated, then traders will leave BJP's side," Kejriwal said.

The Aam Aadmi Party convener's address, peppered with sharp jibes at the PM and his pet projects such as 'Make in India', was lapped up by a sizeable crowd that repeatedly raised slogans against Modi and Jaitley.

Kejriwal claimed that BJP MPs and even Union Ministers are in "favour" of the jewellers' demands contrary to the PM's "adamance". "Even MPs are wondering as to what Jaitley has explained to the PM."

"BJP is on one side and PM on the other. But why? PM is under the total control of Jaitley. I am smaller in terms of age, experience than Modi ji but have a small suggestion for him.

Please leave Jaitley ji's side, he will take you down," Kejriwal said.

He also read out a series of tweets made by Modi in his capacity as Gujarat Chief Minister where the latter had opposed a similar move by the erstwhile UPA government to impose one per cent excise duty on non-silver jewellery.

"What has changed? People thought the PM is with them but you have cheated them. Congress used to impose excise duty and people brought you to power thinking you won't repeat the same. But now that you have repeated the act, what difference is there between you and Sonia Gandhi?" Kejriwal said.

Gold traders, jewellers and artisans have been observing strike since March 2 demanding a roll-back of the budgetary proposal that has impacted the trade which, Kejriwal said, runs into over Rs 1 lakh crore.

The Delhi Chief Minister claimed that due to the budget proposal having impacted their business severely, four to five traders have committed "suicide" in the last one month.

"Some jeweller friends told me that one more person committed suicide last evening over the policies," he said.

AAP MLA Vishesh Ravi, party spokesperson Raghav Chadha and its traders' wing convener Brajesh Goyal were also present on the occasion.

Few protesters, carrying the banner of Guest Teachers' Association, raised slogans against Kejriwal before being removed by the police even as his nearly 30-minute-long speech was interrupted by glitches in the sound system.

"The duty was imposed without consulting traders. It will only lead to inspector raj and a spike in corruption. The cost of collection would be much more than what the government hopes to earn," Kejriwal said.

The excise duty will have a "strangulating" impact on the jewellery sector, Kejriwal said, adding that it flies in the face of Modi's 'Make in India' initiative.

"You go to America, Japan seeking investments. But you are strangulating a flourishing business in the country. I don't get the logic behind it. First, save your own countrymen, then call the foreigners," he said.

"The PM can embrace (Pakistani counterpart) Nawaz Sharif on his birthday, but can't talk to jewellers," he said in reference to the surprise visit by Modi to Lahore in December last year.

The Chief Minister also claimed that President Pranab Mukherjee had extended his "full support" to the cause of the jewellers when he had taken a delegation to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

"Congress had tried the same and Pranab Mukherjee was the Finance Minister then. When jewellers protested continuously for around 22 days, the excise duty was withdrawn.

"The President told me he was aware that imposing the excise duty would lead to corruption and thus it should not be introduced," Kejriwal said while pointing to Delhi government's "prompt" decision to roll back VAT on certain items after traders expressed unhappiness over the same.

Kejriwal also read out the names of 10 top industrialists who he claimed owe around "Rs 7,30,000 crore" to the banks.

"They are not even paying interest but spend thousands of crores on lavish birthday parties, gifting their wives aeroplanes," he said.

"BJP leaders warned people not to come to my rally. I wonder why they are scared of the quarter CM of a half-state. Don't rile the traders. You will have to face dire consequences if they wish you ill. The trading community across the country will abandon BJP," warned Kejriwal.
A second case of Ebola has been confirmed in Liberia months after the country had been declared free from transmissions, health officials said today.

The 5-year-old son of the 30-year-old woman who died Thursday from Ebola has been taken to a treatment centre in Monrovia, said Deputy Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah.

Authorities are now checking everyone the woman was in contact with and 10 health care workers from the hospital where the woman died are under observation.

There are strong indications the woman came from Guinea when the border was closed, Nyenswah said. The woman, who died on arrival at a hospital Thursday, travelled with three of her children.

"We are investigating in both Guinea and Liberia how she entered," he said. "But knowing the porous border we are not surprised; she entered Liberia before getting sick or manifesting signs and symptoms."



The new cases are a setback for Liberia, which had been declared free from transmissions for a third time on Jan. 14. Liberia was first declared free of the disease in May, but new cases emerged twice, forcing officials to reset the clock in a nation where more than 4,800 people have died from the deadly virus.

The World Health Organisation has said Ebola is no longer an international health emergency, but flare-ups, at decreasing frequency, are expected.

Flare-ups have also occurred in Sierra Leone and in Guinea.

In the case of Guinea, the flare-up came just months after the outbreak was declared over. WHO said there have been eight cases of Ebola and seven deaths in Guinea since late February. There are no known cases in Sierra Leone.

Ebola is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of victims or corpses.

Ebola has killed more than 11,300 people, mostly in West Africa, since December 2013.
Bigal Thakur (65) of village Kodi, who lost 10 of his family members in an accident last year, received a cheque for Rs 10 lakh from Union Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha today.

The compensation was announced By Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das after 14 persons had been killed when their SUV was hit by the Howrah-Bhopal Express near Bhurkunda railway station of the East Central Railway at an unmanned railway way crossing on December 7.

Sinha, who went to the village, also gave a cheque to Ghanshayam Thakur, the father of Rajesh Thakur, who was driving the car.
PDP president will be sworn in tomorrow as the first woman Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, also becoming the first-ever Muslim woman CM, heading a coalition government with BJP in the only Muslim-majority state.

The 56-year-old leader, daughter of PDP founder Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, will take oath of office at Raj Bhawan in Jammu tomorrow at 11.00 AM.

Mehbooba assuming office will be a landmark event in the history of Jammu and Kashmir as well as rest of the country.

She will be the first woman to head a government in Jammu and Kashmir and the first Muslim woman to become the Chief Minister of a state in India.

Governor N N Vohra yesterday invited the PDP president to form and lead the PDP-BJP coalition government in the state.

"The Governor's invitation to (Mehbooba) Mufti follows the earlier discussions with the PDP and BJP presidents regarding formation of government in the state and the subsequent communications received from her and Sat Sharma, president, J&K BJP in regard to this matter," an official spokesman said.

The PDP-BJP government can expect a smooth run if the two ideologically opposite parties can avoid controversies that dogged their first brush together with power when Mufti Mohammad Sayeed headed the government for 10 months till his death on January 7.

The PDP-BJP coalition, which also has Sajad Gani Lone led Peoples' Conference as a constituent, has 56 MLAs in the 87-member Assembly.

The PDP has 27 members while BJP has 25. Peoples' Conference has two MLAs while two other independents are supporting the coalition.

The revival of the PDP-BJP coalition government in the state -- after three months of stalemate -- became possible after several rounds of hectic negotiations between the two parties and apparent intervention by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Following Sayeed's death, Governor's Rule was imposed in



the state as the PDP and the BJP did not stake fresh claim for government formation in the state.

Initially, the two parties maintained that Mehbooba was not in a position to take over the reins of the state as she was mourning her father's death.

However, after the mourning period was over, the PDP said it was looking for assurances and confidence building measures from the Centre on implementation of Agenda of Alliance -- common minimum programme of the two parties -- before forming the new government.

Hopes of ending the deadlock were raised when BJP general secretary Ram Madhav arrived in Srinagar in a chartered plane to meet late in the evening on February 17 but nothing came out of the hour-long meeting.

The next high level contact between the two parties came on March 19 when Mehbooba met BJP president Amit Shah.

Again the two parties failed to resolve the issues, forcing the BJP to publicly admit for the first time that no headway could be made on government formation.

In fact, several PDP leaders went to extent of saying the prospects of an alliance with the BJP were all but over.

However, to everyone's surprise, the PDP president went to meet the Prime Minister three days later.

Mehbooba emerged from the meeting with the Prime Minister "satisfied", which shall culminate tomorrow with her swearing in as the Chief Minister.
Indian mining giant Adani today moved one step closer to realising its 21.7 billion dollars coal mine in Australia after the local government granted three mining leases for the controversy-hit project.

Queensland minister for Natural Resources and Mines Anthony Lynham approved the individual lease grantfor 70441Carmichael,70505 Carmichael Eastand 70506Carmichael North,which are estimated to contain 11 billion tonnes of thermal coal, media reports said.

According to state Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, the approval had undergone "extensive government and community scrutiny" and were a step towards securing jobs for region, with more than 5,000 jobs expected to be generated during construction and more than 4,000 during operation.

"I know the people of north and central Queensland will welcome this latest progress for the potential jobs and economic development it brings closer for their communities," she said.

She said "stringent conditions would continue to protect the environment, landholders' and traditional owners' interests and Great Barrier Reef".

Lynham confirmed no dredging at Abbot Point would take place until Adani had demonstrated financial closure.

Over 200 conditions apply to the projectwhich, if it goes ahead, would be the largest coal mine in Australia.

"The mine's environmental authority had about 140 conditions to protect local flora and fauna, groundwater and surface water resources, as well as controls on dust and noise," Lynham said adding, "A further 99 stringent and wide-ranging conditions apply to the rail and port elements of the project."



The project now has 19 permits and approvals at all three levels of government, including nine primary approvals from the state and federal government.

"A number of other steps have to be completed before mine construction can start," Lynham said.

"They include secondary approvals for rail, port facilities, power, water, roadworks and the airport and a financial assurance with the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection.

"The independent Coordinator-General will continue to work with Adani to progress the project," he said.

The latest approvals have come after Adani secured final environmental approvaland had reached an agreement on compensation with a landholderlast month.

Adani's plan to build one of the world's biggest coal mines in Australia has been hampered time and again. A federal court in August last year had revoked the original approval due toenvironmental concerns.

In October last year, the project got a new lease of life after the Australian government gave its re-approval.

Welcoming the latest approvals, Adani said, "The granting of a mining lease helps deliver the company certainty with respect to timelines, while moving to the next phase of the project, subject to the resolution of legal challenges by politically-motivated activists.

"Adani has consistently said that what is required for



its projects to proceed is certainty on approvals. This is key approval helps provide that with respect to Carmichael," the company said in a statement.

"Absent additional legal challenges designed to delay progress on this export-creating mine, the next phase of the project, following this key approval, will see a return to the pre-engineering work that had to be suspended in 2015 with the loss of certainty on approvals timelines that had occurred at that time," Adani said.

"Concurrent with that, the company will continue to finalise second tier approvals, with the clear aim of commencing construction in calendar year 2017."



"In the coming months, Adani and its partners will provide additional detail regarding the next steps for the logistics and labour requirements of the project," it said.

"It is important to note that successive legal challenges to science-based approvals, which are the strictest of their kind for a major resources project in this country, are designed to deny the job creating benefits of the company's mine, rail and port projects to our state.

"It is for this reason that conclusion of second tier approvals and resolution of politically-motivated legal challenges is the company's principal focus, prior to a final investment decision being made, it said.

Having previously sought to progress to the construction phase in 2015, Adani is keenly aware of the risks of proceeding on major works in advance of the conclusion of these matters. Delivering low ash, low sulphur, lower emitting coal to thermal generators in India, while delivering jobs in regions crying out for them, and taxes and royalties to Queensland, is paramount," Adani said.

Meanwhile, the latest state government decision has been severely criticised by the environmental activists.

According to Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Queensland Government's approval of a mining lease while the Great Barrier Reef was suffering its worst bleaching in over a decade was indefensible.

"There is no question that the Reef is suffering right now. Coral scientists, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and even the Queensland Government have acknowledged the severity of this latest bleaching," said Shani Tager, Greenpeace Australia Pacific's Reef Campaigner.

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"This decision is appalling. The Great Barrier Reef is World Heritage-listed because it is a natural wonder of the world, and right now its most pristine areas are suffering from bleaching because the waters are too warm."



Moira Williams, campaigner with 350 Australia, said, "As global temperatures hit terrifying levels and the Reef turns a deathly white, the absurdity of Anastacia Paluszczuk's Government approving this monstrous coal project cannot be understated."



Last week, the Finance minister Arun jaitley on his official visit to Australia denied reports that the issue of Adani's project was on his agenda.

Sources said that during his meeting with Australian energy minister Josh Frydenberg on last Friday, Jaitley was informed that the federal government was fully in support for the Adani project in the state.
Moderate Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has been invited by Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) to attend its summit in Turkey from next week, prompting the separatist amalgam to seek passport to facilitate his travel.

The Mirwaiz received the formal invitation from OIC Secretary General Iyad bin Amin Madani for the 13th Summit to be held at Istanbul from April 10 to 15. The meeting is held every three years with Egypt hosting the last one which he could not attend.

Government sources said it was unlikely that the Hurriyat Chairman would be getting the travel documents to facilitate his travel.

The Mirwaiz, who has been raising concern over the growth of banned ISIS terror group, has meanwhile asked the OIC, an important forum of Islamic countries, to discuss problems faced in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Palestine and play a role in helping the Islamic world get rid of them.

"The OIC member countries need to devise policies with vision and foresightedness to deal with these issues besides putting in efforts to bring Muslim countries closer," he said.

He expressed hope that during the Summit, representatives of OIC members would lay emphasis on Indian and Pakistani leadership to resolve the Kashmir issue as per the wishes and aspirations of the people of Jammu Kashmir.

He urged the Muslim body to use its influence with both the countries to resolve the vexed Kashmir issue.
A Muslim cleric was shot dead by four unidentified persons at a madrassa here allegedly over an old enmity, police said today.

The incident occurred last night when the unidentified persons entered a madrassa here and opened fire at mufti Shahjad Ali, they said, adding the mufti was rushed to a hospital where he was declared brought dead.

An old enmity with is suspected to be the reason behind the murder, police said.

An FIR has been lodged in this regard and police is investigating the matter.
A 12-year-old Muslim boy has accused his teacher of religiously targeting him by calling him a "terrorist" in front of his peers in the US state of Texas, prompting school authorities to probe the incident.

Waleed Abushaaban, a 7th grade student in First Colony Middle School has been the butt of "bomb" jokes and ridicule from his fellow classmates after his teacher made the careless crack, a local TV KHOU.Com reported.

The teacher allegedly made the insensitive comment when her class had been watching the movie "Bend it Like Beckham" after taking an exam and Waleed let out a loud laugh at a joke in the movie.

"We're in the class watching a movie," Waleed said. "And I was just laughing at the movie and the teacher said, "I wouldn't be laughing if I was you. And I said why? She said because we all think you're a terrorist."



After that comment other students started making fun of him and started calling him a "bomb".

"They were like, 'oh I see a bomb!' and they started all laughing and making jokes. I was upset and I felt like I was put in the corner and like everybody was just looking at me," Waleed added.

The English and Language Arts teacher was immediately removed from the classroom after the accusations, and Waleed's family wants her gone for good.

"Just because my son is a Muslim doesn't mean he is a terrorist," said Malek Abushaaban, Waleed's father. "He's as American as anybody else. He was born here ... That's all he knows is how to be an American."



The family is also calling for the school to get religious sensitivity training.

The Fort Bend school district released a statement about the accusations saying they do "not support the teacher's actions."



"No religion should be targeted by and disrespected by any administrator on any school campus," said Quanell X, a community activist.

The school has removed the English and Language Arts teacher from the classroom while it investigates; however, Waleed's family want her permanently dismissed.
Nagaland Minister for School Education and SCERT, Yitachu today said Meluri sub-division under Phek district is the richest land of the state.

Asking people of Naga community to extend support to the government to explore potential of the region, he said, "We occupy a very strategic location and it is high time we ponder on how to help other Nagas."



As the elected representative of Meluri, Yitachu said the area has potential of making Nagaland self-sufficient in power generation while there are also huge deposits of minerals and limestone.

He therefore said that people of the area should be willing to support in developing power generation for industrial growth.

Further, the Minister expressed that once the International Trade route between India and Myanmar is opened through Avakhung village of the sub-division, doors will be opened for South East Asian.

This will make Meluri strategically located for commercial activities and industrialization.
Questioning China's move to block an attempt in the UN to get JeM chief Masood Azhar designated as a terrorist, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu has said Beijing should understand that "today it is India (which is targeted by terror), tomorrow it may be your turn".

He also said Pakistan should give up its "old habit" of finding fault with India and stop "aiding and abetting" terrorism so that the two countries can have close ties.

"I do not know the reason why China blocked the proposal to ban Azhar. He is a notorious terrorist and should be banned," the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister told reporters here.

"Today it is India, tomorrow it may be your (China) turn," he added.

India had yesterday slammed China's virtual veto to prevent the banning of Pathankot terror strike mastermind Azhar, saying it "does not reflect well on the determination that the international community needs to display to decisively defeat the menace of terrorism".

The statement, however, did not mention China by name.

Asked about claims by Pakistan that there was no evidence with India about its abetment of terror, Naidu said there is enough evidence against the neighbouring country and "they should leave their old habit of finding fault with India".

"If Pakistan puts a full stop on aiding, abetting, training and funding terrorists, India and Pakistan can come much closer, work together, since both the countries were once one and were separated for reasons," he said.

"India wants to have good relationship with Pakistan," Naidu said.

He claimed that for the first time in the history of United Nations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had raised the issue of terrorism and said it was unfortunate that UN was still unable to define terrorism.

The entire world and international community should come together and crush the danger and menace of terrorism, Naidu said.

Naidu, meanwhile, rejected reports that Maharashtra Chief



Minister Devendra Fadnavis had said those unwilling to chant 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' had no right to stay in the country.

"He (Fadnavis) did not say so. I know that. This is wrong information," he said.

On the fatwa issued by Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband against the 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' chant, Naidu said it was unfortunate that controversy was being created over nationalistic slogans.

"There is nothing to compel one to say Bharat Mata ki Jai. If somebody says I will not say it, then that is objectionable," he said.

It is a chant in praise of the motherland, Naidu said, "It does not specifically say if it is a Hindu mother, Christian mother or Muslim mother. India is our motherland and we should be proud of her.

"It is unfortunate that some people are trying to create unnecessary controversy over this."



On recent protests at universities, Naidu said students should focus on education, excellence and personality development instead of taking to organising beef festivals, kiss festivals and Mahishasura festivals.

"Moreover, media is also giving more publicity (to these events) than they deserve," he said.

"Some people are invoking the freedom of speech and right to dissent (over such events); dissent is okay, but disintegration is not acceptable and celebrating Afzal Guru, Yakub Memon... They are not seen as belonging to any community, but are regarded as anti-nationals and terrorists," he said.

Told that major political parties in Tamil Nadu are seeking a law against honour killing, Naidu said it was purely a state subject.

"Still, if there is a consensus, a legislation can be brought. A Bill will not prevent the killing, but the political will can definitely, which was lacking in Tamil Nadu for the last few years," he said.

He quipped further, "How can it be honour killing, a killing cannot be honourable.
Union Minister Nitin Gadkari today said state governments running in the name of socialism have "failed in terms of development" and therefore nationalism is the "lone alternative" which talks about socio-economic justice and 'sabka saath, sabka vikas'.

"The model of Communism is on the verge of extinction from where it emerged. It has ended in Russia and its flag is only left flying in China," the Union Minister for Road Transport, Highways and Shipping said while addressing a programme on Madan Mohan Malviya Mission.

"The world is changing, therefore ideology has to maintain a balance with technology and be people friendly. There is a need to link faith, culture and heritage with new technology," he said.

"Dedication towards ideology is not wrong, but using it for opportunism and requirement is a problem," the minister said.

A politician thinks about five years, but great personalities like Swami Vivekananda, Malviya and Ambedkar thought about centuries, Gadkari said, adding "Swami Vivekananda said that tolerance was our basic trait and there is no need to learn it from others.
Terming terrorism as the enemy of humanity, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said there was a need to "delink" religion from it and asserted that "segmented and partial" approaches to counter the menace will not be effective.

Pressing for united global efforts to deal with the scourge, Modi said there can be no distinction between "good" or "bad" terrorism and that it has "no caste, colour, creed or religion".

Appreciating Saudi Arabia's leadership role in fighting terrorism in the Middle East, Modi said India was committed to working with Riyadh as well as with its partners in the region to ensure that the world is a better and safer place to live in.

The Prime Minister said India has sought to challenge and repudiate the terror narrative that global counter-terrorism efforts are directed against any particular religion or ethnic group.

"In this context, we deeply appreciate the leadership role being played by Saudi Arabia in the region to fight this menace," he told leading daily Arab in an interview during his two-day visit to the Kingdom.

Saudi Arabia, a country known as the spiritual home of Islam, recently formed a major coalition of 34 Muslim nations to fight terror, particularly the ISIS. Saudi Arabia and India have a counter-terror mechanism as well.

"To defeat terrorism, all those who believe in humanity have to be united. We need to delink religion from terrorism. Terrorism should be dealt in a comprehensive manner. Segmented and partial approaches have historically proven to be at best suboptimal," Modi said.

"There can be no distinction between 'good' or 'bad' terrorism," he said in a veiled reference to Pakistan, a close ally of Saudi Arabia.

Modi said both India and Saudi Arabia recognise that no cause can justify an act of terror.

He noted that India and Saudi Arabia have come together to cooperate in eradicating the scourge of terrorism.

Hailing the role of King Salman bin Abdulaziz in nurturing the Indo-Saudi partnership, Modi said building further on the strategic partnership with the powerful nation was one of the foreign policy priorities of his government.

To defeat terror, the Prime Minister said governments across the world should enhance cooperation in intelligence sharing, law enforcement, developing best practices and technologies as well as in extradition arrangements and capacity-building.

"India has adopted a comprehensive approach through dealing with its individual elements, including controlling the spread of extremist ideology, plugging financing routes, building a counter narrative to radicalisation through efforts to stem training and recruitment by terrorists," Modi said.
Nepal's pro-Hindu party, part of the ruling coalition, today said it will table an amendment motion in the Parliament to reinstate Nepal as a Hindu nation, warning of massive street protests if the demand is not met.

Rastriya Prajatantra Party-Nepal (RPP-N), the fourth largest party in the Parliament, took the decision during the central committee meeting of the party chaired by RPP-N chairman and Deputy Prime Minister Kamal Thapa that concluded in Birgunj in southern Nepal today.

Party sources said RPP-N decided to move a motion against the provision of secular State in the Constitution and seek returning to a Hindu nation.

The party has been campaigning for reinstatement of a Hindu State since the country was converted into a secular nation through Parliament declaration in 2008, when monarchy was abolished from the country following the success of the People's Movement.

"The party has also decided to launch street agitation for the same purpose, if the constitution amendment process could not reconvert the country into a Hindu State," the proposal endorsed by the party's CWC meeting said.

Last year, the Constituent Assembly had overwhelmingly rejected a proposal by pro-Hindu RPP-N to revert Nepal as a Hindu State, declaring that the Hindu-majority nation will remain secular.

Thapa had registered the amendment proposal demanding to reinstate Nepal as a Hindu State in Article 4 of the revised bill of the new Constitution.

The rejection had triggered violent protests amid an already volatile situation over federal structure.

Today, the RPP-N also asked the government to resolve the issues relating to the agitation launched by the Madhesis through political means of holding dialogue with the agitating parties.
An officer posted with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) was shot dead while his wife seriously injured by unidentified bike-borne assailants in the wee hours in Bijnor district today, with the agency terming it as a "planned attack"



"Tanzil Ahmad was shot dead by two motorcycle borne persons when he was returning after attending a marriage ceremony with his wife Farzana," IG (Law and Order) of UP Police Bhagwan Swaroop said.

The incident took place at 12:45 AM when Ahmed, an assistant commandant with BSF who was currently on deputation in NIA, was returning to Sahaspur from the function.

In New Delhi, NIA IG Sanjeev Kumar termed it as a "planned attack".

"One of our officers, very brave officer Mohammad Tanzil Ahmad had gone to his home to attend a function last night. When he was coming back from the function a planned attack took place on him and he was fired upon.

"He was killed in the firing while his wife was injured. She has been admitted to Fortis Hospital, Noida. He was an assistant commandant with BSF and was on deputation with NIA," he said.

Kumar said Ahmed was an "NIA inspector but back in BSF he was an assistant commandant".

He said the investigations into the killing are on.

"Investigations are on. Right now the UP Police, UP ATS, NIA, the DIG of NIA from Lucknow and his team all of them are there on the spot," he said.

On being asked about the possibility of terror angle behind the attack, ADG, UP Police, Daljit Chowdhry said, "Nothing can be ruled out.

"A very serious offence has taken place in the district and we have taken it very seriously.The body has been sent for postmortem and details of what actually happened will soon come out.

"Borders of the state have been sealed and checking is on in the nearby villages to trace those involved in killing of the officer. We are trying to find out the accused and the motive behind the murder.

Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) teams are at the spot.

"We are also trying to ascertain whether the 9 mm pistol used for the crime was country-made or factory-made. It is definitely a planned attack and not a robbery," he added.
Two unidentified motorcycle -borne assailants shot dead a Investigation Agency (NIA) official, who was part of several terror probe cases related to Indian Mujahideen, and critically wounded his wife in the wee hours today when they were returning home from a wedding near this Uttar Pradesh town.

The killers pumped as many as 24 bullets into Mohammed Tanzil Ahmad and four into his wife Farzana, as their 14-year old daughter and 12-year old son watched the gruesome incident from the back seat of the Wagon-R car they were travelling in, police said, adding the children were not injured.

Ahmad was returning home in Sahaspur village of Bijnor district with his family after attending his niece's wedding in another nearby village in the same district, which is about 150 km from Delhi.

Police termed the killing of Ahmad, posted as Inspector initially with the NIA's intelligence wing and later in its investigation department, as a "planned attack" and did not rule out the possiblity of a terror angle behind the shootout.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh told reporters in Lucknow that he had been apprised of the incident. "Whatever necessary is being done. We are talking (to NIA officials)," Singh said.

Police suspect that Ahmad's movements was being tracked the assailants who used at least one 9mm pistol in the shootout.

"Tanzil Ahmad was shot dead by two motorcycle borne persons when he was returning after attending a marriage ceremony with his wife Farzana," IG (Law and Order) of UP Police Bhagwan Swaroop said.

The incident took place at 12:45 AM when Ahmed, earlier posted as an assistant commandant in BSF and on deputation to NIA, was returning to Sahaspur from the wedding ceremony.

Forty-five-year-old Ahmad, who has been with the NIA ever since the organisation was formed in February 2009, had been investigating many cases especially related to banned Indian Mujahideen terror outfit. His superiors termed him as a thorough professional in intelligence gathering as well as investigation.

According to the police, Ahmad left his home in the evening along with his family to attend a marriage ceremony at a guest house at Sohara village. On their way back, their vehicle was stopped barely 200 metres from his home by two youths who fired at a very close range.
Arun Agarwal, head of leading US-based home textile company Nextt, has been appointed as a member of a board to stimulate the development of small businesses in Texas.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott named Agarwal to the Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board for a term which will expire on February 1, 2019, the first Indian American to be appointed to the key post.

Agarwal says the board will be aiding in the development of products in the areas of business that are most successful for Texas and have had the most commercial success like nanotechnology, biotechnology, renewable energy, agriculture, biomedicine and aerospace.

"With my company headquarters being based in Texas, being able to stimulate the economy by being a part of such a board which has a key initiative to aid in the success of these small businesses is very important to us as a company. These small businesses are the future of the state and the nation," the Nextt CEO told PTI.

He says his priority as a member of the board is to ensure that the development of small businesses in the State continues to be stimulated as they are a vital part of the economy.

"Being able to assist in providing loans that foster the development of products and businesses that will go on to have great commercial success which in return will provide job creation and job retention in the state is very significant to me and my company," he says.

Nextt, which manufactures home textiles, garments, apparel



fabrics and polyester yarns, had recently acquired the rights to Alpha Cotton.

Giving details, Agarwal says Alpha Cotton since the patent's finalisation in September of 2015 has had tremendous success.

"We have confirmed licensing rights to many of the supplier leaders in the industry and really have taken control of this product in the marketplace. Alpha Cotton's business constitutes for USD 3 billion of business worldwide. Retailers and suppliers have continued to be successful with the product because of the inherent benefits the product provides: ultra softness, durability, economical, easy case, wrinkle resistance, colourfastness, quick drying and low pilling," he says.

The patent will provide a new way of using polyester yarns with cotton for the home textiles industry, which in turn creates a high thread count luxurious fabric, which is 30 to 40 per cent cheaper than 100 per cent cotton fabric.

Agarwal, who also has plans to launch Nextt's brands in India soon, says the launch date has been pushed back a bit just due to typical product development processes and finalisations.

"But we are excited to see our products arrive in stores in the very near future. We have just finalised plans to launch the Mikasa brand in India as well," he says.

Nextt is a supplier of home textiles, garments, apparel fabrics and polyester yarns to major retailers like Walmart, Kohl's, Dillard's, JCPenney and Target.

The USD 500 million company, which sells popular brands like Raymond Waites, Trina Turk, Kathy Ireland and Jessica McClintock, does 99 per cent of its sourcing from India with only micro fibres procured from China.
. Photo: YouTube

"Iran has nothing to do with the activities of Indian intelligence network. Pakistan and Iran are tied through decades long religious, social, cultural and political bonds, and nothing can come in way of our relations," Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan said here.

Khan said media should be cautious while reporting on Pakistan-Iran "brotherly" relations.

"Our ties with Iran are by no means linked with the arrest of an Indian spy," he told reporters here yesterday.

He said the recent visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Pakistan was quite "productive but an impression was being given that Iran was involved in certain activities against Pakistan."



The Iranian authorities, he said, had expressed their concern over news proliferating in a certain section of the media portraying Iran in a negative manner despite the very positive visit of the Iranian President.

The minister also mentioned his meeting with Iranian ambassador Mehdi Honardoost, saying the two sides expressed satisfaction over President Rouhani's visit.

"Honardoost assured that Iran would extend full cooperation on all issues that ensured security and development in the two countries," Khan said.

He said "some vested interests" wanted to harm positive and historic ties between Pakistan and Iran.

The Iranian embassy here last week had issued a terse statement after several media outlets hinted that Tehran might have knowledge about Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was reportedly arrested by Pakistani authorities in Balochistan after he entered from Iran.

"During past days some section of Pakistani media has spread contents regarding detention of an Indian agent and the matter related to it, which could have negatives implications on the fraternal and friendly atmosphere of Iran and Pakistan," the embassy had warned.

Kulbhushan, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was a serving Indian Navy officer.

India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.
Pakistan's Human Rights Commission has sought a thorough probe into the mysterious disappearance of a Pakistani woman journalist allegedly kidnapped while pursuing case of an Indian engineer who was jailed over espionage charges by a military court.

The commission raised the matter of Zeenat Shahzadi, a local reporter of Daily Nai Khaber and a TV channel Metro News, with security agencies and the government to ensure her safe recovery as the number of "missing persons" continue to grow in Pakistan with 68 new cases reported last month.

"Disappearance of Shehzadi is shamelessness. Now a 24-year-old woman has been picked up without a warrant. Is this the new trend to pick up young women? We want to know what her crime was and why she is missing without a warrant?" said rights activist and member of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) Hina Jilani at a press conference here.

Zeenat allegedly kidnapped on August 19 last year by "unknown" men while she was striving for the recovery of an Indian national Hamid Ansari, who had reportedly gone missing in Pakistan since November 2012. Police have registered an abduction case against 'unknown men.'



"She was working on a case (of Ansari) openly and in courts and if there is suspicion of her spying (for India) then the State agencies should tell her family," Jilani said, adding that the Commission for the Enquiry of Enforced Disappearances is working on the case but not much has been discovered.

"More disappearances have surfaced and 68 were reported to the Commission in the past one month," she said.

Before her abduction, Zeenat had filed an application with the Supreme Court's Human Rights Cell on behalf of Hamid's mother Fauzia Ansari.

She secured a special power of attorney from Fauzia in August 2013 and also pursued Hamid's case in the Peshawar High Court.

"Who will pay for the time of disappearance? Disappearances are an international crime, who will see to it that the abductors are punished for it?" HRCP Vice-Chairperson Nazish Attaullah questioned.

She said the suicide of Zeenat's brother (Saddam Hussain, 17) the other day was a reflection of the family's desperation over her continued disappearance.

"Whoever may be holding Zeenat, we call upon the governments of Pakistan and Punjab and the security agencies to ensure that the circumstances of her disappearance are thoroughly investigated to identify those involved. She should be located and reunited with her family at the earliest," Nazish said.

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Hamid was reportedly in love with a Pakistani girl of Kohat, a district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, whom he had befriended on Facebook.

According to an official of the HRCP, unable to get a visa for Pakistan, the 28-year old IT Engineer and MBA from Mumbai managed to arrive in Kabul on November 4, 2012.

He arrived in Pakistan around November 12, 2012 and stayed with one of his online friends till another friend got him lodging in a hotel in Kohat.

From there, the police took Hamid away on November 14, 2012 and handed him over to a security agency, the official said.

Zeenat submitted an application to the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances that ordered registration of the FIR in 2014. She also filed a habeas corpus petition in the Peshawar High Court.

"Zeenat received threats from unknown persons who asked her not to pursue this case anymore. We also asked her not to put her life at risk but she said she wanted to help Ansari out of humanity," said Salman Latif, her brother.

Hamid was sentenced to three years' imprisonment last month on charges of illegally entering Pakistan and 'spying' by a military court.
Pakistan today asked its media to avoid linking the arrest of an alleged Indian 'spy' with Iran, days after Tehran warned it that this could have "negative implications" on its bilateral ties.

"Iran has nothing to do with the activities of Indian intelligence network. Pakistan and Iran are tied through decades long religious, social, cultural and political bonds, and nothing can come in way of our relations," Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan told media here.

Khan said media should be cautious while reporting on Pakistan-Iran "brotherly" relations.

"Our ties with Iran are by no means linked with the arrest of an Indian spy," he said.

He said the recent visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Pakistan was quite "productive but an impression was being given that Iran was involved in certain activities against Pakistan."



The Iranian authorities, he said, had expressed their concern over proliferating in a certain section of the media portraying Iran in a negative manner despite the very positive visit of the Iranian President.

The minister also mentioned his meeting with Iranian ambassador Mehdi Honardoost, saying the two sides expressed satisfaction over President Rouhani's visit.

"Honardoost assured that Iran would extend full cooperation on all issues that ensured security and development in the two countries," Khan said.

He said "some vested interests" wanted to harm positive and historic ties between Pakistan and Iran.

The Iranian embassy here had issued a terse statement after several media outlets hinted that Tehran might have knowledge about Kulbhushan Yadhav, who was reportedly arrested by Pakistani authorities in Balochistan after he entered from Iran.

"During past days some section of Pakistani media has spread contents regarding detention of an Indian agent and the matter related to it, which could have negatives implications on the fraternal and friendly atmosphere of Iran and Pakistan," the embassy had warned.

Kulbhushan, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was the serving Indian Navy officer.

In the video, Yadav said that he arrived in Iran in 2003 and started a small business in Chahbahar.

India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.
Thailand has long served as one of the globe's main rice bowls, but chronic water shortages are pushing the country to move away from a grain that dominates its fields and has defined a way of life for generations.

Laddawan Kamsong has spent the past forty years coaxing rice from her plot in central Thailand, but she is tired of watching her farmland squeezed dry by increasingly severe droughts.

"I plan to replace some rice paddies with limes," she told AFP after attending a government-run workshop urging farmers to diversify their crops.

Thailand is one of the world's top rice exporters.

But four consecutive years of below-average rainfall have drained water reserves and strangled production, pushing many farmers into debt.

The current drought, the worst the country has seen in decades, has hit nearly a third of Thailand's 76 provinces, particularly in the rice-heavy central and northeast.

Reservoirs are also dropping to historically low levels.

Thailand is also facing increasing competition from Vietnam and India, who have been jockeying for the top exporter spot and at times surpassed Thailand's output in recent years.

The kingdom's military government is now organising training sessions to encourage millions of rice farmers to diversify into crops that require less irrigation.

Unlike nearly all other crops, rice grows best in a flooded field, with the stalk's base completely submerged for most of the growing season.

At an army-run workshop held in patch of shade in a field in Nonthaburi province near Bangkok, Laddawan was sold the merits of cultivating fruit trees.

In other regions, they are suggesting sugarcane or peas.

These alternatives will drastically reduce water consumption but also break the monoculture that has deteriorated Thai soil for decades.

"We have no choice, we need to adapt," Laddawan said, explaining that she used to plant three rice crops annually, but next year will only have enough water for one.

As the drought bites, some 2,000 Thai villages are surviving off water delivered by the government, while 'rainmaking' airplanes are flying over parched plains, sending an iodine solution into the air in an effort to seed clouds.

After last year's especially weak rainy season -- which falls between June and October -- the ruling military junta asked farmers to abandon their winter rice crop, which is normally cultivated through irrigation and not rainfall.

"The amount of water in storage is low and now we expect that this year's rainy season will be delayed because of El Nino," said Suphot Tovichakchaikul, who leads the country's water management department.

The El Nino weather phenomenon tends to weaken the annual monsoon, which is a lifeline to farmers across the region.
Raw jute supply for Indian jute mills was expected to have limited impact despite Bangladesh having lifted ban of raw jute exports with effect from April 3.

"The impact will be limited for various reasons. The announcement of lifting ban came too late for the current season. Moreover, landed cost of jute will be almost similar of domestic raw jute price," former Indian Jute Mills Association Chairman and jute industry veteran Sanjay Kajaria told PTI.

However, he said it has to be seen how market behaves though lifting of the ban could have some impact on supply, he added.

Jute industry officials said that the measures taken by the government were not adequate and too slow to stem the spiraling raw jute prices in domestic market.

Jute Commissioner's office has taken some measures like fixing raw jute price and jute bags, taken action against a few jute mills for violating jute stock limit order.

"We have found violation in cases of against at least four jute mills for keeping surplus stock than permissible limits and we have asked the state enforcement department to take action," Jute Commissioner Subrata Gupta said.

The sharp spike in raw jute price has affected jobs in Bengal as several mills have closed, rendering thousands jobless.
CBI will soon send judicial request to Australia to seek details of Pearls Group's activities there as it suspects Rs 670 crore collected from public for developing land and forests has been diverted to that country.

Agency sources said Pearls Group Chief Nirmal Singh Bhangoo was allegedly running real estate business -- portable housing projects -- in the name of his relatives in Australia and also reportedly owned a hotel on Gold Coast.

The sources said the agency is probing business dealings of Bhangoo through which public money might have been diverted, including TV channel P7 News, a joint venture with Australian company Global Road Technologies (GRT) International and PHT LifeStyle.

GRT is based somewhere between Gold Coast and Brisbane and had entered into a joint venture with Pearls Group, which is facing probe here for allegedly duping over five crore investors to the tune of Rs 45,000 crore.

They said the alleged diversion of funds to Australia also took place through Global Road Technologies.

Directors of Pearls Group companies PACL and PGF allegedly collected funds from people in the garb of sale of land and forests to them and "deliberately and dishonestly diverted" funds to Australia without informing the investors, the sources said.

The agency will soon be sending Letters Rogatory to Australia seeking information about his business interests, companies suspected to be working with him, assets etc.

Letters Rogatory is a document issued by a court of a sovereign country to a court in another nation seeking legal assistance in probing a crime.

They said, if needed, LRs will also be sent to Dubai in this connection as it is investigating the diversion of some funds there.

During the probe in the last two years, CBI has found 1,300 bank accounts of the suspect company, its directors, and associated firms, they said, adding the agency has frozen assets (mostly Fixed Deposit receipts) to the tune of Rs 280 crore and an additional Rs 108 crore has been deposited with the Delhi High Court.

They said the agency has managed to seize 20,000 documents related to properties whose purchase value was estimated at Rs 5,000 crore.

Bhangoo, CMD of Pearls Golden Forest Ltd (PGF) and ex-Chairman of Pearls Australasia Pty Limited, along with Sukhdev Singh, MD and Promoter-Director of Pearls Agrotech Corporation Ltd (PACL), Gurmeet Singh, Executive Director (Finance) and Subrata Bhattacharya, ED in the PGF/PACL were arrested by CBI in connection with the scam.
Joining issue with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis over his statement that anybody unwilling to utter 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' had no right to stay in India, said Sunday "dictating" what others should do is against the basic tenets of "our democracy".

Countering the opposition party, BJP said it was "unfortunate" that people were "finding fault with these slogans for political reasons".

Amidst the raging debate over nationalism, leader PC Chako said, "Every individual has freedom. Dictating what others should do is against the basic tenets of our democracy. People have the freedom. People have the right. People have the discretion what to say and what not to say."He further warned that "if the RSS and BJP are going to dictate, that will only boomerang and they should have the common sense to understand this".

At a public meeting yesterday, Maharashtra Chief Minister had said, "There is still a dispute over saying 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' and those opposed to saying it, should not have any right to stay here".

Defending Fadnavis, BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli said people are finding fault with these nationalist slogans for political reasons.

"This is very unfortunate. Before independence, people very proudly said 'Vande Mataram', 'Bharat mata ki jai', whether they were Hindus, Muslims, Christians. Anyone and everyone ensured that India got its independence," he said.

"But now, 70 years later, people for political reasons are finding fault with all these nationalist slogans. There is no more love for the country," he added.
In a freak accident, a small plane crashed on a California freeway, slamming into a car parked on the side of the road, killing a woman and seriously injuring five others, including the pilot, officials said.

The accident occurred when the plane made an emergency landing on a Southern California freeway and rear-ended a car parked on the shoulder while the driver was using a cell phone, killing a 38-year-old San Diego woman in the vehicle, California authorities said.

The driver was complying with California laws regarding hands-free phone operation while driving, North County Fire Protection District spokesperson John Buchanan said.

"The Nissan just happened to be there," he said. "They had pulled over to sync a phone with the Bluetooth system in the car."



Authorities have not said why the crash occurred. A large number of people witnessed it, Buchanan told CNN affiliate KGTV, with many saying they heard a sputtering engine before the plane went down.

The single-engine Lancair IV was attempting a "belly landing" using the underside of the plane without the use of landing gear, when it struck car on Interstate 15 in San Diego County, an FAA spokesman said.

The plane skidded on the freeway for about 150 feet before hitting the rear of the car, KGTV said.

The impact forced the bumper and trunk of the sedan into the backseat, where two people sat. One of them was pronounced dead at the scene.

Five people were injured, including the pilot, who had life-threatening injuries, KGTV said. A passenger in the aircraft was among those hurt.

Three people were taken to Palomar Medical Center in Escondido. Chris Saunders, the hospital public relations manager, said two of those people were admitted, with one taken to surgery. The third person was treated and released.

Two other injured people were taken to Sharp Memorial Hospital in Kearny Mesa but there was no information on their condition.

The crash blocked two lanes and caused major backups on the freeway that runs to Las Vegas.

California Highway Patrol Officer Chris Parent said the plane's pilot, 62-year-old Dennis Hogge and his passenger suffered major injuries.

Parent said he was aware of three other planes being forced to come down on the same stretch of highway in the past decade.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today left for home after wrapping up his final-leg of five-day three-nation tour of Belgium, the US and Saudi Arabia.

The Prime Minister had arrived here yesterday from Washington and today he held wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud during which they agreed to strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism.

"Thank you Saudi Arabia. Joined several programmes during my visit, which will deepen economic & people-to-people ties between our nations," Modi tweeted both in Arabic and English before departing for New Delhi.

After the talks, both the countries signed five pacts including one on having cooperation in the exchange of intelligence related to money laundering, terror financing and related crimes.

Both the sides also called on all states to reject its use against other countries and dismantle terror infrastructures where they exist after talks between Prime Minister Modi and King Salman.

Energy-powerhouse Saudi Arabia is India's largest crude oil supplier, accounting for about one-fifth of total imports and both sides also decided to expand cooperation in the sector.

The Prime Minister's first stop was Brussels where he attended the long-delayed India-EU summit and held talks with Belgium counterpart Charles Michel on March 30.

From Brussels Modi went to Washington where he attended the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31 and April 1.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned home tonight after wrapping up his final-leg of five-day three-nation tour of Belgium, the US and Saudi Arabia.

The Prime Minister had arrived in Riyadh yesterday from Washington and today he held wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud during which they agreed to strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism.

"Thank you Saudi Arabia. Joined several programmes during my visit, which will deepen economic & people-to-people ties between our nations," Modi tweeted both in Arabic and English before departing for New Delhi.

The Prime Minister's first stop was Brussels where he attended the long-delayed India-EU summit and held talks with Belgium counterpart Charles Michel on March 30.

From Brussels Modi went to Washington where he attended the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31 and April 1.
Italian police are dropping an investigation into a bishop for the alleged sexual abuse of seminarists, media reports said today.

Prosecutors in Cassino, south of Rome, had opened a probe into monsignor Gerardo Antonazzo after receiving a letter from a seminarian accusing the bishop of sexually molesting him and others.

But prosecutor Luciano d'Emmanuele today released a statement saying no charges would be brought, La Repubblica daily said.

Antonazzo had been quoted yesterday stressing "how utterly unfounded the accusations are".

Sex abuse scandals have dogged the Catholic Church in recent years with alleged victims breaking their silence in the United States, Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Mexico and Poland.

Pope Francis has approved the creation of an internal church tribunal to punish bishops who cover up sex abuse by priests, but networks of abuse survivors point out that the Holy See has shied away from legal action so far.
Proposals to tighten an already restrictive abortion law today drew thousands of people to protests in Poland.

The Catholic church, to which some 90 percent of Poles profess allegiance, backs the proposals being considered by the new right-wing government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Those proposals would tighten what are already some of Europe's most restrictive laws on pregnancy termination.

Current legislation, dating from 1993, already bans all terminations except when pregnancy results from rape or incest, poses a health risk to the mother, or if the foetus is severely deformed.

Pro-life activists support even tougher legislation but the move has sparked a backlash and today's protest saw marchers answer a call by a leftist party to rally outside parliament.

Other marches were taking place in several other cities.

Some carried wire coat hangers, a crude self-abort method, "used in the past by desperate women deprived of their rights to interrupt their pregnancy", organisers said.

Demonstrators bore aloft banners blasting the proposals and accusing authorities of turning Poland into "hell for women".

Some slogans urged Poles to "Make love not PiS".

However, a parish newsletter issued by bishops in favour of the tougher proposals met churchgoers attending Sunday mass.

New proposals would only allow abortion if the mother's life was in danger and lift maximum jail terms for those carrying out illegal terminations from the current two to five years.

PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Prime Minister Beata Szydlo both say they back a proposal which requires another 100,000 signatures for a parliamentary debate.

Feminist organisations say between 100,000 and 150,000 Poles arrange clandestine terminations abroad each year.

Legal abortions in the country of 38 million people are limited to between some 700 to 1,800 per year.
Pope Francis has announced a special collection to help people in Ukraine suffering amid conflict "who thirst for peace and reconciliation."



The pontiff told the faithful today following a Holy Year Mass that Roman Catholic parishes in Europe will hold a special collection on April 24 as a "humanitarian initiative of support," noting that the elderly and children were the most impacted by the violence in eastern Ukraine.

Fighting between Russia-backed separatists and government troops in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 9,100 people since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

Francis also noted that tomorrow is the international day against land mines, saying "too many people are killed or mutilated by these terrible weapons, while brave women and men are risking their lives to clear land mines.
A rare power outage plunged a major section of the Philippine capital's main airport into darkness overnight, forcing flight cancellations that stranded thousands today.

As many as 78 flights by the country's largest carrier Cebu Pacific were cancelled, affecting nearly 14,000 passengers, the company said in a statement.

Flag carrier Philippine Airlines also said some of its flights were cancelled or delayed but could not immediately say how many.

The blackout hit Terminal 3, which services mostly domestic flights, late yesterday and power was not restored until before dawn today.

Exhausted passengers sprawled on the floor as check-in counters and luggage carousels shut down. Long queues formed outside the terminal as entrances were closed until power was restored.

Terminal 3 of Ninoy Aquino International Airport, named after the assassinated father of incumbent President Benigno Aquino, handles an average of 350 domestic and international flights daily, according to data from the transportation ministry.

It is one of four terminals in a complex that was once dubbed by the travel website Guide to Sleeping in Airports as the world's worst due to leaking toilets and creaking facilities.

"We are looking into the root cause of this problem," Terminal 3 general manager Octavio Lina told DZMM radio.

Manila power retailer Meralco said a transmission line tripped briefly but was restored in minutes, suggesting that the problem could be with the airport's systems.

The four Manila airport terminals were designed for 17 million passengers annually, but overuse has made the airport notorious for flight delays.

Plans to build a new airport outside Manila have not materialised under Aquino. An excruciatingly slow infrastructure overhaul has led to chronic commuter train breakdowns and traffic jams.
Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra attempted suicide three times during her struggling days including in 2002 after the death of her alleged former boyfriend Aseem Merchant's mother, her ex-manager Prakash Jaju claimed today.

In a series of tweets, Jaju said the 33-year-old "Quantico" star was extremely close to Merchant's mother and did not take her demise well.

"PC was very close to Aseem merchant's mother, her death in 2002 shattered her so much that she tried to jump off Karan apt to commit suicide," Jaju wrote.

"I reached at nick of time and caught hold of her and tied her to a chair till grills were fixed in all the windows of the flat."



The celebrity manager added he wanted to make a point "that suicidal tendency is in most of the girls of film industry."



"PC may look very strong now but she was also very vulnerable in struggling days, tried to commit suicide 2-3 times but I managed to stop her," he wrote.

Jaju said Priyanka and Aseem used to fight on daily basis and on one such night, the actor attempted suicide.

"Daily PC and Aseem used to fight... She used to call me at 2 am in the night, crying... And I used to take her from Aseem's house, make her understand and drop her at her home.

"Once madam went to Vasai to attempt suicide after fighting with Aseem. I got her back. Girls don't act intelligently at the age of 18-19."



Priyanka, who is shooting in Los Angeles for her maiden Hollywood film "Baywatch", did not immediately respond to messages for her comments on Jaju's claims.

Jaju also spoke about TV actor Pratyusha Banerjee, who was found dead at her home on April 1 in a suspected case of suicide.
Rajasthan Chief Minster Vasundhara Raje today asked party members to express their views on the party forum.

"If any member of the party wants to express anything, it should be only on the party forum," Raje said on the second day of the party's state executive meeting here.

The Chief Minister said her government has presented an inclusive budget and the party workers should reach out to every household to make people aware of area-specific announcements.

She also asked all the leaders, workers and elected public representative to start preparations for 2018 Assembly and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and to create a "positive" environment for the public by reaching out to it with the policies and programmes of the government.
In a curious case, a Gujarati family which wanted to meet the Prime Minister was persuaded by security agencies to return to Rajkot soon after they landed at IGI airport here as a relative alerted the authorities that the family members may attempt suicide.

The incident took place on March 31 when CISF and Delhi police personnel were alerted about a four-member family which had boarded an Air India flight from Rajkot for Delhi.

Officials said as soon as the flight took off from Rajkot, a relative of family arrived at the airport there and informed security personnel about the possible "suicidal intention" of the fliers.

They said when the flight landed in Delhi at about 11 AM Central Industrial Security Force and Delhi Police personnel intercepted the four fliers identified as Jwala Ghanshyamdas, Jwala Mahavir Singh, Bhagirath Singh and Jyotsana Bah.

They insisted that they had some problem in their family and will share it only with the Prime Minister or the Gujarat Chief Minister or Delhi Police chief and if not allowed to do so, they will commit suicide at Jantar Mantar in the national capital, officials said.

They were counselled and subsequently made to board a return flight to Rajkot which landed there at 9:30 PM, they said.

In an another case on the same day, security personnel apprehended a man for entering the airport area allegedly on forged ticket.

They said the person identified as G Pradip got a fake ticket to enter the terminal area as he wanted to see off his family going to Dubai.

CISF personnel detected his suspicious movement and when they checked with the concerned airline, it confirmed that Pradip's ticket was fake. He was handed over to Delhi Police.

The police later arrested him under IPC charges, they said.
Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), has freed a policeman after holding him captive for 13 days, in a boost to peace efforts.

The government launched peace negotiations on Wednesday with the ELN, setting its sights on a total end to a bloody half-century conflict.

The ELN kidnapped police patrolman Hector German Perez on March 20, but on Saturday delivered him to the International Committee of the Red Cross in a rural area of Bolivar yesterday, in northern Colombia, the ICRC said in a statement.

President Juan Manuel Santos confirmed the release in a tweet and said the policeman would soon be reunited with his family.

Bogota hopes the talks with the ELN will bring it on board alongside Colombia's biggest rebel force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in a bid to end what is seen as the last major armed confrontation in the West.

The ELN is a leftist group like the FARC, but they have fought as rivals for territory in a many-sided conflict that started as a peasant uprising in 1964.
Residents of several villages in Doda district of Jammu and Kashmir are forced to live without electricity despite the central government reportedly allocating fund for electrification of the rural hamlets.

The residents of four villages -- Batoli, Bani and Chakla in Chakka panchayat and Grounda village in Mathola panchayat in Bhaderwah Tehsil -- said they are living without electricity even after 68 years of Independence and claimed there has been no progress on the ground despite allocation of funds by the Centre a few years ago.

"All the surrounding villages have been electrified around two decades ago but we have been left out perhaps only because of our caste, as only Gujjars and Mahasha reside in these villages. India became Independent 68 years ago but we are still made to suffer because of the slave mentality," Ghulam Rasool Gujjar, a resident of Batoli village, said.

The Centre has claimed it provided adequate funds to all states for electrification under Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana and Deen Dayal Upadhaya Gram Jyoti Yojana, Gujjar said.

Officials, however, said once fund is sanctioned by the central government, the villages will be electrified.

"We are waiting for the funds from Union Government under Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana for hundred per cent rural electrification. As soon as we get the fund, we will electrify these villages on priority," said Nasib Singh, Superintendent Engineer Maintenance and Rural Electrification Chinab Valley said.
On the pattern of central government's Startup India campaign, the Jharkhand government has introduced "Start-Up Jharkhand", earmarking Rs 50 crore to encourage entrepreneurs in different sectors, Chief Minister Raghubar Das said on Monday.

Informing this at the Think India 2016 Convention here, Das said a policy on Start-UP Jharkhand would be coming up.

Innovation and Incubation Centres were being set up at a cost of Rs 10 crore, he said, adding an innovation lab would also be set up with the help of IIM Ahmedabad.

Das said entrepreneurs were being encouraged in the sectors like Information Technology, Health, Tourism, Agriculture, Biotechnology and alternative energy.
With burial sites in most Chinese cities including Beijing reporting full, running a cemetery has emerged as a booming business in the most populous nation.

"Death has become a rather expensive business," state media reported citing high profit margins of Chinese cemetery companies.

For example, the Lingshan cemetery reported a gross profit margin of 83.3 per cent in 2015. It aims to make 100 million yuan (over 15,000,000 USD) in profits this year, the company said.

Fu Shou Yuan, which owns cemeteries in several Chinese provinces, has also reported a profit. Its average grave price was 80,211 yuan (about 12,340 US dollars) in 2015.

The average cost of a funeral service in Beijing was 70,000 yuan (about 10,700 US dollars) in 2015, Xinhua agency reported.

Traditional Chinese beliefs dictate that burial is the proper way to handle a dead body. In order to show filial piety, many Chinese invest heavily in their parents' tombs.

Most cemeteries in Chinese cities are full, so burials in neighboring cities have become popular. About 80 per cent of plots in cemeteries in Hebei cities surrounding Beijing are sold to Beijing residents.

Larger tomb space and lower prices are the biggest draws. Chen said the Lingshan cemetery has 30,000 grave plots, and a third have been sold.

Qiao Kuanyuan, an expert with the China Funeral Association, said grave plots have become expensive due to land scarcity, and government calls for eco-friendly alternatives have been countered by old beliefs.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs and eight other ministries jointly issued a circular about eco-burials and efficient use of burial sites in February. It called on people to support group burials of family members in a single grave site.

Wang Hongjie, director of the Shanghai Funeral Industry Association, said the eastern metropolis Shanghai has been promoting group burials since 2010.

But not all accept the new methods. Cemetery managers complain group burials drain their profits, and it is difficult to add chambers without damaging the existing tomb structure.

Hang Juan, an official of the Nanjing funeral reform and management department, said more campaigns will be organised to persuade the public to switch to environment-friendly burials, such as burying ashes under trees or scattering them into the sea.
The South African parliament will next week discuss an opposition motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma after country's highest court ruled that he flouted the constitution, an official said today.

The speaker of parliament Baleka Mbete told journalists that the move by the Democratic Alliance (DA) would be considered on April 5.

The DA is pushing for Zuma to be impeached after the Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that he had "failed to uphold, defend and respect the constitution" in ignoring the ombudswoman's directives to repay a portion of public funds used to upgrade his private residence.

"The national assembly will on Tuesday, 5 April, consider a motion by the Democratic Alliance for the removal of the President in terms of section 89 of the constitution," said Mbete.

Zuma, whose ruling African National Congress (ANC) commands a strong grip on parliament, is likely to survive any bid to have him removed.

A previous impeachment attempt in 2015 over failure to arrest Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir fell flat when parliament voted overwhelmingly against it.

The violation of the constitution verdict stems from the controversial 2009 security upgrades on Zuma's home at Nkandla village, in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province.

The project which cost the taxpayers 216 million rand (then USD 24 million) in 2014, included a swimming pool, chicken run, cattle enclosure and an amphitheatre.

A 2014 report by the country's Public Protector found that Zuma and his family "unduly benefited" from the improvements, ordering him to pay back some of the money.

The ANC has rallied behind Zuma since the damning Constitutional Court ruling, but some party veterans including Ahmed Kathrada, an anti-apartheid stalwart jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, have called for him to step down.

Zuma, 73, will complete his second term in office in 2019.
Scoot Airline, the low-cost arm of Singapore Airline (SIA), is all set to land soon in three Indian cities including Chennai, making it the fourth carrier from the Southeast Asian naton to operate to the world's fastest growing aviation market here.

An announcement in this regard is likely to be made in a month, sources in the know of the development said.

Besides parent Singapore Airlines, two of its two subsidiaries Tiger Air and Silk Air also operate to India at present.

SIA also holds 49 per cent stake in Indian full service carrier Vistara, in which Tata Sons is a majority stake holder with 51 per cent.

"Scoot Airline plans to operate from Chennai, Amritsar and Jaipur as part of its India entry plan. The airline is in the process of getting all mandatory approvals. A final announcement in this regard is expected to be made in the next couple of weeks," the sources said.

Like Singapore, airlines from Malaysia also have a significant presence in the Indian market.

Apart from Malaysian Airlines, AirAsia, AirAsia X, Thai AirAsia and Air Malindo Air, all Malaysia-based carriers, also fly to India. In addition, AirAsia has 49 per cent stake in AirAsia India, with Tata Sons holding 49 per cent in this venture, besides others.

Interestingly, Scoot Airline is entering the Indian market at a time when domestic airlines' body, Federation of Indian Airlines which has Jet Airways, SpiceJet, IndiGo and GoAir as its members, are urging the government not to allow creation of overseas hubs by foreign carriers.
Industrial explosives manufacturer Solar Industries India (SII) is planning to ramp up its manufacturing capacity and introduce new solutions for the defence sector to achieve revenue of Rs 3,300 crore by 2018-19.

The Nagpur-headquartered company manufactures explosives and accessories for mining and infrastructure sectors.

"With Coal India setting a target of 1 billion tonne production by 2020, we see this as a huge opportunity for our mining explosives as we are their largest suppliers.

"Similarly, the government's focus on creating infrastructure will create a huge demand for our explosives and explosives accessories," the company's Chief Financial Officer Nilesh Panpalliya told PTI.

"This demand, along with our latest foray into the defence sector, gives us confidence that we will be able to achieve revenues of around Rs 3,300 crore by FY19," he said.

The company entered the defence sector four years ago and has set up India's first HMX plant in the private sector, a large composite propellant plant and facilities for producing other products like pyros and war heads.

The company plans to invest up to Rs 175 crore every year for the next three-four years to enhance its manufacturing capacity.

"India still depends largely on import of explosives for the defence sector. But the Defence Procurement Policy and 'Make in India' initiative have given more emphasis on private participation and we think we have the necessary components and solutions to meet the demand of the sector and reduce dependency on imports," he said.

The facility manufactures HMX and HMX-based compositions like Octol, Oma and Okfol for high explosive anti-tank ammunition and missiles like Akash, LR Sam, Invar and Konkur.

SII currently has a manufacturing capacity of 50 MTPA of HMX, which it plans to enhance to 300 MTPA.

"Earlier we required less quantity of HMX, but now with the defence sector opening up, we will increase the capacity to 300 MTPA.

"Similarly, we will increase the capacity of all other defence related products and also introduce some new solutions," he said.

Currently, the company exports to more than 25 countries and has manufacturing facilities in Nigeria, Zambia and Turkey. It is now setting up plants in South Africa and Australia as well.
A Syrian opposition figure today criticised perceived "American ambiguity" on the future of President Bashar al-Assad and urged Washington to confirm he will not be "rehabilitated" in a future government.

"We have American ambiguity that is very damaging for us," Bassma Kodmani, member of the main opposition High Negotiations Committee which attended last month's peace talks in Geneva.

The committee has rejected Assad's demand for any transitional government to include his regime as Syria struggles to emerge from five years of civil war.

The White House last week indicated Assad should not feature in a transitional unity administration, White House spokesman Josh Earnest dubbing his participation a "non-starter" for Washington.

But Kodmani said the committee wanted confirmation of that stance two days after high level US-Russian discussions on ways of strengthening a fragile ceasefire.

"We don't know what the United States are discussing with Moscow," Assad's long-time ally, said Kodmani.

"We are awaiting confirmation that the USA are maintaining their position to refuse to rehabilitate Assad," she told French media.

Kodmani stressed "Assad's departure must be negotiated. The end of the regime must be a controlled, not a chaotic, transition operation."



But she warned that if Moscow "continues to think Assad should continue to govern then we shall not have a solution in Syria. He cannot remain in power.

"The opposition's position is clear -- negotiation will occur while Assad is still in power, but the transition cannot happen with him."



UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura wants fresh peace talks to start next week in Geneva on ending a conflict that has killed more than 270,000 dead with a transitional government being formed in six months to draft a new constitution ahead of presidential elections in 18 months time.
The spokesman for Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, Al-Nusra Front, his son and 20 other jihadists were killed in air strikes today in the northeast of the country, a monitor said.

"Abu Firas al-Suri, his son and at least 20 jihadists of Al-Nusra and Jund al-Aqsa and jihadists from Uzbekistan were killed in strikes on positions in Idlib province," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

It was not immediately clear if the raids were carried out by Syrian regime warplanes or their Russian allies.

Abdel Rahman said Suri was meeting with other leading jihadists in Kafar Jales when the raids struck and that two other Al-Nusra and Jund al-Aqsa targets were also attacked.

A temporary ceasefire between government forces and rebels has largely held since February 27, but it does not cover Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State group.

On Wednesday, a drone strike near IS's de facto Syrian capital Raqa killed a jihadist commander, according to the Observatory, in the latest in a series of blows to the jihadists in recent weeks.
Technip India, a leading company in project management, engineering and construction for the Energy industry, has contributed Rs 30.82 lakhs to the Chief Minister Public Relief Fund in Tamilnadu towards flood affected people in Chennai.

Employees of the company collected Rs 10.41 lakh for the cause to which the company also contributed the same amount.

"Employees of our three operating centers, Mumbai along with Delhi and Chennai, voluntarily raised a fund of INR 10.41 lakhs and our company also decided to match the donation from employees and donated 10.41 lakh.

Moreover to this, we added an additional amount of Rs 10 lakhs to maximise the donation upto Rs 30.82 Lakhs and handed it over to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister's Public Relief Fund last month," the company said in a statement here today.

Given the scale of disaster, Technip India Management team has also decided to allocate an emergency fund of Rs 75 lakh to provide necessary support to affected employees of Chennai centre.

"For this purpose, the company had formed a committee in the first week of December to review and conduct necessary due diligence for each application received from employee who were badly hit by torrential rains and flash floods," said the statement.

It also said that Technip, an MNC which has its India chapter headquarters in Mumbai, had engaged in charitable contributions for Uttarakhand deluge victims in 2013.

Describing that standing together to face a difficult period is the hallmark of the company, Bhaskar Patel, MD, Technip India, said, "it was disheartening to note that many of our colleagues in Chennai were severely affected by the unprecedented rain in hundred years in Tamil Nadu. Though in a small way but the fund has been very helpful for our 300 plus employees, agency and supporting staff.
A 15-year-old girl was allegedly raped at gunpoint by two youths from her village in Sardhana police station area here, police said today.

The victim's family said that on Friday night they had gone for a function while the girl was sleeping at home. The two youths Mehtab and Nafees entered her home and took her to a vacant house in the village and raped her at gunpoint, a police spokesperson said.

They threatened her not to tell about the incident to anyone and fled from the spot, he said.

After a search, the girl's family members found her in the vacant house next morning.

The medical examination of the girl was conducted.

An FIR has been lodged against the two accused and search is on to nab them, the spokesperson said.
US presidential primaries spark back to life Tuesday after an eventful 10-day break with clear frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both facing the real possibility of losing in Wisconsin.

Defeat in the north-central state isn't likely to immediately change the course of the overall nominating contest, but it could serve as an indicator of the race's current status ahead of the New York primary on April 19, where polls show both in the lead.

It's been a bumpy period for Trump, the Republican billionaire from New York.

Although his campaign has seemed bulletproof up until now, his latest controversies -- including abortion, opponent Ted Cruz's wife and a journalist who said she was roughed up by Trump's campaign manager -- have alienated women voters further, polls indicate.

His divisive style is also under scrutiny, and the real estate magnate had a surprise meeting with Republican party chief Reince Priebus in Washington on Thursday amid rumblings that the party would fracture if he were to win the nomination.

With polls for the Wisconsin Republican primary showing the ultraconservative Cruz holding a 10-point lead, Trump has launched a series of events in the heartland state to rally support. Moderate John Kasich, the Ohio governor, is polling third and last.

Campaigning in Wisconsin yesterday accompanied by Sarah Palin, Trump attacked Cruz for failing to report a loan from Goldman Sachs, his wife's employer.

And today, Trump doubled down on some of his more controversial assertions in recent days -- that the United States should consider leaving NATO and that Japan should be responsible for its own nuclear defense.

"Sometime you're better off saying, wait a minute. We're defending Japan. I mean what we're doing is costing us a fortune," he told the Fox Sunday programme.

"And not only Japan, (but) South Korea. We have 28,000 soldiers on the line," said Trump, who said that rather than fully reimbursing the US for their defense "they pay us peanuts."



He added: "Maybe they would, in fact, be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea... Including with nukes."



The winner of Tuesday's Republican primary will take most of the 42 delegates on offer. If Cruz wins, he will certainly claim it as a turning point in the race, but mathematically speaking he will struggle to overcome his overall delegate deficit.

Currently, Trump has 739, Cruz 460 and Kasich 145. To win the Republican nomination outright, a candidate needs 1,237.
Traders body CAIT has strongly criticised China's move to block India's bid at United Nations for a ban on Jaish-e-Mohamed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar and threatened to boycott products from the neighbouring nation.

The body said it has taken a strong exception to the behaviour of China, which supported Pakistan openly.

"We don't see how would China make up for its stand and continue to work on bilateral talks to promote stability within the region," it added.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) at its Governing Council meeting held yesterday decided to boycott Chinese made goods with immediate effect and this decision will be ratified at the National Traders Conclave, to be held from April 4 to April 6, 2016.

"CAIT would strongly agitate against Chinese goods and pledge to burn holy of Chinese goods made in China," the body's National President B C Bhartia and Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said in a joint statement.

On Thursday, China had requested United Nations committee, which is considering a ban on Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, to keep on hold the designation.

After the terror attack on Pathankot airbase on January 2, India in February wrote to the UN calling for immediate action to list Azhar under the Al-Qaeda Sanctions committee.
Following one of the worst weeks of his campaign, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was on defence as he kicked off a three-day sprint to Wisconsin's primary.

Contenders in both parties crisscrossed the Midwestern state seeking an edge ahead of Tuesday's primaries, none more actively than Trump, who's had a rough week and faces a likely struggle against Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the state, who has passed Trump in recent Wisconsin polls.

The Republican race is overshadowed by a persistent effort by Trump's rivals in the campaign and the party to force the nomination fight into the July convention -- and by his equivocations on whether he will be loyal to the Republican Party or bolt for an independent candidacy if he feels mistreated.

Trump began the afternoon with a rally in the Milwaukee suburb of Racine yesterday, where he defended a series of controversial comments in recent days on NATO, abortion and his remark that Japan and South Korea should perhaps be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.

"This politics is a tough business," said Trump. "Because you can say things one way and the press will criticise you horribly. You say it another way and the press will criticise you horribly."



Off the stage, in a more reflective moment, Trump expressed regret that he had retweeted an unflattering photo of rival Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi, paired with a glamorous photo of his own wife, Melania, a former model, as part of a bitter feud between the two men.

"Yeah, it was a mistake," he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it."



Cruz sought favour in North Dakota, which is not holding a primary or caucuses in the 2016 Republican race. He addressed Republicans at a state convention that is selecting delegates who will go to the national convention unbound to any of the presidential candidates.

Trump and Ohio Gov John Kasich sent supporters on their behalf to make the case that they should be backed by North Dakota's delegates at the Cleveland convention in July.

The Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has grown increasingly bitter, too, though it has not matched the Republican contest for raw hostility. Their attention will quickly turn to an even more consequential contest, in New York on April 19, where the Democratic front-runner dearly hopes to avoid an upset in the state she served as senator. Sanders, who was born in Brooklyn, can claim New York as his home state.

Sanders urged rally-goers to come out in droves Tuesday.

"Here is the political reality," he told a young and pumped-up crowd of thousands on the University of Wisconsin's Eau Claire campus. "If there is a large voter turnout, if working people, many of whom have given up on the political process, if young people come, perhaps for the first time ... we will win on Tuesday."



Clinton sought to draw a contrast with Sanders by emphasising her Democratic bona fides. Before hundreds gathered in a hotel ballroom in Eau Claire later yesterday, the former secretary of state stressed that she has been "a proud Democrat all my adult life and I think that's kind of important if we're selecting somebody to be a Democratic nominee of the Democratic Party.
Turkey has vehemently rejected accusations by Amnesty International that it was forcibly returning Syrian refugees to the conflict-torn country, as Ankara prepares to take back, under an EU deal, Syrians who travelled illegally to Greece.

"The allegations do not reflect reality in any way," the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement yesterday. "It is sad that this kind of was shared with the public (by the media) in such an intense way," it added.

Amnesty International accused Turkey on Friday of illegally forcing groups of some one hundred Syrians a day to return home, saying the alleged expulsions showed the "fatal flaws" in the migrant deal agreed with the EU.

Greece is due tomorrow to start sending back to Turkey all migrants, including Syrians, who crossed the Aegean Sea illegally.

Amnesty said its revelations showed Turkey was not a "safe country" for Syrian refugees to return to.

But the Turkish foreign ministry insisted there was "no change" in the open-door policy that for the last years has allowed any Syrian fleeing the civil war there to seek refuge in the country.

"Turkey is committed to continue to provide protection to Syrians fleeing violence and instability under its international obligations," it added.
A Turkish court has detained, on firearms charges, a Turkish militia fighter accused by Moscow of killing a Russian pilot who ejected over Syria after being shot down by one of Ankara's war planes.

Alparslan Celik and six others were remanded in custody yesterday by the court in the Aegean city of Izmir, the Dogan agency reported. A date for the trial has yet to be set.

Celik was arrested while eating at a restaurant with friends in Izmir last week. Police seized a Kalashnikov, radios, six pistols and bullets after acting on a tip-off.

Celik has been accused by Russia of killing Russian pilot Oleg Peshkov in cold blood as he parachuted to the ground after his plane was shot down by Turkish air forces on the Syrian border on November 24.

The shooting down of the Russian Su-24 and Peshkov's killing caused an unprecedented crisis in relations between Ankara and Moscow.

His detention in Turkey, on charges of possessing illegal firearms, is not directly linked to the incident with the Russian pilot but Celik's lawyer swiftly denounced the move as political.

"What is on trial is not my client but patriotism. There are major political factors at play here," said lawyer Naci Tatac.

Celik, the son of a prominent local politician from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), had since 2014 been fighting alongside Turkmen forces in Syria.

The Turkmen, one of majority Arab Syria's ethnic minorities, speak a language very similar to modern Turkish and are staunch allies of Ankara in fighting forces of Russia's ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Celik in January made a public appearance at a funeral for a Turkish nationalist local politician who was killed fighting with a Turkmen militia in Syria, outraging Moscow even further.

Russia's ambassador to Ankara Andrei Karlov in December directly accused Celik of shooting Peshkov.

Ankara has on occasion shown signs of wanting to calm the row with Moscow, which has made the arrest of Celik one of its conditions for normalising relations.
Britain's city of Leicester, which has a large Indian-origin population, is cracking down on people spitting paan in public places after complaints that the pavements are being stained.

Many of the Indian-origin population of the city enjoy chewing paan but now the local council feel the habit of spitting out the residue has got out of control.

Officials at Leicester City Council are considering bringing a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) to try to stop the spitting along parts of Melton Road and Belgrave Road, known locally as the Golden Mile due to the large number of jewellery stores owned by many Gujarati-origin businessmen.

Local traders and residents in Belgrave are disgusted with their pavements being stained with red paan remains, according to 'Leicester Mercury'.

A city council spokesperson said: "We are aware of this problem which is unhygienic and leaves unsightly staining on pavements.

"We are looking at including paan spitting in a future city-wide Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) which would give us more powers to tackle it.

"Our cleansing teams went out last year at the request of ward councillors and used anti-graffiti spray equipment to remove the paan from walls and dustbins, but the staining is very difficult to remove."



A few years ago a London council had also taken action against this habit among many of its Indian-origin residents.

Brent council launchedan education campaign about the problems of paan spitting, which carries an 80 pounds fine.

The area saw a marked improvement and now plans to re-launch the campaign to raise further awareness on the issue.

Paan is a mixture of tobacco, nuts and spices and is wrapped in a leaf, which is mainly chewed by members of the South Asian community in the UK.
Britain on Sunday changed its procurement rules to encourage public sector bodies to use British steel products as part of efforts to revive the ailing steel industry and save thousands of jobs after India's decided to sell its loss-making businesses in the UK.

Under the new decision, public sector bodies are to be encouraged to buy British steel for construction projects in an effort to help save the industry.

The government said councils and NHS trusts will be asked to consider the economic impact of buying from abroad.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said he was determined to ensure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers.

By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects, we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies, the Pakistani-origin minister said.

The government's decision comes after announced last week that it was selling its loss-making UK plants, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The unions said the government's decision was a small step in the right direction but the measure should have been in place already.

Guidelines were introduced last year requiring central government bodies to take into account the true value of British steel.

Now the guidance is to be extended across the public sector and public procurements involving the supply of steel will need to consider responsible sourcing, the training suppliers give to their workforce, carbon footprint, protecting the health and safety of staff and the social integration of disadvantaged workers.

Contractors working for the public sector will also be required to advertise their requirements for steel so that UK firms can compete for the business.

Authorities hope local steel firms could supply steel for huge projects like the 55 million pound high-speed rail link, which will need some two million tonnes of steel.

It comes after heavy criticism of ministers for failing to take more effective action to prevent the dumping of cheap Chinese steel, seen as one of the key reasons for the problems in the UK steel industry.

The government has played down the impact of new Chinese import tariffs of up to 46.3 per cent.

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community trade union, said the announcement was "a small step in the right direction" but said steelworkers "will be shocked to discover that these measures were not already in place".

"These are bread-and-butter policies that should have been providing opportunities to UK steel producers already," he said.

Tony Burke, assistant general secretary of the Unite union, said the measure needed to compel British steel to be used in all infrastructure projects "otherwise, there will be no recognisable steel industry left in the UK to benefit".
Britain today changed its procurement rules to encourage public sector bodies to use British steel products as part of efforts to revive the country's ailing steel industry and save thousands of jobs after India's Tata Steel decided to sell its loss-making businesses in the UK.

Under the new decision, public sector bodies are to be encouraged to buy British steel for construction projects in an effort to help save the industry.

The government said councils and NHS trusts will be asked to consider the economic impact of buying from abroad.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said he was determined to ensure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers.

"By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects, we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," the Pakistani-origin minister said.

The government's decision comes after Tata Steel announced last week that it was selling its loss-making UK plants, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The unions said the government's decision was "a small step in the right direction" but the measure should have been in place already.

Guidelines were introduced last year requiring central government bodies to take into account the "true value" of British steel.

Now the guidance is to be extended across the public sector and public procurements involving the supply of steel will need to consider "responsible sourcing, the training suppliers give to their workforce, carbon footprint, protecting the health and safety of staff and the social integration of disadvantaged workers".

Contractors working for the public sector will also be required to advertise their requirements for steel so that UK firms can compete for the business.

Authorities hope local steel firms could supply steel for huge projects like the 55-million-pound high-speed rail link, which will need some two million tonnes of steel.

It comes after heavy criticism of ministers for failing to take more effective action to prevent the "dumping" of cheap Chinese steel, seen as one of the key reasons for the problems in the UK steel industry.

The government has played down the impact of new Chinese import tariffs of up to 46.3 per cent.

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community trade union, said the announcement was "a small step in the right direction" but said steelworkers "will be shocked to discover that these measures were not already in place".

"These are bread-and-butter policies that should have been providing opportunities to UK steel producers already," he said.
Tens of thousands of steelworkers in the UK could have their pensions slashed by up to 20% under plans by Tata to wash its hands of the 15 billion pounds British Steel retirement scheme, media reported today.

According to a report in the Sunday Times, the Indian conglomerate is understood to be in negotiations with the government and the Pensions Regulator over putting the scheme, which has about 130,000 active and retired members, into the Protection Fund (PPF), which would mean workers suffer cuts to their retirement savings of as much as 20%.

Last week Tata said UK's largest steelworks, at Port Talbot in South Wales, was no longer viable and put its entire British steel operation up for sale, leaving 15,000 jobs hanging in the balance.

Sources close to the company said it does not plan to continue supporting the fund once it has quit UK steel, according to the report.

"There is no possibility whatsoever [it will retain the scheme]," said one source. "Legally it can do it."



The scheme is one of Britain's biggest - a throwback to when the industry employed hundreds of thousands of workers.

It has a deficit of 485 million pounds, but with assets of almost 14 billion pounds, it is in fairly healthy shape.

Amid the pension talks, Sanjeev Gupta, the Indian origin steel tycoon, has made an alternative proposal to replace Port Talbot's blast furnaces with more efficient electric arc furnaces.

The plan from his company Liberty House, which recently bought assets from Tata and the failed Caparo Industries, is seen as a longshot that would require vast government support.

Tata bought the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus in 2007 in an ill-fated 6.7 billion pounds deal.

It believes it has a strong case for disposing of the pension scheme after propping up the loss-making British operations for years.

It has pumped in 1.5 billion pounds and written down the value to zero. It is working with PwC on the pension plan.

While Tata could put its British arm into administration to shed the liabilities, it is unwilling to do so because of the huge risk to its reputation.

Instead, it is likely to offload the scheme through a compromise deal with the Pensions Regulator.

That would entail it pumping in hundreds of millions of pounds to partly plug the scheme's estimated 2bn pounds buyout deficit - the cost of transferring it to an insurer.

The Community union, which represents steelworkers, said: "Our members would be extremely concerned for their pensions. Tata needs to be a responsible seller of its business and honour its moral and social duties. That includes its obligations to the thousands of members of the pension scheme."



The PPF generally pays full pensions to those who have retired but reduces payouts by 10% for those who retired early or are still in work - of which there are more than 40,000 in the steel scheme.
A US Republican delegation visiting Cairo today said President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was the "right man at the right time" for Egypt even as Washington criticises alleged rights abuses in the country.

The six-member delegation led by hawkish senator Lindsey Graham backed Sisi in the fight against the jihadist Islamic State group, but was cautious when asked to respond to growing accusations of human rights violations committed by Egyptian security forces.

Graham said Sisi was "the right man at the right time" to lead Egypt as the Islamic State group had become a "nightmare" for the entire region.

"There is a desire that Daesh be destroyed in Sinai... the president has expressed his desire to destroy Daesh," Graham said using the Arabic acronym for the IS, which is spearheading an insurgency in the restive peninsula.

When asked about the human rights situation in Egypt, Graham offered a response in stark contrast to the present US administration, which has regularly criticised reported human rights abuses in Egypt.

"I understand that the country is a new democracy and coming out of chaos," told reporters in Cairo.

"He (Sisi) has to balance security with the rule of law... There are elements that come to Egypt to disrupt the nation and there are many people coming here to help you. Don't treat them all in the same way," the senator added.

Rights groups have accused Egypt's security services of carrying out illegal detentions, forced disappearances of activists and torture of detainees since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

After his removal, a police crackdown targeting Morsi's supporters has left hundreds dead and tens of thousands jailed. Hundreds more have been sentenced to death including Morsi himself.

In March, US Secretary of State John Kerry said there was a "deterioration in the human rights situation in Egypt in recent weeks and months".

Ties between Washington and Cairo deteriorated after Morsi's ouster.

The US froze its annual $1.3 billion of military aid to Egypt, which led Cairo to warm up to Russia and France to meet its arms requirements.

But the aid was later released even as Washington remains critical of the government's rights record.
Sanjay Dutt attended his first ever fashion show post his release from Yerwada jail, at the ongoing Lakme Fashion Week and the actor wasn't less than a delight for the photographers as he not only posed for pictures, but also took a selfie with them.

The 56-year-old "Munna Bhai" star, along with wife Manyata, attended designer Masaba's show last evening at the LFW Spring/Summer 2016.

Wearing casual blue shirt and denim, Dutt was in great spirits and posed with his wife, who was dressed in royal blue saree. When photographers requested him for a solo picture, Dutt stood tall in middle of the runway.

Amid photographers calling him with his nickname 'Baba', one of them asked him for a selfie and without refusing even once he took the phone from the cameraperson and clicked few happy selfies with the whole bunch.

Not only this, he sat down with them on floor and got clicked once again.

The actor was convicted in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case, served a 42-month sentence at Pune jail. He was released on February 25, 103 days ahead of his prison term.

Dutt surely became the pre-show showstopper for Masaba, who was showcasing her collection, inspired by the iconic works of Matthieu Venot (an ace French photographer) & Katrin Bremermann (a celebrated German artist).

Actress Shraddha Kapoor was the main showstopper for the designer's collection which she presented in collaboration with fitbit.

Other celebrities spotted in front row were Sonakshi Sinha, Mira Rajput and Sophie Chaudhary. Ali Bhatt's mother Soni Razdan was also present.
Yemen's President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi has relieved prime minister and vice president Khaled Bahah of his duties in government, a presidency source said today.

Hadi appointed Ahmed bin Dagher, former secretary general of the General People's Congress party to which the president once belonged, as prime minister, the source told AFP.

He appointed veteran General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar as vice president, according to the same source, who said Bahah would now serve as a presidential advisor.

There was no immediate explanation behind Bahah's dismissal, which comes just a week ahead of a UN-brokered ceasefire planned between Yemen's warring parties, which is expected to pave the way for peace talks in Kuwait on April 18.

But government sources have in the past spoke of differences between the president and Bahah, who had served as Yemen's envoy to the United Nations before Hadi appointed him as foreign minister and then prime minister.

In December, Hadi reshuffled his cabinet, naming new foreign and interior ministers in a move that was understood to be aimed at smoothing his relations with Bahah.

Hadi has also recently been involving Ahmar more actively in decision-making, appointing him in February as armed forces deputy commander in a bid to rally support from tribes and troops in the rebel-held region around Yemen's capital.

Ahmar's troops played a prominent role in the 2011 uprising that ousted strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose loyalists are now allied with Iran-backed Shiite rebels in control of Sanaa.
South Africa's embattled President Jacob Zuma has dismissed as "preposterous" and "defamatory" allegations that he carried about USD 400 million to Dubai for the wealthy Indian Gupta family.

"The Presidency rejects the preposterous and malicious allegation by Mr Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, that President Jacob Zuma carried R6 billion to Dubai for the Gupta family.

"Mr Malema's allegation has no basis in fact," Zuma's office said in a statement yesterday.

It noted that Zuma had recently concluded "successful visits" to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to strengthen bilateral trade and economic relations between South Africa and the two countries respectively.

"Malema's allegations are both untruthful and defamatory. The Presidency reserves its rights in this regard," the statement warned.

Malema had alleged last Thursday that Zuma was recently in Dubai on a personal visit, dumping six billion rand (about USD 400 million) to the Gupta family.

With huge business interests in South Africa, the wealthy Gupta family, which reportedly keeps close ties with 73-year- old Zuma, has been under fire recently for exerting undue influence on the South African government.

The Gupta family has rejected the accusation.

Zuma is also under pressure to step down after a damning ruling found him in violation of the Constitution.

The criticism comes after the Constitutional Court on Thursday found Zuma in breach of the constitution for using public funds to upgrade his private home at Nkandla village.

Zuma, who has long denied wrongdoing for the work valued in 2014 at 216 million rand (then USD 24 million), on Friday apologised to the nation for the misuse of public funds.
By Tom Westbrook

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Adani Enterprises Ltd was granted approval by Australia's Queensland state government on Sunday to proceed with its proposed $7.7 billion Carmichael coal project in the Galilee Basin.

Queensland Premier Annastascia Palaszczuk said the approvals gave Adani permission to mine coal reserves estimated at 11 billion tonnes and to build roads, workshops, power lines and pipelines associated with the mine.

"Some approvals are still required before construction can start, and ultimately committing to the project will be a decision for Adani," Palaszczuk said in a statement.

Adani said in a statement it would continue to finalise second tier approvals "with the clear aim of commencing construction in calendar year 2017".

Progess would depend on resolving legal challenges from environmentalists, a company spokesman told .

The company has battled opposition from green groups since starting work on the project five years ago. Environmentalists continue to fight Adani's project on numerous fronts and are lobbying banks not to provide loans.

They cite potential damage from port dredging, shipping and climate change stoked by coal from the mine. Two legal challenges to the project are currently before courts.

The Australian Conservation Foundation said in a statement the mine was "inconsistent with Australia's international obligations" to protect the Great Barrier Reef as coal from the mine would stoke global warming and drive coral bleaching.

Several international banks have said they will not provide financing for coal mining in the Galilee Basin, while Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank of Australia pulled out of the project in August.

Analysts say Adani will also find it tough to raise financing for the project due to a prolonged downturn in the global coal market.

Adani's spokesman said that tough market should not put pressure on the project because most of its coal is already earmarked for Adani-owned power plants in India, rather than for sale on the open market.

(Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Richard Pullin)
Britain said on Sunday that all public sector contracts that involve steel supplies must specifically consider UK steel companies as part of plans to find a long-term solution for the country's steel industry.

The government is looking for ways to support domestic steel producers after India's put its British plants up for sale, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said there was no guarantee of a buyer for Britain's biggest steel producer, but a state takeover was not the answer.

Under its support measures, the government will create an approved supplier list specifically for steel companies wanting to bid for public sector projects, such as Britain's 55 million pound ($78.25 million) high-speed rail link, which will need two million tonnes of steel.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said on Sunday he was determined to secure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers and the wider community.

"By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with companies," he said in a statement.

The introduction of measures to ensure British steelmakers are considered for government contracts could take six to nine months, a spokeswoman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills said.

The government has said it is working to broker a deal with potential buyers after Tata Steel's decision to pull out of its almost decade-long venture in Britain, which employs 15,000 people, and which has been hit by high costs and Chinese competition.

Cameron's government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's action, with opposition politicians saying it was "asleep at the wheel."

The prime minister has said he wants Britain and China to work together to tackle over-capacity in steel and that the G20 could be a good forum to address it later in the year.

Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the Steel Statistic bureau.

Last week, China imposed anti-dumping duties of up to 46 percent on specialist steel products from Japan, South Korea and the European Union.

($1 = 0.7028 pounds)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Sunday that UK steel producers must be considered for infrastructure and other government contracts involving steel supplies, as part of plans to find a long-term solution to a crisis in the industry.

The government is looking for ways to support domestic steel producers after India's Tata Steel put its loss-making British plant up for sale on Wednesday, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said there was no guarantee of a buyer for Britain's biggest steel producer, which has been hit by high costs and Chinese competition, and a state takeover was not the answer.

Under its support measures, the government will create an approved supplier list for steel companies wanting to bid for public sector projects, such as Britain's 55 million-pound ($78.25 million) high-speed rail link, which will need two million tonnes of steel.

"By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," Business Secretary Sajid Javid said in a statement.

The introduction of measures to ensure British steelmakers are considered for government contracts could take six to nine months, a spokeswoman for Javid's department said.

The government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's decision to sell its UK plant in south Wales, which employs 15,000, with opposition politicians saying it was "asleep at the wheel."

The government has said it is working to broker a deal with potential buyers after Tata's decision to pull out of its almost decade-long venture in Britain.

Investment firm Greybull Capital is interested in buying Tata's Scunthorpe steelworks and could announce a deal as early as Wednesday, a source familiar with the deal told .

The deal is expected to be for 400 million pounds, with about half of the investment coming from Greybull and the other half from a consortium and maybe a government loan of up to 100 million pounds, the source told .

A Greybull spokesman said talks were continuing constructively.

British newspaper the Telegraph first reported on Sunday that the Meyohas brothers are set to buy the Scunthorpe plant from Tata. [http://bit.ly/1qhju51]

Liberty House Group, which produces steel in Britain, has begun talks with the government over a potential partnership but does not want to buy all of Tata's UK operations, its executive Chairman Sanjeev Gupta was quoted as saying by the Sunday Telegraph.

Javid told the BBC he would not talk about specific offers but said he wanted to find a buyer for the whole business and the government would engage with any willing and serious buyer.

He said the government was looking at how it could help with issues such as Tata's pension burden and costly energy supplies.

"These are the kind of things we have already thought of, we have already started working on and what I hope is that you will have the offer document from Tata, overlay on top of that the help the British government can provide and then you have the makings of a successful deal," he said.

Cheap Chinese imports have hit Britain's steel industry. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the International Steel Statistic bureau.

Cameron has said he wants Britain and China to work together to tackle overcapacity in steel. Last week, however, China imposed anti-dumping duties of up to 46 percent on specialist steel products from Japan, South Korea and the European Union.

($1 = 0.7028 pounds)

(Reporting by Li-mei Hoang and Kylie MacLellan; Vishal Sridhar in Bengaluru and Freya Berry in London, Editing by Susan Fenton and Alan Crosby)
By Anthony Deutsch and Thomas Escritt

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch voters will decide on Wednesday whether to support a European treaty deepening ties with Ukraine in a referendum that will test sentiment towards Brussels ahead of Britain's June Brexit vote and could also bring a boost for Russia.

The broad political, trade and defence treaty is already provisionally in place but has to be ratified by all 28 European Union member states for every part of it to have full legal force. The Netherlands is the only country that has not done so.

While a "no" vote in the non-binding referendum would not force the Dutch government to veto the treaty on an EU level the fragile coalition, which holds the rotating EU presidency, might find it hard to ignore with less than a year to general elections.

Any rejection by Dutch voters or by the government would give Russian President Vladimir Putin, who opposes deeper EU-Ukraine ties and who many Dutch blame for the downing by pro-Russian rebels of a plane travelling from Amsterdam, a victory in his war of words with the West.

An EU decision to push on with the treaty despite a "no vote", whether the government respects it or not, could be damaging for the EU and highlight EU problems ahead of the British vote.

"If politicians ignore the Dutch no then it will be an even stronger signal than what the British have already received that there is no way to correct the European political class and that they should vote to leave," said Thierry Baudet, a "no" campaigner and one of the architects of the referendum that was triggered when activists gathered thousands of signatures of support.

Many Dutch feel they are being asked to choose between two unattractive options: EU expansion plans dreamed up by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels or helping Russian Putin who they blame for the MH17 plane disaster which killed almost 200 Dutch citizens in July 2014.

TURNOUT CRUCIAL

Others are confused by the issues.

"I'm not voting," said Gijs, a driving instructor in Amsterdam. "I can't understand what this referendum is about, and I can't understand why it was called."

A poll by Maurice De Hond on Sunday forecast that 66 percent of people certain to vote, would back 'No' with only 25 percent in favour, with turnout likely to be decisive in shaping the final result. Pollsters TNS Nipo have forecast turnout of 32 percent, just above the 30 percent threshold that is needed for the referendum to be valid.

The government, which supports a "yes" vote, fears it could turn into a protest vote like in 2005, when a majority of the Dutch electorate broke from a pro-European tradition and rejected the EU constitution.

"I hope the Dutch can get over their chagrin and say: 'Yes, we are annoyed with Europe, we are annoyed with this Dutch government, but we will still support Ukraine," said Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem.

While some parliamentary parties have said they would be bound by the outcome, "the government position is that we will follow the law, which simply says we will reconsider," said Dijsselbloem, lending weight to the view that the government will seek to preserve the treaty, or its essence, whatever the outcome.

"PUTIN'S SHADOW"

The government itself shied away from framing the vote in a Russian context but shifted tactic as the referendum approaches.

The youth wing of Dijsselbloem's Labour Party, the junior party in the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, have run a poster campaign showing anti-EU populist Geert Wilders passionately kissing Putin.

"Vladimir Putin's shadow is lurking fairly significantly over this treaty," said "yes" campaigner Joshua Livestro, arguing that a "no" vote will play into Putin's hands.

"Are we now going to give Putin what he wants after all?" he said.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte's cabinet initially stressed the treaty's economic benefits, but has since focused on its importance for Ukrainian reform in the areas of corruption, human rights and democracy.

"Everyone who wants progress in Ukraine is asking us to vote 'yes,' along with 27 other countries. That's what the referendum is about and nothing else," Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher said on Friday.

"No" campaigners say the treaty is a first step toward full EU membership. "Legal scholars call it quasi membership," said Baudet.

Many Ukrainian politicians feel their country deserves the treaty and are keen to show they have made progress in aligning their country with EU standards since the 2014 uprising that toppled pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich.

In a Dutch television interview on Sunday, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin emphasized progress in areas such as gay and transgender rights where the Dutch have always viewed themselves as progressive leaders.

"In the past 24 months since Maidan we've done more reforms than in the last 24 years," he said.

(Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska and Toby Sterling; editing by Anna Willard)
OSLO (Reuters) - The governor of the Norwegian central bank will apply for a second, and final, six-year term, he told on Sunday.

"I am motivated to continue as governor, and can confirm that I will apply," Olsen said in an emailed statement.

Olsen, 64, has been governor of Norges Bank since January 2011. His six-year term can only be renewed once.

By flagging his intentions, Olsen may scare off any other serious contender. In Norway, it is customary for governors to have their terms renewed.

The bank is fighting a downturn in the Norwegian economy prompted by the slump in oil prices. It cut its key policy rate to a record low of 0.50 percent this month and said it may cut again in the autumn.

Olsen's comments came after his position was advertised on Sunday.

"Solid knowledge of monetary policy, financial markets and capital management is required," said the advertisement, published in the Sunday edition of the daily Aftenposten and on the website of the Norwegian state's job positions.

The head of the central bank also heads the bank's board and is responsible for the country's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest.

The deadline for applications for the job is April 24. The list of applicants will be made public.

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik and Gwladys Fouche; Editing by Jason Neely and Susan Fenton)
By Andy Bruce and Costas Pitas

PORT TALBOT, Wales/LONDON (Reuters) - The closure of Tata Steel's operations in Britain would leave a hole in manufacturers' supply chains, dealing a blow to thousands of smaller firms across the country and creating a logistical headache for the car industry.

India's Tata Steel, Britain's biggest producer, put all of its operations up for sale, including the country's largest steelworks at Port Talbot which is losing $1.4 million a day due to depressed steel prices and high costs.

As the government searches for a new buyer, some of Tata's customers are already looking for new sources of steel which is used in everything from car roofs to Heinz baked bean cans, cladding on Ikea buildings and some of the country's coins.

While bigger names have the luxury of a global supply chain to fall back on, smaller companies - which account for around 95 percent of British manufacturing firms - face a tougher task if Port Talbot in south Wales closes.

Tata sells around half of its products into the domestic market, the firm said in 2014.

"It would be entirely undesirable from my point of view," said Tony Mullins, executive chairman of QRL Radiators Group, a Tata Steel customer that makes heating radiators near the Welsh town of Newport, employing around 150 staff.

Looking abroad for steel would leave firms like QRL that use British steel exposed to swings in the currency exchange rate and higher transportation costs. It might also need to hold more stock if it is buying from the other side of the world, having an impact on working capital.

"We have to be competitive, we have to produce quality products, and historically with Tata that has been possible for us," Mullins said.

DRIVING FORCE

Britain, the birthplace of the modern steel industry, has been struggling to compete since its post-war heyday and has shed thousands of jobs in recent years.

Since 2001 imported supplies have met more than half of its domestic demand, according to the International Steel Statistics Bureau (ISSB), as local producers struggled with high energy costs, green taxes and fierce competition.

Germany is the biggest foreign supplier of steel to British manufacturers and construction firms, followed by China, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, the ISSB said.

The government maintains that the main problem is the collapse in the price of steel. China has flooded European markets with relatively cheap steel as a result of its own falling demand.

Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to industry data.

According to the ISSB, China has produced more steel in the last three years than Britain has since the industrial revolution.

Those British steelmakers that remain have been kept going by local manufacturers, a resurgent car industry and foreign demand.

"Hot-rolled coil is produced (at Port Talbot) and that predominately goes into the automotive sector ... that's the bodywork," Dominic King, head of policy and representation at industry group UK Steel, told .

Five carmakers built almost 99 percent of Britain's 1.6 million cars last year and all source steel from Port Talbot, with some already looking for alternatives should the site shut.

The country's biggest carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which made just under a third of national output last year, gets around 30 percent of its steel from the site while Nissan, which operates Britain's biggest single car plant in northern England, buys 45 percent from there.

Showing the cost constraints within the industry, John Leech, who heads up the automotive team at KPMG and works with some of the country's biggest carmakers, said JLR could not afford to give preferential treatment to a more expensive product even though it is owned by Tata Motors - part of the same family of companies as Tata Steel.

"To compete against BMW and Mercedes, Jaguar Land Rover needs to makes sure its cars are cost-competitive and that means using materials that are sourced cheaply and competitively."

JLR said: "Like all other independent businesses, we make our own purchasing decisions based on the right commercial reasons." The firm said it continued to use Tata Steel and did not see any short term impact on its business.

A spokesman at General Motors-owned Vauxhall, which uses Tata's high-strength lightweight steel in its Astra hatchback model said it was "considering the scenario of UK steel plant closures on supply sources".

"There are a number of sources of steel in Europe that are used by our plants in Spain, Germany and Poland," the spokesman said, when asked whether the firm was looking elsewhere.

Leech said timing could be key, with Tata Steel saying it wants to exit Britain as soon as possible.

"It will mean a lot of fast footwork behind the scenes but... the ability to get the same steel from other European or Chinese plants in (a one to three-month) time frame is a possibility," he said.

BUY BRITISH

For many of the workers leaving the Port Talbot plant at the end of their shift this week the has come as a shock, given the investment made under Tata's ownership.

"Tata certainly have influenced training more than the old regime..." said Dave Bowyer, 59, a steelworker for 40 years and Unite union representative, whose ancestors were steelworkers.

"The workforce itself has become far more technical. Our craftsman and production guys, even the guys on the shop floor - a number of them have got degrees."

UK Steel's King said there were many advantages to the British product which continue to attract buyers.

"One is customer service, that you have that close link with the manufacturer... you know in the UK that they are going to be meeting the energy targets, the environmental targets that are out there (and) that engineering skill," he said.

The industry is also known for its highly-skilled flexible workforce with no strike action in 30 years.

Rollo Reid, technical director and grandson of the founder of REIDsteel, one of Britain's largest steel construction companies which sources almost 90 percent of its steel from Tata, worries that if Port Talbot closes, prices will rise.

"There will be one less competitor and when the other European ones go out of business, there will be less competitors and then the price will go up and we'll be completely within the hands of the Chinese."

(Editing by Kate Holton and Janet McBride)
From Accuweather: El Nino-induced snow proves to be 'disappointing' for drought-stricken California



Much-needed mountain snow and rain returned to California this winter, but fell short of expectations amid a super El Nino.



The official snow season for California's Sierra Nevada came to an end at the start of April on a below-normal note and one that AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Ken Clark called "disappointing."



The amount of water stored in the snow for the entire mountain chain averaged 14 percent below normal on April 1, according to the California Cooperative Snow Surveys.



The northern Sierra fared better than the southern Sierra with the amount of water in the snow averaging only 5 percent below normal, compared to the 27 percent below normal in the south.



"The numbers are not anywhere near what many had wanted going into the winter," Clark said. "The much-heralded El Nino brought more snow than the previous four years, but that was not hard to accomplish."

Here are some excellent graphs showing snow water content in the Sierra. This was close to an average year in the Northern Sierra, but below average in Central and South. There was more rain and snow than the previous four years, but this will still be considered year 5 of the drought. Note: For Pacific Crest Trail and John Muir Trail hikers, I recommend using the Upper Tyndall Creek sensor to track the snow conditions. This is the fifth dry year in a row along the JMT, but there should be more water along the trail this summer than the previous four years, and still not too much snow on the passes.This graph shows the snow water content for Upper Tyndall Creek for the last 9 years. There is more snow than the previous four years, but that isn't saying much.
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TUESDAY

Turf grass workshop offered in Kingsville

Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service Kleberg and Kenedy County will have a Turfgrass Workshop/Field Day at 8:30 a.m. at Dick Kleberg Park  Recreation Building, 500 E. Escondido Road, Kingsville. Topics will include turf grass selection and management, soil and nutrient management, pests in the landscape, irrigation practices and diseases of turfgrasses.

The program benefits those interested in residential and commercial operations. Cost: $15/person. To register call 361-595-8566.

WEDNESDAY

Orientation for small businesses

A small business orientation is from 4-6 p.m. at the Economic Development Center, 3209 S. Staples St., CED 146. The seminar will provide new business owners information to start a business. Topics include small business loans and financing requirements, business plan, licensing, contracting and permit information and resources. Free. Information: www.seminarscc.com

Women in business seminar offered

A free event for women in business will be from 9-10:30 a.m. at the Small Business Administration office, 2820 S. Padre Island Drive, Suite 108. The SBA's Woman Owned Small Business will help with contracting certification to compete for federal contracts. The Texas Business Opportunity Development will present the Texas Department of Transportation's TBOD Program that works to increase disadvantaged-owned business participation in the highway construction industry. Information: 361-879-0017, ext. 301 or ext. 303 or email elizabeth.soliz@sba.gov.

THURSDAY

Social media seminar for business

A lunch and learn on social media time savers will be from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Center for Economic Development, 3209 S. Staples St., CED 118. Free. Topics include: tips on how to save up to 10 hours managing social media, post content, social media and sales promotions, best practices and others. Information: 361-879-0017, ext. 301 or ext. 303 or email elizabeth.soliz@sba.gov.

Business financial aid seminar offered

The Small Business Association will offer a seminar on financial assistance to start or expand a business from 9-10:30 a.m. at the SBA office, 2820 S. Padre Island Drive, Suite 108. SBA Guaranty Loan Programs can be an option to take care of financial needs, including working capital, land and building purchase, equipment, inventory and leasehold improvements. Information on government contracting and business consulting services will be provided. Information: 879-0017, ext. 301 or elizabeth.soliz@sba.gov

Government contracting seminar

A business registration for government contracting seminar is from 1-3 p.m. at SBA Corpus Christi Branch Office, 2820 S. Padre Island Drive, Suite 108. The seminar will provide guidance to establish business credentials and enhancing business profiles on various governmental search engines. Free. Information and registration: 361-879-0017, ext. 301 or 303 or email elizabeth.soliz@sba.gov.

LATER

Casino night aids Reading Rally

The Corpus Christi chapter of the Executive Women International announced the 2016 annual fundraiser, Casino Night, from 6:30-10 p.m. April 14 at the Holiday Inn Downtown Marina. Organizers are currently accepting sponsorship opportunities ranging from $1,000 to $3,000. Underwriting of this event helps support EWI's annual Reading Rally (helping the YWCA's YTeens) & Women in Transition Scholarship Fund. Information: 361-215-2817 or 512-786-1624.

Luncheon set for accounting students

The Corpus Christi Chapter of the Texas Society of CPAs will host a luncheon for accounting students and CPAs at 11:30 a.m. April 22 at Katz 21 Steaks & Spirits, 5702 Spohn Drive.

Free for accounting students and $15 for CPAs. Information: 800-428-0272 ext. 279.

Compiled by Natalia Contreras
When is hurricane season? Here's what you need to know in South Texas
Contributed photo Del Mar College Music Department assistant professor Donald Pinson will perform music for trombone and euphonium at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Wolfe Recital Hall, Del Mar College East.

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Sunday

BIRDING: The Audubon Outdoor Club of Corpus Christi will host weekend bird walks at 7:30 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays through April at Blucher Park. Cost: Free. Information: 330-998-2910.

TOURS: The Corpus Christi Area Heritage Society will host tours of its Centennial House from noon to 4 p.m. at 411 N. Upper Broadway St. Cost: $3, adults; $1, children 12 and younger. Information: 361-882-8691.

THEATER: Harbor Playhouse will perform the Broadway musical "Chicago" at 2:30 p.m. at 1802 N. Chaparral St. The production features dazzling dance numbers and mesmerizing musical performances. Cost: $18, adults; $10, children younger than 13. Information: 361-882-5500, www.harborplayhouse.com.

FAMILY: The Aransas County Navigation District designated Sunday as a free beach day for visitors at Rockport Beach. Cost: Free. Information: www.rockportbeach-texas.com.

THEATER: The Rialto Theater will present "Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks" at 3 p.m. at 327 S. Commercial St., Aransas Pass. Cost: $15, general admission; $35, dinner and show; $140, table for four dinner and show. Information: www.rialtotheater.org.

ANIMALS: The HERPS Corpus Christi Exotic Reptile and Pet Show will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Richard M. Borchard Regional Fairgrounds, 1213 Terry Shamsie Blvd., Robstown. Cost; $10, adults; $5, children 3-10; free, children 3 and younger. Information: www.herpshow.net

Monday

CONCERT: Del Mar College Music Department assistant professor Donald Pinson will perform music for trombone and euphonium at 7:30 p.m. at Wolfe Recital Hall, Del Mar College East. Cost: Free. Information: 361-689-1604.

AUTOMOBILE: Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi will host an AutoCheck Motor Monday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the first entrance to the campus at the end of Island Boulevard. Cost: Free. Information: 361-825-3070.
Mary Gonzalez (second from left) received the Person of the Year award from the National Organization for Women chapter at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. The award was given at the Women's History Month Symposium. Gonzalez is associate vice president for student access. Nominees Richard L. Miller, chairman of the psychology and sociology department (left); Maria de Jesus Ayala-Schueneman (second from right), professor and associate director for public services at the Jernigan Library; and Santa Barraza, professor in the art, communications and theater arts department; are also pictured. Nominee Lucy Camacho, associate professor in the environmental engineering department, is not pictured.

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Student named to dean's list

Katie M. Marley of Corpus Christi was named to the Columbia College dean's list for the October-December 2015 and January-March 2016 sessions.

To be named to the dean's list, a student must have completed 12 semester hours in a 16-week period and achieved a minimum grade-point average of 3.5 on a four-point scale.

Competitors receive scholarship awards

Jalin Lawver and Alexandria Del Bosque of Corpus Christi received scholarships at the Scholarship Day competition on March 5 at McMurry University.

Scholarship Day awards are among the highest academic recognitions made by McMurry University to entering freshman students. These awards are based on outstanding academic achievement and the promise of continued academic excellence. Scholarship Day awards provide an annual stipend of at least $8,000 and are renewable for up to eight semesters of full-time study, officials said.

Del Bosque was accepted to McMurry University for entrance in fall 2016.

Engineering majors receive scholarships

The Frank H. & June Smith Dotterweich Memorial Foundation awarded four scholarships valued at $2,000 each to students pursuing engineering at Texas A&M University-Kingsville for the spring 2016 semester, officials said.

The scholarship recipients are Leslie Maldonado, natural gas engineering major of Mission; Brandon Darr, architectural engineering major of Falls City; Audrey Lopez, chemical engineering major of Corpus Christi; and Justin Karr, chemical engineering major of Victoria.

This is the fourth consecutive semester that Lopez and Karr have been awarded this scholarship, officials said.

Each student who earns the Frank H. and June Smith Dotterweich Memorial Foundation scholarship can retain that scholarship as long as they maintain a 3.5 grade-point average. The Dotterweich Trust was established by Dr. Frank Dotterweich in 1990. He was the longtime dean and professor emeritus in the College of Engineering at Texas A&I University.

Award for colleges goes to A&M-CC

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi has been named as one of the Top 50 Colleges for Hispanic Students by BestColleges.com, officials said.

According to the list, the Island University ranked 37th in the nation among four year colleges and universities and 10th in the state. The list was created by examining each school's academics, student engagement, Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities membership status, in- and out-of-state tuitions, percentage of Hispanic enrollees and cultural impact. Each ranked school on the list boasts a cultural center and degree programs or scholarships dedicated to enhancing the experiences of Hispanic students.

Officials said the university was highlighted for its collaboration with Excelencia in Education. The Center for Faculty Excellence was a participant in the "Growing Knowledge About What Works for Latino Student Success" initiative between Excelencia in Education and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and CFE has been invited to speak at Excelencia in Education's Celebracion de Excelencia in Washington, D.C. Excelencia in Education President Sarita Brown was also invited to speak at the University's 2013 Islander Forum, which has provided opportunities for open discussion, feedback and ideas for improving teaching and learning on campus.

The university is recognized as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education and has also been named by the White House as a "Bright Spot in Hispanic Education" by the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, funded by the National Science Foundation, officials said. A&M-CC also features an English as a Second Language International program, a course designed for nonnative English speakers to prepare for entrance into the university. To see the full list of rankings, visit http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/top-50-colleges-for-hispanic-students/.

Dean receives Educator Award

Natalya Delcoure, dean of the College of Business Administration at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, received the Outstanding Educator Award from the Federation of Business Disciplines, officials said.

Delcoure received the award at the 2016 Conference of the Southwestern Finance Association held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Federation of Business Disciplines in Oklahoma City. She has been dean of the College of Business Administration since August 2013. Before taking her Kingsville appointment, she was associate dean and Endowed Professor of Strategic Leadership at the Lucas Graduate School of Business at San Jose State University.

She has been associate dean and director of graduate studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, assistant professor in finance at Sam Houston State University and assistant professor of finance at the Mitchell College of Business at the University of South Alabama.

Delcoure earned her bachelor's degree in accounting and economics at Moscow State University of Railway Engineering, her master's in business administration at University of Louisiana in Monroe and her doctorate in business administration from Louisiana Tech University.

She was named Researcher of the Year in 2002 and 2004 from the Mitchell College of Business. In 2010, she received the Best Paper Award at the Financial Service Institute Symposium with her paper, You! Me! Let's try to make some MO-Ney! This past spring, she received the Distinguished Paper Award at the International Academy of Business and Public Administration Disciplines Conference in Dallas.

Compiled by Natalia Contreras
Worshipful Master David Scherzer (left) and Capt. Billy Sandifer

SHARE HELP took a group of at-risk students interested in medicine to Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in March. The group of men from the Juvenile Justice Center learned how to take blood, administer anesthesia, diagnose certain warning signs, and scrub up for an operation. Many of the young men in the group were surprised to learn how valuable men are in the nursing field, and expressed their desire to learn more about this career opportunity, officials said. LyondellBasell staff Robert Ybarra (front row from left), Vanessa McAllister, Lisa Cobb, Boy Scout Eli Susser, Diana Gonzalez, Kieran Tobin (back row from left), David Myers, Byron Unterbrink and Corpus Christi Site Manager Randy Tatum met while attending the Friends of Scouting Campaign breakfast.

Masons honor wildlife supporter

Corpus Christi Masonic Lodge No. 189 presented its annual Community Builder Award on March 16 to Capt. Billy L. Sandifer, officials said.

Each lodge presents this award to an individual who is not a member of the fraternity for outstanding service to the community. Sandifer's work to promote environmental issues at the Padre Island National Seashore and other organizations supporting wildlife protection and rescue was recently featured in an article in the Caller-Times. Sandifer has been recognized for his efforts nationally by publications such as Field and Stream Magazine and is a feature writer of Texas Saltwater Fisherman magazine, officials said. He is president emeritus and founder of The Friends of Padre and has organized many beach cleanups at the National Seashore resulting in the removal of hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash and flotsam from our beaches. Representatives from the Friends of Padre and the Padre Island National Seashore were also in attendance to congratulate him for his diligent work to keep our beaches clean and improve the environment for area wildlife.

Refining company aids Boy Scouts

LyondellBasell, one of the world's largest plastics, chemical and refining companies, was honored to take part in a recent fundraising effort benefiting the South Texas Council of the Boy Scouts of America. The annual "Friends of Scouting" campaign is the largest source of income for the organization.

LyondellBasell's campaign sponsorship opens doors for area youths to experience Scouting, regardless of their financial situation. The South Texas Council of the Boy Scouts of America is one of the area's largest youth-serving agencies. Annually, it reaches more than 5,000 students from elementary through high school.

Last year, the "Friends of Scouting" campaign raised more than $140,000 to help support the program, area camps and training for future leaders.

Compiled by Natalia Contreras
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By Chris Ramirez of the Caller-Times

The Port of Corpus Christi has chosen the group it wants to be the face of its voluntary resident relocation program.

So, who qualifies to be moved?

Under the relocation plan, homeowners can be moved to a "comparable home." However, comparability is based on a variety of factors, such as the home's size and amenities, not its value. All title-clearing costs, closing fees and moving expenses for homeowners would be covered under the plan. Renters are eligible to be relocated only if the landlord is eligible and opts to sell their property to the port.

On Tuesday, the Port Authority hired Del Richardson & Associates Inc. to coordinate the relocation program on the port's behalf.

Del Richardson, who founded the company in 1984 in Inglewood, California, told the Caller-Times she met with residents and toured Hillcrest in March. She asked them their impressions of the bridge replacement project, the port and what they knew about the relocation program.

Richardson said one of her chief goals will be to clarify program's benefits and to help them find safe, clean housing, if they decide to participate.

"We want to make sure that everyone can make an informed decision," she said.

The firm has been active in Southern California. Some of its contracts include:

October 2014  The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority awarded it a two-year contract for $646,462 to operate its pilot Business Solution Center. The center aims to help small businesses impacted by Crenshaw/LAX Transit Project construction. That contract includes two one-year options for $349,682 for total of $996,144.

September 2015  The VA contracted the firm to find area landlords willing to rent to veterans. The contract was for $600,000.

Twitter: @Caller_Chris
SHARE Carlos Perez

By Natalia Contreras of the Caller-Times

Carlos Perez is known for his skills on the soccer field.

Perez, 16, moved to Mansfield about three years ago from Mexico with his family and is described as smart and competitive by his friends.

"Everybody knew him because he was in the soccer team," Zahrai Aguilera said. "And he was also one of the brightest in his class."

Aguilera, 15, has known Perez since they were in middle school.

Perez, No. 19 on the soccer field, went missing Friday in the Gulf of Mexico near Bob Hall Pier.

"We are hopeful that when his family comes back they'll bring a trace of him," Aguilera said. "We will keep praying for him and I am still very hopeful."

Perez, a freshman at Lake Ridge High School, was on a school trip for a SkillsUSA competition. He was swimming with classmates when he got separated from the group. The beach outing was a planned stop during the school trip, officials said.

About 11 a.m. Friday, Corpus Christi police, firefighters and Coast Guard responded to beach marker 234.

Senior Officer Kirk Stowers said Perez was not an experienced swimmer.

He was last seen wearing black and red shorts, no shirt and was not wearing a life vest, Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Shelly Brown said.

The Coast Guard called off its search about 5 p.m. Saturday after about 10 collective hours searching.

According to the National Weather Service Corpus Christi, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday wave heights were 4-6 ft. tall from Malaquite Beach to Port Aransas.

Meteorologist Douglas Vogelsang said a small craft advisory was issued Friday, which means winds reached more than 12 mph.

Texas EquuSearch director of search operations Frank Black said Mansfield ISD officials requested a search crew Sunday and Coast Guard allowed the search. About five volunteers will help search for Perez starting before dawn Monday. Black said they would search "as long as it takes."

This is the second time in less than a month Texas EquuSearch has assisted with finding people lost in waters near Corpus Christi. In early March the team helped find Odry Lilieth Leon, 13, and Mario Alberto Leon Rangel, 36.

The two were visiting from Saltillo, Mexico, and were on an 18-foot leisure boat with six others when it capsized March 6 about a mile off shore from Swantner Park.

Odry and her father, Mario, were found hours apart March 11 near an oil rig in the bay.

Henri Garcia helped search for Odry and her father, and plans to join the Dickinson-based, Texas EquuSearch at 6 a.m. Monday at Bob Hall Pier to look for Perez.

"I have children and I know that if it was me, I'd want someone out there looking for me, too," Garcia said.

The team will begin the search with a sonar equipped boat, Black said.

"At this point we ask volunteers who will join in the morning to just keep their eyes open along the shoreline," Black said.

Anyone seeking information can call Coast Guard at 361-939-6393 or EquuSearch at 281-309-9500.

Twitter: @CallerNatalia
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/FACEBOOK Gail Minglana Martinez and her husband Lt. Col. Kato Martinez Martinez died March 22 in the Brussels attacks. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Gail Minglana Martinez was a 1992 Flour Bluff High graduate

International news events such as the terrorist attack in Brussels seem a world away from safe, quiet Corpus Christi, Texas, until they're not. The death in Brussels of Gail Minglana Martinez, a former Corpus Christi resident, is a tragic reminder that there's something to the theory of six degrees of separation  that we're all connected by six or fewer steps to anyone or anything in the world.

Chances were that someone out of the 30 killed and 100 wounded would be someone dear to someone here. We now are aware of six: Martinez, who still had plenty of family here, and five wounded  her husband, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, and their four children.

What this means is that Brussels and ISIS, the radical Islamic terror group, are our problem in a personal way. ISIS was Corpus Christi's problem  and Sinton's and Kingsville's and so on  before the loss of Gail Martinez. It just seemed more remote of a problem before Brussels  more forgettable as we went on in our lives. The danger is closer to home than we thought. Usually we worry about whether it could happen here and what can be done to prevent it. Brussels is a reminder that what happens there matters, too, and affects us here.

It's a reminder of our need to join together as a people to mourn our losses and to defeat ISIS. The nation's leaders, starting at the top with President Barack Obama, need to stop relying on self-serving politics as their weapon of choice in the battle. Common enemy, common goal, common ground. Our leaders should be uniting rather than dividing us.

Contrary to what Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz says, each day that passes without Obama uttering the words "radical Islamic terrorism" doesn't make ISIS any stronger. But each day that Obama busies himself more with spinning his perceived legacy than with the actual threat, does.

As recently as last week his administration was trying to shift the blame for his dismissing ISIS as the "jayvee team" in 2014 on an analysis by a highly respected general who retired last week after 40 years of service. By now it's clear that the jayvee comment was the "mission accomplished" of this administration. Admitting it would be more than big of him. It would be a step toward the unity Obama has not achieved. It would be a tacit admission to his bitter political enemies that not all of his problems can be blamed on George W. Bush. The Bush administration, the Obama administration and the next administration are all in this thing together  that's what the country needs to hear from Obama if we all are to be in this thing together.

Likewise, what the country and Obama need to hear from Republican leaders and presidential candidates is a good-faith offer of help to their commander in chief in devising a better strategy to defeat this common enemy.

In a message of condolence to Martinez's family, U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, said: "I call upon President Obama to deliver a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS, root out terror, and ensure that no other family will have to bear a similar tragedy." This was not the self-serving, attention-seeking style of Obama bashing that has earned Farenthold rebukes from us in the past. This was a measured statement, respectful in tone, that needed to be said. It was not presumptuous of Farenthold to be the one to say it, or to pair it with his condolences to the family. He spoke up for his constituents, some of whom went to Flour Bluff High School with Gail Minglana Martinez. The only thing missing was a pledge by Farenthold to help Obama meet this challenge.

This Editorial Board tends to refrain from commenting on international events because they're a world away and we are better-informed about issues closer to home. ISIS has hit us in our home. Our comment on this issue is exactly what our congressman said. We add only this: South Texas will be no more remote to this comprehensive strategy than it is to what happened in Brussels.
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With so many government programs currently under attack, there remains one agency that appears to be impervious to criticism  the Peace Corps. It wasn't always that way.

When it was first established by President Kennedy in 1961, former President Eisenhower referred to it as the "Kiddie Corps" and Sen. Barry Goldwater blasted it as another example of government overreach and wasteful spending, although he later changed his mind when his son became a Peace Corps volunteer.

Looking back, I'd say we were a bunch of amateurs who learned from our mistakes while experiencing the high point of our lives. Today's Peace Corps no longer recruits well-meaning "amateurs."

I was excited about the Peace Corps from its very conception, but decided to wait until there was a call from India for teachers. For me it had to be India. The opportunity came the following year.

Following three months of intensive training in which learning to speak Hindi was top priority, I was assigned to teach history at Osmania University in Hyderabad, the capitol of Andhra Pradesh. There were 10 of us PCVs there, all novices ready and eager to teach English, history, chemistry, geology, biology and journalism. But we soon found out the real reason we were at the university. Vice Chancellor D.S. Reddi informed us we were there primarily to instill idealism into our students, to become their role models. Since that was fine with us, we began looking for useful on-campus projects that would involve our students. Dr. Reddi was delighted on learning we were cleaning and painting one of the college kitchen ceilings, a project that involved scraping away decades of accumulated soot and mold. Instead of joining us, students gathered to gape in astonishment at the crazy American "professors."

It was the period of the Cold War and the CIA in India was secretly training Tibetan Freedom Fighters to help overthrow China's Communist regime. My roommate and I at the student hostel would listen to Radio Peking's English speaking broadcaster spewing out hatred of the United States. Mao Zedong was taunting the U.S. that he had no fear of a nuclear strike on his country, boasting that China could well afford to lose 100 million or even 200 million of its population, but could the U.S. do likewise? Along with the Cuban missile crisis that fall, it was a scary time.

And then it happened. Chinese armies invaded a disputed border territory between the two countries. To my astonishment, I found myself part of a huge anti-Chinese march and rally, with hundreds of students shouting anti-Chinese slogans. The Chinese restaurant in downtown Hyderabad was boarded up, its proprietor fearful of his restaurant being torched.

Not long after this, Dr. Reddi told us of the one positive consequence the war had brought about. Students were now inspired by a higher purpose than themselves, which was the very reason he had requested PCVs.

What he failed to recognize, however, was that war can also unleash mindless hatred. A member of our group, a Japanese American, while in the city shopping, was set upon and beaten by passers-by who mistook him for Chinese. In order for "Ishi" to remain in India, he was speedily transferred north to the Kulu Valley where Asian features were commonly seen, and where he, a geologist, would now be introducing new textile designs to resident weavers. It was all an eye-opening introduction to India with many more surprises to come.
"And you know what, a woman may see it one month, and then she may see it six months later and say: 'Right it's time ... I know what I need to do'."
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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.

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The auto industry can be a funny game of musical chairs; case in point is the Eagle Premier, a name that has almost certainly caused your brow to furrow right now.



The name doesnt sound too French, but the Eagle Premier was largely a creation of Renault, with some American engineering to change the 25 luxury sedan into an acceptable rival for vehicles like the Chevrolet Celebrity and the Ford Taurus.

But before it could go on sale, Renault decided to give up on its American Motors adventure  modest hits with the Alliance and LeCar were outweighed by dogs like the 18 and Fuego  and sold AMC to Chrysler in 1987. While Chrysler saw value in the Jeep lineup (the XJ Cherokee was hot, hot, hot back then), the Renault-derived cars were given the Eagle nameplate and subsequently forgotten by the marketing department.

The Premier was a French car, modified by engineers in Michigan, built in Canada and now sold by a company that didnt really want it. Im surprised Charles Dickens didnt write this sad orphan story.

According to this clip from Motorweek in 1987, it was a car that couldve been a hit if anyone knew about it. Which is a shame, because while the Premier didnt look like much, it was full of interesting engineering ideas. A car no longer than a modern Honda Accord was capable of seating for six. The longitudinally mounted engines with front-wheel drive were something Audi-like in the 80s. And then theres the fact this basic engineering (with the AMC engineers) was developed into the Chrysler LH sedans of the 90s.

Yet no one really cared about the Premier when it went on sale, that coupe they talked about never materialized and it died a quiet death in 1992. Eagle soldiered on just until 1998. And Renault never came back to the States. Which means if you want your modern French car fix in the U.S., either scour the Internet for a decent Premier or wait until you can buy one of the new DS cars here.

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Photo: The Canadian Press Actor Mike Smith arrives in character as Bubbles for the Canadian premiere of the film "Trailer Park Boys Countdown to Liquor Day" in Toronto on Monday, September 21, 2009. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

UPDATE: 3:52 p.m.

Lucy DeCoutere says she has resigned from the "Trailer Park Boys" just hours after one of its principal actors denied assaulting a woman in the U.S.

DeCoutere, who co-stars in the show, testified against Jian Ghomeshi in the former CBC host's highly-publicized sexual assault trial.

Mike Smith, known for playing Bubbles on the cult comedy show, was charged with a misdemeanour in Los Angeles on Friday.

DeCoutere tweeted about her resignation, saying it was linked with the allegation against Smith, adding she had spoken with both her co-star and the alleged victim.

Los Angeles police records show Smith was arrested early Friday morning, and has been released on $20,000 bail.

Police haven't released details of the charge against Smith, but the show has issued a news release in which Smith denies assaulting a woman.

"At no time did I assault her. I am not guilty of the misdemeanour charged against me," Smith says in the written statement, adding the woman he is accused of assaulting is a friend of his.

The statement also included quotes from the alleged victim saying police were called by others not present in the room who mistakenly perceived the argument to be "something other than what it was," and there was no real issue.

Smith will return to a L.A. court on April 29 to face the charge.

DeCoutere did not immediately respond to a request for an interview to elaborate on the reasons behind her Twitter announcement. A few hours before announcing her resignation, DeCoutere tweeted, "If I find out that somebody is abusive, I cut them out of my life. It's very easy."

Ghomeshi was acquitted on all charges of sexual assault and choking last month. Justice William Horkins said he could not rely on the testimony from the three Ghomeshi complainants, including DeCoutere, who agreed to be publicly identified.

Mike Smith, better known as Bubbles from the "Trailer Park Boys," denies committing a misdemeanour offence for which he has been charged with in the U.S.

Los Angeles police records show that the Nova Scotia native was arrested early Friday morning, and has been released on $20,000 bail.

Police haven't released details of the charge against Smith, but he has issued a news release in which he denies assaulting a woman.

"At no time did I assault her. I am not guilty of the misdemeanour charged against me," Smith says in the written statement.

Smith is best-known for his role in the cult comedy "Trailer Park Boys," about three men who live in a trailer park.

The tenth season of the show recently debuted on Netflix.

Smith will return to a L.A. court on April 29 to face the charge.
Photo: CTV

The University of British Columbia is warning students after a man attempted to break in to a residence lounge where a female resident was studying.

An email sent to the campus community says the incident occurred Friday at 2 a.m. outside the Marine Drive Building 5 lounge, where a male was seen pressing himself against the exterior window.

The man tried to enter the building but was unsuccessful, and the female resident fled.

The email says RCMP and campus security were called and arrived quickly, but were unable to apprehend the suspect.

Managing director of student housing and hospitality services Andrew Parr says it's unclear whether the incident is connected to a recent series of "night prowler events" where a man was seen lurking in bathrooms and bedrooms at UBC residences.

Police have said the night prowler incidents may be connected to the violent sexual assault of a 20-year-old woman on campus last week.
Photo: Dave Sopel The lupins at Vik, Iceland

Our guest for the launch feature of Trip Shot is traveller and photographer Joanne Zebroff, with contributing photographer Dave Sopel. Joanne and Dave easily exceeded 4,000 photographs on their first trip in Iceland. If they had their way, a go-fund-me account would send them back, cameras in one hand, map in the other.

So, you wanna take a road trip in Iceland?

By Joanne Zebroff

Iceland is inescapable. Its everywhere in our pop culture, but thats not why we traveled there. We went for the waterfalls, the moon-scapes, and the lack of tacky tourist attractions.

In Iceland, youll never feel prepared enough. No matter how thoroughly youve read the literature, there are always surprises. Travel blogs make it sound easy, and the island looks small, but everything is further and more far-flung than it looks.

Dave Sopel's photographic adventures in Iceland Photo: Dave Sopel The Puffin Photo: Dave Sopel Dyrholaey sea stacks Photo: Dave Sopel Gulfoss Photo: Dave Sopel Jokulsarlon sunset Photo: Dave Sopel Seljalandsfoss Iceland Photo: Dave Sopel Strokkur Photo: Dave Sopel The lupins at Vik Photo: Dave Sopel Vestrahorn Photo: Dave Sopel Skogafoss Photo: Dave Sopel The road into Hverir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Mapping your way

Get a good map, buy the travel books, and, for more research, like Icelands dozens of Facebook pages.

Use Google Earth to mark out where you want to go, and find exact road numbers. Mark your map accordingly, so you dont bypass an important turn off. We discovered u-turns are not always easy, as the Ring Road is narrow and it can be difficult to find a close turnaround point.

Do not assume everything will be well-marked. Dettifoss, the largest waterfall in all of Europe, has a tiny little sign for the turn-off. Hengifoss, a spectacular multi-waterfall hike that was Land of the Lost and Lord of the Rings rolled into one, was easier to find.

Are you a rebel?

If your vehicle rental restricts you from F roads, respect that fact. If you break the contract by traveling on one and something goes wrong, you could be in more trouble than you know.

Be prepared

Limited cell service and isolation are facts in Iceland. On our second last day we were on an iffy road, and got mired in black sand. We saved ourselves by digging out with a cutting board, and layering in flat lava rocks from the field. Lucky, right? Iceland has an excellent volunteer search and rescue system, but they are pretty tired of rescuing foreigners.

How do you keep your batteries charged when you travelling photographers? Buy a Europower bar when you get there, then use the cigarette lighter plug in your camper to charge your batteries as you drive. It was perfect.

Take technical clothing, and plenty of it. When they talk about the weather changes and wind, they mean it. You want to be layered with breathable, wickable clothing. Take advantage of omniheat and quick dry.

Good to know: Those expensive hand towels that dry overnight? They proved invaluable.

Know how you want to see the country

We rented a four-person camper van with our American friend from a company called Happy Campers. The camper rental included a fridge, single burner camper cook stove, an upper bunk, and a back seat which rolled down to create a bed.

We had utensils, cups, plates, and storage pockets galore. We turned down the GPS unit. Our rental had unlimited kilometres, which is important if you plan to drive the entire Ring Road, plus side roads.

Good to know: Havent driven a standard in a long time? Happy Campers are all standard.

Iceland is expensive

Prepare to save money ahead of time, if camping.

We took 18 MERs, those hiking food packages you pour boiling water into and wait 20 minutes. For every $10 to $18 CND you spend here on MERs, you save $25 to $40 dollars for dinners there. That goes for sealed tea bags, sugars, and granola bars as well.

Our first foray into an Icelandic supermarket told us one thing: How varied and cheap our food is in Canada. One food I fell in love with was Skyer. Their yogurt is protein based, richer in body, and comes in flavours we can only dream of here.

To save money, we sought out bakeries and stocked up on submarine sandwiches for those times we knew wed be camping in the middle of nowhere. We loved that fridge for all the times we pulled up to a cafe only to discover it did not open until 11 a.m..

Good to know: Icelands business hours are seasonal, and for isolated areas you will want plenty of pre-paid gas cards.

Joanne Zebroffs photographic adventures in Iceland Photo: Joanne Zebroff Lake Myvatn Photo: Joanne Zebroff Dettifoss Photo: Joanne Zebroff Hengifoss Photo: Joanne Zebroff Horses and volcano Photo: Joanne Zebroff Kirkjufoss Photo: Joanne Zebroff Litelanesfoss Photo: Joanne Zebroff Northern Iceland Photo: Joanne Zebroff Seal on the ice at Jokulsarlon Photo: Joanne Zebroff The colt Photo: Joanne Zebroff West Iceland 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Take lots of camera cards

The landscapes are overwhelming. Waterfalls, Icelandic ponies, mountains, and lava fields - we could not get over the constantly changing landscapes.

Soaring mountains of crumbling basalt and ash, fields of mosses covering acres of lava flow, seemingly endless fields of waving lupines all freshly bursting with intense blues and purples, and cascading random waterfalls with farmhouses at their base that look as though theyve been there for hundreds of years.

I loved June for lupine flower bloom, the puffins returning to Dyrholaey, the melting snows making waterfalls positively gush, and Arctic Terns chick hatching. And icebergs, calving off the glacier and washing up on Diamond Beach.

If you go, have your list, know where and how to get around, take plenty of time, and accept that nothing will be cheap by our standards.

Just make sure you do get there, hopefully for the six or seven times in your lifetime that youll be wanting to return.

Were not called Ice-oholics for nothing.

For more on Iceland: facebook/JDPix

__________

Been on a trip lately? Around the world, around the country, around the block, or around anything that felt like a journey? If you took pictures and want to share, drop me a line. [email protected]

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
Photo: CTV

A dog attack has hospitalized a man in Coquitlam.

The man was walking his own dog on the 2900 block of Panorama Drive, Saturday, when another dog came rushing out of a yard to attack his pet.

Witnesses told CTV the man stepped between the animals and was bitten at least twice. There is no word on the extent of his injuries.

He was taken to hospital by ambulance.

Coquitlam RCMP attended the incident, and local bylaw officers have taken the attacking dog into custody.

The incident is under investigation.

 with files from CTV Vancouver
Photo: Contributed

A small fire on a hill behind houses in the 2100 block of Sunview in Rose Valley was put out quickly by the fire department, on Saturday, according to witnesses.

The fire, which started about 6:40 p.m., was in dry, dead grass and pine needles.

Three fire engines responded.

Castanet will provide more details as they become available.
Photo: Flickr/RCMP

Surrey RCMP were on the scene of a shooting incident late into the night, Saturday.

Just before 8 p.m., police responded to a report of several shots being fired on the 12200 block of 92nd Avenue.

One man received a gunshot wound in the incident, Staff Sgt. B.M. McColl said in a press release.

The man was taken to hospital by ambulance in serious condition. His injuries were not life threatening.

Officers located evidence at the scene to support that shots had been fired, and witnesses told police a vehicle was seen fleeing the scene shortly after the incident. No description of the vehicle was available, however.

Police are continuing to canvass the neighbourhood and speak with witnesses to obtain further information.

Initial indications are it was a targeted incident.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Surrey RCMP at 604-599-0502 or, if they wish to remain anonymous, CrimeStoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or www.solvecrime.ca.
If you have just started your journey in an online casino or are looking for a new site to play,...
Joe Espanol, left, works the counter at Honey Butter Fried Chicken in December 2015 in Chicago. The restaurant offers 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for employees who have been with the company for at least five years. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune)

Chicago employers should allow workers to earn at least five paid sick days a year, according to recommendations by a mayoral task force that could revive efforts to mandate paid sick leave in the city.

The scheduled Sunday release of the Working Families Task Force report comes as more cities adopt earned sick leave laws that would particularly affect low-wage workers, nearly 80 percent of whom don't receive paid sick time and often can't afford to forgo a paycheck.

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"It is unacceptable that more than 200,000 workers in Chicago cannot take a sick day without worrying about losing their job or being unable to pay their bills," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement announcing the recommendations. "This task force report provides the city with a road map for ensuring that our working families receive this important protection."

The task force, convened last summer, was charged with studying paid sick leave, scheduling predictability and paid family and medical leave policies to address growing concerns about the juggling of work and family obligations.

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It was formed shortly after a nonbinding February 2015 referendum in which nearly 82 percent of voters citywide supported the adoption of paid sick days for workers.

Offering paid sick leave would add 0.7 to 1.5 percent in labor costs for most employers, depending on size and usage, according to an analysis completed for the report, which is meant to serve as a blueprint for a city ordinance. The city also hopes to engage county and state leaders in discussions on the topic.

The recommendations reflect a consensus among a "significant majority" of the 27 members of the task force, which includes business, government and worker representatives, though not everyone endorsed them, said Anne Ladky, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group Women Employed and co-chair of the task force.

Both the Illinois Retail Merchants Association and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce oppose the recommendations.

"Businesses are at a tipping point and these proposals will only exacerbate the problems facing employees looking for more hours and higher wages," said Rob Karr, president and CEO of the merchants association. "We cannot provide the jobs, pay the wages and invest in local communities while City Hall layers on one cost after another and chases sales out of the city. These policies will not result in more jobs being created or higher wages  just the opposite. City Hall needs to remember that the overwhelming majority of Chicago's business owners are working families too."

The task force met with 14 focus groups and heard testimony from academics and policy experts as it deliberated, striving to balance workers' needs with business concerns, Ladky said. "It really is a balanced report," she said.

The report proposes employers allow workers to earn an hour of sick time for every 40 hours worked, up to five days in a year, and to roll over up to 20 hours of unused sick days to the following year. It applies to employers of all sizes.

New hires wouldn't be able to use sick days until they'd worked for 180 days, which would exclude many short-term, seasonal, and temporary employees.

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The report also recommends letting employees bank up to five days of their earned sick leave to use for purposes of the Family and Medical Leave Act, such as to care for a newborn or seriously ill family member.

Employers would not have to pay out unused sick days upon an employee's exit from the company. Employers that lump sick days into general paid-time-off benefits wouldn't have to change anything as long as the benefits include at least five days off. Sick leave benefits negotiated as part of collective bargaining would be exempt.

The recommendations are slightly more conservative than a 2014 proposed city ordinance that never got to a vote. That proposal called for an hour of sick time earned for every 30 hours worked, up to five days a year for employers with fewer than 10 workers and nine days for larger employers.

More than 20 cities and four states have adopted paid sick leave laws. President Barack Obama in September issued an executive order mandating federal contractors provide their employees with at least seven days of paid sick leave annually.

"This is extremely important for lots of different kinds of workers, but certainly for the service sector this is critical," said Adam Kader, worker center director of Arise Chicago, a nonprofit which was part of the Chicago task force and has been advocating for paid sick leave for three years.

In the U.S., 61 percent of employees could take paid sick leave in 2015, up from 50 percent in 1991, but access to sick leave is uneven. While more than 80 percent of management and professional occupations have paid sick days, the rate is just 40 percent in service occupations and 38 percent for construction, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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A report from Women Employed estimated 460,000 private-sector workers in Chicago don't have access to paid sick days. Another report, from the National Partnership for Women & Families, put the number at 2.1 million people in Illinois.

Workers without paid sick leave are three times more likely to delay medical care, and their families are two times more likely to delay care, than people with access to paid sick days, according to a new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University and Cleveland State University.

In addition to the risk to health, it can be a cost to business. Showing up to work unwell is estimated to cost business $150 billion a year. Infected food workers are the primary cause of 70 percent of norovirus outbreaks from contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ana Laura Lopez, who worked for 10 years at a thrift store where she got no sick days, hopes the recommendations lead to a new law.

She remembers getting a call from her son's school while she was at work asking her to pick him up because he was sick. Her boss told her to return right away, but she had no one else to watch her son that afternoon or the next day when he was too ill to return to school. When she returned to work the following day her boss gave her a warning and said that if it happened again she would be fired.

"Sometimes they forget we are human beings, they see us like a machine," said Lopez, 40, who is a member of the board of directors of Arise. Employers also often require doctor's receipts, and a visit to a doctor can be expensive, she said.

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The task force also examined the challenges around scheduling, but did not present a policy proposal. Hourly workers without ample notice of their schedules, or who are subject to last-minute shift changes, can have a hard time arranging child care, going to school, taking a second job or budgeting costs when it's not clear how big their paycheck will be.

While there was general agreement that "efforts should be made to better understand and reduce unwanted and harmful levels of hour unpredictability for employees," while not limiting flexibility, the task force called for further examination "given the high levels of complexity with the issue."

Finally, the task force recommended the city seek funding to study and pilot shared security accounts, which are portable benefits programs that are tied to workers rather than employers. Given the growth in the use of independent contractors and freelance and temporary workers, fewer people have access to standard employer-provided benefits.

With shared security accounts, an amount of money is automatically deducted from payroll and put into an account that funds vacation time, retirement, health care coverage or other benefits.

aelejalderuiz@tribpub.com

Twitter @alexiaer
Khoury's play is best when dealing with political and social ideas, when it lands more in the docudrama format that best suits issue-driven plays of this kind. It is less convincing, and has more unnecessary air, when dealing with the personal lives of the intermingled characters, not least because the play needs them all to represent a diversity of positions when people generally are messier than that. I think "Mosque Alert" did not really need to be so heavily fictionalized and personalized. There are plenty of facts in the public record; there were plenty of people who could have been interviewed. The closer to reality, the stronger the play.
Caleb Yunk, 5, of Germantown, Wisc., was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome and is presently using the medication Epidiolex, a liquid cannabinoid, to control the frequency and variance of his seizures. (Chicago Tribune)

A marijuana extract significantly reduced seizures in severely epileptic children, according to a landmark study conducted in part at Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago.

Supporters said the results greatly improve the chances for the drug, called Epidiolex, to win eventual approval by federal regulators for prescription use to treat Dravet syndrome, a debilitating type of epilepsy that strikes in early childhood. The drug would be the first derived from the marijuana plant to win such approval.

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More broadly, the findings also support claims made by advocates of medical marijuana, but represent a much more controlled and limited use of the plant.

Children with Dravet syndrome typically have frequent seizures that cause problems with language, motor skills and relating to others. In the case of one patient in the trial at Lurie, 5-year-old Caleb Yunk, the disease has not been as severe but caused chronic seizures that led to difficulties with skills such as running, jumping and balancing.

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In the trial, Caleb swallowed about 3 milligrams of a strawberry-flavored syrup twice a day. Once he started treatment, his parents said, the Milwaukee-area boy went 100 days without a seizure, and those he did have lasted less than half as long. Because Caleb's seizures can be triggered by overheating, his parents had kept him indoors on hot days but on the drug, he showed enough progress to go swimming with his friends.

Caleb Yunk, 5, is held by his mother, Kelley as she makes dinner for Caleb on March 29, 2016, in Germantown, Wisc. Caleb was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome and is presently using a medication called Epidiolex, which is a purified, liquid cannabinoid. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

"His eyes sparkle more," said his mother, Kelley Yunk. "He's more engaged. I think he's more cheerful. For our family, it was such a huge blessing."

Much of the improvement came from being able to take Caleb off another drug and reduce his use of two others  medication that has serious side effects and made him "dopey," his parents said. Side effects seen during the Epidiolex trial included sleepiness, diarrhea and decreased appetite but were mostly mild or moderate, according to the manufacturer's reported results.

Epidiolex is almost pure cannabidiol, or CBD, a non-psychoactive compound found in marijuana, without the THC component that gets users high.

The study at Lurie was part of a nationwide clinical trial conducted by the drug's maker, GW Pharmaceuticals. While a preliminary study also produced encouraging results, the company said this was the first trial of plant-based CBD involving a randomized, double-blind placebo control, known as the gold standard of disease research.

Double-blind means neither the patient nor the researchers know whether the patient is getting the drug or a placebo, in this case a similar liquid that doesn't contain any medicine, to avoid results being biased by optimistic interpretations.

The study involved about 120 patients, aged 2 to 18, who have Dravet syndrome and whose seizures were resistant to existing medications. Among patients who received the drug, convulsive seizures were reduced by an average of 39 percent, compared to 19 percent for the placebo, over 14 weeks last summer, according to results announced in March.

Officials are hopeful that this will speed up approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make Epidiolex available by prescription.

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Denny Yunk administers a dose of Epidiolex to his 5-year-old son, Caleb, as he sits on the kitchen floor March 29, 2016, at their home in Germantown, Wis. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

The study is one of four trials of Epidiolex to treat Dravet and a similarly serious form of epilepsy known as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Both conditions are rare, with an estimated combined patient population of roughly 30,000, and Dravet has no FDA-approved medication specifically for its treatment.

The promising results mean the company will seek a review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by the end of this year and hopes to win approval to prescribe Epidiolex by the end of 2017, GW Pharmaceuticals CEO Justin Gover said. The drug has Fast Track designation from the FDA.

Initially, Epidiolex would be only for children who have not responded sufficiently to other medications.

It's too early to predict the cost of the drug, Gover said, but the company hopes to convince insurance companies to cover it.

"We're obviously delighted" with the results, he said, calling it a "significant milestone."

UK-based GW Pharmaceuticals already offers Sativex, a drug derived from marijuana that contains equal parts THC and CBD and treats muscle spasms and stiffness in multiple sclerosis patients in Europe and Canada, though it is not available in the U.S. except in trials.

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In a major disappointment for advocates, trials last year failed to show that Sativex worked better than a placebo for cancer pain overall. But some less-frail patients who had pain despite using opioids did benefit, so researchers said it merited further investigation. GW Pharmaceuticals also plans to test treatments for various other conditions, including glioma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Caleb Yunk, 5, takes a temperature reading on his father, Denny, while playing at home on March 29, 2016, in Germantown, Wisc. Caleb was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome and is presently using a medication called Epidiolex, which is a purified, liquid cannabinoid. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Investors have sued GW Pharmaceuticals over its admission that its trials lacked sufficient financial controls. But that is strictly about accounting for the cost of trials and has nothing to do with the test results, which no one has questioned, said Stephen Schultz, vice president of investor relations.

"We believe the lawsuit is completely baseless and without merit," he said.

Company officials emphasized that Epidiolex is very different than marijuana, because it is formulated as a concentrate of just one component of the plant, with pharmaceutical controls to guarantee the same product in every dose.

But medical marijuana advocates consider the Epidiolex results as verification of what they have been saying for years based on patients' stories, that marijuana can help those with epilepsy, which affects about half a million children in the U.S.

Ross Morreale, chairman of the Medical Cannabis Alliance of Illinois and co-founder of marijuana grower Ataraxia, said state law requires lab tests to guarantee potency and purity of medical marijuana, and it is already helping patients with a variety of medical conditions, without waiting for federal approval.

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Illinois children with epilepsy may qualify to access medical marijuana under state law, but it remains illegal under federal law, and many doctors here are reluctant or prohibited by their employers from recommending it.

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The principal investigator for the study at Lurie hospital was Dr. Linda Laux, a pediatric neurologist who specializes in helping children with treatment-resistant epilepsy.

Epidiolex did bring some positive changes in the patients' behavior, attention and focus, as well as motor skills such as walking, she said. Patients have been able to continue taking the drug after the trial.

"These results are very exciting and significant," Laux said. "This is absolutely a ray of sunshine and hope for these families."

Morgan Murphy, spokeswoman for the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Chicago, welcomed the study results, which made her optimistic that the drug will get FDA approval.

"We've been waiting so long for something to come around," she said. "We're getting such a positive reaction from patients. It's a great step forward."

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rmccoppin@tribpub.com

Twitter @RobertMcCoppin
A bullet hole is seen in the window at Brudder's Bar & Grill at 3600 N. Pulaski Road in the Old Irving Park neighborhood of Chicago on April 3, 2016. A 51-year-old bouncer was critically injured the previous night by an attacker who fired shots into the bar from outside. (Michael Tercha / Chicago Tribune)

At least 14 people, including a 51-year-old bouncer, were wounded in shootings in Chicago between late Saturday morning and just before dawn Sunday, police said.

About 11:45 p.m., a 51-year-old man was critically hurt while he was inside a bar in the Old Irving Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side, police said.

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The man was working as a bouncer inside Brudder's Bar & Grill at 3600 N. Pulaski Road when an unknown attacker outside the bar fired shots, police said. The man was struck in the head by a bullet that went through the window of the bar.

He was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was in critical condition, police said.

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At the scene of the shooting, police officers blocked off Addison Street west of Pulaski with red and yellow tape.

Officers and detectives walked in and out of the bar, shining flashlights in search of evidence.

A window just west of the bar's entrance had a bullet hole near a neon Corona sign.

Inside the bar, police officers blocked off a section with red tape. Most of the chairs were put on top of the tables, and some red balloons were tied next to one of the windows.

Across from the bar, a shot-up gray van stood parked on Addison.

As officers continued to investigate the scene and interview witnesses inside the bar, two women came out of the bar onto the sidewalk. One woman leaned on the other woman, burying her face in grief. The other woman hugged her.

Later Sunday morning, black tape covered a distinct bullet hole through the bar's front window. Across the street, a single ribbon of red police tape remained on a gray mini-van that had a two of its passenger side windows shattered.

Meanwhile, detectives canvassed nearby businesses, including a Thai restaurant equipped with surveillance cameras.

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Tina Anaya, who lives near the bar, heard three or four shots while she was at home.

"It was a little scary because I was wondering where they came from, because it happened so close," she said.

"There have been fights before," said Anaya, who has lived about a block from the bar since August. "I can hear people yelling outside. I have two other bars that are close to me, where I live but you can tell when people are leaving, with all the noise, the crowd is very young."

The gunshots also woke up Adam Ali, who lives a few houses west of the bar.

"It's usually fine, but at (midnight) or later it gets rowdy," said Ali.

In other shootings:

Most recently, a 20-year-old man was seriously hurt in a gang-related shooting about 5:40 a.m. in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side, said Officer Jose Estrada, a Chicago police spokesman.

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The man was sitting in a car in the 4400 block of West Monroe Street when an unknown gunman walked up to him and shot him in the face, Estrada said.

He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was in serious condition, Estrada said.

Police said the man is a documented gang member.

About 1:10 a.m., a 29-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman were wounded in a drive-by shooting in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, said Officer Hector Alfaro, a Chicago police spokesman.

The man and the woman were on the front porch of a home in the 800 block of North Central Park Avenue when someone fired shots from a passing dark-colored sedan, Alfaro said.

The man was shot in both of his legs, and the woman was shot in the left thigh. Both were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where their conditions stabilized, Alfaro said.

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A 17-year-old boy was wounded in a shooting about 1:05 a.m. Sunday in the Little Village neighborhood on the West Side, Alfaro said.

The teen was walking on the sidewalk in the 4000 block of West 26th Street when he heard gunshots and realized he was struck, Alfaro said.

He was shot in the left thigh and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition stabilized, Alfaro said.

About 11:35 p.m. Saturday, a 24-year-old man was wounded in a shooting in the Marquette Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side, Alfaro said.

The man was walking on the street in the 3400 block of West 73rd Street when an unknown male attacker walked up to him and fired shots, Alfaro said.

The man was shot in the back and was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center, where his condition stabilized, Alfaro said.

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About 8:50 p.m., a 22-year-old man accidentally shot himself in the South Chicago neighborhood, police said.

The man was in the 9000 block of South Burley Avenue when a firearm in his waistband accidentally went off and hit him in the leg. He was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center, where his condition stabilized, police said.

About 6:25 p.m., two men were shot on the 300 block of South Pulaski Road near the Blue Line CTA station in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, police said.

The victims, a 29-year-old and a 33-year-old, both suffered leg wounds. The 29-year-old was taken to Stroger Hospital in good condition. The older man refused medical attention, police said.

Earlier, two other men were shot on the 7800 block of South Cornell Avenue in the South Shore neighborhood, said Officer Michelle Tannehill, a police spokeswoman.

The shooting happened at 5:28 p.m. and left a 30-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his left leg and a 27-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his ankle. The older man was taken in good condition to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the younger man was in good condition at Jackson Park Hospital.

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A 28-year-old man was shot at 2:21 p.m. on the 3100 block of North Central Avenue in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood, Tannehill said.

The man, who is a gang member, was shot in the right leg after an SUV drove up and began firing, police said. He was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital in good condition, police said.

Earlier, at 1:02 p.m., a 27-year-old man was shot on the 4900 block of West Adams Street in the South Austin neighborhood, Tannehill said. The man was shot five times in the buttocks and was taken to Mount Sinai in good condition. The man was not being cooperative with police.

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A 17-year-old boy was shot in the South Austin neighborhood on the West Side on Saturday morning, police said.

The teen was in the 500 block of North Mayfield Avenue at 10:20 a.m. when a dark blue van pulled up and stopped, Estrada said.

The driver got out, walked up to the teen and began shooting, Estrada said, and a passenger in the van also began shooting.

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The gunman then got back into the van and drove off, Estrada said.

The teen, who is a gang member, was shot in the right leg and was taken to West Suburban Hospital in good condition, police said.

Area North detectives were investigating.

Tribune reporter Tony Briscoe contributed.
Workers inspect he front of the derailed locomotive of an Amtrak train that struck a backhoe that was on the southbound tracks just south of Philadelphia on April 3, 2016. (Clem Murray, TNS)

CHESTER, Pa.  An Amtrak train struck a piece of heavy equipment just south of Philadelphia on Sunday, causing a derailment that killed two Amtrak workers and sent more than 30 passengers to hospitals, authorities said.

Train 89 was heading from New York to Savannah, Georgia, at about 8 a.m. when it hit the equipment that was on the track in Chester, about 15 miles outside Philadelphia, officials said. The impact derailed the lead engine of the train that was carrying more than 300 passengers and seven crew members.

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Chester Fire Commissioner Travis Thomas said two people were killed. A National Transportation Safety Board official confirmed that one was the operator of the equipment. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Amtrak board Chairman Anthony Coscia told him the other person killed was a supervisor and both were Amtrak employees.

The Delaware County medical examiner's office said no information would be released until after autopsies Monday.

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NTSB investigator Ryan Frigo said at an evening news conference that the event data recorder and forward-facing and inward-facing video from the locomotive have been recovered.

He said the locomotive engineer was among those taken to hospitals. Officials said earlier that none of the injuries was deemed life-threatening.

Schumer said it's unclear whether the equipment was being used for regular maintenance, which usually is scheduled on Sunday mornings because there are fewer trains on the tracks, or whether it was clearing debris from high winds in the area overnight. But he said Amtrak has "a 20-step protocol" for having such equipment, described by Amtrak as a backhoe, on the track, and no trains are supposed to go on a track when equipment is present.

"Clearly this seems very likely to be human error," Schumer said, calling for Amtrak to review its processes. "There is virtually no excuse for a backhoe to be on an active track."

An Amtrak spokeswoman said in an email to The Associated Press that any information about the type of equipment on the track and why the train was using that track would have to come from the NTSB. She said any information about the two people killed, including what company they worked for, would have to come from the Delaware County medical examiner.

The company was posting alerts on its website, however, with updates on its service.

Amtrak said service on the Northeast Corridor between New York and Philadelphia began operating after an earlier suspension and limited service was restored between Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia by Sunday afternoon.

Amtrak said Sunday night that it will operate regularly scheduled trains Monday, although there may be some delays on Acela Express, Northeast Regional and other services between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware.

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Frigo said he did not know why the equipment was on a track the train was using. He said scheduling, the track structure and the work that was being performed at the time of the accident would be part of the investigation. The event data recorder has been sent to the safety board's laboratory in Washington and will answer such questions as how fast the train was going at the time of the crash, he said.

Ari Ne'eman, a disability rights activist heading to Washington after speaking at an event in New York, said he was in the second car at the time of the crash.

"The car started shaking wildly, there was a smell of smoke, it looked like there was a small fire and then the window across from us blew out," said Ne'eman, 28, of Silver Spring, Maryland.

Some passengers started to get off after the train stopped, but the conductor quickly stopped them, he said. Officials began directing people to the rear of the train for evacuation and then to a nearby church.

"It was a very frightening experience. I'm frankly very glad that I was not on the first car," where there were injuries, Ne'eman said. "The moment that the car stopped, I said Shema, a Jewish prayer. ... I was just so thankful that the train had come to a stop and we were OK."

Businessman Steve Forbes told C-SPAN's "Book TV" by phone that he was in the next-to-last car when the train "made sudden jerks" as if it was about to make an abrupt stop.

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Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, said the train then made another abrupt stop and "everyone's coffee was flying through the air."

"The most disconcerting thing ... (was) not knowing what had happened," he said.

Since the public address system was knocked out, he and other passengers were left to speculate for 20 or 25 minutes before a crew member came back to tell them what had happened, he said.

On Sunday afternoon, an Amtrak train in Illinois struck a vehicle at a crossing, killing the driver. An Amtrak spokesman said none of the approximately 248 passengers or dozen crew members was hurt. The crash happened in Somonauk, about 65 miles southwest of Chicago.

The Pennsylvania derailment comes almost a year after an Amtrak train originating from Washington, D.C., bound for New York City derailed in Philadelphia. Eight people were killed and more than 200 were injured in the May 12 crash. The exact cause of that crash is still under investigation, but authorities have said the train had been traveling twice the speed limit.

Nearly three decades ago, an Amtrak train struck maintenance equipment on tracks in Chester, near the site of Sunday's derailment. More than 20 people were injured in that January 1988 crash of Train 66, the Night Owl. The NTSB determined afterward that an Amtrak tower operator had failed to switch the train to an unoccupied track.

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Even after years of education, training and experience as an obstetrician/gynecologist, I am never prepared to deliver the news that a pregnancy is abnormal. There is no good way to tell a pregnant woman - a woman who may already be wearing maternity clothes, thinking about names and decorating the nursery - that we have identified a fetal anomaly that can lead to significant, lifelong disability or even her baby's death.

In such situations, physicians have two responsibilities. First, we must always be supportive of the mother or family who has suddenly been confronted with the loss of an imagined ideal pregnancy and child. And second, we help them understand that they have options, one of which is the termination of the pregnancy.

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Unfortunately, that's no longer the case in Indiana, where a new law signed by Gov. Mike Pence, R, punishes doctors if they perform abortions for women because of their fetus' race or sex, or after a diagnosis of disability. Indiana's state government is intruding on the doctor-patient relationship at one of its most vulnerable, sensitive times. Which means that not only does the new law encroach on women's rights to control their own reproduction, it is also bad medicine.

As a mother as well as a doctor, I am acutely aware of the intensity and fear of the unknown inherent in pregnancy and childbirth. Indiana now expects women who live here to experience them without trusting their doctors' knowledge and with strict limits on how doctors may treat patients - limits driven not by science or research, but by politics.

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Supporters of the new law, such as Pence, say the measure "affirms the value of all human life." And yes, some women do choose to carry abnormal pregnancies to term. I am honored to care for them and their babies. I have held and comforted babies as they died, because their mothers were too grief-stricken to bear it. I have cried with families as we watched their babies breathe their last breath.

Not every woman can handle such horror. In the United States, abortion is an ethical, safe, appropriate and - with the exception of North Dakota and Indiana - legal medical option in the case of severe anomalies, one that spares women the emotional pain of stillbirth or the loss of an infant. That loss is dismissed and diminished by this law and by those who support it; the law doesn't save babies, it just forces a horrific fate onto both mother and child. It includes an exception only for termination of babies who would die within three months of being born, as if three months is enough time to justify forcing all women to take on the risks of carrying a pregnancy to term and delivering a baby, only to watch it die.

And that exception would still require women to carry to term pregnancies with some severe and disastrous genetic abnormalities, all of which I've seen in women who chose to have abortions rather than deliver babies who suffer from them.

Trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome, can leave babies with one eye, no nose, kidney defects and a spinal cord without skin covering it. Most are stillborn, but of those that are born alive, more than 80 percent die before they turn 1, only surviving that long after cardiac, spinal and other surgeries.

Spinal muscular atrophy, one type of which is Werdnig-Hoffman disease, is characterized by rapid neurologic degeneration, causing an infant to die within a year because of respiratory failure. This disease doesn't have ultrasound findings, nor would it be found on any routine prenatal screening, so the only way one would know to test for it is if the parents have already had a child born with it. With such a poor prognosis, the parents may have already buried that child. Indiana would now force those parents to go through the same grief again if the disease was detected in a subsequent pregnancy.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a sex-linked disease that causes muscle degeneration starting around 2 years old leading to profound weakness, a need for braces and wheelchairs by age 10, and eventual paralysis. This disease occurs almost exclusively in boys and carries a life expectancy of less than 25 years. It can't be detected with any existing prenatal test. But because Indiana's law also prevents termination of a pregnancy for reasons of gender, parents who already have a child with this horrible disease, and who find out they're expecting a son, will have a 50 percent chance of their newborn also having the disease. And they won't be able to do anything about it, except hope that they won't have to watch both sons die.

Preventing women with these fetal diagnoses from choosing abortion forces them to watch their children die a slow, painful, premature death. My colleagues and I are already asking one another whether we should even offer prenatal screening now that there's no legal choice to end a pregnancy because of the results.

Not all prenatally diagnosed disabilities are fatal, of course. Scientific advances can detect abnormalities with increasing accuracy, allowing families to decide whether having a child with a disability is right for them. Again, what is important is that they have the right to choose. That choice is not the radical outlier Indiana's new law might suggest: Research suggests that women terminate between 60 and 90 percent of pregnancies diagnosed with Down syndrome. These decisions are made out of love and compassion, a seemingly obvious concept but one that bears emphasizing.

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Families who choose to continue abnormal pregnancies and raise children with disabilities are faced with incredible hardships. It can be challenging to determine the severity of the disability before birth, so preparation can be difficult. In families with limited incomes and restricted resources, these children may not receive the care and attention they deserve, again increasing their suffering. Pence says he's shared "precious moments as governor" with such families, but he isn't the one paying the medical bills, transporting the children to their many therapists and doctor's visits, or missing work to serve as a caregiver.

Babies are not born either strictly "normal" or "abnormal"; there is a huge range of outcomes, and before this law, each woman carrying a fetus with genetic anomalies might make a different choice. For those mothers who will now be forced to deliver babies they might not otherwise have had - the babies "saved" by this law - Indiana sets aside no additional funding or services. These babies will require long and repeated hospitalizations, surgeries, office visits, physical and speech therapy, home nursing care, and more. Rather than protecting life, the state has only prolonged suffering.

Some women may still be able to find a physician who can provide them with the abortion care that they need, but through what channels? Instead of mourning a much-loved baby, a woman in Indiana will either have to lie to her provider and say she never wanted to be pregnant, leaving out the critical medical information that actually prompted her decision, or her provider will have to agree to terminate her pregnancy without asking why, which is terrible care. Those women who can afford it could travel out of state, away from their support systems, at great expense and additional stress. All of these options are inhumane treatment of a grieving mother.

The relationship between a pregnant woman and her doctor requires both trust and privacy. There is no room for legislators in the exam room, and there is no space for politics in medical decisions. I provide advice based on scientific evidence and clinical experience so that patients may make educated decisions for themselves. This is impossible if I am legally required to withhold appropriate treatment for a medical condition.

Women want what's best for their families during this precious and precarious time. I became an OB/GYN because I love celebrating the birth of a baby and honoring the new life in the world. Instead, this law forces me to ignore my medical training and stand idly by while my patients suffer. This is not the care I want to provide, nor is it what my patients deserve.

McHugh is an obstetrician/gynecologist in Indianapolis.
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Taiwan-based Foxconn has signed a takeover deal with Japanese electronics giant Sharp.

Foxconn has offered to invest nearly 660 billion yen or 5.9 billion US dollars in Sharp.

Sharp's board earlier concluded a two-day meeting to discuss whether to accept an offer by Foxconn over a rescue by a state-backed investment fund.

The deal comes after five years of courting by Foxconn's CEO Terry Gou, who sees ownership of Sharp as a way to better compete with Asian rivals such as Samsung Electronics.

The CEO says Foxconn will focus on having Sharp transform its technology into products in a speedy and cost competitive way with high quality.
A senior central government representative in Hong Kong says advocating Hong Kong independence is unconstitutional, not a matter of freedom of speech.

The statement was made by Zhang Xiaoming, the director of the liaison office of the central government in Hong Kong.

"Some people in Hong Kong have declared to have set up a political group aiming for 'Hong Kong independence'. In response, I have to be clear-cut about it. This declaration has gone far beyond freedom of speech, and has touched the bottom line of the principle of 'one country, two systems.' We can never tolerate this declaration even with the impossibility of its materialization."

Earlier this week, the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office voiced resolute opposition to the group advocating Hong Kong independence.

The office declared that the decision by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government to not register the organization was "proper."

It also said the group undermines national sovereignty and security and jeopardizes Hong Kong's stability.
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Tanzanian authorities said on Saturday that they will investigate fresh sex abuse claims against its peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The UN peacekeeping mission in DRC said on Friday that it has received allegations of sexual abuse against Tanzanian peacekeepers based in Congo's northeast, the latest in a series of such accusations against UN forces.

Hussein Mwinyi, the east African nation's Minister for Defence and National Service, told Xinhua that the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF) will investigate the latest allegations.

"I have not yet received the latest claims against Tanzanian peacekeepers in DRC," said Mwinyi, adding that TPDF will investigate the claims.

The UN mission said in a statement that it received the allegations against members of its Force Intervention Brigade, tasked with offensive operations, in the village of Mavivi on March 23 and immediately launched an investigation.

The statement did not say how many cases of abuse had been alleged or provide any further details about the accusations.

The UN said this week that it has expanded an investigation into new allegations of sexual abuse by foreign peacekeepers in Central African Republic.

UN officials said they have interviewed some 108 alleged victims, most of them minors.

The UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, which was initially put in place during a civil war that took place in 1998-2003, is the world's largest, with around 20,000 uniformed personnel. The Security Council renewed its mandate earlier this week for one year.
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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Saturday denounced the UN Security Council for dismissing its call for convening a meeting to discuss ongoing U.S.-S.Korea joint military exercises.

The UN Security Council is "turning a blind eye to U.S. nuclear threats to the DPRK," the official KCNA news agency reported.

The DPRK presented a letter to the Security Council late March, calling for holding an urgent meeting on the U.S.-S.Korea annual joint war games code-named "Key Resolve" and "Foal Eagle," which, a spokesperson for the DPRK Foreign Ministry said Saturday, was ignored by the Security Council.

Pyongyang has said that the military exercises, with their large scale and aggressive nature, constitute a grave threat to the DPRK, disturb international peace and stability, and violate respect for state sovereignty.

The spokesperson also said that the DPRK will further strengthen its self-defensive deterrent "capable of frustrating U.S. nuclear threat, blackmail and provocation."

On March 7, South Korea and the United States began their joint annual war games of "Key Resolve" and "Foal Eagle." The "Key Resolve" exercise ended last month, but the "Foal Eagle" field training exercise is scheduled to last till April 30.

Pyongyang has repeatedly denounced the U.S.-South Korea military exercises as a dress rehearsal for northward invasion.
90-minute discussion between leaders has diffused difficulties arising from issues related to South China Sea, foreign minister says

President Xi Jinping's meeting with US President Barack Obama has helped to alleviate tensions at a time when some countries have been playing up the South China Sea issue, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said.

The meeting, which took place on Thursday on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, was closely watched by the international community because many countries are pessimistic about the current state of Sino-US ties, he said.

"The Americans have said that they will not take sides (in the South China Sea issue), so it should not be a problem for the China-US relationship," Wang said.

The relationship should not be affected by historical problems between China and some US allies, and the positive dialogue between the two leaders has reassured the international community, he added.

During the 90-minute meeting, Xi and Obama discussed a range of issues, including economic policies, cooperation on nuclear security, maritime issues and the stability of the Korean Peninsula. The two leaders agreed to deepen cooperation and manage differences of opinion to expand common interests. It was the only bilateral meeting arranged by Obama's team during the summit.

Xi acknowledged that China and the US have disputes and differing views on some subjects, and said both sides should respect each other's concerns and seek solutions through dialogue.

Wang said: "We are confident about the steady development of the China-US relationship this year, and that will continue smoothly into the next term (when a new president is elected in the US)."

Climate change was once a stumbling block for Sino-US relations, but the two countries are now working together to bring the Paris Agreement on climate change issues into force as soon as possible. The two countries have also boosted cooperation on cybersecurity issues, he said.

On Thursday, China and the US, two of the world's leading nuclear powers, issued a joint statement about cooperation on nuclear security. The two countries jointly built the Center of Excellence on Nuclear Security in Beijing, the largest of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, which opened in March.

Chen Kai, secretary-general of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, said the statement was very "inspiring" for maintaining global nuclear security, and would help the international community reach greater consensus on improving the handling of nuclear terrorism.

Foreign Minister Wang said Xi's attendance at the summit indicated that China attaches great importance to nuclear security and reflected China's willingness to promote global security governance.

During the summit, Xi spoke about ways of strengthening the international nuclear security system, including the strengthening of political commitment, national responsibility, international cooperation and the culture of nuclear security.

Ahead of the summit, Xi paid a state visit to the Czech Republic from Monday to Wednesday. The three-day trip was the first time that a Chinese president had visited the Czech Republic, or its predecessor Czechoslovakia, since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949.

The two countries have agreed to elevate their bilateral relations to the level of a "strategic partnership", which Wang said was the most significant political achievement of Xi's visit to the country.

The historic visit will be seen as "a milestone" in Sino-Czech relations, and it will give greater impetus to China-European cooperation, he said.
People use fresh flowers to commemorate their deceased family members at Beijing's Babaoshan Cemetry on Sunday, ahead of Tomb Sweeping Day, which falls on Monday. ZOU HONG/CHINA DAILY

Cars from Beijing crowded the parking lot of Lingshan Pagoda Cemetery in Sanhe city days before Tomb Sweeping Day, which falls on Monday. Located about 50 kilometers from Beijing, the 50-hectare cemetery is one of the most popular burial sites for Beijing residents.

The cemetery's management company is even headquartered in downtown Beijing's central business district to better serve its clients in the capital.

"Rest assured, the tombs here are much bigger than in Beijing," an employee surnamed Chen told a potential client.

Most cemeteries in Chinese cities are full, so burials in neighboring cities have become popular. About 80 percent of the plots in cemeteries in cities in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, are sold to residents of the capital.

Larger tomb space and lower prices are the biggest draws. Chen said one-third of the cemetery's 30,000 plots have already been sold.

In addition to the cemetery in Sanhe, there are also large cemeteries in Hebei's Yixian county and Zhuozhou city.

Traditional Chinese beliefs dictate that burial is the correct way to treat the dead. To demonstrate filial piety, many Chinese invest heavily in their parents' tombs.

Analysis of cemetery companies' accounts showed their profit margins are extremely high. Last year, Fucheng Wufeng, the parent of the company that operates the Lingshan cemetery, reported a gross profit margin of 83.3 percent. It aims to make a profit of 100 million yuan ($15.4 million) this year.

According to an official report, the average cost of a funeral service in Beijing was 70,000 yuan last year.

Qiao Kuanyuan, an expert with the China Funeral Association, said grave plots have become expensive because of a scarcity of land and government calls for eco-friendly alternatives have been countered by traditional beliefs.

Hang Juan, publicity officer of the Nanjing funeral reform and management department, said more campaigns will be organized to persuade the public not to cling to mianzi, or face, when planning funeral services, and to switch to environmentally friendly practices instead, such as burying ashes under trees or scattering them in the sea.
China's ambassador to France, Zhai Jun, suggests adding Chinese language to billboards and instructions in tourist attractions every time he is consulted by the French about improving tourist services.

According to Zhai, one of the reasons is that "China soon will become the largest source of travelers" for France outside Europe.

Outside Europe, China was France's second biggest tourist market in 2013 after the United States, with 1.7 million visitors and $681 million of revenue, Xinhua News Agency reported.

"Previously, the instructions at tourist attractions were full of French, English and Japanese. How could the Chinese language be absent?" Zhai said.

Currently the major museums in Paris provide instructions in Chinese, and Zhai said the conditions are still being improved.

French Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius said in August last year that "the goal we have set with our Chinese officials is to quickly reach 5 million (Chinese tourists)".

Zhai noted that the French side has responded proactively by offering more convenience to Chinese tourists.

Welcoming 84.1 million tourists in 2014, France confirmed its position as the world's most visited country.

Zhai noted that in the past, the United States and Japan accounted for a major portion of the travelers, while the number of Chinese tourist has surged rapidly in recent years.

The ambassador said that the country faced great security challenges last year, including two deadly terrorist attacks that shocked the world.

"This has dealt heavy blows to the French economy and tourism," he said.

Last year, Beijing worked closely with Paris to make the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris a success.

Zhai said he was impressed last November by the unbeaten French spirit and the country's commitment to hosting such an event after a deadly terrorist attack that killed more than 100.

"The conference was not canceled or even delayed. The hosting efforts continued and more attention was paid to anti-terror and other affairs," he said. "This shows that the country still has a considerable amount of potential. It is capable of pulling itself together quickly after suffering heavy blows," he added.

Although the number of Chinese tourists going to France dropped after the attacks, it was a minor dip compared with other countries, Zhai said.

The ambassador said the services provided by France for Chinese travelers have been improving, while "public security remains an issue" as cases of theft and robbery targeting Chinese travelers have been reported frequently.

Due to the large number of Chinese tourists, the number of such cases is daunting and this indicates "a demanding task for the consular protection staff of our embassy and consulates", Zhai said.

"The image of France will be undermined by the daily reports of robbery. The concerns are there," he said.

Zhai said there are also some things that Chinese travelers could be more careful about.

"For example, the impulse to show off fortune. Many Chinese prefer holding high-end bags in their hands after purchasing them," he said, adding that another bad habit is carrying large amounts of money to pay by cash.

Zhai noted that the French have made progress in boosting public security, including increasing cameras to monitor downtown areas and strengthening police patrols.

But he thinks major improvement will not be achieved overnight because of the quickly rising number of Chinese tourists.
Chinese companies prepare to modernize rail systems globally

The capacity to manufacture and export top-end high-speed trains and related equipment is giving a new sheen to the image of China, for long considered maker of low-quality, cheap goods like bags, shoes and lighters.

Even foreign governments and corporate clients are sitting up and taking notice.

China is in talks with more than 30 countries including the United States, Russia, Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran about high-speed rail projects, said Wang Mengshu, a deputy to the National People's Congress and deputy chief engineer of China Railway Tunnel Group Ltd.

"China's first high-speed rail project in Indonesia will arouse more countries' interest, which are keen to put their economic growth on a firmer footing through efficient transportation systems and regional connectivity," said Wang.

China was selected by the Indonesian government to build the nation's first bullet rail link - the 150-kilometer Jakarta-Bandung link last year. It is responsible to construct the $5.5-billion high-speed railway line from Jakarta to Bandung in the Southeast Asian country.

With the operational date scheduled for 2019, the project will be developed by PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia-China, a joint venture formed in October 2015 between a consortium of Indonesian state-owned companies and China Railway International Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China Railway Corp Group.

The project is financed through a Chinese loan provided by China Development Bank which provides around 75 percent of the funding, with the rest arranged by the joint venture partners.

"Even though China is a latecomer to the field in comparison with its German and French rivals, its rail equipment companies have thrived thanks to cost advantages, reasonable delivery times and flexible financing models," Wang said.

Eager to compete with established rivals in Europe, Japan and Canada, China will further develop "smart trains", which apply intelligent technology that will allow trains' speed control, condition determination and fault detection to be performed digitally, Wang said.

The Chinese government announced in September a 370-kilometer high-speed railway project between Las Vegas and Los Angeles will be built by a joint venture by Chinese rail companies, including China Railway Construction Corp, China Railway Corp, and XpressWest Enterprises, a US passenger rail service provider.

The construction work between Nevada and California is expected to start as early as this September, and the estimated investment for the project is $12.7 billion.

As a result, China Railway Rolling Stock Corp, the country's largest train manufacturer, plans to deploy more resources and manpower in the global high-speed rail equipment market, especially in developed economies such as the US or the United Kingdom to fuel robust growth over the next decade.

CRRC was formed by the merger of China's former top two train manufacturers, CNR Corp and CSR Corp, last year, a major step that the Chinese government took to accelerate reform of its behemoth State-owned enterprises, in a bid to push them toward gaining more overseas projects.

Yu Weiping, CRRC's vice-president, said the company is ready to contribute to a new high-speed rail culture in the US, after it invested $60 million to build a new manufacturing facility to produce railcars in Springfield, Massachusetts, last year, after sealing a deal with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to design and supply 284 railcars for the Boston transit system's Orange and Red lines.

"With high-speed trains traveling at a speed of more than 300 kilometers per hour, it will help the US to change the situation of that country's ground commuting systems that have long been dominated by automobiles," said Yu.

The entire range of CRRC's products, including diesel locomotives, electric multiple units and light-rail vehicles, has been exported to nearly 100 countries and regions.

Yu said the company's next step is to gradually switch focus from product exports to capital and technology exports in the global market.

CRRC is preparing to export bullet trains for a high-speed rail project in Russia that would connect Moscow to Kazan. The length of the line is expected to be about 770 kilometers and will run through seven Russian regions with a total population of more than 25 million.

The Chinese company has 46 wholly owned or holding subsidiaries and more than 170,000 employees. It has already built manufacturing facilities and maintenance centers in Malaysia, Turkey and Brazil.

Sheng Guangzu, a deputy to the National People's Congress and general manager of the China Railway Corp, the country's railway service provider, said the Belt and Road Initiative will help China export more high-speed rail technologies and related products to a number of lucrative markets during the country's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).

The initiative, proposed by China in 2013, is a trade and infrastructure network that includes the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

The planned network connects Asia, Europe and Africa and passes through more than 60 countries and regions.

"China will quicken the pace of promoting its railway standards abroad, especially in the markets along the Belt and Road Initiative," said Sheng.

"Because most countries along the Belt and Road Initiative, especially Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and East Europe are planning to build high-speed rail lines or upgrade their existing railway systems, they are keen to acquire technological support from China to assist in the daily operations, maintenance, staff training and other services," said Zhou Qinghe, president of CRRC Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Co, a CRRC subsidiary based in Zhuzhou, Central China's Hunan province.

A Chinese consortium led by Third Railway Survey and Design Institute Group Corp was also chosen to conduct the feasibility study on a planned New Delhi-Mumbai rail project, a big step forward to the development of the Indian rail market.

Another high-speed rail project in India, to connect Mumbai and Ahmedabad, both provincial capitals in the western region, was awarded in December to Japan, which had lost out to China in the race for the Indonesia project.

China will support rail equipment makers in widening their global services and production networks in other regional markets during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, according to the Government Work Report delivered by Premier Li Keqiang on Saturday.

China exported railway equipment worth 21 billion yuan ($3.23 billion) between January and October last year, up 36 percent year-on-year, according to the latest figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics.

"Widening the international sales network and manufacturing bases in overseas markets can help Chinese rail equipment, infrastructure and service providers enhance their localization abilities, as well as gaining political and public support through local employment," said Shen Danyang, spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce.

Domestically, China had constructed more than 19,210 kilometers of high-speed railway network throughout the country by the end of 2015, building a solid foundation for an industry that can generate new market growth points during the nation's 13th Five-Year Plan period.

Contact the writers at zhongnan@chinadaily.com.cn and xiechuanjiao@chinadaily.com.cn
A total of 1,662 migrants have landed on Greek islands near Turkey since a landmark EU-Turkish deal on curbing the influx took effect on Sunday, a Greek coordination panel said Monday.

Half of the migrants - 830 - arrived on Chios and 698 on Lesbos, two islands in the northeast Aegean which lie close to Turkey, according to the SOMP agency which is coordinating Athens' response to the migration crisis.

The continuing influx "creates a problem and raises questions about the intent of all parties" in the agreement, SOMP spokesman Giorgos Kyritsis said.

The deal, reached at an EU-Turkey summit on Friday, aims at cutting off a route that enabled 850,000 people to pour into Europe last year, many of them fleeing conflict in Syria.

From midnight on Saturday, all migrants landing on the Greek islands faced being sent back to Turkey.

For every Syrian sent back, the European Union will resettle one Syrian from the Turkish refugee camps where nearly three million people are living.

The idea is to reduce the incentive for Syrian refugees to board dangerous smugglers' boats to cross to Greece, encouraging them instead to stay in Turkish refugee camps to win a chance at resettlement in Europe.

The EU will also speed up talks on Ankara's bid to join the 28-nation bloc, double refugee aid to $6.8 billion, and give visa-free travel to Turks in Europe's Schengen passport-free zone by June.

Under the deal, all new arrivals are being taken to registration centers set up by the Greek authorities on five Aegean islands. Those seeking asylum will stay there while their application is considered by Greek and European officials.
About one percent of the Chinese population has been diagnosed with autism.[Photo/Xinhua]

After a lively ballot, the "star" of class one was awarded to the chubby, bashful boy Ji Yuanqing.

When the photographer raised the camera, dozens of pupils rushed to pose with the laureate. So many smiling faces pressed against each other that it could be hard to tell that Ji is not like all his classmates.

The 8-year-old boy is the first autistic student to attend Dongtieying No. 2 Primary School in Beijing, and one of the few children living with the disability to study at a mainstream Chinese school.

While Saturday marks World Autism Awareness Day, many Chinese parents are still struggling to find the best learning environment for their autistic children.

Inclusive education, which encourages regular schools to enroll children with disabilities, may be the answer, but a lack of specialist teachers, facilities and awareness among parents means Ji is one of the lucky few.

"A BIGGER WORLD"

Like most Chinese parents, Ji Jingxin and Zhang Lijuan are determined that their only son receives the best education.

After Ji was diagnosed with autism at two, Zhang quit her job to teach the boy at home. Like other autistic children, the boy often struggles with social and oral skills and needs extra time and patience from parents. Zhang said that they will not have a second child as their attentions to Ji "can not be diluted."

Ji senior bares the sole financial responsibility of earning money to send his son to all manner of costly "rehabilitation centers." He said that he became quickly disillusioned with these "centers" as many facilities were driven by profits, and taught very little.

The idea of enrolling Ji into a regular school struck the couple at a singing event about two years ago. To their surprise, Ji began emulating the other children's movement of pressing the headset to the mouth, though not knowing it was meant to amplify the voice.

"At that moment, we realized he knew how to imitate, and that if he was given the opportunity to attend a mainstream school he could learn from healthy children. We were sure that if he attended a special school it would have the adverse affect," Ji senior said.

"He's very close to his mother and has enjoyed his time at home, but we can't be with him forever. We hope he can learn to interact with other children and eventually integrate into society. He deserves a bigger world outside the family."
The lethal condition 'happy heart syndrome' can occur after a joyful event such as a surprise birthday party or the birth of a child

Celebrating a birthday may not seem like a dangerous pastime but too much happiness can be heartbreaking, according to doctors.

Health experts have known for some time that sad events, such as the loss of a spouse, can trigger a condition known as 'broken heart syndrome' which feels like a heart attack and can be fatal if not treated quickly.

Now for the first time doctors have shown that over-excitement from happy events can also spark the condition, which they have named 'happy heart syndrome.' In short, happiness can be lethal.

Since 'broken heart syndrome' was first identified in 1990, doctors at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland have been compiling a database of worldwide attacks which currently holds 1750 patients.

Most attacks were triggered by episodes of severe emotional distress, such as grief, fear and anger. Attending funerals was a common factor and one incident occurred after an obese patient got stuck in the bath.

But for 20 people the condition was precipitated by happy and joyful events, such as a birthday party, wedding, surprise farewell celebration, a favourite rugby team winning a game, or the birth of a grandchild.

Study author Dr Jelena Ghadri, resident cardiologist from University Hospital Zurich said doctors should enquire about happy events as well as sad, when diagnosing heart problems.

"We have shown that the triggers for 'broken heart sydrome' can be more varied than previously thought," she said.
Family members carry a coffin containing the body of Zheng Shifang, 83, up a hill in Lyuting, a village in Anqing, Anhui province, on Sunday. Zheng hanged herself on May 23. New rules requiring cremation are scheduled to take effect on June 1. Chen Jie for China Daily

Authorities in Anqing, Anhui province, say there was no direct relationship between the alleged suicides of several elderly rural residents and the coming burial reforms that require corpses to be cremated.

The Oriental Morning Post in Shanghai published an article saying that six local elderly people committed suicide so their bodies could be buried legally in coffins.

Starting June 1, all corpses must be cremated, according to a notice from the Anqing government on March 25.

After the suicide allegations were published, Anhui provincial government investigated. It found that the deaths had nothing to do with funeral reform, according to an unnamed official with the civil affairs department.

"The newspaper's report is biased, as it cited no genuine facts, and some of the quotes are just the reporter's guesses," said an official surnamed Zhang from the Anqing publicity department.

One 27-year-old resident of a county-level city under Anqing, Yao Xuefei, said on Wednesday in a phone interview that he had not heard of an elderly person committing suicide because of the coming reform.

But resistance to forced cremations among some of the area's oldest residents, especially those in their 80s or 90s, is apparent, he said, adding that younger individuals have taken the reform with greater ease.

"Some of the elderly insist on being buried because of a deeply rooted superstition. It is still very hard to persuade them to accept new concepts," Yao said.

According to common funeral custom, a body should be buried several days after death. But in some villages, the corpse is laid in a coffin and placed in a shabby shed on a hill for at least three years before finally being buried. It is believed that the practice can bring good luck to the descendants of the deceased.

Yao has three family members in their 70s. Following the custom of many villages in Anqing, their coffins were prepared more than 10 years ago.

Residents invite carpenters to make their coffins, and when they are finished, relatives gather at the person's home for a celebration with gifts.

Yao's relatives destroyed their coffins under persuasion by local officials, which included compensation of 1,000 yuan ($160) for each coffin, earlier this year.

China has been encouraging cremation since the 1950s out of concern for land use, among other things. The national cremation rate reached nearly 50 percent in 2012.

The Anqing government announced funeral reforms in 1994 and 2006, but both failed because of tepid support from residents.

Local officials said that old burial customs need to be reformed, partly because some of them have had unexpected consequences.

For example, authorities say a fire that broke out in a forest park in Anqing on Jan 24, just before Spring Festival, may have been caused by locals' burning paper money as an offering to the dead, or by the lighting of firecrackers to honor deceased family members.

More than 20 officials in Anqing were punished after the fire for negligence. Some people speculated that this drove the authorities to adopt the funeral reform.

zhulixin@chinadaily.com.cn
[Photo/Xinhua]

The China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) on Saturday called on tourists to show good manners at attractions nationwide during the three-day break for Tomb-sweeping Day on Monday.

The CNTA asked tourists to behave themselves in order to make tourism "civilized, safe, green and harmonious."

The administration also urged its local branches to properly address tourist complaints, saying that it will make public typical cases after the holiday.

Citizens can choose to provide tips on violations of relevant rules or laws via the "12301" hotline or other platforms.

China's booming domestic tourism market saw over 4 billion trips in 2015, generating tourism revenue of more than 4 trillion yuan (about $620 billion).
YEREVAN - A total of 18 Armenian soldiers have been killed, 35 wounded in border clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops on the Karabakh conflict zone, according to Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan Saturday.

During the National Security Council meeting, Sargsyan called Saturday's clash one of large scale since the cease-fire in 1994. "Due to the coordinated defensive actions, Armenian troops managed to take control of the situation," Sargsyan added.

He also called for the need to sign an agreement with Karabakh on mutual military assistance and gave a number of orders to prevent further escalation of the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops.

Earlier, the Armenian Defense Ministry reported that Azerbaijan launched attacks in the Nagorno-Karabakh region along their borders on Friday night, using heavy weapons, tanks and artillery, according to the press service of the Armenian Defense Ministry on Saturday.

The Ministry said the Azerbaijani troops were repelled and sustained serious losses in the counter-attacks by the Armenian side.

According to reports from the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh Ministry of Defense, two helicopters, three tanks and two unmanned aerial enemy unit were destroyed, with casualties amounting to 200 people.

A 12-year-old was reportedly killed in a missile attack by the Azerbaijani armed forces, and two other children were wounded.

On the same day, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry dismissed reports of an Azerbaijani helicopter having been downed by Armenian armed forces, as the two countries blamed each other for an escalation of tension along their borders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday urged parties in the conflict to "observe an immediate ceasefire and exercise restraint in order to prevent further casualties," according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a bitter dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh seized by Armenia-backed forces from Azerbaijan in 1991. Peace talks have been held since 1994 when a ceasefire was reached.
PARIS - Three consecutive explosions rocked an industrial zone near the southwestern French city of Bordeaux early Sunday, local media reported.

There were no immediate reports of casualties and damage.

The blasts, along with strong fire, broke out at around 6:40 local time (0440 GMT) in a company specializing in chemical products transportation at the industrial zone in Bassens, near Bordeaux, French radio France Bleu Gironde reported on its Twitter.

Firefighters had already been on the scene to conduct rescue operations.

"The situation seems under control," Mayor of Bassens Jean-Pierre Turon told news channel iTele, adding that two firefighters were slight injured in the rescue operations.

The outbreak of a fire may have caused the explosion of two or three tankers filled with gas, he said.
Paul Jourdan, a mineral policy analyst, said that "Chinese factory-relocation is the way to go for Africa." LUCIE MORANGI / FOR CHINA DAILY

A paradigm shift is set to take place with the planned relocation of Chinese factories to Africa.

Paul Jourdan, a mineral policy analyst from South Africa, said the transfer highlights the need for Africa to steer away from deals focusing on the extractive industries.

By developing value-addition, future treaties should instead drive industrial development, which is behind China's economic success.

"China entered into deals that directed foreign investments into powering existing factories while allowing new ones to be set up," he said. "Technology transfer led to increased job opportunities that is key in reduction."

For Africa to realize it Agenda 2063 and its Sustainable Development Goals, "this is the way to go", said Jourdan, former president and CEO of Mintek, a South African mining, processing and minerals beneficiation science council.

He was speaking on the sidelines of an experts meeting during the African Development Week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the topic was the need for due diligence by African states before they sign bilateral treaties.

Several countries are facing litigation over the cancellation of contracts that have been deemed unresponsive to prevailing economic challenges.

"What the Chinese are proposing by setting up industries under the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) concept is helping Africa overcome the aid dependency syndrome and own the process of industrialization," Jourdan said.

"This will see investments translated into long-term benefits, unlike when resources are exported," he said. "Africa needs to industrialize. We need to start beneficiation and product differentiation to enable us to enter the global value chain."

A report prepared by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), titled Investment Policies and Bilateral Investment Treaties in Africa, states that there are more than 2,750 bilateral investment treaties and 2,894 double-taxation treaties globally. Africa claims more than 1,000 deals.

"Sixty-nine percent are agreements with countries located outside the continent, while 31 percent are within the continent," the report stated.

An uptick was recorded in the early 1990s, when Africa pushed for foreign investments to fund economic and social projects.
BAKU -- The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that military operations in some places along the contact line in Nagorno-Karabakh region have resumed.

The ministry said since Armenian armed forces have broken the ceasefire with Azerbaijan on the frontline in Fuzuli, Terter and Aghdam districts, the counter-attack by the Azerbaijan side was carried out.

It also said that Azerbaijani troops had shot down an Armenian drone near Azerbaijan's Fizuli district.

Th ministry on Sunday declared to unilaterally suspend all military operations and response measures in the high-strung disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region with Armenia. However, the Nagorno-Karabakh defense authorities said that heavy battles were still going on in the northeastern and southeastern directions, denying that the Azerbaijani side had implemented a real ceasefire along the contact line in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan on the contact line of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region have reportedly flared up overnight Saturday with the two countries' defense ministries blaming each other for triggering the escalation.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said 12 Azerbaijani soldiers have been killed in the fighting while the Armenian side confirmed that 18 soldiers died in the conflict.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a bitter dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh first broke out in 1988, when the region claimed independence from Azerbaijan to join Armenia.
Chinese President Xi Jinping's proposals at the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) demonstrate China's resolve against nuclear terrorism and will boost world confidence in nuclear energy development, experts said on Sunday.

Xi joined some 50 world leaders on Friday for the fourth and final NSS, a process initiated by U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss how to ensure the security of nuclear materials and facilities and prevent nuclear terrorism.

Describing nuclear terrorism as a grave threat to international security, Xi called for "zero-tolerance for nuclear terrorism" and "removing its breeding ground" at the summit.

Despite growing attention to nuclear security around the world, the development of nuclear energy and increasing use of nuclear technology in agriculture and medicine mean risks for proliferation and loss could surge, experts said. They also warned against terrorists using nuclear devices to launch attacks.

"Leaders of the nuclear energy industry have demanded top priority be given to nuclear security and preventing terrorists from using the Internet to attack nuclear facilities," said Zhu Xuhui, a senior advisor with the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association.

Apart from reinforcing its commitment to countering nuclear terrorism, Xi stressed China has always been committed to development and use of nuclear energy while ensuring security.

"This is to bridge the gap in the energy supply, and address the challenges posed by climate change. China is the country with the fastest growth in nuclear power. At the same time, it has kept a good nuclear security record," Xi said.

Though China put its nuclear energy development on hold after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, it has highlighted nuclear power development as a priority for the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020).

Currently, China has 24 nuclear power generating units under construction, ranking first in the world. China is also trying to explore the international market, inking deals with Britain, Pakistan, the Czech Republic and other countries.

Observers said President Xi addressed concerns about security related to China's nuclear power development and sent a reassuring message that China will continue to enhance nuclear security, boosting domestic and global confidence in nuclear energy development.

"China applies the most stringent security monitoring to ensure the safety and security of nuclear power stations within China and those exported to other parts of the world. Nothing is left to chance," Xi said.

"With a good security monitoring system and a good record, China has expressed willingness to share technology, expertise and resources with countries interested in developing nuclear power as clean energy," said Fan Jishe, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Cartoon by Liao Tingting

On April 1 US local time, Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the fourth Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) and delivered a speech entitled "Strengthen Global Nuclear Security Architecture and Promote Global Nuclear Security Governance".

In his speech, Xi focused on building a global nuclear security system featuring fairness and win-win cooperation. Xi gave a speech explaining Beijing's policies and introduced the country's progress in nuclear safety. He further announced new initiatives to strengthen national nuclear security and promote international cooperation.

President Xi's speech was a major highlight of the summit. Beijing's initiatives attracted close attention of the international media. Xi returned to Beijing after his successful trip to Washington.

The issue of nuclear safety goes beyond national borders. Nuclear security has always been an essential field for Beijing to actively participate in global governance, and fulfill its international obligation and responsibility.

Xi's speech shows that Beijing adheres to the idea of excellence, the principle of fitting its actions to its words while upholding the tenets of win-win cooperation. It fully demonstrates a major country's responsibility to build a global nuclear security system and promote global nuclear security governance.

Beijing's recent progress in nuclear safety is the best evidence that illustrates the strength of a major player on the international stage.

Beijing's continuous efforts in international nuclear security cooperation have greatly contributed to enhance the level of global nuclear safety. As such, China has received much praise from the international community.

Xu Xiujun is deputy director of International Politics and Ecomonics Department, Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Panview China Daily website.
(Photo : Photo By Andrew Harrer/Pool/Getty Images) U.S. President Barack Obama (C) speaks as Xi Jinping, China's president (R), and Francois Hollande, France's president (L), listen during a P5+1 multilateral meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit on April 1, 2016 in Washington, D.C.

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The Chinese government is staying firm on protecting its sovereignty and rights in the South China Sea.



According to China Daily, China will not allow any activities "in the excuse of free navigation" that will pose risk to national sovereignty and interests.



In light of this, President Xi Jinping emphasized on the importance of managing unresolved disputes in a manner that will not tarnish the relationship between his country and the United States.



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"I would like to reiterate to work together with the US side to establish a new-type relationship of big powers, achieve the goal of no conflicts or confrontations, respect with each other, cooperate for win-win results, which is the priority of China's foreign policy," the Chinese leader declared during a meeting with US President Barack Obama on Thursday on the sidelines of the fourth Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in Washington.



Apart from the country's stand on the South China Sea concern, Xi further pointed out that respect between China and the US must be maintained despite differences in views and opinions about various issues.



"I expect to enhance communications with President Obama to focus on cooperation, manage disputes, boost mutual trust and push forward the China-US relationship to continue to develop in a healthy and stable direction," he said.



In the meantime, Obama, in a statement released on Friday, urged the Chinese government to resort to peaceful means in term of resolving conflict with neighboring countries relative to the South China Sea issue, according to Reuters.



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TagsSouth China Sea, china, US, President Xi Jinping, President Barack Obama
(Photo : Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

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At last, Samsung has started to roll out the latest Android Marshmallow update to its devices.



This move comes four months since Google released the Marshmallow 6.0.1 operating system update, reported Gotta Be Mobile.



Industry experts view this development as a step in the right direction for the South Korean manufacturer, which in February finally decided to release the newest update.



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Although Samsung hasn't confirmed all the Marshmallow updates it will be releasing, the company has revealed information on updates for most of its best-selling Samsung Galaxy models.



As expected, the Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow update has already been made available for the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge and Galaxy S6 Edge Plus in Korea.



A number of other Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge Marshmallow updates have also been rolled out in several countries around the world, which include India, the United Kingdom, Austria, Russia, Iraq and the Netherlands.



Galaxy S6 Edge and Galaxy S6 Edge Plus owners in Afghanistan, Croatia, Germany, Czech Republic, Nigeria, Pakistan, Italy, Macedonia and Spain have also received the update.



The Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow update has likewise been released in North America, with Sprint users reporting that their Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge phones have been updated to the latest Google OS..



Verizon and Big Red have likewise confirmed plans to release the Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow updates.



Based on the Galaxy S6 Marshmallow beta released by Samsung, the newest update will introduce major changes and impressive features to the company's flagship devices.



The update brings a new, trendier look to the handsets' interface, as their blue background is replaced with white. The look of several app icons has also received make overs.



The update also installs the popular Google Now on Tap feature which allows users to access information on anything a user is looking at by simply holding down the home button.



Other key features of the Android Marshmallow update for the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge include additional quick settings toggles for Private Mode in the status bar; new emoji characters; and improved visibility of notification panel icons.



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TagsAndroid Marshmallow update, Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, Samsung Galaxy S6, samsung galaxy s6 edge
(Photo : Reuters) Airbnb is a platform for private homeowners to rent out an extra bedroom, or let someone use their apartment while they were away.



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Airbnb has been in the move to crack down on San Francisco hosts who violate the citys law on short-term rentals, complying with the citys housing laws.



The vacation-rental website will begin investigating hosts who list multiple homes. Over the weekend, the company will begin to wash out hosts who have turned private homes into illegal hotels. The companys latest move comes after years of criticism by activists who say lucrative vacation rentals gobble up some of the citys precious housing stock.



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The company showed that 1,149 listings are controlled by hosts who rent more than one entire home through the site. Since local law restricts vacation rentals to permanent residents offering their own home, listing multiple properties is a red flag.



In addition, the 478 of the multiple-property operators are either licensed hotels or rentals of 30 or more days, which are legal. The remaining 671 listings are controlled by 288 hosts. The company is now targeting the 288 hosts for possible expulsion. It brought in 17 percent of San Francisco host revenue, but it only represent 7 percent of all listings in the city.



Authorities said that Airbnb and other short-term rental sites are blamed because of the housing shortage. Critics said that this business gives property owners a financial motive to convert homes into lodging for out-of-town visitors rather than residents.



Airbnb has cited privacy concerns and it said that it will polish its own listings in some cities to comply with the law. In addition, the company removed almost 100 questionable San Francisco listings in January and another 118 in 2015.



Airbnb is described as a platform for private homeowners to rent out an extra bedroom, or let someone use their apartment while they were away. It attracted more commercial operators because of its success and popularity. Some operators even bought properties just for renting them out on Airbnb.



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(Photo : Getty Images) China has announced that it will levy 14.4 to 46.3 percent tax on some hi-tech steel imported from Britain and other EU countries.

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China on Saturday announced that it will impose a 14.4 to 46.3 percent tax on a "special type of hi-tech steel" imported from Britain and rest of the European Union.



China's Ministry of Commerce said it is slapping anti-dumping tariffs on steel imports from EU, Japan and South Korea. According to the ministry, China's steel industry is suffering due to unfair trade practices followed by these respective countries.



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The decision was met with sharp reactions across the U.K., which is already reeling under a nation-wide steel crisis that is likely to result in job cuts for 15,000 - 20,000 local steel workers.



Trade analysts in the U.K. said China's latest anti-dumping tariffs is going to have minimal impact on Britain's local steel industry, but warned that it may escalate into trade a war between the two countries.



"If this is not a trade war, I don't know what is," Gareth Stace, Director of UK Steel, said to a local newspaper.



Meanwhile, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington at the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit. According to sources, Cameron has requested that Xi slows down the export of cheap Chinese steel to the U.K.



Major steel companies in the U.K. blame Chinese steel companies for the excessive dumping in European markets, which is said to be the source of the current woes of the industry in U.K. and other European countries.The British Government's 'pro Chinese policy' has equally been blamed for the deplorable condition of the country's steel industry.



In the past, the British government successfully blocked the EU's decision to levy higher duties on Chinese steel imports, claiming that such a move will lead to a sharp rise in the prices of steel products.



However, the British government's decision to shield Chinese steel imports from higher tariffs has come under stern criticisms from politicians and analysts, claiming that this policy has badly backfired on the local steel industry.



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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.
Another warning on global warming: West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse, causing massive sea level rise

Here's another warning of a possible disastrous future for our planet if mankind does not squarely address global warming: the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse in the next 250 years, causing massive sea level rise that could inundate and even wipe some islands off the map.

A team of researchers made this dire prediction for planet Earth in a study recently published in the scientific journal "Nature," warning that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice could raise sea levels to more than 49 feet by 2500.

The scientistsgeoscientist Rob DeConto from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and paleoclimatologist David Pollard from the Pennsylvania State University in University Parktold Fox News that atmospheric warming due to mankind's greenhouse gas emissions would be a "dominant driver" of ice loss.

DeConto and Pollard further said that Antarctic ice sheets would be difficult to recover due to global warming. They estimated that sea levels can rise as much as 3 feet by the year 2100.

The co-authors made these conclusions after using a model that combines ice sheet and climate dynamics. They also used various processes that sought to establish a connection between atmospheric warming and "hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs."

The scientists used sea-level estimates from the Pliocene and Last Interglacial periods in their processes, and linked these to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

The good news is that the world still has a chance to avoid the apocalyptic scenario of massive sea level rise wiping out entire countries.

In their published study, DeConto said limiting the average global temperature to 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) through cutting greenhouse gas emissions would slow down and even completely prevent the possible collapse of the the West Antarcic ice sheet.

DeConto and Pollard's study is only one of those that attribute rising seas due to melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica to global climate change.

Some members of the scientific community, however, believe that climate change has been going on since the beginning of time.
Fighting breaks out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over disputed zone

A new wave of fighting broke out in the Nagorno-Karabakh region on Saturday, killing dozens and drawing international calls for an immediate ceasefire to stop violence spreading in the South Caucasus.

Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians, has run its own affairs with heavy military and financial backing from Armenia since a separatist war ended in 1994.

The Azeri defense ministry said on Saturday the army had "liberated strategic heights and settlements" in the region.

"Six Armenian tanks were destroyed (and) more than 100 Armenian servicemen were killed and injured," it said in a statement, saying 12 Azeri servicemen had also been killed.

Armenia's government denied the Azeri report on the number of casualties. Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan told a State Security Council meeting about 18 were killed and 35 injured. It was not immediately clear if the death toll included soldiers only.

Earlier on Saturday, Nagorno-Karabakh's military said Armenian anti-aircraft forces had downed an Azeri helicopter. Baku admitted that its Mi-24 helicopter was shot down.

Both sides also reported civilian casualties and accused each other of violating a 1994 ceasefire, a sign that the two-decade-old conflict which has left some 30,000 people dead is far from a peaceful resolution. Similar violence was reported last month.

Armenia is historically Christian, while Azerbaijan is traditionally Muslim.

The violence has forced Russia, a key mediator in the conflict, to step up diplomatic efforts to quench it.

President Vladimir Putin urged the warring sides to immediately observe the ceasefire and "to exercise restraint so as to avert new human casualties," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu have talked by phone with their Armenian and Azeri counterparts.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, meanwhile, called on both sides "to immediately stop fighting and to fully respect the ceasefire."

Azerbaijan frequently threatens to take Nagorno-Karabakh back by force. Clashes around the region have fueled worries of a widening conflict breaking out in the region, which is crossed by oil and natural gas pipelines.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for "an ultimate resolution" of the conflict between during talks with Azeri President Ilham Aliyev at the State Department.
Judgment Day looms, Ken Ham warns, citing the wickedness spreading in today's world just like in the days of Noah

By all indications, it would seem that today's civilisation is reverting to the days of Noah when God ultimately condemned the world for its wickedness, unleashing a great flood that wiped out evil and restarted life, according to Ken Ham, the head of the Answers in Genesis ministry.

Writing for WND, Ham says wickedness is increasing in today's world as people ignore the teachings of God. "As we look at our Western culture today, Christians see many similarities to the wicked days of Noah," he says.

He quotes Genesis 6:5: "Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

Ham cites instances of this growing wickedness in today's world:

1 - Millions of human beings are being murdered in their mothers' wombs because of the widespread practice of abortion, which is legal in America. Since 1973, around 58 million children have been killed by abortion, "making the Holocaust pale in comparison," Ham says.

2 - The homosexual movement is growing bigger and bigger. The U.S. Supreme Court has even legalised same-sex marriage.

3 - Atheists are getting bolder, more aggressive and intolerant, mocking Christians and attacking them.

4 - Many Christian leaders are compromising God's Word, watering down God's authority.

5 - The U.S. education system has eliminated the Bible, prayer, creation and God itself from the classroom. At the same time, legislators and judges protect those who teach the "anti-God religion of evolution" and heed the atheists' call for the removal of Nativity scenes, crosses and Ten Commandments displays in public places.

Ham also cites the prophecy of Matthew 24: "But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be."

So far, God has not yet unleashed His fury. "But He is not going to remain silent. As in the days of Noah, the time will come when God closes the door of salvation and brings judgment to deal with mankind's rebellion," Ham warns.

With the doomsday clock ticking, he says Christians should "take advantage of every opportunity to share the Gospel, warning people to repent before it's too late."

Ham says this is the reason why Answers in Genesis is building a life-size, evangelistic Ark"to point a rebellious people to the modern-day Ark of salvation, Jesus Christ."

This the Ark Encounter, a one-of-a-kind, historically themed amusement park in Williamstown, Kentucky that is set to open on July 7 this year.
Mississippi Senate passes bill protecting Christians' 'freedom of conscience from government discrimination'

Christians living in Mississippi move closer to gaining legal protection against being forced to acknowledge and facilitate gay marriages, thanks to a proposed law on religious freedom passed by the state's senators.

In a convincing 31-17 vote, the Republican-dominated Mississippi Senate approved the bill entitled "Protecting Freedom of Conscience From Government Discrimination Act."

The bill states that public employees, social workers and businesses cannot be punished if they deny services based on their religious belief that marriage can only exist between a man and a woman.

The bill also protects the Christian belief that "sexual relations are properly reserved" only for married men and women.

It also recognises the right of individuals to stand by their belief that gender is determined at birth.

According to a report by Fox News, the bill states that the government would not be allowed to prevent organisations from refusing to marry a same-sex couple, from firing an individual whose "conduct or religious beliefs are inconsistent with those of the religious organisation" or from blocking the adoption of a child because of religious beliefs.

Republican Senator Chris McDaniel explained that the proposed legislation simply wants to safeguard the civil liberties of Mississippi residents.

"Why not preserve the first amendment? Why not preserve the civil liberties that should have always been preserved, not necessarily by individual actors but by state action, limit the power of the state, control those passions?" the lawmaker told Fox News.

Some critics, however, believe that the bill will lead to the discrimination of members of the lesbian, gays, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Senator John Horhn, for instance, described the bill as a stain on Mississippi's reputation.

"Where does this all end? Why do we keep doing this to ourselves, Mississippi? And we wonder why the rest of the world thinks so badly of us. It's because of some things that we do that are unjust," Horhn also told Fox News.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant has not publicly stated his stand on the religious liberty bill. His spokesman, Clay Chandler, said Bryant "will review the legislation if and when it reaches his desk."
Number of migrants and refugees entering Germany drops drastically

The number of migrants entering Germany from Austria fell more than seven times in March to below 5,000 due to the introduction of border controls by countries along the Balkans migrant route, an interior ministry official said on Saturday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure to deliver on a promise to slow arrivals of migrants and refugees after 1.1 million people entered Europe's biggest economy last year, triggering fears about the cost and how to integrate them.

In February, 38,570 migrants arrived in Germany from Austria, already down sharply from 64,700 in January. Austria is the main entry point for migrants crossing into Germany.

Austria imposed border restrictions in February, causing a domino effect in Europe that left thousands of people -- many fleeing war and violence in Syria and other countries -- stranded in Greece.

Critical of the tighter border controls, Merkel is banking on a controversial EU-Turkey deal, which takes effect on Monday, designed to slow the flow of migrants into Western Europe.

The deal gives Turkey political and financial benefits in exchange for taking back refugees and migrants who cross to Greece, and critics fear it could make Europe take a softer line with Ankara on human rights issues.

Under the agreement, which would effectively seal off the main route by which a million migrants crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece last year, Germany is obliged to initially take 1,600 migrants and make available 13,500 places.

An interior ministry official said on Saturday that about 40 people could arrive on Monday.

Many politicians expect new routes to open up as Mediterranean crossings to Italy from Libya resume.

Although Merkel's popularity has bounced back in the last month or so, her conservative party is still suffering in opinion polls while the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) made big gains in state elections last month.

The number of people entering Germany has fallen so sharply that some of the homes built by local authorities for migrants, for example in the eastern state of Thuringia, are empty.

In light of the housing surplus, Thuringia premier Bodo Ramelow has offered to take up to 2,000 migrants stranded near the northern Greek border town of Idomeni.
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Rapper Kendrick Lamar was Saturday's  and likely the entire weekend's  main attraction during the 2016 NCAA March Madness Music Festival at Discovery Green.

The outdoor venue reached capacity more than three hours before Lamar took the stage. Official attendance numbers will be released Monday. Fans were Lamar also drew a huge crowd during December's inaugural Day for Night music and art festival.

Jason Derulo, who performed in March at RodeoHouston; and Twenty One Pilots, whose sound is a haphazard mashup of genres, both went shirtless earlier in the day.

Lamar's jazz-inflected hip-hop seemed to shake the entire city. He kicked off with new single "Levitate" from last month's "untitled unmastered." His set was like a hip-hop master class, incorporating rock flourishes, audience participation and a bracing self-confidence.

He whipped through "For Free?" "Institutionalized" and "Swimming Pools (Drank)" with ease. The crowd kept hands up and voices high, particularly during "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe." Lamar is a focused, fearless performer, but he never seems to be pushing too hard.

He pulled a male fan, David, onstage to spit a few bars from "m.A.A.d. city." It was a solid attempt, but Lamar was left wanting more.

"I think I female could come up here right now. But you gotta know the words," he quipped.

Security then escorted a woman named Jasmine onstage, whose bright smile belied her fire on the mic. She impressed Lamar and hyped up an already fired-up crowd.

The festival continues Sunday with Maroon 5, Pitbull and Flo Rida. Main stage acts are livestreamed atncaa.com/marchmadness/musicfest.

joey.guerra@chron.com

twitter.com/joeyguerra
A 3-year-old boy in north Houston was struck by a car and dragged more than 150 feet Saturday before the driver fled, police said. The boy remains hospitalized in critical condition.

Kese Smith, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department, said a male driver was heading eastbound in the 1100 block of Charnwood at 11:35 a.m. when his red sedan hit the child who was standing in the street. Smith said surveillance video of the car involved in the incident showed the vehicle appears to have a yellow ribbon on the back of it.
A Houston psychiatrist convicted of participating in a scheme that cheated Medicare out of nearly $160 million in unnecessary treatment for mental illness has been sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.

Dr. Sharon Iglehart, 58, a former attending psychiatrist at Riverside General Hospital in Houston, had pleaded guilty to charges of health care fraud and making false statements.

Iglehart was also ordered to pay $6.4 million in restitution by U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal during sentencing Friday.

Iglehart was convicted along with 12 others for their parts in a scheme that fraudulently billed Medicare frkom 2006 to for a psychiatric treatment called partial hospitalization program, which treats severe mental illness, according to the Department of Justice.

The patients never received the treatment, according to federal officials.

Earnest Gibson III, the former president of Riverside, was sentenced to 45 years in the scheme. His son, Earnest Gibson IV, was sentenced to 20 years. The hospital's assistant administrator, Mohammad Khan, received a 40-years sentence, and Regina Askew, an auditor, was sentenced to 12 years.

Robert Crane, who has been convicted as a patient recruiter in 2014, has not yet been sentenced.

"The amounts are so very large and they are more vividly presented when the fraud goes on for a very long time," U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal said when sentencing Askew and both Gibsons last June. "On the other hand, there is a reason for those policy choices. ... To use [federal insurance billing] as a way to achieve personal ends - whether they are wealth, security ... is a great offense."

Evidence presented in the seven-day trial showed that Iglehart also billed Medicare personally for individual psychotherapy and other treatment that was never provided to Riverside patients, according to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney's office. She also falsified medical records to make it appear that patients received psychiatric treatment when they did not, according to the statement.

Iglehart had been reprimanded by the Texas Medical Board in 2009 for "recreating medical records for psychiatric patients significantly later than the time she had provided examination, diagnosis and treatment to the patients," according to the agency's website. In 2011, the TMB cleared that disciplinary status.

Operating in the historic Third Ward and known as Houston Negro Hospital until 1961, Riverside General Hospital began as the city's first hospital for black patients and was one of the state's largest providers for treatment for substance abuse and mental illness. Since the removal of Gibson and the implementation of new leadership, the hospital has lost federal funding.
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.
Why has Donald Trumps cult-of-personality candidacywhich so many professionals and pundits at first dismissed as a branding exercisebecome a fever of sorts? Why has he been able to exploit the failings and foibles of both Barack Obama and of the Republican Party leadership? Why, asks Obama, has Trump received $2 billion in free coverage from the presidents acolytes in the media?

These questions have answers. Consider first the sharp decline in economic growth in the era of globalization. From the post-World War II years to 2000, United States GDP grew at a hearty 3.6 percent per year, on average. Since then, it has averaged 2 percent per year. Worse yet, since 2000, wages have declined while corporate profits remain robust. Wages for men have been flat since 1975.

Not surprisingly, popular discontent with government has grown. According to a recent McClatchy poll, 71 percent of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. In four of the last five national electionsfrom 2006 through 2014the presidents party in Congress has been clobbered. Only in 2012 was the pattern broken, and in that year, Obama won reelection with fewer votes than he got four years earlierthe first president to pull off that dubious feat. We have not seen such sustained dissatisfaction, explains electoral analyst Jay Cost, since public opinion polling began. In fact, wed have to travel back to the 1890s to discover so prolonged a bout of electoral distemper. A quarter-century after the Soviet Union crumbled under the crush of U.S. power and an increasingly high-tech and international economy, politically correct America is suffering from global competition that has helped produce serious fractures. Americas bicoastal elites thrive, while the middle class labors under stagnating or declining incomes.

The controversial bailouts that followed the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 only expanded under President Obama, the most divisive president since Richard Nixon. Obama poses as a champion of economic justice, even as the country suffers from the lowest percentage of people employed in 40 years. The president bemoans growing inequality while campaigning regularly among Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires. When Obama railed against inequality at the home of the aptly named Rich Richman, he should have been ridiculed; instead, he was treated with kid gloves by an adoring press anxious to join him on the right side of history.

In this context, liberal complaints that the mainstream media have given Trump extensive free coverage dont add up to much. In truth, there has been no such thing as a mainstream press since 2008, when, in a manifestation of the countrys political polarization, much of the media enlisted in the Obama campaign. The presidents of CBS and NBC have siblings on Obamas national security staff who helped orchestrate the catastrophe at Benghazi. Key members of the White House staff are married to prominent national reporters for ABC and CNN. The morning news at CNN is anchored by Chris Cuomo, son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and brother of current New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has considered a presidential run. George Stephanopoulos, the anchor for ABCs Sunday morning show, is a former senior advisor to President Clinton and maintains a connection to the Clinton Foundation.

The winners in Obamas America, where the stock market has doubled even as wages have stagnated, have been the big guysbig business, big labor, big government. Unelected bureaucrats have never had it so good. The Affordable Care Act, for instance, created 159 new boards, commissions, or programs. Elected officials more and more resemble these job-for-life bureaucrats, likelier to die in office than to be fired (or voted out) for cause. In 2014, 95 percent of sitting members of the House of Representatives won reelection, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; most of those who left went to work as lobbyists or political operatives. Washington, D.C. recently passed Silicon Valley as the richest region in the U.S.: seven of the nations ten wealthiest counties are in the D.C metro area. Not incidentally, Washington now has the highest rate of fine-wine consumption in the United States.

The federal governments reach has become so vast that it suffocates informed debate and political accountability. No one in the Obama administration has been held accountableas Richard Nixons operatives werefor using the IRS as a mechanism to punish dissenters. Nor have the administrators at the Veterans Administration been held to account for their criminal conduct in running the VA in Arizona. GSA bureaucrats held a lavish conference in Las Vegas, complete with clowns and psychics. They have not only gone unscathed; theyve also been rewarded with bonuses.

Elites in both parties had little to say about the almost 200 illegal immigrants with convictions for homicide, 426 with sexual-assault convictions, and 16,000 with drunk-driving convictions, who, instead of being deported, have been released into American communities. Altogether, over the last seven years, the Obama administration has let 104,000 people who by law should have been deported remain on American soil. The Republican congressional leadership dueled with Obama over immigration reform, to scant effect. Unable to come to an agreement with the opposition, Obama invoked executive privilege, bypassing the Constitution and Congress in an effort to legalize 5 million illegal immigrantsthat is, future Democratic voters.

In his presidential announcement speech last June, Trump seized on the issue of illegal-immigrant crime, especially from Mexican illegals:

When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre not sending you. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what were getting. And it only makes common sense. . . . Theyre sending us not the right people.

Republican presidential candidates such as former Texas governor Rick Perry and Florida senator Marco Rubio excoriated Trump for his intemperate comments. But the New York real-estate developer had separated himself from conventional politicians, who either spoke sotto voce or not at all about illegal immigration. Trump, who grew up in a privileged family, played outer-borough tough guy. His political version of Andrew Dice Clay tapped into authentic anger from working-class voters, white and black, whose children found themselves in failing schools where a quarter of the kids couldnt speak English.

Two weeks after Trump announced his presidential run, just 15 percent of Republicans supported him for president in a YouGov poll. But then Trumps anti-illegal immigrant warnings were given ugly embodiment. On July 5, 2015, 32-year-old Kate Steinle, posing with her father for a photograph on a San Francisco pier, was struck dead by a bullet. Her devastated family discovered that the man who fired the fatal shot was Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico convicted of seven previous felonies and five times ordered deported from the United Statesbut who had cleverly taken refuge among the bien pensants of San Francisco, a sanctuary city that refused to cooperate with federal immigration officials. President Obama stayed resolutely silent on the Steinle killing and San Franciscos nullification of federal law. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had nothing to say about the murder. She did, however, move a fundraiser scheduled at the home of the Steinle family lawyer to a new location.

By contrast, Trump furiously denounced the flouting of federal law that had resulted in Steinles death. The shooting helped send his poll numbers soaring. By the third week in July, Trumps support had almost doubled, to 28 percent.

In fall 2015, a few months away from the Iowa caucuses, Trumps momentum seemed to be stalling. Ben Carson was nipping at his heels. Trump was the lead political story on only three of the 50 days before the mid-November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks that killed 130 people.

In the wake of those attacks, though, Trump moved from 28 percent in the polls to 35 percent, helped again by Obamas ideological tomfoolery. Reacting to worldwide concern about the ISIS threat, Obama was insouciant, insisting, evidence to the contrary, that his ISIL strategy was working. When Obama did make it to Paris a few weeks later for the G-20 summit, he argued that fighting climate change was just as important as undermining ISIS.

Two weeks after the Paris massacres, Trumps candidacy got more fuel from the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, which killed 14 people and wounded 24. It was the bloodiest attack on U.S. soil since 2009, when psychiatrist Major Nidal Hassan had, after numerous warningsand an inaction born of political correctnesskilled 13 soldiers and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in Texas. The families of Hassans victims suffered twicefirst when they lost their loved ones, and again when Obama designated Hassans jihad workplace violence. The administration declined to call Hassans Koran-inspired killings terrorism, because to do so would be unfair to the victims. Try to follow the reasoning on that one.

After San Bernardino, Obama resorted to more euphemisms. While news reports referred to the Islamist ties of the two terrorists, one of whom was a recent immigrant to the U.S., Obama spoke of two individuals who had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam. That raised the question of how Obama felt competent to judge what was and wasnt legitimately Islamic. Worse, his strongest concerns were voiced not about the danger of future jihadi attacks on American soil, but rather the Islamaphobia he feared boiling up in the American population. There is almost no evidence of it: Jews are far more likely to be the victims of hate crimes than Muslims. Obamas talk of Islamophobia was a none-too-subtle reference to white voters drawn to Donald Trump. Attorney general Loretta Lynch, keeping the First Amendment at arms length, suggested that the Justice Department might prosecute people for criticizing Islam.

Americans worry that Obama doesnt understand the jihadist threat, in part because he keeps saying that it isnt much of a threat. He said that the Islamic Statewhom he had previously dismissed as a jayvee teamwas contained on the eve of the Paris attacks, and that the U.S. homeland was safe shortly before San Bernardino. He really seems to believe that the problem is guns, more than the jihadists who use them. Obamas effort to assure Americans that ISIS will be destroyed by the same tactics that have only strengthened the group has been buoyed by Trumps successes in the GOP primaries. Trumps candidacy allows Obama to run the clock out on his inept policies in Mesopotamia. Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg reports that a rattled Obama has taken to wandering the halls of the White House, reminding his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. And the president claims, shaman-like, that the arc of historyevidence be damnedwill vindicate his policies.

Still, the presidents half-educated, semi-Marxist pronouncements about history arent as balmy as those of postmodern academic feminists who support his climate arguments. A dashing new study from the University of Oregon is titled Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. The abstract explains that the lead researcher daringly merges feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions. Though this sounds like a parody worthy of Alan Sokal, the authors seem to be in earnest. In a more serious vein, at the suggestion of Democratic senator Sheldon Whiteside of Rhode Island, the Justice Department is considering bringing racketeering charges against scientists who question the Obama administrations pronouncements on the imminent danger of global warming.

In an October 2015 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, 68 percent agreed with the proposition that a big problem this country has is being politically correct. The sentiment was shared broadly across the political spectrumby 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents, and 81 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 72 percent said they felt that way, but so did 61 percent of nonwhites. But it wasnt until the first GOP debate in August 2015 that a major political figurethat is, Donald Trumpdeclaimed PC as a way of ducking a question from moderator Megan Kelly, whom he went on to abuse in his patented boorish style. I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct, Trump said. 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.

Leaving Trumps incoherence aside, James Kalb, writing in Chronicles, was right to argue that political correctness is a genuine threat to any tolerable way of life. . . . domination of public life by p.c. elites has thus made it impossible for ordinary people to assert their complaints publicly in an acceptable way, so their objections can be shrugged off as the outbursts of ignorant bigots who will, in any event, soon become demographically irrelevant. Writing in the Daily Beast, Tom Nichols notes that part of Trumps success is that his fans love his refusal to be politically correct: Trumps staying power . . . is rooted in the fact that his supporters are not fighting for any particular political outcome, they are fighting back against a culture they think is trying to smother them into cowed silence. The American Left is composed of academia, media, and cultural elites, who, for decades, have tried to act as the arbiters of acceptable public debate and shut down any political expression with which they disagree. To understand Trumps seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, Nicols continues, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness. Because liberals couldnt stop attacking conservatives as sexists, racists, and imbeciles, Nichols maintains, they paved the way for a jackass who embodies their worst fears.

Emerging in the midst of a sluggish economy, the Trump phenomenon has been based on bravado, on the candidates willingness to identify the elephant in the roomwhether illegal immigration, the underside of global trade, declining wages, Islamic terrorism, or political correctness. Eventsand Obamahave repeatedly placed pachyderms in the public square, but most politicians either avert their eyes or describe the elephants as diminutive mammals. It may be true, given the candidates stumbles of late, that Trump is finally imploding. But his success up to now, as one supporter puts it, has come from barking when most pols are whispering.

Top Photo: Angelo Merendino/Getty Images
Director Dmitri Tcherniakov Combines Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker' and 'Iolanta' at Paris Opera

Stage director Dmitrii Tchneriakov has a dream. He wants to produce the entire Russian stage repertoire. Since this is Paris and not the New York Met, where every other production has to be one of Wagner's Ring Cycle, he just might be able to get it done. Tchneriakov got off to a good start recently when he combined two of Pyotor Tchaikovsky's pieces, Nutcracker and Iolanta and saw them performed at the Paris Opera at the Palais Garnier March 14th.

The production was conducted by Alain Altinoglu and starred Bulgarian born opera star Sonya Yoncheva. It was Tchneriakov's drive and determination that brought the entire project to realization. According to the website Opera News, "Tcherniakov rightly identified that the worlds of ballet and opera often live side by side without real contact. For this reason he placed the first interval of a long evening before the final scene of Iolanta, in order to forge a single drama with The Nutcracker. To this end the ballet was no longer a spun-sugar fairy tale, but an exploration of the inner life of Marie-here Iolanta's double-for whom the performance of the opera had been given as a birthday present." Both Iolanta and The Nutcracker were meant to be performed together in a single bill but hadn't been done as such since its premiere.

Of note in most of the reviews of the production has been Ms. Yoncheva's performance. BachTrack online noted, "Sonya Yoncheva triumphed as Iolanta. Her lyric soprano has a creamy lower register, yet has clarity and strength at the top. She is also a deeply affecting actress, playing 'blind' totally convincingly. The scene where Vaudemont discovers her blindness - when he asks her to pick a red rose and she plucks a white one - was desperately moving."

 2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

TagsDmitrii Tchneriakov, Pyotor Tchaikovsky, Nutcracker, Iolanta, Russian Opera, Paris
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Under CEO Tim Cook's direction, Apple refused to help the FBI unlock terrorist Syed Farook's iPhone 5c, which was issued to him by his employer, San Bernardino County.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Monday, the Department of Justice asked a U.S. Judge to vacate her ruling against Apple Inc. after an undisclosed third party did what Apple should have done... unlock the iPhone used by terrorist Syed Farook.

SIRI, the voice activated digital assistant on Apple iPhones and iPads did not unlock the phone for the FBI. Several news organization have reported that Cellebrite, an Israeli data extraction firm, is thought to be the third party that showed the FBI how to bypass Apple's 10-attempt limit to guess the phone's security code.

The DOJ had already been winning their court battle against Apple. U.S. Judge Sheri Pym ordered Apple to comply with the government's warrant. The phone was unlocked just days before a court hearing to enforce the ruling.

Had the legal action moved to higher courts, legal precedent favored the government winning. The DOJ brought their case under the All Writs Act, signed into law by President George Washington in 1789. The Act allows the government to compel third parties to assist them in an investigation. Also, under the Fourth Amendment the government's request constitutes reasonable search and seizure.

Apple's CEO Tim Cook claimed that aiding the FBI would require creating an encryption "backdoor" with a master key that hackers all over the world could use, compromising customers privacy.

Cook's claim was false and not fully forthcoming. The FBI in their court request specifically asked Apple to create new code that would be specific and locked only to Farook's phone, not all phones. In fact, Apple's own security procedures call for doing just that. According to former National Security Agency lawyer, Stewart Baker, "Apple's new security architecture requires that any Apple update, including one written for law enforcement, must be uniquely tied to each individual phone that gets it. The phone can't download an update unless it's been digitally signed by Apple and then 'locked' to an individual phone."

Not only does Apple's own security papers call for doing just what the government requested, Apple has already complied in the past with similar All Writs orders and search warrants.

Cook's claim that he's just looking out for his customer's privacy rights fails on two fronts. First, the phone Farook was using was the property of his employer, San Bernardino County, which issued the phone to Farook for his job as a health inspector. It was a government phone, not a personal one. Secondly, some of the 14 people Farook and his wife killed were likely also Apple customers. The terrorists Farook and his wife supported have declared war on the world, which is filled with Apple customers.

This cartoon was produced on an Apple Mac. This commentary was written on a MacBook pro. As an Apple customer I don't object to the government's more than reasonable request. I don't fear that my privacy will be violated. What does bother me, and wish would bother Tim Cook more, is that Apple iPhones have been the preferred phone choice of terrorists and common criminals because their encryption code is so difficult for law enforcement to unlock.

Apple has come under fire before for being a bad corporate citizen. Over the past several years, human rights groups have complained about working conditions at factories in China producing Apple gadgets.

How quick would Cook comply with the FBI's request if Farook and his wife carried out their massacre at Apple's U.S. headquarters, or if terrorists attacked one of Apple's infamous factories that have been dubbed sweatshops?

The government is right when it argues that Apple's refusal to help has more to do with their corporate brand market strategy than it has to do with maintaining customer privacy rights.

Apple's corporate interests do not and should not supersede the public's and nation's interest,safety and security. Apple is a good product designer. But their deplorable factory conditions and deplorable refusal to assist the war on terror and crime shows they need to also become good corporate citizens. Which they haven't been in China and San Bernardino.

The company now find's itself in the same position it put the government in. It's exploring legal action to compel the government to disclose the third party who unlocked the phone and how they did it, even if it was one of President Obama's kids. iKarma!
Lakewood police cruiser 4.JPG

Lakewood police are investigating a man's claim that his date took his checkbook and someone tried to cash an $800 check.

(Patrick Cooley, cleveland.com)

Bad date: A Lakewood resident March 31 told police he met a woman on an online dating site. When they got together, he believes she stole his checkbook. A woman unsuccessfully attempted to cash a check for $800 from the account in Beachwood. The account since then has been closed, according to police.

Credit card fraud, Elmwood Avenue: A resident told police March 31 that someone fraudulently made a $302 purchase on her debit card account from a merchant in Dublin, Ireland. The card holder has since canceled the account.

Shoplifting, Detroit Avenue: Police were called about 12:15 p.m. March 31 to Marc's on a report the store had a suspected shoplifter. The adult male was given a citation for shoplifting and released.

Tax fraud, Lake Avenue: A city resident came to the police department about 1:50 p.m. March 31 to report she was the victim of identity theft. The woman reported when she attempted to file her tax return, she discovered someone else had already filed a return in her name. The woman also contacted the Internal Revenue Service, which is investigating.

Vandalism, Northland Avenue: A resident March 31 reported that someone egged his car overnight. The resident said several other cars also had been egged.

Suspicious situation, Detroit Avenue: Police were called about 10:15 p.m. March 28 about a man and woman climbing the outside of an apartment building to a third-floor balcony. Police spoke to the pair and learned the woman bet her friend he couldn't make it up the outside of the building. Both tried to climb to a third-floor apartment -- the man made it and the woman didn't. Police advised the couple to use the stairs or elevator to reach their apartment from now on.

Criminal damaging, Detroit Avenue: Police were called about 8 p.m. March 27 to a parking lot on Detroit Avenue about an intoxicated woman. A witness told police the woman broke out a window to a home on Nicholson Avenue. Police discovered a broken window at a Nicholson apartment. The woman is charged with criminal damaging.

Vandalism, Homewood Drive: A resident called police March 26 to report his suspicion that a neighbor egged his house overnight. Police spoke with the neighbors.

Criminal damaging, Winchester Avenue: A resident called police about 5:25 p.m. March to report shots fired at his house. Police arriving on the scene didn't find anyone but found BBs lodged in a windowpane.
Akron police

Akron police are investigating after a 49-year-old man was found shot to death inside his home Saturday afternoon.

(File photo)

AKRON, Ohio -- A 49-year-old man was found shot dead inside his home late Saturday morning, police said.

The man's landlord went to his home on the 200 block of Uhler Avenue about 11:30 a.m. to fix the shower, according to a news release. The landlord went inside the home and found the resident lying dead in the living room with a gunshot wound.

The Summit County Medical Examiner's Office will release the victim's name after his family has been notified.

Akron police ask anyone with information about the killing to call the Akron Police Department's Detective Bureau at 330-375-2490; the U.S. Marshals Service at 866-4-WANTED; or the Summit County Crimestoppers at 330-434-COPS. Callers can remain anonymous.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 25-year-old man arrested Friday after a failed smash-and-grab at a West Side Walgreen's has been charged.

City prosecutors on Saturday charged Christian Wynn, of Cleveland, with breaking and entering at the pharmacy at West 130th Street and Bellaire Avenue.

Wynn, a 17-year-old East Cleveland boy and two others crashed a stolen Dodge Caravan into the front doors of the pharmacy about 4:50 a.m. Friday, police said.

The group then tried to steal the store's ATM , but were unsuccessful, police said.

Officers got to the store and saw a group of people running away, police said. Officers followed them and saw two people, later identified as Wynn and the 17-year-old boy, sitting on a bench on Leeila Avenue.

One of them was muddy and sweating, police said.

Police found the van abandoned a few blocks from Walgreens a short time later. It was listed as stolen from Cleveland.

Officers arrested Wynn and the boy after they watched the store's surveillance footage of the smash-and-grab and confirmed that Wynn and the boy matched the description of two of the suspects, police said.

Two other Cleveland pharmacies have been targeted by similar crimes this year. In those cases, the suspects crashed stolen vehicles into stores and stole ATMs.

Nearly 20 smash-and-grabs were reported in 2015 in Greater Cleveland. Investigators identified three men as suspects in a string of crimes, and their cases are moving through the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas.
Flash, boom, gone! Crowds gather to watch the spectacle of old span's collapse BRIDGE from A1

A segment of the old Innerbelt Bridge in the foreground, during demolition in 2014, with the new westbound bridge behind it. An identical eastbound bridge is expected to be completed later this year. (John Kuntz/The Plain Dealer)

(John Kuntz, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Ohio Department of Transportation has unveiled an ambitious $2.1 billion construction program for 2016 involving around 1,100 projects statewide.

There will be 86 total projects active in ODOT's District 12, which covers Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties. A sampling of projects.

This includes 54 projects in Cuyahoga, 10 in Lake and 8 in Geauga, with 14 involving work in multiple counties.

Critics suggest that the program comes at the expense of lower-income people who have fewer transportation options and often rely on public transit.

ODOT is planning on spending $686 million in Cuyahoga County projects, including the new eastbound George V. Voinovich Bridge, the first two sections of Opportunity Corridor and Lakefront West reconstruction.

About $16 million is for Lake County, which includes six resurfacing projects, two bridge projects and one culvert project. Around $27 million of that is in Geauga County, which includes seven resurfacing projects and one culvert project that includes three locations.

Tom Horsman, a member of Clevelanders for Public Transit, said in an email that Ohio "continues to lag behind when it comes to transportation policy. We spend 63 cents per person on public transit in this state, on par with Mississippi and South Dakota, whereas Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania spend over $50 per capita.

"This year ODOT plans to spend $600 million on roads in Cuyahoga County, including widening two highways, even though our county population has been declining for over 30 years," Horsman wrote. "This is happening while the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority needs over $200 million to bring the system to a state of good repair and is looking to raise fares and cut service because the state gives virtually zero dollars to transit."

Gale Fisk, executive director of RTA's Office of Management and Budget, said state budget cuts since 2011 have adversely affected the transit authority, either by reducing its funding or forcing it to spend more.

He cited sharp cuts in the state Local Government Fund, which was set up in the 1930s to share Ohio sales tax money with local governments. Fisk said RTA has never received money from the fund, but cuts to municipalities forced them to cut services such as transportation for the elderly.

"That left the elderly with a lower number of alternatives, and they use the one that still exists, which is RTA's Paratransit service. It has increased our costs, as this is the fastest growing segment we have," Fisk said.

In 2001, Ohio supplemented local transportation funds with $43 million of state funds (to 62 state wide transit authorities), according to Fisk.

"Over the last 15 years that funding has been cut with the biggest cut in 2002. That funding is $7 million now for all 62 transit authorities," he said.

David Bergstein, spokesman for Ted Strickland's Senate campaign, said that "as governor Ted invested in Ohio's cities and local transportation because he believes that strong cities and this kind of urban infrastructure can help set the stage for working people to succeed."

Even in the midst of a global recession, Bergstein said Strickland prioritized urban infrastructure and public transit.

Matt Bruning, ODOT press secretary in Columbus, said the 1,100 statewide projects are nearly a record.

The highest since 2006 was 1,172 in 2010, Strickland's last year as governor.

"This year's project list is an investment of $2.1 billion," Bruning said. "The last two years both saw record-level investments of $2.4 billion each. Since 2011, we've invested $12.5 billion into nearly 6,000 projects to not only preserve Ohio's transportation network, but enhance capacity where needed."

He said that roughly 70 percent of the 1,100 projects include some federal money. The level varies from project to project. Some projects also have local funds included.

Jocelyn Clemings, spokewoman for ODOT District 12 here, said that of the 1,100 projects statewide, only 27 have a value higher than $10 million.
Twinsburg Credit Card Theft Suspects

Twinsburg police say these two people stole a woman's purse from Cracker Barrel on Ohio 82 and then tried to use her credit cards at Target in Macedonia.

(Twinsburg police)

TWINSBURG, Ohio -- Police are asking for the public's help identifying two people who they say stole a woman's purse at Cracker Barrel and tried to use her stolen credit cards at Target.

Police released a photograph taken from surveillance footage captured at a Target in Macedonia showing a man and woman leaving the store just after noon Saturday.

The two drove away from Target in a dark sedan, police said.

The pair stole the woman's purse from the East Aurora Road Cracker Barrel, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call Twinsburg police at 330-425-1234 or send an email to NDuncan@Twinsburg.oh.us.
An initial flurry of orders has put Tesla Motors' new Model 3 sedan off to a fast start, but the company may need to raise more cash if it hopes to deliver the new electric vehicle to customers on time, analysts said.



Tesla's stock price ended up more than three percent on the day Friday, closing above $237 after opening at nearly $248, the highest mark in six months. Tesla stock had soared about 60 percent since hitting a 12-month low in February.



Chief Executive Elon Musk's ambitious plans include launching the Model 3, Tesla's first mass-market car, in late 2017 and boosting the company's annual production tenfold to 500,000 by 2020. On Sunday, the entrepreneur said in a tweet that at least 276,000 signed up to pre-order the vehicle. Musk also stated he was surprised by the surge of interest, and hinted he would be rewarding those who queued up to buy the car.

Musk Tweet

But there are concerns among some investors in Tesla, which has promised to turn profitable this year, even after the hoopla and exuberance surrounding the unveiling late on Thursday of a Model 3 prototype.



Read MoreTraders: Don't believe Tesla's Model 3 hype

On Friday, Musk said the company had taken orders for 198,000 Model 3s in the first 24 hours, a number that steadily climbed above 250,000 by the next day. Yet analysts questioned how long it could take to deliver those cars after the slower-than-expected launch of the company's Model X sport utility vehicle late last year.

Higher-than-expected demand could mean that some customers making early reservations may not take delivery until 2019 or 2020, analysts said.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, a longtime Tesla booster, predicted the Silicon Valley car maker's sales will hit just under 250,000 in 2020, but maintained a bullish $333 price target on the stock.

Barclays analyst Brian Johnson, with a bearish $165 price target, believes the surge of Model 3 reservations - each accompanied by a refundable $1,000 deposit - could reach 300,000 by the end of June.

The higher-than-expected number of orders could "set the stage for an equity offering" after the company's first-quarter results are posted, Johnson said.

Much of any additional cash raised this year will be needed for Tesla's new U.S. factories, as well as for further product development, Johnson said.

While the Model 3 will have a starting price of $35,000, some analysts expect the first cars will sell for an average of $50,000-$60,000. Tesla prices its current models in several "tiers," depending on content and optional features.

RBC analyst Joseph Spak, who has a $180 price target, said strong initial orders for the Model 3 could help Tesla achieve positive free cash flow - a persistent issue for the company as it has struggled to build production capacity at its Fremont plant in California and finish construction of a battery "gigafactory" near Reno, Nevada.

In February, the company said it expected to be cash-flow positive in March.

Tesla still faces a challenge in ramping up production for the Model 3.

Spak said Tesla may not be able to fulfill many of the early orders before 2019: "Demand was never really our concern, it is more about execution and getting production up to meet demand."

Tesla, established in 2003, had sold less than 110,000 vehicles in its history through December, Sanford C. Bernstein analysts noted.

By the time the Model 3 goes into production, it could face stiff competition from several entrants.

One key competitor is General Motors' Chevrolet Bolt EV, which is expected to launch later this year and also will be priced from around $35,000.

Another is BMW's i3, which is slated soon for an extensive makeover, as well as a redesigned version of the Nissan Leaf that's due late next year.

Underscoring investor wariness about Tesla's prospects, financial service Markit says short interest in the company's stock has been around 25 percent of shares outstanding since early in the year. Short interest is a measure of investors who expect shares to fall.

--CNBC.com contributed to this article.
Three takeways from Missouri's game against Vanderbilt

Missouri football took on Vanderbilt for its homecoming game on Saturday. Here's what to know from the game.
At a time when our lives are filled with news of violence, it seems appropriate to talk about peace.

With the attacks in Paris, San Bernardino and Brussels fresh in our memory, with Sandy Hook, Charleston and the Wisconsin Temple shooting not yet faded from our thoughts, and with Ferguson and Chicago police incidents leaving our heads spinning in disbelief, it seems there is no sensibility left in our world.

With violence dominating our lunchtime, dinner table and water cooler conversations, there is no room for talk about nonviolence.

There's a reason that we worry about violence. From 2001 to 2013, some 3,380 deaths occurred from terrorist attacks in the U.S., most of those in the 9/11 attacks. Each year since, about 35 people have died in terrorist attacks in our country. During the same period, some 406,496 people have died from gun violence including homicides, suicides and accidents. Although the homicide rate has held steady overall, suicide by gun has increased significantly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, domestically, there are 1,000 deaths from firearms for every one death from a terrorist attack.

While the greatest toll from gun violence is physical, the toll from terrorist violence is psychological for both adults and children. A mall, church, movie theater, workplace even a classroom no longer feel like safe places.

Set aside heart disease, cancer and AIDS and the great strides we have made to prevent and treat them. It seems we have been able to do little to prevent terrorist violence and gun violence.

I am not convinced that greater surveillance or gun control are solutions for the longer term. Yet neither is revenge, more incarceration or torture.

Violence in response to violence has not worked as a long-term solution. That is because terrorism and guns are not the causes of violence, but rather the symptoms. If we reflect deeply, we realize that the causes of violence are rooted in poverty, lack of opportunity, injustice (perceived or real), inequality (perceived or real) and fundamentalism (religious or political). The terrorist and shooter do violence out of their own fear, insecurity or desire for revenge.

Terrorism and gun violence have no easy solution. Carpet bombing or taking away guns are not solutions, and neither is pacifism or refusing to take action. But we can begin with a meaningful dialogue.

So this Friday and Saturday, five keynote speakers and 25 presenters will gather before a crowd of more than 250 people at the University of Memphis to share their perspectives at the annual Gandhi-King Conference for Nonviolence (gandhikingconference.org).

Speakers include:

Tavis Smiley, who hosts the late-night PBS talk show, has written about how to eradicate poverty.

Erica Chenoweth, a professor who was ranked among the top 100 global thinkers in 2013 by Foreign Policy magazine and who understands terrorism.

Rev. Mike Kinman, who has traveled to Sudan and Ghana and witnessed stark inequality.

Rev. William Johnson, a minister in Ferguson, Missouri, who has lived through the eruption of violence in his city.

Maya Soetoro-Ng, a professor who teaches the history of the peace movement and efforts to bring about social change. She is also a half-sister to President Barack Obama.

For the most part, these leaders contend that violence in retaliation for violence has not worked, and that we must think of a different approach. Although I may not completely agree with these speakers, I know I will learn a lot by listening to them.

As a doctor, I know it is important to clearly delineate the symptoms of an illness from its root cause. Clearly the violence in our society is a public health problem with both physical and psychological impacts, yet its causes are rooted in political and social conflicts.

At the conference, I don't expect to find a solution to our conflicts, but I know I will better understand the root causes. That may be a good start in a world filled with so much violence.

Dr. Manoj Jain is an infectious disease physician in Memphis.
April 3, 2016 - Rev. Jesse Jackson hugs Aurelia Kyles, wife of Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, during a program to celebrate the life and legacy of Rev. Kyles at Monumental Baptist Church. Health issues kept Rev. Kyles from attending the event. (Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal)

SHARE April 3, 2016 - Monumental Baptist Church choir director Jeffrey Matlock leads the Monumental Intergenerational Choir during the Tribute to a Witness program celebrating the legacy of Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles. Rev. Jesse Jackson was the key speaker to the event that Kyles was unable to attend due to health issues. (Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal) April 3, 2016 - A shaft of colorful light pours through a stained class window onto Carol Jackson during the Tribute to a Witness program that honored the legacy of Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles. (Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal)

By Jody Callahan of The Commercial Appeal

The pews were filled at Monumental Baptist Church Sunday afternoon as folks, including Jesse Jackson, gathered for a tribute to civil rights leader Samuel Billy Kyles.

Kyles, who retired in October 2014 after leading Monumental for 55 years, was unable to attend Sunday. Kyles, 81, has been in poor health since before his retirement, and has made few public appearances since then.

But he would've been thrilled, his wife said, that the members of the church he led since 1959 thought so highly of him that they created the Samuel Billy Kyles Witness Award, meant to honor area youth.

"He would've just been full of joy," said his wife, Aurelia, who attended Sunday's event. "This church was his heart."

Born in Shelby, Mississippi, in 1934, Kyles and his family moved to Chicago when he was 6. He came to Memphis in 1959 to become pastor of Monumental, which had just formed. Kyles soon became active in the civil rights struggles facing the city.

In April 1968, Kyles helped bring Dr. Martin Luther King to Memphis on behalf of the striking sanitation workers. Early on the evening of April 4, Kyles was with King at the Lorraine Motel.

They were due at the Kyles home for dinner that night, and Kyles was urging King to leave the motel. As they were standing on the balcony, the fatal shot rang out, striking down King as Kyles stood just a few feet away.

Kyles was also the subject of the short film, "The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306," which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, in Memphis for Monday's 48th anniversary of King's assassination, spoke briefly at Monumental Sunday about his friend Kyles. He recalled his experiences with Kyles, particularly on those last few days before King was killed.

"Today, I went by the house and visited him for a little while," Jackson said. "It was just a joy to spend an hour with him."

For the award, the church "recognized young people who have witnessed injustice to their peers and have not remained silent." Church officials named six teens  Jaliyah Roberts, Gerel Bowen, Kiley Kuykendall, Sharmaine Burton, Gabriel Cooper and Jaelyn Nelson  as finalists for the award. Each finalist received a certificate, tickets to the National Civil Rights Museum for them and their parents and a copy of the Kyles documentary.

The church also chose two other teens as the winners  Lynette Rockett and Cleveland Yates. The winners got the same gifts as the finalists, plus $250.

Yates couldn't attend Sunday, but Rockett pronounced herself proud of the recognition.

"For me to get chosen, to be a part of it, it's an honor," the 15-year-old sophomore at Hamilton High said.

When asked how she planned to spend the $250, Rockett gave an answer that likely would've also made Kyles proud. Her father is a diabetic, and has problems with his feet that require regular medication.

"(I'll) probably help my daddy pay for his medicine," the teen said.
March 14, 2016 - Police tape is seen outside of a unit in the Valley Forge Apartments in Whitehaven where a 15-year-old girl was shot and killed. Vianca Harris was pronounced dead on the scene. She is one of 60 homicide victims so far in 2016.

(Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Jody Callahan of The Commercial Appeal

By at least one measure, the homicide rate in Memphis this year is nearly twice that of Chicago, a town that is generating unwanted notoriety for its soaring number of killings.

Through the end of March in Memphis, 60 people had been killed in the violent first three months of the year. As of the latest U.S. Census estimate, the Memphis population stands at 656,861, for a homicide rate of 9.13 victims per 100,000 population.

Through the same period in Chicago, 151 people had been killed. As of the latest U.S. Census estimate, the Chicago population stands at 2,722,389, for a homicide rate of 5.55 victims per 100,000 population.

If the Memphis numbers continue rising at that rate for the rest of the year, the city would record more than 240 homicides, a tally that would obliterate the record of 213 set in 1993.

By any measure, it's too much death, too much killing. And it's overwhelming those in the city charged with responding to it.

"It's an emotional strain on everybody right now, the whole community," Shelby County Dist. Atty. Gen. Amy Weirich said. "But in terms of strain on the office, sure. That's potentially 60 more cases of the most serious nature. These are the most emotionally draining and difficult cases we handle."

Memphis Police Department Acting Lt. Col. of Investigative Services Caroline Mason said the homicide unit was coping with the influx, aided by solving 46 of the 60 killings.

"Homicide is a tight-knit unit. The morale is high because they are solving these cases," she said. "It's not like it's 60 unknown, or mysteries. Again, the solve rate is 77 percent."

When asked how much extra stress the homicide increase has put on the unit, Mason said, "I wouldn't say anything about extra stress, because this is just what we do."

But a former homicide detective who spent 17 years in the unit before his retirement said he's heard the strain has been tremendous.

"It would be daunting. You have so many coming in, but so few people working on them. You're just not able to give the attention to them that you should be able to. They're coming in too fast, you're spread too thin. A lot of times when they're coming in that fast, you're going to miss stuff," Bill Ashton said, remembering his time in the unit when homicide rates were up. "When they come in that fast, you get frustrated because you don't have enough time to work on them." It's not just Memphis and Chicago, either. Other large American cities are seeing jumps in homicide numbers. A New York Times story last year pointed to such increases in several cities, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, New Orleans, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.

"It's a nationwide trend," Weirich said. "For the latter part of 2015, we were all watching as major cities across the nation noticed their violent crime spiking. We ended 2015 looking good, and then lo and behold (came) Jan. 1, 2016, and all that good work is gone."

Ask those in law enforcement why the city has seen such a rise in killings, you'll get numerous answers. Some point to MPD's decreased complement of officers, but Weirich doesn't think that holds much truth.

"If extra police officers kept homicides down," she said, "that would've been an easy fix many years ago."

Others point to a milder winter than normal, with the thinking that warmer temperatures lead more people out of homes and into the streets. Some have blamed that for the Chicago spike as well.

Ashton called that bunk.

"That's an old wives' tale. They say the temperature's going to be 102 next week so we're going to have a lot of homicides," he said. "I used to watch and see if that was true, but I didn't see it."

In fact, Ashton wonders if today's social climate doesn't make us more prone to homicide. The advent of social media, the dissemination of opinions  and their ability to reach those who disagree  moves everyone just a little bit closer to eruption, Ashton believes.

"All across the country right now, people are meaner this year than they were two years ago. They are a lot quicker on the flashpoint," he said. "That will filter down to the local stuff, too. People watch it on the news, they look at all this social media stuff. An anger builds up in them and it doesn't take as much for them to go off."

Ashton added that he's even had to police himself more closely these days.

"I'm a nice, calm person but sometimes I just want to slap somebody at the stuff I see," he said. "It can take a person like me and turn them into an angry person."

But one thing most everyone can agree on is that, by their very nature, homicides are almost impossible to predict, let alone prevent.

Unlike, say, armed robberies in one part of town, or car thefts in another, homicides aren't usually patterns that can be plotted on a map, with resources then directed to that area. They are often crimes of passion, and just as often, spontaneous. Trying to stop homicides before they happen, the experts say, is like trying to catch rain with a net.

One of the city's most recent killings, and one of the more bewildering, happened on Interstate 240 last Monday night.

According to police, Tarrance Dixon, 21, and Robert Chaney, 21, got into a road-rage incident with Reginald Burke, 22. It was unclear what prompted the incident, but according to police, Dixon opened fire on Burke's 2006 Mustang. Burke died a few hours later, and both Chaney and Dixon have been charged with second-degree murder.

"They was throwing up gang signs to everybody they seen. My son drove off. They followed him and shot him down," Reginald Burke Sr. said. "(The bullet hit him) in the buttocks. It hit a major artery going to his heart. He bled to death."

Burke Sr. was no stranger to the streets, he said, and his arrest history shows charges for aggravated robbery as well as drug and weapons charges.

His son had no record, except for a speeding ticket, something Burke Sr. took particular pride in. His son had a good job at CarMax, he said, and was planning to return to school.

"I tried to raise my son the proper way so he didn't go through what I went through, in the streets," he said. "I mentored my son from the time I was locked up until the time I got out. My son moved in with me and I taught him everything that needed to be taught."

Now, all that work is gone and the father is left to mourn the son.

"Because some fools just rode up to him and shot the man down like it ain't nothing, like it's cool," he said. "It's something that I can't describe to you. It just hurts so bad."
SHARE Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn

By Michael Collins of The Commercial Appeal

WASHINGTON  The patients who showed up at U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais' medical office hoping to score painkillers often resorted to clever tricks to persuade him to prescribe the drugs.

They'd pretend they didn't know how to pronounce the medication they were requesting and would slowly sound out the name one syllable at a time. Or they would complain that the low dosage he suggested wasn't strong enough to kill their pain.

"You might as well prescribe me candy," they would grumble.

"I've heard that a number of times," DesJarlais said.

U.S. Rep. Phil Roe also has seen the devastating effects of prescription drug abuse  not only to adults, but also to children, especially newborn babies.

DesJarlais and Roe bring a distinctive and important perspective to the table as Congress and the White House look for ways to counter the epidemic of prescription drug abuse and heroin addiction.

Not only do the two East Tennessee lawmakers represent a region that has been hit especially hard by the drug scourge, they are also physicians who, though their medical practices, have witnessed firsthand the destructiveness of addiction.

"It's an issue I'm very familiar with, from my years in medicine probably more so than my years in Congress," said DesJarlais, a South Pittsburg Republican who worked as a general practitioner before he was elected to represent Tennessee's Fourth Congressional District.

In 2014 alone, more than 28,000 drug overdose deaths involved some type of opioid, and 1,269 of those were in Tennessee, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state ranks third in the nation for prescription drug abuse and 12th for drug overdoses.

The numbers are so staggering they have managed to do what other issues could not  unite Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan battle to help those addicted.

In March, the U.S. Senate voted 94-1 to pass a bill that will boost state and local programs that provide services for Americans dealing with the abuse of opioid painkillers and heroin addiction. The bill is now before the U.S. House.

Last week, President Barack Obama's administration announced a number of new initiatives to fight the epidemic. They include steps to improve access to mental health and substance abuse treatment, make it easier for doctors to prescribe drugs to treat opioid disorders and make new grants available to law-enforcement officials investigating the distribution of the drugs.

Obama himself traveled to Atlanta last Tuesday for a national summit on drug abuse, where he heard what he called "heartbreaking" stories of addiction and argued for more funding to treat opioid abuse. He is asking for $1.1 billion to expand treatment for addiction, particularly in rural areas.

Obama's appearance at the summit won him kudos from U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican often critical of the White House but whose coal-country congressional district has been devastated by drug abuse.

For their part, DesJarlais and Roe are both members of the House GOP Doctors' Caucus, a small group of lawmakers with medical backgrounds that has been working on the issue of prescription drug abuse.

Roe, a Johnson City Republican who is a retired obstetrician-gynecologist, is the group's co-chairman and has organized meetings between the caucus and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to try to come up with common solutions to dealing with the problem.

"The reality is there's no silver bullet," Roe said, "but there are a lot of individual solutions that can make a difference."

Roe, for example, has written legislation that advocates the establishment of programs to encourage the proper disposal of unwanted or expired medications. The bill is pending before a House subcommittee.

The bipartisan resolve to tackle opioid abuse could be tested in the coming weeks.

The Senate bill passed in March authorizes $570 million in spending on opioid programs  just half of the $1.1 billion Obama has requested. Even that is cause for concern among some conservatives in the House.

"You can't spend what you don't have," DesJarlais said, adding that he's open to allocating the funding as long as money can be saved somewhere else.

DesJarlais said he can't imagine that Congress would pass up the opportunity to do something about opioid addiction, given that it has devastated so many lives.

"It is not a Republican or a Democratic problem," he said.
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By Ron Maxey of The Commercial Appeal

Differences of opinion don't bother Kelly Harrison as long as they're just differences of opinion. When those differences potentially become a matter of life or death, that's another matter.

"If you don't want my money, I don't want to give you my money," Harrison, of Nesbit, wrote on her Facebook page last week. "But what if I or my family needed your service, life or death, and this could stop you from providing it without any worries? No matter how you paint this picture, it's discrimination."

Harrison was referring to Mississippi's "Freedom of Conscience" Act, a measure that would allow government employees or private business operators to cite religious objections as a basis to deny services to gay or lesbian couples. The bill, House Bill 1523, has passed in both legislative chambers and is on its way to Gov. Phil Bryant. The Republican governor said Friday he would look at the bill and decide what to do when it reaches him, but he has said he doesn't think it discriminates and has supported religious liberty bills previously.

Proponents say the bill is simply a way of providing protection against government interference in religious beliefs.

"In the wake of last year's U.S. Supreme Court decision, many Mississippians, including pastors, wanted protection to exercise their religious liberties," Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said in a statement last week after the Senate approved the bill 31-17. He was referring to the high court's decision last summer in Obergefell v. Hodges, guaranteeing the right to same-sex marriage.

"This bill simply protects those individuals from government interference when practicing their religious beliefs," Reeves said.

All three DeSoto County senators  Chris Massey of Nesbit, David Parker of Olive Branch and Kevin Blackwell of Southaven  supported the bill in last week's vote. All are Republicans.

Critics of the measure say it is one of the more sweeping and, therefore, potentially dangerous of such bills proposed in about 10 states as push back from conservatives who feel their rights and beliefs are being compromised. The Mississippi bill is similar to one vetoed by Republican Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal after a strong backlash by companies that viewed the bill as discriminatory.

The bill, critics say, would open the door to everything from doctors declining medical services, to wedding services such as floral and cake preparation being denied, to adoptions being denied to same-sex couples or even to couples suspected of having premarital sex.

"Once again, legislators are modernizing the Jim Crow Era," the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union said when the bill was introduced in February. "It will allow virtually anyone  including religious organizations, employers, businesses, foster care/adoption agencies, housing institutions, health care organizations, clergy, even governmental officials  to discriminate against other people in the name of religious liberty."

Even celebrity Montel Williams has joined the chorus speaking out on the Mississippi bill. Williams issued a statement after last week's Senate vote, saying the bill evokes the memory in not-so-distant history of former Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett declaring "God was the original segregationist."

The Mississippi bill says a circuit clerk could deny a marriage license to a same-sex couple but would have to take "all necessary steps" to ensure a license is not delayed. However, senators did not fully explain what would happen if all employees of a clerk's office cite the same religious objections.

The bill also says the state could not punish businesses that refuse to sell goods or services to same-sex couples or religious groups that refuse to let gay or lesbian people be foster or adoptive parents.

"It says to LGBT individuals in Mississippi what they've heard all their lives, that they're second-class citizens," Rob Hill, Mississippi director of the Human Rights Campaign, said after last week's Senate vote.

Harrison, the Nesbit resident, and her partner, Heather Pouliot Harrison, became the first same-sex couple in DeSoto County to receive a marriage license last July in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. They have since married.

Harrison said last week by text, as a follow-up to her Facebook comments, that she worries about the wider implications of the bill if it becomes law.

"A little conflict never hurt, but conflict such as this bill ... would be harmful not only to the people but to the economy and to any industry or business that might have considered moving or starting a business in Mississippi," Harrison said.

Nathan Tipton of Hernando, whose Minnesota marriage to his same-sex spouse was recognized by Mississippi in the wake of last year's the Supreme Court decision, said he's bothered by House Bill 1523 on several levels.

"What concerns me about this particular bill is that it also exempts government employees from doing their taxpayer-funded jobs," Tipton said. "Apparently, they learned nothing from the Kim Davis debacle in Kentucky."

"This, to me, is beyond insulting not only because, like it or not, I am legally married, but I'm also a citizen who lives, works, shops, dines, goes to church and pays taxes in Mississippi.

"Mississippi is better than this, or at least I hope it is."

The Associated Press contributed to this story.
SHARE Police officers with dogs during a raid in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels, Belgium. After an intense four-month manhunt across Europe and beyond, police on Friday captured Salah Abdeslam, the top fugitive in the Paris attacks in the same Brussels neighborhood where he grew up. Geert Vanden Wijngaert Associated Press

By Eli Lake, Bloomberg View

Imagine if Ted Cruz or Donald Trump proposed a policy to monitor thousands of Muslim citizens even if they had no specific ties to terrorist groups. Then, for good measure, they called for a new law to allow the police to search the homes of suspected terrorists without a warrant and to place terror suspects under house arrest without a court order.

Sounds like a nightmare. One can imagine the indignation. Pundits and politicians of good conscience would intone against the politics of fear. Some on the right would respond that political correctness should not be a barrier to counterterrorism.

But what I have just described is not a Republican sound bite. Rather, it is the current counterterrorism posture of France. Since the attacks in Paris last November, the socialist government of President Francois Hollande has placed his country under a state of emergency.

France's national guard has been deployed to protect sensitive religious sites and other "soft targets." The country of Voltaire, Diderot and Camus is in 2016 the police state that critics warn Cruz or Trump would bring about if given the chance.

Just listen to Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister. Last month, I asked him at a speech at George Washington University how many French citizens his government was now tracking. He responded, "We are monitoring several thousand people, individuals, not all of them are necessarily terrorists."

He went on to explain that his ministry is working with allied intelligence services and universities to spot trends among young people who self-radicalize. He noted a recent case where a high school student in Marseilles with no prior connections to terrorist groups tried to murder a teacher.

"The difficulty of counterterrorism today is less the difficulty of the intelligence we have, but the difficulty of analysis," he said. "When we have a low signal attached to an individual, that person doesn't seem to be involved in terrorism, it doesn't mean that person is not dangerous."

It's not just France. In the U.K., the National Health Service has a program encouraging citizens to report neighbors who may be going down the path of radicalization, to intervene before a person makes the plunge. British social workers cooperate with British police to prevent teenagers from joining the jihad.

One need only look at photographs from the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek to see in practice what Cruz called for when he said police should "patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods" in the U.S.

None of this is to say America should adopt Europe's approach to counterterrorism, or for that matter Cruz's law enforcement strategy for Muslim neighborhoods. After all, how does one define such a neighborhood in a country like America, where people of all faiths feel free to live wherever they choose?

And while Cruz says he was only calling for a return to what he characterized as the New York Police Department's "proactive" intelligence-gathering policy of the 2000s, many counterterrorism experts say such rhetoric fuels suspicion among the vast majority of Muslim-Americans the police and FBI count on to help them with counterterrorism investigations.

Fortunately, the U.S. is different from Europe. The Muslim community here is far more integrated into society than many Muslims in European countries. As Seamus Hughes, a former U.S. National Counterterrorism Center official and deputy director of George Washington University's program on countering extremism, told me, there have not been many examples of Muslim groups sprouting up in the U.S. that openly call for violence.

What's more, Hughes said, among the 84 individuals arrested in connection to the Islamic State, there is no common profile, other than that they tend to be younger men.

"In the United States, communities don't radicalize, individuals do," he said.

But the response in France, Belgium and the U.K. to violent jihad is nonetheless a cautionary tale. When advanced democracies are terrorized, our freedoms are often the first casualty. This is not because of an inordinate fear of terrorism. It is rather because playing defense against a homegrown terror threat presents us with terrible choices.

We debate closing our borders, enhancing state surveillance or accepting the reality that every now and again one of our neighbors will engage in mass murder. And while the U.S. is not Europe, as the San Bernardino shootings showed, our citizens are not immune to the lure of radicalization.

Policing "Muslim neighborhoods" or preventing Muslim immigration will not prevent terrorist attacks. There is no silver bullet. But to dust off a chestnut from the George W. Bush presidency, it's also true that it's better to fight terrorists over there than over here. As Europe is now learning, to delegate the war on terror to the police is not the end of war, but rather the beginning of a police state.
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Nadeem Zafar



Germantown



In an interview on a recent broadcast, a Muslim resident of the Brussels neighborhood from where the terrorists hailed, gave multiple examples of widespread intelligence failure. He indicated that even a father had informed the authorities about the travel of his son to Syria, and the authorities took no notice.

The Turkish authorities lamented the fact that they had informed Brussels after deporting one of the men involved in the Brussels bombings on March 22; they informed Brussels that the deportee was suspected of having terror links  to no avail.

The most useful intelligence protecting the U.S. comes from American Muslims themselves, as they are always on the lookout for isolated misguided people who might have been poisoned by the hate coming from Islamic State and the like. The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged such critical intelligence on multiple occasions.

With the Internet, including methodologies for assembling weapons and bombs found there, the shining seas to the east and west of us are not as protective as they used to be.

Building walls on our borders may not be the solution. We are a trading nation, and we will fail if we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, fearing thugs and terrorists. Our politicians must not light up fires of hatred in the name of being blunt and not wanting to be politically correct.

A dynamic relationship exists between Homeland Security and American Muslims. Disturbing that in the hope of winning elections undermines U.S. interest and plays into the hands of terrorists and murderers that American Muslims uniformly condemn and reject.
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By Valerie Guenst, Special to Viewpoint

All Tennessee children, regardless of their gender identity or medical conditions, should be treated with compassion and equally under the law, which is why I am so disappointed that the Tennessee legislature has resurrected the misguided and harmful bills SB 2387 and HB 2414.

This legislation discriminates against transgender students by stopping them from using the restroom or locker room that corresponds to who they are  that matches their gender  and does nothing to increase safety in our public schools.

Last Tuesday, I accompanied my 17-year-old daughter downtown to testify against this bill. All kinds of worries and thoughts were running through my head. I wanted to be there to support my brave daughter and I also wanted to make sure lawmakers understood the harmful and dangerous consequences of this legislation.

As we were called to the podium I felt compelled to speak even though I had nothing prepared. Standing beside my attractive and feminine daughter, I blurted out our reality.

My daughter is transgender. From age 2 or 3, her friends were girls. Her favorite color was pink. She loved fashion and perfume. By third grade, she expressed to her brother that she needed to be a girl. I remember stopping everything to talk with her. I told her with confidence, "Lots of people feel that way. We can get help for that." However, inside I was crying and unsure if I could deliver on my promise. I made sure she understood that she had value as a person and should never live a lie.

Later that night, I tossed and turned knowing that I couldn't make my child someone she wasn't. As a mother, I could only help her be the best person she could be.

Today, I am so proud of who she is and the courage she has. She's a role model for the transgender community. She lives her life with integrity, kindness and compassion.

I was so proud to stand next to her on Tuesday as she told her story to state lawmakers. We left the committee room feeling that we had made an impact. We were told that the bill was sent to summer study and essentially killed. Our voices were heard  my beautiful daughter's voice was heard.

Unfortunately, that feeling was short lived. The next day we found out the bill would be reconsidered by the House Education Committee via a procedural maneuver by its sponsor. That same day the Senate Education Committee voted in favor of the bill.

This is a mistake and lawmakers should reverse course.

I know that understanding what it is like to be transgender can be hard, especially if you have never met a transgender person.

But refusing to allow transgender students to use the facilities that correspond with their gender identity violates federal anti-discrimination law and puts Tennessee and local school districts at risk for expensive lawsuits.

Treating students differently based on gender identity is harmful and counter to the mission of educational institutions. Tennessee is better than this. On behalf of my family, we urge Tennessee lawmakers to kill this harmful bill.

Valerie Guenst of Nashville is the mother of three children and an adjunct assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University.
Execution Of Palestinian Exposes Israels Military Culture



By Jonathan Cook

03 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Nazareth: It might have been a moment that jolted Israelis to their senses. Instead the video of an Israeli soldier shooting dead a young Palestinian man as he lay wounded and barely able to move has only intensified the tribal war dance of the Israeli public.



Last week, as the soldier was brought before a military court for investigation, hundreds of supporters protested outside. He enjoys vocal support too from half a dozen cabinet ministers, former army generals, rabbis and  according to opinion polls  a significant majority of the Israeli Jewish public.

It is worth reflecting on this generous act of solidarity.



It is hard to dispute the main facts. On March 24 two Palestinians  Abdel Fattah Al Sharif and Ramzi Qasrawi, both aged 21  were shot during an attack on soldiers manning a checkpoint in the occupied city of Hebron in the West Bank.

Ten minutes later, the 19-year-old soldier at the centre of the investigation arrived. Qasrawi was dead and Al Sharif was lying in the road wounded. Other soldiers milled around, close by.



At that point, the soldier  who cannot be named because of a gag order  approached Al Sharif, aimed his gun at the young mans head and pulled the trigger.



All of this was captured on video, as was a trail of blood that leaked from Al Sharifs head seconds later.



This was not a killing in the fog of war; it was a cold-blooded execution. As Amnesty International noted, such an act constitutes a war crime.



And yet, for most Israelis the soldier is the victim of this story. Some 57 per cent oppose an investigation, let alone prosecuting or jailing him. Some 66 per cent describe his behaviour in positive terms, and only 20 per cent think criticism is warranted. Only a tiny 5 per cent believe the killing should be judged murder.



Should this video and the aftermath serve just one purpose, it is to open a window on the rotten state of the Israeli body politic.



The incontestable evidence of Al Sharifs execution is challenging Israeli Jews to maintain the deception, among themselves and to outsiders, that the institutions of their tribal, ethnic state have any abiding commitment to universal values and human rights.



For decades Israel has trumpeted its army as uniquely moral. The claim was always risible. But in an era of phone cameras, hiding the systematic crimes of a belligerent occupying power has proved ever harder.

The past six months has seen a wave of desperate attacks by Palestinians  mostly improvised, using knives and cars  to end the occupation. Some 190 Palestinians have been killed in this period.

A number of the incidents have been captured on film. In a shocking proportion, Palestinians  including children  have been shot dead even when they posed no threat to Israeli soldiers or civilians. In military parlance, this is called confirming the kill.

The latest video is distinctive not only because the evidence is so indisputable but because it exposes Israels wider military culture.



When the soldier took his shot, his comrades registered not the least surprise that their prisoner had just been executed. This looked suspiciously like an event that had played out many times before: standard operating procedure.



Back in December Swedens foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, spoke out against the Israeli armys trigger-happy attitude. She was lacerated by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and barred from entering Israel.



Last week a letter from 10 US senators  written before the Hebron killing  was made public, echoing Wallstroms concerns. Netanyahu was again indignant, saying his soldiers were not murderers.

Wallstrom was concerned that, by refusing to investigate or condemn obvious examples of summary executions, Israeli officials were sending a message to their soldiers and the wider Israeli public that they condoned such acts.

It is therefore hardly surprising that most Israelis feel this soldier is being singled out. His crime was not executing a Palestinian  that happens all the time  but being caught on film doing so. That was nothing more than bad luck.

The Israeli public did not reach this conclusion by accident. They have been schooled in a tribal idea of justice from a young age. Palestinians are not viewed as fully human or deserving of rights.



That attitude has only intensified of late. Politicians from across the ideological spectrum have urged soldiers, police and armed settlers to kill any Palestinian who raises a hand against a Jew. The incitement has grown intense, and no one  from Netanyahu down  has spoken against it.

In fact, quite the reverse. The few Israeli organisations trying to protect Palestinian rights have come under concerted assault.



Breaking the Silence, a group helping Israeli soldiers turn whistle-blowers, was recently accused by the defence minister of treason. Israel is busy bullying and silencing the messengers, whether foreign diplomats or its own soldiers.

Netanyahu has left no doubt where his sympathies lie. Last week his office issued a press release highlighting that he had called the father of the soldier to commiserate with him.



Rabbis too are contributing to the mood music of this war dance.



As supporters feted the Hebron soldier as a hero, one of the countrys two highest religious authorities, Yitzhak Yosef, the Sephardic chief rabbi, ruled that Israels non-Jews  some 2 million Palestinian citizens  should either agree to become servants to Jews or face expulsion to Saudi Arabia.



Two weeks earlier he told soldiers they were under a religious obligation to kill anyone who attacked them.



Note something else revealing about the Hebron soldier. He was serving in the medical corps. Although his job was to save lives, he believed his greater duty  in the case of Palestinians  was to terminate life.

He is no aberration. The other Israeli medics at the scene  including those affiliated with, and supposedly obligated by, the code of the Red Cross  can be seen ignoring al-Sharif, despite his life-threatening wounds, and clustering instead around a lightly injured Israeli soldier. Palestinian and Jewish life are patently not equal to these medics.



Many recent videos tell a similar story. In November an Israeli ambulance drove past 13-year-old Ahmed Manasra, leaving him untreated, as he lay bleeding from a serious head wound after his involvement in a stabbing attack in occupied East Jerusalem.



And then there are Israels legal authorities.



Israeli media reported last week that the justice ministry had failed even to open an investigation into a policeman suspected of executing a Palestinian man following an attack last month near Tel Aviv, even though the moment was caught on camera.

In the case of the Hebron soldier, the military court is already refashioning the soldier as the victim. In imposing a gag order preventing his identification, they have suggested to ordinary Israelis he is equivalent to a rape victim.



Last week the prosecutors showed the pressure was getting to them  as it doubtless will later to the military judge  when they downgraded their accusations from murder to manslaughter. The army officer who presided over the hearing has already effectively freed the soldier, restricting him to his units base.

The Israeli public understand that this soldier is being investigated for appearances sake, only because the evidence is there for all the world to see.



He may not be a victim, but he is a scapegoat. He acted not just on his own initiative but in accordance with values shared by his unit, by the army command, by most Israeli politicians, by many senior rabbis, and by a significant majority of the Israeli public.

We should judge him harshly, but it is time to extend that censure beyond the lone soldier.



Those who over many decades sent him and hundreds of thousands of others to enforce an illegal, belligerent occupation and taught them to view Palestinians as lesser beings are at least as guilty.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israels Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.



A version of this story first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.








Release Human Rights Defender Prabhat Singh

By William Gomes

03 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Mr. Shri Nanredra Damodardas Modi

Prime Minister of India

Prime Ministers Office

Room number 152

South Block

New Delhi

India

Your Excellency,

I am William Nicholas Gomes, Human rights defender and Freelance journalist.

On 26 March 2016, the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) in Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh, denied release on bail for human rights defender Mr Prabhat Singh and referred him to judicial custody in Jagdalpur Central Jail, pending investigation into his case. He has been held in detention since his arrest without warrant on 21 March 2016.

Prabhat Singh is a human rights defender and journalist, reporting for Patrika newspaper on the situation in the tribal region of Bastar. During the past three months, he has been reporting on allegedly false cases brought against tribal villagers in the areas of Chhattisgarh affected by an insurgency by Maoist groups. He has also reported on harassment of and attacks on human rights defenders and journalists in the region. He has been a strong critic of the Chhattisgarh police and has played a key role in highlighting several cases of police brutality and involvement in human rights violations in the Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh. Prabhat Singh has also played a vital role in organising peaceful protests and discussions devoted to the drafting and implementation of a law that would ensure the independence and security of journalists reporting from areas affected by the Maoist conflict in Bastar.

On 26 March 2016, Prabhat Singhs request for bail was denied at a court hearing at the CJM in Jagdalpur. The Court also refused an application by the police for the extension of Prabhat Singhs police custody and ordered the human rights defender to be sent to the Jagdalpur Central Jail, where he will remain in judicial custody at least until the next court session on 13 April 2016. The police will be required to report on the investigations progress at this session, and the Court will then decide on whether to release Prabhat Singh from judicial custody. A medical report was produced before the judge during the hearing, stating that no injuries had been discovered during a prior examination of the human rights defender. Prabhat Singh opposed the report, claiming that he had never been examined by a doctor and had been forced to sign the report. The judge, however, did not take his objections into account.

On 22 March 2016, Prabhat Singh was officially charged by the CJM in Jagdalpur under section 67 (publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form) and 67(A) of the Information Technology Act, as well as section 292 (publication of obscene or scurrilous matter) of the Indian Penal Code, for allegedly posting an obscene message about a senior police officer on the WhatsApp group Bastar News. On the same day, the human rights defender was also charged in three other cases from 2015. In two of these cases, Prabhat Singh was charged under sections 420, 120B and 35 of the Indian Penal Code for alleged fraud linked to his work at the Aadhaar Facilitation Centre in Dantewada. In the third case the human rights defender was accused of taking pictures of female students from Geedam Higher Secondary School without permission, and manhandling an examiner and demanding money from him. The charges were brought under sections 448, 385, 353, 186, 34 of the Indian Penal Code and section 6 of Chhattisgarh Examination Act.

During the court hearing, which was conducted amidst a heavy police presence, the human rights defender denied all the accusations against him, claiming that the cases had been opened in reprisal for his critical reporting, including his revelation of large-scale fraud at the Aadhaar facilitation centre in Geedam and the mentioned school. After the court hearing took place, Prabhat Singh was returned into custody.

On 21 March 2016, a white-coloured Bolero car stopped in front of the office of the Patrika newspaper in Dantewada. Several policemen in plain clothes got out of it and without presenting an arrest warrant, picked Prabhat Singh up and put him in the car. The human rights defender was then taken to the Parpa Police station in Bastar, where he was detained over-night.

While in custody the human rights defender was beaten and sharp objects were used to cut his hands. Police officers also verbally abused and made death threats against him, forcing him to sign several blank pieces of paper, which allegedly were subsequently used to fabricate the medical report.

I strongly condemn the illegal arrest, detention, and ill-treatment of human rights defender and journalist Prabhat Singh, as well as the charges brought against him, which I believe to be solely motivated by his legitimate and peaceful activities in the defence of human rights in the Bastar region.

I am gravely concerned of the deteriorating situation in the Bastar region with numerous human rights defenders, including lawyers, researches and journalists, being illegally arrested and detained, attacked, tortured and forced to leave the area in recent months.

I urge the authorities in India to:

1. Immediately and unconditionally release Prabhat Singh and drop all charges against him, as I believe that he has been targeted solely as a result of his legitimate and peaceful work in the defence of human rights;

2. Carry out an immediate, thorough and impartial investigation into the illegal arrest, detention and subsequent ill-treatment of Prabhat Singh, with a view to publishing the results and bringing those responsible to justice in accordance with international standards and providing a just reparation, compensation, apology to the human rights defender for the psychological and physical sufferings he has undergone while in police custody;

3. Take all necessary measures to guarantee the physical and psychological integrity and security of Prabhat Singh and members of his family;

4. Guarantee in all circumstances that all human rights defenders in India are able to carry out their legitimate human rights activities without fear of reprisals and free of all restrictions.

Sincerely,

William Nicholas Gomes

Human Rights Defender & Freelance Journalist

Twitter @wnicholasgomes

Email: william@williamnicholasgomes.com

www.facebook.com/williamnicholasgomes






Biometric impression taken in Pakistan for SIM card

A recent press meet with foreign correspondents in Delhi is likely to create a major sensation with its "revelation" that that Government of Indias ambitious Digital India project seeks to link mobile SIM cards with the unique identity number (UID) or Aadhaar, which has been "copied" from similar projects in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Talking with newspersons, Gopal Krishna of the well-known advocacy group, Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties (CFCL), said, "Following the footprints of Pakistan, Government of India set up Unique Identification Authority (UIDAI) of India in January 2009 for biometric identification of Indian residents."Giving details, he said, "One of the most successful examples of implementation of biometric identification is Pakistan. Even SIM card for mobile in Pakistan is done based on biometric identification. Pakistani authorities May 16, 2015 arecsaid they have authenticated 75.5 million SIM cards through biometric verification.""In a related development", Krishna said, "On December 16, 2015 Bangladesh introduced mandatory biometric registration for all SIM card owners. With this new system in place, every mobile phone SIM card will be associated with its user's identity as it appears in the national identity card database of the Election Commission.Every SIM card owner will be asked to verify their identity by providing their fingerprint."Pointing towards who all are involved in the Aadhar project in India, Krishna named "transnational companies like Ernst & Young, L1 Identities Solution, Safran and Accenture", adding, "Ironically, these companies are taking the personal sensitive information for seven years and Government is paying for it.""The development comes close on the heels of the Cabinet approving the blueprint for the Digital India project. It will also provide "high-speed internet as a core utility" down to the gram panchayat level and a cradle-to-grave digital identity - unique, lifelong, online and authenticable in the matter of Aadhaar Act", Krishna said.Talking with newspersons, Col Mathew Thomas, a defense scientist, said, Putting the biometric and demographic data of all Armed Forces personnel into a database, which is accessed by foreign private companies, hands over the entire deployment of the Nations Defenses to foreigners."I think that UID is more dangerous than Masood Azhar. He can at best try a terror strike. UID makes our nation subservient to a foreign power. It takes away our freedom.He said, The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance has repeatedly said that UID is a threat to national security. The present National Security Adviser and a cabinet minister are on record on camera saying that UID is a threat to national security. Foreign firms were founded by former CIA and FBI officials and are contractors to US intelligence agents."Dr M Vijayanunni, former Chief Secretary of Government of Kerala said, China, which is the other country in the world comparable to India in terms of size and diversity of population, abandoned its universal ID system midway in the face of insurmountable problems encountered during its implementation, despite the supposed advantage of their totalitarian system in pushing through such a humongous but ill-advised project.He stated, While the USA has the social security number for all residents, it does not intrude into the privacy of the individuals and is so liberally implemented that it does not block or stand in the way of getting any deserved benefits from the state or from availing of any services from other agencies.Dr Usha Ramanathan, a jurist said, Biometrics, unlike passwords or pin numbers, cannot be replaced. What is a person supposed to do if their biometrics get compromised? We know now that fingerprints, for instance, can be faked, that they can be `lost because someone `stole them, that they can become unusable because of a range of reasons, including that their work wears out their fingerprints or that working in the sun affects iris recognition."
The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) recent "submission" through an affidavit to the Supreme Court of India, in a sealed cover, a list of defaulters on loans, worth Rs 500 crore or more, taken from different banks, has created a flutter among pro-transparency activists. The Apex Court had sought this information from the RBI after it took suo motu cognizance of a recent news report about how a majority of the public sector banks had "written off" bad debts to the tune of Rs 1.14 lakh crore between the financial years 2013 and 2015. The data was obtained by making a right to information (RTI) plea.In order to justify its act, the RBI has argued that "public disclosure would dent the 'fiduciary relationship' that it has with the commercial banks and in turn the 'fiduciary relationship' that those banks have with their borrowers."In an email alert, RTI activist Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) says, the RBI's own Master Circular relating to customer service issued in July 2015, suggests that it has contracted its own stance before the Supreme Court.Paragraph #25 of Master Circular, which talks of "Customer Confidentiality Obligations", says, "The bankers' obligation to maintain secrecy arises out of the contractual relationship between the banker and customer, and as such no information should be divulged to third parties except under circumstances which are well defined."At the same time, it has made following exceptions: (i) Where disclosure is under compulsion of law, (ii) Where there is duty to the public to disclose, (iii) Where interest of bank requires disclosure, and (iv) Where the disclosure is made with the express or implied consent of the customer.According to Nayak, "This Master Circular makes it clear that the term 'customer' includes both depositors and borrowers. The characterisation of a bank's relationship with its borrowers -- particularly those who defaulted on repayment of loans as 'contractual' in nature clearly contradicts what it said before the Apex Court."Nayak insists, "RBI needs to explain to its depositors whose hard earned money it lends out, why it is pushing for double standards -- one for internal operations and one when faced with litigation launched in public interest."He continues, "Until the Apex Court directs the public disclosure of the names of defaulters contained in sealed cover handed over to it by RBI, it will not be known how many of them are 'wilful defaulters'."To prove his point, Nayak quotes from another RBI Master Circular, which describes 'wilful default' as "deemed to have occurred" if "the unit has defaulted in meeting its payment/repayment obligations to the lender even when it has the capacity to honour the obligations."The Master Circular adds, "The identification of the wilful default should be made keeping in view the track record of the borrowers and should not be decided on the basis of isolated transactions/incidents. The default to be categorised as wilful must be intentional, deliberate and calculated."Comments Nayak: "There is very little information in public domain about whether these banks checked whether the defaulters were 'wilful defaulters' or not before writing off bad loans or pushing for debt restructuring."He adds, "Ten public sector banks rejected my request for this information in 2014. They cited 'commercial confidence' covered by Section 8(1)(d) of the RTI Act as the reason for refusing access to names of defaulters and the manner in which bad loans were restructured."Nayak says, "Fiduciary relationship is a relationship based on mutual trust and everything that is done in it must be done lawfully. The law does not permit any kind of protection based on trust for illegal or wrongful actions."He adds, "The Government of India must also clarify whether its promise of 'sab ka saath, sab ka vikas' (with all development for all) will include loan defaulters also, particularly wilful defaulters who seem to have a 'dented and painted relationship' with some banks which is now being characterised as 'fiduciary' in nature."
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Elections are in the air, and it is important to pay attention and be thoughtful about the issues and the candidates, but sometimes I just want a bit of escape. Below you will find some fictional books about elections and about politicians and their families. I enjoy the different perspective offered in these novels.

"Taft 2012" was written by Jason Heller. Through a twist of time and space, in this alternate history, William Howard Taft suddenly appears on the White House lawn 99 years after his one-term presidency ended in 1912. A contentious presidential race is in the works, and no one is happy with the candidates. Suddenly Taft is running for president again. The tongue-in-cheek humor of this tall tale appeals to me.

"Vote for Larry," by young adult author Janet Tashjian, continues the story of Josh Swensen, introduced in "The Gospel According to Larry." As a high school student, Josh created a wildly popular online anti-consumerism persona named Larry. In this book, he is back as a college student who believes politicians are not addressing the most important issues. He ultimately begins a campaign for the presidency to get his ideas and concerns on the table. I found some of the ideas here thought provoking.

"Tempting," by romance author Susan Mallery, tells of a young woman who has discovered that the man she always thought was her father wasn't and that her birth father is likely the senior senator from the state of Washington, the one considering a run for president. She wants to meet her father, but resistance arises from those who suspect her motives.

I often recommend "The President's Daughter" by Ellen Emerson White and the three books that continue this series about Meg Powers. When we meet Meg, she is 16, and her mom is senator from Massachusetts, soon to be a candidate for president. Meg and her brothers struggle with the changes the race brings to their family. For Meg, her teenage years just became of great interest to the press and the public. I think White does a great job with a teen's view of politics, and the strain on the familial relationships.

"Elimination," by Ed Gorman, is the latest in the Dev Conrad series. Conrad is a political consultant, and in this mystery, his client is Jessica Bradshaw, a congresswoman locked in a pitched battle for re-election. The race is tight but going fairly well when someone shoots at Bradshaw. Next, her opponent is accusing the campaign of staging the attempt to win sympathy votes. Gorman gives insight to what campaigns can look like from the inside and the toll they take on candidates and their families.

More scary than enjoyable is an older novel that is getting some attention now. Sinclair Lewis' look at how fascism could arise in the U.S. written during the Great Depression, Lewis intended this satirical book as a cautionary tale. "It Can't Happen Here" has been described as the only one of Lewis' later novels to match the power of his early successes.

There is much to read at the library about politics and elections  both tales from real life and novels. In addition, there are many movies, documentaries and television shows on the subject.

Nancy Higgs, manager, North Park Branch Library.
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ITEMS FOR AGENCIES

Ark Crisis Nursery is in need of kids' play clothes and craft items for children. For more information call Samantha at 812-423-9425.

Evansville Psychiatric Children's Center needs socks and underwear (children's sizes 7-16 for boys and girls), toys, games, cards and card games, arts and crafts kits/items and puzzles (50-450 pieces). For more information, call Pam at 812-477-6436, ext. 233.

Goodwill Family Center is seeking food storage containers with lids, hand sanitizer and tissues. Call Loretta at 812-424-4663 for more details.

ITEMS FOR CLIENTS

Churches Embracing Offenders is looking for bus tokens, two gently used computers, gently used casual clothes and shoes (adult male and female all sizes). Call Tammy at 812-422-2226 with any questions.

Echo Housing Corp./Lucas Place Transitional Housing is seeking diapers (all sizes), baby wipes, brooms, mops, dishes, microwaves, curtains, dishwashing tablets and cleaning supplies. For more details call Kendra at 812-483-2417.

YWCA Live Y'ers needs full size personal care items such as deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, bath soap, hand soap, body lotion, combs, brushes, hair goods, toothpaste and toothbrushes. Email cedwards@ywcaevansville.org or call Courtney at 812-422-1191 for specialized student needs.

VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES

Parenting Time Center is seeking volunteers for evenings during the week and on weekends to escort children upon arrival and departure and to monitor cameras. Call Susan at 812-759-1543 for specific details.

Salvation Army needs two volunteers to assist with answering phones, make appointments, stuffing envelopes, data entry and making copies. Volunteers are needed on Thursdays and Fridays 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and noon to 3:30 p.m. Call Gwen or Jessica at 812-425-1375 for more information.

United Way of Southwestern Indiana is in need of volunteers to assist with receptionist pool, health fair representatives and telephone surveyors. Volunteers are also needed for community projects with United Way Partner Agencies. For more information call Birdie at 812-421-7475 or email bharrison@unitedwayswi.org.

Nonlocal callers should call 800-639-9271 or call their local United Way in Posey, Daviess, Perry, Gibson and Pike counties. From Vanderburgh, Warrick and Spencer counties contact United Way of Southwestern Indiana, P.O. Box 18, Evansville, IN, 47701-0018 or by fax at 812-402-2821. This column is compiled by the United Way of Southwestern Indiana.
Photo furnished by Chris Harp Gina Moore joined Joe Boucher in a duet of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and wowed the crowd Saturday night during the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra's "Piano Men." A 2 p.m. show takes place today at the Victory.

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By Kelly Gifford of the Courier and Press

Great music stands the test of time.

It doesn't matter who is performing; everyone will find a way to sing along.

Billy Joel and Elton John are musicians who have mastered that formula, creating music that both touches people's hearts and also makes anyone listening want to sing along with them. The Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra brought the songs of these two piano men to The Victory stage Saturday night  and will again at 2 p.m. Sunday  for a performance that even had orchestra members singing between playing their sections of music.

The concert was led by a four-piece band out of Portland, Maine, that created the show Piano Men. The group, led by Joe Boucher, created the orchestration to go along with songs such as "New York State of Mind," "Rocket Man," Your Song," and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road."

Boucher's piano chops paired with the local orchestra very well and were not at all overpowered by the large sound of the orchestra. The electric guitar, bass and drum set also was enhanced by the orchestra and gave a great grit to the concert.

This wasn't a concert impersonating Billy Joel or Elton John. Boucher, his band and the orchestra held on to the integrity of the musicians' work while also performing the music as though it was their own. Boucher's rangy vocals were definitely influenced by the two musicians, but he still gave the songs his own flair.

Some special performers aided the night's concert. Gina Moore joined Boucher in a duet of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and wowed the entire crowd with her amazing range and showmanship. Another exciting addition was Alfred Savia, music director of the philharmonic, setting down his baton and taking up his clarinet for a solo during "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant."

There were several moments during the concert that gave me the happy shivers. "Your Song" by Elton John, one of my favorite songs of all time, brought me back to hearing it for the first time on my dad's old 8-track player in our garage. Saturday's concert showed that not only can great music stand the test of time, but can also transport us back to moments that have long passed. Great music, performed by great musicians, makes that experience even better.
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By Jessie Higgins of the Courier and Press

Black barbershops across the city Saturday were full of men receiving not just haircuts  but health screenings.

As one of the least likely groups to visit the doctor for health checkups, the Black Barbershop Initiative aims to bring doctors to black men.

"We have men that come in here once a week for a haircut and to meet up with people," said Marcia Lynch, the owner of Lynch House Of Coiffure on Kentucky Avenue. "This is their country club. That's why this health initiative is so important, because we know where the men are at, this brings the doctors to them."

This is Evansville's sixth year participating in the nationwide health initiative. It was brought by Diana Clements-Boyd, the head of Evansville-Vanderburgh Human Relations Commission.

"African American males have some of the worst health outcomes of any cohort," Clements-Boyd said Saturday.

Hypertension, high blood pressure and diabetes are some of the most common ailments for black men, she said. She hopes the screenings will encourage the men to take control of their health.

That's the effect Saturday's screenings had on Evansville resident Charles Johnson. At last year's Black Barbershop Initiative, Johnson learned he had Type 2 diabetes, and ever since he's been working to get the disease under control.

Saturday, as Johnson got his hair cut, he thumbed through a "Men's Health" book on nutrition provided by the initiative.

"I'm trying to see what I can eat," Johnson said, as he looked over photos of various vegetables. "I think I'm going to run right to the store after this and pick up some of this food."

Johnson's reaction is not uncommon among the men, Lynch said.

"They come in here every week and we make them look good," Lynch said with a laugh. "But I don't know if they feel good. We want to make them feel as good as they look."
SHARE Eugene Kraft poses for a picture with his son Michael Kraft before he left to fight in World War II. Michael Kraft, center, poses for a picture with his three younger siblings and their three great aunts. Michael Kraft poses for a Christmas picture with his wife, Marchita and their baby son, Michael, Jr. on the couple's last visit to Evansville before Michael deployed to Vietnam. Michael Eugene Kraft's photo as it appeared in the April 1967 story in the Evansville Courier about his death.

By Jessie Higgins of the Courier and Press

Michael Kraft was 16 when he became the man of his family.

It had been more than a decade since World War II ended  but the war claimed his father's life all the same. Eugene Kraft was likely haunted by his memories of fighting. He didn't talk about it. Instead, he drank. And in the spring of 1959, it killed him.

As the family left his funeral, Michael's mother told him to take care of his crying sister.

"After that, he always did take care of us," said Michael's sister Dee Wayne, now 67. Her voice caught suddenly as she began to cry.

"I'm sorry," she said, between sobs. "I don't talk about him often."

From then on, Michael's three younger siblings leaned on him, almost as a father. He helped them through issues at school, taught them to get along with other children, and always listened to their problems  even after he left home and joined the Army. Until, in early 1967, Michael was deployed quite suddenly to Vietnam. He died there.

Details about his death are scarce. His family knows he was a lieutenant in the Honor Guard at Fort Myer next to the Arlington National Cemetery. The Honor Guard was sent to Vietnam in January 1967. Many of them died.

"He didn't know he'd be going to war," said Michael's mother, June French, who is now 99. "Michael just wanted to be a paratrooper, like his daddy."

In the end, war affected every part of Michael's life. He was born in 1943, while the country was in the throes of the second World War. His father left to fight in the Pacific just after Michael was born, so Eugene missed the first years of his eldest son's life.

The long deployment put several years between Michael and his younger siblings  Michael was 5 when his mother gave birth to her second son. A year later his sister Dee came, then two years after that his youngest brother.

For a time, the family was at peace.

Eugene and June bought an old school house in Vanderburgh County and remodeled it into a home. Eugene did most of the work, but June designed it and as a finishing touch painted the building in pink stucco.

"So we grew up in a pink school house on a hill," Michael's brother Toby said with a laugh.

Michael was an incredibly outgoing and charismatic child. He was the lead in his senior play and an officer in all his classes. He played in the marching band and escorted the homecoming queen. Nearly 60 years later, June's voice still swells with pride when she lists her son's accomplishments.

"He was so popular," she said. "We bought him a convertible that year and he was in his glory."

To his younger siblings, Michael was larger than life  especially after their father died.

"He stepped up and looked after us," Toby said Wednesday.

"Even now  " he stopped suddenly, overcome with emotion. For several minutes, he could not speak, and when he did, his voice was pitched in pain.

"You see, I had polio when I was 1 year old, and I grew up wearing braces on my legs. And he would always tell me, 'Sit up straight. Walk straight.' " Toby paused again to cry. "Not many days go by I don't think of him."

After high school, Michael went to college in Illinois for a year, then dropped out to join the Army. He met his wife while stationed in Fort Benning, Georgia. Marchita was the daughter of one of his instructors there.

The couple had their first son in the winter 1966. That Christmas, Michael brought his wife and new baby home to Evansville to meet the family. It was a short, but fun, visit. No one dreamed it would be the last time they would see Michael alive.

Michael was killed April 8, 1967, less than a month after his 24th birthday.

His wife never remarried. When she died in 2014 she was buried next to Michael at Arlington National Cemetery.

"We always think about how different our lives would be, if ..." Dee's voice trailed off.

"We don't look upon ourselves as special or anything," Michael's sister said. "We're just an American family contributing to our country."
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The Theory:

The Death Eaters (Voldemort's posse) are a clear analogy for the Nazis, and it goes beyond being violent fascists obsessed with racial purity. Many Death Eaters slipped under the radar and continued living their lives unnoticed after the war, the same way some Nazis did. And it's not implausible that we the viewers don't know about every secret Death Eater still running around.

Maybe one spy that we never found out about is Griphook/Flitwick. If he's the same person, then he's clearly a master of disguise -- we see him wear two entirely different sets of fake beards and wigs as Flitwick, so it isn't entirely unthinkable that he might glue a bunch of shit to his face and pretend to be a goblin banker as well. And if that's the case, it would make him perfectly positioned to infiltrate both Hogwarts and Gringotts and perform surveillance for the Death Eaters right out in the open, cunningly disguised as the exact opposite of Voldemort: a short, chubby creature with a big nose.

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Robin Warder recently won a "Best Screenplay Award" for the short film Indefinite Late Fee. Miles DuBonnet is the pseudonym of Jeremy Kaplowitz, a comedian in NYC and the creator of Lizard People of New York.

What do Chuck Norris, Liam Neeson in Taken, and the Dos Equis guy have in common? They're all losers compared to some of the actual badasses from history whom you know nothing about. Come out to the UCB Sunset for another LIVE podcast, April 9 at 7:00 p.m., where Jack O'Brien, Michael Swaim, and more will get together for an epic competition to find out who was the most hardcore tough guy or tough gal unfairly relegated to the footnotes of history. Get your tickets here!

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Psst ... want to give us feedback on the super-secret beta launch of the upcoming Cracked spin-off site, Braindrop? Well, simply follow us behind this curtain. Or, you know, click here: Braindrop.

If you're looking to get more information about fictional characters than you could've ever hoped for, then check out 5 Movies Plots Given Away by the Characters' Names and 6 Movie Characters You Didn't Know Died Horrible Deaths.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out The Dark Secret Behind Star Wars's Goofiest Characters, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

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China's Huawei Technologies on Friday posted its strongest revenue growth since 2008 as China's adoption of fourth-generation (4G) mobile technology and strong smartphone sales worldwide boosted sales for one of the world's largest telecom equipment makers.

The Shenzhen-headquartered vendor said global revenue rose 37 percent to 395 billion yuan (AU$80 billion) in 2015, slightly above its forecast of 390 billion yuan.

Net profit rose 32 percent to 36.9 billion yuan, from 27.9 billion yuan a year earlier, while operating margins dipped to 11.6 percent from 11.9 percent.

Total liabilities stood at 253 billion yuan, versus total assets of 372 billion yuan, the company said.

Huawei's consumer devices business recorded the biggest jump in revenue last year, rising 72.9 percent as the company outperformed domestic peers Lenovo and Xiaomi.

Huawei became the first Chinese handset vendor to ship more than 100 million smartphones in a year in 2015 when a 44 percent jump in its shipments defied a market slowdown.

The company's growth is "a direct result of strategic focus and heavy investment in our core businesses", Guo Ping, one of Huawei's CEOs who hold the post on a rotating basis, wrote in a statement.

Revenue in Huawei's carrier business, which competes with Sweden's Ericsson for the top spot globally for telecommunication equipment, increased 21.4 percent in 2015 on strong demand for 4G telecommunication equipment.

In Huawei's enterprise division, which builds private networks for companies and organisations, revenue rose 43.8 percent.

The company said it spent 15 percent of its revenue last year on research and development, above its guidance of 10 percent.

Huawei had targeted overall revenue of AU$91 billion by 2018, which translates to roughly 10 percent annual growth.

(Reporting by Yimou Lee and Paul Carsten; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Savio D'Souza)
A data leak being called the largest-ever has shed light on a secretive Panama-based financial company and how it helps the world's rich and famous hide their money in offshore tax havens.

The 'Panama Papers' are a huge leak of more than 11 million documents relating to law firm Mossack Fonseca, based in the Central American nation.

The leak includes details on more than 200,000 companies, foundations and trusts, according to the ABC.

The Panama Papers come in at 2.2TB of data, far larger than previous scandals, such as Wikileaks and the 2013 'Firepower' scandal.

The leak contains emails, contracts, bank records, property deeds, passport copies and other sensitive information dating from 1977 to as recently as December 2015, the ABC is reporting.

The revelations come amid increased global attention on the process of offshoring to minimise and avoid tax. In Australia, a 2015 Senate committee probed major technology companies, with the local heads of Microsoft, Google and Apple called before the committee to face questions over their companies' tax structures.

The Australian Taxation Office is investigating hundreds of high net wealth Australian clients of Mossack Fonseca, having "identified over 800 individual [Australian] taxpayers and we have now linked over 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider located in Hong Kong", according to an ATO statement published by the Australian Financial Review.

Panama Papers

Little-known but powerful law firm Mossack Fonseca is said to be one of the world's top creators of shell companies, which can be legally used to hide the ownership of assets. It is worlds fourth biggest provider of offshore services, according to the Guardian.

A combined team of 370 international journalists has spent the past year combing through the leak, with Australia's ABC set to reveals its findings on the Four Corners program tonight.

The files were initially leaked to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, which shared the documents with The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), with the papers then distributed and analysed by 107 media organisations across 78 countries, including Australia's ABC.

According to the ICIJ: "The leaked data covers nearly 40 years, from the late 1970s through the end of 2015. It allows a never-before-seen view inside the offshore world  providing a day-to-day, decade-by-decade look at how dark money flows through the global financial system, breeding crime and stripping national treasuries of tax revenues."

The initial focus of the leaks has been on world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and his powerful Russian cohorts, offshore companies linked to the family of China's top leader, Xi Jinping, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

Iceland's Prime Minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, is expected to face calls for an early election, essentially a vote of no confidence, after the Panama Papers revealed he had hiding millions of dollars of investments behind a secretive offshore company, the Guardian is reporting.

According to the ABC, 29 billionaires featured in Forbes Magazine's list of the world's 500 richest people are also identified in the leaks.

In a statement published on the BBC , Mossack Fonseca said it has always complied with international protocols to ensure the companies they incorporate are not used for tax evasion, money-laundering, terrorist finance or other illicit purposes.

The company said it conducts thorough due diligence and regrets any misuse of its services.

"For 40 years Mossack Fonseca has operated beyond reproach in our home country and in other jurisdictions where we have operations. Our firm has never been accused or charged in connection with criminal wrongdoing."
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In Bridgeport, Connecticuts largest city, police fired stun guns 21 times in 2015, mostly at Hispanic residents.

In Danbury, police fired an electronic stun gun at a 14-year-old African-American boy.

And up in Hartford police stunned 46 people  including a 14-year-old Hispanic boy  the most uses of the devices in the state.

Yet, in Stamford  the states third largest city  police only used stun guns on two black suspects and one Hispanic.

A Hearst Connecticut Media analysis of hundreds of reports of stun gun deployments during 2015 found that 57 percent of suspects hit with an electronic dart were either black or Hispanic.

Last year marked the first time police departments were required to report each use to the state.

The data also shows police warned whites far more often than blacks and Hispanics before firing. The warning was carried out by pointing a harmless red targeting laser beam  visible as a brilliant red dot on clothing  to induce compliance.

Activists were quick to seize on the data as evidence police are using the stun weapons too often  and unfairly targeting minorities.

We have to get a grip on how Tasers (a brand of stun gun commonly used by police) are being used in Connecticut, said Scott Esdaile, president of the Connecticut NAACP. Its out of control. Tasers were sold as an alternative to lethal force. Its lazy policing.

Police departments defended the stun-gun use, saying deployments are closely reviewed and controlled.

Stamfords Assistant Chief over patrol Thomas Wuennemann, said it was difficult to compare Stamford with the other big cities such as Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford, because the crime rate is so much lower.

But he said since 2006 when the department began using them, they have gained a certain amount of respect in the community.

After a while, they know the reputation of the Taser out on the street. People dont want to be tasered. They have seen it happen before, he said. Possibly, because Stamford has been using them for 10 years, their power has become known and people shy away from forcing police officers to use them.

When we first got them, we used them a lot more out on the street, he said.

Now, all the 120 or so Stamford officers who carry the Tasers have to do is unholster them or go one step further and red dot someone who is not obeying officer commands, and compliance begins to occur relatively quickly, Wuennemann said.

We dont choose to go out every day and use force. I think people are obeying verbal commands, he said.

Training Division commander Capt. William Mullin agreed that when it comes down to it, people want to avoid being shot by a stun gun.

It is another tool and hopefully you dont have to deploy them. The officers are showing a lot of restraint, he said. In Stamford, officers have to go through an eight-hour training class and take another one-hour class to be re-certified to use them every year.

He said the extensive training that well over 100 of the departments 280 officers have received in crisis intervention may be helping to defuse situations before they escalate.

Thousands of volts

The taser reports analyzed by Hearst were mandated in 2014 after state lawmakers, concerned over an increasing use of stun guns and mounting deaths, passed a law requiring police to fill out a one-page form each time a taser is deployed as a warning, fired directly at someone or applied by touching a person with a stun gun.

Tasers emit thousands of volts of electricity, enough to shock or stun a person into temporary paralysis or submission. Taser use is not tracked nationally, although there is ample evidence suggesting minorities are targeted more often than whites.

Hearst found Connecticut police fired their stun guns 403 times during 2015. Whites were tased 42 percent of the time, compared to 34 percent for blacks and 22 percent for Hispanics. Of the total incidents, 57 percent involved black or Hispanic suspects while 43 percent involved white suspects.

Connecticut has 3.6 million people, of which 81 percent are white, 15 percent Hispanic and 11 percent black, according to census numbers.

The taser reports also show that a laser warning was deployed 165 times, with whites receiving the harmless warning 64 percent of the time, compared to 43 percent for Hispanics and 22 percent for blacks.

Also, two people died in 2015 after being stunned by a taser: a 41 year old white man in Branford and a 26 year old white man in Hartford, the reports show.

In all, 18 suspects since 2005 have died in Connecticut after being tased, including an Ansonia man who died earlier this year after being shocked for resisting rescue efforts while trapped inside a car following an I-95 accident.

David McGuire, legislation and policy director for the Connecticut ACLU, said the fact that whites were warned more often than blacks and Hispanics is troublesome.

Thats concerning, McGuire said. The trend is troubling. White people are getting the benefit of a warning. That is a pattern I didnt think would be in the data. Warnings can deescalate the situation. Some of this may be unconscious bias.

Dennis Kenney, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said the racial breakdown of Connecticuts taser use is not surprising given the states mix of wealthy white suburban towns and poor urban centers with large minority populations and high crime rates, such as Bridgeport and Hartford.

My guess is they dont deploy [tasers] in Greenwich an awful lot, Kenney said. In Bridgeport, where there are higher levels of crime, and you have a higher minority population, its more expected.

Greenwich fired tasers twice last year at two white suspects. The towns population of 62,141 is 77 percent white, 11 percent Hispanic and one percent black, according to 2014 census projections.

Stunning kids

In March 2015, a Danbury officer confronted a 14 year old, six foot tall, 182 pound black teenager at an educational facility in the city. The boy was threatening, hostile, non-complainant and combative, had previously been hostile to police and was emotionally disturbed, according to the incident report.

The Danbury officer fired his taser twice, striking the boy with an electronic darts. A taser was also twice applied directly to the boys body for additional, although lower voltage shock, which is known as a drive stun, according to the incident report.

The boy, who is not named, suffered puncture wounds from the darts and abrasions.

Lt. Christian Carroccio, a spokesman for Danbury police, said there are no age restrictions on who can be tased.

In regards to the 14 year old, both uses of force were found to be justified, Carroccio said, adding the department reviews all taser deployments.

It is the policy of the department that all officers will only use the level of force necessary to accomplish lawful objectives, Carroccio said. The force must be reasonable under the circumstances known to the officer at the time the force was used. The department examines all uses of force using this standard.

Carroccio added The department is aware of the greater potential for injury when deploying a taser against persons of small stature, irrespective of age, or those who the officer has reason to believe are pregnant, equipped with a pacemaker, infirm or in obvious ill health.

Hartford Deputy Police Chief Brian Foley, whose department also stunned a 14 year old, said officers dont always know the age of the person they are trying to take into custody.

We agree with avoiding tasing kids, Foley said. But when an officer is in a high stress situation its difficult to determine age. They look to avoid it if possible. We do not want to tase a youth.

McGuire said laws passed by the General Assembly over the last few years instructed police to avoid tasing children, the elderly and visibly pregnant women.

We have seen reports of young people being tased at schools, McGuire said. But we only see what the media reports. Thats the power of this reporting. We intend to go deep into the data.

The ACLU and the NAACP are both pushing lawmakers to require cameras on taser guns so incidents can be recorded for future review.

Taser capitol

Hartford officers stunned 46 people during 2015, by far the most in Connecticut, and one died after being tased. The Connecticut State police fired a stun gun at 32 people and Norwalk police stunned 23 suspects.

Bridgeport and East Hartford each stunned 21 suspects, the reports show.

Foley said Hartford, like Bridgeport, has high crime rates and a large minority population, and said those factors drive police interactions. We are one of the largest departments and we are in a large minority city. I would expect the numbers to be what they are, he said.

Asked about the man who died last year after being tased by Hartford police, Foley said a low voltage direct stun was used on the individual, who was than sedated by medical personnel. Foley said the man was emotionally disturbed but declined further comment because the case remains under investigation.

Our goal is to have all uses on video for the protection of our community and our officers, Foley said, referring body cameras on officers and cameras on stun guns. We will not buy another taser until there are cameras.

Foley took issue with the reports, calling them an incomplete record, because they do provide information about how many tasers a department issues, how many times the firing cartridge is replaced or information about the neighborhood in which they were deployed.

In Norwalk, officers fired tasers 23 times, and 39 percent of the suspects were black, 33 percent white and 30 percent Hispanic. Norwalks population of 87,214 people is 56 percent white, 21 percent Hispanic and 15 percent black.

Terry Blake, a Norwalk police spokesman, said his officers were justified in firing tasers. The tasers are never deployed unless a suspect is aggressive, resisting or fighting with the officers, he said.

Held their fire

By comparison, Stamford police hardly used their tasers, firing three times, at two black suspects and one Hispanic. Stamfords population of 125,301 people is 50 percent white, 27 percent Hispanic and 13 percent black.

I was surprised when I saw the numbers, said Stamford Police Chief Tom Wuennemann, adding at first glance he thought the statistics were too low.

I think its because we have had [tasers] longer, Wuennemann said, explaining the department first began using stun guns in 2006. Tasers get a reputation out on the street. Our usage has dropped dramatically. Once an individual sees someone tased, or knows about someone who was, they want no part of it.

Asked if Stamfords taser policy is different than in Bridgeport or Hartford, Wuennemann said its the same for all departments.

Everyone is trained the same way, Wuennemann said. Bridgeport is more violent. Their murders are always in the 20s; we have two or three a year. But its the individual who decides to comply or not.

State Police spokeswoman Kelly Grant, whose department tased 32 mostly white suspects last year, said the state police numbers show restraint. State police cover 81 towns and 7,000 miles of roadways.

State police issued tasers to over 750 troopers and just 32 discharged their taser last year, Grant said. No other law enforcement agency policed such a large population and used the taser so infrequently.

Overreaction

Kenney said its hard to justify tasing teenagers and elderly people.

Generally, most departments are constrained from deploying against kids and the elderly, Kenney said. Its difficult to imagine an 83 year old man is resisting to the point its the only resource. That says something about the police you are recruiting.

The real question is whether the level of force is justified, Kenney said. The issue is wheen there is disproportionate representation. Tasers are designed to stop an incident from escalating to deadly force. The idea is to tase rather than use lethal force. Its not to overcome resistance and its not for compliance. Its to prevent the escalation of force.

Kenney added officers get in trouble when using [tasers] as a compliance tool. Police like them because when they are fearful its a tool they can rely on and dont have to worry about a person overpowering them.

The taser reports most frequently cite failure to comply with an officers instructions as the reason a person was stunned. Other reasons cited include threatening, hostility, intoxication, previous hostility to officers and emotional disturbance.

john.nickerson@scni.com
Somerset jury finds two of three defendants guilty of murder

Now in its fifth day of testimony and seventh day overall, the double murder trial taking place in Somerset County is now over. The jury decided.
Workers are reporting layoffs at IBM locations across the U.S.  including an estimated 20 to 30 positions being lost at the Boulder facility.

Lee Conrad, a former IBM employee who now runs a watchdog organization, said workers from the Boulder campus and beyond have been emailing him all week to report their impending terminations.

Job cuts did happen at Boulder, Conrad said via email to the Daily Camera. It impacted different business units, from software group, global business services to work groups like the managed storage team to hardware planners.

An employee of Boulders IBM spoke to the Daily Camera on condition of anonymity, confirming that she and others were affected by the layoffs that began Wednesday. The worker will receive one months severance after more than three decades with the company.

That place is emptied out because of all the work being sent off shore, she said. Theres not many U.S. workers left. Im kind of like the token U.S. employee in my department.

Conrad said about 20 to 30 local employees were affected by resource action (RA)  IBM lingo for layoffs.

A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification had not been filed with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment as of press time Friday. A WARN notice would not be triggered unless 50 employees at the site were affected.

The deposed worker also believes age played a factor in her dismissal.

Im the oldest person in my group  everybody is a younger, foreign worker, she said. Theres a lot of discrimination that goes on at IBM.

More than a dozen anonymous posters on TheLayoff.com reported losing their jobs  many after decades with the company. Several blamed the loss of jobs on the H1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers, usually in the tech sector.

Clint Roswell, a spokesperson for IBM, gave the following statement when reached by phone Friday: IBM is aggressively transforming its business to lead in a new era of cognitive and cloud computing. This includes remixing skills to meet client requirements. To this end, IBM hired more than 70,000 professionals in 2015, many in these key skilled areas, and currently has more than 25,000 open positions.

Roswell did not confirm or deny that layoffs had happened at the Boulder facility. Business Insider reported Wedesday that IBM confirmed it is continuously shedding some workers while hiring others.

Business Insider also reported that the company cut as many jobs as it added last year. IBM reported a global work force of 377,757 in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, down just .7 percent from 2014. Most cuts happened from 2013 to 2014, when the company shed 12 percent of its workforce.

An undisclosed number of Boulder jobs were cut in early 2015 as part of company wide reductions. The most recent estimate of IBM employees in Boulder County was 2,800 at the beginning of last year.

Market information officials with the state department of labor believe that figure to be accurate, but based on communications with employees, Conrad believes the actual number is much lower.

The Boulder population has shrunk like every other IBM site in the U.S., Conrad said.

The anonymous employee said half of the 2,800 figure would be a very generous number.

This plant is emptied out  its only contractors left, she said. Its really a sad situation.

For most of the past three years, IBM has struggled to adjust to cloud computing, selling off or shuttering businesses amid missed earnings targets and declining revenue.

Shares of IBM closed at $137.77 on Friday, down just slightly from the previous close of $137.80.

Clif Harald, executive director of the Boulder Economic Council, said job prospects are better here than almost anywhere else in the country.

Our tech sector is very strong, Harald said. If there are layoffs, hopefully theyll be rapidly absorbed.

But the soon-to-be-unemployed former IBMer isnt as confident.

I am concerned, she said. Im not sure what Ill find.

To be honest, I think Ive had enough of working for a large corporation. Im ready to do something a little different.

Shay Castle: 303-473-1626, castles@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/shayshinecastle
Leesburg Electric: With prices soaring, late fees are being waived

Prices are up, so Leesburg Electric has decided that, as of Oct. 1, late fees will be waived.
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I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I cant deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

I thought  this now seems especially funny  that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones.

I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I cant deny that I did, writes PETER HITCHENS

And its all very well being able to buy cheap goods from all over the world, as we fling our borders wide and abandon the protection of our own industries that everyone says is so wicked and will make us poor and backward.

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

But the new broom swept, and it swept pretty clean. In towns I know well, car assembly lines, railway workshops, glassworks engineering plants, chocolate factories vanished or shrank to nothing.

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

Someone usually pops up at this stage and says that we still manufacture a lot. If you say so, but then why are the drug-dealers so busy in our new factory-free industrial areas, and why can I never buy anything that was made here, except from absurdly expensive luxury shops?

Why are our warships made of foreign steel? Why are the few factories that do exist almost always foreign-owned, their fate decided far away by people who dont much care about this country?

And why is our current-account deficit with the rest of the world the worst its ever been in peacetime, and nearly as bad as it was during the Great War that first bankrupted this country a century ago?

If its all been so beneficial, why do so many of the containers that arrive in British ports, full of expensive imports, leave this country empty?

Sure, some things have got cheaper, and there are a lot more little treats and luxuries available.

The coffee and the restaurants are better  but the essentials of life are harder to find than ever: a good life and an honest place; a solid, modest home big enough to house a small family in a peaceful, orderly landscape; good local schools open to all who need them; reasonably paid secure work for this generation and the next; competent government and wise laws.

These have become luxuries, unattainable for millions who once took them for granted.

And now the remains of our steel industry are vanishing, not because nothing can be done (any determined government could save it if it really wanted to) but because were all still worshipping that free-market dogma that captivated us 30 years ago.

I never thought Id yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.

Maybe our real enemy isn't ISIS...

The cross-eyed prejudice of this countrys chattering classes sometimes gets beyond all bearing.

We all loathe Islamic State. We were all rightly dismayed when these maniacs captured Palmyra, one of the great monuments of human civilisation, murdered its chief curator and began to smash it up.

Syrian troops pictured after retaking Palmyra - one of the great monuments of human civilisation

Yet when the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, succeeded in driving the fanatics out of Palmyra, the media could hardly bring themselves to put it anywhere further forward than page 94, and the politicians, always ready to say rude things about IS, could barely utter a word.

Its this kind of thing that makes me wonder whether the alleged hostility of the West to IS is genuine, or a pose.

It often seems to me that they loathe Russia, and Syrias President Assad, much more. Which side are we really on in this conflict?

Striving to identify the maddest moment of the week, I am forced to choose between two: the crazed closure of the majestic coal-fired power station at Ferrybridge to satisfy green zealots (remember that when the power cuts come, as they soon will); and the police ordering paying passengers off a Cornwall-bound train because it was too full  the culmination of a 50-year policy of trying to drive custom away from the railways, rather than expanding and modernising them.

Elizabeth Debicki

So bad, it had me backing the villains

I have actually been watching the BBCs dramatisation of John le Carres The Night Manager because it is so bad. How much worse could it get?

A secret agent in deep cover who simpers nervously every time he is rightly accused of treachery and cant stop himself ogling the bosss girlfriend, while the boss is looking?

A supposed spy chief, who more closely resembles a grumpy Barnsley social worker who has just failed to arrange a gay adoption  and who, while many months pregnant, travels across the world and outshoots a professional assassin?

After not too much of this I was rooting heartily for the villains, who seemed to me to be making a perfectly sound case for the arms trade.

And, while I understand that plots sometimes have to be changed for TV, I think it was utterly gratuitous to invent scenes in which the beautiful Elizabeth Debicki was sadistically tortured, when no such thing happens in the book. Not to mention the ridiculous happy ending. Please, spare us a sequel.

Archbishop in an unholy mess

I am still scratching my head over the Archbishop of Canterburys bizarre response to powerful evidence, gathered and assembled by eminent lawyers, a former police officer and a judge experienced in child abuse trials, that abuse allegations against the late Bishop George Bell are highly questionable, and based on a sloppy, inadequate investigation.

The Archbishop, Justin Welby, hasnt given an inch and continues to defend the Churchs acceptance of a solitary, ancient, uncorroborated, anonymous charge  even though, since it was made public, there have been no further accusations.

But Archbishop Justin has now told the BBC that George Bell  a man he believes to be a filthy child molester who dishonestly and selfishly abused a little girl  is also the greatest hero that most of us have. Ive heard of a broad church, but this is ridiculous. One or the other. Not both.
Aid Minister Justine Greening cannot or will not answer our detailed questions about her departments gigantic handouts and the way in which they are spent

Readers of The Mail on Sunday are quite right to object in their tens of thousands to the ring-fenced billions poured into aid by this country, and to demand, by signing our online petition in large and growing numbers, a parliamentary debate on this extraordinary policy.

This must be a proper debate, with Ministers present, in the Commons chamber  especially after our revelations today that the Government last year spent even more on overseas largesse than its legally fixed target, at a time when we are told the strategically vital steel industry cannot be saved and the Chancellor is incessantly calling for austerity.

Aid Minister Justine Greening cannot or will not answer our detailed questions about her departments gigantic handouts and the way in which they are spent. Much of this money is simply handed to international or supranational bodies, who decide what to do with it according to their own rules.

Let us hope that parliamentary scrutiny will squeeze straight answers out of the Government  and help convert it to common sense. As things stand, it is in the grip of fashion, and perhaps also fear of modish opinion, worried about losing the support of noisy celebrities who have achieved secular sainthood by ostentatious charity.

No solid reasoning or actual facts demand the huge and uncontrollable commitment to aid which Mr Cameron has so foolishly made. He needs to realise that there is a great difference between doing good and looking good.

Of course we need to give aid where it is truly needed. There will always be a case for richer countries helping poorer nations, rooted in ancient ideas of charity. Nobody is against this.

But there is a huge difference between charity and the vast Foreign Aid Industry to which British taxpayers now give vast and growing sums.

Alas, much of this money ends up employing well-off Westerners, or slips into the pockets of politicians and middlemen.

It can also damage the natural economic growth which poorer countries need to pull themselves permanently out of poverty.

There is nothing cruel or unfair or ignorant about criticising the aid policies of the West. The late development expert Lord Bauer said aid was a good way of transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. The Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo complains of Dead Aid doing Africa more harm than good. Nobel prize-winner Angus Deaton has warned us to remember: aid is about its recipients, not about us.

The self-righteous adherence to a fixed target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income is itself proof that the aim is mainly political

Like any guaranteed budget  whose managers know the money will roll in anyway and that they will be penalised not if they overspend but if they fail to spend enough  it is almost impossible to monitor.

A serious aid programme would discover where help was needed, and provide it.

The self-righteous adherence to a fixed target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income is itself proof that the aim is mainly political. It declares: Look at us! See how good and generous we are!

It is to serve such vanity that so much is snatched from the pay of hardworking people in a country with many economic and social problems of its own, which the Government seems increasingly incapable of solving. This cannot be right.

The ring-fencing of aid must end, and end soon.
David Cameron's administration is going into a 'nose-dive', says Dan Hodges

Speak to Ministers. Speak to MPs. Speak to advisers. Speak to civil servants. Speak to Larry the Downing Street cat.

They will each tell you the same thing. The Government is currently trying to fly on autopilot.

From the Prime Minister down, everyone has a single focus, and is driven by a single purpose. Fighting, and winning, the Euro referendum.

And last week the autopilot malfunctioned, sending David Camerons administration into a stomach churning nose-dive.

Right now, in the conventional sense, we no longer have a functioning government at all.

Theres nothing else happening, one Cabinet Minister admitted to me.

All anyone on either side of the debate is concentrating on is Europe. Thats it.

Its been happening for weeks. But in the past few days, it has been typified by the Steel Crisis  yes, it has now secured its own quasi- official designation, and has turned into a springtime nightmare for the Prime Minister.

Letting Sajid Javid disappear to Australia just as Tata was going to announce it was selling off the British steel industry was perhaps not the best judgment, one Downing Street official candidly acknowledged.

Thats candour combined with a flair for understatement.

The Easter recess was supposed to be acting as a political firebreak, holding back and then extinguishing the conflagration caused by Iain Duncan Smiths post-Budget resignation.

Instead, it has seen the Business Secretary humiliatingly transformed into a modern-day Phileas Fogg  the first man to travel from Whitehall to Port Talbot, via Sydney, in under 80 hours.

The long-term economic strategy has been recast as a sinister plan to let the Chinese turn South Wales into an economic wasteland.

And a week that was supposed to see the National Living Wage roll-out underlining the Governments progressive credentials has ended with Ministers defending themselves against the charge they subsist on the blood of redundant manufacturing workers.

In response, Government insiders claim their discreet lobbying saved the Port Talbot plant from immediate closure  they wanted to just shut it  and re-emphasise that, while embarrassing in PR terms, Javids brief absence had minimal impact.

Scroll down for video

The Government has been 'trying to run on autopilot' but it is not working, say Westminster insiders

But the decision to allow the Business Secretary to disappear to the other side of the world was not merely a presentational error.

It provided clear evidence that Downing Street was simply not focused on the political, economic and social implications of Tatas impending decision.

The sight of him frantically scrambling back to London closed the case.

To those watching from the outside  and in particular those watching anxiously from Port Talbot, Rotherham, Scunthorpe and the other associated steel communities  this response appears almost criminally negligent.

But to anyone working on the inside of government, it represents all too predictable negligence.

Governments cannot be flown on autopilot, even during the most tranquil moments in the political cycle.

And thanks to the Euro referendum, we are currently entering the most violent period of political turbulence anyone has seen for decades.

A couple of months ago, one Minister confided in me his great fear. It was that the Out campaign would launch what he called the Ground Zero strategy.

Essentially, this would involve Out abandoning efforts to win the argument on its merits and instead launching an all-out assault on every aspect of Government policy.

Its the Maastricht playbook. Tear everything down, give the impression everythings falling apart, then say to the country, Never mind Europe. You cant really endorse this shambles, can you? 

That is precisely the strategy the Eurosceptics are now pursuing:

Duncan Smiths attack on welfare reform, an attack echoed by those very Conservative Right-wingers who had been championing it.

The assault on the National Living Wage, led by George Osbornes Cabinet colleague, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale.

The claim from Vote Leave, chaired by Michael Gove, that under Jeremy Hunts stewardship, the NHS has plummeted into a financial crisis.

Downing Street, alive to this Euro-nihilism, is preparing its response.

We think the Out campaign are becoming increasingly desperate and reckless, says one No 10 insider. Youll be hearing that word a lot over the coming weeks: Reckless.

Which is fine. Except the charge of recklessness can be effectively deployed only by people who are themselves able to demonstrate maturity, competence and level-headedness.

Or, in other words, people who dont act in the way Ministers have been acting over the past few days.

Vote Leave, chaired by Michael Gove, pictured, said the NHS has 'plummeted into financial crisis'

As we have seen, senior Ministers are now only paying lip service to the day-to-day management of their briefs.

From the moment the Prime Minister gets up to the moment he goes to bed, Europe is the only thing on his mind, one Minister told me.

An exaggeration perhaps, but only a minor one. I need more time to think, he told a meeting of his MPs, just before he flew off for a brief break in Lanzarote.

Now hes back he will be getting precious little mental respite, at least before polling day. Meanwhile, the cracks in his administration are widening.

The black hole in the Budget. The black hole that has been the Governments response to Tata. Perhaps most starkly, the increasingly cavernous black hole at the heart of his Cabinet.

When the Prime Minister announced he was suspending Cabinet responsibility on the issue of Europe, he believed he was making a magnanimous gesture to his Eurosceptic critics.

True to form, they have taken his magnanimity and beaten him around the head with it. Collective responsibility has been replaced by collective irresponsibility.

Cabinet Ministers  under the guise of open debate  believe they now have licence to openly rubbish the policies of their colleagues.

Economic policy. Welfare policy. Health policy. Industrial policy. The Eurosceptics will now pursue their Ground Zero strategy to the death. Even if it means grinding their own Government into the dust.

And there is nothing David Cameron can do about it.

The autopilot isnt functioning. Yet he has no way of seizing back the controls. His political future  maybe the entire future of his party and his Government  now rests on a wing and a prayer.

According to the Westminster rumour mill, Ed Miliband could be preparing for a shock return to frontline politics.

Having kept a low profile in the wake of his Election defeat, he has started to elevate his profile in the past few weeks, with an interview in The Guardian, and a speech making the case for Britains membership of the EU.

Hes getting a taste for it again. I think hed be up for a Shadow Cabinet post, a friend confides.

One current Shadow Minister was less taken with the idea, exclaiming: Why doesnt he just combine sex with travel! I paraphrase.

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband could be in line for a Shadow Cabinet post, according to insiders

An unlikely Labour bromance is blossoming. When former Brownite pistolero Damian McBride agreed to help Jeremy Corbyn with his controversial Trident review, many people predicted friction with Corbyns Marxist communications director Seumas Milne.

But the pair are reportedly getting on like a dacha on fire. Theyre working really well together, says a Corbyn confidant. Oh God, thats all we need, responds one fearful moderate.

Boris Johnson's cycle superhighways could be in serious danger of derailing his prime ministerial ambitions, Im told.

The outgoing London Mayor had earmarked the scheme as one of his legacy projects, but not everyone is embracing his vision of integrated transport in the capital.

What people forget is lots of Tory MPs still drive in to Westminster, and theyre sick of getting caught in all of the roadworks for the scheme, one Minister warns darkly.

Trust me, its going to cost him.

With Tory hopes in the Scottish parliamentary elections buoyed by a series of polls showing them challenging Labour for second place, Downing Street are said to be drawing up plans to entice popular Scottish leader Ruth Davidson south of the border.
The people of the United Kingdom are among the most generous on the planet. Not a global appeal for help after a natural disaster goes by without the Brits digging deep and sending millions to help the victims of earthquake, famine or hurricane.

So what I have to say today is not about our country stopping doing the right thing. It is not about walking down the other side of the road at times of acute distress.

It is not about bringing to an end paying out hard-earned tax pounds to fund long-term projects in the developing world that build governmental capacity, educate those deprived of simple literacy or help provide refuge to victims of grotesque mutilation or persecution.

hundreds of millions gp to India, a country that hosts a Formula One Grand Prix and funds a 600 million space programme (pictured, the indian Space Research Organization's Geosynchronous Satellite)

What I seek to do is make you, the typically generous Brit, very angry indeed and then do something about it!

When I was at the CBI, and also when I served as Minister of State for UK Trade and Investment, I became incensed at the number of occasions I came across our overseas aid budget being spent on infrastructure projects where UK businesses were closed out from doing work. This resulted in UK jobs and tax-generating profits being lost while Japanese, American or French businesses building a bridge here or a power station there were paid for by us!

When the Americans or French give aid, the receiving countrys people get the benefit, but those providing the aid also benefit.

When we give aid, the target country benefits  and so does one of our rival countries at our expense. You couldnt make it up.

The Blair government abolished so-called Tied Aid  offering aid on the condition that it be used to procure goods or services from the provider  as a sop to the Socialists, and the Japanese and French have been laughing all the way to the bank at our expense ever since.

There are very few countries that give their money away without conditions; tied aid is the norm around the world, except for old Muggins, the UK. How does it feel today to know that our aid budget has given up millions of pounds so that the Chinese can employ Chinese people to build stuff in African countries paid for by us?

Then along came Cameron and abused the British taxpayers generosity in an even more scary way. Instead of looking at each project on its merits and deciding on spending cash (or not) in accordance with budgetary constraints  as every town hall and Government department has to do year in year out  the international aid budget was set at 0.7 per cent UK gross national income, whatever that may be.

Digby Jones, the CBI Director-General, 2000-2006

So as the economy grows, so does the dosh available to spend every year on aid projects. And, whats more, it is ring-fenced. So as education and the police suffer cuts the sums available for distribution around the world actually go up.

I could point out the many bonkers schemes your money has gone to under this system: from hundreds of millions to India, a country that hosts a Formula One Grand Prix and funds a 600 million space programme, to 48 million to China  yes, thats right, to the second-richest country on earth  to grow carbon-munching trees near polluting power stations.

Last weeks Mail on Sunday documented examples of naive largesse by the bucketload. And there is always the nagging doubt that our money finds itself ending up in Swiss bank accounts held by corrupt politicians, or facilitates soldiers selling grain to starving people in the regions they are there to help.

This madness has to stop for its own sake. The more profligate the spending overseas, the more ridiculous the projects that are supported, the greater the loss of credibility of the whole concept will be among the British public.

What is a noble idea  being world class in helping those less fortunate lead better, safer and more healthy lives  will die for want of public support, not because the concept is wrong but because so much of the money is wasted.

Those nameless, faceless, unaccountable officials who spend our money in this fashion do so with such lack of rigour or regard simply because they can. Its not their money. If they were spending their own cash they would look at each project so differently.

It is unlike any other branch of Government spending. The NHS, for example, is ring-fenced but its spending does not automatically increase as the country does better year on year. We might be meeting our two per cent of GDP obligations to NATO on defence spending but next year that spending is not going to increase automatically.

With our overseas aid budget, officials have dosh coming out of their ears. It is human nature to be less than rigorous in due diligence and application when you not only have more than enough but you know for sure that theres even more where that last lot came from.

Those people in charge of countries whose people are in dire need of our help must think its their collective birthdays; all you need to do is plead poverty, put the pressure on, and those Brits will pay, again and again.

Tony Blair abolished tied aid, which imposed conditions on the money give to other countries, which meant Britain couldn't benefit. Usually, nations like France and America insist on some kind of involvement with projects, which also allows them to profit, particularly with infrastructure projects

The personal accounts of those in charge of these states can become enriched from their countries resources since the welfare of their people will be taken care of by the UK taxpayer who is making big sacrifices at home, who gets no conditionality as to jobs in return, who has no say in where the money goes or what it achieves, who cant judge its efficacy and who knows for sure that, if the UK economy does better next year through that hard work and sacrifice, then those personal bank accounts will just get even larger.

And dont expect things would change under a Labour government. Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott all voted for the aid budget to be enshrined in law, so they think this state of affairs is fine.

DO YOU KNOW OF A SCANDAL OVER FOREIGN AID? Email your stories to aidmadness@mailonsunday.co.uk or call 0203 7938 7040 Advertisement

They believe in spending other peoples money on their own ideology; indeed theyve developed it to a fine art.

But the problem with their creed is that, when they are in power, they always eventually run out of other peoples money to spend. They nurse their socialism in the womb of The Struggle, secure in the knowledge as they brandish their placards that they couldnt be trusted to run a whelk stall let alone a serious economy.

No sensible PM who wants a quality overseas aid programme which will endure over the decades with the support of the British people would maintain a system that automatically increases the sum doled out every year in such an indiscriminate fashion.

The Great British Public have stopped laughing at this now, Mr Cameron, they have moved to the up with this we will not put stage.

When you are forced to change the policy and climb down from an obviously broken model in the face of opprobrium from everywhere, the real losers will be the very people, the genuine cases  the impoverished, the fearful, the illiterate, the unhealthy, the persecuted  whom we all want to help.

The baby will have well and truly gone down the plughole with the bath water and that will be down to following a path to hell that is paved with good intentions.

MoS's 10 questions to Minister for Aid and how she replied

1 150,000 people have signed the MoSs Foreign Aid e-petition calling for an end to the fixed 0.7 per cent spend on Foreign Aid. Do you personally endorse the call for a fresh parliamentary debate over the fixed aid target?

Justine Greening (pictured) says that the 0.7 per cent budget was in the manifesto and therefore a promise made to those who voted for the Tories

NO COMMENT

2 Why do you think it is necessary for Britain to give away almost double a slice of its wealth compared to the next most generous G20 nation?

NO COMMENT

3 Because our aid budget is tied to national income, it will grow another 4 billion over the next four years regardless of domestic and global needs. The Tories used to argue targets distort priorities. Why is it now fixed?

NO COMMENT

4 And if you think a fixed rate is a good idea, why is DfiD the only government department with one?

NO COMMENT

5 How do you justify giving 1.1 million aid money to teach foreign nationals to sing 37,500 to fly North Korean officials to Canterbury and 8,000 for Tony Blairs spin doctor to lecture in Armenia?

NO COMMENT

6 The Palestinian Authority openly admits supporting salaries for suicide bombers and terrorists. So why are we giving it 25 million?

NO COMMENT

7 Do you understand public concern over cutting police numbers, disability benefits, libraries and social care at home, only to see billions more of their taxes being sent overseas?

NO COMMENT

8 Do you have any concerns about charities receiving huge sums of taxpayers money paying staff substantial six-figure salaries, often more than the Prime Minister?

NO COMMENT

9 Polls have found foreign aid to be the favoured area among voters to see reduced if there must be cuts. Instead you are increasing it. Why?

NO COMMENT

10 World bank expert and Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor Angus Deaton calls for less development aid since he argues it often ends up hurting, not helping, the poor. Is he wrong?

NO COMMENT

What did she say?

The UK aid 0.7 per cent commitment is part of the 2015 manifesto on which this Government was elected. We made a promise to the electorate and we are keeping it. DFIDs work, whether it is helping to prevent deadly diseases like ebola coming to the UK, or enabling Syrian refugees and other would-be migrants to stay in their home region, is about creating a more stable and secure world. Like Mail on Sunday readers, and as a qualified chartered accountant, I want to make sure that taxpayers money is being spent by DFID in the right way. Thats why I have done a root and branch review of every element of how DFID operates  changing the way we work in many countries and focusing on the poorest and most fragile, cutting programmes that dont deliver. Ill continue that value-for-money and results approach in DFID.
Since the time David Cameron became leader of the Conservatives, I have been one of those pushing him to move his party to the centre ground, making it more compassionate towards the less fortunate in society.

We agree on many things, as you might expect with his former speechwriter, and I admire the Prime Minister as a politician. Yet there is one major point of difference: my abhorrence for his Governments blinkered, backfiring and bovine obsession with foreign aid.

As a foreign reporter, I have seen the damage and destruction of human rights that is being done through our funding of repressive despots in Africa.

Ian Birrell describes the Government's obsessions with foreign aid as 'blinkered, backfiring and bovine'

I have heard the anger of people from across the political spectrum over our fuelling of corruption in Asia. And I have seen the mess that simply throwing cash at problems makes in places such as the Caribbean and Central America.

Unfortunately, we are ruled by a generation of politicians who were inspired by Live Aid into the deluded belief that pouring taxpayers cash into poor countries makes them look like kind people.

Yet as a barrage of studies and development experts such as Britains brilliant Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton have shown, such policies can end up doing more harm than good.

Free handouts from abroad encourage bad or weak rulers to divert cash into arms, vanity projects and their own pockets. We attack welfare dependency at home even as we encourage it abroad.

These arrogant policies smack of neo-colonialism, with Westerners strutting the planet telling foreigners how to run their own affairs. And they present a false impression of many parts of the developing world, especially in Africa, as helpless basket cases in need of our salvation.

At the heart of this flawed approach is the absurd UN aid target. Once the Tories talked of targets distorting outcomes; now they lead all three main parties in endorsing the idea we should be the only major economy handing over 0.7 per cent of our national income to aid projects overseas.

THIS idiocy has been enshrined in law. As a result, the Department for International Development (DFID) is the only Government department that must explain to Parliament if it fails to spend enough money.

It is economic insanity to focus on spending over results. The legacy is a Government borrowing to give away 12 billion this year in aid, the same amount it is struggling to find by cutting welfare bills and disability payments at home. And this will rise to a staggering 16 billion by 2020.

No wonder we fund so many spurious projects. And no wonder there was such a rush from Britains beleaguered taxpayers to sign this papers petition demanding a new parliamentary debate over this political stunt.

Few British politicians bother to question the sacred UN target they worship with such fervour.

Unfortunately, we are ruled by a generation of politicians who were inspired by Live Aid (Geldof pictured in Ethiopia after the concert) into the deluded belief that pouring taxpayers cash into poor countries makes them look like kind people, writes Birrell

Yet it is just a figure devised by campaigners in the 1960s, based on dubious economic data. When experts applied the same calculations to the global economy in 2005, they discovered the aid goal should have fallen to 0.01 per cent of GDP.

The study lays bare the folly of the initial method and the subsequent unreflective commitment to the 0.7 per cent aid goal, concluded authors Michael Clemens and Todd Moss from the US Center for Global Development think-tank (itself given millions in aid by Britain). It is an arbitrary figure based on a series of outdated assumptions, they wrote scathingly, adding it failed to match needs and conditions of recipients and budget priorities of the donors.

Since then the world has become richer and the number of poor people in the developing world has plummeted thanks to the twin motors of capitalism and consumerism.

These arrogant policies smack of neo-colonialism, with Westerners strutting the planet telling foreigners how to run their own affairs.

But the aid bandwagon rolls on and on, largely to the benefit of self-aggrandising charities and the growing army of private sector fat cats with their six-figure salaries and swanky offices. I understand that when Chancellor George Osborne was asked at a private gathering why the Tories stuck to such an unpopular policy, he replied that it was to keep the charities off our back.

This does not seem the best reason to blow billions of pounds of other peoples hard-earned money.

Yet they should not be so scared of the avaricious aid industry. For politicians in the Netherlands have proved a country can remove itself from the hook of this anachronistic target, leading to little fuss and smarter spending.

This is a liberal country, long admired for its global outlook, which four decades ago became the first country alongside Sweden to hit the UN target. It went on to hit even higher levels of spending, winning acclaim from a think-tank as the rich nation most committed to interventional development.

But when Holland was struck by the global financial crisis, the governing Left-Right coalition decided it was wrong to cut spending at home but spare aid projects abroad. So calling it development policy modernisation they slashed back aid  by 770 million in one year  and fell below the target in 2013.

Few British politicians bother to question the sacred UN target they worship with such fervour, writes Birrell. Pictured: David Cameron and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2011

Last week I met some politicians and civil servants in The Hague, who told me they were nervous about creating a storm of protest when they abandoned the cherished target. We expected more opposition but surprisingly, it did not cause much of a stir, said one official.

Polls were consulted, showing only one third of voters strongly backed the policy. They took public support for granted but we discovered the public support was far from enthusiastic, said a political adviser. Now Ministers say it is not just about budgets but about results.

How right they are. These sensible Dutch officials admitted there used to be an urgency to spend money in times of growth. Now they say reduced budgets  down from 0.8 per cent of national income down to just over 0.6 per cent  have led to renewed focus on sharper spending.

What a contrast to Britain. Here our political leaders, so desperate to look caring and so trapped by outmoded ideas, continue to chuck cash out the DFID doors as fast as they can even as they close libraries and struggle to fund the Health Service.

Mr Cameron wants to remould his party into compassionate conservatives. Yet there is nothing compassionate about this Great British Giveaway, which often ends up hurting poor people and undermining democracy. Nor is there anything conservative about wasting money with such reckless abandon, especially when it is done simply to silence the bloated poverty sector.
US-British winner of the 2015 Nobel Economics Prize Angus Deaton

There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who live with great poverty and poor health.

That the British people want to help them is not in doubt, is wholly admirable and, arguably, is their duty. Yet setting an aid target of 0.7 per cent of national income makes no sense at all.

If people need help, we should find out what they need, what we can do, and help as we can. But what people need says something about them, not something about us, and has nothing to do with our level of national income.

The needs of Africans are no less when Britain is slumping and no greater when Britain is prospering. When we tie what we give to our income, not to poor peoples needs, we are really saying that the aid is about us, not about them. It makes us feel good to meet the target. We have checked off something that we feel we ought to do. And we are going to check it off whether we are helping them or hurting them.

There are disagreements about how much good aid does. I am sceptical, though I have many good friends who are enthusiastic. But neither good aid nor bad aid can justify the 0.7 per cent.

If aid works, we need to do what is needed, not spend some arbitrary fraction of what we have.

If aid doesnt work, we shouldnt be doing this at all, at least if we are actually trying to help, and not just making ourselves feel good.

If, like me, you are an aid sceptic, the 0.7 per cent target is particularly objectionable when times are hard at home.

We can see the suffering in Britain, and we can easily imagine how lives would be made better by spending more.

The benefits abroad, if they exist, are at best uncertain. Its just not a good deal.

Children in Africa, living in poverty, as hundreds of millions of people still do all over the world. File image

STOP THE FOREIGN AID MADNESS NOW: AS ANOTHER 12BN OF YOUR TAXES ARE SPLURGED ON HAND-OUTS FOR TERRORISTS AND KILLERS, IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPENDING ON FOREIGN AID BUDGET, SIGN OUR PETITION NOW The Mail on Sunday has launched a petition on the official Parliamentary website calling on the Government to scrap the law requiring us to spend a fixed 0.7 per cent of national wealth on foreign aid. The figure is currently 12 billion and will rise to 16 billion by 2020. Rather than helping people who desperately need it, much of this money is wasted and the Great British Giveaway fuels corruption, funds despots and corrodes democracy in developing nations. If you want to stop this madness and see that our money is better spent, click here: Yes, I want to make a difference and sign the petition The link will take you to the Parliamentary petitions web site where our petition is displayed. Once you have signed it, please share it with your family and friends using social media. You must be a UK resident or citizen to sign. Please note that signing the petition will entail you clicking on a link sent to your email inbox. 100,000 people have signed the petition, which will force politicians to at least consider a parliamentary debate on the issue. But more signatures will give the argument to reconsider that aid budget even more weight. If you want to end the madness, sign our petition here Advertisement
On the 24th of March, Australian model Claire Parker was officially named Miss Grand International after winner Anea Garcia, from the Dominican Republic, was dethroned.

Miss Grand International vice-president, Teresa Chaivisut, said that although they believed Ms Garcia, 21, was the deserving winner, she had failed to fulfil her obligations as the reigning queen - many suggesting she was 'too demanding' with her duties.

Ms Parker, 24, a Sydney-based model and actress, was 'utterly shocked and thrilled' to step up as title holder of the competition, which is an annual international beauty contest that encourages women to take a stand for the 'betterment of humanity.'

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New Queen: On the 24th of March, Australian model Claire Parker was officially named Miss Grand International after winner Anea Garcia, from the Dominican Republic, was dethroned

The crown came in controversial circumstances and was a total shock to the Sydney-based model and aspiring actress

'It actually took a couple of days for the enormity of what was happening to really set in. I found out first thing in the morning when I was still in bed and half asleep and my National Director, Renera, called me,' Ms Parker told Daily Mail Australia.

'It wasn't until the official announcement was made by the organisation and I started getting flooded with congratulations calls and messages that I realised "woah, this is actually huge".'

The blonde beauty, who grew up in Oatlands, New South Wales, is no stranger to pageants and in 2015 was one of 30 national finalists in the 2015 Miss Universe Australia pageant.

Exciting: 'It actually took a couple of days for the enormity of what was happening to really set in. I found out first thing in the morning when I was still in bed and half asleep,' Ms Parker said

Star: The rising star of the modelling industry has also appeared in campaigns popular labels including Jets Swimwear, American Apparel, Seafolly and Bras N Things

Trained: The blonde beauty is no stranger to pageants and in 2015 was one of 30 national finalists in the 2015 Miss Universe Australia pageant and competed in 2011 (pictured second from left)

She also competed for the title of Miss Universe Australia in 2011, held the title of Miss Teen Australia in 2010 and won the Cosmopolitan Model Management Model Search in 2013.

The rising star of the modelling industry has also appeared in campaigns popular labels including Jets Swimwear, American Apparel, Seafolly and Bras N Things.

'When I was 18 and fresh out of high school I entered my first beauty pageant, Miss Teen Australia, prior to which I had no experience in the modelling or beauty pageant worlds,' she said.

'Crazily enough I won it which included agency representation for my year of reign and everything kind of snowballed from there!'

Fell into it: 'When I was 18 and fresh out of high school I entered my first beauty pageant, Miss Teen Australia, prior to which I had no experience in the modelling or beauty pageant worlds,' she said

Never dreamt of modelling: 'As a kid I wanted to have seven different jobs, one for every day of the week, because I wanted to be so many things I couldn't decide on just one,' Ms Parker said

But surprisingly, the talented model didn't grow up dreaming of her current career.

'As a kid I wanted to have seven different jobs, one for every day of the week, because I wanted to be so many things I couldn't decide on just one, so I wanted to do them all at the same time,' Ms Parker said.

'Growing up I went through many different stages - wanting to work in a safari park with big cats, to being the first female prime minister of Australia, a teacher, a motivational speaker, a secret spy, a photographer, the front woman of a band, a fashion designer, an actress... Funnily enough I never dreamed of being a model and it's the career I kind of just fell into!'

Ambitious: 'Growing up I went through many different stages - wanting to work in a safari park with big cats, to being the first female prime minister of Australia,' she said

Whirlwind: Ms Parker said the Miss Grand International experience was 'crazy, motivating, exhausting, humbling, stressful, exhilarating, hilarious and testing at times, and all at once'

She also refers to herself as a 'crazy cat lady' and says she thinks she may have been a cat in a former life.

'I have two cats of my own but also volunteer at the Rescue Cat Project foster facility in Western Sydney which helps to rescue, rehabilitate and re-home sick, stray, surrendered and rescued cats and kittens,' she said.

Ms Parker said the Miss Grand International experience was 'crazy, motivating, exhausting, humbling, stressful, exhilarating, hilarious and testing at times, and all at once.'

'For sure it was the most amazing, life changing experience and the three weeks I spent in Thailand with the 72 other incredible women from all around the world, will be something I hold in my heart forever,' she said.

True colours: 'It's a huge test of strength, character and mental resilience and usually towards the end is when the girls' true nature starts to show,' Ms Parker said

Busy six months ahead: As Ms Parker is stepping into the role of Miss Grand International at the halfway point she will reign for just six months

WHAT ARE CLAIRE PARKER'S TOP STYLE AND BEAUTY TIPS? - Life is too short to let other people's insecurities and judgements hold you back from being, doing or wearing exactly what you want, no matter how outrageous it is. - Wear that peacock green sequin jacket with pride! (I actually own a peacock green sequin jacket, it's fabulous). - As for beauty I could tell you all the standard things like eat well, drink lots of water, wear sunscreen etc. - My personal tip when it comes to makeup, good quality brushes make a HUGE difference, it's worth paying that little bit extra. Advertisement

'I won't lie though, people from outside the pageant community have no idea how hard you have to work and how tiring it can definitely be competing in a pageant, particularly at an international level.'

Ms Parker said she rarely had much sleep or free time, had to be in full hair and make up at dawn every day and expected to always be enthusiastic and cooperative.

'It's a huge test of strength, character and mental resilience and usually towards the end is when the girls' true nature starts to show after they've been under so much constant pressure for weeks.'

As Ms Parker is stepping into the role of Miss Grand International at the halfway point she will reign for just six months... but plans to be very busy during this time.

'I will participate in a lot of humanitarian work both in Thailand and internationally, former queens have visited war affected countries like Syria and South Sudan to provide aid and relief to refugees so hopefully the organisation has similar plans for me too,' Ms Parker said.

Challenging times ahead: 'Former queens have visited war affected countries like Syria and South Sudan to provide aid and relief to refugees,' Ms Parker said

Big goals: Ms Parker said she hopes to help with the Miss Grand International cause of 'Stop the war and violence'

'Of course there's also the glamourous side to it attending events and participating in fashion shows and I also plan to keep modelling and pursuing that side of things while i'm overseas. As for the following six months after I hand over the crown - I have no idea yet!'

Ms Parker said she hopes to help with the Miss Grand International cause of 'Stop the war and violence.'

'Obviously one person alone cannot put an end to all wars and violence worldwide, that is unrealistic. However all it takes is one person to stand up and speak out to initiate change and that is what I hope to achieve,' she said.

'There are those who would ridicule this notion and call me idealistic, but it's important to aspire to make change and I can do that by adding my voice to the many who speak out against war and violence.'

Headed for Hollywood: As for the future, Ms Parker hopes to get back into performing and head for Hollywood

Long-term: 'I'm definitely looking to pursue that more pro-actively and hopefully can relocate to LA in the next couple of years and make it on the big screen,' she said

As for the future, Ms Parker hopes to get back into performing and head for Hollywood.

'After I finished high school I went on to study acting and had planned to pursue a career in this industry however things started taking off with modelling and pageants, so it has taken a bit of back seat for now,' she said.

'I'm definitely looking to pursue that more pro-actively and hopefully can relocate to LA in the next couple of years and make it on the big screen.'
Compared to the rest of the world, Australian women are falling behind when it comes to contraception.

In total, almost half of all 18 to 49 year old women in Australia use some form of birth control.

Approximately 32 per cent of these women use the pill, and 22 per cent use condoms as their sole method of contraception, despite being less effective than other long acting reversible contraception (LARC) methods.

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Choices: There are several options for women when it comes to birth control, including the pill, condoms and long acting reversible contraception like IUDs and implants

Commonplace: Almost half of all Australian women aged 18 to 49 used some form of birth control

Expert advice: Dr Deborah Bateson is the medical director at Family Planning NSW and says that there are a lot of misconceptions around forms of contraception

The reason for this, according to Dr Deborah Bateson, the medical director of Family Planning NSW, is a combination of women not being aware of their options, or having incorrect information about the methods.

'I think theres a few reasons for that. Theres some misconceptions and myths around these long acting methods and a lack of awareness,' Dr Bateson told Daily Mail Australia.

FEMAIL investigated the most common contraception options for Australian women, including the advantages and disadvantages of each method, to provide plain-English advice for anyone needing it.

THE PILL

The most common form of contraception for Australian women, the pill contains oestrogen and progestogen. It works by preventing ovulation each month, meaning pregnancy cannot begin.

It can reduce menstrual bleeding, reduce acne and help with symptoms of endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome.

However there are some downsides to the pill. It can increase the risk of bloodclots, and some brands can be expensive if not covered by the pharmaceutical benefits scheme. Some women also report disliking how the hormones impact their mood and weight.

The pill has a 99 per cent effectiveness rate with 'perfect use'. However since it requires women to take it each day, doctors believe that 'typical use' effectiveness is around 91 per cent.

Daily dose: The contraceptive pill is used by around 32 per cent of Australian women, and is by far the most common form of birth control

If it's not on: Condoms are one of the most common forms of contraception for Australian women, and have the added benefit of preventing against sexually transmitted diseases as well

CONDOMS

The second most used form of contraception for women, condoms have the additional benefit of also preventing against sexually transmitted infections.

They create a barrier so that sperm can't enter the vagina and fertilise an egg. Each condom can only be used once then must be thrown away.

One negative for this form of contraception is the variable rate condom effectiveness. If they are being used as the sole form of birth control for a woman, there is a 2 per cent to 18 per cent chance of failure.

The failure rate is mostly variable because of incorrect usage of condoms, but doctors still recommend their use for protecting against infections even if you're using another form of birth control.

Frangers forever: Shaylee Leach (above) uses condoms as her method of contraception because she disliked how hormonal birth control made her feel

Shaylee Leach, a 24-year-old queer woman from Adelaide, uses condoms as her sole method of contraception. She said that she didn't like the way the pill made her feel.

'Hormonal birth control made me more volatile and sad,' she explained. 'I would cry at the drop of a hat over really inane things, like seeing someone littering.'

'I was only really using them in conjunction with barriers like condoms as an additional safety precaution, but they weren't worth the detrimental side effects.'

As she's also non-monogamous, she says that condoms are her preferred method as you can't rely only on non-barrier methods of contraception when being intimate with more than one partner.

Long lasting: An intrauterine device (IUD) can last up to 10 years and is inserted in the uterus by a doctor or nurse

IUD

An IUD, or intrauterine device, is a T shaped plastic rod inserted into the uterus. It can be either a hormone-releasing IUD or a copper IUD. Both essentially block sperm from being able to fertilise an egg and changes the lining of the womb so it is not suitable for pregnancy.

Despite being pushed heavily in many European countries, in Australia very few women have either a hormonal or copper IUD. 'In Sweden about 25 per cent to 30 per cent of women use a IUD, whereas in Australia that figure is around 4 per cent,' Dr Bateson explained.

The IUD is one of the methods that doctors call 'fit and forget', because once it's in place you don't have to do anything to ensure the contraception is working, unlike using the pill or a condom.

Each IUD can be in place for five to 10 years, depending on the type, and are the most effective form of birth control with a more than 99 per cent rate of effectiveness.

'Best decision I ever made': Ali Gay (above) uses an IUD and said that she much prefers it to the pill

Ali Gay, from Hobart, has a Mirena hormonal IUD, and said it was the best decision she ever made.

'I did a fair bit of research before deciding that an IUD was the LARC I wanted,' the 26-year-old said. 'Before I wasn't on any form of hormonal contraception apart from the pill when I was 18 and I hated it.'

She also said that the price and long acting nature of an IUD sold her on it as a form of birth control, but there is misinformation about IUDs, especially amongst young women.

'I knew about IUD's but was taught in high school they were only for women who had already had children, which the lovely nurse at the sexual health clinic told me was not the case,' she said.

Very effective: The contraceptive implant lasts for up to three years and has a failure rate of less than 0.1 per cent. It is inserted in a woman's forearm under the skin

CONTRACEPTIVE IMPLANT

The contraceptive implant is also a LARC, and lasts for three years. It's a small rod that is inserted under the skin of the forearm and releases hormones that stop ovulation and therefore prevent pregnancy.

It's also very effective at preventing pregnancy, with a less than 0.1 per cent failure rate.

As it's also a hormonal form of birth control, some women do experience side effects such as prolonged, or very little, menstrual bleeding.

But as with the IUD, the positives include its long lasting nature and how cost effective it is compared to some birth control like the pill.

Stay clean: Doctors say that it's important to remember that condoms are the only method that prevents against sexually transmitted diseases

Planning: Another non-hormonal form of contraception is the 'ovulation method' where women track their cycle to know when they are 'safe' to have sex and not get pregnant

OVULATION METHOD

Another non-hormonal method is women being aware of their menstrual cycle and only having intercourse on the days when they are least likely to fall pregnant.

Many women use fertility apps to help them track when they are and are not able to have sex 'safely' depending on when they ovulate.

However Dr Bateson does not recommend this method as one that has a high success rate. 'Fertility apps are really usefully for women who are planning a pregnancy, but when it comes to planning not to be pregnant a certain caution is needed,' she explained.

'They havent been tested in terms of an evidence base for preventing pregnancy so we need to have caution. There are other factors, like the fact that sperm can survive for five days in the vagina.'

Knowing your cycle: Iseabella Doherty (above) uses the ovulation method as a form of birth control with her partner of three years

Iseabella Doherty, from Melbourne, uses the ovulation method as her main form of birth control. She said she uses it because her mother did, and it worked really well for her.

'I've put a lot of effort into regulating and observing my cycle, knowing when I ovulate. I think it's really important to be in tune with your body and it's processes,' she said.

She said that knowing her cycle, in combination with other methods, has proved effective for her so far.

'It's important to remember that sperm can survive inside you for up to five days, but douching and pulling out are still relatively reliable methods for the days around when you know you'll be ovulating. I like to stay very clear for a week before I ovulate though, to be safe.'

Just a little prick: Other methods of contraception include contraceptive injections, a vaginal ring and the female condom

OTHER METHODS

There are other methods that are less known and less frequently used than the pill, condoms, implants or IUDs. Contraceptive injections work in a similar way to the implant, but the hormones are given via an injection every six weeks.

The vaginal ring releases hormones in a similar way to the contraceptive pill, except instead of taking a pill each day a ring is inserted into the vagina for three weeks at a time to prevent ovulation.

The female condom, or diaphragm, works in a similar way to the male condom by preventing sperm from reaching the uterus, but instead of being worn on a man's penis is placed inside the woman's vagina before intercourse.

The morning after pill can be taken up to four days after having unprotected sex, and has an 85 per cent chance of preventing pregnancy. It's available without a prescription however doctors do not recommend it as an ongoing form of birth control.

Making a choice: Dr Bateson says that the key is for women to educate themselves about their choices and talk to their doctor about the best method for their situation

Empowerment: Ms Doherty said she believes that it's incredibly empowering for women to learn more about their bodies and menstrual cycles as well as their contraceptive options

VERDICT

Dr Bateson says that the most important thing for women is to talk to their doctor about their options and find the right fit for them.

'The key thing is we want as many options as possible for women so that they can make the best choice that is medically safe for themselves,' she said.
A mother whose pregnant daughter was murdered by her boyfriend has said she never wants her killer to be released from jail.

Ben Blakeley, now 24, from Reading, was jailed for life at Oxford Crown Court in June 2014 after being found guilty of the murder of Jayden Parkinson, 17, who he strangled to death when she was carrying his baby.

He was told he must serve a minimum of 20 years but Jayden's mother Samantha Shrewsbury, 48, from Didcot, said she will campaign for him to stay behind bars when he is eligible for parole.

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Samantha Shrewsbury reveals on Britain's Darkest Taboos that she never wants her daughter's killer to be released. He was jailed for murdering Jayden Parkinson when she was pregnant

Jayden's sister Chloe, pictured, said they tried to get her to stay away from her abusive boyfriend but she said she loved him and hoped he would change

'I don't ever want him to get out, never. And if I go before he does I hope my family fight to keep him inside,' she said.

'He took all our lives, my life stopped the day I found out she was dead. And I've been stuck not being able to move on. I don't ever, ever wish this on anybody not even him.'

Jayden's older sister, Chloe Steele, agrees saying: 'I was not happy that Ben only got 20 years minimum, I think he should have got way longer for what he had done to her.'

The family share their ordeal on the new series of Britain's Darkest Taboos on the Crime and Investigation channel.

They knew Ben had been abusive towards Jayden during their relationship and that he had a criminal record for previous offences including battery and criminal damage.

But they had been unable to get her to stay away from him and his violence towards her ended in murder when he strangled her on 3rd December 2013.

Ben Blakeley, left, was found guilty of the murder of his girlfriend Jayden, right, in 2013 when she was 17. He strangled her to death when she revealed she was expecting his baby

Chloe said: 'I didn't like Ben being with Jayden, I knew he wasn't a safe boy. He had people after him. It was just horrendous. He used to tell us stories; every time he used to come out he used to tell us what he had done to people. It was just sickening to listen to really.'

Samantha said Jayden was attracted to Ben's 'bad boy' reputation when she started dating him at the age of 16 after they met in her home town of Didcot.

At first he treated her to dinner dates and trips to the cinema but then he became increasingly controlling, telling her what to wear and being possessive.

As Jayden fell in love with him, it became harder for the family to prise her out of his grasp, even after he started hitting her.

'She was madly in love with him - besotted with him,' Samantha said.

Samantha said they will never get over their loss. 'He took all our lives,' she said

Chloe added: 'I asked Jayden why she was still with him and her answer was to me was because she loved him and that she had got too attached she couldn't just walk away because she loved him too much.'

Chloe said they became particularly concerned when Jayden told her about an incident when Ben had tried to strangle her but she had managed to fight him off by hitting him with an ashtray.

'When she told me that I wasn't surprised because of what he did to his ex girlfriends - but I thought it was going to be different with Jayden and when she told me I was absolutely distraught,' Chloe said.

Samantha said she then tried everything she could to keep Jayden away from Ben.

'I took her phone off her, cut up her sim cardsand basically I locked her in the house for about five days,' she said.

When Jayden still managed to contact Ben, she became exasperated and gave her an ultimatum.

'I said you got two choices, him and that phone or me, and she chose him and that phone - and that's what broke our relationship down completely,' the mother recalls.

Samantha now wants to set up a charity in Jayden's memory to help victims of domestic abuse

'I was just so angry with her that she couldn't see that all I wanted to do was keep her safe and the best way of doing that was to keep her away from him but he had a hold over my daughter completely.

'I think she was terrified and she loved him  both. I think there's a fine line between love and hate and I think both of them were as intense as each other and I think no matter she hated him what he was doing to her  she loved him in equal amounts.'

Jayden moved in with Ben but eventually she did realise she had to get away from him and sought refuge from the One Foot Forward hostel in Oxford, who planned to help her return to college and train as a hairdresser.

It was then that she discovered she was pregnant and Samantha believes her daughter thought having Ben's baby might tame him and allow them to be a happy family.

'She was really happy to a point, she's 17 and she thinks maybe this baby will make him love me and make him want me, make him change,' Samantha said.

But when Jayden told Ben she was pregnant he flew into a rage and attacked her.

At his trial, the court heard how he took her to isolated woodland near Upton where she strangled her to death and concealed her body with leaves and branches.

A police tent over the grave in Didcot where Ben buried Jayden's body the second time

He later returned with a suitcase and took her body in it to be buried in his uncle's grave in Didcot.

Samantha said: 'I'm mortified that somebody could treat my baby's body with that much disrespect, to only to bury her twice but to put her in a suitcase and move her body in a taxi.

'It doesn't bear thinking about, it makes me sick to my stomach and thought that it wasn't just her it was my grandchild as well.'

Ben was arrested after Jayden was reported missing by her family and her body was later discovered.

Samantha said she will never forget having to identify her daughter's corpse.

'I'll never ever get that picture out of my head because he had beaten her up beforehand and she had bruises all down the right hand side of her face,' she said. 'I remember having a few minutes with her telling her that I was sorry.'

Now Samantha wants to have a more positive means of keeping her daughter's memory alive by setting up a charity in her name to help victims of domestic abuse.

She said: 'I eventually want the charity to have enough money to be able to afford a house that these kids can walk up to where they can feel safe.

'I know I can't eradicate domestic violence in my lifetime but even if I just make a little dent, I could stop one girl ending up like my daughter and grandchild and the mother and the father feeling how our family did, then her life hasnt been in vain.'
When The Killing's Sarah Lund graced our screens back in 2011 in a series of thick, patterned jumpers it caused a boom in sales for Nordic knitwear.

Now Anna Friel is set to do the same in a rather more expensive item of clothing in Marcella, a gritty crime drama in which she plays a detective on the train of a brutal serial killer.

In the eight-part series, set in London, the Brookside star wears a green parka by American brand Woolrich with a padded lining, Teflon coating - and price tag of over 500.

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Anna Friel is constantly seen in the parka throughout the eight part series

Anna Friel during filiming in London, wearing the 535 parka from American clothing designers Woolrich

Woolrich's Vail Coat, available in dark green and blue, from 535

Written by Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of Swedish/Danish TV series The Bridge, the choice of what was in Anna's wardrobe was not taken lightly, as Rosenfeldt confirmed in an interview with The Telegraph.

'How the female protagonist dresses is important,' said Rosenfeldt. 'We spent quite some time on it. We ended up with the parka.

'She has it whenever she's outside. It's a small thing but it's more of a way of easily identifying the character. Whenever you see the parka, you know it's her.

'It matters what the characters wear, and we chose it carefully. We tried on a lot of parkas before we chose that one.'

Sarah Lund, the detective in the killing (played by Danish actress Sofie Grabl) in one of her trademark jumpers by designers Gudrun & Gudrun

Sofia Helin, who played detective Saga Noren, rocked a military style coat with leather gloves in the Bridge, which was also written by Marcella creator, Hans Rosenfeldt

The coat was also chosen for practical reasons considering Marcella was filmed in London over the winter months.

The jacket has a layer of Teflon on the outside as well as a fur-lined hood, which kept Friel protected from the elements.

But at an eye watering 535, the cost of the parka is far more than what most shoppers might spend on their outerwear.

Critics might also suspect a designer coat to be outside of the salary of a member of the police force.

However, a defining look has become central to the female stars of the biggest Scandi crime hits.

Keeping Warm: the coat was chosen for reasons of practicality as well as style due to the cold conditions in London during filming.

Marcella (played by Friel) is also seen rocking a nordic-style jumper, similar to the one worn by Sarah Lund in The Killing, underneath the soon to be infamous parka

Actress Sofie Grabol became so popular as the unconventional star of the Danish TV series The Killing that it spawned a love, not just for Scandi drama, but for the clothes worn by the detectives themselves.

After The Killing came The Bridge, in which Swedish detective Saga Noren was barely seen without her trademark leather trousers and long military-style coat.
A young women has described her connection to her Iranian heritage, and its obsession with plastic surgery, in a revealing interview.

Iranian-American photographer Sunny Shokrae is profiled in recent clip by Refinery29, describing how she grew up in a culture that advocates nose jobs in order to find a good husband.

Iran is known as the nose job capital of the world, with some statistics saying that there are seven times the number of rhinoplasties performed there as in the United States.

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True self: Sunny Shokrae, a New York-based Iranian-American photographer, has revealed in an interview with Refinery29 that her family offered her a nose job to help her find a husband

One of many: Sunny was just five when she left Iran, which is known as the nose job capital of the world as the procedure is seen as a status symbol and is seven times more prevalent than in America

Sunny only lived in Iran until the age of five, but while her parents discouraged her from dating or wearing make-up when she was young, 'my mom would also offer the nose job'.

'Girls are told at a young age to change their noses so they can get married. Literally. They think it'll bring you a better life,' she said.

'It's just a really Iranian way to be,' she added.

However, the New York-based professional is quick to add that despite this trend, 'Iran is not a vain place. It's a really warm amazing culture'.

Right at home: Sunny went on to add that women in Iran think that a nose job will 'bring you a better life'

Younger days: Sunny admitted that when she was a youngster that she wished she was white and named Amy

Yet when it comes to plastic surgery, Sunny calls the nose job the 'point of cosmetic optimization', adding that it's a way that plenty of people 'make a lot of money' doing.

Sunny goes on to reveal that as a youngster she didn't want to be Iranian, actually wishing she was a white girl named Amy.

'It took a really long time to appreciate my difference,' she said. 'I'm happy that I never gave into getting a nose job, because in the end of the day it doesn't matter - who cares?!'

Working away: As a photographer, Sunny now seeks out imperfections to feature in her work

Looking back: Sunny is now glad she never gave into getting the nose job, because she has learned to love her nose

Having overcome the idea that there were beauty standards she was compelled to meet, she eventually became a photographer.

Now, in her work, the artist actively seeks out subjects with perfect imperfections.
Giving the hormone testosterone to older men can radically reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes

Giving the hormone testosterone to older men can radically reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes, research has shown.

Hormone replacement therapy for men was found to benefit those aged between 58 and 78 who had heart conditions.

The findings appear to disprove previous claims testosterone may worsen heart problems, researchers say.

Scientists studied 755 heart patients, who were given supplements of the male hormone either injected or in a gel form.

Those who received the testosterone therapy were 80 per cent less likely to suffer a cardiovascular event such as a heart attack or stroke than those who did not.

This was despite previous research suggesting that testosterone supplements can increase the risk of cardiovascular problems.

Last year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required manufacturers of all approved testosterone products to add labels outlining the danger.

Lead researcher Dr Brent Muhlestein, from the Intermountain Medical Centre Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, US, said: The study shows that using testosterone replacement therapy to increase testosterone to normal levels in androgen-deficient men doesnt increase their risk of a serious heart attack or stroke.

That was the case even in the highest-risk men - those with known pre-existing heart disease.

A randomised clinical trial was now needed to clarify the picture, he said.

The study found that after one year, 64 patients who were not taking testosterone supplements suffered a major cardiovascular event. This compared with only 12 who were taking medium doses of testosterone, and nine who were receiving high doses.

The same trend was seen two years later, by which time 125 patients not treated with testosterone, 38 medium-dose patients and 22 high-dose patients had experienced a major event.

Dr Muhlestein added: The FDAs warning was based on the best clinical information available at the time. As further information, like our research, becomes available - and especially after a large randomised clinical outcomes trial can be accomplished - hopefully the FDA will be able to change its warning.

HRT could particularly benefit older men. Those who received the testosterone therapy were 80 per cent less likely to suffer a cardiovascular event such as a heart attack or stroke than those who did not

The findings were presented at the American College of Cardiologys 65th annual scientific session in Chicago.

Scientists studied 755 heart patients, who were given supplements of the male hormone either injected or in a gel form

Previous research has found that testosterone replacement treatments may also help over-65s walk quicker and reduce depression.

The findings provide evidence that a male menopause may strike men as they age, with dropping levels of testosterone affecting their mood and sexual drive.

Some experts think that as with women, a drop in male sex hormones may explain many of the problems men experience in later life, including fatigue and mood changes.

They insist there is no need for men to suffer as they get older, and should have access to hormone replacement therapy in the same way that women are able to take tablets as they pass the menopause.

But the theory is controversial, with many scientists arguing that a gradual decline in testosterone levels is a natural and healthy part of ageing - and does not require artificial treatments.

The new study, led by scientists in Chicago and Los Angeles, found that treating over-65s with testosterone gels for a year increased their testosterone levels to that expected in a man of 30.

The treatment did not improve energy but did improve mood and depressive symptoms.
I need to know who my wife had an affair with

My wife and I have been happily married for 50 years. We love each other and still enjoy an active sex life. However, just before our 25th wedding anniversary I discovered she was having an affair. I confronted her and she ended it immediately but refused to say who it was with or how long it had been going on. I was afraid of losing her if I pushed too hard for details. I also had a demanding job and there were many other things happening in our lives, including our sons wedding. We were both able to move on. Over the years I have barely mentioned her affair but when I have she still refuses to talk about it. Now, I think about it nearly every day and am desperate to know who the other man was. I have considered turning detective and asking various friends if they know, but this would be unfair to my wife. We are still very much in love and I would hate to jeopardise our relationship. Should I try to live with this, ask her who it was again or try to find out? Whatever the outcome, I would not want to change anything, but why is this affecting me after all these years?

The discovery of an affair is always devastating, but it shows how much you love your wife that you continued with the marriage and forgave her. Because she returns your love, the marriage is still fulfilling 25 years later. Virtually everyone who discovers his or her partner has had an affair wants to know who it was with and she should have told you. Now, with more time on your hands and less time ahead, the question has raised its head again. If she did tell you and you discovered it was one of your friends, you could find that incredibly difficult to deal with. Rather than giving you peace of mind, it could throw you back to the shock of discovery and open up that painful time all over again. If you think you could cope, you could ask her once more, but I think she would maintain her silence. So, though I understand your need to know, its really better to let it go, enjoy the good times and treasure the relationship you have.

I cant support my ungrateful son

All my life I have gone out of my way to help my son emotionally and financially, even though he is now a grown man with a child of his own. I paid for the deposit on his flat and bought him furniture and equipment to start a business. I gave him everything, until last year when I really had nothing left and had to say, no more money. I then received several painful, ranting texts saying I had never supported him. Not once have I received a Mothers Day or even a birthday card. I separated from his father when he was eight because my husband rarely took me anywhere and sex only happened when he had nothing to watch on TV. I have never felt loved or wanted by either of them. Could you help me sort out how to deal with his lack of appreciation for me?

It is important to tell yourself that there is no truth in what he says. You have been an amazingly supportive mother and I fear he is taking advantage of you. Telling you that you dont support him is emotional blackmail. I do agree with parents helping out their children and grandchildren if they can, but you have run out of money and its time he stood on his own two feet. I suggest that you write a letter saying how much you love him and listing all the things you have done to help and support him. Explain that you no longer have the funds to continue to do this and how hurt you feel. Tell him that the most important thing is to have him and your grandchild in your life. Sometimes, if we dont value ourselves enough, we dont get the love we deserve from other people. It sounds as if you have low self-esteem. Google NHS Choices self-esteem for ideas of how to get help with this.

How do I tell them Im bisexual?

I am 16 and think that I may be bisexual as I have strong feelings for a girl I play sport with. However, she is straight and would never feel the same way. I have told my parents about girls who are gay and they look down their noses at them. Im scared that if I tell them theyd turn me away. I get a lot of male attention, but broken relationships and bad encounters have caused my trust in boys to fail. My dad is not well so I am afraid if I tell him it might make him worse. I am so confused about how I feel. This is tearing me apart.

Every parent should love their child just as much whether they are gay, straight or bisexual. They are the same child they have always loved and if that child is confused about their sexuality, parents should show their love and understanding. Sometimes it does come as a surprise and parents may take a little time to adjust, but hopefully they would accept it in time. It may be that as you find it difficult to trust boys a relationship with a girl feels easier. This is too much to carry all on your own so contact LGBT support group Stonewall (stonewall.org.uk, 0800 502 020). Talk through issues facing you at home and they will help you explore your feelings and find a way to tell your parents.

If you have a problem, write to Zelda West-Meads at: YOU, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS, or email z.west-meads@you.co.uk
When ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, the famously driven founder and editor of The Huffington Post, collapsed due to sleep deprivation, she resolved to overhaul her accelerated lifestyle. She tells Jane Mulkerrins how getting eight hours a night has changed her life

I think my bad habits started at Cambridge University. I grew up with a mother who treated sleep as something sacred... And then at Cambridge I wanted to experience everything,' said Arianna Huffington

Inspiration for Arianna Huffingtons latest book came not in the form of a lightbulb moment, but a severe blow to the skull.

Back in 2007, the Greek-born, U.S.-based journalist and entrepreneur was working habitually long hours building The Huffington Post, her recently established news website, while touring prospective colleges with her eldest daughter Christina.

During the day, Arianna dutifully downed her BlackBerry to focus on the matter in hand.

By night, however, she resumed her long-held workaholic ways.

After Christina had fallen asleep, Id fire up the computers and the BlackBerrys and respond to all the urgent emails, attempting to squeeze a full days work into what should have been my sleep time, recalls Arianna, 65.

Then, after about three or four hours of sleep, Id be back up for the day shift.

After the US college tour, she flew to Portland, then to Los Angeles, then home to New York, where she promptly collapsed in her office, coming to in a pool of blood, with a broken cheekbone and requiring five stitches under her eyebrow.

She spent a month visiting medical specialists to find out if she was suffering from a serious underlying condition.

Ariannas sleep habits now are admirable. She gets eight hours a night and turns off all her devices  three iPhones and an iPad  at least 30 minutes before bed

Suddenly you come face to face with your own mortality: do I have a brain tumour, do I have cancer; do I have a heart problem? she remembers.

And when the diagnosis was burnout and sleep deprivation, I wanted to learn everything about it.

The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time is a solidly researched tome, taking in terrifying scientific evidence regarding the long-term effects of sleep deprivation.

I learn that skimping on sleep may eventually affect us so badly that those of us who dont end up dead  through cancer, heart disease or fatal accidents caused by exhaustion  will be overweight, stupid and depressed, our brains, metabolisms and moods ravaged. We might also be prime candidates for Alzheimers.

But the book also covers dreams, societys historical relationship with sleep, and behavioural psychology regarding sex and sleep.

As someone who regularly exists on five or six hours a night, The Sleep Revolution is a radical read. The weekend before meeting its author, for the first time in my adult life, I attempted to get at least seven hours each night, as she recommends.

Theres definitely something in it, I reluctantly concede, as I arrive at the Manhattan offices of The Huffington Post on the following Monday, feeling perky and alert.

Ariannas previous meeting  with the U.S. ambassador to Spain  is running a little over. This is, after all, a woman so well-connected she has Oprah on speed dial, along with the Obamas, the Clintons and the Dalai Lama. So I take a tour of the offices while Arianna finishes.

The Huffington Post  which was sold to AOL in 2011 for $315 million (221 million), retaining Arianna as editor-in-chief  is testament to her message regarding sleep: there are hammocks in the newsroom and two darkened nap rooms which staff can book for 30 minutes to restore their flagging focus during the day. Theres also a cushion-strewn room where weekly breathing and meditation classes are held.

Back in Ariannas office, we settle down on a sofa, on which the editor sometimes takes an afternoon nap herself.

Im a little disappointed, she begins, youre not wearing one of your capes.

Ariana spent her 20s in a decade-long love affair with the renowned columnist and broadcaster Bernard Levin, whom she credits with teaching her to write (pictured in 1972)

Earlier that day, Id been asked to send Ariannas publishers a short biography. I wasnt expecting, however, that shed have a handle on my addiction to sleeve-free outerwear.

Im obsessed with capes, too. Theyre so chic, she says, in her gloriously Greek accent.

On the weekend, if I wear sweatpants and a sweater, I throw a black cape on to cover everything.

Today, however, she is sporting a brown skirt suit, suede knee-high boots and a pearl on a gold chain, and is impeccably blow-dried and made up.

Clearly, Arianna is masterful at making a connection. Her manner is warm, maternal and utterly focused; theres not an iPhone or a laptop in sight throughout our talk.

And within minutes, I find myself confiding in her about my terrible sleep patterns, which began when I was a student.

University is where, she believes, many of us pick up our bad habits, particularly in highly academic institutions where students are told: grades, social life, sleep  pick two.

And most students dont pick sleep, she says.

This month, as part of her mission to revolutionise sleep, Arianna and her team will be launching a campaign on U.S. campuses, with a sleep fair and a strong social media presence.

Were going to do it in a way that isnt preachy, but which throws in all the scientific facts, she says.

Because if you look at the data and see the impact that sleep has on your brain, health, creativity and performance, then its just a matter of changing habits.

I think my bad habits started at Cambridge University, she continues.

I grew up with a mother who treated sleep as something sacred and made us prioritise it. And then at Cambridge I wanted to experience everything

Arianna would hold discussion parties in her room at Girton College, from which men had to be ejected by 10pm. On more than one occasion, this rule was not abided.

I was called into the deans office to be reprimanded, Arianna giggles. And she said, We dont want this to get into Varsity [the university newspaper], so, to avoid that, we will charge you a shilling per man. I do hope they were worth it? A couple of them were, she laughs.

Ariannas sleep habits now are admirable. She gets eight hours a night and turns off all her devices  three iPhones and an iPad  at least 30 minutes before bed.

When Im really good, its an hour, but 30 minutes is non-negotiable, she says.

The unplugging is, according to Arianna, essential, and we should banish anything that requires a charger from the bedroom.

That really is the number one rule for sleep, she says firmly.

Arianna and husband Michael on their honeymoon in 1986. They divorced in 1997 and Michael announced that he was bisexual, a fact that he has claimed his ex-wife was aware of all along

Four years ago, her eldest daughter Christina, then 22 and a student at Yale, was hospitalised with respiratory problems after taking too much cocaine.

Though Arianna says it was the most terrifying moment of my life, she also credits her improved sleep habits with helping her cope.

I was in a much stronger position to deal with everything and be of help to her because I was more resilient, she says.

I find that sleep deprivation is the easiest way to lose your resilience in dealing with challenges.

I was just grateful she was alive, Arianna has said of her daughters hospitalisation.

I was grateful that she wanted to get well and that she had called me.

Christina has subsequently written about her cocaine problem, which began when she was in high school, and taken part in a White House event with other young former drug users and the U.S. governments drugs czar.

She has been open about her drug problem to try to help other young women, says Arianna.

We decided that she would come out [from university], deal with it and then go back to graduate, which is what she did.

Arianna grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Athens with her younger sister Agapi, to whom she is still very close.

Her father Konstantinos Stasinopoulou was a journalist who was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp after publishing an underground newspaper in Greece during the German occupation, and whom Arianna credits with instilling in her a passion for journalism.

He was also a serial philanderer and her mother Elli left him when Arianna was 11.

She had no means of support and sold everything she had. I recall her selling her last gold earrings, says Arianna. But she was insistent on [us having] a good education.

When Ellis ambitious elder daughter saw a picture of Cambridge University and expressed a desire to study there, others laughed  Arianna barely spoke any English. But Elli was beyond supportive.

She discovered that I could take the required exams at the British consulate in Athens, so three times a week I would walk there to have lessons, Arianna remembers.

Then, she borrowed money to take me and my sister to England to see the colleges for real.

Arianna enrolled to study economics at Cambridge, where she became the first foreign (and only the third female) president of the prestigious Cambridge Union, though she was mocked for her accent.

I was a terrible speaker when I started, but I was so entranced by the spectacle of good speakers, and hearts and minds being moved by words, she enthuses.

At first I would write down every word, then I learned to just have headings, then to memorise what I wanted to say  it was a process.

'Speaking is my favourite thing these days, better than writing or being on TV, because theres nothing like the direct connection with an audience.

It was thanks to her performance in the debating chamber that Arianna became a writer.

A publisher saw her debating the changing role of women and invited her to pen a riposte to Germaine Greers feminist tome The Female Eunuch.

Ariannas The Female Woman, which defended a womans right to stay at home and raise a family, was published when she was just 23.

Ariana with daughters Isabella (left) and Christina. Ive tried to instil a very different ethic in my daughters, so they wont make the same mistakes I did,' she said

Her own life looked rather different, however.

She spent her 20s in a decade-long love affair with the renowned columnist and broadcaster Bernard Levin, whom she credits with teaching her to write.

However, he didnt want children or to get married.

I think my life would have been very different if hed married me, she muses.

Who knows what it would have been like. I wouldnt have had my two daughters; I might have other children, but who knows?

She and Bernard remained close friends until his death in 2004.

It was so tough to see him suffer from Alzheimers, she winces.

Somebody who had this extraordinary brain, who could recite entire Shakespeare plays, searching for words and not finding them.

'The last time I saw him, his partner brought him to have tea with me and left us alone, and that was painful, she says sadly.

He hadnt a clue who I was, couldnt remember anything. I went up to my room afterwards and wept.

After the end of their romantic relationship, Arianna decamped to New York, where she met and married Michael Huffington, an oil billionaire who became a Republican congressman.

The couple relocated to Washington DC, where they became glamorous power brokers and, after the pain of a stillborn child when Arianna was 36, went on to have two daughters, Christina, now 26, and Isabella, 24.

But the couple divorced in 1997 and Michael announced that he was bisexual, a fact that he has claimed his ex-wife was aware of all along.

Ariannas focus did not falter. She ran (albeit unsuccessfully) for governor of California in 2003 against Arnold Schwarzenegger, before founding The Huffington Post.

She assures me that her relationships could not be friendlier these days: she, her ex-husband and their daughters spent Christmas together in Napa, California.

As Nora Ephron said, Marriage comes and goes, but divorce is for ever, she laughs.

Putting your children first, rather than your inevitable resentments, is hard, but it has paid off and now its easy. Were good friends.

I ask if shed ever want to be involved more directly in politics again.

No, she says firmly. I feel that you can have more of an impact through political coverage than running for office.

The current campaigns could certainly use some Arianna-influenced sleep promotion. We discuss Februarys Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, around which much of the talk was of candidates sleep deprivation.

They brag about it, says Arianna, horrified, especially the men. Its become a sort of whose is bigger competition.

These days, home is New York, where she lives in a loft big enough to accommodate her daughter Isabella, too.

Right now shes in LA painting. I miss her, says Arianna.

However, she doesnt need to look far to see Isabellas handiwork  more than a dozen of her intricate, large-scale works adorn the walls at The Huffington Post.

Christina, who has been sober for four years, works in television in New York and has a nice boyfriend, Arianna has said.

She is developing a series at the moment for The Huffington Post called Talk to Me, which is about adult children interviewing their parents.

How has she cultivated in her daughters the sort of drive that brought her from a one-bedroom apartment in Athens to the sharp end of global media?

Ive tried to instil a very different ethic in my daughters, so they wont make the same mistakes I did, she says.

I make it clear to them that there is no trade-off between taking care of themselves and their ability to do good work.

Arianna nurtures herself these days with regular pilates and yoga, and daily meditation.

She also avoids eating aeroplane food and taking red-eye flights, and uses The Huffington Posts holiday email service, which automatically deletes messages that arrive while you are on holiday.

It is totally amazing, she enthuses. You can have a recharging vacation and return with new ideas, running on 100 per cent battery.

Ariana's sleep revolution

Sleep deprivation makes us dangerously unhealthy. A lack of melatonin, the hormone that controls our sleep and wake cycles, is linked to higher rates of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers

Getting enough sleep really is a matter of life and death An article based on findings by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, provocatively titled Sleep or Die, discussed the connection between a lack of sleep and an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and obesity  the incidence of death from all causes goes up by 15 per cent when we sleep fewer than five hours per night. Even when it doesnt kill us, sleep deprivation makes us dangerously unhealthy. A lack of melatonin, the hormone that controls our sleep and wake cycles, is linked to higher rates of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers.

Sleep deprivation has also been proven to be one of the biggest variables in our mental and cognitive performance. In just two weeks of getting six hours of sleep a night, the performance drop-off is the same as in someone who has just gone 24 hours without sleep. For those getting just four hours, the impairment is equivalent to that of going 48 hours without sleep.

And when were not well rested, it shows. An experiment in the UK tested the effects of sleep deprivation on a group of 30 women. Their skin was analysed and photographed after they slept for eight hours and then again after sleeping six hours for five nights in a row. Fine lines and wrinkles increased by 45 per cent and redness increased by eight per cent. In other words, we wear our lack of sleep on our faces.

But what do you do when, for whatever reason  a sick toddler, a bad cold, a late night out  you just cant get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep? Fortunately, theres a great remedy: the nap. Naps are a free and readily available way to enjoy what the National Sleep Foundation calls a pleasant luxury, a mini-vacation.

As it turns out, naps are great for us even when we are getting good sleep at night. According to David Randall, author of Dreamland, even a short nap primes our brains to function at a higher level, letting us find solutions to puzzles more quickly and recall information more accurately. While chronic poor sleep can have long-lasting effects on our health, naps can help mitigate some of those effects, at least in the short term.

A study by Paris-Sorbonne University found that short naps lowered stress and boosted the immune system.

Our data suggests a 30-minute nap can reverse the hormonal impact of a night of poor sleep, said one study co-author Brice Faraut. Short of time travel, a nap may be the closest we can get to a second chance at a good nights sleep. Rather than reach for our fifth cup of coffee or third doughnut to deal with the usual post-lunch lull, consider a 20-minute nap. In fact, if youre deciding between the two  caffeine or nap  the science is clear that naps trump caffeine.

Sara Mednick, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, compared the beneficial effects on memory and problem-solving of 200 milligrams of caffeine (about a cup of coffee) to a long nap. The two were equal on perceptual learning, but naps outscored caffeine in word recall and motor learning.

When I feel in need of a nap, I use the couch in my office. I used to close the curtains of the glass wall that looks out over the newsroom, but one day it dawned on me that leaving the curtains open sends a clear message to the newsroom that not only is there no stigma  at least at The Huffington Post  attached to napping, its the best thing we can do to recharge ourselves.

This is an edited extract from The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time by Arianna Huffington, to be published on Thursday by WH Allen, price 16.99.

To order a copy for 12.74, visit you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; offer available until 17 April; p&p is free on orders over 12.




Charlotte Brontes vow to stay true to herself  in both love and ambition  has been a lifelong inspiration to writer Joanna Moorhead. Here she explains why  on the 200th anniversary of Charlottes birth  the novelist is just as relevant to young women today

Joanna Moorhead with her daughter Catriona at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the former home of the Bronte family

I cant remember exactly when I met her, but this much I know: as soon as we became acquainted I was aware how much my new friend Charlotte was going to mean to me. We had so much in common.

Like her, I went to an all-girls boarding school, a place that often seemed cut off from the rest of humanity.

Like her, I had been bereaved as a child.

Like her, I wasnt always popular; I often felt a bit of an outsider, just as she did.

Like her, my family lived on a windswept moor  in the same remote area of Yorkshire where she had spent almost all her life.

And like her, I knew from an early age that the thing I wanted most, in the whole world, was to be a published writer.

The fact that she lived two centuries before me never seemed a drawback; Charlotte Bronte spoke to me, as clearly as if she had been sitting beside me in my classroom.

This month sees the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontes birth; and never in her wildest dreams could she have guessed that two centuries on she would be a global literary superstar

Through her novels, especially Jane Eyre, I knew her voice; it was strong and true and, most importantly, surprisingly modern.

There I was, in the middle of the 1970s, stuck on Donny Osmond, the Bay City Rollers, Abba andCharlotte Bronte.

And what is perhaps most delightful about my long connection with the vicars daughter from Haworth is that she has turned out to be just as much of a role model to my own four daughters, 40 years on.

This month sees the bicentenary of Charlottes birth; and never in her wildest dreams could she have guessed that two centuries on she would be a global literary superstar.

She lived in a tiny world  most of her 38 years were contained in Haworth, apart from her boarding school experience in Lancashire and sojourns as a governess in other parts of Yorkshire.

She did spend some time in Brussels  more of which later  but her geographical horizons were, for the most part, limited.

And there was another dimension in which her life was tiny: as a child, and then as a teenager, she spent much of her time writing and illustrating minuscule books and pictures which were part of a fictional world dreamt up by her, her sisters Emily and Anne, and her brother Branwell.

In my youth I was a frequent visitor to the parsonage at Haworth, reinvented after the family had all died as the Bronte Museum, and there was always something compelling about the life of Charlotte and her siblings.

When the Rev Patrick Bronte arrived there in 1820, he brought with him his large and lively family: wife Maria and their brood of five daughters and one son  Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne  all aged under six.

But over the next few years the family was hit by three tragedies: first Mrs Bronte died of cancer, and then the two eldest girls died of a typhus outbreak at the boarding school where Charlotte and Emily were also pupils. (The school was idiosyncratic, with terrible food  traits I recognised all too well from my own boarding experience.)

Of course, Charlotte was devastated by the losses. Her description in Jane Eyre of Helen Burns, who dies in the school infirmary, is heavily influenced by Maria, her much-loved eldest sister.

Charlotte suffered more losses than me, but we had sibling loss in common; I, too, lost a sister, a girl called Clare, who was just three when she died in a road traffic accident (I was ten at the time).

Joanna and Catriona in the dining room of the parsonage, where the Bronte sisters did most of their writing. On Jane Eyre: Its her quiet, determined independence that most speaks to me,' said Joanna

Like Charlotte in Jane Eyre, I wanted to use my writing to remember my sister and pay tribute to her, and the woman she might have gone on to become.

Perhaps more than anything, though, I recognised the backdrop to Charlottes life: the hilltop village of Haworth, a compact place where the wind whistled through the narrow, cobbled streets and where the weather ruled everything.

No wonder Jane Eyre opens with an account of it, in one of the most famous passages in English literature: There was no possibility of taking a walk that daythe cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

It was a winter wind I knew well, and a penetrating rain I often felt myself; because my family home was just a moor away from Haworth, on another desolate hillside above the similar town of Hebden Bridge.

Like the Brontes, my siblings and I would walk on the moors; like them, we knew the worst the winter snow could bring. Like them, we looked forward to the sunny fields of the summer, and to paddling in the little brook a stones throw from our farmhouse.

But if all this was what drew me to Charlotte, it was her character that made her my lifelong friend.

As every Bronte fan knows, the personality of Jane Eyre, and the events that happen to her, owe a huge amount to the real-life Charlotte and her own story.

Like Charlotte, Jane was a governess; like Charlotte, Jane falls in love with a man she cannot marry.

Like Charlotte, Jane is acutely self-aware; she believes she is plain, but she knows herself to be talented.

She is realistic, too, about those talents, neither pretending to underestimate them, nor overplaying them; this is a woman with a strong and honest sense of herself, aware of her gifts but equally aware of her failings.

And most of all, Jane, like Charlotte, believes that, while she is never less than courteous and polite and respectful of those around her, she is entitled to be on this earth and that, fundamentally, her voice has as much right to be heard as anyone elses.

Its her quiet, determined independence that most speaks to me; and woven in with that independence, impossible to tease out from it, is her inherent, unflinching feminism.

Women, she says, feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts just as much as their brothers do.

Re-reading Jane Eyre recently with my youngest daughter Catriona, 14, as I have done in the past with my elder daughters, we were both struck anew by how of-now Charlottes views remain.

Charlotte Bronte lived in a tiny world  most of her 38 years were contained in Haworth, apart from her boarding school experience in Lancashire and sojourns as a governess in other parts of Yorkshire

She lets you know its OK not to be perfect, says Catriona.

And shes right; shes thinking of lines like this one, in which Jane acknowledges that she has faults, but refuses to be cowed into feeling that those faults reduce her as a person: Do you think, asks Jane, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart!

At a time when young women are assailed from all sides by the idea that physical perfection is all, and that looks are somehow bound up with individual worth, her words have as much  no, more  to say now than when she wrote them.

The delightful truth at the heart of Charlotte is that she lived life on her own terms, and by her own standards; she wasnt afraid of how things looked on the outside, and that is something many women in particular still struggle with today.

Like Jane Eyre, Charlotte would always rather be happy than dignified; like her, she believed that conventionality is not morality.

Like the Western world of the 21st century, Yorkshire in the 19th century was a place where young women were straitjacketed into believing that they had to live according to narrow norms.

These conventions may have changed, but the pressures are as relentless as ever. Charlottes voice, pure and true because it is the voice of one who has lived her message, is that we not only can, but should, step outside those norms and start from the premise of how we want to live our lives.

Look inside your own heart first, was Charlottes message: I made it my own, and I hope and believe that my girls will make it theirs, too.

Whats extraordinary is that Charlottes opinions and behaviour would not be out of place in the 21st century. In her own time, they were radical.

As a young woman from a not-wealthy family, the obvious route  and the one followed by many of her friends  was to marry. But marriage was never an obvious answer to Charlotte; as she explains in Jane Eyre, it wasnt the solution to the fundamental question.

The trouble, as she says, is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

When suitors presented themselves  and even in remote Haworth, some did  they were not encouraged, because during her stay in Brussels in 1842 and 1843, Charlotte had fallen headlong in love with the headmaster of the school in which she was teaching, a man called Constantin Heger.

He appeared, or so it seemed to Charlotte, to reciprocate her feelings  but he was a married man, with several children.

Charlottes clothes in her former bedroom at the Bronte Parsonage Museum

Like Jane Eyre, who discovers that Mr Rochester, the man she loves, is married to a madwoman in the attic, Charlotte knew she could not expect her relationship with Constantin to be consummated or acted upon; but having tasted the reality of love, she was never going to be placated with second best.

In her fiction the difficulty is ironed out when Mrs Rochester dies in a fire; but in real life, Charlottes love for Constantin never could be properly played out.

However, in the end she did find a husband she loved in the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls.

For girls like mine, the story  both the fictional account of Jane Eyre, and the real-life tale of Charlotte  is a testament to the importance of being true to oneself; and also, to never giving up hope, even in the most unlikely of circumstances.

Both Jane and Charlotte found happiness in the end  though for Charlotte, that happiness was all too brief.

Of one thing she was determined: Charlotte was not going to put up with the strictures and social mores of the day when it came to the inequalities of being female.

The big irony of the Bronte household was that it was Branwell, the golden son, who was expected to achieve great things.

But Branwell had a self-destructive streak and wasnt as resilient as his sisters, and perhaps the burden of his fathers hopes weighed too heavily on him.

While Patrick Bronte was waiting for his boy to produce his magnum opus, the girls were working feverishly on their manuscripts.

And when it seemed that their being female would prove a stumbling block to their publication, Charlotte came up with the answer: a name change.

Which is how Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte became Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the pen names that helped them publish their first poetry collection.

If they couldnt wave a wand to make the world a fairer place for women, they could certainly look for ways of getting round the problems.

Women, for Charlotte, were every bit as valuable as men, their lives equally worthwhile, and they had every bit as much right to live out their dreams, and to be ambitious on different fronts.

Like me, Charlotte was a multitasker; like me, she did the cleaning and the mending and the domestic tasks alongside snatching a bit of time at the dining room table to write.

She was a juggler, just as I have always been a juggler and just as my daughters will have to be jugglers. And I hope they follow Charlottes example in knowing that every bit of what they juggle is as valuable as the rest  in other words, our individual needs matter as well as our responsibilities to others.

At the heart of Charlottes resolve was the weapon that is always at the heart of any disadvantaged person to claim their true inheritance: education.

Unlike many women of her time, she had been properly educated, in Latin and classics as well as the womanly arts of music, drawing and needlework.

Whats more, she had been encouraged to read way beyond what was seen as appropriate; Lord Byron, whose work would have been regarded as scandalous at the time, became a huge literary influence, and Mr Rochester is a hero in Byronic mould.

It was to truth, to storytelling and to love that Charlotte devoted herself. Her life, though, was not yet beyond tragedy: within eight months of one another in 1848-9, Branwell, Emily and Anne all died.

Of the Bronte siblings, Charlotte was the only one who tasted success; but it would not be for long.

Having eschewed marriage for years, in 1854 she said yes to her fathers curate, the Rev Nicholls, who had long been in love with her.

Ironically her motivator for marriage may have been a fear about what would happen to her after the death of her father, when her right to remain in the parsonage would disappear.

In another delightfully modern touch, she signed a prenup to ensure that, if she predeceased her husband, her fortune would go not to him but to her father (she later changed this).

Soon after the wedding she got pregnant, and a few months later, in March 1855, aged not quite 39, she died.

On her death certificate the cause is recorded as tuberculosis; but the true reason is much more likely to have been hyperemesis gravidarum, the extreme morning sickness for which the Duchess of Cambridge had to be hospitalised when she was pregnant with Prince George in 2012.

Charlotte is buried in her fathers church in Haworth; and her spirit still seems to swirl around the rooms of the parsonage.

You feel her tiny, neat figure has perhaps gone through the door just ahead of you, and is even now in the next room, settling down in her small, round-rimmed glasses to write.

And whatever she is writing, it is as fresh now as when she penned it.
Interior designer RITA KONIG is leading the fight-back against white-wall minimalism with an opulent collection of treasures

Sunshine yellow chairs from Philippe Hurel (www.philippe-hurel.com) sing against walls in Adam Bray Greville (adambray.drlogic.com). The artwork by David Ratcliff was a wedding present from Ritas friend Honor Fraser (honorfraser.com). The chandelier is on loan from Ritas mother Nina. Initially, I wasnt that taken with it, Rita says, but now Ive grown to love it and its part of the rooms story. The blinds are from Raoul Textiles (raoultextiles.com) and the yellow lamp is by Marianna Kennedy from Rita Konig (ritakonig.com)

THE FAMILY Interior designer and design writer Rita Konig lives with her husband Philip Eade, a biographer, and their daughter Margot, two, in a three-bedroom Victorian garden flat in West London Advertisement

A pop-art print, Hugo Guinness drawings and nostalgic British watercolours are among the jigsaw-like gallery that wraps around Ritas living room. It is a display as effortlessly charming as its owner and demonstrates the easy, elegant style that has made Rita a go-to interior designer on both sides of the Atlantic.

As someone who prizes personality over perfection, Ritas home abounds in pieces with a story to tell. The Love lithograph was a reminder of London life that Rita carried to New York ten years ago: I arrived with nothing but a suitcase and that framed poster under my arm, she remembers. A toleware lamp, so crazy I couldnt resist it, was bought on a weekend in Sag Harbor, The Hamptons, and a mirror that weighs an absolute ton was a gift from her mother. A home is made up of layers that youve accumulated at different stages and have meaning for you, explains Rita.

Interior design by numbers, where everything is colour coordinated or picked from a showroom, is an anathema to Rita  and is one reason why her English-with-a-hint-of-eccentric style was a big hit in the US. I certainly did things in a different way, she says with a smile. Clients appreciated my approach  they wanted things to look old, established and slightly knocked about.

From a young age, Rita saw how her mother, renowned interior designer Nina Campbell, transformed spaces for a clientele including the Duke of York and Ringo Starr: It was amazing to grow up in that world and she has definitely influenced me, she says.

Rita returned to the UK four years ago when she bought her Notting Hill home  initially a bijou flat for one. After she met her husband Philip and Margot was born, space became an issue. The solution? Expand into the flat next door. The result is a long run of living, dining and sleeping spaces on one level that works brilliantly for life with a toddler, plus entertaining. More recently, the apartment has hosted Ritas interior design workshops, where intimate groups gather around the dining table. The aim, says Rita, is to demystify the process  and there wont be any strict rules laid out here. A design cant be done to a blueprint. It needs to start with whats special to you, says Rita.

For information about Ritas workshops, visit ritakonig.com

Rita believes a home takes time to come together. I bought this sofa in Atlanta, but had it reupholstered years later. Doing things in stages is more affordable and means you get better quality pieces in the long run. The sofa is re-covered in Ziggurat by Quadrille Fabrics at Tissus dHelene (tissusdhelene.co.uk). The Love print is by Dandy Star (dandystar.com) and the painting above the sofa, which Rita loves for its simple, flat perspective, is by Emma McClure, bought from Gray MCA (graymca.co.uk)

Ritas gallery wall has evolved gradually with a mix of gifts and fortuitous finds: I love them all, but for different reasons, she says. The mirror belonged to Ritas mother. The fire surround was bought at Petworth Antiques Market, and the granite inset is marked by white strikes where Rita and Philip light matches for the fire

A primrose-painted back door leads straight into the kitchen for a country feel

The kitchen is simple and functional, says Rita. Id never spend a fortune in here  Id much rather buy a really good, comfortable sofa. She did, however, treat herself to the worlds most extravagant wall tiles from Made a Mano (madeamano.com). The green glasses are from Rita Konig (ritakonig.com). The worktops are Corian and the units were made by Ritas joiner and are painted in Lead II from Paint Library (paint-library.co.uk)

LEFT The walls are clad with mixed-width boards and the Smeg linear hob (smeguk.com) is partnered with a simple glass splashback. RIGHT Id just finished a project in San Francisco when I did the kitchen, so I was influenced by that bright, breezy mood, says Rita. The pendant lights are from Labour And Wait (labourandwait.co.uk). The walls are painted in Lead IV from Paint Library

In the interest of marital harmony, the bedroom is painted in Skylight by Farrow & Ball (farrow-ball.com): Philip was starting to fear hed be swallowed up by all my floral prints, says Rita. Inspired by the heavy weaves that she saw hanging at the Kasbah Bab Ourika hotel in Morocco, Rita chose the throw fabric by C&C Milano (cec-milano.com). The curtains overlay sheer blinds in Pea Pods by Robert Kime (robertkime.com). Its a good rule of thumb to combine heavy cloths with something delicate, Rita says. The desk was a gift from her mother, while the vintage toleware leaf lamp was bought in Sag Harbor

The bathroom is wrapped in panelling as green and glossy as tropical leaves, echoed by the iconic Martinique wallpaper (martiniquewallpaper.com). The paint shade is Deep Brunswick Green by Papers and Paints (papersandpaints.co.uk). The basin is set on a vintage table bought at Petworth Antiques Market

This was previously Ritas bedroom, but now doubles as a guest room and Philips study. The wallpaper is by Tyler Hall at Tissus dHelene. The empire daybed is antique and made up in bedlinen by D Porthault (dporthaultparis.com). The Guatemalan wall hanging is from Philips travels
Q I am in my early 20s and have super sensitive skin on my face, which gets very dry and prone to flake. I tried a cleansing wash and tonic for sensitive skin but my face went red and irritated, so much that I just use water now. I never wear make-up so do I need to use a cleanser or would water and moisturiser be OK?

A In a word, no. Firstly, hard water may be a culprit in your skin problems and secondly, water alone will not remove the natural build-up of dead skin cells and daily grime (even without make-up).

So we suggest cleansing with a dedicated soap-free product such as A-Derma Exomega Cleansing Oil for dry to very dry, red, itchy skin, which is based on a soothing oat extract with essential fatty acids and glycerine. To follow up, there is an Emollient Balm for very dry skin, and an Emollient Cream for dry skin.

Cleanse with a dedicated soap-free product such as A-Derma Exomega Cleansing Oil for dry to very dry, red, itchy skin. Another option is Derma E Soothing range, both from victoriahealth.com

Pharmacist Shabir Daya at Victoria Health recommends you also consider Trilogy Very Gentle Cleansing Cream, 22.50/150ml, with pure plant oils and camomile. We are great fans of this range, too, in particular the Very Gentle Calming Serum, 28.50/30ml, and Moisturising Cream, 24.50/50ml.

Another option is Derma E Soothing range, also from Victoria Health, which includes a Soothing Cleanser and Facial Treatment Oil, especially for redness and blotchiness. The soothing formula includes Anti-Ageing Pycnogenol (but this may not be so relevant to your age group).

Just a final thought: skin is literally your gut on the outside so you do need to make sure you are eating well (plenty of vegetables, salads and fruits), with protein (to help build your skin), oily fish, nuts and seeds, and possibly an omega-3 supplement, such as Power of Krill, 25/60ml, soft gels. And, of course, sipping plenty of still filtered water through the day and going light on sugary and/or caffeinated drinks.

Browcote Waterproof Eyebrow Sealant

Beauty Bible loves Browcote Waterproof Eyebrow Sealant, 6.99. Weve known Lipcote forever  admittedly, dont use it ourselves, but have many friends who absolutely swear by it for keeping their lipstick firmly in place.

And after all these years, someones had a eureka moment at Lipcote and only gone and brought out something which does the same for brows.

Very brilliant it is, too: simply apply over your eyebrow pencil or powder, and your brows will still be defined right through to make-up removal time. Because the challenge with brow-defining products is that over the day, they tend somehow to disappear into the ether.
It seems like the Bharat Mata ki Jai slogan has followed Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Saudi Arabia.

The prime minister, who is in the Saudi capital Riyadh to boost diplomatic ties between the two countries, visited the first-of-its-kind all-women IT training centre of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), where hijab-clad women vied for a chance to click a selfie with Modi.

The hall reverberated with the sound of Bharat Mata ki Jai initially, but was later replaced by chants of Modi's name.

IT professionals at TCS training centre in Riyadh gathered to take selfies with PM Narendra Modi

Giving a fillip to bilateral ties, the prime minister on Saturday held wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz on ways to expand strategic cooperation in a range of areas such as trade, investment and counter-terrorism.

In the last seven months, this is Modi's second visit to the Gulf, a strategically important region and home to over eight million Indians. He had visited the United Arab Emirates in August last year.

The prime minister interacted with Saudi IT professionals at the training centre in the heart of Riyadh and invited them to come to India.

For the world, it is considered to be main headline news that in Riyadh today I am meeting those IT professionals who I can say today represent the glory of Saudi Arabia, Modi said. He spent around 40 minutes at the centre and even posed for selfies.

All of you must come to India; I assure you a very warm reception. The atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong mes sage to the world, Modi said.

PM Modi with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz at the official welcome ceremony at the Royal Court, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

PM Modi being ordained The Order of Abdullah by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at his palace in Riyadh

Of the 1,000 women IT professionals who work in the TCS centre in BPO operations, 85 per cent are Saudi nationals.

In this very competitive world today, if we are to progress, all forces have to progress together and have to move ahead in it. When I say forces, we are talking not only of natural resources but also human resources. In human resources, human power plays a very important role, if the capacity of women are built and they are linked with the development process, then development of any country is speeded exponentially, the prime minister said.

Modi stressed that in the IT profession, India had made its place in the world.

I invite all of you to come together to India and you will see for yourself, the impact you will make on Indians, he said.

Meanwhile, terming terrorism the enemy of humanity, Modi said there was a need to de-link religion from it while arguing for a concerted global effort against terrorism.

To defeat terrorism, all those who believe in humanity have to be united. We need to delink religion from terrorism. Terrorism should be dealt in a comprehensive manner. Segmented and partial approaches have historically proven to be at best suboptimal. There can be no distinction between good or bad terrorism, he said in a veiled reference to Pakistan, a close ally of Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, in his characteristic way of striking a personal bond with world leaders, Modi gifted Abdulaziz a gold-plated replica of Kerala's Cheraman Juma Masjid, believed to be the first mosque built in India by Arab traders around 629 AD.

PM @narendramodi gifted His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud a gold-plated replica of the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kerala, the Prime Minister's Office tweeted.

Cheraman Juma Masjid is symbolic of the active trade relations between India and Saudi Arabia since ancient times, the PMO added.

'Only those who chant slogan can stay in India'

By Mail Today Bureau in New Delhi

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi was greeted with chants of Bharat Mata Ki Jai in Riyadh, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis stoked the nationalism debate saying those unwilling to raise the slogan had no right to stay in the country.

There is still a dispute over saying Bharat Mata Ki Jai and those opposing to say it should not have any right to stay here. Those living here should say Bharat Mata Ki Jai, Fadnavis said at a public meeting.

Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis also warned that Indians will not tolerate anti-nationalism

The Maharashtra chief minister also accused Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi of backing those who chant anti-national slogans.

He said the opposition parties should voice their protest against the BJP but not oppose the slogan. Fadnavis cautioned that the people of the country would not tolerate it.

The Congress pointed out that dictating terms to others was against the basic tenets of Indian democracy. Senior Congress leader PC Chako said: Every individual has freedom. Dictating what others should do is against the basic tenets of our democracy. People have the freedom. People have the right. People have the discretion what to say and what not to say. If the RSS and BJP are going to dictate, that will only boomerang and they should have the common sense to understand this.

Defending Fadnavis, BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli accused the Congress of finding fault with nationalist slogans for political reasons.

This is very unfortunate. Before Independence, people very proudly said Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata Ki Jai irrespective of whether they were Hindus, Muslims or Christians. Anyone and everyone ensured that India got its Independence, he said.

But now, 70 years later, people are finding fault with all these nationalist slogans for political reasons. There is no more love for the country, Kohli added.

With regard to the raging debate over womens entry being prohibited at some places of worship, Fadnavis said that as per Hindu culture there was no discrimination based on gender or caste, and hence it was not proper to deny women entry to any temple.
Leo visited Indonesia for his charity, The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation

Leonardo Dicaprio has reportedly been threatened with deportation by the Indonesian government, after he criticised the countrys palm oil industry in an Instagram post.

He visited Indonesia for his charity, The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which is working to help protect the rainforest of the Leuser Ecosystem.

On Instagram DiCaprio posted a picture of himself posing with endangered Sumatran elephants and wrote: The lowland #rainforest of the Leuser Ecosystem are considered the worlds best remaining habitat for the critically endangered Sumatran #elephant. In these forests, ancient elephant migratory paths are still used by some of the last #wild herds of Sumatran elephants. But the expansion of Palm Oil plantations is fragmenting the #forest and cutting off key elephant migratory corridors, making it more difficult for elephant families to find adequate sources of food and water. The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation is supporting local partners to establish a megafauna sanctuary in the Leuser Ecosystem, last place on Earth where Sumatran orangutans, tigers, rhinos and elephants coexist in the wild. -contactmusic.com

Ariana's brush with death

Ariana Grande has revealed her scary near-death experience during the opening night of her Honeymoon tour last year.

Appearing on Alan Carr: Chatty Man the 22-year-old described how she literally almost died, when she was nearly crushed by a moving part of the stage.

Opening night of my Honeymoon tour I almost died, Grande told Carr.

For real, Im not exaggerating. I usually exaggerate, but Im not. You know how they have those toaster things where people come up from the stage and you pop up? Something happened with mine, the thing I was standing on had this wooden plank and it snapped! contactmusic.com

Mounds on Mars are built by wind

New research has found that wind carved massive mounds of more than a mile high on Mars over billions of years. Their location helps pin down when water on the Red Planet dried up during a global climate change event.

The findings show the importance of wind in shaping the Martian landscape, a force that, on Earth, is overpowered by other processes, said lead author Mackenzie Day.
The 1st of April 2016 was not a good day. In the morning, newspapers reported the collapse of the Vivekananda flyover at Rabindra Sarani, near Burrabazar in North Kolkata. 21 killed, 88 injured and 78 rescued. The rescue operations continue.

In 2003 the Ultadanga flyover in East Kolkata had collapsed, injuring 3. The construction of the 2.2 kilometre Vivekananda flyover began in 2007, and the extended deadline was August 2016. The contractor is the IVRCL group in Hyderabad against whom an FIR has been filed.

The rescue operation included the National Disaster force, police, ambulances, fire brigade and volunteers.

A blame game quickly commenced after the Vivekananda flyover collapsed, with politicians rushing to attribute the tragedy to others' negligence

Disaster

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee blamed the Left regime in whose term the flyover was conceived and commenced. But she had to deal with the aftermath of the disaster.

The immediate routine response is compensation: Rs 5 lakh for the dead, Rs 3 lakh for the seriously injured, and Rs 1 lakh for others with minor injuries. Paltry sums which seem to conclude rather than initiate the remedial aftermath.

While PM Modi offered his condolences, Amit Shah has begun his electioneering two days later. Politics subsumes all.

The contractor defends its construction, suggesting the calamity was an Act of God attributable to nature.

The costs of the rescue, properly calculated, are massive. About Rs 500 crores it is said, financed by the government. Re-examining the entire flyover and restoring the collapsed area will result in further thousands of crores being spent.

How do we proceed legally? The Uphaar tragedy took place on June 13, 1997. The Supreme Court disposed off the criminal case unsatisfactorily on September 22, 2015. The civil proceedings, accelerated by the high court, resulted in ridiculous damages by the Supreme Court as if it was a motor vehicle accident. Bhopal has its own history.

Disasters are common in India, reparations elusive. We are not sensitive to death other than those of our loved ones. The question is, how to take reparation and restitution further?

The law of torts by civil suit will take years.

An English text says: The vast majority of tort actions are settled (or withdrawn) before the court pronounces judgment and the machinery of civil justice could not operate if this were not so.

The Bhopal Valentine Days settlement of 1989 was at a preliminary stage and revised slightly upward a few years later amid continuing controversy.

How do we accelerate this process? The first solution is the Nariman solution in the Jamshedpur case. On behalf of Tata, Fali Nariman submitted to the Supreme Court that the matter be referred to former Chief Justice Chandrachud whose report was accepted.

Justice Variavas Delhi HC solution was not to send victims to a civil suit (with legal aid as suggested by Justice Bhagwati in the Sriram Chemicals case (1987) but to ask a writ court to deal with it. This solution worked as far as the HC bench (Mahajan and Mudgal JJ) was concerned, but it ended up in the Supreme Court which reduced damages.

Solution

The Nariman solution is the answer. Let the matter be filed in the High or Supreme Court. Ask for the appointment of a former Chief Justice (say Justice Lodha) to examine the facts and estimate damages for acceptance by the court subject to scrutiny. My preference would be the Supreme Court. The beauty of this solution is that court time is not wasted. Of course, one feature of the Nariman solution was to admit liability, leaving damages to be determined by former Chief Justice Chandrachud.

In the Kolkata case, the collapse speaks for itself. Lawyers call this res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). The Nariman solution is at one with the Vairava solution in that instead of a suit, disaster cases can go the higher judiciary. The difference in that in the Nariman solution, an ex-Chief Justice reports on the solution for acceptance.

In the Variava solution the case was heard for days instead of appointing a committee to deal with it. Damages The next issue relates to quantum of damages.

The SC in Uphaars case reduced the damages to unacceptable levels. One reason for this is the common law system of damages which gives little for pain and suffering, loss of life and earnings.

We have to break out of this, and also extend exemplary (make an example) damages of at least Rs 1,000 crores in this case. The court could also deal with breach of contract.

But there is an aspect that has constantly baffled me. Who pays for the rescue operations? This includes personnel, ambulances, earth diggers, cranes, equipment, hospital treatment. True, this is the states function, but why should the transgressor not pay for it? Rescue is by no means a remoteness of damage.

The further issue relates to criminal investigation. The answer has to be a crack team of the CBI (with forensic experts), a dedicated team of lawyers and a special court for accelerated disposition of the case. Unless this is done, the trial will be delayed and full of holes. Finally, construction contracts and those responsible for them need proper vetting instead of falling into the quagmire of corruption, profit and bribery.

My suggestions are limited to Kolkata and other disasters.

The Nariman solution is to be recommended. I know Nariman was involved in the Carbide case. In his autobiography he regrets his involvement. For me, he is unblemished.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government wants bureaucrats posted outside Delhi to vacate government flats allotted to them while they were in the national Capital.

The Cabinet has set a deadline of 30 June for these IAS and DANICS officers to leave the premises.

According to senior officials in the Delhi government, close to 40 bureaucrats will be affected by this decision.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal with Deputy CM Manish Sisodia

Recently, many officers were transferred from Delhi to other states and union territories, but they are still occupying houses allotted to them by the PWD.

The last year has seen repeated friction between the Delhi government and bureaucrats on several issues. The cabinet took the latest decision citing an acute shortage of government houses.

The Delhi government also hit out at the Centre and asked for an equivalent number of same category government houses in place of Delhi government houses occupied by officers posted outside Delhi.

Serving officers in Delhi are not able to get suitable accommodation, resulting in a crisis, a letter issued by the PWD department to the Ministry of Urban Development said (a copy of the letter is with Mail Today).

According to a senior official, the Delhi cabinet took up the matter on March 22. The cabinet decided that as the central government is the cadre-controlling authority when it comes to IAS/DANICS officers, it should be asked to provide an equivalent number of same category government houses to the Delhi government.

Provisions

The Central government should make provisions for equal number of same category houses for officers attached with the Delhi government. Officers have been complaining that they do not get suitable government houses due to acute shortage. Many officers who were earlier working with Delhi government and are now posted outside the state have retained their houses. In many instances, their families continue to live in them, a senior government official told Mail Today.

The cabinet also decided that if the Centre fails to allocate an equal number of houses to the Delhi government by June 30, officers in possession of Delhi government houses would be asked to vacate them.

Some officers who moved out of Delhi recently see this as the Delhi government trying to get back at bureaucrats.

The tussle between the Delhi government and bureaucrats began soon after the Aam Aadmi Party came to power in February 2015.

Protest

In December 2014, Delhi government bureaucrats went on mass leave to protest against the suspension of two DANICS cadre officers even as the Union Home Ministry declared the suspension as null and void.

Last month, many senior bureaucrats who had a rough stint with the AAP government were transferred out of the national Capital. This included Shakuntala Gamlin, principal secretary (power), who has been posted as chief secretary, Arunachal Pradesh. She was at loggerheads with the AAP government after she was appointed acting Chief Secretary of Delhi by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The IAS officer was on leave ever since a tug of war erupted between the AAP-led Delhi Government and the Centre over her appointment.
Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) got embroiled in the Vivekananda flyover mishap controversy following allegations that party leaders were directly involved in supplying construction materials to the project.

Though the Hyderabad-based construction firm IVRCL bagged the contract, the sub-contract was given to a company named Sandhya Enterprise - a civil contraction agency owned by local Trinamool leader Sanjay Bakshis nephew Rajat Bakshi.

The company was named after Rajats mother. A former Congress councilor and MLA, Sanjay Bakshi is now a TMC leader in north Kolkatas Girish Park area.

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi at the collapse site in Kolkata

His wife Smita is a councilor, chairperson of Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) Borough-IV and a legislator from Jorasanko Assembly segment.

Sanjay is a flourishing promoter in the area with a stake in most of the buildings under construction in the locality.

Smita is contesting this election on a Trinamool ticket from Jorasanko seat.

With the flyover collapse, the much talked about syndicate run by various TMC leaders came to the focal point of debate once again.

According to sources Rajat runs a huge construction syndicated in the name of Sandhya Enterprise in a vast part of northern and central Kolkata.

It was also learnt that the labourers who work for Sandhya Enterprise used to be supplied by Saiful - a TMC strongman from Rajarhat -New Town area in Kolkatas north-eastern outskirts.

Sources said a sub-contract was also given to another company called Ronny Contractors, which was also controlled by Rajat.

With the help of his relatives, Rajat used to regulate the entire construction syndicate network in the area.

He was the key person who used to call the shots as he would decide the supply of building materials and labour chain management in all under-construction projects in Jorasanko-Girish Park locality.

Bharatiya Janata Party national secretary Siddhath Nath Singh on Saturday launched scathing attack on the Mamata government saying it has not ordered any probe into the matter as local Trinamool leaders were involved in the case.
Two separate incidents - one in Islamabad and the other in Lahore - shook Pakistan last Sunday.

In Lahore, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded public park where Christians had gone to celebrate Easter, leaving at least 70 dead and hundreds injured.

The same day, thousands took to streets in Islamabad and indulged in violence to protest the execution of a man they considered a hero for assassinating Punjab province governor Salman Taseer over his criticism of the countrys blasphemy laws.

Pakistani civil society members sing the national anthem at the site of the suicide blast in Lahore

Why was Governor Taseer shot dead by his own body guard, Mumtaz Hussain Qadri?

A little recall here will be helpful. In 2009, Aasia Bibi, a 45-year-old Christian mother of five, making her living as a farm worker, was accused of insulting the Prophet and was arrested under Article 295-C of Pakistans criminal law, under which, to blaspheme the Holy Prophet Mohammad is punishable by death.

A year later, a session court in Sheikhupura sentenced Aasia Bibi to death and fined her Rs 1,00,000.

On 20 November 2010, Governor Taseer visited the Sheikhupura jail to meet Aasia Bibi. He termed the blasphemy law as a black law, provoking the Islamist groups in Pakistan to declare a war against the Governor.

People mourn the death of their relatives as Pakistani police commandos (right) stand guard at the suicide blast site.

On 4 January 2011, when he was stepping into his car after visiting a restaurant in Islamabad, Mumtaz Qadri, one of his bodyguards, sprayed nine bullets on him.

What followed the killing was even more bizarre.

On 5 January 2011, thousands of lawyers, police and other government officials showered rose petals on the killer when he was produced at an Islamabad court.

Ulemas issued statements hailing the assassin and asked Muslims not to offer Namaz-e-Janaza.

On 1 October 2011, the accused was sentenced to death and subsequently, judge Syed Peraiz Ali Shah, who convicted the assassin, was sent abroad by the Pakistan government - obviously to help him escape an assassination bid at the hands of those who regards Qadri as an icon of their faith.

The powerful blast triggered by a suicide bomber in Lahore last Sunday was the end product of this very mindset, which had motivated thousands of faithfuls hailing Qadri as a hero during his trial and a martyr following his hanging on 29 February, this year.

The line of distinction between those who hold the hanged assassin as a model Muslim and the faithful who turned into a suicide bomber to kill and maim hundreds of innocents in Lahore last Sunday, is really thin, if not non-existent.

Apart from Pakistan and a good part of the Middle East, the victims of this doctrine of hate have been Brussels, Paris, Mumbai, Delhi, New York - the list is endless.

The Islamic State (ISIS) is the most visible manifestation of this menacing mindset today, threatening civil society at a global level.

Here one needs to find out the difference between those who march in protest against the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri in Pakistan and the ones in India shouting slogans at JNU and elsewhere glorifying Afzal Guru and Yakub Memon.

Both the groups support terrorists and empathise with their cause and implicitly support their actions.

Interestingly, while in Pakistan such supporters are known as Islamist fundamentalists, in India, they are seen as progressives, liberals, human right activists, intellectuals and even secularists!

In the case of Pakistan, the problem of terror goes deep, for the establishment in the country and the terrorists draw inspiration from a common doctrine - that is, the rejection of all that is pre- Islamic and non-Islamic.

In fact, this was the genesis of creation of Pakistan.

Pakistan, no wonder, considers itself a successor state to all the Muslim invaders (Turks, Arabs, Mughals and Afghans) and has named its missiles after them  Mahmud Ghazni, Mohammed Ghori, Timur, Babur and Ahmed Shah Abdali.

In contrast, India has named its missiles after elements of nature: Prithvi, Aakash, Agni, et al.

So, Pakistan will continue to suffer till it doesnt just cut its links with Islamist terrorism, but also curbs its obsession with being the vanguard of global Islam.
Public figures are more than persons. They often carry what media students call a persona, a larger-than-life projections- an aura which magnifies the self, and creates a sense of charisma.

The public persona can be hyperbolic, exaggerating the impact of a person. Worse, it can be erratic, deflating a politician into less than a person.

Cartoons often perform this function reducing the power, the impact of a person. Cartoons performed this act of condensation and rejection on Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi.

Narendra Modi's 3D holographic projection speech in 2014 election campaign helped in his image building

As their power waned, they shrank and the shrinkage was best captured in cartoons of Rahul resplendent in a pram or Manmohan sulking in a corner behind Sonia Gandhi.

Expressions

Unlike Congress politicians who kept shrinking over the decade, Narendra Modi has created an interesting array of expressions and extensions of himself.

As one explores the diversity of these expressions, one realises the political range of the man and his future limits.

Modis career became a Rorschach. A persons perception of order, the emotional state is understood through the Rorschach.

In reading politics of our time as inkblots, our middle class created and projected a Modi.

Modi in that sense was not a person but a psychological symptom of a middle class tired of the Congress.

Wanting decisiveness and security. As his politics escalated, Modi became a hoarding.

A hoarding is a larger-than -life size portrait of a politician or a film star.

Film star turned politicians such as MGR, NTR, Jayalalithaa loved their hoardings announcing benefits they had granted to the people.

Hoardings of Modi announcing his achievements looked benevolently over traffic at Ahmedabad.

The hoarding still mimics the body. The hoarding emphasises the dominance, the overarching presence of a politician.

Between the megaphone projecting his speeches and the hoarding Modi in his initial campaigns appeared a giant next to Singh and Rahul.

As his popularity increased, his publicity managers realised that the hoarding was too large.

It was gargantuan. One needed something personal, something which was half momento, which humanised Modi. Thus was born the Modi mask.

Photographs of Modis followers all in masks virtually emphasised the redundancy of support for Modi.

The Modi mask as a form of currency emphasised the easy convertibility of Modi from emotion to vote.

The mask in its multiplicity and redundancy evoked the demographic power of Modi.

Gujarati society in media portrayals almost becomes an ensemble of masks.

The mask emphasises the uniformity of emotion, the face, the variety.

By reducing society to a collection of Modi masks one sensed the enormous impact of Modi.

A mask, beyond a point, is a thing of beauty and a toy forever. Toys tends to be abandoned and often become idiosyncratic.

Toys entertain but lack the fury and focus Modis electoral campaign needed. Toys are eventually anecdotal and Modis campaign managers realised that they needed a force, a medium which expressed in a combined way, his historical and technological chutzpah.

Modi needed to look different, be different and be seen as different. Enter the hologram.

Presence

Modi wanted the simultaneity of presence, the fact he was at many places at once. It gave a power and magic to his campaign.

Media crowed about the power and range of the hologram because in a sense the medium had become the message.

Hologram technology allowed Modi to speak live to the Indian electorate at dozens of rallies across the country.

The hologram conveyed a gargantuan presence, emphasised that Modis campaign was moving like a juggernaut across the country.

A hologram replicated Modis being and provided an epidemic power to his impact.

The hologram helped create a magic avatar of Modi, helped create through technological metaphor the idea of a Modi wave.

It aids in a sense of idol worship. The Modi hologram seemed more real than the empirical Modi.

It conveyed his spirit of modernism, his sense of ease and his flair with technology.

By the time Modi got elected, history and technology had helped enforce his presence.

Technology kept magnifying his image conveying a PM whose time had come. As Modis regime stabilised, the Modi campaign ran out of ideas and gimmicks.

Modi whose voice and message was always amplified soon degenerated from a mega-phonic presence to a set of silences.

Voice

Rahul might squeak like a mouse, but his protest still had a sense of voice, it still sounded human, even humane, next to the silence of Modi over Dadri, over the farmers suicides.

Technology which was till then seen as an aid, an extension and amplification of the man, now made him seem like a ventriloquists dummies.

The timing of Modis figure as an icon in the Tussauds wax museum was both apt and ironic.

It led to the predictable expected puns of how the literal waxing of the man reflected his waning magic.

The very process of sculpting the man projected him as a mechanical figure. It is as if the Modi magic and his super powers had run out, that the great animated figure of the last 10 years had now deteriorated to a waxen dummy, a taxidermists delight.

Technology now played ironic. A man once seen as progressive master of the tweet, a digital hero, a electronic avatar, a technologically affable reproduction was now a waxen dummy.

It was almost as if rigor mortis was a few weeks away. Technology and politics had come a full circle.

The animated Modi appeared as dead wood. His face looked immobile, his mannerisms were wooden.

It was as if the very semiotics of the pictures, the technological symptoms Modi was displaying were signaling his future.

It makes one pause and think about the nature and use of technology in contemporary times.

Political campaigns which exaggerate the person and overemphasize technology seem to lose out in the long run.

The BJP will have to get ready to confront the anti-climatic era of Modi, where the person sounds mute against the Frankenstein fictions of hologram and mask.

Politics creates ironies which we still do not understand fully.
At the concluding session of the Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington DC, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made some telling interventions which underscored the need for the world to combat the growing threat of terrorists, who may be trying to use improvised nuclear devices to carry out devastating attacks on cities.

As world leaders watched behind the closed doors a video film of a dramatic but simulated scenario of such an attack by terrorists at the summit, Modi called for proactive measures to tackle the threat of nuclear terrorism through international cooperation.

A senior official present in the room told India Today, the PM emphasised that the only way to reduce the scope of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction was through greater cooperation including information sharing, intelligence exchange and developing human resources on a mass scale to tackle the threat.

PM Narendra Modi chats with US President Barack Obama at a White House dinner in Washington

Modi suggested a unique way of starting the process of capacity building by training the vast network of UN peacekeeping operations, which Indian troops also contribute to, in handling nuclear threats and attacks.

Solutions

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with US President Barack Obama during the summit

The Indian PM also offered other significant solutions at the summit. He pointed out that India had reduced the threat of medical radiological devices being misused by employing technology to make them less harmful or accessible.

He also talked about the need to reduce the vast amount of radiological waste generated by power plants by using reprocessing techniques to reduce the size of such nuclear stockpiles and reuse them.

In the progress report that India submitted at the summit, the statement highlighted the growing threat of cyber attacks on nuclear plants and the need to build capacity and train people to counter such threats.

Earlier, during the various discussions especially at the working dinner, where Modi sat next to US President Barack Obama, the PM came out with some scathing observations of how the world had neglected tackling terrorism.

Modi mentioned three main attributes of modern terrorists: their strategy of making a huge impact through massive attacks; that such terrorists no longer live in caves (alluding to Osama Bin Laden) but stay in cities and are technologically savvy; and that state actors working with nuclear traffickers and terrorists present the greatest risk (an indirect reference to Pakistan).

Technology

A senior Indian official present at the dinner said that Modi had pointed: While terrorists are using 21st century technology, our responses are rooted in the past. While terrorists are globally networked we still act only nationally to counter this threat. That while their reach and supply chains are global, genuine cooperation between nation states are not.

World leaders at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington

The PM also stated: Without prevention and prosecution of acts of terrorism, there is no deterrence against nuclear terrorism.

This was clearly directed at Pakistan, which has foot-dragged on the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks and is showing similar proclivity after the recent Pathankot attacks.

Modi announced some significant Indian contributions during the summit to enhance nuclear security worldwide including giving the International Atomic Energy Agency $1 million towards its Nuclear Security Fund for training and review services.

India also joined the core group of 35 nations, who would carry forward the legacy of the summit by strengthening the implementation of nuclear security measures.
Delhi government's only cancer institute will soon be offering PET scan facility for its patients.

PET scan is a high-end nuclear imaging technology that gives a 3D image of internal organs, detecting anomalies faster and more accurately than common CT scans that can detect only structural problems.

The Delhi State Cancer Institute (DSCI) will be the first state government institute to offer this facility.

Delhi State Cancer Institute (DSCI) will be the first state government institute to offer high-end nuclear imaging technology

Currently, the All India Institute for Medical Science (AIIMS) and RR hospital and a few other private hospitals have this facility.

The DSCI is all set to expand and has requested the government to provide 300 additional beds.

The scan, which normally costs around Rs 25,000, will be available at a meager Rs 5,000 in DSCI.

Apart from this, once the scanning facility is operational, the DSCI plans to reduce the cost of the scan in other private hospitals too.

The PET scan instrument has been procured by the hospital and the facility is available at cheaper rates

The chemical which is used in the scan will be made in our hospital and we will supply it to other hospitals at nominal rates. This will eventually bring down the cost of entire treatment, Dr RK Grover, director, DSCI told Mail Today.

The scan has a wide range of uses, it is primarily for cancer patients and for those suffering from heart and neurological ailments.

The upcoming PET scan ward in the institute is something which one should look out for. The doors of the wards are designed with the natures beauty printed on them.

The room where the treatment will take place has a 3D horse engraved on the wall.

If a patient is availing treatment, he/she should not feel tensed or worried. The natures beauty will relax the mind, said Dr Grover.

Catering to 1,000 patients on a regular basis, the Institute has 100 beds in the in-patient department.

The rooms of the hospital have been designed on colour themes to relieve the patients of mental stress

We started this Institute in 2006 with a distinct vision. We wanted to have an institute which should offer world-class treatment at an affordable price. This has been our mission and vision for the institute, added Dr Grover.

The hospital also has an eye for all colours. The private wards of the hospital have been designed according to the colours of a rainbow- VIBGYOR. Every room of the hospital is accordingly colour-coordinated.

The patients are already mentally stressed. We wanted to have some colour themes so that they can relax for some time, said Dr Grover, who personally decided the interiors.

The operation theatres of the Institute have been named after the famous cancer surgeons  Sushruta, Wertheim, Billroth and Cocker.

The ICUs are named after medical experts who have contributed in the concept of bone-marrow transplant.

It is just a way to have something interesting. By naming them after such personalities, we are remembering the experts as well as their contribution in the field of cancer, he said.

It is no surprise that the patients are happy. Gudiya Devi, 36, whose five-year-old son is admitted in the Institute, has no complaints.

We came here from Bihar and we could not believe that its a government hospital. The food and the hospital premises are extremely hygienic, she said.
The lush green fields soothing the dusty tracks of Sangatpura, a village bereft of any distinct character in Haryanas Jind district, lost its obscurity recently due to a dubious reason.

The settlement of barely 1,000 people entered the shamed list of Haryana villages registering abysmally low girl child births last year.

Yet, the problem hardly rattles the village elders. Most of them dismiss the district administrations claim of critically low sex ratio as a hogwash. They assert that there are enough girls in the village for the boys.

Female to male sex ratio in several Haryana villages remains alarmingly uneven

Mail Today visited some of the villages in Jind, which have been listed as the 10 biggest sex ratio offenders.

It is a well-known fact that Haryana is ranked among the states with worst sex ratio and within the state, these villages of Jind top the unsavoury chart.

In the year 2015, 429 girls against 1,000 boys were born in your village, informs a board put up by the district administration, painted in bold red letters signalling the alarming situation.

Barely 150km from New Delhi, in Sangatpura village plans are rolled out by successive governments to save the girl child.

In an inter-connected age, the message, however, seems to have bypassed Sangatpura.

Alarm Bells

Jinds district commissioner Vinay Singh has taken upon himself to ring the alarm bells.

A signboard in bold red letters warning about the shortage of girls was put up by him. The warning comes with guidelines and advisories to prevent pre-natal sex determination tests, which is a common practice in the region.

There is also a reward of Rs 1 lakh for those reporting sex tests conducted anywhere in the district, to eliminate a girl child.

A signboard in red letters warning about the shortage of girls put up by the district commissioner in Haryanas Sangatpura village

Yet, efforts by the district administration clearly fall short because the men are not even prepared to acknowledge the problem.

This is not true. We dont understand how they have come to this conclusion. This village has enough girl children. You can see for yourself, said Kripal, a farmer in his 60s, who claimed he has five girls in his family.

His claim was disputed by some of the women Mail Today spoke to in Sangatpura.

It is not that women dont want girl child. There is pressure from elders particularly from the in-laws in some families to do away with the girls, said a woman in the village who did not wished to be named.

She is a mother of three, two sons and a daughter. A woman in Gurthali, a village with a sex ratio of 304 for 1,000 males in 2015, told Mail Today that the problem of not having girls was mostly confined to the upper caste communities.

Reasoning her argument, she said: They see girls as izzat (honour) of the family.

As a result, they fear that she might get eve-teased or they would ran away with a village boy. They cant tolerate if a girl gets married against the family wishes, she said, pointing to the rampant issue of honour crimes in Haryana.

District commissioner Vinay Singh is concerned that many villages are still lagging behind, while the state has crossed the sex ratio of 900.

He agreed that mindset of the people is one of the main reasons for this problem.

It is not that they are not literate or that they dont have much money. It is a certain kind of mindset that is the reason behind the low sex ratio. It is true that people still attach a sense of honour with the girls in a family, he acknowledged.

According to him, Anganwadis that are in touch with expecting mothers can play major role in preventing female infanticide.

The officer also talked about initiating action against the Anganwadi workers, who are not doing their jobs properly.

They work in villages and they know the truth. It is their duty to tell these women that infanticide is a crime. We are closely looking into this. We are also thinking about initiating action if necessary, added Singh.

The commissioner said that as many as 10 FIRs have been registered against illegal sex determination racket in the region in the last six months alone.

Mail Today visited several villages, including Kheri Bhulla, Kuchrana Kalan, Sindhvi Khera, Sangatpura, Todi Kheri , Bagru Khurd, Bahadurpur, Dharoli Khera, Rewar and Gurthali, with the lowest female sex ratio in the year 2015.

Among them Dharoli Khera had the lowest sex ratio with 217 females for every 1,000 males.

Curse of Illegal sex determination racket

By Kumar Vikram

Thriving illegal sex determination racket which spreads across several states, including Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, is one of the main reasons behind the low sex ratio in the villages of Jind district in Haryana.

Even as the government has initiated multiple schemes to promote the birth of a girl child in Haryana, the racket has emerged as one of the most deterrent in achieving the desired result.

Officials have confirmed the presence of agents, who are in touch with some people in villages and these agents have nexus with those running the illegal racket in other states.

Illegal sex determination racket in other states is a major obstacle in safeguarding girl children in Haryana.

In one case we raided a place in Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh) with the help of a decoy customer. The operation took many days and finally we reached the place to unearth the racket. We also busted one such racket in Himachal Pradesh. It was revealed that people from villages in Jind used to approach them for illegal prenatal sex determination, said Vinay Singh, district commissioner, Jind.

According to the officer, the administration has alerted Anganwadi workers and a reward of Rs lakh is given to those providing information about such activities.

Singh said that the state government has several schemes to promote the birth of a girl child.

Haryana CM Manohar Lal in March 2015 launched one such scheme - Aapki Beti Humari Beti - with an objective to combat the declining child sex ratio in the state.

Under this scheme, the first girl child born on or after January 22, 2015, in the SC and BPL families, will receive Rs 21,000.

Similarly, under the scheme, all parents of Haryana are provided financial incentive of Rs 5,000 per year for up to five years.

The objectives of such schemes, according to Singh, is to bring about positive changes in the societal attitude towards girl child.

This can be achieved by celebrating the birth of a girl child, improving child sex ratio in the state, increasing enrollment and retention of girl children in schools, raising the age of marriage of girls and, also, providing them economic empowerment.

If the Jind district commissioner is to be believed, the awareness is necessary to curb the menace and several steps have been taken in this regard.
Vice-President M Hamid Ansari joined the secularism debate

Joining the debate on secularism, Vice-President M Hamid Ansari on Saturday said any discussion of the constitutional ideal of India being a secular republic having a composite culture has to be premised on the existential reality of the society, which is characterised by heterogeneity.

Is it therefore bold to expect that the Supreme Court may consider, in its wisdom, to clarify the contours within which the principles of secularism and composite culture should operate with a view to strengthen their functional modality and remove ambiguities that have crept in? Indian secularism has been described as ameliorative whose spiritual core is incrementalism. A citizen could well hope that this incremental approach is used to enhance social cohesion and social peace, Ansari said.

He said in present times people increasingly turn to the judiciary hoping that it can solve the complicated social problems.

One of the matters in the societal domain that figure prominently in public discourse relate to the constitutional ideal of India being a secular republic having a composite culture. The former expression is in the Preamble and the latter in Article 51A(f)."

He said any discussion of these constitutional values has to be premised on the existential reality of our society.

It is characterised by heterogeneity; a population of 1.3 billion comprising of over 4,635 communities, 78 per cent of whom are not only linguistic and cultural but social categories. Religious minorities constitute 19.4 per cent of the total, he added.

Our democratic polity and its secular State structure were put in place in full awareness of this plurality. There was no suggestion to erase identities and homogenise them, he added.

Quoting from judgment in the Bommai case, the vice president said in spite of clarity on secularism in the judgment, different interpretations were placed on it.
In the backdrop of toppling of its government in Uttarakhand, the Congress on Saturday sought to put its flock together in Himachal Pradesh with all its state leaders pledging to unitedly fight attempts to destabilise the Virbhadra Singh government.

With factional feud in the partys Uttarakhand unit partly contributing to the exit of its government, the Congress organised a meeting of the coordination committee of Himachal in Delhi where all its leaders in the state, including chief minister Virbhadra Singh, all ministers and MLAs were present.

The meeting, that lasted over two and half hours, was chaired by AICC general secretary Ambika Soni, who is also in-charge of party affairs in the state, and saw all Congress MLAs from Himachal Pradesh putting their weight behind the state government.

The Congress organised a meeting in Delhi where all Himachal leaders, including CM Virbhadra Singh, were present.

Ambika Soni, claimed the Congress legislature party is fully united and there was not even an iota of possibility of a situation like Uttarakhand emerging in the state.

Soni said that there was no crisis in Himachal Congress and what happened in the Uttarakhand was an attack on democracy.

She alleged that the BJP-led central government was trying to destabilise the Congress government in the state, but said its efforts would not succeed.

Congress in the state would protest at the block level against the anti-democratic approach and tactic of BJP.

Regarding the on-going investigations by CBI and ED against the Chief Minister, Soni said this matter is sub-judice, the investigation is going on since 2011 and we are going to face it and no one is going to evade the law.

Senior Himachal Congress leaders Kaul Singh, Vidya Stokes and PCC chief Sukhvinder Singh Sukkhu, who attended today's meeting, also said that there was no crisis in the party in the state and the government under the leadership of Virbhadra Singh was strong and stable and would not only last its full term but also return to power in the next assembly polls.

Sukkhu dismissed the claims of BJP leaders that some Congress MLAs were in touch with the party and said that on the contrary some disgruntled BJP MLAs were in touch with Congress.

Sources said some of the state Congress leaders, who are known critics of Virbhadra, vented out their anger against him at the meeting and sought changes in the functioning of the state government.

Sukhu said the party will fight unitedly any attempt to destabilise its government.

We are together. We will protest jointly against the Centre's attempts to destabilise the Himachal government. We will oppose BJP's attempt to topple the Congress' elected government in Himachal Pradesh, he said.
The State Department has suspended its internal review into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or her top aides mishandled emails containing information now deemed 'top secret'.

The department has paused the review to avoid interfering with an ongoing FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private server while she was America's top diplomat, spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said on Friday.

Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, has apologized for using the private email server for official business while in office from 2009 to 2013 and said she did nothing wrong. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing the arrangement.

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The State Department announced on Friday that the internal review into Hillary Clinton's emails would be suspended to avoid interfering with an ongoing FBI investigation

On January 29, the State Department said 22 emails sent or received by Clinton had been upgraded to top secret at the request US intelligence agencies.

The State Department said the top secret emails would not be made public as part of the release of thousands of Clinton's emails. It said that none of the emails were marked classified when sent.

At the time, the department also said it would conduct an internal review on whether the information in the emails was classified at the time it passed through Clinton's private clintonemail.com account run on a server in her New York home.

The State Department consulted the FBI about this in February, and in March the law enforcement agency asked the State Department to halt its inquiry.

'The FBI communicated to us that we should follow our standard practice, which is to put our internal review on hold while there is an ongoing law enforcement investigation ,' State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told reporters.

'The internal review is on hold, pending completion of the FBI's work,' she added.' We'll reassess next steps after the FBI's work is complete.'

Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, has apologized for using the private email server for official business while in office from 2009 to 2013 and said she did nothing wrong

A US State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the State Department had really only done 'administrative work' on its review but had held off while waiting for a response from the FBI.

'It took a little bit of time for the FBI to respond to our request for advice and in the interim we did not pursue the review out of prudence,' said the official, who declined further comment on the State Department review.

The government forbids handling of classified information, which may or may not be marked that way, outside secure government-controlled channels, and sometimes prosecutes people who remove it from such channels.

The government classifies information as top secret if it deems a leak could cause 'exceptionally grave damage' to national security.

Two judges have allowed a group suing for Clinton's records to seek sworn testimony from officials.
Six police officers have been killed in Turkey after suspected PKK militants blew up a building they were searching, security sources said.

A further four police officers are being treated in hospital following the blast in the town of Nusaybin, in the southeastern Mardin province on the Syrian border.

The victims were believed to have been taking part in an anti-PKK military operation in the town, which has been under curfew since mid-March as a result of escalating violence.

Blast: Seven police officers were killed and at least 27 people were wounded in a separate car bombing in Diyarbakir on Thursday. Police on Saturday announced they had arrested a key suspect

Attack: Security and forensic officials work at the site after a blast caused by a car bomb targeting a minibus carrying police officers on Thursday

It comes as police in Turkey arrested a key suspect in a separate car bombing that killed seven people and wounded 27 in the southeastern town of Diyarbakir on Thursday.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) claimed responsibility for Thursday's bombing, which targeted a minibus carrying police officers.

Sources said police seized a man - named only as AC - they believe parked the explosive-laden vehicle before remotely detonating it as the minibus passed it on a busy street.

Ambulances rushed to the scene, where images showed the police bus reduced to a burnt-out wreck by the force of the blast. Of the 27 wounded, 14 were civilians and 13 police officers.

The blast damaged several cars and shattered almost all the windows of a high rise building nearby.

On Friday, authorities arrested nine other people in connection with the bombing.

A bomb in Nusaybin, on the Turkey-Syria border, on Saturday killed six police officers. It comes just days after a car bombing in Diyarbakir, claimed by the PKK, killed seven people and wounded 27 more

Bomb: Six police officers were killed and 27 people wounded in an explosion in Diyarbakir, Turkey, on Saturday

Turkish policemen secure the area after an explosion in Diyarbakir on Thursday. Seven officers were killed in the attack, and a further six died in a blast in a building in Nusaybin on Saturday

Thursday's attack, which was later claimed by Kurdish militants, took place on the eve of a rare visit by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to central Diyarbakir

The attack happened just one day before Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu visited the city and outlined plans to confiscate and rebuild a historic neighbourhood wrecked in fighting since July.

A total of eight members of the security forces were killed on Saturday in separate clashes around the mainly Kurdish region, according to security forces.

A police officer from a combat unit was also killed in Yuksekova near the Iraqi border, where security forces began operations and imposed a round-the-clock curfew on March 13.

A soldier was also killed in the town of Sirnak, the military said on its website.

Damage: A remotely-operated car bomb went off as a police vehicle drove past the city's main bus terminal

A man walks past the broken windows of a car dealership following a bomb attack in Diyarbakir in Turkey

The blast damaged several cars and shattered almost all the windows of a high rise building in the area

Broken windows of a high rise apartment building are seen following a bomb attack in Diyarbakir

The predominately Kurdish southeast of Turkey has seen the worst violence in two decades since the PKK abandoned a two-year ceasefire in July and resumed its armed campaign for autonomy.

The government says more than 5,000 militants and almost 400 soldiers and police have been killed.

Opposition parties estimate that between 500 and 1,000 civilians have also been killed in the fighting, largely concentrated in densely populated urban centres.

Late on Friday, militants used a car bomb to strike a military outpost near the town of Kiziltepe by the Syrian frontier.
Some female Air France cabin crew are resisting an airline ruling that they should wear a headscarf while in Tehran, when flights to the Iranian capital resume later this month.

'Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the headscarf,' said Christophe Pillet of the Syndicat National du Personnel Navigant Commercial (SNPNC) union.

The SNPNC has requested to Air France management to make it a voluntary measure.

Company chiefs had sent staff a memo informing that female staff would be required 'to wear trousers during the flight with a loose fitting jacket and a scarf covering their hair on leaving he plane', Pillet said.

Company chiefs had sent staff a memo informing that female staff would be required 'to wear trousers during the flight with a loose fitting jacket and a scarf covering their hair on leaving he plane', Pillet said

Air France announced in December 2015 the resumption of Paris-Tehran flights after they were suspended in 2008 when Iran was hit with international sanctions over its nuclear ambitions Valery Hache (AFP/File)

According to Pillet, management has raised the possibility of 'penalties' against anyone not observing the dress code.

Air France told AFP that all air crew were 'obliged like other foreign visitors to respect the laws of the countries to which they travelled'.

'Iranian law requires that a veil covering the hair be worn in public places by all women on its territory.

'This obligation, which does not apply during the flight, is respected by all international airlines which fly to Iran,' the airline said.

Air France added that the headscarf rule when flying to certain destinations was 'not new' since it had applied before flights to Tehran were stopped and also to crew flying to Saudi Arabia

British Airways is set to restart flights to Iran from July, marking an exciting opportunity for Iran's growing tourism and commercial trade

Air France added that the headscarf rule when flying to certain destinations was 'not new' since it had applied before flights to Tehran were stopped and also to crew flying to Saudi Arabia.

Air France announced in December the resumption of Paris-Tehran flights after they were suspended in 2008 when Iran was hit with international sanctions over its nuclear ambitions.
Files also reveal that famous dog-trainer Barbara Woodhouse submitted many ideas to Woman's Hour - many of which were rejected

With its mix of cookery tips, celebrity interviews and social and political debate, it is the radio show that offers a distinctly female perspective on the world.

But BBC bosses originally insisted Womans Hour be fronted by a male presenter because female listeners would resent being preached at by a woman, files from the Corporations archive reveal.

One BBC memo about the Radio 4 show, which was created in 1946, stated: You are right, I feel, in putting a man in talking charge. Women cant bear being talked at by other women. What they will take for a man  I speak purely radiographically  they will resent from a woman.

T. Holland Bennett (second left) interviewing Miss Deborah Kerr (left), Mrs. Elsie May Crump (second right) and Miss Margaret Bondfield (far right) for Women's Hour in the 1940s

HOW CHURCHILL WAS 'MUZZLED' BY THE CORPORATION Sir Winston Churchill Sir Winston Churchill was muzzled by the BBC in the years leading up to the Second World War  and once tried to bribe his way on to the air waves, the Corporations archives reveal. Sir Winston, below, who spoke about politics on the BBC just six times in the decade before he became Prime Minister, vented his frustration in letters to then director-general Sir John Reith. In January 1930, he wrote: I am about to make a public offer to the BBC of 100 out of my own pocket for the right to speak for half an hour on politics. How ashamed you will all be in a few years for having muzzled the broadcast! Exactly the same thing happened in the old days when they were afraid of freedom of speech and writing, but the obstructionists have gained no fame in history. But Sir John responded: We have more than once been offered 100 not for half an hour but for one minute. We are not obstructing anybody at the present moment. Advertisement

Broadcaster Alan Ivimey, a former RAF intelligence officer, was duly appointed as the programmes first presenter.

The files also reveal how the idea for a womans hour was first put forward in a letter by a female listener.

The woman  identified as J. M. Schofield from Rochdale  suggested the new show should be presented by a woman and should be aimed at middle-class housewives who didnt want their brains to go mouldy.

She wrote: In view of the fact that the BBC pays large sums to dance bands and crooners, I think they might engage the woman with the right personality to host a womans hour along the lines I have suggested.

'I assume the right type of person would make a big success of it.

From the outset, BBC bosses had set ideas about what would appeal to women, with the first show including items on mothers midday meal and putting your best face forward.

Its airing was seen as such an event that journalist T. Holland Bennett listened live with three women, including film star Deborah Kerr.

Their comments were then included in the second edition of the programme.

Even with a man presenting the programme, BBC bosses were still disparaging.

Barbara Woodhouse regularly contributed ideas to Woman's Hour

The producers in 1946 were urged to stop using the word expert when talking about housework and cooking  because the term couldnt exist in those areas.

Any discussion of womens health issues proved problematic, with listeners even being advised to turn down the volume on their radios if they were likely to be offended.

Even this wasnt enough for BBC boss John McMillan, who wondered whether one particular item about the older woman did not represent a lowering of broadcasting standards.

He wrote: It is acutely embarrassing to hear about hot flushes, diseases of the ovaries, the possibility of womb removal and so on being transmitted on 376 kilowatts at two oclock in the afternoon.

The files also reveal Barbara Woodhouse  who would later find national fame as a dog trainer  wrote to Womans Hour regularly suggesting ideas for the programme.

The blunt-speaking Ms Woodhouse  who had been a working farmer  presented an item called taking my cows on holiday, but other ideas about domestic service, rain and ideas for childrens parties were rejected.
For more of the latest on Donald Trump visit www.dailymail.co.uk/trump

Earlier this week, Trump said there should be 'some sort of punishment' for women if abortion were a crime

Upon being asked whether he had ever dated a woman who had an abortion, he deflected the question and pressed to move on

Donald Trump has avoided answering a question about whether he has ever dated a woman who has had an abortion.

In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, the GOP frontrunner insisted she should move on to the next questions, preferring not to answer.

Earlier this week, Mr Trump claimed abortion should be banned and women punished if they get one.

In light of the sensitivity surrounding the topic, Ms Dowd wrote that she felt obliged to uncover the history behind his Draconian views.

'When he was a swinging bachelor in Manhattan, was he ever involved with anyone who had an abortion?' she asked him.

'Such an interesting question,' he said. 'So what's your next question?' Mr Trump responded.

Scroll down for video

Avoiding questions: In an interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump would not specifically state whether he had ever dated a woman who has had an abortion

Donald Trump said during an interview on CBS's Face The Nation on Friday (pictured) that laws on abortion were 'set' and would remain so 'until they're changed'

On Friday, the GOP frontrunner also responded to questions on abortion on CBS's Face The Nation.

He said his comments were made in reply to a 'hypothetical' question and told host John Dickerson he remained pro-life.

When Dickerson asked Trump if he thought abortion was murder, the billionaire said he 'didn't disagree' with the statement.

'What would you do to further restrict women's access to abortion, as President?' Dickerson asked.

Trump replied: 'I know where you're going and I just want to say. A question was asked to me in a very hypothetical - and it was said, 'illegal, illegal'.

'I've been told by some people that was an older line answer and that was an answer given on the basis of an older line from years ago, on a very conservative basis.

'But I was asked a hypothetical question - hypothetically, hypothetically.'

He added: 'The laws are set now on abortion. And that's the way they're going to remain until they're changed.'

Trump then said he would have preferred it if were up to each state to rule on abortion.

'At this moment the laws are set and I think we have to leave it that way,' he said.

When pressed by Dickerson, Trump refused to say whether he thought abortion was murder.

He paused then said: 'I have my opinions on it but I'd rather not comment on it.'

Trump then said he was pro-life and then told Dickerson he 'didn't disagree' with the proposition that abortion is murder.

Host John Dickerson (right) asked Trump (left) if he thought abortion was murder. Trump refused to comment but said he was pro-life and 'didn't disagree' with the statement

His spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said Trump meant that abortion laws won't change until he's president.

'Then he will change the law through his judicial appointments and allow the states to protect the unborn,' she said.

The GOP frontrunner said earlier this week at a town hall in Wisconsin that there should be 'some form of punishment' for women who get abortions if the procedure is outlawed.

He backed off that remark under fierce criticism, saying if abortion were no longer legal, abortionists should be penalized for performing the procedure  not the women who have it.

The abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America responded partly tongue-in-cheek to Trump's comment that abortion laws should be left alone. 'Donald Trump has seen the light,' the group said in a statement, quickly adding, 'April Fools.'

The group's president, Ilyse Hogue, said Trump's grasp of abortion policy has been 'all over the place this week' but added, 'We know that misogyny would rule in a Trump White House and that never bodes well for reproductive health care or advancing women's equality.'

Trump has hit a rough patch in his campaign as he heads into the Wisconsin primary Tuesday. His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has been charged with simple battery, accused of grabbing a reporter's arm.

He faced a backlash for comments about rival Ted Cruz's wife and managed to displease both sides in the abortion debate with his now-retracted comment that women who get abortions should be punished.
Labour's candidate to be London Mayor faced fresh controversy last night after it emerged he once wrote a how to guide for people wanting to sue the police for damages.

Sadiq Khan told his readers that they could secure payouts of up to 10,000 from forces by alleging racist behaviour or claiming wrongful arrest.

Mr Khan, who is predicted to beat Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith in next months mayoral contest, gave the advice as a contributor to the book Challenging Racism: Using The Human Rights Act.

In a chapter called Actions Against The Police, Mr Khan advised potential claimants to accuse officers of behaving in a high-handed manner, because it would allow them to demand aggravated damages.

Sadiq Khan told readers of Challenging Racism: Using The Human Right Act, that they could secure payouts of up to 10,000 from forces by alleging racist behaviour or claiming wrongful arrest

Astonishingly, Mr Khan  who as Mayor would be in charge of the Metropolitan force  appears to encourage people to engineer claims by urging them to think laterally in looking for human rights issues; many are not obviously a breach of human rights, but have a human rights angle. Mr Khan also suggested potential litigants should approach the unions, who may consider paying the legal costs of bringing a case against the police.

At the time the book was published, 2003, Mr Khan was involved in legal action against Scotland Yard over their attempt to keep order during the 2001 May Day riots.

During the disturbances, more than ten people were injured and 40 arrests made after 1,500 anti-capitalists went on the rampage in Central London.

Mr Khan lodged test cases at the High Court accusing the police of wrongful detention and false imprisonment in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights because the police had penned thousands of protesters into an enclosed area.

Mr Khan said that the behaviour of the police demands close scrutiny because they had no reasonable grounds to detain everyone. His comments stood in stark contrast to those of then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who praised the operation.

If Mr Khans action had been successful it would have exposed the police to hundreds of damages claims, amounting to millions of pounds. It was struck out, however.

At the time, he was a partner in the law firm Christian Khan, which specialised in actions against the police.

The row comes after Mr Khan was forced to suspend his Commons-based speechwriter Shueb Salar after The Mail on Sunday revealed he had posted offensive and homophobic remarks on social media.

Last night, Boris Johnson said that Mr Khans background made him ill-suited to succeed him as Mayor.

He added: Khan has spent years tying up our police in red tape and nuisance legal action  how can he possibly stand up for them and the work they do? Electing someone who made a living from obstructing the police would be a serious error.

A spokesman for Sadiq Khan said: Sadiq is the only candidate with a real plan to keep Londoners safe  ensuring there are enough armed response officers to deal with major incidents, backing officers to shoot-to-kill during terrorist attacks and restoring real neighbourhood policing.

Zac Goldsmith once called for a forced global economic crash in order to help the environment

Zac Goldsmith once called for a forced global economic crash in order to help the environment, it was revealed last night.

Mr Goldsmith  the Citys overwhelming preference to be the next London Mayor  also called for a ban on new international trade deals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Last night, Mr Goldsmith was in the unusual position for a Conservative MP of being criticised by Labour for being anti-business. Shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle said that his extreme proposals would have a catastrophic impact on Londons economy.

Mr Goldsmith made his demands as editor of The Ecologist magazine in 1999, when he published a Declaration on Climate Change.

He called for punitive taxes on motoring and an end to the exploration and development of new oil, coal and gas reserves.

And to reduce fossil fuel consumption, he advocated nothing less than a crash programme.
Civil servants who spend the most on foreign aid are rewarded with promotion, a whistleblower has claimed.

The former civil servant at the Department for International Development (DFID) said the practice left new recruits disillusioned, with many quitting in despair.

Promotions at DFID are given on the basis of how many millions you can spend, not on the quality of aid, the source told The Mail on Sunday. Thats why the bright young things who join in their 20s get very upset.

An insider has revealed to the Mail on Sunday how employees at the Department for International Development are encouraged to spend because of the rigid commitment to spending 0.7 per cent of the nation's income on foreign aid - even if it means choosing risky projects

At the heart of the problem, said the source, is the Governments rigid commitment to spending 0.7 per cent of the nations income on foreign aid.

It leads to a frantic scramble to spend taxpayers money  even if it means funding projects that officials know are risky.

The big elephant in the room is not spending it, the source added. There has been this sudden increase to 0.7 but you cant just dump extra hundreds of millions on countries without knowing what you are going to do.

The whistleblower said the DFID was reluctant to investigate corrupt use of foreign aid because it would stop the flow of money and prevent the UK meeting the 0.7 target.

Direct budget support [money given directly to another countrys government] has encouraged corruption. It is like giving a bottle of whisky to an alcoholic and saying this is your last bottle, treat it well, dont drink it all at once, the source said.

Multinational companies take advantage of the obligation to spend by overcharging DFID for consultants, the source added.

STOP THE FOREIGN AID MADNESS NOW: AS ANOTHER 12BN OF YOUR TAXES ARE SPLURGED ON HAND-OUTS FOR TERRORISTS AND KILLERS, IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPENDING ON FOREIGN AID BUDGET, SIGN OUR PETITION NOW The Mail on Sunday has launched a petition on the official Parliamentary website calling on the Government to scrap the law requiring us to spend a fixed 0.7 per cent of national wealth on foreign aid. The figure is currently 12 billion and will rise to 16 billion by 2020. Rather than helping people who desperately need it, much of this money is wasted and the Great British Giveaway fuels corruption, funds despots and corrodes democracy in developing nations. If you want to stop this madness and see that our money is better spent, click here: Yes, I want to make a difference and sign the petition The link will take you to the Parliamentary petitions web site where our petition is displayed. Once you have signed it, please share it with your family and friends using social media. You must be a UK resident or citizen to sign. Please note that signing the petition will entail you clicking on a link sent to your email inbox. 100,000 people have signed the petition, which will force politicians to at least consider a parliamentary debate on the issue. But more signatures will give the argument to reconsider that aid budget even more weight. If you want to end the madness, sign our petition here Advertisement

And officials simply acquiesce because of the pressure to meet the new targets. The insider said: People are paid well over market odds to get rid of the money. DFID is not interested in interrogating them properly. As long as it is accounted for, nobody cares how it goes out.

We were being charged 1,100 a day for a consultant during one of the last projects I was involved with. But I said I thought it was 500 a day and they said, All right, well accept that. 

The source added: DFID procedures for spending money are extremely complicated and time-consuming. You need to write a business case, set out your monitoring and evaluation schedule and define your business targets and show you are achieving value for money.

Other countries that are cutting funding are looking at Britain with amazement.
The Peru Two drugs mule who is still behind bars has said she hopes her accomplices release could speed up her own bid for freedom.

Melissa Reid, 22, who was jailed in Peru for smuggling 1.5 million of cocaine, has told family she sees the release of Michaella McCollum three days ago as a positive sign as she waits to hear if judges will bring forward her hearing.

In a phone call from prison to mother Debbie, she said: Its great news for Michaella. Im delighted. I so hope its me next. Last night, at their home in Lenzie, near Glasgow, Mrs Reid revealed the news of McCollums release had come as a complete shock to her and husband, Billy.

Melissa Reid, 22, (pictured arriving in court in 2013) who was jailed in Peru for smuggling 1.5 million of cocaine, has told family she sees the release of Michaella McCollum three days ago as a positive sign

She said: We share her enthusiasm and really hope this is it, that well finally get our daughter back home with us to restart her life again.

Were absolutely delighted for Michaella. Melissa will miss her because theyve been through a lot together.

McCollum, 23, from Northern Ireland, was freed on parole from the Ancon 2 jail on Thursday, almost three years after the pair were caught with 24lb of cocaine in suitcases at Lima airport.

Both were sentenced to six years and eight months in jail after pleading guilty but they followed different legal avenues in their bids for freedom.

McCollum must report to authorities each month and remain in Peru while she waits for a judicial hearing to decide her long-term fate. Reid is holding out for formal expulsion from Peru so she can return home.
Activists smoked marijuana, vaped and ate cannabis-laced edibles outside the White House at 4.20pm on Saturday to send their message that the drug shouldn't be considered dangerous.

Protesters planned to display a 51-foot-long inflatable 'joint' at Saturday's demonstration, but protest organizer Adam Eidinger said the Secret Service wouldn't allow it, citing security concerns.

Possession of up to 2 ounces of pot is legal for people aged 21 and above in the nation's capital, but smoking in public is illegal.

However, U.S. Park Police Sgt. Anna Rose says her agency made no arrests. Eidinger said police 'were very respectful.'

Demonstrators march for the legalization of marijuana outside of the White House, in Washington, Saturday, April 2, 2016. During the march they demanded Obama use his authority to stop marijuana arrests and pardon offenders. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Protest organizers say President Barack Obama should remove pot from the list of Schedule 1 controlled substances, which includes heroin and other addictive drugs.

On the DC Cannabis Campaign's website, a listing for Saturday's protest read: 'As long as cannabis is treated in the same category of drugs as heroin, with no accepted medical use, police will continue to arrest and lockup our brothers and sisters.

'We will not be seeking any type of permit from the National Park Police because it is our constitutional right to peacefully gather and demand Obama stop being hypocrite.

'He smoked cannabis and became the president of the United States, and while he might think cannabis is a bad habit, does he seriously think its on par with heroin, nicotine, or alcohol?

Obama has maintained that pot advocates should try to lobby Congress to pass a bill reclassifying the drug.
Astonishing photographs show thousands of Velella velella jellyfish on a Florida beach.

The City of Hallandale Beach shared snaps of the so-called 'Blue Sailors' on Facebook Thursday.

The post said: 'This AM thousands of small jellyfish washed in to our beach covering the shoreline and prompting continuous questions from beach patrons.'

'This happens about every three years.

Astonishing photographs show thousands of Velella velella jellyfish on a Florida beach

'We are flying our Purple flag for dangerous marine life.

'These particular jellyfish are scientifically named "Valella" [sic] or nicknamed "Blue Sailors".

'They are not really a dangerous type and are not known to sting.

'In this large group of blue sailors may be some actual Man-O -War stinging jellyfish.'

Nova Southeastern University marine biology professor Charles Messing told the Sun Sentinel: 'They are beautiful.

'They're an interesting addition to our beaches, when the wind blows in the right direction at the right time of year.

'I expect they're all up and down the coast of southeast Florida.'

Strong winds and ocean currents are able to bring the jellyfish to the shore, it's been reported

According to CNN, strong winds and ocean currents are able to bring the jellyfish to the shore.

The City of Hallandale Facebook page said: 'Public works beach tractor did rake up numerous, but they continue to wash up and cleanup will be a gradual process.'

The Thursday post said there had been 'only one minor sting in the first three hours of our day.'
She becomes the fourth major Scottish politician to come out

It is the first time she has revealed details about her private life

Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, pictured, has come out after confirming she has a female partner

Kezia Dugdale has spoken about her sexuality for the first time and revealed the strength she gains from her female partner.

Only weeks before the Holyrood election, the Scottish Labour leader said: 'I have a female partner. I don't talk about it very much because I don't feel I need to.

'And there's something too about how meteoric my career has been. I am generally calm, almost serene. I don't get easily stressed or battered.'

In an interview with the Fabian Review she added: 'But I need a bit of stability to do that, and that means my private life is my private life.

'That's the thing I just have to have that nobody gets to touch, and that gives me the strength to be calm elsewhere.'

It is the first time she has revealed any intimate details about her private life.

Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, is also gay, while Patrick Harvie, co-convener of the Scottish Greens, is bisexual.

Scottish Secretary of State David Mundell came out as gay earlier this year.

Miss Dugdale also made the extraordinary admission she could back Scottish independence in the event of Brexit.

It means a vote to leave the European Union, in June, would leave the future of the UK hanging by a thread, with potentially the two biggest parties campaigning to break up Britain.

Miss Dugdale has faced criticism for being soft on independence previously, after saying she would let Labour MSPs campaign for separation in a future referendum.

In the interview, she said it was 'not inconceivable' she could back a vote for independence if that would secure Scotland's membership of the EU.

Miss Davidson, who campaigned alongside Miss Dugdale during the 2014 independence campaign, said: 'This staggering admission  that it's 'not inconceivable' Kezia Dugdale could vote for independence  means Scottish Labour simply cannot be trusted to defend the decision of two million Scots to stay part of the UK.'

Recent polls have shown older voters are flocking from Labour to the Tories.

Miss Dugdale, right with UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, revealed details about her private life for the first time

Miss Dugdale, right with SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, is the fourth major Scottish politician to come out recently

Miss Dugdale has said recently she would block any attempt at a second referendum  and even promised to put it in Scottish Labour's manifesto, to try to win back No voters.

However, in the interview, she dismissed fears of coming third behind the Tories in May's Scottish elections.

'Their core message seems to be that you can only trust the Tories with the Union, but that trust was broken with [the introduction of] EVEL [English Votes for English Laws],' she said,

Astonishingly, last night Labour insisted Miss Dugdale had made her position clear since the interview in February that she was, in fact, completely opposed to independence.
Police appealed for information last night after a young mother and her baby girl went missing.

Isobel Hughes, 20, and her daughter Mya were last seen at 10pm on Friday in Ealing, West London.

Baby Mya, who is just six weeks old and has a heart condition, requires regular medical checks, but police say there have been no sightings of the pair since they vanished.

Vanished: Isobel Hughes, 20, and her daughter Mya were last seen at 10pm on Friday in Ealing

Detectives appealed for anyone with information about their whereabouts to call 101 or the Missing People helpline on 116000.
Mr Baird also embarassed himself last week in a Tweet mix-up

Two staff members have left after raising eyebrows on social media sites

Mike Baird has asked his office staff not to

New South Wales Premier Mike Baird recently issued a memo to his staff asking them not to embarrass him when it comes to using social media.

Titled 'social media guidelines,' the memo was handed out to the minister's office staff just a week after Mr Baird embarrassed himself with a copy and past bungle on Twitter while addressing the victims of the bombings in Brussels, according to the Daily Telegraph.

'Don't embarrass yourself. Don't embarrass the premier. This includes comments on the federal government policy at any level,' the memo read.

New South Wales Premier Mike Baird (pictured) recently issued a memo to his staff asking them not to embarrass him when it comes to using social media

Titled 'social media guidelines,' the memo was handed out to the minister's office staff just a week after a Mr Baird embarrassed himself with a copy and past bungle on Twitter (pictured)

It comes after two staffers left the office amid raised eyebrows.

An advisor to Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian is no longer working in the office after she was seen at a rally protesting the controversial lockout laws introduced by Mr Baird, according to the Telegraph.

An employee of the Energy Minister Anthony Roberts resigned recently after posting critical comments about Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on their social media account.

Last week, Mr Baird posted a message of support on Twitter for those affected by the horrific terrorist attacks in Brussels, but in his haste it seems he forgot to remove a note directing him to use the statement on his social media accounts.

'Tweet/FB option. Sydney, and all of NSW, stands with you Brussels,' the original tweet read.

Mr Baird forgot to remove a note directing him to use a statement of support for those affected by the Brussel terror attacks on social media which appears to be advice from a media adviser

Mr Baird, who is quite active on social media, deleted the Tweet after an hour and has not made any comments about the Twitter bungle

Within the hour Mr Baird, who forked out $30,000 for 51 days of social media training, deleted the tweet and reposted without the note, which appears to be advice from his media adviser.

But the usually Twitter savvy premier was not able to remove the tweet before before a number of social media users saved it, with many reposting the blunder to his account.

'How do I show the world I'm a 'compassionate' man to win votes? Do I use Twitter or FB,' one social media user joked.

'#awks,' wrote another.
The poll shows many think he still has his eye on the top job

A new poll has revealed Australian voters want Tony Abbott out of politics

Australians want Tony Abbott to quit politics and believe he is only sticking around so he can get his top job back a recent poll found.

According to the poll 58 per cent of Australians think Abbott still has his eye on the top job.

More than 60 per cent of voters think he should leave Parliament, Fairfax revealed.

The national poll was conducted last month by Research now for The Australia Institute and found that more than half of Coalition voters want Abbott gone.

A new poll has revealed the Australian public don't want to see former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in politics anymore

The poll also found three quarters of Greens and Labor voters don't think he should be sticking around.

Ben Oquist is the executive director of the think take and says voters across 'all demographics' think Abbot should retire.

'While that is obviously a matter for him it looks like the public has moved on from Abbott-era policies and is looking for something new,' Mr Oquist said.

The poll revealed most Australians believe Abbott is staying in politics because he wants the top job back

More than 70 percent of poll respondents said they didn't think Abbott would ever be Prime Minister again

1412 people were questioned as part of the poll.

The poll reveals 73 per cent of all people and 70.5 per cent of coalition voters believe Abbott will never be Prime Minister again.

More than half of those polled believe Abbott's presence is damaging to Malcolm Turnbull.

Abbot who has stayed in the media since he was toppled in September last year says he supports Turnbull as Prime Minister.

The poll also showed the medi-savvy politician could be hurting the reputation of Malcolm Turnbull

At the start of the annual Pollie Pedal charity bike ride fundraiser for Carers Australia in Canberra on Sunday, Mr Abbott told reporters his focus was on helping carers, who he considers 'uncanonised saints'.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull indicated he is not about to offer Mr Abbott a cabinet position, nor is he distracted by any comments the former leader might make.

Turnbull said renewal is very important in politics.

'I've brought a lot of new talent into the cabinet, I've brought a lot more women into the cabinet and that's the process I expect to continue in the future,' Mr Turnbull told Sky News on Sunday.

He said he is 'utterly undistracted' by the views of Mr Abbott, while adding that he expects all members and candidates to be supportive and disciplined.

'It's a team business ... the choice is between me and Bill Shorten,' he said.
Vulnerable: 'Sarah' asked The Mail On Sunday not to reveal her face, to protect her baby

Falling pregnant with a longed-for baby should be the happiest time in any womans life, and all the more so if, like millions, she has struggled to conceive by normal means.

Yet an increasing number of desperate would-be mothers are falling victim to a dark new threat in the troubling world of unregulated child conception  so-called natural insemination demanded by unscrupulous sperm donors.

For some, this means coercive sex and even rape at the hands of men posing as benevolent donors.

Unregulated sperm donation websites claim to provide a legitimate, much-needed service, introducing couples and single women to sources of semen, meeting a demand that licensed clinics, which have a shortage of donors, cannot fulfil. But their critics  including a growing number of MPs  say they are a magnet for sexual predators who attack women too embarrassed, or powerless, to complain to the police.

The Mail on Sunday was alerted to the problem by the case of Sarah, who has asked us not to reveal her real name to protect her baby, now five months old.

Young and vulnerable, Sarah became fixated on the idea of having a baby. With no boyfriend, she turned to the private website Pollen Tree, which purports to be a fertility network for prospective parents of all kinds, set up to put both sperm and egg donors in touch with potential recipients.

Its homepage includes glowing testimonials from users, and mentions in the national press.

Unlicensed sites such as this  there are several more  offer a very different route to pregnancy to the network of official clinics, governed by strict rules and licensed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority.

For those seeking artificial insemination, the licensed clinics maintain a register of donors recording their real names, and insist on strict health checks. Insemination takes place on the premises under medical supervision.

There is certainly no expectation of sexual intercourse.

However, the unlicensed sites impose no requirement for donors to reveal their true identities, and almost all use false names. Pollen Tree does ask prospective donors to give an undertaking they are free of sexually transmitted and inheritable diseases, but as its owner, former lawyer Patrick Harrison, told this newspaper, it has no way of enforcing this.

He said it would be futile to try to verify such claims: Documents could be faked. You could run up something using Photoshop.

And it was through Pollen Tree that Sarah, then 19, found herself in contact with a man calling himself Peter Smith, who, among other things, made the bizarre claim that he had been to spy school and was a highly trained secret agent.

I can be gullible, Sarah said. Im very easily led.

HOW 'SARAH' WAS TRICKED INTO SEX ON DONOR WEBSITE l Went on the Pollen Tree website, owned by former lawyers Patrick and Rita Harrison, hoping to find an artificial insemination sperm donor l Contacted by Peter, who told her NI  natural insemination  was the best way to get pregnant l Ended up having sex with him numerous times, after he promised they could have a loving relationship. Advertisement

WHAT 'SARAH' SHOULD HAVE DONE TO PROTECT HERSELF l Signed up to a licensed site recommended by the National Gamete Donation Trust charity l Refused any suggestion of natural insemination. A proposed Bill would outlaw this and punish website owners who allowed it to continue with criminal prosecution Website owner: Former website Patrick Harrison Couple: His co-owner wife, Rita Advertisement

So when he said we had to have sex naturally for me to get pregnant, I believed him. I like to see the good in people. Its only now that I can see that because I was willing to do almost anything to have a child, he took advantage of me.

Had she been more fortunate, her profile would have been seen by a man willing to attend a licensed clinic, as recommended by the site.

Sarah is now 21, but she looks much younger and it takes only minutes in her company to realise she is unusually naive  a classic symptom of the condition she was diagnosed with in childhood, Asperger syndrome, a form of autism. It makes Smiths behaviour all the more despicable.

She lives in a modest house with her child and her parents, in a quiet suburb on the South Coast.

Sarah was never able to discover Smiths real name, where he lives, or what he did for a living  yet he was to become the father of her child.

After several weeks of contact on the internet, Smith demanded naked pictures of Sarah. Once he called and I was having a shower. He told me, take a picture! At first I found it uncomfortable. But I just wanted a baby, so I gave in. Now I think all he ever wanted was to have sex with me.

Sarah finally met Smith in December 2014. He said he only did natural insemination. At the time, I didnt care. So we met, and had sex  in all, about 12 times. We never went on a date anywhere, though once, after we had sex in his car, he took me to McDonalds.

Throughout the time she was seeing him, Sarah never learnt his phone number: He would call me, but it always came up blocked.

Assault: Sperm donor Gennadij Ravaich

She did not alert Pollen Tree, which remained unaware of her case. She became pregnant in March 2015.

There is compelling evidence that Sarahs experience is far from unique, and may have been shared by thousands of women.

In February, social scientist Claire McQuoid set up the Sperm Donor Abuse Foundation, which will soon have a helpline for women like Sarah.

McQuoid spent much of last year undercover on the internet, talking to men and women she met online. The results are shocking. Many women related stories of coercion: of finding themselves alone with men who had said they were happy to donate sperm for artificial insemination (AI) but then demanded natural insemination (NI). Others demanded AI plus  a sperm sample in a pot produced by sexual contact.

In 2012, married neuroscientist Gennadij Revaich  who claimed to have fathered 58 children  was convicted of two charges of sexual assault arising from his secret life as a sperm donor, and given a suspended jail sentence. But his case has not deterred others.

McQuoid said she liaised with 160 men, of whom 24 stated from the outset that they would only provide sperm with sexual contact. Another 27 said initially they were happy to agree to AI, but changed their minds while McQuoid was still conversing with them online, saying they wanted sexual contact after all.

McQuoid said she met a further 79 men face-to-face who had insisted they were prepared to do AI, and to do so without being paid. But once she met them, 15 requested immediate payment of sums between 50 and 275 per sample, which is illegal. One man demanded both NI and payment. Almost all the others wanted varying sexual contact.

According to McQuoid, out of 79 men, only six were prepared to honour their original agreement of artificial insemination without sexual contact or financial remuneration.

What, other than the obvious, motivates unlicensed sperm donors? Chris, a prolific veteran who said his semen had led to more than 100 successful pregnancies over 20 years  most via unlicensed websites  agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. He said he charged nothing other than his travel expenses, though sometimes recipients provided a small gift.

He was disarmingly frank, saying he started because it felt like an opportunity to do something significant when I wasnt doing anything significant in other areas of my life.

Chris said he was a mixed donor who had used NI with a fifth of the 250 to 500 women (he wasnt sure of the total) he had tried to impregnate. He added: I dont pretend there arent some sexually motivated donors out there, and women who are put in uncomfortable situations.

Sarah suffered an ordeal after meeting 'Peter', had she met someone who had been willing to attend a licensed clinic

But he angrily rejected McQuoids findings, insisting abuse was highly unusual. Meanwhile, he added, being a sperm donor had wrecked his prospects of having a normal family: I cant stress enough how impossible women find it to have a relationship with you if you say youre a donor. One of the features of the choices Ive made is that Im likely to face a lonely old age.

He was withering about licensed clinics, stating  accurately  there was a catastrophic shortage of British sperm, which meant clinic semen was often imported.

Moreover, although the children of licensed donors would be able to find out who they were when they turned 18, women using a clinic would usually learn far less about their donor than if they met them through a website  even if, in order to protect themselves from legal liability, unlicensed donors were almost always anonymous. Patrick Harrison insisted yesterday that the Pollen Tree site is vigorously moderated: We get rid of between 10 and 15 per cent of those who sign up within 24 hours. We check everyones user name and email address.

He could not, he added, stop donors seeking NI: We can moderate our website, but we cant moderate the real world.

In order to curb possible abuse, he said, since the beginning of 2015 Pollen Tree has charged its 20,000 members, both donors and recipients, 19 a month for the privilege of being able to contact each other via the site  so it should be possible to discover real names from credit card or PayPal details.

But he added: We would only provide those details if contacted by the police.

We certainly wouldnt disclose those details to Sarah. Yet critics insist the unlicensed sites pose a threat to womens health and safety.

Laura Witjens, chief executive of the National Gamete Donation Trust, a Government-funded charity that provides information on licensed, regulated clinics and artificial insemination, said that, unfortunately, experiences such as Sarahs were common.

Ive dealt with lesbian couples who had never had sex with a man before but felt compelled to go along with it, who wanted a child so badly they shut their eyes and pretended it wasnt happening. Ive met a serial donor who calls the children he has fathered his kills.

Many of these men are in it for kicks.

Even after she had her baby, Sarahs misery and abuse continued. Once she was pregnant, contact from Smith became rare. She said: He said he was on a submarine, and could only send a message once a month when they came up for supplies. But a few months after her son was born, he was back in touch  and again demanding sex, claiming he could read tea leaves and knew Sarah was destined to have another baby with him.

I will see you soon for chat, cuddles and high union intercourse xxxx, he wrote in one email.

In the meantime, he added, his spy job meant he had to be away  so Sarah should send him pics please, sexy pics.

I will see you soon for chat, cuddles and high union intercourse xxxx Email from donor 'Peter Smith'

Last month, furious at Smiths efforts to have sex with her again, Sarah contacted Laura Lyons, director of Are They Safe, which conducts background checks for people entering new relationships.

Her mother, Paula, spoke to police, who have started an investigation. However, as the law stands, it is unclear whether Smith has committed an offence.

Ms Lyons was appalled by Sarahs story, and together they approached cyberstalking and criminal justice expert Harry Fletcher.

He and Ms Lyons have drafted a Bill designed to regulate the unlicensed websites and make it an offence to advertise NI donation.

It is already supported by MPs from all main parties, including Labours Barry Sheerman, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Autism, and Tory Tim Loughton, the former Minister for Children. They plan to introduce it in the next session of Parliament. This is a ghastly form of trafficking, Mr Sheerman said. We have a duty to protect its victims.

Mr Fletcher added: It is extraordinary that a man can set himself up as a natural sperm donor without a criminal records or health check.

Websites should not advertise their services, and doing so should be an offence leading to possible imprisonment.

But Pollen Trees Patrick Harrison said such legislation would make no difference. If youre going to regulate fertility websites in the way thats being suggested, youre also going to have to close down Facebook, Google and Yahoo, he said.

Until last week, Peter Smith had not been on Pollen Tree for a while. Then he popped up again  using a different user name and email address.

Posing as a woman looking for semen, Ms Lyons contacted him, first online, and then by phone. He sent a photo  which Sarah identified as the father of her child.

His story had changed. This time, he said he was a doctor: it was his brother who was a spy. But soon he was recommending NI, and promising he would find the best sexual position to ensure she had a girl.
Delta Airlines is suspending two of its routes to Brussels after last month's devastating terrorist attack, the company announced Saturday.

The airline is temporarily stopping those flights out of Georgia's HartsfieldJackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the U.S., until March 2017.

Flights will continue to operate to Brussels out of New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport 'once the airport provides clearance for international operations'.

Delta said it made the decision due to the 'uncertainty surrounding the re-opening of Brussels airport and weakening demand' in a statement on the airline's website.

'Delta remains committed to the Belgium market and will resume service between New York-JFK and Brussels once the airport provides clearance for international operations.

'Customers affected by the schedule change will be re-accommodated on alternative Delta services or flights operated by joint venture partners Air France and KLM,' the statement said.

Since the March 22 terrorist attacks, flights are not coming in or out of the Brussels airport.

Ibrahim El Bakraoui and another bomber Najim Laachraoui set off suicide vests and suitcases filled with explosives at the airport on March 22.

They were accompanied by the 'Man in White' who abandoned his suicide mission and fled the terminal when his nail-shrouded bomb failed to explode.

Just 79 minutes later, Ibrahim's brother Khalid El Bakraoui detonated his suicide vest on a Brussels Metro train at Maelbeek station.

The FBI warned Dutch officials that Belgium was looking for the brothers Ibrahim El Bakraoui (left) and Khalid El Bakraoui (right), the brothers responsible for the terrorist attack on March 16

Ibrahim (center) and Najim Laachraoui (left) set off suicide vests and suitcases filled with explosives at the airport on March 22. The 'man in white' (right) is still on the run

The terror attacks killed a total of 32, in a revised count that was previously at 35 because officials had counted three people with dual nationalities twice.

A series of missteps and blunders by Belgium's security and intelligence agencies have come to light since the attacks, as well weaknesses in communication between intelligence agencies across Europe.

Although it seems like limited flight travel might return to the airport soon, officials say it will be 'months' before the airport is up and running at full capacity.
A shocked motorist has described the moment he watched a police officer allegedly shoot dead a kangaroo with a 'crook leg' after it collapsed in the middle of a busy road.

The driver was travelling near Plenty Road in Bundoora in Melbourne's north, when he noticed the stricken animal and decided to position his vehicle behind her so she would not be hit by another car.

After police arrived, the group realised the kangaroo was carrying a joey and according to the driver, one officer shot the animal at 'close range and hit her in the neck'.

'We slowly drive [sic] away, last thing we see is Skippy lying in a pool of blood, getting dragged off the road onto the grass,' the driver wrote on Reddit.

A shocked motorist has described the moment he watched a police officer allegedly shoot dead a kangaroo (pictured) with a 'crook leg' after it collapsed in the middle of a busy road

It is unknown whether the joey survived.

'It's sad, but hopefully the best come from the sad situation and the little tacker ended up being saved,' the motorist said.

Police allegedly told the driver local wildlife rescue services could not rehabilitate the animal and would have to instead 'put a bullet in its head'.

The man uploaded a picture of the kangaroo to Reddit on Saturday and while some were saddened by the need to kill the animal, others defended the actions of police.

'It's pretty fair that they don't want to carry the roo. Kangaroos are extremely dangerous if they feel threatened, especially those who live in suburbs. It's fair to say it's not worth risking injury to save it,' one person wrote.

'Very often it's sadly not an option to do anything else, because there's not enough resources to fix 'roos with broken legs, if it's even an option. It's very sad, but very common,' another penned.

Plenty Road in Bundoora lies adjacent to Bundoora Park and kangaroos often venture away from the 400 acre parkland, trying their luck at crossing the busy motorway.

In January 2010, a photographer was left shocked when a police officer shot an injured kangaroo after it was hit by a car and wandered onto the tram tracks on Plenty Road, The Herald Sun reported.

The man uploaded a picture of the kangaroo to Reddit on Saturday and while some were saddened by the need to kill the animal, others defended the actions of police

The driver was travelling near Plenty Road in Bundoora in Melbourne's north

Adam Elwood had stopped to take pictures before walking up to police to talk about the future of the stricken animal.

'When the police officer put on blue gloves, I thought he was going to try to move it. He produced his gun,' he said at the time.

Mr Elwood said the officer shot the animal twice in the head and a police spokesperson claimed if the kangaroo had of been left to limp back to the busy road, it could have caused a serious collision.

'Police dont have the facilities to care for injured animals so the only alternative is to leave them there injured and suffering and potentially dangerous to anybody else who comes along or they put them down,' Police Association secretary Sen Sgt Greg Davies said.

The RSPCA said any injured kangaroo must be assessed before it is euthanised and ensured the bullet is directed to the base of the brain to be classed a 'humane'.

'If you don't know where the vital centres are in the base of the brain of the kangaroo, you don't shoot it.'

In January 2010, a photographer was left shocked when a police officer shot an injured kangaroo after it was hit by a car and wandered onto the tram tracks on Plenty Road
Southern wing of Port Authority Bus Terminal was also evacuated for an hour after false bomb scare this afternoon

Authorities are still investigating the vehicle and the driver has been found

Gas canisters were empty and the vehicle was deemed safe by 8.35pm

Truck had Brooklyn address on the side, but it was licensed in Georgia

Bomb squad, fire department, EMS, and dozens of police were on the scene at West 46th St. and 7th Ave, as tourists stood by and watched

Officers found exposed wires extending from the dashboard and gas canisters behind the seats

Suspicious truck was left running and unattended in front of Marriott Hotel

Times Square was evacuated at 8pm on Saturday for about half an hour

Times Square was evacuated after a suspicious vehicle with exposed wires from the dashboard and gas canisters behind the seats was left unattended and running, authorities said.

The bomb squad, fire department and emergency units were called to the scene around 8pm on Saturday after the moving truck was found on West 46th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, according to the NYPD.

The evacuation was called off around 8.35pm, although authorities are still investigating the vehicle and questioning the truck driver.

Times Square was evacuated after a suspicious vehicle was left unattended and running, authorities said

Source: this caused Times Square evac. Suspicious truck left running. Police see this inside. pic.twitter.com/uxCH6osePy  CeFaan Kim (@CeFaanKim) April 3, 2016

Members of the police force set up barricades and evacuated all pedestrians and occupied vehicles in the area surrounding West 46th Street and 7th Avenue around 8pm on Saturday

The area, which is normally packed with tourists, was left completely empty other than members of the NYPD who were called to the scene. Onlookers stayed at the edge of the zone until the evacuation was called off at 8.35pm

Members of the Critical Response Command noticed a suspicious vehicle was parked in front of the Marriott Hotel while they were patrolling the area at 7.51pm, according to the NYPD.

Dozens of police officers searched a moving truck with an East New York, Brooklyn, address on the side of the vehicle, although officials say it was licensed in Georgia.

Officers noticed 'wires extending out from the dashboard' and gas canisters behind the seat.

ABC7 reporter CeFaan Kim posted a photograph on Twitter of the driver's seat of the truck, showing the lighter plug with several wires attached.

An emergency unit and bomb squad were called, but they found the gas canisters were empty and the vehicle was later deemed safe.

Police officers, and other patrol groups, some of which were mounted on horses, evacuated the area filled with pedestrians. Occupied vehicles were also barred from the area.

Social media posts showed authorities moving barricades into the streets as onlookers stood by to watch.

At 8.35pm, NYPD spokesperson J. Peter Donald tweeted: 'All clear in Times Square after a suspicious truck was left running and unattended.'

An investigation is ongoing, and the driver has been found.

New York City's Port Authority was also evacuated this afternoon at 2.43pm after a suspicious box wrapped in brown paper was found by a bomb-sniffing dog.

Commuters were barred from the southern wing of the station for an hour before the box was found to be harmless.

The NYPD has been ramping up its presence following the Brussels terror attacks on March 22.

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said an additional 13,000 cops have been dispatched to the subways and major landmarks in New York City.

Members of the Critical Response Command noticed a suspicious vehicle was parked in front of the Marriott Hotel while they were patrolling the area at 7.51pm and the bomb squad and emergency unit were called

Officers noticed 'wires extending out from the dashboard' and gas canisters behind the seat although those were later found to be empty

The truck had an address on the side from East New York in Brooklyn, although the truck was licenced in Georgia

Due to NYPD activity, traffic delays & road closures around W 46th St & 7th Ave, MN. Consider alternate routes.  NYCEM - Notify NYC (@NotifyNYC) April 3, 2016
Some properties have been left empty and dilapidated, including Pyrmont's Terminus Hotel which is now on market

The pair own extensive real estate in Surry Hills and Pyrmont and many have slammed

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The properties belonging to a mysterious multi-millionaire couple have been pictured worse for wear after being left empty and neglected for decades.

Isaac and Susan Wakil, aged in their 80s, began investing in millions of dollars worth of properties in run down suburbs in the 1970s and and left the public infuriated after many of the buildings never opened their doors.

The childless couple, who left Pyrmont's Terminus Hotel unopened for 30 years, have been accused of being 'land bankers,' and 'scapegoats' for Australia's expensive housing market.

Pictures of multiple Surry Hills and Pyrmont properties owned by their Citilease Property Group, show neglected buildings covered with overgrown ivy, graffiti, faded signs and rusted roof tiles.

The properties (pictured Pyrmont's Terminus Hotel) belonging to a mysterious multi-millionaire couple have been pictured worse for wear after being left empty and neglected for decades

The Wakil's own a multi-storey building on Sussex Street in Sydney's CBD after purchasing the lot for $7.5 million in 2003

Locals have long been saddened by the neglected Terminus Hotel, which the Wakil's sold to a private owner in September 2015 along with several other properties on the same street for $23,290,000.

According to RP Data, the couple purchased the property for just $250,000 in November 1984 and never opened its doors. The pub is currently on the market for around $5 million.

The Wakil's own a multi-storey building on Sussex Street in Sydney's CBD after purchasing the lot for $7.5 million in 2003. At the same time they secured another apartment block on Kent Street.

Both unused buildings have boards covering the windows and are strewn with posters and peeling paint.

Isaac (right) and Susan Wakil (centre), aged in their 80s, began investing in properties in run down suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s

Locals have long been saddened by the neglected Terminus Hotel, which the Wakil's sold to a private owner in September 2015 along with several other properties on the same street for $23,290,000

According to RP Data, the couple purchased the property for just $250,000 in November 1984 and never opened its doors. The pub is currently on the market for around $5 million

Many of the unused buildings have boards covering the windows and are strewn with posters and peeling paint

In 2012, frustrated locals stormed the Griffiths Tea building with banners and signs

In the late 1980s, the couple were known to frequent the Sydney social scene, but by 1990 became recluse and rejected any requests for interviews.

In 2012, frustrated locals stormed one of their dilapidated buildings - Griffiths Tea building - and were armed with signs including one saying: 'New Year's Eve resolution - Destroy capital before it destroys us.'

The pair sold the Griffiths Tea building on Wentworth Avenue in Surry Hills, last year for an undisclosed sum, and now has been sold off the plan as inner city apartments.

In 2014, Mr and Ms Wakil decided to sell off $200 million worth of their property and donate the generous proceeds to charity.

In 2012, frustrated locals stormed one of their dilapidated buildings - Griffiths Tea building - and were armed with signs including one saying: 'New Year's Eve resolution - Destroy capital before it destroys us'

The couple purchased an apartment block on Kent Street in Surry Hills in 2003

In 2014, Mr and Ms Wakil decided to sell off $200 million worth of their property and donate the generous proceeds to charity

'Australia is a great country and it's a good feeling to give something back,' Mr Wakil said after donating millions to charity

Sydney University's nursing school were gifted a whopping $10.8 million from the pair and the Sydney Jewish Museum were honoured with a $1 million donation.

'Susan and I appreciate the valuable work of nurses in the frontline of health care,' Mr Wakil said at the time.

'Australia is a great country and it's a good feeling to give something back.'

Mrs Wakil escaped war-torn Europe after her mother died in a Soviet concentration camp and married Mr Wakil, an Iraqi emigre from Baghdad who became a clothing manufacturer in Sydney.

More than 30 years ago the Wakils were at regular attendees of Opera House opening nights, arts events, and charity balls.

The couple had no children and Mrs Wakil donated their time to charities such as the Black and White Committee and St Vincents Hospital, while Isaac Wakil worked in the garment trade and bought property.

Locals have long been saddened by the neglected Terminus Hotel, which the Wakil's sold to a private owner in September 2015

The Wakil's sold the pub to a private owner in September 2015 along with several other properties and a run down garage on the same street for $23,290,000
A 100-year-old woman was evicted from her apartment Friday, after her landlord claimed she was too noisy fighting with her daughter.

Evelyn Heller, of Palm Desert, California, has two weeks to vacate the space, the Desert Sun reported.

Deep Canyon Desert LLC's reason for the eviction was because of frequent noisy verbal disputes between the great-grandmother and her daughter, according to the newspaper.

100-year-old Evelyn Heller represented herself during Friday's eviction trial at the courthouse in Palm Springs

Heller was also accused of having an apartment that was in 'deplorable conditions,' the Desert Sun quoted an apartment complex manager as saying.

Heller represented herself during Friday's eviction trial.

The Desert Sun reported: 'After she took an oath to tell the truth, she kept her hand raised and did a brief hula dance, then laughed under her breath.'

Heller, via the newspaper, told Riverside County Judge Charles Haines: 'I have four grandsons, but I don't want to be dependent on them.

'I can't be a burden to my family.

'They don't have room for me.

'That happens in life.'

Deep Canyon Desert LLC is the landlord for apartments at 45200 Deep Canyon Road, the Desert Sun reported

The centenarian was ordered 'to pay $616 in prorated rent and more than $800 in court and attorney's fees,' the newspaper wrote.

She was unable to hear the judge's ruling, and was later informed of what happened by a deputy, according to the Desert Sun.

She was quoted by the newspaper as saying: 'What?

'What kind of ridiculous thing is that?

'But I don't have any money.'

William Windham represented the landlord and told the Desert Sun: 'I've evicted people off of their death beds and regretted every second of the trial.
Christine Thi Woo, the local mother whose body was found in her SUV Thursday alongside her three-still living children after she vanished Monday, bought sleeping pills as one of her last acts, CBS reported.

She bought the tablets from a Walgreens near her home, then visited a McDonald's with her children. She was not seen again until her body was found in a parking lot across the road from the McDonald's.

Her husband Brandon described her as a 'rock' and a 'lioness'. But locals who knew the woman say she seemed 'overwhelmed' and 'depressed'.

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Sleeping pills: Model mom Christine Thi Woo bought sleeping pills from this Walgreens store prior to her disappeance Monday. She was found three dead days later in the parking lot of a SuperTarget

Mystery: Woo (pictured, left) was found dead in her SUV at about 6:30 pm Thursday. Her children Lauren Woo, 5, Nathan Woo, 3, and Leah Woo, 1, were found alive by her side. All three suffered extreme dehydration

'Lioness': 'Husband Brandon Woo described his wife as a 'rock' and a 'lioness' who was protective of her children. He also said she was 'the most stable person you could ever meet'

Quynh Chau, who runs a nonprofit called The Source of Hope, told WFAA 8 that Christine Woo had recently contacted her and seemed depressed. She said the mother had promised to attend an event to help the homeless but didnt show up.

'She cried out to us and I could hear that in the sense of her voice,' Chau told News 8 hours before SUV was found. 'I wish so much that I could do something to reach out to her.'

And an employee of Frisco music school 7 Notes said to The Dallas Morning News that she seemed 'overwhelmed'.

The Woos took their kids to 7 Notes each Saturday, where Christine would take Lauren for piano lessons while Brandon would accompany Nathan and Leah to baby and toddler classes.

'She just loved her kids,' 7 Notes director Eileen Tan said. 'The whole family was into it.'

Tan described Christine Woo's enthusiasm for Lauren's piano lessons as 'gung ho' in an interview with CBS DFW Friday.

But Tan's executive assistant, Charde Carbonell, said that Christine Woo's enthusiasm had waned dramatically since the kids enrolled in December.

She said the mom had talked to her on the phone for weeks gathering information before enrolling the children, but the parents' visits became inconsistent, and they would ask to 'take a break' or skip lessons.

'She seemed overwhelmed,' Carbonell said.

Discovery: Pictured here is the SUV in which Woo was discovered with her children. Her cause of death is still unknown but her body had no signs of trauma

Medical check: As well as being dehydrated, all three children also had rashes from sitting in their own waste. Leah was in critical condition Friday

But husband Brandon Woo, speaking to CBS DFW on Thursday while his wife was still missing, insisted there were no problems with their marriage and that she had no reason to run away from home.

'Shes a loving mother, a great wife. Shes the most stable person you could ever meet,' he said.

He also told WFAA, 'She's like a lioness, she would fight for her kids, she would never hurt her kids at all.'

And in another conversation with the station, he said: 'Shes the rock of the family. Shes the most level head. Im the one who gets emotional, always worried about finances or this and that. Shes the one that says, "Well figure it out."'

He also said that she was in 'good spirits and good health' when he saw her Monday morning and that he didn't know anything was wrong until he got home from work.

'I kissed them goodbye as I always do, went out the door like I always do, come home that day and they were gone. Not there,' he told Fox.

'Got to the house, no kids, no wife, so Im thinking, "OK they may be out at the playground, shopping, somewhere," so I give her a call, call her cellphone. Cellphone rings in the other room,' he told NBC5.

He told WFAA that Christine had left the house secured, without packing suitcases or even taking a bottle for their baby. 'She had every reason to come home,' he told the station.

Vigil: Parents held a vigil for Woo on Friday evening at Warren Park, praying, singing and lighting candles

Friday evening saw local parents heading to Warren Park to hold a candlelight vigil for Woo.

Organized by Frisco Mom's Care, the vigil saw several dozen parents holding candles, singing songs and saying prayers for the deceased mother.

Many there had not met Woo, but felt moved by her story.

'It touched our hearts, shes a mother just like we are. We just wanted to be able to show support and say a prayer for her children,' Ariana Trimmer of Frisco Moms Care told CBS.

'I think every mother, every parent that has heard of the story has played out in their imagination what happened in that car,' said Cate Biggs, also of Frisco Moms Care.

'If theres a mother out there that is having a hard time she needs to know that this is a community supports her.'

Prayers: 'It touched our hearts, shes a mother just like we are. We just wanted to be able to show support and say a prayer for her children,' Ariana Trimmer of vigil organizers Frisco Moms Care told CBS

Christine Thi Woo's body was found in her SUV in the parking lot of a SuperTarget department store in the Dallas suburb of McKinney about 6:30 pm on Thursday.

Her three children, Lauren Woo, 5, Nathan Woo, 3, and Leah Woo, 1, were 'extremely dehydrated' and suffering rashes caused by sitting in their own waste, CBS DFW said Friday.

The station also said one-year-old Leah was in critical condition. All three were taken to the Childrens Medical Center in Plano.

The cause of Woo's death is still unknown. There was no sign of trauma on her body, according to the Dallas News.

Information is expected to be released by the Collin County Medical Examiner early next week.

Brandon Woo had reported his wife and children missing on Tuesday afternoon, mistakenly believing that missing persons could not be reported for 24 hours.

He had received text messages saying that Christine Woo had used her credit card at a Walgreens near her home.

She was also seen on security footage at Walgreen's, and she and her children were later spotted on video at a McDonald's just across the road from the lot where her body was found.

Police said earlier in the week that the family does not have a history of problems nor did Woo have any known medical or mental issues.

CCTV: Woo and her children were seen in surveillance at a Walgreens, pictured, near her home. They were later spotted on surveillance video (pictured) at a McDonald's across the road from where her body was found

The Dallas Morning News spoke to friends and neighbors of the family, who said Brandon Woo is a quiet man and the 'breadwinner' of the home.

Conversely, Christine Woo was described as an outgoing woman who would help out people in the community, and had recently started attending a women's Bible study at Stonebriar Community Church.

'She was a very lovely person and a sweet soul,' Elle Bonner, who lives next door to the family, told the paper.

The couple were also actively involved in the local community, their former neighbors in San Antonio told The San Antonio Express-News.

'We were all surprised to hear about it,' said Ruben Gutierrez, who lives in the cul-de-sac where the Woos lived until 2014. 'They always seemed to be happy.'

Another neighbor, who did not wish to be named, said, 'They were great people. Good neighbors.'

Brandon Woo released a statement through the Plano Childrens Medical Center that read, 'Thank you for your thoughts and concern for the well-being of my family.

'We request that everyone please respect our privacy as we focus on healing.'

The Dallas News reported that Christine Woo, nee Nguyen, was a Vietnamese-American from San Antonio who graduated from Texas A&M University in 1999 with a business degree.

She was born in Seguin, Texas, and Brandon was born in Hong Kong, The San Antonio Express-News said.
Director Lilly Wachowski made her first public appearance since coming out as transgender on Saturday as she attended the GLAAD Media Awards.

Wachowski walked the red carpet in Beverly Hills, California, Saturday evening in a floor-length black gown.

The filmmaker announced her gender transition to a woman in a heartfelt statement on March 8, six years after her sister Lana Wachowski came out as transgender.

Director Lilly Wachowski attended the GLAAD Media Awards on Saturday, making it her first appearance since coming out as transgender

Wachowski's series Sense8 was awarded Outstanding Drama Series taking out the top spot against more well known shows Grey's Anatomy, How To Get Away With Murder and Empire

When Wachowski accepted the award for Series8 and thanked the 'fabulous people at GLAAD', according to GLAAD's twitter

'My flight instinct is off the charts right now but you have to fight against it,' Wachowski told TheWrap of her nerves before Saturday's event.

Lilly has previously braved cameras in support for her Netflix series Sense8.

The show won the GLAAD award for Outstanding Drama Series on Saturday, and Wachowski accepted the award for the show.

The show took out the top spot against more well-known shows Grey's Anatomy, How To Get Away With Murder and Empire.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the GLAAD Media Awards honor media 'for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and the issues that affect their lives.

The filmmaker announced her gender transition to a woman in a heartfelt statement on March 8, six years after her sister Lana Wachowski came out as transgender

Wachowski has previously braved cameras in support for Sense8

Presenters Lea Michele (center) and Keke Palmer (right) greeted Wachowski on stage after announcing the win

'They also fund GLAAD's work to amplify stories from the LGBT community that build support for equality and acceptance.'

In her coming out statement published last month, Wachowski said 'being transgender is not easy', and that she is 'one of the lucky ones'.

'We live in a majority-enforced gender binary world. This means when you're transgender you have to face the hard reality of living the rest of your life in a world that is openly hostile to you,' she wrote.

The filmmaker added: 'I am one of the lucky ones. Having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process.

'Transgender people without support, means and privilege do not have this luxury. And many do not survive.'

Lilly, right, and Lana Wachowski, left, pictured in a 1990s photo before they both came out as transgender

Lana Wachowski, right, announced her transition to a woman in 2008, eight years before Lilly came out as transgender
The two gold miners trapped for a fortnight almost one kilometre underground are still suffering despite their miracle survival as the 10th anniversary of the nears.

Brant Webb and Todd Russell had been working in a steel cage at the end of a teleloader in Beaconsfield mine, northeast Tasmania, on the night of April 25, 2006.

A small earthquake triggered an underground rockfall shortly before 9.30pm, trapping the pair and killing Larry Knight who was driving the work vehicle.

The 44-year-olds body was found two days after the collapse, and many lost hope for Mr Webb and Mr Russell who remained unaccounted for.

But after two long weeks and a delicate rescue operation, the pair famously left the mine fist pumping the air.

Close friends and locals in the small town, though, say their woes werent left in the rubble, according to Adelaide Now, despite their survival and a $1 million media deal with Channel Nine.

After spending two weeks trapped in a cage almost one kilometre underground, gold miners Todd Russell (left) and Brant Webb (centre) were freed and famously walked out fist pumping the air

Todd Russell, who was 34 at the time of the disaster and would now be 44, is pictured at Beaconsfield's mine heritage museum in 2011

Brant Webb, who was 37-years-old when he was trapped almost one kilometre underground for two weeks, is pictured in 2011

It sounds like a fairytale story for them, but thats not the way it worked out, said friend Greg Crowden told the paper.

Mr Webb, who was 37 at the time of the disaster, is now working four jobs to pay off his mortgage doing home deliveries for a local bottle shop, consulting to a vineyard, working in a motor workshop and recounting his story to tour groups.

Despite doing rehab to get back into work, he still suffers flashbacks, anxiety, and grief over the loss of Mr Knight.

With his handsome Channel Nine pay-check, which was controversially taxed at the ATOs second job rate, Mr Webb bought yachts and jetskis.

On day six, after long-slogs of precarious drilling, the survivors received emergency supplies - food, water, vitamins, space blankets, clothing, plastic bags and glow sticks

The pair had been feared dead until five days in when two frustrated rescue workers and colleagues disobeyed orders and ventured into an insecure access area and heard the trapped workers calling for help

They both thought, for a long time, they werent going to make it, Mr Crowden told Adelaide Now

It wasnt a slab of rock sitting above them, it was a lot of fines [small rocks]. It would only take one keystone rock to come out and it was over for them, which they were aware of,' Mr Crowden said

Mr Russell, who was then-34, is an explosives consultant to mining companies and captain of the local fire brigade.

He used his $1 million deal to buy 14 hectares and build a sprawling home with swimming pool for his family.

He never enjoyed the media attention.

The pair had been feared dead until five days in when two frustrated rescue workers and colleagues disobeyed orders and ventured into an insecure access area and heard the trapped workers calling for help.

They both thought, for a long time, they werent going to make it, Mr Crowden told Adelaide Now.

It wasnt a slab of rock sitting above them, it was a lot of fines [small rocks]. It would only take one keystone rock to come out and it was over for them, which they were aware of.

They wrote their lovenotes to their families on their uniforms and they were lying there for two weeks waiting for stuff to fall on them, waiting to die.

On day six, after long-slogs of precarious drilling, the survivors received emergency supplies - food, water, vitamins, space blankets, clothing, plastic bags and glow sticks.

14 days after the earthquake, Brant Webb and Todd Russell walked out of the Beaconsfield mine.

The pair leave the mine after a small earthquake caused an underground rockfall, trapping them for 14 days

Mr Russel (left) and Mr Webb (right) move their safety tags to 'safe' as they emerge from the mine after a delicate rescue mission

It sounds like a fairytale story for them, but thats not the way it worked out, friend Greg Crowden said

Close friends and locals in the small town said their woes werent left in the rubble despite the miracle survival (Todd Russell pictured)

They were each given a $1 million media deal with Channel Nine to tell their exclusive stories (interview pictured). The pay was controversially taxed at the ATOs second job rate

The pair were trapped in a cage almost one kilometre underground for a fortnight
His mother was arrested for DUI in January but avoided jail time by agreeing to enter rehab for the second time

After being arrested he was taken hospital where he was treated for severe intoxication and underwent a psych evaluation

Trouble: Trouble-making scion Peter Brant Jr. allegedly ran up a huge tab at Nobu in Tribeca and then left without paying

The son of supermodel Stephanie Seymour and billionaire businessman Peter Brant has been accused of leaving one of New York's trendiest restaurants without paying the bill.

Peter Brant Jr. was at Nobu Tribeca in New York City enjoying an evening out with friends when he reportedly walked out of the venue after racking up a $2,000 bill of food and drinks.

Page Six reports the 22-year-old socialite was with a group of girls including wealthy friends Gaia Matisse and Kyra Kennedy.

A source told the New York Post, 'Peter came in with a group of girls including Kyra and Gaia. The girls didn't really order anything, but he went crazy and ordered a ton of food and drinks, about $2,000 worth.'

The source added, 'But when it came to paying the bill, Peter ran out of the restaurant.'

And when 'Nobu staff tried to make him pay... He started arguing, and then ran out. The girls were horrified and had to split the bill between them.'

The episode is just the latest in a long line of anti-social behavior the scion has been displaying, who is currently out on $5,000 bail.

Last month, he was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport waiting to board a JetBlue fight to West Palm Beach when he reportedly got into an argument with an airline employee who stopped him for getting on the plane.

A source said he was acting 'drunk and belligerent' at the time.

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Mugshot: Brant Jr., 22 is facing potential jail time for allegedly assaulting a Port Authority cop at JFK in March

Not cheap! At pricey Nobu, a bottle of rare sake can run up to $480, while the top bottle of Dom Perignon goes for $960

Parents: Stephanie Seymour and billionaire Peter Brant (pictured above in February 2012)

The Port Authority police then reported to the scene and asked Brant Jr. to sit down and lower his voice, at which point he allegedly assaulted one of the cops.

He was taken to Jamaica Hospital where he was treated for severe intoxication and underwent a psych evaluation.

He and his younger brother Harry have been fixtures on the New York fashion and society scenes, and recently released a unisex make-up collection with MAC cosmetics.

Brant Jr. is rumored to be dating Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece, who he was recently spotted with at a pajama party hosted by Dolce & Gabbana.

The alleged airport assault is the latest run-in with police for the Brant family, with his mother, model Stephanie Seymour being arrested and charged with DUI in January after her Range Rover allegedly rolled backwards down a hill into a white Mercedes.

Police responding to the scene said she smelled of alcohol, had bloodshot eyes, and took seven tries to find her ID in her bag.

Seymour avoided jail time by signing up for her second stint in rehab.

She is still facing charges for evading responsibility and failure to drive in a proper lane after police also determined she knocked over a utility pole that same night.

Young love: Brant Jr. is rumored to be dating Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece, who he was recently spotted with at a pajama party hosted by Dolce & Gabbana (above)

Pals: He is also friends with Oscar-nominated actress Abigail Breslin, and posted a photo of the pair out together at Manhattan hotspot Indochine

Legal troubles: His mother (above in police custody) was arrested for DUI in January but avoided jail time by agreeing to enter rehab for the second time

In 2011, Seymour also called police to report an incident of domestic abuse at the family's Greenwich, Connecticut home.

Brant Jr. was also ticketed for possession of marijuana in 2014 while in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood.

Philip Russell, who represented Seymour in January, told the New York Daily News that Brant's behavior was 'out of character.'
Police also said the Issa and his wife were trying to evict Amir who was using the back of their house as an apartment and had caused damages

Francisco said he was often 'impressed' with how Issa handled the issues with his son

Francisco said Issa told him his son had a 'drug problem' and had called the police due to this in the past

He also said this wasn't the first time police had been called to the home to deal with a disturbance

Francisco Gonzalez Jr, the son of Issa's neighbors, said he appeared calm and collected after the shooting

Amir's mother Rabihah Issa, 68, was also found dead in the bathroom of the family home when cops arrived

Cops say Shehada ' Joe' Khalil Issa, 69, shot his son Amir, 29,Tuesday allegedly because he was gay

Neighbors of a Los Angeles father who allegedly killed his son for being gay described him as a patient man, who often had to call the police to handle his son.

Shehada 'Joe' Khalil Issa, 69, was arrested Tuesday after police arrived at his North Hills home to find his son Amir, 29, and his wife, Rabihah Issa, 68, dead.

Francisco Gonzalez Jr, the son of Issa's neighbors, said the 69-year-old was collected after the alleged shooting of Amir and Rabihah.

Francisco told the LA Times he heard the gunshot and ran over to find out what had happened at Issa's home.

Arrested: Shehada Khalil Issa of North Hills was arrested Tuesday after allegedly shooting his own son. Prosecutors claim he shot the 29-year-old because he had come out as gay

Police arrived at his North Hills home to find the bodies of his son Amir, 29, (pictured) and his wife, who has not been named, dead

'Were those bullets? Are you OK, Joe? Was that you?' Francisco asked Issa.

'Everything is fine now,' he replied, according to the LA Times.

Although it would be the last, Francisco said it certainly wasn't the first time police had to intervene at the home.

About three months ago, Issa called police on his son.

He told Francisco: 'Its just my son acting crazy again. Its the drugs. I called the cops, so Im just waiting for them. Im just going to wait here.'

'Drugs can mess up your life. My son had a great life, and then he did drugs and it all went away.'

Francisco told the LA Times he was impressed with how Issa handled the situation.

Issa told Francisco that Amir worked with computers.

'He was very patient and showed no signs of aggression. Thats why its so shocking and sad.'

'We feel for him. Its a tragedy,' Francisco told the LA Times.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office claimed that Issa had threatened to kill his son in the past because of his sexual orientation.

'The murder was committed because of the victim's sexual orientation and because of the defendant's perception of that status and the victim's association with a person and a group of that status,' prosecutors alleged in a statement.

On his Facebook page Amir spoke about wanting to be called 'Prince Christ' and how the friction within his family

Before Christmas Amir posted an expletive-filled video to his Facebook in which he had a heated debate with two people he identifies as his parents about their sex life. At one point the man, thought to be his father, calls him a pervert and says he should be castrated

They said that Issa used a shotgun in the attack.

The body of Amir was found outside the home with a shot in the abdomen and in the face.

It is unclear what Issa used to attack Rabihah, but she was found covered in blood on the family's bathroom floor.

Police said she had been 'dead for a while' and there was 'obviously some fort of foul play'.

When police arrived on the scene, Issa admitted that he shot his son with the shotgun, said Sergeant Greg Bruce of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Issa is being held at the Mens Central Jail without bail on one count of premeditated murder. His arraignment is scheduled for April 11; if convicted he may face life in jail.

Last month Amir ranted about his family on Facebook, writing: 'Every day I wake up feeling like my sister or brother or mother or father is literally controlling me in my sleep. I have no free will.the moment I lose consciousness it feels like they tell people to rape and molest me and make it seem like I enjoy that.

'I was earning over $100k by age 26 and this has negatively impacted my life made ,me live in pain and become unemployed. If there is a devil or evil spirit, I truly believe it manifests itself in my family. My name is Prince Christ.

He added: 'Does it make you feel better abiut yourself to call me names and control me? I dont want to be related to any of these people..nor their relatives watching and advocating this inhumane treatment. They have literally robbed my bank account, lied to courts and doctor to try and label me as mentally ill and failed in their attempts to have me falsely imprisoned and evicted.

'Weapon': Prosecutors claim that a shotgun like the one pictured here, at the scene, was used in the crime

'My doctors certified that i have no mental illness and the courts have cleared my good name and I do not have a criminal record. I successfully passed a background check. If there are any good people on this earth, please help free me from this inhumane slavery.'

He spoke about religion and said he had changed his life insurance and work retirement investments to go to 'the church I was born in, the Seventh day adventist church of glendale.'

Before Christmas Amir posted an expletive-filled video to his Facebook in which he had a heated debate with two people he identifies as his parents about their sex life.

At one point the man, thought to be his father, calls him a pervert and says he should be castrated.

The LA Times reported that Amir was living in the back of Issa's house and using it as an apartment, but his parents were seeking to sell the house and evict their son, Sergeant Bruce said.

Bruce's detectives had been involved in the eviction process, he said.

He added that Amir had damaged the home and Issa and his wife had to hire a contractor to fix it.

Sergeant Bruce said he was unaware of any conflict because of Amir's sexual orientation.

Mother: Amir's mother was also dead when police arrived, although how she died has not been announced by authorities. At present Issa has only been charged with one count of premeditated murder

According to The Daily News, Issa told police that he had found his wife's body, then encountered his son who threatened him with a knife. 'A shooting then took place,' it claimed.

But Operations-Valley Bureau Homicide Detective John Doerbecker, quoted in the article,denied that account. 'The suspect made incriminating statements implicating himself in the death of [the son] and was arrested for murder,' he told the paper.

'He claimed [the son] was armed with a knife, and there was no knife to be found [there]. It was a horrible family tragedy.'

A report by The Daily News on Friday quoted neighbor Maria Gomez as saying she'd heard Issa and his son frequently shouting at one another in recent months.

'Its very difficult to think that something like this can happen in a moment,' she said.
Trump has since called his attack on Heidi a 'mistake' and backtracked on his comments that women who get abortions should be 'punished'

Trump was also lampooned for violence at his rallies, with Hammond repeatedly punching a supporter in the face

Comedian Darrell Hammond reprised his uncanny role as the Republican front runner, complimenting daughter Ivanka's 'rack' after giving birth

When confronted about sexist Heidi Cruz tweets, supporter said the retweet was an accident because Donald's hands were simply too big

Skit pitted news anchor against 'crazy' Trump supporter who performed mental gymnastics to defend the presidential candidate

SNL's opening skit skewered Donald Trump, throwing his recent attacks on Heidi Cruz and women who get abortions in an indefensible light.

Kate McKinnon played CNN anchor Kate Bolduan as she questioned a 'crazed' Trump supporter who justified the Republican's front-runner comments at every turn.

Comedian Darrell Hammond reprised his uncanny role as Trump, complimenting daughter Ivanka's 'rack', punching his own supporters at rallies, and leading fans in a call and response, chanting: 'Women suck!'

The episode hosted by Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage comes just as Trump is backtracking on his recent comments against women and rethinking his strategy among female voters.

The sketch pitted CNN anchor Kate Bolduan, played by Kate McKinnon (left), against Trump supporter Scottie Nell Hughes, played by Cecily Strong (right)

Comedian Darrell Hammond reprised his role as Trump, complimenting daughter Ivanka's 'rack', punching his own supporters at rallies, and leading fans in a call and response, chanting: 'Women suck!'

Punchlines came in early as Kate McKinnon introduced herself, saying: 'I'm Kate Bolduan. I have the brains for MSNBC, but the hair for Fox News, so here I am at CNN.

'It's been another bad week for Donald Trump with women. Joining me to talk about it from the tea party network is Scottie Nell.'

Conservative pundit Scottie Nell Hughes, who appeared on CNN to defend Trump on Thursday, was ridiculed throughout the 5-minute opening skit.

McKinnon confronted her character about Trump's sexist tweets depicting Heidi Cruz in an unflattering light next to his own wife Melania, with the caption: 'A picture worth a thousand words.'

Strong impersonated the conservative pundit's stammer and shot back saying: 'Okay-- so, no -- so actually, so that was an accident, okay, because Donald's hands are just so big he can't see every little tweet his fingers retweet.'

Referencing Trump's previous allusions to the size of his manhood, she held her hands outstretched in front of her before saying: 'His hands are this big....flaccid!''

McKinnon also questioned Trump's comments that women who get abortions should be 'punished', a stance the Republican candidate has since taken back by pinning the blame on doctors who perform abortions instead.

Strong desperately tried to argue it was only an April Fool's joke, until McKinnon responded curtly: 'He said that on March 30th.'

Strong, playing the unflappable Trump supporter, went on to say: 'I mean, Kate, of course Donald loves women. He is a father to a woman.'

The skit cut to comedian Darrell Hammond as he impersonated Trump by squinting his eyes, pouting his lips, and crudely complimenting his daughter Ivanka's 'rack'.

When the Trump supporter argued that the candidate was 'creating a dialogue about women,' the sketch cut back to Hammond leading fake supporters to chant: 'Women suck!'

The showdown between Trump supporters and protesters at his rallies was also brought to light, with Hammond punching a man at his rally, despite the supporter saying: 'I'm voting for you!'

Again, Strong's character tried to explain the candidate's actions by claiming there was a bee on the supporter's face.

The showdown between Trump supporters and protesters at his rallies was also brought to light, with Hammond punching a man at his rally, despite the supporter saying: 'I'm voting for you!' (pictured)

The skit ended with both women agreeing that Trump was a better candidate than Ted Cruz. The episode comes as Trump is backtracking on his attacks against Heidi Cruz and women who have abortions

The sketch ended with a monologue from Strong, who said: 'You can't break me, Kate, because I'm crazy. And crazy don't break.

'I know you agree with me on three things when it comes to Trump. One, he is drop dead gorgeous.

'Two, he is bringing trade back, so we can make American grapes again.

'And three, he is way better than Ted Cruz', to which McKinnon's character concedes: 'Okay, yes, that I do agree on.'

The episode aired just as Trump got into hot water for his comments about abortion and his attack on opponent Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi.

Trump said on Friday that it was 'a mistake' to attack Heidi Cruz and his campaign quickly reversed his claims on abortion.

His comments raised concerns in the Republican Party about whether his unpopularity with women in preference polls would make him unelectable in a match-up against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
A brawl involving 50 protesters has broken out at a Halal expo in Melbourne, leaving one man with deep lacerations above his eye after having a 'pole rammed into his head.'

Just after 12.30pm on Sunday, anti-Islamic group Party for Freedom clashed with anti-racism protesters after picketing at the entrance to the exhibition at Melbourne Showgrounds.

A video captured by a witness showed a young man, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with 'rapefugees,' being treated by paramedics before he was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital in a serious but stable condition.

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A brawl involving 50 protesters has broken out at a Halal expo in Melbourne, leaving one man with deep lacerations above his eye

Scenes from the brawl show one man (pictured in a blue shirt) wielding a pole

The brawl involved about 50 people as the anti-Islamic group Party for Freedom clashed with anti-racism protesters

Police at the scene begin to break up the brawl, which started outside a Halal expo

Police at the scene of the brawl to split up the violence on Sunday afternoon

Anti-racism campaigners also gathered in Federation Square at 2pm on Sunday afternoon to protest the far right-wing United Patriots Front

Protesters representing Party for Freedom reportedly arrived wearing black outfits and had their faces covered with ski masks, The Herald Sun reported.

'(Antifa protesters) rocked up in a group and started punching people,' witness Erik Anderson said.

'I saw some turn up but then hide as they were waiting for more. They're intention when arriving was to start a fight.'

According to the man filming the scene, some belongings were stolen by the anti-fascist protesters.

Protesters outside the event shout and wave placards

It was claimed that some anti-fascist supporters stole belongings during the uproar

Protesters representing Party for Freedom reportedly arrived wearing black outfits and had their faces covered with ski masks

According to the man filming the scene, some belongings were stolen by the anti-fascist protesters

'(Antifa protesters) rocked up in a group and started punching people,' witness Erik Anderson said

It is unknown if any arrests were made by police during the violent brawl and some attendees questioned whether police had 'a handle' on the situation.

Anti-racism campaigners also gathered in Federation Square at 2pm on Sunday afternoon to protest the far right-wing United Patriots Front.

The UPF reportedly dropped their plans for a rally after hearing anti-racism campaigners would be in attendance.

It is unknown if any arrests were made by police during the violent brawl and some attendees questioned whether police had 'a handle' on the situation

Anti-racism campaigners also gathered in Federation Square at 2pm on Sunday afternoon to protest the far right-wing United Patriots Front
The RAF are planning to bolster their intelligence branch in the fight against terrorism by investing 2.6billion on nine top of the range spy planes.

Each Boeing P-8 Poseidon will have the capacity to deliver GCHQ-style intelligence gathering, with the facilities to hack terrorists' communications and track their movements.

The spy planes will provide a wealth of invaluable intelligence data from the sky, feeding back to the security services.

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Each Boeing P-8 Poseidon (pictured) will have the capacity to deliver GCHQ-style intelligence gathering, with the facilities to hack terrorists' communications and track their movements

As well as serving as an intelligence asset, the multi-functional jet will be stationed to protect the British waters and naval assets, according to The Daily Record.

The deal marks the first time Britain has invested in top spy planes since 2010 when the Nimrod Maritime Reconnaissance Aircraft (Nimrod MR4A) was scrapped.

3.4 billion of taxpayers money was wasted on the cancelling of the Nimrod deal, which was axed in a bid to save 1.9 million from expected running costs.

Similarly Britain's Harriers were sold to the Americans for a cut price despite receiving substantial investment for refurbishment.

Despite concerns about the cost of the new spy planes, the quality of the technology will be needed at a time when terrorist attacks have decimated Brussels and Paris.

The deal marks the first time Britain has invested in top spy planes since 2010 when the Nimrod Maritime Reconnaissance Aircraft (Nimrod MR4A) was scrapped

READY FOR ACTION: THE P-8's SPECIFICATION The Boeing P-8 Poseidon can reach a speed of 564 mph and weighs 62.7tons. The plane has enough room for a pilot, a co-pilot and a crew of seven. Measuring at 129ft long with a wingspan of 117ft, the P-8 uses electro-optical infra-red sensors for tracking and identifying suspects. When required, the P-8 has a raft of weapons including supersonic low-altitude missiles (SLAM) and sonar buoy torpedoes. Advertisement

The Boeing P-8 Poseidon is well equipped with an arsenal of weapons, including Harpoon anti-ship missiles and depth charges for taking out submarines and battleships.

It uses sensors and radars to detect enemy submarines and aircraft approaching British territory, particularly its coast.

'We are committed to buying P-8 aircraft, which will be based at RAF Lossieouth, an MoD spokesman told The Daily Record.
Michaella McCollum Connolly, one of the 'Peru Two', has given her first interview since being released on parole, blaming 'a moment of madness' for her attempt to smuggle cocaine worth 1.5 million to Europe.

McCollum Connolly, from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, looked a world away from the stony faced young woman who was caught at Lima Airport in 2013 with 24lbs of the Class A drug.

The infamous 'hair donut' do had been replaced with long blonde locks, and the 23-year-old wore a smart white blazer over ripped black jeans and a black top, opting for red lipstick with matching nails.

Michaella McCollum Connolly, 23, from Co Tyrone, has spoken for the first time since her parole, admitting that she 'could have potentially killed a lot of people' had she succeeded in smuggling 24lbs of cocaine to Spain

The 23-year-old from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, had seemingly undergone an image overhaul since being released on parole on Thursday, having served two years and three months.

McCollum Connolly and Melissa Reid, from Scotland, were sentenced to six years and eight months after admitting trying to smuggle cocaine from Peru to Spain.

'I can confirm Michaella has been released from jail and I'm waiting to hear the outcome of the judicial process,' said Kevin Winters, McCollum's solicitor, describing her prison conditions as 'horrendous'

It is not yet known whether the terms of her release will allow her to return home or if she will have to remain in Peru for some time.

McCollum Connolly was freed under new legislation on early prison release introduced in the South American country last year.

Peruvian authorities agreed to let both 23-year-old women serve the remainder of their sentences in the UK, but the pair still remain in the South American country.

New look: McCollum Connolly sported long blonde locks, a smart white blazer and red lipstick with matching nails for her interview with the Irish state broadcaster

Northern Irish Michaella McCollum Connolly and Melissa Reid from Scotland were jailed for six years and eight months in 2013 after they were caught with cocaine worth 1.5million hidden in their luggage at Lima Airport

Michaella McCollum Connolly, pictured in 2013, was released effectively on parole on Thursday night

A judicial process will now determine what, if any, conditions are attached to McCollum Connolly's effective parole, it is understood.

While moves are being made to repatriate her to Northern Ireland, it is believed she will have to spend a considerable part of her parole in Peru.

Speaking to Irish media on Sunday, McCollum Connolly acknowledged the potentially devastating consequences if she had successfully smuggled the drugs back to Europe.

'I probably would have had a lot of blood on my hands,' she said.

'I potentially could have filled Europe full of a lot of drugs.

'I could have potentially killed a lot of people, not directly but I could have caused a lot of harm to people.'

'I made a decision in a moment of madness. I'm not a bad person. I want to demonstrate that I'm a good person.'

McCollum has been interviewed in Peru for a documentary that will be aired on RTE One on Sunday night.

She said: 'I've forgotten the things that everybody takes for granted in life.

'Seeing the sun, seeing the darkness, seeing the moon and the stars, things I haven't seen in almost three years.'

McCollum was released from prison at 5pm on Thursday following a successful application for parole, Mr Winters said.

The solicitor stressed she was not freed under any repatriation scheme or other protocol between Peru and the UK and that a pending judicial hearing would determine the conditions of her parole.

'At this stage it remains unclear when Michaella may be eligible to return home,' he added.

'That will be a matter for the court and a pending judicial hearing to determine the conditions of her parole.

'We are working with her lawyers in Peru and hope to be in a position to clarify further, as soon as possible.'

McCollum (picturedin 2013) is not freed under any repatriation scheme or other protocol between Peru and the UK and a pending judicial hearing would determine the conditions of her parole

Meanwhile, Reid, from Lenzie, Glasgow, is still in Ancon 2 prison as she has asked for a prison transfer to Scotland, rather than parole.

While McCollum Connolly's legal team is applying for her to be repatriated to Northern Ireland, she may have to serve parole in Peru.

This means that while not behind bars, McCollum Connolly would have to stay in Peru for the remainder of her six years and eight month sentence.

'Michaella left the prison as part of a supervised release on parole. It's called semi libertad in Peru,' a Prison Service spokeswoman said.

'If she complies with all the conditions then she won't have to go back to prison and the process for her of completing her sentence will continue here in Peru.

'The other woman [Reid'] didn't leave jail because she is seeking a prison transfer to her home country.'

McCollum Connolly's parole release comes three months after she was struck down with an unknown tropical disease at the Ancon 2 prison, north of the capital Lima.

'Michaella has been brought to the hospital in the prison. She has a tropical illness but we don't know what it is,' an inmate said.

'We really hope she is ok. This [illness] is pretty regular in here, especially with the foreigners.'

According to an inmate, McCollum Connolly had been popular with the other prisoners and learned to speak Spanish while serving her time at Ancon 2 prison, north of the capital Lima

As of June last year, the 23-year-old women were to be allowed to serve the remainder of their prison sentences in the UK, but the pair still remain in South America

According to the inmate, McCollum Connolly had been popular with the other prisoners and learned to speak Spanish while serving her time.

The pair had previously been held at Lima's Virgen de Fatima prison but were moved to the Ancon 2 prison, where horrific conditions reportedly had McCollum crammed in to a cell with 30 other prisoners with extremely poor sanitation and toilet facilities.

Last year, Stormont Justice Minister David Ford approved an application for the repatriation of McCollum on a number of issues, including the difficulty encountered in maintaining family contact.

McCollum, from Dungannon, and Reid, from Glasgow, were caught with the haul at Lima airport on August 6 2013 attempting to fly to Spain.

They had claimed they were forced into carrying the drugs but pleaded guilty to charges later that year.

The pair were caught trying to board a flight with 24lb (11kg) of cocaine in food packets hidden inside their luggage.
Residents of a six-story block of flats in leafy Kensington, south west London, have expressed outrage at plans to built a radical UFO-style extension on top of the building.

Cromwell Mansions, built around 1890, overlooks a conservation area and the individual, spacious flats within it sell for around 2million.

Now the council is hoping to add two or three floors to the block of flats by designing an unconventional spaceship-shaped structure at roof level - totally at odds with the red-brick Victorian building.

Residents of a six-story block of flats in leafy Kensington, south west London, have expressed outrage at plans to built a UFO-style extension on top of the building (pictured: aLL Design's model photo showing what the structure would look like)

Cromwell Mansions, built around 1890, overlooks a conservation area and the individual flats within it sell for around 2million (pictured: what the flats will look like if the development goes ahead)

The flats are situated in an affluent London area, near to Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and the River Thames

The proposed development is for 'a new two-story roof extension containing two two-bed dwellings and one three-bed dwelling'.

The curved structure would be built using lightweight steel and timber, and the designers, from architecture company aLL Design, claim it would be shaped to avoid protruding over the sides or blocking the light of the existing building.

However, a number of residents have strongly objected to the planning application, claiming that the radial, new-age designs are not fitting on top of such a traditional-style building.

On the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's website, one called it 'ill considered', adding: 'This design and the amended version would sit uncomfortably on top of a Victorian mansion block.'

The curved structure would be built using lightweight steel and timber, and the designers claim it would be shaped to avoid protruding over the sides or blocking the light of the existing building. Pictured: a plan for the extension's layout

A number of residents have strongly objected to the planning application. Pictured: a plan showing what the structure would look like sideways on

On the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's website, one resident called it 'ill considered', adding: 'This design and the amended version would sit uncomfortably on top of a Victorian mansion block'. Pictured: another plan of the structure made by aLL Design

Another Cromwell Mansions resident wrote that they looked at the plans with 'very great concern and amazement'. They said: 'The proposed design is fully out of character and an alien addition on top of this fine Victorian building.'

A resident called Edward Lewis spoke to The Express about the locals' backlash against the propsals. He said: 'I think the whole of the village is up in arms about this plan because it simply would look over us like some awful eagle in its lofty lair.'

Another objector calls the plans 'an unwelcome intrusion to this area' and someone else goes as far as to say that 'the extra traffic would be dangerous and cause unacceptable congestion'.

The proposed development is for 'a new two-story roof extension containing two two-bed dwellings and one three-bed dwelling' (pictured: a model of the two-story extension that is being proposed)

On aLL Design's website it says the company 'work in all scales of design and cultural endeavour' and that their 'mission is simple: "Make life better'"'. Pictured: a computer generated image of what the structure will look like

On aLL Design's website it says the company 'work in all scales of design and cultural endeavour' and that their 'mission is simple: "Make life better'"'.

They have offices in London and in Chongqing, China, and work on projects all over the world.

According to The Express, Will Alsop, who founded aLL Design, said: 'I have tried to produce a thing of beauty'.
More than half of this university class of medical students want to leave the UK after graduating because of new contracts, it has been claimed.

In the photograph below the University of Birmingham trainees raise their hands when asked by their lecturer if they intent to move to hospitals abroad when they qualify.

The university lecturer who took the photo claimed she got the response when she asked her second-year students what their intentions were.

The University of Birmingham trainees raise their hands when asked by their lecturer if they intent to move to hospitals abroad when they qualify

It is a warning to health secretary Jeremy Hunt who is underfire over the controversial new junior doctors' contract.

Strikes by doctors have forced operations to be cancelled as medics say the new contract will lead to longer working hours, put patients at risk and slash wages.

It is part of the government's plan to create a 'seven-day' NHS and highlight that basic junior doctors' pay will go up by an average of 13.5 per cent. And the starting wage for a junior doctor is to rise from 22,636 to 27,000.

Jeremy Hunt is underfire over the doctors' contract

The lecturer, who asked not to be named, told the Sunday People: 'These are pre-clinical undergraduates not yet working in hospitals but they already realise the contract has major implications for them.

'Many of them intend to cross into Scotland or Wales, where the new contract is not being imposed.

'Others will go to places far afield, like Australia and New Zealand.

'Who will deliver our front-line services then? It's worrying.'

Hospital bosses and the government are braced for further industrial action on Wednesday. Junior doctors plan to give only emergency care for 48 hours and have warned that a total strike will take place later this month.

Mr Hunt is forcing doctors to accept the new contracts after talks with union bosses failed.

His seven-days-a-week NHS vision has been criticised as already existing. But medics warn if he wants a fuller service at weekends then more money is needed to pay for nurses and doctors.
But he insisted Tata's move went further than the Government expected

Javid came under fire for travelling to Australia as the announcement came

The move threatens thousands of jobs, particularly at Port Talbot in Wales

Sajid Javid today vowed the Government would step in to help a buyer for the Port Talbot steel works but stopped short of detailing how.

But the Business Secretary was forced to admit he had been caught out by Tata's announcement this week it wanted to sell up and get out of the UK steel business - confessing the firm went much further than he had expected.

Mr Javid came under heavy criticism for travelling to Australia on a trade trip and with plans to extend the visit with a family holiday as Tata made its announcement in Mumbai.

The move threatens 40,000 UK jobs and Mr Javid was forced to fly back from Australia having only been down under for 15 hours.

Sajid Javid, pictured on the BBC today, said the Government would offer a package of help to the Port Talbot steel works but refused to spell out the detail

Labour's shadow chancellor John McDonnell today said Mr Javid should be sacked for his actions, claiming there was a need for someone 'more dynamic' who could end 'disarray' in the Government.

Tory MP Peter Bone, speaking on behalf of the Grassroots Out Brexit campaign, added to pressure by claiming Mr Javid was not serious about saving Port Talbot and only wanted to wait until the EU referendum was over.

In a BBC interview today, Mr Javid said he was aware of the 'three Ps' that were crucial to help secure a deal - highlighting challenges over workers' pension schemes, plant machinery at the site and the expensive power bills.

But Mr Javid insisted the details of the Government offer would be 'commercially sensitive' meaning he could not spell out the answer.

And insisting the Government had been working on solutions for 'weeks', Mr Javid said nationalisation was 'rarely' the answer to industrial problems - insisting the most successful steel works were all in private hands.

Speaking on BBC One Andrew Marr programme, Mr Javid said the steel industry was 'absolutely vital' for economic and national security, adding: 'I don't want to live in a country where we import all our steel and that's why we have been clear we will do everything we can to keep steel making at Port Talbot and to help those workers.'

The Business Secretary said there were 'global challenges' the UK government could not change but insisted ministers had 'tools in our box and we have been working on them for months and months'.

Appearing on the BBC today, Mr Javid, left, insisted he and the Government had been working on its support for the steel industry for 'weeks'. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell, right, said not helping the workers would create a huge unemployment bill

And he said: 'Tata know it will take time, they know it is not a matter of weeks.

'It will take much longer (after expressions of interest) to work out a deal. That will of course be with Tata itself but of course it will involve me and the Government too.'

Mr Javid continued: 'Tata will issue an offer document very soon, alongside that the UK government knows, I have known for a while, that we are going to also offer support to eventually clinch that buyer and to give that steel plant a long term, viable future.

'I don't think nationalisation is a solution to this - I also think it wouldn't be prudent to rule anything out at this stage but I think nationalisation is rarely a solution.

'There will be enough to find the right buyer, working with the Government to take this forward.'

The Business Secretary faced severe criticism and calls for him to consider quitting after he travelled to Australia when Tata made its announcement in Mumbai.

And today, Mr Javid admitted: 'We knew it was an important meeting but when they made the announcement, we didn't anticipate they would go that far with the news.

'The strength of the announcement and how far they went, particularly in terms of timing, was much further than we expected - that's why I turned around and came straight back and my first visit was to Port Talbot.'

Sajid Javid, pictured left today arriving at the BBC, insisted the Government would offer help - but refused to spell out exactly what. John McDonnell, right this morning, warned the Government it had to step in

Mr Javid said the Government had secured a commitment from Tata to pursue a sale weeks after they were confidentially told of plans to close the site down.

Mr Javid was in Australia for just 15 hours ahead of a conference but came under heavy criticism after it emerged he had travelled down under with his family - planning to extend his trip with a holiday.

He insisted he abandoned the trip of his own 'volition' - despite claims he was ordered home.

Mr McDonnell said: 'I think we need someone else doing the job. We need someone who is more dynamic.

'And if I was David Cameron, I'd be looking to bring in someone who is more effective.'

He added: 'This is disarray in government. David Cameron has got to get a grip on this now.'

Mr McDonnell earlier warned the exchequer could be hit with an annual 1.5million benefit bill for steel workers if their jobs are not saved.

Also speaking on the BBC, he said: 'We know this isn't a zero-cost exercise.

'If it closes now we could be into a cost of 1-1.5bn a year just supporting people on welfare benefits; the collapse of local economies.'

He added: 'If we can find another buyer it's got to be not an asset-stripping job, we've got to have some guarantees  keeping Port Talbot open for example.

'If we haven't got that leeway in the timescale well then as a fall back yes, nationalise in the short-term to stabilise the situation, prepare the sector then before you look back out to another buyer.

'That would give us the stability that we need in this sector.'

Mr Javid flew back from Australia this week after facing criticism for being away from the UK during the steel crisis. He travelled to Port Talbot on Friday, pictured

Mr Bone said: 'The EU's impotence in the face of the threat to the British steel industry has been cruelly exposed. It is paralysed by its inertia and its inability to take quick and effective decisions.

'Meanwhile, our ministers flounder around issuing contradictory and meaningless statements. With Port Talbot losing 1 million a day, no one serious will want to buy it and save it from extinction.'

He added: 'My fear is that the Government is simply playing for time. It wants to kick Port Talbot's fate into the long grass until we have voted in the June 23 referendum on our EU membership.

'If we vote to stay, as David Cameron hopes, then we should expect that the South Wales plant and others will be quietly put out of their misery.'

Outlining the Government's intentions, Mr Javid said: 'I want to find a buyer for the whole business, of course there will be help that needs to be provided - because we have been working on this for weeks, I have thought very carefully about the kind of help we can provide.

'There is not much I can say about that but I can give you a flavour.'

He said: 'Any buyer that comes along will want to look at what I have referred to as the three Ps - they are going to want to look at plant, they are going to want to look at pensions, they are also going to want to look at power supplies.'

Mr Javid said the support from the government and the Tata offer document would be the 'makings of a successful deal'.

The Business Secretary insisted steps had already been taken to exempt steel from the 'green deal' which makes electricity bills for heavy industry the highest in Europe.

John Ralfe, a leading pensions' expert, said the pension deficit in Tata's UK steel businesses could cost taxpayers 'at least' 2billion if it were taken over by the state.

Mr Javid denied Britain was standing in the way of new tariffs on Chinese imports.

He said: 'The UK has been the leader of getting more done when there is evidence of dumping and imposing tariffs.

'Look at what has been the result of those tariffs - where they have been introduced, if you look at Chinese wire rod, tariffs were introduced and imports were down to virtually nil in the UK.

'Just a few months ago, the industry came to me about rebar, a particular product from the steel sector, and they wanted tariffs imposed. I led the charge in Europe for that, they were introduced just months ago.

'Compared to this time last years, imports of rebar from China are down 99 per cent.'

Mr Javid insisted he did not want a 'more protectionist' Europe dominated by broad, sweeping trade tariffs but said there was 'no question' the levies could help provide a 'level playing field'.

Labour MP Angela Rayner hit out at Mr Javid's performance following the interview, insisting he had 'done nothing' to save the steel industry.

Redcar MP Anna Turley said the interview had been 'woeful'.

Overnight, a possible buyer emerged for the Port Talbot steelworks.

Steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta - the founder of the commodities firm Liberty House- said he had already opened discussions with owners Tata Steel and was ready to hold talks with the Government.

'We would need a proper partnership with the Government. I don't know what that would entail at this stage. We've started the discussions ... we are in the process of starting a discussion with Tata,' he told The Sunday Telegraph.

'I haven't made a proposition that I want to buy all of (Tata Steel UK) because that's too big an undertaking to even put on the table at this stage.

'If the company, its people, its workers and the Government would be willing to consider my suggestions then I'm willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that.'

Labour MP Angela Rayner hit out at Mr Javid's performance following the interview, insisting he had 'done nothing' to save the steel industry

German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp has emerged as a potential buyer for Tata's Port Talbot plant.

Guidelines introduced last year requiring central government bodies to take into account the 'true value' of British steel will be extended across the public sector - including the NHS and local councils.

Under the guidelines, public procurements which involve the supply of steel will need to consider 'responsible sourcing, the training suppliers give to their workforce, carbon footprint, protecting the health and safety of staff and the social integration of disadvantaged workers'.

Contractors working for the public sector will also be required to advertise their requirements for steel so that UK firms can compete for the business.

But it emerged today that contracts worth billions of pounds have been handed to foreign firms.

Three Royal Navy destroyers contain only 20 per cent British steel, while a 3.5billion contract for armoured vehicles uses mostly Swedish steel.

The new Forth crossing is using 42,000 tons of steel from China, Poland and Spain.

Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock said: 'When public bodies buy steel they must taking account of the true value of buying British.'
Lord Falconer has warned that prisons are becoming 'terrorist academies'

About 1,000 Muslim prisoners are at risk of being radicalised in British jails as part of 'terrorist academies'.

Lord Falconer has warned the number is higher than those who have travelled to fight in the Middle East and Syria.

The shadow justice secretary said that extreme Islamist inmates were taking control of some wings.

A report due on how to stop extremism in prison still hasn't been published, he added. He suggested that Michael Gove, the justice secretary, was concentrating on the EU referendum.

The Labour peer said the issue, combined with rising prisoner numbers and funding cuts means that jails have turned into a 'powder keg'.

He told The Sunday Times: 'Everything about the prisons is going wrong at the moment  assaults by prisoners on prison officers; assaults by prisoners on prisoners; prisoner suicides; incidents where riot squads are required to deal with trouble,' he said.

'If all of those things are going wrong, it is extraordinarily unlikely that [the combating of] radicalisation is also not going wrong.'

He wants Muslim inmates to be protected from Islamist gangs that intimidate and control some sections of prisons.

'We do not want a situation where vulnerable Muslims are being sent to terrorist academies in our high-security prisons without there being a strategy on how to deal with it,' he added.

Senior Home Office officials have produced a report on how extremism in prisons can be addressed but it has not been published. It was expected to be released last month but no new publication date has been given.

Lord Falconer said it was Labour's policy to increase prison officer numbers and bring moderate imams into jails to engage with those interested in extremism.

Prisoner numbers are set to rise to 89,900 by 2020, while the Ministry of Justice budget falls from 6.8billion to 5.7bn.

The prison service said it was not complacent about the possible risks that Islamist extremism poses to jails.
A woman carrying a gun and dressed as Rambo sparked a terror alert at a tourist hot spot in Spain.

Petrified witnesses called police after spotting the woman in Plaza de Espana, a large square in Madrid, but when she was stopped by officers they were amazed to discover she was actually a Civil Guard on a training exercise.

A short clip shows the woman, dressed in a bandanna with a gun slung over her shoulder, acting strangely as she staggers along a pavement and falls to the ground.

Fear: This woman sparked a terror alert when she was seen staggering around Madrid carrying a weapon

While she is only visible briefly, before passing behind a set of trees, the woman resembles a reveller returning from a long night out rather than a trained officer performing an important training session.

Bizarrely she initially claimed to belong to a theatre group, before telling police she was a member of the law enforcement agency afterwards. The rifle she was carrying also turned out to be a fake.

Two colleagues dressed up as dancers. who were also taking part in the tactical exercise, were later forced to identify themselves while the officers checked their out their story.

The scare came as the Spanish government maintains the country on a level four terror alert after the deadly tube and airport attacks in Brussels.

Left-wing politician Francisco Perez Esteban branded the exercise 'reckless'.

He said: 'It's unacceptable that law enforcement agents carry out exercises of this sort in the street and cause unnecessary alarm when the Interior Ministry and the Interior Minister are sending out messages urging calm and caution among the public.

'A level four terror alert is reason enough for law enforcement agencies to refrain from these types of drills, without identification on them and with weapons which the public have no way of knowing whether they're real or fake.'

Disguise: Wearing a bandanna and with a fake gun slung over her shoulder the woman falls to her feet

Training: When the police were called officers were amazed to find that the woman was a Spanish Civil Guard

A Civil Guard spokesman confirmed the woman filmed was on a field exercise as part of a training course but said she was not told to wear the clothes she dressed up in.

He also rubbished initial reports city hall officials had not been informed in advance.

Last month a Nigerian sparked a scare in Fuencarral-El Pardo north of Madrid by walking down a street with a weapon bystanders took for a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder.

Drama: The woman initially told police, pictured they arrive at the scene, that she was a theatre group member

Exercise: After questioning the woman, officers found that she was carrying out a tactical training session

Footage taken by a witness showed the officers ordering him to drop it and lie on the ground as they approached him before one kicked it away and colleagues handcuffed him.

It was subsequently discovered he was carrying an air rifle which was a replica of an M-16 used by the US military.
A kitten was saved from a horrible death after being dumped in a deep freezer at an animal shelter in NSW, but others haven't been so lucky.

The ratepayer-funded Wagga Wagga City Council's Glendfield Road animal shelter has allegedly left cats to die in freezers while dozens of other animals have vanished from official records, Fairfax Media reported.

The investigation revealed that over the past three years, not only have volunteers made shocking discoveries of cats in freezers, but more than 80 of their dogs and cats have disappeared from its books.

This lifeless cat was found slumped on top of garbage bags in a freezer at Wagga Wagga City Council's animal shelter, with what appears to be bloodstained claw marks and wide eyes

Belinda Oakman, a volunteer worker at the shelter, said she followed a 'muffled noise' to a freezer where a frostbitten kitten was rescued, moments from death.

Ms Oakman, in a signed affidavit to the RSPCA last October, described how she slowly opened the freezer to reveal a kitten, no older than 12 weeks, slumped over black garbage bags.

'I very slowly put my hand in and touched it. It let out a muffled cry. I was in total shock.'

She said the cat's fur had 'started to ice over...its eyes wide.' She wrapped it up and sought urgent medical treatment for the kitten.

Ms Oakman said she was told that a ranger had been 'severely bitten' by the kitten while removing it from its cage and subsequently 'knocked out' the animal. It was put into the freezer as storage becase it was presumed to be dead, where euthanised animals are normally discarded.

Ms Oakman adopted the kitten, naming it 'Saviour'.

In an incident several months earlier, volunteer workers made another disturbing discovery of a dead cat placed in a freezer with wide eyes and what appeared to be blood coming out of its nose, bloodstained scratch claw marks and blood on all four walls of the freezer.

Wagga Wagga City Council general manager Alan Eldridge told Fairfax Media on Friday the council could not comment on the kitten found alive in the freezer as the RSPCA were investigating the matter.

He said the allegations had not been substantiated so far.

The cat also appeared to have blood coming out of its nose, with blood stains on all four walls of the freezer

This isn't the first time the council's animal shelter has been embroiled in controversy.

In June last year, the pound prematurely euthanised Skye Paproth's lost and microchipped dog, Cindy, before she could collect the family pet in the 14 days she was allocated.

Cindy was instead euthanised after one week despite being safe, healthy and her owner being successfully contacted.

The council was then forced to issue a public apology after it tried to tell Ms Paproth that the animal had 'escaped'.

In a media release, Wagga mayor Rod Kendall said: 'I know no staff member sets out to do the wrong thing...but mistakes do happen from time to time.'

But retired school teacher and shelter volunteer Myriam Hribar kept a diary which outlined numerous allegations of animal cruelty, including feral cats being left in crush cages for up to five days with no evidence of a food or water bowl in their cage.

'It is very sad to see dying dogs just left to die,' she wrote. 'I am not a vet, but just like a parent knows it is time to take a child to the doctor or hospital, a dying dog should automatically have vet treatment. How can you see this and not do anything?'

Former volunteer Simone Lieschke said in a petition that she witnessed an emaciated sick, young black dog left to die while a rabbit was left for five days with obvious signs of disease, its eyes closed oozing puss and an infected ear.

'Both these animals should have been taken to the vet immediately and not left to suffer,' Ms Lieschke wrote.

Other allegations of cruelty by the three volunteers include animals left without food or water, a mother dog left on the wet cement to give birth to her puppies, the mishandling of animals, sick animals left to die without vet treatment and the 'overwhelming lack of compassion for animals'.

The volunteers also raised concerns with the shelter's statistics, alleging that 'incoming and outgoing numbers of animals are not matching', an 'inaccurate euthanasia percentage' and 'anomalies in surrender statistics for cats'.

Nine lives: This cat (pictured), also found dumped in one of the pound's freezers, was saved by former volunteer Belinda Oakman who ended up adopting the 'larger than life' family member, named 'Saviour'

According to Wagga Wagga Pound's statistics, 69 dogs have died and not been euthanised in the past three years, meaning that a dog dies nearly every fortnight.

During a three-year period, a total of 44 dogs and 37 cats were unaccounted for.

The Council's pound website is often not kept up to date, which rescue groups and the public rely on to determine which animals they can save and to identify lost pets.

The design of the new dog kennels, which cost $700,000, has not taken into account animal welfare and practicality, resulting in dogs sleeping on cold, wet cement or cement covered in faeces and urine.

In a statement provided to Daily Mail Australia, Mr Eldridge said he acknowledged there had been mistakes at the shelter in the past, and 'assured' that the animals are 'well cared for' and is 'working with staff to improve animal welfare' at the pound.

'Despite the confronting nature of their day-to-day role, Council staff always endeavour to act with the utmost professionalism and care in all their duties,' Mr Eldridge said.

He said that while the matters were distressing, they are 'historic in nature' and 'any necessary action has been taken in the past'.

RSPCA NSW Chief Inspector David O' Shannessy told Fairfax Media that following an extensive investigation, they were not confident of proving 'criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt' and not having a pound-specific animal welfare code of practice presented them with legal obstacles.

Ms Oakman said she volunteers at the shelter because many of the surrendered animals never would have experienced human kindness, and without volunteers, routine neglect and abuse would pass unnoticed.
A toddler aged just three has been questioned by police for allegedly sexually abusing another child, it has emerged.

The youngster was spoken to by officers over claims of 'sexual activity' with two other children aged seven and five, in a case recorded by Durham police.

It emerged as part of research which revealed the number of children questioned over illegal sexual activity with other children had doubled in three years from 555 in 2013 to 1,047 in 2015.

Research has found that the number of children questioned over illegal sexual activity with other children has doubled in three years from 555 in 2013 to 1,047 in 2015 (file picture)

The Sun on Sunday reports that police are increasingly questioning youngsters about alleged sexual abuse of other children.

It says the figures would be even higher had London's Met police not refused to disclose any cases it had recorded.

Youngsters aged under five were identified as criminal suspects by three police forces - West Mercia, West Yorkshire and South Wales, according to the Sun on Sunday's home affairs correspondent Tom Wells.

The newspaper quotes Barnado's chief executive Javed Khan as saying: 'Children abusing other children is deeply worrying.

'They're getting distorted ideas from images online or, tragically, because they've been abused themselves.'

It comes a month after new figures showed a total of 70 sex attacks were committed by children under 10 last year.

A toddler aged just three has been questioned by police for allegedly sexually abusing another child, it has emerged (file picture)

The figures showed how scores of children carried out alleged sex attacks but could not be prosecuted because they were under the criminal age of responsibility.

The NSPCC warned at the time that many of the child offenders could be suffering from abuse themselves.

A spokeswoman said: 'It is deeply concerning that so many very young children are said to have committed sexual offences.

'In these cases we have to question the environment in which they are growing up that has led to them behaving in this way.
The Government was urged to review its foreign aid to Tanzania today after it emerged 200million was spent in the country before its government rigged an election.

Senior Tory MPs, led by former defence secretary Liam Fox, claimed the figures showed the Department for International Development was spraying money around to hit its target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid.

The spending - amounting to a total of 12billion a year - is deeply unpopular among some on the Conservative benches.

The United States has reportedly cancelled aid worth 330million to Tanzania after accusing the country's government of a 'pattern of actions' to undermine democracy.

Former defence secretary Liam Fox, left, today urged a review of Britain's 200million aid handouts to Tanzania, overseen by International Development Secretary Justine Greening, right

Former defence secretary Liam Fox told the Sunday Telegraph: 'When there are clear breaches of political rights or human rights they will expect a response in terms of the aid we contribute.

'The fact that the US has reacted in such a strong way gives a very good signal.

'We should be reviewing our own contribution in the light of that.'

Owen Paterson, the former Northern Ireland secretary, added to pressure by saying Britain should 'act accordingly' in light of the US move.

Dr Fox said there were parts of the world Britain could valuably invest money to ease poverty and contribute to development.

But he warned: 'Countries need to earn support from the British taxpayer rather than us spraying money around until we hit 0.7 per cent.'

Tanzania cancelled an election on the semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar last year amid claims an opposition Civic United Front candidate was poised to win.

A rescheduled poll was announced at the last minute in March and was boycotted by the opposition amid fears it would be rigged.

Last month, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US foreign aid agency, suspended co-operation with Tanzania over the election.

It said: 'On March 20, 2016, Tanzania moved forward with a new election in Zanzibar that was neither inclusive nor representative, despite the repeated concerns of the US Government and the international community.

'As a result, while the United States and Tanzania continue to share many priorities, the MCC Board of Directors determined that the Government of Tanzania has engaged in a pattern of actions inconsistent with MCC's eligibility criteria, and voted to suspend the agency's partnership with the Government of Tanzania.'

The US Ambassador to Tanzania Mark Childress has said existing cooperation between the country and the United States will continue but not extended, in line with the MCC decision.

Dianna Melrose, the British High Commissioner in Tanzania, has joined criticism of the way the election was handled by the Tanzanian government.

A government spokeswoman said: 'We have made clear that the March elections in Zanzibar cannot be deemed representative of the will of the people.

'We keep all aspects of our relationships with partner governments under constant review and this will be no exception.'

The website of DFID outlines Britain Tanzanian aid programme.

It said: 'We work in Tanzania to boost wealth creation, achieve the Millennium Development Goals and help citizens hold their government to account.

'Tanzania is politically stable and the last 10 years have seen good economic growth but little reduction in income poverty  30 per cent of people live on under 7 a month.

'Strong progress has been made in health, education and other basic services in the past decade, with over 90% of children now going to primary school.

'However the challenge remains to reach everyone in need across this large, sparsely populated nation.'

The new row comes after it emerged that Britain overspent its foreign aid budget by nearly 200 million last year.

STOP THE FOREIGN AID MADNESS NOW: AS ANOTHER 12BN OF YOUR TAXES ARE SPLURGED ON HAND-OUTS FOR TERRORISTS AND KILLERS, IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPENDING ON FOREIGN AID BUDGET, SIGN OUR PETITION NOW The Mail on Sunday has launched a petition on the official Parliamentary website calling on the Government to scrap the law requiring us to spend a fixed 0.7 per cent of national wealth on foreign aid. The figure is currently 12 billion and will rise to 16 billion by 2020. Rather than helping people who desperately need it, much of this money is wasted and the Great British Giveaway fuels corruption, funds despots and corrodes democracy in developing nations. If you want to stop this madness and see that our money is better spent, click here: Yes, I want to make a difference and sign the petition The link will take you to the Parliamentary petitions web site where our petition is displayed. Once you have signed it, please share it with your family and friends using social media. You must be a UK resident or citizen to sign. Please note that signing the petition will entail you clicking on a link sent to your email inbox. 100,000 people have signed the petition, which will force politicians to at least consider a parliamentary debate on the issue. But more signatures will give the argument to reconsider that aid budget even more weight. If you want to end the madness, sign our petition here Advertisement

The extraordinary figure was part of a massive 513 million rise in foreign aid in 2015 following the Government's decision to set a controversial new target.

Overseas aid spending has now risen to a highest-ever 12.2 billion. But shock figures from DFID show the Government overshot its own target by 172 million.

The news came as a Mail on Sunday campaign launched last week to scrap David Cameron's pledge to spend a set percentage of the national income on overseas aid won overwhelming support, as an astonishing 150,000 people signed our petition on a Parliamentary website.

The Mail on Sunday is calling on the Government to drop the target, which critics say encourages spending by necessity rather than need, and invites waste and corruption.

It is the biggest newspaper e-petition ever, with the number of signatures on our petition already enough to force MPs to consider a debate.

The Prime Minister has pledged to spend 0.7 per cent of the UK's Gross National Income (GNI) on developing countries.

But new statistics quietly released on the DFID's website show that the Government not only met the target, it exceeded it by 172 million  money that could have been spent on jobs, homes, schools or hospitals in Britain.

Although the excess spend is only 0.01 per cent of GNI, the sheer scale of our national income means it is a vast amount.
Last year she ranted at Katy Perry 's pastor father that his daughter was 'leading families astray'

Weick has protested against gay rights, suggested Monster energy drink is satanic and disrupted Muslim events

She later interrupted a church's family Easter egg hunt by protesting with a crucified Easter Bunny toy

'My life is with the lord Jesus Christ you died on a cross, not some stinking bunny', she said

Far right Christian yelled 'shame on you' and claimed the costume was a 'pagan' ritual

Christine Weick shouted abuse at someone dressed as the Easter Bunny outside a

A far right Christian who famously ranted at Katy Perry's father about his 'satanic' daughter has been filmed screaming abuse at the Easter Bunny.

A member of Church Hill, Tennessee, had dressed up as the character and was standing in the car park to welcome families to the church on Easter weekend when they were confronted by Christine Weick.

The notorious far right activist was filmed storming up to the waving bunny and yelling at them for participating in a 'pagan' ritual.

'This is a church of the holy god. You are nothing more than Santa Claus coming to a church,' she said. 'Shame on you.

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Christine Weick had arrived at Church Hill, Tennessee, on Easter weekend where a churchgoer was dressed in an Easter Bunny costume to welcome families

The notorious far right activist was filmed storming up to the waving bunny and yelling at them for participating in a 'pagan' ritual

'Call your self a Christian in a pigging costume. When you stand before god I wonder if you'll be wearing that.'

Weick was filmed by Angela Cummings who, bizarrely, then started shouting 'Hugh Hefner, Playboy bunny.'

Cummings later uploaded the videos to her YouTube page, Opposing Views reports.

Weick was confronted by a member of the congregation who tried to calm her down telling the activist the bunny 'is for kids.'

'This is pagan,' said the activist, who previously protested against gay rights on Mother's Day, interrupted several Muslim events and stated that she believes Monster energy drinks are linked with Satan.

A second video shows her protesting a First Freewill Baptist Church's Easter egg hunt - with an Easter Bunny fluffy toy being crucified on a large cross.

Weick is shown insisting that police arrest an unidentified man who appears to have damaged her protest sign

The officer, however, simply informed her that as the property is worth less $500 she will have to sort out the issue herself

Weick resumed her yelling, shouting that: 'I speak the truth here and you don't like it! And you know what, they crucified Jesus Christ for the same thing!'

After a churchgoer told her to 'get a life', Weick replied 'I got a life, my life is with the lord Jesus Christ you died on a cross, not some stinking bunny.'

Weick, who is living in her car after becoming estranged from her family, according to Joe My God, was not finished with her Easter weekend activism.

A second video shows her protesting a First Freewill Baptist Church's Easter egg hunt - with an Easter Bunny fluffy toy being crucified on a large cross.

Weick is shown insisting that police arrest an unidentified man who appears to have damaged her protest sign.

The officer, however, simply informed her that as the property is worth less $500 she will have to sort out the issue herself.

She then resumed her yelling, shouting that: 'I speak the truth here and you don't like it! And you know what, they crucified Jesus Christ for the same thing!

'They crucified Jesus Christ for speaking the truth! You guys are the same way, you crucify Jesus Christ yourself with this pagan activity!'

She later told WJHL: 'I don't need to get 50 scriptures out to tell you why God is offended about the Easter bunny.'

Last year Weick had had ambushed Katy Perry's father Keith Hudson (pictured with the singer and her mother Mary Hudson) with an extraordinary rant in which she condemned him for raising 'a satanic woman who has led millions to hell'.

Weick, has previously protested against gay rights on Mother's Day, interrupted several Muslim events and stated that she believes Monster energy drinks are linked with Satan

Last year Weick had had ambushed Katy Perry's father with an extraordinary rant in which she condemned him for raising 'a satanic woman who has led millions to hell'.

She had waited for Keith Hudson, an evangelical minister, after he appeared on a radio show in Phoenix, Arizona, and launched a tirade against him for his daughter's actions.

Weick accused him of being complicit in the damnation of Katy Perry fans, including her own son, who she said was going to Hell for watching the pop star's videos.

She said: 'You're the daughter of Katy Perry - do you know that she is one of the most wicked people - she is a satanic woman who has led millions to hell!'

Weick references the video for her hit song ET, released in 2011, as being particularly objectionable.

She tells him: 'I watched the video ET made by your daughter. She's having a sex with demons on the video!', before concluding that Hudson is, by association, 'leading families astray'.

Weick also blames Hudson for the damnation of her son, a Perry fan who enjoys her videos, and refuses to accept Hudson's argument that he cannot be blamed for what his adult daughter does.
As Loyd Grossman says, 'London is not a museum city, you can't freeze it'

A stretch of the Thames should be made into a designated conservation area to stop London becoming 'blighted by piecemeal highrise development', Historic England is claiming.

The government service will begin a public consultation next month to win backing for statutory protection to be given to the eight-mile stretch between Putney Bridge and Tower Bridge.

Planning permission to build more than 200 buildings more than 20 storeys high in the city has been granted, with many destined for riverside locations.

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London then... (captured by Canaletto in 1746 in a painting called The River Thames with St. Paul's Cathedral on Lord Mayor's Day)

And London now. Historic England is claiming that some areas of the city, such as the south bank of the Thames in Vauxhall, are 'blighted by piecemeal highrise development'

It is likely that developers and politicians under pressure to meet housing and other targets will oppose the plans to create such a large protected area, The Sunday Times reported.

Celebrity chef Loyd Grossman, chairman of the Heritage Alliance, told the newspaper: 'London is not a museum city. You can't freeze it.'

Although he added that the rate of development is 'robbing London of one of its greatest assets'.

In the most recent edition of Historic England's Conservation Bulletin, Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, writes: 'London has some great tall buildings. But it also has some which many acknowledge to have been mistakes, and very clumsily located.

'Some areas such as the south bank of the Thames in Vauxhall are  I would argue  already blighted by piecemeal highrise development.

'With over two hundred consented tall buildings in London in the pipeline, the face of the city is already set to change.'

The public body will begin a public consultation next month to win backing for the eight-mile area between Putney Bridge and Tower bridge to be given statutory protection.

He adds: 'Lets seize the opportunity of the debate around the London Plan, take a long hard look at the future of London, and make sure we dont mistakenly kill the goose that lays the golden egg  Londons special character.'

Large stretches of the Thames, including the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, are already conservation areas, as well as World Heritage sites.

There are over 8,000 conservation areas in England in total.

Large stretches of the Thames, including the Tower of London (pictured) and Westminster Abbey, are already conservation areas, as well as World Heritage sites. There are over 8,000 conservation areas in England in total

In the bulletin, Mr Wilson writes that the 'number of active tower cranes' in a city may be a sign of its economic vitality - but whether or not it is a measure of successful development 'depends on what is being built and on the impact on the community around that building'.

Graham Morrison, a partner at Allies & Morrison, an architecture and urban planning practice based in London, blames Boris Johnson's mayoral authority for supporting developments that 'aggressively exploit' the river.

He writes: 'It has allowed too many developments, planned perpendicularly to the waterway - like pigs to a trough, maximizing a financial return from every window but leaving the city fabric and the river with the hermetic stumps of their lower floors.'
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ruled out the idea of a national anti-corruption commission as part of the debate with crossbench senators for the restoration of the construction watchdog.

Mr Turnbull said he does not expect the House of Representatives to sit for the full extra three sitting weeks set aside to try to get the Senate to pass the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).

With Labor and the Greens opposing the bill, Mr Turnbull needs the support of six of the eight crossbench senators for his ABCC bill to prevent a double-dissolution election on July 2, with the legislation having already been rejected once.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ruled out the idea of a national anti-corruption commission as part of the debate with crossbench senators for the restoration of the construction watchdog

But some crossbench senators are pushing for broader oversight rather than in just one industry and are calling for a national independent commission against corruption (ICAC).

'Whatever the merits of that, that is quite separate and distinct from the ABCC legislation. If they want to have a federal ICAC they should move a private member's bill in the normal way,' he told Sky News on Sunday.

Mr Turnbull has recalled parliament from April 18 to debate the ABCC in the Senate but he does not expect the lower house to sit throughout that period.

'We don't anticipate it will sit for the three weeks ... the lower house will sit for a portion of that time, for at least the first part of the week beginning Monday April 18,' he said.

Mr Turnbull said he does not expect the House of Representatives to sit for the full extra three sitting weeks set aside to try to get the Senate to pass the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC)

With Labor and the Greens opposing the bill, Mr Turnbull needs the support of six of the eight crossbench senators for his ABCC bill to prevent a double-dissolution election on July 2, with the legislation having already been rejected once

But manager of opposition business Tony Burke said the prime minister was just trying to avoid scrutiny.

He said if about 150 MPs are flying to Canberra for parliament it should be a normal parliamentary sitting week with question time every day beginning on the Monday.

'Anything less is a pure indulgence on the part of the prime minister and would be treating taxpayers as mugs,' Mr Burke said.

'If parliament is being recalled then members should put in a full week of work in Canberra and Malcolm Turnbull should face the scrutiny of question time.'

If successful, the ABCC bill would restore a Howard-era construction industry ombudsman, which has been used to criticise Labor on union corruption following the Royal Commission into trade unions.

But some crossbench senators are pushing for broader oversight rather than in just one industry and are calling for a national independent commission against corruption (ICAC)

Mr Turnbull has recalled parliament from April 18 to debate the ABCC in the Senate but he does not expect the lower house to sit throughout that period
A sick letter written by Jimmy Savile has revealed how girl patients he knew pretended to be 'madly jealous' about a meeting he had with Margaret Thatcher.

The paedophile DJ wrote the note to the late Prime Minister after meeting her in 1979 while he was fundraising for the Stoke Mandeville spinal injuries unit in Buckinghamshire.

He said young female patients had 'wanted to know' what Mrs Thatcher wore and what she had eaten - adding that 'all the paralysed lads called me "Sir James"'.

A sick letter written by Jimmy Savile (left) has revealed how girl patients he knew pretended to be 'madly jealous' about a meeting he had with Margaret Thatcher (right)

The letter was revealed in files unearthed at The National Archives in Kew.

Thanking Mrs Thatcher for inviting him to lunch, the DJ and entertainer wrote: 'I waited a week before writing to you because I had such a superb time I didn't want to be too effusive.

'My girl patients pretended to be madly jealous + wanted to know what you wore + what you ate.

'All the paralysed lads called me "Sir James" all week. They all love you. Me too!!'

The note was signed 'Jimmy Savile OBE' with three kisses and it included his London address and home telephone number.

It was written in blue felt tip on a flyer - complete with a grinning mug shot - for 'Jim's Daily Dozen' sponsored walk in which he aimed to cover 12 miles a day to reach 31 towns and cities in 31 days.

Mrs Thatcher was later invited to view the building works at Stoke Mandeville.

The paedophile DJ (left) wrote the note to the late Prime Minister (right) after meeting her in 1979 while he was fundraising for the Stoke Mandeville spinal injuries unit in Buckinghamshire

Savile (pictured) said young female patients had 'wanted to know' what Mrs Thatcher wore and what she had eaten - adding that 'all the paralysed lads called me "Sir James"'

The records show that in March 1981, after Sunday lunch with Savile at Chequers, Mrs Thatcher returned to Westminster, to find a note in her weekend box, from her personal secretary.

Caroline Stephens, asked Mrs Thatcher: 'Can you kindly let know if you made any promises to Jimmy Savile when you lunched with him yesterday, for instance: 1. Did you offer him any money for Stoke Mandeville? 2. Did you tell him if you would appear on Jim'll Fix It?'

Mrs Thatcher answered 'no' to going on the show but the first query was - in the words of her private secretary Jeremy Knight - a 'tricky' matter.

At first, Downing Street thought it might get away with a 'symbolic' gesture such as donating the first brick at the unit.

But then Savile asked Mrs Thatcher for a 'Government grant' and the Prime Minister asked: 'Are you thinking of millions of pounds?'

When Savile made clear he was talking about a token amount the Government agreed 500,000, a sum so small, the file notes, it did not need Treasury approval.

Intriguingly, the file is missing two documents - a letter from Savile to Mrs Thatcher on a date unknown and a record of a phone call to her in February 1980.
A babysitter who was acquitted of the murder of a 10-month-old girl she was looking after was later captured on audio referring to another child in her care a 'motherf***er.'

According to police transcripts, recorded during an investigation of baby Chloe Murphy's 2010 death, babysitter Ketapat Jenkins also said a 'fat' child had a higher chance of dying because she hadn't looked after it properly, according to police transcripts aired on Sunday Night.

Mrs Jenkins was later charged with child homicide over Chloe's death, but in 2014 she was found not guilty.

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Chloe Murphy died in 2010 after being in the care of Ketapat Jenkins, who had been babysitting her while her parents had a night out

During an investigation into Chloe's 2010 death, and before Mrs Jenkins was charged, police put listening devices into her car and home. Mrs Jenkins was later acquited of Chloe's homicide

During the investigation into Chloe's death, while Mrs Jenkins continued caring for other children, a police listening device recorded Mrs Jenkins saying: 'the fat one should have a higher chance of dying because I didn't look after the fat one proper'

The conversation recorded by police was played at a coronial inquest into Chloes death, which was held in 2016

Only Mrs Jenkins' side of the conversations were recorded by police during their investigation

Chloe's parents Anthony and Kat Murphy are distraught and believe the justice system has failed them

Babysitter Ketapat Jenkins (left) was accused at her trial of deliberately assaulting Chloe while the girl's parents went out. She was found not guilty in 2014 with the court ruling Chloe may have died from a fall

A jury found Mrs Jenkins guilt had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt, so she was acquited.

She had exercised her right to silence and never gave evidence.

Chloe had died two days after being babysat by Mrs Jenkins in her Kensington, Melbourne home, but she can be retried if fresh and compelling evidence comes to light.

In 2015, a coronial inquest into Chloe's death was confirmed and its findings announced earlier in 2016.

Chloe's mother Phurithee Murphy was pictured leaving the Coroners Court of Victoria in tears after coroner Jacqui Hawkins found Mrs Jenkins likely caused the baby's injuries

During the police investigation into Chloe's death, before Mrs Jenkins was charged, listening devices were placed in Mrs Jenkins' home and car as she continued to care for other children, the Seven Network's Sunday Night reported.

Transcripts of police recordings presented to an inquest report her saying: 'the fat one should have a higher chance of dying because I didn't look after the fat one proper'.

'Sometimes it... slipped out of the walker... I f****** ducking out for a bit of cigarettes... next I turned around, the motherf***** fell to the floor.'

The conversation had been held in Thai and translated to English, the ABC reported.

Ketapat Jenkins was found not guilty of child homicide in 2014 but coroner Jacqui Hawkins found she likely caused Chloe's injuries with the trauma likely the result of severe shaking, a head impact and arm twisting

Sunday Night reporter Denham Hitchcock confronted Mrs Jenkins but she refused to say anything about what happened to Chloe

Speaking to Sunday night, an international expert on child abuse, Doctor Lori Frasier, chief of child abuse paediatrics at Penn State College of Medicine in the U.S., said she had no doubt Chloe's injuries had been caused by being thrown against a hard surface.

She had no doubt Chloe had been murdered. She even agreed when asked if someone got away with murder.

In her findings after the 2016 inquest into Chloe's death, Victorian coroner Jacqui Hawkins found Mrs Jenkins likely caused the baby's injuries and said the trauma was likely the result of severe shaking, a head impact and twisting to the arm.

She said during her findings she would refer the case to the Director of Public Prosecution, believing an offence may have been committed in connection with Chloe's death.

'I find on the balance of probabilities that Mrs Jenkins caused the significant and traumatic injuries Chloe sustained on the night of 3 December 2010,' Coroner Hawkins said.

While the legal principle of double jeopardy applies in Australia, meaning a person cannot be tried twice for the same offence, a new trial is possible if significant new evidence is found. No new charges have yet been laid against.

Chloe's father Anthony Murphy said there had been a miscarriage of justice over his daughter's death.

'The right outcome hasn't occurred and I think that all the powers that be should allow another trial to proceed,' he told said.

'Because this cannot be allowed to just stand and just fade away into the background.

Chloe's father Anthony Murphy said he couldn't fathom that nobody could do anything about the fact his daughter's likely killer was walking free

Chloe was discovered limp and unresponsive by her parents Anthony and Kat Murphy (pictured leaving court) when they arrived to collect her from Mrs Jenkins' Kensington home in 2010

'I can't fathom how, with a finding this strong, that nobody can do anything about it... and that the person responsible is walking free I can't stomach, I won't stomach.'

Chloe was discovered limp and unresponsive by her parents Anthony and Kay Murphy when they arrived to collect her from Mrs Jenkins' Kensington home.

She was taken to the Royal Children's Hospital where it was discovered she had a fractured skull and arm, a significant brain injury, and eye haemorrhages.

Her life support was turned off two days later.

A panel of nine medical experts, testifying at the inquest, said it was most probable Chloe's injuries were non-accidental and caused by at least three acts, including twisting to her arm, 'rotational force' such as shaking and a head impact.

Chloe's parents were 'shocked' when Ms Jenkins was acquitted in March 2014, breaking down in court when the 'not guilty' verdict was read at the end of the five week trial.

The Director of Public Prosecution last year said further charges against Mrs Jenkins were possible if fresh evidence arose, but that was 'speculative'.

Mrs Jenkins has consistently denied harming Chloe deliberately or accidentally.

She was not in court for the inquest's finding.
Witnesses who had overheard the dispute had then called the police

Ling released a statement saying she and Smith were having a 'heavy argument' but she never felt in danger

'If I find out that somebody is abusive, I cut them out of my life,' she said

Co-star Lucy DeCoutere tweeted next day she was resigning from the show

A Trailer Park Boys actress has quit the show after co-star Mike 'Bubbles' Smith was arrested for allegedly choking a woman at an iconic Hollywood hotel.

Lucy DeCoutere tweeted Saturday she was resigning - just one day after Smith was arrested on domestic battery charges.

'If I find out that somebody is abusive, I cut them out of my life. It's very easy,' said DeCoutere who claimed previously she had been a victim of sexual abuse by a Canadian radio host.

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Trailer Park Boys actress Lucy DeCoutere (left) has quit the show after co-star Mike 'Bubbles' Smith (right) was arrested for allegedly choking a woman at an iconic Hollywood hotel

DeCoutere's comments came shortly after the Trailer Park Boys released a statement which insisted the cast stood behind Smith, CBC reports.

Show manager Louis Thomas said later that the statement only represented the show's three main characters.

Smith himself has since released a statement disputing the allegations against him.

'(Alleged victim) Georgia is a friend of mine and we had a loud and heated dispute,' he said. At no time did I assault her. I am not guilty of the misdemeanor charged against me.'

Georgia Ling, the alleged victim, has also released a statement defending Smith, saying that someone had heard them arguing and called the police.

'At no point did I feel I was in danger, otherwise I would've called the police myself, which I did not,' she said.

Arrested: The man behind the cult character Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys, Mike Smith (pictured center with co-stars Robb Wells and John Paul Tremblay) was arrested in Hollywood on Friday for domestic battery

Lucy DeCoutere tweeted Saturday she was resigning shortly after the Trailer Park Boys released a statement which insisted the cast stood behind Smith

Mike became the breakout star of TV mockumentary Trailer Park Boys when it first aired in Canada in the early 2000s playing trailer park inhabitant Bubbles. The cult show has been resurrected after old episodes found a large international following thanks to Netflix

'The police were called by others not present in the room who mistakenly perceived the argument to be something other than what it was. When the officers arrived, I tried to assure them there was no real issue, but they proceeded to arrest Mike.'

Smith, the man behind the cult character Bubbles from the resurrected comedy, was arrested early Friday morning.

TMZ reports that the 43-year-old actor was taken into custody after a verbal altercation with a woman allegedly turned violent.

The Canadian actor - whose show's tenth season was released on Netflix just days earlier - was detained by Hollywood Police at 1.15am after witnesses reported a man and woman fighting in a bathroom at the Roosevelt Hotel.

The actor was charged with misdemeanor domestic battery but released just after 5am Friday morning on $20,000 bail, the Dailymail.com has confirmed.

Witnesses told TMZ that the Trailer Park Boys star and the woman were arguing in the restrooms near the hotel's iconic pool and bar reportedly over who the actor was texting.

Alleged scene: Witnesses claim the actor was arguing with the woman in the bathrooms of the Roosevelt Hotel

Previous support: The actor has previously spoken out against violence against women supporting his fellow Trailer Park Boys star Lucy DeCoutere after she accused Canadian radio personality Jian Ghomeshi of choking and raping her

Witnesses claim they then heard the woman yell, 'You're chocking me', and when they ran to help they say Mike pinning the woman against the bathroom wall.

The actor reportedly ran away but was detained a short time later by LAPD officers.

Earlier in the evening the star had been at performance by English funnyman Noel Fielding before heading to the Hollywood Boulevard hotel.

Smith had previously spoken out against violence against women and even offered support to DeCoutere after she accused Canadian radio personality Jian Ghomeshi of choking and raping her.

Back in 2014, Mike wrote on Twitter: 'I am incredibly proud of my friend @lucydecoutere for having the courage to come forward against #JianGhomeshi Way to go Luce! #IBelieveLucy.'

Last month, Jian was found not guilty of raping the actress and two other women who also said they were attacked by him.

Mike became the breakout star of TV mockumentary Trailer Park Boys when it first aired in Canada in the early 2000s playing trailer park inhabitant Bubbles.

The cult show has been resurrected after old episodes found a large international following thanks to Netflix.
The head detective of Interpol in Venezuela has been charged with smuggling nearly 770lbs of cocaine to the Dominican Republic.

Chief Detective Eliecer Garcia, 42, reportedly coordinated the large shipment of cocaine from north-west Venezuela on behalf of a local businessman last week.

Prosecutors believe that Garcia used his senior position at Interpol to ensure that the plane carrying the Class A drugs could leave Venezuela without being checked.

Bad cop: Eliecer Garcia, chief detective at Venezuela's Interpol, allegedly coordinated this 769lbs shipment of cocaine, found hidden in luggage by police on the Dominican Republic last week

Garcia allegedly co-ordinated the 769lbs (349kg) cocaine shipment to the Dominican Republic, which was then seized by border police at La Romana International Airport on March 24.

Venezuelan businessman Pablo Cardenas, 45, has been accused of financing the haul, after which Garcia organised to have it sent from the city of Barquisimeto, Lara State, on a Cessna aircraft.

Dominican authorities found the drugs inside the Cessna plane, stashed away in three suitcases and two large packages.

Police business: Prosecutors believe that Garcia used position as Interpol Chief Detective to ensure that the planeload of cocaine could leave Venezuela without being checked properly

Garcia and Cardenas were arrested as part of a dozen raids in Caracas, Margarita, Barquisimeto, the Venezuelan Attorney General's Office said in a statement on Saturday.

Cardenas and Garcia have been arrested along with national guard sergeants Darwin Sanoja Rodriguez, 27, Rolan Torrealba Silva, 22, Franklin Perez Pena, 50, Onesimus Romero Hernandez, 34, and Roberto Sivira Fernandez, 25.

Also arrested are three security agents at Barquisimeto's airport; Jose Hernandez Rodriguez, 62, Nelson Peraza Sira, 32, and Eduard Lucena Rivero, 30.
Donald Trump has admitted that he regrets sharing an unflattering picture of Ted Cruz's wife Heidi on Twitter - in a rare act of contrition from the Republican presidential frontrunner.

Recently, the billionaire businessman became engaged in an increasingly personal war of words with Cruz, his nearest challenger in the race for the GOP nomination, which even drew in their wives.

After an anti-Trump super PAC unveiled a controversial campaign ad ahead of voting in Arizona and Utah last month, using a GQ magazine photograph of Trump's wife Melania lying naked and handcuffed to a briefcase, the real estate mogul fired back.

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Donald Trump has admitted that he regrets sharing an unflattering picture of Ted Cruz's wife Heidi on Twitter - in a rare act of contrition from the Republican presidential frontrunner

Cruz denied being behind the ad, which was accompanied by the words: 'Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady. Or, you could support Cruz on Tuesday.'

Trump retaliated first with a threat. 'Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad,' he said on Twitter. 'Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!'

He later retweeted an unflattering picture of Cruz's wife Heidi next to a glamorous shot of his own wife Melania, a Slovenian-American jewelry designer and former model.

The caption, which referenced his threat, said: 'No need to "spill the beans". The images are worth a thousands words.'

But now, as polls show Trump is doing poorly nationwide among female voters, he said: 'Yeah, it was a mistake'.

Speaking to The New York Times' Maureen Dowd, in a column published Saturday, he added: 'If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it.'

However, Trump also insisted Cruz 'did it first'.

Trump retweeted this unflattering picture of Cruz's wife Heidi next to a glamorous shot of his own wife Melania, a Slovenian-American jewelry designer and former model

Trump's retweet was in retaliation to this ad from an anti-Trump super PAC which used a GQ magazine photograph of Trump's wife Melania lying naked and handcuffed to a briefcase

And on the picture of his wife Melania  from a shoot for British GQ in 2000, he added that he 'didn't love it.'

'I think she's taken better pictures,' he said, before adding that 'it wasn't nude!'

Despite being in pole position to seize the Republican nomination, Trump endured one of the worst weeks of his campaign after saying women who have abortions should be 'punished'  before his campaign quickly backtracked.

Polls show his latest controversies, including comments on Heidi Cruz, abortion and a reporter who says she was roughed up by Trump's campaign manager have alienated women voters further.

But during a taping of Face The Nation on Friday, Trump said he believed that, when it comes to abortion: 'The laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way.'

Later in the interview, which will air in full on Sunday, Trump said he agreed that 'abortion is murder'.

Ted Cruz denied being behind the ad, while Heidi hit back at The Donald's threat to 'spill the beans'

His spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, quickly issued a clarification that Trump meant that laws won't change until he's president and appoints judges who can interpret them differently.

Hours after the interview excerpt was released on Friday, Hicks denied Trump was backtracking on his opposition to abortion.

'Mr. Trump gave an accurate account of the law as it is today and made clear it must stay that way now - until he is president,' Hicks said.

'Then he will change the law through his judicial appointments and allow the states to protect the unborn. There is nothing new or different here.'

The 69-year-old Trump - who has been a Democrat, a political independent and is only a recent convert to the 'pro-life' anti-abortion position - has been accused of flip-flopping on the issue.

Abortions are still fiercely opposed by many Republicans, four decades after the US Supreme Court affirmed its legality nationwide.

Trump has been criticized by abortion supporters and opponents for not being clear about his position on the hot-button political issue.

In an apparent effort to address his unpopularity with women, Trump said his wife will be campaigning with him Monday while daughter Ivanka with join him on the campaign trail soon. Pictured from left, Trump with wife Melania, Ivanka and her husband Jared Kusher at an event in February

And it was the second time in days that he'd stepped in hot water over the issue.

On Wednesday, he'd said women should be punished for getting abortions if they're ever banned - a position the notoriously unapologetic campaign quickly reversed.

Trump shocked many television viewers in an interview broadcast Wednesday on MSNBC when he said 'there has to be some form of punishment' for a woman who has an abortion.

The Trump campaign later issued a statement saying that if abortion were to become illegal under US law, then the doctor or any other person involved in performing the procedure would be legally responsible.

'The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb,' the statement read. 'I am pro-life with exceptions.'

His remarks also managed to unite both abortion rights activists and opponents in their criticism.

Furthermore, it raised concerns in the Republican Party about whether his unpopularity with women as measured in preference polling would make him unelectable in a general election match-up against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Ahead of the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, Trump (pictured in Wausau on Saturday) has launched a series of events in the heartland state to rally support

In an apparent effort to address that concern, Trump said his wife will be campaigning with him Monday.

Trump's daughter Ivanka, who just had a baby, will also be returning to campaign with him in another week or so, he said.

As polls for the Wisconsin Republican primary show the ultraconservative Cruz is holding a 10-point lead, Trump has launched a series of events in the heartland state to rally support. Moderate John Kasich, the Ohio governor, is polling third and last.

But the real estate mogul says that even if he loses Wisconsin - where 42 delegates are up for grabs, he'll still win the nomination.

Trump acknowledged in an interview on 'Fox News Sunday' that last week wasn't his best of the campaign - with much of it spent much on defense over comments about abortion, NATO and nuclear weapons for Japan and South Korea.
For more of the latest on Donald Trump visit www.dailymail.co.uk/trump

Says his long path to the White House began when Ronald Reagan wrote to him in the 1980s, saying he should run

Added that she backs his immigration policies and gives him advice

She has now opened up in a candid interview with the New York Post

Ivana Trump has gone back on claims her ex-husband Donald once raped her and insists the Republican frontrunner is not feminist, but loves women.

In an interview with the New York Post, the Czech-American who celebrated the birth of grandson Theodore James last week, revealed that Ronald Reagan urged the mogul to run for the White House in the 1980s.

The 67-year-old also admitted that she is backing her former spouse for President and thinks his current wife Melania will be an 'OK' first lady.

When it comes to his policies, she added that America does need immigrants, otherwise there would be no one to clean up after them.

Even though their marriage was destroyed by the billionaire cheating with Marla Marples, Ivana insists the pair are still friends, and she has even be a confident when it comes to his appearances on the political stage.

Ever since Ronald Reagan allegedly dropped The Donald a letter saying he should be President in the late 1980s - five years before the split - the mother-of-three insists the businessman has had his eyes on the White House.

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Ivana Trump (right) has gone back on claims her ex-husband Donald (left) once raped her and insists the Republican frontrunner is not feminist, but loves women. The pair are pictured together in September 2014

But issues, including his love life, got in the way.

She told the Post: 'There was the divorce, there was the scandal, and American women loved me and hated him.

'So there was no way that he would go into [politics] at that point. But he was always tooling around with the idea.'

She was referring to Trump's infidelity with Marla Marples that pushed the couple apart in 1991.

Ivana told Barbara Walters in a 1991 '20/20' interview that Maples stopped her at a restaurant in Aspen and told her, 'I'm Marla and I love your husband. Do you?'

Ivana filed for divorce, claiming in her deposition that Donald raped her after he used her plastic surgeon for a scalp-reduction surgery to remove a bald spot.

According to the 1993 book 'Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,'he screamed at her: Your f****** doctor has ruined me!' before forcing himself on her sexually.

But in the interview with the Post she now claims that she was never abused, and the content was based on negotiations by lawyers.

She told the newspaper: 'I was never abused.'

The Donald handed the divorce like a businessman. She got a $14 million cash settlement, the familys 45-room Greenwich, Conn., mansion, an apartment at Trump Plaza, and use of Donalds Palm Beach mansion, Mar-a-Lago, every March.

The Czech 67-year-old, who split from the billioanire in 1991, revealed that she is backing her former spouse for President and thinks his current wife Melania will be an 'OK' first lady

Once it was all said and done, the pair became friends. She now speaks to him frequently about his appearances.

Her constant advice is for him to 'calm down', yet she still believes he should be in the White House.

'He's very outspoken. He just says it as it is. He's no politician. He's a businessman. He knows how to talk. He can give an hour speech without notes . . . He's blunt.'

Despite being an immigrant, she also insists The Donald's tough border policies need to be put in place - including the wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

'I have nothing against Mexicans, but if they [come] here  like this 19-year-old, she's pregnant, she crossed over a wall that's this high (raises her hand to show the Post reporter roughly four feet off the ground).

'She gives the birth in American hospital, which is for free. The child becomes American automatically. She brings the whole family, she doesn't pay the taxes, she doesn't have a job, she gets the housing, she gets the food stamps. Who's paying? You and me.

'As long as you come here legally and get a proper job . . . we need immigrants. Who's going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans don't like to do that.'

Ivana (pictured in October 2015) insists she agrees with Trump's controversial border policies, despite being an immigrant herself

She recalls how she met Trump when she went to Maxwell's Plum - a notorious New York pick-up spot for the wealthy - in 1976.

'[There's] this tall blond guy with blue eyes. He said, 'I'm Donald Trump and I see you're looking for a table. I can help you.' I look at my friends and said, 'The good news is, we're going to get a table real fast. The bad news is, this guy is going to be sitting with us.' '

After the meal, she told the Post that Donald paid the bill without telling them and disappeared. It took Ivana by surprise.

'I said, 'There's something strange because I've never met a man who didn't want anything from a woman and paid for it,' ' Ivana says with a laugh.

When she walked outside, there was Donald, in the driver's seat of his own limousine. 'He drove us home and then we started to date,' she says.

After less than a year, the two married, in 1977, and went on to have three children together: Donald Jr., now 38, Ivanka, 34, and Eric, 32. Donald hired his wife to work within his Trump Organization.

She worked in interior design until the pair had their acrimonious split in 1991. Now she juggles her property portfolio, and allegedly three boyfriends.

Ivana also has eight grandchildren - a group that was added to just last week.
innocence as scientists reported a 'cold hit' on another prisoner Jerry L Crotty who died 10 years ago

Lawyers claim that DNA proves a former Navy sailor was wrongly convicted of raping a Virginia woman and murdering her husband more than three decades ago.

Keith Allen Harward, 59, has served more than 33 years of a life sentence for the murder of Jesse Perron, who was beaten to death with a crowbar, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The killer repeatedly raped Perron's wife as their children slept in a nearby bedroom.

Last month, the Innocence Project filed an innocence petition after initial DNA testing failed to identify Harward's genetic profile in sperm left by the killer.

Lawyers claim DNA proves that former Navy sailor, Keith Allen Harward (left), was wrongly accused of raping a woman and murdering her husband more than three decades ago. Instead, forensic scientists reported a 'cold hit' on Jerry L Crotty (right), who was Harward's shipmate during the time of the attacks

Last month, the Innocence Project filed an innocence petition after initial DNA testing failed to identify Harward's genetic profile in sperm left by the killer. Harward is pictured with former girlfriend Gladys Bates

Harward was convicted largely on the testimony of experts who said bite marks on the rape victim matched his teeth to within 'reasonable medical certainty' and 'reasonable scientific certainty'.

But after the sperm was run through the national DNA database forensic scientists reported a 'cold hit' on Jerry L Crotty, who was Harward's shipmate stationed on the USS Carl Vinson during the time of the attacks.

The aircraft carrier undergoing work at a location near the victims home.

The case became known as 'the bite-mark case,' after more than 1,000 sailors on the aircraft carrier underwent dental screenings to see if their tooth alignment matched the bite marks on the rape victims legs, according to the Times-Dispatch.

Crotty, who died in an Ohio prison in June 2006, was serving seven to 25 years for abduction, burglary, theft and firearms violations.

Harward's lawyers wrote to the Virginia Supreme Court in a brief filed last week: 'The stark evidence of his innocence not only meets the rigorous standard of proof for a writ of actual innocence, but indeed far surpasses it.'

A spokesman for the Virginia Attorney General's Office, told the Times-Dispatch that they 'are working with Mr. Harward's attorneys to get the situation resolved as quickly as possible'.

Olga Akselrod, Harward's lawyer with the Innocence Project, said he first contacted them in 2007, seeking DNA testing, but there was a long line ahead of him.

He was moved up because he was convicted on bite mark evidence, which is a controversial forensic technique.

The rape victim, who was attacked while no lights were on in the house, was unable to identify Harward.

His lawyers have requested that the court expedite its review of the case so that he can be exonerated as quickly as is feasible. Harward pictured with a former girlfriend

But she described her attacker as a white male, 19 or 20 years old, clean-shaven and wearing a sailor's uniform, according to the Times-Dispatch.

Crotty was 19 at the time of the attack and Harward was 26 at the time.

A security guard at the shipyard also identified Harward as a clean-shaven sailor he saw enter the shipyard with blood spatter on his uniform.

But old photographs strongly suggested Harward had a mustache.

His lawyers said studies have since discredited the scientific basis for bite mark comparison and that the security guard identified Harward from a spread of mug shots after he had been hypnotized by investigators, according to the Times-Dispatch.

In 1983, Harward was convicted of capital murder, robbery, sodomy and rape.
tirade he continually screams and swears at her in shop

The shocking moment a Muslim woman is racially abused by a man in a west London shop has been captured on camera.

Ahlam Saed, 25, said the row flared up, in the Shepherd's Bush store, after the man called her 'Batman' when she went in to buy some sweets wearing her full veil.

Throughout the upsetting dispute, the man swears at Miss Saed and repeatedly asks 'why do you wear that?' referring to her face veil.

Row: This man racially abuses a Muslim woman during a dispute in a grocery store in west London

Miss Saed, who is of Somali heritage, said she heard the man humming the theme tune to the Bruce Wayne cartoon before saying to his two young daughters: 'Look kids, Batman has walked in'

She claims he added: 'Say what you want girls, she won't understand English anyway.'

It was at this point that Miss Saed decided to film the man with her phone.

In Miss Saed's clip he is heard asking: 'How do they know if you're a man or a woman?'

Clearly upset, Miss Saed tells him to set a better example for his children.

She replies: 'You're ignorant you need to grow up and stop teaching kids that [language].'

During the argument one of the man's daughters is seen covering her face and crying, clearly upset by the fact her father is screaming at another woman.

Offensive: During the argument the shouts racial slurs at the woman, while his young children watch on

At one point in the clip the man says: 'I know a white girl who married a Muslim man and she has an ISIS flag on her back wall.'

Even when the shop keeper and a Muslim customer intervene in order to stop the row, the man still continues to verbally attack Miss Saed.

After the man repeatedly orders Miss Saed to stop filming his children, the video ends with her being ushered out the store.

Intervene: Even when a customer and the shop keeper intervene the man continues to berate the woman

Speaking to MailOnline, Miss Saed explained she had never met the man before and that she was simply minding her own business when the dispute started.

She said: 'At first I was angry with what he was saying but I decided to filter it out and show him that I did speak English and that I am educated.

'But all I got was effin and blinding, so it was was useless trying to have a conversation.

'It's upsetting that people like me, who were minding their own business, have to go through this sort of thing.'
Threats: Russian tycoon Alexander Perepilichnyy

A Russian whistleblower received Skype messages demanding 1million euros in the months before he died in suspicious circumstances, a court has heard.

Businessman Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed while jogging outside his 3 million mansion in Weybridge, Surrey, in November 2012 but police ruled out foul play at the time.

Serious concerns of an assassination were raised when a previous hearing was told that the tycoon could have been poisoned using a lethal plant found only in remote regions of China.

The father-of-two had fled to the UK after revealing 'explosive' information to Swiss authorities in an investigation into a 140 million Russian money-laundering scheme in Swiss bank accounts.

He had also provided evidence against those linked to the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, and became the fourth person linked to the case to die in suspicious circumstances.

Henrietta Hill QC, representing Hermitage Capital Management, which led the Russian fraud investigation, told Surrey Coroner's Court on Thursday that Mr Perepilichnyy had received threats in December 2011.

She said that Russian-speaking staff had translated Skype messages between Mr Perepilichnyy and members of the Klyuev Organised Crime Group, including one asking for 1million euros (800,700).

She told the coroner: 'These messages show he was threatened by members of this group. It appears to amount to a threat to him because of his role in some of this investigation.

'It is our understanding that there have been threats in relation to large amounts of money. There is a Skype reference to the payment of 1 million euros to avoid unspecified consequences.'

A further reference to threats for 300,000 roubles (3,000) appeared later that month.

The messages ended in April 2012, around the time he testified in the fraud case. In the following months he took out a number of life insurance policies worth millions of pounds.

Sudden death: Mr Perepilichnyy collapsed while jogging outside his 3 million mansion in Surrey, pictured

Luxury: He was jogging in the private St George's Hill estate, pictured, when he suffered a heart attack

Coroner Richard Travers said he would seek to get the Skype messages officially translated.

Bob Moxon-Brown, representing one of Alexander's life insurers Legal & General, asked whether there was information he was 'in contact with British intelligence'.

Concerns about the timescale of the long-awaited inquest were also raised during the review.

Dijen Basu, representing the chief constable of Surrey Police, complained about the number of pre-inquest reviews held.

Skype messages: Surrey Coroner's Court, pictured, heard Mr Perepilichnyy received threats before he died

He said: 'It is also a concern that it appears that in this investigation and inquest in relation to the death three years ago, we have had more pre-inquest reviews than there have been in the Hillsborough, which is the longest legal inquest in history.'

John Beggs, representing Mr Perepilichnyy's widow, said: 'It's having a significant impact on the wellbeing of the surviving family. They [involved parties] have a duty to the widow to get on with it.'

Genetic testing into whether he died of heart problems is due to be completed at the end of April.
Female soldiers (file picture) are expected to be granted access to front line units later this year prompting a review of fitness requirements

The Army is re-writing its fitness tests to make sure women can qualify for front line units once rules are changed this year, it was reported today.

Physical differences between men and women will be recognised in the tests as Defence Secretary Michael Fallon prepares to sign off on plans to allow women into the most dangerous roles for the first time.

Female soldiers are expected to be allowed to join close combat units, including the infantry and armoured regiments, for the first time from this summer.

The reforms will come alongside changes to the Army's physical training which is currently 'optimised for male physiology', the Sunday Times reported.

The new standards will be introduced from 2019 and are intended to better balance the demands of a specific military role with the training given to the individual recruit.

Research which has driven Mr Fallon's expected decision found women were twice as likely to suffer musculoskeletal injuries during initial training.

And analysis of recent Army recruits suggests only 30 women a year would pass the current physical standards for joining the front line units.

The study found: 'We know that women are built differently to men  higher fat mass, less muscle mass, less cardio output, which leads to greater/quicker energy deficit than men and they have to work harder to achieve the same output.'

Sources told the Sunday Times the modified tests will not be aimed to 'satisfy a gender requirement' but will be an attempt to 'drive down' the number of women injured.

One test being reviewed is a requirement for women under 30 to be able to do 21 press-ups, 50 sit-ups and run one and a half miles in 13 minutes or less. Also under review is the requirement for infantry to complete an eight-mile march carrying a 55lb rucksack within two hours.

Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan, warned: 'You will have infantry soldiers who are less capable than they are today.

'I have spoken to people who are serving in the infantry who said that if women are allowed in, they will leave.'

General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the general staff, said: 'I want to make it very clear that there will be no lowering of training or qualifying levels for soldiers in ground close combat roles.'

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: 'The MOD is undertaking a review to establish the physical standards required for ground close combat, which is due to complete in 2019.

'It will be based upon the principle that any standards will be related to the required role rather than individual characteristics.

'No decisions have been taken and any claims of what this will involve are pure speculation.'
A tattoo-covered ex-convict has been arrested for allegedly abducting a woman at knifepoint in her driveway.

John Crawford, 25, is accused of forcing his way into a 24-year-old woman's car outside her home in Akron, Ohio.

Crawford - who has vulgar tattoos inked across his forehead, eyebrow and all over his body - demanded the terrified woman drive him 10 miles to two other towns on Tuesday night, Cleveland.com reported.

'God forgives': Heavily inked John Crawford, 25, has been arrested for allegedly abducting a woman at knifepoint in her driveway

He told her he planned to tie her up, throw her into the trunk of her vehicle and lock her in his basement, according to court records.

Crawford - who has 'RAW' tattooed above his left eyebrow and 'God forgives' inked on his forehead - allegedly threatened to hurt the woman and her family if she tried to flee.

The ex-con, who has previous for pepper spraying and biting people, is also accused of fighting a man who tried to help the woman after they arrived at Crawford's home in Munroe Falls, Ohio.

The heroic 30-year-old was left with minor injuries after the alleged kidnapper repeatedly punched him in the face, court records say.

Crawford was later arrested at his home, where he had a folding knife and 17 zip ties, police said.

He has been charged with abduction, kidnapping and assault and is being held on a $250,000 bond.

The tattooed convict has committed seven misdemeanor offences in the last 11 months, including one of possessing a syringe just four days before his most recent arrest.

Crawford spent 18 months in prison after pepper spraying two people in the face during a robbery-gone-wrong in 2012.

He stole a man's wallet and $50 and tried to flee, but was caught by the victim.

Crawford beat him away and bit a second man who tried to help, before punching and threatening to stab him.
A primary school that excluded 'up to thirty disabled children' 'in a rush to become an academy' has rejected education chiefs' calls to rescind some of the expulsions.

Nonsuch Primary School in Woodgate Valley, Birmingham, has been accused of 'bullying, intimidation, secrecy and dishonesty' after children as young as four were kicked out.

There were 193 pupils at the school in a 2012 Osted inspection, meaning a staggering one in seven pupils were excluded in 12 months.

Tory councillor John Lines has claimed the 'unusually high' exclusion rate was part of a ploy to improve behaviour figures in a 'rush to become an academy'.

Nonsuch Primary School in Woodgate Valley, Birmingham, has been accused of 'bullying, intimidation, secrecy and dishonesty' after children as young as four were kicked out. There were 193 pupils at the school in a 2012 Osted inspection, meaning a staggering one in seven pupils were excluded in 12 months

He also likened the situation to the Trojan Horse controversy, an alleged plot by hardline Muslims to Islamise schools in Birmingham.

Speaking today, the councillor who represents Bartley Green ward, said: 'To become an academy one needs to ensure the records of the school and behaviour are at a reasonable standard.

'So in the rush to become an academy it seems they excluded 30 pupils in around 12 months to get that status.'

Nonsuch Primary School became an academy at the start of the year, and the trust that now runs the school launched its own independent inquiry into the spate of expulsions.

But Mr Lines has demanded more action, having written to the Department of Education about the scandal calling for action over the 'appalling reports of discrimination of our very young, vulnerable citizens, some of whom are still without formal schooling'.

He has also held two public meetings in Birmingham where he said: 'The mood was anger and frustration coupled with the usual concerns.'

He added: 'When I originally wrote to the Department of Education, they said 30 pupils in 12 months was unusually high. But now they are going back on that.

'Their attitude seems to be complete denial, which is disgraceful. The headmistress, Jo Walkley, has been on "sick leave" for months.

Tory councillor John Lines (pictured) has claimed the 'unusually high' exclusion rate was part of a ploy to improve behavior figures in a 'rush to become an academy'

'Most of the children who have been excluded are disabled, it really is sickening.

'I am giving my support to parents and misrepresented children and I will continue to do that. No one will stop me doing that.

'There is someone, somewhere accountable for this appalling behaviour.

'There has been a large number of people that have said nothing and watched from the sidelines as parents and children have been subjected to this appalling behaviour.

'The powers that be, those who should be responsible, have just turned a blind eye. These difficulties have taken place while Nonsuch was under the authority of the council.

'It appears to me the dash for academy status may be a serious concern, although I support the academy process. The dash towards academy status was made with undue haste.

'I have called for an investigation into the school. We need to probe what is going on for the sake of other children. The only failing I can see is the school's, not the children's.

Mason Dunbar (pictured), 10, who suffers from cerebral palsy, was kicked out of Nonsuch Primary School on November 19 last year for 'defiance'

'Frankly, I find it hard to understand how a child of four and five can be so unruly, so uncontrollable, that they merit exclusion.'

In February, an independent review found that nine-year-old pupil Josh Long, who was permanently excluded in October last year, should have his expulsion rescinded.

But astonishingly the school has rejected this finding and barred Josh, who is believed to have Tourette's, from coming back to school.

A report following the February meeting states: 'The panel agrees that, on the evidence available to them, the governing committee was wrong to conclude the headteacher had exhausted all possible alternative means of supporting Joshua.

'The panel members decided that the governing committee was wrong to draw their own inference from Joshua's early school reports.

'The panel decided it would be appropriate to recommend that the discipline committee of Nonsuch School reconsider the decision not to reinstate Joshua.'

However, following a meeting of Nonsuch governors and trust members last month, Josh's mother Louise was informed the ban stands.

The letter states: 'After full consideration, the governors decided to uphold the decision by the school to permanently exclude Josh for persistent disruptive behaviour.'

Louise, 28, said: 'It is outrageous. I believe Josh has been victimised. He is a boy and boys will be boys.

'If you don't talk to a child with respect, you are not going to get it back. I don't think it has been done fairly at all. It is organised chaos.'

She denies her son is overly disruptive, but admits he is a youngster with some issues. He is currently being assessed for possible Tourette Syndrome.

Another pupil, Mason Dunbar, 10, who suffers from cerebral palsy, was kicked out of Nonsuch Primary School on November 19 last year for 'defiance'.

The exclusion was rescinded following an appeal in January and the youngster - who suffers from behavioural issues including Attention Deficit Hyperactive and Oppositional Defiance Disorder - is now back at school.

But his father, Tony, 41, said: 'The school just cannot deal with disabled children, so they get rid of them.

'I think they were hoping they could hide their record if they became an academy.

'It's like when a business goes bankrupt and gets a new name, they can erase their past. That's what they're trying to do now.

'Mason's now getting the care he needs, but they really had no idea. It took months fighting to allow him to have the right carers in.

'They didn't know what he was entitled to, or what forms they had to fill in, it's shocking.'

A Birmingham City Council spokesperson said: 'We take these claims very seriously and are working closely with Nonsuch Primary School, its academy trust and the Regional Schools Commissioner, to review the inclusion processes and procedures for all pupils.
It may have been 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare - but rumours circulating about the Bard's mysterious identity are as frequent as ever.

Now one leading Shakespeare expert is claiming that the English playwright was actually a dark-haired Jewish woman, who lived in London.

John Hudson's book, entitled Shakespeare's Dark Lady, explores the theory that Shakespeare's true identity is that of a woman named Amelia Bassano.

Leading Shakespeare expert John Hudson claims in his book (pictured right) that the English playwright (pictured left) was actually a dark-haired Jewish woman, who lived in London

According to Mr Hudson, Amelia was born in 1569 to a family of Venetian Jews who were court musicians to Queen Elizabeth I.

As a teen she became mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, First Baron Hunsdon, who was in charge of the English theatre and patron of the company that staged Shakespeare's plays.

She was therefore well-placed and had all the right knowledge skills, and contacts to have produced the canon we attribute to Shakespeare.

Mr Hudson, who directs the innovative Shakespeare company the Dark Lady Players, based in New York, also believes that Amelia had an affair with the playwright Christopher Marlowe, writer of Doctor Faustus, and became pregnant before dying in poverty in 1645.

One of the main reasons why he suspects Amelia wrote the plays is that many are based abroad - whereas Shakespeare was believed to have stayed in England for his entire life,The Sun reports.

Could a woman named Amelia Bassano have written the Bard's canon? Pictured: A performance of Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night at the Apollo Theatre starring Stephen Fry as Malvolio and Mark Rylance as Olivia

The Bard recently hit the headlines after experts concluded that it is possible that his skull was stolen from his tomb by trophy hunters over 200 years ago

A number of his - or her - plays reveal a knowledge about Italy, where Amelia's family came from, as well as skills such as falconry, baking and Hebrew.

Mr Hudson's conclusion reads: 'As our world slowly becomes less racist, less sexist, and less religiously dogmatic, perhaps the time has come at last for her story to get a hearing.'

Although the theory is not widely accepted by academics, there are numerous conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's identity circulating on the internet.

A number of people have concluded that it must be more of a coincidence that there is an Emilia in Othello and a Bassan(i)o in The Merchant of Venice.

The Bard recently hit the headlines after experts concluded that it is possible that his skull was stolen by trophy hunters over 200 years ago.

Archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) were able to look beneath the surface of what is widely thought to be the writer's grave - but they discovered 'an odd disturbance at the head end'.
But only 202 - half what is expected - went due to slow processing, and 330 arrived on Greek shores the same day

Boats left Lesbos this morning, with guards accompanying them from coach and on the boats to the Turkish coast

Deal requires EU to take one official refugee for every one returned to Turkey, to discourage dangerous crossing

First wave of migrants returned to Turkey this morning under new EU deal, as nation prepares to take 500 this week

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Escorted by masked border guards in black military-style uniforms, these are some of the first migrants to be deported from Greece under a deal aimed at halting the influx into Europe.

As the measure was finally enforced yesterday, they were loaded on to boats at dawn and each assigned a border agency officer to enforce the journey from Lesbos.

Many of the guards wore surgical-style gloves and masks as they sat either side of the rows of migrants on board.

The protests took place as 138 refugees arrived in Turkey from the Moria Refugee Camp in Lesbos today, accompanies by heavy guard, some of whom wore masks

But more migrants are still arriving in Greece. A mother holds her child as migrants arrive on a Greek coast guard boat today, after being collected at sea by the authorities

Refugees are escorted by Turkish police as they arrive by ferry from the Lesvos (Lesbos), Greece, at the Dikili harbour in Izmir, Turkey

But the total returned to Turkey yesterday  only 202  was less than half the number the country was expecting.

It was also a fraction of the more than 5,000 who have been smuggled on to Greek islands since the EU deal was introduced last month, requiring all new arrivals to be sent back.

Local police said a slow processing system meant the 202 were the only migrants Greece could legally deport at present. The vast majority were Pakistanis who had not claimed asylum, and so would have been sent back even without the new arrangement.

Even as the boats left for Turkey, a string of people-smuggling vessels arrived on the Greek islands carrying 330 new arrivals.

Under the deal introduced on March 20, for every Syrian refugee returned to Turkey, another will be taken from the country and resettled in the EU, with numbers capped at 72,000. But only two Syrians went back yesterday, and they did so voluntarily.

Last night it remained unclear if more boats returning migrants to the Turkish port of Dikili would leave this week. Lesbos police later confirmed there would be no migrants deported to Turkey today. Yesterday riot police were deployed to the islands harbour and an army Chinook buzzed overhead as the deportation began.

Protesters, many of them with British accents, held banners to demonstrate against deportations planned at the port of Mytilini, Lesbos

Migrants are escorted by Turkish police officers as they arrive in the Turkish coastal town of Dikili, Turkey, as part of a deal requiring Europe to settle one refugee for every one returned to Turkey in order to discourage the dangerous sea crossing

Ferries left the island of Lesbos in greecxe carrying about 200 migrants - less than half the number that were expected to be returned

Ewa Moncure, spokesman for EU border agency Frontex, said each migrant was assigned an escort officer for safety and security.

The guards accompanied their designated migrant by bus from the Moira holding camp to the dock, and then on board the boat where they remained by their side for the voyage to Turkey.

Miss Moncure added: It was very calm. They were led on carrying their luggage. There were also additional teams of Greek police on board but there was no trouble. A total of 136 migrants were returned from Lesbos and 66 from the nearby island of Chios, according to Greek police.

These included 130 Pakistanis as well as Indians, Sri Lankans, Congolese, Afghanis, Somalis, Bangladeshis and Iranians.

These were the only people who we were legally able to return under the terms of the deal, a Lesbos police spokesman said. Its a very slow process. The other migrants are not processed yet.

This was despite Turkish interior minister Efkan Ala saying at the weekend that it was prepared for 500 people to arrive yesterday and Greek media reporting that 750 were expected by Wednesday.

A Greek woman today had to be dragged to safety after collapsing because migrants have blocked the road to Macedonia as Greece tried to send migrants back to Turkey as part of a new EU deal

A migrant who collapsed is helped by a friend as other migrants and refugees block the highway near the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Evzoni, Greece

Migrants and refugees shout slogans as they block the highway, protesting against the first wave of migrants being sent back to Turkey as part of a new EU deal

Another road block took place near another impromptu migrant camp at Idomeni, further south, in which protesters scuffled with police (pictured)

Migrants protested at Idomeni (pictured) as an enormous and complex logistical operation involving thousands of EU and other officials was launched today to ship migrants from Greece back to Turkey

Greek authorities said about 100 people today blocked the highway near the Evzones crossing, near the village of Evzoni, where a sprawling refugee camp of thousands developed in recent months

The area at Evzoni had been a pedestrian crossing for migrants and refugees until Macedonian authorities restricted the flow, and then closed it completely last month

The migrants looked furious as they chanted and shouted as it emerged some would be sent back to Turkey after making such a long and arduous journey into Europe

The Greek woman who collapsed as the roads were blocked was helped by police officers and given aid

Greece sent back a first wave of migrants to Turkey today under an EU deal to ease its migration crisis that has run into heavy criticism from rights groups

A handful of protesters  several with British accents  demonstrated against the deportations at Lesbos harbour, holding placards saying, No borders, no nations.

The EU deal with Turkey aimed to halt the route used by a million people to cross the Aegean Sea into the EU last year leading to scores of deaths. But since the deal was introduced 2,890 migrants have arrived on Lesbos, 1,766 on Chios and 479 on Samos, according to official Greek police figures.

Police sources on Lesbos said there had been a flurry of last-minute asylum applications since the deal came into force.

Boris Cheshirkov, the UN refugee agency spokesman on the island, said: Over two thousand people have stated their wish to seek asylum and we need to see a credible process go ahead with the Greek asylum service.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has said the EUs deal with Turkey lacks legal safeguards. Amnesty International called it a historic blow to human rights.

A small Turkish ferry and a larger catamaran left the island of Lesbos carrying 131 migrants, mainly from Pakistan and Bangladesh at dawn today, according to the EU border agency Frontex

Refugees are escorted by Turkish police as they arrive by ferry from the Greek island of Lesbos at the Dikili harbour in Izmir, Turkey

Turkey and the EU clinched the agreement in March, with the 28-nation bloc desperate to stem its worst migration crisis since the Second World War

Under the terms of the deal, all 'irregular migrants' arriving since March 20 face being sent back, although the accord calls for each case to be examined individually

A Greek ferry carrying refugees back to Turkey from the Greek island of Lesbos arrives at Dikili Harbour in Izmir, Turkey

A Turkish catamaran taking the first group of migrants to be sent back to Turkey leave the port of Chios early on April 4, 2016

Meanwhile, in Greece, migrants blockaded two major highways near to the border, stopping traffic in both directions in protest to the deportations.

Greek authorities said about 100 people today blocked the highway near the Evzones crossing, near the village of Idomeni, where a sprawling refugee camp of thousands developed in recent months.

The area had been a pedestrian crossing for migrants and refugees until Macedonian authorities restricted the flow, and then closed it completely last month.

Meanwhile, hundreds of refugees and migrants were continuing to block trucks from using another section of the highway further south near the town of Polykastro, near another impromptu camp.

A Greek woman today had to be dragged to safety after collapsing near the blockade at Idomeni, where a number of migrants tussled with police.

State news agency ANA reported that some 250 migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and African nations would be sent back daily between Monday and Wednesday

Rights groups have criticised the deal, questioning whether it is legal and ethical. Migrants are escorted by Turkish police as they arrive by ferry from the Greek island of Lesbos

Police stand guard as migrants are escorted by Frontex officers into a ferry, in the port of Mytilene, Lesbos

The woman fell unconscious and was aided by policeman amid the dramatic scenes, in which hundreds of migrants held placards, blocking off two major highways linking to the border.

It comes as it emerged that a quiet Alpine border crossing is set to become Europe's next migrant flashpoint after Austria promised to send troops to stop a surge of refugees crossing from Italy.

Police and riot officers were present, but 'the procedure was very calm, everything was orderly,' Frontex said.

This morning, a Turkish catamaran carried migrants from the neighbouring island of Chios. Officials have not yet confirmed how many people are on board.

A few dozen activists on Chios gathered near the embarkation site to protest against the deportations, chanting 'Freedom'.

'Stop the dirty deal', 'stop deportations' and 'wake up Europe' were among the banners brandished in Lesbos against the disputed EU-Turkey agreement.

A couple of hours later, the first ferry docked in the Turkish coastal town of Dikili.

Red tents have been set up along the town's harbourside to receive the arrivals.

Deported: Over 51,000 refugees and migrants seeking to reach northern Europe are stuck in Greece

A Frontex officer (R) takes a picture as migrants board a passenger boat to be returned to Turkey

A group of refugees walk to a bus after their arrival at the airport in Hanover, central Germany. The first Syrians arrived in Germany from Istanbul under a controversial EU-Turkey migrants pact

However, Mustafa Toprak, governor of Turkey's Izmir region, said the migrants would only be staying briefly in Dikili and the resort of Cesme - a second reception point - before being moved on.

Turkey and the EU clinched the agreement in March, with the 28-nation bloc desperate to stem its worst migration crisis since the Second World War.

Under the terms of the deal, all 'irregular migrants' arriving since March 20 face being sent back, although the accord calls for each case to be examined individually.

For every Syrian refugee returned, another Syrian refugee will be resettled from Turkey to the EU, with numbers capped at 72,000.

In Monday's first wave, Turkish Interior Minister Efkan Ala has said his country was ready to receive 500 people and that Greek authorities had provided 400 names, although these numbers could change.

Police sources on Lesbos, a Greek holiday island that has served as the gateway for hundreds of thousands of people coming from Turkey, said there had been a flurry of last-minute asylum applications.

'We... have over two thousand people that have stated their wish to seek asylum and we need to see a credible process go ahead with the Greek asylum service for those that wish to express their protection concerns,' said Boris Cheshirkov, the UN refugee agency spokesman on Lesbos.

Policemen escort a group of refugees after their arrival at the airport in Hanover, central Germany

Syrian refugees arrive at the Friedland reception centre in Goettingen, Germany. A group of 16 Syrian refugees arrived on a scheduled flight from Turkey under the agreement between the EU and Turkey

Greek officials have been tight-lipped over how many migrants will cross the Aegean Sea back to Turkey.

State news agency ANA reported that some 250 migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and African nations would be sent back daily between Monday and Wednesday.

Yiorgos Kyritsis, spokesman for Greece's refugee coordination unit, insisted Monday's operation only 'involves people who have not requested asylum'.

Rights groups have criticised the deal, questioning whether it is legal and ethical.

'We don't know what is going to actually happen,' senior UN migration official Peter Sutherland admitted this weekend.

'But if there is any question of collective deportations without individuals being given the right to claim asylum, that is illegal.'

Amnesty International says Turkey is not a safe country for refugees - a charge Ankara rejects.

Protesters are pictured at the Italian village of Brenner on the border with Austria where they clashed with police at a demonstration against the closure of borders

Meanwhile Austrian police used pepper spray, pictured, against the demonstrators who want migrants to be allowed to move between countries

Two police officers were reportedly injured in the clashes, with several pictured here on the Austrian side of the border in riot gear

Let refugees in was the clear message left by the protesters who painted this near the border, pictured

Many migrants on the islands have complained of not being given sufficient time and access to carry out the asylum procedure.

Vassilis Balas, manager of the Suda refugee camp in Chios, said many migrants had only just started applying.

'UNHCR (the UN refugee agency) is facilitating this process in the camps. It's facilitating a process that actually should have been done by the police and other authorities in the hotspot,' he said.

The operation to resettle Syrians to Europe under the one-for-one arrangement also starts Monday.

Germany expects to take in a first group of about 35 Syrians from Turkey on Monday, the German interior ministry said.

Several dozen others are expected to arrive in France, Finland and Portugal, according to German government sources.

Meanwhile The Times reports a quiet Alpine border crossing is set to become Europe's next migrant flashpoint after Austria promised to send troops to stop a surge of refugees crossing from Italy.

Migrant sailings from Libya to Italy were expected to rise to more than 19,000 since the start of 2016, a 90 per cent increase year on year.

Others held up banners demanding the borders be opened and migrants be allowed to pass through

Men masking their faces with scarfs and hoods used paint rollers and sprayers to spell out the message

The Austrian defence minister said he was deploying soldiers to the Brenner Pass to stop migrants before they could head north. The closure of the pass aims to prevent migrants entering northern Europe through Italy, as the country usually allows migrants to board trains.

The EU has instead now told Italy it must identify all migrants as they land in the country, although this is expected to create a 'bottleneck' the size of the migrant camps in Calais.

The mobilisation could involve other Aegean islands with major refugee and migrant populations such as Chios and Lesbos.

Yesterday, protests were held across Europe as Greece began deporting migrants back to Turkey.

At the same time, Austria sent troops to the border to prevent a new flood entering northern Europe through Italy.

Some in Brenner held up a banner for #overthefortress, pictured, a campaign to support refugees

Scuffles broke out between officers and protesters with bottles thrown at police according to reports

Over the weekend, Austrian police clashed with protesters demonstrating against the closure of Europe's borders to migrants, with police officers reported to be injured.

Hundreds of migrants protested in Greece as the government prepared to send 500 refugees back to Turkey in a bid to reduce the flow of new arrivals.

Many of the demonstrators held homemade placards with slogans appealing for help as they voiced their anger outside the Chios registration camp.

In Austria about 1,500 people took part in the demonstration at the Brenner border crossing between Austria and Italy.

Toward the end of a peaceful march dozens of protesters tried to break through a line of Austrian police in riot gear.

Police used batons and pepper spray to drive back the protesters, some of whom threw bottles and rocks at the officers.

The Austrian newspaper the Tiroler Tageszeitung reported on its website that two police officers were injured.

Other messages of support for migrants were dotted around the town, including this graffiti on an Austrian sign

One young Syrian refugee appeals to the European governments after fleeing his home in Syria

Stacks of life jackets and safety floats litter the ground on the Greek island of Levos

Police sources on Lesbos on Sunday said there had been a flurry of last-minute asylum applications by refugees and migrants seeking to avoid expulsion.

Under the EU deal, all 'new irregular migrants' who arrived in Greece after March 20 face being sent back to Turkey - although the deal calls for each case to be examined individually.

In addition, for every Syrian refugee being returned to Turkey from the Greek islands, another Syrian refugee will be will be resettled from Turkey to the EU, with numbers capped at 72,000.

The idea of this is to reduce the incentive for Syrian refugees to board dangerous smugglers' boats to Europe, as they will have hope of being resettled directly from refugee camps in Turkey.

But on the Aegean islands themselves, many migrants have complained of not being given sufficient time and access to the asylum procedure.

Dozens of young and old migrants gathered together to voice their disapproval of the deportations

Police sources on Lesbos on Sunday said there had been a flurry of last-minute asylum applications by refugees and migrants seeking to avoid expulsion

Turkish Interior Minister Efkan Ala said his country had made preparations to receive 500 people on Monday, and that the Greeks had given the names of 400

Anas al-Bakhr, a Syrian engineer from Homs, said police marked his date of arrival on Chios as March 20 - the day the EU-Turkey migration deal nominally took effect - even though he arrived on the 19th.

'They said the computers were broken that day', Mr Anas said.

On the other side of the Aegean, work is underway on a centre to host those sent back to the Turkish tourist resort of Cesme.

Another is being created in Dikili, opposite Lesbos - the island that has handled the bulk of the influx of people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Turkish media reports say the Turkish Red Crescent is also preparing to open a refugee camp with capacity for 5,000 people further inland in Manisa.

The EU-Turkey deal is the latest attempt to stem the number of people in search of a new life in Europe. More than a million migrants entered last year, and over 150,000 people have crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece in 2016.

Refugees and migrants gather for a demonstration at a makeshift camp in Idomeni

Under the EU deal, all 'new irregular migrants' who arrived in Greece after March 20 face being sent back to Turkey - although the deal calls for each case to be examined individually

Migrants carry their life possessions in a single bag as tehy are escorted by anti-riot police inside the Moria migrant camp in Mytilene

Germany expects to take in a first group of about 35 Syrian asylum seekers from Turkey this week, the German interior ministry said on Sunday.

Several dozen Syrians are also expected to arrive in France, Finland and Portugal, according to German government sources.

The deal has faced strong opposition from rights groups.

Amnesty International has accused Turkey of illegally forcing groups of some 100 Syrians to return every day, saying the alleged expulsions showed 'fatal flaws' in the migrant deal agreed with the EU.

Turkey rejects the charge, insisting it still adopts the open-door policy that for the last few years has allowed any Syrian fleeing civil war back home to seek refuge.

There are over 52,000 refugees and migrants currently in Greece, according to official figures.

The operation to resettle Syrians to Europe under the one-for-one arrangement also starts tomorrow

Children stand behind a fence inside the Moria migrant camp transformed from a police-run detention facility

With most facilities already full, authorities are trying to create space for an additional 30,000 people in new camps.

Adding to the urgency, sporadic violence has broken out between ethnic migrant groups in the overcrowded camps.

But many migrants are reluctant to move to organised centres, fearing that they will not be allowed to leave.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, quoted by the Tagesspiegel am Sonntag weekly, voiced optimism today that the refugee influx had peaked.
Feared woman would be raped and killed had he not taken immediate action

A British police inspector has been hailed a hero after saving a woman from being raped and murdered by a 60-strong angry lynch mob in war-torn South Sudan.

Inspector Kelvin Shipp, 55, was on a year-long deployment with the United Nations in the African country when he came across the barbaric scene.

The unarmed father-of-three spotted the group trying to smash their way into the woman's car, quickly intervened and bravely fought them off.

Inspector Kelvin Shipp (pictured) has been hailed a hero after saving a woman from being raped and murdered by a 60-strong angry lynch mob in war-torn South Sudan

The mob were banging on the car's windows in an attempt to get her out and seriously harm her but Inspector Shipp's courageous efforts meant she stayed safe until South Sudanese police arrived.

Now Inspector Shipp, of Southsea, Hampshire, has been awarded a chief constable's commendation for his brave and selfless actions.

He is one of around 100 top British officers in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's stabilisation unit who can be deployed to countries worldwide for various missions.

He was deployed in Juba, South Sudan, from September 2014 to September 2015 during the country's ongoing civil war.

His role in the broken country was to establish neighbourhood policing and train South Sudanese police officers who were operating in the civil war.

Inspector Shipp, formerly a neighbourhood inspector in Waterlooville, near Portsmouth, was on a 40-minute drive to UN House on the outskirts of Juba before challenging the gang.

He spotted a woman - who was a colleague from the UN - sitting helplessly in her car as she was swarmed by the mob.

Now Inspector Shipp, of Southsea, Hampshire, has been awarded a chief constable's commendation for his brave and selfless actions in South Sudan (pictured)

The group had become violent and angry towards the woman because her car had collided with a motorbike rider.

Inspector Shipp said that officers were advised not to assist after crashes as there is a high chance of volatile crowds forming, yet he decided to intervene after seeing the danger his colleague was in.

Angry South Sudanese locals were climbing on the car bonnet and banging on the windows to try to get the woman out, with a high probability she would be raped and murdered, according to Inspector Shipp.

He pushed his way through the crowd and bravely fought them off by repeatedly dragging them off the car.

A Dutch officer from the UN also arrived and was able to help Inspector Shipp, although the Dutchman was singled out by a large group of the attackers and was forced to run away.

Inspector Shipp, who is from Hampshire Constabulary, said: 'My conservative estimate was there were about 60 people around this vehicle.

Inspector Kelvin Shipp, 55, was on a year-long deployment with the United Nations in the African country when he came across the barbaric scene

'I thought "I can't leave her here, if they get her out of the car she'll get probably quite a beating".

'My guess was that they'd rape her and there was a pretty high probability they'd kill her - and it was all over a minor accident.

'They were banging their fists on the windows, they were on the bonnet. Not surprisingly the woman was in there pretty distressed on the phone.

'I got out of the car and pushed my way through the crowd. At the same time a Dutch officer arrived and he was there.

'We were pushing these people back and then six or seven singled him out. He had to run to get away. And it left me in there with this mob.

'They managed to smash the windscreen of this car trying to get in to this woman.

'All I was trying to do was drag them off and push them off as best I could, getting pushed and shoved. Luckily they weren't really focused on me.'

Inspector Shipp added: 'It was quite a frightening situation.

'I knew I was isolated. Here in the UK it might be frightening but you can hear on the radio the control room and units being called up.'

John Wallace, police function manager at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's stabilisation unit, said: 'He showed a lot of courage by going out and going to the aid of a UN officer, who probably would have been lynched.

'They were going to cause her serious harm.'
Pastor Robert Jaynes (pictured), 45, pleaded guilty to producing 100 tons of fake pot and to conspiracy to commit fraud through mislabeling the controlled substances

On the morning of an Indiana pastor's secret confession to running a massive $2.6 million synthetic marijuana ring, he told federal agents he would come clean if the others involved were spared.

Pastor Robert Jaynes, 45, pleaded guilty to producing 100 tons of fake pot and to conspiracy to commit fraud through mislabeling the controlled substances, according to the IndyStar.

After police raided his inventory in 2013, the 'fire and brimstone' pastor told authorities he would come clean if they vowed not to indict others at the Irvington Bible Baptist Church.

He told police that churchgoers 'were good people' and they didn't know what they were doing.

Jaynes said they had no idea his synthetic drug warehouse operation, disguised as a 'potpourri' business, was illegal.

But according to court documents, some churchgoers knew the potpourri could be smoked but did not ask questions about it.

The church is down the road from the business park, where Jaynes owned warehouses.

Investigators had seized packets labeled 'Pirates Booty,' or 'Strawberry Passion Pyara' from the warehouses weeks before his confession, according to The Daily Beast.

Jaynes initially said the operation was legal before declaring he'd go to prison but didn't want to see anyone else go down.

But detectives told him immunity for his followers wasn't guaranteed, according to the Indianapolis Star.

Under the agreement, prosecutors agreed not to seek a prison sentence of more than 12.5 years.

But he initially faced a maximum of 25 years in prison and a $1.25 million fine.

Jaynes agreed to forfeit at least $41,000 and more than 800 pounds of 'silver colored' coins and bars that, investigators say, were obtained through the illegal drug operation.

Under the agreement, prosecutors agreed not to seek a prison sentence of more than 12. 5 years. But Jaynes initially faced a maximum of 25 years in prison and a $1.25 million fine. He's pictured with his wife Stacey

Former sheriff's deputy, Jason Woods (left and right), who worked out with the pastor on his drug lab property, was also involved with the drug ring. He is facing six felonies

His brother-in-law and fellow church leader Kirk Parsons; an Indianapolis public school teacher who struck a deal with prosecutors; and a pair of married sheriff's deputies who worked out with the pastor on his drug lab property, were all involved with the drug ring.

On Tuesday, Parsons pleaded guilty to the same charges. But the details of his plea were kept under seal. Parsons is also 45.

Another suspect, David Neal of Carmel, hanged himself in February while in a Seattle prison, according to the King County medical examiner.

Doug Sloan, a former traveling clown and Libertarian state senate candidate was also implicated.

He allegedly visited a strip club with Russell Taylor, the director of Jared Fogle's youth charity who is serving 27 years behind bars on child porn charges, according to the Indy Star.

Sloan told investigators that Pastor Jaynes, along with deputies Teresa and Jason Woods, had known Taylor for years, according to The Daily Beast.

Woods' wife Teresa Woods (left and right) was arrested in December 2014 in connection to the drug operation

Jaynes said churchgoers at the Irvington Bible Baptist Church (pictured) had no idea his synthetic drug warehouse operation, disguised as a 'potpourri' business, was illegal

He said that Taylor smoked the marijuana with the cops 'on numerous occasions while socializing'.

The married sheriff's deputies Jason and Teresa Woods completed a diversion program to avoid criminal records but Jason Woods was arrested again on pending charges.

He now facing six felonies in Hancock County for allegedly using his shield to provide security to the drug conspiracy, which stretched from China to Indiana to California, in return for gift trips to Vegas, the Indy Star reported.

'All of us were like, 'This is the weirdest cast of characters we've seen,' Brent Eaton, Hancock County's prosecutor, told The Daily Beast.

'You've got the preacher, the guy who's running [Fogle's] foundation, the sheriff's deputies, people from the church.'

Eaton said 'it's very unusual' as the drug trade 'doesn't just exist in dark alleys or late at night in tough neighborhoods'.
News comes as it's reported ISIS has executed 15 of its own members

An Islamic State rocket expert believed to have been responsible for an attack that killed a US marine has died in a drone strike in Iraq.

Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin, 27, was killed last month by an ISIS rocket attack that also wounded eight marines at an artillery position in the Makhmur area of northern Iraq.

On Sunday, Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman for the US-led operation against the jihadists, said: 'Several hours ago, we killed an ISIL (ISIS) member believed responsible for the rocket attack that resulted in the death of Sergeant Cardin.'

The news comes as the terror group killed 15 of its own members, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Killed: Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin, 27, was killed last month by an ISIS rocket attack in northern Iraq

Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin, from Temecula, California, died from wounds suffered when his unit was attacked

Staff Sergeant Cardin, from Temecula, California, died from wounds suffered when his unit was attacked with rocket fire in March.

The attack was reportedly 'indirect fire attack' and was described as a 'lucky strike by ISIS'.

Colonel Warren said they had killed Jasim Khadijah, an 'ISIL (ISIS) member and former Iraqi officer'.

He was 'a rocket expert, apparently... he controlled those attacks,' Warren said.

He added that the strike also killed five other ISIS fighters in addition to Khadijah and destroyed a drone and two vehicles.

The terror group overran large parts of Iraq in 2014, but the country's forces have since regained significant ground with the backing of US-led air strikes and training.

US President Barack Obama repeatedly pledged that there would be no 'boots on the ground' to fight ISIS, but has deployed special forces to Iraq who are carrying out raids targeting the jihadists.

Staff Sergeant Cardin died from wounds suffered when his unit was attacked with rocket fire in March

The last time a US service member killed in Iraq was in October 2015. Army Master Sergeant Joshua L. Wheeler, a special operations soldier, was killed in a firefight in during a raid on an ISIS prison.

On Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said ISIS had killed 15 of its own members following the arrest of 35 members on Saturday in Raqqa.
New polls out this morning show Sen. Ted Cruz mounting a serious challenge to GOP frontrunner Donald Trump in Wisconsin, but The Donald holding commanding leads closer to home.

The CBS News Battleground Tracker poll shows Cruz six points up, standing at 43 percent to Trump's 37 percent. While John Kasich has 18 percent in Wisconsin.

Voters there head to the polls Tuesday where 42 delegates will be at stake.

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While Donald Trump (left) has the delegate lead and is up in the polls in New York and Pennsylvania, Ted Cruz (right) could win another state this week if he has a victory in Wisconsin

Ted Cruz is at the top in Wisconsin right now, with voters heading to the polls there on Tuesday, lining him up to potentially win another state over frontrunner Donald Trump

Cruz is helped by Republicans who describe themselves as 'very' conservative who are looking for a 'consistent conservative' out of the trio of GOP candidates left.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, once in the presidential race himself, endorsed Cruz before his state's primary, another move that seems to have aided the Texas senator in today's poll, the CBS data suggested.

Trump discussed the Wisconsin polls today, as he's been behind in a number of them, with the Real Clear Political polling average having him down 6.8 percentage points to Cruz.

The Donald suggested that he doesn't necessarily have to win Wisconsin in order to get to the 1,237 delegates he needs to prevent a contested Republican National Convention in July.

'I would always be better to win,' Trump said today on Fox News Sunday.

'I think I get there anyways, but I like Wisconsin, I like the people of Wisconsin, I think they like me, I've had tremendous crowds, we've had a tremendous response and I think I'm going to do very well in Wisconsin,' Trump said.

The big delegate-rich states coming after Wisconsin are New York on April 19 and Pennsylvania on April 26.

John Kasich is in third place in Wisconsin, New York and Pennsylvania, even though he grew up outside of Pittsburgh and governs Pennsylvania's next door neighbor Ohio

In both those northeastern states, Trump holds commanding lead.

In New York, his home state, Trump bests Cruz by 31 points.

Trump leads with 52 percent support to Cruz's 21 percent support.

Kasich is again is stuck in third place with 20 percent support, though within the margin of error to potentially do better than Cruz.

In Pennsylvania, Trump receives 47 percent support to Cruz's 29 percent support.

Kasich, who is next-door-neighbor Ohio's governor and grew up outside of Pittsburgh, only receives 22 percent support in the Keystone State.

Voters, especially those in Wisconsin, indicate a very divided Republican party with those supporting Trump telling pollster that they're coming into the Republican party fold to specifically support his candidacy.

The voters not backing Trump are supportive of a contested Republican convention so that their candidates may have a chance to rise.

'Voters for either Trump or Cruz would neither be enthusiastic nor satisfied if their opponent ultimately ends up as the nominee,' the CBS report said. 'And John Kasich's voters in New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would not be satisfied with either Trump or Cruz as well.'

As for whether Trump's recent spat of controversies hurt him  from the abortion comments he had to walk back, to his fight with Cruz over their wives and to his campaign manager's battery charge for man-handling a reporter  the CBS poll results suggests no, but with a caveat.

The controversies may make it harder for him to widen his base.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is slightly ahead of Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin  49-to-47 percent.
Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch has posted photographs on social media showing a huge haul of weapons it claims to have seized after attacking a village in Aleppo.

A dozen fighters from the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group were killed and others were wounded in Saturday's attack by militants led by Nusra Front on the village of al-Ais in northern Syria, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Hezbollah has been fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's troops in Syria's civil war.

Haul: This photograph apparently shows weapons captured by Nusra Front during the attack on the northern village of al-Ais in Aleppo province, Syria

This picture of boxes of what appear to be anti-tank missiles captured by Nusra Front have been posted online

Photos apparently showing Saturday's attack in al-Ais in the province of Aleppo, weapons looted by Nusra Front, and the bodies of dead Hezbollah fighters have been posted on social media.

Meanwhile, Syrian troops and their allies have captured another town controlled by the Islamic State group, according to state media reports.

The push into the town of Qaryatain took place under the cover of Russian air strikes and dealt another setback to the extremists.

The advance came a week after Syrian forces recaptured Palmyra from ISIS and is strategically significant for the government side.

The capture of Qaryatain deprives the terror group of a main base in central Syria and could be used by government forces in the future to launch attacks on ISIS-held areas near the Iraqi border.

The Syrian army command said in a statement that troops have 'restored security and stability to Qaryatain and farms surrounding it'.

The statement, read by an army general on state TV, said the oil and gas pipelines in the area will be secured and ISIS supply routes between the eastern desert and the Qalamoun region will be cut.

A Nusra Front tank fires at Syrian troops and pro-government gunmen in the northern village of al-Ais

Fighters from Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, the Nusra Front, are pictured marching toward the village of al-Ais

A Syrian army general, speaking live from Qaryatain with the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV, said troops are now dismantling bombs placed by extremists and will prepare to launch fresh attacks on areas held by ISIS.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said intense fighting was under way in Qaryatain as government troops fight to capture all parts of the town.

The observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said that ISIS fighters are still in control of small areas east of the town but 'are on the verge of collapse'.

He added that the extremists are withdrawing towards eastern parts of the mountainous Qalamoun region.

The observatory reported later in the day that ISIS fighters have withdrawn from much of the town toward the eastern suburbs of Qaryatain.

ISIS has suffered major defeats in Syria in recent months amid intense air strikes by Russian warplanes.

Fighters from Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, the Nusra Front, get ready to attack the northern village of al-Ais

Smoke billows as Nusra Front fighters attack the northern village of al-Ais in Aleppo province, Syria

Qaryatain used to be home to a sizeable Christian population and lies midway between Palmyra and the capital, Damascus.

Last summer, activists said Qaryatain had a mixed population of around 40,000 Sunni Muslims and Christians, as well as thousands of internally displaced people who had fled from the nearby city of Homs. Many of the Christians fled the town after it came under ISIS attack.

Dozens of Qaryatain's Christians and other residents have been abducted by the extremists. While the town was under ISIS control, some were released and others were made to sign pledges to pay a tax imposed on non-Muslims.
The relieved driver and passengers burst into laughter as they were allowed to go on their way with a warning for speeding

Pratt and his cat inspected the vehicle before he finally revealed the prank

If Froo Froo meowed three times in a row, it meant drugs had been found

Part of the 'police feline unit' he returned with his cat - Officer Froo Froo

A Utah police chief pulled a hilarious April Fools' Day prank during a traffic stop with the help of his 'drug-sniffing' cat Officer Froo Froo.

Salina City Police Department Chief Eric Pratt had pulled over a speeding vehicle for doing 91mph in an 80mph hour zone on April 1 when he decided to carry out the practical joke.

Video, filmed by Pratt, shows the officer asking for the driver's license and registration before noting an 'odor' coming from the car.

He then told the motorist, and his three passengers, that he was going to deploy his drugs-sniffing cat to search for controlled substances.

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Utah police chief Eric Pratt pulled a hilarious April Fools' Day prank during a traffic stop with the help of his 'drug-sniffing' cat Officer Froo Froo (pictured is the motorist and passenger bursting into laughter after the joke)

'I'm with the feline unit, the Salina Police Department's Feline Unit and I do have my feline partner with me,' Pratt said on the video posted to the Salina City Police Department Facebook page.

'So what I'm going to do, I'm going to deploy my cat around the outside of your vehicle. If the cat indicates the odor of a controlled substance, we're going to go from there, OK? Does that make sense to you?'

The citizens looked, perhaps unsurprisingly, confused.

But Pratt went onto explain that his cat - Officer Froo Froo - had been on the force for eight years and would meow three times in a row if she detected the presence of marijuana, cocaine, or any other controlled substances.

Salina City Police Department Chief Eric Pratt had pulled over a speeding vehicle for doing 91mph in an 80mph hour zone on April 1 when he decided to carry out the practical joke

Video shows Pratt, pictured with Froo Froo, saying: 'I'm with the feline unit, the Salina Police Department's Feline Unit and I do have my feline partner with me'

Pratt went onto explain that his cat - Officer Froo Froo - had been on the force for eight years and would meow three times in a row if she detected the presence of marijuana, cocaine, or any other controlled substances

Pratt and Officer Froo Froo completed a lap around the car as the feline 'inspected' the vehicle

The police chief disappeared back to his car and returned a moment later - with his black and white cat in his arms.

Pratt and Officer Froo Froo completed a lap around the car as the feline 'inspected' the vehicle.

He then informed one of the passengers that the cat had seemed particularly interested in her.

'Do you have anything you shouldn't have?' he asked the woman, who confirmed she did not.

At this point, Pratt could not keep the joke going any longer.

'You guys, I can't keep playing with you,' he told them. 'This is an April Fools' joke.

The driver and passengers looked stunned before bursting into laughter.

'I've been wanting to do this for a while,' he told them. 'I'm sorry I had to try it. Do you forgive me?'

'I don't know yet!' the motorist joked.

Pratt, who used to run the department's canine unit, let the driver off with a warning for speeding, saying; 'if you'll slow down for me and don't make a complaint to my city, we'll call it good.'

After several minutes, Pratt could not keep the joke going any longer and admitted it had been an April Fools' Joke

The driver and passengers looked stunned before bursting into laughter and leaned out to stroke the cat

Since posting it to the department's Facebook page, the video has already attracted more than 2.5 million views.

Pratt also posted a message to any potential complainers about the use of police resources.

'Before anyone gets too carried away (there's always a few), no tax payer dollars were spent in relation to this video.

'The few minutes of fuel will be paid for by me, I'm a salaried employee and this is on my own time, and last but not least, my sweet cat Froo Froo was not injured during this incident.

'The stop was legitimate (speeding), and my decision to give a warning was legitimate (I regularly warn for 11 over, which is what the stop was for). Smile people, it's April Fool's Day!'
A Toronto city councillor has disinvited six 'hypocrite' colleagues from his hypothetical funeral in a bizarre press release slamming them for allegedly exploiting the death of former mayor Rob Ford

Coun Giorgio Mammoliti, who represents around 50,000 people in a small ward of the Canadian city, accused six fellow politicians of 'pretending' to have respected the controversial mayor after his death last month.

Mammoliti - who served under Ford but has previously called him a 'goon', an 'idiot' and openly admitted not liking him - was seen wiping a tear from his eye when Ford's death was announced.

Two days after Ford's burial, the councillor sent a press release to Torontoist entitled: 'Dirty half dozen. If I die tomorrow, these six people need not attend the funeral.'

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Toronto councillor Giorgio Mammoliti (left) has disinvited six 'hypocrite' colleagues from his hypothetical funeral in a press release slamming them for allegedly exploiting the death of former mayor Rob Ford (right)

Mammoliti called out the five Toronto councillors and an MP for their alleged hypocrisy as he sent out the press release just two days after the former mayor was buried

In the release, Mammoliti wrote: 'In the worst case of hypocrisy that I have ever witnessed, the vermin that dwell in the underbelly of Toronto were put in full force in an exemplary display of the wickedest behavior mankind can exhibit.'

Spelling a colleague's first name wrong, he continued: 'Shelly [sic] Carrol, Adam Vaughan, Gord Perks, Janet Davis, Joe Mihevc and Josh Matlow need to explain to the public through the media how they have the face to pretend they respected the man when they used the previous years to attack the man instead of the message.

'This is not a left-right issue. Many on the left and he [sic] right that disagreed with some of his political positions limited their disagreement to the issues without attacking the man.

'These people went to the disgusting extent of turning their back in Council at Rob Ford's most vulnerable point in his life.

'I could not believe what I saw in the days after his death from these people,' Mammoliti added.

'Even God was squirming in his own house with their presence.'

The letter struck a different tune to some of the other things Mammoliti has had to say about Ford.

Mammoliti accused six fellow politicians of 'pretending' to have respected the controversial mayor after his death last month. Pictured left to right: Top row, Councillor Shelley Carroll, MP Adam Vaughan and Councillor Gord Perks. Bottom row, Councillor Janet Davis, Councillor Joe Mihevc and Councillor Josh Matlow

In 2002, Mammoliti called Ford a 'goon' and an 'idiot' in a single interview with the Globe and Mail. He later apologized for calling Ford 'a big goon'.

The same year, he told the Toronto Star: 'Its no secret we dont like each other  and we dont like each others politics.'

Other insults included him telling the National Post in 2009 that Ford was put 'on this Earth to embarrass city council'.

Ford served as Mayor of Toronto from 2010 and 2014, with Mammoliti among his executive for most of his tenure.

However, the pair had a number of public rows, with the councillor withdrawing his support for Ford when he lost a conflict of interest court hearing in 2012.

The international spotlight fell on Ford in May 2013 when a video emerged showing Ford appearing to inhale from a crack pipe.

Although he became the subject of a police investigation and later admitted to reporters that he had smoked crack cocaine, Ford was never charged with a crime.

He also battled alcoholism during his tenure as mayor, leading many to call for his resignation.

Despite Ford and Mammoliti's high profile spats, it was the councillor who called out the five Toronto councillors and an MP for their alleged hypocrisy as he sent out the press release just two days after the former mayor was buried.

Ford died on March 22 after losing his battle with cancer.
The biggest financial data leak in history has revealed how Vladimir Putin's inner circle and a 'dirty dozen' list of world leaders are using offshore tax havens to hide their wealth.

A host of celebrities, sports stars, British politicians and the global rich are all implicated in the so-called Panama Papers - a leak of 11million files which contain more data than the amount stolen by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

Documents were leaked from one of the world's most secretive companies, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, and show how the company has allegedly helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax.

Megastars Jackie Chan and Lionel Messi are among the big names accused of using Mossack Fonseca to invest their millions offshore. And the Panama Papers also reveal that the 26million stolen during the Brink's Mat robbery in 1983 may have been channelled into an offshore company set up by the controversial law firm.

Meanwhile, Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak, Libya's former leader Colonel Gaddafi, Syria's president Bashar al-Assad and Chinese president Xi Jinping are among those alleged to have links to tax havens through families and associates.

Lord Ashcroft, Baroness Pamela Sharples and former Tory MP Michael Mates are the only British politicians who have been named in the data release so far, while several dictators make up the 12 world leaders listed.

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Under pressure: Vladimir Putin listens during a meeting today hours after it emerged his inner circle and a 'dirty dozen' list of world leaders are using offshore tax havens to hide their wealth

Revelation: The so-called Panama Papers, part of a leak of 11million files, implicate those in Russian president Vladimir Putin's inner circle, along with families and associates of Syria's president Bashar al-Assad (above)

King of Saudi Arabia, King Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud (pictured left) was also named

Argentina's president Mauricio Macri (left) and Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko (right) were listed

German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung obtained the files and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists but the identity of the source who leaked them and how it was done is unknown.

The unprecedented leak of confidential documents reveal:

A network of secret offshore deals and loans worth 1.4 billion that leads to Russian President Vladimir Putin;

Twelve national leaders, including the King of Saudi Arabia, president of Ukraine and the prime minister of Iceland, are among 143 politicians revealed to have offshore accounts, including several dictators;

Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to British political parties are among those said to have benefited from tax havens;

A member of Fifa's ethics committee, which is supposed to be reforming the organisation, worked as a lawyer for people charged with bribery and corruption.

Putin's name is not included in the records but his friends and associates appear to have earned millions of pounds from deals that would have been difficult to secure without his patronage. The BBC and The Guardian set out the details in the documents.

Among the disclosures are that six members of the House of Lords and three former Conservative MPs had offshore accounts, although the only British politicians so far named are Lord Ashcroft, Tory peer Baroness Pamela Sharples and former Conservative MP Michael Mates. Dozens of donors to UK political parties had similar arrangements, the leak reveals.

A representative for Mr Mates said the reference to the former Tory MP in the Panama Papers related to a small shareholding the politician once held in a Bahamian company.

He insisted the company was set up legitimately to create a leisure development in Barbuda, an island that is part of the East Caribbean state of Antigua and Barbuda.

Mr Mates said he had not and would not receive any remuneration unless and until the development took place, nor were the shares of any value, as the company never had any real value. He denies he has ever sought to avoid paying taxes.

Campaigners said David Cameron now faces a 'credibility test', having promised to end tax secrecy four years ago.

Lord Ashcroft (left), Baroness Pamela Sharples and former Tory MP Michael Mates (right) are among the British politicians also named in the data release

UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (pictured centre) is one of the world leaders named

Convicted former Ukraine prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko (left) and former prime minister of Georgia Bidzina Ivanishvili (right) are among those revealed to have offshore accounts

The ex-prime minister of Iraq Ayad Allawi (pictured) is also said to have benefited from using tax havens

The Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davi Gunnlaugsson (left) and former prime minister of Qatar Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani (right) are both named in the leaked documents

While using offshore companies is not illegal, the practice has long been morally dubious and is under the spotlight amid a wider examination of tax avoidance by large companies such as Google.

Mr Cameron has vowed to end 'tax secrecy' in the UK. But critics say little has been done  with the Prime Minister due to hold his latest summit on the issue next month.

Mr Cameron said four years ago that some offshore schemes were 'not fair and not right'.

TWELVE NATIONAL LEADERS WHO WERE NAMED IN THE DATA LEAK 1. President of Argentina Mauricio Macri 2. King of Saudi Arabia King Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud 3. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko 4. Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davi Gunnlaugsson 5. UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan 6. Former prime minister of Georgia Bidzina Ivanishvili 7. Ex-prime minister of Iraq Ayad Allawi 8. Former prime minister of Jordan Ali Abu al-Ragheb 9. Former prime minister of Qatar Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani 10. Former Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani 11. Former president of Sudan Ahmad Ali al-Mirghani 12. Convicted former Ukraine prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko Advertisement

'Frankly some of these schemes where people are parking huge amounts of money offshore and taking loans back just to minimise their tax rates, it is not morally acceptable,' he added.

The Prime Minister will now come under intense pressure to abolish all the UK's tax havens, including the crown dependencies Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

In 2012, it emerged that the Prime Minister's father Ian ran a network of entirely legal offshore investment funds to grow the family fortune. The leaked records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with The Guardian and the BBC.

The data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 to the end of 2015, and lists nearly 15,600 paper companies set up for clients who wanted to keep their financial affairs secret.

Thousands were created by UBS and HSBC, the latter of which was fined by the US government for laundering money from Iran.

Mossack Fonseca is Panamanian but runs a worldwide operation.

Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister, and Sigmundur Davi Gunnlaugsson, prime minister of Iceland  who now faces calls for a snap election.

The leaks also reveal a suspected billion-dollar money laundering ring that was run by a Russian bank and involved close associates of President Putin.

Mossack Fonseca said in a statement: 'Our firm has never been accused or charged in connection with criminal wrongdoing.

Families and associates of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak (pictured left), Libya's former leader Muammar Gaddafi (right) were also implicated in the data leak

Former Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (pictured) is also named in the data release

Former prime minister of Jordan Ali Abu al-Ragheb (left) and former president of Sudan Ahmad Ali al-Mirghani (right) were both listed in the leaked confidential documents

'If we detect suspicious activity or misconduct, we are quick to report it to the authorities.'

Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said the documents covered the day-to-day business at Mossack Fonseca for the past 40 years.

He said: 'I think the leak will prove to be probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents.'

More details about the leak will be revealed in Richard Bilton's investigation, BBC Panorama: Tax Havens of the Rich and Powerful Exposed, to air tomorrow evening on BBC One at 7.30pm.

Revealed: The money trail that leads from Vladimir Putin's best friend and head of his 'crony bank' all the way back round to the Russian president

Leaked financial data reveals how a network of secret offshore deals and huge loans worth 1.4billion created a trail beginning and ending with Vladimir Putin, it has been reported.

A massive leak of documents reveal how the Russian president's best friend Sergei Roldugin and the man who heads up Putin's 'crony bank' Yuri Kovalchuk are linked to the movement of money offshore.

Bank Rossiya, which Roldugin owns 3.2 per cent of, sent instructions to Swiss lawyers who in turn got in touch with Mossack Fonseca. The Panamanian law firm then set up offshore company Sandalwood Continental Ltd in the British Virgin Islands and other offshores linked to Roldugin.

The so-called Panama Papers implicate those in Russian president Vladimir Putin's inner circle. This graphic shows how Putin's best friend Sergei Roldugin, who owns 3.2 per cent of Bank Rossiya, and the man who heads the bank up, Yuri Kovalchuk, are linked to a trail which has seen money moved offshore via Swiss lawyers, Mossack Fonseca, and a subsidiary of Russia's state-owned VTB bank in Cyprus to a firm set up in the British Virgin Islands called Sandalwood Continental Ltd. Money was then lent to Ozon, which owns the private Igora ski resort outside St Petersburg, the place where Putin's daughter Katya got married

But the money later found its way back to Russia via Ozon, which was lent $11.3million by Sandalwood in 2010/11. Ozon is the owner of the private Igora ski resort outside St Petersburg, where Putin's daughter Katya got married, according to The Guardian.

Putin's name is not included in the leaked documents but his friends and associates appear to have earned millions of pounds from deals that would have been difficult to secure without his patronage.

Meanwhile Roldugin, a professional musician, is said to have accumulated a fortune by being put in control of a series of assets worth at least $100million.

Last week a senior Russian official revealed how the Kremlin was braced for an expose on Mr Putin's alleged secret fortune.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, one of the president's closest aides, dismissed the allegations as false and politically motivated even before they were published.

He said a number of foreign secret services were behind the claims, which suggest that Mr Putin has amassed a secret personal fortune of more than 28billion ($40billion).

Former Tory MPs, party donors and David Cameron's late father among those named in huge leak of documents linked to Panama law firm

Ian Cameron (pictured with his son), a stockbroker and multi-millionaire, was a client of a controversial offshore law firm based in Panama

Former Tory MPs, party donors and the Prime Minister's late father were named last night in a huge leak of millions of documents exposing the use of offshore tax regimes by the world's richest people.

Ian Cameron, a stockbroker and multi-millionaire, was a client of a controversial offshore law firm based in Panama.

He was accused of using the firm, Mossack Fonseca, to shield his investment fund, Blairmore Holdings, Inc., from British taxes.

A series of British politicians were also said last night to be implicated in the massive data release.

It was reported that six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to British political parties have been shown to have had offshore assets.

None were named last night but revelations about the hidden wealth of politicians and their supporters will trigger nerves in Number Ten as names and details emerge from the leak this week.

If Tory donors or senior figures are implicated, it will be a huge embarrassment to the Prime Minister.

The BBC and the Guardian last night set out details from the so-called 'Panama Papers'  11.5million files leaked from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world's fourth biggest offshore law firm.

They show that 12 national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.

Close associates of Russia's President Putin are also implicated, although the Russian president's name is not said to appear directly on any documents.

ABOUT MOSSACK FONSECA One of the world's most secretive companies, Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca boasts of a global network with 600 people working in 42 countries. The services it offers include incorporating companies in offshore jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands, as well as wealth management and administering offshore firms for a yearly fee. The company operates in tax havens such as Switzerland, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, as well as British crown dependencies Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. Advertisement

The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and the BBC.

Though there is nothing unlawful about using offshore companies, the files raise fundamental questions about the ethics of such tax havens  and the revelations are likely to provoke urgent calls for reforms of a system that critics say is arcane and open to abuse.

Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt's former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davi Gunnlaugsson.

The leaks also reveal a suspected billion-dollar money laundering ring that was run by a Russian bank and involved close associates of President Putin.

The operation was run by Bank Rossiya, which is subject to US and EU sanctions following Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Revealed: 26million stolen in 1983 Brink's Mat heist may have been channelled offshore by Panama law firm

The 26 million stolen during the Brink's Mat robbery in 1983 may have been channelled into an offshore company set up by Mossack Fonseca, the leaked documents reveal.

The theft, dubbed the 'Crime of the Century', involved criminals stealing gold bullion, diamonds and cash from the Heathrow International Trading Estate in London.

The leaked files show that 16 months later, Mossack Fonseca set up a Panama shell company called Feberion Inc.

Revealed: Cash from the notorious Brink's Mat heist at Heathrow in 1983 may have been moved offshire by the Panamanian Law Firm

Documents show that the man behind Feberion Inc. was Gordon Parry, who laundered money for the Brink's-Mat plotters.

An internal memo written in 1986 by Jurgen Mossack, one the co-founders of Mossack Fonseca, showed that it knew it was 'apparently involved in the management of money from the famous theft from Brink's-Mat in London'.

The memo stated: 'The company itself has not been used illegally, but it could be that the company invested money through bank accounts and properties that was illegitimately sourced'.

Documents appear to show that Mossack Fonseca later took steps to prevent British police from gaining control of the company in an attempt to get the money back.

The robbery of gold bullion and jewels worth 26 million from the Brink's-Mat vaults at London's Heathrow Airport at 6.30am on November 26, 1983, was Britain's biggest.

A bribed security guard let six armed men into the warehouse and within an hour had they pulled off 'the heist of the century'.

The gang doused security guards at the warehouse in petrol and threatened them with a lit match for the combination numbers of the vault.

It is thought more than 17 million of the cash realised from the gold has been accounted for by police, with the rest believed to be invested in property in Britain and Spain or drugs.

Hunt for the cash: Police have for years searched for the money, pictured here in 2001, 18 years after the heist, digging up land in east London

Eleven bars of the gold were found in 1985 and melted down and a further 1 million of gold was later recovered from the Bank of England where it was being stored after re-entering the legal market.

The rest is believed to have been melted down shortly after the robbery. But police have continued to trace cash and assets linked to profits from the haul.

And Lloyd's of London, the insurance market that paid out for the stolen millions, is believed to have forced 25 people linked to the robbery to secretly pay back every penny stolen in March 1995 following investigations by private detectives.

Only two of the actual robbers have been convicted. Michael McAvoy and Brian Robinson are each serving 25 years.

Others have been convicted of handling the bullion or making profit from the robbery. They include convicted killer Kenneth Noye, jailed in 1986 for handling the bullion for 14 years, reduced to 13 on appeal.

How billionaire husbands including Scot Young use mysterious Panama law firm to hide their fortunes from the wives they divorce

Scot Young helped hide 500million from his wife in a game of hide and concealment aided by a Panama-based law firm, leaked documents revealed today.

The British tycoon used Mossack Fonseca and other offshore businesses to stash some of his fortune in Russia, the British Virgin Islands and Monaco, it has emerged.

Mr Young, who died after plunging onto railings below his 3million London penthouse in December 2014, is among a number of super-rich husbands named in leaked documents today.

Russia's 'fertilizer king' Dmitri Rybolovlev and aviation tycoon Clive Joy, 55, also allegedly used Mossack Fonseca to shield assets from their soon-to-be ex-wives.

Leaked emails also reveal how Mossack Fonseca helped predominantly male clients find the 'silver bullet' to keep their fortunes out of the hands of their partners.

Revealed: Property Tycoon Scot Young, pictured shortly before his death in 2014 with girlfriend Noelle Reno, used a Panama-based law firm to hide cash and assets from ex-wife Michelle, right outside the High Court during their long divorce battle

Conduit: Mossack Fonseca's headquarters in Panama, where they helped mainly husbands hide assets from their wives, often before the divorce started

Evidence: This leaked email reveals how Mossack Fonseca staff joked about helping a Dutch client hide assets from his wife ahead of a divorce

Scot Young's ex-wife Michelle has spent huge sums trying to trace his money after she won 25million at the High Court but never received a penny in a six-year divorce battle.

Young was even jailed for refusing to reveal how much money he was worth and a judge refused to believe he was penniless after he went bust after a disastrous deal.

TYCOON EARNED 2BN AND LOST IT IN MYSTERIOUS MOSCOW DEAL Scot Young, once one of Britain's wealthiest property developers, claimed he was penniless after a large Moscow real estate deal collapsed. He had mysteriously risen to huge success from an underprivileged youth on a tenement block in a run-down part of Dundee. He left school with few qualifications but rode off the back of the property boom of the late 1980s and was given a hand on the property ladder by ex-wife Michelle Young's father after they met in 1988. His wife said he was always 'secretive' about the deals he was doing and there were claims he was linked to players in the Russian underworld. Mr Young then apparently lost his immense wealth in a huge property development project in Russia called Project Moscow. Boris Berezovsky, who died in mysterious circumstances last year, was known to be an investor in the scheme. He also died penniless. In one hearing during their marathon divorce battle her legal team compared his story with the plot of the 1980s comedy movie Brewster's Millions, in which a failing baseball player is told he will inherit 300 million dollars if he can spend 30 million of it in 30 days and have nothing to show for it. Despite huge debts, his life was funded by some of his creditors, to whom he owed millions. But his wife Michelle maintains that he had money stashed away offshore - and spent huge sums herself using investigators to track his fortune down. He fell to his death in December 2014, with some blaming a break-up with his girlfriend Noelle and others his financial problems. Advertisement

Scot Young's American girlfriend Noelle Reno, a reality star and presenter, said his loss of wealth had always 'killed him'.

However when they appeared together on the Ladies of London TV show her rented a 8,000-a-month flat with Miss Reno and had bought her a six-carat diamond engagement ring, despite claiming to be broke.

Today as his links to Mossack Fonseca were fully revealed, Ms Young, who set a support group for women like her called the 'First Wives Club', said today that Scot's tangled web of offshore businesses was 'like a baby Enron there are so many assets'.

She said that for women trying to find a husband's hidden cash is a 'blood sport', adding: 'Unless youve got the funds, youre dead and buried'.

Today it was revealed that some of the world's most high profile divorce battle have links to Mossack Fonseca.

Martin Kenney, an asset recovery specialist working in offshore havens told The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ): 'These offshore companies and foundations are instruments in a game of hide and concealment.'

Leaked emails reveal how Mossack Fonseca staff joked about helping a Dutch man hide cash from his wife before he started divorce proceedings.

The note, which contains a smiley emoji, says the client needed to protect his assets against the unpleasant results of a divorce (on the horizon!)

One husband in Thailand needed a 'silver bullet' to stop his wife getting to his money.

Another client in Ecuador was offered a series of shell companies 'to transfer assets before the divorce'

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev spent eight years battling his ex-wife Elena before they settled on a deal that could have been worth up 2.9billion.

Their very public and bitter feud brought to light accusations of his infidelity on yacht parties and attempts to 'hide' assets - including Greek islands and New York properties - out of her reach.

According to the ICIJ Mossack Fonseca incorporated his company Xitrans Finance Ltd in the British Virgin Islands.

Despite only being a post box, its assets have been described as a 'mini Louvre' because it owned owned paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and Monet as well as large amounts of Louis XVI style furniture.

Leaked emails allegedly reveal that in 2009, as their marriage disintegrated, began to move the art and furniture away from their home in Switzerland to London and Singapore to prevent Elena getting them.

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev (left) and his ex-wife Elena (right) had divorce proceedings dubbed the costliest break-up of all time, said to be worth up to 2.9bn

An aviation tycoon embroiled with his wife in a multi-million pound divorce also used Mossack Fonseca.

Clive and Nichola Joy were even driven to fight over a 470,000 vintage Bentley Tourer during the expensive High Court battle.

Clive Joy, 55, whose fortune was once put at 69million, has been pleading poverty in defending a massive financial claim by the mother of his three children.

But Mrs Joy, 47, says he is claiming to be penniless as part of a dishonest strategy to reduce any financial award she may receive by hiding his fortune in an offshore trust.

Money worries: Clive Joy was once worth 69million but is now claiming to have 80,000 euros, or 65,000, left in the bank - and facing huge legal costs

The couple met in April 2001 and married five years later. Mrs Joy petitioned for divorce in July 2011, the court heard. A decree nisi was pronounced in June last year, but the divorce has yet to be finalised while the couple run up enormous legal bills squabbling over the partition of their assets.

Zimbabwe-born Mr Joy attended university in England and has lived with his family for spells in the Caribbean and in France.

He made his fortune through a phenomenally successful aircraft leasing firm. Mr Pointer said that Mr Joy moved the money made from this venture into a trust in 2002.

His wifes lawyers say he transferred about 69million to the British Virgin Islands-based trust. But Mr Pointer said the familys living expenses were funded by drawing cash from a bank loan, secured against the trust.

As party of their legal wrangle her lawyers sent Mossack Fonseca a court order to freeze his wealth until the courts had agreed a settlement.

One of Mossack Fonseca's lawyers said in an email: 'The consequences for breach of a Freezing Injunction are serious, and we as Registered Agent, must act responsibly'.

The judge, Sir Peter Singer, said that Mr Joy's case was 'a rotten edifice founded on concealment and misrepresentation and therefore a sham, a charade, bogus, spurious and contrived'.

Valuable: The Joys even fought over this model of Bentley - a 1928 Tourer (not actual car)

Today Mrs Joy said in an email to the ICIJ: 'The law has to change, these offshore trusts make a mockery of justice'.

Mossack Fonseca said in a statement: 'We are not involved in managing our clients companies.

'Excluding the professional fees we earn, we do not take possession or custody of clients money, or have anything to do with any of the direct financial aspects related to operating their businesses'.
Racial tensions erupted during an armed demonstration outside a Nation of Islam mosque in Dallas on Saturday.

Anti-radicalization protesters from the Bureau of American Islamic Relations turned up with semi-automatic rifles, clad in skeleton masks as they confronted members of the New Black Panther Party.

Hundreds of black activists meant the group was outnumbered as they lined up behind barricades on Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard.

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Anti-Muslim protesters from the Bureau of American Islamic Relations turned up at a Nation of Islam Mosque in Dallas with rifles and clad in skeleton masks to confront members of the New Black Panther Party

Hundreds of black activists meant the group were outnumbered as they lined up behind barricades on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. They were eventually told to leave by police

According to Fox 4, they only stood firm for a few minutes before police told them to leave for their own safety.

As they left, the protesters chanted: 'Black power'.

A large number of officers were on duty, fearing racial overtones of the rally would turn into violence.

Activist Olinka Green told the Dallas Morning News: 'This is what they fear - the black man. This is what America fears.'

Yafeuh Balogun of the Huey P Newton Gun Club added: 'It's a people's victory here in South Dallas today.'

The Bureau of American Islamic Relations, or BAIR, rallies against what it calls radical Islam.

In a Facebook post about the counter-protest, one of the organizers wrote: 'We have decided to Protest the Nation of Islam for promoting violence against Americans openly and publicly. This is NOT about color of skin, not a white vs black thing, (not for us anyway).

'This is about RADICAL ISLAM. They have threatened to continue killing Cops, Random White People and their children to further their agenda of hate and dominance through violence.

The Bureau of American Islamic Relations was met by members of the Dallas Black Panthers (pictured) organization when they arrived at the mosque

Members of the Dallas Black Panther group stood their ground as Bureau of American Islamic Relations members staged their protest

Members of the Dallas Black Panthers group guarded the church as Bureau of American Islamic Relations members staged a protest

'They have teamed up with C.A.I.R. and that is unacceptable as well. We cannot stand by while all these different Anti American, Arab radical Islamists team up with Nation of Islam/Black Panthers and White anti American Anarchist groups, joining together in the goal of destroying our Country and killing innocent people to gain Dominance through fear

'We will be going in full gear for self defense only. This is a full gear situation, We have a comprehensive security plan for this event, all the bases are covered, you will be briefed by B.A.I.R. Team leaders and DPD as to how the security and self defense procedures will be handled.

'There are back up forces, staged strategically around the entire area. Your safety is paramount to B.A.I.R so we have taken extreme precautions.

'Again I repeat this is a FULL GEAR situation, not required but recommended. We will have the means in place to protect those who do not have weaponry and gear so come one come all its time to stand now, stand for what you believe in and don't let evil win.'

Police said the event ended without incident, according to Raw Story.

WHAT IS BAIR? The Bureau of American Islamic Relations is an anti-radicalization organization The organization rallies against what it calls radical Islam The organization claims that radical Islam has 'threatened to continue killing Cops, Random White People and their children to further their agenda of hate and dominance through violence' It claims to 'stand in opposition (on all levels)' with the Council On American-Islamic Relations Advertisement

NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY The New Black Panther Party is a black political organization founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1989 It is not an official successor of the Black Panther Party The NBPP claims to hold up the legacy of the BPP Its website claims: 'The SOLE PURPOSE of a Panther is to be a REVOLUTIONARY in the Black/Afrikan People's liberation struggle, and to mobilize the masses towards self determination'. Advertisement

The police department released a statement about the event prior to the protest beginning, The Blaze reported.

'The department is committed to protecting the Constitutional rights of all citizens and will make every effort to keep this protest peaceful,' the statement said.

Mosque supporter Purlie Gates was upset about the protest, according to CBS Dallas-Fort Worth.

'These people came to our community under false pretenses,' Gates said. 'Could we do the same thing?

'Could we make some allegations about a group in Highland Park and arm a militia and say we are going to go over there with arms and protest? That would have been stopped at city hall. The police would have stopped that.'

Krystal Muhammad of the New Black Panther Party told FOX 4 last week that they would be at the mosque to make sure no BAIR members went inside.

'We wont allow anybody to come in and try to intimidate our brothers and sisters,' she said.

Despite the success with the counter protest, it should be noted that the Southern Poverty Law Center considers thew New Black Panther Party to be a hate group.

People stood watch on the roof of the African-American mosque as the Bureau of American Islamic Relations organization staged a protest
Images showing the devastation inside Palmyra's national museum with priceless ancient artefacts destroyed have been released after the town was recaptured from ISIS by Syrian government forces.

The historic and cultural heritage the museum had preserved was demolished or vandalised by militants, who believe their actions are sanctioned by the extremist teachings they follow.

Statues and sculptures dating back to the second millennium BC lay littered around the museum in Palmyra, which was retaken by President Bashar al-Assad's troops last week.

Images showing the devastation of priceless ancient artefacts inside Palmyra's national museum have been released

Statues and sculptures dating back to the second millennium BC lay littered around the museum in Palmyra

The 81-year-old head of antiquities at the museum, Khaled al-Asaad, was decapitated by ISIS extremists after he tried to protect the treasures of the site.

Syrian troops and their allies have now captured another town controlled by the ISIS in central Syria, 60 miles from Palmyra, according to state media reports.

The push into the town of Qaryatain took place under the cover of Russian air strikes and dealt another setback to the the terrorist group in Syria.

An activist group that monitors the Syrian civil war said that government forces are in control of most of the town after ISIS fighters withdrew to its eastern outskirts.

The historic and cultural heritage the museum had preserved was destroyed or vandalised by militants

ISIS fighters believe their actions are sanctioned by the extremist teachings they follow. A government soldier looks at the scene of devastation

The advance is strategically significant for the government side.

The capture of Qaryatain deprives ISIS of a main base in central Syria and could be used by government forces in the future to launch attacks on ISIS-held areas near the Iraqi border.

Qaryatain used to be home to a sizeable Christian population and lies midway between Palmyra and the capital, Damascus.

Activists said last summer that Qaryatain had a mixed population of around 40,000 Sunni Muslims and Christians, as well as thousands of internally displaced people who had fled from the nearby city of Homs. Many of the Christians fled the town after it came under IS attack.

Dozens of Qaryatain's Christians and other residents have been abducted by the extremists. While the town was under ISIS control, some were released, others were made to sign pledges to pay a tax imposed on non-Muslims.

While ISIS extremists blew up and destroyed some of the world's most precious relics at Palmyra's archaeological sites during their 10-month reign there, the ancient Saint Eliane Monastery near Qaryatain was also bulldozed and destroyed shortly after ISIS took the town in August.

ISIS extremists blew up and destroyed some of the world's most precious relics at Palmyra's archaeological sites during their 10-month reign there

Syrian troops and their allies have now recaptured the town of Qaryatain, 60 miles from Palmyra

ISIS decapitated Palmyra's 81-year-old chief archaeologist Khaled Asaad, pictured, in August 2015

Christians make up about 10 per cent of Syria's pre-war population of 23 million people.

The Syrian army command said in a statement that troops have 'restored security and stability to Qaryatain and farms surrounding it'. The statement, read by an army general on state TV, said the oil and gas pipelines in the area will be secured and IS supply routes between eastern desert and the Qalamoun region will be cut.

A Syrian army general, speaking live from Qaryatain with the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV, said troops are now dismantling bombs placed by extremists and will prepare to launch fresh attacks on areas held by ISIS.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said intense fighting was under way in Qaryatain as government troops fight to capture all parts of the town.

The observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said that ISIS fighters are still in control of small areas east of the town but 'are on the verge of collapse'. He added that the extremists are withdrawing towards eastern parts of the mountainous Qalamoun region.

The capture of Qaryatain deprives ISIS of a main base in central Syria and could be used by government forces in the future to launch attacks on ISIS-held areas near the Iraqi border

Palmyra's national museum (pictured) is now under the control of Syrian government forces

The observatory reported later in the day that IS fighters have withdrawn from much of the town toward the eastern suburbs of Qaryatain.

ISIS has suffered major defeats in Syria in recent months amid intense air strikes by Russian warplanes.

Earlier, the observatory reported that fighting in northern Syria the previous day killed several fighters belonging to the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group. Hezbollah has been fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's troops in Syria's civil war.

The observatory said 12 Hezbollah fighters were killed and dozens were wounded in Saturday's attack by militants led by al Qaida's Syria branch - known as the Nusra Front - on the northern village of al-Ais.

In southern Lebanon, social media postings on Sunday carried photos of seven Hezbollah fighters said to be among those killed in al-Ais.
A report that Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may take part in a nude photoshoot for a gay magazine is an April Fools joke.

PinkNews reported on Friday - April 1 - that the leader was planning the nude cover shoot to raise awareness of body issues and testicular cancer.

Trudeau is known for making equality his main focus for his leadership and he has supported LGBT rights and feminism.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is known for making equality his main focus for his leadership and has supported LGBT rights and feminism

Kindness is one Size Fits All: Trudeau also posed in a pink shirt for an anti-homophobia campaign

And this year he's set to make history this year when he becomes the first Canadian PM to march at Pride. Trudeau pictured during Toronto Pride 2015 when he was the Federal Liberal Party leader

The report said that Trudeau accepted a preliminary bid from a gay magazine to feature in its upcoming naked issue.

Trudeau's photoshoot will be done 'tastefully' as the PM 'wants to set a new tone of public engagement around health issues', a source was quoted in the PinkNews' joke.

He decided to take part in the photoshoot so that he can 'contribute to the discussion', it added.

And it further joked that the offer to strip off was also extended to US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and EU President Jean-Claude Juncker, but none had agreed to take part.

The report said a source close to David Cameron told PinkNews: 'The Prime Minister is very passionate about men's health issues, but he felt in this case he could do more for the public good by keeping his clothes on.'

Since he took office in November 2015 he has appointed a gender-balanced cabinet and voiced his views on equality.

He also recently posed in a pink shirt for an anti-homophobia campaign.

The nude photoshoot offer was also reportedly extended to US President Barack Obama (left), UK Prime Minister David Cameron (center) and EU President Jean-Claude Juncker (right)

Since he took office in November 2015 he has appointed a gender-balanced cabinet (pictured) and voiced his views on equality




Thousands now tweeting about the first murder on show in 65-year history

With a gut-wrenching domestic violence plot which culminated in what appeared to be the first murder in its 65-year history, last nights episode of The Archers proved to be anything but an everyday story of country folk.

Social media went into meltdown with tens of thousands of listeners expressing shock after Helen Titchener stabbed husband Rob in a dinner-time struggle in front of their young son Henry, five.

Moments earlier, Helen had bravely informed Rob she was going to leave him because of his controlling behaviour which included dictating her clothes, hair and when she was allowed to leave the home.

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A gut-wrenching domestic violence plot involving The Archers characters Rob and Helen last night appeared to end in the first murder in its 65-year history

It prompted thousands of people to comment online, including celebrities such as Pam Ares (pictured)

The sudden fury of people rushing to Twitter to talk about it prompted one person to dub the trend 'The day #TheArchers broke Twitter

Rob handed her the knife and challenged her saying it was the only way out, taunting her by saying you are nothing without me here. It then goes quiet.

As Rob (played by Timothy Watson) lay dying, Helen (Louiza Patikas) told worried Henry his daddy was asleep - but then telephoned her friend Kirsty Miller to tell her that she had killed him to make him stop.

So many listeners rushed to social media to talk about the programme that it led one, Holly Mumby-Croft, to dub the trend: 'The day #TheArchers broke Twitter!'

Among fans of the show expressing their reaction was the broadcaster and comedienne Pam Ayres, who claimed the instalment had left her in a state of nervous collapse.

She wrote on Twitter: Gut-wrenching scenes to make you stagger, Helen stabbed him with a dagger Lying in his bloodstained shirt Rob got his pie and his dessert.

Rob Titchener is played by Timothy Watson and Helen Archer by Louiza Patikas (pictured)

Listeners praised the way the controversial storyline was handled.

Becka Gandy, a teacher, said: Never been so shocked by any radio, film or TV. Incredible depiction of abuse - true public service from the BBC.

Barrister and keen Archers fan Nigel Pascoe QC said: I know we are not allowed to tout, but I am more than prepared to represent Helen, along with most of the criminal bar...

Another listener, named Salford Villain on Twitter, jokes: 'If Helen needs an alibi I'm there for her. I've heard everything that's gone on for months.

Novellist Linda Grant said she was actually shaking after the murder, while Caroline Shutter, who chairs a theatre charity, said it was a humdinger of an episode.

Newsreader Corrie Corfield said: Thunderous downpour in Tooting. Perfect accompaniment to the horror coming out of my wireless at the moment [in] The Archers.

Andrew Thackeray, an artistic director from Salisbury, wrote on Twitter: OMG! Helen. Glad its all been recorded. Cops will be able to listen to back episodes on iplayer & know whats been going on.

Journalist Jane Merrick said: That was terrifying. Lightning overhead just as Helen stabbed Rob.

In other listener comments, one called the episode phenomenal, adding: Most tense episode in over 20 years of listening! Heart still racing! Brilliantly done.

Meanwhile, Philip Osabutey said: Tonights episode of the archers is a belter. Am shaking with fear and apprehension. This is not for the faint hearted!

Archers writer Tim Stimpson last night thanked fans for their messages of praise.

Rob handed her the knife and challenged her saying it was the only way out, taunting her by saying you are nothing without me here, then it went silent

He wrote: It was a shocking thing to write. I could hardly believe the words on the screen. Lots of credit to the whole team.

But when asked if Titchener had really died, he teased: Obviously I couldnt possibly comment! Its going to be quite a week though...

Defending the domestic violence storyline, the Archers editor Sean OConnor told BBC Radio 4s Womans Hour: I think its absolutely what The Archers should be doing, The Archers is not a chocolate box storyline set in the 1950s weve been doing hard-hitting story-lines since the start of the show.

Were trying to do it faithfully and honour the womens stories were trying to represent.

Others joked about the moment when Helen finally defied her abusive partner, defying his order to take the pie out of the oven, which seemed to spark fury in the controlling character Rob.
Chip Johnson (pictured), the mayor of Hernando, allegedly sent a naked selfie of him to a number of his colleagues

The ex-lover of a Mississippi mayor allegedly sent a naked selfie of him to a number of his colleagues.

Chip Johnson, the mayor of Hernando, said the picture was taken last year and sent to the woman, who he was involved with at the time.

Johnson is not sure what led her to send the image to a number of the citys aldermen, he told WMC Action 5 News.

Its hurtful to have trust in someone and have that trust violated, he told the newspaper.

But Johnson added that the pictures circulation will not stop him from serving as mayor.

I made a personal misstep and Im not going to allow it to affect my job, said Johnson, who has been Hernandos mayor for more than a decade.

The people have asked me to do this job and Im sitting at my desk right now.

He added that he is seeking legal advice as distributing a nude image without consent is considered revenge porn.

However, while more than half of states in America have laws specifically applicable to revenge porn  where images typically obtained consensually during a relationship but later shared without permission - Mississippi is not one of them.
Gas canisters were empty and the vehicle was deemed safe by 8.35pm

Truck had Brooklyn address on the side, but it was licensed in Georgia

Bomb squad, fire department, EMS, and dozens of police were on the scene at West 46th St. and 7th Ave, as tourists stood by and watched

Officers found exposed wires extending from the dashboard and gas canisters behind the seats

Suspicious truck was left running and unattended in front of Marriott Hotel

Times Square was evacuated at 8pm on Saturday for about half an hour

Times Square was evacuated Saturday night after a suspicious vehicle with exposed wires from the dashboard and gas canisters behind the seats was left unattended and running, authorities said.

Twenty-eight-year-old truck driver Ryan Frasier has been issued 10 summonses for what are mainly 'Department of Transportation violations', the New York Daily News reported.

Frasier has been released and has a June 3rd court date scheduled, according to the newspaper.

The bomb squad, fire department and emergency units were called to the scene around 8pm on Saturday after the moving truck was found on West 46th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, according to the NYPD.

The evacuation was called off around 8.35pm Saturday.

Truck driver Ryan Frasier, 28, (pictured center) has been issued 10 summonses after he left a moving truck unattended in Times Square last night, sparking a security scare that led to an evacuation of the tourist hot spot

Times Square was evacuated after a suspicious vehicle was left unattended and running, authorities said

Source: this caused Times Square evac. Suspicious truck left running. Police see this inside. pic.twitter.com/uxCH6osePy  CeFaan Kim (@CeFaanKim) April 3, 2016

Members of the police force set up barricades and evacuated all pedestrians and occupied vehicles in the area surrounding West 46th Street and 7th Avenue around 8pm on Saturday

The area, which is normally packed with tourists, was left completely empty other than members of the NYPD who were called to the scene. Onlookers stayed at the edge of the zone until the evacuation was called off at 8.35pm Saturday

Members of the Critical Response Command noticed a suspicious vehicle was parked in front of the Marriott Hotel while they were patrolling the area at 7.51pm Saturday, according to the NYPD.

Dozens of police officers searched a moving truck with an East New York, Brooklyn, address on the side of the vehicle, although officials said it was licensed in Georgia.

Officers noticed 'wires extending out from the dashboard' and gas canisters behind the seat.

ABC7 reporter CeFaan Kim posted a photograph on Twitter of the driver's seat of the truck, showing the lighter plug with several wires attached.

An emergency unit and bomb squad were called, but they found the gas canisters were empty and the vehicle was later deemed safe.

Police officers, and other patrol groups, some of which were mounted on horses, evacuated the area filled with pedestrians. Occupied vehicles were also barred from the area.

Social media posts showed authorities moving barricades into the streets as onlookers stood by to watch.

At 8.35pm Saturday, NYPD spokesperson J. Peter Donald tweeted: 'All clear in Times Square after a suspicious truck was left running and unattended.'

New York City's Port Authority was also evacuated Saturday afternoon at 2.43pm after a suspicious box wrapped in brown paper was found by a bomb-sniffing dog.

Commuters were barred from the southern wing of the station for an hour before the box was found to be harmless.

The NYPD has been ramping up its presence following the Brussels terror attacks on March 22.

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said an additional 13,000 cops have been dispatched to the subways and major landmarks in New York City.

Members of the Critical Response Command noticed a suspicious vehicle was parked in front of the Marriott Hotel while they were patrolling the area at 7.51pm Saturday and the bomb squad and emergency unit were called

Officers noticed 'wires extending out from the dashboard' and gas canisters behind the seat although those were later found to be empty

The truck had an address on the side from East New York in Brooklyn, although the truck was licenced in Georgia

Due to NYPD activity, traffic delays & road closures around W 46th St & 7th Ave, MN. Consider alternate routes.  NYCEM - Notify NYC (@NotifyNYC) April 3, 2016
The BBC blew thousands of pounds towards a holiday for actress Sophie Okonedo and her boyfriend, it has been revealed.

The broadcaster used licence fee payers money to pay for a pair of business class flights, so that they could go whale-watching and wine tasting in South Africas Cape Town.

Miss Okonedo had just finished filming Undercover with co-star Adrian Lester, a major new BBC1 police drama which started last night.

Business class: The BBC blew thousands of pounds on a holiday for actress Sophie Okonedo and her boyfriend

The show is the first British drama to feature two black actors in leading roles, but what was supposed to be a breakthrough for diversity on screen is now being overshadowed by the spending scandal.

The BBC flew Miss Okonedos boyfriend  a mystery man known only as John  out to meet her after the shoot in Johannesburg, so that they could share the romantic break.

Afterwards, it flew them back to London business class, all at licence fee payers expense.

The BBC would not disclose how much it spent on the tickets, but two one-way business class flights from Cape Town to London cost around 5,000 on British Airways  the equivalent cost of 34 television licences.

Yesterday, MPs attacked the BBC for handing out super perks at a time when it is supposed to be cutting costs.

The broadcaster has already slashed its sports budget as it battles to plug a funding black hole of 800million a year.

Miss Okonedo had just finished filming Undercover with co-star Adrian Lester (pictured), a major new BBC1 police drama which started last night

Undercover is the first British drama to feature two black actors - Adrian Lester and Sophie Okonedo - in leading roles

Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen said: At the same time as the BBC are claiming that they cant find any more cost savings in order to justify the continued criminalisation of the licence fee, theyre providing super-perks for their stars and their stars family and friends.

This will deeply, deeply depress fair-minded licence fee payers.

The BBC admitted that it had lavished the money on Miss Okonedo, 47, and her boyfriend.

But it defended the spending as something the corporation has done numerous times.

Depress licence fee payers

In line with industry practice, the BBC will on occasion agree to pay for a spouse or partner of a leading actor to travel in premium economy when theyre filming abroad owing to the unsociable and unpredictable hours actors work over long periods, a spokesman said. In this instance, Sophie requested that instead of her flying business and her partner flying premium economy, they would both fly out premium economy and back in business so that they could fly back together at no extra cost to the production.

Miss Okonedo, who has a grown up daughter, Aoife, from a previous relationship, paid for her hotel and activities herself.

But even this was organised through a production company engaged by the BBC to manage its shoot in South Africa.
Convicted drugs mule Michaella McCollum Connolly has come under fire after appearing on television to apologise for her actions only to be slated for overhauling her image and not sounding sorry enough.

McCollum Connolly said she 'hates herself' when she thinks of the pain and suffering her cocaine trafficking could have caused and claimed she was a different person now after serving more than two years in South American prisons.

But after telling her story on Irish channel RTE One, both she and the programme received heavy criticism for her 'glammed up' appearance and 'soft questioning'.

McCollum Connolly and Melissa Reid, from Scotland, were imprisoned in 2013 for six years and eight months after admitting trying to smuggle 11 kilos of cocaine worth 1.9m million from Peru to Spain.

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Michaella McCollum Connolly, 23, from Co Tyrone, has spoken for the first time since her parole, admitting that she 'could have potentially killed a lot of people' had she succeeded in smuggling 24lbs of cocaine to Spain

She appeared on RTE One but was criticised for her 'X-Factor-like makeover' and 'rehearsed-sounding' answers

McCollum Connolly said she 'hates herself' for all the pain she caused people and is 'a different person' to who she was when she was convicted

McCollum Connolly, from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, looked a world away from the stony faced young woman who was caught at Lima Airport in 2013 with 24lbs of the Class A drug.

Her infamous 'hair donut' do had been replaced with long blonde locks, and the 23-year-old wore a smart white blazer over ripped black jeans and a black top, opting for red lipstick with matching nails.

Some likened her appearance to an 'X-Factor makeover' on Twitter while others said the show did not seem genuine.

Paddy O'Dea tweeted: 'This girl has been media prepped within an inch of her life. Nothing genuine about this interview.'

Aine O'Connor added on Twitter: 'What a complete and utter contrived, rehearsed set-up.'

Despite admitting her mistake, many on social media were still critical, claiming she was playing the victim rather than owning up to her situation.

During the interview she also told how she got sick when she arrived at Lima airport moments before her arrest at the realisation that what she was doing was wrong.

While Reid remains behind bars in a bid to secure a prison transfer back to Scotland, McCollum Connolly is now free but may have to stay in the country for as long as another six years before being allowed back to her home in Dungannon.

Some people on Twitter criticised her appearance, likening it to an 'X-Factor makeover' before the live shows

Others said the interview did not seem genuine and hit out at her answers, claiming they sounded 'rehearsed'

Aine O'Connor tweeted a very criticial response, pictured, to the RTE One interview

Looking remarkably healthy and sporting a new blonde look, she told RTE: I remember getting sick, standing in the airport, knowing that Im doing something wrong.

I didnt know how to walk away... it didnt feel real. I didnt feel like this was really happening. I was scared. I wanted to curl up into a ball and die.

Of how she feels in hindsight, she said: The guilt (is) something I have to live with for the rest of my life.

When I think about it, I try not to think about it because it makes me hate myself to be capable of causing that much pain and suffering.

I dont think that guilt is ever going to go away because how could I forgive myself.

She added: If the drugs had of got back what could have happened, I probably would have had a lot of blood on my hands.

New look: McCollum Connolly sported long blonde locks, a smart white blazer and red lipstick with matching nails for her interview with the Irish state broadcaster

Some on Twitter even suggested the 23-year-old seemed like she was trying to launch a new career with the interview

But there were also some who defended McCollum Connolly, chiding others who were quick to judge her

Others said she sounded 'articulate' in her responses and congratulated her for owning up to her mistakes

The amount of families that would have (been) ruined.

She accepts that she could have caused destruction to society and she asked: Who am I to be able to do that?

On August 6, 2013, McCollum Connolly and Reid were arrested at Lima Airport with the drugs hidden in food packets in their luggage.

The pair had travelled to Peru and were on their way to Spain when they were caught.

Airport police became suspicious when they noticed the girls avoiding sniffer dogs and were also curious about why two young women were travelling with large suitcases rather than backpacks.

Police searched the bags and found 1.9million worth of cocaine.

The two women initially claimed they had been forced to carry the cocaine by a British drugs gang who had threatened their families.

They said they had been kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to transport the drugs.

However, they later agreed to drop this line of defence.

McCollum Connollys family, including her mother Nora, has flown out to Peru to meet her. It is believed McCollum Connolly will now begin working with a local religious group, which helps people suffering with HIV and AIDS.

Last night, she explained how she justified her decision to carry the drugs.

She said: I thought Im just picking up something and bringing it back. I never thought of the contents and whats inside and what it could do to people.

She also told RTE that she didnt really grasp the full reality of what she was doing.

And in doing it, she appears to accept she made mistake but believes this shouldnt make her a bad person.

She told the broadcaster: In life everybody makes mistakes (but) it doesnt make them a bad person.

I didnt understand the consequences of a bad decision, I didnt understand what I was doing. I was very naive.

Northern Irish Michaella McCollum Connolly and Melissa Reid from Scotland were jailed for six years and eight months in 2013 after they were caught with cocaine worth 1.5million hidden in their luggage at Lima Airport

Michaella McCollum Connolly, pictured in 2013, was released effectively on parole on Thursday night

And she insisted: Im not the same person I was when I committed the crime.

Ive matured a lot, Ive learnt a lot of things that ten years in university I probably couldnt learn.

Of the scale of the drugs she was caught with, she said: I potentially could have filled Europe full of a lot of drugs.

I could have potentially killed a lot of people, not directly but I could have caused a lot of harm to people.

And again, she insisted: I was very naive, I was so young very insecure, a lot of times I didnt know how to say no to something.

On what freedom is like for her now, she said: (It) feels surreal to be walking down the road with my family, sleeping in a bed, waking up not having to pass the count

Ive forgotten the things that everybody takes for granted in life.

Seeing the sun, seeing the darkness, seeing the moon and the stars, things I havent seen in almost three years.

She also recalled her decision to take the cases carrying the drugs as a moment of madness.

McCollum (picturedin 2013) is not freed under any repatriation scheme or other protocol between Peru and the UK and a pending judicial hearing would determine the conditions of her parole

McCollum Connolly, who says she plans to study psychology, said: I was scared to take responsibility because I didnt know what would happen then.

I made a decision in a moment of madness. Im not a bad person. I want to demonstrate that Im a good person.

It is not yet known whether the terms of her release will allow her to return home or if she will have to remain in Peru for some time.

McCollum Connolly was freed under new legislation on early prison release introduced in the South American country last year.

Peruvian authorities agreed to let both 23-year-old women serve the remainder of their sentences in the UK, but the pair still remain in the South American country.

A judicial process will now determine what, if any, conditions are attached to McCollum Connolly's effective parole, it is understood.

While moves are being made to repatriate her to Northern Ireland, it is believed she will have to spend a considerable part of her parole in Peru.

According to an inmate, McCollum Connolly had been popular with the other prisoners and learned to speak Spanish while serving her time at Ancon 2 prison, north of the capital Lima

As of June last year, the 23-year-old women were to be allowed to serve the remainder of their prison sentences in the UK, but the pair still remain in South America

Her solicitor Kevin Winters stressed she was not freed under any repatriation scheme or other protocol between Peru and the UK and that a pending judicial hearing would determine the conditions of her parole.

'At this stage it remains unclear when Michaella may be eligible to return home,' he added.

'That will be a matter for the court and a pending judicial hearing to determine the conditions of her parole.

'We are working with her lawyers in Peru and hope to be in a position to clarify further, as soon as possible.'

Meanwhile, Reid, from Lenzie, Glasgow, is still in Ancon 2 prison as she has asked for a prison transfer to Scotland, rather than parole.

While McCollum Connolly's legal team is applying for her to be repatriated to Northern Ireland, she may have to serve parole in Peru.

This means that while not behind bars, McCollum Connolly would have to stay in Peru for the remainder of her six years and eight month sentence.

'Michaella left the prison as part of a supervised release on parole. It's called semi libertad in Peru,' a Prison Service spokeswoman said.

'If she complies with all the conditions then she won't have to go back to prison and the process for her of completing her sentence will continue here in Peru.

'The other woman [Reid'] didn't leave jail because she is seeking a prison transfer to her home country.'

McCollum Connolly's parole release comes three months after she was struck down with an unknown tropical disease at the Ancon 2 prison, north of the capital Lima.

'Michaella has been brought to the hospital in the prison. She has a tropical illness but we don't know what it is,' an inmate said.

'We really hope she is ok. This [illness] is pretty regular in here, especially with the foreigners.'

According to the inmate, McCollum Connolly had been popular with the other prisoners and learned to speak Spanish while serving her time.

The pair had previously been held at Lima's Virgen de Fatima prison but were moved to the Ancon 2 prison, where horrific conditions reportedly had McCollum crammed in to a cell with 30 other prisoners with extremely poor sanitation and toilet facilities.

Last year, Stormont Justice Minister David Ford approved an application for the repatriation of McCollum on a number of issues, including the difficulty encountered in maintaining family contact.

McCollum, from Dungannon, and Reid, from Glasgow, were caught with the haul at Lima airport on August 6 2013 attempting to fly to Spain.

They had claimed they were forced into carrying the drugs but pleaded guilty to charges later that year.

The pair were caught trying to board a flight with 24lb (11kg) of cocaine in food packets hidden inside their luggage.
The EU referendum battle took an astonishing new twist last night after officials caved in to demands to come clean about the true scale of mass immigration.

The U-turn  a major victory for the Daily Mail  sets the stage for the potentially explosive figures to be published just one month before the June 23 vote.

The information could reveal up to 1.3million extra EU citizens are living here  electrifying the referendum debate and giving a major boost to the Out camp.

MPs said the Government was only releasing the information under huge pressure. One said it was Late, but a good deal better than never.

Official figures show 919,000 EU migrants have arrived in Britain since June 2010, but the number of NI numbers issued in the same period is 2.2million

Senior Tory backbencher David Davis said: These figures will highlight the extent that the Government is not in control of our borders and the importance of Brexit.

Lord Green of Deddington, the chairman of Migrationwatch, said: This is progress. The Government have at last recognised that they cannot continue to obfuscate on a matter of such importance to the public and possibly to the referendum.

The decision follows a bitter row over so-called active National Insurance numbers. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show some 919,000 EU migrants have arrived in Britain since June 2010. But, in the same period of time, officials have issued 2.2million NI numbers to EU migrants.

MPs say the gap suggests huge numbers of incomers may have been missed by the ONS, leaving officials in the dark about the true scale of the pressure being placed on hospitals and schools.

In a sustained campaign, backed by the Mail, Brexit campaigners and economists have called for the release of the active NI numbers, which means those which are currently being used to claim benefits or pay taxes.

This data will give a snapshot of who is actually here  and ensure the public are not voting in the referendum on the basis of inaccurate information on immigration.

Senior Tory backbencher David Davis (pictured) said: These figures will highlight the extent that the Government is not in control of our borders and the importance of Brexit.

But ministers and officials have been blocking their release. HMRC chiefs refused to answer Parliamentary questions, Freedom of Information requests or letters from MPs on the grounds it would be too costly  sparking allegations of an official cover-up.

However, in the wake of huge pressure from MPs in favour of quitting the EU, Downing Street has now ordered their release.

MPs said they believed this was because the pressure had become unsustainable.

The information is being sent to the ONS by HMRC chief executive Lin Homer. She has separately said it will be sent to MPs on the Treasury Select Committee by the end of this month.

Government sources said this was being done with a view to the ONS publishing a paper at the end of May which will attempt to explain the true scale of immigration in recent years. This will be published alongside the latest net migration statistics on May 26.

Last week, Britains statistics watchdog said the public must be informed about the true extent of immigration ahead of June 23. The UK Statistics Authority said it is concerned that current data on how many people are arriving in Britain falls short of providing a full picture.

Officially, 257,000 EU nationals were said to have arrived last year alone, but 630,000 people from the EU were given NI numbers. The figures include 209,000 NI numbers given to Romanians and Bulgarians. Officially, only 55,000 Romanians and Bulgarians settled here last year.

The first request for the NI data was made by the economist and former senior government adviser Jonathan Portes last November. The Government rejected the request, saying it would not release the information because doing so would be unhelpful to the Prime Ministers renegotiation of Britains EU membership.

Mr Portes appealed and in February the Government again refused his request saying that getting the information would be too expensive.

Lord Green of Deddington, the chairman of Migrationwatch, (pictured) said: This is progress. The Government have at last recognised that they cannot continue to obfuscate on a matter of such importance to the public and possibly to the referendum.

Mr Portes said the data on the number of recent EU migrants would shed considerable light on possibly the most important  and certainly the highest profile  issue in what is certainly the most important electoral campaign in the UK in recent memory.

Others who have been demanding its publication include Cabinet ministers Chris Grayling and John Whittingdale as well as Mr Davis.

Mr Davis said the difference between the ONS figures and the number of NI numbers being doled out had significant implications for the job prospects of British citizens, housing and public services.
The public are being fooled into believing the streets are safer than they really are because police place too much importance on minor offences ahead of serious crimes, a report has claimed.

Constabularies are using a Victorian model to record incidents which treats all crimes  from shoplifting to murder  as equal, researchers from the University of Cambridge have revealed.

Their research comes a year after the Daily Mail told how police in South Yorkshire ignored the sexual abuse of hundreds of young girls because they were too busy chasing Labour targets on high-volume minor offences that would earn bonuses for senior staff.

Offences  including car crime  were considered crucial for satisfying a target culture introduced by the last Labour government

Money was diverted away from protecting children in order to pursue so-called priority crimes, according to former detective Tony Brookes. The offences  which included car crime  were considered crucial for satisfying a target culture introduced by the last Labour government.

It meant that, while young girls suffered heinous abuse at the hands of sex gangs in Sheffield and Rotherham, top brass at South Yorkshire Police could have had a perverse incentive to instruct their officers to look elsewhere. The targets have been scrapped by the Tories.

Not all crimes are equal

The Cambridge Institute of Criminology has now devised its Cambridge Crime Harm Index to measure offences according to the damage inflicted on victims and how long a prison sentence it could attract, rather than counting crimes as if they are all of equal seriousness. Researchers argued that their proposals would dramatically improve identification and policing of areas where the most damaging crime takes place, and help get the most dangerous criminals off the streets.

Professor Lawrence Sherman, director of the institute, said: Not all crimes are equal. Counting them as if they are fosters distortion of risk and accountability.

If shoplifting drops while murder triples, crime is reported as down  yet any common sense view of public safety cries out for some adjustment for seriousness. There is no meaningful bottom line indicator of whether public safety is actually improving or declining in any given year or place.

Measuring by the number of days in prison each crime could attract ensures that police, policymakers and the public are better informed on rates and trends of crime, the risks posed and resources required.

The study, published in academic journal Policing, compared crime across the UK over ten years using both systems. While overall crime counts between 2002 and 2012 showed a drop of 37 per cent, the index reveals harm caused only dropped by 21 per cent.

The index is based on the number of days of imprisonment an offence would result in at the lowest starting point for an offender with no previous convictions, according to guidelines prepared for courts.

Police place too much importance on minor offences ahead of serious crimes, a report has claimed

Where penalty guidelines are expressed in community service hours, the index converts them into days, and if the starting point is a fine then it calculates how long it would take to earn the sum at adult minimum wage.

The approach should be added to the current system and would require no new funding, the criminologists claimed.
The proposal comes after a striking increase in complaints about drivers was reported between 2014 and 2015

appearance or love life and could face punishment for flirting

Drivers would be banned from commenting on passengers'

NYC's Taxi and Limousine Commission has proposed a new policy, which would make sexual

Soon taxi drivers in New York City could face harsh fines or losing their license if they flirt or comment on their passenger's love life.

The 'clean up package', proposed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, would create highly-specific definitions of sexual harassment and sexual contact for drivers.

If the proposal is passed and a taxi or for-hire vehicle driver is found in violation,they could face license revocation and fines for touching or ejaculating on their passengers.

They also face a suspension for commenting on their passengers' appearance or even broach the subject of dating.

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Taxi drivers in New York City could face harsh fines for flirting with passengers or commenting on their appearance if a new proposal from the Taxi and Limousine Commission is passed

'Even what some would call "innocent flirting" is absolutely inappropriate and no passenger should be subjected to that environment,' TLC spokesman Allan Fromberg told Gothamist.

Fromberg said the goal of he proposal is to make rules that have a broad interpretation more specific for both driver and passenger.

TLC decided to reevaluate the policy because passenger complaints have jumped from 17,000 in 2014 to 21,000 in 2015.

However, Fromberg says the 23 per cent increase in complaints is 'proportionally lower' because of a 40 per cent increase in drivers from 2014 to 2015.

A panic button has also been considered for New York cabs.

Fourteen out of 166 reported rapes in the city in 2015 were committed by hire car drivers.

Two women reported sexual assaults in an Uber car in Brooklyn and a taxi in Queens last month, according to the Independent.
One Labour MP said the figures were the 'human cost of Tory cuts'

Thousands of elderly and vulnerable patients are still enduring 15-minute flying care visits  two years after they were supposed to have been outlawed.

Hundreds of councils have been commissioning the slots in defiance of government warnings that they are an assault on dignity, a survey reveals.

Carers say they are so rushed they have no time to offer any companionship to elderly residents, who wont see anyone else that day. And many 15-minute visits are shortened further because staff must allow time to travel to the next patient.

Thousands of elderly and vulnerable patients are still enduring 15-minute flying care visits  two years after they were supposed to have been outlawed

One housebound resident said he had to go without lunch because otherwise there would not be enough time for carers to help him to the toilet.

Freedom of Information requests from 139 councils by the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity found that 105 had commissioned care visits that lasted 15 minutes or less, in defiance of government and NHS guidelines that state slots should last at least half an hour.

It came as a separate investigation claimed that care workers were cutting short their visits to elderly patients to as little as five minutes  then faking records to cover up their negligence.

Leonard Cheshire Disability chief executive Clare Pelham said: We are concerned that many councils are still commissioning flying care visits  often 15 minutes or even less  to deliver essential personal care such as washing, dressing and eating.

These rushed visits are simply not long enough to provide dignified support to disabled and older people, leaving many facing impossible choices such as using the toilet or having a cup of tea.

We urge councils to follow government guidance which clearly says that 15 minutes is never enough for personal care.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said: It is difficult to see how this dehumanising approach can really be described as care at all, and this is unfair on care workers, let alone on frail older people. It is truly deplorable that some frail older people are going without any lunch because a care worker does not have the time to give it to them.

Freedom of Information requests from 139 councils by the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity found that 105 had commissioned care visits that lasted 15 minutes or less

'THERE'S NO TIME TO JUST HAVE A CHAT' - ONE CARER SPEAKS OUT Carer Rachel Lindfield Rachel Lindfield, 26, routinely carried out 15-minute visits for one of the UKs largest private homecare providers. She said she had no time to offer simple companionship and care because she was so busy rushing to complete the practical tasks. Miss Lindfield, who lives in south-east London, said she was expected to make someone a meal, help them to the toilet and check their medication  a list of jobs she found literally impossible. She added: There was no time to sit with them, ask them how they are, just have a chat. It leaves you with no time to provide that companionship and care. Miss Lindfield, who is now employed as a foster care worker, added that many 15-minute visits were shortened to allow carers time to get to the next patient. Advertisement

Allocating such a short amount of time for home visits makes it impossible for staff to deliver proper care or engage in any normal friendly interaction with the person being cared for  for whom this may be their only social contact all day.

Care staff who are under pressure to keep to a tight timetable are likely to cut short visits, fail to complete tasks and may not notice serious changes in the persons health or circumstances.

The investigation  which covered a third of councils in England  found that the proportion allocating 15-minute slots was similar to three years ago, indicating the recent crackdowns have had little effect.

MP Andrew Gwynne, Labours public health spokesman, said: These disturbing figures show the human cost of Tory cuts to social care services in England.

These fleeting visits are so short that some older people are now saying they have to choose better getting washed or getting fed. The Tories neglect of social care has been allowed to go on for too long.

A Department of Health spokesman said: Its not acceptable for care visits to be inappropriately short  it is vital older and vulnerable people get the high quality care they deserve. Thats why we are putting more funding into social care  local authorities will have access to up to 3.5 billion more funding this Parliament.

A joint investigation by The Sunday Times and Channel 4s Dispatches said care workers were cutting short their visits to as little as five minutes. Investigators say they also found evidence of agency workers failing to turn up or arriving hours late, leaving clients unwashed for days and failing to give medication at the right time.
White British pupils are being overtaken at school by students from ten other ethnic groups by the time they sit their GCSEs, an alarming new report reveals today.

At the age of five, white British students are among the top three highest achievers, and their shocking slip down the rankings by the time they reach 16 was last night blamed on the education system and their parents.

The trend will renew concern about the under-achievement of white working-class pupils, in particular, which MPs have previously labelled as staggeringly low.

At the age of five, white British students are among the top three highest achievers, but they slip down the rankings by ten places by the time they are 14. File image

How white students slip down the league table between the ages of five and 16, according to CentreForum

Researchers from the CentreForum think-tank said pupils without English as a first language often made faster progress because teachers helped them catch up and their families were more supportive.

Education experts said white British children were being let down by schools and also by parents who did not fully support their education. In contrast, immigrant children were keen to make use of the educational opportunities on offer and received huge support from their aspirational families.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the results were concerning.

He added: On the face of it, the education system is letting down white British children and we must examine the reasons with great urgency. The children of immigrants are improving much faster. In part this is because the parents and children are very keen to make use of the educational opportunities which are readily available to them. But also, the extra attention they receive may inadvertently be diverting attention from the needs of the poor white British pupils.

On the face of it, the education system is letting down white British children Professor Alan Smithers, Birmingham University

Referring to white British pupils, he added: Too often, parents in low-income homes have been turned off by having to attend school and those attitudes are passed on to their children.

The Government has toughened up GCSEs and will launch a more rigorous grading scale of one to nine next year, which is pegged to international standards for the first time. A five will be considered a good pass  between a current C and B grade  and a nine will be gained by only the highest achievers.

Ministers are also introducing a new measure of school performance across eight academic GCSE subjects including English, maths, science, languages and the humanities.

Researchers from the think-tank, which is chaired by former schools minister and Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury David Laws, analysed last years GCSE results and calculated the proportion of teenagers who would have gained a good pass in all eight subjects. They also compared the data to test results in primary schools.

Researchers from the CentreForum think-tank said pupils without English as a first language often made faster progress because teachers helped them catch up and their families were more supportive. File image

At the age of five, white British children were narrowly beaten on assessments  known as the Early Years Foundation Stage Profiles  by only two other ethnic groups: Indian and mixed (white and Asian).

However, they start to fall behind in primaries and by the time they reach Key Stage Four (age 14-16), they have been overtaken by ten other ethnic groups, including Chinese, Bangladeshi and black African pupils.

The trend will renew concern about the under-achievement of white working-class pupils, which MPs previously called staggeringly low

The study found that 73 per cent of Chinese students in English schools were achieving eight good GCSE passes in these tough subjects, compared to 37 per cent of white British pupils. Separately, outside of the ethnic groups, the report compared the performance of pupils with English as a first language, to pupils with English as an additional language (EAL).

The report found that pupils with English as a second language made significant strides throughout their education. Some 40.2 per cent of these EAL students achieved eight good passes at GCSE compared to 37.6 per cent of native speakers.

They make the equivalent of around half a grades extra progress in each subject between Key Stage Two (ages seven to 11) and Key Stage Four as teachers help them catch up with speaking, reading and writing in English. Jo Hutchinson, associate director of education data and statistics at CentreForum, said previous research had shown that higher educational aspirations were associated with certain ethnic minority groups.

She said: Also, whats bigger than aspirations is parental engagement, so were talking about things like parents attending parents evenings at school, talking to their children about subject options, supervising homework, ensuring that the family eats together and has regular meal and bedtimes.

Some of those factors are less likely to occur among poor white British families, she said. In 2014, Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsteds chief inspector of schools, claimed that immigrant parents appeared to care more about their childrens education. Overall, the think-tank estimates about 60 per cent of secondary pupils and more than 40 per cent of primary pupils are still failing to achieve a world-class benchmark.

A Department for Education spokesman said the new GCSE good pass is set in line with the average performance in high-performing countries such as Finland, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
A British skier has told how he escaped in his socks from a pack of wolves after accidentally going off-piste and crashing into a tree while on holiday.

Janveer Sandhu nearly lost both legs to frostbite after ditching his heavy ski boots to run from the predators through waist-deep snow.

The 30-year-old says he then climbed a tree to get away, where he spent a freezing night and ate snow to stay hydrated, in scenes reminiscent of Oscar-winning Leonardo DiCaprio film The Revenant.

He was eventually picked up by a passing motorist the next day  but still faces losing a toe to frostbite.

Janveer Sandhu, left, fled a pack of wolves, file picture right, after crashing while skiing off-piste in Bulgaria

It was the best thing ever when I saw the car, said Mr Sandhu, a project manager. I just thought Im going to live.

The drama has echoes of Oscar-winning film The Revenant, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a 19th-century frontiersman who battles through the snow-swept US wilderness after being mauled by a bear.

Mr Sandhus own fight for survival began during a five-day break with a friend in Bansko, Bulgaria, in early February. On the second evening, the experienced skier went down a black run on his own.

However he became confused by the signs and ended up going off-piste into steep, dense woodland  where he crashed into a tree at high speed.

I wasnt knocked out but I was in shock, he said. Blood was coming from my nose.

He said he then saw three wolves just a few hundred feet away  and they were heading in his direction.

Mr Sandhu escaped the wolves in just his socks and almost lost both legs to frostbite, pictured

Id started going downhill after the crash but when I saw the wolves I had to go back up, he said. I climbed for about 45 minutes  but it was difficult.

'I was waist-deep in snow. I was still in my boots so got rid of them. I didnt think about my feet. I just wanted to save my life.

I realised every step [away from civilisation] was death, so I climbed a tree where I spent the night. I ate snow because I was thirsty.

Locals later told him that wolves dont like to climb up steep slopes in powdery snow  but he didnt know this at the time.

During the night he saw the rescue teams search lights, but says they were too far away to shout. His mobile phone also had no signal.

It wasnt until sunrise that he dared clamber down, trekking for hours before finding a road where he was picked up by a Romanian family.

His experiences in the wild have been likened to Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar-winning film The Revenant

Mr Sandhu, from Ilford, Essex, was then taken to hospital in Sofia, where doctors battled to save his legs.

He flew home on February 13, but was admitted to Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford for a further three days.

He now has to return next week, when the tip of his right big toe and all the next toe may be amputated. However he said he is lucky to still have his feet at all.
Former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell last night joined demands for the department to pay back almost 200million of aid

Former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell last night joined demands for the department to pay back almost 200million of foreign aid.

The ministry yesterday admitted it had mistakenly spent 172million more than it should have done last year  with UK taxpayers money.

The huge amount was part of a 513million rise in foreign aid in 2015.

Several reports highlighted new alleged examples of the scandalous use of the money  including funds falling into the hands of jihadist rebels in Syria.

Mr Mitchell, development secretary between 2010 and 2012, said that news of Department for International Developments overspend would antagonise taxpayers. Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, also weighed in, demanding that the Government stop spraying round so much in foreign aid.

The Government had already been criticised for locking Britain into a target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income (GNI) on aid  now worth around 12billion a year.

The revelation that spending has exceeded even this high level will further anger Tory backbenchers, given that most Whitehall departments are having to make stringent cuts.

They say the money should instead be targeted at helping people in Britain, such as steelworkers begging the Government for state support to save their plants. It emerged yesterday that 200million of UK aid had been spent in Tanzania before its government allegedly rigged an election.

Around 18,000 a year is going to two jailed Palestinians who stabbed a British woman and murdered her friend.

Mr Mitchell told Sky News: Even I wouldnt argue that we should exceed the 0.7 per cent commitment which we have made  But if there has been an overspend that will have to be repaid from the budget this year and we should try and make sure that doesnt happen again because it really antagonises taxpayers.

He added: At the end of the day, the 0.7 per cent commitment that British taxpayers are making, it has to be spent well and, of course, it has to be spent in creating safe, conflict-free and prosperous societies overseas and not in any way support migration.

Some backbenchers say the money should instead be targeted at helping people in Britain, such as steelworkers begging the Government for state support to save their plants

TERRORISTS AND VOTE-RIGGING REGIMES GIVEN YOUR MONEY TANZANIA Britain gave 200million to Tanzania before its government sought to rig an election. The east African nation cancelled a vote on the island of Zanzibar last year amid claims the opposition was poised to win. Another poll was announced at the last minute in March and was boycotted by the opposition. The US cancelled aid worth 330million to Tanzania after accusing its government of undermining democracy. But Britain spends hundreds of millions there. DfID said this boosts measures to help citizens hold the government to account. The Foreign Office said there was no decision to reduce UK support for Tanzania even though the election did not reflect the will of the people. PALESTINIANS Two Palestinian terrorists who stabbed a British woman and killed her friend each receive 9,000 a year. Kay Wilson, 51, was left for dead in Jerusalem, while American Kristine Luken was killed in 2010. Kifah Ghanimat and Aiad Fatfata were jailed, but it emerged their families get a monthly stipend of 750 each from the Palestinian Authority, indirectly paid by DfID. Miss Wilson said the absolute unfairness of it alIs just devastating. Monthly pay: Palestinian killer Kifah Ghanimat, who gets 9,000 a year from the British foreign aid budget Advertisement

The whole reason for the international development commitment made by the Coalition and confirmed by the Conservative government is to build prosperous and safe societies overseas.

Figures sneaked out by DfID on Friday show ministers spent over their 0.7 per cent aid target in 2015 by 172million  money that could have been spent on jobs, homes, schools or hospitals in Britain  taking the total to a record-breaking 12.2billion.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg (pictured) called the overspend a 'graphic example of the idiocy of setting such a fixed target' on foreign aid

Although the excess is only 0.01 per cent of GNI, the sheer scale of our national income means it is a vast amount.

Dr Fox pointed to what had happened in Tanzania, saying that International Development Secretary Justine Greening should follow a US decision to cancel aid to the African country, after accusing its government of a pattern of actions to undermine democracy.

Countries need to earn support from the British taxpayer rather than us spraying money around until we hit 0.7 per cent, he told the Sunday Telegraph.

When there are clear breaches of political rights or human rights they will expect a response in terms of the aid we contribute. The fact that the US has reacted in such a strong way gives a very good signal. We should be reviewing our own contribution in the light of that.

Reacting to the overspend, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said: There can be no more graphic example of the idiocy of setting such a fixed target. This overspend will anger taxpayers who do not want their money frittered away on politicians vanity.

A Government spokesman said: These are provisional statistics that will fluctuate and well only know the final figure towards the end of the year.

As an example, for both 2013 and 2014 the provisional estimate was revised down from 0.71 per cent to 0.7 per cent.

UK investment in overseas development is firmly in the UKs own national interest. Aid goes only where it is most needed and where it will deliver the very best results for taxpayers money.
Doing little to dispel rumours they are soon to be married, model Cara Delevingne, 23, and singer St. Vincent, 33, are moving into a flat they have bought in Pariss arty 6th arrondissement.

The two Rive Gauche lovebirds will be able to sip coffee at the famous literary cafe Les Deux Magots. St Vincent will likely do the ordering, as I hear shes an expert at French.

Cara can speak fluent fashion  all she needs to get by in Paris...

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Cara Delevingne, 23, and singer St. Vincent, 33, are moving into a flat they have bought in Pariss arty 6th arrondissement

Will Taron stay Solo?

I predict spring may bring new romance for actors Taron Egerton and Suki Waterhouse.

The pair were inseparable filming Billionaire Boys Club, as my picture shows, below, but later lost touch.

Now Taron has landed the plum role of Hans Solo in a Star Wars spin-off and Suki is texting him regularly.

They plan to meet when shes next in the UK.

Taron Egerton and Suki Waterhouse: I predict spring may bring new romance for the actors

Eliza's heartbreak

I hear Earl Spencers hopes of soon walking daughter Lady Eliza, 23, down the aisle have been sadly dashed.

Princess Dianas niece has split from her boyfriend of four years, financier Matthew Rozowsky  the couple are pictured below in happier times  after bickering once too often.

Lady Eliza, the Earls second daughter from his first marriage to model Victoria Lockwood, is nursing her broken heart in Cape Town, where she lives with twin sister Lady Amelia.

Princess Dianas niece has split from her boyfriend of four years, financier Matthew Rozowsky  the couple are pictured here in happier times

Good grief, Katie

Is Katie Keight hinting she and Damien Hirst have split?

At 25, Katie is half the age of the artist who has wowed her with a flashy, fast-paced lifestyle for two years.

But now model Katie, pictured below with Damien, has been posting some cryptic Instagram messages.

One reads: Grief is an important process that slowly allows us to release the powerful energetic bond we have with another person. That doesnt sound good, Damien.
She has already graced the covers of multiple international editions such as British, French, and Italian Vogue.

And Gigi Hadid continues to take over the world - literally - as she poses for the German version of the fashion powerhouse.

The 20-year-old model's natural beauty was on full display, baring plenty of her skin that glowed behind natural make-up.

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Cover girl: Gigi Hadid, 20, continues to take over the world - literally - as she poses for the German version of the fashion powerhouse

Gigi shared the cover on Instagram with her more than 15 million followers.

'German Vogue!' she exclaimed in the picture's caption.

Sitting down, dressed in a pink, floral, Dolce & Gabbana kimono dress, the model's back curved slightly as she leaned over her left leg.

The stunner's hair was styled in a softer version of the traditional milkmaid braid.

See more of the latest Gigi Hadid updates as she poses for German Vogue

Busy woman: Presently, she is one of the most well-known faces of pop culture, which has made her an in-demand person for campaigns, runways and magazine spreads. She shared her Vogue China cover on Instagram six weeks ago

Presently, she is one of the most well-known faces of pop culture, which has made her an in-demand person for campaigns, runways and magazine spreads.

Since February, the model has graced three editions of Vogue: China, France, and Germany.

Aside from her career in the fashion industry, her personal life keeps her name in the headlines.

Relationship status: Aside from her career in the fashion industry, her personal life keeps her name in the headlines. She is pictured on March 30 in New York

Gigi has been linked to many a musician beau, beginning with Australian singer Cody Simpson.

Following thier split, the model's next high-profile relationship was with DNCE member Joe Jonas.

After the duo's split last November, the 20-year-old reportedly began dating former One Direction member Zayn Malik.

Gigi eventually appeared in the Brit's music video for Pillow Talk, which sparked rumours that the duo's relationship could be purely business related.
She is currently taking the modelling world by storm, however Jennifer Hawkins also looks set to dominate the world of alcohol.

The 32-year-old Australian beauty won a gold medal for her new tequila brand Sesion Premium Tequila at the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits competition.

Former Miss Universe winner Jennifer co-owns the brand with husband Jake Wall, 32, and Sydney businessman, Tim Freeburn.

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In high spirits! Jennifer Hawkins has won a gold medal for her new tequila brand Sesion Premium Tequila at the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits competition

Despite only being launched in December last year, the trio won a gold medal for their mocha flavoured liqueur at the competition - regarded as the Academy Awards for spirits.

Meanwhile, their Blanco and Reposado flavours also received silver medals, after being judged by 39 experts and competing against more than 1850 entries.

Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, Jennifer said she was ecstatic about receiving the three medals.

Successful pairing: The Miss Universe winner 2004 co-owns the brand with husband Jake Wall

Winning formula: The trio won a gold medal for their mocha flavoured liqueur at the competition, while their Blanco and Reposado flavours also received silver medals

'It is so amazing to think that our little idea of starting a tequila company has come to life and getting recognition at the highest level,' she said.

'Sesion has only just launched, so, really, it's just a baby [brand]. There's so many exciting things to come.'

The award-winning tequila is currently served on Qantas flights and negotiations are underway for Sesion to be sold internationally.

Sesion is produced at the famed Tierra de Agaves distillery which is run by the Beckmann family, who have been making tequila for eight generations.

Cheers! The couple launched the brand last year after working on it for four years

Cashing in: The couple - who tied the knot in 2013 - capitalised on their love for sipping cheeky tequilas

Top drop: The couple filter their Instagram accounts with snaps of themselves enjoying the alcoholic beverage, with Jake writing: 'Our goal for the last two years was to bring out the smoothest 100% agave tequila possible'

Capitalising on their love for sipping cheeky tequilas here and there, the celebrity couple who tied the knot in 2013 launched the brand last year, after working on it for four years.

Taking to Instagram with some details about the company, Jake wrote at the time: 'Pumped to announce that we have created a new premium tequila brand called SESION.

'Our goal for the last two years was to bring out the smoothest 100% agave tequila possible and #SESIONTEQUILA is just that.

'We've sourced our tequila from Mexico's (UNESCO) World Heritage site and distillery - Tierra de Agaves, owned by 8th generation tequila dynasty the Beckmann family.

'It's been a crazy ride and we can't wait for you to try it!' he added of the brand which is named after the Spanish word for session.

Personal touch: The model couple made a trip to Mexico themselves in June to take a hands-on approach with the business and taste some flavours

The model couple made a trip to Mexico themselves in June to take a hands-on approach with the business and taste some flavours.

Making their way through the agave fields, Jake even put his handyman skills to good use at the time, helping the local farmers harvest the plant from which the distilled beverage is produced.

Sesion is Jake and Jennifer's latest commercial project, and while it may seem surprising to see the pair front an alcoholic beverage venture, Jake says it was a no-brainer given the pair's love for the drink.

Relaxed: While it may seem surprising to see the pair front an alcoholic beverage venture, Jake says it was a no-brainer given the pair's love for the drink

Hands-on: During production Jake even put his handyman skills to good use at the time, helping the local farmers harvest the plant from which the distilled beverage is produced

'Tequila was a natural progression because it is our drink of choice, we love it, so thought why not do our own?' he told The Daily Telegraph.

'Jen and I have a pretty healthy lifestyle, but we do like a drink and to let our hair down and tequila gives a really good vibe,' he also added.

Meanwhile, when speaking to Gourmet Traveller recently, beauty queen Jennifer said: 'There's definitely a gap in the market for an Australian tequila'.

'We find that if we have tequila, the night takes unexpected turns - it's more spontaneous and fun. It kind of elevates you,' she also said.

Jennifer's joint venture with her husband is her second, as the pair also own property development company J Group.

Having won Miss Universe back in 2004, Jennifer is also a prominent face in Australian fashion as a face of retail giant Myer.

And she's proved she's just as savvy off the runway as opposed to on, with her own tanning and beauty range called JBronze.
They're the proud parents to two adorable little girls, but on Friday night Candice and David Warner headed out for a date night without their angelic children in tow.

The 30-year-old cosied up to her sportsman husband and the pair snapped a selfie which she later shared with her fans on Instagram writing: 'Beautiful night out with my one and only.'

Candice cut a stylish figure in a black frock that featured a plunging neckline and rested her arm on David's shoulder and flashed her stunning wedding and engagement rings.

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Quality time: Candice and David Warner headed out for a date night without their angelic children in tow on Friday night

The mother-of-two wore her blonde tresses loosely curled and out around her shoulders and flashed a smile to the camera.

David wore a smart black jacket layered over a white T-shirt and beamed brightly as he snapped the picture.

Last month the new family of four travelled to India to support David in the international T20 tournament.

Parents night out: The 30-year-old cosied up to her sportsman husband and the pair snapped a selfie which she later shared with her fans on Instagram. Pictured at the 2015 Allan Border Medal

Despite his busy schedule with training and games, doting father David always manages to find the time to spend with his three beautiful girls.

Candice shared a sweet snap with her fans last week as her husband lay beside their youngest daughter, Indi Rae.

The cricketing star was dressed in his training gear adoringly looked down at his daughter and tickled her stomach as they spent some quality time together.

Baby bliss: Despite his busy schedule with training and games, doting father David always manages to find the time to spend with his three beautiful girls

Water baby: Candice and Ivy Mae frolicked in the crystal waters of their hotel pool during their stay in India and the mother joked that her daughter 'won't get out of the water'

Throughout their trip to India both parents documented their travels, and showed off that both of their children are water babies.

Candice and Ivy Mae frolicked in the crystal waters of their hotel pool, and the mother joked that her daughter 'won't get out of the water'.

David popped the question to the Australian professional Ironwoman during Australia's tour of South Africa in March 2014 following a whirlwind six-month romance.

The pair wed in a beautiful Sydney ceremony in April last year, just six months after welcoming their first daughter in 2014.
Katie Holmes was seen once again without that diamond band on her ring finger that has prompted repeated speculation she's engaged.

The 37-year-old, who has been spotted wearing it for months, was seen ring-less during a trip to the grocery store in Agoura Hills, outside of LA, on Saturday.

It comes after the ex-wife of Tom Cruise had been linked romantically with actor Jamie Foxx with rumors heating up in the last week or so.

Heading home: Katie Holmes was seen once again without that diamond band on her ring finger from her rumored beau Jamie Foxx

The Dawson's Creek star wore skinny jeans with a cream sweater layered on top of a white T-shirt, adding ballet flats and sunglasses, as she shopped for supplies.

She showed off her svelte frame in the fitted bottoms, pairing it with a knitted lightweight sweater.

Katie carried the grocery bag in one hand with her phone in her other hand while pounding the pavement in light hued flats.

The mom-of-one showed off her natural beauty and flawless complexion by choosing to go makeup free and wearing her brunette locks loose, opting for a deep side part and natural waves for her daytime outing.

Looking good: The 37-year-old, who was seen wearing the band for months, was spotted ring-less during a trip to the grocery store in Agoura Hills, California

Casual day out: The actress wore skinny jeans with a cream sweater layered on top of a white T-shirt, adding ballet flats and sunglasses

This is not the first time she's been seen without the ring.

The beauty headed to a solo dinner in Calabasas on Friday flashing her ring-less finger.

Katie has remained quiet on her love life since her 2012 divorce from Tom Cruise.

Solo outing: This is not the first time she's been seen without the ring; the beauty headed to dinner in Calabasas on Friday flashing her ring-less finger

Mum to daughter Suri, she's has been spotted with the sizeable ring on her engagement finger for months.

In May, Jamie's rep told TMZ that the bands aren't wedding, engagement or promise rings from him.

InTouch's source claims that the actors plan on tying the knot: 'They've discussed eloping or having a small, quiet wedding in an out-of-the-way place.'

Side by side: Katie pictured with Jamie at a 2013 party in East Hampton, New York

Katie is set to make her directorial debut with the film All We Had - which she also stars in as well.

In March, she wrote: 'Cant wait to bring my film ALL WE HAD to @tribeca 2016 April 13-24!.'

The movie is based on Annie Weatherwax's 2014 novel, a drama about a resilient mother and daughter who find strength in each other.

The drama also stars Luke Wilson, Judy Greer, Richard Kind, Mark Consuelos and Eve Lindley.

Having a blast: The beauty showed off the ring while out and about in March




To stand out on a star-studded red carpet you cannot just throw on any old ensemble - and these two ladies certainly did not do that.

Ruby Rose and Lea Michele both made style statements at the 27th Annual GLAAD Media Awards on Saturday night.

The pair proved less is definitely more monochrome looks that demanded attention as soon as they hit the event's red carpet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

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Style statements: Ruby Rose and Lea Michele both made style statements at the 27th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in Beverly Hills on Saturday night

Surprise! Ruby - and the rest of the the award attendees were blown away - when Taylor Swift made a surprise appearance to present the Australian star with her award

While the television stars both embraced the same colour scheme - all-white being the order of the day - their looks could not have looked more different.

Ruby went for a strong and sexy suit which was the perfect vehicle to show off her trim and toned physique.

The 30-year-old star's look consisted of classic elements but had a very modern twist.

The star wore the classically tailored pants with a cropped top that ensured she flashed plenty of skin.

Less is more: Ruby went for a strong and sexy suit which was the perfect vehicle to show off her trim and toned physique

With a twist: The star wore the classically tailored pants with a cropped top that ensured she flashed plenty of skin but was still classy

Just a hint: The actress (pictured with Heather Matarazzo and Keke Palmer - right) did add just a touch of colour to her look with Ruby wearing a green-tinted hair extension braided on to the top of her head

The romper featured a cut-out across the Orange Is The New Black star's stomach and the top then wrapped across her bust creating a cleavage-baring - and tattoo revealing - neckline.

Ensuring the look was chic as well as sexy, the Australian star added a white jacket which she perched on her shoulders.

As the all-white look already made such a statement, Ruby accessorized the outfit just with a pair of white Stuart Weitzman nudist shoes and some stacked rings on her fingers.

Lovely lace: Lea went for a very different all-white look wearing a whimsical lace floor-length Elie Saab dress

Sneak peek: While white lace, the 29-year-old's look was not all conservative and virginal as it was also sheer

Shade of the night: Also embracing the colour white was I Am Cait star, Candis Cayne whose gown had a delicate art deco scalloped pattern on it

Proud pair: After handing over the award to Ruby, the pair headed backstage to pose for pictures

The actress did add just a touch of colour to her look with Ruby wearing a green-tinted hair extension braided on to the top of her head.

The awards is a very big night for the Hollywood newcomer, as Ruby was being honoured with the GLAAD's Stephen F. Kolzak Award, which is presented to an LGBT media professional who has made a significant difference in promoting equality and acceptance for the community.

Her fellow Orange Is The New Black co-star Laverne Cox has previously been presented with the award as has Wanda Sykes, Chaz Bono, Melissa Etheridge, Ellen DeGeneres and Sir Ian McKellen among others.

Stylishly sexy: The 26-year-old walked on the stage to lots of cheers wearing a dramatic long sleeve blue gown with a thigh-high split

Honoured to be honouring: The recording artist appeared over the moon to help recognise Ruby's impact on helping further understanding and acceptance of the LGBT community

Oh la la! The pop star's dress certainly was very sexy despite its long sleeves and floor length

Ruby - and the rest of the the award attendees were blown away - when Taylor Swift made a surprise appearance to present the Australian star with her award.

The 26-year-old walked on the stage to lots of cheers wearing a dramatic long sleeve blue gown with a thigh-high split.

The recording artist appeared over the moon to help recognise Ruby's impact on helping further understanding and acceptance of the LGBT community.

Better late then never: Caitlyn Jenner skipped the red carpet but not her favourite colour - red - with the star making a late and bold entrance

Figure flattering: The star wore a long sleeved dress with a plunging neckline which cinched in at the waist

Recognized: The 66-year-old's E! .show I Am Cait, was nominated for Outstanding Reality Show

Double billing: The star's show tied for top spot with I Am Jazz from TLC which star's 15-year-old trans activist Jazz Jennings and her family (pictured right)

Lea went for a very different all-white look wearing a whimsical lace floor-length dress by Elie Saab.

While white lace, the 29-year-old's look was not all conservative and virginal as it was also sheer.

Lea's dress also had a plunging neckline which showed off the actress' decolletage and had a low back as well.

Call of the wild: Demi Lovato, who certainly embraced her fashion wild side, was honoured at the event

Important role: Nick Jonas presented the Vanguard Award to the star for her efforts to promoted acceptance

Doing her bit: The 23-year-old has been very vocal in her support for the LGBT community and has often spoken about her grandfather who came out as gay during the 1960s

Following Ruby's lead, Lea let her dress be the feature and went without big attention stealing accessories.

Also embracing the colour white was I Am Cait star, Candis Cayne whose gown had a delicate art deco scalloped pattern on it.

Reality show I Am Cait, which follows Caitlyn Jenner, was nominated for Outstanding Reality Show.

Daring look: For her big night, Demi wore a pair of nude flared trousers with black sequins forming a leopard print pattern

Finishing touch: Making her look even harder to miss, the Cool For Summer star wore her pants with a black waist coat with nothing underneath and a suit jacket, styled like it was a cape

How low can she go: Demi - who wore her hair in a sleek half up, half down 'do - had more than her fair share of cleavage on display and posted a SnapChat earlier in the evening poking fun at herself

Double duty: Not only was the singer honoured at the event, she also preformed twice during the evening

Caitlyn skipped the red carpet but not her favourite colour - red - with the star making a late and bold entrance.

The 66-year-old star wore a long sleeved dress with a plunging neckline which cinched in at the waist.

Caitlyn arrived at the party along despite Candis and some of her other co-stars being at the awards.

She's got front: Demi was given a run for her money when it came to exposing cleavage by Nene Leakes

Careful there! The star (pictured with Derek Hiugh) risked a wardrobe malfunction at every turn

Sheer statement: Keke Palmer left little to the imagination in a sheer dress which she wore with just a thong

Also being honoured at the event was Demi Lovato, who certainly embraced her fashion wild side.

Demi was honoured with the Vanguard Award - previously presented to Kerry Washington, Jennifer Lopez and Charlize Theron - for her efforts to promoted acceptance.

The 23-year-old has been very vocal in her support for the LGBT community and has often spoken about her grandfather who came out as gay during the 1960s.

Important evening: Filmmaker Lilly Wachowski made her first public appearance since she came out as transgender last month

Top ging: Lily's series Sense8 was awarded Outstanding Drama Series taking out the top spot against more well known shows Grey's Anatomy, How To Get Away With Murder and Empire

Ladies in black: While the colour white made for a red carpet statement, classic black was also a go-to at the GLAAD Awards as seen on Teri Polo (left) and Judith Light

GLAAD Media Awards Winners 2016 Vanguard Award: Demi Lovato Stephen F. Kolzak Award: Ruby Rose Outstanding Reality Program: 'I Am Cait' and 'I Am Jazz' Outstanding TV Movie or Limited Series: 'Bessie' Best Drama Series: 'Sense8' Outstanding Film Wide Release: 'Carol' Outstanding Comedy Series: 'Transparent' Outstanding Documentary: 'Kumu Hina' Outstanding Daily Drama: 'The Bold and The Beautiful' Outstanding Music Artist: 'Troye Sivan, Blue Neighbourhood' Outstanding Comic Book: 'Lumberjanes' Advertisement

For her big night, Demi wore a pair of nude flared trousers with black sequins forming a leopard print pattern.

Making her look even harder to miss, the Cool For Summer star wore her pants with a black waist coat with nothing underneath and a suit jacket, styled like it was a cape.

Demi - who wore her hair in a sleek half up, half down 'do - had more than her fair share of cleavage on display and posted a SnapChat earlier in the evening poking fun at herself.

Finding balance: Hedging her shade and style bets was Oscar winner Patricia Arquette, who wore a black and white gown

Mastering monochrome: Following Patricia's lead Transparent creator Jill Soloway wore a black and white look. Her show was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series

Simply stunning: Queen Latifah showed off her curves in a simple yet striking black and white gown

Made an impact: The 46-year-old acteess won Outstanding TV Movie or Limited Series for her film Bessie

The star walked the carpet with Nick Jonas, who was tasked with presenting her with her award.

Demi was certainly given a run for her money when it came to exposing cleavage by Nene Leakes, who risked a wardrobe malfunction at every turn.

While the colour white made for a red carpet statement, classic black was also a go-to at the GLAAD Awards.

Breaking the mould: Adding some colour to the style mix was star Zendaya, who wore a midnight blue dress

Sleek and chic: The 19-year-old's red carpet look featured an embellished top with a skirt that had two zippers up the front which she unzipped slightly to create thigh high splits

Performance partner: The actress joined singer Troye Sivan to present the award for Outstanding TV Movie or Limited Series

Thanks for everything: The award winner and the 19-year-old caught up backstage after the presentation

One of those embracing the simple shade was Lilly Wachowski. The Awards was Lilly's first public appearance since she came out as transgender last month.

The filmmaker is the sister of director Lana Wachowski, who came out as transgender in 2012 and the pair form a formidable cinematic team.

Lily's series Sense8 was awarded Outstanding Drama Series taking out the top spot against more well known shows Grey's Anatomy, How To Get Away With Murder and Empire.

Big moment: The Australian singer won Outstanding Music Artist and said he 'could not be prouder'

Different approaches: Not everyone went for over-the-top red carpet looks, comedian Tig Notaro wore a casual ensemble while Paul Abdul wore a cocktail style outfit

Hitting the stage: Luckily Paula wore giant platform heels as she struggled to reach the microphone as she spoke at the awards

Ray of sunshine: Garcelle Beauvais added a pop of colour on the carpet in a luminous yellow and pink dress

Hedging her shade and style bets was Oscar winner Patricia Arquette, who wore a black and white gown.

Adding some colour to the style mix was star Zendaya, whore wore a midnight blue dress.

The 19-year-old's red carpet look featured an embellished top with a skirt that had two zippers up the front which she unzipped slightly to create thigh high splits.

Golden girl: Kat Graham wore head-to-toe gold, rocking a silk romper with tassel belt

Guiding star: The big awards was hosted by Ross Matthews, his third time being the host with the most

Dapper gentlemen: Ross led the way for a bevvy of snappy suits with blue and grey certainly being the shades of choice for the male stars which included Derek Hough (left) and Michael Sam

The big awards was hosted by Ross Matthews and it was his third time being the host with the most.

Ross led the way for a bevvy of snappy suits with blue and grey certainly being the shades of choice for the male stars.

While outside of Hollywood's usual awards season, the GLAAD Media Awards is an extremely important one recognizing film, television and traditional media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

This year the awards are being televised on Logo in a one-hour special premiering Monday at 10pm.
Ronan Keatings wife Storm Uechtritz certainly didn't put a foot wrong when she stepped out at The Champions Day race event on Saturday.

The Australian television producer - who was named ambassador of the derby day race meet - strutted through Sydney's Royal Randwick Racecourse in an eye-catching semi-sheer Self Portrait frock which boasted intricate frills and cut-out detailing that only accentuated her slender curves.

Not wishing to draw attention away from the fancy frock, the blonde beauty kept her look largely uncluttered - accessorising minimally with a black hat.

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Racy in lace! Ronan Keating's stunning wife Storm Uechtritz flaunted her svelte figure in a sheer lace gown at Champions Day at Royal Randwick Racecourse, in Sydney, on Saturday

However, the fashionista made a slight exception to the rule with multiple silver rings and a gold bangle which added a pop of sparkle to the already striking outfit.

The beauty, who hails from North Queensland, wore her long blonde locks in sweeping waves, while applying just the right amount of mascara and kohl eye liner to enhance her big blue eyes.

Storm also applied a nude lipstick and a dusting of pink powder onto her cheeks.

Eye catching attire: The Australian television producer - who was named ambassador of the derby day race meet - strutted through the event in the Self Portrait frock which boasted intricate frills and zipper detailing that only accentuated her slender curves

Thanks! Storm made sure to thank beauty and fashion team for a job well done on her fashionable attire

Break time: Storm was handed Cadbury chocolate for a sugar hit to keep up her race day ambassador credentials

The race day ambassador looked to be in high spirits as she pouted and posed towards the cameraman vying to capture her best side.

She even took to Instagram to upload a series of snaps of her stunning outfit.

In the first of two posts, Storm praised her beauty and fashion team, saying: It's time for the races! Thank you @zenakdor @houseofkdorthese beautiful jewels to compliment my@myer outfit& @neridawinter hat.

In the second snap uploaded to her social media, the beauty posed with a block of Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate.

They found me some chocolate!! Perfect mid-afternoon energy boost between races, she wrote alongside the snap.

Looking good: Ronan Keating looked handsome in a crisp black suit, white button-up shirt and matching black tie

Meanwhile, Ronan looked handsome in a crisp black suit, white button-up shirt and matching black tie.

The Irish-born singer, who performed on the day, completed his suave outfit with black boots and a pair of oversized sunglasses.

Speaking at the race event, the 39-year-old hinted a Boyzone reunion was in the works for their 25th anniversary.

'I think a tour would be the right thing to do': Ronan Keating has teased fans that Boyzone might be heading for a reunion tour in two years

Hot talent: The Irish crooner, who was one of four original members of the band, revealed his hopes at Sydney's Randwick Racecourse on Saturday afternoon

We'll probably mark it somehow. I think a tour would be the right thing to do, he told attendees.

Other possibilities could include a new album, but Ronan agreed the reunion should hark back to some of the group's classics.

It's going to be about nostalgia, it's not going to be about new music really, he added.

Boyzone reunited in 2008 for a highly successful world tour and released a greatest hits album with two new singles.
It was only last month that she took to social media to wish her friend of 13 years a happy birthday.

And Tully Smyth again posted on Instagram on Sunday as her old friend Ruby Rose accepted an award at the 27th Annual GLAAD Awards in Los Angeles.

The former Big Brother housemate gushed about her long-time pal in the caption writing: 'What's that? Oh, that's just my dear friend of 13 years receiving a GLAAD award from Taylor Swift,'

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Proud: Tully Smyth posted on Instagram on Sunday to share a gushing message as her old friend Ruby Rose accepted an award from Taylor Swift at the 27th Annual GLAAD Awards in Los Angeles

Supportive friendship: The former Big Brother housemate gushed about her long-time pal in the caption writing: 'What's that? Oh, that's just my dear friend of 13 years receiving a GLAAD award from Taylor Swift'

The message continued: 'Rubes was honoured with the "Stephen F. Kolzak" award for her work promoting equality and acceptance for the LGBTI community.

'I could not be prouder of you Rugby Rose #GlaadAwards'.

In the image Ruby is dressed in chic white trousers with a matching jacket and reached out to accept the award from Taylor who put on a leggy display in a navy gown a split up her thigh.

The pair smiled brightly at each other and appeared to be engaged in a lively chat as Taylor handed over the GLAAD Award to the Orange Is The New Black star.

Feeling nostalgic? Last month Tully took to Instagram to share a very sweet flashback picture of herself and Ruby to celebrate her friends 30th birthday

Birthday flashback! The image from years ago shows both girls sporting long hair and heavy fringe, while Tully joked in hindsight their hairstyles should have been reconsidered.

Last month Tully took to Instagram to share a very sweet flashback picture of herself and Ruby to celebrate her friends 30th birthday.

The image from years ago shows both girls sporting long hair and heavy fringe, while Tully joked in hindsight their hairstyles should have been reconsidered.

The 28-year-old also revealed that that they weren't always the best of friends when they met as teenagers writing: 'Happy 30th Birthday @rubyrose! When I met you I was 15 years old and you scared the living shit out of me.'

'Now, I couldn't love you more or be prouder of everything you've achieved and the person you've become,' the blogger continued.

'I wish you were home to celebrate with us but know @bananastark will make sure it's one to remember. I love you Mickey. P.S We should never get fringes again.'

The two gal pals regularly feature on each other's social media accounts and always catch up when the Orange Is The New Black visits her native Australia.

Road trip fun: The two friends often feature on each other's social media accounts

Late last year the Melbourne-based blogger pleaded with her friend of 15-years to help her find a date.

In the clip that was uploaded to Instagram by Ruby, Tully sips on a glass of wine while telling her the actress: 'I just think it's really rude you don't use your five million followers to get me a date'.

Ruby quickly corrected her oversight, posting the video with the caption: 'It's time she had good loving. She's right, I haven't spent enough time finding her a date.'

Girls night out: The 28-year-old blogger first met Ruby during the 2003 Girlfriend Magazine Model Search competition

Tully's luck in love seems to have changed since November after recently being romantically linked to Richie Strahan - the 2016 Bachelor.

The blogger seems to be doing a lot of reminiscing of late, and recently re-posted a photo originally taken during a sunny holiday last year, of her staring out to sea in a striking two-piece.

She put on an incredibly leggy display in a funky two-piece from Aussie designers N.L.P Women and flashed plenty of flesh in a yellow, zip-up bikini top, while concealing her gaze behind a pair of Valley sunglasses.

Meanwhile, she played the role of captain in a sailor's hat, as her glorious blonde hair flicked about in the sea breeze over her left shoulder.

Reflecting on her past holiday, she captioned the image: 'This time last year I was manning my own cruise.  #YoungBloldTravel' (sic).

Ahoy! Tully shared this bikini-clad throwback snap with her 241,000 Instagram followers over the weekend - days after her rumoured ex-fling Richie Strahan was announced as the 2016 Bachelor

Lovers no more: Although saying she has no luck in finding a date, Tully has recently been romantically linked to 2016 Bachelor Richie Strahan
Its the show that constantly delivers the unexpected for viewers as well as for contestants.

And on Sunday night this years My Kitchen Rules, hopefuls were surprised when they were forced to cook for returning cooks from previous years.

But returning contestant Sophia Pou ruffled the judges' feathers as she took on judging duties herself while slamming contestants quality of food leaving them open-mouthed.

She's back! Returning contestant Sophia Pou ruffled feathers on My Kitchen Rules on Sunday as she took on judging duties along with 19 other returnees

While taking bite of the first dish of the evening - Carmine and Lauren's Quail with mushroom thyme broth, the controversial star made it known she was less than impressed.

'I like the idea of this dish but it's just not where it needs to be,' she said.

Upon the second main course Sophia left her 19 fellow former constants speechless when she compared Mike and Tarq's peared seared duck breast with Thai curry sauce and pineapple fried rice to a dead rat.

Hard: While on the show she slammed this year's contestants' dishes, labelling Carmine and Lauren's Quail with mushroom thyme broth a poor effort

No limit: Upon the second main Sophia left her fellow former constants speechless when she compared Mike and Tarq's peared seared duck breast with Thai curry sauce and pineapple fried rice to a dead rat

'Well, look, the sauce was good, it wasn't that bad but then the duck it was probably one of the worst things I have ever put in my mouth,' she stated bluntly.

'It was like a rat had died in a shoe,' she concluded leaving the table gobsmacked.

For the second half of the episode she continued to hit out at New South Wales contestants Cookie and Chris for their inspired Taco dessert.

'It is great to have good ideas but you need them to work and there needs to be harmony on the plate...I don't know where they are going but I don't want to go there again,' Sophia said.

She went on to describe Eve and Jason's crepes with pickled orange and candied walnuts dessert as simply 'not good'.

'I just don't know who is telling them that this is good. I would really question my friends and what they were telling me because this was not a very nice dish for a signature dish.

Disgusted: She said: 'Well look the sauce was good, it wasn't that bad but then the duck it was probably one of the worst things I have ever put in my mouth...It was like a rat had died in a shoe'

Outspoken: She went on to describe Eve and Jason's crepes with pickled orange and candied walnuts dessert as simply 'not good' while adding 'I would love to never see this dish again'

'And I would love to never ever see this dish again.'

Former Dancing With The Stars finalist, Ash Pollard, appeared to be back to her devilish self with in the episode as she sat alongside bestie Camilla Counsel.

The cook, more famous for her wild tresses, told the camera: 'Their fate's in our hands,' adding an evil laugh while tapping her fingers together like a Hollywood villain.

Also returning to the kitchen for the challenge was Cowboy Rob Murphy and daughter Lynzey Murphy from last year along with 2015 winners Will Stewart and Steve Flood.

Leigh Sexton and Jennifer 'Princess' Evans from the 2012 series also returned as well as 2013 winners Dan and Steph.

My Kitchen Rules continues on Monday at 7.30pm on Channel Seven.
She sizzles as she strikes a sexy pose on the latest cover of Elle Magazine.

And Kerry Washington was once more a sight to behold as she attended a dinner that was thrown in her honour by the magazine at A.O.C. in Los Angeles on Saturday night.

The 39-year-old looked exquisite in a floral print turtleneck gown as she made a poised appearance at the candle lit bash.

Hello petal: Kerry Washington was a sight to behold as she attended an Elle bash thrown in her honour at A.O.C. in Los Angeles on Saturday night

Kerry's modest yet striking frock featured a pattern of bright and multicoloured spring flowers and a flattering cinched waistline to highlight her hourglass figure.

Hair braided across her forehead, the Scandal actress drew attention to her stunning features with smoky eye shadow and light pink blush for added radiance.

She also carried a black clutch and wore a pair of sexy heels.

On the April cover of Elle magazine, Kerry wears a sporty grey sweatshirt and a sexy, tousled 'do of bed head.

Flower power: Kerry's modest yet striking frock featured a pattern of bright and multicoloured spring flowers and a flattering cinched waistline to highlight her hourglass figure

Cheers! Washington cosied up to the super stylish Rachel Zoe, who wore a fluffy jacket and carried her glass

The actress admitted in the glossy that she looked up to the real life Olivia Pope, who she plays on the hit drama Scandal.

'Even though Olivia Pope has obviously made the decision that she is not a mom, playing her made me feel like I could be a mom. Because she knows there's always another waythere's always a way to fix it, there's always a way to solve it, to win.'

She added: 'And I feel like playing her made me feel like, All right, I can do it. I will figure out how to juggle it all.'

Meeting her match! The actress even had the chance to mingle with the real-life Anita Hill, who Kerry portrays in Confirmation, as well as Movado Group CEO Efraim Grinberg

White hot! Rachel looked bohemian chic in her off-the-shoulder dress, while mom-to-be Erika Christensen highlighted her bump with a peplum tank and off-white skirt

The beauty also gushed over show creator Shonda Rhimes.

'She's been such an amazing resource, as a mom, and as a working mom...I am on one show and I have one kid, and she has three shows and kids,' she said.

Aside from her role on Scandal, Kerry will also be seen in the HBO drama Confirmation.

Kerry plays law professor Anita Hill, whose landmark 1991 testimony that she had been sexually harassed by then-Supreme Court nominee Thomas opened up a national dialogue about sexual harassment in the workplace.

The movie premieres on April 16.

Simply chic: Ellen Pompeo kept it stylishly cosy in a silky black frock
Two stars of reality TV series The Only Way Is Essex partied with an on-the-run drug smuggler while holidaying on the Costa del Sol.

Fugitive Gerard Hagan posted photographs online of James Lock and Jake Hall on days and nights out together while they were in Marbella filming their latest series.

The 31-year-old - caught in one of the biggest ever cocaine seizures in the British Isles - took selfies with the pair while out at sea, in a club and driving around the holiday hotspot.

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Two stars of reality TV series The Only Way Is Essex partied with an on-the-run drug smuggler while holidaying on the Costa del Sol. Fugitive Gerard Hagan posted photographs online of James Lock and Jake Hall on days and nights out together while they were in Marbella filming their latest series

The 31-year-old (right) - caught in one of the biggest ever cocaine seizures in the British Isles - took selfies with the pair while out at sea, in a club and driving around the holiday hotspot

Both men are believed to have been unaware of Hagan's criminal past as they let their hair down alongside him on the Spanish coast in September last year.

The snaps only emerged last week.

A source close to James, 29, and Jake, 25, told the Sunday People: 'They were having a great time with Gerard. They were living the high life  going to the best clubs, driving the best cars.'

Hagan was jailed in November 2008 at Cork Circuit Criminal Court after pleading guilty to his part in the audacious transatlantic cocaine trafficking plot

Star-struck Hagan put pictures of his nights out with the duo on Instagram.

The drug baron was jailed in 2008 after being found guilty of being involved in the shipment of 350million worth of cocaine off the Irish coast.

He was paid 5,000 to for his role in attempting to smuggle 1.5 tonnes of the Class A drug into Britain from the Caribbean via Ireland.

Their plan unravelled when the group tried to transfer 62 bales of the drug from a yacht to a dingy.

The inflatable capsized in rough seas after being overloaded with the illegal cargo and accidentally being filled with diesel instead of petrol.

Hagan ditched the vessel and swam ashore, running to a nearby farmhouse for help.

However, he was eventually arrested and ended up with a ten-year jail sentence.

Two years later he was transferred from Ireland to HMP Kirkham, Lancashire, but absconded in 2012.

Police rearrested him on the Costa del Sol in 2013, sending him back to the UK where his jail time was extended by another six months.

He was soon released on parole but wanted by police not long later after breaching the terms of his licence.

Living it up: Lapping up the luxury lifestyle of the Spanish resort, Hagan, (top left) from Merseyside, and James (top right) were pictured in a nightclub alongside another male companion

Hagan found himself back in custody at the start of this year after Spanish police detained him over allegations he was involved in yet another huge shipment of cocaine, this time worth 480million.

He was one of five men from Merseyside lifted after three tons of the drug were found in a warehouse in Galicia, north-west Spain, along with 730,000 in euros and a gun.
She's known for being a bit of a chameleon when it comes to her style.

And Kylie Jenner switched it up again in a retro-inspired golden sheath and opulent fur coat for an outing to celebrity hotspot The Nice Guy in West Hollywood on Saturday night.

The 18-year-old reality star looked like modern day pin-up in the demure outfit but still managed to display a flash of leg and a hint of cleavage for the night out.

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Golden girl: Kylie Jenner looked like modern day pin-up in the demure nude outfit as she arrived at the exclusive eatery The Nice Guy in West Hollywood on Saturday night

Kylie stunned in the golden ribbed dress that reached past her knees in an uncharacteristically long length and hugged her toned curves.

Letting her fur coat dangle off one shoulder, the social media star complemented the ensemble with some nude suede courts.

Her long raven tresses cascaded past her shoulders in a straight style, and she outlined her famously full pout with a dewy pink lipstick, opting for a touch of eyeliner for her peepers.

See more of the latest on Kylie Jenner as she flaunts her ample assets in a gold midi dress

Legs for days: The 18-year-old reality star shimmered in the retro-inspired golden sheath and opulent fur coat

Strike a pose: the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star complemented the ensemble with some nude suede courts

Sporting a deep golden glow, the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star seemed in high spirits as she sauntered down the street.

Flicking her long hair and raising a finger to her lips, the LA-born teen looked at ease in front of photographers.

Kylie - who is dating rapper Tyga - cast a coy glance to the ground before making her entrance to the exclusive eatery.

In the nude: Kylie let her long raven tresses cascades past her shoulders and outlined her famously full pout with a dewy pink lipstick

Pin-up: The LA-born sgtar opted for a flick of winged eyeliner and a dash of irridescent shimmer to outline her peepers

Gold star: Kylie flicked out her dark tresses as she sauntered through the night

Furry nice: Kylie covered up in lavish fur coat which complemented her dress perfectly

Changing her tune: Kylie had plenty of time for her fans in stark contrast to another recent night out in which she asked a young girl not to touch her

In demand: The star proved popular with her young fans who were thrilled to meet their idol

Model moment: Kendall Jenner showed off her supermodel stems to perfection in caged thigh-high boots and a racy side-split skirt

Rear of the year: The social media star flaunted her perky posterior in the black skintight skirt

Kylie was joined by her older sister Kendall, 20, who strutted her stuff in her favoured Sophia Webster thigh-high Mila boots that featured a racy caged design and fluffy pom poms at the back.

She paired the killer footwear with a bodycon black skirt, which hugged her every curve and revealed a tantalizing amount of toned thigh due to the cut-out side panels.

Keeping the rest of her look casual, Kendall opted for a simple sleeveless tank in a mink-grey hue and carried a quirky Givenchy goat hair bag.

The reality star kept her glossy raven tresses loose and fuss-free and opted for just a slick of rose-pink lipgloss and a sweep of mascara to highlight her striking features.

Natural beauty: Kendall kept her glossy raven tresses loose and fuss-free and opted for just a slick of rose-pink lipgloss and a sweep of mascara to highlight her striking features

Legs for days: The 20-year-old model's choice of skirt - which featured a garter-like strappy detail - ensured she showcased a lot more thigh than perhaps she bargained for

The outing comes after Kylie enjoyed a little weekend getaway with friends and documented it on Snapchat.

The teen reality star got behind the wheel of a SUV for part of their trip and took her pals on something of a wild ride.

And the star appeared to have a blast as she sped along the bumpy route.

In control: Kylie Jenner took thge wheel as she drove her pals through rough terrains in a SUV

In a video shared to Snapchat, Kylie is seen taking control of the wheel, racing through the dirt road.

She begins to yell, 'Oh my!' in a playful manner, as best friend Jordyn Woods is heard off camera yelling in agreement.

A male pal is heard yelling, 'faster!' while the fourth member of the group is heard yelling, 'no!'

Just Kylie: The pretty teen made sure to snap a selfie while on her weekend trip

Easy attire: Kylie was California cool in a plain white T-shirt with matching trainers

Kylie was California cool in a plain white T-shirt with matching trainers.

The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star added a pair of light-wash denim shorts, complete with a worn in look.

Best friend Jordyn Woods layered a maroon coat over a bright top while their male companion wore a casual T-shirt and athletic pants.

Snack time! The teen made her way to a truck filled with healthy goodies

Drink up! Following the groups' outing, the Lip Kit owner grabbed a juice from a nearby fruit stand

Enjoying nature: Later, the raven-haired teen made time to pose in front of a bed of orange and yellow flowers. 'Getaway,' she captioned the Instagram snap

During another portion of her Snapchat, Kylie shared the view from her father's Malibu mansion.

Following the groups' outing, the Lip Kit owner grabbed a juice from a nearby fruit stand.

Later, the raven-haired teen made time to pose in front of a bed of orange and yellow flowers.

'Getaway,' she captioned the Instagram snap.
He's undoubtedly the man of the moment after wowing audiences with his steamy performance on The Night Manager.

And Tom Hiddleston was keen to discuss his monumental acting success in the chatty thespian series, Variety Studio: Actors On Actors in Los Angeles, California on Saturday, alongside fellow Aaron Paul.

The 35-year-old actor charmed in a sky-blue shirt which was casually undone at the top, displaying a hint of chest hair allowing his fans to continue with their swooning dedication.

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Ready to talk: Tom Hiddleston, 35, was keen to discuss his monumental acting success in chatty thespian series, Variety Studio: Actors On Actors in Los Angeles, California on Saturday

Acting buddies: Tom posed with Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul, 36, ahead of their segment

Balancing out the casual element of his look, Tom suited up in a navy blazer which clung on to his lean physique with a single done button.

Standing tall at 6 ft 1 in, he wore a pair of black skinny jeans which complemented his grey suede lace shoes by Aquatalia.

Raring to go, the British actor sported a pleased look on his face as he charmed with a head of perfectly styled hair.

Embracing the Californian atmosphere, the Thor actor no doubt looked genuinely relaxed at his solidified presence in the acting business.

Casually smart: Tom balanced out the smart element of his look with a sky-blue shirt underneath which was casually undone at the top, displaying a hint of chest hair

Tom, who made hearts flutter in a derriere-exposing sex scene with actress Elizabeth Debicki in the BBC One series The Night Manager, posed with Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul who was also on hand to talk about his acting career to date.

Shortly after, the duo took to the set where they had a frank and hearty chatter with a television screen in the background with the show's name advertised on it.

At one point Aaron, 36, looked fascinated by Tom as he continued to disclose tales of his experience in the business.

Experts in their field: The duo took to the set where they had a frank and hearty chatter with a television screen in the back ground with the show's name in the background

Some advice? At one pint Aaron looked fascinated by Tom as he continued to disclose tales of his experience in the business

Suave: The Brit actor wowed audiences in his BBC drama The Night Manager

Waiting in the wings was Jennifer Lopez who wore a stylish purple ensemble as she sat down with actress Felicity Huffman as they exposed their stories of years past.

Meanwhile, it's thought that Tom is the front-runner to land a role that could blow all of his previous parts out of the water as fans continue to urge for the heartthrob to take over from Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Tom's adorers dashed to Twitter where they called for the hunk to play 007, after the Night Manager came to an end last Sunday and they didn't want to let his charmingly good looks go to waste.

The former Eton College student did nothing to quell rumours that he could be in line to fill Craig's shoes, after his character ordered the secret agent's signature drink in the concluding episode.

Posing pretty: Jennifer Lopez, 46, was also on set of Variety Studio: Actors on Actors with Felicity Huffman

Stunner: The mom of two paired the look with shimmery eye makeup, kohl lined lids, a touch of blush on her cheeks and nude lip gloss; pictured with Aaron Paul

The star has been playing the lead role of Jonathan Pine in the John Le Carre adaptation, and last week he sent fans into meltdown after uttering the words: 'Excuse me, sir? Can I have a vodka martini please?'

It is said that the franchise's producer Barbara Broccoli initially through Tom was 'too posh' to play James Bond but now has an altered state of mind on the casting.

'She wasn't familiar with his whole catalogue, but she's watched hours and hours of footage and her perception has totally changed,' an insider mentioned.

Luther stand-out Idris Elba, Homeland's Damian Lewis and even Poldark's Aidan Turner have all been in the running to play the legendary Secret Service agent.
The cast of Real Housewives of Melbourne kept their cool as they arrived to film the explosive series three reunion special in the Victorian capital this week.

If past episodes are anything to go by, the Q&A with fashion designer Alex Perry is set to be a tense showdown between the glamourous reality TV stars when it airs in early May on Arena.

But ahead of the scandalous debrief - which reportedly took place at a film studio in Ripponlea, Melbourne on Saturday - Pettifleur Berenger and Gina Liano looked perfectly poised for the cameras.

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There's going to be drama! Arriving to film the series three reunion show on Saturday, The Real Housewives of Melbourne's Pettifleur Berenger (R) and Gina Liano (L) looked suitably poised and glammed up for the cameras

Mum-of-two Gina cut a remarkably elegant figure in a stunning silver gown with a thigh-high split that showed off her long, bronzed legs.

The busy barrister also appeared to clutch a white fur coat as she was closely followed by a camera crew while strutting to the entrance to the studios.

Finishing off her vintage Hollywood look, the 48-year-old beauty opted for an over-sized, glitzy ring that matched her sheer dress and shiny silver platform heels.

Making a scene: Mum-of-two Gina (pictured) cut a remarkably elegant figure in a stunning silver gown with a thigh-high split that showed off her long, bronzed legs.

Smile for the camera! The busy barrister also appeared to clutch a white fur coat as she was closely followed by a film crew while strutting to the entrance to the studios

Finishing off her vintage Hollywood look, the 48-year-old beauty opted for an over-sized, glitzy ring that matched her sheer dress and shiny silver platform heels

Meanwhile, Sri Lankan-born Pettifleur looked effortlessly chic in a pair of high-waisted, monochrome cropped trousers.

The mother-of-three, 51, complemented her lower half with a stylish white top and matching pumps and wore her caramel hair loosely.

The property developer - who is in a relationship with partner of nine years Frank Palazzo - was seen leaving a black car and taking out clothes with a male assistant before making her way to the studio front doors.

Meanwhile, Sri Lankan-born Pettifleur (pictured) looked effortlessly chic in a pair of high-waisted, monochrome cropped trousers

A change of clothes? The property developer was also seen leaving a black car and taking out clothes with a male assistant before making her way to the studio front doors

Stylish display: The mother-of-three, 51, complemented her lower half with a stylish white top and matching pumps and wore her caramel hair loosely, as she was spotted beside an item of Louis Vuitton rolling luggage

Elsewhere, she was spotted beside an item of Louis Vuitton rolling luggage while speaking with several members of the Real Housewives backstage crew.

Janet Roach, 57, also made her entrance in suitably extravagant style - clutching a Louis Vuitton handbag and stepping out of her luxury Mercedes Benz.

The blonde, from Mornington Peninsula, bundled up in a fur-lined black coat over a pink top and slinked into a pair of figure-hugging skinny jeans.

Turning heads: Janet Roach, 57, also made her entrance in suitably extravagant style - clutching a Louis Vuitton handbag and stepping out of her luxury Mercedes Benz

Looking chic: The blonde bundled up in a fur-lined black coat over a pink top and slinked into a pair of figure-hugging skinny jeans

In good company: Janet - mother to two adult children, Paul, 31, and Jake, 27 - looked positively runway ready in a pair of black, lace-up high heels, as she was joined by a smartly dressed minder

Janet - mother to two adult children, Paul, 31, and Jake, 27 - looked positively runway ready in a pair of black, lace-up high heels, as she was joined by a smartly dressed minder.

But as the Foxtel cameras rolled, she tried to make a low key entrance by concealing her gaze behind dark sunglasses and wearing her platinum blonde locks pulled back in a low bun.

In stark contrast to her glittering co-stars, however, housewife Lydia Schiavello chose to conceal her designer outfit beneath a long black coat.

Low key entrance: In stark contrast to her glittering co-stars, housewife Lydia Schiavello (pictured) chose to conceal her designer outfit beneath a long black coat

Straight to the dressing room! Opting for comfort in a pair of white Adidas sneakers, it would seem she was saving fans a glimpse of her long black sheer gown until the reunion show's scheduled broadcast next month

Dressing for comfort in a pair of white Adidas sneakers, it would seem she was saving fans a glimpse of her long black sheer gown until the reunion show's scheduled broadcast next month.

The wife of architect Andrew Norbury also opted for a pair of shades and let her raven black hair tumble loosely across her shoulders as she held tightly to her purse and a black leather handbag.

Meanwhile, hospitality mogul Chyka Keebaugh also didn't quite look her glamorous self as she appeared in business mode for the TV taping.

Going for smart casual: Hospitality mogul Chyka Keebaugh (pictured) also didn't quite look her glamorous self as she appeared in business mode for the TV taping

Dressing down: The Big Group co-founder, 47, opted for an all-black ensemble and comfortable shoes, and accessorised with sunglasses and a brown handbag

The Big Group co-founder, 47, opted for an all-black ensemble and comfortable shoes, and accessorised with sunglasses and a brown handbag.

For the reunion special, the housewives - including Gamble Breaux, Jackie Gillies, and Susie McLean - will join designer and TV personality Alex Perry to reflect on the drama of the past series.

The 90-minute episode - which premieres on Sunday May 8 on Arena - will see the cast members navigate treacherous waters and set the record straight over the year's highs and lows.

From Pettifleurs black widow taunts about Gamble, to rumours of an extramarital affair, Jackies baby dilemma and Gambles Byron Bay wedding - series three of Real Housewives was arguably the most eventful yet.
Kerry Katona has blasted claims she is dating a convicted murderer.

The Sun reported that the former pop starlet had enjoyed an 'instant connection' with Kevin Lane, 48, who spent 18 years in jail after shooting a car dealer in 1994.

The 35-year-old former Atomic Kitten star slammed the claims in a series of Twitter posts, in which she deemed the story 'the biggest pile of s**t ever'.

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Troubles? Kerry Katona has blasted claims she is dating a convicted murderer after The Sun reported that the former pop starlet had enjoyed an 'instant connection' with Kevin Lane, 48

Kerry took to the microblogging site to a series of messages at the publication, in which she revealed that her spokespeople denied the story yet it was run anyway.

The mother-of-four wrote: This is the biggest pile of s**t ever!!! I am not dating bloody anyone!!!!!!!!... Even though you rang my people who told you its not true why do you still print it!

The Sun claimed that Kerry met Kevin on a night out in central London last month, after a friend invited him and she later locked lips with him.

Alleged suitor: Kevin Lane (pictured), who spent 18 years in jail after shooting a car dealer in 1994, was reported to be Kerry's new man although she staunchly denied the claim

Denial: The 35-year-old former Atomic Kitten star slammed the claims in a series of Twitter posts, in which she deemed the story 'the biggest pile of s**t ever'

Denial: The mother-of-four wrote: This is the biggest pile of s**t ever!!! I am not dating bloody anyone!!!!!!!!... Even though you rang my people who told you its not true why do you still print it!'

Shocked! Kerry staunchly denied the reports about her alleged new romance

Sources told The Sun: 'There was an instant connection between Kevin and Kerry. She was very wrapped up in him and they left arm in arm and kissing.

'Its the last thing she needs now. If shed had an inkling she wouldnt have gone near him.'

A representative for Kerry told MailOnline: 'Kerry had never met him before that evening. He was invited by a friend of a friend to join their group for part of the evening. She certainly had no idea of his history and in no way was it a date.'

Love life! The Sun claimed that Kerry met Kevin on a night out in central London last month, after a friend invited him and she later locked lips with him

Single sensational: Although she later deleted her exchange with the newspaper, she did take to Twitter again to hark about her single life and her insistence on waiting for the right man

Slammed: Kerry took to the microblogging site to a series of messages at the publication, in which she revealed that her spokespeople denied the story yet it was run anyway

Although she later deleted her exchange with the newspaper, she did take to Twitter again to hark about her single life and her insistence on waiting for the right man.

She added: 'I'm single, not because I'm scared. I'm single because I have set my standards higher & I'm not settling for anything less!!!!

'You can't love life if you don't live it and you cant live life if you don't love it. So love life, live life, and add a little spice :) xxx'

Lost love: Although she later deleted her exchange with the newspaper, she did take to Twitter again to hark about her single life and her insistence on waiting for the right man (pictured with ex-husband Mark Croft

Kerry's staunch denial comes just a day after she was spied out and about near her East Sussex home looking healthy and happy.

Sporting a chilled out ensemble comprising of a grey camouflage tracksuit and cream sheepskin boots, she looked completely relaxed as she exited a shop, where she went entirely make-up free while scraping her blonde tresses into a high bun.

While Kerry looked carefree on Saturday, she was caught in yet another media storm this week after it was claimed she was uncontrollably drunk following a flight to Gran Canaria.

The star was snapped lying on the ground with her trousers around her ankles after reportedly drinking on the flight.
She's known for her love of fashion and Nicole Richie proved that she can still look stylish no matter how low-key her look.

The 34-year-old was pictured holding hands with her adorable daughter Harlow, eight, from her marriage to Joel Madden when she arrived at the BossNotes: Leading with Style event.

Held at the WestfieldTopanga Mall in Woodland Hills, CA, Nicole looked perfectly at ease as she arrived at the event.

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Style icon: Nicole Richie wore her own relaxed style when she gave a fashion talk at the Westfield Topanga Mall in Woodland Hills, CA, on Saturday

Sweet: The 34-year-old was pictured holding hands with her adorable daughter Harlow, eight, from her marriage to Joel Madden when she arrived at the BossNotes: Leading with Style event

She wore a black pussybow blouse for the outing, tucked into Seventies-inspired flare jeans , adding some height with ankle boots which had a metal heel.

She wore her short blonde locks in a tousled style and completed her look with a pair of elegant gold drop earrings.

Nicole was in good company on the day as her good friend Katherine Schwarzenegger was also in tow.

Chic: She wore a black pussybow blouse for the outing, tucked into Seventies-inspired flare jeans , adding some height with ankle boots which had a metal heel

Stunning: She wore her short blonde locks in a tousled style and completed her look with a pair of elegant gold drop earrings

She went for a glam but low-key look in an all black ensemble which consisted of an edgy leather biker jacket and slim-fitting trousers.

Lionel Richie's daughter tweeted about the day, writing about how much fun she had:

She said: 'So excited to visit @westfieldtop this Saturday to join @whowhatwear for a fun #bossnotes panel on How to Balance it All" #ad

Pals: Nicole was in good company on the day as her good friend Katherine Schwarzenegger was also in tow

Nicole's reality show Candidly Nicole ended its second season run on VH1 in September and the cable network has yet to announce a decision whether to bring it back for a third time.

Last month, it was Nicole went along for the ride as she trailed Good Charlotte - her husband Joel Madden's band with his brother Benji - as they toured across the UK and Ireland.

Good Charlotte supported the group All Time Low, but Nicole and Benji's wife Cameron Diaz were there to support their mates and Nicole made it a family affair, bringing along the couple's children.
They co-starred in the Oscar-winning Imitation Game, famously getting on together.

So it was little surprise that Allen Leech decided to drop-by and visit his friend Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of his latest film, Doctor Strange, while he was in New York on Saturday.

Arriving on the latest Marvel film's set in Manhattan with Benedict's niece, Emily Peacock, the 38-year-old actor cut a casual figure as he dropped by to say hello to the film's leading man.

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Dropping by: Allen Leech decided to drop-by and visit his friend Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of his latest film, Doctor Strange, while he was in New York on Saturday - along with the Marvel star's niece

Apparently nonplussed by the busy crew and cast scattered all over the street - where scenes for an epic action scene were being shot - the Downton Abbey star and his companion cut a relaxed pair.

Strolling along side-by-side, Allen looked at ease in the company of the pretty blonde, and the pair chatted away in an animated fashion.

Clearly enjoying some downtime after wrapping up filming on his first post-Downton feature, Hunter's Prayer, the chiseled actor cut a very casual figure.

Opting for a dress-down look the award-winning actor opted to wear a brown Belstaff leather jacket over a simple grey tee.

A long way from Branson: Arriving on the latest Marvel film's set in Manhattan, the 38-year-old actor cut a casual figure as he dropped by to say hello to the film's leading man

He rounded his casual look off with a smart flourish, wearing a pair of crisp black chinos and a pair of tan brogues.

And clearly having long forgotten about his Downton character Tom Branson's clean-cut image, the star added a rugged edge to his look with a smattering of stubble.

His pretty blonde companion had also opted for a casual yet smart look, Donned a belted mid-length navy overcoat, skinny denim jeans and a pair of jazzy slip on trainers

Clearly feeling the chill in the air, she wore a voluminous leopard-print scarf underneath her jacket.

She looked well-prepared for the excursion, as she carried a multitude of bag and a trusty umbrella to combat the city's changeable spring weather.

The pair were later seen chatting away to Benedict as he held court in-between takes, in full-costume.

Dressed from head-to-toe as Doctor Steven Strange, the titular hero of the marvel film, the 39-year-old actor had clearly done his research when it came to the sorcerer comic book hero.

MailOnline has contacted a representative of Allen's for comment.
It was a drawn-out process that left Melbourne socialite Brynne Edelsten maintaining she owes lawyers $70,000 in court fees as she continues her divorce.

But after saying she felt 'screwed' forking out legal bills, her ex businessman husband Geoffrey, 72, insists the bombshell, 33, he was married to for four years pocketed in excess of $4million from him.

Former medic Geoffrey told Daily Mail Australia on Sunday: 'In the four years we were married, she's had a total of, if not more than, $4million from me in in clothes, jewellery and travel.

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Happier times: Socialite Brynne Edelsten reportedly owes lawyers $70,000 in court fees from her legal battle with ex-husband Geoffrey but he says she could have sold the dresses he bought her to pay the legal bills

'She could have sold the gowns if she was that worried about owing money to lawyers,' he said.

He went on: 'I bought her designer dresses, paid for air fares for her and her family to go to Tahiti for her birthday several years ago and to fly her family to Australia several times.

'She was dripping in jewellery I bought her...she had it all. I don't think of her at all. I wish her well and hope she copes with life well after me.'

Rollercoaster: The pair wed in a lavish $3 million affair at Melbournes Crown Casino in November 2009 but split in early 2014. Pictured a year earlier at Melbourne Cup Day

Brynne and Geoffrey, who share a 40 year age gap, wed in a lavish $3 million affair at Melbournes Crown Casino in November 2009.

They split in early 2013 amid speculation Geoffrey had taken another woman on holiday after meeting her on sugardaddyforme.com.

At the time he vociferously denied any wrong-doing, saying he did pay for American woman Stacy Da Silva to travel with him to Miami but the trip was strictly business.

Socialite: Brynne is pictured at the Melbourne Myer Bourke Street reopening and 100th birthday in 2011

Glittering gowns: Her ex husband says he bought her dresses and jewellery

Out and about: She is seen at WHO 'Sexiest People' Party in 2011

The pair have since battled it out in the family law courts with Brynne pushing for a slice of Geoffrey's cash as part of her divorce settlement.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Sunday, Brynne said: 'Its been really stressful and tough. I feel really frustrated,' she said after reappearing in the Melbourne Federal Court court.

'Its left me, financially, in a really tough place trying to cover things...Ive gone through all my savings.'

MGA Lawyers Mark Geremia went on to explain that Brynne owed the firm $70,000 and that they have 'begun bankruptcy proceedings.

'We issued a proceeding to recover the debt and she failed to file a defence,' he stated.

Night life: She is sen in a bejewelled dress and heels at Marquee Nightclub in Sydney in 2013

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Brynne for further comment.

Last year Brynne opened up about her ongoing divorce to the Herald Sun claiming her former partner got really nasty.

'It got really nasty and I hate confrontation, which made it hard, she told the publication.

'If I were to get married again and knew what I had to go through, I would never have even considered it.

The one after Brynne: Geoffrey also moved on with controversial model Gabi Grecko who he married last June at a registry office in Melbourne. The pair split four months later

Since splitting with the medical entrepreneur she had been in a budding relationship with trainer Cemre Volkan, known by the moniker Red Ra, but separated from him in March last year.

They are since believed to have rekindled their romance and have been spotted in recent weeks.

For his part Geoffrey moved on with controversial model Gabi Grecko who he married last June at a registry office in Melbourne. The pair split four months later.
He's famed for his passion for his causes almost as much as his acting ability, even advocating for the struggle of climate change during his Oscars acceptance speech.

So it should be no surprise that Leonardo DiCaprio understands a bit of traction comes with the territory, such as the way the Indonesian government recently threatened to ban him after some unflattering Instagram posts.

However, the 41-year-old looked absolutely unfazed after the controversial visit as he casually took in the Long Beach ePrix in California on Sunday.

See Leonardo DiCaprio updates as he enjoys the Long Beach ePrix in California

Not bothered: Leonardo DiCaprio looked relaxed as he enjoyed the Long Beach ePrix in California on Sunday after the Indonesian government recently threatened to ban him

Threatened: The 41-year-old upset the government after a recent visit in which he condemned the palm oil industry, which he says is destroying the country's rain forests and endangering wildlife

Leonardo looked laid-back in a light blue button down shirt which he sported with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

He coupled the collared shirt with a pair of fitted, dark wash jeans, and stood with his hands in either pocket as he chatted with the CEO of Formula E Holdings Alejandro Agag.

As was announced this past October, the two are set to be working together as Leonardo chairs the organization's newly-created Formula E Sustainability Committee.

The committee will focus on such environmental issues as the long-term imprint Formula E has on the cities in which it races.

Laid-back: Leonardo dressed casually in a light blue button down with fitted, dark wash jeans

In good company: The star was seen chatting with the CEO of Formula E Holdings Alejandro Agag, with whom he is working as the chair of the organization's Formula E Sustainability Committee

Leonardo accessorized his casual look for Sunday with a textured, grey newsboy cap, hiding his eyes behind a stylish pair of black sunglasses.

He was later spotted enjoying the race alongside friends Vincent Laresca and Bert Hedaya as they sipped on Champagne.

The Oscar winner looked completely unfazed after being criticized by the Indonesian government for posts he had shared on social media during his recent visit.

Incognito: The Revenant star accessorized with a textured, grey newsboy cap as well as a pair of black sunglasses as he watched the race

Relaxed: Despite his recent drama with Indonesia, Leonardo looked laid-back as he enjoyed the race on Sunday while sipping Champagne with friends

He garnered the ire of the government after condemning the country's palm oil industry, which he says is destroying the country's rain forests and endangering wildlife.

In response to Leonardo's posts, Heru Santoso, the spokesman for the Directorate General for Immigration at the Law and Human Rights Ministry, said: 'We support his concern to save the Leuser ecosystem. But we can blacklist him from returning to Indonesia at any time if he keeps posting incitement or provocative statements in his social media.'

And while no one had complained about the Wolf of Wall Street star yet, Heru explained that companies and organizations have the right to request that immigration authorities ban him from reentering Indonesia.

A call for help: The Oscar winner could be seen posing with a Sumatran Orangutan in one post, as he praised the work of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, asking fans to donate and support

Impassioned: Along with fellow actors Adrien Brody and Fisher Stevens, Leonardo toured Gunung Leuser National Park in Aceh as part of his controversial visit

In one post - which has now received 463k likes - the actor was seen posing alongside a Sumatran Orangutan as he pleaded for his fans' help.

'As the forest of the #Indonesian #LeuserEcosystem continues to be cleared to meet demand for Palm Oil, the critically endangered Sumatran #orangutan is being pushed to the brink of extinction,' he wrote.

Leonardo added: 'If we don't stop this rampant destruction, the Leuser Ecosystem and the Sumatran orangutans that call it home could be lost forever.'

The Revenant star also shared a link to the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, which he was asking fans to support in his posts.

Taking a stand: Leonardo is famously outspoken for his causes, having discussed climate change during his acceptance speech at the Oscars in February

Indonesia's Minister of the Environment and Forestry, Dr Siti Nurbaya, has since shared her thoughts with Leonardo's strides for the Leuser Ecosystem, telling foresthints.news that she appreciates his good intentions.

'My view is that DiCaprio's concerns are both sincere and substantial, and he has certainly acted in good faith. In fact, we largely share his concerns on this matter,' she said.

'In light of this and to reciprocate his sincerity and good intentions, I am open to working together with DiCaprio in a joint effort whereby both of us can have our concerns addressed, including those that pertain to the Leuser Ecosystem.

However, she clarified that the Jokowi administration has been reviewing the issue of '700 thousand hectares of palm oil plantations which have been categorized as encroaching on forest areas.'

The minister continued: 'We require solutions that can be adopted on the ground. Our main concern is to create a balance within the Leuser Ecosystem. To this end, the protection of lowland forests to preserve wildlife habitats in this ecosystem must be weighed against our concerns about sustainable community livelihoods.'

'It was the current government that issued an Ecosystem Restoration license with a view to supporting an improved home range for key wildlife species there,' she added, noting the administration had properly addressed Leonardo's concern about protecting key wildlife habitats in the Bukit Tigapuluh Landscape.

And the minister clarified that Leonardo would not be deported should he ever return to Indonesia to voice his concerns.

She even offered to grab a cup of coffee with the actor and activist if he is around while she is in New York at the UN Headquarters.
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It's the biggest night in theatre, with scores of talented stars hoping to be recognised for their achievements on the stage.

So Gemma Arterton and Laura Carmichael ensured they pulled out all the stops for the annual Olivier Awards, which were held at the iconic Royal Opera House in London on Sunday night.

Clad in a glittering purple gown that hugged her slender curves, the 30-year-old actress put on a dazzling display as she glimmered under the bright lights of the red carpet, no doubt full of elation after being nominated for Best Actress In A Play for her role in Nell Gywnn.

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Brit of all right! Gemma Arterton and Laura Carmichael ensured they pulled out all the stops for the annual Olivier Awards, which were held at the iconic Royal Opera House in London on Sunday night

Clinging to her toned frame, the plum coloured dress was adorned with streams of shimmering sequins that ran along the bust and full length skirt, twinkling under the lights.

Featuring added embellishment and chunky jewels along the neckline, Gemma looked dressed to win as she prepared to find out if she beat her prestigious competition on the evening, which includes Nicole Kidman.

Adding another dimension to her glitzy gown, it bore billowing chiffon sleeves that flared out above the wrist, whilst a risque split flashed her extravagant heels which laced up with intricate purple threading.

Perfect in plum: Clad in a glittering purple gown that hugged her slender curves, the 30-year-old actress put on a dazzling display as she glimmered under the bright lights of the red carpet, after being nominated for Best Actress In A Play for her role in Nell Gywnn

Purple haze: Clinging to her toned frame, the plum coloured dress was adorned with streams of shimmering sequins that ran along the bust and full length skirt, twinkling under the lights

Wearing her chestnut coloured locks loose and poker straight, she styled her glossy bob in a side parting, framing her heart-shaped face which bore a neutral make-up palette.

Accentuating her stunning features, she lined her hazel coloured eyes with a slick of mascara whilst she covered her plump pout with a nude gloss.

Keeping the focus on her gown, she opted to keep her accessories simple, just wearing a pair of violet hued chandelier style earrings.

Flower power: Laura Carmichael also put on a dazzling display in a chiffon floral gown that nipped in at her tiny waist

Hello petal! Vintage in design, the floor length frock featured layers of ruffles on the hem, sheathing her lithe frame

Meanwhile, Laura Carmichael also put on a dazzling display in a chiffon floral gown that nipped in at her tiny waist before flaring out to full length.

Vintage in design, the floor length frock featured layers of ruffles on the hem, sheathing her lithe frame.

With a high neckline and billowing sleeves she dazzled whilst keeping her toned physique concealed beneath the billowing folds of fabric.

The look of love: Kit Harington and Game Of Thrones co-star Rose Leslie made their red carpet debut as a couple, having previously confined their relationship to low-key outings

Thespians: Dame Judi Dench made a welcome arrival to the red carpet alongside Kenneth Branagh before cosying up to iconic singer and theatre lover Cyndi Lauper, who sported bubblegum pink locks

During the awards, which will be aired on ITV, Jack Savoretti will give a special performance to mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death, whilst casts from Bugsy Malone, Guys And Dolls, Bend It Like Beckham, In The Heights, Kinky Boots, Mrs Henderson Presents and Seven Brides will also perform

Prestigious theatre star Michael Ball will oversee the performances as host for the evening and set the tone for the evening as he took to the stage in a pair of red, patent leather high heel boots.

He joked: 'Why wasn't I cast in Kinky Boots, Nell Gwynn or Gypsy? Tonight I think I've got to prove I've been overlooked.'

He then joined best actor in a musical nominees Matt Henry and Killian Donnelly and the cast of Kinky Boots as they kicked off a performance from the show.

Great dames! Shirley Bassey complemented Judi Dench on the red carpet as they both opted for black and gold designs

Ladies night: (L-R) Ava West, Arlene Phillips, Zoe Wanamaker and Beverley Knight attended the ceremony in style

Stunning in silver: Emma Williams turned heads in a silver gown with a dramatic ruffled train that followed her as she walked

Oscar winner Mark Rylance also kicked off the red carpet in style as he arrived wearing one of his trademark trilbies.

The actor will go head to head with Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch at the awards, which is considered the most prestigious event in the UK's theatrical calendar.

Both actors are nominated in the best actor category alongside Sir Kenneth Branagh for The Winter's Tale, Adrian Lester for Red Velvet and Kenneth Cranham for The Father.

This is Benedict's first nomination, while Rylance has been nominated eight times and won twice.

Here come the girls! Fresh Meat star Zawe Ashton dazzled in ruffled cream gown, whilst EastEnders actress Preeya Kalidas opted for a risque backless gown with delicate gold chains holding the garment together. Glee's Amber Riley also dazzled in a plunging black gown

Meanwhile, Downton Abbey star Jim Carter said he was 'very proud' of his wife, actress Imelda Staunton, who has earned her eleventh Olivier nomination for her role in Gypsy.

Musical revival Gypsy is leading the way at the awards this year, with eight nominations overall.

Jim said: 'It was a tremendous production, a wonderful show and I'm very proud of Imelda.'

Asked what it would mean if she won, he said: 'It'd be nice, I mean it means more that she was good in the show.'

Cute couples: Brian May cosied up to wife Anita Dobson, whilst Adrian Lester also kept close to his wife Lolita Chakrabarti

Singer Jack Savoretti was also feeling emotional as he discussed his performance later this evening, which will see him deliver Sonnet 18 to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

He said: 'I genuinely have fear going through my blood and my bones.

'I've never stood in the presence of so many talented, hard-working actors and musicians and singers, so you can't slip anything by this crowd, you have to get it right.'

With the band: Laura Carmichael, Uzo Aduba and Zawe Ashton made for an unstoppable fashion force on the red carpet whilst Mark Rylance cut a dapper figure in his signature hat as he was flanked by his wife Claire Van Kampen and actress Melody Grove

The golden touch: Dame Shirley was her typical effervescent self as she cosied up to Amber Riley and Sir Lenny Henry

Amber Riley also graced the red carpet as she revealed her excitement at moving to London in the upcoming months.

Best known for playing Mercedes Jones in hit American TV series Glee, she will be taking on the lead role in the West End production of Dreamgirls.

She told Press Association: 'I think being on the West End and being able to revive such an amazing show is a tremendous honour. I love a good challenge and I'm really excited to do it.'

Encore! Jerry Mitchell collected the Best Costume Design award on behalf of Gregg Barnes for Kinky Boots, Anna Fleischle won the Blue-i theatre technology award for best set design award for Hangmen and Dominic Cooke scooped Best Revival for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Getting cosy: Jessie Buckley seemed to be enjoying the evening alongside David Gandy whilst Tom Gibbons - winner of the Best Sound Design award for People, Places and Things - celebrated with presenters Noma Dumezweni and Stephen Campbell Moore

Sherlock creator Mark Gatiss won the first big award of the evening as he was named best actor in a supporting role for Three Days In The Country.

Mark said: 'I'm absolutely overwhelmed, I can't tell you what this means to me. It was an amazing performance and a gift of a part. I'm thrilled to bits, thank you very much.'

Meanwhile, Gypsy also scooped its first award for best lighting design, which was awarded to Mark Henderson and was presented by Harry Potter And The Cursed Child actress Noma Dumezweni and The History Boys star Stephen Campbell Moore.

Black or bold: (L-R) Juliet Stephenson, Denise Gough, Ruthie Henshall and Tracie Bennett

Double trouble: Rory Kinnear kept an arm around his long-term partner Pandora Colin who dazzled in a gold sequinned mini dress that hugged her hourglass frame, whilst Daniel Boys walked the red carpet with Carrie Hope Fletcher who looked pretty in pink

Dame Judi Dench also walked away with Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Winter's Tale, but joked she was 'livid' as her win meant she had lost a bet with her grandson.

The veteran actress was presented with her award by The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time star Luke Treadaway.

She said: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I'm absolutely livid as I had a bet with my grandson ... and I'm never going to be able to forget it.'

She praised 'a really fantastic company and crew and stage management', saying of the award: 'It's lovely to have, but in actual fact it belongs to all those people just as much as it belongs to me.'

Green with envy! Raza Jaffrey snuggled up to Lara Pulver who dazzled in a jade gown that flashed a hint of her impressive cleavage, whilst suited and booted Kenneth Cranham also seemed to be enjoying the night with his guest

Oscar-winner Mark Rylance lost out on winning another big award as Kenneth Cranham took home the best actor award for The Father.

A tearful Kenneth thanked his fellow cast members and the play's director James Macdonald.

'He's a wonderful director, very kind, he's very perceptive and he let's you find your performance and he directs further on down the line.'

He teared up as he thanked his agent, Stephanie Randall, saying 'the things that's happened to her and the way she's been on this play has been fantastic.'

Here come the boys! (L-R) Matt Henry, Jim Carter, Tom Sturridge and James Norton looked dapper on the red carpet

Denise Gough used her best actress win for People, Places And Things to register her concern that none of the actresses nominated in her category were ethnic minorities.

After accepting the award from James Norton, she said: 'Okay I've got 40 seconds so I've got to be quick. This is for my people, you all know who you are.'

She then said she she was 'just a bit disappointed' that, in a year marked by widespread uproar about the lack of diversity at awards shows, she was 'sad' about the lack of diversity among the nominees in her own category.

She added: 'I'm taking Noma Dumezweni and Marianne Jean-Baptiste with me.'

Following the ceremony, the star's flocked to the official afterparty where they mingled and revelled in the celebratory atmosphere.

Those that won awards proudly showed them off, while others couldn't stop smiling as they spent quality time with their partners and industry pals.

Party time: Sherlock creator Mark Gatiss (L) was named best actor in a supporting role for Three Days In The Country and celebrated with co-star Lesley Manville, whilst Kasper Holten picked up the award for Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci for Best New Opera Production

Top gongs: Dame Judi Dench led the winners on the night and beamed as she won Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Party time: Jessica Swale and Gemma Arterton were in fine spirits as they hung out at the official afterparty

Popular: Gemma placed an affectionate hand on the shoulder of David Bedella, who looked to be in a fine mood

Having a ball: Michael Ball looked dapper in a traditional black suit, while David Gandy was typically dashing in a velvet grey jacket

Loving couple: Brian May and wife Anita Dobson were sartorially in sync in glamorous black attire

Gal pals: Jemima Cooper and Zoe Wanamaker put on a close display in the star-studded room

Deep in conversation: Lenny Henry, clad in a red velvet jacket, and Arthur Darvill, in a stylish black ensemble, chatted away merrily

Class acts: David Suchet put an arm around Lesley Manville, who looked stunning in a black dress adorned with eye-catching metallic detailing

Stylish: Laura Carmichael wore a vintage design which fully covered her from the neck down

Here come the girls: Zawe Ashton, Laura Carmichael, Cyndi Lauper and Uzo Aduba all looked pretty as a picture

Well-deserved: Mark Gatiss proudly showed off his Best Actor in a Supporting Role award

Glamorous: Jessie Buckley wowed in a figure-fitting decorative gown while James Norton oozed sophistication in a three-piece suit

Happy! Eddie Izzard was surrounded by gorgeous women at the after party and looked jubilant as he grinned from ear to ear

Let's celebrate: Raza Jaffrey and his wife Lara Pulver celebrated her success in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category

I'll drink to that: Rob Ashford and Tom Sturridge marked the occasion by enjoying a glass of wine and bottle of beer

Having a blast: Gurinder Chadha (middle) and Paul Mayeda Berges (right) were all smiles as they were joined by a male guest

Man in the middle: Kenneth Cranham remained straight-faced while the women flanking him flashed bright smiles

Looking good: Lolita Chakrabarti and her husband Adrian Lester looked relaxed in one another's company

Star attraction: Mark Rylance was flanked by Janet McTeer and Janie Dee, who looked stunning in their evening best

Going for gold: Tracie Bennett wowed in a sleeveless satin gold gown which shimmered underneath the lights

Tasting success: Jessica Swale looked bright-eyed as she tilted her head cutely to the side, while Tracie revealed her dress's plunging back as she twirled for the camera

A night to remember: Fan favourite James joined Dominic Cooke looked quite the dapper pair as they smiled for the camera
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Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor sprinted in full superhero costume on the New York City set of Doctor Strange on Sunday.

In the Marvel flick, the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) teaches the 39-year-old Benedict as neurosurgeon-turned-sorcerer Dr. Stephen Strange as well as 38-year-old Chiwetel as Karl Mordo.

'He's a good friend of mine,' Ejiofor revealed to EW last August.

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Action! Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor sprinted in full superhero costume on the New York City set of Doctor Strange on Sunday

'So, it's gonna be fun. And Tilda Swinton - I haven't worked with her, but I'm excited to work with her. She's brilliant.'

It will be an onscreen reunion for the Oscar-nominated Englishmen - who both attended LAMDA - following their 2013 drama 12 Years a Slave.

As the titular character, Cumberbatch rocked a silver-streaked wig, red Cloak of Levitation, and the amulet Eye of Agamotto - which 'can manipulate time.'

'Theres all sorts of craziness [in Doctor Strange],' the Zoolander 2 funnyman told EW in December.

Colleagues on and off-screen: In the Marvel flick, the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) teaches the 39-year-old Benedict as neurosurgeon-turned-sorcerer Dr. Stephen Strange as well as 38-year-old Chiwetel as Karl Mordo

Ejiofor revealed to EW last August: 'He's a good friend of mine! So, it's gonna be fun. And Tilda Swinton - I haven't worked with her, but I'm excited to work with her. She's brilliant'

Talented British duo: It will be an onscreen reunion for the Oscar-nominated Englishmen - who both attended LAMDA - following their 2013 drama 12 Years a Slave

'Theres all sorts of craziness...Its really rough and tumble': As the titular character, Cumberbatch rocked a silver-streaked wig, red Cloak of Levitation, and the amulet Eye of Agamotto - which 'can manipulate time'

Magic in his hands: The actor did his best to mime sorcery

Better luck next year? As the Hamlet thespian filmed in the Big Apple, Kenneth Cranham beat him for the Olivier Awards' best actor trophy at the ceremony which took place at London's Royal Opera House on Sunday

'Falling, flying, jumping, fighting, punching, getting punched. Its really rough and tumble.'

As the Hamlet thespian filmed in the Big Apple, Kenneth Cranham beat him for the Olivier Awards' best actor trophy at the ceremony which took place at London's Royal Opera House on Sunday.

Also spotted on the Lower Manhattan set that morning was Mads Mikkelsen as a 'sorcerer who breaks off into his own sect from the Ancient One.'

The Danish 50-year-old sported elaborate cracked eye make-up and a matching silver styled ponytail with his brown karategi and spat-style boots.

Getting warmed up! Benedict looked to be stretching as he prepared to film his high-speed scenes on Sunday

Focused: The Sherlock star could be seen closing his eyes as he focused on his character for the spirited scenes

Away he goes! The leading man's red cape billowed behind him as he was seen running around the New York City set

Tough day? Benedict's Dr. Strange sported a worried look and had blood on his face in the scenes filmed on Sunday

Alongside his dreadlocked minion? Also spotted on the Lower Manhattan set that morning was Mads Mikkelsen as a 'sorcerer who breaks off into his own sect from the Ancient One'

Enlightened? The Danish 50-year-old sported elaborate cracked eye make-up and a matching silver styled ponytail with his brown karategi and spat-style boots

In between takes, the Hannibal star hid his face paint beneath a green, fur-hooded coat.

Scott Derrickson (Deliver Us from Evil, Sinister) directs Doctor Strange - also featuring Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Benedict Wong - which hits UK theaters October 28 and US theaters November 4.

On Saturday, Cumberbatch got an on-set visit from his wife Sophie Hunter, whom he first met on the 2009 set of Burlesque Fairytales.

10 months ago, the Sherlock heartthrob and the 38-year-old theatre director welcomed their first child, son Christopher.

Smoke break: In between takes, the Hannibal star hid his face paint beneath a green, fur-hooded coat

Lightning weapon: Scott Derrickson (Deliver Us from Evil, Sinister) directs Doctor Strange - also featuring Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Benedict Wong - which hits UK theaters October 28 and US theaters November 4

Hand-in-hand stroll: On Saturday, Cumberbatch got an on-set visit from his wife Sophie Hunter, whom he first met on the 2009 set of Burlesque Fairytales

Sorry 'Cumberb****es': 10 months ago, the Sherlock heartthrob and the 38-year-old theatre director welcomed their first child, son Christopher
'It was a mistake': Trump regrets retweet of Cruz wife

Donald Trump says he regrets retweeting an unflattering picture of the wife of arch-rival Ted Cruz, in a rare act of contrition from the Republican presidential frontrunner.

Trump is in pole position to seize the Republican nomination but is doing poorly nationwide among women voters, polls show, and faced stern criticism from all sides in recent days after saying women who have illegal abortions should be "punished," before he backtracked.

The billionaire real-estate mogul has been engaged in an increasingly personal war of words with Cruz, his nearest challenger in the Republican race for the White House, that even drew in their wives.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has been engaged in an increasingly personal war of words with Ted Cruz, his nearest challenger in the Republican race Kena Betancur (AFP/File)

An anti-Trump political group unveiled a controversial campaign ad ahead of votes in Arizona and Utah last month that used a GQ magazine photograph of Trump's wife Melania lying naked and handcuffed to a briefcase.

Cruz denied being behind the ad, which was accompanied by the words: "Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady."

Trump then retweeted a photo compilation of an unflattering photo of Cruz's wife Heidi next to Melania, a Slovenian-American jewelry designer and former model.

"Yeah, it was a mistake," Trump said of the retweet, talking to The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in a column published Saturday.
Japanese warships in Philippines near disputed waterway

Two Japanese destroyers and a submarine docked at a Philippine port on Sunday near disputed South China Sea waters, where Beijing's increasingly assertive behaviour has sparked global concern.

Manila is seeking to strengthen ties with Tokyo as tensions mount over the disputed waterway, almost all of which is claimed by China.

Japanese submarine Oyashio and destroyers JS Ariake and JS Setogiri docked in the Subic port Sunday for a routine visit at a sprawling former US naval base just 200 kilometres (125 miles) from a Chinese-held shoal.

A Philippine navy band plays during a welcoming ceremony for Japanese destroyer JS Ariake, at a port of the former US naval base in Subic bay, north of Manila, on April 3, 2016 Ted Aljibe (AFP)

"The visit is a manifestation of a sustained promotion of regional peace and stability and enhancement of maritime cooperation between neighbouring navies," Philippine Navy spokesman Commander Lued Lincuna said.

The Ariake was equipped with an anti-submarine helicopter, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

The port call came on the eve of war games between the United States and Filipino soldiers in the Philippines, which is seen as a showcase of a long-standing military alliance that the Philippines is counting on to deter China.

Seriously outgunned by its much larger rival China, the Philippines has turned to allies like the United States and Japan to upgrade its armed forces in recent years.

In February, Japan agreed to supply the Philippines with military hardware, which may include anti-submarine reconnaissance aircraft and radar technology.

Tensions in the South China Sea -- through which one-third of the world's oil passes -- have mounted in recent months since China transformed contested reefs into artificial islands capable of supporting military facilities.

Aside from the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have overlapping claims.

Japan and China are locked in a separate dispute over an uninhabited island chain in the East Sea.

The Philippines has asked a United Nations-backed tribunal to declare China's sea claims as illegal and the government expects a decision this year.
Decades-old dispute separates Western Sahara families

Ergueibi Abdelahi was just nine months old when his aunt scooped him up and fled fighting in Western Sahara after Morocco sent troops into the former Spanish colony, leaving his parents and brother behind.

Until he was 10, he thought his aunt was his mother.

"She (my mother) was at the market on the day we ran," Abdelahi says of their escape in 1978 across the border into Algeria.

Security men standing next to a mural with the Western Sahara flag at the Smara refugee camp in Algeria's Tindouf province Farouk Batiche, Farouk Batiche (AFP)

"From what I was told, people fled the bombing barefoot. We arrived in the refugee camp and never left."

Abdelahi's family is just one of thousands split up in the war that broke out after Morocco annexed the vast desert territory in 1975 in a move that was not recognised by the international community.

Tens of thousands of Sahrawis live as refugees in the west of Algeria, while some of their relatives remained hundreds of kilometres away in Western Sahara.

Their future today looks even more uncertain after a diplomatic row broke out last month when UN chief Ban Ki-moon referred to Western Sahara's "occupation" during a visit to a refugee camp.

A furious Morocco expelled dozens of UN personnel and demanded the United Nations close its military liaison office in Western Sahara.

The incident has stalled UN efforts to broker a settlement for the area that have dragged on for a quarter century.

A 1991 ceasefire ended one and a half decades of fighting between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front backed by Algeria.

But Rabat remains unwavering in its insistence that Western Sahara is an integral part of its kingdom.

Larger than Britain but with a population of under one million people, Western Sahara has lucrative phosphate reserves, rich fishing grounds and potentially oil.

Sahrawis are campaigning for the right to self-determination, but Morocco insists its sovereignty cannot be challenged.

- 'Mother, father and brother' -

Abdelahi is now almost 40 years old and heads the editorial team at Radio Smara, a small radio station that broadcasts for three hours a day out of the Smara refugee camp near the Moroccan border.

His wife and three children were all born in the same camp, near Tinouf around 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) west of Algiers. It is named after a town in Western Sahara.

At least 90,000 Sahrawi refugees live off international aid in five camps in the Tinouf area, according to the UN. The Algerian government says the number is closer to 165,000.

For decades, the two sides of Abdelahi's family -- one in Western Sahara, the other in the refugee camp -- were unsure of each other's existence, he says.

"Those who had fled thought those who stayed had been jailed or had died, and those who stayed under the occupation thought the same about those who had escaped."

The Polisario Front provided Abdelahi with a second family, he says.

"I've always thought the Polisario was my mother, father and brother."

In 2011, he was finally able to see his family again in Western Sahara, thanks to a family visit programme run by the UN refugee agency with agreement from Morocco and the Polisario.

"It was very moving," he says. "But we had to go straight to the hospital to see my mother who had not been sleeping for a week."

- Boys turned 'old men' -

Others have not been so lucky.

Mohammed Cheikh Kentaoui was 19 years old when Morocco annexed Western Sahara.

He fled with a pair of military boots, determined to fight the Moroccan army. But instead the Polisario assigned him a teaching job in a refugee camp.

Two decades later, he was in the Algerian capital when he heard his mother had died.

Kentaoui, now an accountant with three daughters, leafs through a family photo album in the Smara camp, telling his story as his wife prepares tea.

In 2008, through the same UN scheme, he was able to visit some relatives in Western Sahara.

"They welcomed us with a massive party that lasted five days," he says. "It wasn't long, but at least we saw the family."

Another Smara resident, Khadija Metkhari, says she cried with joy when she saw her brothers for the first time in 2004 after decades apart.

"When I left, they were still going to school," she says. "When I returned, I found old men I barely recognised."

Her father had died of old age and another brother had died in the war.

But Metkhari is quick to brush aside any nostalgia.

"I couldn't stay with them," she says, referring to her brothers.

"I promised the Polisario I would fight with it until independence, and I won't go back on that."

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (C) arrives at the Sahrawi refugee camp of Rabouni, south of the Algerian city of Tindouf in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, March 5, 2016
All asylum children freed from mainland detention: Australia

The last asylum-seeker children in Australian mainland detention have been freed, the government said on Sunday, although dozens of others are still being held on the remote Pacific island of Nauru.

Under Canberra's harsh immigration policy, asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are turned back or sent to Pacific camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea where they are held indefinitely while their refugee applications are processed.

They are blocked from resettling in Australia even if found to be refugees.

People hold placards at a protest outside an immigration office in Sydney, in February 2016 William West (AFP/File)

Canberra has been under pressure from rights groups to release children from the centres, with doctors and whistleblowers saying the detention of asylum-seekers has left some struggling with mental health problems.

"We've succeeded since the change of government (in September 2013) not only in stopping the boats but we've also succeeded... that there are now no children who'd arrived unlawfully by boat in detention," Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told Sky News.

"It's always been a goal of the immigration minister... to get kids out of detention."

The announcement means the children have been moved to community detention, where asylum-seekers waiting for their refugee applications to be processed live within the community. They are usually allowed to move around freely.

Detention levels for asylum-seeker children in immigration centres have fallen from a record number of almost 2,000 in June 2013.

"In 2007... there were no children in detention. So it's almost a decade since we've had no children in detention," Immigration Minister Peter Dutton told reporters in Brisbane.

"It's been a significant achievement."

- 'No policy change' -

Deputy Labor opposition leader Tanya Plibersek welcomed the news but said there had "been a massive expansion of time that people stay in detention in Australia".

The average time for people being held in mainland detention facilities is at its highest level -- 464 days -- since records were kept from January 2012, according to immigration department figures.

Meanwhile, another 50 children were still being held at the Nauru camp, according to the latest figures from Australia's immigration department, although the Pacific government said in October the asylum-seekers there are free to roam around the tiny nation.

The announcement came as refugee advocates said the 267 asylum-seekers due to be deported to Nauru following a court ruling in February were still in Australia in what they claim as a success for their #LetThemStay campaign.

The asylum-seekers, including children, had been brought to Australia from Nauru for medical treatment.

There have been numerous protests against the deportations under the #LetThemStay campaign, with Australian church leaders also vowing to defy the government's immigration rules, offering sanctuary to the asylum-seekers.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young called on Dutton to take a step further and rule out sending children back to Nauru.

"Peter Dutton should allow these families and children to apply for visas in Australia, so that they can get on with rebuilding their lives in safety," Hanson-Young said in a statement Sunday.

Turnbull said the government's policy of not allowing asylum-seekers who arrived by boat to settle in Australia had not changed.

"That is why as part of our exercise, we are working with other countries in the region to resettle people who are on Nauru or indeed (PNG's) Manus so that they settle somewhere else," the prime minister said.

Australia has struck an agreement with Cambodia to accept refugees in exchange for millions of dollars in aid, but so far only five have taken up the offer, with three -- two from Iran and one ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar -- later choosing to return home.

People attend a candlelight vigil in support of asylum seekers, in Melbourne, in 2014 Esther Lim (AFP/File)
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Size matters at the Shinto Kanamara Matsuri, where groups of locals parade three heavy phalluses around the city - the biggest was as tall as a full-grown man.

Japanese revellers carried giant phalluses through the streets of Kawasaki on Sunday to worship the humble penis and fertility in one of the world's most unusual festivals.

Giggling festival-goers, including young children and grandmothers dressed in kimonos, sucked on penis lollipops and posed with phallus-shaped sculptures.

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Japanese revellers carried giant phalluses through the streets of Kawasaki on Sunday to worship the humble penis and fertility in one of the world's most unusual festivals

The festivities, known as Festival of the Steel Phallus, originated from prostitutes who wished to pray for good business and protection from sexually transmitted diseases

More than 20,000 people gathered to enjoy the annual festival which Shinto believers carry giant phalluses through the streets

An anatomically correct radish-carving contest drew a large crowd of sniggering onlookers, while blushing parents perched babies on a giant see-saw of frighteningly accurate likeness to pray for fertility.

Tens of thousands gather every spring for the festival, where they can buy keepsakes such as key chains, trinkets, pens, chocolates and even toy glasses with a plastic penis nose.

For the local priest of the Kanayama Shrine, however, it is no laughing matter.

'If young children are not used to seeing (male genitalia), they could get into a bit of a panic when the time comes,' Hiroyuki Nakamura said, explaining the festival's educational role.

'People come to pray for good fortune and to ask the gods to protect them. The festival is steeped in the past but has still has a valuable part to play in modern society.'

Known as the Festival of the Steel Phallus - or colloquially as the 'Willy Festival' - legend has it that in the Edo Period (1603-1868) a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman's vagina castrated several unfortunate young men on their wedding nights.

A local blacksmith came to the rescue by forging an iron dildo to break the demon's teeth and today a three-foot black steel phallus sits in the shrine's courtyard to honour the Shinto deities of fertility, childbirth and protection from sexually transmitted infections.

Residents of Kawasaki carry phalluses of all different sizes while participating in a tradition that began nearly 40 years ago

Tens of thousands gather every spring for the festival, where they can buy keepsakes such as key chains, trinkets, pens, chocolates and even toy glasses with a plastic penis nose

Over the centuries, sex workers also made a pilgrimage to the shrine to seek its powers of protection before the festival became a tourist attraction in the 1970s.

'I think it's brilliant,' said Sayuri Kubo, a 14-year-old schoolgirl proudly holding an erotic lollipop. 'The mikoshi (portable shrine) parade was awesome.'

Three mikoshi are lugged through the streets of Kawasaki, including a giant pink phallus called Elizabeth, donated by a local drag queen club.

There is a serious side to the frivolity, despite the bizarre sight of normally reserved Japanese housewives posing for snapshots with oversized dildos.

Proceeds from sales of the saucy memorabilia go to HIV research while the shrine itself is visited year-round by married couples hoping to start a family.

Shinto Kanamara Matsuri, the Festival of the Steel Phallus, started as a small tradition but has grown into a popular a tourist attraction

Proceeds from sales of the saucy memorabilia go to HIV research while the shrine itself is visited year-round by married couples hoping to start a family

'It's about propagating the species,' nursery school teacher Natsuki Kanayama said, holding lollipops in both hands with another poking out of her cleavage. 'I'm praying that I can have as many children as possible.'

Not surprisingly, however, the festival drew curious stares from visiting foreigners.

'It's insane,' said American tourist Jason Bradley. 'I've heard about 'Cool Japan' - I guess this is what they mean.'

Locals parade giant phalluses through the streets, and were said to have drawn some curious stares from visiting foreigners

Visitors pose with phallus-shaped lollipops in front of a large pink shrine. The festival is held annually on the first Sunday in April, attracting hundreds of visitors from both inside and outside Japan
Thai authorities seize thousands of 'political' red bowls

Thai authorities have confiscated about 8,000 red bowls bearing a message from ousted ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, police said Sunday, in the junta's latest attempt to block the resurgence of the political party it toppled.

The raids followed the arrest last week of a woman seen posing with one of the bowls in photos on social media. She has been charged with sedition, a move slammed by a rights group as absurd.

The plastic scoops, used for pouring water in Buddhist ceremonies during Thailand's upcoming new year, bear a note signed by former prime minister Thaksin, whose political bloc has spent the past decade vying for power with a military-backed elite.

Deposed former Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra pictured in New York on March 9, 2016 Jewel Samad (AFP/File)

Thaksin was ousted in a 2006 coup and now lives in exile, while the government run by his sister Yingluck was toppled by the current junta in 2014.

The bowls -- cast in the Shinawatra's signature red colour -- were first distributed at a temple fair last week in the northern province of Chiang Mai.

The message printed on the side reads: "The situation may be hot, but brothers and sisters may gain coolness from the water inside this bucket."

On Saturday police and soldiers raided homes and offices of three former MPs from the Shinawatras' Puea Thai Party in the northern province of Nan to seize the bowls.

"If we allow these bowls to be distributed, it could benefit some political parties or result in losses to others," said officer Prayoon Chamnankong, who led one of the raids.

In a social media post Sunday, Thaksin urged the junta to focus on more important matters.

"I've done it (given out bowls) several times in the past and it never posed a problem to national security," he wrote, suggesting the junta spend its time tackling other issues such as an ongoing drought and a simmering Muslim insurgency in the far south.

The woman arrested last week could be jailed for up to seven years if convicted of sedition.

Human Rights Watch called the case evidence that the junta's "intolerance of dissent has reached the point of absolute absurdity".

"When military courts try people for sedition for posting photos with holiday gifts from deposed leaders, it's clear that the end of repression is nowhere in sight," said Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director.

The junta has outlawed all political activities since its power grab, pledging to heal the kingdom's bitter divides.

But critics say the generals are chiefly bent on crippling the Shinawatra clan, who are wildly popular with their rural supporters in the north and northeast but hated by the Bangkok-centric military and royalist elite.

A similar attempt to quash the siblings' enduring popularity was made earlier this year when authorities banned a calendar featuring the pair in an embrace.

After keeping quiet for much of the past two years, the family's powerful political machine has recently become more vocal as the country gears up for the junta's promised elections in 2017.
Iran oil exports surpass 2 million barrels per day

Iran's oil exports have surpassed two million barrels per day following the lifting of sanctions under its nuclear deal with world powers, Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said on Sunday.

"Iran's oil and gas condensate exports are now at more than 2 million barrels per day" after rising by 250,000 bpd since March 1, the ministry's Shana news service quoted Zanganeh as saying.

Iran has doubled exports since its nuclear accord took effect on January 16.

Iran's oil exports have surpassed two million barrels per day following the lifting of sanctions under its nuclear deal with world powers

Iran, an OPEC member, has the world's fourth-largest oil reserves but its exports were long hampered by sanctions over its nuclear programme.

It has moved ahead with an increase in exports despite global concerns over a supply glut that has pushed oil prices below $40 a barrel, from more than $100 a barrel in mid-2014.

Top exporter Saudi Arabia has said it is willing to consider an output freeze to help shore up prices.

But in an interview published Friday, Saudi deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman reiterated Riyadh's position that other major producers, including Iran, would need to do the same.

His remarks drove down oil prices, with US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for delivery in May sliding $1.55 (4.0 percent) to $36.79 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Major oil producers led by Russia and Saudi Arabia are to meet in Doha on April 17 to discuss measures to stabilise prices, including a proposal not to pump out oil above a certain level.

But Tehran rejects any output freeze -- first mooted by Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in February -- until it regains its pre-sanctions market share.

Zanganeh described the proposal in late February as a "very funny joke", as production levels vary widely among oil producers.

Under more than a decade of sanctions, Iran witnessed crucial global ties cut from its economy, including its lifeblood oil markets.

In January 2012, under hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, the European Union stopped buying oil from Iran and global banking networks blocked the Islamic republic from the SWIFT system.

Hope only returned after president Hassan Rouhani's election in 2013 that culminated in ending the nuclear standoff after two years of negotiations.

Since the nuclear deal's implementation, Tehran has resumed exporting to the European market.

But Asian countries China, India, Japan and South Korea remain the main customers of Iranian oil.
Libya oil corp, central bank rally around unity govt

Libya's National Oil Corporation and Central Bank, backbones of its wealth, have thrown their support behind a UN-backed unity government in a blow to a rival administration refusing to cede power.

The two institutions, which have struggled to remain neutral since Libya's 2011 armed revolt and subsequent turbulence, said they welcomed the Government of National Accord, in separate statements.

Prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj and members of the GNA arrived Wednesday in Tripoli where a rival government, unrecognised by the international community, has ruled since mid-2014.

Oil is Libya's main natural resource, with reserves estimated at 48 billion barrels, the largest in Africa Abdullah Doma (AFP/File)

The Tripoli administration, established after the powerful Libya Dawn militia alliance overrun the capital that year, has demanded that Sarraj leave or surrender, branding the GNA "illegal".

Founded in 1970, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) is based in Tripoli where Libya's Central Bank -- the depositor of the country's oil wealth -- also has its headquarters.

They have continued to operate independently despite the chaos that engulfed Libya after the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

"We have been working with Prime Minister Sarraj and the Presidency Council to put this period of divisions and rivalry behind us," NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla.

"We have been looking to the future, and now we have a clear international legal framework in place," he added in a statement published Saturday on the NOC website.

The Central Bank of Libya also "welcomed" the GNA and wished them "all the success in carrying out the difficult tasks ahead of them".

It urged Libyans to "now more than ever to unite and collaborate by working together to ensure that security and safety prevail in Libya, to stop fighting and bloodshed, to empower the judicial system and to embrace the rule of law".

A Libyan financial expert said the NOC and Central Bank support amounted to "a resounding vote of confidence" in the GNA.

"The two institutions are the basis of Libyan livelihood and without them the GNA would not be able to function," he said, asking not to be named.

- Battered economy -

Oil is Libya's main natural resource, with reserves estimated at 48 billion barrels, the largest in Africa.

The North African nation had an output capacity of about 1.6 million barrels per day before the uprising, accounting for more than 95 percent of exports and 75 percent of the budget.

But production has slumped amid violence as rival forces battled for control of oil terminals.

Control of the oil industry is key for the GNA, which not only needs to unite the country but also shore up an economy weakened by the drop of oil prices on the international market.

Since the revolt, and the emergence of two rival administrations, the central bank struggled to keep the country afloat, urging tough spending cuts and hinting that it dipped into foreign reserves.

On Thursday, Sarraj met the head of the Central Bank to discuss measures to safeguard banks and tackle the country's "cash flow problem", his office said.

"Difficult times lie ahead. The immediate challenge is to end the cash crisis," Mattia Toaldo, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said earlier in the week.

Following Sarraj's arrival in Tripoli, pledges of loyalty began pouring in and supporters rallied in the city although his government still needs the formal approval of the house of representatives (HoR).

"The HoR remains the legitimate body to endorse the GNA. I urge the HoR to hold a comprehensive session to vote on GNA in free will," UN envoy to Libya Martin Kobler said in a tweet Sunday.

On Thursday, the mayors of 10 coastal cities that were under the control of the Tripoli authorities called on Libyans to "support the national unity government".

The following day, guards in charge of securing installations in Libya's so-called eastern "oil crescent" also offered their support and said they would hand over to the unity government three oil terminal.

The UN Security Council has passed Resolution 2278 stating that oil exports from Libya must be placed under the authority of the GNA.

Libya's UN-backed prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj speaks during a press conference in Tripoli on March 30, 2016
EU may need refugee deals with N.African states: German minister

Germany's interior minister voiced optimism Sunday that Europe's refugee influx had peaked but said agreements with North African countries may be needed to prevent mass arrivals in future.

A controversial EU-Turkey deal goes into effect on Monday under which Ankara has pledged to take back migrants from EU member Greece, while it plans to launch orderly transports of Syrian asylum-seekers to the 28-member bloc.

Germany -- which took in more than one million refugees and migrants last year -- has already seen arrivals drop sharply to an average of 140 a day on its Austrian border, said Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere.

Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa inside a detention center in Tripoli in 2015 Mahmud Turkia (AFP/File)

"I can say with a great deal of caution that the peak of the refugee crisis is behind us," de Maiziere was quoted as telling the Tagesspiegel am Sonntag newspaper, speaking weeks after Balkan countries closed their borders to the wave of migrants.

The German minister added however that "there are still some questions that we must answer".

"This includes the implementation of the negotiated agreement achieved with Turkey, but also a search for solutions in case of possible alternative routes, such as via Libya and Italy," he said.

"If, once more, more people come via this route, we will need to search for similar solutions as we did with Turkey and also enter into negotiations with North African countries," he added.

"I could imagine reception centres in North Africa for refugees who are returned from Italy, and in turn a humanitarian admission programme with the North African country in question," he said.
South Africa parliament to consider Zuma impeachment

The South African parliament will next week discuss an opposition motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma after the highest court ruled that he flouted the constitution, an official said Sunday.

The speaker of parliament Baleka Mbete told journalists that the move by the Democratic Alliance (DA) would be considered on April 5.

The DA is pushing for Zuma to be impeached after the Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that he had "failed to uphold, defend and respect the constitution" in ignoring the ombudswoman's directives to repay a portion of public funds used to upgrade his private residence.

South Africa's Constitutional Court found President Jacob Zuma in breach of the constitution for using public funds to upgrade his private home David Harrison (AFP/File)

"The national assembly will on Tuesday, 5 April, consider a motion by the Democratic Alliance for the removal of the president in terms of section 89 of the constitution," said Mbete.

Zuma, whose ruling African National Congress (ANC) commands a strong grip on parliament, is likely to survive any bid to have him removed.

A previous impeachment attempt in 2015 over a failure to arrest Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir fell flat when parliament voted overwhelmingly against it.

The violation of the constitution verdict stems from the controversial 2009 security upgrades on Zuma's home at Nkandla village, in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province.

The project, which cost the taxpayers 216 million rand (then $24 million) in 2014, included a swimming pool, chicken run, cattle enclosure and an amphitheatre.

A 2014 report by the country's Public Protector found that Zuma and his family "unduly benefited" from the improvements, ordering him to pay back some of the money.

The ANC has rallied behind Zuma since the damning Constitutional Court ruling, but some party veterans including Ahmed Kathrada, an anti-apartheid stalwart jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, have called for him to step down.
Leader of Ansaru jihadist group arrested in Nigeria

The leader of Nigeria's Ansaru jihadist group, a Boko Haram splinter group ideologically aligned to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has been arrested, an army spokesman said on Sunday.

Khalid al-Barnawi is one of three Nigerians listed by Washington in 2012 as "specially designated global terrorists".

The US Department of State in June 2012 named Barnawi alongside Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau and Ansaru founder Abubakar Adam Kambar as terrorists.

Khalid al-Barnawi is the leader of Nigeria's Ansaru jihadist group and was listed by Washington in 2012 as "specially designated global terrorists" Str (AFP/File)

"Security agents made a breakthrough on Friday in the fight against terrorism by arresting Khalid al-Barnawi, the leader of Ansaru terrorist group in Lokoja," military spokesman Brigadier General Rabe Abubakar said.

"He is among those on top of the list of our wanted terrorists," he added.

Lokoja is the capital of Nigeria's central Kogi state.

"Shekau is the most visible leader of the Nigeria-based militant group Jamaatu Ahlis Sunna Liddaawati Wal-Jihad, commonly referred to as Boko Haram," the US state department said 2012.

"Khalid al-Barnawi and Abubakar Adam Kambar have ties to Boko Haram and have close links to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," it said in a statement.

Al-Barnawi assumed the leadership of Ansaru following the death of Kambar in a military raid on his hideout in Kano in March 2012.

"We are very happy about this development (arrest). It is a great breakthrough in our fight against insurgency in the country," Information Minister Lai Mohammed told AFP.

A serving army officer added that his arrest was "a huge succees and will have a profound effect on counter-terrorism operations in Nigeria and beyond".

"He is a known transnational terrorist and the backbone of all Al-Qaeda affiliate groups in west Africa," the officer, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

Ansaru, a splinter group of Boko Haram, specialising in high profile killings and attacks on global interests, is also linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Barnawi, 47, whose real name is Usman Umar Abubakar, hailed from Biu town in restive northeast Borno state.

He and his group have been involved in a string of kidnappings of mostly foreigners.

The group comprises mostly western-educated Boko Haram members who were trained in AQIM camps in the Algerian desert.

They disapproved of Boko Haram's indiscriminate bombing and shooting campaign, preferring instead high profile killings and attacks on western interests.

Kamber and al-Barnawi were both former close allies of the late Boko Haram sect leader Mohammed Yusuf.

Al-Barnawi was the alleged mastermind of the 2011 kidnap of a Briton and an Italian, both construction engineers, in northern Kebbi state.

The two hostages were killed in a failed rescue bid by British and Nigerian Special Forces in the northern city of Sokoto in 2012.

Trained in Afghanistan and Algeria, he was also behind the 2012 kidnap of a German construction engineer - Edgar Raupach -- in the northern city of Kano.

The German was killed along with four captors in a botched rescue operation by Nigerian troops the same year at a hideout on the outskirts of Kano, where the group is mostly based.

Ansaru also claimed a 2012 attack on a maximum security facility in Abuja where detained Islamists were being held, killing two policemen and freeing 40 inmates.

With the emergence of Ansaru, Barnawi's faction became independent of Boko Haram but still maintained ties.

The group also claimed responsibility for the kidnap of a French engineer, Francis Collomp, in northern Katsina state in 2012. He escaped later escaped.

Ansaru claimed the December 26, 2012 attack on a maximum security facility in Abuja where captured Islamists were being held, killing two policemen and freeing 40 detainees.

The group said it was responsible for a 2013 attack on a convoy of Mali-bound Nigerian troops in Kogi state, killing two soldiers and seriously wounding five others.
Rebel attack on Yemen hospital kills 3 civilians

Three civilians were killed in east Yemen on Sunday when rockets fired by Iran-backed rebels hit a government hospital, the facility's director and a local official said.

The attack wounded 17 other people, said the director of the Marib General Hospital Authority, Shawqi al-Sharjabi.

Pro-government forces, backed by a Saudi-led coalition battling the rebels for more than a year, have retaken most of the eastern Marib province from the Shiite Huthi insurgents and their allies.

A Yemeni Huthi supporter visits a cemetary in Sanaa, on March 25, 2016 Mohammed Huwais (AFP/File)

However, the rebels still control northern and western parts of the oil-rich province east of the capital Sanaa, which has been held by the Huthis since September 2014.

A government official in Marib city told AFP that rockets were fired by rebels from the Haylan mountains overlooking the provincial capital.

He said the attack, which killed a doctor, took place during a visit to the city by a government delegation.

The rebel advance on Sanaa forced Yemen's internationally-recognised government last year to declare main southern city Aden a temporary capital.

But President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and many government officials spend most of their time in Riyadh as they struggle to secure Aden and other parts of the country where Sunni jihadists have gained ground.

Sunday's attack comes as the warring parties prepare for a UN-brokered ceasefire on April 10 intended to pave the way for peace talks in Kuwait a week later.

The planned truce was only agreed by the two sides after months of shuttle diplomacy by UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed.

Previous UN-sponsored negotiations between the rebels and the government failed to make any headway, and a ceasefire announced for December 15 was repeatedly violated and abandoned by the Saudi-led Arab coalition on January 2.
Yemen president dismisses PM Bahah over 'failures'

Yemen's President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi on Sunday relieved prime minister and vice president Khaled Bahah of his duties due to what he called government "failures".

Bahah's surprise dismissal comes just a week ahead of a UN-brokered ceasefire planned between Yemen's warring parties, which is expected to pave the way for peace talks in Kuwait on April 18.

Hadi appointed Ahmed bin Dagher, former secretary general of the General People's Congress party to which the president once belonged, as prime minister, according to a decision published on the official sabanew.net website.

Khaled Bahah, pictured on January 19, 2016, has been relieved of his duties as prime minister and vice president

He appointed veteran General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar as vice president, and a presidency source said that Bahah would now serve as a presidential advisor.

Hadi said the decision to replace Bahah was "due to the failures that have accompanied the performance of the government during the past period in the fields of economy, services, and security".

Bahah's government has "failed to ease the suffering of our people, resolve their problems and provide their needs," Hadi said in a statement.

Iran-backed rebels have been in control of capital Sanaa since 2014, forcing the government to declare second-city Aden as temporary capital.

But Hadi and many government officials, including Bahah, spend most of their time in Riyadh as they struggle to secure Aden and other parts of the country where Sunni jihadists have gained ground.

Adding to the unrest, the local militiamen who fought alongside the government to retake Aden from the rebels last summer have clashed with guards protecting the presidential palace to protest unpaid wages despite Hadi's orders to merge them with the security forces.

Hadi spoke Sunday of a "lack of a proper government administration of the unlimited support from our brothers in the Arab coalition, notably Saudi Arabia" which is leading an alliance against the rebels.

- Troubled relationship -

Government sources have in the past spoke of differences between the president and Bahah, who had served as Yemen's envoy to the United Nations before Hadi appointed him as foreign minister and then prime minister.

In December, Hadi reshuffled his cabinet, naming new foreign and interior ministers in a move that was understood to be aimed at smoothing his relations with Bahah.

Hadi has also recently been involving Ahmar more actively in decision-making, appointing him in February as armed forces deputy commander in a bid to rally support from tribes and troops in the rebel-held region around Yemen's capital.

Ahmar's troops played a prominent role in the 2011 uprising that ousted strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose loyalists are now allied with the Shiite Huthi rebels in control of Sanaa.

Hadi said his decisions aim to "achieve what our people are aspiring for and to restore the state authority, security and stability."

The United Nations says about 6,300 people have been killed in the war in Yemen since the Saudi-led coalition intervened in March last year, more than half of them civilians.

The planned truce was only agreed by the warring sides after months of shuttle diplomacy by UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed.

Previous UN-sponsored negotiations between the rebels and the government failed to make any headway, and a ceasefire announced for December 15 was repeatedly violated and abandoned by the Saudi-led Arab coalition on January 2.
This win's for you Shane: Samuels taunts Warne

Man of the match Marlon Samuels taunted Australia spin legend Shane Warne after his unbeaten 85 set the West Indies up for a sensational World Twenty20 title triumph on Sunday.

The right-handed batsman's 66-ball knock kept the Windies in with a chance of successfully beating England's 155-9 total after openers Johnson Charles and Chris Gayle fell early for a combined five runs.

Samuels' scintillating 85 included nine boundaries and two sixes and laid the foundations for Carlos Brathwaite to dramatically hit four consecutive sixes as the Windies won with two balls to spare in Kolkata.

West Indies's Marlon Samuels (C) celebrates after winning the World T20 final Dibyangshu Sarkar (AFP)

The 35-year-old cheekily dedicated the Windies' historic second World T20 title to Warne, who has clashed with Samuels on a number of occasions in the past.

The pair had an infamous run-in during Australia's Big Bash League in 2013 and Warne rekindled the feud when he criticised Samuels following his dismissal against India in Thursday's WT20 semi-final.

"I woke up this morning with one thing on my mind, said Samuels.

"Shane Warne has been talking continuously and all I want to say is this is for Shane Warne."

Samuels made just eight in the Windies' seven-wicket victory over India in the last-four, but his monumental innings on Sunday was reminiscent of his contribution in the final four years ago.

The West Indies won their first World T20 title in 2012 with Samuels scoring 78 against Sri Lanka in the final.
Broner stops Theophane in 9th, leaving WBA belt vacant

WASHINGTON (AP)  Adrien Broner spent much of the time before his latest fight trading verbal barbs with Floyd Mayweather.

Broner challenged Mayweather after defeating Ashley Theophane in a ninth-round technical knockout on Friday night.

"Somebody that I look up to, someone that I admire took the chance to do an interview and talk bad about me," Broner said. "I'm a man  Floyd has got to see me."

Broner's defeat of Theophane, a fighter promoted by Mayweather, leaves the WBA super lightweight title vacant. The bout was supposed to be Broner's first defense of the belt, but he weighed in 0.4 pounds over the 140-pound limit Thursday and was stripped of the title.

That setback appeared far from Broner's mind, though, as he continued his words with Mayweather during TV an interview.

"We won that belt already, we're on to the next one," Broner said. "I will not be fighting 140 again. ... I grew out of the weight."

Mayweather retired following the 49th and final victory of his unblemished career last September. He sat ringside throughout the fight, and laughed and flashed a wide smile during Broner's comments.

Now 26, Broner (32-2, 24 KOs) has been compared to Mayweather throughout his career, both in terms of his counterpunching style and image.

Broner's latest fight went on amid reports of warrants for his arrest on felony assault and robbery charges in Ohio, stemming from an incident in January.

"As you know, I've been going through a lot and for me to come in here and bottle everything up and do what I did, I want to give myself a pat on the back," Broner said.

Broner is expected to turn himself in to authorities on Monday.

Theophane (39-7-1) could've won the title with a victory, but he never looked like a serious threat before referee Luis Pabon stopped the fight 1:10 into the ninth round.

First, Broner caught Theophane with a body shot and then a right hook, chasing him onto the ropes. With Broner punching furiously, Theophane slipped away, backpedaled and appeared to lift his glove toward Pabon, who stepped in immediately.

Broner promised a stoppage on Wednesday, but for a time, Theophane looked to have weathered the worst. And by the eighth, a scattering of boos could be heard amid the crowd of 8,172 at the DC Armory in a city Broner calls his second home.

Still, he thanked the city after the fight, even if he couldn't have the same affection for Mayweather, someone he said was once a mentor.
Argentine experts question report on missing Mexico students

MEXICO CITY (AP)  Argentine forensic experts who have studied a dump in southern Mexico where government officials claim the bodies of 43 missing students were burned said Saturday that results from a new investigation of the site are incomplete and inconclusive.

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team released a statement saying the latest investigation by a team of experts "neither confirms nor denies" the official version of what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa.

The Argentines were called in shortly after the teachers' college students disappeared in Iguala in Guerrero state on Sept. 26, 2014. An investigation by Mexico's government concluded they were killed by a local drug gang after being confused with members of a rival group. They were purportedly taken by corrupt local police and handed over to the gang, which incinerated their bodies at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula and threw the remains into a river.

FILE - In this Dec. 26, 2015 file photo, relatives of the 43 missing students from the rural teachers college march holding pictures of their missing loved ones during a protest in Mexico City. Argentine forensic experts who have studied a dump in southern Mexico where government officials claim the bodies of 43 missing teachers college students were burned say a new investigation of the site is incomplete and inconclusive. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team was called in shortly after the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa disappeared in Iguala in Guerrero state on Sept. 26, 2014. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte, File)

The Argentines  who were brought in at the request of the students' families and worked with government investigators  studied the dump and said first in January 2015 and later in a full report released in February 2016 that the evidence did not support the official version of events.

In September 2015, another team of independent experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, released a report that dismantled the government's investigation. The report explained how state and federal police, as well as the military, were monitoring the students' movements before they were attacked. But no one intervened when Iguala and Cocula police attacked, killing six people and participating in the disappearance of the 43.

The case drew international condemnation and the government's perceived mishandling of it dogged the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Attorney General Arely Gomez responded by ordering a new investigation by yet another team of experts. They began working in February.

On Friday, a representative of the new team said it had found evidence of a large fire at the Cocula dump. Ricardo Damian Torres also said the remains of at least 17 burned bodies were found in the dump, but he didn't specify when the bodies were incinerated.

Torres said tests would be conducted in the coming weeks to determine whether it would have been possible to burn all 43 students at the dump.

"There is sufficient evidence, including physically observable, to affirm that there was a controlled fire event of great dimensions in the place called the Cocula dump," he said, speaking for the six-member fire-expert team.

Later the same day, the IACHR's team of experts released a statement saying that by holding the news conference Mexico's attorney general's office had broken their agreement to seek consensus on how this latest investigation would be handled.

The statement said Torres had alluded to information that had not been analyzed by the IACHR experts and was not even a consensus among the fire experts.

Then on Saturday, the Argentine experts released a statement listing what they said were the shortcomings of the new investigation.

The statement said investigators didn't specify when the fire took place  if it coincided with the disappearance of the students  or if the 17 bodies belong to any of the missing students. It asked the new team to provide more information as to how it reached its findings.
From limos to junk, quirky museums tell Beijing's history

BEIJING (AP)  Stuffed into a tiny room off an alleyway are items that Wang Jinming readily admits were put out with the garbage: Paper string, a needle holder, a metal pancake maker built for thrusting into a fire.

"These objects all look quite old and shabby," he said. "But they record real history."

Wang's Beijing Old Items Exhibition in the heart of old Beijing is one of dozens of private museums that dot the capital's backstreets and its suburbs. Their collections feature the grand and mundane  from items salvaged from the garbage to a limousine in which Mao Zedong once rode.

In this Tuesday, March 22, 2016 photo, Wang Jinming shows his household items and street objects dating from 1900s to the 1970s which he collected at his private museum in Beijing. Wangs Beijing Old Items Exhibition in the heart of old Beijing is one of dozens of private museums that dot the capitals backstreets and its suburbs. Their collections feature the grand and mundane - from items salvaged from the garbage to a limousine in which Mao Zedong once rode. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Entering these private museums is to peel off a largely forgotten layer of Beijing's recent history.

While state-run museums seek mainly to legitimize the ruling Communist Party through its own highly selective interpretation of history, the capital's private museums are born from their founders' hobbies and obsessions, along with a sense of duty to keep alive a little bit of history others might dismiss as trivial.

"If you throw it on the street, people would say 'What's this?' and maybe think it's useless and throw it away," said Wang, gesturing around the room packed with hundreds of household items and street objects dating from the 1900s to the 1970s. "But we think it's culture."

Wang delights in telling visitors to guess what the objects are in their hands. They might include a popsicle holder used by street vendors or a bucket-shaped iron heated by charcoal. All form part of the collection that Wang and two co-founders began in the 1980s after asking foreign visitors why they were so interested in buying old everyday items.

"They said, 'To collect.' Now if you go to someone's home you probably can't find such things," Wang said.

Picking up a doughnut-shaped metal bell, Wang explained that before Beijing had many hospitals, itinerant doctors used to roam the streets. "When you heard this sound, the doctor was walking in the street, available, ringing the bell," he said.

Liu Chen, 27, first visited the museum after reading about it on social media and has returned several times with friends.

"It's not like big state-owned museums. You don't need to buy a ticket to enter some sort of grand hall and stroll through different chambers," he said. "Here many of the old objects displayed might have been the kind of things used by Mr. Wang himself when he was a kid, so you can feel his enthusiasm, which is the key thing that distinguishes it from other museums."

As China grows richer, wealthy citizens, banks and private businesses have invested in Chinese art and started museums to display their wealth or patriotism. Others, such as Luo Wenyou, opened their collections after their pastimes evolved into callings.

In 1998, when he already owned about 70 old cars, Luo took part in an 800-kilometer (500-mile) rally from the northeastern city of Dalian to Beijing, his iconic Red Flag sedan the only Chinese car in the event.

Having learned about vintage car associations and museums outside China, and inspired by shouts of "long live Red Flag" as he pulled up to Tiananmen Square, Luo decided he was honor-bound to preserve the legacy of China's early motoring history.

"I had a karting track, a transport company and a garage. After the rally I sold them off cheaply in order to immediately start a vintage car association and later found the museum, to fill the gap," said Luo. "I felt this was my personal duty." His museum opened in 2009 and he now boasts more than 200 vintage Chinese and foreign cars.

Some of Luo's cars have stories from China's recent history. They include a car Mao refused to ride in until the brand's Romanized name on the hood was replaced with Chinese characters and a car found in an overgrown patch of grass that had been assigned to former President Liu Shaoqi. The latter vehicle still had broken windows from when Liu was pursued by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution after falling out of favor with Mao.

Luo lives at the site with his wife so he can open up outside normal hours for visitors traveling from afar. "Even if just one person comes we will open, even though the entrance fee won't cover the electricity," he said.

Private collections like Luo's offer a welcome alternative to state museums that seek to draw the visitor into a narrative about the greatness of China and the necessity of the Communist Party's leadership, said Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

"You don't really find publicly supported pockets of weirdness," Tinari said.

Ma Weidu opened China's first private museum in 1996, filling it with antiques bought cheaply in the late 1970s and 80s from Beijing residents eager for cash to buy refrigerators, TVs and washing machines.

"I could buy 10 average pieces of art for 65 yuan ($10)," said Ma.

In those early days, his most valuable acquisition was a bowl made in an imperial kiln during the reign of the Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong about 250 years ago, Ma said. Purchased for just 6 yuan (less than $1) at the time, it could be worth as much as 600,000 yuan ($92,000) if sold today, he said.

Ma's Guanfu Museum now has three branches across China with two more opening this year. Ma himself has become a TV personality, hosting programs teaching antique hunters how to discern between real treasures and fakes.

Ever keen to attract more visitors, Ma, a cat lover, recently named 20 felines as assistant curators.

"A lot of people who come to the museum ... are more interested in cats than culture," said Ma. "But some may come here because of the cats and in doing so learn something about antiques."

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Associated Press researcher Yu Bing and news assistants Dong Tongjian and Liu Zheng contributed to this report.

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016 photo, a picture of Ma Weidu is placed on a table against his collection at his private museum in Beijing. Ma opened Chinas first private museum in 1996, filling it with antiques bought cheaply in the late 1970s and 80s from Beijing residents eager for cash to buy refrigerators, TVs and washing machines. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Sunday, March 27, 2016 photo, Luo Wenyou poses in front of one of his vintage car collection, a Red Flag limousine, on display at his private museum in Huairou district of Beijing. As China grows richer, wealthy citizens, banks and private businesses have invested in Chinese art and started museums to display their wealth or patriotism. Others, such as Luo, opened their collections after their pastimes evolved into callings. In 1998, when he already owned about 70 old cars, Luo took part in an 800-kilometer (500-mile) rally from the northeastern city of Dalian to Beijing, his iconic Red Flag sedan the only Chinese car in the event. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Tuesday, March 22, 2016 photo, a tour guide shows tourists household items and street objects dating from the 1900s to the 1970s collected by Wang Jinming at a private museum in Beijing. Wangs Beijing Old Items Exhibition in the heart of old Beijing is one of dozens of private museums that dot the capitals backstreets and its suburbs. Their collections feature the grand and mundane - from items salvaged from the garbage to a limousine in which Mao Zedong once rode. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Tuesday, March 22, 2016 photo, household items and street objects dating from the 1900s to 1970s collected by Wang Jinming are displayed at his private museum in Beijing. Wangs Beijing Old Items Exhibition in the heart of old Beijing is one of dozens of private museums that dot the capitals backstreets and its suburbs. Their collections feature the grand and mundane - from items salvaged from the garbage to a limousine in which Mao Zedong once rode. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016 photo, visitors look at antiques on display at a private museum owned by Ma Weidu in Beijing. Ma opened Chinas first private museum in 1996, filling it with antiques bought cheaply in the late 1970s and 80s from Beijing residents eager for cash to buy refrigerators, TVs and washing machines. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016, photo, a visitor looks at antiques on display at a private museum owned by Ma Weidu in Beijing. Ma opened Chinas first private museum in 1996, filling it with antiques bought cheaply in the late 1970s and 80s from Beijing residents eager for cash to buy refrigerators, TVs and washing machines. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016 photo, Ma Weidu plays with a cat at his private museum in Beijing. Ma opened Chinas first private museum in 1996, filling it with antiques bought cheaply in the late 1970s and 80s from Beijing residents eager for cash to buy refrigerators, TVs and washing machines. Ever keen to attract more visitors, Ma, a cat lover, recently named 20 felines as "assistant curators" to attract visitors who he hopes will "learn something about antiques." (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Sunday, March 27, 2016, photo, Luo Wenyou poses by his Red Flag car which he used in the 1998 vintage car rally to drive from the northeastern city of Dalian to Beijing, at his private museum in Huairou district of Beijing. As China grows richer, wealthy citizens, banks and private businesses have invested in Chinese art and started museums to display their wealth or patriotism. Others, such as Luo, opened their collections after their pastimes evolved into callings. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Sunday, March 27, 2016, photo, Red Flag car models are displayed with other vintage cars collected by Luo Wenyou at his private museum in Huairou district of Beijing. As China grows richer, wealthy citizens, banks and private businesses have invested in Chinese art and started museums to display their wealth or patriotism. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Tuesday, March 22, 2016, photo, tourists try out antique household items which were collected by Wang Jinming at a private museum in Beijing. Wangs Beijing Old Items Exhibition in the heart of old Beijing is one of dozens of private museums that dot the capitals backstreets and its suburbs. Their collections feature the grand and mundane  from items salvaged from the garbage to a limousine in which Mao Zedong once rode. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016, photo, a visitor looks at antiques on display at a private museum owned by Ma Weidu in Beijing. Ma opened Chinas first private museum in 1996, filling it with antiques bought cheaply in the late 1970s and 80s from Beijing residents eager for cash to buy refrigerators, TVs and washing machines. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
Austria claims much of the credit for EU migrant deal

VIENNA (AP)  Just weeks ago, thousands of migrants a day were streaming into northern Europe. Now the influx has been dramatically crimped and Austria is claiming much of the credit.

The small country at the heart of Europe traditionally is associated with schnitzel, Mozart and "The Sound of Music." More recently, it has also gained a reputation for a hard-nosed migration stance that has shaped Europe's response to the biggest migrant arrivals since World War II.

Austria's decision to shut down its border  the main transit route into the heart of Europe for most refugees  initially caused consternation among many in Europe. But senior Austrian politicians assert the decision helped forge last month's agreement between the EU and Turkey that commits Ankara to start taking back migrants who pay smugglers to make dangerous sea crossings to the Greek islands.

A boy looks from a tent in a makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. A plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries Saturday, two days before the deal brokered by the European Union is set to be implemented. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

"I believe that we played a significant role in ... finding a solution for the migration crisis," Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz told The Associated Press ahead of the first expected migrant returns from Greece to Turkey on Monday.

The premise behind the deal is that Europe will send back to Turkey anyone from any country who doesn't qualify for asylum or has tried to evade a rigorous asylum application process. For every person sent back, EU countries would take in one person confirmed to have made a legitimate asylum request.

Austria  and other eastern European nations  argue that their decision to close their borders leading from Greece through the Balkans and into prosperous northern Europe enabled the deal with Turkey to happen by creating new facts on the ground.

Those facts include having over 50,000 migrants pile up in Greece, as borders further north closed and boatloads of people still poured across its vast Aegean Sea border daily from Turkey.

The Austrian decision meant there would be no more "waving through" of migrants as they sought to get to Austria, Sweden or Germany, which alone accepted more than 1 million refugees last year. As the Balkan route shut down, the sufferings of migrants trapped in makeshift camps in northern Greece, notably around the border village of Idomeni, laid bare the scale of the human misery and increased pressure within the EU to act.

"The right measures were taken on the European level (only) after Austria's outcry," Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann told reporters.

Others see a more nuanced picture.

Anton Pelinka, a politics professor at Eotvoes Lorant University in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, says it was Hungary that played a big role in the EU's new approach. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was arguably the first to reject German-led attempts to allow the migrants free passage through Europe with his migrant quotas and his razor-wire border fences.

"Hungary was in fact the initiator of what then consequently was put into force in the Balkans," he said.

Still, Austria's decision to impose daily caps on those seeking asylum at its southeastern border as of Feb. 19 sent ripples of alarm through countries along the migrant route, from Slovenia to Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia.

Austrian and Balkan route police chiefs on Feb. 18 called for the migrant flow "to be reduced to the greatest possible extent." A day later, Austria imposed caps both on the number of asylum seekers it would accept daily and overall for the whole year. Five days later on Feb. 24, foreign and interior ministers from Austria and its southern neighbors made it formal  tightening border controls and announcing that a complete shutdown of the route was looming.

The move was initially met by harsh criticism. The EU said Austria's clampdown on asylum seekers contravened international law. Greece recalled its ambassador to Vienna and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the border restrictions "are not in line with international law or with common human decency."

But the mood has changed.

While declining to comment on Austria's role in the migrant debate, EU migration spokeswoman Tove Ernst echoed the language coming out of Vienna, saying all members "must commit to ending the 'wave-through' approach to those who indicate an interest in applying for asylum elsewhere."

The move to shut the Balkans route was drastic  but it worked. Figures provided Friday to the AP show the number of new refugee arrivals registered by German police dropped from an average of over 2,000 daily at the start of the year to several hundred from the middle of February. Currently, about 100 people are being recorded each day.

Kurz suggested other EU nations had just been waiting for an opening to fall in line.

"The fact that our path was the right one revealed itself after only a few weeks," he said, asserting that all 28 EU nations endorsed an end to the unfettered migration shortly after Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia also shut their borders.

"I can stand criticism from here and there, particularly when it comes from those who after a few weeks agree to what we suggested," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Frank Jordans in Berlin and Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade contributed.

In this photo taken Thursday, March 31, 2016, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Vienna, Austria. I believe that we played a significant role in ... finding a solution for the migration crisis, Kurz said ahead of the first expected migrant returns from Greece to Turkey on Monday. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 31, 2016, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Vienna, Austria. I believe that we played a significant role in ... finding a solution for the migration crisis, Kurz said ahead of the first expected migrant returns from Greece to Turkey on Monday. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 31, 2016, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Vienna, Austria. I believe that we played a significant role in ... finding a solution for the migration crisis, Kurz said ahead of the first expected migrant returns from Greece to Turkey on Monday. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

Children pose for a photo in a makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. A plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries Saturday, two days before the deal brokered by the European Union is set to be implemented. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A boy pose for a photo in a makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. A plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries Saturday, two days before the deal brokered by the European Union is set to be implemented. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Children play with a toy camera in the makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. A plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries Saturday, two days before the deal brokered by the European Union is set to be implemented. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A woman walks through the makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. A plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries Saturday, two days before the deal brokered by the European Union is set to be implemented. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Azerbaijan: Unilateral cease-fire against Nagorno-Karabakh

BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP)  Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry announced a unilateral cease-fire Sunday against the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, but rebel forces in the area said that they continued to come under fire from Azerbaijani forces.

Fighting in what was a dormant conflict for two decades flared up over the weekend with a boy and at least 30 troops killed on both sides. Each side blamed the other for Saturday's escalation, the worst since the end of a full-scale war in 1994.

The Defense Ministry said, in response to pleas from international organizations, it will be unilaterally "suspending a counter-offensive and response on the territories occupied by Armenia." The ministry added it will not focus on fortifying the territory that Azerbaijan has "liberated." It did not elaborate.

In this image from TV, a car lays destroyed with blood showing in the aftermath after heavy fighting erupted in Terter, Azerbaijan, Saturday April 2, 2016, between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia expressed grave concern on Saturday over the recent military conflict along the Azerbaijan-Armenia border, calling on all parties involved to stop fighting and exercise restraint. Officials from each of the former Soviet republics blamed the other on Saturday for the fighting which began overnight. (Kanal S TV via AP) TV OUT

Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994 with no resolution of the region's status. The conflict is fueled by long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris.

Armenian forces also occupy several areas outside Nagorno-Karabakh proper. The sides are separated by a demilitarized buffer zone, but small clashes have broken out frequently.

Earlier Sunday, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry, Vagif Dargyakhly, said Azerbaijani positions came under fire overnight and that civilian areas also were hit.

On Saturday, Armenia said 18 soldiers were killed and Azerbaijan reported 12 dead.

Footage from the village of Gapanli, over 250 kilometers east of Baku, on the Azerbaijani side, showed Grad multiple missile launchers firing rounds from the field.

Officials in the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh promptly disputed the reports of the unilateral cease-fire, saying that the town of Martakert has been heavily shelled all day despite Azerbaijan's pledge. David Babayan, spokesman for the Karabakh president, told The Associated Press on Sunday that they had not seen any signs that fighting was suspended: "The situation is quite the opposite."

The defense ministry of Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday also claimed to have restored control over a strategic area near the front line. It said Nagorno-Karabakh forces went on a counter-offensive around the village of Talish after Azerbaijani forces shelled their positions just before dawn. Two Karabakh troops were reported injured.

It also said Azerbaijan was using rockets, artillery and armor against the region.

The self-proclaimed officials in Karabakh, however, said they will be ready to discuss a cease-fire with Azerbaijan as long as their respective positions on the ground are restored.

Armenia's deputy defense minister at a Sunday briefing with military attaches based in Yerevan said Armenia will be ready to send troops to Karabakh "if necessary."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Sunday to back its ally Azerbaijan in the conflict, saying that the flare-up could have been avoided if "fair and decisive steps" had been taken.

"We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties," he said.

The unresolved conflict has been an economic blow to Armenia because Turkey has closed its border with Armenia.

___

Avet Demourian in Yerevan, Armenia, and Dominique Soguel in Istanbul contributed to this report.

In this image from TV, a car lays destroyed with blood showing in the aftermath after heavy fighting erupted in Terter, Azerbaijan, Saturday April 2, 2016, between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia expressed grave concern on Saturday over the recent military conflict along the Azerbaijan-Armenia border, calling on all parties involved to stop fighting and exercise restraint. Officials from each of the former Soviet republics blamed the other on Saturday for the fighting which began overnight. (Kanal S TV via AP) TV OUT

In this image from TV, a car destroyed with blood showing in the aftermath after heavy fighting erupted in Terter, Azerbaijan, Saturday April 2, 2016, between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia expressed grave concern on Saturday over the recent military conflict along the Azerbaijan-Armenia border, calling on all parties involved to stop fighting and exercise restraint. Officials from each of the former Soviet republics blamed the other on Saturday for the fighting which began overnight. (Kanal S TV via AP) TV OUT

12-year-old Gevorg Grigoryan's mother pulls a blanket up for her son who was wounded in a missile barrage by Azerbaijani forces, in a hospital in Stepanakert, in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region, Armenia, Saturday, April 2, 2016. Heavy fighting has broken out between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces along the front lines of the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region, reportedly killing at least one child in what one official called the worst clashes since 1994. (Areg Balayan/PAN Photo via AP)

Doctors render aid to 12-year-old Gevorg Grigoryan, who was wounded in a missile barrage by Azerbaijani forces, in a hospital in Stepanakert, in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region, Armenia, Saturday, April 2, 2016. Heavy fighting has broken out between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces along the front lines of the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region, reportedly killing at least one child in what one official called the worst clashes since 1994. (Areg Balayan/PAN Photo via AP)
EPL clubs deny links to doping after claims against doctor

LONDON (AP)  Premier League clubs Arsenal, Chelsea and Leicester emphatically dismissed any links to doping on Sunday after being embroiled in an investigation into a doctor alleged to have prescribed performance-enhancing substances.

The doctor, Mark Bonar, was secretly filmed by The Sunday Times saying he has treated more than 150 athletes in the last six years with banned substances. A British government-mandated investigation is set to look into Bonar and how the country's anti-doping agency handled allegations against him in 2014.

Bonar used Twitter on Sunday to call the Sunday Times reports "false and very misleading."

"I have never had a relationship with any premier football club or player," he tweeted. "I have never prescribed Androgen (hormone) therapy for the purpose of performance enhancement. I treat symptomatic men with low test levels."

The London-based Sunday Times, which sent an athlete undercover to see Bonar, said the doctor claimed to have worked with a "few footballers" who are past or current players at Arsenal, Chelsea and Leicester. But the publication acknowledged that it had "no independent evidence Bonar treated the players" and there was scant detail in the report.

Leicester, the surprise leader of the Premier League, insisted that it follows "robust and comprehensive anti-doping protocols to ensure its full compliance" with anti-doping rules.

The central England team added that it "is extremely disappointed that The Sunday Times has published unsubstantiated allegations referring to players from clubs including Leicester City when, on its own admission, it has insufficient evidence to support the claims."

Chelsea denounced any links to doping as "false and entirely without foundation" while insisting the club has never used Bonar's services and has "no knowledge or record of any of our players having been treated by him."

Arsenal said its players participate in about 50 random drugs tests each season and none of them has failed.

"Arsenal Football Club is extremely disappointed by the publication of these false claims which are without foundation," the north London club said.

The front-page report about Bonar led to the British government hastily ordering an investigation into why the country's anti-doping agency dismissed allegations two years ago that he prescribed performance-enhancing drugs to an athlete.

The Sunday Times said documents implicating Bonar were handed to U.K. Anti-Doping in 2014 by an unnamed athlete who had been suspended for breaching doping rules.

UKAD confirmed Sunday that it opened an investigation into Bonar after interviewing an athlete in April and May 2014 but said the doctor fell outside its jurisdiction because he was not governed by a sport.

"UKAD had no other intelligence to corroborate the sportsman's allegations," the agency said in a statement.

"As a result, UKAD recommended to the sportsperson that more information was needed and ... that information could be passed, if appropriate, to the General Medical Council, which does have the powers to investigate possible medical malpractice and pursue if necessary."

But Britain's culture, media and sport department wants further information from UKAD about its handling of the case.

"I have asked for there to be an urgent independent investigation into what action was taken when these allegations were first received and what more needs to be done to ensure that British sport remains clean," Culture Secretary John Whittingdale said in a statement.

"There is no room for complacency in the fight against doping and the government is already looking at whether existing legislation in this area goes far enough. If it becomes clear that stronger criminal sanctions are needed, then we will not hesitate to act."

The World Anti-Doping Agency said it found the reports "deeply unsettling" and welcomed the British government investigation.

The Sunday Times secretly recorded Bonar making allegations to an unnamed "aspiring Olympic runner" sent to see him by the paper about how banned performance-enhancing drugs had been prescribed for athletes.

"Some of these treatments I use are banned on a professional circuit," Bonar was recorded as saying. "So you have to be mindful of that. Having said that  I have worked with lots of professional athletes who do use these treatments."
In Istanbul, an Arabic bookstore anchors Syrian refugees

Istanbul (AP)  A rustic, three story-Arabic bookstore in old Istanbul has become an anchor for many Syrians who have stayed put in Turkey but crave a taste of home.

The founder and owner of Pages, Samer al-Kadri, a refugee himself, says the store strives to be a bridge between Syrians, Turks and the myriad of foreigners who visit the city.

Its weekly program includes music concerts and, starting soon, language exchanges in Arabic, English and Turkish. Books are available in all three languages. Al-Kadri is acutely aware that the language barrier "has made it difficult for Syrians to really integrate into society."

In this photo taken on Friday, April 1, 2016, Syrian refugee Samer Al-Kadri, founder and owner of Pages, a rustic three story-Arabic language bookshop, removes a book at his store in Istanbul, Turkey. The bookstore has become an anchor for many Syrians who have stayed put in Turkey but crave a taste of home. Al-Kadri, a refugee himself, says the store strives to be a bridge between Syrians, Turks and the myriad of foreigners who visit the city. Its weekly program includes oriental music concerts and, starting soon, language exchanges in Arabic, English and Turkish. Books are available in all three languages. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Turkey is hosting 2.7 million Syrian refugees and is due to receive many more under a plan with the European Union that aims to halt the smuggling of migrants into Europe. The deal stipulates that for every Syrian returned, another Syrian in Turkey will be relocated to a European country.

The plan has drawn considerable criticism from human rights groups, who worry that Turkey is not a suitable haven for asylum-seekers and fear it could pave the way for mass deportations. Amnesty International says Turkey has already scaled down its registration of Syrian refugees and is illegally sending back refugees to its war-torn neighbor.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry denies this and says the country maintains its open-door policy and adheres to the principle of not returning Syrians.

In the eyes of many Syrians, the deal has rendered them pawns in a political bargain that benefits everyone but them.

Ola Suleiman, a new employee at the bookstore, says there's a touch of "evil" to the deal because "they are deciding the fate of a people."

While her middle-class family is among the Syrians who are doing better for themselves in Istanbul, it hasn't been easy. The cost of life in Turkey is far higher than in pre-war or even post-war Syria. Most Syrian refugees live outside the camps and largely fend for themselves.

Suleiman and her siblings work six days a week without vacation just to keep their household afloat. Technically many Syrians do not have the right to work. Suleiman does not have a work contract let alone health insurance. This, she says, leaves Syrian workers vulnerable to exploitation while allowing Turkish business owners to evade taxes.

Turkey has committed to giving work permits to its Syrian "guests" but there are signs this perk may be riddled with caveats.

Still, Suleiman likes working in a bookshop and treasures the precious moments that allow her to read once again. It is a feeling shared by many customers, including Faiz Dakhil, who loves the scent of books and says this place makes him "feel at home."

Al-Kadri, Suleiman and Dakhil have stayed in Turkey because they want to be able to return to Syria as soon as the war is over. But those who fled to Europe have cut their losses and are dreaming of a better future elsewhere. For them, it will be extra hard to start a new life in Turkey.

"I hope that everyone who left with the intention of improving their situation can complete his journey, doesn't return to Turkey," says Dakhil.

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This story corrects the spelling of one of the writer's names, Bram Janssen.

In this photo taken on Friday, April 1, 2016, Syrian refugee Samer Al-Kadri, founder and owner of Pages, a rustic three story-Arabic language bookshop, sits outside his store in Istanbul, Turkey. The bookstore has become an anchor for many Syrians who have stayed put in Turkey but crave a taste of home. Al-Kadri, a refugee himself, says the store strives to be a bridge between Syrians, Turks and the myriad of foreigners who visit the city. Its weekly program includes oriental music concerts and, starting soon, language exchanges in Arabic, English and Turkish. Books are available in all three languages. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

In this photo taken on Friday, April 1, 2016, customers are seen Pages, a rustic three story-Arabic language bookshop in Istanbul, Turkey. The bookstore has become an anchor for many Syrians who have stayed put in Turkey but crave a taste of home. The founder and owner of Pages, Samer al-Kadri, a refugee himself, says the store strives to be a bridge between Syrians, Turks and the myriad of foreigners who visit the city. Its weekly program includes oriental music concerts and, starting soon, language exchanges in Arabic, English and Turkish. Books are available in all three languages. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Residents wave national flags as they protest against plans to build a refugee camp under the new EU-Turkey deal in Aegean resort of Dikili, Izmir, Turkey, Saturday, April 2, 2016. Under the new deal refugees and migrants who arrived on Greek islands after March 20 will be sent back to Turkey starting on upcoming Monday.(AP Photo)
EU Parliament head: Turkey's satire complaint 'untenable'

BERLIN (AP)  The head of the European Parliament has criticized Turkey for complaining about a German satirical song that poked fun at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Martin Schulz said in an interview published Sunday "it's intolerable that the president of another country demands we restrict democratic rights in Germany because he feels ridiculed."

Turkey's Foreign Ministry summoned the German ambassador to demand the clip's removal from the website of German public broadcaster ARD. German weekly Bild am Sonntag quoted Schulz calling the move "completely untenable."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks at the inauguration of the Diyanet Center of America in Lanham, Md., on Saturday, April 2, 2016. (AP Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz)

Schulz, who is German, said Europe shouldn't remain silent about human rights violations in Turkey either "just because we're cooperating with them on the refugee issue."
Train smashes into double-decker bus in Thailand, killing 3

BANGKOK (AP)  A train smashed into a double-decker bus carrying Thai tourists at an unguarded railway crossing in central Thailand on Sunday, with local media reporting that three people were killed and more than two dozen injured.

Security video showed the bus moving slowly across the tracks and stopping momentarily before it is hit by the train. A car had crossed the tracks safely from the opposite direction a few seconds earlier.

Soon after the accident, the driver of another bus behind the one that was hit is seen getting out and running toward the crash. Another video from a camera positioned at a different angle shows the bus being hit and dragged some distance in a cloud of dust.

This image taken from close circuit television video provided by TPBS shows the moment a passenger train, left in background, hit a tourist bus at a crossing in Nakhon Pathom province, west of Bangkok, Thailand, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The accident occurred at about 7:30 a.m. when the double-decker bus was taking Thai tourists to Samet island in Rayong province, southeast of Bangkok. (TPBS via AP) THAILAND OUT, TV OUT, NO SALES

The Bangkok Post said that the driver of the bus was killed on the spot, and that two passengers died at a hospital. Around 30 passengers were injured.

The newspaper said the accident occurred at about 7:30 a.m. in Nakhon Pathom province, west of Bangkok. The bus was taking tourists to Samet island in Rayong province, southeast of Bangkok.

Such accidents occur often in Thailand, where many railway crossings do not have barriers.

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Online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t8puLMH6TM
Islamic State affiliate claims Saudi police station bombing

CAIRO (AP)  An Islamic State affiliate in Saudi Arabia claimed on Sunday that its militants detonated two explosive devices in front of a police station in the city of al-Dalam, setting fire to three police vehicles.

Also Sunday, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki said a person was killed by an improvised explosive device near the police station in al-Dalam. The statement, carried by the Saudi Press Agency, said police are investigating the incident, which took place on Saturday, but gave no further details on the victim's nationality, who was referred to as a resident.

The statement issued by the IS affiliate Najd Province made no reference to that deadly attack, only saying Sunday its bombing took place a day earlier. It gave no further details.

Some Saudi news websites published images of the aftermath late Saturday night, showing police jeeps and SUVs on fire outside the police station in al-Dalam, located 62 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of the capital Riyadh.

No deaths or injuries were reported. Local police spokesman Fawaz al-Mayman, quoted by the Almowaten website, said the incident is still under investigation and that police would issue a statement soon.

There have been several attacks in Saudi Arabia over the past year carried out by local Islamic State group affiliates. The Najd Province affiliate is the kingdom's most active. It claimed responsibility for two major bombings in eastern Saudi Arabia and one in Kuwait that killed 53 people at Shiite mosques last May and June. Najd Province is the traditional name for the central heartland of the peninsula and the homeland of the ruling Al Saud family.

Another IS-inspired group, calling itself the Hijaz Province affiliate, said it was behind a mosque bombing inside a police compound that killed 15 people in August. The Bahrain Province affiliate claimed responsibility for a shooting in eastern Saudi Arabia that killed five worshippers in October.

A similar attack in late January outside a Shiite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia killed four people, though no group claimed responsibility. Last month, Saudi police killed six men they said were wanted for the murder of a counter-terrorism security officer, whose death was filmed and posted online by the suspects who declared their allegiance to the IS group.

Saudi Arabia is part of the U.S.-led coalition bombing the IS group in Iraq and Syria. IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has called Saudi Arabia's Western-allied rulers "apostates" and has encouraged attacks against the Sunni-ruled kingdom.

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Missouri veteran who escaped Nazi prison camp gets medal

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP)  Edwin Shifrin's family knew he successfully escaped from a Nazi prison camp during World War II, but it wasn't until one of his children started digging into his wartime past that they learned the details of the clever escape.

Shifrin, 93, seldom discussed his time at war, but he received a prisoner-of-war medal in February after son Dan Shifrin dug through old news reports and his father's military records and pieced together what happened.

"It is an amazing story," said Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, who expedited the medal process after hearing about it from Shifrin's daughter in January. Shifrin received the award during a family-only ceremony in the suburban St. Louis apartment that he shares with his wife of 67 years.

This February 2016 photo provided by Dan Shifrin shows his father, 93-year-old Edwin Shifrin at home in Clayton, Mo., looking at a prisoner-of-war medal he just received for his World War II military service. The award was expedited by U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri after she was approached by Shifrin's family about his clever escape from a Nazi prison camp. That may never have come to light if not for the efforts of son Dan Shifrin, who says he was able to learn about the escape by digging through old news reports and his father's military records. (Marianne Shifrin/Dan Shifrin via AP)

"This is the very best part of my job," McCaskill said by phone from her Senate offices in Washington.

Edwin Shifrin's memory is fading, so his son Dan shared his story:

Assigned to the Army's 30th Infantry Division, 1st Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, Company C, Shifrin landed on France's Normandy beach in June 1944 a week after the D-Day invasion and then fought the Germans in battles at St. Lo and Mortain.

The Germans captured him on Aug. 7, and Shifrin was sent from a prison camp to his final stop, Poland lockup Stalag IIIC, which was about 90 miles from Berlin. Telegrams to U.S. family members notified them he was missing in action.

Shifrin was among the camp's roughly 1,000 prisoners, many of whom formed "an escape committee" and drew up a getaway plan.

Each morning when the Germans did simply a numerical headcount  no actual names were called out  a prisoner designated by the committee would hide, touching off what turned out to be a futile search by guards. The hiding prisoner would later quietly rejoin the others, but the befuddled guards would lower the next day's headcount by one.

On the second day, two prisoners would hide, touching off another futile search and getting the guards to lower the next day's head count by one again. That continued with three and four prisoners hiding and the guards classifying them as escaped. Eventually, four men actually escaped, but the guards didn't notice because they had already lowered the roll-call numbers to account for the prisoners who had hidden.

Shifrin and some other prisoners got their chance in mid-January 1945, just weeks before the Russians liberated the camp. Dan Shifrin said "the rest of their journey is pretty hazy," but what's known is they hitchhiked on Allied supply trucks and purloined rides on horses and bikes on their way to Italy. By that April, Shifrin was back on U.S. soil, in Boston.

After getting his law degree, he became a St. Louis attorney and worked well into his 80s. He seldom discussed his time at war.

"We knew he'd been in the war, that he had been captured and that he escaped. That's about it. He didn't talk about it," said Dan Shifrin, who lives in the Denver area. "My guess is he figured it was just part of his life  many went through it, many didn't return. Many of those who did return didn't return in one piece."

Chronicling his dad's past, Dan Shifrin added, "gave me much greater appreciation for what he and others went through."
Brazil buses burned to protest death of boy by stray bullet

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP)  Demonstrators protesting the death of a boy who was killed by a stray bullet looted stores and set 12 buses ablaze in Brazil over the weekend.

Officials urged people in the area to stay home Sunday, fearing more violence might erupt during the afternoon funeral for Rian Gabriel.

The 4-year-old was shot in the chest on Easter Sunday while playing outside his grandparents' home in Rio de Janeiro's Madureira neighborhood.

Shootouts are common there as rival drug gangs fight for control. Police have said that weren't conducting operations in that area at that time because of a gunbattle. But the boy's mother, Patricia Moraes, blamed police, saying there wasn't any gunfight.

"The police came in shooting. When I went to grab him, he had already fallen," Moraes told the Globo television network's G1 Internet portal. "Since I'm from a poor, humble family it's going to stay just as it is, but my son is not coming back."

The military police in Rio de Janeiro state and local police could not be reached for comment.

Local television showed images of buses burning Saturday night in the municipality of Mage. G1 said firefighters were kept from the area due to fears for their safety.

"We've never had this kind of situation in our municipality. We had 12 buses set on fire and several businesses and a bank broken into, looted," said Nelson Vinagre, Mage's secretary for public order. "It's chaos."
Stephanie Seymour due back in court in drunken driving case

STAMFORD, Conn. (AP)  A Connecticut judge is set to decide whether supermodel Stephanie Seymour can enter a program that could lead to the dismissal of a drunken driving charge.

The former Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated model is due back in Stamford Superior Court on Monday.

A judge is expected to rule on whether Seymour can enter the state's alcohol education program, which includes several weeks of classes or treatment and can lead to charges being dropped.

FILE- In this Feb. 2, 2016, file photo, supermodel Stephanie Seymour attends an arraignment hearing on a drunken driving charge in Stamford, Conn. A Connecticut judge is set to decide whether Seymour can enter a program that could lead to the dismissal of a drunken driving charge. Seymour is due back in Stamford Superior Court on Monday, April 4. (Douglas Healey /New York Post via AP, Pool, File)

Police say the 47-year-old Seymour backed her SUV into another car on a highway exit ramp in her hometown of Greenwich in January. She's also charged with crashing into a utility pole and leaving the scene in another accident the same day.
Sen. Graham to Arab world: US hasn't changed despite Trump

CAIRO (AP)  Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham sought to reassure the Arab world Sunday over the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president, saying in Cairo that Congress would continue to play a primary role in foreign policy, "regardless of what Mr. Trump says or does."

"The Congress is going to be around no matter who is president," Graham told reporters after meeting with Egyptian President Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi as part of a Republican congressional delegation touring the Middle East.

"All of us, regardless of what Mr. Trump says or does, we are going to keep being who we are, so don't let the political scenes at home get you too upset," Graham said. "That's what I told the president."

In this photo provided by Egypt's state news agency, MENA, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, right meets with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, left, at the office of the Presidency in Cairo, Egypt. On Sunday, Graham told reporters in Cairo, that Republican candidate Donald Trumps campaign does not mean that the U.S. has fundamentally changed in terms of the way we view the world, and even if he wins, the congress will be around doing its job. (MENA via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

Graham's comments regarding the front-runner for his party's nomination reflect a growing concern in Washington over the effect a Trump presidency could have on U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Trump has stirred controversy both at home and abroad with proposals that include a blanket ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S. and the building of a massive wall along the entire U.S.-Mexican border.

"Don't let the politics of the moment make you believe that America has fundamentally changed in terms of the way we view the world. It hasn't," Graham said.

Graham has endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump's main Republican rival, despite the fact that Graham has been a vocal public critic of Cruz for years. Speaking to The Daily Show's Trevor Noah last month, Graham said he was endorsing Cruz because he is, "not completely crazy."

Speaking to reporters Sunday, Graham said he wants the U.S. to increase its military aid to el-Sissi's government, which is battling a long-running insurgency in the northern Sinai by militants affiliated with the Islamic State group.

With $1.3 billion annually, Egypt is the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel.

Graham said the delegation's main purpose in Egypt is to improve and deepen relations with el-Sissi, and to support the economy to help ensure the stability of Egypt.

"If Egypt fails, every problem in the Mideast becomes a hundred times worse," Graham said.

Graham, along with Sen. John McCain, was vehemently opposed to the July 2013 military ouster of elected Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, led by then-Defense Minister el-Sissi. The military removed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood amid mass protests against his one-year rule.

But on Sunday, Graham appeared to back el-Sissi as "a military man who understands terrorism" and "someone I can work with."

In recent weeks, Egypt was rebuked over its human rights record by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as well as the European Union's foreign affairs arm, the European Parliament, the U.N. Council for Human Rights and several Western European nations, including key trade partner and EU heavyweight Germany. The case of an Italian student kidnapped and tortured to death in Cairo has also poisoned Egypt's long close ties with Italy, amid suspicions that it was carried out by members of the security forces.

Graham acknowledged those concerns and said he and his colleagues are encouraging Egypt to improve its record on human rights and freedom of expression.

"Our hope is that the Egyptian government can prove to the international community that they're sincerely responding to legitimate concerns while at the same time trying to maintain security," Graham said.
The ban on flying drones over crowds or in towns and cities could soon be lifted, according to files obtained from a government-sponsored committee.

The Federal Aviation Administration currently prohibits most commercial drone flights over crowds, and this is hampering plans for package delivery drones in urban areas.

Now, a source claims the Small UAV Coalition is recommending the ban be relaxed to encourage commercial development in the area.

Government-sponsored committee, the Small UAV Coalition, is recommending standards that could clear the way for commercial drone flights over populated areas and help speed the introduction of package delivery drones and other uses not yet possible

'Every TV station in the country wants one, but they can't be limited to flying in the middle of nowhere because there's no news in the middle of nowhere,' said Jim Williams, a former head of the FAA's drone office who now advises the industry for Dentons, an international law firm.

Mobile network providers also want to loosen restrictions so drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, can inspect mobile phone masts, which often are in urban areas.

Amazon's vision for package deliveries entails drones winging their way over city and suburban neighborhoods.

The AP obtained a copy of the recommendations, which were sent to the FAA late Friday.

The agency is not bound by the recommendations and can make changes when it writes the final rules.

The recommendations call for creating four categories of small drones that commercial operators can fly over people, including crowds in some cases.

THE REPORT'S RECOMMENDATIONS The recommendations call for creating four categories of small drones that commercial operators can fly over people, including crowds in some cases. The first category of drones would weigh no more than about a half-pound (230 grams). They essentially could fly unrestricted over people, including crowds. Drone makers would have to certify that if the drone hit someone, there would be no more than a 1 per cent chance that the maximum force of the impact would cause a serious injury. Drones in the second category are expected to be mostly small quadcopters - drones with multiple arms and propellers, and weighing 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), but there is no weight limit. Flights over people, including crowds, would depend on the design and operating instructions. Manufacturers would have to demonstrate through testing that the chance of a serious injury was 1 percent or less. Drones in the third category could not fly over crowds or densely populated areas. The recommendations call for creating four categories of small drones that commercial operators can fly over people, including crowds in some cases. The first category would weigh no more than about a half-pound (230 grams) and could fly unrestricted over. Stock image These drones would be used for work in closed or restricted sites where the people that the drones fly over have permission from the drone operator to be present. Those people would be incidental to the drone operations and flights over them would be brief, rather than sustained. Manufacturers would have to show there was a 30 percent chance or less that a person would be seriously injured if struck by the drone at the maximum strength impact possible. Drones in the fourth category could have sustained flights over crowds. Working with the FAA and engaging the local community, the operator would have to develop a 'congested area plan' showing how flight risks would be mitigated. As before, the risk of serious injury would have to be 30 per cent or less. Safety tests would be more exacting and the FAA would set a limit on how strong the drone's maximum impact could be. Advertisement

The first category of drones would weigh no more than about a half-pound (230 grams). They essentially could fly unrestricted over people, including crowds.

Drone makers would have to certify that if the drone hit someone, there would be no more than a 1 percent chance that the maximum force of the impact would cause a serious injury.

For the three other categories, the drones would have to fly at least 20ft (6 metres) over the heads of people and keep a distance of at least 10ft (3 metres) laterally from someone.

'The risks are nominal,' said Michael Drobac, executive director of the Small UAV Coalition. 'The reality is the technology would likely save lives rather than threaten them.'

Mobile network providers want to loosen restrictions so drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, can inspect mobile phone masts, which often are in urban areas. Amazon's vision for package deliveries entails drones winging their way over city and suburban neighborhoods (Amazon Prime Air pictured)

The FAA announced the formation of the committee in February as a way to circumvent traditional federal rule-making procedures, which can take years.

The committee was made up of 27 companies or trade associations, including drone manufacturers and companies that want to fly drones, as well as airline and private pilots, airports, crop dusting companies and helicopter operators.

A last-minute disagreement nearly kept the committee from meeting the Friday deadline for the recommendations.

THE SMALL UAV COALITION The FAA announced the formation of the committee in February as a way to circumvent traditional federal rule-making procedures, which can take years. The committee was made up of 27 companies or trade associations, including drone manufacturers and companies that want to fly drones, as well as airline and private pilots, airports, crop dusting companies and helicopter operators. The Air Line Pilots Association and trade associations for the helicopter and crop dusting industries wanted to require that all commercial drone operators pass an aviation knowledge test administered in person by the FAA and receive a background check from the Transportation Security Administration, according to an industry official familiar with the discussions. Most committee members opposed requiring anything more than an online knowledge test. The matter was resolved by the inclusion of a dissent by those in favor of the FAA test and TSA clearance. Advertisement

The Air Line Pilots Association and trade associations for the helicopter and crop dusting industries wanted to require that all commercial drone operators pass an aviation knowledge test administered in person by the FAA and receive a background check from the Transportation Security Administration, according to an industry official familiar with the discussions.

Most committee members opposed requiring anything more than an online knowledge test. The matter was resolved by the inclusion of a dissent by those in favor of the FAA test and TSA clearance.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions.

The FAA initially described the panel as a 'micro' drone committee. The agency defines such drones as those weighing less than 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms).

But the committee decided not to set a weight limit for most of the categories.

That means it's possible that any 'small' drone, which the FAA defines as weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms), could win approval to fly over people if the drone met the safety criteria laid out in the recommendations.
Deportation of migrants from Greece to Turkey starts Monday

ATHENS, Greece (AP)  An agreement between the European Union and Turkey to deport migrants currently on Greek islands back to the Turkish mainland is to take effect Monday morning, but the operation is threatened by a shortage of personnel.

Frontex, the EU's border management agency, is responsible for the implementation of the deal, but has less than one tenth of the 2,300 officers that it needs to do the job. The agency relies on the EU's 28 member states to provide translators and other officials to process asylum seekers, but these have not been forthcoming, even as the continent faces its worst refugee crisis since World War II.

The EU-Turkey deal aims to control the mass influx of people into Europe, many of whom have crossed the dangerous Aegean Sea with the help of smugglers. Under the deal, migrants arriving illegally in Greece will be returned to Turkey if they do not apply for asylum or if they make an asylum claim that is rejected.

Migrants and refugees inside Moria camp 0n the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. More than 3,000 people stay in the camp as the plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

For every person sent back, EU countries would take in one person confirmed to have made a legitimate asylum request.

The deal was originally supposed to take effect immediately, on March 20, but has faced delays due to the shortage of personnel and other problems.

The looming implementation of the deal and the closure of European borders have slowed the flow of people into Greece but not stopped it altogether. In the 24 hours leading to 7:30 a.m. Sunday, 514 arrived, according to authorities. There are now over 6,100 migrants in the Aegean islands, more than half in Lesbos.

Giorgos Kyritsis, a spokesman for the Greek government's refugee crisis committee, told The Associated Press that Frontex only has 200 officers in place to accompany the deported migrants, but almost none of the other personnel that would facilitate screening those who apply for asylum.

Other agencies, such as UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency, are trying to help migrants go through the asylum application process. Many avoid even applying, certain they will be deported anyway.

Frontex has secured three vessels that will make the short trip from the island of Lesbos to the Turkish coast starting Monday morning. It aims to deport about 750 migrants, mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan, who either did not apply for asylum or whose applications have been rejected, in the first three days. To safeguard against unrest, the number of deported migrants will be matched by the same number of Frontex border guards on each ship.

"We do not know how this operation will proceed...This is being done for the first time and it raises unprecedented legal issues as well," Kyritsis said.

The Greek government must also deal with the over 46,000 migrants and refugees now on the mainland, more than 20,000 of whom live in makeshift camps on the northern border with Macedonia and in Athens. They have become stuck after Macedonia and other counties have closed their borders, essentially closing off a popular route through the Balkans into Western Europe.

The Greek government wants to empty the makeshift camps and move the people to organized camps without using force. But many, especially in the Idomeni camp on the Macedonian border, refuse to budge, sometimes believing rumors that the closed borders will reopen.

Kyritsis said it appeared that "some people are acting in bad faith" in spreading false hopes.

"If we find out they are also connected with migrant (exploitation) networks, we will use the full force of the law on them," he said.

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Costas Kantouris in Thessaloniki, Idyli Tsakiri, in Idomeni, and Raphael Kominis and Nikolia Apostolou, in Lesbos, contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to .read that the deal was originally supposed to take effect on March 20, instead of March 19.

Migrants and refugees inside Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. More than 3,000 migrants and refugees stay in the camp as the plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A woman walks next to a tall wire fence at Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. More than 3,000 migrants and refugees stay in the camp as the plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A girl covers her face as she peers out during the visit of an Islamic State rape victim Iraqi Yazidi Nadia Murad Basee Taha in the makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Nadia Murad Basee Taha is candidate for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Migrants and refugees are seen inside Moria camp in the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. More than 3000 people stay in the camp as the plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A Pakistani migrant sleeps on a pallet on z beach in a camp set up by volunteers near the port of Mytilini, in the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Children play with a ball inside a huge tent at the port of Piraeus, near Athens, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The EU-Turkey deal stipulates that those who reach the shores of Greece unlawfully will be returned to Turkey unless they qualify for asylum. The deal aims to break the lucrative smuggling operations that now operate out Turkey. (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

A boy pulls the dress of a woman as they walk in front of tents at the port of Piraeus, near Athens, on Sunday, April 3, 2016. The EU-Turkey deal stipulates that those who reach the shores of Greece unlawfully will be returned to Turkey unless they qualify for asylum. The deal aims to break the lucrative smuggling operations that now operate out Turkey. (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

Clothes are left to dry on a goalpost at the port of Piraeus, near Athens, on Sunday, April 3, 2016. The EU-Turkey deal stipulates that those who reach the shores of Greece unlawfully will be returned to Turkey unless they qualify for asylum. The deal aims to break the lucrative smuggling operations that now operate out Turkey. (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

Migrants and refugees do their daily chores at the port of Piraeus, near Athens, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The EU-Turkey deal stipulates that those who reach the shores of Greece unlawfully will be returned to Turkey unless they qualify for asylum. The deal aims to break the lucrative smuggling operations that now operate out Turkey. (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

Migrants and refugees are seen inside Moria camp in the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. More than 3000 people stay in the camp as the plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A general view of Moria camp, where more than 3000 refugees and migrants stay in at the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A migrant from Somalia looks on in a camp set up by volunteers near the port of Mytilini, in the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A Pakistani migrant gives a soup to another in a camp set up by volunteers near the port of Mytilini, in the Greek island of Lesbos, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey is set to be implemented starting Monday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Children play behind a banner in the makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. The EU-Turkey deal stipulates that those who reach the shores of Greece unlawfully will be returned to Turkey unless they qualify for asylum. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People watch the visit of an Islamic State rape victim Iraqi Yazidi Nadia Murad Basee Taha in the makeshift refugee camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Nadia Murad Basee Taha is candidate for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Congress doesn't plan to do much in election year

WASHINGTON (AP)  Congress increasingly is being defined by what it's not doing this election year.

The Senate returns this week with a strong majority of Republicans saying no to any consideration of President Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court. No hearings, no vote and, for some lawmakers, not even a meeting with federal appeals court Judge Merrick Garland.

Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, insist that the decision on filling the court vacancy rests with the next president after voters have their say in November's election.

FILE - In this Feb. 24, 2016, file photo, the Capitol in Washington is illuminated during a thunderstorm with the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building reflected on the rain-covered windows. Congress increasingly is defined by what it's not doing this election year. The Senate returns this week with a strong majority of Republicans saying no to confirmation hearings and a vote on President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

A bipartisan bill to aid Flint, Michigan, where the city's 100,000 residents are struggling with lead-contaminated water, is being blocked by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who wants to ensure that the money is paid for without adding to the federal deficit. The dispute over Flint has snagged a far-reaching measure on energy.

In the House, where lawmakers return from their break April 12, conservative opposition probably will make it impossible to pass a budget, in what would be a major embarrassment for Republican Speaker Paul Ryan. A Republican proposal to aid debt-stricken Puerto Rico has drawn criticism from House Democrats and conservatives, raising doubts about Congress' ability to resolve the issue.

The latest Gallup Poll shows public approval of Congress at an abysmal 13 percent. Yet, so far no incumbent lawmaker has lost a primary.

A look at the issues in limbo in Congress:

THE FIGHT OVER GARLAND

Garland plans to meet with 11 senators in the week ahead, including two Republicans. Democrats are maintaining election-year pressure on Republicans for blocking the usual Senate committee hearings and vote on a high court nominee.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and John Boozman of Arkansas are set to sit down with Garland on Tuesday. Collins is one of just two Republicans out of 54 who are open to hearings and a vote on Garland; Boozman is up for re-election this year. Eager to keep the fight in the news, Democrats say there might be 50 more Garland meetings with senators in the coming weeks, and they plan repeated Senate floor speeches on the issue.

Over the Senate's two-week recess, both sides pushed their messages back home, but Democrats were particularly aggressive as senators held news conferences and wrote newspaper columns. Swing-state Republicans facing re-election were top targets, including Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio and Iowa's Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, responsible for holding hearings on judicial nominees.

Garland has met with just one Republican: Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, who is embroiled in a difficult re-election fight and has said the Senate should provide "rational, adult, open-minded consideration" of Garland, an Illinois native.

At least 15 Republican senators have said they are willing to meet Garland, though most oppose letting the confirmation process progress. Only Collins and Kirk are open to hearings and a vote.

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SPENDING

It's been years since Congress approved each of the annual appropriations bills  the 12 measures that fund the budgets of agencies and departments. The new normal is an all-encompassing bill at the end of the year. Republicans leaders such as McConnell want to get process back on track, and the Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to start the week of April 11.

It'll be a test for the Senate, and pitfalls await, including potential fights over immigration, environmental regulations and gun rights.

In the House, Republican leaders are still trying to win approval of a broader budget plan that's usually a precursor to action on the spending bills. Chances are iffy at best. It's not clear what the path forward on the appropriations bills will be.

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PUERTO RICO

House Republicans unveiled a plan to help Puerto Rico with its $70 billion debt, but a draft bill by the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Republican Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah, was rejected by Democrats, Republican conservatives and Puerto Rican officials.

The proposal would create a five-person board designed to audit the territory's government and create fiscal plans and budget measures  steps Republicans say are necessary for Puerto Rico to get its economy back on track. The board would have the authority to enact the plan if the territory's governor and legislature failed to do so.

The draft would not give Puerto Rico the broad bankruptcy authority it has asked for, but would allow the oversight board to decide whether debt restructuring is necessary

The House Republican Study Committee, a group of around 170 conservatives, expressed concerns about the debt restructuring provisions. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats said the oversight board would be too controlling.

Puerto Rico's government has defaulted on $37 million in interest on bonds issued by Puerto Rico's Infrastructure Financing Authority, as well as nearly $60 million in Public Finance Corporation bonds. The bonds are not protected by the U.S. territory's government. Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla has warned there is no money for future payments, including $400 million due in May in bonds issued by the Government Development Bank.

Bishop said he will continue to work on the bill to gain consensus.

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CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Advocates for a criminal justice overhaul are hoping Congress will move legislation in both chambers before the summer, though the effort has run into roadblocks in the Senate.

The Republican caucus is split over a bipartisan bill that would give judges the discretion to impose lesser sentences than federal mandatory minimums and eliminate mandatory life sentences for three-time, nonviolent drug offenders.

Some conservatives, including Arkansas' Tom Cotton and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz of Texas, say the bill could release violent offenders from prison. It's a charge that their Republican colleagues backing the bill strongly deny.

Senators are now rewriting parts of the bill, but even with the expected changes, it's unclear whether McConnell will choose to move forward.

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Protesters clash with police at Italian-Austrian border

MILAN (AP)  Italian demonstrators clashed with Austrian police on Sunday when they crossed the Brenner Pass border to protest against Austria's plans to enforce controls to limit the passage of migrants.

Some 500 human rights activists marched on the border Sunday, lighting flares and spraying "Welcome" on a sign announcing the passage to Austria. Austrian police said they detained around 50 protests for throwing stones at officers, injuring five, and vandalizing property.

Police used batons and pepper spray to drive back the protesters, according to reports in the Austrian media.

Police try to stopp protesters who demonstrate against new borders, on their way in the Italian village of Brenner on the Italian-Austrian border, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Austria's defense minister said his country will deploy soldiers at a key Alpine pass to stop migrants arriving from Italy. Hans Peter Doskozil told German daily Die Welt that the move anticipates a shift in migrant flows from the Turkey-Greece route to the central Mediterranean. In an interview published Saturday, the newspaper quotes Doskozil saying that the military can provide "considerable support to border security" at the Brenner pass. ( AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

An Austrian official was also quoted in the German media as saying that Austria will deploy soldiers to the borders to ensure that an expected influx through Italy won't make it north.

Several European Union countries have responded to the influx of migrants from across the Mediterranean by reintroducing border controls along their previously open frontiers.

Many expect that an EU-Turkey deal tightening the Balkans route will send migrants across the sea to Italy and then northwards, once weather permits.

Police officers try to stopp protesters on their way in the village of Brenner on the Italian-Austrian border, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Austria's defense minister said his country will deploy soldiers at a key Alpine pass to stop migrants arriving from Italy. Hans Peter Doskozil told German daily Die Welt that the move anticipates a shift in migrant flows from the Turkey-Greece route to the central Mediterranean. In an interview published Saturday, the newspaper quotes Doskozil saying that the military can provide "considerable support to border security" at the Brenner pass. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

"Welcome" is painted to the Austrian Border sign after protests in the village of Brenner on the Italian-Austrian border, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Austria's defense minister said his country will deploy soldiers at a key Alpine pass to stop migrants arriving from Italy. Hans Peter Doskozil told German daily Die Welt that the move anticipates a shift in migrant flows from the Turkey-Greece route to the central Mediterranean. In an interview published Saturday, the newspaper quotes Doskozil saying that the military can provide "considerable support to border security" at the Brenner pass. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

"Refugees wellcome to EU" is painted on a street in front of Austrian police officers in thevillage of Brenner on the Italian-Austrian border, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Austria's defense minister said his country will deploy soldiers at a key Alpine pass to stop migrants arriving from Italy. Hans Peter Doskozil told German daily Die Welt that the move anticipates a shift in migrant flows from the Turkey-Greece route to the central Mediterranean. In an interview published Saturday, the newspaper quotes Doskozil saying that the military can provide "considerable support to border security" at the Brenner pass.(AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Protesters with a banner make their way in the Italian village of Brenner on the Italian-Austrian border, Sunday, April 3, 2016. Austria's defense minister said his country will deploy soldiers at a key Alpine pass to stop migrants arriving from Italy. Hans Peter Doskozil told German daily Die Welt that the move anticipates a shift in migrant flows from the Turkey-Greece route to the central Mediterranean. In an interview published Saturday, the newspaper quotes Doskozil saying that the military can provide "considerable support to border security" at the Brenner pass. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Police officers stand on the the Austrian side of road in the village of Brenner AT the Italian-Austrian border, during protests against new borders Sunday, April 3, 2016. Austria's defense minister said his country will deploy soldiers at a key Alpine pass to stop migrants arriving from Italy. Hans Peter Doskozil told German daily Die Welt that the move anticipates a shift in migrant flows from the Turkey-Greece route to the central Mediterranean. In an interview published Saturday, the newspaper quotes Doskozil saying that the military can provide "considerable support to border security" at the Brenner pass. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)
Guyana investigate posts against president on Facebook

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP)  Police say they've arrested a woman who used her Facebook account to suggest that Guyana's President David Granger should be assassinated.

They say other social media users alerted them to the posts by Bibi Safoora Salim, who they say apparently lost her government job after Granger won election in May. One post allegedly said the president "wants a bullet in head."

Police say they also detained her son. Both have been released on bail.

Police spokesman Wendell Blanhum said on Sunday that agents are hunting for two other Guyanese who also made postings against Granger.
WWII veteran awarded 5 medals for service 70 years after war

HERMISTON, Ore. (AP)  A 92-year-old Oregon man has been honored for his military service 70 years after he returned home from World War II.

The East Oregonian reports (http://bit.ly/1RVSX9j ) that William Jones on Saturday was presented with five medals including a Presidential Citation, Good Conduct Medal, campaign medals for the American and Euro-African-Middle-Eastern campaigns and the World War II Victory Medal.

Jones says he didn't apply for the medals after returning to the United States in 1945 because he believed he would be reassigned to Japan. When that conflict ended, he forgot about metals as he slipped back into civilian life.

Jones's niece applied for the medals for him. She received offers to help from the offices of two Oregon Congressmen, Rep. Greg Walden and Sen. Ron Wyden.

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Steel crisis: Unions urge Government support for plan to save jobs

Unions are stepping up their campaign to save thousands of jobs in the crisis hit steel industry with a new plan which needs Government support.

An emergency meeting of union representatives from Tata Steel plants across the UK was told of frantic efforts to stop the industry collapsing.

The plan will be presented to the Government tomorrow.

Workers at the threatened Tata Steel plant in Port Talbot

The unions set out their demands of Government, including helping to secure the customer base and guaranteeing production of Tata's UK steel operations so that customers are not lost following the company's shock announcement to sell its UK assets.

The Government was also urged to work to ensure the integrity of the business is guaranteed, because allowing Tata or other investors to cherry-pick assets will put steelmaking at risk.

Union officials said Tata's plants are viable but they require investment.

The business needs the investment originally planned by Tata - understood to be 1.5 billion over 10 years.

"This level of investment should be achievable given that any buyer would be gaining control of assets worth 4 billion," said a union statement.

"But Government support is needed to bridge the 2-3 years it will take to get back to self-sustainability."

The unions have engaged steel industry advisers Syndex UK to help develop its plans.

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of Community, said: "It was clear from our meeting today that steelworkers are the guardians of their industry and they know what action is needed to secure the future of steelmaking in the UK.

"There needs to be a step-change in the level of Government involvement with Tata, its customers and the unions and this is why we have set out our demands.

"The Government needs to reassure the customer base, they need to make it clear to Tata that the integrity of the business must be maintained, and the Government must invest in our steel industry to give it a future."

Harish Patel, national officer of Unite, said: "Steelworkers are united in their view of what the Government must do. This business should have a future but it needs immediate action to reassure customers and protect the integrity of the business. We don't want to hear more warm words from ministers. We want Government to work with us to deliver this plan, invest in the future of steelmaking and protect the jobs of thousands of steelworkers across the UK."

Dave Hulse, national officer of the GMB, said: "There is no time for further delay from this Government. They need to be loud and clear to instil confidence in customers and steelworkers that this business will have a future.

"Government must hold Tata to being a responsible seller. You can't rush selling off the UK steel industry. Everybody needs to work together in the best interests of our industrial security and steel communities across the UK."

Union leaders are hoping to present their plan to the Government on Tuesday.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid met with a Tata official on Monday, while contact continued to be made with potential buyers or investors.

Business Minister Anna Soubry will appear before the Welsh Affairs Committee on April 12 to answer questions about the future of steel production in Port Talbot.

Speaking outside the Business Department before the meeting, with Tata, she said that while talks were ongoing regarding the planned sale of Tata's Scunthorpe plant, the future of the Port Talbot steelworks was a "different kettle of fish".

"In that sense that is where we are losing a lot of money, well Tata is. There's a big job to be done there."

Ms Soubry again defended Government policy towards helping the industry, adding: "We've been implementing a compensation scheme, and we'll be exempting steel from two of the green tariffs from December 2017.

"So we're doing all of these things, along with the tariffs as well."

TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said: "The next few days will be crucial for UK steel. Ministers need to show British steelworkers that they are on their side.

"Other EU governments have acted to support their steel industries, ours must do the same.

"Securing a future for Tata's UK steel plants is a crucial first step. But the Government also needs to ensure that British manufacturers can compete in the global market over the longer term and retain their highly-skilled workforces.

"This means standing up to China over steel dumping and developing an industrial strategy that places UK steel at its heart."

Shadow business secretary Angela Eagle said: "The future of British steelmaking is hanging in the balance.

"Labour has been demanding action for months to address the growing crisis in this vital strategic industry. The Welsh Assembly has been recalled and the steel unions are working hard to find a way forward.

"Yet the crisis continues to grow and the Government is still missing in action. They have refused to recall Parliament and their response has been utterly chaotic. They need to get a grip fast. We've had enough of warm words, now is the time for concrete action."

Sanjeev Gupta, head of the Liberty Group, said he had "very encouraging" talks with the Government and raised the possibility of taking over the Port Talbot steelworks without huge job losses.

Mr Gupta told the BBC he believed jobs at Port Talbot could be saved if at least 700 workers in its blast furnaces were retrained.

"We've never undertaken anything which requires redundancies - I won't undertake something which will require mass redundancies," he said.
Drugs mule Michaella McCollum speaks out after leaving Peru prison

A drugs mule released from prison in Peru has insisted she is a good person who made a bad decision in a moment of madness.

Michaella McCollum, from Northern Ireland, was freed on parole on Thursday after serving more than two years in South American jails.

McCollum and Melissa Reid, from Scotland, were imprisoned in 2013 for six years and eight months after admitting trying to smuggle cocaine worth 1.5 million from Peru to Spain.

Michaella McCollum during her exclusive first interview with the Irish broadcaster RTE (RTE/PA)

In her first interview since being released, the Co Tyrone woman said: "I've forgotten the things that everybody takes for granted in life.

"Seeing the sun, seeing the darkness, seeing the moon and the stars, things I haven't seen in almost three years."

McCollum was freed under new legislation on early prison release introduced in Peru last year.

She had served two years and three months.

It is anticipated she will have to remain in Peru for a considerable period as part of her parole conditions.

Reid remains in prison in Peru.

She has been seeking to serve the remainder of her sentence closer to home in Scotland.

McCollum has been interviewed in Peru for a documentary that will be aired on RTE One on Sunday night.

In it, she acknowledged the potentially devastating consequences if she had successfully smuggled the drugs back to Europe.

"I probably would have had a lot of blood on my hands," she said.

"I potentially could have filled Europe full of a lot of drugs.

"I could have potentially killed a lot of people, not directly but I could have caused a lot of harm to people."

She added: "I made a decision in a moment of madness. I'm not a bad person. I want to demonstrate that I'm a good person."

McCollum, from Dungannon, and Reid, from Glasgow, were caught with the haul at Lima airport on August 6 2013 attempting to fly to Spain.

They had claimed they were forced into carrying the drugs but pleaded guilty to charges later that year.

The pair were caught trying to board a flight with 24lb (11kg) of cocaine in food packets hidden inside their luggage.

McCollum and Reid faced the prospect of a maximum 15-year prison term but struck a behind-closed-doors plea bargain to secure a shorter sentence.
Councils 'spent more than 200m on staff settlements, most with gagging orders'

Councils have spent more than 200 million on settlements with staff - most of which include "gagging orders", an investigation has found.

Over the past five years, 17,571 "compromise agreements" or settlements were signed by council workers.

Most include a strict clause preventing them from criticising their bosses, BBC Radio 5 live Investigates has found.

Meg Hillier, who chairs the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, said it is unacceptable if compromise agreements are used to prevent whistleblowing

Staff received a total of 226.7 million from the settlements, a figure which includes both enhancements and statutory payments.

Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, told the BBC it is unacceptable if the agreements are being used to prevent whistleblowing.

She said: "It is ridiculous to make people who're getting redundancy to sign these. It just goes to show it is being used rather indiscriminately.

"There can be no excuse for silencing people who have got a legitimate concern about some serious issues - be it around child protection or basic service delivery that's not going well.

"If an employee is being told they can't talk about something and bought off, that's not an acceptable use of these settlement agreements."

Ministers have warned local authorities against using pay-offs to silence staff.

But Freedom of Information responses received by the programme show many local authorities are continuing to use the clause.

The gagging clauses were signed as part of agreements between councils and workers who are taking voluntary redundancy, early retirement, or are leaving after a dispute at work.

Most workers get a bigger pay-off if they sign the settlement agreement, but BBC Radio 5 Live said it is difficult to assess precisely how much the agreements have cost the public purse because of the different way councils present the figures.

Cardiff Council issued the most settlement agreements, with 2,008 staff signing one over the five years, resulting in pay-outs totalling 5.5m.

Cardiff was using them as a matter of routine when people took voluntary redundancy or early retirement, but said it ended this policy in January 2015.

Wirral Council used the agreements with more than 1,000 people who took voluntary redundancy or early retirement between 2010 and 2012, although the council said they are rarely used now.

The figures come after concerns were raised that authorities are using gagging clauses to stifle criticism.

Several teachers forced out of schools at the centre of the Birmingham Trojan Horse scandal were offered settlement agreements.

The teachers raised concerns about governing bodies that were trying to introduce strict Islamic principles.

A Government report into the scandal found there was a perception among staff that the city council preferred to move teachers on rather than confront misbehaving governing bodies.

A Department for Communities and Local Government spokesman said: "There is no excuse for outrageous pay-offs at a time when all parts of the public sector should be finding ways to save taxpayers' money.

"We are bringing in a cap on public sector pay-offs of 95,000 and will ensure that high earners will have to repay redundancy money if they return to the public sector within a year."

The spokesman added: "Recent guidance makes clear that confidentiality clauses should only be used in extreme circumstances and cannot be used to hide the value or nature of any severance payments.
Britain says government contracts must consider local steel firms

LONDON, April 3 (Reuters) - Britain said on Sunday that all public sector contracts that involve steel supplies must specifically consider UK steel companies as part of plans to find a long-term solution for the country's steel industry.

The government is looking for ways to support domestic steel producers after India's Tata Steel put its British plants up for sale, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said there was no guarantee of a buyer for Britain's biggest steel producer, but a state takeover was not the answer.

Under its support measures, the government will create an approved supplier list specifically for steel companies wanting to bid for public sector projects, such as Britain's 55 million pound ($78.25 million) high-speed rail link, which will need two million tonnes of steel.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said on Sunday he was determined to secure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers and the wider community.

"By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," he said in a statement.

The introduction of measures to ensure British steelmakers are considered for government contracts could take six to nine months, a spokeswoman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills said.

The government has said it is working to broker a deal with potential buyers after Tata Steel's decision to pull out of its almost decade-long venture in Britain, which employs 15,000 people, and which has been hit by high costs and Chinese competition.

Cameron's government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's action, with opposition politicians saying it was "asleep at the wheel."

The prime minister has said he wants Britain and China to work together to tackle over-capacity in steel and that the G20 could be a good forum to address it later in the year.

Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the International Steel Statistic bureau.
Gunmen seize four tugboat crew off eastern Malaysia

MANILA, April 3 (Reuters) - Gunmen seized four Malaysian crew of a tugboat off the coast of the eastern state of Sabah, a week after a similar attack on a Taiwanese tugboat in the southern Philippines, media reported on Sunday.

The four were taken at gunpoint on Friday evening and brought by speed boat to the southern Philippines, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said, quoting an unnamed military official. Three other crew were left behind.

The gunmen, suspected to be Abu Sayyaf militants, also took laptops, mobile phones and unspecified amounts of cash. The tugboat returned to Sabah when the gunmen left.

"We confirm receiving reports of this incident," military spokesman Major Filemon Tan told reporters. "We have coordinated with our Malaysian counterparts."

It was the second attack in a week on tugboats in the waters that border of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Ten Indonesians were abducted when a Taiwanese tugboat was intercepted in the southern Philippines.
Bangladesh former PM to seek bail over firebombing attack

DHAKA, April 3 (Reuters) - Bangladesh's former Prime Minister and main opposition leader Khaleda Zia is expected to appear in court and seek bail after she was issued with an arrest warrant over a deadly firebombing attack, her lawyer said on Sunday.

A court in Dhaka issued arrest warrants on Wednesday for Zia, 70, and 27 leaders and activists of her Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in connection with a petrol bomb attack on a bus in January last year during a deadly anti-government campaign.

"Most likely, Madam will appear before the court on April 5 and will seek bail," Khaleda's lawyer Sanaullah Miah told reporters.

The BNP called for a countrywide protest on Monday against the arrest warrant, saying it was politically motivated.

More than 120 people were killed and hundreds injured early last year in political violence during transport blockades and strikes aimed at toppling the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Bangladeshi politics has been mired for years in rivalry between Hasina and Khaleda. Both women are related to former national leaders, and they have alternated as prime minister for most of the past two decades.

Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation of 160 million, has also seen a surge in Islamist violence in which liberal activists, members of minority Muslim sects and other religious groups have been targeted.

Prime Minister Hasina has blamed the rising tide of violence on the opposition BNP and its key ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, many of whose leaders are being prosecuted for war crimes during the 1971 war of independence. The opposition denies any involvement.
Syrian forces seize Islamic State-held town near Palmyra

By Lisa Barrington

BEIRUT, April 3 (Reuters) - Syrian and allied forces backed by Russian air strikes drove Islamic State militants out of the town of al-Qaryatain on Sunday after encircling it over the past few days, Syria's military command said.

Surrounded by hills, al-Qaryatain is 100 km (60 miles) west of the ancient city of Palmyra, which government forces recaptured from Islamic State last Sunday.

Al-Qaryatain had been held by the militant group since late August. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been trying to retake al-Qaryatain and other pockets of Islamic State control to reduce the jihadist group's ability to project military power into the heavily populated western region of Syria, where Damascus and other main cities are located.

Syrian state television said the army and its allies "fully restored security and stability to al-Qaryatain after killing the last remaining groups of Daesh terrorists" in the town, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

In a statement read out on Syrian television, the military command said this was a strategic victory which secures oil and gas routes between the Damascus area and oilfields in eastern Syria. It also disrupts Islamic State supply routes within Syria.

Government forces entered the town from a number of directions, Syrian media said. A Syrian military source told SANA state news agency the army had cleared areas northwest of the town of explosives planted by Islamic State.

Islamic State militants retreating from Palmyra laid thousands of mines which the Syrian army is now clearing before civilians can return.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government forces had taken over half the town and that fierce fighting continued between Assad's troops and Islamic State to the north and southeast of al-Qaryatain.

The Britain-based Observatory, which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said more than 40 air strikes by Russian and Syrian planes hit areas near the town on Sunday.

When Islamic State took over al-Qaryatain last August it demolished a Christian monastery and took around 200 of the town's residents prisoner, transferring some of them to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group's de facto capital.

Islamic State still has complete control over Raqqa and runs most of Deir al-Zor province in eastern Syria, which borders Iraq.

A fragile "cessation of hostilities" truce has held in Syria for over a month as the various parties to the conflict try to negotiate an end to Syria's civil war.

But the truce excludes Islamic State and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front. Air and land attacks by Syrian and allied forces continue in parts of Syria where the government says the groups are present.
Azerbaijan says to stop fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, separatists voice doubts

By Nailia Bagirova and Hasmik Mkrtchyan

BAKU/YEREVAN, April 3 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan said on Sunday it would stop fighting Armenian-backed separatists over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region after two days of clashes, but the other side denounced Baku's gesture as hollow and said violence was continuing.

Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians, has run its own affairs with heavy military and financial backing from Armenia since a separatist war ended in 1994.

But the situation along the tense "contact line" deteriorated in recent weeks, leading to clashes in which dozens were killed that drew international calls for an immediate ceasefire. Both sides also reported civilian casualties.

"Armenia has violated all the norms of international law. We won't abandon our principal position. But at the same time we will observe the ceasefire and after that we will try to solve the conflict peacefully," President Ilham Aliyev said at a security council meeting broadcast by Azeri state TV.

Aliyev also said Azeri troops had achieved a "great victory" in an apparent reference to territorial gains made on Saturday.

Armenian officials, however, said the fighting had not let up and Deputy Defence Minister David Tonoyan said his country was ready to provide "direct military assistance" to Nagorno-Karabakh forces if necessary.

"The statement by the Azerbaijan side is an information trap and does not amount to a unilateral ceasefire," Artsrun Hovhannisyan, spokesman for the Armenian Defence Ministry, said in a post on his Facebook page.

Russian news agencies reported artillery attacks by both sides near the town of Mardakert in the north of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Azeri Defence Ministry said earlier on Sunday it would "cease retaliatory military actions" against the separatist forces. The previous day it said the Azeri army had "liberated strategic heights and settlements" in the north and east of the region.

The Nagorno-Karabakh military said Baku's statement on a unilateral ceasefire was "disinformation" but that it was ready to discuss a ceasefire proposal from Azerbaijan on the condition both sides returned to their positions held before the clashes erupted.

"The Nagorno-Karabakh armed forces are ready to meet and discuss a ceasefire proposal in the context of restoring former positions," the Nagorno-Karabakh military said.

"UNRESTRAINED FANTASIES".

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region home to around 150,000 people on the southern Armenian-Azeri border, broke out in the dying years of Soviet Union. By the time the 1994 ceasefire was brokered, some 30,000 people had been killed in the violence.

Multiple efforts over the years to reach a permanent settlement led by France, Russia and the United states have failed. Baku frequently threatens to take back the mountain region by force.

The Azeri Defence Ministry said its forces had destroyed 10 separatist tanks and killed multiple fighters in overnight clashes.

The Nagorno-Karabakh military rejected the Azeri statements that it had suffered heavy losses as a "display of unrestrained fantasies", saying it had destroyed 14 Azeri tanks and five armoured vehicles in the past 24 hours.

"The enemy is trying to hide its helplessness, carrying out attacks with Grad rocket launchers and 152 millimetre artillery in the direction of the civilian population," the Armenian Defence Ministry said in a statement.

STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE

Crisscrossed with pipelines and sandwiched between the Caspian and Black seas, stability in the southern Caucasus is a major strategic objective for Azerbaijan and other large oil and gas producers in the region.

World top oil producer Russia - which maintains a garrison of troops, jets and attack helicopters in northern Armenia - has been a key mediator in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and moved on Saturday to suppress the renewed violence.

President Vladimir Putin urged the warring sides to immediately observe the ceasefire while Russia's foreign and defence ministers talked by phone with their Armenian and Azeri counterparts.

Azerbaijan's presidential press service said Turkey, the other major power in the region along with Russia, had voiced support for Baku's actions, the RIA news agency reported.

The United Nations has also called on the parties involved to put an immediate end to the fighting and to respect the ceasefire agreement.
South Africa's parliament to debate Zuma's impeachment motion on Tuesday

JOHANNESBURG, April 3 (Reuters) - South Africa's National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete said on Sunday that parliament on Tuesday will debate a motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma which was tabled by an opposition party.

A ruling by South Africa's top court on Thursday held that Zuma had failed to uphold the constitution by ignoring instructions to pay back some of the $16 million in state funds spent on renovations at his sprawling residence at Nkandla.
In Brexit warm up, Dutch voters to consider EU treaty with Ukraine

By Anthony Deutsch and Thomas Escritt

AMSTERDAM, April 3 (Reuters) - Dutch voters will decide on Wednesday whether to support a European treaty deepening ties with Ukraine in a referendum that will test sentiment towards Brussels ahead of Britain's June Brexit vote and could also bring a boost for Russia.

The broad political, trade and defence treaty is already provisionally in place but has to be ratified by all 28 European Union member states for every part of it to have full legal force. The Netherlands is the only country that has not done so.

While a "no" vote in the non-binding referendum would not force the Dutch government to veto the treaty on an EU level the fragile coalition, which holds the rotating EU presidency, might find it hard to ignore with less than a year to general elections.

Any rejection by Dutch voters or by the government would give Russian President Vladimir Putin, who opposes deeper EU-Ukraine ties and who many Dutch blame for the downing by pro-Russian rebels of a plane travelling from Amsterdam, a victory in his war of words with the West.

An EU decision to push on with the treaty despite a "no vote", whether the government respects it or not, could be damaging for the EU and highlight EU problems ahead of the British vote.

"If politicians ignore the Dutch no then it will be an even stronger signal than what the British have already received that there is no way to correct the European political class and that they should vote to leave," said Thierry Baudet, a "no" campaigner and one of the architects of the referendum that was triggered when activists gathered thousands of signatures of support.

Many Dutch feel they are being asked to choose between two unattractive options: EU expansion plans dreamed up by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels or helping Russian Putin who they blame for the MH17 plane disaster which killed almost 200 Dutch citizens in July 2014.

TURNOUT CRUCIAL

Others are confused by the issues.

"I'm not voting," said Gijs, a driving instructor in Amsterdam. "I can't understand what this referendum is about, and I can't understand why it was called."

A poll by Maurice De Hond on Sunday forecast that 66 percent of people certain to vote, would back 'No' with only 25 percent in favour, with turnout likely to be decisive in shaping the final result. Pollsters TNS Nipo have forecast turnout of 32 percent, just above the 30 percent threshold that is needed for the referendum to be valid.

The government, which supports a "yes" vote, fears it could turn into a protest vote like in 2005, when a majority of the Dutch electorate broke from a pro-European tradition and rejected the EU constitution.

"I hope the Dutch can get over their chagrin and say: 'Yes, we are annoyed with Europe, we are annoyed with this Dutch government, but we will still support Ukraine," said Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem.

While some parliamentary parties have said they would be bound by the outcome, "the government position is that we will follow the law, which simply says we will reconsider," said Dijsselbloem, lending weight to the view that the government will seek to preserve the treaty, or its essence, whatever the outcome.

"PUTIN'S SHADOW"

The government itself shied away from framing the vote in a Russian context but shifted tactic as the referendum approaches.

The youth wing of Dijsselbloem's Labour Party, the junior party in the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, have run a poster campaign showing anti-EU populist Geert Wilders passionately kissing Putin.

"Vladimir Putin's shadow is lurking fairly significantly over this treaty," said "yes" campaigner Joshua Livestro, arguing that a "no" vote will play into Putin's hands.

"Are we now going to give Putin what he wants after all?" he said.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte's cabinet initially stressed the treaty's economic benefits, but has since focused on its importance for Ukrainian reform in the areas of corruption, human rights and democracy.

"Everyone who wants progress in Ukraine is asking us to vote 'yes,' along with 27 other countries. That's what the referendum is about and nothing else," Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher said on Friday.

"No" campaigners say the treaty is a first step toward full EU membership. "Legal scholars call it quasi membership," said Baudet.

Many Ukrainian politicians feel their country deserves the treaty and are keen to show they have made progress in aligning their country with EU standards since the 2014 uprising that toppled pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich.

In a Dutch television interview on Sunday, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin emphasized progress in areas such as gay and transgender rights where the Dutch have always viewed themselves as progressive leaders.
Film depicting China's shadow over Hong Kong wins top Asian award

By Venus Wu and Donny Kwok

HONG KONG, April 4 (Reuters) - A Hong Kong film portraying a dystopian future under Chinese Communist Party rule won one of Asia's top film awards on Sunday at a time when Beijing's attempts to rein in the city's democratic development have stoked growing political tensions.

"Ten Years", a feature-length film comprising five short vignettes depicting a dark vision of the city in 2025 is a surprise hit. It strikes a public chord nearly 16 months after tens of thousands blocked roads across the city as part of an "Occupy Central" civil disobedience movement to demand China's leaders allow full democracy in 2017.

The low-budget, independent film brushed off competition from commercial hits like martial arts flick Ip Man 3.

"Ten Years exposed the fear of Hong Kong people (towards China)," said Chow Kwun-wai, one of the five directors who worked on it after winning best picture at the Hong Kong film awards that recognises film excellence across Asia.

"Ten Years also provided Hong Kong people and us a chance to show that we have no fear."

After the awards, a few Chinese media portals including Tencent and Sina omitted any mention of the film as best picture winner while reporting on other results of the night.

People across Hong Kong, which reverted from British to Chinese rule in 1997, have in recent months thronged to cinemas and open-air screenings to watch the controversial movie.

Scenes include those of an old woman setting herself alight before Hong Kong's British Consulate and Hong Kong kids dressed in military uniforms policing adults in scenes echoing child "Red Guards" from China's fraught 1966-76 Cultural Revolution .

Few, including the film's directors, had expected it to win, given its political undertones and dystopian vision.

China's state-controlled Global Times denounced the film in a January editorial as absurd and pessimistic and said it was a "thought virus".

Soon after, screenings of the film stopped in Hong Kong cinemas. Cinema operators told the film-makers they could no longer show it because of scheduling issues.

"People in the movie industry gave Ten Years the best film award to express their position. This is the thing that touched me the most," Chow added.
Two separate incidents - one in Islamabad and the other in Lahore - shook Pakistan last Sunday. In Lahore, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded public park where Christians had gone to celebrate Easter, leaving at least 70 dead and hundreds injured.

The same day, thousands took to streets in Islamabad and indulged in violence to protest the execution of a man they consider a hero for assassinating Punjab province governor Salman Taseer over his criticism of the country's blasphemy laws.

Why was governor Taseer shot dead by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Hussain Qadri? A little recall here will be helpful.

In 2009, Aasia Bibi, a 45-year-old Christian mother of five, making her living as a farm worker, was accused of "insulting" the Prophet and was arrested under Article 295-C of Pakistan's criminal law, under which, to blaspheme the Holy Prophet Mohammed is punishable by death.

A year later, a session court in Sheikhupura sentenced Aasia Bibi to death and fined her Rs 1,00,000. On November 20, 2010, governor Taseer visited the Sheikhupura Jail to meet Aasia Bibi. There he termed the blasphemy law a "black law", provoking the Islamist groups in Pakistan to declare a war against the governor.

On January 4, 2011, when he was stepping into his car after visiting a restaurant in Islamabad, Mumtaz Qadri, one of his bodyguards, sprayed nine bullets at him.

What followed the killing was even more bizarre. On January 5, 2011, thousands of lawyers, police and other government officials showered rose petals on the killer when he was produced at an Islamabad court. Ulemas issued statements hailing the assassin and asking Muslims not to offer namaz-e-janaza.

A suicide bomber in Lahore on March 27 was the end product of this very mindset. (AP)

On October 1, 2011, the accused was sentenced to death and subsequently, judge Syed Peraiz Ali Shah, who convicted the assassin, was sent abroad by the Pakistan government - obviously to help him escape an assassination bid at the hands of those who regards Qadri as an icon of their faith.

A suicide bomber in Lahore on March 27 was the end product of this very mindset which had motivated thousands of "faithfuls" hailing Qadri as a hero during his trial and a martyr following his hanging on February 29 this year.

The line of distinction between those who hold the hanged assassin as a model Muslim and the "faithful" who turned into a suicide bomber to kill and maim hundreds of innocents in Lahore last Sunday, is really thin, if not non-existent.

Apart from Pakistan and a good part of the Middle East, the victims of this doctrine of hate have been Brussels, Paris, Mumbai, Delhi, New York - the list is endless. Islamic State (ISIS) is the most visible manifestation of this menacing mindset today, threatening civil society at a global level.

Here one needs to find out the difference between those who march in protest against the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri in Pakistan and the ones in India shouting slogans at JNU and elsewhere glorifying Afzal Guru and Yakub Memon. Both groups support terrorists and empathise with their cause and implicitly support their actions.

Interestingly, while in Pakistan such supporters are known as Islamist fundamentalists, in India, they are seen as progressives, liberals, human rights activists, intellectuals and even "secularists"!

In the case of Pakistan, the problem of terror goes deep, for the establishment in the country and the terrorists draw inspiration from a common doctrine - that is, the rejection of all that is pre-Islamic and non-Islamic.

In fact, this was the genesis of creation of Pakistan. Pakistan, no wonder, considers itself a successor state to all the Muslim invaders (Turks, Arabs, Mughals and Afghans) and has named its missiles after them - Mahmud Ghazni, Mohammed Ghori, Timur, Babur and Ahmed Shah Abdali. In contrast, India has named its missiles after elements of nature: Prithvi, Aakash, Agni, et al.

So, Pakistan will continue to suffer till it doesn't just cut its links with Islamist terrorism, but also curbs its obsession with being the vanguard of global Islam.
Attorney General Mark Herring has made two assertions regarding nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. PolitiFact Virginia rates the statements as mostly false and true.

The bad grade goes to a claim that every nominee since 1875 received a confirmation hearing; the good grade goes to a claim that since 1900 six justices have been confirmed during election years. President Obamas nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia makes Herrings latter claim the more pertinent of the two.

Republicans in the Senate say they will not bring Garlands nomination to a vote and will not even hold hearings on it. They explain that the presidential election should occur before a justice is picked. Elections have consequences. Let the people decide, in other words.

The basic problem with the excuse is that election results do not necessarily translate into mandates for specific policies and actions. How many voters base their decisions on a candidates court preferences? A marked ballot does not tell. The Constitution calls for collaboration between the president and the Senate regarding judicial selection. Presidents nominate to the federal bench individuals who are confirmed or rejected by the Senate as it exercises its authority to offer advice and to bestow consent. The Constitution does not add, except in election years. Strict constructionists and believers in original intent must agree that the process should proceed whenever a vacancy opens. Refusing to give Garland a hearing violates the spirit of the Constitution and disgraces conservatism properly understood.

Presidents serve until their terms end. If a crisis arises during their final months, they have an obligation to act. President George H.W. Bush ordered military intervention in Somalia in December 1992  after he had lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton. The commander-in-chief was a true lame duck.

The Scalia-Garland controversy invites speculation regarding terms for federal judges. Supreme Court justices serve for life. They leave the court when they either retire or die. Scalia ascended to the court in 1986; President Ronald Reagan nominated him; the Senate confirmed him 97-0. If elections have consequences, then Reagans 1984 re-election had in Scalias presence consequences for 30 years. Blocking Garland without a hearing or a vote implicitly would limit the consequences of Obamas 2012 re-election to fewer than four years. This is preposterous, as a letter in The Wall Street Journal pointed out.

One answer would be to set terms for federal judges at, say, 10 years, with the prospect of one reappointment. Judicial terms that would exceed presidential terms would give the courts a measure of stability the elected branches lack.

Both parties have made mischief regarding nominations. The uncivil treatment of Robert Bork transformed a name into a verb. The Republican treatment of Garland is worse than the Democratic treatment of Bork. Bork testified at a hearing; he came up for a vote. The arguments against granting Garland common courtesy set unwelcome precedents. Herrings facts are true, his criticism just.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch
GRUNDY  Retired coal miner Fred McCracken was raised in a Democratic household, but he doesnt think the country is ready for a woman president and longs for a candidate like ol big ears Ross Perot.

The 67-year-old Buchanan County resident says he probably wont vote in November, but he sees how electing Donald J. Trump would send a message to the world.

These other countries need to know that theres somebody over here stupid enough to pull the trigger on em, McCracken said as he finished up at a barber shop along U.S. 460, the winding highway that serves as the main drag in this mountainous corner of Southwest Virginia.

Doug Davis, another retired coal worker waiting for a haircut at Jerrys Barber Shop in Oakwood, said the slumping coal mining business may be Gods way of scattering the people out.

When it comes to Trump, his faith is stronger.

I think hell do alright, said Davis, 69. Because he hates failure.

There arent many votes to be had in Buchanan, a shrinking Appalachian county on the edge of West Virginia and Kentucky with an estimated population of 22,776.

But of the ballots cast for Republicans here in the March 1 primary, an exceptional number went to Trump, who won a narrow victory statewide over now-withdrawn Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. The tough-talking Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote  his highest margin in the country so far.

***

Over a Mexican lunch in Grundy, the county seat where most of the old downtown was demolished and a mountainside was blasted away to create enough flat land for a Walmart, Liz Justus credited Trump for being the first to talk about building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants.

The 53-year-old co-owner of a home health care business said shes never been political previously and thinks Trump can go a little overboard with the name-calling.

But when he says hell bring back coal jobs, she believes him.

He has the personality where he would do it just to prove that he could do it, Justus said.

If working-class anger is the fuel for Trumps rise, few places were better primed for a blowup. Among Buchanans almost all-white populace, unemployment is high, incomes are low and college degrees are rare.

From 2011 to 2015, the number of coal jobs in Virginia fell from 4,867 to 3,033, a drop of nearly 38 percent, according to state data.

The growth of cheaper natural gas as a source of fuel to generate electric power and environmental restrictions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions have put the coal industry under pressure, with weak coal prices forcing several large producers to consider bankruptcy.

Last month, CONSOL Energy Inc., a major employer in Buchanan, sold its Buchanan mine and other coal assets in a $420 million deal with Coronado IV LLC.

In the past five years, Buchanans population has fallen about 5.5 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Declining coal production has meant less tax revenue for the county government, forcing officials to consider steep budget cuts and possible layoffs of public workers.

Many Buchanan residents pointed to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clintons recent comment about putting a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business. The remark came as Clinton was describing a $30 billion plan to safeguard benefits for miners and their families and diversify coal-dependent economies.

***

That a New York billionaire associated with ritz and glamour would find rock-solid support in a hardscrabble place such as Buchanan  where Grundys one chain hotel warns guests of an extra cleaning fee for rooms smudged by dirty boots  is one of many unexpected turns of the 2016 campaign cycle.

In interviews with Buchanan residents and political observers, the Trump effect here was attributed to a combination of demographics, fury over lost jobs, and economic decline (much of it blamed on President Barack Obama and the so-called war on coal) and, perhaps above all, a desperate desire for something different.

Trump gives voice to a feeling of frustration, the lack of any other place to turn, lack of confidence in the economic future that so many people in places like Buchanan County are feeling, said Rick Boucher, a former Democratic congressman who represented Southwest Virginias 9th District for three decades before he lost the seat to Rep. Morgan Griffith in the 2010 Republican wave.

I think to a large extent that explains why hes been so popular nationwide, Boucher said.

Trump, who has promised to scale back regulation by cutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, won every locality in the 9th District but the city of Radford, which Rubio took by 30 votes.

Tucker Davis, a 25-year-old Republican operative who served as Trumps field director for western Virginia, would not discuss campaign strategy, but he told a crowd at a recent Buchanan GOP meeting that people are fed up and yearning for leadership.

I think theyre ready to knock the table over and change things, said Davis, a Grundy native whos angling to represent Virginia this summer as a Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Several Buchanan residents said they see establishment opposition to Trump  outlined starkly by 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romneys assertion that the Trump campaign has become associated with racism, misogyny, vulgarity and violence  as interference meant to keep an outsider from gaining power.

I think theyre using scare tactics on him, said Justus, adding that if Trump were racist, he wouldnt have the support of Ben Carson and Herman Cain, who are African-American.

In a speech at Radford University on the eve of Super Tuesday, Trump told the crowd hes a believer in clean coal.

Were going to bring the coal industry back 100 percent, he said. If I win, were going to go clean coal, and that technology is working. I hear it works.

Though Appalachian coal regions have been one of Trumps strongest areas of support, some Buchanan residents arent sold on the idea that the industry can be restored.

Daniel Duryea, a 35-year-old electrician who moved to the area a few years ago from New York, said Trump is blowing smoke.

People here, theyve got a false hope, Duryea said. And theyre looking for something like that.

Trump himself hasnt always been hot on coal labor.

In an interview with Playboy magazine published in 1990, he used a mining analogy while describing deal-making as a beautiful, creative pursuit.

The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son. If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines, Trump said.

But most people dont have the imagination  or whatever  to leave their mine. They dont have it. 

He went on to describe it as an ability to become an entrepreneur, a great athlete, a great writer.

As with many statements from Trumps pre-politics life, his supporters seem more focused on what hes saying now. And how he says it.

The working class in the U.S. loves Trumps straightforward style, said Corey Stewart, chairman of Trumps Virginia campaign and a member of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.

I think a lot of people feel that he says what they think. And the things that theyve been afraid to say.

***

With blue-collar Democratic traditions rooted in labor unions, many suspect the party crossover made possible by Virginias open primary system played a large role in the Buchanan result.

Jamie Hale, a 44-year-old former Obama voter who considers himself blessed to still have work at a coal-fired power plant in neighboring Wise County, said hes now behind Trump.

Hes for compromise and making deals, Hale said. Here in the last eight years, weve had no compromise. Its all been just stop Obama regardless.

J. Carroll Branham, the Democratic chairman of the Buchanan Board of Supervisors, guesses as much as half of the Trump vote in the county may have been Democrats. Branham said hes open to voting for Trump in November but considers him unproven and needs to see concrete plans.

This county is not hard-core Democrat or Republican, Branham said. Most of the time they elect what they think are the best people.

On Super Tuesday, Trump won 1,588 of 2,278 Buchanan primary votes for Republican candidates, followed by 313 for Rubio and 266 for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won 523 of 744 total Democratic votes.

In the 2008 primaries, Buchanan cast 680 votes for Republicans and 2,497 votes for Democrats, the vast majority of which went to Clinton.

If Trump becomes the nominee and runs strong in Southwest Virginia, Republican organizers know a surge here easily could be wiped out by high-population localities in Northern Virginia that favor Democrats and where Trumps primary showing was weaker.

In recently released electoral predictions envisioning a Trump vs. Clinton matchup, the University of Virginias Center for Politics switched Virginia from a toss-up state to leaning Democratic.

Russell V. Presley, an attorney who chairs the Buchanan Democratic Committee, said its been difficult to gauge whos voting for Trump because few people seem to be outwardly stating their support.

He said EPA regulations have little to do with Buchanans higher-grade, metallurgical coal, which hinges largely on Chinese demand for steel.

Presley said he believes the political mood in Buchanan has been shaped by eight years of conservative broadcasters blaming Obama for all the ills of the economy.

I think when he got elected, our country took a step forward, Presley said. But unfortunately certain areas of the country, including my own, probably took two steps back.

***

Opposition to Obama has roiled Buchanan politics previously.

In 2008, the campaign of Republican nominee John McCain severed ties with GOP leader Bobby May, then serving as treasurer of the local party, after the Los Angeles Times drew attention to a racially charged column May had written that included jokes about Obama replacing the American flags stars with a star and crescent and hiring the rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black.

May, who last month finished a four-year stint as chairman of the local party, called the controversy old news and said Buchanan supported Trump out of fear and loathing.

If youve got a job, you dont know if youre going to have it tomorrow, said May, whose son was laid off from a mining job before Christmas. And if you dont have a job, youre really angry.

May said hes a Cruz supporter who voted for Rubio in the primary and would vote for Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee.

This is a fight for survival, May said.

***

With Trump winning huge swaths of rural Virginia, many state lawmakers now find themselves in the tricky position of seeing their constituents embrace a candidate few in elected office leapt to endorse.

Griffith has not endorsed any presidential candidate but said he would support Trump if he wins the nomination. As a native of the South, Griffith said, hed say things a little bit differently than the New Yorker.

But he thinks we need to get a better deal, Griffith said. And the people in my district think they need to get a better deal.

Del. James W. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell, whose district includes Buchanan, endorsed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush before he switched to Rubio but said he absolutely would support Trump in the general election.

Hes a straight shooter. He pretty much tells it how it is, Morefield said. And I think thats what people are really looking for in a candidate right now. I think theres an overall disgust with the establishment, whether youre a Democrat or a Republican.

Morefield and other officials say theyre working to create a business-friendly environment that can lure new industries to Southwest Virginia.

For Buchanan, that has meant trying to develop the infrastructure to bring more call and data centers to a mountaintop business park built on a reclaimed surface mine.

Boucher, who emphasized telecommunications as a lifeline for rural areas, said Internet commerce has made it less important for companies to be geographically close to their customers and has opened up possibilities in areas where land is cheap and taxes are low.

If you look at what rural areas offer, businesses should want to flock there, Boucher said.

The county also is continuing to establish itself as education center. Its home to the Appalachian School of Law and the Appalachian College of Pharmacy. An optometry school is in the works.

Were just trying to hold on right now and wait til things begin to get better, Branham said.

For many, that means hoping for President Trump.

I do feel like he knows what it feels like to be on the bottom. Him filing bankruptcies and so forth in the past, said Bill Crigger, a 40-year-old Trump supporter from Vansant.

Thats about as low as you can get financially. And our county right now is about as low as you can get financially.

I dont think itll ever boom again, said Monica Emerick, 42. But I think itll come back to life.
New Delhi: Food regulator FSSAI has allowed state authorities to start proceedings against noodle or pasta makers if taste enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG) is found in their products despite carrying 'No MSG' or 'No added MSG' label on the packets.

The direction, which comes after the Maggi controversy last year, clarified that state food safety commissioners can launch specific enforcement/prosecution only after ascertaining that MSG was "deliberately added" during the course of manufacturing and the same was not declared on the label of the noodle/pasta packer as per the food safety regulations.

"To prevent, both, avoidable harassment/ prosecution of Food Business Operators (FBOs) as well as to ensure that consumers are facilitated to exercise informed choices in respect of what they eat, proceedings may be launched against FBOs only when the lables states "No MSG" or "No added MSG" and MSG is actually found in the foodstuff," Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) said in an order. Glutamate is naturally found in some common foods such as milk, spices, wheat, vegetables, etc.

Presently there is no analytical method to determine whether MSG was added to the product during its manufacture or was naturally present in the product. This can however be checked through inspection of the manufacturing premises.

"Commissioners of Food Safety are advised that specific enforcement/prosecution may not be launched against the manufacturers of Noodles/Pasta on account of presence of MSG/Glutamic Acid unless it is ascertained by the department that Monosodium Glutamate flavour enhancer (INS E-621) was deliberately added during the course of manufacture without required declaration on the label as indicated in Para 1 above," the order added.

In June, Nestle had to withdraw its instant noodles brand Maggi from the market over allegations of high lead content and presence of MSG (monosodium glutamate).

The food safety regulator FSSAI had banned Maggi noodles after it found excess level of lead in samples, terming it as "unsafe and hazardous" for human consumption.

Meanwhile, the Swiss food group Nestle said on Friday it had not been informed by government authorities of any new health issues with its instant noodles after a newspaper reported tests had detected higher-than-permissible levels of ash in the product.

"We have not received any notice from the concerned authorities about samples of Maggi noodles collected from Umesh Chandra, Barabanki. We have also not received any notice from the court and we have heard about this only from a media report," a Nestle spokesman in India said.

The Wall Street Journal had cited food safety inspectors in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh as saying they had filed a lawsuit accusing Nestle of substandard practices after ash content in samples of its Maggi 2-Minute Noodles was found to exceed the legal limit.

The Indian unit of the Swiss food giant had been grappling with a public relations crisis that hit sales after local regulators reported last year that some packets of the Maggi noodles contained unsafe levels of lead. Sales resumed in November.

Nestle said on Friday its products were safe, adding it had come across instances in Uttar Pradesh in which standards for macaroni products were being applied for instant noodles with seasoning, which it called "erroneous and misleading".
Hyderabad: With Andhra Pradesh and Telangana receiving bright sunshine and with the weather department predicting a hotter summer this year, the governments of both states should focus on harnessing the suns energy through the Grid Connected Solar Rooftop and Small Power Plant scheme of the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE).

The two states can take a lesson or two from Karnataka where the scheme is being implemented. In Bengaluru, the installed solar rooftop capacity is already around 3.5MW. While owners of small houses can utilise the power generated for their own use, those having large roof areas can even sell power back to the Karnataka government at a price of Rs 9.56 per unit.

Karnataka is ahead in using this scheme even though AP has the potential of generating more solar power. As per National Institute of Solar Energy, MNRE, AP has 38 GWp (Giga Watts peak) potential of solar energy whereas Karnataka has only 24GWp. Telangana is close with 20GWp of solar energy potential.

A research by the Center for Ecological Science at Indian Institute of Science has found that Telangana receives solar radiation of minimum 4.5 kWh/m2/day (kilowatts hour/ meter square/ day) in peak winter and 6.6 kWh/m2/day of solar radiation in summer. For AP, while the maximum limit stays the same, the minimum goes down to 4kWh/m2/day in the months of the southwest monsoon and winter.

As per the research, at a place which receives 4.5 kWh/m2/day, a solar cell can generate 69 Watts/m2 of power, which means that anyone having a house with a roof of 100 square meters can have a solar power plant of 6.9 Kilo Watt capacity which will be enough to run the household. Surplus power can be sold to the government if the MNRE scheme is implemented.

Using the same calculations, AP and Telangana, which have a combined 2,056 hectare of barren land that can be used for generating solar power, can have power plants of at least 1,400MW capacity round the year.

Dr T.V. Ramachandra of CES, IISc, whose work has been instrumental in helping Karnataka take up the grid-connected solar rooftop scheme says, It is high time that Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments take to solar power for satisfying their needs. They have the solar potential to even generate surplus power and sell to neighbouring states. This will also go a long way in conserving the environment in both states.
Women who have abortions should be punished, said American presidential contender Donald Trump. Hours later, he swallowed his words and reiterated the Republican Partys stand that it is the offending doctors who ought to be punished. Either way women stand to lose, but its no longer politically correct to say punish the women! After all, they have votes. An American activist once said, If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

While abortion remains a dirty word because it reminds us of illegitimate and adolescent pregnancies, the truth is that it is widely used as a means of birth control when other methods fail. Malayali women living in the Gulf countries come to Kerala to have abortions. Women from the Maldives choose hospitals in Thiruvananthapuram. These are among our best kept secrets.

The birth rate in Kerala has steadily declined in the last few decades and today the average family has only one or two children. Dr. Divya Dhananjayan, an anesthetist from Kannur says, Six weeks after the birth of the first child, when women come for the first consultation they invariably ask us how to avoid conceiving again. Insertion of copper-T during the first visit is very common. After the second child is born, most women opt for sterilization.

Dr. Rekha M, a gynecologist, who has served in Kozhikode and Palakkad, says most of the women who have abortions are married, and roughly 75% fall within the 20-30 age group. While most couples prefer to limit family size to two, some couples with two sons opt for a third child due their desire for a daughter, and vice versa. Muslim women often have more than two children. Religious taboos impact the womans decision to avoid some or all forms of contraception.

Women tend to conceal the fact that they have inserted copper-T, often requesting the doctors not to tell the accompanying relatives. Dr. Rekha adds that doctors are often reluctant to perform or recommend abortions, while the women concerned have absolutely no qualms.

Here comes a shocker! Both Dr. Divya and Dr. Rekha state that when women discover an unwanted pregnancy they often resort to over-the-counter drug purchases in order to induce miscarriage. While the success of these attempts is invariably hushed up, the failures are evident when the women seek medical intervention as a last resort.

The hospital then has no option but to perform an abortion as there is a strong possibility that the drugs ingested would have harmed the foetus. Estimates from China indicate that 13 million abortions were performed in 2008 and 10 million abortion pills were sold. Whether the government of Kerala has similar statistics is anybodys guess.

Russia legalized in 1920

Believe it or not - abortion has been practiced worldwide for thousands of years. It was condemned by all religions but nevertheless had distinguished advocates like Plato and Aristotle. Today abortion is legal in many countries, illegal in some and controversial everywhere. The first country to legalize abortion was Russia in 1920 under Lenin. The United States waited until 1973 when the Supreme Court pronounced its path-breaking judgment in the Roe vs. Wade case.

China gradually liberalized its abortion laws staring 1954 and introduced the one-child norm in 1979 (which it scrapped in 2015). India under Indira Gandhi passed the MTP (Medical Termination of Pregnancy) Act in 1971 legalizing abortion and specifying the situations where it is permissible. The consent of the woman is mandatory. If the girl is a minor, parental consent is required. Very soon we had an abortion-on-demand scenario, but the law took care to protect the unborn girl child by outlawing sex-determination tests.

(Author and IT professional)

Children? Whatever for?

Someone from the Bharat Mata brigade has been advising Hindu women to go forth and multiply. Now thats what I call the devil quoting the Bible instead of the Bhagvad Gita. My dear man, do you know what it feels like to carry that extra weight around in your pot-belly for nine long months? Do you have any clue about the intensity of labour pain? Or are you going to pay for my epidural?

Youre right when you say the pain doesnt last a lifetime.

But whos going to breastfeed the squealing infant every time it announces it insatiable hunger to the world at the top of its lungs? You? Whos going to clean the urine and feces every now and then? You? Whos going to stay up all night when the little bundle of delight chooses to stay awake? Whos going to prepare the special foods that babies need? Whos going to teach the little devil to walk, talk, and do its homework? Whos going to pay the school and college fees? And when the parasite grows up and walks away, whos going to wipe my tears? You? Yes, my dear man, the pain might well last a lifetime.

Why should I care how many Hindu women are left on planet Earth a 100 years from now? I know for sure Im not going to be around. Im not even certain homo sapiens will be around, given the holes in the ozone layer, global warming and all those things politicians and environmentalists are endlessly talking about. The way were going about destroying it, the planet itself may go up in smoke. I just hope it doesnt happen in my lifetime.

We need to bring down Indias population to half a billion in 25 years - and the world population to 3 billion. That can happen if 50% of the worlds women refuse to reproduce and the other 50% adopt the one-child formula. (Now please dont do the math. I didnt. I was just shooting from the hip.) In the meantime the men will continue killing each other and placing bombs at crowded locations. From each according to his ability!

The religious zealots who advise us to have more children should consider tackling the dowry menace, child marriage, female foeticide, female infanticide, trafficking in women and children, domestic violence, rape and child abuse, before making wanton recommendations about birth un-control. As for me, Im headed for that abortion clinic. Its legal!

When does life begin

The Islamic and Catholic nations have been insisting that abortion is tantamount to murder. Such a value judgment presupposes that life begins at the point of conception. But does it? It may be argued that the spermatozoa are alive, and hence using a spermicide also amounts to destruction of life. The ovum, the spermatozoa and the embryo have no independent viable existence outside the human body. We have invented cloning but we are yet to design an incubator that can nurture the embryo for nine months. The human embryo is a therefore a parasite in the womans body  not necessarily that of the woman who supplied the ovum. Any female body can play host. (How I wish a day would come when male bodies are chosen instead!)

Do women have the right to refuse to nurture the fruit of their own conception? And is it sinful to say Sorry, not in my body!? Can the state compel an unwilling woman to bear an unwanted child? While suicide and mercy-killing are illegal in many countries, people condone these incidents when they do occur. Abortion, however, is still frowned upon, if not condemned altogether. Is it because the crime here is perpetrated by a woman?

Our concern for the embryo often surpasses our concern for living children. The state and society do very little to prevent neglect and abuse. In the third world, infants starve to death because their parents are unable to feed them. Is it better to destroy life in the womb or should we allow the infant to be born, only to die slowly?

Its also interesting that while the destruction of life is often questioned, the callous and indiscriminate creation of life goes unchallenged. Breeding without responsibility is not considered a crime against humanity or an offence against the state. Is this because a male privilege is involved? At the heart of the anti-abortion campaign lies the masculine fear of total loss of control over reproduction. The pill has already tilted the balance of reproductive power in favour of women. When abortion is universally available, the control of creation will fall into womens hands. This has already happened in Kerala and in the Indian metropolises, not to mention the developed world.

It is estimated that several million abortions take place in the world every year. Millions of women are prepared to risk their lives in illegal abortions rather than carry unwanted babies. These faceless, voiceless women are not represented at international forums, but their choice is crystal clear.

In a truly free society, women should have control over their own bodies. A woman is not an incubator. Behind every decision to abort lies a womans indescribable anguish. Abortion, in the final analysis, is a hard choice between two evils. To bear an unwanted child is the greater evil.
Chennai: The first major rally of DMDK-Peoples Welfare Alliance will be held at Maamandur near Chengalpet on April 10 in which the first list of candidates will be announced for the May 16 assembly polls, said alliance coordinator and MDMK general secretary Vaiko.

A decision was taken after a meeting, the four-party combine Peoples Welfare Front (PWF), comprising the MDMK, VCK, CPI (M) and CPI, met Vijayakanth at the latters party office on Friday. Mr Vaiko, VCK president Thol. Thirumavalavan, CPI (M) secretary G. Ramakrishnan and CPI state secretary R. Mutharasan participated in the meeting, in which, the election strategy and identification of constituencies were discussed.

Mr Vaiko said the first meeting, after the alliance was clinched on March 23, would be held on April 10 at Andal Alagar College of Engineering, in which he, Vijayakanth and other PWF leaders would attend. The first list of candidates of the front will be released in the meeting, he added.

Accusing both the ruling AIADMK and the opposition DMK of ruining the state, Mr Vaiko exuded confidence that people were yearning for a change and the front would sweep the polls.

He also said Vijayakanth would become the Chief Minister after May 19 (the day of counting) and form a coalition government that would free the state from liquor, corruption and provide solace to all sections, including the farmers and fishermen. He also said the coalition government would also confiscate the ill-gotten wealth of the AIADMK and DMK members and auction them publicly.
Father Tom Uzhunnalil was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old people's home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis.

Yemen: An Indian priest, hailing from Pala in Kerala, who was abducted by gunmen in Yemen last month is safe and could be released soon, a Catholic group said on Sunday, quoting the Indian foreign minister.

Father Tom Uzhunnalil was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old people's home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis.

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) said a delegation met Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj who said the government was working to secure the priest's safe return.

Read: Indian priest held by Islamic State in Yemen

"She has assured us Father Tom is safe and negotiations are on for his release which could happen very soon," said Father Joseph Chinnaiyan, deputy secretary of the CBCI.

Media reports last week said the priest was killed by Islamic State militants on Good Friday, although no one has claimed responsibility for last month's attack in which gunmen killed four Indian nuns, two Yemeni female staff members, eight elderly residents and a guard.

Father Chinnaiyan said the reports were inaccurate.

Aden has been racked by lawlessness since Hadi supporters, backed by Gulf Arab military forces, drove fighters of the Iran-allied Houthi group from the city in July last year.

Read: Will spare no efforts to rescue priest missing in Yemen: Sushma Swaraj

International aid groups have pulled most of their foreign staff from Yemen due to security concerns.
Ever since the BJP-led NDA came to power, atmosphere in several universities and institutions has vitiated with issues of free speech and nationalism occupying their space. As seen at University of Hyderabad and the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the two issues culminated in the suicide of a student while in the other, it led to arrest of a few students on charges of sedition which hit national and international headlines. The incidents sparked heated debate which refuses to die.



Education is essentially a political project. This is easy to see. Education meant to prepare responsible citizens for a democratic society will be essentially different from what a feudal or patriarchal society prefers. It is necessary, therefore, to be vigilant against the attitude of the state and the ruling elite to education.



Democracy is the guarantor of citizens freedom: the reason why it is deemed the best of all possible governments. Education enables citizens to access the fruits of freedom. For the illiterate, freedom is an illusion. But illiteracy is not the only hindrance to freedom. Equally dangerous, as Noam Chomskyamong a host of othersargues, is the eagerness of the state to condition citizens and stereotype public opinion.



It is against this background that the seriousness of interfering with academia needs to be seen. Conditioning young minds either by abolishing the space for freedom of thought and action or by pitting the might of the state against them is disruptive of the democratic ethos of our country. It is tantamount to pitting education against democracy.

The keenness to nip in the bud the danger of free thinking belongs, according to Hannah Arendt, to the totalitarian, not democratic mindset.



All governments, according to her, exercise authority. Much depends on how authority is exercised. The democratic state, by way of exercising authority, modifies the freedom of citizens. Dictatorships suppress freedom. Totalitarian regimes not only suppress political freedom, argues Arendt, but also human spontaneity, which is the seed of freedom. Academia is not concerned, primarily, with political freedom, not even with civic freedom, but it is concerned with human spontaneity. No civilised society can or should allow the disruption of this seminal freedom. Attack on spontaneity is attack on humanity itself.



This explains why the agenda to regiment academia is so very tempting to those who chafe at the inconveniences of democracy. It would seem eminently desirable to such dispositions to curb spontaneity by re-engineering academia. With the might of propaganda at ones disposal and the vulnerability of the masses, it is not difficult to persuade the people that freedom of thought and speech is anti-national. Or, at the very least, that our institutions of higher education shall be better off if they are secured against the anarchy that some lurking, undesirable elements might unleash under the pretext of free thinking.



It is important to be clear as to why freedom of thought and speech is fundamental to education for democracy. This takes us back to the earliest roots of democracy. The essence of citizenship in democracy, as the Greeks understood it, had two aspects: the right to speak and the right to act. The right to speak includes the right to criticise, but not the licence to libel. The right to act means the right to act significantly, but not unlawfully or disruptively.



Thereby hangs the tale! And it is something thinkers on education have addressed with utmost seriousness. Education is a process of learning. The freedom to err is basic to learning, otherwise, only the prefect (those who do not err) will be admissible to institutions of learning. But such people do not need no learn! Coercive regimentationthe purpose of which is to forestall mistakes and offencesis sure to destroy the very idea of education.



Freedom to err, at the same time, has to be balanced against discipline. This precarious balance is difficult, but essential, to maintain. It is something that no agency or outfit extraneous to universities can understand, much less respect. Only those who are illiterate about, or indifferent to, education will allow unruly elements, whosoever they be, to play bull in the China shops of liberal education.



Turmoil in institutions



The eruption of turmoil in some of our most liberal institutions of higher education at the present time owes majorly to two factors: the overshadowing of academia by the clouds of majoritarian triumphalism and the annexation of education by the market. Both have one thing in common: distrust for freedom of thought and speech.



There is, however, a bottom-line that everyone has to respectthe rule of law. For all its limitations, which are quantitatively formidable, our judicial system is a zealous custodian of citizens rights and liberties. Any activity or advocacy in the academia which smacks of distrust in or disrespect for the judiciary must be avoided. The operative part of free thinking is freedom. Freedom cannot exist in anarchy. The judiciary is our bulwark against anarchy and nothing, absolutely nothing, should be done to belittle any aspect of the rule of law, especially in the name of freedom of thought and speech.



There is, as yet, no clarity on the contextual specifics of the JNU episode. Whether or not it was stage-managed to foreground the nationalism discourse we do not know. This much we know: it has been grabbed as an opportunity to do so. Arguably, the sound and fury of ultra-nationalism has no pedagogic sense or sensibility. Nationalism of this kind is a patriarchal project. It is against the spirit of democracy, which requires that freedom to debate and disagree be secured for citizens.



History progresses like the Ganga. Its waters, as they run down from the heights, meet with diverse obstructions and hindrances- boulders, bends, curves and turns. Regulatory obstructions are germane even to waterworks. Unhindered flow of water will not result in its supply to households. The same principle holds good for public life as well. Shallow minds may see disagreement or criticism as a nuisance. Thinking, seeking, struggling individuals like Rohit Vemula, Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar, Anirban and the like are healthier embodiments of the democratic cause than those who are tempted to overpower academia. And that is so, even if they falter and err many times in the process.



Even then, they need to respect their ideological antagonists. The human being is of far greater value than advocacy of every kind. Politics is made for man, and not man for politics. Under no circumstance should academia be polarised or turned into a battle zone. Commitment to freedom is proved best by defending the freedom of others to think and act differently from oneself. It is not the elemental fury of ultra-nationalism that needs to be engaged in defence of democracy, but its spirit. The irony to be eschewed is that of this very spirit over-running academia through the naivete of those who charge against the windmills of ultra-nationalism.



(The writer is former principal of St Stephens College, Delhi)


In the first complaint to the newly-created Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), a city-based advocate on Saturday sought a probe against Chief Minister Siddaramaiah over the Hublot watch gifted to him by an NRI doctor.





The complaint filed by S Nataraj Sharma referred a writ petition he filed before the High Court, seeking direction to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to consider his complaint against the Chief Minister. The High Court had dismissed the petition stating it would not come in the way of authorities considering the representation.



Sharma, along with another advocate N P Amrutesh, first went to Khanija Bhavan, where the ACBs office is supposed to be set up. There was no activity at Khanija Bhavan, not even infrastructure work. We then went to state DG and IGP Om Prakash's office. However, he was not there. Hence, we submitted the complaint at his office and got an acknowledgment,'' Amrutesh said.



Later, the complainant went to the Malleswaram police station. However the police refused to receive the complaint. The complaint was finally filed with DySP Abdul Khader, who is the designated officer to receive complaints till the ACB office is set up. The DySP said that they have 15 days time to hold a preliminary enquiry on the complaint.



The complaint said that there has to be an investigation to find out if the chief minister rendered some help to his childhood friend Dr Girish Chandra Varma in return for the expensive gift. Till today, CM's best friend Dr Varma has not come out in public with any statement. Dr Varma has also not furnished the original receipt of the watch he had purchased. The watch is under the custody of the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. While handing over the watch to the Speaker, the CM has apparently handed over an affidavit and other documents. These documents will have to be verified,'' the complaint stated.



The complainant has also requested the ACB to verify if the watch has cleared regulations like customs duty and regulations under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA). Senior ACB officials were not available for comment.


Two unidentified motorcycle -borne assailants shot dead a National Investigation Agency (NIA) official, who was part of several terror probe cases related to Indian Mujahideen, and critically wounded his wife in the wee hours today when they were returning home from a wedding near this Uttar Pradesh town.



The killers pumped as many as 24 bullets into Mohd Tanzil Ahmad and four into his wife Farzana, as their 14-year old daughter and 12-year old son watched the gruesome incident from the back seat of the Wagon-R car they were travelling in, police said, adding the children were not injured.



Ahmad was returning home in Sahaspur village of Bijnor district with his family after attending his niece's wedding in another nearby village in the same district, which is about 150 km from Delhi.



Police termed the killing of Ahmad, posted as Inspector initially with the NIA's intelligence wing and later in its investigation department, as a "planned attack" and did not rule out the possiblity of a terror angle behind the shootout.



Home Minister Rajnath Singh told reporters in Lucknow that he had been apprised of the incident. "Whatever necessary is being done. We are talking (to NIA officials)," Singh said.



Police suspect that Ahmad's movements was being tracked the assailants who used at least one 9mm pistol in the shootout.



"Tanzil Ahmad was shot dead by two motorcycle borne persons when he was returning after attending a marriage ceremony with his wife Farzana," IG (Law and Order) of UP Police Bhagwan Swaroop said.



The incident took place at 12:45 AM when Ahmed, earlier posted as an assistant commandant in BSF and on deputation to NIA, was returning to Sahaspur from the wedding ceremony.



45-year-old Ahmad, who has been with the NIA ever since the organisation was formed in February 2009, had been investigating many cases especially related to banned Indian Mujahideen terror outfit. His superiors termed him as a thorough professional in intelligence gathering as well as investigation.



According to the police, Ahmad left his home in the evening along with his family to attend a marriage ceremony at a guest house at Sohara village. On their way back, their vehicle was stopped barely 200 metres from his home by two youths who fired at a very close range.



In New Delhi, NIA IG Sanjeev Kumar termed it as a "planned attack" and said "one of our officers, very brave officer Mohammad Tanzil Ahmad had gone to his home to attend a function last night.



"When he was coming back from the function, a planned attack took place on him and he was fired upon. He was killed in the firing while his wife was injured. She has been admitted to Fortis Hospital, Noida. He was an assistant commandant with BSF and was on deputation with NIA."



Ahmad was taken a nearby Cosmos hospital where he was declared brought dead, while his wife was shifted to the Fortis Hospital in Nodia.



The hospital issued a statement about the health condition of his wife, saying "the patient has been brought ina critical condition. Our doctors are providing the best medical treatment to treat the patient. As a matter of patient confidentiality, we cannot comment any further."



The Uttar Pradesh Police have sealed the borders of the district and launched a manhunt for the assailants.



Additional Director General of Police Daljit Chowdhry said "nothing can be ruled out," when asked whether there was a possibility of terror angle behind the attack.



"A very serious offence has taken place in the district and we have taken it very seriously. The body has been sent for post-mortem and details of what actually happened will soon come out. Borders of the state have been sealed and checking is on in the nearby villages to trace those involved in killing of the officer. We are trying to find out the accused and the motive behind the murder," he said.



"Investigations are on. Right now the UP Police, UP ATS, NIA, the DIG of NIA from Lucknow and his team all of them are there on the spot," Chowdhry said.



He said the state police was also trying to ascertain whether the 9 mm pistol used for the crime was country-made or factory-made. "It is definitely a planned attack and not a robbery," he added.



UP Director General of Police Javeed Ahmad said IG Special Task Force (STF) and IG Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) have been sent to Bijnor and the matter is being probed.



"We are also in touch with NIA officers and coordinating with them. We will go deep into it and ensure those involved are arrested", Ahmad said.



Superintendent of Police, Bijnor, Subhash Singh Baghel said, Tanzil came to Bijnor on Friday to take attend his niece's marriage which was held at a guest house in Sohara village, around 9kms from their residence.



At around 8.00 pm on Saturday evening, Tanzil and his family left their home for the marriage function. When they were returning home at around 1.00 AM, their vehicle was stopped around 300 meters away from their residence by the two youths on a motorcycle.



"When Tanzil stopped his car, they fired several rounds and escaped," the SP said, adding locals rushed to the spot hearing the gunshots.
Less than two weeks from now, Delhi government will introduce the second phase of odd-even car scheme to ease road congestion and curb rising air pollution in the city. It will be similar to the car curbs in January, says Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in a radio advertisement.





Kejriwal tells listeners that the world is surprised to see how disciplined Delhiites are. According to him, the second round of odd-even, between April 15 and April 30, will clear clogged roads and let citizens breathe deep.



In fact, bolstered by the response to odd-even trial in January, Deputy CM Manish Sisodia told the Delhi Assembly on Monday: Together we silenced all critics and pessimists who prophesied doom. The odd-even scheme received overwhelming response. Pollution fell steadily as support of the people rose  formidable traffic jams cleared to wide, open roads.



Odd-even 2.0 will exempt CNG-fuelled vehicles from the rules that prevent plying of private cars on alternate days, but the final word on whether women will be exempted from the road rationing drive is not out yet.



During the last phase, Kejriwal government had listed out some exceptions  including two-wheelers, emergency service vehicles, women drivers and top politicians. According to Transport Minister Gopal Rai, the opinion on excluding women drivers from the exemption list is divided. Exceptions for the odd-even rules will be declared before the rollout of the second phase.



Days after successful implementation of the odd-even trial in January, Rai had asked Delhiites to brace for no exemption car curbs in future. But he later clarified that the government doesnt want to scrap the various exemption categories without scaling up reliability and comfort of public transport in Delhi.



According to an estimate, Delhi will need at least 5,000 more buses to scrap exemptions for two-wheelers and women drivers.



Delhi Transport Corporation has a fleet of 4,461 buses  which includes 3,781 low-floor buses and 680 standard-floor buses. The government plans to procure 3,000 more buses by the end of the next fiscal year. Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly and BJP MLA Vijender Gupta says the government cant achieve this target with a Plan outlay of Rs 325 crore.



How can government purchase 3,000 buses and develop bus terminal with such a meagre spending? Gupta told the Assembly during the discussion on Budget proposals for the coming fiscal year.



The government has promised to introduce 1,000 premium buses for the citys rich. According to a government official, these high fare-buses will be procured by DIMTA (Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System  a joint venture between Delhi government and IDFC Limited). DIMTS oversees operation of some 1,200 orange-colour non-AC buses.

Without car curbs in place, DTC says its average ridership is 35 lakh per day. Whereas, Delhi Metro claims it ferries 27 lakh passengers per day.



With the completion of Phase-III metro project by December 2016, Metros ridership will increase to 41 lakh, Delhi government says. One corridor of Phase-III from Jahangirpuri to Badli is already in operation.



About 248 new mini buses are to be inducted, increasing the total fleet of feeder buses to 517 on 93 routes during 2016-17. I propose Rs 736 crore for DMRC, Sisodia said in his recent Budget speech, laying emphasis on the need to boost last-mile connectivity.



In January, the odd-even formula for rationing of road space kept nearly 10 lakh private vehicles off the city roads. But the ridership of Metros and buses rose only marginally. With the addition of 1,200 private buses to its fleet during the first phase of odd-even curbs, DTC ferried over five lakh passengers per day. But the average peak hour rush in Metro trains remained unaltered during the 15-day period.



I started carpooling when the government imposed the odd-even rule. I think it is not just about saving petrol but also about doing our bit for the environment, Kamlesh Yadav, a Mayur Vihar resident, says. With the second phase of odd-even trial round the corner, Yadav says he will carpool with his neighbours for his office commute.



App-based taxi-hailing companies like Uber, Ola and Meru had launched their carpooling service ahead of the first round of odd-even experiment: Bla Bla Car, a French ride-sharing cab service, also made an entry into the Delhi market. Uber had then launched its carpooling service with a claim that people in Delhi spend 90 minutes to and from work each day. Getting more butts into fewer cars is an important step towards reducing congestion and pollution in the capital over time, a statement issued by the company had said.



During the odd-even days, I shared my cab with a family of three. But you need a lot of patience to rideshare, says Nishant Gupta, who commutes six days a week for work.

Autorickshaw unions, however, are in no mood to let people carpool. Rajendra Soni, general secretary of Bharatiya Private Transporter Mazdoor Mahasangh, says autorickshaw and black-and-yellow taxi unions will hold a strike

on April 16 if government doesnt impose a ban on app-based taxi firms.



Kejriwal government is serving the interests of big corporates. App-based cab companies are taking away the livelihood of traditional black-and-yellow taxi and autrickshaw drivers, Soni tells Deccan Herald. Nearly 13,000 black-and-yellow taxis and over 80,000 autorickshaws ply on the city roads.



Earlier, the unions were upset over an autorickshaw permit scam which prevented the government from rolling out 10,000 new three-wheelers ahead of the odd-even trial in January.



But Transport Minister Rai is taking no chances this time. He met DTC officials on Friday and asked them to curb breakdown of buses during the 15-day odd-even road-rationing drive in April. As per the DTCs report to the Kejriwal government, the average number of trips operated daily increased to 38,731 from 33,175 per day because of reduced congestion and breakdown of buses.



Monitoring pollution

Rai says the government will monitor air quality across Delhi-NCR to assess the role of odd-even scheme in cutting down vehicular emissions. The city has six ambient air quality monitoring stations in Delhi. Government in the recent Budget has proposed to add three fixed monitoring stations and one mobile monitoring van by the end of this fiscal year.

According to the Aam Aadmi Party government, there was a 20-25 per cent dip in the air pollution during the odd-even curbs in January.



In inner Delhi, the average PM 2.5 (particulate matter with diameter below 2.5 microns) was around 300 micrograms/m3. However, in border areas, the levels remained around 400 micrograms/m3, Rai had said at a news conference at the end of first round of road-rationing drive in Delhi. Vehicular emissions are known source of high PM 2.5 levels.

Rai had blamed the high levels of PM 2.5 in outlying areas to the entry of trucks in the Capital and proximity to areas falling outside the odd-even car rule zone.



On April 13, the government will organise an oath-taking ceremony for seeking allegiance of DTC and Delhi Metro employees, and Civil Defence volunteers, among others, to make the drive successful. For enforcement of the odd-even drive, the AAP government said sub-divisional magistrates of the Revenue department will make way for retired Defence personnel. The AAP government had earlier sought a list of 400 ex-servicemen from the Rajya Sainik Board.



In the previous round of odd-even car curbs, Traffic Police, Transport Department and SDMs were authorised to issue Rs 2,000-challans for violations.


A 29-year-old Indo-Canadian Sikh was viciously assaulted by four men in Canada in an alleged racially motivated attack, drawing strong condemnation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.





Supninder Singh Khehra, an Indian citizen from Patiala and a resident of the Toronto suburb of Brampton, was verbally abused and beaten by a group of men who seemed to be drunk by who targeted him because of his brown skin and turban.



Khehra who is still recovering, said he was out with friends in Quebec City after dark and trying to hail a cab when a car full of men approached and started shouting at him in French, swearing and pointing at his turban, CTV reported online.



"I was punched in the eye and fell to the ground, where I was kicked repeatedly. It was all because of my race, my colour and the headgear I was wearing," he said.

He said his turban "went flying off."



"I'm really worried about the safety and wellbeing of young kids of my community who wear turbans," Khehra added.



The incident has been condemned by Trudeau while he was speaking to reporters in Washington, where he was attending the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.



Trudeau was quoted as saying that such "hateful acts" had "no place in Canada". He said, "We stand clearly against the kind of discrimination and intolerance that represents."



Trudeau had a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the summit in Washington.



Jaskaran Sandhu, a director of the World Sikh Organisation Canada, said he believes the men should be charged.



He added he is "positive that the Canadian society...will come together and say that this is completely against the fabric of this country."



Two men were arrested after the incident. One was let go without a charge, police said.

The other, a 22-year-old, faces charges of assault and uttering threats to a police officer. They said they are still investigating and more charges are possible.


With the onset of the festive season, the gems and jewellery industry fears losing out on sizeable sales, with some industry leaders saying continuation of the strike will be a "disaster" for the business.





All India Gems and Jewellery Trade Federation (GJF) Director Ashok Minawala said if the jewellers continue to strike, it's going to be "a disaster" during Gudi Padwa in Maharashtra.



"We must understand the consumer demand, retain and maintain it. There is a need to come out of the mindset and start a proper and meaningful dialogue with the government and reach some decision. If the strike ends, the demand during Gudi Padwa as well as the entire festival season is going to be phenomenal," he added.



Waman Hari Pethe Director Aditya Pethe rued that there is a lot of confusion in the consumer's mind with regard to the jewellers' strike as 80 per cent of the shops are shut since last one month.



"However, if the agitation is over soon, then the offtake will zoom as there is lot of backlog consumer demand. We expect minimum 30-35 per cent rise in demand on the Gudi Padwa day. It will be very high during the festive season," he added.



"The demand will be at least three-fold during Gudi Padwa, where people consider it auspicious to buy gold, due to a lot of pent-up demand that was help up following the all India strike by jewellers across the country," PNG Jewellers CMD Saurabh Gadgil told PTI here.



The demand, he said, will be mainly for weddings as the marriage season is round the corner. However, small ticket articles like coins and small jewelleries will also be in demand due to Gudi Padwa.



He said PNG, which has 25 stores in Maharashtra, is getting a lot of enquiries for wedding jewelleries. But the booking has not begun as consumers are confused about the strike.



"We are hoping that the strike will end soon, otherwise the result will be disastrous for the industry," he opined.



The jewellers have been on a pan-India strike since March 2 to protest against imposition of excise levy, demanding withdrawal of the budgetary proposal.



Meanwhile, the government has constituted a panel under former chief economic advisor Ashok Lahiri to look into the set of demand of jewellers.



The sub-committee, which has been asked to submit its report in 60 days, will look into issues related to the compliance procedure for the excise duty, including records to be maintained, forms to be filled, operating procedures and other relevant aspects.



The government, in the Budget for 2016-17, had proposed 1 per cent excise duty on jewellery without input credit or 12.5 per cent with input tax credit on jewellery excluding silver other than those studded with diamonds and precious stones.
A physical trainer and instructor has been arrested for allegedly raping and killing a Dalit girl in the hostel of their college in Bikaner district.





The body of the 17-year old girl was found in a water tank on Tuesday morning following which her parents lodged a complaint against trainer Vijendra Singh accusing him of raping and killing the girl, police said.



The accused was arrested on Wednesday and under police custody, the police said.

"It was alleged that the girl was raped in the hostel room of Vijendra on Monday night and later her body was found in the tank. She was pursuing BSTC (a course to become teacher) from the private college in Nokha," the police said.



The Dalit girl belonged to Barmer district.



Local people, her relatives and public representatives including Leader of Opposition Rameshwar Dudi have demanded a probe into the matter.
A day after being denied entry into the inner sanctum of Shani Shinganapur temple in Maharashtra, Bhumata Ranragini Brigade president Trupti Desai today said she is planning to file a "contempt of court" case against Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and state government.





"It was the CM who, in January, had extended his support to our cause and failed to protect us yesterday. Now we have already given a complaint to Supa police station against the police (who failed to protect women activists yesterday), local administration and trustees and demanded that a contempt of court case should be filed against CM and Maharashtra government," said Desai.



She alleged that whatever happened yesterday was a premeditated ploy to kill them.



"When villagers unleashed an attack on us and started beating us, police were standing as mere spectators and did not oppose them," she further alleged.



Desai claimed that she and other activists sustained bruises during the attack by villagers.



"We will wait till tomorrow as we feel that court will initiate a 'suo moto' action against Maharashtra government in yesterday's incident and if it does not happen, we are planning to file a contempt of court case against the CM and Maharashtra state for failing to implement the High Court ruling," informed Desai.



Desai and her 25 supporters, who were escorted till Pune district boundary by the Ahmednagar police, reached to the city in the wee hours today.



"After the contempt of court procedure, we are also planning to head to Trimbakeshwar temple in Nashik," she said.



The Maharashtra BJP had yesterday slammed Desai, saying her agitation to force entry into the inner sanctum of the Shani Shinganapur temple was nothing but a "political stunt" seeking publicity.



Desai termed it as an irresponsible statement. She said instead of taking stern action against police, trustees and local administration for failing to give the women protection and implementing the court order immediately, such wrong statements were being made.



Armed with a Bombay High Court order to end gender discrimination at temples, women activists yesterday made a determined bid to storm the inner sanctum of Shani Shinganapur temple, but were stopped by villagers and later detained by police.



The HC had on Friday ruled that entry to temples was a fundamental right of women and it was the state's fundamental duty to protect it.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today invited oil-rich Saudi Arabia's top business tycoons to invest in India's key sectors like defence, insurance, railway and oil as he projected his country as an attractive investment destination even in the face of a global economic slowdown.



Saudi Arabia is planning to set up world's largest sovereign wealth fund of over USD 2 trillion and India was eyeing a major investment from the country which is India's fourth largest trading partner.



Listing policy initiatives taken by his government to boost economic growth, Modi said his government was looking for major investment in defence production, railways and deep sea off-shore oil exploration in coal gasification to produce clean energy.



The Prime Minister made the pitch while interacting with a group of 30 top Saudi CEOs and Indian business leaders at the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce here.



The Saudi business honchos, who attended the interaction, collectively account for a major share of the Saudi GDP.



Talking about his government's initiative in "high temperature deep sea off shore exploration", Modi invited Saudi investment in the sector which has been opened up for FDI from this month.



He said "most transparent" policy framework has been put in place and that market driven revenue sharing model will be adopted for such project.



The Prime Minister said India plans to build a staggering 50 million low cost housing, a mega project requiring huge investment which will create massive economic opportunities besides creating jobs.

"I want to give house to every poor Indian. I think every year a new Saudi Arabia has to be built in my country. That is a huge requirement," he said.



Modi said railways and food processing sectors have been opened up for 100 per cent Foreign Direct Investment and that there is huge investment opportunity in building cold storage network as well as in manufacture of equipment for generation of solar power.



Pitching for Saudi investment in the defence sector, Modi said India's biggest import bill after petroleum products is defence equipment and asserted that the government now is focusing on indigenous production.



"We are importing everything. Why not we develop defence equipment in India. Your investment can play a major role in this," he said.

Talking about cyber threats, the Prime Minister said major investments will be required to ensure cyber security and Saudi Arabia can invest significantly in the sector.



The Prime Minister also faced range of questions at the interaction relating to retrospective tax, proposed Goods and Services Tax, non-performing assets of Indian banks and whether India will allow Islamic banking.



Referring to specific sectors, Modi said India plans to go for coal gasification in order to be able to produce clean energy and invited Saudi companies to invest in the sector. "I think your companies can do a great deal in this regard."



Seeking investment in railways, he said, "Today, India's railway is world's second longest network and I wish to double that. I wish to upgrade it. We have 50 cities in the country where we wish to build metro network."



He said the insurance sector has been opened up and that there is huge scope in it. The Prime Minister also invited Saudi investment in agriculture and medical tourism sectors.
Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has announced that the Uttar Pradesh government would provide free food material, including flour, rice and lentil, to over two lakh 'antyodaya' families in drought-hit Bundelkhand region.





The chief minister had launched distribution of 'Samajwadi' relief material in Mahoba and Chitrakoot districts last month, an official spokesman said.



Under the relief programme, every 'antyodaya' family would be provided 10 kg flour, five kg rice, five kg lentil, 25 kg potato, five litre mustard oil, one kg pure ghee and one kg milk powder every month, the spokesman said.



The relief material would be provided to 2.3 lakh 'poorest of the poor' families in all seven districts of Bundelkhand region, he said.



The drought-prone Bundelkhand region is spread across 13 districts in UP and MP. Jhansi, Jalaun, Hamirpur, Banda, Mahoba, Chitrakoot and Lalitpur districts fall in UP, while the rest in MP.



The National Human Rights Commission had recently sought reports from the governments of the two states over the plight of people living in drought-hit Bundelkhand region.
A complaint seeking a probe by the newly-formed Anti-Corruption Bureau against Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah regarding his luxury watch has been lodged with police here.





Since petitioner Nataraj Sharma could not find the office of the ACB, he has lodged the complaint with the Additional Director General of Police and Bengaluru City Police Commissioner.



Police said the complaint will be forwarded to the ACB.



Sharma, in his complaint, sought ACB probe into the trail of the chief minister's diamond-studded Hublot Big Bang-301-M watch, which was handed over by Siddaramaiah early last month, amid uproar in the state assembly, to Speaker Kagodu Thimappa, declaring it a state asset.



"Sharma has requested the ACB to probe the source of the chief minister's luxury watch," Amrutesh, counsel for Sharma, told PTI here.



The controversy was stoked by JDS leader H D Kumaraswamy, and in response the chief minister had said the watch was gifted to him by his Dubai-based friend Girish Chandra Verma who visited India last July.



Opposition BJP leader Jagadish Shettar had demanded a high-level probe by a central agency into the matter. He had also accused the Chief Minister of violating the code of conduct for ministers and FCRA.



Shettar had also questioned Siddaramaiah's claims of being a follower of Ram Manohar Lohia for his conduct, but wearing a costly watch worth around Rs 70 lakh.



Former Chief Minister Kumaraswamy had also alleged that the watch was stolen from the house of a doctor who had returned from Kuwait and had indicated that the Chief Minister's watch resembled one of the stolen watches.



However, Dr Sudhakar Shetty had clarified to the media that the watch worn by Siddaramaiah wasn't his.



Despite Opposition BJP protests both inside and outside the state legislature, demanding withdrawal of the newly created ACB, Siddaramaiah had made it clear that there was no question of going back.



BJP had alleged that government was "destabilising" the Lokayukta by creating a separate Anti-Corruption Bureau.




The recent attack at the check-in area of Brussel-Zaventem Airport that serves the Belgian capital of Brussels, has given birth to a lot of concerns. There are many issues that need to be addressed when it comes to the landside security in India.





The airports in India boast of best international qualities and standards, when it comes to infrastructure. Right from management to the services, airports like Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, and Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad, are a testimony of the same. But are the people who visit airports in India safe?



There are two types of security apparatus that need to be addressed at airports namely, landside security and airside security. Airside security starts when you go past the security check, and go through the hallway to the gates, from there to the tarmac through the aerobridge and into the plane  all this airside security has reasonably taken off. Everything going into the plane, including the passengers, is screened  food, luggage, personnel  the plane is checked and sanitised.



Landside areas include parking lots, public transportation train stations and access roads, usually till the check-in area. This area, especially in case of India, is easily accessible and completely unsanitised, except for the Sheikh ul Alam International Airport, Srinagar.



At the Bandaranaike International Airport, Colombo, the security protocol makes airline passengers disembark from their private vehicles 500 meters before they enter the airport, and board an airport shuttle, after a security frisking. The airport shuttle is sanitised for any explosives and has a security detail in accompaniment to neutralise any potential bomb/hijack threat. The Srinagar Airport also follows similar security protocols.



At Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru, like other airports in Metro cities, airline passengers do not undergo security checks till they enter the terminal area where potential terrorists have scope to explode bombs and cause immense harm. The security checks begin well after they enter the terminal and only before they enter the airside of the airport terminal. To that extent, the landside of the airport is vulnerable to terror threats. So what is it that saves us from implementing the Srinagar/Colombo airport model?



Because of the stringent security checks on the airside, terrorists will not hijack planes, is a theory of most security experts. The security at our airports is aircraft-oriented. There is a mindset that this lets us keep aircraft safe and we forget about other things, says Air Marshall B K Pandey. Pandey also adds that cost is one of the reasons that has led to preventing the government to replicate landside security apparatus, as put in place in Srinagar.



Technology can be an option. Except for being walled, we also need sensors, that can improve and help detect possible threats, advises Pandey. He also emphasises on security techiniques being changed, emulating Israel model.



We need to realise that an armed gaurd alerts the terrorist, who can resort to snatching his gun, as happened in Udhampur in 2015. The guard always needs to be unarmed, and should be provided cover from a distance, opines Pandey.



Indias aviation security has improved over the past 10-20 years. But that doesnt mean that we are not vulnerable. We do need upgradation, says Sanat Kaul, Chairman, International Foundation for Aviation, Aerospace and Development (India Chapter). Kaul also appreciates the kind of security protocol followed at the Colombo Airport. Colombo Airport, along with having a checkpoint 500 metres before the airport, also has a mudwall. So, in case the explosives get off, the mudwall will prevent the magnitude of casualities, adds Kaul.



Kaul further adds that this system is needed in India, but cost is a constraint. The security of the people is paramount. We need to shift more towards technology. We also need emphasis on peripheral security. But along with the installation cost, we also need to realise that it has maintainance that needs to be borne, opines Kaul.



Helpful, yet inconvenient



Omar Abdullah, former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, is of a different opinion. Yes, indeed it has helped prevent attack, he says. In January 2001, a six-member Lashkar-e-Toiba suicide squad tried to storm the Srinagar Airport. But due to the stringent landside security, the bid was foiled. In June 2007, Glasgow aborted a bombing by Kafeel Ahmed, who got radicalised in the UK. Ahmed crashed the vehicle loaded with explosives. He wanted to crash the terminal and explode it, but didnt succeed with his Iraqi counterpart. Therefore, the terminal can be crashed by car, two-wheeler or a pedestrian, according to Juval Aviv, a Mossad agent.



But Abdullah goes on to add, We have to realise that such a kind of security apparatus in place at Srinagar Airport is due to a different reason. We have been facing terror threats on a daily basis.



He also highlights the inconvenience caused by such protocols. Plus this kind of security apparatus is causing a lot of inconvenience to the passengers here. So, in case of larger cities, which handle larger number of travellers, it wont be feasible. But the point is, along with being a civilian airport, it also serves defence. So this kind of apparatus is needed here, says Abdullah, adding, Just because there was an attack in Brussels doesnt mean that we need to panic here. We should not forget that we have been facing terrorism much before it surfaced in Europe, and we have been handling it efficiently.



The concerns about landside security is expressed by Rajiv Chib, Director, Aerospace and Defence at PriceWaterhouse Coopers. If you were to ask someone today, what they expect from airport security, you would receive a considerably different response than if you had asked the same question six months ago, says Chib.



There is considerable debate now of moving the security cordon outside the airport and further away from the check-in. However, a balance has to be met between the extent of security and passenger convenience, he added. He also opines that the long queues of vehicles and people may just move a vulnerable point elsewhere, rather than eliminating risk.



Chib goes on to add, The first priority should be an integrated command, control and communication centre in the airport, which leverages the telecommunications infrastructure and is designed to integrate CCTVs, Access Control, Intrusion Detection, Digital Video Recording, Intelligent Video Analytics and Surveillance Systems, Building Management Systems, technology-based solutions, among others across a single network backbone.



Kaul and Shekar Viswanathan, Vice Chairman of Toyota Kirloskar Motor, do advocate the use of car scanners in the landside of the airport. They use scanners to carry out a wide range of product-scanning at ports, right from human-scanning to luggage-scanning, and container-scanning. It can be applied to cars also, before entering the landside of the airport, says Kaul. I am all for car-scanning, says Viswanathan. But he quickly adds, I want to just add one more caveat here, whether it might intrude the privacy of the people. So that way, a Colombo-kind of model would be more viable.



T Suneel Kumar, Additional Director General (Internal Security Division), Karnataka State Police adds that though the aerodome security is being taken care of by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), yet stringent measures may be recommended for landside security at airports.



Concerns galore



The airport security issues dont stop here. There are lot of other issues that are highlighted by Pandey and Kaul. Earlier, no construction was allowed within 300 metres of an airport. But now we see developments coming up right next to them, says Pandey. Now, terrorists can throw explosives at airports or snipe from them, he adds.



Kaul is of the opinion that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasing, and so is the potent threat in the current scenario. The use of UAVs needs to be regulated. There are lot of unregulated UAVs in the market. So terrorists can remotely access the airports and strike, says Kaul. He suggests that we should set up no-drone areas and make sure that these drones remain within visual sight.



But on the other hand, airports think that they have enough security apparatus at the airports. At BIAL, we place paramount importance on the safety of our passengers, stakeholders and community. BIAL, in collaboration with CISF and the State Police, continues to take all measures to ensure complete security of people and property at the Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru, says a spokesperson from the airport.



The attack on Brussels is an eye-opener when it comes to aviation security. There was the time when the airside at US airports was open to everyone. You just walked through a light security check, and could pick up your relatives at the gate. But the 9/11 attacks changed the scenario. Airside security became important. In this case, isnt it time that issues pertaining to landside security at Indian airports are also addressed?




Microsoft continues to bank on its Windows operating system. But the software giant is also increasingly staking out new technology areas, including software that can have natural conversations with people.



Those were the twin messages from the company at an event in San Francisco last week for developers. At the event, Microsoft said Windows 10, the latest version of its operating system, is now running on 270 million active devices, eight months after it was released to the public. That represented the fastest adoption ever for a new version of Windows, outpacing the rate at which Windows 7 was adopted by 145 percent, the company said.



Microsoft also revealed new tools for developers to create bots, pieces of software that can be used to produce new methods of interacting with computers, such as a chat interface for ordering pizzas online.



We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences, Satya Nadella, Microsofts chief executive, said at the event.



The bot move is something of a gamble. Microsoft recently released a Twitter chatbot called Tay that used artificial intelligence to respond to communications from Twitter users. The experiment went awry when people fooled the software into repeating racist, sexist and other offensive remarks. Microsoft shut Tay down and Nadella acknowledged the company had been humbled.



Were back to the drawing board, he said.

In another area of new technology, Microsoft said it had begun shipping a version of HoloLens, the companys augmented reality headset that overlays digital images on the wearers view of the real world. The $3,000 (Rs 1,98,689) product is aimed at developers making applications for HoloLens.



The company also emphasised its progress with Windows 10, in a reminder that  for all of the talk of Microsofts fading stature in the technology industry  Windows is still the software that most of the world uses to run its PCs.



Microsoft previously said it intended to get Windows 10 running on 1 billion devices two to three years after the product shipped in July. In a recent interview, Terry Myerson, an executive vice president at Microsoft, said he was confident the company could still reach that objective.



The goal was always ambitious, but enterprises are deploying faster than ever before, Myerson said.



Yet Windows 10 may not do everything Microsoft hoped. Its success has not significantly shifted the tech industrys dynamics, in which mobile platforms like Apples iOS and Googles Android have eclipsed Windows. PC sales have not grown in years, and most analysts dont expect that to change soon.



Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research, said developers had little incentive to create software for Windows first when they can reach bigger audiences elsewhere.

This year, well likely see more enterprises embracing Windows 10 after a period of watching and testing the platform, so that will help, but it wont do anything for consumer adoption or increased development by consumer-centric app developers, Dawson said.



A big reason for Microsofts waning influence among developers is its dire situation in mobile. The companys acquisition of Nokias phone division several years ago was widely viewed as a disaster. Microsoft laid off much of the workforce that joined through the deal and slashed the number of handset models it sells.



Windows 10 is supposed to give developers an incentive to create apps for Microsoft products by making it easy for them to produce software that can run on any Windows 10 device, including PCs, smartphones and the Xbox One console. Microsoft praises new universal apps of this nature from the likes of Twitter, Uber, King, Disney, the Wargaming Group, Square Enix and Yahoo.



It isnt clear that the apps being made for Windows 10 will be sufficient to get people to buy phones running the software.



We obviously have work to do in mobile, Myerson said.

To keep interest in Windows 10, Microsoft said that it would refresh the software with an update that would connect users with Cortana, the virtual assistant in the operating system, without requiring a PC to be unlocked first. People could then use their PCs like Amazons Echo device, which can be summoned to answer questions about the weather and trivia from across the room.



The Windows 10 update will also enhance a feature called Windows Hello that lets people more securely log into Windows using biometric verification, like facial recognition. The change will allow people to sign into websites and apps with Windows Hello so they dont have to use passwords.



David Smith, an analyst at Gartner, said Windows 10 should be considered a success, especially compared with its predecessor, Windows 8, which many people disliked for too aggressively pushing a striking redesign of the softwares interface. (Microsoft skipped over the Windows 9 name.)



Still, he doubts that enough people will see a need to buy PCs to return the market to growth.



I dont see it creating this massive upgrade cycle, Smith said.






A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology  a second Norse settlement in North America, farther south than ever known.



The new Canadian site, with telltale signs of iron-working, was discovered last summer after infrared images from 400 miles in space showed possible man-made shapes under discoloured vegetation. The site is on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, about 300 miles south of LAnse aux Meadows, the first and only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, discovered in 1960.



Since then, archaeologists, following up clues in the histories known as the sagas, have been hunting for the holy grail of other Viking, or Norse, landmarks in the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.



But last year, Sarah H Parcak, a leading space archaeologist working with Canadian experts and the science series NOVA for a two-hour television documentary, Vikings Unearthed, that will be aired on PBS next week, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of Greenland, to Massachusetts. She found hundreds of potential hot spots that high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one particularly promising candidate  a dark stain with buried rectilinear features.



Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, a grassy headland above a rocky beach an hours trek from the nearest road, showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder  signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.



In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped convince scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the sites promise. The experts are to resume digging there this summer.



It screams, Please excavate me! said Parcak, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite images to expose the looting of ancient Egyptian antiquities and is using it to globally crowdsource new archaeological sites from space.



Given the dashed hopes of previous searches and the many spurious claims of Viking presence in the Americas, scientists on the project as well as outside experts have voiced caution.



Tremendous, if its really true, said William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Centre and Curator in Anthropology at the Smithsonians National Museum of Natural History in Washington. It wouldnt be unexpected, he said, but added that he wanted to see the data.



Theres no lock that its Norse, but theres no alternative evidence, said Douglas Bolender, a research assistant professor at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Centre for Archeological Research and the department of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who joined the expedition. He said a buried structure there could be a smithy for longboat nails and weaponry, another strong indicator of Viking presence.

It would just be logical that theres more than one site, said Gerald F Bigelow, a lecturer in history at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and a specialist in archaeology of the North Atlantic.



Davide Zori, an assistant professor of archaeology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and a specialist on Viking expansion in the North Atlantic, called the find potentially very important.



Much depends on what else is found at the site. In archaeology, context is everything. A famous prehistoric site in Brooklin, Maine, yielded an 11th century silver Norse coin but it is believed to have landed there through trade and not as proof of Viking settlement.



Master shipbuilders and seafarers, warriors, traders and raiders, the Vikings boiled out of the Scandinavian fjords starting around the eighth century, marauding through Asia and West Asia, North Africa and Europe. The Vikings focused particularly on the British Isles, and west to Iceland and Greenland, as memorialised in oral narratives and later recorded as the sagas by 13th-century Icelandic monks.



Remnants of a life



Around 1000, Leif Ericson led an expedition to what became known as Vinland at the northernmost point of Newfoundland at LAnse aux Meadows (the name an obscure corruption from the French) where explorers starting in 1960 discovered remnants of an extensive colony, including dwellings, a forge, and carpentry workshop  the Vikings first and so far only known landmark in the New World. They appear to have been routed by indigenous people the Norse called Skraeling.



One intriguing find was the seeds of a butternut tree, which did not grow that far north and hinted of travels to milder climates in the Gulf of St Lawrence. But evidence of other Viking settlements has been lacking.



Parcak (pronounced PAR-kak) began her research by using a commercial satellite called WorldView-3, belonging to the company DigitalGlobe, to search known Norse sites on minuscule Papa Stour in the Shetland Islands of Scotland.



Using the near-infrared spectrum invisible to the human eye, the satellite detected buried walls, and digging yielded a carnelian bead from India similar to those found at other Viking sites. Parcak then focused her satellite search on thousands of miles of coastline from the Canadian Arctic to New England.



After two weeks of digging at Point Rosee, an unexpected find in a flooded trench excited the explorers  several seeds, or perhaps blueberries, which were hurriedly sent for testing. The dates came back wildly off  700 years after the Vikings, maybe even contemporary. They seem to have migrated onto the site much later.



You feeling nervous, Sarah? a NOVA reporter asked Parcak. No, Im not, she said.




The Opposition Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu on Sunday said that it will finalise the number of constituencies to be given to the Congress on Monday.





It was decided after prolonged negotiation on seat sharing arrangements for the May 16 polls.



Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad will meet DMK president M Karunanidhi on Monday for seat-sharing talks. Therefore, we expect that a good decision will be attained, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) president M Karunanidhis son M K Stalin said.



Round of talks



The ensuing meeting between Azad and Karunanidhi will be the second round of seat-sharing talks and the deal is expected to be sealed.



The first round of talks held on March 25 remained inconclusive, since the Congress demanded more seats, which made the DMK to drag the issue.



Tamil Nadu Congress Committee (TNCC) sources told Deccan Herald that it has been demanding the same number of 63 seats allotted to it in the 2011 polls, considering that Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) led by actor Vijayakanth had not joined the DMK-led front and that the DMK has enough seats to offer.



But, the DMK rejected TNCCs demand to offer so many seats stating that the situation was different this time.



However, after hectic parleys it was believed that the DMK is ready to offer 35 to 40 seats for the Congress and the deal is expected to be signed in the next meeting.



Putting aside their past acrimony, the DMK and the Congress entered into a poll pact in February for the upcoming Assembly elections in state.



In 2011 polls to the state Assembly, the DMK had allocated 63 seats in the alliance. In 2006, it was 48 seats. After having an alliance with the Congress in 2004, the DMK snapped its ties with the UPA government in 2013 by charging the Centre for not effectively handling the Sri Lankan Tamils issue.



In 2014 Lok Sabha elections the Congress and the DMK fought separately and the former drew blank in all the 39 seats in Tamil Nadu.



The Congress in the state has weakened after one of its senior leader and former Union minister G K Vasan quit the party and revived his Tamil Maanila Congress.
The Archdiocese of Bengaluru will observe a four-hour prayer vigil at St Francis Xaviers Cathedral here for the safe return of Father Tom Uzhunnalil, who was reportedly abducted by unidentified gunmen in war-torn Yemen last month.





The prayer vigil will include a holy mass and prayer service starting 6 pm on Monday, primarily for the safe return of Fr Uzhunnalil. All the 140 churches in six districts will also hold special prayers for him, Archbishop Bernard Blasius Moras told Deccan Herald over phone.



Fr Uzhunnalil was abducted on March 4 during a raid on a nursing home run by the Kolkata-based Missionaries of Charity. There is no confirmed information about his whereabouts till now.



The archdiocese will also pray for the killers of 16 people, including four nuns of Missionaries of Charity, who were taking care of physically challenged people in Yemen. We pray that these killers may change their lives and we also pray for those who are suffering because of their religious faith, he added.



The archbishop described as rumours reports that Fr Uzhunnalil was crucified on Good Friday (March 25). The news in not true and created a lot of confusion in the community. We are in touch with the bishop of Yemen, the Salesians of Don Bosco congregation and government authorities. None of them has confirmed the killing of Fr Tom. Its a rumour. We are hoping that its not true, the archbishop said.



Fr Uzhunnalil, a 56-year-old Salesian priest from the Province of Bangalore, had left for war-bound Yemen in 2008 for charitable service. He continued to serve there despite threats to his life.



The priest hails from Ramapuram town in Keralas Kottayam district, said Fr V M Mathew, spokesperson of Don Bosco Provincial House. Earlier, a delegation of Catholic Bishops Conference of India called on Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, who promised the abducts priests safe return to India.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has denied permission to a US defence department team for a prolonged search for the remains of the crew of an American B24 bomber plane (nicknamed Hot as Hell) that crashed in Arunachal Pradesh in January, 1944.





Beginning on October 2, 2015, the team searched the crash area in the Upper Siang district only for 35 days during which they recovered the remains of only one or two persons.



Much to the dismay of the families of the eight crew which perished in the crash, the Obama administration told them the crash site recovery operation of September-October 2015 was cut short because large areas of the site were deemed physically unstable.



While the US government didn't go into any specifics about what it meant by unstable terrain, the family members are not buying that argument. They claim the permission was withdrawn by the Indian government because the area is close to China border.



I do not believe that explanation. I have been to that crash site myself, and found it steep but not unstable. It is much more likely that the (Narendra) Modi government restricted the length of time to investigate the crash site, out of fear that a prolonged recovery operation would upset China, which claims Arunachal as its own territory, Gary Zaetz, nephew of the Hot as Hell's navigator First Lieutenant Irwin Zaetz told Deccan Herald in an emailed interview. More than 1,300 US veterans went missing in the China-Burma-India theatre of operations during the World-War-II, out of which close to 400 are believed to be in the remote pockets of India.



New Delhi gave search permission in January 2008 after several years of dialogue between the two nations and after discovery of the Hot As Hell wreckage in 2006. Surveys were carried out in November 2008 but the Arunachal Pradesh operation was suspended in 2009 for the next six years.




External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday said that India has secured the release of four Indian nationals arrested by the Syrian government in January.





I had requested Deputy Prime Minister of Syria for their release during his visit to India in January this year. Thank you Syria, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said in one of her tweets.



They were arrested by the Syrian government which had thought they were on their way to join ISIS.
A day after Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis courted controversy over Bharat mata Ki Jai slogan, he sought to clarify on Sunday that he will object to anyone who will say  I wont say Bharat Mata Ki Jai.





On Saturday, addressing a BJP workers meeting at Nashik, Fadnavis had said: There are crores of people in this country who feel that one must say Bharat Mata Ki Jai and those who cant praise Bharat Mata don't have the right to live in this countrywe have no issues if you oppose BJP, but we will not tolerate if you oppose Bharat Mata.



However, on Sunday, Fadnavis came out with a clarification and instead blamed the media for the controversy. In my 50 minutes speech, for 45 long minutes, I spoke about Maharashtras drought situation and development and just for 5 minutes, I spoke on Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Shani Shingnapur issue, but the media picked only the Bharat Mata... issue and that too, only a part of it.It clearly proves that a section of media is interested in creating controversy only, he said.



Fadnavis added, I also mentioned in my speech on Saturday that Bharat Mata Ki Jai has nothing to do with religions, because I salute those 500 plus patriotic, highly placed and respected Muslim clerics who not only hoisted the National Flag at the Mahim Dargah in Mumbai, but, also chanted Bharat Mata Ki Jai with a feeling of nationalism and patriotism on March 17. No media is broadcasting this.


After a gap of eight years, Indian Air Force (IAF) is all set to participate once again in the USAs Red Flag exercise which is the worlds toughest and best mock war drill in the air.





The Indian aircraft  four each of Sukhoi-30 MKI and deep penetration Jaguars; two C17 transport plans and two IL-78 mid air refuellers  will travel through Bahrain, Egypt, France, Portugal and Canada before reaching the Eielson air base in Alaska, where the exercise would be conducted between April 28 and May 13.



The IAF participated in the Red Flag only once in 2008 after the bilateral relations between New Delhi and Washington improved. India planned for a second show in 2013, but USAF abandoned the plan citing budgetary constraints.



Because of the expenses involved, the government decided to take part in the Red Flag once in five years. The first one in 2008, cost the exchequer about Rs 100 crore.



The personnel have assembled at the Jamnagar air base where they will undergo some training schedule. Advanced party will leave shortly and the rest would join them later in the USA, said an IAF spokesperson on Sunday. Conceived after the Vietnam war, the Red Flag is the world's most challenging air exercise that provides air force pilots realistic combat experience. Participation in the air exercise was earlier restricted to close US allies, but extended to India in the last decade.
The first Indian high-throughput satellite GSAT-11 that will pack more data in the same spectrum space, is set for December 2016 launch.





It is a new breed of satellite that provides many times more capacity than conventional payloads using new technology.



Commercial high-throughput satellites like ViaSat-1 and EchoStar XVII provide more than 100 Gbit per second of capacity, which is more than 100 times the capacity offered by a conventional Ku-band satellite.



The GSAT-11 payload will provide a capacity of about 10 Gbps to render broadband connectivity in rural areas. Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) plans for more such satellites in future.



Earlier this week, the Union Cabinet approved procurement of launch services and realisation of ground segment for GSAT-11 spacecraft at a cost of Rs 1117 crore.



With 32 high-power spot beams, GSAT-11 would provide high bandwidth VSAT communication.



Because of the 5600 Kg lift-off mass, the satellite will be launched by the French ArianeSpace rockets by 2016 end, Isro officials told Deccan Herald. The ground segment is being realised to address the rural communication requirements.



Almost at the same time, Isro will attempt to park another communication satellite in the 36,000 km geo-synchronous orbit, using the indigenous GSLV rockets.



If the experiment  and the follow up launches  are successful, then India in future would not have to shell out foreign exchanges to launch the heavy communication satellites.




The ED investigation against liquor baron Vijay Mallya is gathering pace with the agency planning to issue Letters Rogatory to some countries.





The ED seeks information about the liquor barons assets abroad, including South Africa and the United Kingdom.



The move comes even as the ED issued a third summons to Mallya to appear before it on April 9. He has been avoiding appearing before the ED and has asked the agency to allow him to appear in May.



The investigators have details about the assets held by Mallya in various countries.



However, sources said they need to look at the exact volume of his assets in countries like South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Hong Kong and France, official sources said.


The Nitish regime in Bihar has decided to not only accord EBC (extremely backward class) status to transgenders, but also set up a welfare board for them.





The move will help the third gender, commonly known as hijras, avail quota in state government jobs and educational institutions.



The welfare board, which is likely to be known as Kinnar Kalyan Board, will consist of 21 members from the government side and nine members from the third gender community.



The governments step is in accordance with the apex court ruling in 2014 where in the Supreme Court had ruled that transgenders were entitled to all fundamental rights, reservation in jobs and education.



The SC in 2014 had accorded legal recognition to transgenders as a third gender and asked the Centre to treat transgenders as socially and economically backward.The third gender will be provided reservations in government jobs, said Bihars Social Welfare Minister, Manju Verma. She also added that the government was mulling over the proposal to provide financial help to such individuals from the transgender community who opt for sex change.



In its previous avatar, the Nitish regime had issued an advertisement inviting applications from qualified non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to conduct a survey of eunuchs. The primary aim was to bring the third gender into the mainstream. The survey was the first step towards the implementation of their rehabilitation plan.



These eunuchs, after being identified, were supposed to be imparted vocational training to facilitate their socio-economic rehabilitation. Those covered under the scheme were supposed to be trained as per their aptitude and interest for employment as cooks, drivers and security guards in residential complexes. But the plan remained a non-starter.



Prior to this, the Bihar Government had decided to use the services of third gender as tax collector.
National Investigation Agency (NIA) DSP Tanzil Ahmed was shot dead by unidentified assailants in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnore district, about 400 kilometres from here late on Saturday night.





According to police sources, Ahmed, who was returning home in his car after attending the wedding ceremony of his niece in Syohara, was intercepted by two motorcycle-borne assailants and was sprayed with bullets from close range.



Ahmed's wife also sustained serious injuries and was admitted to a hospital in a critical condition. His two children, who were accompanying the couple in the car watched the gruesome incident, escaped unhurt.



Ahmed was rushed to a hospital in the neighbouring Moradabad town but was declared brought dead. His wife was shifted to a higher centre.



The postmortem report said as many as 24 bullets had been fired at Ahmed. A dozen bullets were lodged in the body while nine went through... three bullets brushed his body, said a doctor, who was in the team that conducted the postmortem.



He also said there were two different types of bullets in the body indicating that two different firearms were used in the killing. The bullets had been fired by 9 mm pistol, which is a prohibited bore, he said.



Although the police officials refused to say if Ahmed was also associated with the investigation into the recent terror attack on Pathankot airbase, sources revealed that the slain NIA officer had been involved in busting fake currency rackets and was also part of the team that probed last year's blast at a house in West Bengal's Burdwan district.



Police officials said the motive behind the killing was yet to be ascertained. On whether Ahmed's killing was the handiwork of terrorists, a senior UP police official said that nothing can be ruled out.



Additional director general of police (law and order) Daljit Chaudhary said the security agencies were probing the killing from different angles.



Ahmeds family members, however, expressed apprehension that the officer might have been killed by terrorists. He did not have enmity with any one here, said a resident of Ahmed's village in Sahaspur.



The killing of the senior NIA official triggered alarm bells in the police circles and teams of UP Anti-Terrorist Squad, Special Task Force as well as NIA officials rushed to the spot and launched an investigation.



Meanwhile, the Delhi government announced Rs 1 crore compensation to the kin of the NIA officer. The Delhi government will give Rs 1 crore compensation to the family of NIA officer Mohd Tanzil Ahmad as part of its policy, said a government official. He is being given compensation as the officer was residing in Delhi.
Despite the presence of a police booth 50 metres away from the spot, five armed men robbed Rs 36 lakh from the office of a beverage-making company in west Delhis Bali Nagar.





The police are raiding several places in the city to nab the culprits who came on a motorcycle and a scooter to loot the cash on Friday evening.



The incident occurred at the second floor office of JMD Beverage Private Limited situated on the main Najafgarh road in Baali Nagar around 7.30 pm when the owner along with three-four employees were present in the office.



Five armed men entered into the office around 7.30 pm and asked the office employees to stay still at gun point. After that they bolted the door from inside. All the men had hidden their faces behind helmets, said a police officer.



The assailants then took two bags with cash worth Rs 36 lakh into their possession and snatched all the mobile phones from the employees, the officer added.



The robbers then rushed downstairs after locking the employees in the office.While coming down from the companys office, the scooters key slipped out of the hands of a robber and fell on the staircase. Unable to find the keys, two of them then ran away from the spot leaving the scooter behind, while the other three sped away on the motorcycle.



While entering the office, the robbers had turned the face of four CCTV cameras installed there towards the road so that their movement could not be captured, said sources. However, other cameras installed at different shops in the same area recorded them.



The cameras captured their movement going towards the Baali Road, a police officer said.



Later, the police checked the ownership of the scooter which the robbed had left behind, and it found out to be a stolen vehicle.



At a distance of 60 metres from the office, a police booth is situated where four policemen remain on a vigil throughout the day by putting up barricades around the booth. However, on Friday, no barricade was seen there in the evening.



According to sources, the five robbers went past the booth while they were fleeing the spot after robbing money.



Policemen at the booth got the information about the robbery five minutes after the incident had occurred.



A senior police officer told Deccan Herald that since very few people knew that a monetary transaction was going to occur in the office around that time, the involvement of an insider cannot be ruled out.



We are questioning some people related with the business, as well as those who have left the office some time back. One person had come there to collect the payment and very few people knew about it, said a senior police officer of the area.
Minister of State for Agriculture Krishna Byregowda has appealed to the agitating students of the various Universities of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) to withdraw the ongoing protest.





The government will consider the demands of the students. A meeting of the students representatives and vice-chancellors of UAS will be arranged shortly, he stated in a press release. The students have been on an indefinite strike since March 31 demanding that the agriculture graduates be offered government jobs. They are also seeking withdrawal of a proposal that allows private players to start agricultural colleges.
As garbage heaps started to grow bigger, efforts to lift the blockade of waste trucks at Kannahalli and Seegehalli processing units began on Sunday.





A committee comprising elected representatives, locals and officers would be formed to look into the issues of Kannahalli and Seegehalli waste processing units.



The decision was taken at a meeting held under the leadership of Union Law and Justice Minister D V Sadananda Gowda on Sunday. The minister, who represents Bengaluru North constituency under which the units fall, discussed with villagers, BBMP officials and MLAs the problems faced by villagers due to the presence of waste processing units and solutions that needed to be chalked out. Waste should be processed in such a way that villagers are not affected. In this regard, steps would be taken in 20 days. At the Karnataka Compost Development Corporation (KCDC) unit near Kudlu Main Road, a biofilter has been installed and the smell has been brought under control completely. The technology will be adopted here too, Mayor B N Manjunatha Reddy said. He said local representatives from the villages will be taken to the KCDC unit and shown the biofilter system and its functioning. Yeshwantpur MLA S T Somashekar said the problem at the units started because heaps of garbage were dumped at the premises before the functioning of units. He said the Palike should ensure that smell does not spread by effectively running the waste processing machines.

The mayor assured him that the problem of smell would be solved at the earliest. We will take all steps to make sure villagers do not suffer. But there is no question of closing the units since we have spent crores to build them.In March, villagers had held a series of protests and stopped garbage trucks from entering the units.



They demanded the closure of the units as the smell was unbearable. Palike commissioner G Kumar Naik who was present, said they are looking at an alternative for the Terra Firma garbage unit, which has been closed. He said the garbage generated in the city would be difficult to be disposed if it is not taken to the waste processing units.



Meanwhile, the garbage crisis has surfaced again with several pockets like HSR Layout, NR Colony, Padmanabhanagar, Uttarahalli, Vijayanagar, Kalasipalyam and KR Market turning eyesores. Garbage remains uncleared and plastic covers are dumped despite the government ban.
Bus stand stalls fleecing passengers



The stalls in the KSRTC bus stands charge more than the MRP for any product - be it newspaper, biscuits, eateries etc. On an average, these stalls charge Re one or Rs two extra. This is nothing but daylight robbery and the practice is at almost all KSRTC bus stands across the State. Why are the authorities concerned allowing this illegal act? Action should be initiated against scrupulous shopkeepers fleecing passengers.

Bhaskar



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Shift this bus shelter

According to the directions issued by the Transport department and traffic police, bus stops should be located away from traffic signals, circles and junctions. But, the bus shelter at the BEML Circle of New Thippasandra, is right next the traffic signal and in the heart of the junction. All the buses stop at the shelter to pick up passengers leading to immense traffic snarls. In addition, auto drivers, who park their vehicles right in front of the bus shelter, are adding more to the problem. The traffic authorities concerned should take urgent action to shift the bus shelter from the circle.

Hemachandran P, Vimanapura



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Autos violating permit terms

The autos plying on Suranjandas Road connecting Old Madras Road and Old Airport Road are violating traffic rules and permit regulations. The drivers, with the connivance of traffic police, have converted their vehicles into share autos accommodating more than 10 passengers. In addition to overloading, they also demand exorbitant fare. All this is happening right under the nose of traffic police officers on duty at the BEML circle and other parts of the road.The transport authorities should conduct an inspection and seize such autos for violation of permit conditions.

Roshan Rohit P, Vimanapura



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Irregular garbage collection

Garbage is not being collected regularly on First A Cross, New Aravind Memorial School Road, Kodichikkanahalli (Bilekahalli ward) in BTM 4th stage. The BBMP authorities have not resolved the issue despite several calls and complaints to the authorities concerned. With no other go, residents are compelled to dispose garbage on vacant sites. The Palike authorities should consider the matter seriously.

Megha, Kodichikkanahalli



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Stray dog menace in UAS Layout

Stray dog menace has assumed alarming proportions in UAS Layout, RMV second stage. A pack of about 12 dogs howl day-in and day-out, affecting sleep during night time. Children are the most vulnerable and residents fear to send them out. Will the BBMP squad swing into action at the earliest?

R Ranaganathan, UAS Layout



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KSRTC buses deviating from route

The KSRTC buses plying to Kanakapura, Malavalli and Kollegal are deviating from their stipulated route. The buses bound for these places should pass through Yediyur Circle, Deepak Nursing Home and Banashankari. But, most the drivers are reaching Banashankari via KR Road, skipping Yediyur circle.On March 27 at 1.30 pm a senior citizen boarded the bus KA-42/F-933 at Kaggalipura to Yediyur circle. At JBS Nursing Home, the bus turned towards KR Road. The senior citizen protested and requested the conductor to drop him at Yediyur circle because the conductor had issued him the ticket to Yediyur circle. However, the driver on duty answered arrogantly and dropped the aged man at MM Industries in KR road. The authorities concerned are requested to ensure that the buses ply on the stipulated route.

Rajanna



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Late arrival of Kacheguda Express

The Kacheguda-Yeshwantpur Express (train number 17603) reaches Yeshwantpur at 10.30 am. A majority of the commuters in this train are students and IT employees. Since the train reaches the station at 10.30 am, they are finding it difficult to reach the office. Hence, such an arrangement of late arrival is of little help and serves minimal purpose of connecting Bengaluru with Hyderabad in a span of 9 to 11 hours. The railways should consider early arrival of the train at Yeshwantpur in public interest.

Varun Dambal, Nagarabhavi



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Garbage dumped on vacant site

Garbage is being dumped on a vacant site opposite Ashraya Residency on 27th Main in BTM first stage. The heap of garbage is set on fire and the fumes from the burning trash have become a health hazard. The authorities concerned should take immediate action to stop dumping of garbage.

A resident of BTM Layout



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Need a hand? Write to us

*Letters of grievances are pouring in and we are doing our best to accommodate as many as possible. Readers may write in to highlight civic problems affecting their locality and we will help address them in an interactive and effective manner.Grievances and issues related to public utility agencies such as Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) and Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Limited (Bescom) would be highlighted in the weekly column. The writeups, which could be accompanied by photographs highlighting the problems, will be published on Mondays.*Mail your grievances to: peoplesproblems @deccanherald.co.in



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A complaint against Siddaramaiah with the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) seems to have helped the chief minister to prove a point.





The opposition made charges that ACB is a dummy organisation and complaints cannot be filed with the investigative agency. That their charges are baseless has been proved wrong by the complainant. I am ready for the probe, Siddaramaiah said, replying to queries from reporters in Bengaluru on Sunday.



A Bengaluru-based advocate had filed a complaint addressed to the Additional Director General of Police, ACB, to probe the source of the chief ministers diamond-studded Hublot watch. The watch, which opposition leaders claimed cost Rs 70 lakh, was recently handed over to the state government as a state asset after it triggered a row.



To another query, Siddaramaiah said the appointment of directors to various state-run boards and corporations would be announced in two days.




3 April 2016 (FRANCE24)  Migrants waving signs that read We want freedom protested on the Greek island of Chios on Sunday, a day before a controversial EU deal that will see hundreds of people deported back to Turkey was due to come into effect. An estimated 750 people will be sent back to Turkey between Monday and Wednesday as part of the first wave of deportations under the EU deal, Greeces state news agency ANA reported. Under the terms of the much-criticised agreement, all newcomers who arrived in Greece after the March 20 deadline are liable to be deported if they fail to apply for asylum or if their request is rejected. The demonstration came after hundreds of migrants on Chios tore through a razor fence surrounding their detention centre on Friday, camping out at the port in protest against the planned expulsions. Clashes also broke out at the site late on Thursday, during which windows were smashed and 10 people were lightly injured, according to a police official. They say that they dont want to go back to Turkey and that they are afraid for their safety after yesterdays clashes between migrants in the hotspot, the official said on Friday, using an EU euphemism for what have basically become detention centres. The tension on Chios has raised fears of further unrest less than 24 hours before the deportations are due to begin. It is also still unclear how and where the operation will take place. Planning is in progress, said George Kyritsis, a Greek government spokesman for the migration crisis. Turkeys interior minister, Efkan Ala, was quoted by the pro-government newspaper Aksam as saying 500 people were expected in Turkey from Greece on Monday. Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis would be deported to their countries, he said. Although arrivals have slowed, 514 migrants crossed from Turkey to the Greek islands on Sunday morning. Overall, more than 6,000 have registered since the March deadline. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and human rights groups have denounced the EU deal as lacking legal safeguards. Amnesty International has called it a historic blow to human rights and said it would send a delegation to Chios and nearby Lesbos on Monday to monitor the situation. We feel theres still gaps in both countries that need to be addressed, said UNHCRs spokesman on Lesbos, Boris Cheshirkov, referring to Greece and Turkey. Were not opposed to returns as long as people are not in need of international protection, they have not applied for asylum and human rights are adhered to, he added. More than 3,300 migrants and refugees are on Lesbos, Greeces third-biggest island and home to many Greek refugees who fled Turkey in the 1920s. About 2,800 people are held at the Moria centre, a sprawling complex of prefabricated containers, 800 more than its stated capacity. Of those, 2,000 have made asylum claims, UNHCR says. Aid agencies have pulled out of the Lesbos camp since it became a closed facility last month, and also as a protest at the conditions there. Journalists have been barred from entering the site or the holding centres on four other islands. Condition on Lesbos were challenging and volatile, UNHCR said, with insufficient food and pregnant women and children among those held. Families have been separated because of the agreement, with some members inside the Lesbos holding centre and others on the mainland or elsewhere in Europe. Many of those who have arrived here have experienced horrendous wars, Cheshirkov said. To be put in a closed environment it feels like punishment, whereas seeking asylum is not a crime, its a fundamental human right.
OSU defense dominates, offense revs up late in 54-10 rout of Iowa

Overcoming a sluggish start by its offense, Ohio State pulled away for a 54-10 victory over Iowa.
dpa ElectionsData

With dpa ElectionsData you get access to a unique collection of data. Via a programming interface (Rest-API), your developers can access detailed information, candidate profiles and live results for all national elections in the European Union and important international elections, like the US Midterm elections etc.

The data pool also includes all heads of state and government as well as about 20,000 elected members of parliament throughout the EU. In addition to their data (name, party, constituency or list position), we collect social media profiles and official websites of individuals and parties.
Next Game: at Delaware 4/3/2016 | 2:00 Next Game Full Schedule Apr. 03 (Sun) / 2:00 at Delaware

The Drexel softball team dropped two games to Delaware to open this weekend's conference series on Saturday. The Dragons fell by a 6-2 deficit in game one and then were defeated again by the Blue Hens, 9-1 in five innings in the second game of the day.The Dragons were the first to get on the board in game one, scoring a run assingled to left field in the first inning. Delaware came back with two runs in the bottom of the inning, however, to take a 2-1 lead which they would hold into the fifth.In the fifth, the Dragons tied it up asreached on a fielding error that allowedto cross the plate from third. However, the Blue Hens would put up three runs in the bottom of the fifth to go ahead again, 5-2. Delaware would add a final run in the bottom of the sixth to cement its victory in the first game of the day.In game two, the Blue Hens came out strong with seven runs in the bottom of the first. They added an additional run in the second to take an early 8-0 lead.Drexel would cut Delaware's advantage to seven runs in the third as Reed sent a single into left field that scored Lightfoot from second base.Leading the Dragons 8-1 in the bottom of the fifth, the Blue Hens tacked on a final run off of a sacrifice fly that put the mercy rule in place and gave Delaware its second win of the day.With the losses, the Dragons move to 15-17 overall and 0-5 in CAA action. Drexel will return to action tomorrow as it closes out the series with Delaware with a single game that is now set to begin at 2 p.m.
Yes, you can transfer your domain to any registrar or hosting company once you have purchased it. Since domain transfers are a manual process, it can take up to 5 days to transfer the domain.

Domains purchased with payment plans are not eligible to transfer until all payments have been made. Please remember that our 30-day money back guarantee is void once a domain has been transferred.

For transfer instructions to GoDaddy, please click here.
Language courses and cultural tourism in Sardinia

If you are looking for a great destination where to learn Italian with an experiential language course, Sardinia is a great option. Studiainitalia, an Italian agency specialized in language courses and creative tourism, collaborates with great language schools on the island, and is offering a special program that combines Italian lessons with local activities.

Catch the Wave special offer

The Catch the Wave program involves three language schools in the towns of Alghero, Cagliari and Olbia. It lasts for a minimum of two weeks in two different schools, to as long at the student wishes. The package fees are:

 440 for 2 weeks

 660 for 3 weeks

 190 for each additional week in the same school

The rates include the registration fees; the educational material; 20 hours of Italian language lessons in groups of 3-8 students; the certificate of attendance; and 2 afternoon activities in each town.

The afternoon cultural activities include:

A guided walking tour of Alghero's old town and learning about the precious local Red Coral

A guided walking tour of Olbia's old town and learning about the history and people of the Costa Smeralda

A guided walking tour of Cagliari's old town and learning about Italian cinema through a movie screening & discussion

Studiainitalia can also provide accommodation in independent flats, shared student apartments, or in host families.

About the Destination

Sardinia is a striking island with ancient history and pristine nature, which can be fully appreciated in the towns of the Catch the Wave program.

Alghero, which is the only place in Italy where the Catalan language is co-official, has a very interesting history, from pre-historic settlements all the way to the House of Savoy, passing through Phoenicians, Genoa, the Aragonese and the Habsburgs. The town is home to the archaeological site of Anghelu Ruju, the largest necropolis of pre-Nuragic Sardinia (3200-2800 BC). Among the wonders of nature in the territory of Alghero, are about 300 caves both above and under water. The most famous ones are Neptune's Grotto, a breathtaking stalactite cave, and Nereo Cave, the biggest marine cave in the Mediterranean Sea.

Cagliari is truly a precious place. The sparkling clear sea is framed by long strips of sand and green promontories, while the old streets reveal secrets of remote and recent history. Let's begin with the eco-friendliness factor: Cagliari is one of the greenest Italian cities. Its province is home to the Barumini Nuragic complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Among other attractions are the Cittadella dei Musei (different museums with amazing artistic and historical collections); the fortified Castello district with the Medieval Bastion of Saint Remy and Saint Mary's Cathedral; and the Necropolis of Tuvixeddu.

Local archaeological ruins suggest that ancient OLBIA was founded by the Punics from Ancient Carthage, although the Cabu Abbas Nuragic Complex demonstrates that the area had been inhabited much earlier. Olbia's historic center treasures the Romanesque Church of San Simplicio, erected in the 1000s using only granite; and the Medieval Church of St. Paolo with baroque interiors. The Bay of Olbia is home to Tavolara Island, a giant block of limestone that remains in pristine condition within the Marine Protected Area of Tavolara-Punta Coda Cavallo.

For more information, visit studiainitalia.com
The rise of kids masstige dressing - Fashion finds a place on childrens gift list

Debenhams the multi channel retailer is experiencing a growing trend of masstige dressing for kids with sales of premium brands delivering double digit growth. Top of the list is the mini me fashion brand Baker by Ted Baker which has delivered 25% sales growth in the last five years, with increasing appetite for the range over recent seasons.

The rise is attributed to parents upgrading their childrens wardrobe and dressing kids as an extension to their own fashion image and also the increasing desire for children to receive clothes as part of their gift lists for Christmas, Easter and birthday. This Easter Debenhams expects to sell 63,000 units of Baker by Ted Baker childrenswear as clothing makes an appearance alongside Easter eggs on gift lists.

The department store, which introduced Designer wear at high street prices for children in as early as 2000 with its Rocha.JohnRocha line has a new hero brand in the shape of Baker by Ted Baker, an exclusive line launched in 2012. Selling an annual 1.5 million units, the Baker by Ted Baker range has captured the attention of UK parents with its distinct style of graphic print, sumptuous colourways and premium fabrics. Originally offered as boys and girlswear, the Baker by Ted Baker brand now incorporates childrens swim, nightwear, underwear and footwear.

Sales for the Baker by Ted Baker brand which is stocked in the UK, the Middle East, Russia, Cyprus, Iceland and Turkey have been on an upward trajectory as more and more parents choose to dress their children in a mini me established fashion brand. Following in the footsteps of North West and Harper Beckham parents are upgrading the kids wardrobe and opting for a look that adds to their overall fashion credibility, says Childrenswear Head of Buying, Shani Delargy.

Where we see an average selling price of 9 on entry price point kidswear, we see that parents will happily upgrade to 20 an item on boyswear and 25 an item on girlswear for a more premium fashion brand. Fuelling the demand is the ongoing pester power of both girls and boys who are keen to select their own clothing and are adding clothing to their holiday and birthday gift lists.

Areas in the UK bitten hardest by the Baker by Ted Baker bug are the North Midlands which accounts for 30% of the brands sales followed by East Anglia with 11% of sales. The North and Central regions are also big fans of the brand with an additional 10% of sales each.

Easter and Christmas are key periods for Baker by Ted Baker sales as parents indulge their children with new outfits as part of the experience of spending time with family. The Christmas 2015 season saw the brand sell almost 600,000 units with a line of girls party dresses selling out in a two week period. Items tipped to be Easter 2016 treats include girls dresses and boys shirts and shorts.

For more information, visit debenhams.com
Seat set to stir up compact SUV market with temptingly priced Ateca

Following its highly acclaimed world debut at the Geneva motor show just a few weeks ago, Seat has confirmed full UK pricing and specification for its first SUV, Ateca. Temptingly priced from only 17,990, the Barcelona-based marque is looking to make quite an impact in the UKs compact SUV market.

Which, judging by the initial signs for Seats latest creation, staking its claim in the fast-growing segment shouldnt be too difficult. For starters, in several key European markets, including France and Germany, where ordering has already opened, Ateca is already proving quite a hit, even before customers have got behind the wheel.

Another good omen, and a possible reason behind the eagerness to snap one up, lies with initial media reaction to the car. In the UK alone, media pundits have already begun showering it with praise, just on the basis of prototype drives. Auto Express magazine hailed Ateca as an impressive piece of kit, while the Daily Telegraph hyped it up further with in September, Seat dealers will be very busy indeed.

Ateca UK line-up  in detail

Keenly priced from 17,990, Seats first SUV undercuts several key rivals, including the Nissan Qashqai by over 500, as well as the Ford Kuga by around 2,000*. Kicking things off, the entry-level S has all the essential kit which a growing family or young-at-heart couple might need. On the inside, the classy interior includes air conditioning, Media System Touch five-inch touchscreen with USB and SD connectivity, leather steering wheel and gearknob, plus split-folding rear seats with reclining function. On the outside, Atecas stylish lines are complemented by 16-inch Design alloy wheels and LED daytime running lights.

Moving up to the expected UK best-selling trim level, SE, brings in an array of comfort, convenience and style features, including dual-zone climate control, cruise control, electrically adjustable, heated and folding door mirrors and rear parking sensors. As buyers have come to expect from the Spanish marque, technology touches also abound. Among them is Full Link (Seats seamless three-in-one connectivity solution for smartphones and tablets), together with an upgraded infotainment in the form of Media System Plus with eight-inch colour touchscreen, USB/Aux-in port, SD card slot, eight speakers, voice control and Bluetooth audio streaming and hands-free system. Externally, the mid-trim level looks sharp with 17-inch Dynamic alloy wheels, LED taillights and black roof rails.

Rounding off the initial UK line-up, at least until the First Edition version is confirmed in May, is XCELLENCE. The new flagship trim ushers in a plethora of enticing premium features, including four new innovations for Seat. The first is a Connectivity Hub with Wireless Phone Charger which also boosts in-car phone signal, as well as multi-colour interior ambient lighting with LED interior illumination and a choice of eight colours. Penultimately, comes an Ateca welcome light silhouette which is projected onto the ground from the bottom of the door mirrors, and finally, Seat Drive Profile with Driving Experience selector. This latest evolution of the brands tried and tested technology allows the driver to adjust Atecas set-up (steering, throttle response and gear change speeds  the latter on DSG-equipped versions) according to road and weather conditions or personal preferences, including Off-road and Snow modes on four-wheel-drive versions.

The kit count continues to climb with Convenience Pack (auto lights and wipers, auto-dimming rear view mirror and automatic coming and leaving home lights function), KESSY (Keyless Enter & Go) and Navigation system (3D map display, high resolution display, two SD card slots, DAB digital radio). Also among its features are black leather upholstery, rear view camera and Winter Pack (incorporating heated front seats and headlight washer system).

Unsurprisingly, the halo version also looks the part, boasting 18-inch Performance alloy wheels, chrome roof rails and window surrounds, as well as chrome double exhaust pipes and aluminium roof rails. Full LED headlights and dark tinted rear windows complete the premium look.

An array of safety aids and systems come as standard on every Ateca, including new Front Assist with City Emergency Braking and Pedestrian Protection, plus Tiredness Recognition. Also featuring across the range are ASR traction control, ESC, electronic differential lock (XDS), seven airbags, Hill Hold Control, and last, but by no means least, tyre pressure monitor.

Ateca  comfort, convenience, style and technology options aplenty

Every Ateca comes with an enviable list of standard equipment, but, for those seeking even more creature comforts, there are plenty of options. Literally. Some of the most noteworthy are its technology highlights, several of which are debuting on Seats latest model. The innovative electric tailgate with Virtual Pedal, for both opening and closing, is available from 415, with Top View Camera, offering a 360-degree view to assist with parking and manoeuvring at 470. Lane Assist, costs 470 as part of a Driving Assistance Pack with High Beam Assist, while Blind Spot Detection, complete with new Rear Cross Traffic Alert, is also available as part of a pack, from 620.

Several convenience features are also likely to catch the eye, including a double boot floor for 115, Park Assist (self parking functionality) for 325, and again, a first for Seat, a heated windscreen from 155.

For added style and cachet, buyers will probably tick the options box alongside electric panoramic sunroof for 935 and 19-inch Exclusive machined alloy wheels on XCELLENCE which come in at 670. Several of the most popular items have also been grouped into seven option packs. All prices quoted are inclusive of VAT.

Varied range of engines - up to 190 PS

The new Seat Ateca is available with a wide choice of engines, including a frugal 1.6 TDI capable of 65.7 mpg, as well as several over 150 PS, to suit those seeking a decent amount of performance to power their SUV. A total of five engines feature in total, comprised of two petrol and three diesel, ranging in power from 115 PS to 190 PS and all mated to either six-speed manual or seven-speed DSG-auto transmissions.

The three-cylinder 1.0 TSI 115 PS is available on the S and SE, while the 1.6 TDI 115 PS also features on S and SE. Upping the power stakes to 150 PS brings in both the 1.4 EcoTSI with Active Cylinder Shutdown, as well as the highly-regarded 2.0 TDI, both of which appear across SE and XCELLENCE trims. The 2.0 TDI 190, is exclusively available on the range-topping XCELLENCE, and comes with DSG and 4Drive, Seats four-wheel-drive system. 4Drive is also an option with the 2.0 TDI 150.

A choice of 11 paint colours are available, eight of which are metallic. Several new shades debut on a Seat with Ateca, namely, Jungle Green, Lava Blue, Mato Brown, Rodium Grey and Samoa Orange. Mediterranean Blue is the free-of-charge paint.

Priced from 17,990 to 29,990, Ateca will be available to order from 3rd May 2016, ahead of official showroom launch on 9th September.
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(Photo:  Peter Kenny / Ecumenical News)Rev. Stephen Sidorak at a World Council of Churches meeting at the Ecumenical Center in Geneva on March 11, 2016.

President Barack Obama has said he would like to further cut the US nuclear arsenal, stating, however, he has concerns about efforts to modernise America's most deadly weapons.

"My preference would be to bring down further our nuclear arsenal," he told reporters at the end of a Nuclear Security Summit he hosted in Washington, RTE news reported from Ireland.

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office for his commitment to non-proliferation and was responding to a question about updates to the U.S. arsenal

The U.S. president used his final nuclear security summit on April 1 to deliver a stark warning that "madmen" could kill and injure hundreds of thousands of innocent people using only plutonium the size of an apple.

"The danger of a terrorist group obtaining and using a nuclear weapon is one of the greatest threats to global security," said Obama, convening the meeting of more than 50 world leaders in Washington, The Guardian reported.

Obama argued that since the first such summit six years ago, the world has measurably reduced the risk of nuclear terrorism by taking "concrete, tangible steps". Enough material for more than 150 nuclear weapons has been secured or removed, he said.

Absent from the summit is Russia which thought to possess more nuclear weapons than any other country, including the United States. The two former Cold War foes share about 90 percent of the world's nuclear arsenal.

In this case President Vladimir Putin was the spoiler, but Rev. Stephen Sidorak is a U.S. pastor who no matter what continues his decades-long toil for his yearning that nuclear weapons must never be used in anger again.

Last year he carried out a "Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace to Japan on a Matter of Life and Death" in decades of toiling for his yearning that nuclear weapons must never be used in anger again.

When the World Council of Churches Commission of the Churches on International Affairs met in Geneva March 7-11 Sidorak spoke to participants about a pilgrimage he made to Japan 70 years after the atomic bombings.

Sidorak is ecumenical staff officer for the Council of Bishops Office of Christian Unity and Interreligious Relationships of the United Methodist Church in the United States.

He notes that recent actions on the Korean Peninsula underline the fragility around nulcear armaments use.

He traces his own lengthy involvement in efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons to his time in parish ministry before the pilgrimage on the 70th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs on Japan in the closing days of the Second World War.

MISSIONS TO HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

"A member of a local church I served recounted his duties during the Second World War which included flying the cover squadron escort missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki," in August 1945 shortly after the bombings.

"He was the pilot of the plane assigned to document the destruction of the two Japanese cities," said Sidorak elaborating on the only two instances of cities having atomic bombs dropped on them.

"The primary reason for our pilgrimage to Japan was to address our contemporary nuclear predicament both in terms of weaponry and energy," explained Sidorak.

The world needs to move forward on this issue, he says.

The visit to Japan involved "visiting the wounds," and visiting "locations of ugly violence and injustices."

At least three locations came to mind as the pilgrims arrived in Japan - Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima (which was ravaged by a massive earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in March 2011).

Many Christians today believe idolatry to be a thing of their pagan past.

Sidorak says, however, there is new idolatry "as we now worship the power we have to destroy creation much more than we worship the God of creation".

"We bow down and worship weapons of mass destruction and the source of their power, nuclear energy," he notes.

As Sidorak flew from the Land of the Rising Sun back to the United States in 2015, he reflected on the pilgrimage.

"What was done cannot be undone. However, the first victims of the atomic age on August 6 and August 9 seventy years ago, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will not have died in vain, if nuclear weapons are never used again."
(Photo:  Sean Hawkey /WCC)Silent protestors in Paris with a message on global warning ahead of the COP21 UN climate connference in Paris on Nov. 29, 2015.

The COP21 climate conference in Paris is humanity's last chance and it should focus on global inequality as "global warming is the human rights challenge of our time" say Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and Rev. Canon Mpho Tutu issued a statement Nov. 30 on behalf of their foundation noting the conference offers a narrow opportunity that world leaders must seize.

"We are in uncharted territory. Never before have representatives of the entire human family had the opportunity to sit down together and collectively change the trajectory of our species and our earth," they said.

In Paris Nov. 30, faith campaigners presented a total of 1,780,528 signatures gathered worldwide calling for decisive action to curb global warming.

The petitions were delivered to leaders of the United Nations COP 21 climate conference beginning its work in Paris.

'WE CAN DO IT TOGETHER'

"We can do it together, we must do it together, and we will do it together," said Anglican Archbishop and "ACT ambassador" Thabo Makgoba of Cape Town as he handed over the petitions to Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN body dealing with climate change, and Nicolas Hulot, French President Francois Hollande's special envoy for the planet.

Makgoba is the global climate ambassador for ACT Alliance, a worldwide coalition of 137 churches and affiliated organizations working for positive and sustainable change.

The handover took place at a "Faith in Climate Justice" event on 28 November in St Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, attended by about 400 people including climate campaigners, many of whom had walked hundreds of miles on pilgrimages to the French capital.

In June the World Council of Churches and the poverty-fighting UK based Christian Aid praised Pope Francis for his call for a radical rethinking of humanity's relationship with the earth in which he urges people of faith in all walks of life.

The Pope's encyclical called Laudato si (May you be praised) asks "What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?"

Almost 150 heads of State and government are assembling in Paris for the 21st Conference of the Parties facing pressure to reach a historic deal to curb harmful emissions as past such conferences have failed to deliver on minimalist needs.

"That is why we say: Global warming is the human rights challenge of our time. If we do not address it, collectively, it can only mean we have decided that the rights of some members of the human family are more important than others," said the Tutus.

With Paris in a security lockdown following last weekend's terror attacks expectations are riding high. More than 600,000 people in 175 countries marched at the weekend to demand a strong deal to curb greenhouse gases, Sky News reported.

The Tutus said the closest the world has come to achieving global consensus on anything in the past was the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that opened for signature in 1968 and has been ratified by 191 of 195recognized States.

"But it is surely much simpler to agree not to fire nukes at each other than it is to agree to alter deeply entrenched behaviour patterns, reign in consumptiveness, threaten personal wealth and undermine powerful business interests.

"Which is exactly what we have to do."

Ahead of the Paris talks 183 nations have submitted individual commitments of varying degrees on how to shackle global warming.

Over the next two weeks negotiators will try to hammer out common ground to steer the global economy away from dependence on fossil fuels and to hold back the earth's rising temperatures and increasing climate unpredictability.

'MOMENTUM TO CHANGE'

"The momentum towards change has come, and it might be stronger than we understand", wrote Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches in an Advent message on the eve of the Paris talks.

"A 'green shift' is now more possible than ever", wrote Tveit, hailing progress with renewable energy initiatives and referring to the withdrawal of investments from fossil fuel industries.

(Photo: Sean Hawkey / WCC) On the eve of UN climate talks called COP21 in Paris, demonstrators gathered in the Place de la Republique in Paris. Frustrated at the planned climate march being banned following terror attacks the preceding weekend, riot police were brought in to ensure the march didn't happen and some confrontations ensued on Nov. 29, 2015

"Many larger companies understand this development and are making decisions towards ending the use of fossil energy in the next five to 15 years, a great shift from the previously projected 30-40 years," he wrote.
News Details

Midea acquire 80.1% stake in Toshiba home appliances business

Date: 01-04-16

Toshiba Corporation and China-based Midea Group Co., Ltd. have signed a Definitive Agreement where Midea will acquire an 80.1% stake in Toshiba Lifestyle Products & Services Corporation., the home appliances arm of Toshiba. The transaction price for the 80.1% stake is approximately JPY53.7 billion (US$473 million) (subject to certain adjustments) at closing. The home Appliances products made by Toshiba includes refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and other small domestic appliances. Midea is given the license to use the Toshiba brand worldwide in relation to the Business for 40 years. Additionally Midea will receive more than 5,000 intellectual property assets and a license to use other home appliance related intellectual properties retained by Toshiba. We are glad to witness the fruition of our strategic partnership with Midea, crystallized by this transaction, said Masashi Muromachi, Representative Executive Officer, President and CEO of Toshiba. The home appliances business has long been an important part of our company, culture and brand image. In the process of identifying a trusted partner, we carefully looked at track records, capabilities, resources and commitment to the Business. Midea and Toshiba have more than 20 years successful cooperation in various areas and have built a good mutual understanding. We are impressed by Mideas focus on globalization, strong product development capabilities, extensive global distribution network and commitment to high quality. I am confident that Mideas further investment in R&D, marketing and branding will bring about a brighter future for the home appliances business. Mr. Fang Hongbo, Chairman and President of Midea, commented: We are pleased to elevate the partnership between Toshiba and Midea to a new level, which I am sure will foster many more exciting cooperation opportunities ahead. Today is also an important landmark in Mideas globalization endeavor. With a strong global home appliance and HVAC business, the addition of Toshiba Home Appliance, its iconic brand, talented team and leading technologies, will significantly strengthen our competitiveness in Japan, Southeast Asia and the global market. We appreciate the trust that Toshiba has placed in us by signing up to a long term brand licensing arrangement. Midea will continue our adherence to the highest standard of brand image, product quality, and customer service, which has been the bedrock of our achievements to date. We also recognize that the Businesss current management and employees are very valuable assets, and I am confident that our additional investment will offer many promising opportunities for this talented team. I look forward to working closely with Toshiba to further grow the Business and develop Midea into a global home appliance power house with a focus on innovation.
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.




Regards,

hereandnow



Quote: Mullhollander Here's a map of Canton Zurich showing the 12 districts and the borders of the communities within the districts. For District Zurich, there is only one community, City of Zurich:



http://www.statistik.zh.ch/internet/...enzen_2014.png



Thank you so much! All the information and links you provided are much appreciated. Your answer goes much beyond my original question and perhaps answers some follow-up questions I would have asked!



I have just begun doing some ground work for house hunting in Zurich - I will arrive there by Mid-May. The reason for the OP was to first get a big picture of the canton and various districts. I first thought, the 'District' of Zurich was the 'Canton' and that my choices for neighbourhoods to find an apartment would be very limited. I later realised that I was only looking at the district of Zurich, and that the Canton is much bigger. As you rightly pointed out, the word 'Kreise' is also translated as 'District' and that can cause some confusion for a lay person.



The link to look up the relevant Kreis-offices in Zurich district is greatly helpful! I would assume that there would be similar information available for the other 11 districts.



Just a side note to give you some context: My work permit is issued by the Canton of Zurich, and therefore I can only live in the said Canton.



Thank you once again!



Quote: aSwissInTheUS Official sources:

All the districts/Bezirke: http://www.bezirke.zh.ch/internet/ju...e/bezirke.html



You can see the all the communes/Gemeinde which are part of a district in the subpage. The district's name is the name of the town where the district court is.



Or super, super official:

http://www2.zhlex.zh.ch/appl/zhlex_r.nsf/0/14BF9643CCAFF0BAC1257F15003AF903/$file/173.1_10.3.85_91.pdf



In normal daily life, districts are of no relevance. They become relevant when you get sued, want to sue, or appeal a commune decision.



If I counted correctly there are indeed twelve districts in the canton of Zurich, and one is indeed named Zurich, and its only commune is Zurich.





In the commune of Zurich there are indeed 12 Kreise (as a English translation the word 'district' is sometimes used. Which is confusing as they have nothing to do or in common with the Bezirke/Ditricts).



There are slightly more important for the daily life then the districts.

For ex: You can register your residence at the Kreis-Office.



Here the addresses of all Kreis-Office (available in German only):

There is a dropbox where you can select street and enter house number to look up the relevant office for any address in Zurich.

https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/...ngszeiten.html Dear Mullhollander, this is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you very much for your time and help with this.Regards,hereandnowDear aSwissInTheUS,Thank you so much! All the information and links you provided are much appreciated. Your answer goes much beyond my original question and perhaps answers some follow-up questions I would have asked!I have just begun doing some ground work for house hunting in Zurich - I will arrive there by Mid-May. The reason for the OP was to first get a big picture of the canton and various districts. I first thought, the 'District' of Zurich was the 'Canton' and that my choices for neighbourhoods to find an apartment would be very limited. I later realised that I was only looking at the district of Zurich, and that the Canton is much bigger. As you rightly pointed out, the word 'Kreise' is also translated as 'District' and that can cause some confusion for a lay person.The link to look up the relevant Kreis-offices in Zurich district is greatly helpful! I would assume that there would be similar information available for the other 11 districts.Just a side note to give you some context: My work permit is issued by the Canton of Zurich, and therefore I can only live in the said Canton.Thank you once again! Last edited by 3Wishes; 03.04.2016 at 14:53 . Reason: merging consecutive replies
Re: Yearly Travel Pass Quote: Kahlila Has anyone purchased the yearly rail travel pass for Switzerland or a pass for travel across Europe? I just moved here and want to see many places, but not break the bank either. What is the best way to determine if it is worth it?



After I'd been here some time I realised that (due to changes in my circumstances) I was spending so much on train travel that it was worth my while to get the monthly general abonnement. (Incidentally, it is possible to buy an annual general abonnement which, at CHF 3656, works out cheaper than a monthly one, but you have to pay the total amount up front).



I kept the general abonnement for several years, and really enjoyed having it as I could travel further afield in Switzerland at no additional expense, as well as making all my regular trips.



Then my circumstances changed again and I cancelled my general abonnement (mainly because I couldn't afford to keep it).



At some point (can't remember when) I also had a monthly travel pass which covered my canton, plus the half fare card. This enabled me to travel freely in Vaud (useful for my daily activities), but I could also benefit from reduced travel costs when I went outside Vaud.



Most recently, I have had a monthly pass which just covers one specific journey, plus my half fare card.



In summary, I would suggest that you get a half fare card to start with. They aren't expensive and will quickly pay for themselves if you travel any distance. Then keep a track of your expenses and after a few months work out what option (general abonnement, monthly pass for your canton, or point.to-point pass) is best for you. When I first moved here, I had a half-fare card. I kept a track of how much I spent on train tickets every month. Initially this was quite low.After I'd been here some time I realised that (due to changes in my circumstances) I was spending so much on train travel that it was worth my while to get the monthly general abonnement. (Incidentally, it is possible to buy an annual general abonnement which, at CHF 3656, works out cheaper than a monthly one, but you have to pay the total amount up front).I kept the general abonnement for several years, and really enjoyed having it as I could travel further afield in Switzerland at no additional expense, as well as making all my regular trips.Then my circumstances changed again and I cancelled my general abonnement (mainly because I couldn't afford to keep it).At some point (can't remember when) I also had a monthly travel pass which covered my canton, plus the half fare card. This enabled me to travel freely in Vaud (useful for my daily activities), but I could also benefit from reduced travel costs when I went outside Vaud.Most recently, I have had a monthly pass which just covers one specific journey, plus my half fare card.In summary, I would suggest that you get a half fare card to start with. They aren't expensive and will quickly pay for themselves if you travel any distance. Then keep a track of your expenses and after a few months work out what option (general abonnement, monthly pass for your canton, or point.to-point pass) is best for you.
100 peacebuilders at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace (UPEACE) wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Australia to urge the government of the Commonwealth of Australia to settle the maritime boundary dispute between Timor-Leste and Australia in good faith, in a peaceful and judicious manner, in compliance with international law and with an equitable result. See https://www.facebook.com/Hands-Off-Timors-Oil-UPEACE-campaign-474611022733547/

PDF of the letter is here

The Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, MP

Prime Minister of Australia

Government of the Commonwealth of Australia

Parliament House

CANBERRA ACT 2600



2 April 2016



Dear Prime Minister Turnbull,



Greetings of Peace from graduate students of the United Nations-mandated University for Peace (UPEACE) in Costa Rica. We are peacebuilders from 36 countries with a broad range of experience and we believe in peaceful resolution of conflict.



We believe that the dispute between Australia and Timor-Leste in respect of the Timor Sea should be settled in good faith, in a peaceful and judicious manner, in compliance with international law and with an equitable result.



To this end, we urge you, as the head of the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia to lead the Government and the people of Australia in formulating and adopting policies that respect the sovereignty and dignity of the Timor-Leste nation, and the rights of Timor-Lestes people.



Specifically, the Government of Australia should:



1. Resubmit to the mechanism of resolving maritime boundary disputes provided by the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea;



2. Open immediately negotiations with the Government of Timor-Leste to agree to a permanent maritime boundary based on the Median Line Principle;



3. Halt appropriation of revenues unilaterally from the Timorese side of the halfway line as it reduces opportunities for good lives for women, children, and vulnerable people in Timor-Leste.



Thank you very much.



Yours sincerely,



Graduate Students at the University for Peace (UPEACE)



(named in the Appendix)



see full list of signers here:
VANCOUVER, British Columbia--The Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology (JVIR)--the Society of Interventional Radiology's peer-reviewed scientific journal--presented the 2015 JVIR Editor's Best awards during the April 3 general session of the SIR Annual Scientific Meeting, April 2-April 7 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The annual awards, supported by SIR Foundation, are made after a comprehensive review of all papers submitted to JVIR during the prior year.

2015 JVIR EDITOR'S AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING CLINICAL RESEARCH PAPER

Dong Il Gwon, M.D., an associate professor at University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Asan Medical Center, Seoul, South Korea, was honored with the award for outstanding clinical research paper for "Vascular Plug-assisted Retrograde Transvenous Obliteration (PARTO) for the Treatment of Gastric Varices and Hepatic Encephalopathy: A Prospective Multicenter Study." In citing why this paper stood out JVIR Editor-in-chief Ziv J Haskal, M.D., FSIR, noted, "Patients with life-threatening bleeding complications from cirrhosis have increasingly benefited from balloon-occluded retrograde transvenous obliteration and PARTO procedures. Dr. Gwon's study is the first large-scale study to validate the effectiveness of a newer, rapid, single-session means of performing this procedure, which is poised to replace, worldwide, the multihour, overnight option practiced since 1989."

2015 JVIR EDITOR'S AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING LABORATORY INVESTIGATION

Ron C. Gaba, M.D., FSIR, a faculty member in the interventional radiology division of the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, Chicago, was honored with the award for outstanding laboratory investigation for "Gene Expression in Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Pilot Study of Potential Transarterial Chemoembolization Response Biomarkers." Haskal, a professor with the department of radiology and medical imaging at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, said, "Interventional radiologists are the leading specialists for targeted treatment of liver cancers. The research shows how gene analysis may lead to better patient outcomes by helping to identify patients and measuring outcomes better. This is the basis of highly personalized, patient-specific therapies, which are widely regarded as the future of medicine."

Haskal also recognized the authors of an additional six clinical and five laboratory papers for their contributions.

More information about the Society of Interventional Radiology, finding an interventional radiologist in your area, minimally invasive treatments, and the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology can be found online at sirweb.org.

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About the Society of Interventional Radiology Foundation

SIR Foundation is a scientific foundation dedicated to fostering research and education in interventional radiology for the purposes of advancing scientific knowledge, increasing the number of skilled investigators in interventional radiology and developing innovative therapies that lead to improved patient care and quality of life. Visit sirfoundation.org.

About the Society of Interventional Radiology

The Society of Interventional Radiology is a nonprofit, professional medical society representing more than 6,100 practicing interventional radiology physicians, scientists and clinical associates, dedicated to improving patient care through the limitless potential of image-guided therapies. SIR's members work in a variety of settings and at different professional levels--from medical students and residents to university faculty and private practice physicians. Visit sirweb.org. The Society of Interventional Radiology is holding its Annual Scientific Meeting April 2-7 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, British Columbia, Canada. Visit sirmeeting.org.

2015 JVIR Editor's Award for Outstanding Clinical Research Paper: "Vascular Plug-assisted Retrograde Transvenous Obliteration for the Treatment of Gastric Varices and Hepatic Encephalopathy: A Prospective Multicenter Study." Dong Il Gwon, Young Hwan Kim, Gi-Young Ko, Jong Woo Kim, Heung Kyu Ko, Jin Hyoung Kim, Ji Hoon Shin, Hyun-Ki Yoon and others. 2015 JVIR Editor's Award for Outstanding Laboratory Paper: "Gene Expression in Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Pilot Study of Potential Transarterial Chemoembolization Response Biomarkers," Ron C. Gaba, John V. Groth, Ahmad Parvinian, Grace Guzman and Leigh C. Casadaban.

Reporters may obtain both papers by contacting Elise Castelli, (703) 460-5572, ecastelli@sirweb.org, or Ellen Acconcia, (703) 460-5582, eacconcia@sirweb.org, in SIR's communications department. From April 2-6, they can be reached in the Vancouver Newsroom at (778) 331-7650 or (778) 331-7651.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (April 3, 2016)--Women who underwent a nonsurgical, image-guided treatment, uterine fibroid embolization (UFE), for the treatment of uterine fibroids experienced improved sexual function and a higher overall quality of life. The research, part of a French multicenter study, presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology's Annual Scientific Meeting, also found the vast majority of women treated with UFE sustained improvement for more than a year.

"Women with uterine fibroids often experience troubling symptoms and significant discomfort, which diminish their sex lives and reduce their quality of life. These symptoms include heavy menstrual bleeding, pain during sexual intercourse, pelvic pain and back and leg pain," said Helene Vernhet-Kovacsik, M.D., the study's lead researcher and an interventional radiologist in the department of vascular radiology at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, Montpellier in France. "Working in collaboration with a patient's gynecologist, interventional radiologists can now offer these women a treatment option which alleviates chronic pain within the female reproductive system and allows the opportunity to lead a full and more normal life."

Researchers from 25 centers throughout France conducted a prospective study involving 264 women who underwent UFE to treat benign fibroid growths. A common condition, fibroids develop in the uterine muscular wall, varying in size from a quarter of an inch to larger than a cantaloupe. Most women with uterine fibroids also have more than one.

During UFE, an interventional radiologist makes a tiny nick in the skin in the groin or wrist and inserts a catheter into the artery. Using real-time imaging, the doctor guides the catheter into the uterine arteries and then releases tiny particles, the size of grains of sand, to block the blood flow that supplies oxygen and nutrients to the fibroid tumors, causing them to shrink and die.

Study participants completed the Uterine Fibroid Symptom and Health-related Quality of Life Questionnaire (UFE-QoL) to report their quality of life before and one year post treatment. The women were also asked to complete the Female Sexual Function Index, or FSFI (a brief questionnaire developed for the specific purpose of assessing sexual function in clinical trials), to track their sexual function, including items such as desire, arousal, lubrication and orgasm.

At the beginning of the study, 189 of the 264 women suffered abnormally heavy menstrual bleeding and 171 experienced pain, among other symptoms associated with pelvic pressure. When researchers followed up with participants a year after treatment, only 39 of those 189 continued to experience abnormal bleeding and only 42 of the 171 women still dealt with pelvic pressure.

Nearly eight in 10 (78.8 percent) women who completed self-reported assessments at the one-year mark demonstrated improvement in sexual function, including pain, desire, arousal and satisfaction--as measured by the FSFI. Additionally, about nine in 10 (90.2 percent) women who completed the UFE-QoL assessment reported a better overall quality of life, with average scores increasing from 45 at treatment to 71 one year after. UFE-QoL scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a better health-related quality of life.

"Through our expertise in performing image-guided therapy, interventional radiologists pioneered the treatment of uterine fibroids using this much less invasive technique. Compared to surgery such as hysterectomy, which requires significant recovery time and increases health care cost burdens, UFE gives women the opportunity to return to their daily routine as quickly as possible after treatment," said Marc R. Sapoval, M.D., Ph.D., one of the study's co-authors and an interventional radiologist at Hopital Europeen in Paris. "My patients have told me their general well-being has improved because they are not as tired and feel less depressed because of the reduction in bleeding, pain and the other related symptoms of uterine fibroids."

"The significant quality of life improvements demonstrated in this study should help put an end to any debate on the effectiveness of UFE and its numerous benefits for women with symptomatic fibroids," said Alan H. Matsumoto, M.D., FSIR, an interventional radiologist and professor and chair of the department of radiology and medical imaging at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville and an expert in minimally invasive treatments for uterine fibroids. "Although in use for more than 20 years, UFE is rarely offered as a treatment option to women in the United States, despite the fact that it is a proven, safe and effective treatment that spares women from the risks and long-term consequences of a hysterectomy," said Matsumoto, who is also the SIR 2015-16 president.

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Abstract 31: "Evaluation of Changes in Sexual Function Related to Uterine Fibroid Embolization," H. V. Kovacsik, Montpellier Department of Vascular Radiology Montpellier Cedex; D. Herbreteau, CHU Tours; M.R. Sapoval, Hopital Europeen; G. Pompidou; J.P. Beregi, Service Radiologie Vasculaire; S. Bommart, CHU; J.M. Bartoli, Hopital de la Timone. SIR Annual Scientific Meeting, April 2-7, 2016. This abstract can be found at sirmeeting.org.

About the Society of Interventional Radiology

The Society of Interventional Radiology is a nonprofit, professional medical society representing more than 6,100 practicing interventional radiology physicians, scientists and clinical associates, dedicated to improving patient care through the limitless potential of image-guided therapies. SIR's members work in a variety of settings and at different professional levels--from medical students and residents to university faculty and private practice physicians. Visit sirweb.org.

The Society of Interventional Radiology is holding its Annual Scientific Meeting April 2-7 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, British Columbia, Canada. Visit sirmeeting.org.

Interviews and medical illustrations are available by contacting SIR's communications department staff: Elise Castelli, SIR senior manager PR and communication, ecastelli@sirweb.org, (703) 460-5572, or Ellen Acconcia, SIR senior manager, web and content strategy, eacconcia@sirweb.org, (703) 460-5582. From April 2-6, they can be reached in the Vancouver Newsroom, (778) 331-7650 or (778) 331-7651.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia--Renan Uflacker, M.D., FSIR, was honored posthumously on April 3 with the Society of Interventional Radiology Foundation Leaders in Innovation Award. The award was announced during the Society of Interventional Radiology's (SIR) Annual Scientific Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia.

"Dr. Uflacker's pioneering work helped transform interventional radiology into the cutting-edge medical field it is today," said Stephen T. Kee, M.D., MMM, FSIR, SIR Foundation board chair. "His work--from the endovascular treatment of liver disease, to peripheral vascular disease, aneurysms and interventional oncology--provides a bedrock upon which new generations of interventional radiologists can learn from and further develop."

Uflacker was a professor and director of the division of vascular and interventional radiology at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, for 34 years. He was part of a national trial that resulted in the approval of the first covered stent for biliary application in United States. Prior to his death, Uflacker was participating in a long-term project to create and grow new vessels in limbs with lack of blood flow.

The Dr. Gary J. Becker Young Investigator Award recognizes promising young practitioners to encourage the pursuit of academic careers. This year's recipient was Sarah White, M.D., M.S., associate professor of radiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), Milwaukee. White's work focuses on clinical and translational research in the division of vascular interventional radiology.

The following individuals were recognized for their outstanding achievements in research and innovation with the Dr. Constantin Cope Medical Student Research Award: Alexander Pasciak, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore; Megan Sue, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles; Richard Boyer, Vanderbilt University, Nashville; and Tianshen Hu, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

SIR Foundation's Resident/Fellow Research Awards recognize high-quality research by trainees. This year's recipients are Ali Alian, M.D., University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas; Paul M. Haste, M.D., Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis; and Olaguoke Akinwande, M.D., Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore.

This year's Frederick S. Keller, M.D., Philanthropist of the Year Award was presented to Gordon McLennan, M.D., FSIR, professor of radiology and biomedical engineering and program director of the Interventional Radiology Fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, in honor of his outstanding commitment to SIR Foundation. McLennan, a past foundation chair, inspired SIR members and industry to support IR research through active involvement with the Discovery Campaign. As chair, he helped start the SIR Foundation Gala.

###

About the Society of Interventional Radiology Foundation

SIR Foundation is a scientific foundation dedicated to fostering research and education in interventional radiology for the purposes of advancing scientific knowledge, increasing the number of skilled investigators in interventional radiology and developing innovative therapies that lead to improved patient care and quality of life. Visit sirfoundation.org.

About the Society of Interventional Radiology

The Society of Interventional Radiology is a nonprofit, professional medical society representing more than 6,100 practicing interventional radiology physicians, scientists and clinical associates, dedicated to improving patient care through the limitless potential of image-guided therapies. SIR's members work in a variety of settings and at different professional levels--from medical students and residents to university faculty and private practice physicians. Visit sirweb.org. The Society of Interventional Radiology is holding its Annual Scientific Meeting April 2-7 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, British Columbia, Canada. Visit sirmeeting.org.

Interviews are available by contacting Elise Castelli, SIR senior manager, PR and communication, ecastelli@sirweb.org, (703) 460-5572. From April 2-6 they can be reached in the Vancouver Newsroom at (778) 331-7650 or (778) 331-7651.
After last week saw the US Dollar exchange rates (USD) soften considerably in the aftermath of a dovish speech from the FED Chairwoman , will Thursdays speech by Janet Yellen be equally detrimental? We examine the latest GBP to USD exchange rate forecasts for this coming week.

Investors have not been particularly encouraged by the latest UK Services PMI, in spite of an uptick in sector growth, as the UK economy continues to lose general momentum.

With the US Dollar encouraged higher by fresh Fed hawkishness, the GBP to USD exchange rate has thus slumped on Tuesday morning.

While today has not been heavy-hitting in terms of UK domestic data, the GBP/USD has nonetheless managed to see positive movement today.

This is on account of the afternoons US factory and durable goods orders for February, which failed to improve in their finalised forms.

A positive UK Construction PMI has seen the British pound climb versus the major currencies today.

While the latest UK Construction PMI bettered expectations to hold steady on the month in March the sector remains in its weakest state of growth for three years, dampening Pound (GBP) sentiment somewhat.

Latest Pound/Dollar Exchange Rates

On Sunday the Pound to British Pound exchange rate (GBP/GBP) converts at 1

The live inter-bank GBP-GBP spot rate is quoted as 1 today.

Today finds the pound to euro spot exchange rate priced at 1.147.

At time of writing the pound to canadian dollar exchange rate is quoted at 1.542.

NB: the forex rates mentioned above, revised as of 23rd Oct 2022, are inter-bank prices that will require a margin from your bank. Foreign exchange brokers can save up to 5% on international payments in comparison to the banks.

In the early part of the previous week the GBP/USD conversion rate trended positively following dovish comments from Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen.

However, Friday saw the British Pound dive versus the US Dollar thanks to disappointing British manufacturing output and mostly positive US ecostats.

With Yellen due to make another speech this week, there is a high chance of significant GBP/USD volatility.

Popular (USD) Currency Exchange News in Last 30 Days

Pound Sterling (GBP) Exchange Rates Forecast: UK Services PMI in Focus

There will be several domestic data publications over the coming week with potential to provoke Pound Sterling exchange rate volatility.

However, there is a high chance that Sterling gains will be limited even if domestic ecostats produce positive results.

This is because political uncertainty as a result of the EU referendum and the British steel crisis is likely to dominate trader focus.

One of the most significant British ecostats this week will be Tuesdays Services PMI. Not only is the services sector the single largest contributor to British Gross Domestic Product, but also it remains one of the only drivers of growth in the UK at present. Last weeks disappointing manufacturing data only highlights imbalance in the UKs economy.

In addition to the Services PMI; the Construction PMI, Composite PMI, Industrial Production, Manufacturing Production, Total Trade Balance and NIESR Gross Domestic Product Estimate data should all be of interest to those trading with the UK Pound.

Pound Sterling to US Dollar Conversion Rate Forecast: Will the US Dollar Build on Last Fridays Gains?

Last Friday the US Dollar climbed significantly, erasing many of its weekly losses, after domestic data produced mostly positive results. Higher-than-expected Non-Farm Payrolls and greater-than-forecast Manufacturing output contributed heavily to US Dollar gains.

This week traders will be focussing on the publication of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes from the most recent policy meeting, and speechs from Fed officials including Chairwoman Janet Yellen.

The FOMC meeting minutes may not be hugely impactful given that Yellen recently stated that policymakers will need to be cautious thanks to external risks posed by Chinas economic slowdown. However, the Yellen speech should cause significant movement amid expectations of yet more dovishness and a reduced reliance on data to determine policy.

In addition to the ecostats outlined above; the ISM Non-Manufacturing Composite, Trade Balance and Consumer Credit reports will be significant for those invested in the Greenback (USD).
The Previous Weeks Pound Sterling (GBP) Exchange Rate Movement was Dominated by UK Steel Industrys Catastrophic Decline, Meanwhile the Rand's Outlook Was Plagued by Developments in the South African Parliament.

An improved UK Services PMI has kept the Pound (GBP) on a stronger trend against the South African Rand (ZAR) on Tuesday morning.

The appeal of the Rand has dived following the Standard Bank PMI, which fell further into contraction territory than forecast to clock in at 47.0 rather than 48.6 in March.

For the most part, Sterling has made a far better start to the present week than the last week. In the case of GBP/ZAR, this is on account of the Rand remaining weak due to the uncertainty hanging over President Zumas future as president.

With commodity prices back in decline at the start of the week the pound to rand exchange rate has been on bullish form.

As investors wait to see the ultimate outcome of the recent verdict against South African President Jacob Zuma there has been little cause for Rand (ZAR) strength.

Exchange rate investors witnessed the South African Rand gain notably against the Pound Sterling and others last week, thanks to developments in the South African parliament.

Last week was not one to remember for investors in the British Pound, as the UK currency began on an unstable footing and quickly lost its way as the week progressed.

For the most part, investors in Sterling were put off by the rapidly unwinding condition of the UKs steel industry, which threatened to unravel completely when Indian corporation Tata began looking for a buyer for its unprofitable UK steel plants.

The tension was exacerbated when reports emerged that not only had the UK government been attempting to keep tariffs on cheap Chinese steel low, but that China had actually imposed trade tariffs on steel dumping from Wales.

Here are the latest fx rates as a reference:

On Sunday the Pound to British Pound exchange rate (GBP/GBP) converts at 1

At time of writing the pound to pound exchange rate is quoted at 1.

The pound conversion rate (against euro) is quoted at 1.147 EUR/GBP.

The live inter-bank GBP-USD spot rate is quoted as 1.13 today.

Please note: the FX rates above, updated 23rd Oct 2022, will have a commission applied by your typical high street bank. Currency brokers specialise in these type of foreign currency transactions and can save you up to 5% on international payments compared to the banks.

UK Trade Balance Stats could Restore Order to GBP/ZAR This Week

With the government still struggling to find some kind of fix-all solution to the UKs steel issues, any notable positive developments have the potential to boost Sterlings appeal this week.

Outside of the steel industry, however, movement for the Pound will primarily be decided by tomorrows construction PMI results for March, as well as the composite and services PMIs for the same month, which are due on Tuesday.

The greatest GBP movement is expected to come on Friday, when, among other data, the UKs trade balance stats for February will be announced.

Rand Exchange Rates Strengthened Last Week by Slip in Zumas Power

The South African Rand was able to gain notably against the Pound Sterling and others last week, thanks to developments in the South African parliament.

President Jacob Zuma has been a deeply unpopular figure among the population and opposition parties, owing to deep-seated convictions of the Presidents corruption.

Events took a step forward last week when Zuma was ruled to have abused national law in order to upgrade his private home. The opposition Democratic Alliance party leapt at the opportunity, with leader Mmusi Maimane insisting that removing Zuma from power was its highest priority.

Shortage of South African Rand-Related Data could Leave Parliamentary Proceedings as Focus This Week

Domestic data is relatively thin on the ground for the coming week, therefore the ZAR may lose out overall against Sterling if nothing major happens in the South African courts.

In terms of data, Tuesday will bring the pessimistically forecast standard bank PMI for March, while Thursday will see the announcement of the manufacturing production stats for February.

Regarding parliament, any positive steps towards the removal of Jacob Zuma from the presidential seat are likely to boost the Rands appeal, while stagnation or failure among lawmakers will potentially see the Rand tumble in response.

UK Steel Dealt a Hammer Blow Last Week by Tatas Shift of Focus

Having been battered by pessimistic speculation and astonishing figures of daily losses, the UKs steel industry was given a final drubbing on Friday after details emerged regarding Tatas future activities.

In addition to trying to sell off their UK operations, news arrived that Tata was looking to merge with German steel giant Thyssenkrupp, which was described by economist Mike Bird as maybe the most symbolic UK industrial decline story ever.
Don't worry about this. Worked for an Israeli company before switching my jobs and arriving to Dubai. Your options are:

1. Upon arrival to Israel, make sure before handing over your passport that you tell the immigration officer that you can't have Israeli visa/stamp in your passport due to nature of your business travels. Tell him/her that you're traveling to countries where Israeli stamp might cause you problems or restrict entry. They will give you a card to keep with your passport until you leave. It's not a strange thing for them, they are aware of it.

2. Even if you somehow end up with an Israeli stamp in your passport, you can always get a new (blank) passport in your home country.

3. I'm 99% sure that Israeli stamp in your passport won't cause you any trouble at Dubai airport. However, can't be too sure about other cities and countries.
An update



My friends husband came back to Spain, He present the EX18 which his wife had completed in Ireland. That form had previously been supplied by the police to be used to cancel the residencia. He then discovered that an EX19 is required to cancel Residencia. The police might have made the error because of confusion which can ocur when people rfer to a `resindencia' when they men EU Registration, Just a tohouht.



When the Police saw that he had his wifes Philippines passport and her residencia, they said it was illegal for him to have them and they threatened to arrest him. He had a letter from his wife (in English) authorising him to cancel her Residencia. They seized the passport and the residencia.



Of course, his wife in Ireland required her passport. I made several visits to the police station to try to recover the passport but they refused.



I then called the police in Ireland and eventually it was arranged that my friend would go to the police station with another authorisation and request for the return of her passport. That was countersigned by the immigration officer of the Garda (Irish police). She emailed the letter. I translated it and took both copies to the police. I understood that the emailed document and my translation were not legally acceptable. However, the police relented and gave me the passport.



My wifes husband has now returned to Ireland but will be back in Spain next month.



I have prepared a letter of authorisation for him to act for his wife in the cancelation of her residencia which I emailed to her. Both the English letter and the one in Spanish have been signed by my friend and countersigned by the Garda. Thus, her husband will have an original letter written in Spanish and thus will not need an official translation. Hopefully, he will be able to cancel my friends residencia when he is back in Spain.



My friends husband wanted to also cancel his EU Citizens Registration but was told that as his wifes residencia relies on his EU Registration, he cannot cancel his registration until his wifes Residencia is cancelled. He was also told that as he had obtained the EU Registration using a UK passport he would have to produce that to make the cancellation. That passport had expired. He has dual nationality and was travelling on his Irish passport. I spoke to the police about that. I explained that even if he renewed his UK passport it would bear a different number from the one he had used to obtain the EU Registration.



I also told them that of course he could apply to change his nationality on his EU Registration from British to Irish using his Irish passport (I know one does not need the previous passport to do that) and then using his Irish passport immediately cancel it. After some arguing, they agreed he could use his valid Irish passport. We will see what happens when he returns.



For those interested I will post an up date.
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Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln arent often mentioned in the same sentence, but novelist Stephen Harrigan found some common ground between the Donald and the Great Emancipator at Saturdays San Antonio Book Festival.

Harrigan writes about Lincoln as a young lawyer and budding politician in the 1830s in his latest novel A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.

The author, whose other books include The Gates of the Alamo, described this unwrinkled Lincoln as ferociously ambitious, somewhat bewildered and confused at times and prone to falling on his face politically.

And he was very good at smearing other candidates in the newspapers, Harrigan said. He would have fit perfectly in todays presidential race. If hed had a Twitter account, he would have gotten in a lot of trouble.

Harrigan was one of more than 90 authors who participated in readings, panel discussions, one-on-one interviews and book-signings at the fourth annual festival, which rewards curiosity and lifelong learning, and keeps people excited and inspired to live in a place that values ideas, books and reading, director Katy Flato said.

Festival officials estimated attendance topping 15,000 on a sunny day that drew lots of families to the Central Library and the Southwest School of Art for literary entertainment and enlightenment, childrens art activities, storytellers, a special teen section called Geektown and cooking demonstrations.

We came just for the experience, said Wolfgang Cazares, an architecture student at San Antonio College, who was with his friend Jessica Gonzalez, also a SAC student, who works at the San Antonio Zoo. Its just awesome to see so many people attracted to reading and to writers.

Im an avid reader and an amateur writer, Gonzalez added. So this is a lot of fun.

Among the writers at the festival was journalist Rebecca Traister, who traces the effect of more women saying no to marriage in her book All the Single Ladies.

I see it reshaping out politics in practically every way, Traister said during a panel discussion that included Kate Bolick, author of Spinster. Traister cited increasing the minimum wage as a huge issue for single women.

Renowned ecologist Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, was asked what humans still have to learn from animals.

We call ourselves the rational animal, and we are, but we are also the only irrational animal, he said. Other animals are the ultimate pragmatists. They act on what they see and sense. They are complete realists about the world. The other thing that impresses me is how incredibly peaceable animals are with their own families  all the time.

Other authors who spoke about their books included Marisa Abrajano (White Backlash: Immigration, Race and American Politics), H.W. Brands (Reagan: The Life), Skip Hollandsworth (The Midnight Assassin) and Whitley Streiber (The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained.)

Topics of discussion at the festival ranged from college sports to the mysteries of the mind, immigration to fracking, politicians to corn tortillas.

sbennett@express-news.net
by Mitch Cox | Sun, Apr 3rd 1:51am EDT

Derek Holland allowed four hits and three runs in just three innings of work as the Rangers fell to the Indians 3-1 in the final game of Spring Training.

Fantasy Impact:

Holland gave up a three-run home run to Rajai Davis that accounted for all of the runs. In his previous start, Holland surrendered grand-slam home run to the Dodgers' Justin Turner that erased a 4-0 Rangers lead. In all, the lefty gave up five home runs in the preseason. For the spring, Holland made seven starts, compiling a record of 3-2 and an ERA of 2.88. He allowed 30 hits in 25 innings and struck out 17 while walking nine. As he tries to regain his standing after missing most of the past two seasons, Holland will need to avoid the gopher balls that plagued him this spring.
Fayetteville-area high school football top performers for Week 10

Here are the Fayetteville area's top performers from Week 10 of the 2022 high school football season.
These days it seems that we never have enough time, whether that be to complete work tasks, get the job done or simply to focus on ourselves. Stress is accepted as part of everyday life, but this year, in line with National Stress Awareness Month, Titanic Spa, wants us to think about introducing a little calm to our lives and reduce stress.

In 2015 stress accounted for 35% of all work related ill health cases and 43% of all working days lost due to ill health.

The UK's first eco-spa nestled deep within the Pennine Yorkshire is the perfect place to start making the steps towards combatting stress. Stress affects everyone and Natalie Hart, Spa Operations Manager, at the multi-award winning Titanic Spa, shares her top tips for controlling stress levels.

1. Be Kind To Your Body - Caring for your body means that you are less likely to feel overworked, exhausted and unhappy. Eating and drinking well will ensure that you have more energy, better concentration, and an improved mood, brightening your outlook for the day ahead of you. Top Tip: Aim to eat more than your 5 a day. The government's latest recommendations suggest topping up your vegetable intake to 5 portions a day, and fruit to two portions.

2. Learn When You Can Say No - We are all guilty of taking on too much at times but understanding when you can say no may help you time manage better. Doing less but doing it well can be just as satisfying and will give you the momentum and confidence to complete your next task more efficiently. Top tip: Keeping a diary can help to organise your thoughts and manage the days ahead with more ease.

3. Relax Muscles - When our mind is stressed our body follows suit, stiffening and tensing up, often without us noticing. Easing out this tension and realigning the body improves your posture and can help focus the mind better. Top tip: Slowly circle your ankles and shoulders, taking a few moments to breathe in and out deeply, opening up the chest.

4. Get Some Green Air - As long as you're wrapped up in the cold, sheltered by an umbrella from the rain, or enjoying the feeling of sun or the breeze on your skin, taking a walk where there are trees or countryside gives you an often well-needed change of environment and mood boost. Top tip: Take a walk and breathe in and out deeply. The breathing alone helps to calm mind and rebalance the body.

5. Indulge Yourself - If you cannot see past the problems and stress, do something for yourself to improve how you address any stressful issues later on. Making time for yourself means you are prioritising your health and wellbeing, decreasing stress levels. Top tip: Regular spa treatments will give you an hour or two to concentrate purely on your wellbeing, allowing you to relax fully.

Combat the stress in your life!

by Emma Barlow for www.femalefirst.co.uk


The Jungle Book is set to be one of the biggest films of the spring and there's not long to go now until the movie blasts onto the big screen.

The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book is one of the upcoming movies that I cannot wait to see as Disney have done such a great job with their live-action movies Maleficent and Cinderella. I really am expecting great things from the Jon Favreau-directed film.

The director has brought together a terrific cast as Bill Murray is Baloo, Ben Kingsley is Bagheera, Christopher Walken is King Louie, Scarlett Johansson is Kaa, Lupita Nyong'o is Raksha and Idris Elba is Shere Khan.

We are also going to be introduced to the acting talents of Neel Sethi, who will take on the central role of Mowgli. And they all feature in a set of terrific new character posters.

Jon Favreau has already brought us movies such as Iron Man and Iron Man 2 and this is his first feature film since Chef back in 2014.

The Jungle Book follows Mowgli (Sethi), a man-cub who's been raised by a family of wolves. But Mowgli finds he is no longer welcome in the jungle when fearsome tiger Shere Khan (Elba), who bears the scars of Man, promises to eliminate what he sees as a threat. Urged to abandon the only home he's ever known, Mowgli embarks on a captivating journey of self-discovery, guided by panther-turned-stern mentor Bagheera (Kingsley), and the free-spirited bear Baloo (Murray).

Along the way, Mowgli encounters jungle creatures who don't exactly have his best interests at heart, including Kaa (Johansson), a python whose seductive voice and gaze hypnotizes the man-cub, and the smooth-talking King Louie (Walken), who tries to coerce Mowgli into giving up the secret to the elusive and deadly red flower: fire.

The Jungle Book is released 15th April.

by Helen Earnshaw for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Emma Atkins doesn't think she can have any more children.

Emma Atkins

The 'Emmerdale' star, who has just returned to the soap from maternity leave, is desperate to have another baby following the birth of her first child Albert 12 months ago but is concerned her age will prevent her from falling pregnant.

Asked if she wants to have another child, she told Star magazine: "Yes but I may not be able to get pregnant. I'll be 41 soon, so you can never take it for granted."

But, for the time being, the blonde beauty - who is known for playing bad girl Charity Dingle in the soap - has her hands full with little Albert, whom she has with her boyfriend Tom.

She said: "It's been physical! He was 9lb 3oz when he was born. People kept saying, 'He's a big baby!' but he was just perfect ot me. I miss him [when I'm at work] but I see him at the end of the day and can't wait to hug the bones off him."

Meanwhile, Emma has admitted she's determined to shed a bit of her baby weight now she's back on the popular show.

She added: "I wanted to look great [when I returned to the programme] but I haven't done anything since Albert's birth. I'm going to start doing a bit of exercise to give me more agility."
Horses, have played an integral part of Bollywood cinema from the very beginning, be it a gun wielding dacoit riding a horse and scaring people off, or a romantic hero eloping with his lady love on a horse. This fast running four legged animal, is much loved by people as it signifies strength, speed and power.

Check out 10 pictures of Salman Khan with his recently found love (Horses)!

It is reported that during the shooting of the movie Veer: An Epic Love Story Of A Warrior, Salman Khan had to ride horses throughout the movie and the actor, fell in love with the animal ever since. It's been six years now and Salman Khan has purchased quite a few horses and rears them at his farmhouse in the city's outskirts.

So Funny! 15 Pics Of Aishwarya Rai Clicked When She Was Not Ready



"Salman's farmhouse in Panvel has a lot of animals -- from poultry to goats, cows and dogs -- he has them all there, space being a constraint in Mumbai. His staff is constantly at hend to tend to these animals. The horses are a new addition to the 'family'. He is now interested in breeding them."

Rare Pics Of Bollywood Stars Wearing Heavy Metal T-shirts!

Since Salman Khan loves horses so much, we'd really love to see the actor making a movie about horse racing and the thrill it gives to people. We're sure a movie on horse racing would be one of a kind in Bollywood.

10 Sweetest Pictures Of Riteish Deshmukh & Genelia D'Souza
Yes, you read it right! The alleged ex-couple Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif were spotted partying together recently at the producer Aarti Shetty's residence. Not just that, along with the duo, Alia Bhatt with rumoured boyfriend Sidharth Malhotra, Aamir Khan with wife Kiran Rao and director Zoya Akhtar, Sonam Kapoor and many others were also spotted outside Aarti Shetty's house.

Check out the gallery below and be ready to get bowled over by their sizzling looks. Among everyone Ranbir & Aamir won our heart with their stylish appearances.

Click On 'VIEW PHOTOS' To See All The Pictures:

SHOCKER! Priyanka Chopra Tried To Commit SUICIDE Twice, Says Ex-Manager; Attacks SRK & Deepika Too!

A few days back, rumours were rife that Katrina's mom is visiting India to meet Ranbir's mom Neetu Kapoor for their patch-up. But Katrina cleared all the fuss by saying, ''Yes, my mother is in Mumbai and no, she is not here to meet Neetu Kapoor.''

SRK With Emraan, AbRam With Gauri & Many More! 16 Best Instagram PICS Of Celebs From April 1st Week!

The beautiful actress also revealed to a leading daily that, "My mother is personally working on the curriculum. Teaching is her passion. I overheard her talking to someone on the phone a few days back; she was saying that in the current education model, kids are finding it very difficult to pay attention [to their studies]. So, she is trying to make learning fun for them. My contribution, however, is limited to the financial aspect."

Well, after their (Ranbir-Katrina) last outing together, we still have a little hope that the duo may get back to each other, soon!

On the work front, Katrina and Ranbir will be next seen together in Jagga Jasoos. The film is directed by none other than Anurag basu and is expected to hit the theatres in June, 2016.
Shocking news of Balika Vadhu and ex-Bigg Boss contestant Pratyusha Banerjee has shaken the television industry. As soon as her friends heard the news, they rushed to the Kokilaben hospital. Apparently, Pratyusha's ex-boyfriend Markand booked tickets for her parents, who stay in Jamshedpur.

After the post-mortem was done, the body was taken to the Oshiwara crematorium. The funeral of the actress took place at 6 pm at Oshiwara electric crematorium. The actress was dressed like a bride for the funeral.

View Photos: TV Celebrities Attend Pratyusha's Funeral

Her last wish was to get married to her boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh . Designer Rohit Verma had also revealed that she was excited and had placed order for her bridal outfit.

Several friends from television industry attended the funeral. Kamya Punjabi broke down completely. Sara Khan, Ajaz Khan, Vikas Gupta, Smita Bansal, Rohit Verma, Ratan Rajput, Rakhi Sawant, Apoorva Agnihotri, Jay Bhanusali, Mahi Vij and others attended the funeral.

Initially, boyfriend Rahul was suspected and was questioned, as it was said that the couple were facing problem in relationship. The post-mortem reports also reveal that it is clear case of suicide and no foul play. Now Rahul is let off, as the police rule out foul play.

Pratyusha was a great actress, it is sad that her life ended in such a way! We want the truth to be out and if any foul play, we wish, the guilty be punished.
After spending more than $9 billion on outbound acquisitions snapping up brand names all over the world since 2008, Fosun International, Chinas largest privately owned conglomerate, says it will now slow foreign purchases and cut debt.

There is no doubt Fosun will be different in the next five years compared with the last five. We will make more effort on internal growth [than on overseas acquisitions], Liang Xinjun, chief executive of Fosun International told FinanceAsia in an exclusive interview on Friday. He aded the company will also hunt for unicorn firms with the goal of making big profits with small investments.

The Shanghai-headquartered conglomerate has been aggressively expanding overseas by buying global brands ranging from Frances Club Med, Canadas Cirque du Soleil to insurers and property. Its investments pushed up the companys debt from Rmb54 billion ($8.3 billion) in 2011 to Rmb115 billion ($18 billion) last year.

However the serial Chinese acquirer has yet to make a single outbound purchase this year, while oth er Chinese companies have spent $92 billion on 184 foreign deals, which is close to last years record annual volume of $107 billion, according to data provider Dealogic.

Guo Guangchang, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of Fosun, echoed Liangs sentiment. We are always like this: When everyone gets excited, we become more cautious, he told investors at a Fosun event in Hong Kong on Thursday, his first public appearance in the city since he went missing in December. His company later clarified he had been assisting a government investigation.

The disappearance of Guo, one of Chinas most high-profile entrepreneurs, dented investor confidence in the company. Fosun-related stocks tumbled in value in mainland China, Hong Kong and New York, at the time because investors worried Fosun's overseas spending no longer enjoyed government favour.

According to one person with knowledge of the issue, Guo was assisting with a probe into Ai Baojun, a former vice mayor of Shanghai, who had been under investigation by the countrys anti-corruption watchdog late last year. Guo introduced Ai to a friend of his, from whom Ai alledgedly purchased a property at a discount. At the time Ai was working at the Shanghai-based Baosteel, a state-owned iron and steel company before he became vice mayor in December 2007, the person said.

When asked about the circumstances of Guo's disappearance, Fosuns corporate communications department said it is the responsibility of any Chinese citizen to assist a government investigation but it declined to offer details of the nature of the investigation in which Guo was assisting.

CEO Liang told FinanceAsia that both Guo and Fosun werent involved in any illegal business and everything was back to normal. He [Guo] didnt do anything wrong. He was just a witness. His testifying was long over. The government has taken no further action.

Both Fosuns bond issuances and IPOs [of firms Fosun invested in] were subject to government approvals. And we also signed strategic agreements with a number of big Chinese state-owned enterprises. If this matter wasnt completely over, it would be very hard for you to imagine how we could get these approvals under the very sensitive circumstances, Liang added.

Fosun in January entered into a strategic cooperation with conglomerate China Merchants Group, as Fosun takes an interest in investing in logistics businesses of the countrys oldest SOE. Five of Fosuns subsidiaries, including Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group, have issued domestic bonds totaling Rmb12.42 billion ($1.9 billion) so far this year, according to the company.

Guo was allowed to travel to the US within one week of being released and attended this years two sessions  plenary meetings of the countrys top legislative and consultative bodies in Beijing in early March, as a member of Chinas top advisory organization.

New investment targets

Chairman Guo said on Thursday Fosun would narrow its investment focus from developed economies, such as the US and Europe where it has splurged on acquisitions in the past, to mainly emerging markets, notably Russia, Brazil and India, where valuation of companies is lower.

Commodities have also caught his eye, although he admitted Fosuns $441 million acquisition of Australias Roc Oil in 2014 wasnt a success due to the plunge in oil prices. We were a little early, he said. This year is a good timing and Fosun will make more investments in commodities.

Founded in 1992 by philosophy student Guo, genetic engineering student Liang and two other college friends from the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, Fosun quickly developed into one of Chinas most high-profile privately owned successes. One of its recipes for success is to emulate Warren Buffett.

After running six insurers globally including Portugals largest insurance company Fidelidade, the ambitious Chinese company keeps looking for insurance assets in Japan, Australia and China, CEO Liang said, in a bid to use premiums generated by insurance operations to accumulate long-term capital to finance investments.

We already have European and American insurers. No need to buy that many, Liang said. We have assets in Japan, but we dont have reasonable insurance premiums to match them. The same case in Australia. And we have loads of assets in China, but the size of premiums is very small. The two dont match at all.

Out of Fosuns Rmb160 billion ($25 billion) investable assets of insurance segment, euro-denominated assets account for 43%, usd-denominated for 39% while Rmb and yen only for 8.8% and 1.7%, respectively.

Apart from looking for a larger pool of insurance capital, Liang said Fosun will further capitalize on the high leverage of its insurance funding, which has the average ratio of about 4.5 times, way below more than 10 times sometimes practiced in the industry.

Meanwhile, it has become cautious on outbound MA of late. In December Fosun dropped its interest in European merchant bank BHF Kleinwort Benson Group, which was followed by its termination of a $460 million bid for 52% of Israeli insurer Phoenix Holdings in February after certain pre-deal conditions were not met.

After we gave up the Israeli deal, there were rumors saying Israel doesnt like Fosun or Fosun doesnt like Israel. Fosun will use another deal to prove we still like Israel, said Liang, adding the company would announce the deal (not in the insurance industry) in Israel soon.

Fosuns $18 billion debt burden seemed to have played an important role in its acquiring spree, with short-term debts accounting for 43% as of end 2015.

These cancelled plans indicate that management is becoming more prudent in investment and financial management, although it will take more time to see whether the company has significantly reduced its risk appetite and improved risk management, Kai Hu, an analyst at Moodys, said in a note on February 18.

CLICK ON PAGE 2 FOR MORE ON FOSUN'S PLANS TO REDUCE DEBT AND HUNT FOR UNICORNS

Cutting debt

In its annual results release on Thursday, Fosun for the first time brought up the goal of improving its credit rating to investment grade, as it is currently rated BB/Ba3 by S&P and Moodys respectively.

The group is determined to reduce its debt ratio, CEO Liang said. We want to improve our credit rating, so that the leverage ratio of insurance [premiums] could be increased automatically.

Fosuns net gearing ratio fell from 73% in 2014 to 69% last year, while its average funding cost declined from 5.61% to 4.97% over the same period. Liang said its debt ratio will keep dropping this year, but he declined to set a goal.

It depends on how fast we can sell assets [to pay back debt], which is up to the valuation in the market  We have assets worth tens of billions of yuan that we could sell, he said, adding the company wont rush to dispose of assets until the market turns good.

Apart from numerous properties, the company has a large portfolio of minority equity investments, some of which it may sell to alleviate funding pressure, according to Liang.

These include an 8.7% stake in Focus Media, the first Chinese company to de-list from the US and re-list in the A-share market through a backdoor listing in Shenzhen, 25% of Alibaba-backed online lender MyBank, and 10% of Cainiao Network, a logistic affiliate of Alibaba.

Fosuns investment division, which has less secondary market exposure, performed well, analysts at Goldman Sachs said in a note on Thursday, referring to nearly Rmb3 billion net profit generated by the division last year with 12 projects listing in mainland China and Hong Kong.

Looking for unicorns

In order to reposition itself in investors' eyes from a debt-laden conglomerate, Fosun will also seek to discover, invest and nurture unicorns.

A unicorn in finance refers to that rare enity, an unlisted company valued above $1 billion. Chairman Guo used the word "unicorns" 20 times in its letter to shareholders.

Guo said Fosun will seek unicorns, transform its existing projects into unicorns, and team up with non-Fosun unicorns. The group will also work to develop itself into a Unicorn enterprise in the long term, he said in the letter.

Fosuns standard of what constitutes a unicorn is higher than the generally accepted definition. Unicorns are those in which we can make a profit of $1 billion in two years or the valuation of our investment can increase by $1 billion in two years, Liang said. He added unicorns should grow exponentially rather than linearly as they rely less on capital expenditure to boost growth.

He revealed Fosun has already invested in a few unicorns in health, wealth and happiness, three core segments of the companys business, in Hong Kong, but declined to elaborate further.

In addition, Fosun has been trying to building its existing investments into unicorns, notably those in the healthcare (excluding pharmaceutical unit) and tourism segments, both of which will go public in the future, according to Liang.

He cited Guahao.com as an example, in which Fosun invested $65 million for a nearly 10% stake last year. It soon develops into the countrys largest online hospital appointment-booking platform with 82 million subscribers and 17% of market share.

Toto Castineiras and audience member at a Cirque du Soleil's show in 2011 in California

For its more sizeable tourism business, Fosun has already kicked off a pre-IPO fundraising round to bring in investors into its leisure portfolio, which includes global brands such as Club Med, Cirque du Soleil, UKs Thomas Cook as well as local names like Shanghai Yuyuan Tourist Mart.

We could actually close the fundraising today as weve already received three good offers [from Chinese and international investors]. But we want to wait and see a bit more, Liang said.

We will prove to investors and shareholders that Fosun is really transforming, he added. They will know this is our strategy, not a show.

On a personal note, Liang, 47 years old and second-in-command at Fosun, said he was busier last year, spending 60 days overseas, and didnt enjoy much leisure time.

I didnt even get a chance to celebrate my birthday last year as I was travelling overseas, he said. But I enjoy being so busy as work brings me a lot of fun.
Berkshire Partners LLC, a Boston, MA-based investment firm, closed its ninth private equity fund, with total equity commitments of $5.5 billion.

Berkshire Fund IX was subscribed primarily by existing and new investors including large endowments, foundations, pension funds and financial institutions.

The firm invests $50m to $500m of equity capital in middle market growth companies with acquisition values between $200m and $2 billion.

Founded thirty years ago, Berkshire has completed over 115 investments in mid-sized companies and developed specific industry experience in several areas including consumer products and retail, business services, communications, industrials and transportation.

The firm private equity investment staff counts over 60 professionals and is led by 24 managing directors.

FinSMEs

02/04/2016

PRESS RELEASE

Berkshire Partners Closes Berkshire Fund IX

Boston, Massachusetts, March 31, 2016  Berkshire Partners LLC, a Boston-based investment firm, today announced the closing of the firms ninth private equity investment fund, Berkshire Fund IX, with total equity commitments of $5.5 billion.

Fund IXs capital was subscribed primarily by institutional investors in previous Berkshire funds. Investors include many of the worlds largest endowments, foundations, pension funds and financial institutions. Consistent with its philosophy of alignment with limited partners, Berkshire is the largest investor in Fund IX.

Berkshire seeks to invest in middle market growth companies in partnership with talented management teams. Fund IXs portfolio is expected to consist of companies with acquisition values between $200 million and $2 billion. The firm aims to invest $50 million to $500 million of equity capital in each portfolio company.

Since its inception thirty years ago, Berkshire has completed over 115 investments in mid-sized companies and developed specific industry experience in several areas including consumer products and retail, business services, communications, industrials and transportation. Berkshires private equity investment staff numbers over 60 professionals and is led by the firms 24 managing directors.

Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP served as fund counsel. The firm engaged no intermediary to assist in fundraising.
Hrithik Roshan, who was served with a legal notice for allegedly defaming the Pope because of his tweet which stated that he'd rather date the Pope than any of the actresses the media had been linking him up with, has apologised for hurting religious sentiments.

Seems my tweet about His Holiness has led 2misunderstanding. My apologies 4 hurt caused 2religious or other sentiments. Was unintentional.

 Hrithik Roshan (@iHrithik) April 2, 2016

A few days back, the actor had invited the wrath of a minority community over his tweet in January and was slapped with a criminal notice for "hurting religious sentiments". The tweet in question:

Ther r more chances of me having had an affair with d Pope dan any of d (Im sure wonderful)women d media hs ben naming.Thanks but no thanks.  Hrithik Roshan (@iHrithik) January 28, 2016

Hrithik's tweet was reportedly in response to an interview by Kangana Ranaut  with whom he had been linked by the press  in which she spoke about a "silly ex". Kangana had not specifically named Hrithik in the interview.

The notice was sent to Hrithik on Monday, 28 March, by Abraham Mathai, All India President of the Indian Christian Voice, an organisation representing the larger interests of the Christian community, including Roman Catholics, in India. The notice, read: "Our client Dr Abraham Mathai, who is a Christian by birth and faith... is extremely hurt by your disobedient and inexcusable comments, which has hurt the religious feelings and sentiments of majority of Christians across the world."

Mathai's lawyer Rizwan Siddiquee had said that the criminal notice was sent under Section 295 A of the Indian Penal Code over Hrithik's "unwarranted and uncalled for comments made against the highly respected Pope Francis" on Twitter on 28 January. "My client wants a written public apology from Hrithik Roshan within seven days," Siddiquee had said.

The actor has apologised via twitter within five days since the criminal notice was served to him but one wonders why his lawyers came up with the weird defense regarding the matter two days back when they argued that Hrithik didnt mean the head of the Vatican but, a fish. Turns out the Eurasian Ruffe, a freshwater fish found in Europe, is also called a pope. Reacting to Hrithik's tweet, Siddiquee said, "I am not surprised. At least better sense prevailed. To err is human and to accept is divine."
An Indian priest abducted by gunmen in Yemen last month is safe and could be released soon, a Catholic group said on Sunday, quoting the Indian foreign minister.

Father Tom Uzhunnalil was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old people's home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis.

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) said a delegation met Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj who said the government was working to secure the priest's safe return.

"She has assured us Father Tom is safe and negotiations are on for his release which could happen very soon," said Father Joseph Chinnaiyan, deputy secretary of the CBCI.

Media reports last week said the priest was killed by Islamic State militants on Good Friday, although no one has claimed responsibility for last month's attack in which gunmen killed four Indian nuns, two Yemeni female staff members, eight elderly residents and a guard. Reports also suggested that the Indian government was not sure about the involvement of Islamic State.

Father Chinnaiyan said the reports were inaccurate.

According to IBNLive, the Catholic priest had appeared in a video recently released by his abductors, asking for help. The report added that through the video, his abductors had demanded millions of dollars in ransom.

Aden has been racked by lawlessness since Hadi supporters, backed by Gulf Arab military forces, drove fighters of the Iran-allied Houthi group from the city in July last year.

International aid groups have pulled most of their foreign staff from Yemen due to security concerns.

With inputs from Reuters
The National Investigation Agencys Deputy SP, Mohammed Tanzil, was shot dead by two unidentified motorbike-borne assailants near Sahaspur town in Bijnor district late Saturday, while he was returning from his native place after attending his nieces wedding along with his family.

According to NIA sources, Tanzil was a part of several investigations looking into serious terror cases, including the attack on Pathankot airbase in January. The incident came just days after Pakistans Joint Investigation Team, looking into the attack on Pathankot Airbase, completed its five-day long Indian leg of the investigation.

Former top police officials and security experts view the killing of the NIA officer as a very serious matter -- which could have taken place either at the behest of a foreign agency or drug cartel, or may even have links with local political authorities giving patronage to certain terror outfits.

What happened on 2 April night and thereafter?

-Mohammed Tanzil, Deputy SP with Indias elite investigation agency, the NIA, was on his way back to Delhi after attending a wedding at his native Bijnor district in UP.

-His Cyan-coloured Wagon-R car was suddenly accosted by two unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle.

-The two unidentified gunmen fired indiscriminately at Tanzil and his wife at point black range, managing to hit the officer with 24 bullets and his wife with four.

-Tanzil succumbed to his injuries, while his wife is in a critical condition at a hospital in Noida.

-Initial post-mortem reports revealed that the 24 bullets were pumped into Tanzils body from a 9mm pistol at point blank range.

According to sources, the attack on the NIA officer couldnt have been a mere coincidence, or accidental.

Its a well-planned attack to eliminate Mohammed Tanzil, and proper recce was conducted to monitor the entire movement of the officer by the assailants, to give the plan fool proof shape, an NIA source said.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) and Special Task Force (STF) of the UP police have been roped in for a joint operation with the NIA. The borders have already been sealed and a manhunt is underway.

Possible motives

NIA has begun a thorough investigation to identify, and capture, the gunmen who killed Tanzil, their motive and the greater forces at play behind the killing.

Theres a strong motive behind the killing of our officer. Prima facie evidence shows that professional killers were used to eliminate Tanzil, who was not only handling some important terror cases but was also a brave officer in the NIA squad, a senior NIA official said.

While the investigators are already exploring various angles to this incident, former top cops and counter-terrorism analysts have pointed out several possible motives:

-Terror angle: Tanzil could have zeroed in on the operators involved in the Pathankot attack or any other terror attack case, prodding them to take action.

-Drug cartel:The drug mafia in the Pathankot region, with possible international terror links, may also have been a factor.

-Role of sleeper cells: Theres conjecture that says that sleeper cells involved in the Pathankot and Gurdaspur terror attacks may have played a role in Tanzils killing.

-Local politicians who patronize terror operators and criminals may have had a hand.

-A remote possibility of local handlers of any Islamic terror group objecting to a Muslim NIA officer taking them on.

Prakash Singh, former DGP of UP Police said, If the officer has been killed for professional reasons, as it seems so, its a very serious matter. The most important question is whether it was done at the behest of any foreign agency fearing that Pakistans role in the Pathankot airbase attack would get exposed, or due to some other motives. Here, the motive is very important,

Another angle of eliminating Tanzil could be that the local operators of any Islamic terror outfit felt that how could a Muslim gather evidences against fellow Muslims, Singh said, who was also former DGP of Border Security Force.

The manner in which Tanzil was brutally gunned down exhibits a strong grudge and reflects on the extreme hatred of the killers.

Maj Gen Dhruv C Katoch, former director, Centre for Land Warfare & Studies,said, Tanzil was probably getting closer to the truth. Its important to find out the forces behind the two killers. Theres also a drug angle in the Pathankot case. In Punjab, theres an unholy nexus between a section of politicians across party lines, bureaucrats, police and drug mafia.

Did Tanzil get to know the names of those involved in the attack or supporting a terror outfit? If the investigators fail to find out the people and their motive behind the NIA officers killing, then there wont be any incentive for the police to investigate serious cases of terror, etc, Katoch said, without ruling out the possibility of a local political angle.

Any involvement of local political authorities also needs to be exploredunder whose patronage did the local operators of terror outfits flourish? Its all about vote bank politics and the criminals easily get away with crimes due to political patronage, added Katoch, a defence analyst.

Prior to the Pathankot airbase attack on 2 January, a similar terror attack took place in Gurdaspur in July 2015. In both the cases, terrorists stormed the target locations with ease and as a result, the role of sleeper cells has been probed.

Counter-terrorism analyst Anil Kamboj remarked, It was very clear in the terror attacks in both Gurdaspur and Pathankot that without local support from sleeper cells, the terrorists from across the border couldnt have made it in so easily.

This question has been raised several times. And now in the case of Tanzil too, the role of sleeper cells cant be ruled out. May be he got close to knowing the names of the operators of sleeper cells backed by some strong forces. It needs to be probed and revealed. Kamboj said.

Bijnor-- A SIMI hotbed: any connection?

According to sources, Bijnor district has been a hotbed for the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists. Its noteworthy that after Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had announced the renewal of a five-year ban on SIMI in September 2014, the sleeper cells of the banned outfit made its presence felt during investigations in the Bijnor bomb blast case.

During investigation, a small liquid petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder (2.5 kg capacity) fitted with wires, two electronic chips (circuits), a metal pipe and two cartons of match boxes were recovered from the house where the blast had taken place.

According to police sources, the CCTV footage revealed the identities of five suspects, seen taking their badly burnt aide to a local doctor. All five of these men were alleged SIMI activists who escaped after breaking out of a jail in Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh.

SIMI has a modus operandi of using matchstick sulphur as their signature in terror attacks outside Uttar Pradesh. In at least a dozen incidents of terror attacks in southern states, SIMIs signature had helped investigators to zero in on the accused.

Were probing into all possible links, including involvement of locals in this case, a police source added.
Hours after Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police (DGP) Javeed Ahmad gave a good dressing down to the field staff, specially the district Superintendents of Police (SPs), in his Police Week address, a National Investigation Agency (NIA) functionary was sprayed with bullets about 325 km from the state capital.

The incident proved that the DGPs concern was serious. Though the extent of the damage done may be ascertained later, the crime surely raises a question mark on the policing in the state.

Mohammed Tanzil, a liaison officer with the NIA probing Pathankot terrorist attack in India, was killed near Sahaspur, under Syohara police station area in Bijnor district, when he was returning after attending the marriage of his niece, late Saturday night.

He and his wife, also injured in the attack, were rushed to Cosmos hospital in Moradabad, but Tanzil succumbed. His wife, who was shifted to Kailash Hospital in Noida, is in serious condition. NIA officials and IG, UP Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) Aseem Arun have already reached the spot and is investigating the killing of Tanzil, in view of the sensitive nature of his present assignment.

Tanzil, originally from the Border Security Force, was a liaison officer of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), when officials from Pakistan had come to visit the Pathankot air base. The police, however, is tight-lipped over the nature of attack, as his assailants came out of nowhere on motorcycles and managed to escape the spot after shooting him 21 times. The slain officer's brother, Ranghib, has refused to believe his brother could have personal enmity with anyone as he was viewed as a jovial person.

When contacted, UP DGP Javeed Ahmad said as per the preliminary reports, the assailants had come from the nearby village and prima facie, it doesn't look like a part of a broader plan or any terrorist ramifications. "It is early to reach any conclusions," he added.

No matter what emerges after the probe into this case, the law and order situation of Uttar Pradesh is going to be under a cloud once again. Senior officers are being defied everyday by subordinates who get postings from somewhere at the top and can afford to ignore the superior officers. This incident provides ample scope to discuss UPs law and order afresh.

In his address at Police Week, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was right when he said the functioning of police reflects the image of the government. As always, Akhilesh was apt in theory, but in terms of implementation, he is seen to fall short of what is required in the state with a population of 21 crore.

At least in the last year of his government, he should understand that he needs to put in place some really good police officers.

"Statistics of over a lakh murders, and about 3,000 rapes during the last four years speak volumes of the law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh, the state BJP president Laxmikant Bajpayee says.
Editor's note: Amnesty International India's Executive Director Aakar Patel had argued in his weekly column for Firstpost that Kulbhushan Jadhav, the Indian jailed in Pakistan for spying, and who was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on 10 April, couldn't possibly be engaged in espionage for Research and Analysis Wing, India's spy agency. We've reproduced his column in full.

An Indian in Pakistan, Kulbhushan Jadhav, has been accused of being a spy from Research and Analysis Wing, referred to by its acronym, RAW.

Reports from Pakistan say that the man was caught after speaking to his family in Marathi over the cellphone. Calls from Pakistan to India are of course monitored and so the man was traced. He was also carrying his Indian passport. This seems like a very different sort of spy than the ones we see in movies, who carry fake passports and are highly trained. I will be very surprised if this individual turns out to be from RAW.

This is because RAW agents, just like CIA and Mossad and ISI agents, are usually posted in embassies, with diplomatic passports. I read somewhere the current National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, was apparently in Pakistan on such a posting. However, so far as I know he was in the Intelligence Bureau and not RAW.

The IB (it is also known by its short form) is the internal spying agency, focussed on spying on Indians. If you want to say it more politely, you could say spying on activities in India.

If Doval was IB, what was he doing in Pakistan? I am not sure, and much of the activities of the two spying agencies are known to us only through rumour and not fact.

Sometimes even RAW chiefs do not know what is going on inside RAW. Ten years ago, Outlook magazine reported that RAW had a policy of not hiring Muslims. None of its 15,000 or so employees was Muslim. When Reuters reported the story, it spoke to AS Dulat, the former RAW chief, who said he "did not recall coming across any Muslims in the organisation", adding that if we do not have any Muslims obviously this is a handicap" and if there are no Muslims, there must have been a reluctance to take them in. It is also not easy to find that many Muslims."

Another former RAW chief Girish Chandra Saxena said, the need for Muslim officers in intelligence-gathering is acute," and there are very few people who have knowledge of Urdu or Arabic. The issue has to be addressed.

If the need is acute and it is a handicap, then why not just hire them? I do not know.

As someone who has done track-two work, I have met some former ISI chiefs and one of them, Asad Durrani, I have known for some years now because we wrote for the same newspaper.

My experience of the ISI came some time ago when I was visiting Harappa, which is a couple of hours' drive from Lahore. I was there to see the Indus Valley Civilisation, which is beautifully preserved.

I first went there many years ago, and before I reached the ticket counter, the man had issued tickets for foreigners, which cost much more than those for locals. I asked him how he knew I was not a local and he said: "Yahan koi Pakistani nahin aate."

This time, when I went to the ticket counter I was given locals' tickets and I did not declare my Indian status. Inside the complex, a man in shalwar qameez asked us where we had come from and we said, honestly, "Lahore". He left. Our guide, who knew, then said that the ISI was keeping a record of all foreigners in the area. When we were exiting, the man again stopped us and asked us for the national identity cards that all Pakistanis carry. We were caught and taken to the ISI office, which was inside the complex. There our passport details were noted down and we were sent off after being scolded for being evasive. "Don't you know how dangerous it is for foreigners?"

I said earlier that RAW agents usually travelled on diplomatic passports. My experience with RAW is from October 2001, when I was in Afghanistan to cover the war. To reach there we had to go through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and wait in Dushanbe for the next convoy. In the hotel, I met two middle aged Indian men, in suits and tie, who were at breakfast every morning and the bar in the evening. The rest of us were reporters from all over the world but these two men were different.

When our convoy reached the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border, our passports were checked by Russian soldiers. All the reporters went through but the Russians sent those two Indian men back to Dushanbe.

I returned to the hotel two weeks later, after my assignment ended. I had fallen off a horse into a river and the visa stamps on my passport were smudged. This worried me. At the hotel, the taxi that was driving me to Uzbekistan broke down and I was standing with my backpack wondering what to do, when one of the two men, who were still there, asked where I was going. He offered me a lift (they were in a white Mercedes Benz). At the border, I pulled out my passport to get it stamped while the men remained in the car. I began explaining to the officer my story but he took one look at the two men and waved me off. That is when I finally realised who the men were.

I was ignorant, but Russian soldiers and Uzbek officers could pick out RAW men at a glance.
Coimbatore: Questioning China's move to block an attempt in the United Nations to get JeM chief Masood Azhar designated as a terrorist, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu has said Beijing should understand that "today it is India (which is targeted by terror), tomorrow it may be your turn".

He also said Pakistan should give up its "old habit" of finding fault with India and stop "aiding and abetting" terrorism so that the two countries can have close ties.

"I do not know the reason why China blocked the proposal to ban Azhar. He is a notorious terrorist and should be banned," the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister told reporters here.

"Today it is India, tomorrow it may be your (China) turn," he added.

India had on Sunday slammed China's virtual veto to prevent the banning of Pathankot terror strike mastermind Azhar, saying it "does not reflect well on the determination that the international community needs to display to decisively defeat the menace of terrorism".

The statement, however, did not mention China by name.

Asked about claims by Pakistan that there was no evidence with India about its abetment of terror, Naidu said there is enough evidence against the neighbouring country and "they should leave their old habit of finding fault with India".

"If Pakistan puts a full stop on aiding, abetting, training and funding terrorists, India and Pakistan can come much closer, work together, since both the countries were once one and were separated for reasons," he said.

"India wants to have a good relationship with Pakistan," Naidu said.

He claimed that for the first time in the history of United Nations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had raised the issue of terrorism and said it was unfortunate that UN was still unable to define terrorism.

The entire world and international community should come together and crush the danger and menace of terrorism, Naidu said.
Tezpur: Infiltration and developing the town as a tourist destination are the two key issues which are likely to agitate the voters' mind in deciding the fate of candidates in the prestigious Tezpur constituency during the Assam Assembly polls.

Prominent citizens from the town, which is also termed as the cultural hub of Assam and is going to poll in the first phase on 4 April, are of the view that neither the state government nor the Centre is playing a positive role in solving the problems of Assam.

"Tezpur's main problem is the presence of a huge number of infiltrators in and around the town in the last 10 years. While the state is doing nothing, the Centre is also not paying full attention to the problem and giving a step-motherly treatment to Assam," veteran film actor Rajeev K

Doley told PTI in Tezpur.

For the rise of Bengali-speaking Muslim population in Tezpur, he blamed both Congress and BJP ally AGP.

In last Assembly polls in 2011, the Tezpur seat went to Congress' Rajen Borthakur who was later expelled from the party due to dissident activities, while AGP's Brindaban Goswami had won the 2006 polls.

Congress has this time fielded young candidate Hiranya Bhuyan against Goswami who is a veteran in regional politics and has a considerable support base in Tezpur.

Doley, who is also the Director of Centre for Inclusive Development in Tezpur University, said an expert team should be formed comprising ground workers and socio-cultural researcher to study the infiltration problem rather than constituting any Parliamentary or Assembly committee.

"Deportation of foreigners is not a practical solution anymore. We need to evolve an appropriate mechanism to deal with the problem and ensure that we do not allow aliens to enter further from today," he added.

Tezpur Sahitya Sabha President Hemanta Barua said it will be a fight between the junior and senior in Tezpur with chances of Goswami being more because of his popularity.

"In Tezpur, there are many issues which are likely to agitate the people's mind during voting. Beautification of the town, development of roads and flash flood issues are important. Many things can be done for tourism development of the place also," he added.

Barua claimed people are not fully satisfied with Goswami as he was MLA earlier also but did not do enough for the constituency.

"AIUDF, which have fielded a Bengali Hindu candidate Sukhendra Nath in Tezpur, can play a spoilsport for both the parties. If he gets minority votes, then Congress will be in problem and if the Bengali Hindu votes go to him, then AGP will be in problem, he explained.

Veteran film actor Prithviraj Rabha claimed around 60 percent votes will go to AIUDF and rest to Congress in east of Tezpur, where primarily Muslim voters are there.

"So the votes in town will decide who will win and who will lose... There are as such no big problem in Tezpur, but we all feel that the city could have been developed as an important tourist destination. No party has worked in this direction," he added.

Rabha, son of the doyen of Assamese culture and a Communist leader Kalaguru Bishnu Prasad Rabha, criticised both the state and central governments for lack of overall development of Assam.

Film editor A Nagraj said the blamegame between parties over insider-outsider is hampering the "holistic development" of the state and it should end immediately.

"All outsiders, including those from other states, came here because local authorities and people allowed them. Assam's economy is dependent on them. If they leave now, the entire economy will collapse," said Nagraj, who is also a faculty member of Tezpur University.
The Vice-President of India, like the President or the Prime Minister, represents the whole country  all the people, and not just some of them, or the community he or she comes from. Unfortunately, the Vice-President of India, Hamid Ansari, has sometimes been talking like a spokesman for Muslims in India. This is not his job.

On 2 April, Ansari must have raised hackles all around when he called on the Supreme Court to reflect on how minorities can be protected from majoritarianism and clarify the contours within which the principles of secularism and composite culture should operate with a view to strengthen their functional modality and remove ambiguities

He also wondered aloud, without any sense of irony, whether Indian democracy may not be better served with a more complete separation of religion and politics  when this is precisely what Muslim organisations oppose. Throughout Indias journey from 1947, Muslim institutions have opposed a uniform civil code, the triple talaq and several other things. Recently, the Jamiat-e-Islami-e-Hind had the effrontery to tell the Supreme Court it had no business looking into triple talaq, a simple gender rights issue that should have nothing to do with religion. Nor has he spoken aggressively against the Haj subsidy, something that directly brings the state into a religious activity.

Ansari also didnt stop to think whether Indias brand of secularism is impacting Hindus more than Muslims, where states directly control major temples (Tirupati in Andhra, Siddhivinayak in Maharashtra, and Sabarimala in Kerala). The state directly controls thousands of temples in the south, and even in some places in the north. Nor does he even seem aware that courts happily intervene in Hindu religious practices, but never those of Muslims or Christians. The constitutional protections given to minorities to run their own religious and cultural institutions excludes Hindu institutions in practice.

Also, is Ansari unaware of recent history, where Hindus have been ethnically cleansed from two neighbouring countries, and also from a Muslim majority state in India (J&K)? Majoritarianism, if it existed, would never have allowed the majority community to be cleansed from one of its states.

It is possible to take a more charitable view of Ansaris speech, but given the context in which he asked for these clarifications, it is obvious that he is only talking about Muslim concerns when the state is run by the BJP, which has obvious links to Hindu organisations.

At the outset one must make it clear that the Sangh parivar has not helped matters by making nationalism a big issue, especially its narrow view of it, including the need for Indians to chant Bharat Mata ki Jai or Vande Mataram. The beef controversy was not only avoidable, but needed opposing. What people will eat, wear or speak cannot be imposed from above, whichever be the party in power. This statement applies equally to narrow definitions of secularism, where the Sangh alone is designated as communal, excluding many parties that are caste-based or based on support of minority communities (as in Hyderabad, Assam, J&K, Kerala and elsewhere). Sickularism is as bad as narrow nationalism.

However, Ansari has shown that he too is not above sectarian thinking from the way he is voicing the concerns of Muslims to the exclusion of the so-called majority.

Consider his various other statements, made at the 16th convention of Jammu University:

He said any public discourse on India being a secular republic with a composite culture cannot overlook Indias heterogeneityA population of 1.3 billion comprising over 4,635 communities religious minorities constitute 19.4 percent of the total Our democratic polity and its secular state structure were put in place in full awareness of this plurality. There was no suggestion to erase identities and homogenise them.

One must ask: who is seeking to erase plurality? It is not the Sangh or the BJP government, despite the outlandish statements made by some members of the Sangh on Bharat mata ki jai. It is interesting that till some time ago, the Left used to proclaim Indias composite culture in order to deny its Hindu underpinnings; now Ansari is rubbishing the whole idea of a composite culture and says India is about 4,635 communities.

Then he contradicts himself by referring to 19.4 percent minorities, as though they are some solid block that needs defending from the remaining 80-and-odd percent majoritarians. If India is a composite of 4,635 communities, we are all minorities and Hindus are not one solid phalanx of religious unity. There is no majority or minority. And certainly a Muslim population of 180 million cannot by any stretch of imagination be called a minority.

Ansari also failed to look at his own communitys efforts to erase plurality, with organisations like the Tabligh seeking to weed out any traces of Indian influence in Islam  worship at dargahs, veneration of pirs, etc. In Tamil Nadu, where Muslims were till recently more Tamils than Muslims, there is a concerted effort to Wahhabise them.

Elsewhere too, Muslims are learning to grow beards to emphasise difference rather than common citizenship, and even something as basic as Ramzan is being Arabised as Ramadan in some quarters. Ansaris silence on this deliberate effort to separate Muslims from Indian syncretism is eloquent.

If attempts to homogenise Indians are reprehensible, surely attempts to homogenise Muslims are equally reprehensible?

Ansari also said that the three accepted characteristics of a secular state were liberty to practise religion, equality between religions in state practice, and neutrality or a fence of separation between the state and religion.

There is no bar on anyone practising any religion in India. So the first point exists in India. The second, equality between religions, does not exist, because Indian politicians have used the rights of minorities under Articles 25-30 (to run their own institutions without state interference) to ringfence minority institutions but Hindu institutions have become personal fiefs of politicians to run their rackets. We have made a mockery of Article 14, which guarantees equality before the law, by excluding Hindu institutions from the right to administer their own institutions. And some laws primarily apply to Hindus. A recent case in point is the Bombay High Court decision to force the Shani Shingnapur temple to give women the same rights as men (which is commendable) to enter the sanctum sanctorum. But the same is not explicitly applicable to the Haji Ali Dargah or other mosques.

And then Ansari made this remark: The difficulty lies in delineating, for purposes of public policy and practice, the line that separates them from religion The way of life argument, used in philosophical texts and some judicial pronouncements, does not help identify common principles of equity in a multi-religious society. Since a wall of separation is not possible under Indian conditions, the challenge is to develop a formula for equidistance and minimum involvement. For this purpose, principles of faith need to be segregated from contours of culture since a conflation of the two obfuscates the boundaries of both. (italics mine)

Since it is obvious that only Hinduism describes itself as a way of life, Ansaris target is clear: he wants the state de-Hinduised. Not objectionable in itself, but Ansari seems to want not only separation of state from religion, but also culture from religion. This is the only interpretation one can give to his statement that principles of faith need to be segregated from contours of culture since a conflation of the two obfuscates the boundaries of both.

Can faith really be hermetically sealed from the culture in which it grows? Is there no such thing as Indian Islam, where elements of local culture are inextricably mixed with elements of Islam?

Is Ansari a closet fundamentalist, who wants his faith to be untainted by local culture?

In fact, he contradicts himself again when he uses a quote from Left historian KN Pannikar, who said: Whether India developed as a melting pot of cultures or only remained a salad bowl is no more the issue. The crucial question is whether Indian culture is conceived as a static phenomenon, tracing its identity to a single unchanging source, or a dynamic phenomenon, critically and creatively interrogating all that is new.

This Pannikar observation was meant to tell Hindus to stop looking only at their past for identity validation, but Ansari seems to want to retain Indian Islam is a pure state that has nothing to do with local culture. Does he want to deny the right of Islam in India to Indianise by critically and creatively interrogating all that is new? If Muslims want to sing Vande Mataram, as AR Rahman did, would Ansari think this is an unwarranted mixture of culture and religion?

The real tragedy is that Ansari has reduced himself to a spokesman for his community rather than the Vice-President of all of India. And this is not the first time he has done so. In September last year, he made a specific plea to give Muslims reservations in jobs, when the constitution does not allow quotas based on religion.

Ansari has to be make up his mind whether he is just a Muslim or the V-P of India who happens to be a Muslim.
New York: Donald Trump says he regrets retweeting an unflattering picture of the wife of arch-rival Ted Cruz, in a rare act of contrition from the Republican presidential frontrunner.

Trump is in pole position to seize the Republican nomination but is doing poorly nationwide among women voters, polls show, and faced stern criticism from all sides in recent days after saying women who have illegal abortions should be "punished," before he backtracked.

The billionaire real-estate mogul has been engaged in an increasingly personal war of words with Cruz, his nearest challenger in the Republican race for the White House, that even drew in their wives.

An anti-Trump political group unveiled a controversial campaign ad ahead of votes in Arizona and Utah last month that used a GQ magazine photograph of Trump's wife Melania lying naked and handcuffed to a briefcase.

Cruz denied being behind the ad, which was accompanied by the words: "Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady."

Trump then retweeted a photo compilation of an unflattering photo of Cruz's wife Heidi next to Melania, a Slovenian-American jewellery designer and former model.

"Yeah, it was a mistake," Trump said of the retweet, talking to The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in a column published Saturday.

"If I had to do it again, I wouldnt have sent it."
The marijuana decriminalization movement appears to be set up for one doozy of an election season.

Once a taboo topic that politicians would avoid at all costs, marijuana legalization has become a closely followed national issue -- and for good reason. Pretty much all polls have shown that a majority of the American public is now in favor of legalizing marijuana. Surveys from Pew Research Center and General Social Survey showed a modest majority holding that view, whereas the latest polls from Gallup and AP-NORC resulted in 58% and 61% of respondents in favor, respectively.

Why the push to legalize is so powerful

The core constituencies for this support can be divided into three groups.

First, there are those who would benefit from greater access to medical marijuana. Medical marijuana is currently approved in 23 states, and a 24th could be right around the corner. Although each of those states has a different list of ailments that marijuana can legally be used to treat, glaucoma and certain terminal cancers are common to them.

Secondly, there are those who simply want the freedom to purchase marijuana for recreational purposes without the fear of local, state, or federal prosecution.

Finally, the third category are legislators who are looking for new ways to generate tax revenue without completely crushing the pocketbooks of their constituents. Marijuana certainly serves that purpose, since taxes on it only impact the businesses involved with, and the customers who buy, marijuana-based products. Since those taxes would affect only a minority of the population, the idea of them has generally been well-received.

Colorado has been the hallmark early example of success for legal recreational marijuana. The state logged nearly $1 billion in cumulative sales and $135 million in tax and licensing revenue in 2015. That was up 42% from 2014, when recreational marijuana first became legally available for sale within the state.

Three reasons California is marijuana's crown jewel

But for as much as Colorado has been a shining success for the legal marijuana industry, it's far from its crown jewel. That title would go to California, which is expected to have a recreational marijuana initiative on the ballot this coming November. If marijuana were legalized for recreational use in California, it would be the biggest win so far for the movement, and it would likely remain its most important victory shy of the federal government changing its stance on the drug.

Here are three reasons in particular why the California ballot initiative is so important to the marijuana movement.

1. California's economy is monstrously large

For starters, California has the largest economy in the United States by a mile. In fact, according to World Bank GDP estimates from 2014, if California were a country, it would rank as the eighth-largest economy in the world, trailing only the U.S. (excluding California), China, Japan, Germany, U.K., France and Brazil. It's larger than Russia, India, Canada or Australia. That enormous size could mean a profound jump in annual marijuana sales, as well as in the taxes and licensing fees generated by them.

However, don't forget that marijuana's expansion is about more than just tax revenue. It also creates jobs in the growing, processing, selling, consulting, financing, and even software industries. An approval in California would more than likely spur some job creation there, a win for both the state and the nation as a whole.

2. California's existing dispensary network is massive

If you thought Oregon was well-prepared for the approval of recreational marijuana with 250-plus medical marijuana dispensaries already in place, it has nothing on California which has somewhere between 500 and 1,000 marijuana dispensaries and clubs. Having this foundation in existence prior to approval would make it extremely easy to "flip the switch" and allow these dispensaries to begin selling marijuana for recreational purposes.

But the bigger factor here is that this infrastructure allows California's legal marijuana market to better compete against the black market. The more competition there is, presumably the more growers and shops there will be, creating an environment that drives down legal marijuana prices. Whether legal prices in California will be competitive enough to cannibalize the black market remains to be seen, but the infrastructure is certainly there for some switching to be observed.

3. California will draw big names

Finally, California's size means the ballot initiative fight is likely attract some of the largest and most high-profile donors to the campaign.

For example, in December, Sean Parker, the billionaire founder of music and file-sharing service Napster (which is now a part of Rhapsody) pledged to match donations for a measure to legalize cannabis in California on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Leafly estimates that Parker's optimism (and matching donations) could wind up costing the billionaire as much as $20 million.

Other high-profile names could also play major roles. Calvin Broadus, whom you probably know better as rapper Snoop Dogg, has been a regular investor in the Los Angeles medical marijuana market and even in marijuana delivery services. Snoop Dogg has a huge fan following, as do a number of actors and comedians who have come out in favor of legalization. These celebrities can be expected to use their fame to push for legalization in America's most-populous state.

Now for the bad news

Although California's grassroots campaign to legalize recreational marijuana may result in an approval this November, it still doesn't mean that common investors like you and me should be anywhere near the marijuana industry. Until the federal government decides to change its tune, the industry will continue to find itself behind the eight-ball.

Arguably the biggest issue is that the marijuana industry has no easy access to capital or basic banking services. Most states that have medical marijuana laws on their books allow for banks to follow a long list of regulations in order to serve the industry. Yet banks, in general, are avoiding marijuana-based businesses altogether for fear of federal prosecution at a future date. Most marijuana businesses can't even get checking accounts let alone lines of credit, meaning cash is king in the marijuana business, and security is a serious problem.

The other problem is corporate income taxes. Marijuana may be federally illegal, but marijuana businesses are still expected to pay taxes. As salt in the wound, marijuana businesses aren't allowed to take normal business deductions for things like rent, because they're selling a federally illegal substance. Long story short, marijuana-based businesses are paying far more than their fair share in taxes.

These factors are all you need to know as an investor to raise the red warning flag. Regardless of how quickly the marijuana business expands at the state level, it's federal legalization that matters most for investors.
On the surface, ONEOK (OKE 2.78%) appears to be a rock-solid dividend stock. Not only does it offer a very generous 8.5% yield, but that yield is backed by a solid 1.3 times distribution coverage ratio. That being said, below the surface there are some concerns, not necessarily with ONEOK, but with its MLP ONEOK Partners (OKS). Because of those concerns, and the implication they have for ONEOK, investors might want to consider some other energy dividend stocks instead.

Drilling down into the issues at ONEOK Partners

Lower oil and gas prices have created some challenges for ONEOK Partners because not all of its midstream contracts are fee-based. That has it directly exposed to commodity prices, which has put downward pressure on the company's earnings. It's a situation it is working to address by restructuring some of its contracts to fee-based contracts.

That said, even with those contract restructurings the company still will have some direct exposure to commodity prices. However, it estimates that it will still earn enough to completely cover its distribution, though with no room to spare. The problem is that this estimate is based on oil averaging $40 to $45 a barrel this year, which is not something it has done yet this year. Worse yet, if oil weakens it could cause the company to really miss the mark and possibly cut its distribution, which could impact the payout at parent company ONEOK. It's a risk that some investors might want to avoid this year.

A safer MLP option

Sticking with the MLP theme, Enterprise Products Partners (EPD 0.08%) is a much safer income option because, unlike ONEOK Partners, it doesn't already pay out all its cash flow to investors. Instead, it retains a substantial portion of its cash flow with its payout ratio averaging a much more robust 1.4 times over the past five years. Enterprise Products Partners uses that cash flow to help fund growth projects, with the company currently in the process of building $6.6 billion in primarily fee-based assets. These assets are expected to fuel 5.2% distribution growth this year, juicing an already generous 6.35% payout for Enterprise Products Partners' investors.

A refined dividend growth story

While dividend growth certainly isn't in the cards for ONEOK investors, it's something that can be expected at Valero Energy (VLO 2.65%). In fact, after boosting its payout 80% last year, the company has already increased its dividend by 20% this year. It has plenty of room to keep increasing that payout because unlike ONEOK, which pays out roughly two-thirds of its cash flow, Valero's payout ratio is much safer, only in the mid-20% range:

Not only does the company have plenty of room to grow its payout given that ratio, but it's actually the beneficiary of low oil prices. Those low prices not only reduce the input costs at its refineries, but they fuel stronger demand for gasoline. In fact, last year was the best year for gasoline demand in the U.S. since before the financial crisis, and demand this year has been coming in much higher than projected. All of which points to Valero's ability to increase its dividend even more this year.

An oil company with a boatload of cash

Oil and gas producers have been the hardest hit during the downturn due to their very direct exposure to those weakening commodity prices. That has forced a lot of these companies to reduce or suspend dividend payouts because they lack either the cash or the cash flow to both fund capex and their dividends. Occidental Petroleum (OXY 3.50%), on the other hand, has been able to avoid this pain thanks to a cash-rich balance sheet as well as outside sources of cash that are flowing into its coffers this year.

As of the end of last year Occidental Petroleum's cash balance stood at $4.4 billion. Furthermore, the company was expecting to receive another $900 million in cash from a legal settlement and $300 million in proceeds from asset sales. Add it up and the company's cash on hand alone can fully cover its expected $3 billion capex budget and its $2.23 billion dividend outlay with room to spare. That is before factoring in cash flow from operations, which last quarter was $944 million at a low-to-mid $40 oil price. In other words, this is an oil dividend that's not at risk of being cut in 2016 and could even head higher.

Investor takeaway

While the chance is remote that ONEOK will be forced to cut its payout this year, that doesn't diminish the fact that the risk is still there. Investors that want to avoid the risk of seeing their dividend cut this year, might want to take a look at Valero, Enterprise Products Partners, or Occidental Petroleum. All three companies have payouts that appear to be on solid ground in 2016, even if oil prices take another tumble.
While online shopping has both doomed some retailers and saved others, discount chain Big Lots (BIG) doesn't even sell things on its website (though it does have plans to change that).

Instead, while rivals like Wal-Mart (WMT 2.02%) invest tens, if not hundreds, of millions in improving their e-commerce platforms, the closeout specialist has focused on customer experience as delivered by its employees. That strategy has helped the chain, which saw its same-store sales decline in 2012 and 2013, turn things around.

In Q4 2015 the company achieved its eighth straight quarter of comparable store growth with a 0.7% increase. In addition, Big Lots saw a 1.8% same-store sales increase in fiscal 2015, and reported adjusted income from continuing operations of $2.97 per diluted share (non-GAAP), representing a 21% increase compared to fiscal 2014.

Those are healthy numbers that show the company has come back strong. But what is most interesting about Big Lots' future prospects may be the one thing its CEO David Campisi is not worried about -- rising minimum wages.

Other retailers are concerned

An improving economy and increasing political pressure have forced a number of companies to increase their wages above mandated minimums. In some cases, where the retailers did not take steps themselves, various municipalities have increased minimum wages.

Wal-Mart is one of the companies that has pre-emptively started paying its lowest-paid employees more. The world's largest retailer raised wages in January, paying all employees hired before Jan. 1, 2016 at least $10 an hour. New entry-level associates still start at $9 an hour but will move to at least $10 an hour after successfully completing the company's new retail skills and training program. The chain also adjusted its pay higher at other levels of hourly employees bringing its average hourly wage to $13.38.

Unlike Columbus, Ohio-based Big Lots, which does not expect voluntary or forced minimum pay increases to hurt its business, Wal-Mart noted in its Q4 earnings report that expected investments in people (and technology) caused operating income to drop by 11.2% in its fiscal 2016, which closed Jan. 29, 2016. The company expects that pain will to continue to be felt in its fiscal 2017.

"The impact from incremental investments in wages and training in the U.S. is projected to be approximately $0.30 per share for the full year," said the earnings release. "As a result of the timing of wage investments, the company expects the first quarter will be affected somewhat more on a year-over-year basis than in subsequent quarters."

What is Big Lots saying?

Campisi said his company has not been affected by national efforts to raise the minimum wage during a recent call with analysts, reported The Columbus Dispatch.

"We are not feeling that at all," Campisi said. "We have a lot of long-term associates out there, an amazing team of people that have been with us 10, 15, 20 years that are making way over minimum wage because they've been with us for a long time."

The Big Lots CEO said he believed that his employees were also attracted and retained by the chain's 20% employee discount. It's "a big selling tool for our human-resources team when we recruit," he said, noting the deal "is significantly different" from the discounts offered by competitors.

"I believe the overall package, when you roll it all together, is very compelling," Campisi said.

Retaining employees is key

While Wal-Mart is doling out raises to stay ahead of being forced to do so, Big Lots appears to be building a culture where longevity is rewarded. That's a smart play, and one which can also help recruit employees because they see a path not just for advancement, but to earn more money. It makes the chain's starting wages less relevant, because workers looking at the big picture see where they can get to.

Campisi clearly believes that compensating people fairly ultimately saves money, and that happy employees benefit the chain's relationship with its customers. That's a healthier view than Wal-Mart's not-very-well disguised position that paying reasonable wages is an unfortunately necessary drag on earnings.

Ultimately, in addition to helping the chain raise sales, giving regular raises to its employees could save Big Lots money. If the economy continues to improve and employees could earn more money elsewhere, they may be less likely to leave if they have been well-treated all along.

Rising wages won't impair Big Lots turnaround because they have already been priced in, and if they go up further, the chain will simply leverage its even happier workers to grow its business even more. That prediction may sound naive, but for this retailer, that's how it appears to be working.
Source: Disney.

Yesterday was the last day for several attractions atDisney's least visited Florida theme park. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set Adventure -- the long-standing attraction where kids play on a super-sized backyard playground -- and the Lights, Motors, Action! Extreme Stunt Show closed on Saturday. Several nearby attractions, shops, restaurants, and character greeting areas will also be joining Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set Adventure and Lights, Motors, Action! Extreme Stunt Show in being unavailable to guests starting today.

Disney has a very good reason for shutting down the heart of its Streets of America section, a move that will find even the park's iconic mouse-eared water tower eventually coming down. This is the back of the park where Star Wars Land and Toy Story Land will ultimately rise, transforming Disney's Hollywood Studios from a dud to a rock star in its theme park empire.

It can't happen soon enough. Disney's Hollywood Studios recently saw Animal Kingdom pass it up to be Disney World's third most visited attraction. With rivalComcastmaking big gains at its movie-themed park and Islands of Adventure sibling, Disney can't afford to phone it in anymore. It can't let Disney's Hollywood Studios be the afterthought that it has been over the past few years. Just check out the annual attendance trends at the six Central Florida parks owned by Disney or Comcast over the past five years through 2014, the last year that we have official third-party data.

Theme Park 2009 2014 Change Magic Kingdom 17,233,000 19,332,000 12.2% Epcot 10,990,000 11,454,000 4.2% Animal Kingdom 9,590,000 10,402,000 8.5% Hollywood Studios 9,700,000 10,312,000 6.3% Universal Studios Florida 5,530,000 8,263,000 49.4% Islands of Adventure 4,627,000 8,141,000 75.9%

Source: Themed Entertainment Association.

The dramatic growth spurt at Comcast-owned parks since 2009 can be attributed largely to the Harry Potter-themed expansion at both of its Florida gated attractions, but Comcast has also been active in expanding and updating Universal Studios Florida with more relevant rides. Disney's Hollywood Studios has been scaling back during that time, so it's not a surprise to see the park gain just 612,000 in annual attendance over five years while its rival a few minutes away is greeting 2.733 million more guests a year than it was five years earlier.

This will all change of course. Toy Story Land and Star Wars Land will breathe new life into a park that will likely bear a new name by the time those two expansions are complete. The rub is that it will take several years for that experience to materialize, and Disney's Hollywood Studios will have voids to fill as hardhats take over significant sections of the park. It will be an issue. The vehicle stunt show had capacity for 5,000 guests several times a day. The Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set Adventure gave young children a unique playground to unwind in a park that has few actual rides suitable for the younger set. With Disney prices inching higher every year -- it now costs as much as $114 plus tax for a one-day ticket to Disney's Hollywood Studios -- it can't afford to be barren for too long. You can only fool park guests for so long passing off Star Wars-themed short films and fireworks shows as marquee attractions.

Disney should have done a better job of preparing its least visited Florida park for the lull before its ambitious dreams become a marketable reality. Comcast got it right. It's odd to see Disney blow it here.

The article Disney World's Least Popular Park Shrinks Again originally appeared on Fool.com.

Rick Munarriz owns shares of Walt Disney. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Walt Disney. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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With each passing year, a handful of the world's best-selling drugs lose patent protection, and when that happens it can blow a hole in the top line of even the largest drugmakers. To help offset the revenue decline, many big pharma companies shell out billions of dollars on acquisitions in an effort to build out their portfolio of products and stabilize their sales.

Whenever an acquisition is announced, the shares of the targeted company tend to skyrocket, and any investors who were smart enough (or lucky enough) to have bought the stock before the acquisition announcement tend to score a huge profit.

Knowing that, we reached out to a team of our Motley Fool healthcare analysts and asked them to share a company that they think could be the shopping list of one of the big boys in the industry. Read on to see what companies they singled out.

Kristine Harjes: Johnson & Johnsons CEO Alex Gorsky has been very upfront about wanting his company to engage in M&A but keep a focus on small opportunities. Gorsky is looking for the next Imbruvica the next Darzalex the next minimally invasive surgery platform with a contact lens, as he put it at this years J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. Once such an opportunity is found, Johnson & Johnson can then leverage its expertise to grow it into a blockbuster drug.

It seems like no secret to me where this next opportunity lies: Johnson & Johnson has already expressed interest in small-cap Geron and its lead compound imetelstat. Imetelstat in phase 2 studies for a treating myelofibrosis -- and based on data so far, it looks like if it clears FDA approval it has a good shot at displacing the current new standard of care.

Why would Johnson & Johnson take the plunge and acquire Geron? Id argue that the value proposition is extremely strong. While its hard to measure the valuation of a company without any revenue, Gerons sub-$500 million market cap is tiny for a company with a promising compound that could become the big dog in a $2 billion market.

Plus, Johnson & Johnson has already invested $35 million as an upfront payment in a collaboration agreement with Geron on imetelstat. And thats just the beginning. The agreement also puts Johnson & Johnson on the hook for up to another $900 million in potential milestone payments -- the sum of which, Ill point out, is double Gerons market cap. If Johnson & Johnson believes imetelstat will continue its promising track, the pharma giant would be remiss to pass up on buying Geron in its entirety now.

Brian Feroldi: One company I could easily see catching a buyout offer isAcadia Pharmaceuticals . Currently, Acadia is still just a clinical-stage biopharma, but that could change later this year if its lead compound, Nuplazid, manages to win regulatory approval. The drug is currently in the FDA's hands as a potential treatment for Parkinson's disease psychosis, and its PDUFA date is May 1, so we won't have to wait long to see if the drug will find its way to market.

I think the odds of an approval are quite good. An FDA advisory committee recently voted 12-2 in favor. and voted on whether they think the drug should win approval. While those results don't guarantee an FDA approval, I'd argue that they tilt the odds toward success.

Nuplazid also has other attributes going for it that may sway the agency's decision. Currently there are no approved products to treat Parkinson disease psychosis, which is one of the reasons the FDA gave Nuplazid both the breakthrough therapy and priority review designations. That indicates that regulators are well aware of the lack of treatment options and are eager to bring one to market.

If all goes well for Nuplazid, it looks like it could be a blockbuster. Analysts see peak sales in excess of $3 billion, which could prove to be a conservative number if Nuplazid also wins label expansion claims for Alzheimer's disease psychosis or schizophrenia. I think that's a big enough number to grab the attention of many big pharma companies, and that's why it wouldn't surprise me one bit to see one of them make an offer to buy Acadia outright.

Cory Renauer:Now that Ireland-domiciledJazz Pharmaceuticals stock has left the stratosphere, it's at the top of my potential big pharma buyout list. Its enterprise value -- a metric that accounts for market cap, debts, and cash -- of around $7.4 billion is in the Goldilocks zone for big American pharmas looking to lower their tax burden and pick up a company with strong earnings growth.

Sales of Jazz's top product, Xyrem, for treatment of narcolepsy symptoms grew about 23% to $955 million last year.Before we hear of any offers, one important event needs to play out.

While Xyrem has been a spectacular growth driver, it's also the subject of ongoing patent legislation. Jazz holds 20 Xyrem patents, but not the almighty composition-of-matter patent.Smelling an opportunity, seven different drugmakers have filed applications for approval of generic versions, although Jazz insists its patents will stand up for the drug that made up about 73% of the company's total sales last year. Potential suitors are right to be concerned.

Last summer, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board began proceedings involving six Jazz patents regarding distribution of Xyrem. The company expects a decision in mid-July.If the judge rules strongly in favor of letting Jazz maintain Xyrem exclusivity, expect acquisition offers to pop up like dandelions.

If judges rule unfavorably for Jazz, and Xyrem begins facing generic competition, there's still a chance some suitors could come calling later in the year. Jazz is awaiting phase 3 results for JZP-110, a candidate for both narcolepsy and the much wider obstructive sleep apnea indication. If approved for both, it could top Xyrem's success. Results from this trial aren't expected until the end of the year, so we'll have to wait a bit longer to see how it plays out.

Cheryl Swanson: Big pharma companies, like all of us, enjoy bargains. And gene therapy company Bluebird Bio is flashing blue-plate special pricing right now, making this company a much more enticing takeover target. While the clinical-stage biotech is no stranger to takeover speculation, no one could call Bluebird a bargain last year. Inflated expectations sent the stock up 750% in less than two years, to reach an all-time high last summer.

Bluebird has since fallen out of favor with Wall Street, however. In November, a somewhat disappointing update on Bluebird's Lenti-D phase 2/3 trial had analysts slashing price targets to the bone. The question now is whether the clinical-stage biotech could bounce back, especially since more definitive data is due on the Lenti-D program in a few weeks at the American Academy of Neurology conference.

Whatever that data shows -- or analysts assume it to show -- Bluebird has another asset much more important to big pharma buyers. Along with Kite Pharma and Juno Therapeutics, Bluebird is a leader in CAR-T therapies, often touted as the next big thing in cancer treatment. Late last year, preliminary studies from the National Cancer Institute showed selective data on Bluebird's CAR-T cancer program that was impressive. One advanced cancer patient with multiple myeloma experienced a complete remission eight weeks after treatment. Celgenehas already opted into Bluebird's first CAR-T clinical trial, handing over $10 million to jump in, which could end up a "try before you buy" deal. There's no guarantee Bluebird is on the right track with its curative drugs. But the well-funded company is now trading at less than twice its cash level, making it the kind of bargain not often seen in smaller biotechs with a highly promising pipeline.

Todd Campbell: I think Cheryl is on to something with her theory that formerly white-hot stocks working on next-generation CAR-T cancer therapies could be the focus of future M&A, but I think that it'sKite Pharmathat's the more likely buyout candidate.

Kite Pharma is conducting a pivotal phase 2 trial of KTE-C19, a CAR-T therapy targeting diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), and interim results are expected this year. Kite Pharma thinks that solid interim data could allow it to file for FDA approval ahead of final data in 2017. If so, then Kite Pharma could conceivably have its first CAR-T on the market next year.

That accelerated timeline could be very attractive to a large biopharma, such asGilead SciencesorAmgen -- two companies that might otherwise balk at forking out big money to buy an early stage cancer company.

Adding conviction to my thinking is that Kite Pharma's C-suite is packed with people who have been previously associated with M&A. CEO Belldegrun was at Cougar Biotechnology whenJ&Jbought it. CFO Butitta was CFO of NextWave whenPfizerbought it in 2012. and, Chief Commercial Officer Shawn Cline Tomasello worked forPharmacyclicswhen AbbVie bought it. The list goes on and on.

Who might acquire Kite Pharma is anyone's guess, but Amgen is already collaborating with the company, and Kite Pharma's chief medical officer, David Chang, is the former head of oncology at Amgen.

Sean Williams: The air has been let out of a number majority of biotech stock valuations in 2016, which is beginning to make this industry quite attractive from a possible takeover standpoint. One company that I suspect could begin to draw some interest, and a possible buyout, is Radius Health .

The lynchpin of Radius Health's portfolio is abaloparatide, a once-daily injectable therapy designed to treat osteoporosis. Wall Street and Radius' shareholders had anxiously been waiting for Amgenand its partner UCB to report late-stage data on romosozumab, a once-monthly injectable solution for osteoporosis that was viewed as abaloparatide's greatest competitor. In February Amgen and UCB delivered. Their late-stage trial hit both co-primary endpoint of reducing the relative risk of vertebral fractures through 12- and 24-months by 73% and 75%, respectively. However, romosozumab did not reach clinical significance in a secondary endpoint of reducing relative risk of non-vertebral fractures in the 12- or 24-month periods examined.

On the other hand, abaloparatide reduced vertebral fractures by 86% in the ACTIVE study at the 18-montn mark, and it did lead to a statistically significant reduction in non-vertebral fractures of 43%. In other words, Radius Health's lead drug looks as if it has a clear path to superiority. This could very well make it an attractive asset for a larger drugmaker to acquire.

Additionally, Radius Health is more than likely looking for a partner in Europe that'll help market abaloparatide. In effect, it's actively seeking a world-renowned drug giant to for assistance, or perhaps a buyout. While nothing is written in stone, I'd keep a close eye on Radius as a buyout candidate within the industry.

The article This Could Be the Next Big Pharma Buyout originally appeared on Fool.com.

Brian Feroldi has no position in any stocks mentioned. Cheryl Swanson owns shares of Amgen and Johnson & Johnson. Cory Renauer owns shares of Johnson & Johnson. Kristine Harjes owns shares of Johnson & Johnson. Sean Williams has no position in any stocks mentioned. Todd Campbell has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Bluebird Bio, Johnson & Johnson, and Juno Therapeutics. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump may want to avoid West Hollywood when he campaigns in California ahead of the state's potentially decisive June 7 primary.

Lindsey Horvath, the mayor of West Hollywood, Calif., which is located in the heart of Los Angeles County and home to a sizable population of gay men, penned a letter to Trump this week explaining that he is unwelcome in her city.

"With the primary making its way to California, as West Hollywood's Mayor, I want to make very clear that your campaign of violence and intimidation is not welcome in our City," she wrote in the letter.

"From mocking people living with disabilities to classifying entire ethnicities as violent criminals to persecuting specific religious communities, Trump has pursued headlines in this election season with reckless abandon," Horvath later explained in an op-ed for the Advocate.

Read more on WashingtonExaminer.com
Sen. Ted Cruz is making the case that GOP presidential rival John Kasich and his pesky campaign cannot win the party nomination unless he has top showings in eight states -- an argument that could help Cruz in the upcoming Wisconsin primary and the GOP White House race.

Cruz in recent interviews has repeatedly cited a Republican National Committee rule that states candidates can be nominated only if they've won the total delegate majority in eight or more states, as reported first by The Washington Post.

The Texas senator is trailing front-runner Donald Trump by 273 delegates with about half of the countrys caucus-primary contests remaining.

However, Cruz now leads Trump in the Tuesdays Wisconsin primary, according to most polls. But Kasich, the governor of Ohio who is running a distant third in the GOP White House, could win enough votes to decide the primary and the entire nominating process.

Kasich has won only one contest, his home-state of Ohio, and he has finished in second-place or tied for second in five others.

Trump has 736 pledged delegates, followed by Cruz with 463, then Kasich with 143 -- with 1,237 needed to secure the nomination.

The RNC wrote the rule in 2012 after then-Texas Rep. Ron Paul had nearly enough wins to at least complicate the nomination process for clear front-runner Mitt Romney.

Kasich is now considered the only remaining candidate that the Republican establishment could try to nominate in a contested convention.

Trump and Cruz have in part made their campaigns an indictment of insider Washington and are being called un-electable in a general-election race against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Cruz on Wednesday told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt: "It was the Washington establishment that put this rule in place. So now when the Washington establishment candidates are losing, they want to change the rules to try to parachute in some candidate who hasn't earned the votes of the people. That is nothing short of crazy."

Hewitt was following up on Cruzs comments on a CNN Town Hall in which he said Kasich being on the ballot was against the rules and If no one has 1,237 (delegates), you have to have won at least eight states."

Karl Rove, a senior Bush White House adviser, said Thursday on Hewitts show that Cruz has misinterpreted the so-called 40b rule.

Rove acknowledge the rule was indeed written just before the 2012 convention to keep Paul, who has just roughly 5 percent of the vote, from getting a full blown nomination process.

He said the rule states candidates must have that majority of delegates to have an official nominating speech and seconding speeches. However, they can receive votes on the first ballot from the pledged delegates they won in caucuses and primaries.

Republican officials and others have also reportedly said new rules could be written before this years convention in July.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday downplayed speculation about a wild-card candidate nabbing the partys presidential nomination and other controversies related to the July convention now overshadowing the GOP candidates campaigns.



The controversies -- particularly about delegates and candidates pledges to support the eventual nominee -- have escalated in recent weeks as front-runner Donald Trump continues to struggle to win the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination before the convention.

Meanwhile, rivals Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are looking for ways to get more delegates to win the nomination.

Priebus acknowledged on Fox News Sunday that delegates won by a candidate in state primaries and caucuses must vote for that candidate in the first round of balloting at the convention, but can later vote for somebody else. However, he called the possibility of another candidate winning in later-round balloting an extreme hypothetical.

"You get into a multi-ballot convention whereyou've got five or six or seven rounds, it's possible that a person can be nominated that's not one of the three," said Priebus, who appeared on all of the major Sunday political talk shows. "But I think ... our nominee is likely to be the one of the three people running."

He also argued that Trump, Cruz and Kasich all suggesting that they would break their pledge to support the eventual nominee is political manipulation or leveraging.

I really do believe this is positioning, Priebus told Fox. I think they want to be loyal to the party. I believe they will be loyal to the party.

He also said the delegates signed the pledge in exchange for sharing RNC campaign data. However, he dismissed as too preliminary a suggestion about suing a candidate for breaking the pledge.

Cruz in recent days has tried to make the case that last-running Kasich cannot win the party nomination unless he has top showings in at least eight states. The argument could help Cruz in the upcoming Wisconsin primary and the GOP White House race because it eliminates Kasich as the spoiler.

Trump has 736 pledged delegates, followed by Cruz with 463, then Kasich, who has 143. A total of 1,237 delegates are needed to secure the nomination.

Kasich has won only one contest, his home-state of Ohio, and he has finished in second place or tied for second in five others.

The RNC wrote the so-called 40b rule in 2012 after then-Texas Rep. Ron Paul nearly had enough wins to at least complicate the nomination process for clear front-runner Mitt Romney.

The rule states that at the GOP national convention a presidential candidate must have the support of a majority of delegates from eight different states to win the nomination.



Priebus said Sunday that Romney delegates wrote the rules and that they applied only to that convention. However, he suggested that 40b or some version of it would likely remain, considering this time the rules will be written mostly by Trump and Cruz delegates.
Air France stewardesses have caused an uproar over new uniform rules that will require them to wear headscarves on flights from Paris to Tehran when the airline resumes services there later this month.

Female flight crew members have been told to cover their hair once they disembark for the Iranian capital, the UK Daily Telegraph reported Saturday. Unions are urging the airline that those flights should be made voluntary for women.

Flights between Paris and Tehran will happen three times per week starting April 17. The resumption comes after an eight-year break, stemming from the completion of the Iran nuclear deal.

Iranian women have been forced to cover their hair or face fines since the Islamic revolution in 1979. The Telegraph notes that public signs of religion have been frowned upon in France since the country enacted a law separating church and state in 1905.

It is not our role to pass judgment on the wearing of headscarves or veils in Iran. What we are denouncing is that it is being made compulsory, UNAC flight crews union chief Flore Arrighi told The Telegraph. Stewardesses must be given the right to refuse these flights.

Air France brushed off the uproar, saying that other airline staff members were obliged to comply with Iranian rules. The airline sees Tehran flights as an excellent business development," the newspaper reported.

Tolerance and respect for the customs of the countries we serve are part of the values of our company, an Air France spokesman said.

The airline also noted that French law allows the restriction of some freedoms if justified by the nature of the task to be accomplished.

Christophe Pillet, the deputy head of the SNPNC flight crews union, told the newspaper that the stewardesses were prepared to wear headscarves in Iran when out of uniform, but didnt want it to become part of the uniform.

Female staff do not wish to have dress regulations imposed on them, especially the obligation to wear an Air France scarf that completely covers their hair as soon as they leave the plane, he added.

Stewardesses normally can choose between wearing a skirt or trousers, but have been instructed to wear a long jacket and trousers specifically for Tehran flights.

Click for more from the UK Daily Telegraph.
Two construction workers were killed when an Amtrak train traveling from New York to Savannah, Ga., Sunday struck a backhoe that was on the tracks about 15 miles south of Philadelphia, Delaware County officials said.

The crash, which occurred around 8 a.m., derailed the lead engine of Palmetto Train 89, according to a statement by Amtrak.

Of the 341 passengers and seven crew members on the train, 35 people were hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries, according to Chester County Fire Commissioner Travis Thomas.

"We have the situation under control now," Thomas said.

National Transportation Safety Board Investigator-in-Charge Ryan Frigo said Sunday evening that the NTSB had recovered the locomotive's event data recorder, inward-facing video and forward-facing video.

Frigo said one of those killed was the backhoe operator, but did not identify the second person killed. Neither person was named. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters in New York that both workers killed were Amtrak employees.

Schumer said debris from the crash flew into the first two cars, injuring some passengers. Schumer said it's unclear whether the backhoe was performing regular maintenance or whether it was cleaning up debris from high overnight winds. He called for a complete investigation.

Reports from witnesses on the train indicate the Amtrak conductor blew the train's horn, but construction workers were unable to clear the tracks in time.



A passenger on the train described a fireball and windows on the train being blown out upon impact.

"The conductor did inform us that there was a fatality, that there were people working on the track," Stephanie Burroughs told Fox News. Burroughs said she was told the death was someone who was "working on the tracks."

She also said there were "some injuries" to passengers in the front car, but she had heard the worst injury was a broken arm.

Linton Holmes was towards the back of the train and described a "rumbling" and "a bunch of dust" when the derailment occurred.

"There were some people, they were pretty bloody, because it was like an explosion," Holmes said at a news conference. "We got off track and there was an explosion and there was a big fire."



Another passenger, Ari Ne'eman, told Fox News that despite the shock of the crash, passengers evacuated in an orderly manner.

"The evacuation was not panicked," Ne'eman said. "The Amtrak personnel told everybody not to take their luggage during the evacuation."

Amtrak said it was providing limited service between Wilmington and Philadelphia by Sunday afternoon after temporarily suspending service in that area earlier in the day.

The crash comes nearly a year after the Amtrak Northeast Regional derailed on May 12 in Philadelphia, killing eight and injuring more than 200. That was the deadliest Amtrak crash since a 1987 derailment near Baltimore that killed 16.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.


Authorities in Ohio arrested a man Friday who has been on the run since 2013 over a charge he sexually assaulted a girl with special needs in Puerto Rico.

The Vindicator reported that Luis Cruz Ramos, 30, was captured around 1 p.m. Friday after a manhunt and a shootout with police. Hes being held at a hospital under police guard and is expected to recover.

He was a very dangerous individual, U.S. Marshal Peter J. Elliot told The Vindicator. Elliot said Ramos was handcuffed when he was placed on the stretcher and taken to an ambulance.

Ramos was shot by a member of the U.S. Marshals Northern Ohio Fugitive Task Force, Elliot added.

Ramos fled a traffic stop in Campbell early Thursday, firing shots into two police cruisers and shooting at other officers, authorities said. He abandoned his vehicle at a Boardman cemetery and managed to dodge a search by SWAT team members.

He was then spotted Friday in the area when authorities pursued him on foot until he was captured.

A woman who claimed to be Ramos ex-girlfriend called Campbell police Tuesday from Philadelphia, saying he held her against her will at a Campbell home, according to The Vindicator. She told authorities of the sex assault warrant.

Campbell Police Chief Drew Rauzan said hes thankful that Ramos was caught.

Very sincere and heartfelt thank you to those Mahoning Valley Crisis Response Team members and marshals task force members who pursued this dangerous offender, Rauzan said. I am thankful that this ongoing situation was ended with no injuries to the general public or those police officers who laid their lives on the line to bring Ramos to justice.

Ramos now faces at least two counts of felony assault for the shots he fired at officers during the chase and several other charges from separate jurisdictions, The Vindicator reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from The Vindicator.
Parents of students at a New Hampshire high school are furious over officials refusal to reveal that a dean of students was arrested in February on charges she possessed heroin and steroids.



Rekha Luther served as Pembroke Academys dean of students until her resignation on March 22, in the wake of her arrest. Police were reportedly tipped off by a caller who allegedly saw a whole bundle of hypodermic needles at the school. A subsequent search by police determined the needles belonged to Luther, Chief Dwayne Gilman told The Concord Monitor.

Obviously, with the emphasis on heroin in the state right now, thats just not something we wanted to take lightly, Gilman said. Everything you dont want to hear in a school happened in one day.

Luther, 36, was handcuffed and taken out of the school through a back door. The incident was so under-the-radar, a school district meeting with about 100 parents present two weeks later never even touched on Luthers arrest.

Theres two ways to get the job done: You can be a bull in a china shop or you can think methodically, still have the same outcome and not affect anyone else, Gilman told The Concord Monitor.

Luther posted $10,000 personal recognizance bail the same day she was arrested and was later arraigned in district court. She faces four charges of possession of a controlled drug.

The Concord Monitor reported that Luthers fiance, Jonathan Pesa, died in June from a drug overdose.

But many parents never learned of Luthers issues until The Concord Monitors story appeared on Friday.

A lot of people are appalled that it has been kept quiet, parent Rachel Tether told WMUR9.

The mother of a 17-year-old Pembroke student said she didnt know about Luthers arrest until she saw Luthers name in a police log.

Somebody just disappears from a position of authority and nobody asked questions? The kids dont say anything? Jeanne LaBarge told The Concord Monitor. Its amazing to me how they kept this so quiet.

Top district officials wouldnt comment on the arrest to The Concord Monitor.
San Francisco police said Saturday a mother and her infant daughter were found safe after disappearing under suspicious circumstances.

The woman, identified as 23-year-old Dana Rinta and her 17-month-old daughter, walked into a police station and were both safe and unharmed. Police said they were last seen on March 14.

According to KTVU-TV, Rinta is the ex-girlfriend of Stanislav Petrov. Petrov has accused two Alameda County sheriffs deputies of assault in November. Three sheriffs deputies in total have been placed on leave because of the incident.

Petrov was arrested along with four others Friday afternoon in an FBI raid at a Visitacion Valley home. FBI spokesman Prentiss Danner told KTVU-TV that Petrov is facing federal charges and sources told the station those charges are for guns and drugs.

The FBI is expected to formally announce the charges Monday, according to KGO-TV.

The San Francisco Police Department said in a news release Friday there was a shooting at the same block where Petrov was arrested. Danner told KGO-TV that Petrovs arrest wasnt related to the shooting, but they are concerned about his safety in relation to the shooting.

Days before the raid, Petrov filed a claim against Alameda County, seeking damages for what his lawyers called The worst law enforcement beating weve seen on video since Rodney King.

Petrov allegedly led sheriffs deputies on a high-speed chase from San Leandro to San Francisco on Nov. 12. The deputies caught up to him after he crashed and fled into a Mission District alley.

The San Francisco Public Defenders Office released video of the incident the following day. One deputy is accused of stealing a gold chain from Petrov and allegedly tried to bribe two homeless people who had witnessed the incident.

Petrovs lawyers said he suffered a severe hand injury and a large gash to his head.

Click for more from KTVU-TV.
An unidentified intruder reportedly was arrested after allegedly throwing a backpack over the White House fence and then trying to jump it late Friday.

According to WTTG-TV, the incident at the north fence occurred around 11:45 p.m. Secret Service spokesman Robert Hoback told Reuters in an email the intruder was arrested without incident.

The individual was charged with unlawful entry and transported to Washingtons Metropolitan Police Department, the Secret Service told WTTG-TV.

The name of the intruder wasnt immediately released.

Reuters reported there was no indication from the agency that the backpack tossed over the fence contained any weapons.

The agency conducted standard security sweeps after the incident and the White House complex resumed normal operations shortly after they were completed.

The Secret Service has repeatedly been criticized over the several attempts of intruders trying to get into the White House.

Click for more from WTTG-TV.

Click for more from Reuters.
Soldiers arrested Burkina Faso's transitional president and prime minister Wednesday, raising fears of a coup just weeks before the country was to hold an election to replace its longtime leader who was ousted in a popular uprising late last year.

Hours later, gunfire erupted in the capital as the soldiers behind the standoff tried to disperse protesters who were marching on the presidential palace where the two transitional leaders were being detained. It was not immediately clear whether any of the demonstrators were wounded.

People could be seen fleeing in all directions as the shooting continued, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.

Members of the presidential security unit formed by the ex-president who was ousted from power last year have been publicly at odds with the transitional leaders in recent months. On Wednesday, they banned the interim president and prime minister from leaving, and were seen putting up barricades around the presidential palace.

Burkina Faso hosts French special forces and serves as an important ally of both France and the United States in the fight against Islamic militants in West Africa. While Burkina Faso has largely been spared from extremist violence, a Romanian national was abducted in April, and a Mali-based jihadi group claimed responsibility.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was "outraged" by the reports of the detentions and called for the officials' immediate release, his spokesman said in a statement. "This incident is a flagrant violation of Burkina Faso's constitution and transitional charter," the statement said.

Moumina Cheriff Sy, the speaker of the transitional parliament, called Wednesday's developments "a blow to the republic and its institutions."

"I call on all patriots to gather to defend the motherland," he added, calling on members of parliament to protest.

There was no immediate claim by the military on public air waves that they now controlled the country.

News of the standoff Wednesday created panic in Burkina Faso's capital of Ouagadougou, where people closed shops early and headed home fearing violent demonstrations. The protests that led to President Blaise Compaore's ouster escalated to a point where the parliament building was set ablaze.

Interim President Michel Kafando and Prime Minister Lt. Col. Yacouba Isaac Zida had been tasked with organizing the Oct. 11 presidential election, which many hoped would strengthen the country's democracy after the 27-year rule of Compaore.

But there have been tensions over the vote because members of Compaore's party have been declared ineligible. Anyone who supported the ex-president's bid to amend the constitution so he could seek another term is also banned from running.

Another chief source of tension has been an ongoing dispute between the transitional officials and the country's elite Presidential Security Regiment, which was behind Wednesday's standoff. The 1,300-strong group was set up in 1996 by Compaore and had previously called for the resignation of the interim prime minister, who is a former second-in-command of the unit. The prime minister initially had threatened to disband the group back in December but later reversed course.

Then on Monday, a truth and reconciliation commission released a report again calling for the disbanding of the unit. Human rights groups have accused the regiment of opening fire on unarmed demonstrators last October, when massive protests forced Compaore to resign.

Burkina Faso's military initially had picked Zida to lead the country when it swooped in and took control in the power vacuum after Compaore's resignation. The international community, though, urged the military to swiftly hand back power or face crippling economic sanctions. Kafando, a former ambassador to the U.N., was then chosen as transitional president, and he tapped Zida to serve as prime minister.
There is more evidence that Russian forces are not pulling out of Syria, but instead, more troops are arriving there, a new video from Russian television Saturday apparently shows.

The video shows a convoy of Russian troops headed to Palmyra to begin mine clearance operations after ISIS was routed from there earlier this week.

Col. Steve Warren, a US-led coalition spokesman in Iraq, could not confirm that Russian "sappers" or engineers had arrived in Syria when asked at a Pentagon press conference Friday.

Russian jets and helicopter gunships helped Syrian forces push ISIS from Palmyra, once a popular tourist destination filled with ancient Roman-era artifacts, earlier this week.

A US defense official tells Fox News that Syrian forces suffered "heavy losses" against ISIS, but would not offer any specifics.

In a statement from Russia's defense ministry posted on its website, the new Russian forces will conduct "humanitarian mine clearance" in Palmyra.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in March that his main forces would begin withdrawing from Syria. Pentagon officials now say otherwise.

Huge Russian convoy going to Palmyra to demine it pic.twitter.com/n3ORoXgzUN  BM-27 Uragan (@bm27_uragan) April 2, 2016

Critics point to a similar pledge from President Putin when Russian agreed to a ceasefire and to withdrawal troops and equipment out of eastern Ukraine in 2014. The outgoing U.S. commander of NATO forces in Europe recently said Russian troops and equipment remain.

Despite sending less than half of its jet fighters back to Russia, there are now more Russian attack helicopters in Syria than at any time since the air campaign to shore up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began in late September.

The Pentagon has not seen Russian aircraft fly from Syria to Russia since March 19, one official tells Fox News.

More than 20 fixed-wing fighter-bomber aircraft remain in Syria in addition to more than a dozen attack helicopters including the newest gunship in Russia's arsenal, the Mi-28N "Havoc."

US officials believe the deployment of Russian military forces to Syria is not short term.

"The Russians installed underground fuel tanks in their airbase in Latakia. This was not a temporary move, but a permanent one," a defense official told Fox News.

The Russian Navy has occupied a Syrian port in Tartus since the early 1970s.

In Fall 2015, the Russians sent T-90 battle tanks, rocket-propelled artillery systems, and in December, the advanced S-400 air defense system to protect their new airbase north of Tartus on the Mediterranean coast in Latakia. US officials say all of these weapons remain as well.

After defeating ISIS in Palmyra, it is unclear if the Russian-backed Syrian forces will continue to the Islamic State's de-facto capital of Raqqa, only a three-hour drive from Palmyra, or head east to oil-rich Deir ez-Zor, the site of an Assad regime airbase.

Col. Warren did not expect an assault on ISIS headquarters in the near future.

"Nobody's going to get to Raqqa anytime soon, frankly, neither the Russians nor the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces]," said Col Warren.

The US military supports the Syrian Democratic Forces which are made up of largely Kurdish fighters, but also Arab groups as well.

Russia has been accused of killing hundreds of civilians and destroying hospitals inside Syria. US officials say Russia has conducted a majority of its airstrikes using unguided or dumb bombs, far less precise than the satellite-guided weapons used by the US military.
Syrian engineering teams and popular defense groups uncovered a mass grave in a neighborhood in the newly recaptured ancient city of Palmyra, Syrias state-news agency reported Friday.

The remains of about 40 people, 23 of them women and children, were found in the graves. SANA news agency reported they were killed by Islamic State militants and said some of the bodies were beheaded and bore signs of torture.

Syrian army experts detonated hundreds of mines they say were planted by the Islamic State before they were forced out of Palmyra last Sunday, according to the Associated Press.

Reporters were able to tour the archaeological gem that had attracted tens of thousands of tourists every year before the Islamic State captured the city and destroyed most of its Christian artifacts. While, some parts of the site, including the Roman-era grand colonnades and amphitheater appeared relatively untouched, the damage every else was very much visible.

According to the Associated Press, the Arch of Triumph  which was under the Roman emperor Septimus Severus between A.D. 193 and A.D. 211, has been reduced to a pile of stones. The monumental arch once sat atop the famed colonnaded streets of the ancient town.

The Temple of Baalshamin and parts of the Temple of Bel, one of the best-preserved Roman-era sites, are also destroyed.

The town was completely deserted Friday, except for Syrian army soldiers working on dismantling explosives and visiting journalists. The town is completely deserted; its remaining residents had fled as the Syrian armys offensive against ISIS began last month.

Traces of the fighting could be seen all around. Burned cars parked on the side of the road, electricity cables strewn about on the streets, and scattered empty water tanks apparently used as barricades.

At the entrance to the Roman amphitheater, where the Islamic State filmed children shooting captive Syrian soldiers in the head, black graffiti is sprayed on a stone wall.

"Lasting and Expanding," it read in Arabic, a logo of the Islamic State group. "The Islamic State" is scribbled on another nearby wall.

A Syrian officer told reporters that more than 3,000 mines have so far been dismantled. "They booby-trapped everything, trees, doors, animals," he said, speaking of the militants. Russian sappers have arrived in Syria to help the Syrian army clear mines in and around the town.

Palmyra is located about 155 miles east of Damascus, the Syrian capital. Government troops, backed by allied militiamen and Russian airstrikes retook the town on Sunday from ISIS extremists who had controlled Palmyra and its environs for 10 months.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The murders of four translators working to bring the Bible to obscure languages in the Middle East earlier this month won't stop the charity behind the effort from its work, officials said.

The four unidentified translators, who worked secretly for Wycliffe Associates, a Florida non-profit dedicated to bringing the gospel to hundreds of obscure languages, were killed by suspected Islamist militants at an undisclosed location,Wycliffe officials said in a statement.

They shot and destroyed all the equipment in the office, read the statement. The invaders burned all the books and other translation materials in the office."

Even when tragedy strikes, as in this case, the testimony of Christ is loud and clear...  Bruce Smith, Wycliffe Associates President

The work is so dangerous that Wycliffe Associates President Bruce Smith will not even say what country the office was in or give the names of those killed. He did say the attackers shot two workers to death and beat two more to death with emptied guns as they used their bodies to shield a senior translator who survived.

Officials for Wycliffe Associates said hard drives containing the translation work for eight different language projects may be salvageable.

The remaining translation team has decided to re-double their efforts to translate, publish, and print Gods word for these eight language communities.

The attack highlights the recent wave of genocide against Christians in places like the Middle East and Europe.

"The attack on translators shows how dangerous it is for Christians, Ryan Mauro, a national security analyst for the Clarion Project, told FoxNews.com

Translators know the language and are usually familiar with the territory and population. Yet, even they are at high risk of death simply for being Christian. There is no how-to guide for survival that a Christian can follow."

Wycliffe Associates has been in existence for over 70 years, helping Christians throughout the world by working towards translating Bibles into nearly 2,000 different languages. They often set up offices in the areas where a new translation is needed, working on the ground level in places like Asia, Africa and South America as well as the Middle East using a method of translation called Paradigm 3.0, which focuses on local translators and local control.

Smith said the work simply cannot be done in the relative safety of the U.S.

The simple answer is that the Church prefers to do translation where the people are, Smith said. Paradigm 3.0 Bible translation is all about church engagement from beginning to end. Dislocated translations delay and dilute the impact to the local communities.

Officials for Wycliffe Associates say that those who survived the attack have committed to finishing the projects in an effort to recover the work lost. They are in the process of setting up a new secret location and have even asked for the publics help in raising emergency funds.

Even when tragedy strikes, as in this case, the testimony of Christ is loud and clear, Smith also said in his statement to FoxNews.com. Yes, there is a tremendous cost. But as Tertullian, an early Church father, said  the blood of martyrs are the seeds of the church.
Anti-ISIS coalition airstrikes on Sunday killed a top militant who was responsible for the death of a U.S. Marine in northern Iraq last month, a military spokesman said Sunday.

Staff Sgt. Louis Cardin, 27, was killed and eight other Marines were wounded when their detachment came under rocket fire on March 19. Coalition Spokesman Col. Steve Warren said ISIS fighter Jasim Khadijah was a rocket expert who controlled these attacks, according to Reuters.

Jasim Khadijah was an ISIS member and former Iraqi officer believed directly connected to the recent rocket attack that killed SSG Cardin and wounded eight other U.S. Marines, Warren said.

Warren said the drone strike also killed five other ISIS fighters and destroyed two vehicles belonging to the Islamist group.

Cardin was the second American combat death in Iraq since the start of the campaign to fight ISIS in 2014, according to Reuters.

The loss of a Marine is sad, but I thought about it: He was leading his Marines in combat, Gen. Robert Neller said at a Marine Corps Association dinner on March 24, according to Military.com. They were in indirect fire and he made sure everybody got in the bunker, and he just didnt make it in time. Is that sad? Thats sad. But if youre going to go, you want to go in the fight.

Fox News Jennifer Griffin contributed to this story.
Israel has expanded the fishing zone off the Gaza coast to allow Palestinian fishermen to sail out further.

COGAT, the Israeli defense body that handles civilian issues with the Palestinians, announced the new limits Thursday saying they would stay in effect for the coming two months to coincide with the fishing season. The new maritime perimeter expands the fishing zone off parts of Gaza by three more nautical miles to nine.

Israel set a limit in 2007 after Hamas seized Gaza from forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in bloody street battles.

It has since extended the zone several times to ease the lives of Gaza fishermen.

Israel noted the measure is contingent on the fisherman respecting the agreement and not abusing it with smuggling or infiltration attempts.
Muslim teacher Salah Farah stood in the way as Islamist militants stormed his bus in Kenya in December -- refusing their demands to split from Christian passengers and instead taking a bullet that would later kill him.

Now, three months after the attack, the father of five will be honored posthumously by Kenya for his act of courage, the country's president announced this week.

President Uhuru Kenyatta told parliament during his state of the union address Thursday that he is awarding the Order Of The Grand Warrior -- one of the country's highest honors -- to Farah, according to multiple media reports.

Farah and about 60 other passengers were traveling from the capital, Nairobi, to the town of Mandera, on Dec. 21 when Somalia-based al-Shabab militants began firing shots at the bus.

The gunmen forced the bus to stop and told the Muslims and Christian passengers to separate. Farah, who was the deputy head of the Mandera township primary school, and other Muslim passengers refused to cooperate -- instead telling the insurgents to kill all the passengers or leave them alone. Al-Shabab militants have been known to execute Christians and spare Muslims in previous attacks in the region.

Farah, who was shot in the hip and suffered shrapnel wounds to his arm, died during surgery one month later. Prior to his death, Farah told Kenya's The Daily Nation that, "We asked them to kill all of us or leave us alone."

"People should live peacefully together, Farrah told Voice of America from his hospital bed in January.

We are brothers. It's only the religion that is the difference, so I ask my brother Muslims to take care of the Christians so that the Christians also take care of us.  and let us help one another and let us live together peacefully," Farah said.

On Thursday, Kenyatta lauded Farah, telling parliament that the Muslim man "refused to be divided by terrorism," BBC News reported.

"We are our brother's keeper. I salute Salah Farah, (the) Muslim teacher who died protecting Christians in Al-Shabaab attack," Kenyatta said, according to The Daily Nation.

Farah's brother, Rasheed, told the news outlet that the Kenyan president called the family on Thursday and asked about Farah's five children.

"The President himself called us Thursday at noon. He asked about Salah's five children and told me 'usijali (don't worry) we shall take care of them.' He also spoke to his wife and other family members," he told the Daily Nation.

"He (the President) vowed to visit Mandera to visit the children, saying they won't be forgotten. We are very happy we have not been forgotten. We are one people," he said.

Immediately following Farah's death, Kenyans took to social media to praise him, saying his example should be emulated in a country facing a growing threat of Islamic extremism as Kenyans with ties to al-Shabab launch attacks in this country.

In 2011, Kenya's government deployed peacekeepers to Somalia in part to stop al-Shabab members from crossing the border and launching attacks on Kenyan territory. Al-Shabab opposed the deployment and vowed to wage more attacks.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Matthew Bryce eyed the syringe.

This isnt going to kill me, is it? he asked.

He wasnt interested in the answer as much as he was the high. Injecting heroin was rumored to produce a faster and stronger rush than snorting the drug.

And it did. Moments after the needle pierced his skin, the high coursed through his body.

It felt like euphoria, Bryce said. Nothing compares to the feeling it gives you.

Eight years later, Bryce felt a similar rush the first time he held his son. In the visiting room of Coffeewood Correctional Center in Culpeper County, Bryce marveled at the soft skin of his 3-month-old baby.

For eight years, the Culpeper resident struggled to break his heroin addiction. Sometimes, hed stayed clean for months at a time before succumbing to the drugs siren call.

As he snuggled with baby Colton, Bryce felt hopeful that, this time, he could get clean permanently.

He was in Coffeewood, serving a two-year sentence for larceny.

I told myself, If I cant get clean here, I cant get clean anywhere, he said.

Bryce attended the prisons 12-step program meetings for addicts. He had never been in prison before, and found more substance abuse help there than he had in jail.

Two years ago, Bryce left prison. Two weeks ago, he celebrated four years of sobriety.

I was high but never happy, he said. I was full of fear and always wondering how to get more heroin. Today, Im so happy with everything I have.

A GROWING HABIT

Bryce began experimenting with drugs in high school. His habit grew to include opiate pills by the time he enrolled at Radford University, where a friend introduced him to heroin, saying it was like the pills but cheaper.

The friend shared some heroin bought in Baltimore, and Bryce was hooked. He traveled to Washington for a geology class field trip and gave a homeless man dinner and two packs of cigarettes in exchange for an introduction to a drug dealer.

Bryce soon learned the best routes to Washington, the exact amount of gas hed need for the trip and the names of several drug dealers.

He kept hearing about the benefits of injecting heroinsniff it and waste it, shoot it and taste it, other users told him.

Soon, he was shooting up regularly, spending $300$500 a day on heroin and crack. He dropped out of college and lost several jobs.

He thought about money constantly, but only as a means for more drugs. He scrounged for change to get a cheeseburger from the McDonalds dollar menu when he got hungry.

But no couch cushions hid enough change to buy drugs. After friends and family learned not to loan him money, Bryce turned to stealing.

Im so ashamed and embarrassed of that now, he said. I would never want to steal anything, but thats what drugs do to you.

He was in and out of jail, rehabs and hospitals.

He overdosed five times, went to rehab seven times and ended up in jail more times than he can count.

The initial euphoria was gone. Bryce was taking heroin just to stave off withdrawal.

So many mornings, you wake up and you dont want to open the curtains, you dont even want to see the sun, he said.

Bryce wanted a better life and tried to break his addiction.

I would go to rehab and I would leave with the best of intentions, he said. I could have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I would never get high again.

Heroin has a high relapse rate; about 90 percent of recovering addicts will go back to the drug. The drug changes the parts of the brain that process pleasure, and those changes remain for years after an addict gets clean.

The brain then has to work harder to feel pleasure, and heroin offers an alluring shortcut to euphoria.

Once, Bryce threw a syringe out his car window, telling himself, Im never going to do this again.

The next day, he went back to the ditch on the side of the road to find the needle.

BUILDING A NEW LIFE

He was clean and on house arrest for stealing when he met Beth through a mutual friend. He couldnt go anywhere, so he had plenty of time to talk with her.

Bryce had no car, no job, no income.

Beth was a single mother determined to stay away from an improbable relationship.

But the pair fell in love.

They married within months of meeting. Bryce had been clean for five months.

Then he failed a drug screen through the probation office and was sentenced to two years in prison. Beth was just a few months pregnant at the time.

Going through the pregnancy alone was difficult, but she was determined to make the marriage work.

I knew what he was capable of, she said recently, gesturing toward 3-year-old Colton playing with a toy kitchen. I could envision this life.

Bryce couldnt. But he wanted a marriage, a home, children and a job.

He left Coffeewood in 2014 determined to build that life with Beth, her daughter Charleigh and Colton.

He avoided his old friends and started a tree-trimming business.

Shortly after getting out of prison, he was shopping at Kohls and the cashier asked him to apply for a credit card. Bryce did, assuming hed be rejected. But his application was accepted.

I almost cried, he said. Someone trusted me.

He takes things day by day, knowing that heroin addiction is difficult to overcome, but determined to hold on to the life hes built.

When I was using, I felt like everyone elses life was better than mine, he said. Now I feel like I have the best life. I couldnt have imagined all of this would be possible for me. My life is second to none.
SALT LAKE CITYMormon leaders called on members to practice tolerance despite political differences, providing the faiths U.S. members guidance at a church conference Saturday amid a presidential campaign marked by harsh rhetoric and bickering.

The faiths leaders also reiterated the belief that the religion is the only true church, and that its leaders are prophets speaking for the Lord. They implored members to be more thoughtful and sensitive toward children from all backgrounds, many of whom arent from picture-perfect families.

In a nod to the religions international footprint, five of 11 men announced as new members of a second-tier leadership council are from countries outside the United States: Guatemala, Argentina, Italy, Australia and New Zealand. More than half of the 15.6 million members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints live outside the U.S.

Church President Thomas S. Monson, 88, was in attendance, but he did not give any speeches. He is considered the religions prophet.

The comments on politics came from Kevin R. Duncan, a member of the Quorum of the Seventy. He said people should be wary of resenting others because they belong to another religion, hold opposing political views or even root for a different sports team.

Let us all remember that God looketh not upon the color of the jersey or the political party, Duncan said. In the competitions of life, if we win, let us win with grace. If we lose, let us lose with grace.

Mormon leaders dont endorse candidates or parties, but they sometimes weigh in on what they consider crucial moral issues.

This presidential cycle, the church has defended religious liberty after Republican front-runner Donald Trump suggested banning Muslims from entering the U.S. It also renewed calls for an end to culture wars where people stake out extreme positions.

Henry B. Eyring, a longtime member of a top church leadership council called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, urged members to listen carefully to speeches from Mormon leaders so they can feel closer to the Lord. This is the only true church, he said.

Neil L. Anderson of the Quorum of the Twelve urged members to embrace all the children of the faithno matter their family situation. He said the religion has hundreds of thousands of children who live with only one parent or whose parents arent Mormon.

He said the religion will still advocate for families led by married men and women who belong to the faith, but said children are welcome from any situation.

While a childs earthly situation may not be ideal, a childs spiritual DNA is perfect because ones true identity is as a son or daughter of God, Anderson said.

Anderson didnt mention children of gay parents. The church came under fire last November when it announced new rules banning baptisms for children living with a gay or lesbian parent.

Church leaders have said the rules were meant to prevent children from being caught in a tug-of-war between teachings at home and church.
BRUSSELSWhen Ibrahim El Bakraoui blew himself up in the Brussels Airport check-in area, killing and maiming scores of travelers, it was at least the third time he had passed unimpeded through an airport terminal in recent months.

Suspected by Turkey of being a foreign terrorist fighter and known at home in Belgium as an ex-con wanted for parole violations, Bakraoui was still allowed to board a commercial airliner unaccompanied last summer, flying freely from Istanbul to the Netherlands and disappearing without a trace.

The ease with which he did so raises questions about how much governments know about the movements of returnees among the 5,000 home-grown jihadis who have trained and fought in places like Syria or Iraq. Many now pose a serious threat, according to the police agency Europol. Some, like Bakraoui, have already used their deadly skills in cities like Brussels or Paris.

Testimony from government ministers, extracts of documents and conversations with police, border and aviation officials reveal a series of security gaps, misunderstandings and procedural red tape that surrounded the deportation last July of this future suicide bomber.

Even those who take some responsibility for missing the threat Bakraoui posed find it hard to understand why his capture raised no alarms. This was a man picked up by Turkish authorities in Gaziantep near Syria, who had done jail time in Belgium for armed robbery, including shooting at police with a Kalashnikov.

We are talking about someone with a 10-year conviction, who spent a few years in prison, then traveled via Turkey to the Syrian border, Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon said on March 25, as lawmakers probed for security shortfalls three days after the Brussels attacks left 32 people dead.

You dont have to have worked long on terrorism to conclude from all this that there is a very high probability90 percent, 99 percent, take your pickthat we are dealing with a foreign fighter, he said.

Bakraoui may be just one case among many. Turkey has deported around 3,250 suspected foreign terrorist fighters since 2011a number that does not include those turned back before making it to Syria, according to its foreign ministry.

Turkeys government says Belgium made no extradition request for Bakraoui when it learned on June 26 that he was in Turkey, leaving him free to travel anywhere in Europe.

It was obvious that he was affiliated and involved in the conflict zones, and he was wounded. That is the reason why he was deported. And this is the information that was communicated to Belgium, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told CNN in an interview aired Thursday.

Bakraoui is not the only case to fall through the communications gap. In September 2014, just over a year before Bakraouis trip to Amsterdam, three French jihadis who said they were defecting from the Islamic State group were able to buy tickets to Marseille, fly together unescorted and walk out of customs as free men, one of their lawyers, Pierre Dunac, said.

According to Frances interior ministry, they were detained in Turkey for visa violationsalthough they were wanted men back home. Before setting out for Syria, two of them were associated with Mohamed Merah, the Islamic extremist who killed seven people in the south of France in 2012.

Amid a government uproar, the three turned themselves in to French police and have been behind bars ever since, facing terrorism charges.

As for Bakraoui, what he did while in Turkey and what he would go on to do in Brussels would remain a mystery to Belgian authorities for quite some time.

He disappeared off their radar last May and only popped back up on June 26, when Turkey notified Belgium that he had been picked up two weeks earlier near the Syrian border. More than two weeks would go by without a Belgian response.

Then, on the morning of July 14, Turkeys foreign ministry sent an advisory to Belgian and Dutch authorities that Bakraoui was booked on a 10:40 a.m. Pegasus Airlines flight in Istanbul, bound for Amsterdam.

The Dutch justice ministry said the deportation warning was sent to a Turkish-language electronic drop box that is normally checked twice a day. The message was prioritized as urgent, but the subject line read simply Itinerary. It gave no reason for Bakraouis expulsion.

A separate communique was sent to a Belgian police liaison officer in Turkey. When he requested details of the allegations against Bakraoui, he was told to make a written request, which he did the following day. A reply arrived on July 20, according to Jambons testimony, almost a week after Bakraoui walked out of Amsterdams Schiphol airport.

Turkish officials, including Erdogan, maintain they did their job by warning Belgium that Bakraoui could be a foreign terrorist fighter. The Belgian government says the warning failed to include that crucial detail.

Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens conceded we should have guessed, based on the place he had been to.
Dreamjobs4me.com Launches New Resume Templates For Job Seekers

Dreamjobs4me.com also offers opportunities for jobs from organizations around the world, which make the site a great place to search for vacancies, employments, jobs and post jobs, after the resume has been built with the help of the resume builder.

--

DreamJobs4me is an internet site that has been working on providing the most convenient way to search a job online from anywhere in the world. The site provides career opportunities for candidates in a large variety of fields, which makes the process of finding the right job easier. DreamJobs4me has recently introduced resume templates for different careers in various professions and to match different preferences. The main motive of introducing the resume templates is to give a clear guideline to those who have been facing difficulties in making a proper resume for applying for a job. The resume templates are available free of cost for a limited time only.

Dreamjobs4me has introduced around 80 resume templates for the job seekers to make an appropriate resume. Each resume template that Dreamjobs4me has developed describes a brief description about the candidate. By using these templates, candidates can easily develop their own personalized resume with an attention grabbing style. The site also has a resume builder facility that has been specifically designed with the help of HR professionals and recruitment experts to make the process more streamlined and easier for people.

Most of the resumes are based on profile summary, skills, education and professional experiences. The DreamJobs4me resume templates are made in such a way that they are professional looking yet attention grabbing, their streamlined layout makes it easier for the recruiters to read, understand and notice the job applicant's strong points.

Dreamjobs4me.com also offers opportunities for jobs from organizations around the world, which make the site a great place to search for vacancies, employments, jobs and post jobs, after the resume has been built with the help of the resume builder.

The DreamJobs4Me spokesperson said: "Job seekers can use the state of the art resume builder which will guide them at every step to complete their resume, once complete job seekers can choose from over 80 beautifully crafted resume templates and apply their favorite resume template with a single click"

In addition to the resume templates, job seekers can also find useful resume tips, interview tips, interview sample questions and answers that will help them find their dream job.

About: Founded in 2010, DreamJobs4me is one of the fastest growing job listing site that helps job seekers find the best jobs around the world using cutting edge technology. DreamJobs4me also helps organizations achieve its strategic goals by providing state of the art recruitment tools.

For more information, please log on to www.dreamjobs4me.com

Contact Details:

Company: DreamJobs4Me

Name: James Broad

Email: james.broad@dreamjobs4me.com

Phone: +1 636-266-6123

Website: www.dreamjobs4me.com

Country: United States of America

For more information about us, please visit http://www.dreamjobs4me.com

Contact Info:

Name: James Broad

Email: james.broad@dreamjobs4me.com

Organization: DreamJobs4Me

Phone: +1 636-266-6123

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/dreamjobs4me-com-launches-new-resume-templates-for-job-seekers/109176

Release ID: 109176

For more information visit r



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Bay Area Mediation Services By Certified Arbitrator & Mediator Website Launched

The San-Francisco based Bellman Legal launched a new website offering advice, information and access to its renowned and cost-effective mediation services, delivered by dispute resolution specialist and certified mediator Gabriel Leif Bellman.

--

The prominent San Francisco-based law firm Bellman Legal announced the launch of a new website offering information, advice and access to its acclaimed, certified and cost-effective mediation and arbitration services.

More information is available at http://www.bellmanlegal.com.

Bellman Legal is a San-Francisco based law firm providing renowned and licensed mediation, arbitration and litigation services on a wide range of legal areas. The firm is led by dispute resolution specialist and CRDC certified mediator Gabriel Leif Bellman.

Mr. Bellman currently mediates on the prestigious panel for the Bar Association of San Francisco and is a certified mediator with the Office of Citizen's Complaints, resolving disputes between citizens and police officers.

He also mediates on the panel for Community Boards Neighborhood dispute resolution, acts as a certified arbitrator for the San Francisco Housing Services and has been selected as a returning judge for negotiation competitions for law students throughout the Bay Area.

Drawing on Mr. Bellman's extensive dispute resolution experience, Bellman Legal's newly launched website is currently offering information, advice and access to certified mediation services tailored for clients interested in a more flexible, amicable and cost-effective solution to resolve civil legal disputes.

Mr. Bellman explains that the mediation process, where a neutral third party intervenes between two conflicting parties to assist in reaching a mutually acceptable decision, offers several advantages over the traditional litigation process and other alternative means of adversarial dispute resolution.

He describes that the informality and flexibility of the mediation process along with the voluntary and non-binding nature of the participation can facilitate a more efficient negotiation to ensure a faster and more productive resolution while still allowing for an amicable relationship to be maintained with the opposing party and spiraling legal costs avoided.

Mr. Bellman's areas of expertise include personal injury, landlord-tenant disputes, disability, civil rights, employment, discrimination, business, property disputes, real estate, toxic torts, harassment, workplace issues, and more.

Additional information on the benefits of the mediation process and Bellman Legal's services along with examples of legal outcomes achieved by Gabriel Bellman in several health, criminal and general civil law cases are available on website link provided above. Legal consultations with Mr. Bellman can be requested at 415-676-9894.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.bellmanlegal.com

Contact Info:

Name: Gabriel Bellman

Email: bellmanlegal@gmail.com

Organization: Bellman Legal

Address: 852 Bush St, San Francisco, CA 94108,

Phone: 415-931-2599

Release ID: 109259

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On April 30 at Around the Corner in Lakewood, 18616 Detroit Ave., Nanze.org will host its Spring Happy Hour from 6 - 8 p.m. The $25 admission includes unlimited beer, wine, well drinks and assorted appetizers. The event will feature a Chinese raffle, silent auction and a 50/50 raffle. Prizes include a four-pack of Disney park-hopper passes, Cleveland Browns merchandise and much more. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online The organization aims to better the lives of children in the sub-Saharan country of Malawi by improving education facilities, water and sanitation conditions and livelihood opportunities. Nanze's current focus is to build a school in the Chikwasa village of Malawi, where the organization currently provides support to the nursery school and community center, both of which are small one-room buildings that Nanze would also like to expand.Visit the organization's website for complete information.
iStock/Thinkstock(ST. JOHN'S, Canada) -- An archaeological discovery has renewed doubts that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover North America.

Recent excavations in Newfoundland, off Canada's east coast, provide evidence that Vikings may have settled in the area about 1,000 years ago and 400 years before Columbus discovered the continent.

After using satellite images to locate the site, the archaeologists found iron tools and what appeared to be a turf wall, similar to what Viking settlers built across the North Atlantic, according to BBC.

Sarah Parcak, who led the small team of archaeologists, believes it could be a Viking site.

"It's in a part of Newfoundland that would have had a lot of great natural resources so great access to wood, to animals, to fish," she said. "The kind of spot the Norse would've ideally settled."

According to archaeologist Douglas Bolander, the find "has the potential to give us a whole new set of insights into what the Norse were doing in North America, how long they stayed, and possibly the reasons that they left."

If confirmed, this would be the second Viking site found in Newfoundland. The first was found in 1960 on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland at L'Anse aux Meadows. The 11th-century Viking settlement is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
#1

The HTC 10 Mini is reported to come with a 4.7 inch display upfront. Well, this is much smaller as compared to the rumored 5.15 inch of the original HTC 10 and slight bigger to the 4 inch Apple iPhone SE. The resolution of the display however, isn't known as of yet. Expected HTC to include a Full HD panel on the Mini variant of their flagship smartphone. This will apparently make it sharper than the iPhone SE.

#2

HTC 10 is leaked to feature an all new metal unibody design that is tipped to debut with the launch of its bigger brother. Apparently a number of press images of the HTC 10 smartphone has been leaked so far. This successfully gives us a glimpse at what HTC has in store for its Mini variant.

#3

If the recently leaked report is to be relied upon, the HTC 10 Mini will come with an all-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 823 chip with cores clocked at 2.8GHz each. According to the report the Snapdragon 823 is merely a modified version of the SD820 with bumped up clockspeed.

#4

Just like the HTC 10, the Mini version of the smartphone is reported to come with a 4GB of RAM. In fact, 4GB has now become a standard for upper mid-range to flagship smartphone of present date. Some manufacturers have upped the game even further by launching smartphone with 6GB of RAM. Well, that's more RAM than your average PC!

#5

According to the report HTC will launch the Mini version of the flagship smartphone only in September this year. So the Taiwanese maker may eventually end up unveiling it at IFA Berlin.
Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016): Here's what we think about the phone! Reviews oi -Harshita

Samsung introduced the Galaxy J series last year to target the budget-conscious consumers who were driven towards affordable Chinese smartphones from the likes of Xiaomi, LeEco, Gionee and others. Since 2014, the smartphone market in India has seen the uptake of online specific smartphones. Samsung realized that it was left behind by its Chinese rivals in the budget segment, who were tapping the market with their aggressively priced, online specific devices, and came up with Samsung Galaxy J3 (6) but with an additional feature.

The Samsung Galaxy J3 has been placed in the sub-Rs 10,000 category, and comes with specifications that are good for a phone in this price range. However, the key feature of the smartphone is what makes it different and help it score an extra point. We are taking about the Samsung's S Bike mode, which as per the company is a unique service that has been designed to make the motor-bikers' lives easy. As its name suggests, the feature lets two-wheeler riders set automated incoming call replies without actually taking the phone out of their pockets.

Nokia A1 Press Image Surface: An Exciting Android Smartphone with a Disappointing Twist!

We went hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy J3 (6) smartphone and here are our first impressions of the phone and the S Bike mode.

Design and display:



The Galaxy J3 (6) smartphone is based on the design that has been used for the previous J series smartphones. It makes sense for Samsung phones to have a unified and familiar faux leather look across the product lineup to be easily identifiable among the crowd. The J3 (6) phone is dominated by plastic material with a metallic ring running across the side, but looks good for its price. It is light on hand and, thanks to the 5-inch display, is comfortable to be used single handedly.

The front adorns a 5-inch HD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, which offers good viewing angles and reproduces colours well. Above the display, there is a 5MP camera and below it, there is a physical home button, sandwiched between two capacitive buttons. The left has volume rocker, while right has the power button. The back panel of the phone is removable.

Processor:



Samsung Galaxy J3 (6) is powered by a quad-core processor with clock speed 1.5GHz. It is paired with 1.5GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. In addition to that, you get an expandable storage of up to 128GB via microSD card. The overall hardware specifications seem nice for a Samsung phone. Though competitors have better processing units to offer, it will all depend on the performance of the chipset that will make a difference.

Camera:



The 8MP rear camera on the phone is accompanied by an LED flash. During the brief hands-on period, we tried the camera and found it fine. However, neither the ambient lighting conditions nor the short time period were apt to test it and judge its performance. Up front, there is a 5MP selfie camera with f2.2 aperture.

Software:



The Samsung Galaxy J3 (6) runs Android 5.1 Lollipop wrapped under the company's native TouchWiz UI. The highlight of the software is that it features an Ultra Data Saving (UDS) mode which is capable of saving up to 50 percent on mobile data usage, as per company claims. The data saving mode is powered by Opera which compresses data in order to save overall mobile data usage.

S Bike mode:



The S Bike Mode is essentially the highlight of the smartphone. It is a feature that has been designed keeping the safety of two-wheeler riders in mind. The feature helps in responding to incoming calls with gesture or automated response, so that the rider doesn't get distracted by the call. The company has added smart reply feature to the app so that the user reply to an incoming call with ease, on the basis of its priority. For instance, when the user is riding the bike, the rider will not get vibration or ring alert while the caller will hear a pre-recorded message. The phone will not vibrate or ring, and the user remains unaware of incoming calls to avoid distraction while riding. However, the mode allows caller to choose to press 1 in order to reach the rider in case of emergency. The app also understands gestures.

The S Bike mode can be launched from the Quick Settings itself, which is handy and easily accessible. The company gives an NFC tag inside the retail box, which can be fixed to the fuel tank of a bike or on the helmet of the rider, for easy accessibility.

It has a simple interface and is pretty easy to use. The app supports 14 languages. It has been launched with the Galaxy J3 (6) but it will be coming to other J series smartphones sooner or later.

Conclusion:



The Galaxy J3 (6) is Samsung's take on its budget rivals. The phone looks nice and packs in decent features for its price of Rs 8,990, but its highlight remains the S Bike mode, which can be its saving point against the specs heavy budget offerings from competitors. In terms of connectivity, it supports 4G LTE, dual-SIM, a microSD card, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC. The phone houses a 2600mAh battery. The phone will be available exclusively via Snapdeal from April 7th.

Best Mobiles in India

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Pakistan Asks Tehran for Details About Alleged Indian Spy

by Noor Zahid April 01, 2016

Pakistani authorities asked Iran to investigate a suspected Indian spy arrested last month in Baluchistan.

Pakistan's Interior Ministry sent a communique to the Iranian Embassy in Islamabad accusing Kulbhushan Jadhav of involvement in an Indian spy network and saying he was planning subversive activities against the recently launched multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. He had allegedly been living in Chabahar, an Iranian port on the Gulf of Oman, west of Pakistan, before illegally entering Baluchistan.

Reuters reported that Pakistan's government aired video footage this week of Jadhav saying he set up an office in Chabahar and later worked for the Indian spy agency. It was unclear whether he made the comments freely.

India has confirmed that Jadhav is a former Indian navy officer, but denied he is a spy and said he had taken early retirement from the military.

Iranian authorities have not publicly commented on the allegations, but the embassy in Islamabad released a statement criticizing Pakistani media outlets for their reporting of the case.

"During the past few days, some sections of the Pakistani media have spread content regarding the detention of an Indian agent and the matter related to it, which could have negative implications on the fraternal and friendly atmosphere of Iran and Pakistan," a statement by the Iranian Embassy said.

Pakistan, Iran pacts

News of the spy came after a two-day visit last month to Islamabad by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who signed a number of pacts to further economic ties with Pakistan.

Pakistani media reported that officials discussed India's alleged spying activities with Rouhani. Iranian media said the matter was not discussed.

Although ties between Iran and Pakistan have been relatively distant with brief periods of economic cooperation, Iran's recent expansion of economic and trade ties with India has drawn attention in Islamabad.

Analysts say that India's recent investments in the Chabahar port project are seen as a countereffort by India to sabotage the China-Pakistan economic corridor project, by providing an alternate route that would bypass Pakistan.

Analyst Saeed Nazir of the Islamabad-based Institute of Policy Studies says that India has invested around $150 million in Chabahar and wants to create an economic route to Afghanistan and Central Asian countries.

There has been little trade between India and landlocked Afghanistan, in part because Pakistan has been reluctant to allow goods to be transported between the two countries.

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Taliban sold Indian spy to Pakistani intelligence: Senior German diplomat

Iran Press TV

Sun Apr 3, 2016 1:42AM

The Taliban sold an Indian spy to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), says a high-ranking German diplomat.

The former German ambassador in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Syria, Gunter Mulack, made the claim while giving a speech Karachi, The Hindu English-language Indian daily newspaper reported on Sunday.

Mulack said the former Indian Navy officer, Kulbhushan Jadhav, was kidnapped "by the Taliban and sold" to Pakistani intelligence. Earlier, it was announced that Jadhav had been arrested in Pakistan's Balochistan province.

After his alleged arrest, the Pakistani government released a video in which he confessed to attempts to destabilize Pakistan by supporting the Baloch separatist insurgency.

In the video, he admits to working for India's primary foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), for which he carried out subversive activities in Balochistan and Karachi.

"RAW is involved in some activities related to the Baloch liberation movement within Pakistan and the region around it," he said in the video.

The 6-minute footage was released at a joint news conference by Pakistani Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid and Director General Inter-Services Public Relations lieutenant General Asim Saleem Bajwa.

Jadav states that he was hired by RAW at the end of 2013 and "Ever since I have been directing various activities in Balochistan and Karachi at the behest of RAW and deteriorating law and order situation in Karachi."

New Delhi has confirmed Jadav as an Indian national but maintains that he was no longer employed by the navy as he had taken an early retirement.

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UN peacekeeping chief condemns sexual exploitation; says victims' needs are 'top priority'

1 April 2016  The top United Nations peacekeeping official has underscored that the protection of and assistance to victims of sexual exploitation and abuse in the Central African Republic remains the Organization's top priority.

According to the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General, Herve Ladsous, the Under-Secretary-General who heads the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said: 'I condemn the scourge of sexual exploitation in the Central African Republic,' and reiterated proposals to establish martial courts in situ.

Mr. Ladsous met with personnel from the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) and, through video conference, with staff from the field, where he firmly reminded military personnel commanders and police officers that they needed to be personally committed to countering sexual exploitation and abuse.

Speaking to reporters in Bangui, the UN peacekeeping chief stressed that it was the responsibility of police and troop contributing countries to provide military and police staff personnel who have been sensitized, trained and fully aware that they would face sanctions if allegations were to be confirmed.

At the same time, victims in the area continued to be interviewed by a MINUSCA-led investigation team comprised of experts on internal oversight, human rights, child and women's protection, conduct and discipline from various parts of the UN system, including the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Mr. Ladsous has been in CAR since earlier in the week when he represented the Secretary-General at the inauguration ceremony of the newly elected president of CAR, Faustin-Archange Touadera.

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Security Council requests options on deploying UN police in crisis-torn Burundi

1 April 2016  Paving the way for enhanced United Nations engagement in Burundi, the Security Council this evening requested Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to explore with the Government and regional actors options for a police deployment "to increase UN capacity to monitor the security situation, advance the rule of law and promote respect for human rights" in the country.

Unanimously adopting a French-led resolution, the Council reiterated "its deep concern about the persistence of violence in Burundi, as well as the persisting political impasse in the country, and the attendant serious humanitarian consequences," and requested Mr. Ban, in consultation with the Burundi Government and in coordination with the African Union (AU), to present within 15 days options for deploying a UN police component.

The Council further requested the Secretary-General to enhance the United Nations' engagement in the country through strengthening the team of the Special Adviser for conflict prevention, including in Burundi, in order to work with the Government of Burundi and other concerned stakeholders to support the inter-Burundian dialogue.

Burundi was thrown into crisis this past April when President Nkurunziza decided to run for a controversial third term that he went on to win in July. To date, it has been reported that more than 400 people have been killed, more than 250,000 have fled the nation, and thousands more have been arrested and possibly subjected to human rights violations.

Urging the Government and all parties to reject any kind of violence and condemn any public statement inciting violence or hatred, the Security Council in its resolution demanded that all sides in Burundi refrain from any action that would threaten peace and stability in the country.

The Council went on to stress the urgency of convening a genuine and inclusive inter-Burundian dialogue, based on the respect of the Constitution and the Arusha Agreement, in coordination with the Government and all stakeholders committed to a peaceful solution, both inside and outside the country, in order to find a consensual and nationally owned solution to the current crisis.

While the text noted a decrease in the number of killings, it nevertheless expressed the Council's concern over reports of increased disappearances and acts of torture, and underscored its deep concern for the continued worsening of the humanitarian situation. The Council also strongly condemned all violations and abuses of human rights in Burundi, "whoever perpetrates them."

Welcoming the consent of the Burundian authorities to increase the number of human rights observers and military experts of the AU, the Council called for their full and speedy deployment in Burundi, notes that 30 human rights observers and 15 military observers have been deployed so far, and urged the Government of Burundi and other concerned stakeholders to provide them with full cooperation in order to facilitate the implementation of their mandate.

Also by the resolution, the 15-nation Council "expressed its intention to consider measures against all actors, inside and outside Burundi, whose actions and statements contribute to the perpetuation of violence and impede the search for a peaceful solution."

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Shootings in Somalia's Capital Leave 7 Dead

by Harun Maruf, Jeff Seldin April 01, 2016

Seven people, including three intelligence security officers, died Saturday in three shootings in Mogadishu, according to witnesses in Somalia's capital.

The violence came a day after confirmation from a U.S. official that an airstrike had killed a senior member of the al-Shabab militant group.

Two of the shootings in Mogadishu involved masked or unidentified gunmen, with one attack killing two officers with Somalia's National Intelligence Agency. The third incident occurred when government security forces carrying out an operation opened fire on a crowd protesting their actions, killing three and wounding one.

The death of Al-Shabab assassin Hassan Ali Dhore occurred in an airstrike Thursday. The Somali government last year put him on a "most wanted" list of 12 people involved in terror attacks in Mogadishu.

Another suspected U.S. airstrike Friday was reported to have killed a commander known as "Qorilow," the head of al-Shabab forces in Jannaale town, and three other militants. A separate strike Saturday killed six militants in the Lower Juba region, according to local officials and residents.

'Significant' strike

U.S. Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook said the airstrike that killed Dhore was carried out in cooperation with Somali forces. He said Dhore had planned and led previous attacks that killed at least three U.S. citizens, and he was suspected of plotting further attacks against Americans in the East African country.

"While we are still assessing the results of this operation," Cook said, "removing Dhore from the battlefield would be a significant blow to al-Shabab's operational planning and [its] ability to conduct attacks against ... Somalia, its citizens, U.S. partners in the region and against Americans abroad."

Al-Shabab militants, who have staged attacks in Kenya as well as throughout Somalia, are considered to be closely linked to the al-Qaida terror network.

The deputy commander of Somalia's army, General Ali Bashe, told journalists that Somali commandos operating deep in al-Shabab-controlled territory had located and identified Dhore.

"This was a successful operation and it will continue," the general said.

In an interview with VOA's Somali service, Bashe said Dhore was killed at Toratorow village in a battle with Somali forces using the help of U.S. military experts.

Unlike the U.S. official's report, the Somali general said it was not clear whether Dhore was killed by a drone or by gunfire. At least two other Somali militants were killed along with Dhore.

Dhore commanded al-Shabab's Amniyat security and intelligence group, which included a feared squad of assassins that targeted lawmakers and other officials in Mogadishu.

A U.S. defense official said the strike took place about 30 kilometers south of Jilib, southwest of the capital, Mogadishu. He said the U.S. military had been watching Dhore for a long time and the Somali government shared information that led to the attack.

Additional strikes

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said in a note on Twitter Thursday night that his country's army and allied forces were in the midst of a heavy attack against al-Shabab. The presidential tweet was unusual in that it disclosed an operation still underway.

A similar commando raid March 9 in Awdhegle town, 120 kilometers southwest of Mogadishu, was carried out jointly by U.S. and Somali special forces. Awdhegle is near the area where Dhore was hit on Thursday.

The Pentagon said Dhore played "a direct role" in a December 2014 attack on Mogadishu's airport that killed several members of the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia (AMISOM) and one U.S. citizen.

"Dhore was also directly responsible for the March 27, 2015, attack on the Maka al-Mukarram Hotel in Mogadishu, resulting in the deaths of 15 people, including one Somali-American national," the U.S. statement said.

VOA's Joshua Fatzick in Washington contributed to this report.

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Inherent Resolve Strikes Target ISIL in Syria, Iraq

From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release

SOUTHWEST ASIA, April 2, 2016  U.S. and coalition military forces continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq yesterday, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.

Officials reported details of yesterday's strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.

Operation Inherent Resolve - Targeted Operations Against ISIL Terrorists

Operation Inherent Resolve

Strikes in Syria

Attack and remotely piloted aircraft conducted six strikes in Syria:

-- Near Hawl, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle.

-- Near Raqqah, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle.

-- Near Mara, four strikes struck four separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed 10 ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL bunkers, an ISIL mortar position and an ISIL vehicle bomb.

Strikes in Iraq

Rocket artillery and fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 20 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:

-- Near Qaim, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit.

-- Near Habbaniyah, two strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed an ISIL weapons cache.

-- Near Haditha, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit.

-- Near Hit, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit, destroying an ISIL vehicle bomb, two ISIL fuel tankers, an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL-used bridge, an ISIL barge and eight ISIL boats and denying ISIL access to terrain.

-- Near Kirkuk, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL command and control node, four ISIL assembly areas and an ISIL supply cache.

-- Near Qayyarah, seven strikes struck three separate ISIL tactical units and an ISIL weapons cache and destroyed two ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL assembly areas, an ISIL command and control node, two ISIL vehicles and an ISIL unmanned aerial vehicle.

-- Near Ramadi, a strike destroyed an ISIL anti-air artillery piece.

-- Near Sinjar, two strikes struck a large ISIL tactical unit, destroying an ISIL vehicle and suppressing an ISIL mortar firing position.

-- Near Sultan Abdallah, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed six ISIL rocket rails and an ISIL supply cache.

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 one 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 that have conducted strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

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US to send more special forces to Syria: Report

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 3:47PM

The United States is considering a new plan to "greatly increase" the number of American special forces deployed in Syria, says a new report.

US officials have told Reuters on condition of anonymity that the administration of President Barack Obama is weighing the proposal to accelerate "recent gains against" Daesh (ISIL) terrorists in Syria.

The officials with direct knowledge of the proposal's details refused to disclose the exact increase under consideration, but one of them explained that it would leave the US special operations contingent many times larger than the around 50 troops currently in Syria.

They said the plan also includes an increase in the number of American troops in Iraq.

The new plan in Syria would be separate from a revised US military effort under way to train militants, according to the report.

Last December, the US announced it was deploying a new force of special operations troops to Iraq to conduct raids against Daesh there and in neighboring Syria. The announcement followed another one in October, which said dozens of US special forces would be deployed in Syria- the first US ground troops to be stationed there.

The additional US forces in Syria would be primarily assigned to establishing sites where they would train militants and eventually provide them weapons.

Currently there are dozens of US special operations forces in Syria, who are working closely with a collection of various armed groups that are trying to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The US has long been supplying the militants with ammunition.

US officials claim that Daesh is losing a battle to forces arrayed against it from many sides in Iraq and Syria.

Washington has, under another new plan, begun training new groups of militants in Syria.

"Dozens of people are now being trained," US Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the US-led coalition, said on Friday. "These are individuals as opposed to units."

Separately, the CIA has been running a similar program aimed at pressuring Assad to step down. The CIA-armed militants, however, are now shooting at Pentagon-armed ones in Syria, according to US officials and militant leaders.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. Hundreds of thousands of people have reportedly lost their lives and millions have been displaced as a result of the violence.

The US-led coalition has been pounding purported Daesh positions inside Syria since September 2014, without any authorization from Damascus or the UN. However, they have done little to stop the terrorists' advances in parts of Syria.

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US, Philippines to launch military drills near South China Sea

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 12:56PM

The United Sates and Philippines will kick off an eleven-day military drill not far from the South China Sea.

The joint war games dubbed Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) will be launched on Monday, AFP reported on Saturday.

Thousands of US and Philippine soldiers are set to take part in the exercises with at least 55 American aircraft, according to Balikatan spokesman Captain Celeste Frank Sayson. Philippines will also deploy fighter jets it has recently acquired.

While Beijing has formerly warned other countries about the actions that could harm China's sovereignty, the US and Philippines insist that the war games are not explicitly aimed at China.

The Philippines will hold the drills as it is preparing to host US troops in at least five military bases, including one facing disputed islands in the South China Sea, under an agreement with Washington.

The 10-year military pact was signed by the US and the Philippine government in Manila in 2014, but was approved by the Philippine Supreme Court in January this year.

It would allow the US to rotate more forces and military assets through the Southeast Asian country.

The US has long been trying to increase its influence in the Asia-Pacific region to step up surveillance over China. Its military warships have been sailing within some nautical miles off China's artificial islands several times. Advanced US spy planes have also been deployed to airbases in the neighboring countries.

China, which claims sovereignty over nearly all of the South China Sea, has been building artificial islands in disputed parts of the sea.

The US accuses Beijing of carrying out what it calls a land reclamation program in the South China Sea by building the islands in the disputed areas. Beijing, however, accuses Washington of meddling in the regional issues and deliberately stoking tensions in the South China Sea.

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Putin calls for end to Nagorno-Karabakh clashes

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 12:46PM

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for an immediate end to recent clashes between Armenian-backed and Azerbaijani forces in the disputed Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

On Saturday, the Russian president called for a ceasefire between the two sides after officials from Armenia and the Azerbaijan Republic announced the clashes and reported an unknown number of casualties.

"President Putin calls on the parties in the conflict to observe an immediate ceasefire and exercise restraint in order to prevent further casualties," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu have also reportedly held talks with their counterparts from Yerevan and Baku.

'12 Azeri, 18 Armenian troops killed'

Azerbaijan said Saturday that Armenian forces had killed 12 of its soldiers and shot down a helicopter in fierce fighting between the arch-foes.

"Twelve Azeri servicemen were killed in action and a helicopter was shot down by Armenian forces," Azerbaijan's defense ministry said in a statement, also claiming that Azeri forces took control of "two strategic heights and a village" in Karabakh.

The statement also claimed that more than 100 Armenian forces had been killed or wounded. The ministry also claimed to have destroyed six Armenian tanks and 15 artillery positions.

Meanwhile, Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian claimed that Azeri troops had killed 18 Armenian soldiers.

"From our side 18 soldiers were killed and some 35 others wounded," Sarkisian said in a televised statement, not specifying if the soldiers belonged to Yerevan-backed forces in Karabakh or Armenia's armed forces.

This as earlier in the day, authorities from both countries accused the other side of provoking the violence which started overnight Friday.

The Azeri Defense Ministry also accused Armenian soldiers of opening fire 127 times along the border, including civilian residential areas, over a 24-hour time period.

Karabakh region, which is located in the Azerbaijan Republic but populated by Armenians, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian militia and the Armenian troops since a three-year war, claiming over 30,000 lives, over the region ended between the two republics in 1994 through Russian mediation.

Last December, the Armenian Defense Ministry said the ceasefire deal reached in 1994 was no longer in place, saying the current situation amounted to "war."

Although the two countries are divided by a buffer zone, both sides frequently accuse one another of violating the ceasefire.

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Azeri, Armenian troops clash at Karabakh region

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 10:30AM

Major clashes involving heavy gun and mortar fire have reportedly erupted between the military forces of Azerbaijan Republic and Armenia along the disputed border region of Karabakh.

Authorities from the two countries accused each other on Saturday of provoking the skirmishes, which broke out overnight with no immediate reports of casualties.

The Azerbaijan Republic Defense Ministry announced in a Saturday statement that Armenian troops opened fire 127 times along the border over a 24-hour period using mortars and heavy artillery shells that struck civilian regions.

Ministry spokesman Vagif Dargyakhly denied an announcement by Armenian Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan that an Azerbaijani helicopter was shot down during the clashes.

The Armenian Defense Ministry also alleged that Azeri forces initiated an offensive overnight, using tanks, artillery and military aircraft in a bid to make inroads into Nagorno-Karabkh.

It added, "Azerbaijani authorities bear all responsibility for the unprecedentedly supercharged situation."

Karabakh region, which is located in Azerbaijan Republic but populated by Armenians, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian militia and the Armenian military troops since a war over the region ended between the two republics in 1994 through Russian mediation.

Years of negotiations under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have led to little progress in the resolution of the dispute.

The two sides are separated by a demilitarized buffer zone, but both blame each other for frequent violations.

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Egypt army kills scores of militants in Sinai Peninsula

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 9:22AM

The Egyptian military says it has killed scores of militants in the restive province of North Sinai, located in the country's extreme northeast.

In an official statement on Friday, the Egyptian army said as many as 65 militants had been killed during military operations in the cities of Sheikh Zuweid and Rafah in the province, Egyptian daily Al-Ahram reported on its website.

Also on Friday, at least four policemen were killed when their vehicle went over a roadside bomb in el-Arish, the province's capital. Several other policemen and civilians were reportedly injured in the incident.

The latest instance of violence comes after a military spokesman announced last October that Egyptian forces had gained "full control" over the three cities following successful raids against "terrorist strongholds" and weapon caches, the paper added.

Over the past several years, Egyptian troops have been engaged in efforts to quell rampant militancy across the Sinai Peninsula.

The battle has led to the deaths of hundreds of troops and militants, including those with the Takfiri Velayat Sinai group.

Previously known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, the outfit has pledged allegiance to the Daesh terror group, which is mainly active in Iraq and Syria.

In October 2014, a state of emergency was declared across the whole peninsula following a deadly terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 33 soldiers.

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UN approves resolution to dispatch unarmed police to Burundi

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 5:12AM

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has adopted a resolution that allows the deployment of unarmed UN police to Burundi in a bid to help contain the escalating unrest gripping the landlocked African country.

The 15-member council unanimously passed the French-drafted motion on Friday after days of tough negotiations over its wording.

The resolution asks UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to draw up within 15 days a list of options for the proposed police force in coordination with the African Union and consultations with the Burundian government.

It provides for the "deployment of a United Nations police contribution to increase the United Nations capacity to monitor the security situation, promote the respect of human rights and advance rule of law" in the violence-wracked state.

The resolution further expresses concerns about "the persisting political impasse" in Burundi and underlines the need for convening "a genuine and inclusive inter-Burundian dialogue."

The African country plunged into turmoil last April when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced his decision to run for a third consecutive five-year term, a move that was denounced by opponents as contrary to the constitution and a 2006 peace deal that ended years of civil war.

Nkurunziza did win the third term, garnering 70 percent of the 2.8 million votes cast in the election last July. Widespread unrest and a failed coup preceded the election, however.

At least 400 people have been killed and 250,000 others have fled Burundi due to the unrest over the past year.

Referring to the UNSC-adopted resolution, France's UN ambassador Francois Delattre said, "This resolution is a first step towards a strengthened UN presence in Burundi to help ensure the respect for human rights and alert the international community on the reality of the situation on the ground."

He said that between 20 and 30 police forces are expected to be deployed to Burundi as unarmed "experts and observers."

Burundi's UN envoy Albert Shingiro voiced his government's readiness "to discuss and to come to an agreement on the nature, the size and the missions" of the UN police force.

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At Least 32 Killed In Heavy Fighting In Nagorno-Karabakh

April 02, 2016

by RFE/RL's Armenian Service and RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service

Intense fighting has been reported in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan, with heavy casualties reported on both sides and the OSCE expressing its "grave concern" at developments.

The Armenian military accused Azerbaijani forces of launching a major offensive, involving tanks, heavy artillery, and helicopter gunships.

The Azerbaijani military said its frontline forces had first come under "intensive fire" from mortars, grenade launchers, and artillery and that the Azerbaijani Army had to take "urgent measures" to respond.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said that 12 soldiers had died in the fighting. It said one Mi-24 helicopter was shot down and that one tank had been destroyed in a mine explosion.

The ministry claimed the army had "liberated strategic heights and settlements" in the region.

"Six Armenian tanks were destroyed [and] more than 100 Armenian servicemen were killed and injured," it said in a statement.

President Serzh Sarkisian said Azerbaijani troops had killed 18 ethnic Armenian soldiers.

"From our side, 18 soldiers were killed and some 35 others wounded," Sarkisian said at a meeting of the National Security Council in Yerevan, according to his press office.

He did not specify if the soldiers belonged to Yerevan-backed separatist forces in Nagorno-Karabakh or Armenia's armed forces.

Reports from the region said two civilians had also been killed, including a 12-year-old boy.

Nagorno-Karabakh lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians.

The Armenian Defense Ministry called it the most serious escalation of fighting in the conflict since a 1994 truce and called on the United States, Russia, and France -- who lead international efforts to mediate the conflict -- to urgently intervene.

Armenian Prime Minister Ovik Abrahamian convened an urgent meeting over the "unprecedented large-scale hostilities from the enemy," the Armenian government said.

"Armenia is ready to take the necessary steps to stabilize the situation," Abrahamian said.

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian is expected to convene a Security Council meeting on the situation later on April 2.

In a statement, the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, which has been mediating the conflict, expressed "grave concern over the reported large-scale cease-fire violations that are taking place along the Line of Contact in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone. We strongly condemn the use of force and regret the senseless loss of life, including civilians.

The statement -- by ambassadors Igor Popov of Russia, James Warlick of the United States, and Pierre Andrieu of France -- called upon the sides to stop shooting and take all necessary measures to stabilize the situation on the ground.

Warlick said on Twitter that the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs will meet in Vienna on April 4 and convene the Minsk Group on April 5 to address the violence.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said Putin is "deeply concerned about the reports on resumed military actions along the line of engagement in Nagorno-Karabakh." He said Putin called on the parties to the conflict to implement an immediate cease-fire and to exercise restraint.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later spoke separately by phone with the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia to urge calm, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. Russia has sold arms to both sides in the conflict.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned "in the strongest terms" the cease-fire violations while extending Washington's condolences to all affected families.

"We urge the sides to show restraint, avoid further escalation, and strictly adhere to the ceasefire," Kerry said in an April 2 statement.

He added that "the unstable situation on the ground demonstrates why the sides must enter into an immediate negotiation under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs on a comprehensive settlement of the conflict."

The U.S. top diplomat reiterated that there is no military solution to the conflict.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called on the parties to stop the fighting immediately and observe the cease-fire.

"The sides must show restraint and avoid any further actions or statements that could result in escalation," Mogherini said in a statement.

She said both sides should refrain from the use of force and resume efforts towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

Hikmat Hajiyev, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry, called on the international community to condemn Armenia's actions.

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh broke out in the dying years of the Soviet Union and killed about 30,000 people.

Years of diplomatic efforts, led by the OSCE, have been largely unsuccessful at resolving the simmering crisis between the two heavily armed neighbors.

The fresh outbreak of violence came as the presidents of both Azerbaijan and Armenia, Ilham Aliyev and Sarkisian, were winding up visits to the United States.

Just hours before the fighting broke out, Aliyev and Sarkisian met jointly with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who called on the South Caucasus leaders to peacefully settle the protracted dispute.

On March 30, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for an "ultimate resolution" to the conflict during talks in Washington with Aliyev.

At his meeting with Kerry, Aliyev thanked the United States for trying to end the conflict but said it could only be resolved through a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for the "immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian troops" from Azerbaijan.

Nagorno-Karabakh, populated mainly by ethnic Armenians, declared independence from Azerbaijan after a 1988-94 war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Internationally mediated negotiations with the involvement of the OSCE's Minsk Group have failed to result in a resolution. The Minsk Group is co-chaired by France, Russia, and the United States.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/nagorno-karabakh- heavy-fighting-armenia-azerbaijan/27649973.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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US sends F-15 fighter jets to Iceland, Netherlands

Iran Press TV

Sun Apr 3, 2016 2:15AM

The US military has sent a dozen F-15C fighter jets and some 350 airmen to Iceland and the Netherlands, as part of an effort to deter alleged Russian aggression in Europe.

According to an announcement by the US Air Force on Friday, US aircraft units from the 131st Fighter Squadron at Barnes Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts and the 194th Fighter Squadron at Fresno Air National Guard Base in California will support NATO air surveillance missions in Iceland and conduct flying training in the Netherlands.

The F-15s are part of the US's Theater Security Packages, a rotational force used to augment existing Air Force capabilities in Europe, the Air Force said.

"Russia's increased patrols with fighters, bombers and submarines in the North Atlantic have brought new attention to the region and the need for NATO to have a presence there as well," said Magnus Nordenman, director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

The aircraft are scheduled to remain in Europe through September.

The US used to have an air base in Iceland during the Cold War but that base was closed in 2006.

In February, the US also said it will send six F-15s to Finland as part of a program initiated in 2014 to reassure NATO allies after Russian military intervention in Ukraine. These aircraft are set to deploy next month.

Tensions increased between Russia and the West in March 2014 after Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea jointed the Russian Federation following a referendum. NATO eventually severed all military cooperation with Moscow over a crisis in Ukraine in April 2014.

Ties further soured after the US and its European allies accused Russia of destabilizing the situation in Ukraine and imposed a number of sanctions against Moscow over the crisis in Russian-speaking regions in eastern Ukraine. Russia has rejected the accusations.

In the appraisal, Russia also accused the US and the European Union of supporting an "anti-constitutional coup d'etat in Ukraine", which led to a divide in the Ukrainian society, as well as the military conflict in east of the country.

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China to work together with the US for new-type relationship: Xi

People's Daily Online

(China Daily) 09:12, April 02, 2016

Countries should handle points of friction constructively, president says

China and the United States should handle unresolved disputes in a constructive manner to avoid misunderstandings and escalation in conflicts, President Xi Jinping told US President Barack Obama on Thursday.

China will firmly safeguard its sovereignty and rights in the South China Sea and will not accept any activities excusing, in the name of free navigation, behavior that could harm its national sovereignty, Xi said.

"I would like to reiterate that to work together with the US side to establish a new-type relationship between big powers, achieve the goal of no conflict or confrontation, show respect for each other and cooperate for win-win results is the priority of China's foreign policy," he said.

The president made the remarks during a meeting with Obama on the sidelines of the 4th Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, which concludes on Friday.

The 90-minute meeting was the only bilateral meeting Obama arranged during the summit, which was attended by more than 50 heads of state and governments.

The two countries have carried out effective communication on issues including Iranian nuclear development, Syria, Afghanistan and peacekeeping, and that shows great potential for a new-type big power relationship, Xi said.

The global economy is experiencing a sluggish period, and no country in the world should stimulate exports by currency depreciation, he added.

China and the US should boost trust between their militaries, and they should make cybersecurity an area for cooperation, Xi said.

It had been a contentious issue in bilateral relations for years before Xi's state visit to the US in September, when the two leaders reached consensus on more effectively tackling the issue.

Xi also reiterated China's stance on Taiwan and called on the US to uphold the one-China policy and help to maintain peaceful development cross-Straits ties.

Obama praised the cooperation between the two countries on nuclear security, citing the example of China's new Nuclear Security Center of Excellence, a joint program between the two nations that opened in Beijing just before the nuclear summit.

"I believe we can deepen our cooperation, including against nuclear smuggling," he said.

Obama said he and Xi are both committed to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the full implementation of UN sanctions.

Assistant Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang told reporters after the meeting that the presidents agreed to speed up negotiations on the China-US Bilateral Investment Treaty.

He added that Xi reaffirmed Beijing's stance opposing Pyongyang's development of nuclear weapons.

Jin Canrong, director of the Center for International Strategic Studies at Renmin University of China, said, "As competition between China and the US increases, meetings of the two presidents are playing a bigger role in stabilizing strategic ties, which need intense care."

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DPRK denounces Security Council for ignoring call for discussing U.S.-S.Korea war games

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 09:40, April 03, 2016

PYONGYANG, April 2 -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Saturday denounced the UN Security Council for dismissing its call for convening a meeting to discuss ongoing U.S.-S.Korea joint military exercises.

The UN Security Council is "turning a blind eye to U.S. nuclear threats to the DPRK," the official KCNA news agency reported.

The DPRK presented a letter to the Security Council late March, calling for holding an urgent meeting on the U.S.-S.Korea annual joint war games code-named "Key Resolve" and "Foal Eagle," which, a spokesperson for the DPRK Foreign Ministry said Saturday, was ignored by the Security Council.

Pyongyang has said that the military exercises, with their large scale and aggressive nature, constitute a grave threat to the DPRK, disturb international peace and stability, and violate respect for state sovereignty.

The spokesperson also said that the DPRK will further strengthen its self-defensive deterrent "capable of frustrating U.S. nuclear threat, blackmail and provocation."

On March 7, South Korea and the United States began their joint annual war games of "Key Resolve" and "Foal Eagle." The "Key Resolve" exercise ended last month, but the "Foal Eagle" field training exercise is scheduled to last till April 30.

Pyongyang has repeatedly denounced the U.S.-South Korea military exercises as a dress rehearsal for northward invasion.

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DPRK test-fires new-type guided rockets: report

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 11:28, April 02, 2016

PYONGYANG, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has test-fired "new-type anti-air guided rockets" under the observation of its top leader Kim Jong Un, the country's official KCNA news agency reported Saturday.

The rockets accurately hit the aerial targets of the simulated enemy, the KCNA said without specifying when and where the test was carried out.

Kim was satisfied with the test, saying it demonstrated the DPRK's rapidly growing defense capability.

The DPRK on Friday fired a ground-to-air missile into its eastern waters, according to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The launch came just three days after Pyongyang fired a rocket in northeastern direction.

Pyongyang's frequent projectile launches in recent weeks are said to protest the ongoing U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises and newly-adopted international sanctions on the DPRK.

In early March, UN Security Council adopted tougher-than-ever sanctions on Pyongyang over its fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6.

On March 7, South Korea and the United Stateskicked off their joint annual war games "Key Resolve" and "Foal Eagle." The "Key Resolve" exercise ended last month, but the "Foal Eagle" field training exercise is scheduled to last till April 30.

Pyongyang has repeatedly denounced the U.S.-South Korea military exercises as a dress rehearsal for northward invasion.

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Iran Navy might untouched by US sanctions: Commander

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 2:36PM

Iran's Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari says sanctions by the United States and its allies will fail to hinder the country's plans to boost its military might.

"Regardless of opposition from the US and its allies, [our] plans will be implemented based on requirements to defend the country's maritime borders," Sayyari told reporters in the southern Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas on Saturday on the sidelines of a ceremony to welcome the 38th fleet of the Iranian Navy.

Despite sanctions, the Iranian naval forces have succeeded in making great achievements, Sayyari said, adding that if all countries opposing the Islamic establishment pool their resources they will fail to make any breakthrough to hinder the Iranian Navy's progress.

He downplayed the impact of sanctions against the Islamic Republic and said Iran's Navy has managed to manufacture military equipment, including destroyers such as Jamaran, Damavand and Sahand, under such embargoes.

He added that Iran's Navy would pay no heed to foreigners' talks about the country's maneuvers aimed at enhancing its defense power.

In recent years, Iran has made great achievements in its defense sector and conducted numerous military drills.

Iran has repeatedly assured other countries that its military might poses no threat to other states, insisting that the country's defense doctrine is entirely based on deterrence.

Iran's Navy chief further said the 38th fleet returned home after accomplishing its mission in international waters during some 75 days.

He added that the flotilla conveyed Iran's message of peace and friendship to other countries and carried out measures to fight piracy.

Sayyari said the 39th flotilla of the Iranian Navy, consisting of Alvand destroyer, had set off for the Bay of Bengal to attend a ceremony marking the anniversary of India's Independence Day (observed annually on August 15) and returned home before the 38th fleet.

He also noted that the 40th fleet, comprising Alborz destroyer and Qom logistic-combat warships, would set off for high seas in near future.

In recent years, Iran's Navy has increased its presence in international waters to protect naval routes and provide security for merchant vessels and tankers.

The Iranian Navy has also been conducting patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008 in line with international efforts against piracy in order to safeguard merchant containers and oil tankers owned or leased by Iran or other countries.

Iran's Navy has managed to foil several attacks on both Iranian and foreign tankers during its missions in international waters.

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Obama Says U.S. Will Address Some Iranian Concerns Over Sanctions

April 02, 2016

by RFE/RL

U.S. President Barack Obama said that his administration is preparing to address concerns that Iran is not getting the full benefit of sanctions relief under its nuclear accord with world powers.

At a press conference following a Washington Nuclear Security Summit with world leaders on April 1, Obama said because Iran has been keeping its side of the deal, the United States will do what it can to ensure Tehran experiences promised relief from nuclear-related sanctions.

"Some of the concerns that Iran has expressed, we are going to work with them to address," he said.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and his counterparts in Europe "will be clarifying for companies what transactions with Iran are in fact allowed" under the nuclear agreement so businesses do not risk running afoul of remaining U.S. restrictions on transactions with Iran, he said.

Despite the lifting of most global economic sanctions on Iran in January, many restrictions remain in place in the United States because of Iran's status as a state sponsor of terrorism, its repeated testing of ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, and violations of human rights.

Obama did not provide details at his press conference, but he stressed that some of the disappointment Iran is experiencing with sanctions relief thus far is due to Tehran's own misbehavior, not the remaining U.S. sanctions.

"Iran so far has followed the letter of the agreement, but the spirit of the agreement involves Iran also sending signals to the world community and businesses that it is not going to be engaging in a range of provocative actions that might scare businesses off," Obama said.

"When they launch ballistic missiles with slogans calling for the destruction of Israel, that makes businesses nervous," he said.

"Iran has to understand that businesses want to go where they feel safe," he said. "There is a geopolitical risk that is heightened when Iran ships missiles to Hizballah and threatens Israel."

Iran also "faces the challenge that companies have not been doing business there for a long time, and they have to get comfortable" with the idea of going back into Iran, he said.

"It is going to take time over the next several months for companies and their legal departments to feel confident...there may not be risks of liability if they do business with Iran."

Earlier in the day, Obama cautioned that "it will take time for Iran to reintegrate into the global economy, but Iran is already beginning to see the benefit of [the nuclear] deal."

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, AP, and dpa

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/obama- says-will-address-some-iranian-concerns-us- sanctions-nuclear-deal/27649729.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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Iraqi forces seize Daesh prison in Anbar, free 1,500 people

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 10:9PM

Iraqi security forces have attacked an underground prison run by the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the western province of Anbar, freeing as many as 1,500 prisoners.

Malallah al-Obeidi, the head of the al-Baghdadi city council, said Saturday that the large prison was located in the Hit district, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of the provincial capital Ramadi, where civilians and Iraqi security members were incarcerated, Iraq's al-Sumaria news reported.

All the freed inmates were taken to a safe place outside the district, the official further said.

In the past few days, government forces managed to liberate several regions in the district and are now pushing towards the town of Hit, under Daesh control since October 2014.

The operation to liberate Hit, a Euphrates Valley town, started earlier this week and is part of a wider push that includes capture of embattled Mosul, which has served as the de-facto capital of the terrorist group in Iraq.

Daesh has suffered major blows from Iraqi forces over the past months and is increasingly losing areas under its control. The terror group recently moved its key command centers to hospitals and health centers in Iraq's northern city of Hawijah in Kirkuk province to use civilians as human shields against government airstrikes.

Gruesome violence has plagued the northern and western parts of Iraq ever since the Takfiris launched an offensive in June 2014, and took control of portions of the Iraqi territory.

Only in the month of March, 1,119 Iraqi people, including 575 civilians, lost their lives and 1,561 others sustained injuries due to armed conflicts, acts of terror and violence, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) announced on Friday.

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32 Daesh terrorists killed, injured in Iraqi air raids on Kirkuk: Source

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 10:19AM

More than a dozen Takfiri Daesh militants have been killed and many more wounded in Iraqi army airstrikes on the northern province of Kirkuk, an Iraqi security source says.

Iraq's al-Sumaria News quoted the official as saying on Saturday that 15 militants were killed and 17 others sustained injuries when Iraqi Sukhoi fighter jets bombarded a convoy affiliated with Daesh in Hawijah District in southern Kirkuk.

Three vehicles carrying military equipment were also destroyed during the aerial assaults.

On Friday, a local source in Iraq's northwestern province of Nineveh said that Daesh had executed 30 of its members for fleeing clashes in southern Mosul.

Meanwhile, a village in the southern entrance to the city of Hit in the western province of Anbar was liberated.

An Iraqi army general said the Iraqi flag has been hoisted on top of one of the buildings in the village, adding that four Daesh elements were killed while five explosive-laden vehicles were destroyed with their occupants.

The head of the city council of Khalidiya in Anbar also said US-led strikes left 35 Daesh terrorists dead.

The northern and western parts of Iraq have seen violence by Daesh since the group began an offensive in the Iraqi territory in June 2014.

Daesh terrorists have been carrying out horrific acts of violence, such as public decapitations and crucifixions, against all communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians in areas they have overrun.

Iraqi army soldiers and fighters from Popular Mobilization Units are involved in operations to eradicate Daesh.

The US and it allies have been carrying out airstrikes in Iraq since June 2014 allegedly targeting Daesh.

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Iraqi security forces recapture four areas in Anbar

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 1:0AM

Iraqi security forces, backed by fighters from allied Popular Mobilization Units, have fully liberated four districts in the conflict-ridden western province of Anbar from Daesh Takfiri terrorists.

Government forces carried out a string of counter-terrorism operations in close proximity to the city of Hit, located 145 kilometers (90 miles) west of the capital Baghdad on Friday and managed to wrest control over the regions of Basateen, Mourour, Saklat and Askari.

Provincial authorities, speaking on condition of anonymity, said nearly 100 Daesh terrorists and 15 Iraqi soldiers were killed during the offensives.

Iraqi fighter jets also bombed a Daesh base and killed 13 terrorists elsewhere in Anbar, while a weapons depot and a tunnel were destroyed in al-Sen and Tal al-Marg districts of Hit.

Separately, Iraqi military aircraft pounded a strategic bridge in Hit, cutting off a Daesh supply line in the area.

The operation to liberate Hit started earlier this week and is part of a wider push to capture embattled Mosul in the northern province of Nineveh.

Furthermore, Iraqi army soldiers thwarted a Daesh raid against the village of Kharbardan south of Mosul, killing 27 extremists in the process. Two men and a woman, who could not detonate their explosive-laden jackets, were among the slain militants.

The northern and western parts of Iraq have been plagued by gruesome violence ever since Takfiri Daesh terrorists mounted an offensive in June 2014.

The militants have been committing crimes against all ethnic and religious communities in Iraq, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians.

The Iraqi army and volunteer fighters have been engaged in operations to liberate militant-held regions.

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Libya: Security Council welcomes Presidency Council's arrival in Tripoli

1 April 2016  The United Nations today welcomed the arrival in the Libyan capital of Prime Minister Fayez Serraj and other members of the Presidency Council of the Government of National Accord.

"This was an important step towards bringing stability to the country and bringing the political process back on track to implement the Libyan Political Agreement," the Security Council said in a press statement issued by Ambassador Liu Jieyi, the Council president for the month of April.

The Libyan Political Agreement, which was signed in Skhirat, Morocco, on 17 December 2015, following a UN-brokered process to form a national unity. The Council had welcomed the Agreement in its resolution 2259 (2015).

In today's statement, the Security Council encouraged the Presidency Council to urgently start its work so as "to broaden the basis of its support and to tackle Libya's political, security, humanitarian, economic and institutional challenges and to confront the rising threat of terrorism." In particular, this includes the threat from groups proclaiming allegiance to Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and groups affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The Council also reiterated its call on all parties in Libya to support the efforts underway and again expressed concern about activities which could be damaging to the "integrity and unity of Libyan State financial institutions and the National Oil Corporation."

In addition, the Council renewed their call, from resolution 2259 (2015), "to cease support to and official contact with parallel institutions that claim to be the legitimate authority but are outside of the Libyan Political Agreement as specified by it."

Since arriving on Thursday, the Presidency Council has met with local political leaders, as well as businesses, including with the Governor of the Central Bank and Tripoli municipalities.

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Syria: UN advisor warns of 'lost momentum' and frustration in humanitarian access talks

1 April 2016  Diplomats are "very frustrated" about not being able to keep the early momentum in the humanitarian track of the intra-Syrian talks, a United Nations humanitarian mediator has warned.

Coming out of yesterday's International Syria Support Group (ISSG) meeting on humanitarian access, Jan Egeland, Special Advisor to the UN Special Envoy for Syria, told reporters that the situation has notably improved from 2015, but the operation is now running into difficulties.

Compared with a year earlier, when UN had access to only one besieged area in Yarmouk, humanitarian supplies have now reached 150,000 people in 11 of the 18 besieged areas, he said.

In addition, convoys got a greenlight to go to three new places, Arbeen, Zamalka and Zabadin. Airdrops in Deir Ez Zor are likely to start on a regular basis within a fortnight.

"However, I will not hide that we are afraid now to lose some of the momentum that we got after the Munich meeting," Mr. Egeland said.

There is no access or greenlight at all to Douma, Darayya and East Harasta. In Douma, more than 90,000 people are in need. And there are a number of administrative problems, security issues, and delays. For the three new areas, UN has much higher number of people in need that the Government approved.

"And perhaps, most importantly, we are still not where we should be according to international law on medical services and health services for the besieged areas," he said, noting that surgical equipment is still taken off convoys, the besieged areas remain off-limits to medical personal, and medical evacuation is not permitted.

Within the last 75 hours, three children bled to death in Madaya, he said. "They were playing with an unexploded bomb, they were gravely wounded but they didn't die. They died because of medical evacuation was not allowed and possible to organize," he added.

"It is basically a bit frustrating now and my clear message was that all of the countries that have influence, not only Russia, have to help us," he said.

Urging the Government and the opposition groups to break the impasse, Mr. Egeland said "we must continue to get to the remaining besieged areas and we cannot allow medical services to be exempted."

The next ISSG meeting on humanitarian access will take place on Thursday, 7 April. He said he expects Russia, Iran, China, Iraq as well as the Europeans who have contact with Damascus to be actively engaged with the Government.

The ISSG, comprised of the United Nations, the Arab League, the European Union and 18 countries, has been seeking a path forward on the crisis in Syria for several months.

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Syria's Pro-Democracy Protesters Show Renewed Defiance in Face of Jihadist Intimidation

by Jamie Dettmer April 01, 2016

The reduction of hostilities in Syria after last month's cease-fire deal has led to a resurgence of demonstrations in rebel-held areas.

Thousands of pro-democracy activists have taken to the streets to demand that President Bashar al-Assad relinquish power. And as political activists and ordinary residents again find their voice, their target isn't only the Assad regime, but also jihadist groups such as al-Qaida's affiliate in the country, Jabhat al-Nusra.

For more than a week, people in the southern suburbs of Damascus have held protests urging al-Nusra to withdraw from districts controlled by opposition forces south of the capital.

The protests were sparked in the town of Beit Sahem after al-Nusra fighters fired on a checkpoint manned by opposition militiamen; then intensified when the fighters killed a protester, according to activists with a group calling itself the Rally for the Syrian Revolutionary Spring.

Protesters have rallied in dozens of towns in the northern Syria province of Idlib, an al-Nusra stronghold since the jihadists and affiliated hardline Islamist factions seized it in March 2015.

Al-Qaida's affiliate has sometimes talked of the province as an emirate, but has refrained from trying to control all aspects of local governance. Grass-roots councils that have sprung up in Idlib oversee education and local services.

Al-Nusra fighters say the protesters waving the three-star revolutionary flag associated with the moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) are being fomented by rival armed factions. They point to the involvement of Ahmad al-Saoud, leader of the Western-backed FSA Division 13, in anti-Nusra protests in the town of Maarat al-Numan.

The claim is dismissed by Bassam al-Kuwaitli, managing director of RM Team, a monitoring and evaluation research organization that works with local and international NGOs on projects in Syria.

"It is mostly activists trying to reclaim their space back," he said of the protests.

The brandishing of the revolutionary flag is seen as part of that reclaiming. But al-Nusra sees the banner as representing secularism, and recently announced a ban on the flag.

Protests tax al-Nusra

According to Charles Lister, an analyst with the Middle East Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the protests represent a serious challenge to al-Nusra. The jihadist group is "vulnerable when faced with constrained levels of violence," he said.

Faced with emboldened locals and activists, the al-Qaida affiliate has overstepped in its reaction to the burgeoning protests, he adds.

The jihadists deployed scores of militants on motorbikes to storm a street demonstration in mid-March in Maarat al-Numan. The crackdown quickly morphed into the raiding of weapons storage facilities belonging to the 13th Division and the arrest of some of the FSA militia's members.

For many, the scene was reminiscent of Jabhat al-Nusra's elimination of FSA rivals  the Syrian Revolutionaries Front in Idlib in November 2014 and Harakat Hazm in Aleppo in March 2015, according to Lister.

"However, what has followed the 13th Division's subjugation in Maarat al-Numan is markedly different," he added. "Both the SRF and Harakat Hazm were widely distrusted by Syria's conventional opposition, but the 13th Division is extremely popular."

Protests have continued  demonstrators set fire to an al-Qaida jail and freed detained 13th Division fighters March 13. A similar pushback has been seen in other towns in northern Syria and the Damascus suburbs, where local sheiks and clerics warned al-Nusra that an aggressive response would prompt an explosion.

Growing opposition

Militarily preeminent within the armed opposition to Assad, al-Nusra now risks provoking a widespread popular backlash.

Activists argue that as peace negotiations continue in Geneva, the West should seize the opportunity to embrace the Syrian opposition to Assad and offer greater material support  both to non-armed groups and the armed wing of the revolution.

Anti-Nusra protests also have continued in the city of Salqin in the Idlib countryside and in the town of al-Atareb on the outskirts of Aleppo, where al-Nusra seems unable to intimidate opponents into silence by attacking opposition militiamen and local residents.

The same is true in the towns of Beit Sahem, Yelda and Babila in the suburbs of the Syrian capital.

According to the Sham News Network, an anti-Assad media outlet, the unpopularity of al-Nusra is built on "accumulated grievances" between the jihadist group  a onetime ally of the Islamic State but now a bitter rival  and local residents. Six civilians were injured in protests when al-Nusra members opened fire on demonstrators last month.

The Assad regime's reaction to the anti-Nusra protests isn't helping the pro-democracy protesters. Several towns that have seen protests have been targeted for airstrikes  seemingly a regime tactic to undermine political activism and shore up support for al-Nusra. Since the uprising against Assad began, the regime has maintained that all its opponents are "terrorists."

On Friday, Syrian government warplanes targeted Maarat al-Numan with multiple airstrikes in what Lister described in a tweet as an "unsurprisingly cynical move" by the Assad regime.

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Turkey sends arms to Daesh in Syria through aid convoys: Russia

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 7:59AM

Russia's envoy to the United Nations (UN) says he has submitted to the Security Council purported evidence of the illicit transfer of arms and military hardware by Turkey to Daesh terrorist group in Syria.

"The main supplier of weapons and military equipment to ISIL fighters is Turkey, which is doing so through non-governmental organizations. Work in this area is overseen by the National Intelligence Organization of Turkey," Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin wrote in a letter to the UNSC, RT report on Friday.

Churkin also said that the transfer of military supplies to the notorious terrorist group "mainly involves vehicles" that operated across Syria under the cover of "humanitarian aid convoys."

He identified in his letter a number of NGOs funded by Turkish and other foreign sources that shipped to Syria cargoes of various sorts, including military equipment, throughout the past year.

"The Besar foundation is most actively engaged in pursuing these objectives and, in 2015, formed around 50 convoys to the Turkmen areas of Bayirbucak and Kiziltepe (260 kilometers north of the Syrian capital of Damascus)," the Russian envoy said. He also identified the Iyilikder Foundation and the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms as other groups involved in the alleged operations.

According to Churkin, such deliveries are carried out through various checkpoints on the Turkish-Syrian border as well as waterways, specifically the Euphrates River.

The Russian military released a batch of purported evidence implicating Turkey in late 2015, including satellite images of columns of oil tanker trucks moving into Turkey from areas controlled by Daesh militants in Syria.

Ankara is widely believed to be the key conduit for armed militants slipping into Syria to join the foreign-backed militancy across Syria that seeks to topple the Damascus government.

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Amnesty Says Turkey Illegally Sending Syrians Back To War Zone

April 02, 2016

by RFE/RL

Amnesty International has accused Turkey of illegally returning thousands of Syrians to their war-torn homeland in recent months.

The human rights group said Turkey has been expelling around 100 men, women, and children nearly daily since mid-January.

"EU leaders have willfully ignored the simplest of facts: Turkey is not a safe country for Syrian refugees," Amnesty's Europe and Central Asia Director John Dalhuisen said on April 1.

Turkey's Foreign Ministry denied Syrians were being sent back against their will, while a spokesman for the European Commission said it took the allegations seriously and would raise them with Ankara.

The news comes as Greece pressed ahead with plans to start deporting migrants and refugees back to Turkey next week.

Lawmakers in Athens on April 1 voted 169-107 to back draft legislation, fast-tracked through parliament, to allow the returns to start as soon as April 4.

The operation would see migrants and refugees who arrived on Greek islands after March 20 put on boats and sent back to Turkey.

The imminent deportations are backed by the European Union following its recent agreement with Turkey, and triggered more violence at detention camps in Greece.

Authorities on the Greek island of Chios said several hundred people pushed their way out of an overcrowded detention camp and staged a peaceful protest on April 1 in the island's main town, chanting "Freedom! Freedom!" and "Turkey No!"

More protests are planned on the island on April 2.

Greek officials did not respond to the criticism directly, but insisted the rights of detained asylum seekers were being protected.

"I assure you that we will strictly observe human rights procedures, not what people are inventing but what is required under the circumstances," Migration Affairs Minister Ioannis Mouzalas told parliament on April 1.

In Geneva, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) urged Greece and Turkey to provide further safeguards for asylum seekers before the returns begin.

The UNHCR noted that conditions were worsening by the day for more than 4,000 people being held in detention on Greek islands.

With reporting by AP and Reuters

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/amnesty-turkey- sending-syrians-back-to-war-zone/27650007.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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DPP pledges to work to maintain cross-strait stability

ROC Central News Agency

2016/04/02 14:30:25

Taipei, April 2 (CNA) The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on Saturday said it has taken note of a statement by the U.S. government encouraging Taipei and Beijing to continue their efforts to maintain cross-Taiwan Strait peace and stability.

"Cross-strait peace and stability is the joint responsibility of the two sides. We will work hard for it," DPP spokesman Wang Min-sheng () said.

Wang added that the DPP also appreciated Washington's commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act and its attention to cross-strait peace.

He was responding to remarks made by U.S. National Security Council Senior Director for Asian Affairs Dan Kritenbrink in a press briefing held Thursday, prior to a meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping ().

On a question related to Taiwan, Kritenbrink said he expected the issue of Taiwan would be raised in the meeting because it almost always comes up in any meeting between the two presidents.

"What I'm confident will happen, if and when that issue is raised, is that President Obama will make very clear that we remain committed to our One-China Policy based on both the Three Joint Communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act," he said.

Under the Taiwan Relations Act, Washington agrees to provide Taiwan the means to defend itself, including by selling arms to the island. And in the Three Joint Communiques signed by the U.S. and People's Republic of China as the two sides normalized relations in the 1970s and 1980s, both sides agreed to respect each other's national sovereignty and territorial integrity and the United States formally acknowledged the desire of Chinese people for a unified and undivided China.

Kritenbrink also said: "I'm confident he'll also make very clear that we have welcomed the historic progress in cross-strait relations over the last eight years, and we'd like to see that progress, that peace and that stability to continue."

He added: "Our fundamental national interest, of course, is in the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. And we have encouraged both counterparts in Beijing and in Taipei to continue that work as the new DPP administration under Tsai Ing-wen comes into power in Taipei" in May.

(By Sophia Yeh and Y.F. Low)

ENDITEM/cs

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Six Turkish forces killed in alleged PKK bombing

Iran Press TV

Sat Apr 2, 2016 9:25PM

Six Turkish forces, including a Special Forces police officer, have reportedly been killed in a bomb blast in southeastern Turkey, blamed on Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants.

The Saturday bombing in the Nusaybin district of Mardin Province took place while Turkish security forces were conducting a military operation in the restive area, local press outlets reported.

The development came as Turkish military's General Staff announced in a statement that its forces killed 12 PKK militants in security operations on Friday, including two in the Nusaybin district.

The statement, cited by the country's official Anadolu press agency, further added that the latest killing of the PKK elements in the area brought the total number of the militants killed in Nusaybin so far to 150.

The military statement added that Turkish forces further killed six PKK militants in Sirnak Province, three more in the Yuksekova district of Hakkari Province, and another in the Belen district of Hatay Province during security operations bringing the total number of alleged PKK elements killed in those areas to 249.

It also noted that Turkish forces seized a number of weapons and IEDs during the operations

A ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish government collapsed in July 2015 and attacks on Turkish security forces have soared ever since.

Ankara has been engaged in a large-scale campaign against the PKK in its southern border region in the past few months. The Turkish military has also been conducting offensives against the positions of the group in northern Iraq and Syria.

The operations began in the wake of a deadly July 2015 bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc. More than 30 people perished in the attack, which the Turkish government blamed on the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.

Following the bombing, PKK militants, who accuse the government in Ankara of supporting Daesh, engaged in a series of attacks against Turkish security forces, prompting a major crackdown and military operations in predominantly Kurdish populated areas of the country by Turkey.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also denounced Western support for Kurdish forces, including the People's Protection Units (YPG), fighting against the Daesh terrorist group in war-ravaged Syria.

Describing the YPG as "a gang of terrorists," Erdogan insisted on Thursday during his visit to the US that it was an extension of the PKK militants.

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Poroshenko Predicts Win In Dutch Vote On Ukraine Pact With EU

April 02, 2016

by RFE/RL

The United States has urged Dutch voters to approve Ukraine's cooperation agreement with the European Union in a referendum on April 4, even as Ukraine's president predicted victory.

"We're absolutely sure that European integration and the implementation of our Association Agreement will not be stopped," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on April 1.

Poroshenko met with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington and afterward stressed the friendship between their countries.

He accused the Dutch anti-EU activists who demanded the referendum of exploiting the Ukraine question as part of an agenda to strike a blow against the EU. The cooperation deal with Ukraine puts Kyiv on a path toward eventual EU membership.

"The real purpose was an internal Dutch discussion about the future of the European Union and internal political clashes," Poroshenko said. "This is very dangerous -- that a 45-million-person country could become the victim of this."

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said that while it is up to Dutch voters to decide, "we believe that an Association Agreement is in the best interests of Ukraine, the Netherlands, and Europe."

The agreement "is critical to ensuring that Ukraine's leaders continue to make the needed and important reforms that will contribute to a more peaceful, democratic, prosperous, and stable continent," she said.

Trudeau added that "it will provide new economic opportunities for the Netherlands, for Ukraine, and for Europe as a whole."

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker last month sought to assure Dutch voters who oppose further expansion of the EU after years of incorporating other Eastern European states that he doesn't expect Ukraine to join the EU for another 25 years.

He has warned that a rejection of the treaty by Dutch voters could lead to a "continental crisis."

Earlier in the day, Poroshenko met with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the summit and the two discussed the prospects for creating a new governing coalition in Ukraine.

Poroshenko has sought to assure U.S. leaders as he made the rounds in Washington that he is close to getting an agreement with other parties to form a new coalition, despite a failed attempt at doing so earlier this week.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and TASS

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/poroshenko- predicts-win-dutch-vote-ukraine-cooperation- pact-european-union/27649728.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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Obama Hails Summit Accord, But Says Nuclear Terrorism Still a Risk

by Pamela Dockins April 02, 2016

The leaders of more than 50 nations who met in Washington about nuclear security and terrorism agreed on the actions they will take together to reduce the risks facing the world, but President Barack Obama says the hard work starts now, building on the summit's accomplishments.

The global effort to keep nuclear materials secure has made important progress, Obama told Americans Saturday. "As terrorists and criminal gangs look around for the deadly ingredients for a nuclear device, vast regions of the world are now off limits."

Summarizing the summit, Obama said "no terrorist group has yet succeeded in obtaining a nuclear device or producing a dirty bomb using radioactive materials." However, he added that al-Qaida, Islamic State and other terror groups certainly have tried to do so.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was at the summit, "wholeheartedly" endorsed the communique and action plan agreed by the participants. He called on the entire world to sustain and build on the momentum the summit achieved, by "developing concrete recommendations on the nexus between nuclear terrorism and cyber security."

Obama is following up the meetings on nuclear security with White House talks on Monday with NATO's secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg. They will discuss the fight against Islamic State extremists and other terrorists, as well as the refugee crisis in Europe and plans for a NATO summit conference in Poland three months from now.

Brussels attacks a shock to all

The devastating attacks in Brussels on March 22 were not specifically aimed at NATO's headquarters there, but Islamic State's suicide-bomb assault on the city's airport and subway was a shock to the alliance, to the European Union and other international institutions based in the Belgian capital.

Despite the bloodshed in Western Europe, Islamic State "continues to lose ground" in Syria and Iraq, Obama said in his weekly address to the nation, broadcast Saturday from the hall where the summit took place.

"Our coalition continues to take out [IS] leaders, including those planning terrorist attacks against our countries," the president said. "They're losing their oil infrastructure and revenues [and] their morale is suffering."

Obama said he has invited all nations represented at the nuclear security summit to join the U.S. "in a broader discussion among our intelligence and security services, on how we can improve information sharing to prevent terrorist attacks."

As Obama and Stoltenberg look at the effort to degrade and destroy the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, U.S. officials said they also will review NATO's efforts to control and alleviate the refugee crisis confronting Western Europe.

Terrorists disguised as refugees

Islamic State's savage tactics in the Syrian civil war - beheadings, torture and human trafficking in areas they control - have caused much of the refugee exodus in recent months. At the same time, the terror network also has infiltrated the massive tide of refugees, sending IS assassins into the West disguised as victims of war.

During the two-day summit, leaders concentrated on both the need to reduce world stockpiles of nuclear materials as well as the particular risk that terror groups could acquire radioactive substances.

"Working with other nations, we have removed or secured enough nuclear material for more than 150 nuclear materials," Obama said, adding that "this is material that will now never fall into the hands of terrorists."

More than a dozen nations have disposed of their entire supplies of highly enriched uranium and plutonium  the radioactive elements necessary to build nuclear bombs, the president said, declaring this is "significant and meaningful" progress. Still, Obama noted, some countries' nuclear arsenals are expanding, and stocks of plutonium are growing.

Summit highlights need for collaboration

During six years of international meetings on nuclear security, which he initiated, the U.S. president said, "We've embraced a new type of thinking and a new type of action."

"This is a perfect example of a 21st-century security challenge that no one nation can solve alone," Obama said at the summit's plenary session Friday. "It requires coalitions and sustained coordination across borders and institutions."

He also met with a smaller gathering of the nations mostly closely involved in last year's nuclear agreement with Iran. Obama said that deal was "a substantial success ... focused on the dangers of nuclear proliferation in a real way."

Threat from North Korea

This year's nuclear security summit also focused on North Korea's nuclear-weapons development program.

Obama met with leaders from South Korea and Japan about North Korea's provocative gestures and actions, and he also held a separate private meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who said "We want to enhance communication and coordination on the Korean nuclear issue and other regional and global issues."

While some nuclear proliferation experts expressed optimism over China's verbal commitments to keeping the regime of Kim Jong Un in check, they also said China needs to safeguard its own growing nuclear capabilities.

"The United States is very grateful that China is participating," said Debra Decker of the Washington-based Stimson Center. "China is going to be a leader in the international world market for power reactors, and they may be, probably in the next 10 years, the largest possessor of nuclear power reactors.

"If China wants to go forward and say they have the best power plants and [wishes] to export them," they need to prove that they can adhere to baseline nuclear safety protocols, she added.

The U.S. and other world powers may be experiencing a heightened sense of urgency in securing nuclear material and sites from terrorists following the March 22 attacks in Brussels, and subsequent reports that IS members also were plotting to gain information about a Belgian nuclear facility.

Nuclear sites' security

One U.S. lawmaker, Congressman Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, "We should assume terrorists will continue to seek out the weakest links at nuclear facilities around the globe."

World leaders also are concerned about the security of nuclear materials and facilities in countries such as nuclear armed Pakistan, where a terrorist attack in Lahore last Sunday killed more than 70 people, many of them Christians celebrating the Easter holiday.

Experts say security gaps remain for several reasons: there still is no international framework to monitor nuclear materials; some countries are unwilling to open up supplies intended for commercial use, and some militaries have been unable to agree on how to deal with their nuclear material.

"If you wanted to cause a nuclear incident, you might look for the country with the most vulnerable reactors," said James Andrew Lewis, head of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

VOA White House correspondent Mary Alice Salinas, Katherine Gypson, Kenneth Schwartz and Li Bao of VOA's Mandarin Service contributed to this report.

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Graphic Illustration

John Mark McLaughlin smiles when reminiscing about his journey that started 85 years ago in Wichita County.

"There have been a few bumps along the way, but we forget about those when recalling all the good things," he said.

John Mark McLaughlin was born Oct. 24, 1930, to Clarence Thurston and Evelyn Claire Littleton McLaughlin. He had three sisters: Jean McLaughlin DeFord, Evelyn McLaughlin Knox and Ruth McLaughlin Riddle.

His growing up years were spent on or near the family's Diamond M Ranch at Snyder. He was 14 when he enrolled in a military school and later graduated from the University Texas School of Law.

Mark McLaughlin and Amy Johnson were married in 1954, the same year she graduated from the University of Texas with a Bachelor of Science degree in Home Economics.

Amy was born Sept. 6, 1932. to David and Thelma Munson Johnson of San Antonio. Her grandfather, August Johnson, was a native of Sweden who immigrated to Texas in 1905. He and wife Hannah Samuelson, also a native of Sweden, raised seven sons, including Amy's father, on a farm in Williamson County. Amy's mother was also Swedish from St. Paul, Minnesota.

After their father's untimely death in 1942, Amy and her sisters Nancy and Lynn, were raised single-handedly by their mother, who supported the family as a schoolteacher in the San Antonio public schools. Her mother's strong, quiet and gentle determination instilled in Amy and her sisters the character to do only what is right, good and a credit to God and her family, Mark said.

When Amy was a student at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio, she was selected by the local Joske's department store as Miss Teen Texas, earning a prize trip to New York. She was also elected Major of the Lassos, the high school girls' pep squad.

Mark and Amy McLaughlin had four children: a son Michael, who died in infancy, Laure McLaughlin of Austin, Brian and wife Cynthia of Midland and Matthew and wife Melissa, who live in Fort Worth; six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

The McLaughlin's returned to Snyder in 1958 after he spent two years in the Air Force and two years as assistant state attorney general under then-Attorney General Will Wilson.

Mark established a partnership with his father in the oil business but soon accepted an invitation from law school classmate Bill Marschall, a San Angelo native, to be a law partner.

In 1962, the two friends started Texas State Bank in San Angelo.

"I was just a young man, didn't know limitations at that age, didn't have any sense to know why we couldn't start a bank," Mark told the Standard-Times. "

This bank has done well and consequently I've done well. I also founded the first cellular telephone company in San Angelo, now known as West Central Wireless."

In 1963, Mark founded the 16-section Double M Ranch in Nolan County. Through the years, the MM Ranch grew to more than 40 sections of land in Nolan, Tom Green and Schleicher counties.

"I've raised everything out there," Mark said. "We ran sheep and several hundred head of Angora goats until the predators put us out of the business. We still run registered and commercial Angus cattle."

"The boys love the ranch. They both enjoy saddling up their horses and riding," Mark said.

Although, Mark has served his community with honor through the years, he is doubly proud of his contribution to the agriculture industry. He was president of the Mohair Council of America and president of Fort Worth-based Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association in the 1990s.

Amy Johnson McLaughlin was 78 when she died June 7, 2011. Her devotion to and pride in her family were unmatched, but her pride in her civic work in San Angelo and with UT followed closely.

In 1982, the University of Texas honored Amy by the Department of Human Ecology in the College of Natural Sciences with the establishment of the Amy Johnson McLaughlin Professorship in Home Economics. In 2001, she was co-chair of a committee raising funds to build the new Seay Building, now housing some of the Human Ecology departments. The building foyer is named in her honor.

In San Angelo, Amy served as president of the San Angelo Junior League and was a longtime board member of Fort Concho National Historic Landmark, the San Angelo Cultural Affairs Council and the San Angelo Symphony Society.

Amy and Mark were among the earliest benefactors of the San Angelo Area Foundation and made a major donation to underwrite its scholarship program.

Mark McLaughlin stills come to his office daily in the bank he founded.

"He just really has that work ethic you don't see as much of these days," said Gary Cox, president of Texas Bank. "He's dedicated to life and work and just wants to continue to be active and involved."

Jerry Lackey is the agriculture editor emeritus. Contact him at jlackey@wcc.net or 325-949-2291.
SHARE Photo courtesy Netclearance/TNS Danske Bank in Denmark provides MobilePay, a system that uses technology from San Diego-based Netclearance.

System takes credit cards out of picture

By Mike Freeman, The San Diego Union-Tribune (TNS)

SAN DIEGO  Does a small San Diego startup stand a chance in the mobile payment market competing against the likes of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay?

Netclearance Chief Executive David Fernandez thinks so, based on his company's success last year in Scandinavia, where Netclearance partnered with Danske Bank to get its mobile payment technology deployed in 30,000 retailers ranging from grocery stores to Starbucks.

"The merchants love it because they get over a 50 percent reduction in transaction fees, and they get their money in milliseconds," said Fernandez, who formerly worked at Qualcomm and Motorola Mobility. "It's a game changer."

That remains to be seen. Mobile payments have been slow to take hold, particularly in the U.S., because most payment machines here lack the wireless capabilities to link cash registers to smartphones.

In addition, current magnetic strip technology works. So consumers in general haven't been clamoring to pay with mobile devices.

"The track record for mobile payment services is not good. Apple Pay and Android Pay have yet to become major forces in the financial world, with only a small percentage of iOS and Android users adopting them," said industry research firm CCS Insight in a recent report.

Apple Pay and Samsung Pay use Near Field Communications technology and security tokenization to let shoppers tap smartphones on payment terminals to charge registered credit or debit cards.

Dozens of mobile wallet apps, including a popular one from Starbucks, do essentially the same thing but use a scannable code instead of NFC.

What makes Netclearance different is it removes the credit card firms from the equation  enabling banks and retailers to set up their own private, direct mobile payment networks.

"It allows a person with an app  a bank app, a brand app  to completely bypass the credit card rails," said Fernandez. "So the payments that people are making in Denmark  over 2.8 million active users with an app provided by the bank  those payments are not going through a MasterCard or a Visa. They are basically going directly to the bank."

The company's technology includes a small payment terminal with NFC, Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi technology that connects to the cash register. Netclearance provides software tools for banks and retailers to include mobile payments as part of their branded apps for customers.

U.S. retailers, including Target and Walmart, are members of the Merchant Customer Exchange, a consortium that's developing a merchant-owned mobile payment system.

For its part, Netclearance is talking with a large financial institution about rolling out its system in the U.S. But it hasn't inked a deal yet.

"Our main customers are the banks," said Fernandez. "Because it's app based, it gives the banks more control on the benefits they can give to their users. It is really an intelligent payment system."
L to R: Giliberto Salvador Reyes, 18; Eric Ramos, 19; Fred Angel Garcia, 17.

SHARE Ramos Garcia Reyes

Second victim dies from injuries

By Staff Report

Police have arrested seven youths in the aftermath of a March 26 shooting that left two teens dead.

Eric Ramos and Giliberto Salvador Reyes, both 18, Fred Angel Garcia, 17, and four male juveniles were arrested and charged with murder, according to a news release from the San Angelo Police Department.

Ramos was booked into the Tom Green County Jail at 8:37 p.m. Thursday. Garcia was booked at 1:44 a.m. and Reyes at 3:28 a.m. Friday. No bond is set for the teens.

The juveniles were also charged with murder Thursday and were being held at the Tom Green County Juvenile Justice Center, according to the release.

The arrests were made following an investigation by SAPDs Criminal Investigations Division into the deaths of Zane Lopez, 16, and Juan Guerrero, 17.

Lopez, who had been in critical condition in the intensive care unit at Shannon Medical Center, died of his injuries Thursday, the release stated.

Medical personnel pronounced him dead about 9:32 p.m. Thursday. His body has been taken to Lubbock for autopsy Friday morning, the release stated.

Officers were dispatched to the 1100 block of East 22nd Street at 9:46 p.m. March 26 in response to a report of a shooting, according to the release.

Police found two teens suffering from apparent gunshot wounds. Juan Guerrero, 17, was pronounced dead at the scene, and Lopez was taken to the hospital, according to SAPD.

Police obtained statements and forensic evidence that resulted in the arrest and charges for Ramos, Garcia, Reyes and the four juveniles, according to the release.

The investigation is ongoing and no further information is available for release, the release stated.

Ramos and Garcia did not have any other arrests listed in Tom Green County Jail records. Reyes was arrested Jan. 25, charged with unlawful carrying of a weapon, possession of marijuana less than 2 ounces and failure to satisfy court agreements.

Garcia is enrolled at Central High School, said Jamie Highsmith, public information officer for San Angelo Independent School District.

The two boys killed in the shooting withdrew from SAISD this school year, one in the fall and the other in spring, Highsmith said.

SAISD is bringing in extra counselors for students, she said.

Members of the SAPD Criminal Investigation Division, Special Operations Section, Narcotics and CSI are conducting an investigation, and Detective C Kolbe is the lead investigator.

Details about funeral services for Lopez and Guerrero were not available Friday.

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The San Angelo Police Department released the following:

"Seven suspects have been charged in connection to last weeks fatal shooting that left two San Angelo teens dead.



On Thursday, March 31, 2016, 18-year-old Eric Ramos was booked into the Tom Green County Jail, charged with Murder in connection to the homicides of 17-year-old Juan Guerrero and 16-year-old Zane Lopez that occurred last Saturday evening. Two additional adult males, 17-year-old Fred Angel Garcia and 18-year-old Giliberto Reyes were taken into custody and booked early this morning; both men have been charged with Murder. In addition to the arrested adults, four male juvenile suspects have been apprehended and charged with the murders. The juveniles were taken into custody on Thursday and were booked into the Tom Green County Juvenile Justice Center. Their names are not being released.



These arrests came as a result of an investigation that began on Saturday, March 26, 2016, at 9:46 p.m., when Officers responded to the report of a shooting in the 1100 block of E. 22nd Street.



Officers and medical personnel arrived and located Guerrero and Lopez suffering from apparent gunshot wounds. Guerrero was pronounced dead at the scene and Lopez was transported to Shannon Medical Center for treatment. Lopez later succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead by medical staff around 9:32 p.m. last night. Lopezs body was transported to Lubbock this morning for autopsy.



Members of the San Angelo Police Departments Criminal Investigations Division has continued to work tirelessly since the fatal shootings of Guerrero and Lopez, obtaining statements and forensic evidence which resulted in the probable cause to arrest Ramos, Garcia, Reyes, and the four juveniles for the charge of Murder.



This investigation is still ongoing and no further information is available for release at this time."
Bugorenko

By Ngan Ho of the San Angelo Standard-Times

Being able to speak Russian fluently has played a pivotal role in Staff Sgt. Dennis Bugerenko's military career.

Bugerenko, 31, was honored by Goodfellow Air Force Base for his mission at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in 2015.

He was recognized during a San Angelo Chamber of Commerce luncheon in early March.

He spent 45 days acting as a translator between U.S. and Russian military leadership.

"I was there to translate for when they wanted to make sure the rules were continued to be followed," he said. "Whenever there was an issue, a phone call needed to be made, I was called up."

In essence, Bugerenko's role was to act as a traffic controller by translating communication for leaders on both forces to prevent airspace conflicts.

"One of the biggest issues for us there was fear of safety," Bugerenko said. "With us being involved in Syria and Russia being involved in Syria, we had to make sure there was airspace de-confliction."

Bugerenko said he was one of the few selected from a short list of people for the mission.

He was born and raised on a small farm in Ukraine. His family immigrated to Houston from Russia in the early 1990s when he was a child.

Growing up in a strict and structured household, Bugerenko found himself in need of direction while attending the University of Houston in 2003, majoring in computer science.

"When I was in high school, parents were like you need to do this, this and this ... After that I was like, I need something to motivate me. I'll join the Air Force," Bugerenko said.

Bugerenko ditched the college life and joined the Air Force in 2005 when he was 20, and the rest is history, he said.

Bugerenko said he can also read Russian, and his Russian fluency was all thanks to his mother.

"That's actually a big kudos to my mom," he said. "I remember arguing with her about this. In the summertime she would get out the old Russian notebooks, and she's like, 'You will read and write and remember.'

"I would argue with her, 'When will I ever use this, I'm in America now, I don't need to know this language,' " Bugerenko said with a chuckle. "She forced me, and I did it, and lo and behold, 10 years later I joined the Air Force.

"Now I thank her a lot, thank you for forcing me," he said. "It's a good thing. It was exactly what I needed. She saw potential."

Bugerenko said he had always wanted to be a pilot, so the Air Force was the best fit for him despite him being color blind, which prohibits him from flying planes. Instead, he specialized in linguistics.

Bugerenko said he plans to stay in the Air Force for as long as possible and plans to retire in Texas, working as a civilian on a base.

"I guess from here on out I'm going to be trying to actually get back to that same mission," he said. "I'm happy where I am now."
Yfat Yossifor/Standard-Times Retired San Angelo physician Allen Anderson leans on his first-of-its-kind Evolution iE2 airplane Friday at San Angelo Regional Airport.

SHARE Yfat Yossifor / Standard-Times Kevin Eldredge, Lancair director of business development, is set to fly Allen Anderson's Evolution iE2 airplane to Florida this weekend. Yfat Yossifor / Standard-Times Allen Anderson gets into his Lancair Evolution iE2 for a flight Friday at San Angelo Regional Airport. Related Photos San Angeloan buys experimental aircraft

By Federico Martinez, Federico.Martinez@gosanangelo.com / @Federico_SAST

It can fly nonstop for eight hours at speeds of 240 knots per hour. It seats four adults comfortably and even has a portable potty built into one of the rear seats.

The experimental, first-of-its-kind airplane was purchased by retired San Angelo physician Allen Anderson and will be officially unveiled to the world this week at the Fun 'N Sun International Fly-In & Expo in Lakeland, Florida. The Evolution iE2 prototype was built by Redmond, Oregon-based Lancair International and generated a buzz of interest from industry and airplane enthusiasts for months because of the plane's many innovations.

"The Evolution is the first of its kind to have a piston on it," said Kevin Eldredge, director of business development for Lancair. Other planes fly using a carburetor, he noted. "It has the first engine that electronically controls the plane. It's all electronically connected and includes automatic safety features that do things like help pilots land more safely."

Lancair sells plane kits that airplane enthusiasts can build themselves or pay the company to build for them. Anderson opted to have the company construct the plane, but he provided specific directions so that his plane would include custom-made options, like the built in portable toilet. The plane's seats are also the same colors used by the University of Texas, his beloved alma mater.

Anderson said he spent about $950,000 for the new plane, which is about $600,000 cheaper than similar planes that use a carburetor.

Anderson has been flying planes since 1975, when he was in the Navy. The experienced flyer said he purchased the plane because it was a chance to own the first model and because it is larger, travels faster and is more fuel-efficient than its predecessor, which he already owns. The Evolution gets 13.8 miles per gallon, which is better fuel efficiency than the Cadillac Escalade he drives Anderson said. The plane can stay airborne without having to refuel for up to eight hours, four hours longer than other planes.

The plane takes about seven months to build, Eldredge said. Lancair is already taking orders for the new aircraft.

Eldredge, who has been racing planes competitively for 12 years, flew Anderson's new plane from Oregon to San Angelo on Thursday. The trip gave the pilot an opportunity to test out the new plane and become familiar with it so that he could teach Anderson.

Learning how to fly Anderson's new plane rather than planes that use a carburetor is similar to learning how to transition from using a vehicle with a stick shift to a vehicle with an automatic transmission, Eldridge said.

On Friday Eldredge and Anderson flew the plane to Florida for the air show, the first of three shows across the country where the plane will be showcased.

After the shows, Anderson says he and his wife will take a still-to-be-determined trip in the new plane. Anderson said he prefers flying his own plane over riding in a commercial airliner.

"I've never left myself behind or lost our baggage," he said.
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To include your club or organization, send your information to anne.flippin@gosanangelo.com.

Time, date, address and a contact telephone number are required.

The deadline for Club Calendar is 5 p.m. Thursday, 10 days before the Sunday publication date. For more information, call 325-659-8250.

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Preceptor Iota Omicron will meet at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. Becky Francis will host the meeting at 305 W. Ave. A. She will present "What Is Old Is New Again." President Carolyn Tegeler will conduct the business meeting.

New officers were elected at the first meeting in March and will be installed at the April 19 meeting.

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Newtimers will have monthly coffee at 10 a.m. Wednesday at St. Paul Presbyterian Church, 11 N. Park St. to meet and greet with refreshments.

Information: 325-651-6324

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Promenade Squares will dance mainstream and plus level at 7 p.m. Thursday, at 618 Locust St. The caller will be John Geen. Visitors are welcome.

Information: 325-944-1439
Mercedes has opened the door for a potential MotoGP test for the team's reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton.

Last year, the Briton said: "When my dad bought me my first go-kart I actually wanted a motorbike.

"I'd love to test a MotoGP bike just to see what it's like."

The natural fit for a Hamilton test would be the MotoGP team Yamaha, as it boasts 'superstar' counterpart Valentino Rossi and a sponsor - the energy drink Monster - in common with Brackley based Mercedes.

Rossi admitted last year he would like to see Hamilton try the Yamaha, and Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff now says: "It would not be a problem for us if he (Hamilton) wanted to do it.

"On the contrary, it's a fun idea," Wolff told Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport. "Besides, I think he has already ridden a motorcycle in the past."

Also on board is Lin Jarvis, Yamaha's MotoGP chief.

"For now it is just an idea," he said, "but clearly it would be very interesting."

(GMM)
F1's reigning world champion team Mercedes has appealed to its carmaker parent Daimler to stave off a threat posed by 2016 title rival Ferrari.

In Australia two weeks ago, both silver cars were beaten off the grid by the Ferraris, after the Maranello team proved to have best mastered the new rules limiting drivers to the use of a single clutch lever for race starts.

Now, Mercedes has qualified first and second in Bahrain but the team is again worried that Ferrari will simply leap ahead.

"Ideally, we'll do the same thing on the start as we did two weeks ago," smiled Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel, who is third on the grid but led early in Melbourne. "I wouldn't mind!"

Acknowledging that Ferrari has the upper hand, Mercedes is reaching out for help.

"Daimler is making a new clutch for us," team boss Toto Wolff told Germany's Auto Bild. "We have asked the research department for help."

"We don't know exactly when it will be ready," he added, referring to "weeks or months".

Pole sitter Lewis Hamilton said in Bahrain that Mercedes has been working on improving what it already has since Australia, but admitted he "highly doubts" the situation will be much different compared to two weeks ago.

Mercedes, however, is not alone in having a key area to work on at the start of the 2016 season, amid paddock rumours Ferrari is struggling with its new turbo.

Asked if there is a fundamental problem, Kimi Raikkonen - who retired in Australia with a fiery airbox - told the Finnish broadcaster MTV in Bahrain: "Well, at the last race there was."

It is believed that until the problem is resolved, Ferrari is not able to turn its 'power units' up to full power, especially in qualifying.

"But qualifying and the race are entirely different things," Raikkonen said, referring to the half-second gap between Mercedes and Ferrari on Saturday.

"We know that we are always closer to them in the race," he added.

(GMM)
Race organisers and F1 have confirmed reports that the race start time for the inaugural grand prix in Azerbaijan is changing.

We reported on Saturday that after daylight saving was scrapped in the country, Baku promoter Arif Rahimov had asked the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone to agree to wind back the official start time from 6pm to 5pm local.

"So with the time change now, if we bring it back one hour, it will be in line with what we have in terms of the European times, so yes it will still avoid the clash" with the end of Le Mans, he said.

Rahimov confirmed the news on Sunday, and the official F1 website showed the revised time.

"We had to wait for confirmation about a week ago and now it will start 5pm," he told GMM partner Autosport Middle East.

"It's going to be the same time for the European time so it will be 3pm start, so it will be after the Le Mans race," Rahimov added.

(GMM)
F1 bosses have been told to mull over an all-new 'aggregate' format for qualifying, after reverting to the 2015 system was ruled out by the sport's authorities on Sunday.

"It's crazy," one source at the meeting told the Telegraph newspaper, as it emerged that simply abandoning the failed 'musical chairs' experiment was no longer an option.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff had said on Saturday that anyone who blocks a resolution to the farcical saga should be "crucified".

But now he says: "They said that 2015 (qualifying) is not acceptable for them as it was not good enough and we have to accept it."

So the bosses' task now is to assess an all-new format before they meet again on Thursday.

FIA president Jean Todt said as he emerged from Sunday's meeting in Bahrain that the F1 world will need to be "patient" until the details emerge next week.

But authoritative sources, including Germany's Auto Motor und Sport and British television Sky, report that the new system will involve drivers' 2 best times being aggregated as they progress through the three segments of qualifying.

Williams deputy Claire Williams is quoted by the Independent as saying engineers are assessing whether it can be introduced in Shanghai.

But Auto Motor und Sport has calculated that, if the system had been in place in Bahrain, it would be Nico Rosberg on pole rather than Lewis Hamilton, even though the latter's decisive lap has been widely hailed.

Asked if aggregate times are a kick in the stomach for F1 purists, Wolff said: "I think the kick is even lower than that."

Williams, meanwhile, said of the newly-proposed idea: "It is quite a well thought through proposal that the FIA have come up with and hopefully it will be a solution that will work for everybody, and that will be be easy for our fans to understand".

(GMM)
Guilford Technical Community Colleges All-College Read series continues in April and will feature two events about Appalachian culture.

Dancer and instructor Carol Thompson and musicians Steve Terrell and Lu Williams will present Do-Si-Do: An Interactive Presentation at noon April 6 at the Joseph S. Koury Hospitality Careers Center. The collaborative show will teach audiences about traditional Southern dance.

Amy Clark, professor of English and applied linguistics at the University of Virginias College at Wise, will present Talking Appalachian: Voice and Place at noon April 15 at the Percy H. Sears Applied Technologies Center auditorium. Clark will explore the rich histories of Appalachian English from western Pennsylvania to northern Georgia as well as examine the complexities of owning a widely recognized accent.

The All-College Read is an annual event where faculty, students and staff read the same book. This years selection is Bill Brysons A Walk in the Woods, based on the authors experience hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Both events will take place on the Jamestown Campus, 601 E. Main St. in Jamestown. The events are free and open to the public.
On Thursday, Virginia State Police trooper Chad P. Dermyer was participating in a training exercise at a Richmond bus station when he approached a man just inside the facilitys front doors. Dermyer, a 37-year-old from Michigan, had just begun speaking to him when the man pulled out a handgun and fired multiple rounds at the trooper, police officials said. Two other troopers returned fire and killed the gunman, according to the state police. Dermyer was later pronounced dead. His death contributes to a grim, growing toll: During the first three months of 2016, the number of police officers killed in shootings more than doubled from the same 2015 period. Dermyer was the 16th law enforcement officer shot and killed this year, up from seven such deaths at the same point in 2015, according to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund, a nonprofit group that tracks line-of-duty deaths.

Last year, police officers fatally shot 990 people, the vast majority of them individuals armed with guns or people who had attacked or threatened others, according to The Posts database. As of Friday, officers have shot and killed more than 250 people. All told, the memorial funds database on police officer deaths shows a slight increase overall. Including Dermyer, there were 30 officers killed in the first three months of 2016, up from 27 deaths a year earlier. While fatal shootings have surged, the number of officers who died in traffic accidents or from other causes, such as heart attacks, has declined. Last year, the number of officers who died increased from the year before, an uptick that was due to things other than gunfire. According to the memorial fund, the number of officers fatally shot declined (falling to 42 from 49), as did the number killed in what the memorial fund called felonious incidents (falling to 52 from 61). But the death toll rose to 124 deaths from 119 a year earlier because of spikes in traffic accidents and job-related illnesses.

Overall, the number of officers fatally shot each year nationwide is down from what it has been in recent decades. In the 1970s, an average of 127 officers were shot and killed each year; between 2000 and 2009, an average of 57 officers were fatally shot each year. In perhaps the highest-profile example of such an attack this year, a Philadelphia officer survived being ambushed by a man who ran up to his car and opened fire; authorities later said the attacker told them he had pledged his loyalty to the Islamic State. Some of these attacks have been launched by Islamic extremists or sovereign citizen types with a hatred of our government; others are being carried out by mentally deranged or coldblooded criminals who see police as the enemy, Craig W. Floyd, chief executive of the memorial fund, said.
GREENSBORO  While tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs were being lost, Piedmont Triad International Airport was quietly growing into the regions next-generation employment center.

In the past 15 years, companies such as FedEx Express, HAECO Americas, Cessna Citation and Honda Aviation have turned this quiet passenger airport into an aviation district that employs 5,000 people and helps support another 8,000 jobs in related industries.

But apparently that was just the warmup.

Workers are now building a taxiway and bridge from the western runway to 1,000 acres that could attract the attention of major aviation companies around the world that wouldnt have taken a second look 10 years ago.

Federal, state and local governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 1998 on a building binge that wont be over until 2017. Thats when the N.C. Department of Transportation is likely to finish the bridge over a leg of Interstate 73, currently under construction through airport property.

PTI needs the space because it is bursting at the seams with other expanding businesses that have filled land mostly beside the eastern runway, where aviation workers do jobs ranging from overhauling jet engines to building the HondaJet.

And Guilford Technical Community College is right there as well with three buildings where 400 students learn a range of skills.

So when you wonder where the passengers are on a quiet day at PTIs terminal, remember theres a lot going on outside that is changing the regions future.

Rarely does so much promise hang on what is essentially an overpass.

Economic developers have complained they were losing major aerospace projects because the land could not be reached from the airport.

The airport had known for years that the state DOT was planning to build a section of Interstate 73 through Rockingham County into Guilford County, eventually connecting N.C. 68 with Bryan Boulevard on the northwest side of the airport.

So the airport bought hundreds of acres, including a golf course, for future development.

But it couldnt build a taxiway from its runways to that land until DOT built the new road  and a bridge that is large and flat enough to hold airliners rolling across that road.

PTI Executive Director Kevin Baker said he made it a mission to get that bridge built.

Companies wouldnt look twice at the land without runway access, Baker said. Its easier to go pick a flat site in Wichita.

So he went to civic groups, elected officials, government transportation officials  anybody he could find to talk about what an asset the airport could be if it only had that bridge.

Dammit, he would tell them, weve got to get that space open. We want to be ready to say yes. 

The construction had been scheduled for this year at the earliest. But through political arm twisting and negotiations, local officials persuaded DOT to start construction of the road and the bridge in 2014.

The bridge must be wide, strong and perfectly level. Planes dont travel on an incline. Period.

So beginning April 11, crews will use a crane to begin laying 165 girders to hold those planes. Theyll cast a concrete roadbed on top of that. And once the airport completes access taxiways beside the runways, it will be ready to cut through the dirt to the bridge  an overpass for jumbo jets.

People got so tired of me ... pounding my fist saying, We need to build this bridge,  Baker said. To see it coming out of the ground is one of the coolest things in my professional life.

PTI has come a long way.

The airport opened in 1927 as Lindley Field, eight miles west of Greensboro. Pitcairn Aviation, the governments airmail carrier, made the first airmail delivery to North Carolina on May 1.

In 1930, Pitcairn became Eastern Air Transport and began North Carolinas first passenger service from the Triad.

By the 1950s, the Greensboro-High Point Airport Authority began the process of turning the airport into a regional operation, opening a new terminal in 1958 and buying 900 acres to allow for expanded runways and protect from encroaching development.

On a tour of the property, Baker can hardly control his excitement as he shows off the 50-foot trench that contains the roadbed for Interstate 73 and the massive supports that could someday hold the weight of a jumbo jet.

He remembers when he and now-retired Executive Director Ted Johnson were sitting in another airport waiting for a flight one day, dreaming about ways to expand PTI. With the land they were slowly accumulating to the west, Baker and Johnson sketched out rough lines over a map that outlined two plans.

Todays $500 million expansion, now crawling with bulldozers, was one of those hand-drawn visions.

Farther to the north of PTI, Baker stood recently at the green on the 16th hole at Pleasant Ridge Golf Course, now owned by the airport. With the bright sun above and the fresh smell of grass in the air, he looked down the sloping fairway at a small lake where the taxiway will end.

Eventually, he said, this may be Boeing sitting underneath there.

The two biggest drivers of PTIs corporate success are Asian companies. One is an import planted and nurtured in Greensboro. The other is U.S. grown and later acquired.

Honda Aircraft Co. employs about 1,700 people at its world headquarters here and builds the HondaJet for worldwide distribution. Those tiny jets, classified as very light jets by the industry, began flying out to customers in December.

Then theres HAECO Americas, which employs 1,400 people at PTI and is one of the worlds largest aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul companies. It serves the entire western hemisphere from Greensboro.

Before it was HAECO Americas, the company was TIMCO. At any given time, full-size jets from airlines around the world are crammed into the companys four hangars beside the runway, surrounded by workers stripping interiors, threading wires and securing tiny bolts inside jet engines.

In the coming months, the company is likely to begin work on a fifth hangar that will employ 400 people by 2018.

HAECO will search the country for workers to fill that hangar because the Triad cant train them fast enough.

HAECO hires about 300 workers a year at an average salary of $46,000 and the majority come from someplace other than Greensboro.

Kip Blakely, HAECOs vice president of customer and government relations, would like to see that change.

Were not producing nearly enough, he said.

GTCC is working hard to fill that gap.

However, space for students who want complete aviation skills training is limited to 400 in a variety of courses.

Whatever they study, the students know that aviation-related companies across the nation are interested in them.

One program shows how aviation companies and GTCC are working together to build an economic sector that could ultimately attract other companies to PTI and beyond.

In 2009, Honda approached GTCC and asked the school to develop a training program for the Garmin G1000 cockpit instrument system, which was planned for the HondaJet.

The $100,000 system was and remains a state-of-the-art system requiring the most sophisticated technicians to maintain and repair it.

Money from Honda, the state and Duke Energy helped the school buy two G1000 systems for GTCC.

Now, the program trains 40 students divided into two classes. Those students can go to work for Honda or other companies once theyve earned their two-year degrees.

If there were no jobs here, thered be no reason to have the school, said David Mayers, GTCCs department chair for the Division of Avionics. If there were no school, thered be fewer jobs.

Vlad Prosanov, whose family came to Charlotte from Russia in 2007, moved to Greensboro for the program after a few years with no particular career goal after high school. Sitting at an elevated table with a jumble of small wires attached to a rack of components for the G1000, the 22-year-old worked beside his classmates with patient intensity.

At first, he wasnt sure if he made the right choice.

But the more I got into it, the more I really like it, Prosanov said. Its hands-on. Thats what I like.

GTCC President Randy Parker said the school will soon offer five two-year aviation degrees to supply the industry  and thats not counting programs for specific companies such as Honda.

Parker said that even before the airports 1,000-acre western site opens, PTI is already a regional business megasite.

The airport is really a megasite in itself, Parker said. We talk about the megasites in Chatham County and in Randolph. (But) when you look at the airport, were the only one on the East Coast that is truly considered a megasite for aviation companies to locate right there on the tarmac.

Lisa Shoemaker may have found her calling two months ago with her new job at HAECO, the Hong Kong aircraft engineering company that is hiring hundreds of workers and technicians.

Just a couple of years ago, Shoemaker was living in Myrtle Beach and working as a personal trainer and manager for a condo cleaning service.

But she wanted a way out.

So Shoemaker, 43, enrolled in the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics in Myrtle Beach.

Shoemaker said she was inspired to change her career after the death of her grandmother, who had worked in manufacturing.

I never in a million years would have picked something like this because I didnt have the confidence, said Shoemaker, a mother of three.

Shoemaker, a small woman, paused during the interview to pick up a wrench nearly as large as her arm to tighten a bolt on the landing gear of a towering Airbus that she was repairing.

The tire alone was nearly as tall as Shoemaker.

HAECO handles only the largest airliners, including some Boeing 777 jumbo jets.

When she walked into the first of four hangars that HAECO operates, Shoemaker said, I felt like Honey I Shrunk the Kids. 

Women are rare in the aircraft repair business, but she said the industry aggressively recruited her.

The work is hard, she added, but she came here wanting a challenge. Learning to do her job is like drinking through a fire hose, but her co-workers have been helpful even as they joke about her being the rare woman under the towering jetliners.

Baker said the expansion project took the work of scores of government, business and civic leaders. Ultimately, it will take the engagement of local, regional and state recruiters to land the right businesses on the site.

He knows the next steps will be difficult.

If a company chooses PTI for a new plant, theres the matter of preparing the site and securing state and local incentives to drive the deal.

But even today, Baker said, the airport has already proven that it will pay its way back into state coffers.

With 5,000 workers earning an average salary of $60,000 a year, Baker said the state can collect a lot of taxes on that $300 million payroll.

Add the money that auditors, lawyers, engineers and architects can make from airport operations, he continued, and PTI becomes a $1.2 billion industry for the region.

That should be enough to persuade state leaders to invest in any economic development project that comes along, Baker said.

The bridge  and the access it grants to all that open land  is key.

In a lot of ways, the bridge represents both physically and metaphorically what PTI will be in the decades to come.

This bridge becomes the turning point for the future of the airport, Baker said, and well see what comes to the other side.
An opportunity is hidden in the recent bathroom furor. How many thousands of public bathroom doors are there in North Carolina? If the government would care to alleviate its fears on a grand scale, an army of short-arm inspectors can be recruited in number enough to post one at each door. Requirements for the job are few: Each inspector should have at least one good eye. Unemployment would be eradicated. Think how safe each and every bathroom would become!
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Haiti - FLASH : 5 alleged murderers of police officers arrested





The Principal Inspector, Garry Desrosiers, Deputy Spokesman of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) during a balance press conference on anti-crime operations by the Central Directorate of Judicial Police (DCPJ) revealed that over the last two weeks of March, at least 35 individuals were arrested in operations by the PNH including 5 individuals accused of the murder of 4 police officers and 3 suspects in the case of the lynching of 3 women with disabilities.



These 35 individuals arrested are accused including: criminal conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and kidnapping simulation and rape indicated the spokesman.



Garry Desrosiers has reported the arrest, in Cabaret, of 3 suspects in connection with the investigation into the murder of 3 women with disabilities last week in this commune noting that other suspects are being sought https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17033-haiti-social-the-triple-lynching-of-disabled-women-provokes-outrage.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16982-haiti-flash-3-disabled-women-assassinated.html



Regarding the assassination of several police officer, the PNH has not remained inactive and proceeded to the arrest of 5 individuals accused of the murders of 4 officers in separate cases :



Theomar Wilfort, Dumas Joseph and Remy Egulson operating in a network of gangs have been arrested, accused of involvement in the assassinations of agents Jean Ralph Coq (9 November 2015) and Johnson Jean Pierre (April 13, 2015).



Macaron Faubert was also arrested in connection with the murder of police officer David Dume February 12, 2016 on the side of Martissant 7 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16590-haiti-security-a-police-officer-shot-dead-at-martissant.html



Another man, identified as Marcel Stevenson was arrested and transferred to the DCPJ, suspected of murdering the police officer Wagnac Warrior December 19, 2015 in Delmas 33.



Moreover a named Lourdes Marie Altidor, was apprehended for having simulated the kidnapping of his two children to extort money from their father, confessing "I did not kidnap my children. I kept them in my house in order to earn 10,000 US dollars of their biological father..."



While Lahens Stimphil was arrested for his alleged involvement in the abduction of his young cousin, demanding a ransom of 30,000 dollars to the parents.



SL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Politic : Elections to the UEH postponed indefinitely





In a note, Rectorate of the State University of Haiti (UEH) informs the university community in particular and the public in general that :



1 - The ballot for the election of a new Executive Council of UEH did not take place Wednesday, March 30, 2016, for lack of quorum. 24 members of the University Council (UC) necessary, a two-thirds majority, only 23 were present.



2) The Rectorate condemns a series of violent incidents that have led to the deterioration of the work environment and ultimately to the occupancy of the Rectorate and the Directorate of Post-graduate Studies of the UEH. It should be noted in particular the vandalizing of several vehicles of service of Rectorate including a bus used to transport employees, placed on the bridge of Croix-des-Missions in a way to obstruct traffic. The Central Electoral Commission of UEH has been forced to sit in Moulin-sur-Mer with the authorization of the CU on 29 and 30 March 2016, for the final stages of the process, namely the electoral debates and the vote ;



3) The debates were organized on 29 and 30 March 2016 in strict accordance with the Election UEH Charter with student representatives and with representatives of professors and finally with the members gathered of the CU. They lasted nearly 6 hours;



4) In conducting these discussions, the penultimate stage of the electoral calendar has been crossed. There remains only the election to achieve to complete the process and provide the UEH legitimate leaders in accordance with the transitional provisions and electoral Charter UEH.



Also in a separate note, the Council of UEH advises all public authorities and all national and international partners that "the outgoing Executive Council, consisting of the Rector Jean-Vernet Henry and Vice-Rectors Jean Poincy and Fritz Deshommes, remains in office until the installation of a new elected board in accordance with the prescribed of Public Service and the resolution of 19 March 2016." In this regard the outgoing Executive Council is "the only authorized to commit UEH towards third"



See also :

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-16987-icihaiti-notice-latest-decisions-taken-in-the-council-of-ueh.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16871-haiti-education-rectorate-of-the-ueh-nearly-40-days-of-occupation.html

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-16810-icihaiti-politic-students-of-ueh-harden-their-position.html

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-16755-icihaiti-social-4-month-blockage-in-ueh.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16619-haiti-politic-the-occupation-of-the-rectorate-in-ueh-continues.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16619-haiti-politic-the-occupation-of-the-rectorate-in-ueh-continues.html

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-16426-icihaiti-social-civil-disobedience-week-by-students.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Published on 2016/04/03 | Source

Chinese tourists pose for a photo in Songdo, Incheon, where the hit soap "My Love from the Star" was shot. /Yonhap

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A growing number of massive tour groups from China are pouring into Korea.

Kicking off the flood of visitors this year were 6,000 sales reps for a cosmetics and health supplement outfit.

They arrived here earlier this week aboard 158 airplanes as part of a bonus trip. The city of Incheon threw a chicken and beer party for them -- a popular combination thanks to the hit soap "My Love from the Star", which took China by storm.

May will see an even bigger group of around 8,000 reps for a Nanjing-based health supplement manufacturer. They plan to shop and attend a flower festival along the Han River. And in June, around 10,000 reps for direct-sale giant Herbalife's Singapore branch are scheduled to visit Gyeonggi Province.

The Korea Tourism Organization and the Seoul Metropolitan Government forecast between 30 to 40 groups of more than 1,000 Chinese tourists to visit Korea on bonus trips. Direct-sales behemoth Amway set the record in 2014, when 14,791 of its reps came to Korea.

The main attraction of Korea for the companies is the explosive popularity of Korean TV soaps and K-pop among the housewives who typically work a sideline in direct sales. Korea is also conveniently close.

Experts say while these mass tours bring in a lot of money, Korea needs to offer a wider variety of programs and bolster infrastructure so visitors can experience more than just shopping centers and soap opera locations.

Lee Choong-ki at Kyunghee University said, "The popularity of the Korean Wave could cool at any time, so a wider variety of tourist attractions is urgently needed".
Published on 2016/04/02

See how young South Koreans are embracing the hanbok, K-pop is helping to grow China's plastic surgery industry, take a trip back to Korea Joa 2015 with Raine with a visit to a Korean temple, and learn how a Korean "imagineer" is hoping to add more substance to how Koreans experience and relate to their culture.

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"More Young South Koreans Find Hanbok Traditional Dress Attractive And Its Sales Are Soaring"

Modern South Korean culture is a pastiche of past and present sensibilities that is continually finding new forms of expression. In this post, JKNUS explores how Korea's hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, is being somewhat rediscovered as "free-spirited youngsters reinterpret it to suit their taste". Fabrics and styles are indeed changing, and it's exciting to see how both men and women are reinterpreting and adapting the hanbok and reaching new levels of style in the process.

...READ ON JKNUS

"K-Pop Influences Boom In China's Plastic Surgery Industry"

South Korea is well known as the place to go if cosmetic surgery is on your to-do list. Many men and women have gone under the knife in Korea for both small and large alterations to their body, and their expertise is attracting a number of international tourists looking to do the same. K-culture exports like K-pop have, according to the China Christian Daily, also resulted in a rise of cosmetic surgery back in China: "While South Korea is known to be the world's leading country for plastic surgery procedures, China and its consumers now demand to go under the knife, too for beauty purposes and this demand is increasing".

...READ ON CHINA CHRISTIAN DAILY

"[HanCinema's Korea Joa] Haedong Yonggung Temple"

Here's a flashback to Korea Joa 2015, a cultural exchange program aimed at promoting K-culture to foreigners by exploring the country and its people. In this post, Raine shared some stunning snaps of Haedong Yonggung Temple while sharing a little history and her own experiences: "Built in 1376 by Goryeo Dynasty Buddhist teacher Naong, the temple runs along the water and as one walks along the stone paths twelve stone zodiac statues welcome all visitors to the peaceful place where monks and citizens alike come to pray".

...READ ON HANCINEMA

"Finding New Horizons for Korea in its Past: The Cultural Pioneering of Jin Yong Lee"

Yes, yes, we all know about K-culture and its incredible spread around the world, but is the country sending out the right message? Is there an alternative to mere branding and buzz? Emanuel Pastreich, writing for Huffiest, features the works and ideas of Jin Yong Lee, a self-proclaimed "imagineer" who's trying to add more depth to how South Koreans seen and related to their own culture in the ever-shifting twenty-first century: "Jin Yong has taken the first steps towards realizing a cultural Renaissance in Korea that reinterprets traditional culture and combines it with the potential of emerging technologies to create a compelling paradigm shift".

...READ ON HUFFPOST
Published on 2016/04/02

Grab a beer with your next McDonald's burger in Korea, a self-proclaimed "fat girl" has some suggestions on where to go in Seoul, My Korean Kitchen has a sweet snack packed with Nutella to try, and find out where in America you can go to find the best Korean cuisine.

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"A Burger, Fries and ... Beer, Please"

Even those who are set on coming to Korea and experiencing for themselves the country's delicious array of foods, drinks and snacks will sometimes regress towards the iconic golden arches of McDonalds. But now, and South Korea is by no means the first country to offer this indulgence, at selected Korean McDonalds you can add a beer to your order! Yes, that's right, beer at McDonalds; for better or worse?

...READ ON US NEWS

"Spaghetti in Seoul? A 'fat girl' tells you where to go"

Are you looking for foreign food in Korea's capital, Seoul? Gemma from England has been in Korea for a number of years now and has dedicated herself to discovering, and then sharing, her foodie adventures in the country's capital. Gemma is a self-described "fat girl" and in this post, you'll find out a little more about her as well as some suggestions to visit next time you're in town.

...READ ON MALAY MAIL ONLINE

"NUTELLA STUFFED SWEET RICE FLOUR DOUGHNUT HOLES"

Sue over at My Korea Kitchens has a delicious treat stuffed with Nutella for us all to try! Easter has come and gone, but if you have a sweet tooth you definitely want to follow Sue's steps for making chocolate-stuffed doughnuts: "Clearly, Nutella is not a Korean ingredient and you probably heard/read/tried many recipes with Nutella in it. But have you used it with sweet rice flour? If not, you must!"

...READ ON MY KOREAN KITCHEN

"10Best: Favorite Korean food from fusion to fine dining"

If you're a fan of Korean culture and food and live in America, you'll love this post from USA Today as they offer some great suggestions on where to go to find the best Korean food from modern fusion to fine dining that includes picks from Washington, Louisville, Houston, Los Angeles and more! Korean food is often cited as the number one reason many tourists choose to visit Korea, but if you're unable to visit The Land of the Morning Calm and live in America, why not flagged these suggestions to ensure you know what all the hype is about.

...READ ON USA TODAY
Published on 2016/04/03 | Source

The single largest group of Chinese tourists ever to arrive by plane flooded the western port city of Incheon on Monday.

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The 6,000 Chinese tourists are sales reps for China's Aolan International Beauty Group, which sells cosmetics and health supplements.

They arrived in Korea aboard 158 airplanes as part of a bonus trip.

The city of Incheon threw a chicken and beer party for them -- a popular combination thanks to the hit soap "My Love from the Star", which took China by storm.

City officials set up 750 tables along the beach in Wolmido and served 3,000 chickens and 4,500 cans of beer.

The reps are in Korea till Saturday.
Published on 2016/04/03 | Source

Vitaliy Raskalov poses atop Lotte World Tower in Seoul in this Instagram picture posted Monday.

Ukrainian photographer Vitaliy Raskalov, who made a name taking pictures from high places, recently set his sights on a brand-new Korean landmark.

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The result, posted online Monday, shows his feet resting on a yellow crane above the half-finished 123-story Lotte World Tower and far below the expanse of Seokchon Lake.

Raskalov pairs up with Russian Vadim Makhorov to snap selfies from the top of skyscrapers and other tall structures around the world, including the 124-foot Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Cologne Cathedral and Shanghai Tower.

Security staff at Lotte Corporation were flummoxed. The company had beefed up security after the pair posted photos of Sinchon and Mt. Nam early this month, and put up posters at the entrances to the construction site with pictures of the two daredevils. In vain.

On Tuesday, Raskalov posted another photo sitting atop Lotte World Tower and wrote that he would already have been gone by the time Lotte staff realized it.

At 555 m Lotte World Tower is the tallest building in Korea and fifth tallest in the world. The top floors offer breathtaking views not only of Seoul, but parts of neighboring Gyeonggi Province and even Seoul Airport, which is used by the president on official trips.

In November last year, Lotte Corporation became the first private business in Korea to set up its own anti-terror squad complete with bomb-sniffer dogs and stationed around 400 security guards at the tower around the clock.

But the two photographers slipped past them. Security staff scrutinized CCTV footage during the period they suspect the two went up to the top but found no leads.

"Judging by their track record, we believe they snuck into the tower at night and waited till morning before taking the photo on top of the crane", a Lotte staffer said. "We're going to have to review our security system".

Lotte is unlikely to bring charges.
Provider completes purchase for rehab facility

Twelve Oaks LLC, a part of Pyramid Healthcare, bought 12-acre site and 10,000-square-foot home on Old Turnpike Road for $2.3 million, land records show.

MILLS RIVER  A health care company that plans to open a substance-abuse treatment facility has closed on the sale of a 12-acre parcel on Old Turnpike Road in Mills River.



Twelve Oaks LLC, a corporation formed in North Carolina by Pennsylvania-based Pyramid Healthcare Inc., bought the property for $2.3 million last month from Farrell B. and Brenda Kaye Jones of Ormond Beach, Fla. The property, valued for tax purposes at $1.24 million, contains a 10,000-square-foot home valued at $1.16 million.

Mills River Town Manager Jeff Wells said that Pyamids North Carolina director of operations, Chad Husted, had told him the company was moving ahead with its plans for a treatment center for men and women who have already gotten sober or been detoxed.

The Mills River Town Council granted Pyramid a special-use permit over the strenuous objections of neighbors in December after a public hearing that stretched over two nights. Council members said state law restricted what they could consider in the way of testimony from residents, who told the board they feared for their safety and predicted that property values would plunge. In its approval of the permit, the Town Council required the health care provider to file a regular update that would report any problems, fully cooperate with law enforcement and work diligently to ensure safety. The council also formed a seven-member advisory group that would monitor the facility. It will be made up of representatives of Pyramid, the fire department and the sheriffs office, a Town Council member, the town manager and two community members  one selected by the council and one selected by Pyramid.

I think what Ill do at the next council meeting is mention that its closed and we should start looking at the advisory board, Wells said when a reporter told him of the sale. We havent been approached by them about any sort of permits. Im sure theyre at the early stages.

It sounds like well have to start putting together that advisory committee, Wells added. What the council wanted was just a committee that was represented by some citizen leaders as well as town officials and representatives from the business just to make sure that they ingrain themselves in the community and that theyre getting started in the right way and doing things in the right way. I think they were talking about something that would be biannual or at the most quarterly (in terms of meetings). I think its mainly just a committee that can keep open communications between the business and the community.

Pyramid committed to an improvement to the driveway that would make it easier for fire trucks and ambulances to get in and out.

Thats what well see first, Wells said. Well see the road and the parking and a site plan for those.

In the meantime, the company would need a building permit from the county for the renovation and must get a license from the state to operate a treatment facility.

Pyramids Hendersonville attorney, Bill Alexander, assured residents that patients at the facility would not be under the influence of drugs or alcohol when they arrive or while they are in treatment.

Somehow people believe that this is a detoxification facility, he told the Mills River Town Board. This is a not a detox facility and will never be a detox facility. It cannot be one under existing law.

Individuals must have been detoxified prior to entering into these facilities, he added, quoting from the state administrative code regulating residential treatment facilities. Pyramid Healthcare does own and operate a couple of methadone clinics in other states. They are familiar with methadone treatment. That is not what this property is. We could not possibly under a special use permit issued by this board operate a methadone treatment facility. It just cannot be done.

Pyramid Healthcare is expanding its footprint in Western North Carolina. Last week it acquired Real Recovery in Asheville, a sober living home for men ages 18 to 28. The facility provides high-quality, personalized care that helps young men develop the life skills and strong sense of community they need to succeed on their path to recovery through participation in positive, sober experiences, the company said on its website. In Asheville Pyramid also owns October Road Inc., a provider of outpatient addiction and mental health treatment services.
Someday, you might have your very own stone.

Everyone will know its yours because your name will be on it, along with a couple of dates. Itll be yours for a long time, perhaps forever, but sadly, youll never see it in its finished form. Youll just have to trust that its the right size for the job or, as in Dead Presidents by Brady Carlson, you could be memorialized with a stone the size of a South Dakota mountain.

Brady Carlson is a curious guy and when his curiosity is piqued, he tends to go all-out in a search for information. Years ago, in grade school, he became interested in U.S. presidents and he noticed that most books are written about the lives of our leaders. That led him to wonder about their deaths.

A few years ago, he finally acted on his inquisitiveness with a cross-country journey to the graves of the presidents and their monuments.

Beginning with the Father of Our Country, Carlson learned that Washington didnt want a lot of foofaraw upon his death. He really didnt want a city to be named after himself, either; one can only imagine how hed feel about his monument which, by the way, wasnt finished for nearly 90 years after George died.

Every schoolchild knows that John Q. Adams and Thomas Jefferson  friends, rivals, and signers of the Declaration of Independence  both died on July 4, 1826. Thats an eerie coincidence, but Carlson says its more common than we think. Presidents Ford and Truman both died the day after Christmas (in different years). James Madison almost died on Independence Day, 1836, but he declined medical help to do so, and died a few days prior.

Abraham Lincolns bones sat in a basement for almost a decade. Parts of James Garfields skeletal remains are in a museum, remnants of an attempted murder, a trial and mishandled injury. One president was exhumed 140 years after he died, one lay in a temporary crypt for two months longer than his entire presidency and, surprisingly, just one (so far) rests in peace in Washington.

In less than a year, a new person will sit in the Oval Office. What happened to 39 of his (or her) predecessors is the premise behind this peek at presidential passings.

You dont have to look much past the title of Dead Presidents to know that youre in for something enjoyably irreverent here, but author Brady Carlson isnt disrespectful. His fascinating journey was genuine, as evidenced by places he sleuthed, people he met along the way, and the cant-stop-reading information he found. We learn about gravesites and places where we only think a president rests in peace. We learn how he got there  sometimes a circuitous route. And we learn how our former leaders are remembered forever. Or not.

History buffs will relish this book. Trivia lovers will eat it up, and political fans should lobby for it. If politics as (un)usual has your ear this year, Dead Presidents is stone-cold fun.
As we welcome April, I've noticed the additions to the early morning chorus produced by the birds in residence around my home. From American robins and Eastern towhees to song sparrows and Carolina chickadees, all our feathered friends produce their own unique serenades to greet each new day.

Of course, the songs of birds play important roles in their daily lives. Half of the world's bird species are known as passerines, or songbirds; in itself a good indication of the importance of song in the day-to-day routines of birds.

The scientific definition of a songbird is that it is a species with a specialized voice box known as a syr-inx. This amazing organ allows for the production of some of the melodic and complex songs characteristic of birds such as wood thrush, Northern cardinal and Carolina wrens. Many of the warblers  a family of birds that should be beginning to returning to the region  produce a diverse range of songs.

Among other purposes, attracting mates, intimidating rivals and signaling territorial borders are some of the reasons birds sing. For human listeners, it's easy to think that birds also sing for the sheer joy of produc-ing these amazing choruses. That belief, however, is probably based more on the ear of the beholder.

We would probably be unaware of the presence of many birds if it wasn't for their vocalizations. This fact is particularly true of nocturnal birds or denizens of inaccessible habitats such as swamps and marshes.

I was reminded of this fact when Facebook friend Kenneth Oakes sent me a message on March 23 about the arrival of the first whip-poor-will of the spring.

"A whip-poor-will has just arrived," he wrote in his message. "It is about 12 days early." Kenneth noted that usually the arrival date for whip-poor-wills, as well as for hummingbirds, is about April 5.

"This is the earliest I've ever seen them arrive in this area," Kenneth wrote. For the past two years, he noted that whip-poor-wills have been a week to 12 days late in arriving in the spring.

Kenneth is not the only person who has reported "early bird" whip-poor-wills. Brookie Potter, who lives with his wife, Jean, near Wilbur Lake in Carter County, Tennessee, heard two calling whip-poor-wills near his home on Easter Sunday, March 27. He reported his observation on bristol-birds, an online list-serve forum for sharing area bird sightings.

Ironically, the whip-poor-will is not one of the world's many passerine, or songbird, species. Nevertheless, this bird's nocturnal serenades are one of my fondest childhood memories. I remember sitting on my grandparents' front porch to listen for hours to the whip-poor-wills as they sang the syllables of their own names from the nearby edges of the woodlands.

Kenneth also reported that he thinks the juncos have departed. "Winter is not over until they leave," he wrote. "Let's hope for an early spring."

All indications, such as the early arrivals of birds such as whip-poor-wills, are that an early spring could be in the works. This is also the time of year when I keep my eyes open for the arrival of the first ruby-throated hummingbirds of spring. In fact, I put out my sugar water feeders the last week of March.

According to websites that track the annual northward migration of these tiny birds, the first humming-birds should start arriving in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina any day now. As always, I invite readers to share with me the date and time of these first sightings.

Email me at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com or send me a message on Facebook to notify me when you ob-serve your first hummingbird of spring 2016.

While I haven't yet seen hummingbirds, plenty of other birds have been making appearances. My fish pond has been visited twice by pairs of wood ducks. My other recent sightings have included tree swallows, brown thrashers and chipping sparrows. I love spring for the simple fact you never know when a new bird will surprise you with an unanticipated arrival.
MEADOWVIEW, Va.  The Harvest Table Restaurant and Wolf Hills Brewing Co. will host an evening of local food and beer on April 12. These two businesses are trailblazers in their crafts and join forces to create a culinary experience for the community.

The Harvest Table Restaurant in Meadowview, Virginia, has been a farm-to-table restaurant since 2007. The majority of the produce and meat comes from within a 30 mile radius  including their own farm and small cattle operation two miles from the restaurant.

Wolf Hills Brewing Co. began in a humble tasting room with three taps in 2009 as one of the first craft breweries in the area. The brewery now has around 15 taps as well as a highly attended music venue. Popular brews such as the White Blaze Honey Cream Ale and Troopers Alley IPA can be found in groceries stores in the area.

Chefs Philip Newton and Bradley Griffin are creating a five-course menu highlighting the best of the spring season which is sure to include fresh picked micro greens, mizuna and radishes from the Harvest Table Farm, as well as their grass fed and finished beef. The courses will be created to complement the beer tastings.

One of the owners of Wolf Hills, Chris Bircher, will be present to describe the process of making each beer and describe the flavor profiles.

The five-course dinner will begin at 6 p.m. and feature five beer tastings and will be take place at the Harvest Table Restaurant. Seating is limited. Advance tickets are $55 with tickets at the door costing $65. To reserve your seats, contact Megan at events@harvesttablerestaurant.com or call 276-944-5140.
In 2002, responding to a study demonstrating the need for the Virginia coalfields to participate in the 21st-century economy, the Cumberland Plateau Company (CPC), a public, not-for-profit corporation created to support the efforts of the four-county Cumberland Plateau Planning District, began investigating options for building a fiber-optic network serving Buchanan, Dickenson, Russell and Tazewell counties.

A year later, the U.S. Economic Development Administration made the initial commitment to provide $1.655 million for the project, if a local match of $710,660 could be obtained. The Virginia Tobacco Commission provided that match, and the resulting fiber-optic project became known as the CPC OptiNet.

Because the CPC had no operational experience in telecommunications at the time, the EDA suggested a partnership with a competitive local exchange carrier. Bristol Virginia Utilities (now BVU Authority) fit that description. So in 2004, BVU and the CPC agreed to work together to fund, install, operate and maintain the CPC OptiNet. And, as stated in the agreement, CPC OptiNet was to be jointly owned, with CPC and BVU each having a 50 percent interest.

Since then, additional grants have been received and several hundred miles of fiber-optic infrastructure have been built, exclusively with public funding. Significant additional funding was used to add fiber in Wise and Lee counties to provide redundancy for the CPC OptiNet. This amounted to nearly $34 million, including a National Telecommunications & Information Administration grant of about $11 million.

The public funding has been critical to providing the robust and redundant fiber required by business and industrial customers such as Northrop Grumman, CGI, Pyott Boone, Sykes and EnerVest. About 1,000 businesses, industries, hospitals and public institutions benefit from this system, including Southwest Virginia Community College, the University of Appalachia College of Pharmacy, Bluefield College and the Appalachian School of Law.

New initiatives that have grown out of the CPC OptiNet, such as the Virginia Coalfield Coalitions Regional Wireless 4G Project, have further enhanced economic development opportunities in the region. This public investment of $14 million, as well as about $9 million by the wireless carrier, has made our region one of the first rural areas in the nation with 4G wireless coverage.

Given the success of the CPC OptiNet, it came as a surprise to hear in the fall of 2015 that BVU was discussing assigning its interests to a private, for-profit entity as part of a larger sale of the BVU OptiNet system. On numerous occasions since, the CPC requested information from BVU concerning those plans. The CPC is very interested, because BVU is the operational partner, and if it pulls out of the CPC OptiNet, assigning rights to another operator, the CPC would be saddled with that operator for the remainder of the agreement, another 14 years.

BVU steadfastly refused to confirm, deny or even discuss whether it was planning to exit the CPC OptiNet. It was not until Feb. 5, 2016, through a posting on the Bristol Herald Couriers website, that the CPC learned of the purported agreement between BVU and Sunset Digital.

To be clear, BVU never advised, inquired or consulted the CPC regarding its plans to walk away from the agreement. Instead of a collaborative process expected between partners, BVU acted unilaterally. This behavior is even more troubling when you consider that BVU and Sunset had been in talks since at least Sept. 1.

The CPC also remains perplexed as to how BVU can sell publicly funded assets without a public solicitation process.

The CPC holds these fiber-optic assets in trust for our federal and state funders to be used for economic development in the Cumberland Plateau region. CPC believes the CPC OptiNet is every bit as important a piece of infrastructure as water, sewer and roads in the 21st century. Indeed, with the continuing decline of coal mining as an economic engine in the four-county district, the need for the opportunities created by the network are greater than ever. Without it, the coalfields region will be hampered from diversifying its economy, keeping businesses competitive, helping local entrepreneurs, attracting new employers, and creating much-needed new jobs.

In the CPC OptiNet agreement, the CPC is given a right of approval and a right of first refusal.

BVU has informed the CPC that it will soon give CPC formal notice of BVUs deal to exit the CPC OptiNet, and seek the CPCs approval. At this point, the CPC does not have adequate information to decide whether to approve the deal.

Because the CPC OptiNet was built using public funds, there are programmatic requirements and contractual obligations by which any new operator would be bound. The CPC has requested information from BVU and from Sunset Digital concerning their positions with respect to these issues. To date, neither has provided the requested information.

The CPC must perform due diligence regarding the future of these vital assets. The criteria used by BVU to select the first offer they received to sell BVU OptiNet and assign its rights to CPC OptiNet might not be sufficient to meet the best interests of the citizens of the region.

The CPC OptiNet is a crucial tool for continued economic development in our area. The CPC is determined to see that the network continues to grow and serve our area in the future.
Nothing goes right for Edgewood in long trip to East Central
The foundations of the global order seem increasingly unsteady. The intensity of upheavals in West Asia, Europes ongoing crisis, and great power competition in the Asia-Pacific, is matched only by the transformational forces rocking the global economy, climate, cyberspace, and other transnational domains.

The principal strategic task for the United States  and its partners  is to channel these forces and help shape international circumstances before other forces and events shape them for us.

This should be the animating purpose of the strategic partnership between India and the US.

Indias rise is as significant a feature of todays international landscape as any other. The same is true of its partnership with the US  a partnership between two countries that for the first time in history have a deep stake in each others success.

Read | US and India should collaborate to counter China in the Indian Ocean

Thanks to sustained bipartisan consensus in both countries, and sustained efforts by both leaderships, the depth and breadth of todays partnership would have been unthinkable two decades ago.

In the security realm, after years of non-alignment, India looks to the US as its largest defence supplier and both engage in more bilateral military exercises today than either does with any other country. In the economic realm, bilateral and people-to-people ties are growing tighter by the day. Two decades ago, two-way trade was at $8 billion a year. Today, it is on the verge of $100 billion. From Silicon Valley to Bengaluru and Wall Street to Mumbai, Indians and Americans are making an impact on one another and in the world.

For all the good news, both leaderships recognise that much work remains if we are to realise the full promise of this partnership. Ambitious bilateral goals  whether it is reaching $500 billion annual trade, working towards a free trade agreement, or fully integrating India into the broader Asian economic architecture  are necessary, but not sufficient.

The prerequisite to taking this leap is Indias economic revitalisation. Washington can contribute toward this by providing capital, technology, and expertise, but what New Delhi does for itself will matter far more in comparison.

Read | India-US bonding: Its not about give and take

If Indias economic success is substantial and sustainable, much is possible. This begins with the India-Pacific, where together India and the US can help build a regional order that protects convergent values and interests, starting with stronger engagement with Japan, Australia, and the smaller Southeast Asian states. Beyond the India-Pacific, India plays a critical role in nearly every region and issue of consequence  from the future of democracy to nuclear non-proliferation, great power politics to climate, and the impact of technological innovation on international affairs. In each of these areas and others, a common approach will be critical to enhancing the value of the strategic partnership.

For all the achievements of the past decade, it is the decade to come that will demonstrate whether the shared strategic bet will yield benefits and deliver on the two countries shared vision for the Pacific Century.

William J Burns is former US deputy secretary of state and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This article is published as part of an association between HT and Carnegie India.

The views expressed are personal
Of the four states and a union territory going to polls, Assam offers the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) its best shot at victory.

Much of it will depend on how the party performs in the first phase on Monday, covering 65 of the 126 assembly constituencies in an ethnically diverse state prone to conflicts and politics of polarisation. The seats in Phase 1  distributed across Assams eastern half, Barak Valley in the south and the two hill districts in between  have traditionally been Congress strongholds.

The party had won 54 of its 78 seats from these regions in the 2011 assembly polls. The trend was similar in the 2001 and 2006 polls, which the Congress won  enabling Tarun Gogoi to rule for an unprecedented 15 years.

Saffron desperation

The BJP, smarting from its electoral losses in Delhi and Bihar, is desperate for its maiden victory in Assam.

The party hopes to gain from anti-incumbency as well as consolidation of votes due to an alliance with the regional Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF). The AGP, the Congress main rival since 1985, has been ailing ever since it lost power in 2001. The BPF was the Congress ruling ally for eight years, until 2014.

Never since its Assam debut in 1985  the same as AGP  has the BJP won more than 10 assembly seats here. The partys confidence is derived from its 2014 Lok Sabha show, in which it won seven out of 14 seats.

Read: State polls survey: Mamata to retain Bengal, hung assembly in Assam

Four of these Lok Sabha seats straddle eastern Assams tea belts, where plantation workers are a major voting force. The Adivasis, or tea tribes, have been a traditional Congress votebank along with Muslims, who dictate the terms in most Barak Valley seats.

The BJP feels that Adivasis have gravitated towards it while Bengali Hindus  a huge chunk of voters in several eastern Assam and Barak Valley constituencies  are party loyalists owing to its promise of accepting non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh as Indians. We will win and provide the break Assam needs from years of Congress misrule and favouritism to people of suspect nationality, Sarbananda Sonowal, Union minister and BJP state unit chief, said.

He also happens to be the BJPs chief ministerial candidate.

Read: Will uproot Congress from Assam, Karnataka: Amit Shah

However, Gogoi dismissed the BJPs hopes as a miscalculation. It is easier said than done. While Bengali Hindus have seen through (Prime Minister Narendra) Modis fake promises, plantation workers know that the BJP has deprived them of free rations, he said. Why did they go for an alliance if they are so confident?

Another factor the BJP is relying on is its promise to grant Scheduled Tribe status to six Assam communities. These include the Tai-Ahom (the group Gogoi belongs to), besides the Moran and Matak who constitute the bulk of the indigenous peoples in eastern Assam seats.

Confident Congress

The Congress, state president Anjan Dutta maintains, will sweep the Phase 1 seats. His conviction is based on BJPs reliance on tainted candidates imported from the Congress, dissension because of its alliance with the AGP, and the perceived disillusionment of the people with Modi.

The BJP also has an unwritten understanding with AIUDF, which will help us, Dutta said.

The AIUDF (All India United Democratic Front), headed by perfume baron Badruddin Ajmal, is the third major player in the fray. It became the second-largest party in 2011 by catering primarily to the Muslim angst of being perceived as Bangladeshis with the agenda of outnumbering the indigenous peoples.

Read: How can a family-centric party serve people? Sonowal in Majuli

Apart from Barak Valley, the AIUDF wont factor significantly in Phase 1 seats.

The Congress is battling charges of being family-centric with at least 10 candidates in this phase having dynastic linkages. But we have given 90% of the seats to deserving candidates, unlike our rivals, Gogoi said, adding that it works to the partys advantage.

He also believes that Sonowal is facing challenges from leaders within his party, besides splinter groups of both the BJP and AGP, which could upset the alliances calculations.

Top two, same district

The focus of attention in Phase 1 is central Assams Jorhat district, where Gogoi and Sonowal  the top two candidates  are contesting. Gogoi is seeking re-election from his pet constituency of Titabor, and his main rival there is the BJPs Lok Sabha member Kamakhya Prasad Tasa.

Some 40 km to the north is Majuli, an island in the Brahmaputra river, where Sonowals bid to become the chief minster depends on who the Mishing tribal voters go with. Sonowals main rival, sitting MLA Rajib Lochan Pegu of Congress, is a local Mishing unlike the BJP candidate  who belongs to the Sonowal Kachari tribe scattered further in the east.

Richest and poorest

The richest and poorest candidates of Assam are contesting in the Phase 1 constituencies.

Of the 539 candidates in this phase, 112 are crorepatis, with 20 possessing assets of more than Rs 5 crore. The richest is Jyoti Subba, wife of former Congress MP Mani Kumar Subba, who is contesting the Sootea assembly seat as an independent.

Read: Modi insulting Assam, BJP-led alliance communal: Sonia

Jyoti Subba has total assets worth Rs 288.12 crore. AGPs Naren Sonowal, contesting the Naharkatiya seat, follows with Rs 33.95 crore. Rahul Roy, sitting Congress MLA from Algapur and son of former minister Gautam Roy, comes third with Rs 25.01 crore in total assets.

The poorest candidates with zero assets are Jiten Tanti, the CPI(ML)s candidate from Teok constituency; Diganta Phukan, an independent candidate contesting from the Mariani seat; and Debangshu Nath, an SUCI(C) candidate contesting the Patharkandi seat.

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BJPs chief ministerial candidate for Assam, Sarbananda Sonowal, spoke at length with Utpal Parashar about the partys prospects, major polls issues and his chances from the Majuli constituency.

What is your reading of the poll scenario in Assam at this stage?

The people of Assam have decided to bring BJP to power because they want development, good governance and security. Congress has miserably failed to protect the interest of the local people of Assam, the greater Assamese society living in Barak Valley and Brahmaputra Valley.

Congress has polluted the whole system and made it corrupt. Corruption isnt confined to the state capital but it has been decentralized to the grass roots through panchayati raj system. Only Congress leaders, ministers and MLAs benefited during 15 years of Tarun Gogois government.

How many seats are you confident of winning?

BJP is still marching with our target of Mission 84. The target (of winning 84 of the 126 seats in Assam along with alliance partners Asom Gana Parisdhad and Bodo Peoples Front) is still very much reachable. We are confident of that and working hard day and night.

The BJP campaign has focused on stopping influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Do you think it would be a major factor with voters?

People feel that under the Congress regime, the self respect, the swabhiman of Assam cant be protected. Our land, our culture is very much insecure under their regime. They have tied up with elements like Badruddin Ajmal, whose party, All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), has been advocating for the settlement of illegal migrants in Assam since its inception.

The indigenous people of Assam have become endangered due to such large scale entry of Bangladeshis. Voters now firmly believe only BJP can stop the influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and protect interests of the bona fide Indian citizens living in Assam.

How would you rate 15 years of Tarun Gogoi-led Congress government?

No development took place in the last 15 years. All the major industries have shut down. Unemployment has grown from 9 lakhs in 2001 to 26 lakhs in 2015-16. There is no hope under their regime. People have now decided that Congress should be rejected and BJP brought to power. BJP has been performing in other states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh excellently, so people think only BJP can bring bright changes to the lives of people of Assam.

What made you decide on contesting from Majuli, the largest river island and centre of Vaishnavite culture in Assam?

Majuli is the most backward constituency in the state. This place has made enormous contribution to the growth of human values and universal brotherhood in Assam. It is most important to protect Majuli from the erosion of Brahmaputra and restoration of culture, heritage and values in Assam. Thats why I have chosen Majuli as my constituency.

What are the problems your constituency faces?

There are several challenges as there are no proper roads, no bridges connecting Majuli to the rest of the world, no infrastructure for health, sanitation or good education, no drinking water. Thats why I thought if any visible changes have to be brought to Assam the starting point should be Majuli. I am quite confident about my victory.

Whats your response to ULFA (I)s charges against BJP for fielding a former militant accused of masterminding extra-judicial killings from the Margherita constituency?

ULFA may say whatever they have to say but our focus in on what the people think. We have seen that the people of Assam have come forward spontaneously to support us, so it the people who will decide as they are the best judge. The peoples court will decide what is good or bad. Voters are the ones who play a pivotal role in election and we are confident that their verdict will be in our favour.

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More than 150 years after the British brought them to cash in on Assams natural wealth, three communities continue to matter the most during elections in the state.

But unlike past polls, the Congress is now not the sole claimant of the vote banks these communities  referred to as Ali, Kuli, Bongali in order of their voting strengths  comprise.

Indira Gandhi loyalist Devakanta Barooah, Congress president during the Emergency (1975-77), had popularised the Ali-Kuli-Bongali slogan. Ali stands for Bengali Muslims settled by the British along the riverbanks for paddy and vegetable cultivation. Kuli is for Adivasis brought from central India to work in tea plantations and as loggers for the timber trade.

Migration of Bengali Muslims and Hindus forced by Partition in 1947 and events leading to Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 led to demographic complications and friction with indigenous groups. The British relied on Bongalis, or Bengali Hindus, for clerical jobs and petty trade.

Post-independence, the Congress banked on this troika to win elections. They invariably stood by, even in 1985 when the party won the least number of seats  25. Together, these communities have dictated the outcome in 90 of Assams 126 assembly seats. Bengali Muslims hold sway over 40 seats, Adivasis in 30, and Bengali Hindus in 10.

In a little over a decade, perfume baron Badruddin Ajmals All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) has eaten into the migrant Muslim vote base of the Congress while BJP has made inroads among Adivasis and Bengali Hindus.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi emphasised the importance of these communities by addressing rallies, first in Muslim-dominated Barpeta district of western Assam, the tea-growing belts of eastern Assam, and Bengali Hindu-dominated Silchar in southern Assam.

CM Tarun Gogoi, eyeing a fourth straight term, refers to his Muslim MLAs to claim the Congress has never really lost them. But Ajmal says Muslims are opting for AIUDF.

The BJPs minority cell has ideas about penetrating Muslim areas but the party is more confident in constituencies dominated by Adivasis and Bengali Hindus. Five of the seven Lok Sabha seats it won in 2014 were from the tea-growing areas of eastern Assam while Bengali Hindus played a role in helping the party bag the other two. The sub-text of this victory was the lead BJP took in 69 assembly segments.

The importance of these two groups has made BJP promise ST status for Adivasis and refugee status for Bengali Hindus who fled religious persecution (up to December 2014) in Bangladesh.

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The BJPs electoral appeal in the absence of any perceptible Modi wave and the Congresss tenacity against a spirited attack on one of its last fortresses will be under test when people in Assams 65 constituencies, and 18 in West Bengal, vote in the first phase on Monday.

Of the four states and a Union Territory going to the polls in the next six weeks, the BJP has its eyes on Assam where it fancies a chance to oust the Congress that has been ruling the state for the past 15 years.

About 9 million voters in tea-growing upper Assam and Barak Valley, the states southern part bordering Bangladesh, will determine the BJPs fate. The party did well in these two regions in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The momentum it gains in these belts could carry it through the April 11 elections for 61 seats in Muslim-dominated lower and central Assam.

Locked in a close contest with Left parties in Kerala, the Congress seems precariously poised in Assam.

Read | Win or lose, Bengal polls will be historic for Left-Congress alliance

Polling in 18 constituencies in Maoist-hit districts of West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura in West Bengal could be the barometer for chief minister Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress to assess whether last weeks tragic flyover collapse in Kolkata has any adverse resonance outside the city.

It will also test her claims about restoring peace and development in this region where, she said, 400-500 people used to be killed every year before she came to power in 2011.

This April-May polls are the first since the BJP stormed to power at the Centre in May 2014 that the party is not seeking votes directly in the name of Narendra Modi.

The Prime Minister has campaigned for his party but the focus has been on local issues  illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and corruption in Assam; lack of development and the Narada bribery scandal involving ruling Trinamool leaders in West Bengal.

On May 19 when votes are counted, the results will show how much the BJP depends on a personality cult for electoral success.

Read | State polls survey: Mamata to retain Bengal, hung assembly in Assam

The results will also set the stage for presidential elections in 2017. Party position in every assembly matters to the NDA to get the Head of State of its choice because the President is elected by an electoral college, comprising parliamentarians and MLAs.

The RSS, the BJPs ideological patron, is said to be keenly watching the numbers in different assemblies. As it is, the BJP along with its allies rules 12 states, excluding Jammu and Kashmir where the PDP-BJP government will be formed on Monday, but may not have the requisite numbers to force a candidate of its own choice.

The assembly elections will have a bearing on the Centre because a poor BJP show may embolden rivals to further oppose pending, key reforms.

Projections suggest the NDAs tally, with support from the AIADMK and seven nominated members, will be 86 in the Rajya Sabha by August  against the combined strength of 87 of the Congress-led grouping. The NDA will need smaller parties for the majority figure of 123 in the 245-member Upper House of Parliament.

The AIADMK has been a reliable NDA supporter in Parliament, except for the goods and services tax bill. No doubt, BJP strategists are secretly wishing a thumping victory for J Jayalalithaa in the assembly polls.

Read | How can a family-centric party serve people? Sonowal in Majuli
In November last year, when pieces of the poll puzzle in Assam were scattered all over, the BJP looked the most sure-footed, with a defined target, a dynamic leadership and surging popularity.

The only hitch was Badruddin Ajmal-led AIDUF, which claims to represent the states minorities  not the BJPs prime target. But during the past five months, after parties formed new alliances, Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi, the old Congress warhorse, looks to be straining at the leash.

And the BJP is perceptibly losing its sheen probably because of the on-off-on alliances with different anti-Congress and breakaway groups  such as Trinamool BJP and AGP Anchalikata Mancha  and the denial of tickets to BJP veterans in the state  especially the Hindi-speaking BJP leaders in the northeast.

BJP rebels, who are fighting a subversive battle against the partys central leadership, however, said the state BJP had been hijacked by former All Assam Students Union, Sarbananda Sonowal, the current state BJP chief, and Himanta Biswa Sarma, BJPs chief campaigner who was Gogois second-in-command.

When theres confusion all around, what makes Gogoi still tick? He is already getting high returns on his investments in culture as the BJP is painted as an aggressor from the north.

Gogois most visible masterstroke, it seems, was putting up a statue of Lachit Barphukan, the Ahom general who decidedly defeated the Mughal navy in the battle of Saraighat in 1671. Gogoi wants the statue to be a symbol of Assamese pride. The target, obviously, is the raiders from the north.

Our position was not good a few months ago, but now we are confident of forming the government again. People wanted change, but they are comparing both parties  what the BJP has done at the Centre and what the Congress has done in the state. He is expecting 60 of the 126 seats this time.

But former BJP state chief Sidhartha Bhattacharyya said, Somebody is investing money against the BJP in Assam through the Congress, which is the only state from where the party can generate funds. The Congress is desperate to see the BJP lose Assam to complete a hat-trick of losses after Delhi and Bihar.

Gogoi, meanwhile, has one deft move for each of his opponents. To tame the BPF, a BJP ally perceived so far to be the only representative of the Bodos, he has tied up with the BPFs rival, UPP, which has control over non-Bodos, who constitute 65% of Bodoland Territorial Council population. Next, for both Ajmal  now trying to broaden his base among non-Muslims in the Bengali-speaking Barak Valley  and BJP  which is betting heavily on Hindu Bengali votes  Gogoi devised another move.

He promised, If voted to power, I will bring the Barak and Brahmaputra valleys closer. The Barak Valley will get a mini secretariat and four state directorates.

The canny Ahom knows its his last bout before bowing out. I may not live through the fourth term, but my passion keeps me going. Now, 80-plus Gogoi is getting ready for his final Saraighat, it seems.
Britain changed its procurement rules to encourage public sector bodies to use British steel products as part of efforts to revive the countrys ailing steel industry and save thousands of jobs after Indias Tata Steel decided to sell its loss-making businesses in the UK.

Under the new decision, public sector bodies are to be encouraged to buy British steel for construction projects in an effort to help save the industry.

The government said councils and NHS trusts will be asked to consider the economic impact of buying from abroad.

Business secretary Sajid Javid said he was determined to ensure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers.

By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects, we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies, the Pakistani-origin minister said.

The governments decision comes after Tata Steel announced last week that it was selling its loss-making UK plants, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The unions said the governments decision was a small step in the right direction but the measure should have been in place already.

Guidelines were introduced last year requiring central government bodies to take into account the true value of British steel.

Now the guidance to be extended across the public sector and public procurements involving the supply of steel will need to consider responsible sourcing, the training suppliers give to their workforce, carbon footprint, protecting the health and safety of staff and the social integration of disadvantaged workers.

Contractors working for the public sector will be required to advertise their requirements for steel so that UK firms can compete for business.

Authorities hope local steel firms could supply steel for huge projects like the 55-million-pound high-speed rail link, which will need some two million tonnes of steel.

It comes after heavy criticism of ministers for failing to take more effective action to prevent the dumping of cheap Chinese steel, seen as one of the key reasons for the problems in the UK steel industry.

The government has played down the impact of new Chinese import tariffs, that are up to 46.3%.

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community trade union, said the announcement was a small step in the right direction but said steelworkers will be shocked to discover that these measures were not already in place.

These are bread-and-butter policies that should have been providing opportunities to UK steel producers already, he said.
Sanjeev Gupta of the Liberty House Group has emerged as a potential buyer as Tata Steel prepares to sell its UK assets and the David Cameron government scrambles to assure the future of thousands of jobs affected by the sell-off decision.

Gupta, who graduated from Cambridge in 1995, is the founder and heads the international steel and non-ferrous metals group, operating from four hubs in London, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong with a network of offices spread across 30 countries around the world.

Gupta is considered a potential buyer for some parts of Tata Steels business in Britain. His family recently bought most of the companies in the Caparo Industries Group (owned by Swraj Paul), which went into administration in end-2015.

Gupta said he had already opened discussions with Tata Steel and was ready to hold talks with the government: We would need a proper partnership with the government. I dont know what that would entail at this stage. Weve started the discussions ... we are in the process of starting a discussion with Tata, he told The Sunday Telegraph.

He added: I havent made a proposition that I want to buy all of (Tata Steel UK) because thats too big an undertaking to even put on the table at this stage. If the company, its people, its workers and the government would be willing to consider my suggestions then Im willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that.

Gupta is described as hailing from a very successful industrial and business family and has put his background and experience to good use to grow the trading business globally. He traded various commodities in the markets of Asia, Middle East, Europe and Africa, establishing and developing the Liberty brand and the global network. From the year 2000 onwards, SKGs focus has been on growing the trade in steel, metals and raw materials while developing the industrial asset base of the Group.

The Cameron government, meanwhile, asked all public sector bodies to buy British steel for infrastructure and other projects, as part of efforts to rescue the beleaguered steel industry grappling under dumping of Chinese steel.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said: By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects, we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies.

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community trade union, said the announcement was a small step in the right direction but said steelworkers will be shocked to discover that these measures were not already in place.

Shadow business secretary Angela Eagle said while the announcement was welcome, but added: The government has been dragged kicking and screaming to take action to support the steel industry, which is a vital foundation industry and has descended further into crisis on their watch, she said.

The Liberty groups turnover is approaching USD 5 billion, covering steel, raw materials and non-ferrous metals, employing over 2000 people globally, while total production capacity in steel exceeds 3 million MT per annum, it said.

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Somewhere in the wastelands of Ladakh there is a spectral monument. Generations of tourists and locals have been led to believe that it is a Magnetic Hill, where vehicles, even when their engines are switched off, appear to move up a gradient on their own because of the supposed magnetic pull of a distant mountain. But the Magnetic Hill is a hoax. The natural design of the expanse is such that it creates a powerful optical illusion  the seeming uphill is in reality a downhill.

This sounds like the story of our leader with an illusory magnetic field and his devout who think they are going up while they are actually going downhill. But I mention the Magnetic Hill only to point out that we dont have to invoke god and mass delusions to understand that successful myths are all around us, in a whole hierarchy of things. They are surprisingly easy to spread. In the Magnetic Hill hypothesis there is a combination of powerful influences, apart from the optical illusion of the terrain: A higher authority seeded the idea of magnetism (until recently, on the site, there was a government notice board that announced the spurious science of the Magnetic Hill); and people wished to believe in it because magnetism is more interesting than banal gravity, and certainly more interesting than the realisation that they have been tricked by their eyes.

Read | Kejriwal asks to clear Chandni Chowk mess in a week

The popular middle-class myth that Arvind Kejriwal is a dangerous anarchist has been established by similar influences. In 2014, for political reasons, journalistic and scholarly authorities seeded the idea that he was an anarchist; and for political reasons, the middle-class found it an interesting idea. When I used to edit a magazine a seasoned journalist pitched the idea that Kejriwal had serious psychiatric problems and that he must be hospitalised.

Sometimes, people who do not read or watch television news end up preserving a lot of clarity. A reason why Kejriwal emerged triumphant after two elections despite losing the support of mainstream journalism. And he is going strong. He is experimenting with transformative ideas in alleviating urban poverty, providing basic healthcare and reducing pollution even as he uses cunning to survive Indian politics. A recent poll projects that his AAP would storm Punjab in the assembly elections next year.

Read | Majithia slams Kejriwal for not taking any Sikh in his cabinet

As we know, there was a time when Kejriwal was Kanhaiya Kumar; but that was when he appeared to be a non-political activist warring against corruption. But he realised that it is meaningless to scream revolution in India. In a democracy the greatest mass movement is democracy itself and a revolution does occur every now and then; it is called elections. To make a change in India one cannot shun politics, instead one should become politics. That was when the middle-class opinion about him began to change. He was becoming too big.

The middle-class liked him but at the time they adored Narendra Modi. So it was convenient to dismiss Kejriwal as an anarchist. A string of events told in a particular way seemed to corroborate the view that he indeed was.

Even though he was a chief minister he went on a street protest, then he resigned, went to jail on a defamation charge and the day Modi was sworn in as prime minister, Kejriwal suffered in a cell filled with mosquitoes, but then he fought another election and shocked Modi and the upper classes.

He has since had many run-ins with an anarchist central government that has refused to let him function in peace.

Read | Security stepped up after hoax caller threatens to blow up Kejriwal

If you belong to the urban Indian middle-class anywhere in the nation you probably believe that Kejriwal is, to put it nicely, unfit to govern. You are like the somnolent in the film Inception. Some of my beloved friends have seeded a powerful idea in your head.

An amusing hint to this fact occurred in January when Kejriwal experimented with restricting cars in Delhi through the odd-even rule to reduce air pollution. Among the news reports that tried to portray the plan as a failure, there were some that claimed pollution in Delhi had actually increased on the days the odd-even rule was in force.

Now, one can argue that taking some cars off the road may have no immediate effect on air quality in a city but the claim that the banishment of thousands of cars increased pollution is not in the realm of journalistic imbecility but myth-building.

On social media Kejriwal was ridiculed more than the alleged feminist Madhu Kishwar, who had tweeted, My car number ends with Zero. I take it no restrictions for me coz 0 is neither even nor odd Its just 0! (She once accused Smriti Irani of being semi-literate.)

Read | You can shake hands with ISI, not us: Kejriwal tells Centre

But Kejriwal has exceptional moral confidence in himself. He does not have to resort to posturing. This month there would be another bout of the odd-even rule. There would be much middle-class lament but, eventually, the experiment would triumph. Your ideology does not alter the fact that restricting cars in a city results in cleaner air.

His other major move is to open a thousand street clinics that would use technology to make swift diagnoses for the poor.

In his second avatar as chief minister he has greatly transformed his communication. For instance, he does not inform us of his diarrhoea anymore. But he is unafraid of being accused of disorderly conduct. When there was an internal rebellion he quelled it decisively.

Amusing though that a man of his cunning would be careless enough to let a colleague discreetly record his sensitive telephone conversations. Even editors are careful these days  for instance, they know that chap in the office with a dumb Nokia is likely to record phone conversations. It is hard to record on smartphones.

Manu Joseph is a journalist and the author of the novel, The Illicit Happiness of Other People. The author tweets via @manujosephsan

The views expressed are personal.

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JNU is believed to be seeking legal opinion over punishment to a few students in connection with an event against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised.

Sources said the chief proctors office is seeking legal opinion on the quantum of punishment to the students in connection with the controversial February 9 event. If the authorities decide to press ahead with action against the students, it is likely to kick off a fresh round of protests.

The university panel probing the issue had submitted its report on March 11. But the varsity is yet to take a call on the issue.

It is a sensitive issue and the university doesnt intend to be unfair to anybody. Keeping the discipline norms in mind the quantum of punishment will be decided but it has to be made sure first that the penalty should be legally justified, sources said.

After a high-level committee of the university found them guilty of violating university norms and discipline rules, show-cause notices were issued to 21 students on March 14, asking them to explain why disciplinary action should not be initiated against them.

The students had earlier refused to depose before the probe committee, demanding that the enquiry be started afresh.

The varsity, however, turned down the demand and maintained that the students will be given three chances to appear before the disciplinary committee and, if they fail to do so, the panel will finalise its recommendations on the basis of evidence, eyewitness accounts, students deposition, and other material available on hand.

The students, who had refused to accept the findings of the probe panel, had sent token replies to the administration saying they cannot respond to undefined charges.

The administration had also communicated to the students that if they do not reply to the show-cause notice, it will be assumed that they did not have anything to say in the matter and the office will proceed further in the matter.

The report of the five-member panel has pointed at lapses on part of the students as well as the administration. However, no explanation has been sought from any of the administrative officials.

Taking into account the role of outsiders in the controversial event, the university panel has found Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, both of whom face sedition charges, guilty of arousing communal, caste or regional feeling or creating disharmony among students.

While no specific charges have been made out against students union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who has also been slapped with a sedition case in connection with the event, the university has found ABVP member Saurabh Sharma guilty of blocking traffic on February 9, the day the controversial programme was held.
Sri Sri Ravishankars Art of Living Foundation says it wont pay the remainder of the Rs 5 crore compensation until a scientific assessment of the damage is made, proposing instead to furnish a bank guarantee.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) had fined the organisation for holding a grand fest on the Yamuna floodplain. It paid Rs 25 lakh on the day of the event and the remaining was to be paid by April 1.

The foundation has sent an application to the tribunal to modify its March 9 order and accept a bank guarantee instead. It said it was preparing a proposal to conduct a scientific study to assess the damage to the floodplain.

The tribunal had permitted the foundation to hold the festival on the condition that it paid Rs 5 crore as compensation before the event on March 11. The foundation, on the day of the event, said that it would pay Rs 25 lakh then and pay the remainder later. It submitted the latest application to the tribunal on April 1. The tribunal will look into their application on Monday.

The application filed by the foundation states, The applicant (AOL) submits that the present application is being filed for modification of the order dated March 9 and March 11 to allow for submission for security by way of a bank guarantee in lieu of payment of balance as directed. The applicant is in the process of preparing a proposal, laying down the process/methodology for collection of scientific data/evidence regarding the assessment of actual environmental damage, if any. It hopes to persuade the tribunal that the damage is neither permanent nor irreversible but, in fact, remediable. Therefore, it seeks an opportunity to demonstrate that the allegations levelled against it are baseless. The reports submitted by expert committees, on the basis of which the previous orders were made, were predominantly based on visual examination of the site.

The application has got Yamuna activists fuming.

The March 9 judgment establishes the damage was done. If AOL felt that it was wrong, why did it pay Rs 25 lakh as a first instalment? The damage is there for all to see. The judgment clearly states that the amount is needed to restore the floodplain, said Manoj Misra, who filed the petition against the foundation in February.
In 2007, the world watched with amazement as Ratan Tata, the then chairman of the Tata Group, announced the acquisition of the Anglo-Dutch Corus Group in a $12 billion deal. It also marked a high point in a spree of overseas acquisitions by Indian companies before the 2008 financial crisis. The company went on to acquire Jaguar Land Rover. Mr Tata called the Corus deal a very visionary move... Hopefully in future, people will look back and say that we did the right thing.

Less than a decade later, Tata Steel has put up for sale its loss-making business in Britain, putting thousands of jobs at risk and potentially forcing the David Cameron government to seek a solution ahead of an EU referendum dominated by concerns about the economy.

Read | How the Winners Curse caught up with Tata Steel in UK

A banner declaring Save our Steel erected outside the Tata Steel plant at Port Talbot is emblematic of the changes that are currently sweeping the worlds manufacturing and commodity industries.

In an integrated world the volume and direction of raw material and intermediate goods shipments can prove to be a useful guide to gauge the health of economies. The level of action in the factory floors of China is of far greater consequence, given the economys size and its influence over global commodity prices.

What we are witnessing in the steel industry is primarily a consequence of the slowdown in Chinas factory floors. If people across the world are buying fewer cars and houses, it is showing up in the slump in demand for steel. Global steel demand has not returned to the levels seen before the Great Crash of 2008. Sluggish demand has led to a fall in prices. The deceleration in China has only accentuated the crises. With local demand faltering, Chinese steel and other producers, some analysts point out, had to export substantial quantities at lower prices, or even at a loss, to the rest of the world, leading to accusations of dumping.

For Indian companies that have added capacities over the years riding the boom, the wobbly world economy isnt a happy state to be in. Buying factories is a common strategy to corner a larger chunk of booming global demand. The problem occurs when companies borrow large sums to fund these acquisitions on assumptions that the rapidity of demand expansion will continue consistently for a long period of time.

Read | Tatas UK steel exit raises expectations of European mergers

When the slide occurs, as witnessed currently, the companies struggle to earn enough to repay their debts. This is a lesson Indias corporate world can continue to ignore only at its own peril. In the final analysis, the ability to read the early warning signals of a global economic slide will separate those that deftly ride the boom-bust cycle, and those that fall by the wayside.
A number of students found paper 1 (BE/BTech) of Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) Mains lengthy in Jaipur on Sunday, while in Patna many applicants said that the paper was easy.

In Jaipur, students were dissatisfied with the time limit for paper I. They found chemistry and physics portion of the exam tougher than mathematics. A total of 90 questions, carrying 360 marks, had to be answered in three hours.

I found chemistry portion toughest and could attempt only 60 out of 90 questions. Mathematics questions were of average difficulty but physics and chemistry papers were tough. Overall, the paper was lengthy, said Abhishek, who took the exam.

The question paper was very lengthy and I attempted only 75 out of 90 questions. However, my preparation was good and I am confident of getting a decent score, said another applicant Mridul Jain.

A total of 44,253 candidates appeared for paper I held across 72 centers in Jaipur. They were frisked at the venue as carrying any stationery, mobile phones and electronic gadgets was prohibited.

In Bihar, around 54,000 students appeared from different parts of the state at around 29 centres in Patna, 10 in Muzaffarpur and eight in Gaya. Students who took Paper-1 termed the overall paper easy with chemistry being most scoring.

It was perhaps the easiest paper of JEE (Mains) in last three years. Mathematics was relatively easy while chemistry was quite scoring. Only physics was tough among the three subjects, like always, said Rajat Kumar and Manish Kumar, who took the examination.

JEE paper-1 aspirants had started lining up at the examination hall since 7am in the morning, as per CBSE guidelines. The CBSE has taken strict measures to prevent use of unfair means.

While most examinees cooperated to the frisking and security measures at the centres, tension was reported from a few centres in Bihar, where parents of the appearing students and security personnel had a tiff. No violence was reported.

Parents of the examinees waited outside the examination hall in the scorching heat till 12.30pm, the conclusion of paper 1.

In Lucknow, many candidates reached examination centre hours before the start of the paper as they knew that frisking will be done.

Thousands of students took the exam in Lucknow too, but we do not have their reaction till now.

Ahead of the start of exam, City Montessori School student Gaurav told HT that he had prepared well for examination.

Alongside boards I prepared for the competitive examination. But honestly speaking, this exam is going to be tough. I will also appear in state entrance exam to be conducted by AKTU previously known as UP Technical University, said Gaurav.

Read more | IIT-JEE (Mains) today: Paper pattern expected to be like last year

Sundays exam was a pen-and-paper test with the online test being scheduled to take place on April 8 and 9.

JEE (Main) is being conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education at Centres in 129 cities in India and abroad. More than 12.07 lakh aspiring engineers are likely to sit for the prestigious exam this year.

The three-hour long test has questions from Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics - all of which have equal weightage.

Based on the performance in JEE (Main), the top 1.5 lakh aspirants will be selected to take the JEE (Advanced) for admission to the Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs).

(With inputs from Lucknow Correspondent)
The Haryana government has told the Punjab and Haryana high court that 2,110 FIRs (first information reports) were registered and 567 persons were arrested so far in connection with the Jat quota agitation in February, which left 30 people dead and property worth thousands of crores destroyed.

The figures, however, could turn out to be just a number to escape the wrath of the judiciary and the common people for now, as the states own track record suggests.

For instance, in the same affidavit filed in the court, the state has admitted that for the Jat quota violence witnessed in 2010 and 2012, of the 69 criminal cases registered, only one led to conviction. It says that in 19 cases, the accused were acquitted, and 26 people remained untraced. In 20 odd cases, the trial was still underway, the affidavit added.

The governments response came in response to a contempt of court petition by an NGO, which had alleged that it was non-compliance of court orders that had resulted in loss of lives and property during the Jat agitation.

The Supreme Court, in a case related to destruction of public and private property, had directed states to take preventive measures to avoid violent protests and provide teeth to investigation agencies to deal with protesters.

The high court had also ordered implementation of the directions.

The Haryana government, however, said the police had not failed in controlling the violence. It said the police had made arrangements to maintain law and order and negotiations were held on several occasions, but that the agitation took a violent turn and the army had to be called in.

The large scale loss of property and life during this years Jat agitation happened despite the government having put in place a road map for 2012, which had promised to thwart any such occurrences in future and bringing those responsible for the previous violent stirs to task.

Additional chief secretary, home, P K Das, who filed this affidavit has made special mention of the fact that the high court order to implement the Supreme Court directions were passed in January 2013 but he had taken over only in November 2015.

The respondents have already complied with the directions issued by the honourable court, Das claims in the affidavit, seeking discharge of the rule.

The affidavit also reveals that although only 11 cases of settlement of damages were reported during the previous protests, they were yet to be settled.

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Kanpur: The one-and-a-half year old girl, who was taken out from a borewell by armymen and NDRF personnel in Kanpurs Nawabganj area on Sunday evening after over 10 hours of her falling into it, was declared dead when taken to hospital.

The child named Khushi was found at 45 feet of the 110 feet deep borewell into which she had fallen at about 7 am on Sunday. The diggers reached Khushi at 5.35 pm.

She had fallen into the borewell, with an opening of just half-a-foot, upside down. Doctors said she died some four hours before she was brought to hospital at around 6 pm.

Many people, who accompanied her to the hospital while praying for her surivival, broke down at the LLR hospital on being told that the kid had died. Among them were army and NDRF men who tirelessly worked for 10 hours and 35 minutes to get her out of the borewell.

It is heart breaking for all us, she couldnt make it, said SP West Sachindra Patel. If the family gives us a complaint the police are ready to lodge an FIR and act against the people who left the borewell opened, he said.

The army had flown in its experts from Bareilly and Haldwani in a special chopper to take over the rescue operation. Later in a day a team of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) joined the operation.

The NDRF personnel pulled her out and gave her to a waiting Col Dushyant Singh. She was motionless at that time; but it appeared that she was breathing faintly, he said.

Wrapped in a blanket Khushi was rushed to the LLRs intensive care unit where the team of doctors, headed by JL Gupta, tried to revive the child for about an hour. The girl was declared dead at 7 pm.

Doctors said the child did not get oxygen properly because of her position in the borewell despite oxygen being supplied from three cylinders, from different angles.

Khushis mother Shyama had come to Kanpur from Kanpur Dehat for treatment and was staying at a relatives place near Roadways Colony in Nawabganj. She had gone to attend natures call when Khushi crawled up to the five borewell and slipped in one of them.

It is alleged Kanpur Development Authority (KDA) got these borewells dug for soil testing related work that was required for one of its townships coming up in the vicinity. But the borewells werent closed after the work was over.

District magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma said accountability will be fixed in this case. Showcauses notices were being issued to the KDA and the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute (HBTI), he said. The authority had given HBTI the work of soil testing and the institute sublet the task to a private company.

We will get to the bottom of this; it is serious, he said.
Can a man accused of raping a mentally challenged woman be prosecuted under POCSO -- the law meant for the welfare of child victims of sexual abuse?

A mother of a 38-year-old woman, who is a patient of cerebral palsy, raised this question before the Supreme Court and said her daughters alleged rapist should be booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act because her mental age was that of a childs. The accused in the case is booked under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and facing trial in Saket district court.

POCSO is a stringent law compared to IPC. It prescribes a child-friendly procedure wherein an accuseds lawyer cannot ask direct questions from the victim and can do so only through the judge. In court the accused or his counsel cannot see the child, who sits in a separate room when recording her statement. POCSO does not fix a ceiling for compensating victims.

Advocate Aysweria Bhatti told a bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra that the petitioners daughters mental age is of a 6-year-old and communication skill of a 3-year-old. Her speech is incoherent and an expert is needed when she records her statement before the judge, Bhatti said. Due to her disability she is still a child mentally.

The bench agreed to examine the question and asked for the police response on the petition. It fixed May 3 to hear the case and stopped the Saket trial court from hearing the rape case.

As per the police case, the girl was raped in July 2014. The accused allegedly sexually assaulted her in her house when the mother was not there.

A petition was filed before the Delhi high court for a similar relief. But the HC sent the matter to the trial court and did not give any order on the plea. It just mandated presence of a medical expert during the victims examination.

Bhatti told HT the trial judge did not record the victims statement verbatim. In February this year she went for a surgery that left her with 22 stitches. The judge, however, wanted her to be in the court, he said.

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Undeterred by the Maoist attack that killed seven of their colleagues last week, troops of the 230th CRPF battalion have nabbed six Maoists from the Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

Officials said a special squad from the unit apprehended the Maoists identified as Madvi Muka (22), Madkami Deva (24), Madkami Ganga (24), Chinga (25), Budram (30) and Sanna (28) from the Nelavaram and Chichor villages of Sukma, located on the southern-most tip of the forested Bastar area.

They said all the six were wanted by the state police for various crimes and had warrants pending against them.

They have been nabbed by the troops of the same Central Reserve Police Force unit whose seven men were ambushed by Maoists last week. All six Maoists have been handed over to state police, an official said.

Seven personnel of the 230th battalion were killed in the landmine ambush when they were travelling in a civilian vehicle to transport a cooler for an ailing sniffer dog of the force named scout on March 30 in the neighbouring Dantewada district.

The unit was deployed in Raipur last November for special anti-Maoist operations along the Sukma-Dantewada axis that is notorious for the movement of armed Maoist cadres as it borders Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

CRPF director general K Durga Prasad recently said that the unit was instrumental in facilitating Maoist surrenders in the area and that they helped local police in apprehending 18 warantee ultras in the last few months.
Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has came under fire from the Congress for saying that every Indian will have to chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai if they want to live in the country.

Fadnavis had made the comment while addressing a Bharatiya Janata Party workers rally at Nashik on Saturday, the first day of the executive meeting of the party.

If you want to live in this country then you have to say Bharat Mata ki Jai, otherwise you have no right to live here, said the CM, reports ANI.

He added, Some people say we will not say Bharat Mata ki Jai. Then what? Pakistan ki jai or China ki jai?

Some people say we will not say Bharat Mata ki Jai. Then what? Pakistan ki jai or China ki jai?-CM Devendra Fadnavis pic.twitter.com/dG5LPzVllS  ANI (@ANI_news) April 3, 2016

Read | Every Indian must chant Bharat Mata ki jai, says Maharashtra CM

Reacting to the Maharashtra chief ministers statement, Congress leader Sandeep Dixit slammed the BJP and Fadnavis, saying the saffron party is fabricating the slogan for political gains.

This is a completely irrelevant thing. Its a non-issue. The BJP is trying to make this into a controversial issue to try and show themselves to be great nationalists or patriots. The BJP and its predecessors had no role in the independence struggle. Its leaders once jailed actually wrote apology to the government, Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit said on Sunday.

Dixit said that it is only by constructing a false sense of national identity and issues like Bharat Mata Ki Jai, the BJP is trying to project itself as a patriotic party.

The Congress leader further stated that the Maharashtra government has been facing problems and the chief minister is not able to perform there.

The BJP came fourth in the local elections. So, quite clearly they are about to lose that state. If elections are held today, the Maharashtra government will be wiped out. So how else do you comeback in popular support if you can?t govern?is by creating all these controversies, he said.

The chanting of slogan has been at the centre of a growing debate on nationalism in the recent months.

Deobands Darul Uloom issued a religious edict recently prohibiting Muslims from chanting Bharat Mata Ki Jai on the grounds that idol worship is forbidden in Islam.

Earlier, AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi had said that he wont chant the slogan even if a knife is put to my throat, rejecting RSS chief Mohan Bhagwats suggestion that the young generation must be taught patriotic slogans like Bharat Mata ki Jai.

Later, his party legislator in Maharashtra Waris Pathan was suspended from the assembly for toeing Owaisis line on the issue.

Read | Want the whole world to chant Bharat Mata ki Jai: RSS chief Bhagwat

(With inputs from ANI)
Police have started looking for Rajat Bakshi, a relative of Jorasanko Trinamool MLA Smita Bakshi, as Rajats firm Sandhyamani Projects had the sub-contract for supplying iron, cement and labour for Vivekananda flyover.

We are looking for him, joint commissioner (crime), Kolkata Police, told HT. Sandhyamani Projects has already raised a political controversy in the state with both BJP and Congress leaders highlighting it as an example of Trinamool Congress being a direct beneficiary of the project.

On Saturday morning, officers of Kolkata Police interrogated IVRCLs employees, including its project manager, to get an idea of the material used in building the flyover. The quality of materials and engineering is important as experts have already suggested that deficiencies in these aspects caused the collapse. The death toll till 4pm stood at 26, of which two were women.

The total number of arrests went up to four on Saturday with police also arresting project manager Tanmay Sil from Burdwan district. The three arrested on Friday (assistant general manager Mallikaarjun, assistant manager Debjyoti Majumdar and structure manager Pradip Kumar Saha) were produced before a court on Saturday and were remanded to police custody for seven days.

Sil will be produced on Sunday.

Engineers of RITES, PWD and HRBC told the police that low quality materials, including the steel used in the flyover, could be the cause of the accident. Other engineers pointed out that the buckled columns were not sufficient to carry the weight of the bridge.

Police are interrogating the project engineer, site engineer and the workers to get the exact measurement of the steel pillars. We will come to a conclusion as soon as we get the forensic analysis report of the samples of the broken flyover, said a police officer.

The police have formed a 23-member special investigation team and have initiated a case under sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.
Of the four states and a Union Territory going to polls, Assam offers BJP  smarting from electoral setbacks in Delhi and Bihar  its best shot at victory.

The partys bid to end the Congress 15-year run will depend on how it performs in the first phase on Monday, covering 65 of the 126 assembly constituencies in the ethnically diverse state prone to conflicts and polarisation on the issue of illegal migrants aka Bangladeshis. These seats, distributed across Assams eastern half, Barak Valley in the south and two hill districts in between, have been Congress strongholds.

The party had won 54 of its 78 seats from these regions in the 2011 assembly polls and is confident of retaining them.

The BJP hopes to gain from anti-incumbency as well as consolidation of indigenous votes due to its alliance with the regional Asom Gana Parishad and Bodoland Peoples Front. The AGP, the Congress main rival since 1985, hasnt been in good health after losing power in 2001. BPF was the Congress ruling ally for eight years until 2014.

The BJP has never won more than 10 assembly seats since its debut election in 1985. But the 2014 Lok Sabha show  the party won seven of 14 parliamentary seats  has fuelled its confidence this time.

Four of these seats straddle eastern Assams tea belts where plantation workers are a major voting force. The Adivasis, or tea tribes, have been a traditional Congress vote bank BJP claims to have penetrated.

The party sees the sizeable Bengali Hindus as loyalists too, as it has promised citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh. We will win by uprooting the corrupt and family-centric Congress, Sarbananda Sonowal, BJPs state president and CM candidate, said.

Bengali Hindus have seen through BJPs fake promises while plantation workers know BJP has deprived them of free rations, chief minister Tarun Gogoi said.

The BJP, positioning Mandate 2016 as a fight between indigenous and illegal migrants, is also banking on its assurance to grant Scheduled Tribe status to six Assam communities, most of whom inhabit the eastern

Assam seats. Phase 1 will decide the fate of both Gogoi and Sonowal, who are contesting Titabor and Majuli assembly seats 40km apart.

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India and Saudi Arabia on Sunday agreed to expand strategic cooperation in areas of counter-terrorism, defence, trade and investment as Prime Minister Narendra Modi concluded his visit to the kingdom.

Modi, who called on Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, was conferred Saudi Arabias highest civilian honour, the King Abdulaziz Sash.

The two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation in counter-terrorism operations, intelligence sharing and capacity-building to strengthen cooperation in law enforcement, anti-money laundering, drug-trafficking and other transnational crimes, said a joint statement issued after their meeting.

Modi also invited Saudi companies to invest in the infrastructure sector in India.

The two leaders condemned terrorism in all forms and manifestations, irrespective of who the perpetrators were and of their motivations. They called on all states to reject the use of terror against other countries, dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist and to cut off any kind of support and financing to the terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states; and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice, it said.

The Indian side was briefed on the Kingdoms initiative in bringing together Islamic Alliance against terrorism.

A memorandum of understanding on intelligence sharing and a framework agreement aimed at facilitating investments by the private sectors were signed. Pacts on recruiting general category workers and promoting cooperation in the field of handicrafts were also inked.

Modi also met Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir as well as Khalid A Al Falih, minister of health who also heads the Saudi Arabian national oil company Aramco. Al Falih told the PM that Aramco looks at India as its most preferred investment destination.

Earlier in the day, Modi visited an all-women IT centre of Tata Consultancy Services in Riyadh, where around 1,000 women work in business process outsourcing operations, 85% of whom are Saudi nationals. He invited the women professionals to visit India. Modi also addressed a roundtable with a group of 30 Saudi chief executive officers and Indian businessmen, where he batted for improved relations in areas such as petroleum, renewable energy, infrastructure, defence and agriculture.
An Indian priest abducted by gunmen in Yemen last month is safe and could be released soon, a Catholic group said on Sunday, quoting Sushma Swaraj, the external affairs minister.

Father Tom Uzhunnalil was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old peoples home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) said a delegation had met Swaraj who said the government was working to secure the priests safe return.

She has assured us Father Tom is safe and negotiations are on for his release which could happen very soon, said Father Joseph Chinnaiyan, deputy secretary of the CBCI.

Media reports last week said the priest was killed by Islamic State militants on Good Friday, although no one has claimed responsibility for last months attack in which gunmen killed four Indian nuns, two Yemeni female staff members, eight elderly residents and a guard.

Father Chinnaiyan said the reports were inaccurate. Aden has been racked by lawlessness since Hadi supporters, backed by Gulf Arab military forces, drove fighters of the Iran-allied Houthi group from the city in July last year. International aid groups have pulled most of their foreign staff from Yemen due to security concerns.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday to leave Union finance minister Arun Jaitleys side if he did not want to lose the support of traders.

Gold traders, jewellers and artisans have been observing strike since March 2, demanding roll-back of the budgetary proposal of excise duty on non-silver jewellery that has impacted the trade.

Addressing a gathering of jewellers at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, Kejriwal warned BJP of erosion in its support base among traders and wondered if Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Modi had any differences at all as the ruling BJP was implementing the policies of the UPA dispensation.

The notion was that BJP is a party of traders. Then what has happened now? I want to tell the PM that Jaitley ji will not have to gather votes or contest elections. You need votes so please be a little careful. If jewellers are cheated, then traders will leave BJPs side, Kejriwal said.

The Aam Aadmi Party conveners address, peppered with sharp jibes at the PM and his pet projects such as Make in India, was lapped up by a sizeable crowd that repeatedly raised slogans against Modi and Jaitley.

Kejriwal claimed that BJP MPs and even Union ministers are in favour of the jewellers demands contrary to the PMs adamance. Even MPs are wondering as to what Jaitley has explained to the PM. BJP is on one side and PM on the other. But why? PM is under the total control of Jaitley. I am smaller in terms of age, experience than Modi ji but have a small suggestion for him. Please leave Jaitley jis side, he will take you down, Kejriwal said.

Read | Arvind Kejriwal: Delhis chief micromanager, thoughtful tactician

He also read out a series of tweets made by Modi in his capacity as Gujarat chief minister where he had opposed a similar move by the erstwhile UPA government to impose 1% excise duty on non-silver jewellery.

What has changed? People thought the PM is with them but you have cheated them. Congress used to impose excise duty and people brought you to power thinking you wont repeat the same. But now that you have repeated the act, what difference is there between you and Sonia Gandhi? Kejriwal said.

Gold traders, jewellers and artisans have been observing strike since March 2 demanding a roll-back of the budgetary proposal that has impacted the trade which, Kejriwal said, runs into over Rs 1 lakh crore.

Kejriwal claimed that due to the budget proposal having impacted their business severely, four to five traders have committed suicide in the last one month.

Some jeweller friends told me that one more person committed suicide last evening over the policies, he said.

Few protesters, carrying the banner of Guest Teachers Association, raised slogans against Kejriwal before being removed by the police even as his nearly 30-minute-long speech was interrupted by glitches in the sound system.

The duty was imposed without consulting traders. It will only lead to inspector raj and a spike in corruption. The cost of collection would be much more than what the government hopes to earn, Kejriwal said. The excise duty will have a strangulating impact on the jewellery sector, Kejriwal said, adding that it flies in the face of Modis Make in India initiative. You go to America, Japan seeking investments. But you are strangulating a flourishing business in the country. I dont get the logic behind it. First, save your own countrymen, then call the foreigners, Kejriwal said.

The PM can embrace (Pakistani counterpart) Nawaz Sharif on his birthday, but cant talk to jewellers, he said in reference to the surprise visit by Modi to Lahore in December last year.

Kejriwal also claimed that President Pranab Mukherjee had extended his full support to the cause of the jewellers when he had taken a delegation to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Congress had tried the same and Pranab Mukherjee was the finance minister then. When jewellers protested continuously for around 22 days, the excise duty was withdrawn. The President told me he was aware that imposing the excise duty would lead to corruption and thus it should not be introduced, Kejriwal said while pointing to Delhi governments prompt decision to roll back VAT on certain items after traders expressed unhappiness over the same.

Read | Centre will destabilise, Delhi and Himachal next: Kejriwal

Kejriwal also read out the names of 10 top industrialists who he claimed owe around Rs 7,30,000 crore to the banks. They are not even paying interest but spend thousands of crores on lavish birthday parties, gifting their wives aeroplanes, he said. BJP leaders warned people not to come to my rally. I wonder why they are scared of the quarter CM of a half-state. Dont rile the traders. You will have to face dire consequences if they wish you ill. The trading community across the country will abandon BJP, warned Kejriwal.
A senior National Investigation Agency (NIA) officer died on Sunday after two unidentified gunmen fired over 20 bullets at him in Uttar Pradeshs Bijnor district, the first such attack on a member of Indias only federal anti-terror body.

NIA inspector Mohammed Tanzil Ahmed and his family were heading back to their house in UPs Sahaspur at 1am on Sunday when two motorcycle-borne men forced him to stop his WagonR car at Seohara and fired from close range.

Forty five year-old Ahmed  on deputation from the Border Security Force and part of several probe teams against terror outfit Indian Mujahideen  had gone to Bijnor with his family to attend a marriage function.

Read: NIA officer shot dead in Bijnor, wife injured

Tanzil Ahmed was an asset to the agency. His killing is a great loss to the NIA. We take it as a challenge to bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. We will not rest until that happens, said Sanjeev Kumar Singh, acting director general of the NIA.

NIA officer Mohammed Tanzil's body was brought to his residence in Delh on Sunday. (Arun Sharma/HT Photo)

An initial probe suggested the murder was meticulously planned, and the assailants conducted a recce. The fact that more than 20 bullets were fired at the officer suggests that the assailants didnt want him to survive at any cost, said a senior NIA official.

Sources said both children  14-year-old daughter Jumnish and 11-year-old son Sahbagh who were in the backseat saved their lives by hiding behind the seats.

Their mother, Farzana, is in a critical condition in a Noida hospital.

Read: India cannot simply wish away the threat of the Islamic State

Ahmeds daughter told us two assailants on bikes with covered faces fired bullets at her father. Ahmeds wife got bullet injuries in an effort to save her husband, said UP police chief Javed Ahmad.

We have formed a special team consisting of officials from ATS, STF and local police to solve the case.

Family members mourn Tanzils murder at his residence in Delhi. (Arun Sharma/HT Photo)

The only clue was that the assailants came from the Sahaspur side and went back the same way after the murder, the DGP added.

So far we have not received any information that Ahmed had any tiff at the marriage function he attended.

Home minister Rajnath Singh told reporters in Lucknow he had been apprised of the incident and that Delhi Polices special cell will also probe the murder. The Delhi government announced a compensation of Rs 1 crore for Ahmeds family.

Police suspect Ahmeds movements were being tracked by the assailants who used at least one 9mm pistol in the shootout.

The NIA is looking into all of Ahmeds cases and his personal conduct, sources said.

Ahmed was with the NIA since its inception in February 2009 and investigated many cases related to the Indian Mujahideen.

During a recent investigation into Islamic State-linked modules in the country, the agency uncovered plans to target police officers as well as other security agencies.

Terming Ahmeds murder as a planned attack, Singh said Ahmed was not formally a part of the Pathankot airbase attack probe team but was consulted owing to his knowledge of Urdu.

Ahmed was also rumoured to be part of the NIA team that will visit Pakistan to collect evidence in the Pathankot militant strike case but NIA officials said such a team was yet to be constituted.

Anti-terrorist squad inspector general Aseem Arun, who is tasked with investigating Ahmeds murder, said it was difficult to say anything about the possibility of a terrorist attack at this stage of the investigation.

Bijnor was last in the news in 2014 after an accidental blast revealed the presence of a SIMI module.
An officer with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) was shot dead by unknown people in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh early on Sunday.

Deputy superintendent of police Mohammad Tanzil and his family were heading back to their house in Sahaspur town around 1 am when two motorcycle-borne men forced him to stop his WagonR car at Seohara and fired from a close range.

Tanzil, on deputation from the Border Security Force, had gone to Bijnor city with his family to attend a marriage function.

NIA inspector general Sanjeev Singh said that while Tanzil died immediately, his wife was critically injured. She was taken to a hospital in Noida. Their two children, who were sitting in the backseat of the car, were reportedly unharmed.

The NIA, meanwhile, termed Tanzils murder as a planned attack. Singh said that though Tanzil was not formally a part of the Pathankot airbase attack probe team, he was consulted owing to his knowledge of Urdu.

Mohd Tanzil, when he was coming back from a function, a planned attack took place on him-NIA IG Sanjiv Kumar Singh pic.twitter.com/hvLC7fvU0i  ANI (@ANI_news) April 3, 2016

Meanwhile, the state government appointed Aseem Arun, inspector general of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, to investigate Tanzils murder. We will probe the incident from all possible angles, including personal enmity, Arun told HT over the phone. He, however, said it would be difficult to say anything on the possibility of a terror attack at this stage of the investigation.

(With inputs from agencies)
In a vegetable farm on the outskirts of Srinagar, an aging Hazra Begum tills her land. For her, Jammu-Kashmir getting its first woman chief minister is, at best, a harbinger of better times, especially as far as womens issues are concerned.

Inshallah, Im optimistic about Mehbooba Mufti as chief minister on all fields, says 55-year-old Begum, adding that along with issues of human rights violation there remains serious administration issues like unemployment and corruption to tackle. I hope she will listen to the woes of Kashmirs women.

Kashmiri women at work at a vegetable field on the outskirts of Srinagar. (Waseem Andrabi/HT Photo)

After Mehbooba, 56, is sworn in on April 4, she will become the first-ever woman chief minister of the state and Indias second Muslim woman chief minister after Syeda Anwara Taimur, who served as the Assam chief minister for six months in 1980-81.

Read | J-K: Mehbooba set to be sworn in on April 4

Being a woman and a mother, Mehbooba can understand the suffering of the people, especially women issues, much better. I am sure she will work for the upliftment of downtrodden people, says Andleeb Saqi, a humanitarian aid worker in her 30s.

But for many others, the occasion is only symbolic. She  as anyone from such a mainstream political party in Kashmir  will follow a path carved by pro-India political ideologies.

A woman chief minister is symbolic only from a gender perspective, says Essar Batool, a Srinagar-based human rights activist in her mid-20s. Shes just another politician loyal to the Indian state, and it has nothing to do with her gender.

Her coming to power shouldnt mean anything and shouldnt be cause for any celebration, adds Batool, who is one of the authors of the recently launched book, Do you remember Kunan Poshpora?, based on the alleged mass rape of Kashmiri women by the army in 1991.

Protesting on the streets on human rights issues and often visiting the houses of slain militants, Mehbooba followed what many call soft separatist rhetoric and succeeded in connecting with the people by tending to the angst of Kashmiris that the separatists could not assuage.

A Kashmiri woman stands in front of a poster of disappeared persons in Srinagar. (Waseem Andrabi/HT File Photo)

But today, women who have been protesting against the disappearance of their husbands or sons feel let down, because they feel Mehbooba is a part of the political establishment of Kashmir that just promises and never delivers any justice.

Genuine is our tears, not Mehboobas, says Parveena Ahangar, chairperson of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). True tears are of those whose sons and husbands are missing or whose innocent sons have been killed by the Indian security forces.

Mehboobas tears are crocodile tears.

Mehbooba is a mother. She should understand the pain of losing a son or husband, says Ahanger, whose son Javiad Ahmed was allegedly picked up by security agencies on August 18, 1990, and never returned.

Read | Mehbooba must be allowed to rule

Ayshia Zahgeer, a 23-year-old law student, agrees with Ahanger.

She has, of course, spoken about bringing the perpetrators of violence inflicted on women to book but that was when she was in the Opposition, and in her place every political party speaks in that tone. They are basically acting, says Zahgeer.

Genuine is our tears, not Mehboobas, says Parveena Ahangar, chairperson of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). (Waseem Andrabi/HT Photo)

Some Kashmiri women, however, view Mehboobas accession to the chair through a progressive prism and believe certain stereotypes would be broken.

I have encountered a patriarchal mindset in Kashmir. Many times, I have been told by grandparents of children I teach that why should their granddaughters be educated? Perhaps a woman leading the state will help change such mindset, says Iram Wani, 30, a teacher at a government school in Srinagar.

Mehbooba, a law graduate and single mother of two daughters, started her political career as a Congress candidate in 1996 when her father was leading the electoral campaign in the state. She won from their home constituency Bijbehara.

Read | Mehbooba meets J-K guv, stakes claim to power with BJP support

Political observers say that Mehboobas rise as a political leader was scripted, not by her father but herself. She was, they say, one of the chief architects of the PDP that was founded by her father, former chief minister Mufti Sayeed, in 1999.

But Hirra Azmat, a 21-year-old post-graduate student of mass communication at the Kashmir University, disagrees.

Mehbooba becoming the CM is just an accident, another gimmick of dynastic politics. It only reinforces the patriarchal notion that a woman must be reliant on a successful man. In this case, her father, she says.

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Place: Niyamatpur, near Kulti in Burdwan district

Time: Around 1 pm, April 2

The slogan Rahul Gandhi, lal salaam rose from a thousand lips under a merciless sun on Saturday, drowning the Congress leaders own microphone-enhanced voice and opening a new chapter in the annals of West Bengals politics. Before him, thousands of red flags fluttered alongside the Congress tricolour  making for a spectacle that was never witnessed before in the states history.

Five months ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a situation where a prominent member of the Gandhi family was being hailed with a slogan as leftist as this. But then, times have changed, bringing two eternal rivals  the Congress and the CPI(M)  together to take on Mamata Banerjees Trinamool Congress. Whatever be its outcome, the 2016 Bengal assembly elections will be unique.

Read: Trinamool, Mamata to blame for Kolkata flyover collapse: Rahul Gandhi

Interestingly, a completely different scenario is playing out in Kerala. The two parties are at each others throats in the southern state, with the Left trying every trick in the book to ensure that a Congress-led government does not come to power again.

There is yet another dimension to the unique Bengal experiment. The Bihar model of grand alliance in 2015 will become complete in the state, with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Janata Dal United (JDU)  fringe parties in the state  joining hands with the Congress and the Left. The Bihar experiment did not have the Left, and observers say this may just mark the birth of an anti-BJP platform in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. We are fighting together, and have become a part of the grand alliance. We are trying to get Lalu Prasad to campaign in favour of the alliance, Binda Ray, Bengal president of the RJD, told HT.

JDU state president Amitava Dutta, on the other hand, said he has already spoken to Left Front chairman Biman Bose and Congress leader Somen Mitra on Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar campaigning extensively in the state.

Amal Mukhopadhyay, former principal of Presidency College and a political science expert, marvelled at how two parties with completely different ideologies had come together before the elections. It was not imposed from the top it happened in response to a convergence that took place at the ground level. Ordinary political workers were the real sufferers under the Trinamool Congress rule. The urge and push came from the bottom rungs, he said.

Read: Flyover collapse: Trinamool on back foot 3 days before Bengal polls

I believe we will see a tough fight in the polls. If nothing else, we will at least see a strong opposition breathing down the rulers neck, he added.

The alliance makes arithmetic sense. In the 2011 Poriborton vote, the Congress and Left Front bagged 8.91% and 41.05% of the votes respectively, as opposed to the Trinamool Congress 39.08%. However, while 49.96% is indeed a winning combination, it remains to be seen if the vote shares from five years ago can be repeated in a process as dynamic as politics.

Working in the alliances favour would be anti-incumbency against the Trinamool Congress. Another aspect to look out for is the BJP vote share of 4.06%, which has risen to 16.8% now. If the alliance weans away a few saffron votes, it would be able to deal the Trinamool quite an electoral punch.

The 2014 Lok Sabha vote share  wherein the Trinamool got 39.02%, Congress 9.7%, the Left 29.6% and BJP 16.8%  is interesting in this context. The alliance may see a silver lining in the fact that the Trinamool Congress never got more than 40% votes since 2011.

Read: Sena to fight polls in four states that BJP is eyeing

AICC member Om Prakash Mishra recently wrote a 27-page letter to party chairperson Sonia Gandhi, explaining how the combine can topple the ruling party with the help of some swing BJP votes. Though this projection may seem a little too adventurous, it is clear from Mamatas recent speeches that the tie-up is worrying her considerably.

Significantly, the idea of the alliance  which took root about three months ago in the corridors of the Left  has gained ground despite all the scepticism surrounding it. While many, including Front chairman Biman Bose, were unsure of putting up a united front, political leaders as well as workers from all the parties were seen campaigning hand-in-hand.

Ask 92-year-old Congress MLA Gyan Singh Sohanpal, who is trying to win Kharagpur Sadar for the 11th time, for his thoughts on the alliance. The support given to me by the Left was more than what I expected. They are working sincerely for me all the time, he told HT.

Read: Modi promises new Bengal, asks voters to oust scam-hit Mamata

For the voters, the show of unity seemed nothing short of dramatic. Five-time Congress MLA Manas Bhuniya was seen addressing rallies standing under a red umbrella made by Left supporters. On the other hand, CPI(M) state secretary Suryakanta Mishra was garlanded by Congress supporters. At the CPI(M) party office, Deepa Dasmunshi  the Congress candidate against Banerjee  was seen discussing future poll strategies under photographs of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Two recent incidents  the Narada sting operation and the Vivekananda flyover collapse  have further strengthened the alliances cause against the ruling party. While the first showed at least 13 Trinamool leaders accepting money from representatives of a fictitious company, the other depicted an instance of faulty infrastructure construction under the present government.

Leaders of both the parties attacked the government in tandem over the two issues, knowing well that the Trinamool Congress has found itself in a vulnerable position just before the elections. After all, what could be a better time to strike than when the irons hot?
There will be crocodile and kangaroo kathi rolls to go with Kingfisher beer at the Bar Stock Exchange in New Zealand; Kerala fish moilee in New York via Indian Accent; and spinach poriyal at Farzi Cafe in Dubai.

All three restaurants have opted to go overseas before expanding beyond their homes bases in India, in an indication of how the Indian restaurant chain is going global, in truly international style, driven by a growing confidence in Indian cuisines, chefs and restaurant brands.

I wanted to go to New York to say, we have this thing called mishti doi and it is better than any yogurt youve tasted, says Manish Mehrotra, head chef at Indian Accent in NYC, which opened in February and is the restaurants first branch outside Delhi.

Read: Indian restaurant Gaggan in Bangkok becomes Asias best restaurant

Gurgaons Farzi Cafe opened in Dubai last week, Mumbai-based Inday is offering desi cuisine with a healthy twist in New York, Imli is set to open in Los Angeles by June and the Bar Stock Exchange will have launched either branches or franchises in Dubai, Singapore, Mauritius and New Zealand by December.

One thing that sets these restaurants apart from existing Indian cuisine establishments is a total absence of generic curries, naans, dals and dosas. Instead, these restaurateurs are taking formats that have proved successful at home and offering them to the rest of the world, with only minor tweaks.

Were going to keep the spices and wraps Indian, but change the proteins to more familiar meats, says Kshama Prabhu, executive chef at the Bar Stock Exchange (BSE), which has five outlets, all in Mumbai. Were going to keep our Indian beers too, and add local brews to the menu. Theres no point in going to a new country if were not going to take something local with us.

The restaurants USPs will remain intact too. For BSE, its the smartphone app that tracks the prices of alcoholic drinks as they fluctuate based on the orders being placed at the bar; for Indian Accent, its fine-dine Indian food with gourmet plating; for Farzi Cafe, its modern take on traditional Indian recipes, which sees molecular gastronomy techniques being applied to traditional food.

Until now, Indian food abroad was represented by Indian immigrants, says Nachiket Shetye, restaurateur and co-founder of Restaurant Week. But now there is a wave of reverse integration, with chefs, restaurateurs and food experts from India showcasing a different kind of Indian food  one that is innovative, modern, well-plated and diverse. Its not just for the Indian diaspora looking for some comfort food; its tailored to the global diner.

Food writer Mangal Dalal attributes this shift to two factors  a change in the profile of the international diner, and an increasingly ambitious Indian restaurateur.

Over the past five years, as Indias economy, soft power and expat population have grown, its culture has caught the international imagination in a big way, he says. This has resulted in a growing awareness of the nuances of the cuisine. So now, there are people in other countries who want more than butter chicken  they want to maybe taste missal pav, or a Kerala beef fry. And Indian restaurateurs such as Zorawar Kalra [of Farzi Cafe] are noticing this gap in the market and setting out to meet the demand.

Read: Huge boom in regional Indian restaurants, bars: Restaurateur A.D. Singh

In Auckland, for instance, Turkish businessman Jamele Brown, 32, had been cooking Indian food at home from time to time, because what he got in the two local Indian restaurants was nothing like what his Indian roommates had fed him at university in the US.

I was very excited when news of Bar Stock Exchange showed up on a local food website, he says. The restaurants here serve really bad curry and naan. Im waiting to eat good mutton curry again, and try some new things as well. Brown says that he feels that BSE will have a leg-up over the local Indian restauants because this one is probably more authentic.

Indian restaurants have been going abroad for years, says Vir Sanghvi, food writer and editorial advisor to the Hindustan Times. For example, Gaylord opened in the US in 1972. The change is in the food being served by these exports, which is in itself a reflection of the change in Indias urban dining scenario. The food we eat while dining out has changed. We earlier emphasised old-fashioned cuisine, now we eat modern takes on the same food. So the same shift is visible now in the Indian restaurants that are going abroad.

Read: Punjabi woman popularises Indian cuisine in Ghana

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Dal-chawal rice balls in Dubai

Farzi Cafe, a modern Indian bistro, opened in Gurgaon in August 2014 with a menu full of Indian classics with a molecular gastronomy twist. Like the Dal Chawal Arancini that served up the Indian classic as stuffed Italian-style rice balls, flavoured with pickle, rolled in breadcrumbs and pan-fried.

The #Farzified Biryani being served at Farzi Cafe, Dubai.

In January, they opened in Delhi. And on Wednesday the restaurant opened its third outlet, in Dubai. On the menu are favourites from the Indian menus, such as spinach poriyal and charmoula-crusted paneer tikka, and a few twists with an Arabic influence, such as pita golgappas, spiked beef toasties, and smoked beef patthar ke kebab.

Indian food has had a perception problem overseas, says owner Zorawar Kalra. It is not in the top ten options while dining out because it hasnt been packaged well, plated well. And the days of butter chicken with a pool of cream on top passing muster are long gone.

To find out exactly what would work, head chef Saurabh Udinia spent eight months doing research and food trails in Dubai. Dubai diners love the global experience, he says, and our research shows that competition for the kind of thing we do is negligible.

The exteriors of the Farzi Cafe in Dubai.

Dubai was chosen because of its multicultural expat population. We think this is the right time to we got the kind of response in Gurgoan that we hadnt expected, Kalra says. The willingness to experiment showed us that diners are hungry for something new. And we were tempted to try Dubai because of its similarities with Gurgaon -- a young population excited about food innovation and willing to spend on a dining experience.

Farzi is in an up-and-coming neighbourhood where a new cinema is set to open amid plenty of offices. I had been planning to be first at Farzi, says Clarence Lobo, a 25-year-old web designer and Muscat native who has been living in Dubai for five years. Muscat has a very large Indian population, so I grew up with a lot of the food I ate at Farzi. The golgappas, for instance, were a familiar concept, though the taste of Farzis was really new and different. The interiors are also so beautifully done up. I always thought of Indian as very home delivery food, but this was a new approach.

Solkadi, walnut halwa in LA

When Mumbai boy Nikhil Merchant, 34, decided to open a restaurant after nine years as a food consultant, he says he never considered locating it in Mumbai -- or Delhi or Bangalore. The markets here are very saturated, he says.

Seeking opportunities overseas, he narrowed it down to the US -- mainly because of the diverse palate , exposure to Indian food and large Indian expat population.

The Imli pop-up in Los Angeles saw Merchant selling the Bombay rasta sandwich, a Goan prawn curry, a walnut halwa and cutting chai.

But New York was too crowded, says Merchant. In Los Angeles, I realised Indian food is very underrepresented. It seems like a great opportunity.

Merchant plans to launch Imli in downtown LA this June.

There are cities in the world -- like New York and London -- that are known as cultural melting pots, he says. And then there are cities such as Los Angeles and Pittsburgh that are just now making that transition because of a diverse student population, cheaper rents, and so on. These are really rich markets for us as chefs.

To test his theory, Merchant ran a pilot of sorts in February, with a day-long Imli pop-up. It served four dishes -- the Bombay rasta sandwich, a Goan prawn curry, a walnut halwa and cutting chai.

The Bombay Rasta sandwich served at the Imli pop-up in Los Angeles.

The reception was very encouraging, he says. There were 10 people waiting by the time the food was ready. We served the curry with solkadi, which I think caught people off-guard, but the attitude was very welcoming and interested. It got the sense that they werent intimidated because while it was new, it was also familiar. A tea is a tea at the end of the day, and a sandwich is a sandwich.

For the restaurant menu too, Merchant plans to focus on Indian street food, which is easy to eat, quick and delicious and can be priced reasonably. We will also incorporate regional specialties such as undhiyo, he says.

One of the customers at the Imli pop-up was local teacher Enchante Samuels.

I thought I had eaten Indian food, says the 24-year-old. But I realised I havent even skimmed the surface. I had never had solkadi, and I loved the green chutney in the rasta sandwich. Id never tasted anything like that before. I would totally come back, especially for the tea, which was so strong. I would love to make that a part of my morning routine.

A new Indian accent in New York

After opening in Delhi in 2009, Indian Accent opened its second outlet in New York in February -- even before its launch in Mumbai, which is still in the works.

Owner Rohit Khattar says the timing felt perfect because New York is the food capital of the world and Indian cuisine is being talked about around the world.

The mishti doi cannoli served at Indian Accent, New York.

It was a matter of conquering one of the worlds most difficult -- and rewarding -- food cities, adds head chef Manish Mehrotra. Plus, there arent that many fine-dine Indian restaurants here. Its a gap in the market.

Their menu in NYC features old favourites such as Kashmiri morel masala with roasted walnut and parmesan papad, and a pork belly vindaloo served with traditional Goan red rice. Additions include a pastrami naan, a black carrot halwa topped with salted chikki and milk cake ice-cream, and curries that, instead of being served in bowls, have been incorporated into naans and breads.

We have retained a lot of what made Indian Accent successful in Delhi, says Mehrotra. And were using Indian salt and imported ingredients for our masalas to retain the flavours of the original recipes.

Still, Mehrotra admits, it was a challenge for the first couple of weeks. There are a lot of good restaurants in NY, and what we wanted to do was nail that balance between fine dining and authentic Indian food but obtaining ingredients was a bit of a challenge, he says. For example, we dont have any mutton dishes because it was so difficult to source the meat. We also had a hard time training the front-of-the-house staff. We actually sat with them with a map of India, to the point that my head waiter can now tell you the capital of Chhattisgarh.

The New York outpost of Indian Accent sees 130 diners daily for their dinner service.

Mehrotra says it was also a challenge to acclimatise diners to this new sort of Indian food. We had people asking us, why dont you have biryani on the menu? Why no chicken tikka? he says. But people have come around. We are sold out almost every day. With a 65-seat capacity, we have about 130 people in for our dinner service every night.

Jeanine Lafferty, 42, an environment officer in the Flat Iron district where the restaurant is located. I was walking around with my partner last week and saw crowds inside, she says. We decided to walk in because we love Indian food. But what we ate was not what we expected.

The couple ordered the dal gosht, mushroom shorba and blue cheese naan, ending with the besan ladoo cheesecake for dessert. It felt like a new cuisine altogether, Lafferty says. I especially loved the cheesecake; the taste was so new but the format so familiar.

Aviation executive Azim Khan, 42, has been a New Yorker for 22 years but still misses the food he grew up on in Dehradun. New York has a lot of food, but when firm partners are visiting from the UK or Canada and I take them out to dinner, Ive always wished I could give them a fine-dining experience of Indian food, he says. Two weeks ago, I took a group to Indian Accent and it was a massive hit. The food was beautiful, elegant and delicious. We ordered five portions of the lamb dal gosht.

Garam masala steaks on Broadway

Pilates instructor Susan Rotega, 34, has breakfast at 1133 Broadway every day. This is where Mumbai-born food consultant Abhishek Honawar set up his first restaurant, Inday, a year ago.

Rotega likes the food because its healthy, unusual and flavourful. One day she opts for cauliflower flavoured with mustard seeds and turmeric, the next a waffle iron dosa with chutneys or pan-seared salmon flavoured with grated coconut and kokum.

The dosa waffle at Inday at Broadway, New York, is served with Indian chutneys.

She also alternates between the eaterys two most popular salad dressings -- a quintessentially Indian green mint-cilantro chutney, and an orange-coconut one. Sometimes shell have the cardamom-flavoured yogurt.

I always associated Indian food with being oily and heavy. But it completely the opposite at Inday, she says.

Thats exactly the reaction Honawar was going for when he set up the fast food-cum-make your own salad bowl outfit.

Our cuisine has so much heritage, he says. I wanted to showcase a different side of it, offer a taste of India without the accompanying guilt. New York is an interesting and profitable market, and having already worked in Mumbai, I wanted to diversify.

So theres quinoa cooked with mustard seeds; cacao chai, a twist on masala tea; and steak marinated in house-blend red spices that are a twist on garam masala. About 95% of our diners are American, and the rest Indian, says Honawar. We see about 600 people a day and we initially underestimated how prepared theyd be for spicy food, so we kept spice levels low. We have since tweaked them up on the request of some diners.
Remember Chef, the 2014 American comedy, in which Carl Casper, (Jon Favreau), an innovative chef loses his job at a restaurant and travels across America in a food truck to reclaim his culinary creativity?

Many youngsters  not all of them chefs though  are reliving Caspers experience across Delhi and other NCR towns on similar food trucks. What motivated Casper was a loss of job but many of these youngsters got on to the food trucks because they could not find the funds to start a restaurant.

The food trucks that first arrived on city roads about three years back are now ubiquitous  there are over 30 food trucks in Delhi/NCR. Gurgaon has about 18 of them, Delhi and Noida have six each.

Read: Food truck fever sweeping Delhi

Young chefs in the region, wearing aprons and caps, are slicing and dicing an array of awesome dishes in these kitchens on the wheels. On the menu are myriad Japanese, Lebanese, Continental, and Mexican dishes such as Tacos, Quesadillas, Burritos, Enchiladas, which you would otherwise find only in fine-dining restaurants.

The food trucks  passion projects of their owners  flaunt whacky names and colourful customised designs  Oh Buoy, Eggjactly, Drifters Cafe, Forklicious, Sushi House Mafia, Dosa Inc. If Oh Buoy offers Mexican fast food, pastas and risottos; Sushi House Mafia serves sushi.

Sushi is an expensive meal, and we wanted to introduce it to the common people, says Vikrant Misra, 33, a retail professional who launched Sushi House Mafia in January along with his lawyer friend, Lavanika Partis. I wanted to start a restaurant but soon realised that rents in Gurgaon were too high to realise that dream. So I decided to launch the food truck.

Oh Buoy in Noida offers Mexican fast food, pasta and risottos straight from its state-of-the-art kitchens inside trucks. (Burhaan Kinu/HT)

Though the young food truck owners come from varying professional backgrounds, passion for food brings them together. And they do not forget to remind you that their specialty food trucks are not to be confused with immobile stationary Chinese food vans. Food trucks have brought authentic international cuisine to the streets at a very affordable price. And unlike most street stalls, we ensure high food safety standards, says Varun Yadav, who started Oh Buoy, the first food truck in Noida. Yadav was a computer engineer before he set out on gastronomic journey with his friend Neha Yadav, a chef.

The trucks get their supplies from their base kitchens where primary cooking happens. They have state-of-the-art kitchens complete with sewage and water tanks. Eggjactly, which offers Belgian waffles, pastas, and breads, has a 400-litre water tank, 200-litre sewage tank on the roof and a holding bin at the bottom.

So where and how does one locate these mobile restaurants which are changing the very idea of street food in the city? Most operate between 11am and 11pm, travel to fixed locations, follow a timetable, and update their whereabouts on their websites, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

In Gurgaon, a lot of them are parked on Leisure Valley Road with their managers handing out menus to the steady stream of customers in the evening. Some of these trucks, Traffic Stopper for instance, operate until 3am. We keep quite busy, most of our customers are young professionals, says Shashank Mishra, the manager.

Vikrant Misra, whose trucks organised live screening of India-West India semi-final on Thursday, agrees, Food trucks are more successful in Gurgaon as it is multicultural city full of expats and young professionals. They travel abroad frequently and understand the concept.

Now these food trucks arrive at doorsteps too with all their Mexican and Continental fare to cater to private parties. Karan Maliks Super Sucker is seen more at events such as auto expos, food festivals, exhibitions, and private parties than on roads these days. Apart from corporate events, we regularly cater to birthdays, where we offer a variety from hotdogs to French fries to momos, says Malik, who drives the Super Sucker himself. Having Super Sucker at your birthday costs about `600 per person.

Now even five star hotels are bringing their gourmet expertise to the street on food trucks. The Lalit Food Truck Company, for example, operates at two locations  the World Trade Center in Barakhamba Lane on weekdays and the courtyard of the DLF Mall in Saket on weekends. It offers a range of Mexican dishes such as Tacos, Falafel, and Churros.

The idea was to offer five-star quality food with a street food experience to the people on the go at an affordable price. The food sold by trucks is prepared at The Lalit New Delhis kitchen, says Keshav Suri, executive director, Lalit Suri Hospitality Group.

The company has launched food trucks in Mumbai, Bangalore, and recently a pizza truck in Delhi. We plan to expand The Lalit Food Truck Company across India, including smaller cities, says Suri.

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Shiv Sena leader Neelam Gorhe has moved a proposal in the legislative council seeking its recommendation for an undivided Maharashtra to the governor. The proposal has been mooted under a rule which is generally used to convey the sense of the house on a larger issue.

Interestingly, the proposal has a provision for a vote in the house, an exercise which will test the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Making matters tough for the BJP, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) have also moved similar proposals, which, if approved by the legislative council chairman Ramraje Nimbalkar, will come up for discussion on Tuesday.

With the Sena, Congress and NCP in favour of a united Maharashtra, the BJP will be in a spot.

The BJP will have to either oppose the proposal and spell out its support for statehood to Vidarbha or back the proposal for a united Maharashtra, in which case it stands to face a backlash in its stronghold of Vidarbha.

Various statements are being made about carving out separate states of Vidarbha, Marathwada and Mumbai. Our party has always opposed such attempts. This proposal is an instrument for the house to come together and reaffirm the commitment and political will for a united Maharashtra, Gorhe said.

Explaining the strategy, a Sena leader said that the BJP would be caught between the devil and the deep sea.

By letting former advocate general Shreehari Aney resign, the BJP has indicated that it is not in favour of breaking up Maharashtra just yet. Now is the time when it will have to give a concrete assurance on the issue, said the Sena leader on condition of anonymity.
Buoyed by its Bihar experiment, where it fielded more than 80 candidates and polled two lakh votes during last years Assembly elections, the Shiv Sena is out to embarrass its ally, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), again by contesting four upcoming state elections in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and field candidates independent of the BJPs plans.

On Saturday, the Sena declared its first list of 24 of the 45-odd candidates that it plans to field in Kerala.

In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the party may only put up a token fight , but the Sena is keen on making an impact in Assam and West Bengal - two states the BJP also wants to make significant gains in . Part of the plan is to send senior leaders, including Members of Parliament, to campaign there. The party is also clear about its calling card - a hardline Hindutva stance and highlighting the issue of Bangladeshi nationals migrating to these states without proper documentation .

The move is a result of the breakdown in understanding between the allies, Sena senior leader and MP Anil Desai said. Earlier, there was an understanding between the Sena and the BJP that we would focus on Maharashtra and not contest in other states, so the BJPs chances are not jeopardised. Now that no such understanding remains, we dont want to put a halt to expanding our party base.

The partys West Bengal in charge, Vinay Shukla, said, Our reading of the situation shows there is disenchantment among Hindu voters as they view Mamata [Bannerjee, CM] as someone who appeases minorities. A significant portion also believes no party in Bengal wants to take on the issue of Bangladeshi migrants. Our strategies will primarily revolve around these issues.

While the Sena is yet to decide the exact number of seats, leaders have already travelled to Assam and WB in the past few weeks to mobilise its cadre.

Relations with the BJP showing no signs of improving is one of the reasons the Sena is keen on contesting in the two states its allly is vying for.

Another reason is the gains the party believes it made during the Bihar polls. Of the 80 seats it contested, its candidates stood third in seven, while in two others, they came fourth.

Party seniors are aware the Sena may not be able to win any seat, but say the exercise is aimed at long-term gains, apart from trying to poach the BJPs voter base.

In all these states, we have been known for our cultural and social activities - be it organising the Ganesha festivities or running ambulance services. We dont expect a windfall, but this is a start to our larger expansion plans in the country, Desai said.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Saturday issued summons to Santosh, wife of chief parliamentary secretary (CPS) and Phillaur Akali legislator Avinash Chander, in a money-laundering inquiry related to the multi-crore-rupee synthetic drug racket associated with former wrestler Jagdish Bhola.

On March 9, the ED had interrogated her for 11 hours. It is also reported to have summoned Chanders brother, Steven Kaler. The central agency has asked both to appear before the investigation officer on April 8 in its office near BMC Chowk here. Sources said that the agency had sought business record from the CPS but he had failed to turn up on the given dates. The agency then unearthed a lot of property that Chander is alleged to have bought in the name of Santosh.

Sources said the agency investigated Chanders alleged relationship with Goraya-based businessman Chunni Lal Gaba, an accused in the case, whose property worth more than `80 crore it has attached already. The investigation was focussed on the diary that the income tax department had seized from Gaba and in which a few prominent entries are in the name of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) legislator.

The diary has overwriting and cuttings on a few pages carrying Chanders name, and the ED had secured it from the income tax department through court and sent it for forensic analysis to find out the crossed-out names.
aseembassi@hindustantimes.com

The Amritsar district administration is busying itself with development projects for the holy citys uplift. The projects were started a long time ago, but the authorities skipped a flurry of deadlines. That seems to have changed recently after deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal reviewed the projects and asked the district administration to gear up. In an interview with HTs Aseem Bassi, deputy commissioner Varun Roojam talks about what the government is trying to change in the city. Here are the excerpts:

HT: The bugle for the assembly elections has been blown. The government must also be working hard; what instructions have you received?

Roojam: Yesterday (Friday), deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal called a meeting and reviewed the status of the projects. Work is being done on major projects such as the BRTS, Food Street, Road to Golden Temple and War Memorial in Amritsar. Also, we will be spending `800 crore in the urban area through the municipal corporation while Rs 136 crore will be spent in the rural sector. We are committed to completing all the projects by September, as we have been asked to. Once the work is complete, things will change.

People are facing a lot of inconvenience because, for example, during construction of roads, alternative routes have not been marked.

Yes, I agree that people are facing problems and at places there is absence of service lanes. We are serious about the issue, and I feel that things have improved recently. But we will consistently work on this to ensure that people do not face any hassles.

An important city like Amritsar and even officers do not have a proper place to sit.

This is true that all the officers of the civil and the police administration are scattered due to lack of offices. I am keeping a close eye on construction of the district administrative complex. I have been told that it will be completed by December, but I have asked them to make it operational by September. I understand there are problems for people too as they cant find officers under one roof, but we will soon be ready with the new complex.

The construction is creating hassles for pilgrims going to Golden Temple. Nothing is being done.

As the road beautification project is going on around the Golden Temple, people are facing issues. I will soon talk to the police commissioner to ensure that the area is decongested. Once the beautification project is complete, we will designate the area around the Golden Temple as a no vehicle zone. Only pedestrians will be allowed beyond the Saragarhi Parking roundabout.

Thousands of tourists visit Amritsar everyday, but the city has nothing to offer in terms of facilities, particularly at the border.

We want tourists visiting the border area to get the best of facilities. A building of the tourism department is complete at the border. A parking lot is also being constructed there. Also, the tourism and cultural department will soon make the building operational and things will get better. Moreover, the expansion of the visitors gallery is on at full swing. When that is complete, it can accommodate around 10,000 people.

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Despite the government ban on use of polythene bags, their use is rampant in the city as the administration is slow in taking the violators to task.

As the state government order puts a ban on use of polybags in urban areas from April 1, there appears no impact in the city.

The Amritsar Municipal Corporation is yet to constitute enforcement teams to conduct special drives in the city and challan the violators. Unlike other cities, no attempt is being made to publicise the prohibitory order with regard to use of polythene bags and thermocol items considered harmful to health.

On Saturday, deputy commissioner Varun Roojam announced to start challaning violators. I will ensure implementation of the ban in the district and ask MC to bring all the stakeholders on board and ask them to abide the order. They will have to conduct raids to keep check on violation of the norms and no relaxation will be given, said Roojam.

Polythene bags are being used by all shopkeepers in the walled city as well as in other parts. The use is rampant among vegetable vendors and grocery shop owners, but even high-end stores have failed to come out with an alternative to polybags.

Also, the holy city where religious processions and roadside langars are a common, use of plastic and thermocol plates and cups goes on.

On this, the DC said, I appeal to the people of Amritsar to abide by the law and collect biodegradable garbage and hand it over to MC for disposal. Ban on plastic material is a leap to protect the ecology. I assure polybag use will be curbed.

SGPC for alternative

As the ban is on, the SGPC is also committed to follow it and has decided to look for alternatives so that the prasad is not given in plastic packets. SGPC spokesperson Daljit Bedi said, We welcome the ban on plastic. Though we do not distribute parsad in plastic bags but when packed, plastic is used. We will soon stop it and replace it with paper or jute bag.

Situation no better in Pathankot

With the ban on polythene bags in the state, shopkeepers and the customers are in a fix to find the alternative. The administration has yet not started imposing fines on polybag-users though.

Some vendors and shopkeepers in the city have stopped using polybags and customers are not happy with that. Residents are slowly learning to carry cloth bags when they go out shopping, especially to buy vegetables and fruits. The use of plastic bags is still rampant on the city outskirts. Keeping an eye on the entire city has become a Herculean task for the government employees authorised to check the use of plastic bags.

The administration has started targeting the stockists and is raiding big stores and malls, said mayor Anil Vasudeva. The residents should realise that use of polybags is not good for health as it is toxic. We will not spare violators, he said.

Pawan Kumar, a seller of polybags said government should have first come out with alternatives. Govt should bring clarity on thickness of polybags that have been banned, he said.

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The Punjab and Haryana high court has directed Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, Faridkot, to make admissions in postgraduate medical courses as per institutional preference and not on the basis of domicile of candidates under the state quota.

The high court bench of justice RK Jain quashed the clause incorporated by the state government in a December 2015 notification which allowed for admission to postgraduate medical colleges on the basis of domicile of students.

Around 40% seats of postgraduate courses of Punjabs government and private colleges are filled by the state. The notification was carried out for the admissions on these seats.

The court allowed a petition by students who challenged the clause saying reservation on the basis of domicile was not permissible as per law.

The petitioners, who had passed their MBBS course from institutions situated in the Punjab, were represented by their counsels, senior advocate Gurminder Singh and RPS Bara.

The counsels for the students argued before the court that the government was adopting different yardsticks, saying for admission to MBBS courses it had made pass Class 10 +2 exam from Punjab compulsory and for postgraduate courses the condition was changed by making being a resident of Punjab mandatory.
With more than a million students across the country having appeared for the IIT-JEE Mains, over 10 lakh candidates appeared for the offline exam on Sunday.

For most students appearing at the Chandigarh centre - Moti Ram Arya Senior Secondary School, Sector 27 - the exam was a relatively easy barring the physics section which they called tough and slightly lengthy.

Prechur Jya, from Delhi Public School, Chandigarh, said the paper was easy to attempt except for the physics section which was tricky.

I felt it was slightly lengthy. Physics focused more on the NCERT part but the Maths section was fine. I didnt get much time for revision.

This Patiala girl who is giving the #iitjee for the 2nd time found the Physics section tough @HTPunjab pic.twitter.com/SZm3GuuVhu  Aneesha Bedi (@AneeshaBedi) April 3, 2016

On the other hand, Mehar Gupta from Ludhiana said she could not complete the paper finding it rather lengthy. Most of the students, however, appeared to be at peace with the chemisty section.

For Sumiti Patel from Patiala, who was giving the paper for the second time, the paper was a slight disappointment. She, too, found the physics section relatively tough. But, as compared to last year, I feel it was alright, she added.

It may be pertinent to mention that while Chandigarh was not a centre last year for the exam, it came as a big relief to students from neighbouring towns like Patiala, Ambala and Ludhiana, who felt coming to Chandigarh for the exam was easier than going all the way to Kurukshetra in Haryana.

While the exam for the engineering aspirants was held from 9:30 to 12:30, another exam for architecture students was held from 2 to 5pm.

Students: #iitjee 2016 was easy, not as lengthy as last year. Here are some reactions from Chd @HTPunjab @htTweets pic.twitter.com/JHH0I2grxB  Aneesha Bedi (@AneeshaBedi) April 3, 2016

The administration and the examination conducting body was said to be cooperative in Chandigarh as aspirants shared that they were served water at regular intervals. A disabled student from Ludhiana, Sumit Mago, was grateful to the authorities for allowing him to enter the premises in a car to be dropped till the classroom. Students were not allowed to carry their pens or wrist watches to the hall for that matter. Fresh pens were distributed to candidates in the examination hall and a wall clock was put in each classroom as preventive measure against cheating.

The final scores that determine the admission cut-off is a 60:40 combination of JEE Main cores long with marks of Class 12 after normalising it to remove discrepancies that could be cause by different standards of marking across different education boards.

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Constructed in 1905, the Ludhiana railway station is all set for a major overhaul. For this, French National Railway Company  which visited the city railway station on Saturday  promised to bear 50% of the total cost to be spent on consultancy services for the renovation of the station.

The remaining cost will be borne by the railway authorities here. The total cost of consultancy services is Rs 3.15 crore.

The railway authorities and French governments delegation of SNCF consultancy during the meeting discussed a series of upgrade plans under the Make in India campaign, a dream project of PM Narendra Modi.

Architect Eric Dussiot, one of the representatives from the French Consultancy Company, presented the work which they had executed in cities of France through presentations and assured that city station would be modernised on the same lines.

The foreign delegation said that it would submit the whole project report for modernisation of station within six months and the work will begin after the completion of report.

Northern Railways Ferozepur division officials said, City railway station has been selected for upgrade as it is one of the busiest stations with an average footfall of 70,000 people daily.

Sharing their problems and suggestions, railway engineers and divisional managers raised issues shortage of platforms, low speed trains and lack of infrastructure among others.

Rail traffic management problem was also discussed. French team said that to resolve the issue either the speed of trains would have to be increased or more tracks would be installed. They said that a train from Delhi to Chandigarh will be started that will run at speed of 200 km/hour.

Northern Railways division railway manager Anuj Prakash said, People could see the new look of city railway station in next three or four years as major changes are in store. Fun places, shopping complex, better eating joints, proper resting area, wifi facility, renovation of building among others have been included in the upgrade.
Cases of suicide by farmers due to debt continue to be reported in the district despite political leaders visits to the houses of the farmers who have committed suicide and the governments claim of implementing pro-farmer policies.

During the last three months, around 14 cases of suicide by farmers have been reported from the district while only one case has been considered eligible for compensation.

The state government had earlier announced the make payment of compensation the same day, but this poicy seemed to have flopped as most of the agrrieved families alleged that they have not yet received compensation despite submitting all the required documents.

The family of Gurtej Singh, who committed suicide in 2014, said that they have still not received the compensation. Gurtej had committed suicide in October 2014 and despite submitting all the required documents we have not been given the compensation amount, said one of his family members when the HT contacted them. However, the district administration, that claimed to have provided compensation to around 15 families, contradicted the claims of Gurtejs family.

We had distributed around Rs 42 lakh as compensation amount to the aggrieved families and Gurtej Singhs family is one of the beneficiaries, said one of the officials of the administration, who maintains the record of beneficiaries.

But Gurtejs family continued to claim that they did not receive any compensation.

HT has learnt that till now the administration has received applications of around 226 cases of suicide out of which only 15 have been given compensation.

During the past 6 months, the district has seen a number of political leaders such as Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, AAP member of Parliament Bhagwant Mann, Congress leaders Jagmeet Brar, Ravneet Bittu etc. visiting the families of such farmers but tragic deaths dont seem to end.

The farmers feel that such visits dont serve any purpose and it ends up being a photo-op for these politicians. If a member of any family commits suicide, we expect some assistance from the establishment. However, leaders pay visits, make tall promises and then vanish in the air, said a farmer of Bhaini Bagah village. Others feel that the families political leaders visit have more chances of getting compensation without a fuss.

AAP leaders had highlighted two such cases of suicide in the district, out of which one family from Sahnewali village was considered for compensation.

The district administration, which approves and recommends suicide cases for compensation, demands an FIR copy and evidence of bank loans from the family. However, there have been cases where one family had received compensation without these documents while the other was denied the same despite having all the documents, alleged another farmer.

Meanwhile, representatives of a farmers union have criticised Union food processing minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal for calling their protest as a political stunt.

District president of BKU (Ugrahan group) leader Ram Singh Bhaini Bagha said that the Union minister has changed her tunes after the NDA came to power at the Centre. She had vehemently criticised the Congress-led UPA for ignoring farmers of Punjab. However, afte the BJP-led NDA came to power, she claimed that farmers didnt need the assistance of the Union government. And, if she claimed to be a pro- farmer leader, why her party did not implement the Swaminathan commission report promising the implementation of which the BJP came to power.

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The Batala unit of the National Students Union of India (NSUI) resigned enmasse on Saturday, reflecting a deeping crisis within the student wing of the Congress party.

The mass resignation by NSUI members came to protest the expulsion of their district chairman, Sanamdeep Singh Babbar alias Sunny Babbar.

The NSUI members, who sent their resignations to national general secretary Ajay Chikkara, accused their Punjab president, Iqbal Singh Grewal, of fuelling groupism in the party. They also demanded Iqbals resignation.

The student partys Batala unit president Deepak Ladda told HT that Iqbal had appointed Babbar as the chairman on January 24 and ever attended various functions since then. But, Ladda added, Iqbal was now claiming that there was no post of chairman for the NSUI.

Thats stupid, Ladda told HT, Iqbal Singh is trying to weaken the base of the Congress party in the constituency.

On the one hand, the state high command is ordering Congressmen to work collectively for the partys victory in the forthcoming assembly election and on the other, Iqbal Singh is expelling NSUI members without any reasons, Ladda added.

Among the NSUI members who resigned are the recently-nominated Batala assembly segment president Parmodh Kumar, vice-president Nishant Malhotra, Amrik Singh Bajwa and Gurpreet Singh.

Babbar, a supporter of local Congress MLA Ashwani Sekhri, was expelled on March 31 when the duo had appointed Parmodh Kumar as NSUI president for Batala and Nishant Malhotra as vice-president.

In doing so, they had bypassed supporters of state youth secretary, Nitin Sharma, who is a contender for Congress ticket from Batala in the assembly polls.

Iqbal Singh said the resignations of the NSUIs Batala president and vice-president hardly mattered. He said he had already cancelled their appointments besides those made in the past few months.

I had even issued a show cause notice to district president Deepak Ladda as he had appointed the office-bearers without taking the approval of the state unit. Very soon, senior leaders of the wing (NSUI) will arrive in Batala and reconstruct the entire unit for which they have already invited applications, Iqbal said.

Ladda, however, said he and the other Gudaspur unit members of the NSUI will lodge a complaint with the party high command and seek strict action against Iqbal.
Jaskaran Singh, son of Harbans Singh, accused a private hospital of performing a neuro-surgery of his father without any need just to make money.

Jaskaran Singh said that his father Harbans Singh of Gehri Butter village had met with an accident on February 25.

He brought him to the civil hospital here, but he was referred to the Max Hospital. Jaskaran said that the doctors at the private hospital advised for head surgery, which was conducted on February 26.

He alleged that the hospital authorities charged as much as Rs 10 lakh for the surgery, but his fathers condition became critical day by day.

He alleged that the surgery was also not needed. He took his father to the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, on March 28 because of his critical condition where he improved. However, at present, Harbans is admitted to a local private hospital here.

Jaskaran alleged that doctors of Max Super specialty hospital are responsible for his fathers condition and demanded an enquiry by a medical board. However, authorities of Max hospital denied the allegations and said that the surgery was needed going by the condition of the patient.

The patient was kept on ventilator support as per requirement and he was showing improvement signs but the family members took him from the hospital.
While documenting the history of Partition, historians faced a paucity of information and turned to the fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and others to bridge the fissures. A new breed of historians is grappling with the dynamic Punjabi society and finding ways of writing the peoples history sans the one-community prism applied by the mainstream historians in the two Punjabs.

(From left) Ishwar Dayal Gaur; Surinder Singh; and Raj Kumar Hans (HT Photos)

Among the scholars playing a positive role in this direction is socio-cultural historian Ishwar Dayal Gaur, who points out that the dominant craft of history is not able to free itself from the colonial pattern communal history. Punjabiyat is conspicuous by its absence in the history books on Punjab. The socio-cultural ethos of Punjab is too nuanced to be unfolded and measured simply on the basis of empirical and hard facts that present Punjabs people simply as Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, or Pakistani Punjabis and Indian Punjabis, he says.

Nanak-Farid model

Gaur, professor of history in the Panjab University evening college, has opened a fresh dialogue in the paper, Forgotten Makers of Punjab: Discovering Indigenous Paradigm of History. This outside-the-box study was presented at Sardar Mahan Singh Dhesi Annual Lecture last week at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. Gaurs is a case of practising what he preaches, because he has penned two significant books  Martyr As Bridegroom: A Folk Representation of Bhagat Singh and Society, Religion and Patriarchy: Exploring Medieval Punjab through Hir Waris  that bring forth the shared history of the composite culture of Punjab, gleaned from folklore.

In the recent paper, he has drawn attention to the inclusive concept of the Nanak-Farid model. Guru Nanak (1469-1539) had visited Pakpattan to collect the Bani of the first Punjabi Sufi saint-poet, Baba Farid (1173-1265), and bequeathed to us the literary and philosophical legacy of Punjab. Incidentally, similar work has been done by Pakistani Punjabi scholar Najm Hosain Syed.

A scene from the partition of Punjab, 1947. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

For historians working on Punjab history, Partition is something that happened just the other day, because we are dealing with thousands of years of history that cannot be written with narrow sectarian and national ideologies. We have to rise above them, says Surinder Singh, former chairperson of the Panjab University department of history. He recalls two seminars organised at the department in Chandigarh, in which Pakistani scholars also participated and led to the publication of two volumes  Sufism in Punjab and Popular Literature and Pre-Modern Societies in South Asia  he co-edited with Gaur.

Folklore archives

This approach to history lays stress on the study of indigenous resources such as folklore and other vernacular texts to include the forgotten makers of Punjab. Raj Kumar Hans, professor of history at MS University, Baroda, says: I went to vernacular texts to write Reimagining 19thcentury to study the radicalism of Wazir Singh and the reshaping of gender roles in the writings of woman Dalit poet Peero Preman.

Similarly Gaur turns to the vernacular in tracing the forgotten makers of the land of five rivers: Dullah Bhatti, who challenged the Mughal state and saved the honour of Hindu girls from feudal lords; Sufi poet Shah Husain, who spiritualised the domestic space of Punjab by bringing Hir, Ranjha and spinning-wheel (charkha) in his vernacular kafis; Bulleh Shah, who obliterated the distinction between the Prophet, Lord Krishna, and Ranjha; Shah Mohammed, who portrayed the broad canvas of the Khalsa Raj of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, for whom the poet had tremendous regard; and Qadiryaar, also a court poet of the Maharaja, who took upon himself to write the saga of an ascetic prince called Puran Bhagat.

(nirupama.dutt@hindustantimes.com)
Singapore has emerged the bar capital of Asia, dominating a ranking of the regions top 50 watering holes and taking the top spot with 28 Hongkong Street.

In the inaugural edition of Asias 50 Best Bars awards -- a spinoff of the Worlds 50 Best Bars -- a panel of 154 judges including high-level bartenders, bar consultants, brand ambassadors, journalists and global bar hoppers weighed in to pronounce the best drinking hotspots across Asia.

Read: 145, a new cafe and bar in Kala Ghoda offers comfort fare with a twist

Taking the top spot is a Singapore bar famous for its discretion. Since opening in 2011, 28 Hongkong Street has built up hype by playing itself down in the manner of a secret, clandestine speakeasy.

Tucked away in a downtown thoroughfare, the bar is non-descript with nothing but the street number to identify itself: There is no awning, no flashing lights, or swanky, velvet-roped entrance.

Read: Mumbai airports popular bars can save you from boredom

But once inside the beige doors, the bars swish clientele sip on $20 cocktails like the Modest Mule, made with lemongrass-laced vodka, ginger beer, lime and rosemary, and the colorfully named Whores Bath, made with manuka honey vodka, umeshu (liqueur made with Japanese apricots) poire liqueur, lemon and Hawaiian lava salt pickled ginger.

Speak Low, Shanghai was declared as the second best bar in Asia. (Twitter)

28 Hongkong Street is an emblem of the region, editors write. A benchmark of quality across drinks and hospitality.

Overall, Singapore and Hong Kong tied with nine spots each on the list, followed by Tokyo, which scored eight spots.

Read: Mumbais eateries, pubs and libraries turn into performance spaces

But with four of the top 10 spots, including the No. 1 ranking, Singapore is the big winner this year.

The results also surprised editors, who predicted Shanghai to finish fourth after Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo with the number of bars represented.

Instead, Bangkok nabbed the spot with six addresses including Vesper, the citys top-ranked bar in 17th place.

Read: Best pubs in Gurgaon

Bangkoks people have a serious case of cocktail fever and, with the number of international tenders setting up in the city and locals opening up their own places, it is only going in one direction from here.

Here are the top 10 bars in Asia, according to Asias 50 Best Bars:

1 28 Hongkong Street, Singapore

2 Speak Low, Shanghai

3 High Five, Tokyo

4 Lobster Bar & Grill, Hong Kong

5 Manhattan, Singapore,

6 Quinary, Hong Kong

7 Operation Dagger, Singapore

8 Jigger & Pony, Singapore

9 Union Trading Company, Shanghai

10 Omakase + Appreciate, Kuala Lumpur

Follow @htlifeandstyle for more.
Rahul Raj Singh, boyfriend of TV actor Pratyusha Banerjee who allegedly committed suicide on Friday, was admitted to a Mumbai hospital on Sunday. Singhs lawyer Neeraj Gupta told ANI that Rahul is suffering from depression and complained of chest pain, after which he was taken to the hospital.

He added that Singh felt unwell around 10 am on Sunday when he was supposed to leave for the police station. He is suffering from depression and chest pain. He was missing Pratyusha a lot, the lawyer said.

Rahuls friend Saila Chadda, who took him to the hospital, said that he is almost on the verge of madness and hence, the family decided to hospitalise him. He is traumatised so badly that he can probably go under shock or go mad. Anything can happen to him. So we decided to admit him in the hospital. With consent of all legal advisors we have brought him here, she said.

The world may go against him. But my gut feeling is he is clear as the way he cried the whole time. I was a witness to it, none of you were there then, she added.

When asked whether the this depression was because of the police interrogation, lawyer Neeraj Gupta denied it, He did not have any problem with the interrogation. He co-operated with the cops. He is traumatised after Pratyushas death, he said.

He is suffering from depression and chest pain. He has been hospitalized today-Rahul Raj's lawyer Neeraj Gupta to ANI #PratyushaBanerjee  ANI (@ANI_news) April 3, 2016

Singh was questioned by the Mumbai Police on Saturday in connection with Pratyushas suicide. The Balika Vadhu actor was found hanging from the ceiling in her Mumbai apartment. In his statement to police, Rahul said, When I entered the bedroom, I found Pratyusha hanging from the ceiling. I got very scared. Immediately, I called the neighbours and with their help, I took her to Kokilaben Hospital. We assumed that she was alive, but she was not. I got so scared that I did not inform the police. It was the hospital authorities who informed them. After the doctors declaration, I called up Pratyushas family members and a few of our close friends.

The police said they detained Singh for questioning but have not found anything incriminating against him, and he was let off late on Saturday. A police officer privy to the investigations said, We have recorded statements of both her parents and they have not levelled any allegations against Singh. We have not found anything against Singh so far.

Banerjee was allegedly reprimanded by Singh for drinking too much at a party, which was held at their apartment the day before, less than an hour before she hanged herself. The next morning before going to the church, Singh asked Banerjee to come along but she refused, sources said, adding, that after Singh got home from the church, the couple napped and Singh woke up around 1pm.

Read: Rahuls family alleges Pratyusha was facing acute financial problems

A police source said Singh had reprimanded Banerjee after he found her consuming alcohol in the afternoon. He then freshened up, and before taking another nap, asked her to wake him up in a while.

Banerjee woke Singh up around 2.45pm following which he went out to get lunch and returned home around 3.15pm. Singhs advocate Neeraj Gupta said, Rahul found that the door was locked from within and he had not taken a key. He called Banerjee on her phone several times, but did not get an answer. He also dropped a text message.

After calling her several times, Singh fetched a key maker, who tried to open the lock, Gupta added. The police said a cook from the neighbouring flat eventually entered their flat through a window.

Kuchh toh hai tujhse raabta.... Tu humsafar hai phir kya fikar hai.... @rahul.r.singh.378 A photo posted by Pratyusha Banerjee (@iamprats) on Oct 2, 2015 at 10:48am PDT

Around 4.30pm, Banerjee was found hanging from the ceiling, the police said, adding that Singh rushed her to Kokilaben Hospital and then called Banerjees uncle before informing her parents and close friends.

The police said Singh spoke to someone after getting Banerjee to the hospital, switched off his phone and then left the hospital. But he was later found by the police and they added this is the only reason they have detained him for questioning.

Advocate Neeraj Gupta, who is representing Singh, said, Let the police investigate the case. My client is innocent. When asked if the couple had a fight, Gupta rubbished them as baseless rumours. He also refuted claims of a financial dispute.
Azerbaijan said on Sunday it would stop fighting Armenian-backed troops over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region after two days of renewed clashes killed dozens and drew international calls for an immediate ceasefire.

Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians, has run its own affairs with heavy military and financial backing from Armenia since a separatist war ended in 1994.

But the situation along the tense contact line has deteriorated in past weeks and a fresh eruption of violence on Saturday left many dead on both sides.

Having taken into account ... appeals from international organisations, Azerbaijan has decided to unilaterally cease retaliatory military actions and will consolidate yesterdays territory gains, RIA news agency quoted the Azeri Defence Ministry as saying.

Nagorno-Karabakh officials, however, said the fighting had not let up.

At this very moment, hostilities continue, Interfax news agency quoted a spokesman for the separatist forces as saying.

In the last 24 hours, Azerbaijan has twice declared a cessation of hostilities, but the reality and situation now is that no practical steps have been taken on their side, the spokesman said.

Azerbaijan and Armenian-backed forces have both reported civilian casualties and accused each other of violating a 1994 ceasefire, brokered after fierce fighting in the breakaway region left some 30,000 people dead.

Unrestrained Fantasies

The Azeri Defence Ministry said its forces had destroyed 10 separatist tanks and killed multiple fighters in overnight clashes.

The Nagorno-Karabakh military said its losses were much lower and that it had destroyed 14 Azeri tanks and five armoured vehicles in the past 24 hours.

This is another display of the unrestrained fantasies on the Azeri side, RIA cited a military spokesman as saying.

Crisscrossed with pipelines and sandwiched between the Caspian and Black seas, stability in the southern Caucasus is a major strategic objective for Azerbaijan and other large oil and gas producers in the region.

World top oil producer Russia - which maintains a garrison of troops, jets and attack helicopters in northern Armenia - has been a key mediator in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh which is home to around 150,000 people, and moved on Saturday to suppress the renewed violence.

President Vladimir Putin urged the warring sides to immediately observe the ceasefire while Russias foreign and defence ministers talked by phone with their Armenian and Azeri counterparts.

The Azeri presidential press service said Turkey, the other major power in the region along with Russia, had voiced support for Bakus actions, RIA reported.

The United Nations has also called on the parties involved to put an immediate end to the fighting and to respect the ceasefire agreement.
Brussels Airport reopens on Sunday with three symbolic flights and strict additional security checks for passengers, marking a new era for air travel in Belgium after attacks by Islamic State suicide bombers.

The key travel hub has been closed since two men blew themselves up in the departure hall on March 22 in coordinated blasts that also struck a metro station in the Belgian capital, killing a total of 32 people.

The attacks at the heart of Europe shocked the country and many hope the airports reopening, albeit in a limited capacity and using a tent-like temporary check-in facility, will help turn the page on this months traumatic events.

Brussels Airport chief executive Arnaud Feist on Saturday said the partial resumption of services would start with three symbolic passenger flights to Faro, Athens and Turin.

These flights are the first hopeful sign from an airport that is standing up straight after a cowardly attack, Feist said.

Tough new checks will be in place after police threatened to go on strike if security wasnt improved, and travellers have been asked to come in three hours before departure time.

One of the biggest changes will be that only passengers with tickets and ID documents will be allowed into the makeshift departure hall, and their bags will be checked before entering. Once inside, passengers will also undergo the usual security checks.

The airport will initially only be accessible by car. Vehicles will be screened and subject to spot checks, while extra police and soldiers will be on patrol throughout the airport zone.

The first flight will leave for Faro at 1140 GMT, and the number taking off will increase in the coming days.

Still, the airport will be only be able to work at 20 percent capacity using the temporary facilities, handling 800 to 1,000 passengers an hour.

Months to rebuild

Feist said the reconstruction of the departure hall will take months. The damage was severe, with images from the scene showing the buildings glass-fronted facade in shatters, collapsed ceilings and destroyed check-in desks.

Feist said he expected the airport to start running normally again from late June or early July before the start of the summer holidays.

The closure of Zaventem airport has wreaked havoc on the travel industry, triggering a drop in tourist arrivals and forcing thousands of passengers to be rerouted to other airports in and around Belgium.

Brussels Airport, which claims it contributes some three billion euros ($3.4 billion) annually to the Belgian economy, has not released any figures on the economic impact of the shutdown, but top carrier Brussels Airlines has said it has been losing five million euros daily.

With 260 companies on-site employing some 20,000 staff overall, the airport is one of the countrys largest employers.

Hotel reservations in the capital have fallen by 50 percent since March 22, the Brussels Hotels Association said.

Belgiums tourist industry was already suffering from the aftermath of Islamic State attacks in Paris last November, which killed 130 people.

Several of the Paris attackers had links to Brussels and the city went into lockdown for several days after the carnage in neighbouring France, with security forces fearing an imminent attack.

The sole surviving Paris suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in Brussels on March 18, metres from his family home, just four days before the Brussels killings.

He denies having any prior knowledge of the attacks in the Belgian capital, although investigators have uncovered links with two of the bombers.

Belgian police are still hunting for a mystery third suspect, known as the man in the hat, who was seen in CCTV footage next to the two airport bombers.
A Brussels Airlines flight to the Portuguese city of Faro became the first plane Sunday to take off from Brussels Airport since its departure hall was wrecked in Islamic State suicide attacks 12 days ago.

In an emotional ceremony at the airport, tearful employees and government officials marked the departure with a minutes silence and a round of applause, AFP reporters saw.

On the tarmac, fire engines and police vehicles lined up on either side of the aircraft to form a guard of honour for the plane.

Were back, said Brussels Airport chief executive Arnaud Fei.

The passengers on board were the first to undergo the airports strict new security regime after the coordinated March 22 attacks, which also struck a Brussels metro station and killed 32 people.

The key travel hub has been closed since two men blew themselves up in the departure hall in coordinated blasts that also struck a metro station in the Belgian capital, killing a total of 32 people.

The attacks at the heart of Europe shocked the country and many hope the airports reopening, albeit in a limited capacity and using a tent-like temporary check-in facility, will help turn the page on this months traumatic events.

Brussels Airport chief executive Arnaud Feist on Saturday said the partial resumption of services would start with three symbolic passenger flights to Faro, Athens and Turin.

The number of flights will be stepped up gradually in coming days, although the airport will only be able to work at 20 percent capacity at best using the temporary facilities, handling 800 to 1,000 passengers an hour.

It will take months for the blast-damaged departure hall to be repaired, the airport operator has said.
Painting the town red is not an offence in Britain, as long as you dont do it the Indian way.

The practice of paan-spitting among Indian-origin people residing in Britain has irked many  prompting city councils to impose fines and protection orders against offenders. Public spaces in towns and London areas with a substantial Asian population can be seen splattered with red stains.

Incidentally, paan is sold at various shops and restaurants in these areas to cater to the Indians cultural preference for chewing betel leaf after meals.

The practice has evoked growing public and official ire in the country. The police in the London borough of Brent have imposed a fine of 80 pounds for each such offence committed in its jurisdiction, particularly along Wembley High Road and Ealing Road.

It is also reported to have reached an infuriating extent in the east Midlands city of Leicester, which has a large number of Indian-origin people residing in the vicinity of Belgrave Road and Melton Road. The Leicester city council recently carried out a public consultation on spitting, and the opinion was overwhelmingly in favour of enforcing penalities on offenders.

A city council spokesman said: We are aware of this problem, which is unhygienic and leaves unsightly stains on pavements. We are looking at including paan-spitting in a future city-wide Public Spaces Protection Order, which would give us more powers to tackle it.

Our cleansing teams went out last year at the request of ward councillors, and used anti-graffiti spray equipment to remove paan stains from walls and dustbins. But its not an easy task, he added.

Many Indian-origin residents are equally disgusted by the practice. Jit Dhanji, the service delivery manager at the Belgrave Neighbourhood Centre, told local daily Leicester Mercury: It is a cultural thing. People have done it for generations upon generations in India and it is fine there. But it is not appropriate in an urban environment like Belgrave.

Dhanji, however, doesnt believe theres any malice involved. These people just need to be educated about where to spit, he said.

Speaking on the issue, a Brent Council spokesman told Hindustan Times: The police are acting against paan-spitting. However, the area is geographically too large to permanently cover all the known hotpots, and perpetrators are reluctant to spit in front of uniformed officers.

In 2013, public health functions were been brought under council control. As a result, there are plans to re-launch the campaign with a greater focus on raising awareness on the health risks of chewing tobacco paan and offering practical support to help chewers quit, he added.

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Greece was on Sunday making final preparations to return hundreds of migrants to Turkey, the first to be sent back under a landmark EU deal that has been slammed by rights watchdogs.

The operation is set to begin Monday on the Greek island of Lesbos, which has served as a gateway for hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants arriving in Europe from Turkey in the past year.

Details of how the operation will proceed are sketchy, with Greek officials tight-lipped Sunday over who and how many migrants will be sent back across the Aegean Sea.

Turkish interior minister Efkan Ala said his country had made preparations to receive 500 people on Monday, and that the Greeks had given the names of 400.

We have been in touch with the Greek authorities and said we could take 500 people and they have given us 400 names. Tomorrow its possible that this figure could change, Ala was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.

The European Union signed the controversial deal with Turkey in March as it wrestles with the continents worst migration crisis since World War II, with more than a million people arriving from the Middle East and elsewhere last year.

Under the agreement, designed to discourage people from making the risky Aegean crossing, all irregular migrants arriving since March 20 face being sent back, although the deal calls for each case to be examined individually.

In addition, for every Syrian refugee returned, another Syrian refugee will be resettled from Turkey to the EU, with numbers capped at 72,000.

The deal has faced heavy criticism from human rights groups, who have questioned whether it is legal and ethical.

We dont know what is going to actually happen, senior UN migration official Peter Sutherland said Saturday. But if there is any question of collective deportations without individuals being given the right to claim asylum, that is illegal.

Yiorgos Kyritsis, spokesman for Greeces refugee coordination unit, insisted Mondays operation involves people who have not requested asylum.

Refugees and migrants including children who left the Chios registration camp, shout slogans and hold placards reading "'No Turkey" as they camp out in the port of Chios. (AFP)

Focus on South Asian migrants

But on the Aegean islands themselves, many migrants have complained of not being given sufficient time and access to the asylum procedure.

Anas al-Bakhr, a Syrian engineer from Homs who is among those stuck on Chios island, said police marked his arrival date as March 20 -- the day the deal entered force -- even though he arrived on the 19th.

They said the computers were broken that day, Bakhr told AFP.

As well as Lesbos, migrants may also be sent back from other Greek islands where many migrants have arrived, such as Chios, where members of EU border agency Frontex were seen arriving Sunday.

Greek state news agency ANA reported that some 250 migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and African nations would be sent back daily between Monday and Wednesday, and that some 350 Frontex officers had arrived over the weekend for the operation.

The migrants would be taken from Lesbos to the Turkish port of Dikili, ANA said, adding that Frontex had chartered two Turkish tourist ferries. A third Turkish vessel has been hired to take some 250 mainly Pakistani migrants from Chios, the agency added.

Police sources on Lesbos on Sunday said there had been a flurry of last-minute asylum applications amongst the 3,300 migrants there.

We... have over two thousand people that have stated their wish to seek asylum and we need to see a credible process go ahead with the Greek asylum service for those that wish to express their protection concerns, said Boris Cheshirkov, the UN refugee agency spokesman on Lesbos.

A migrant stands inside the Moria migrant camp transformed in police-run detention facility in Mytilene, on Lesbos island. (AFP)

Turkish preparations

On the other side of the Aegean, work is underway on a centre to host those sent back to the Turkish tourist resort of Cesme, with another being created in Dikili opposite Lesbos.

Turkish media reports say the Turkish Red Crescent is also preparing to open a refugee camp with capacity for 5,000 people further inland in Manisa.

The operation to resettle Syrians to Europe under the one-for-one arrangement also starts Monday.

Germany expects to take in a first group of about 35 Syrians from Turkey on Monday, the German interior ministry said. Several dozen others are expected to arrive in France, Finland and Portugal, according to German government sources.

Campaigners have criticised the deal, with Amnesty International accusing Turkey of illegally forcing Syrians to return to their war-torn homeland -- proof that Turkey is not a safe country for refugees, it says.

Turkey rejects the charge, insisting it has not changed its open-door policy for Syrian refugees.

Greece, meanwhile, is struggling to accommodate a massive bottleneck of 52,000 migrants stuck on its territory after Balkan countries closed their borders to stop the influx.

Sporadic violence has broken out between different nationalities in overcrowded camps.

It is evident that the longer this situation drags out, we will have such incidents by desperate people, Kyritsis told AFP.

Several hundred Italians and Austrians, meanwhile, demonstrated against what they called fortress Europe, at the Brenner Pass crossing point between the two countries.
The attack on Christians celebrating Easter in a park in Lahore, in which more than 70 people lost their lives, has again put the spotlight on Pakistans vulnerable religious minorities.

The suicide bombing on March 27, claimed by the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, was a continuation of such attacks on the Christian minority over the years, the worst being the killing of more than 80 people at the All Saints Church in Peshawar in 2013.

Christians are being targeted for two reasons, say analysts. The first is that the community is seen as an ally of the West, and any attack on Muslims there is seen as justification for assaults on Pakistani Christians.

Since September 11 and the resultant US military operation in Afghanistan, we have seen a rise in attacks on Christians in Pakistan, says Mubarik Ali, a historian and political scientist.

Christians have been targeted in the past too but in individual cases and much less numbers, he says.

The second reason is Pakistans controversial blasphemy laws, under which Christians have been accused, usually on false grounds and often to settle personal scores.

But the attacks in blasphemy cases have grown more vicious and violent. In 2014, a Christian couple was hacked and burnt to death at a brick kiln by a mob of hundreds who suspected them of burning copies of the Quran.

Police arrested more than 40 people but they were released because of pressure from religious parties.

What we are seeing is that in the past, those accused of blasphemy would be handed over to police. Now its mob justice. And no one gets punished, says Zohra Yusuf of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The blasphemy case that received the most attention occurred in 2009, when Aasia Bibi, a poor Christian farm worker in a small village of Punjab, was accused of blasphemy and put behind bars. What made her famous was that then Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer visited Aasia Bibi and expressed his reservations about the blasphemy laws under which innocent people could be so easily indicted.

These remarks cost Taseer his life as in 2011, when he was shot dead by his bodyguard who was angered by his questioning of the blasphemy laws.

In 2016, the bodyguard  Mumtaz Qadri  was hanged for his act but nearly a hundred thousand people came to pay tribute to him at his funeral.

The fact that Aasia is alive and Qadri is dead has angered a lot of people in Pakistan, says Ali.

It is that anger that possibly manifested itself in the attack on Christians at Lahores Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park but the irony is that most of those who died and were injured were Muslims.

And yet the message was clear: Christians are under attack once again.

This has led to hundreds of Christians fleeing Pakistan in a bid to save their lives. According to the Church World Service, a faith-based NGO, hundreds have applied for asylum in Thailand and Sri Lanka.

They are living in sub-human conditions, says a journalist who visited a detention centre in Bangkok.

For most religious minorities, it is a similar predicament. Hundreds of Hindus have fled to India over the past five years while members of the Ahmadi community have sought asylum in the West over threats to their lives.

What we forget is that the bulk remains in Pakistan, says Badar Alam, a local journalist. Alam says a small percentage make it out of Pakistan because most members of religious minorities are poor and uneducated.

So far, the government has done little to address the concerns of minorities. Despite pronouncements made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, almost no one has been arrested in the repeated attacks on minorities.

Journalists say the PML-N government is under pressure from religious groups. In the case of the ruling party, many of those who carry out or back the attacks are political allies.

Analysts say that while Sharifs government may have made the right noises, it remains to be seen whether it will follow up with action against militant groups and religious parties that have repeatedly targeted these vulnerable communities. There is little hope this will happen any time soon, they say.
Pakistan government has cautioned the media against linking Iran with the arrest of an alleged Indian spy, days after Tehran warned that such reports could have negative implications on bilateral ties.

Iran has nothing to do with the activities of Indian intelligence network. Pakistan and Iran are tied through decades long religious, social, cultural and political bonds, and nothing can come in way of our relations, interior minister Nisar Ali Khan said here.

Khan said media should be cautious while reporting on Pakistan-Iran brotherly relations.

Our ties with Iran are by no means linked with the arrest of an Indian spy, he told reporters at Islamabad on Saturday.

He said the recent visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Pakistan was quite productive but an impression was being given that Iran was involved in certain activities against Pakistan.

The Iranian authorities, he said, had expressed their concern over news proliferating in a certain section of the media portraying Iran in a negative manner despite the very positive visit of the Iranian President.

The minister also mentioned his meeting with Iranian ambassador Mehdi Honardoost, saying the two sides expressed satisfaction over President Rouhanis visit.

Honardoost assured that Iran would extend full cooperation on all issues that ensured security and development in the two countries, Khan said.

He said some vested interests wanted to harm positive and historic ties between Pakistan and Iran.

The Iranian embassy here last week had issued a terse statement after several media outlets hinted that Tehran might have knowledge about Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was reportedly arrested by Pakistani authorities in Balochistan after he entered from Iran.

During past days some section of Pakistani media has spread contents regarding detention of an Indian agent and the matter related to it, which could have negatives implications on the fraternal and friendly atmosphere of Iran and Pakistan, the embassy had warned.

Kulbhushan, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning subversive activities in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a confessional video of Jadhav, who said he was a serving Indian Navy officer.

India has acknowledged Jadhav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.
Close aides of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif are among those whose assets feature in a vast expose of tax havens published Sunday after a year-long investigation into 11.5 million leaked documents.

The assets of around 140 political figures -- including 12 current of former heads of states -- are mentioned in the revelations, according to the probe by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

The investigation yielded 11.5 million documents from around 214,000 offshore entities, the ICIJ said on its website.

The leaked data from 1975 to the end of last year provides what the ICIJ described as a never-before-seen view inside the offshore world.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung said Sunday the amount of data it obtained is several times larger than a previous cache of offshore data published by WikiLeaks in 2013 that exposed the financial dealings of prominent individuals.

Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it's about corruption. https://t.co/dYNjD6eIeZ pic.twitter.com/638aIu8oSU  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 3, 2016

Sharifs family owned properties in London

Hussain and Hasan Nawaz Sharif, and Mariam Safdar, the sons and daughter of Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, had set up set up at least four offshore companies in British Virgin Islands (BVI), reported the Indian Express. The Sharif family bought six lavish properties overlooking Londons Hyde Park through these companies.

Documents reviewed by The Indian Express and subsequent enquiries reveal that the Sharif family mortgaged four of these properties to the Deutsche Bank (Suisse) SA for a loan of GBP 7 million and the Bank of Scotland part financed the purchase of two other apartments.

$2 billion offshore trails that leads to Putin

Though the presidents name does not appear in any of the records, the data reveals a pattern  his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage, reported the Guardian.

The documents suggest Putins family has benefited from this money  his friends fortunes appear his to spend.

Putin and his close associates secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies, the ICIJ said.

These findings show how deeply ingrained harmful practices and criminality are in the offshore world, said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the US-based University of California, Berkeley, cited by the consortium.

The other names figuring in the leak included the president of Ukraine, the king of Saudi Arabia and the prime ministers of Iceland, the ICIJ statement said.

The leaked documents came from Mossack Fonseca, a law firm with offices in more than 35 countries.

They were reviewed by a team of more than 370 reporters from over 70 countries, according to the ICIJ.

The BBC cited Panama-based Mossack Fonseca as saying it had operated beyond reproach for 40 years and had never been charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

It wasnt clear who was the original source of the leaked documents.

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40 years of financial records, 11 main allegations
Republican frontrunner for the White House Donald Trump has warned of a very massive recession and said its a terrible time to invest in stocks, in an interview to Washington Post.

He said the US was sitting on a financial bubble, unemployment was much higher than reflected in official numbers and the country was being ripped by other countries.

Im pessimistic, Trump said. Unless changes are made. Changes could be made. But the good news is, he has a solution: Trump. I can fix it. I can fix it pretty quickly.

He told Post reporters the key to his proposed fix is a turnaround on trade, by renegotiating agreements that, according to him are skewed against the US currently. And large income tax cuts.

As a leading contender for the top job of a country central to the global economy, and which triggered the 2008 financial crisis, his comments will be followed with some concern.

Trump is already being watched closely. President Barack Obama said on Friday many world leaders brought up Trump with him in private conversations at the recent nuclear summit.

But as the Post said Trump is way too gloomy and out of sync with the current assessment of the economy by multiple experts, and his predictions have been wrong in the past.

In 2012, for instance, he said that if Obama was re-elected president oil and gas prices would go through the roof. Quite the opposite happened, fuelled by rising natural gas production.

Trump has been pessimistic about the economy questioning the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, arguing unemployment is far more than 5% cited by the government. He is now saying these are precarious times.

Part of the reason its precarious is because we are being ripped so badly by other countries. We are being ripped so badly by China. It just never ends. Nobodys ever going to stop it.

On the stock market, his assessment was blunt: I think were sitting on an economic bubble. A financial bubble. He said that was trued for the entire economy, and not a specific sector.
The anti-Islamic State (IS) coalition conducting airstrikes in Iraq and Syria has killed a militant believed to be responsible for an attack on US troops in northern Iraq last month that left a marine dead.

Jasim Khadijah, a former Iraqi officer not considered a high-value target, was killed by a drone strike overnight in northern Iraq, coalition spokesman US Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters in Baghdad.

We have information (that) he was a rocket expert, he controlled these attacks, said Warren, referring to the shelling of a base used by US troops near the town of Makhmour, located between Mosul and Kirkuk.

That attack killed marine staff sergeant Louis Cardin and wounded eight others, all part of a company-sized detachment of less than 200 troops. They provide force protection fire to Iraqi army troops, who are making slow progress in a campaign to clear areas around Mosul, an IS stronghold.

Cardins was the second combat death of an American service member in Iraq since the start of the campaign to fight the militant group in 2014.

Warren said five other Islamic State fighters were killed in the air strike.

In another development in Syria, the dreaded group has executed 15 of its fighters in the largest execution of the militant groups security services so far in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.

The killings followed the arrest of 35 of its members on Saturday in Raqqa, according to Britain-based observatory, which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of sources on the ground.

The members were killed in connection with the assassination of senior IS figure Abu Hija al-Tunisi, who died on Wednesday in an air strike, the observatory said.

Reuters could not independently verify this information.
Turning off the heat during the winter months may help dieters stay slim or lose weight, according to a new study that examines waist circumference in older adults.

The scientists behind the study say that the latest research, which links higher indoor temperatures to larger waists and lower indoor temperatures to slimmer waists, is important because waist circumference has been linked to hypertension, heart disease and diabetes.

Lead researcher Dr. Keigo Saeki and his team said that their findings may be explained by thermogenesis, which is when the body generates heat. Body heat generation in brown fat helps burn calories. Previous studies linked brown fat to higher metabolism and better blood sugar control.

"Although cold exposure may be a trigger of cardiovascular disease, our data suggest that safe and appropriate cold exposure may be an effective preventive measure against obesity," said Keigo Saeki of Nara Medical University School of Medicine Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Nara, Japan.

The HEIJO-KYO study involved data from 1,103 people. Participants had an average age of 72, and all individuals participating in the study stayed home during the daytime. The research team noted that participants underwent annual measurements of their abdominal, or waist, circumference from 2010 to 2014.

Saeki and his team also measured the indoor temperatures of where participants lived. The measurement took place every year for one 48-hour period during the winter seasons. The researchers noted that the average outside temperature on measurement days was 48 degrees Fahrenheit, or 8.7 degrees Celsius. Participants were then divided into four groups based on the average indoor temperatures of their homes.

The study revealed that participants in the lowest indoor temperature group were at 50 degrees Fahrenheit, or 10 degrees Celsius, had an average waist circumference of 32 inches, which the researchers said was 1.4 inches smaller than participants grouped in the highest indoor temperature group. The team found that participants in the highest indoor temperature group were 33.4 inches on average.

The researchers said that the findings held true even after accounting for participants' age, sex, physical activity, total calorie intake and socioeconomic status.

The study was presented recently at the Endocrine Society annual meeting in Boston.

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Republican front-runner Donald Trump laid it on presidential hopeful John Kasich Sunday, demanding that the Ohio Gov. drop out of the GOP race immediately. The business mogul-turned-presidential candidate claims that Kasich was taking some of his votes off by staying in the race, and quite simply, such tactics were unfair.

Trump further stated that he already expressed his reservations about the other GOP candidate during his recently-conducted meeting with the Republican National Committee last week.

"All he's doing is just, he goes from place to place, and loses, and he keeps running. Well, why doesn't Marco Rubio do that? Why doesn't Jeb Bush do that? Why didn't all of them do that?" Trump said.

"Now if he wants to go and have his name put in nomination in the convention, he can do that. He doesn't have to run and take my votes. Because he's taking my votes. He's not taking Cruz's votes. He's taking my votes."

Trump's statements on Sunday might be indicative of the growing unease on the bold GOP candidate's campaign. Though he still leads against his rivals by a significant margin, a series of controversies last week, most notably his statements involving abortion, might have created a very real speed bump for his so-called "Trump Train."

With the Wisconsin primaries coming, Trump must be able to put on a good show. This is especially due to his loss in a very important state, Iowa, where rival Ted Cruz completely dominated.

Unfortunately for Trump, a number of polls in the state are so far predicting a very similar turnout to that of Iowa. One poll, conducted by the Marquette Law School, has shown the business mogul trailing his rival by a full 10 percent.

Thus, with Ted Cruz closing in on his numbers, future votes have never been as important for Trump. Hence, the sheer presence of candidate John Kasich still being in the race has touched a raw nerve on the front-runner.

"It's very unfair because he's taking our votes. Anybody could have stayed in. You could have had Jim Gilmore stay in. I mean, to be honest with you, Gilmore could have just stayed in. A guy like George Pataki could have just stayed in, he had zero. So it's very unfair that Kasich stays in, is my opinion," Trump said.

Trump's controversial campaign for the presidency has recently become even more controversial, with his recent rallies plagued by violence and strong statements bordering on abuse. His brazen attacks targeting a number of groups, including his own party, have gotten to a point where securing a nomination this coming July might finally end up getting tricky.

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HALIFAX  In a bustling classroom filled with streams of Arabic and English, two brothers are studies in concentration as they write out the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

Ahmad, 10, and Mohamad Al Marrach, 9, are among 41 Syrian children who arrived at Joseph Howe Elementary School in February, suddenly expanding the small, inner-city school's population by a third from its existing 146 students.

The bright, colourful classroom  its name was recently added in Arabic on the door  is the end of a long journey for the brothers. They recall moving quickly with their parents when bombs started falling on their town, and prefer their new school to one that occasionally lost power in Lebanon.

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Now, they and their fellow refugees face a fresh set of challenges, including complete and sudden immersion in an unknown language. It has created demands on the school system that teachers' unions and school boards say should draw added funding from provincial and federal governments.

Not enough resources to ease transition

Julie Jebailey, the school's only Arabic-speaking teacher, translates as Mohamad talks about his new life. "Sometimes English is hard," he says.

Like most of the Syrian children in this class, which has gone from 17 to 24 kids in a few weeks, he's still at the stage of using smiles, gestures and a single word to communicate his needs.

Across the country, schools are accepting thousands of refugee children who are grappling with a new language and, in some instances, attending school for the first time after leaving camps in the Middle East.

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Shelley Morse, the president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union, says with 316 Syrians expected in the Halifax board's schools this year, she's hearing from teachers who are struggling.

"It can't be absorbed within existing budgets. We need help."

"What we've been hearing is the teachers are working really hard to ensure a good transition, but the problem is the resources and funding aren't necessarily in place for that," she said in an interview.

Melinda Daye, the chair of the Halifax school board, said schools are just beginning to discover the kinds of needs the children may require, ranging from teacher assistants to speech language pathologists.

"It can't be absorbed within existing budgets. We need help," she said, adding she's put the request in to the province and hopes to hear back by June.

At Joseph Howe school, the Grade 1 and 2 class where the Al Marrach boys are immersed has seen a rapid transition.

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"I can get along. It was a hard transition at first," says classroom teacher Kimberly Sparks, as she takes a brief break from teaching her existing, younger students basic literacy skills, while Jebailey and Shelley Manthorne, an English-as-an-Additional-Language teacher, work with the Syrians.

Would prefer system like Alberta

However, Manthorne and Jebailey have to move between classrooms, and often Sparks' main assistance comes from Arabic-speaking volunteers.

Another teacher at the school, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said she would prefer a system like Alberta's, where students are first given literacy programs in a separate program to prepare to enter the mainstream.

"As a language teacher myself I know it takes up to a year to catch up ... but I don't know if we have the resources to do that," said the teacher.

Joy Bowen-Eyre, the chair of the Calgary Board of Education, says the funding is a national issue  and she recently called on Ottawa to start providing money to Alberta to help with educating the children among the 25,000 Syrians that have been brought to Canada.

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"These are students who need significant amounts of care and support."

She says the 427 new Syrian students in her board require funding roughly equivalent to one new school, and so far the board is covering all costs.

"We haven't had any funding at all to support the Syrian students ... That's a considerable concern for us. These are students who need significant amounts of care and support," she said.

Asked about the issue during a recent visit to Calgary, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was non-commital about what Ottawa can do.

"We're engaged constantly with partners at different levels and looking for solutions for the challenges that exist," he told reporters.

Not enough children per class to hire new teachers

Alberta Minister of Education David Eggen said in an email his government has restored grants for English language education, and "these students may qualify for the English as a Second Language Grant if they need additional English language supports."

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The federal Immigration Department didn't provide a comment by deadline.

Doug Hadley, a spokesman for the Halifax school board, said most of the roughly 316 Syrian children are spread around 30 schools and in many instances it means an addition of two or three children to a class  not enough for the hiring of a new teacher.

However, he said the board is keeping track of the costs and the need for resources and will pass it along to the province.

A spokesperson for the Nova Scotia government declined comment on what assistance will be provided to schools.

At Joseph Howe school, Sparks said she's started a checklist each day to ensure she's spending time with each child and keeping track of their needs.

"It's busy. It is busy," she said, "but I enjoy coming in every day."

Also on HuffPost

Numbers That Show There's Much More To Do To Help Syrian Refugees See Gallery
It's official: the Nineties are back, and I for one could not be more excited. The Nineties are synonymous with the girlband - a special combination of five girls, but in this case four, that boys and girls either want to bed or to be.

During the Nineties girlband domination was in full force and even to this day there isn't a week where Spice Girls reunion rumours make the pages of the press. But, it seems that as recently as this week, Victoria Beckham is still being a buzzkill and saying no to involvement in a 20th Anniversary Spice Girls reunion.

Quite unexpectedly in 2016, instead of sticking our girl power fingers in the air, we're going to be dusting off our combat trousers and pretending that we're just not that interested in anything. Because on 1 January 2016, a lesser-known band called All Saints rocked the pop stratosphere by dumping a simple statement on their social channels seemingly claiming that 2016 was going to be their year.

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And after announcing the title of their new album by utilising the '' emoji - in probably the most effective way emoji has ever been used to market anything in the history of emoji - they had showed us all that this time around, they mean business.

With that in mind, here are my 10 reasons this All Saints reunion, and particularly the new album Red Flag, is something you need to be getting involved in.

1.Lead single One Strike is amazing. We live in a world where singles don't really exist, but forget that, this is the Nineties! On 26 February 2016 Mel, Shaz, Nic & Nat dropped their first track in 10 years onto iTunes. And less than a month later, One Woman Man appeared I was forced to take a step back and realise I wasn't witnessing a repeat of their ill fated 2006 reunion album Studio 1 - something special is happening this time around. The stars have aligned.

2.One Woman Man contains one of the best lyrics in their entire back catalogue -"every battle has a widow, the mourner won't be me..." - and is sung by Shaznay with the conviction of a woman who will not be wronged. That's real girl power.

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3.It's perfectly timed with the whole Nineties revival. Nostalgia is powerful feeling, which probably explains why Barry Manilow is still filling arenas 40 years on. And as I've already established, All Saints mean business this time around and that means embracing their 90's roots - something they refused to do last time out. There are some moments that evoke their urban pop of the Nineties whilst also sounding fresh for 2016.

4.They seem to genuinely give a shit this time around. Mel was quite vocal about making Studio 1 for the money - they had signed a deal with Parlophone in 2005 before writing a single song, and she wasn't really into the album. Red Flag is different.

5.The promo is being handled perfectly. Great 'grat track' (Nineties translation: 'single') selection and their social media presence is the perfect balance of behind the scenes LOL action and serious 'it's all about the music' posts. Social media is a relatively alien thing to a band who had all but imploded by 2001, but they've taken to it brilliantly. It's very easy to be an All Saints fan in 2016.

6.They all look amazing and are on top vocal form. Time has treated these ladies very well. (I'm sure their Nineties millions help a little). But, crucially, looks aren't important when their voices sound this good. Their trademark harmonies, Shaz's attitude, Mel's honey-laden verses and even Nic and Nat - often regarded as less talented - sound great on their lines.

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7.They're not everywhere but the few key pieces of press they've agreed to (I-D, The Observer, etc.) show they know they're marketing to their (now a little bit older) original fan base. Basically, they're not saying yes to any old shit and hoping it sticks. There's a strategy - one that could even include more music... *squeals*

8.The Koko gig. Having a gig booked for the week of the album release is a smart move. Think of all that free social media activity to promote the newly available album. It also helps that the album sold out in about nine minutes. I told you nostalgia is powerful.

9.Announcing a fully fledged tour based on the good feeling surrounding the reunion and the sell-out in minutes Koko gig. All Saints absolutely mean business this time around, and they've mentioned that touring was something they very rarely got to do in their Nineties heyday, and we all know it's where the money is made...

10.We haven't even heard Make Me Love U yet, which Shaznay told I-D she wrote about eight years ago, and loads of acts have tried to poach for themselves, but she saved for All Saints because she thinks it's one of the best songs she's ever written.

I'll stop now, but I could absolutely go on. I'm excited. Can you tell?

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On Wednesday 30 March an 11-year-old child named Kareem went missing. He had brown hair, a cheeky smile, and wore a little pink hoody. You won't have heard about his disappearance though, because, you see, he's a refugee. Not a white skinned, blonde haired, blue eyed little girl. He is little boy from Afghanistan who had travelled half way across the world alone to reach the 'safety' of first world France. There he lived alone in 'The Jungle', a makeshift camp currently housing over 5,000 refugees. British volunteers built him a small wooden shelter, gave him some food, some clothes and a little bit of love. He was traumatised, vulnerable and needed urgent care.

He was also just one of the hundreds of unaccompanied children in Calais that the world seems to have conveniently forgotten. Desperate to reach the UK and finally feel safe and secure (something drummed into many of these children in their homelands and reinforced by the tear gassing and brutality they've witnessed by the French police and extremists) he was last seen attempting to get onto a ferry leaving for Dover. That's it. No more news. UK social services have no record of him arriving, French officials refuse to listen to our pleas to acknowledge he's gone missing at all.

Most distressed of all is Liz Clegg, an awe-inspiring long term volunteer we are honoured to work with, who has acted as a matriarch to the hundreds of kids roaming free in the camp. Kareem and Liz had a special relationship. In the absence of any real presence by large child focussed charities or government child protection she cared for him, loved him, gave him some stability, and a little mobile phone which now is simply ringing out.

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And Kareem isn't the only one no longer accounted for. In January Europol announced that 10,000 children had disappeared after being registered in Europe (in Calais and Dunkirk no registration even takes place). Meanwhile our teams on the ground in Greece tell us of rumours the traffickers have started offering unaccompanied children transport across the Balkans in exchange for their organs, a reality too horrific to even contemplate.

Greg Williams on behalf of Help Refugees

So in February we did the first ever proper census of Calais and found that of the 5,497 refugees in the camp 423 were unaccompanied (the youngest there now is just eight years old). We begged authorities to delay the forced demolition of the southern part of the camp, fearing the lone children would be terrified by the often violent destruction and unsettled by being displaced again, grow desperate, simply run away or worst of all fall into the hands of traffickers or worse. No one listened. Our court case to prevent the demolition failed. The police moved in. And the small wooden shelters those children now called home were torn down and burned.

Contrary to some of the 'comfortable myths' perpetuated at the time Jules Ferry (the official government-run women and children's centre which houses only 500) was already full, so the 423 children couldn't go there. The 'heated tents' on offer were flooded and uninhabitable. The respite centres around France wouldn't take kids who were on their own. Endless excuses were peddled around by French and UK governments declaring plenty of "safe options" for these kids when the fact is there were very few if any. And those that were open to them were not understood, with no information and no translators and when we we pleaded with and one French official to get a translator so the kids could understand what was happening to them, they simply barked back at us that these unaccompanied children should "speak French".

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So, last week (28-30 March) we conducted our second census and found to our horror that there are 129 less unaccompanied children than before. Did they get on a bus to a French respite centre? Unlikely, no lone children were allowed to go there. Did they run away to another country? Possibly. Did they make it to the UK. No one knows. No one seems to care much either. Opportunistic vultures who prey on vulnerable young children are only too aware there's no real child protection in place.

Yet in Calais we are the only ones who seem to be even bothering to try to find out if the children there are disappearing.

So you'd be forgiven for thinking that we are a large NGO, a government body or an international charity. We aren't. We are a grassroots collective (turned charitable fund) who started just seven months ago when we arrived in Calais. Five women with zero experience simply eager to help for a few days. We were faced with the stark reality that there were literally no large charities there helping. No infrastructure, no distribution network, no centralised food system, no nothing. Just tents, a few toilets and and kids roaming free whilst some well meaning British people dumped old clothes on the ground and a small (but incredible) local French charity made up of six retired people struggled to cope with the ever growing number of refugees.

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Greg Williams on behalf of Help Refugees

Since then we have worked every moment of every day to make things better there in any way we can: we set up a huge distribution warehouse, built endless shelters, helped provide thousands of meals a day. We supported Liz Clegg's unofficial women and children's centre, expanded to Greece and Dunkirk and called ourselves 'Help Refugees'.

We built an incredible team of people on the ground who have dedicated their lives to helping and who are also mostly volunteers. They too have no training for the physical and psychological distress they face every day and many of them are traumatised by what they see and hear. They are the ones who carried out the census.

It isn't enough. Not even nearly.

Why are we the only ones counting and caring for these children? Why won't the French take account of their responsibilities? And why does Britain continue to peddle the lie that they are somehow helping, announcing proudly that they have spent 534,000 on child protection in Calais (a paltry sum compared with the 37million they've spent on fences and security) only for us to find out they only fund Terre D'Asile - the small French centre which only houses 30 children a night and for a maximum of five days before they're kicked out.

A recent report found that 61.06% of all the children in Calais feel unsafe in the camp, and 69.9% of of the camp's population have been tear gassed by the police. No wonder so many these already traumatised children are so desperate to escape and see Britain (where so many of their families reside) as their only salvation.

Many of the kids also have the legal right to be in the UK - in January 15-year-old Masud died in the back of a lorry trying to reach his sister in Manchester. Last week 17-year-old Mohammed (misreported as being 18 years old) died under a truck which had reached the UK, again trying to reach a close family member. Under EU law (Dublin III) they both had a legal right to be here. Yet the process was so drawn out, the information so lacking, the conditions in the camp so dire, that Masud and Mohammed couldn't bear to wait any longer and were forced, like so many others, to chose between train tracks or traffickers.

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Meanwhile Liz Clegg and her team now face an agonising wait for news, with no one stepping forward to provide any answers.

Kareem and many of the other missing children may have made it somewhere to safety. They may also, inconceivably for those who know and love them, not. But surely crossing our fingers can't be the solution. Those children deserve so much better than that.

We call upon the French government and the UNHCR to set up a proper registration system and safeguarding measures for all unaccompanied children in Calais and Dunkirk and safeguarding measures when they disappear.

By allowing this situation to continue we are all complicit in our silence.

Update Monday 4th April: Thank you so much for the overwhelming support from everyone since this blog was published. We are delighted to say that since its publication thanks to an urgent intervention from the UK children's commissioner Kareem has been located and is now safe and sound and in the care of social services. We remained concerned for the whereabouts of the remaining unaccounted for children and call for the urgent implication of child registration and safeguarding in Calais and Dunkirk

Please donate here to support Help Refugees vital work
Imagine I call you a Nazi.

That's great for me, because now I can ignore anything you say, and I've made it clear to everyone else that they should ignore you too. In fact, anyone who agrees with or defends you is also a Nazi. Think of the time I've saved.

"You're no platformed! You're no platformed! Everyone is no platformed!"

The problem is, this won't change your mind. You now think I'm an idiot. It's obvious I'm trying to shout you down and to put anyone else off from listening to you. You might laugh at me. You might be abusive. We're not going to learn anything from each other, and we're not going to be friends.

It's the same with calling someone a "social justice warrior" as a way to avoid addressing what they say. Or, indeed, a "racist", "transphobe" or "Islamophobe". It might make you feel better, but it's not going to win any arguments or change any minds. Likely it will push people into two camps: for you and against you.

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Do you know who else liked to put people into camps? Hitler.

Let's spell it out logically. If Nazis do a thing, it may be more likely that the thing is bad, but the thing could still be morally neutral or even good.

Hitler was a vegetarian, but that doesn't mean all vegetarians are Nazis.

People who are diametrically opposed to everything you believe in could be saying something which is factually correct, or that might have an important point or lesson which could help your own understanding, even if they don't realise this, and even if they are in fact Nazis.

We live accelerated lives. We communicate in small snippets of text, in messages or tweets or comments on Facebook. Context is generally lost, and we have no time to question whether someone actually means a particular point. It's much easier and more emotionally satisfying just to assume the worst.

I've previously written about Political Correctness, and how it can actually harm diversity and understanding (for example, by telling black women activists they can't criticize FGM because of western privilege).

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While I was reading the many great responses to my article, I came across a link to an post at Pharyngula by the biology professor and internet personality PZ Myers. In The anti-PC police are in the wrong, PZ says:

I'm really fed up with all the op-eds emerging now, decrying those wimpy college students and political correctness and trigger warnings and safe spaces. They're all from obnoxious ignoramuses who are really trying to defend their sheltered privilege from criticism.

He's he calling anyone who disagrees with him a Nazi . He goes on to say:

the anti-PC language does the opposite of what its obnoxious proponents claim. It's not about advocating for free speech. It's about using accusations of "PC" and mocking efforts to give minorities a voice to silence critics of the status quo.

I'm doing no such thing: I'm all for giving minorities a voice to criticise the status quo. But it'll do no good to anyone for me to abuse PZ about it, or indeed for anyone to abuse anyone else about anything.

Instead, In the interests of peace, love and misunderstanding, I ask this...

Let's stop pretending that we can win arguments by declaring those with different opinions so terrible that we can never be seen with them, and that no decent person should be seen with them either.

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Let's try to make the world a better place, and make it more likely that our 'opponents' will actually consider what we're trying to say.

If someone actually is inciting violence or hatred or seeking to remove the rights of other people, then we can stand up against them together.

But let's start by acknowledging that, right now, too many people dismiss the opinions of others out of hand far too easily.
Fairfax Media

Renowned Australian writer, journalist and playwright Bob Ellis died on Sunday aged 74.

For the past year Ellis had liver cancer. He died at his home at Palm Beach in Sydney's north just after 4pm Sunday.

Ellis' son Jack posted on his father's personal blog, Table Talk, saying Ellis died at home surrounded by his family.

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"He died, as was his wish, at home. His family were by his bedside," he wrote.

"If you have our phone numbers, please dont ring yet. There is too much going on."





A provocative figure, Ellis started out his 40-year career as a political writer incensed by the Vietnam War. He worked as a speechwriter for Labor leaders Bob Carr, Paul Keating and Kim Beazley, before unsuccessfully contesting the Federal seat of Mackellar as an independent candidate against Bronwyn Bishop in 1994.

Acclaimed for his political commentary, Ellis wrote two books relating to his involvement with the Labor Party -- Goodbye Jerusalem and Goodbye Babylon.

At a low point in Ellis' career, the first edition of Goodbye Jerusalem was pulped in 1998 for defaming Tony Abbott, Peter Costello and their wives.

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Ellis was married to author and screenwriter Anna Brooksbank and they had three children together -- Jack, Tom and Jenny.

An obituary on the Independent Australia website referred to Ellis as a "true genius...with a once in a generation facility for language."

"Often controversial, frequently confronting and always brilliant, Bob was simply unable to turn a dull phrase. He wrote movies and plays and books and articles and appeared on stage and gave speeches and was, in short, a brilliant, bubbling spring of creativity."

Ellis was a regular contributor to the site.

Vale Bob Ellis. A brilliant writer, a wicked wit, a true believer with every fibre of his being. And so it goes.  Bill Shorten (@billshortenmp) April 3, 2016

My thoughts tonight are with Annie Brooksbank, playwright, scriptwriter and now Bob Ellis' grieving widow. RIP.  Mark Colvin (@Colvinius) April 3, 2016

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I read all Bob Ellis's diaries when I was 17 and loved them. He injected romanticism into political life, something we shouldn't lose.  Shaun Crowe (@shauncrowe) April 3, 2016

Ellis announced he had cancer on his personal blog in July last year.

The news is very bad and I may have months to live but it is more like weeks, the blog read.
Kokkai Ng via Getty Images Sign indicating to call 000 in case of emergency, on the side of a phone booth in Sydney, Australia.

At least 60 people have been evacuated from a suburb in Sydney's north after a pool chemical warehouse caught fire sending potentially toxic smoke across the area.

Police said the fire broke out at the warehouse on Jersey Street in Hornsby just before 6am Sunday.

Around 50 firefighters battled the blaze for several hours before it was extinguished mid-morning.

FRNSW crews are attending to a factory fire in Hornsby. Hazmat crews tasked due to the contents inside the factory.  NSW Incident Alerts (@nswincidents) April 2, 2016

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Police evacuated 30 people from neighbouring streets and a police spokeswoman told The Huffington Post that firefighters evacuated a further 30 residents.

The blaze threatened properties in the area, police said.

Authorities are telling locals to stay indoors and to keep their windows and doors closed as smoke from the fire impacts the area.

Hornsby: Building fire on the corner of Jersey & Bridge Streets. https://t.co/6rm43QpgOj#sun7https://t.co/hewoRSpnjd  7 News Sydney (@7NewsSydney) April 2, 2016

"They (firefighters) are concerned about the potential risks with the smoke," the police spokeswoman said.

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"Anyone with a health issue should avoid the area and don't go jogging through the smoke."

UPDATE: Adjacent properties under threat at Hornsby factory fire, up to 50 firefighters on the scene. #9Newspic.twitter.com/WuRVaIkF5V  Nine News Sydney (@9NewsSyd) April 2, 2016

A huge blaze has broken out at a pool chemical warehouse in #Hornsby. 30 people have been evacuated. @TheTodayShowpic.twitter.com/Ay3sD0yZF4  Natalia Cooper (@Natalia_Cooper9) April 2, 2016

She said it was unknown whether anyone was inside the warehouse at the time the fire broke out and that the cause of the blaze was unclear.

She said rail services could be impacted because the warehouse backed onto a train line.

The Pacific Highway and some local roads are closed in the area due to the fire.

HORNSBY: #PacificHwy closed in both directions btn Mildred Ave and Bridge Rd due to a building fire. https://t.co/kOyrkr60NJ  Live Traffic Sydney (@LiveTrafficSyd) April 2, 2016
Stocktrek Images via Getty Images South China Sea, February 15, 2010 - The aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN-68), the guided-missile cruiser USS Chosin (CG-65), the guided-missile destroyers USS Sampson (DDG-102) and USS Pinckney (DDG-91), and the guided-missile frigate USS Rentz (FFG-46) operate in formation in the South China Sea. The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group is conducting operations in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of responsibility.

Japan is dispatching a submarine to Sydney in a bid to win over Australia's contract to purchase maritime arms to boost defence around the Asia-Pacific region. Tensions are high in the Asia-Pacific region as China becomes more assertive over its claims on the South China Sea, an action that has alarmed surrounding nations as well as nations that have interests in the region such as the United States. If we are going to achieve peace, prosperity and mutual understanding in the Asia-Pacific region, is brute force the way to diffusing the tensions in the volatile region?

Japan sent a Soryu submarine to impress the Australians with their high-tech maritime defence as they try to wrestle a deal from competitors like France and Germany. Four hundred and fifty Japanese personnel are expected to take part in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force, claiming the military exercise will improve tactical skills.

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For many observers, this is not just a business deal for the Japanese, but a chance to flaunt its submarines and arsenal power; to tell the region and the world Japan is, once again, a serious player. History has told us this is not the first time that Japan, under the patronage of the US, is building up its military in response to perceived Chinese aggression. Knowing that China and Japan have deep, almost ingrained hatred towards each other since the 19th Century, the US is playing a dangerous game in provoking more tensions in the region.

In the eyes of outsiders, there is probably nothing particularly valuable in the East China Sea. For China and Japan, it is about national pride. In addition to history and war reparations, a serious strain in China-Japan relations, there is the Diaoyu Islands/Senkaku Islands dispute.

The source of the tension stems from the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), when the then Qing Government was forced to forfeit Taiwan and "all islands appertaining or belonging to the said island of Taiwan" under the Shimonoseki Treaty. Due to the Allied victory in the Second World War, these islands were returned to China after Japan agreed to surrender unconditionally. However, to respond to the communist threat from the newly established People's Republic of China, the US decided to change the rules to strengthen its ally Japan's position to counter against growing communist power in the Asia-Pacific region. As a result, the USA and Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Conference to allow Japan to patrol and exercise control of these islands -- an agreement that China does not recognise and thus have carried on tensions until this day.

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In addition to the Diaoyu Islands/Senkaku Islands dispute, a number of Asia-Pacific nations such as China, Vietnam, The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei are contesting claims over the Paracel, Scarborough and Spratley Islands. These rival claims, coupled with external influence from superpowers such as the USA, are encouraging contenders to turn to militarisation as a way to achieve their objectives.

With China's growing assertion in the region, its smaller Asian neighbours are fretful of their sovereignty and China's growing influence in the region. Historically, China had been the dominating cultural and political force across the region. With its vast economy, geography and growing military expenditure, the Chinese are becoming more confident with their territorial claims. The US, who is eager to reaffirm its role in the Asia-Pacific region as demonstrated by a number of speeches from President Barack Obama, staunchly backs Japan and other nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines with its military build-up.

If we can learn one thing from history, it should be that using military might is counterproductive against a growing power like China, who has momentum to become one of the next global superpowers. With Western powers like the US and even Australia joining the chorus of other Asian countries to challenge China's claims, this would only provoke Beijing to possibly take drastic actions. Forums like ASEAN, APEC and East Asia Summit have attempted to address these issues, but have been futile since there were no intentions of peaceful resolutions. So is there a role for Australia to play?

A militarising Asia-Pacific is detrimental to Australia's economic and geopolitical interests. Unlike many countries around the world, Australia enjoys productive bilateral relationships with China, the US and Japan. Given Australia's geographical location and bicultural understanding, there is a leadership role for Australia to play to pacify militarisation and regional conflict. Rather than taking sides, Australia should get on the diplomatic front foot to facilitate dialogues and discussions with all interested parties to avoid armed conflict. Australia should not diminish its diplomatic influence in the region by taking sides on these disputes. In fact, what we should be doing is serving as a bridge for these much-needed discussions to take place so tensions can be defused.
Each day brings news of struggle and discord.



Brussels is bombed. Lahore is attacked. Refugees flee war-torn homes, risking life and limb to pursue hope and dignity in distant lands.



Headlines at home are no less sinister.



Presidential candidates contend less on the playing field of ideas and vision, and more on the volume of diatribe and the bitterness of personal attacks.



These struggles signal a deep intolerance that is all too pervasive in our modern world.



It is tempting, in this context, to meet intolerance with a call for greater tolerance.



But our fractured world needs something more - it needs respect.



Several years ago, I recall my friend Rick Little, founder of the International Youth Foundation, being the first to describe to me his distaste for tolerance as an objective for a better global society.



Tolerance implies control of anger, the repression of dislike, and a grudging apathy toward the people and things we'd rather avoid.



While tolerance may tamp violence, reduce vitriol, and soften the blow of human excess, what it does not do is foster the empathy and understanding needed to solve our greatest problems.



Only respect can do that.



Respect is bolder, and harder, than tolerance.



And it's something we badly need in public policy, politics, business, communities, homes, and in our basic discourse as human beings.



When we seek tolerance, we're not doing enough. We're not opening our minds to truly understand others. We're not showing our own humility and gratitude for what we have in the world, nor are we realizing that others might not have as much as we do. We're not overcoming ignorance, unlocking prejudice, or building awareness about who others are, where they come from, and what they hope to achieve in the future.



Tolerance requires suppression.



Respect demands much more.



Respect insists on acceptance. It means I accept you have your rights, your freedoms - including the freedom to speak out against my position -, and your own distinct path and destiny in the world. And respect requires me to acknowledge that you earned it.



In this way, respect also calls on us to reexamine our own position in the world. Even if I disagree with what you are doing, respect means I don't prevent you from pursuing your deserved path, just as you should not prevent me from pursuing my own.



If we approach our interactions with this type of good faith, we will build understanding that ultimately leads to respect.



This has implications that span the world of policy, politics, business, and beyond.



So, what does respect versus tolerance look like in action?



Consider the refugee crisis.



When a million-plus Syrians pour onto Europe's shores and into her cities, tolerance means casting our gaze aside and going about our daily lives while others raise their voice in condemnation, labeling each would-be countrymen as a danger to society, a burden on the public dole, a usurper of jobs that should instead go to domestic workers.



Respect, on the other hand, means first considering the struggle refugees endured to reach Europe. And while it does not demand that we accept them into our homes and our countries without end, it does demand us to understand and empathize with the forces that led them to attempt such a perilous journey in the first place.



Or look at America's coming election.



Tolerance among candidates would mean ditching the ad-hominem character assaults that have come to consume TV debates in favor of silent deferment as others make their point.



Respect, by contrast, would mean actively welcoming an opponent's point of view, and using it as impetus to lift the logic and ambition of one's own viewpoint.



Respect in our nation's politics is especially important, because it raises the level of our public debate, and ensures the ideas that emanate from electoral contests breed policy solutions on par with the challenges we face.



Let's turn to business.



The minimum wage is a major issue in American public policy. Employers often dismiss worker requests for more pay as an unbearable burden on business, while labor lambasts this recalcitrance as greed and an unremitting focus on profits.



Tolerance, here, leads to an unhealthy equilibrium in which employers face high turnover among staff, while workers shift from job to job in search of higher pay and more regular hours.



Respect entails an honest and open discussion in which workers come to understand more fully the operational and competitive pressure under which their business is working, and employers empathize more deeply with how low pay and shifting hours can make it difficult for workers to provide for their families.



Such discussions can enhance the equilibrium for both parties, breeding one in which workers earn a better living and are more productive, and in which employers save money and boost profits due to reduced turnover among staff.



Or consider diplomacy.



Diplomacy nowadays is no longer the sole territory of government but rather requires the discourse and the engagement of leaders across public, private, and civil society sectors. Tolerance would mean being indifferent to others and thus alienating ones "opponents" and its peoples. Diplomacy is a departure from indifference and its defining feature is respect: connecting over culture, values and the need for co-creation of policies, exchanges, and protocols.


African cuisines are striving to achieve the visibility and popularity among consumers in the Global North that other culinary traditions from the Global South have been enjoying. On the occasion of a public event at the New School, I had the opportunity of discussing the landscape of African cuisines in the US and their trajectory in the cosmopolitan world of fine dining with Senegalese chef, entrepreneur and author Pierre Thiam.

His personal history, from a student of chemistry and physics to a successful restaurateur and ambassador for African cuisines, is tightly interwoven with the historical developments of the post-colonial transition and the social changes brought about by dynamics of globalization.

Thiam does not embrace the romantic idea of original, untouched cuisines in Africa, pointing out how the continent has been connected with other civilizations for centuries. We can mention the inclusion of North Africa in the Roman empire, the expansion of Muslim civilizations into Sub-Saharan Africa, the close trade and cultural connections between East Africa and South Asia through the Indian Ocean commercial routes, the Atlantic slave trade and, more recently, the expansion of European Colonial empires. Thiam's Dakar is a cosmopolitan city that negotiates its colonial heritage, for good and bad, with its desire for modernity and relevance. French-style baguettes, embraced in the past as a symbol of refinement, are often preferred to local grains such as fonio, pointing to the effects of what chef Thiam defined as "colonial brainwashing" -- the implicit acceptance that everything coming from the white occupiers was intrinsically superior to one's native customs. The devastating psychological consequences of this tension, both at the individual and at the communal level, were reflected also on the food system. The French imported what was called "broken rice" from the territories they controlled in Indochina to replace the traditional varieties of rice that Africans had domesticated centuries before, in order to allow local farmers to concentrate on peanuts, which originated in the Americas and had become economically valuable once oil extraction technologies were perfected. Nevertheless, the "broken rice" was absorbed into Senegalese cuisines to create new delicious dishes. At the same time, Vietnamese nems became integral part of menus for local celebrations. The contemporary vibrancy of Senegalese cuisine and other cuisines from Africa is the result of resilience honed through hybridization, power negotiations, and cultural violence.

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Nostalgia for the familiar flavors from home played an important role in determining Thiam's professional growth. His first interest in cuisine was stimulated by a copy of the Larousse Gastronomique, found at home. The volume extolled classic French gastronomy, a sign of the pervasive influence of French culinary high culture. Its pictures and recipes provided windows into a faraway and exotic world that Thiam would get to know only years later, when he moved to the US. In fact, in Senegal cooking was considered a female occupation, and although Thiam enjoyed eating, the idea of working in kitchen never dawned on him. However, when he moved to America and found himself working in restaurant kitchens, he enjoyed and found comfort in the dishes that the women in his immigrant community prepared, shared, and at times sold. Building on his sensory memory and on the food these women provided, and applying the restaurant techniques he was learning, Thiam started cooking Senegalese food. From that moment on, his frequent trips to Senegal and other places in Africa allowed him to constantly research the history, the practices, the scents and texture of local cooking traditions. His approach is almost ethnographic, as his cookbooks suggest.
Islamic State Militants in al-Raqqa

This week we begin a two part series on a post-ISIS Middle East. In Part I we look at "The Middle East after ISIS." Next week, in Part II, we examine whether a post-ISIS Middle East can be stabilized and what role, if any, the U.S. and its allies can play.

By all accounts the Islamic State caliphate is teetering. The capture of Palmyra, although highly touted for its archeological ruins, was also an important military objective. The city lies along the M 20 Route to Deir ez-Zur, further east on the Euphrates River. The capture of Deir ez Zur would largely divide Islamic State (IS) territory in Syria from that in Iraq, further splintering the Islamic State. Raqqa and Mosul, arguably the most important cities, politically and economically, in Islamic State are slowly but inexorably being surrounded by a military noose. Dabiq, a city of critical psychological importance in Islamic State's messianic apocalyptic narrative, finds itself in a similar situation.

Technically, Islamic State consists of 30 different wilayahs (provinces), 20 of which are in Iraq and Syria, and 10 are outside of its core territory. It no longer controls all 20 of the provinces in Iraq and Syria and some, like the wilayah of Baghdad and Kirkuk in Iraq or Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, it has never actually controlled. The Islamic State caliphate would therefore survive in the 10 remaining wilayahs, even if the core territory in Syria and Iraq was recaptured.

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Moreover, it is likely that new wilayahs will be created in the future. The fifth edition of the Islamic State's propaganda magazine Dabiq, titled "Remaining and Expanding," outlined the procedure for creating new wilayahs in the Islamic State. To establish a new province a Jihadist group must organize themselves into a single, unified body, and then publically declare their allegiance to the Emir of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. They must nominate a Wali (governor), subject to the approval of al-Baghdadi, a Shura Council to provide religious leadership, and devise a military strategy to secure territorial control of the wilayah and to establish Islamic State's version of Sharia law. Once these conditions have been met and the Emir's approval is secured; the new province would be recognized as part of the Islamic State caliphate and receive support from the leadership in al-Raqqa.

This was also the edition where Islamic State announced the creation of new Islamic State wilayahs in Sinai, Libya, Yemen, Algeria and the Arabian Peninsula. In later editions of Dabiq, IS acknowledged that it has supporters in East Turkestan (the Chinese region of Xinjiang), as well as in Indonesia and the Philippines, and that at some point wilayahs would be declared there as well. Significantly, once a wilayah is declared, other jihadist groups that refuse to recognize the new province, swear allegiance to al-Baghdadi, or accept the authority of the Islamic State Caliphate, would be considered illegitimate.

Nonetheless, the loss of its core territory in Iraq and Syria would be a significant blow to Islamic State. The caliphate might "officially" survive in the remaining provinces, although most are not really controlled by Islamic State affiliates and largely exist in name only, but many of the trappings of a political state would be lost. Significantly, outside of the core territory, there is only one city, Derna in Libya, which is actually controlled by Islamic State. The role of Islamic state as an insurgency in Iraq and Syria, and as an international jihadist movement elsewhere would, however, also continue.

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Such an outcome is by no means a foregone conclusion. Even the most optimistic scenario places it at least 18 to 24 months in the future. Much can happen elsewhere, especially in North Africa in general and Libya in particular, during that interval that could either accelerate the destruction of Islamic State or significantly mitigate the consequences of the loss of its current territory in Iraq and Syria.

More importantly, what would a post-Islamic State Middle East look like? The simple answer is probably not a whole lot different.

From West Africa to the Hindu Kush of Central Asia, the Islamic world is in a state of crisis. Not only does this crisis encompass virtually the entire Middle East, but it extends well beyond it to include North Africa and West Africa, including the Sahel fringe of sub-Saharan Africa, all the way to the Indian Ocean, as well as large portions of central Asia, and in particular Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At the core of that crisis is a loss of political legitimacy that is undermining, and in some cases outright destroying, the topography of nation states that were established as a consequence of the post-World War I partition of the Ottoman Empire and the later mid-twentieth century European decolonization in Africa and Asia. Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya are all failed states. There are many more across north and central Africa on the brink.

It's unclear what a post-Islamic State Iraq and Syria will look like. In the case of Syria, it is clear that the Assad family dominated Syria of old will never return. It's likely that some kind of autonomous or semi-autonomous Kurdish state, the so called Rojava, will emerge along Syria's northern border with Turkey. A development that may help stabilize Syria, but prove to be destabilizing to Turkey's relationship with its own Kurdish citizens and by extension to Turkey itself.

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On March 17, leaders of Rojava's three cantons declared themselves a federal region within Syria. Damascus, Ankara and Washington all condemned the declaration--possibly the only time during the Syrian Civil War that all three governments actually agreed on anything. It is hard to see, however, how some kind of de facto Kurdish state will not emerge in Syria.

The disposition of Syria's Sunni inhabitants remains to be seen. Even if some kind of federated Sunni state was to emerge in Syria, it is likely that a jihadist insurgency against the Assad government would continue. At best, the Syrian Civil War will move from a high intensity conflict to a lower intensity one, but the fighting will most likely remain.

The situation in Iraq will probably be similar. The Kurdish Regional government in Erbil has stopped short of declaring its independence, although privately it has made it clear to American diplomats that independence is its ultimate goal. It has certainly been acting in an increasingly autonomous manner. Ultimately, Erbil's autonomy will depend on the extent it is successful in getting control over the export of the oil it produces. Such control will likely involve the cooperation and support of the Turkish government. Ankara's willingness to lend its support will be shaped by Turkey's conflicting desire to increase its influence in Iraq, while at the same time minimizing the influence of an autonomous Rojava.

Dealing with a Sunni insurgency in Iraq will ultimately revolve around a political solution to the status of Iraq's Sunni citizens. Iraq has been reluctant to organize and arm a Sunni militia to repeat the success that the American sponsored Awakening Councils had in containing jihadist activity in Iraq's Sunni triangle for fear that such a militia would become the core of an armed Sunni opposition to the Baghdad government.

At the same time it has failed to present a credible plan for a meaningful political role for Iraq's Sunnis. It has turned a blind eye to the Shia militia driven, ongoing ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad, or the Shia militia reprisals against Sunnis. Without a political solution, jihadist violence in the Sunni triangle and terrorist attacks in the Shiite areas of Iraq will continue. The intensity of the violence may diminish somewhat, but it will not go away.

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The petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula have maintained some semblance of stability through a combination of financial largess to its citizens, a highly sophisticated internal security apparatus, and the combination of the latest advanced weaponry buttressed by American security guarantees.

All of these elements have been financed by the region's oil wealth. A source of financing, which in the new reality of sub-$50 per barrel oil, will be difficult to maintain. Couple that with the resurrection of historic Persian imperialism, this time in the guise of defending the rights of downtrodden Shia minorities, and in the case of Bahrain and the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia outright majorities, and you have all of the elements to create yet another vortex of instability in the Middle East. That does not mean that the petro-monarchies of the region are poised to topple domino-like into chaos. They may well survive for another generation. It does mean, however, that the trend in the region is toward more instability and chaos not less.

The situation in northern and western Africa is decidedly grimmer. The Libyan Civil War has become a maelstrom that has not only destroyed Libya as a functioning nation state but has sucked in jihadists from though out Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. It's estimated that there are approximately 10,000 foreign jihadists in Libya. Between a third and a half of them are affiliated with Islamic State, and the balance with other jihadist organizations there. Roughly 80 percent of those jihadists are drawn from Africa. Regardless of what happens in Libya, these jihadists will eventually return home and become a new source of instability. This is especially true of Tunisia, which has supplied between one quarter and one third of all of the foreign jihadists in Libya.

Libya's African neighbors cannot afford the sophisticated weaponry or internal security apparatus of the petro-monarchies. Only two countries have any appreciable quantities of oil or gas--Nigeria and Algeria. In both countries that oil wealth, relative to the size of their populations, will not allow the kind of financial largess that has bought a modicum of stability in the Gulf. Most of the nations in the Saharan and sub-Saharan Sahel zone are already fragile to begin with and will be hard pressed to deal with the long-term challenge of expanding jihadist activity within their borders.

Moreover, with the exception of France, there is little appetite for Western military intervention in this region. Even the French interventions, limited as they were, in Mali, Chad, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast and Djibouti, required varying degrees of American logistical support. Currently France also has additional troops stationed in Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso as part of Operation Burkhane designed to disrupt the flow of jihadists across the Sahara. Whether Paris has an appetite for an extended military deployment in its former African colonies remains to be seen.

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Central Asia presents a mixed picture. The "stans," the former Soviet Central Asian Republics, are by comparison relatively stable. All of them, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgzstan and Tajikistan, are dealing with varying degrees of jihadist insurgencies and all four are directly or indirectly affected by low oil prices, either because they are significant energy producers like Kazakhstan, or because their economics are closely tied to Russia's and they feel the effects of a deteriorating Russian economy.

Moreover, Moscow is engaged in what is increasingly seen at the Kremlin as a potentially existential conflict with China to retain its influence in the Central Asian region. Control of the oil and gas pipelines that bring the regions hydrocarbons to Europe gives the Kremlin a great deal of influence here and increases its leverage with its European customers. It also allows it to ensure that the region's energy resources do not compete with or undermine Russia's own energy exports, either presently to Europe, and in the future to China and the rest of Asia.

More significantly, the region is flanked by two hotbeds of jihadist activity--the Caucasus in the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan on the east. Russia fought two wars to control jihadist activity in Chechnya, and the threat of jihadist sponsored violence in Syria and Iraq spilling into the Caucasus is judged to be a major risk at the Kremlin. Significantly, after Tunisia, the next biggest source of foreign jihadists in Syria, are from the Caucasus.

The eastern flank of central Asia is not much better. For now there is little prospect of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan. As long as Western military assistance is maintained at current levels, it is likely that the Afghan government will retain control of the cities even if it steadily loses ground in the countryside to the Taliban. Russia has cultivated close ties to the Tajik community in northern Afghanistan. It has supplied military and financial assistance to the Tajik dominated Afghan Northern Alliance that is believed, by Western intelligence agencies, to be in the range of some $200 million a year.

If the Afghan government were too collapse, Russia would be expected to support a Tajik state in northern Afghanistan as a buffer between the "stans" and a potentially Taliban dominated government in Kabul. Iran seems to have a similar strategy with the predominantly Shiite Hazara in western Afghanistan. Should that eventuality happen, Afghanistan would join the steadily growing roster of failed and dismembered states.

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The imminent failure of Pakistan as a coherent state has been predicted many times. Almost half of Pakistan's territory is based on the spurious legitimacy of the Durand agreement between Afghanistan and Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. The Pakistani government's reliance on jihadist organizations organized, funded and largely directed by its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) as a vehicle for extending its influence in Afghanistan and Kashmir, and as a form of proxy warfare against India, is a source of political instability throughout central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Moreover, it is not entirely clear to what extent the civilian government in Islamabad can effectively control Pakistan's military or its intelligence agency.

In Pakistan's case, it would be the first failed state since the Soviet Union, to possess nuclear weapons. In the case of the USSR, the nuclear proliferation consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, were largely contained. At least that's what Western intelligence agencies believe. That's probably true since if a terrorist organization had successfully diverted a Soviet nuclear weapon the odds are that it would have been used by now.

In the event of the failure of the Pakistani state, however, it is hard to be sanguine that the United States would have the same level of success in securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. To suggest that Pakistan is on the verge of falling part would be overly alarmist. Here too, the Pakistani regime could well muddle through for another generation, but here also the trend is toward more chaos and instability in the future, not less. Historians will long debate whether Islamic jihadism was a consequence of the crisis of political legitimacy in the Middle East or its cause. The answer is probably a little of both. The question of whether American sponsorship of the Afghan mujahedeen ultimately metastasized into the current phenomenon of international jihadism will be equally debated.

Privately, Russian diplomats are fond of pointing out to their American counterparts that it was the West that ultimately released the jihadist genie into the world and that today we are paying the price for creating the Afghan mujahedeen a generation ago. American diplomats, at least those versed in Cold War history, are quick to reply that modern terrorism in the Middle East and Western Europe, from the PLO to Bader Meinhoff, was after all invented, organized and funded by the Soviet KGB. In the long run, like most academic debates, it really won't matter much anyway, nor will it change the reality that we face today.
From the US government's perspective, the rules of the nation-state systems and existing international norms suggest that if the US does a favor for a country (in this case, the Islamic Republic), Tehran will absolutely reciprocate. But unfortunately what many so-called Iran policy makers, in the West, do not comprehend is that Iran's domestic and foreign policies are not shaped the same way that those of other modern nation-states' are informed.

Iran's domestic and foreign policies are shaped by the interactions and contradictions among three concentric circles of forces, rather than solely by national interests. (I will not delve into these three pillars in this article)

Currently, the ruling clerics of Iran are empowered and emboldened to an unprecedented level, where they are launching ballistic missiles, in the midst of the day, for the world to see. I can not imagine that these open, belligerent and provocative actions would have ever happened if the Islamic Republic was still under UNSC sanctions, or if the White House was not following the carrot-but-no-stick policies.

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The Islamic Republic is publicly acknowledging their IRGC role in helping the Syrian dictator, and publicly galvanizing the Shiite proxies, and giving birth to more Shiite militias, to fuel the sectarian conflict. Americans thought that the US relief of sanctions against the Islamic Republic and the appeasement policies, would definitely generate a favorable reaction from Iranian leaders towards the US. But again, Western politicians appear to be naive in comparison to their Iranian counterparts.

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who previously gave his blessing to Rouhani's nuclear team and congratulated them for reaching a nuclear deal with the P5+1, is now turning the trend around after he has achieved his objectives, after IRGC and Khamenei has received billions of dollars, after Iran's ruling politicians witnessed Obama's weakness, and after Khamenei became confident that UNSC sanctions can not be snapped back anymore thanks to Russia and China's veto power in the UN Security Council.

In fact, Khamenei appears to be preparing the field to pull out of the nuclear deal, which is President Obama's utmost nightmare. President Obama has shown that he will do anything to maintain the nuclear deal- his foreign policy legacy and "accomplishment"- intact.

In Iran's politics, Obama's concessions and appeasement attitude mean weakness. The more you give the ruling clerics, the more they want and the more they are empowered to pursue their regional hegemonic ambitions. These are basic rules. Elementary reading of Middle Eastern history would tell Iran's policy makers about these basic rules of how politics works in Middle East.

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Khamenei: "when I say the enemy, I mean the US government"- Khamenei's Shrewd Tactics

In his hometown of Mashahad, where Khamenei recently gave his yearly speech, he heavily criticized President Rouhani, Iran's foreign foreign minister, Javad Zarif, and he explained that how the United States remains the preeminent enemy of the Islamic Republic.

In addition, Khamenei also warned the Iranian youths not to be trapped by President Obama and the White House's last week message to the Iranians. Mockingly, he argued that Obama's latest message and the White House creation of a haft-sin sofreh [the traditional Nowruz food] were methods to deceive the Iranian youth.

Khamenei has several tactics with his recent lashing out at Rouhani's and Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif and the United States.

The fact is that if it was not for Khamenei's blessing, Rouhani would have not been capable of continuing with the negotiations and reaching the nuclear deal. Even before Rouhani came to power, Khamenei and senior cadre of IRGC were preparing the platform for a nuclear deal. But they are emboldened now, are in a stronger position vis a vis the US after sanctions were lifted, and they do not need the deal anymore after achieving their objectives.

In addition, in order to preserve his power, Khamenei has always attempted to play the game of the moderates versus hardliners for the Western viewers. While in public he shows his support for the hardliners, in private he gives the green light to the moderates.

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In Mashhad, where a significant amount of the hardline clerics reside, Khamenei sends his real message that he continues to respect the Islamic Republic's ideological principles of opposing the United States and preventing rapprochement between Tehran and the "Great Satan".

In addition, not only does he assure his hardline social base in the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij and the army that he is on their side rather than on the side of moderates, but also he is empowering them to begin controlling the moderates and more freely criticizing Rouhani's team.

Third, whenever a president gains popularity, Khamenei attempts to curb the president by empowering hardliners. Fourth, Khamenei's modus of operandi is to avoid any situation that holds him accountable for major issues. On the one hand he gives license to and instructs Rouhani to make a deal, on the other hand he tells the public that this is not what he wanted. Therefore, if Iran pulls out of the nuclear deal or people do not see the fruit of the sanctions relief, they would point fingers to Rouhani. Finally, by criticizing Rouhani, Zarif, and the US, Khamenei seems to be preparing the platform to pull out of the nuclear agreement after sanctions have been lifted.

_______________

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is an American political scientist, business advisor and the president of the International American Council on the Middle East. Harvard-educated, Rafizadeh serves on the advisory board of Harvard International Review. An American citizen, he is originally from Iran and Syria, lived most of his life in Iran and Syria till recently. He is a board member of several significant and influential international and governmental institutions, and he is native speaker of couple of languages including Arabic and Persian. He also speaks English and Dari, and can converse in French, Hebrew.

You can sign up for Dr. Rafizadeh's newsletter for the latest news and analyses on HERE. You can also order his books on HERE.

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You can learn more about Dr. Rafizadeh on HERE.
UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 17: Actor George Clooney and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, on the way to a United Way press conference in support of the Calling for 211 Act of 2003. The act supports the creation of a 211 hotline for community and volunteer services. (Photo By Chris Maddaloni/Roll Call/Getty Images)

The Sanders campaign attacked Hillary Clinton for raising the funds needed to change the Congress, state houses and state legislatures; all necessary if the "revolution" Sanders talks about is to happen. Sanders responds this way to a question from Rachel Maddow. "Rival Hillary Clinton has been fundraising for her campaign as well as the Democratic Party. Will the Sanders campaign begin this type of fundraising as well, Maddow asked. "We'll see," Sanders said. "Right now, our focus is on winning the nomination." It seems Sanders one-note candidacy continues and his campaign can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Hillary Clinton knows how to get things done in government. She understands what it would mean if Democrats controlled the Congress, both House and Senate, and why it is important to stop Republicans at the state level from gerrymandering congressional districts in their favor. Because of this she set up the Hillary Victory Fund, a fundraising mechanism to help the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and State Democratic Parties win elections at all levels. Thirty-two state parties have joined this initiative. Bernie Sanders has also set up such a fund. The difference is Hillary is raising millions of dollars for it and Sanders has raised about $1,000. Hillary is taking her valuable time and that of her campaign staff to set up fundraisers for this effort and it's not stopping her from fighting for the nomination. Fact is if Sanders cared to help anyone but himself he could simply send out an email to his supporters, many of whom already maxed out on primary money to him, asking them to donate to his fund for the DNC and state parties.

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One of the targets of Sanders attack was George Clooney who is married to Amal Alamuddin Clooney, lawyer activist and author. They have agreed to be hosts at two dinners, one in San Francisco and one at their home in Los Angeles for the Hillary Victory Fund. At both dinners the starting ask is $33,400 per person and the SF dinner has a top ask of $353,400. Sanders immediately attacked Clinton for asking Clooney to host these dinners. He tried to link Clooney to his Wall Street tirades and to link anyone who would attend such a dinner to Wall Street. The problem is George Clooney made his money from acting and his wife is a world respected activist for progressive people and causes. He says he actually likes Clooney and one would assume he did so when he realized this is just the type of activist he should want to support and get support from. Clooney "played an important part in anti-war activism and humanitarian work. Since 2008, Clooney has served as one of the United Nations Messengers of Peace. He has been advocating for Darfur, as well as organized the Hope for Haiti telethon to raise funds for victims. Clooney was arrested in 2012 during a protest outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington D.C where he was protesting the war in Darfur."

Clinton and Clooney are asking other activists with money to join them and spend it on the "revolution" Sanders keeps talking about. Except for $2,700 which is the limit Hillary can receive from any one person for the primary this money doesn't benefit her primary campaign and most of the people attending have already donated that limit to her. So all this money goes to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) which is allowed to raise $33,400 from a single person and each of the thirty-two Democratic State Parties that can accept up to $10,000 into their federal accounts. This money strengthens the State Parties so they can focus on raising their own funds for local candidates as well. The irony of attacking Hillary for raising this money for Democrats is should by any chance Bernie Sanders be the Democratic nominee it would benefit him.

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The fragility of breakthroughs in the many crises afflicting the Arab region does not necessarily mean the breakthroughs are transient. Rather, this fragility must invite more local, regional, and international resolve so that the available opportunities become plausible and serious policies and solutions. Some of what is happening in the Libyan, Yemeni, and Syrian issues, especially in terms of internationally brokered diplomatic efforts, is hopeful, promising and deserves serious investments rather than disregard. In truth, the main responsibility now rests with the US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. For one thing, the two men have portrayed themselves as a "rescue team" who are trying to secure deals and perhaps even the so-called Grand Bargain. However, this does not absolve others of responsibility and accountability, especially given the dismal conditions in the three Arab countries in question in addition to Lebanon and Iraq. Specifically, this means Arab, Iranian, Turkish, and European leaders, bearing in mind the varying degree of their culpabilities in the region's disasters. True, both US President Obama and Russian President Putin are behind the decisions being implemented by the Kerry-Lavrov duo, but history will remember them equally as witnesses to the destruction of Syria, and the displacement and dispossession of its people - and children. The four men will equally be remembered as enablers of an Iranian policy that has helped disrupt an Arab country's march towards a normal, healthy life. But these men can still reshape their historic legacy if they show seriousness and honesty in pushing for breakthroughs, rather than be remembered for mere ploys. While Libya is not the product of American or Russian policies as much as of European policies, the US-Russian support for accords on Libya remains crucial. Likewise in Yemen; while not the making of US-Russian policies, their role in transforming the country from the site of a devastating war to a site for regional accord is imperative for both Yemen and regional relations. Naturally, Syria remains at the top of the issues where Kerry and Lavrov's legacies could be cemented if they don't want their names to be linked to bloodbaths. Thus, the two men have an exceptional opportunity that will not last long, to bring about a radical change in their diplomatic record in the Middle East. Perhaps history could then efface their hallmarks in the region's tragedies, and remember instead how they adjusted course and worked hard to carve out solutions, away from considerations of ego and narcissism.

Certainly, these two veterans are acting in accordance with the national interests of their two countries, and this is their job as foreign ministers. However, their diplomatic roles and their implications for the Middle East in particular have been marked by their characters and personal relations. For this reason, the focus on this important duo in the history of the Middle East is not arbitrary or random. Their loyalty to their respective presidents is clear. John Kerry appeared shocked when he led the choir promising severe consequences against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for crossing that infamous "red line" of President Obama. But Kerry then rushed to back off, while many expected him to resign having gone too far in voicing warnings only to backtrack so quickly.

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John Kerry was sincere in his pursuit of a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, making dozens of visits in the hope of securing some achievement. However, political reality forced him to admit to the failure of his efforts, and to set aside that issue, focusing instead on the Iranian and Syrian issues with his friend Lavrov. They set off together away from the red line and towards the golden formula that satisfied them and Israel: dismantling Syria's chemical weapons arsenal, in return for the US not conducting strikes that would topple the Assad regime.

Sergei Lavrov faithfully carried out the Kremlin's policy, which set its sights on Syria as the stepping stone towards restoring Russia's regional and global influence, and at the same time, towards reviving Russian nationalism to mobilize popular support for Russia's revanchism. Lavrov replaced his signature smile he had as ambassador to UN with a frown and a loud voice, delivering the firmness and inflexible policy of Russia in the new era. His mind, memory, and heart were preoccupied by Ukraine and the anger over NATO-led sanctions against Russia; Libya and NATO's "trickery" against Russia in the UN Security Council; and concerns over the Western support for the Islamists' rise to power, especially in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring that was a source of a lot of consternation for Moscow. This to the Kremlin was a toxic combination, but Lavrov found an antidote through his close relationship with his American counterpart as he sought to build mutual trust.

The experience and acumen of the two men have allowed them to try to make history, by turning the page on US animus with Iran and concluding a deal on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. Russia was the main gateway for the American passage to Iran, and on this issue in particular, Lavrov secured for Kerry what Obama had set out to achieve, namely, the normalization of American-Iranian relations.

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The two men realized from the beginning that absolute focus on the nuclear issue and refusing to discuss Iran's regional ambitions meant giving consent to Iran to continue meddling in the Arab countries. The difference is that Lavrov consented to this wilfully seeing as that was the Kremlin's policy and given Russia's alliance with Iran in Syria, while Kerry was implementing the White House's policy of deliberate denial and appeasement.

The result was the same: the US-Russian blessing of Iranian influence in Iraq, Lebanon through Hezbollah, Yemen through the Houthis, and Syria through Iran's intervention in the war.

A few weeks and months ago, signs emerged of preparations in Yemen and Syria, that could be the result of Russian decisions quintessentially and policies that the Russian and American top diplomats may have helped forge.

In Yemen, where Russian-Saudi and American-Saudi relations have dimensions that go beyond the bilateral, it seems that Moscow and Washington are seriously pushing for radical solutions. The UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed is preparing for a key round of negotiations between the Yemeni parties in Kuwait on April 18. The relationship between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis is taking a promising path, if pledges made are implemented. If progress is made on the five key axes of the talks in Kuwait, Yemen could soon be on its way to peace. This requires naturally not only a US-Russian decision, but also for Saudi Arabia, which leads the Arab coalition, to implement concrete measures that would show to the Yemenis a serious desire to aid and rebuild their country, now and not later. Confidence measures should start immediately, and Yemen is also a key stop for Saudi-Iranian confidence building measures.

The hope for a breakthrough in Syria could be expanded, if Russian diplomacy proves that it is not manoeuvring but is intent to broker a serious political solution that goes beyond stopping the bleeding. The political solution is being led by Russia at the decision of the United States. Yet this does not mean full American surrender to Moscow's designs in Syria, if the future of Bashar al-Assad is what will decide the future of Syria.

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Breakthroughs have occurred on many fronts, and military operations have decreased. Some besieged areas received relief and aid, and the future of Assad is being discussed in isolation from the consensus regarding the continuation of the regime. UN Envoy Staffan de Mistura, with US-Russian help, has been able to rescue the political process from collapse. He is determined to continue his mission beyond ceasefires, in order to reach political solutions and settlements. His determination, however, remains contingent upon Russian and American decisions and serious help from Kerry and Lavrov.

Libya is a candidate for a breakthrough too, despite its fragility. The European Union welcomed what it said was the only opportunity for unification and reconciliation, after head of the UN-backed reconciliation government Fayez Sarraj arrived in Tripoli. Sarraj arrived with a number of Libyan presidential council members through the main naval base in the capital. This is an important development that could prove crucial to Libya's democratic transition and march to peace, security, and stability, according to UN envoy Martin Kobler.

European foreign ministers welcomed the development and praised the courage of Sarraj and his companions. However, this is not enough. The European responsibility for what happened in Libya compels European leaders to be more serious and coherent in their approach to Libya. The Russian consent to NATO measures in Libya is a very important development, bearing in mind that Libya was the epitome of Western "treachery" in Moscow's thinking. Therefore, and given that the US does not hold the same level of responsibility for the Libyan tragedy as European powers, any investment by Kerry and Lavrov in pushing Libya towards recovery would be crucial to rallying Europeans behind a prudent salvation policy in Libya.

There is no reason to trust that the fragile breakthroughs will lead to a quantum leap and a grand bargain that would take the Middle East out of its crucible. However, it is not wise to pour cold water on these breakthroughs because of the lack of confidence in American designs and Russian plans for the region.
NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 05: Activists hold a protest near the Manhattan apartment of billionaire and Republican financier David Koch on June 5, 2014 in New York City. The demonstrators were protesting against the campaign contributions by the billionaire Koch brothers who are owners of Koch Industries Inc. The brothers have become a focus of Democrats and liberals as they are accused of skewing the political playing field with their finances. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Jane Mayer's new book,

, has already revealed many previously unknown facts about the Koch brothers in particular. For instance, reporting in the book forms the bulk of her latest New Yorker

, showing that the Kochs' newfound interest in criminal justice reform is primarily a front to boost their P.R. and to

In addition, the book shows that family patriach Fred Koch's fortune was cemented

Stalin, and was forged by providing crucial

. But even these stunning results only touch the surface of the interesting facts, some new and some expounded, in Mayer's new book.

The Nazi Connection

One of the earliest revelations from the book was the New York Times reporting that Fred Koch partnered with Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis to build an oil refinery that was "a critical industrial cog in Hitler's war machine." This is damning enough, but other passages from the book are equally jarring. For instance, in 1938, Fred wrote that,

"Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard...."

Mayer argues that he preferred their work ethic to the laziness and government dependence he believed was caused by the New Deal. Later, he hired a German nanny for his two sons who was "a fervent Nazi sympathizer who frequently touted Hitler's virtues." To round out his wrongheadedness, Fred claimed that, "the colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," expressed admiration of Mussolini and aided Stalin early in his career.

Ideological Indoctrination

One of the crucial parts of the Koch strategy is creating an intellectual infrastructure for their libertarian ideas. Mayer lays out the long history of the wealthy buying their way into universities, focusing on John M. Olin's strategy of funding programs for "Law and Economics" at prestigious universities. Olin, who believed that Marxism and Keynesianism were essentially the same, and claimed that liberalism and socialism were "synonymous," aimed to reshape the university. Rather than an explicitly conservative course, he preferred the law and economics program because it didn't appear ideological, but noted that "Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects." He said later, "Law and Economics is neutral, but it has the philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplined, it seems neutral, but it isn't in fact."

The Koch brothers are slightly less subtle, funding organizations like the Mercatus Center, which unabashedly support a plutocratic agenda. Mayer writes that George Pearson, an early Koch advisor, believed gifts to universities "didn't guarantee enough ideological control." He suggested that donors maintain control over hires. As of 2015, Mayer reports that the Kochs subsidized programs in 207 colleges and universities and were set to expand into 18 more. In some cases, such as West Virginia University and Florida State University, their foundations exert influence over hires. At Florida State, one student reported that the new introductory economics course included lessons that "sweatshop labor wasn't bad," and "climate change wasn't caused by humans and isn't a big issue." A libertarian donor gave grants to 63 colleges to fund programs that were "required to teach his favorite philosopher, the celebrator of self-interest Ayn Rand." In North Carolina, Art Pope funded think-tanks that pushed to cut public university budgets at the same time as he gave grants to support programs in "Western civilization and free-market economics."

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Even more disturbingly, the Koch brothers have recently been pushing their ideology into high schools. The curriculum teaches that,

"Franklin Roosevelt didn't alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminator, and the government, rather than business caused the 2008 recession."

Christina Wilkie and Joy Resmovits of Huffington Post report that the program, Young Entrepreneurs, which Charles and Elizabeth Koch founded in 1991, has expanded dramatically, with $1.45 million in assets in 2012. In 2012-2013, it was taught in 29 Kansas and Missouri schools, with plans to expand into 42.

Strategic Use of Racism

One of the dirtiest tactics on the right has long been the strategic use of racism for political gain. In his book on the subject, Ian Haney-Lopez argues that racism has been exploited to undermine the middle class. The Koch brothers and their network of organizations often stoop to low levels to ensure Republicans are elected.

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Mayer reports that during now-Gov. Sam Brownback's 1996 Senate race there was a "barrage of phone calls informing voters that his opponent Jill Docking, was a Jew." According to later reporting from the Wall Street Journal, an operative on the Koch payroll was involved in the ads. Later, the American Future Fund, which "received more than 92 percent of its 2012 revenues from two organizations connected to Charles and David Koch," became involved in an attack on former Democratic congressman Bruce Braley. The odious Koch-linked attack narrated,

"For centuries, Muslims built mosques where they won military victories. Now, they want to build a mosque at Ground Zero, where Islamic terrorists killed 3,000 Americans. It's like the Japanese building at Pearl Harbor."

Mayer notes that David Koch accepts the crank theory pushed by Dinesh D'Souza that Obama is secretly influenced by his father's anti-colonial agenda. She cites an interview Matthew Continetti had with David in which Continetti reports:

David agreed. "He's the most radical president we've ever had as a nation," he said, "and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had." David suggested the president's radicalism was tied to his upbringing. "His father was a hard core economic socialist in Kenya," he said. "Obama didn't really interact with his father face-to-face very much, but was apparently from what I read a great admirer of his father's points of view. So he had sort of antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life. It just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve.

Random Factoids

Mayer's book is frequently difficult to stomach: Learning how a powerful group of donors is engaging in a coordinated assault on American democracy is never easy. Nor is it easy to read about the children of Crossett, Arkansas, who stay inside breathing from respirators because of Koch Industry pollution. However, the book contains a slew of anecdotes that are at least somewhat humorous, which can ease reading. For instance, Mayer notes that,

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"Susan Gore, heiress to the a piece of the Gore-Tex fabric fortune and founder of a conservative think tank... was so intent on increasing her personal inheritance that she tried to adopt her ex-husband."

The goal was to increase the share of the family trust she would inherit. Mayer's book also highlights how the conservative plutocratic movement have often bought off seemingly anti-establishment characters. She notes that Glenn Beck is paid more than a million dollars a year to read what is termed "embedded content," which he says on air, "making it sound as if it were his own opinion."

Interestingly, the Koch brothers were not always loved by leading conservative intellectuals. Mayer notes that William F. Buckley Jr. called their ideas "Anarcho-Totalitarianism." As I've documented, such criticisms may return as the Koch brothers continue to threaten the power and influence of other powerful right-wing interests, like the Chamber of Commerce.

Conclusion

Mayer's book draws from other works, like Daniel Schulman, Ken Vogel and the brilliant investigative journalist Lee Fang. However, it offers a comprehensive history, not just of the Koch brothers, but of early funders of the conservative movement, like the Richard Mellon Scaife and John M. Olin. In addition, it includes detailed document of Art Pope's takeover of North Carolina, the powerful DeVos family and the depravity of John Menard Jr., who once labeled arsenic-tainted mulch as "ideal for playgrounds." As the Koch network becomes on track to spend a small fortune on the 2016 election, their history and strategy becomes even more compelling.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a service at the Christian Cultural Center church in the Brooklyn borough of New York, April 3, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

One needn't speculate about how the Democrats could end up losing the 2016 presidential election. In fact, a subtly complex, multi-part plan to do just that is exactly what the Democrats have been up to over the last six months.

Here's a detailed report on the ten steps the Democrats are now taking to ensure they lose the White House to the Republicans in 2016:

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1. Assume that Donald Trump will be the Republicans' 2016 nominee, though it's now clear he won't be.

Republican pundits agree: Trump will come up short of the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the Republican nomination prior to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Trump will come up short for several reasons: (a) neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich has any reason to leave the race before Cleveland, and the entirety of their ambition in remaining candidates is to deny delegates to Trump pre-Cleveland; (b) delegates Trump thought he had earned -- in Louisiana, in Tennessee, in South Carolina, and soon enough elsewhere -- are being and will be taken from him pre-Convention via shenanigans coordinated by Ted Cruz's ground operation; (c) Trump is about to lose Wisconsin, and will continue to lose certain smaller and more rural states to Cruz and large pockets of delegates to Kasich in Midwestern and Northeastern states; and (d) there are just too few states left for Trump to clinch before Cleveland, now that his "win %" is well over 50% (that is, he has to win well over 50% of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination pre-convention, and in a three-candidate primary he's clearly not been able to do that).

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In short, there's a reason that FiveThirtyEight.com now says Trump is 5% below where he needs to be to get the nomination outright. And Trump's terrible performance this past week -- with scandals involving his campaign manager allegedly assaulting a female reporter; his retweets of attacks on his opponent's wife; his paradoxical inference that he's simultaneously pro-choice in practice and believes women should be criminally punished for getting abortions; his continued threat to mount an Independent run for President -- will do nothing to change that.

Trump has no chance whatsoever to secure the nomination at the Convention itself. Choose your reason: so-called "faithless" delegates; delegates who are free to choose whoever they wish after the first ballot; delegates "for Trump" who in fact were selected and seated by Cruz or Kasich; backroom Establishment machinations that sway delegates hoping to curry Party favor -- all will conspire to deny the nomination to the man who Washington Post polling indicates would be, at the start of his campaign, one of the most unpopular political candidates in U.S. history.

2. Nominate the only person who can reunite the Republican Party once Trump failing to get the nomination has fractured it beyond repair.

Hillary Clinton is one of the least popular major-party politicians in America, and her disapproval rating is not just sky-high among Republicans -- we already knew that -- but is in fact a long-time institutional motivator for the entire Republican Party.

Nothing unites Republicans quite like hatred of the Clintons. If Trump's supporters are denied seeing their favored candidate win the nomination despite his lead in delegates earned through primaries and caucuses -- and make no mistake, they will be so denied -- their impulse to bolt the Republican Party completely will (and can) only be stopped by a Clinton candidacy.

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Hillary Clinton is, in short, the only savior the Republican Party has left.

So the Democrats are working as hard as they can to nominate her, of course.

3. Fracture the Democratic Party by broadly supporting the Clinton camp's attempts to smear Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

Three weeks ago, no one was talking about the Democratic race being "negative."

Then Bernie Sanders starting winning more Election Day votes than Clinton, started cutting into her delegate lead, and started developing the sort of momentum that could lead to catastrophic electoral results for Clinton in the latter half of the election season. After winning 60% of the delegates in February, Clinton won only 51% of them in March, and is now set to lose the first two votes on April (Wisconsin and Wyoming). The frustration in her camp is palpable, and recently was seen on the face of the candidate herself while reprimanding a Sanders supporter during a public rally.

So the Clinton camp -- with the help of the media and cable-news interviews (as well as newspaper editorials) by Party elites -- changed the narrative.

Clinton campaign staff put out the conspiracy theory that Sanders was planning (I paraphrase) "a massive negative attack campaign" in New York, based solely on internal polls taken by Sanders to determine which issues New York voters are most interested in hearing the candidates discuss. Clinton supporters Barney Frank and Bakari Sellers accused Sanders of being a "McCarthyite" -- comparison to the late Senator Joe McCarthy being one of the most damning slanders in American politics -- for noting that oil lobbyists were bundling money for the Clinton campaign and for her super-PAC. The Clinton camp accused the Sanders campaign of "playing games" with the scheduling of a primary debate in New York. They said Sanders was deliberately permitting his supporters to boo Clinton at his rallies. They attacked his surrogates for mentioning, in passing, the FBI investigation into Clinton's private email server. They accused the Sanders campaign of "lying" about Clinton's record. They accused Sanders of a secret and anti-democratic plan to convince super-delegates to vote the same way as their states of origin did (and if you can explain to me how that's either a secret plan or anti-democratic, I'd appreciate it). They falsely claimed that Sanders hadn't sufficiently rebuked Donald Trump for his comments about criminalizing abortion.

And on and on.

Every day for the past two weeks the Clinton campaign has attacked the ethics and integrity of Sanders and his campaign, usually by falsely claiming that Sanders -- for instance, by broadly and on principle opposing super-PACs and money from lobbyists, no matter who their money goes to -- was maliciously doing the same to them.

In short, the Clinton campaign went relentlessly negative and managed to get the national media to accuse the Sanders campaign of doing so -- a premise set up by a Clinton campaign memo leaked to the media alleging that Sanders "was about to go negative" in New York. It was Karl-Rovian political philosophy at its very best, and it worked for the Clinton campaign -- but not in the way they intended.

With each new attack on Sanders, the Clinton campaign has permanently alienated a new crop of Sanders voters. 33 percent of Sanders supporters already say that they might not vote for Clinton; so by going negative and so relentlessly, the Clinton campaign is tearing up potential November votes for their candidate by the tens of thousands or more.

4. Fatally underestimate the electoral chances of the two men now most likely to be the Republican presidential nominee in November: Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

According to RealClearPolitics, one of the nation's top polling aggregators, John Kasich has beaten Hillary Clinton in every single head-to-head poll taken in 2016. Across ten polls, Kasich beats Clinton by an average of more than six points. To put this in perspective, the last time Clinton defeated Kasich in a head-to-head poll was more than seven months ago.

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The Cruz-Clinton polling is more mixed -- and yet, somehow, every bit as troubling. Between August of 2013 and August of 2015, Hillary Clinton beat Ted Cruz in every single head-to-head poll. And there were a lot of them: 37, to be exact. But then something happened; after a brief hiatus from Cruz-Clinton polls, pollsters again began testing that matchup in November of 2015. This times, the results were dramatically different.

Now, Cruz beats Clinton 31% of the time, ties her 14% of the time, and loses to her 55% of the time. The last seven polls show the two in a statistical tie -- Clinton leads narrowly, but well within the polls' margin of error.

It would be an impressive showing for Clinton if Cruz were an impressive candidate.

In fact, Ted Cruz is one of the least popular politicians in America, indeed one of the least popular major-party candidates of the last few election cycles. His average favorability-unfavorability rating is -17.6, though this figure is aided enormously by a single outlier poll that found a -6 rating. Take that outlier out of the equation, and Cruz is underwater to the tune of -19.2 points in recent polling.

Clinton supporters say that general election polling isn't accurate in April. Unfortunately, we know from hard data that that's not correct. In fact, according to studies, we're right in the middle of a spike in general-election polling accuracy -- right now, as in this minute. As Vox notes, "By the time we get to mid-April of an election year, polls explain about half the variance in the eventual vote split. And mid-April polls have correctly 'called' the winner in about two-thirds of the cases since 1952."

5. Fail to nominate their most popular candidate, in particular the one with the best chance of beating Ted Cruz or John Kasich in the fall.

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In 2016, Clinton's favorability-unfavorability rating has been checked by pollsters twenty times. Clinton's hasn't been viewed favorably by a majority of respondents even once. More than that, her negative score has been in double-digits 85 percent of the time (and one of the three times it wasn't, it was -9).

The problem here -- or, rather, another problem -- is that the RealClearPolitics history shows that Clinton only becomes more unpopular the more hotly contested an election is, and as many pundits have noted, the Clinton-Sanders race has generated sufficient heat that Clinton may struggle to win over a significant percentage of Sanders voters should she win the nomination. If she wins the nomination with super-delegates, rather than clinching it via pledged delegates alone, that discontent within the party will be larger still.

Meanwhile, Sanders consistently beats every Republican candidate -- including Cruz and Kasich -- by more than Clinton, not just nationally but in battleground-state polling. Democrats have thus far disregarded this polling both because of a specious argument from the Clinton camp (general-election polling means nothing unless it tells a good story for Secretary Clinton) and a dangerous assumption originating from the same source (that Trump will definitely be the GOP nominee, and because anyone could beat Trump in November, it hardly matters who the Democrats nominate).

John Kasich is substantially more popular than Hillary Clinton nationally, but less popular than Bernie Sanders. So how does a Clinton-Kasich general-election battle sound to you, Democrats?

6. Freeze one of the most popular Democrats nationally, Bernie Sanders, out of the picture altogether.



In 2008, when Hillary Clinton lost a hotly contested presidential nominating contest to Barack Obama, she was rewarded with the second-most powerful executive position in the U.S. government: Secretary of State.

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In 2016, the Clinton camp, determined to offend Sanders and his supporters, has leaked that if he continues to do well -- winning about half the delegates in the primary season post-March 1st -- they'll consider giving him a good speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

They may even, if he's really good and plays really nice with everyone, let him chat with Secretary Clinton a few times about his priorities and maybe (if he's lucky!) get her to adopt one or two of his positions that, in fact, she already has adopted-cum-stole via her largely plagiarized-from-Bernie stump speeches.

What? No Cabinet-level position, just a nice speaking slot on TV?

When Bernie's been on TV more over the past six months than he was in the twenty-five years prior?

Yes, it's true: the Clinton campaign is throwing maximum shade at Bernie regarding his future in the Party, and in the most condescending way possible.

They've even gone so far as to leak possible VP candidates for Clinton -- Cory Booker; Julian Castro -- just to be certain that Sanders supporters know that neither Sanders nor his closest ally in Congress, Elizabeth Warren, will have any place whatsoever in a second (or rather third) Clinton Administration.

By freezing Sanders and his platform out of the Democratic Party altogether, it ensures that not only will Clinton lose many Sanders supporters -- which will already happen pursuant to step #5 of the Democrats plan to lose the White House -- but also that she will lose most or all of the independent voters that Sanders has thus far been winning over her by 30 to 40 points. Indeed, Clinton has done everything she can do to signal that neither Sanders' views nor his supporters will have any place in her Administration should she win the White House -- which callous disregard of the Democratic base substantially decreases her chances of ever occupying that building.

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7. Reject Sanders' call for a fifty-state general-election campaign.

If John Kasich is the Republican nominee, the entire Midwest -- especially Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana -- will be up for grabs in the fall. Given Clinton's weak standing relative to Kasich in national and state head-to-head polling, if Kasich is the GOP nominee the Democrats will need to have a plan to pick up states they would not normally contest.

Polling suggests that Bernie Sanders could expand the Democratic map by bringing either into play for the first time or more firmly into the Democratic camp certain purple or even red states -- Kansas, Missouri, Utah, Alaska, New Hampshire, Michigan -- that Clinton might well lose in November should she be the Democratic nominee. But nothing in the demeanor or public statements of the Clinton campaign suggests that it has a plan to make its candidate -- already one of the most unpopular Democrats in the nation -- into a candidate who could win over independents or beat a relatively moderate Republican like John Kasich in battleground states.

Sanders has made clear that the Democrats will need, in 2016, a movement of the sort they had in 2008 when President Obama first ran for national office. He has said explicitly that a fifty-state strategy is needed, one that acknowledges that independent voters and even moderate Republicans are persuadable in a situation in which the GOP has tacked hard to the right in recent years. If Clinton is nominated by the Democrats, the Democrats will approach the national electoral map the same way Al Gore did in 2000, and that simply won't cut it.

And it shouldn't cut it -- as a general-election campaign that starts out with little hope of or interest in winning over independents, indeed whose only plan to win over independents is to have the other party nominate its worst imaginable candidate, is almost destined to lose on Election Day.

8. Do nothing whatsoever to address outstanding concerns about the character, integrity, and judgment of the Party's front-runner.

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Clinton has refused to release her Wall Street speeches when she could easily do so, making it look like she has something to hide. Clinton has refused to clearly articulate any mistakes she might have made with respect to her private email server, making it look like she exercises bad judgment and then has no ability or willingness to self-analyze or admit error -- precisely the quality so many people find unnerving in Donald Trump.

Clinton has refused to reign in her out-of-control husband -- and I'm speaking only in political terms here -- who helped her lose in 2008 with ill-considered analogies between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson and is now going around the country saying that Obama's economy has left many people out (adding too that he won't recuse himself from casting a super-delegate vote for his own wife). Clinton has refused to distance herself from the Clinton Foundation, despite the bad press it's gotten for the myriad conflicts of interest necessarily involved in its fundraising efforts. Despite saying that oil money makes up an infinitesimal percentage of her fundraising, Clinton has refused to just let that money go and make the same pledge to forego it that Sanders has.

Clinton has routinely slipped into the same sleazy politico-speak -- accusing Sanders of "voting against" the auto bail-out when he didn't; accusing Sanders of condoning Trump's anti-women comments when he hasn't; trying to set up primary debates for dates and times no one could possibly be watching -- that's made her so unpopular nationally.

In short, Hillary Clinton appears to blame everyone but herself for the lack of trust the American people have in her. That's a bad look for any politician, both because it ignores the concerns of voters and, moreover, suggests a candidate incapable of personal and political growth. There are many things the Clinton camp could be doing now to rehabilitate her image for the general election, and they're doing absolutely none of them.

9. Over-rely on the national media to set the political narrative for the campaign season, further alienating voters who want to vote for a candidate with vision.

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From the jump, the Clinton campaign should have distanced itself from the whole "super-delegate" component of the presidential election season, as voters rightly see super-delegates as anti-democratic and singularly non-responsive to the Democratic base. Instead, the Clintons reveled in the day-in, day-out media reports that wrongly assigned her super-delegates as part of her delegate count. This rightly infuriated Sanders supporters. Clinton could have said, "Don't include those delegates because they haven't voted yet; and besides, I plan to win in the pledged delegate battle" -- but she never did.

Clinton used media cover to evade substantial criticism for participating in so few debates, and for the debates that were held being held at such inconvenient -- sometimes downright strange -- dates and times.

Clinton waited to see which Sanders' policy positions were most popular among the media and among voters before adopting these positions herself.

Clinton sat back and let the media focus primarily on Trump, because she thought that doing so would emphasize that, on the Democratic side, the front-runner's eventual nomination was a near-certainty. This made the Republican contest the focal point of American political discourse month after month -- a lack of media coverage that hurt Democratic turnout in caucuses and, more generally, made the Democratic Party seem less energetic than the Republicans.

Using behind-the-scenes machinations to sweep out of her way any Democratic candidates besides (in addition to Sanders) Jim Webb, Martin O'Malley, and Lincoln Chafee -- three deeply underwhelming individuals -- didn't help, as it made the Democratic bench seem far, far more shallow than it actually is. If you're wondering why Clinton's only credible competition is an Independent (Sanders), you really don't understand how the Clintons do things.

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And now Clinton continues to buy the media hype that she's far more popular than Sanders and beating him handily, even though her campaign has basically been a disaster since March 1st. She and her team have missed the important particulars of the Sanders' comeback -- both its specific contours and what it portends more generally -- only and precisely because the national media has missed it, too.

And on and on.

The problem is that Clinton had so routinely used favorable media coverage as a crutch that it has weakened -- if not stopped in its tracks -- her ability to improve as a candidate or raise the profile of the Democratic "brand" more generally. Nor has it prepared her to understand how and why so many Democrats are angry at the media right now, and with a fervor usually reserved for Republican ire about "left-wing bias."

When the media turns on Clinton in the fall -- should she be the nominee -- it will be entirely predictable, as the media benefits when a general-election race is as close as possible. And Clinton simply won't be prepared for it. Nor will the Democrats, who will have done insufficient work setting the terms of the national political discourse for the media, rather than the other way around.

10. Ignore the youth vote.

More Millennials have a favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism, and they're voting for Sanders over Clinton by approximately a 50-point margin. Clinton's only response is empty political rhetoric: "You may not be supporting me, but I'm supporting you!" That's not just empty talk -- it's patronizing. Millennials don't want someone from their grandparents' generation saying, "I'm supporting you!", nor do they even just wanted to be listened to -- in fact, they want their values to be reflected, and sincerely so, in the politicians for whom they vote.

Hillary Clinton doesn't share the values or vision for America of the generation that will steer the Democratic Party for the next half-century, and shows no interest in doing so. That spells doom for the Party long-term -- possibly even its devolution or dissolution in the next few election cycles, as we're seeing with the Republican Party now. And it's entirely avoidable. In fact, Bernie Sanders is not so much what the Clintons see him as -- a pest -- as the writing on the wall telling the Democratic Leadership Council and its ilk that their days are numbered, and that if they don't pivot into the America we all live in, rather than merely the America they and their friends inhabit, the Democratic Party will ultimately cease to exist.

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In sum, the Democrats are flawlessly executing a complex plan to lose the 2016 presidential election, slowly dismantle their own party apparatus, and become irrelevant in the next ten years.

Congratulations to them.

And, given what we're seeing now on the GOP side, God help the rest of us.
When someone shoots and kills another person it is called homicide.

If a police officer in South Dakota shoots and kills someone it is called "justifiable homicide."



There is a huge problem in this state because police officers and medical doctors are not properly trained to identify mental illness. Whenever confronted by a mentally disturbed person the first action of the police is to shoot to kill.

Time after time individuals turn themselves into the local hospital for mental problems and time after time they are given a bottle of pills and sent on their way.

Elijah Whitemagpie was a 20-year-old Lakota man with a drug and alcohol addiction problem leading to a state of mental instability. One night he was spotted with a knife in his hand at the local library. Some say he threw rocks at the library window.

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When confronted by the police he advanced toward them, according to a police report, with knife in hand and he was shot five times by a Rapid City police officer. Whitemagpie survived the bullet wounds. After a trial and conviction he was sent to the Jameson Annex Prison where he tied a sheet around his neck and committed suicide.

A young Lakota man named Christopher Capps was shot to death by a Rapid City police officer while walking toward him with a stick in his hand. His father Jerry called it homicide. The lawsuit he and his family filed is still winding its way through the court system.

My point is that there is a severe lack of training for police officers in dealing with mentally ill individuals. And as I said what is even worse is the total lack of trained doctors or a facility that deals with mental illness in this city.

Earl Hicks, who was shot to death by a police officer last month, was not an Indian, but he was raised around the Indian people. He was a young man who had gone through a lot of physical ailments in his short life. He had open heart surgery to repair a leaking valve when he was only seven months old. It was a physical handicap that deterred him from a lot of youthful activities as he was growing up. Last September he was told that he once again had a leaky heart valve. The Heart Doctor's in Rapid City told him they could not do the surgery here so he was sent to Denver. He was home recovering from the open heart surgery when he was told he had to go back into the hospital to have a pacemaker installed. He was scared to death of all of the operations.

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We noticed he was hallucinating by talking to himself and believing that a couple of guys at the Cornerstone Mission were out to kill his mom. We took him to the Regional Behavioral Hospital and they kept him for a day, gave him pills and sent him on his way. When matters seemed to have gotten worse we took him to the hospital again and the same thing happened: He was prescribed more pills and sent home. He was taking so many pills that his mother was shocked when she found all of the bottles at his apartment after his death. He was on at least 10 different medications.

There is apparently no central place where a person suffering from mental illness' data can be stored so that if they attempt to buy a gun the data would show up. All a person has to do is fill out a form and on the form it asks if they have ever been hospitalized for mental illness and all they have to do is check "no" and they can buy a gun. A gun shop owner can only go by what they put on the form, but if there was a place where the shop owner could call prior to selling the gun that would list the name of anyone suffering from a mental illness this would stop them from selling that person a gun.

Law enforcement and the doctors in Rapid City need to find a way to address this serious problem. Earl was my stepson and he was crying out for the help that never came. We could take him to the hospital time and again, but if he could not get the help he needed there is nothing further we could have done.

He took the gun he bought and went to the Cornerstone Mission and tried to shoot a man who used to be his best friend. He was shot to death by a Rapid City police officer with a 223 Rifle. This was also proclaimed as a "justifiable homicide" by the powers-that-be.

Some say that Earl had the pistol hanging down at his side when he was shot and that he was not pointing it at the police officer. Anyhow, Earl is dead and there has to be a way to prevent people with mental problems from buying a gun. He bought the gun two days before he was killed and if we knew he had a gun we would have taken it away from him and he would still be alive.

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The system needs to change. More lives will be lost to police shootings if it does not. It is happening all over America and not just in Rapid City.
Photo credit: Housing Works

A Michigan Judge Is About to Throw Someone in Prison for Being HIV-Positive... Again

UPDATE (4/4/2016): Corey's defense successfully sought an adjournment of the case today, meaning that it will be heard in two to four weeks time. Local advocate Kelly Doyle has set up an Indiegogo campaign to help raise funds for his mounting legal costs.

Three weeks ago, Corey Rangel was pulled over in Cassopolis, MI for having a loud muffler. The officer ultimately cited Rangel for driving without proof of insurance and without corrective lenses -- minor infractions, but nonetheless an infraction he would have to report to his probation officer. He was nine months into his probation for drug-related charges, during which he had maintained his sobriety.

In my conversation with Corey about his case, he says that this is where things started to go awry. In Corey's words, the probation officer originally waived the minor infraction. "Basically, he told me that I was a model example of how drug courts can work -- and not to worry." But several hours later, he got an ominous phone call: Report to jail immediately. And don't forget to bring your phone.

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When he reported to jail, authorities demanded that he hand over his phone and the password to open it. "I was scared and didn't know what I could or couldn't do -- and I didn't have anything to hide. So I did it."

Apparently, the police spent the next several days calling contacts in Corey's phone and asking them whether they had sex with Corey and whether they knew he was HIV-positive.

Corey's friend Nico received one of those calls. I spoke with him about his conversation with authorities. "Officer Andrew called me and said he was speaking on behalf of Corey, and asked me if I knew 'about' him -- like in reference to his status of HIV undetectable. I said he told me about that. Then he started asking if we had been intimate. It seemed like he was uncomfortable asking those questions and it was pretty shocking."

It is, in fact, shocking -- especially given the fact that Michigan law expressly forbids authorities from engaging in such actions. Indeed, the ACLU of Michigan fired off a letter expressing concern about Corey's "outrageous and unacceptable" treatment. The letter cites a Michigan law forbidding the disclosure of another person's HIV status without their permission. "MCL 333.5131 makes it very clear that information pertaining to a person's HIV status is confidential and can only be released under particular circumstances." Violating these provisions is classified as a misdemeanor.

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Nonetheless, Corey is scheduled for another hearing Monday, April 4 at 1:30 PM in front of Cass County Circuit Court Judge Michael E. Dodge. Things do not look good. At his preliminary hearing, the prosecutor called Corey "deceitful" and "dishonest," without providing any basis for these accusations. Authorities have thus far failed to turn over basic records about Corey's case to his defense attorney, making it all but impossible for him to receive a fair hearing. His friends and supporters are gravely concerned that Corey's HIV status is biasing Corey's treatment and that he is at risk of being sent to prison for years for a very minor infraction -- an infraction that would not normally be punished so harshly.

Corey's treatment is sadly not unusual in Michigan. For my doctoral research at The University of Michigan, I reviewed every conviction under Michigan's antiquated HIV disclosure law since the law was enacted in 1989. That law makes it a felony for an HIV-positive person to engage in "sexual penetration" without first disclosing their HIV-positive status -- whether or not that sexual contact poses any risk of transmission.

When I learned about Corey's case, the judge's name jumped out at me. I realized after reviewing my records that there was a troubling reason: Judge Dodge is exactly the same judge who sent an HIV-positive dancer, Melissa Goodman, to prison in 2009 for giving a lap dance.

Of the many criminal cases I reviewed for my dissertation, Goodman's was perhaps the most disturbing. Goodman was arrested after a raid on a strip club in which she danced. Local media outlets at the time reported her case in vague terms, stating simply that she had engaged in "sex acts" with a client without disclosing her status. When I finally tracked down the transcripts from Goodman's plea hearing, I realized that the media was being evasive about what really transpired.

Let me quote directly from the transcript where the prosecutor asks the detective on the case what transpired between a confidential informant and Goodman:

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Q Can you tell us, sir, did he indicate receiving a dance or dances from her? A Yes, he did. Q Did any of that include any type of sexual penetration, and if so, please explain? A He received several dances from her. Q Let me focus you particularly on a situation involving a penetration with his nose or nasal area of his face. A He would pay her twenty dollars a song for a lap dance, and on this occasion she was topless, she began dancing, started grinding on him, trying to arouse his penis. At one point she exposed her vagina area to him and placed it on the tip of his nose and began grinding on his nose with her vagina. Q Did the confidential informant indicate that his nose actually went inside or penetrated her vaginal area? A Yes, it did.

Yes, you read that correctly: Judge Dodge convicted Goodman in 2009 for allegedly allowing a man's nose to penetrate her vagina. Even if it were true that the client's nose penetrated her vagina (a fact that seems highly unlikely), HIV has never been transmitted through nasal-vaginal penetration. But under Michigan law, risk is not part of the equation; you could argue that a pelvic exam would fall under the law's purview.

Judge Dodge's courtroom has already played host to one of the most troubling criminal cases brought under an HIV-specific criminal laws in recent memory. Will Judge Dodge let stigma prevail again on Monday?
With such films as Tsotsi and Rendition, director Gavin Hood has made a career out of tackling difficult subject matter and presenting them in a compelling fashion. His latest, the military thriller Eye in the Sky, which doubles as both a character drama and a meditation on the ramifications of drone warfare, is no exception. The film, featuring an all-star ensemble including Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, and the final performance Alan Rickman, is thoughtful and challenging, and unlike a lot of the films we tend to get out of Hollywood on this subject.

I had a chance to discuss the film with Mr. Hood recently, and we delved not only into the origins of the project, but also his own views on the difficult issue of drones, as well as his thoughts on working on independent films versus Hollywood blockbusters like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and his memories of working with the late, great Alan Rickman. Read on for the transcript of our chat:

I appreciate that you're tackling a topic that a lot of, not just filmmakers, but politicians and journalists do not want to talk about, which is this very deep and wide gray area that is drone warfare. My question is: why do this story?

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It's a great question. I was reading a lot of scripts, and I happened to read this fabulous script, written by Guy Hibbert, a British writer. And I had, I hope the same experience our audiences are having now, which is I began reading. I didn't quite know where it was going. I became hooked by the tension of the scenario that he created of, "Should we or should we not release a hellfire missile?", and I thought, at some points, that I knew what I would do.

No sooner had I thought that that I found myself turning the page and hearing an argument that made me question what I was thinking and wonder what I would do. The tension ramped up and ramped up. And at the same time, when I got to the end...I wanted to know what would happen next. I kept turning the page. Then, when I got to the end, I was left with so many questions. I wanted to talk to somebody. And of course, there was nobody to talk to. I'd just read a script all by myself.

So, I thought, "Well, if it's having this effect on me and it's encouraging me to..." I immediately went into the internet. I started researching and I called some friends who knew friends. I started talking to lawyers and people in the military and people in human rights areas. Before I knew it, I'd sort of spent three weeks researching, based on Guy's script, before I felt ready to actually declare that I was interested in directing the film. I thought, if the film is prompting this kind of questioning in myself, maybe it'll have that kind of effect on an audience.

What I liked was that it didn't tell me what to think. It forced me to think. I think what I like about Guy's script is that he approaches this from multiple angles, including the angle, and usually, of the innocent bystander, which, in film, is often tricky to dramatize. You have this little girl who's the innocent bystander, who has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on around her in the story, and yet, we see a world from a perspective that we would normally not see. We also see it from the point of view of the military intelligence officers, the drone pilot, all the usual suspects. And each of them is somebody who's facing the problem from a very different position and therefore has a very particular point of view.

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And in dramaturgical terms, what's compelling is when your protagonist has to choose from two bad options.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that brings to mind Hannah Arendt's comment that when you choose the lesser of two evils, don't kid yourself that you're not still doing evil. I don't think she'd put it quite as glibly as I just did. But, the idea, the lesser of two evils doesn't mean you're not still having to choose something deeply immoral.

Right, there's a moral toll.

It raises a very difficult question. It doesn't present, I don't think, any easy answers. I mean in some ways it's really the trolley experiment or the trolley problem, most people call it which, if folks don't know about it, it's easy to look up on Wikipedia, but this idea of the train that's moving down a track and if you don't intervene, it will crush five workers, but if you pull a big lever, the train will move onto another track and only kill one worker: will you pull the lever?

And of course, that's the starting point. Of course, if your answer is yes, I would intervene and trade one life for five, the next step is that, if you're standing on a bridge, the trains gonna go under the bridge. It will take out five workers, and standing next to you is a large man. Will you put your hands on that man and push him off the bridge. It's still one life for five, but somehow people recoil because it's a little more intimate. You have to get your hands dirty.

And then the question...You can spit it out any way you like. Now you're alone on a bridge. Would you jump off the bridge and trade your life for five? And then the question is, well who are the five, you finally ask. Oh, they're your family. Maybe you would. Or they're not your family. These kinds of ethical and moral questions and scenarios, you can spin out and change the facts just slightly and it fundamentally changes the way individuals approach the problem.

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I think you can change Guy's scenario in the film just a little and you might come to a different approach, which sort of begs the question, then, of the bigger themes that I think the film...raises the question, should I say? It raises the question of bigger themes. The broader themes are what you alluded to earlier, is what is this new form of warfare? Where we are, we are not putting the hands on the large man. We are pulling levers from a distance. We're firing from a distance. Our troops are safe.

Does that create a sort of detachment? Does that make it easier to pull the trigger? Many in the military would argue no, because now we have great intelligence and we can see better. We're not just firing a missile from out at sea or off a ship. We're actually looking at the target. On the other hand, that attempt to sanitize war, I think, can, if not carefully examined, make it easier to go to war if you're using a technology that operates at a distance. The next question that it raises is what is the effect on the civilian population? You're firing a missile out of the sky.

How does the civilian population react to that event? Are you ultimately, in attempting to take out one individual, losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the local population and creating more antagonism to your cause. And all of these questions are, you could pause the film at any point and spin off in a particular discussion because at each moment in the film, there's a slightly different argument being made by a different character.

Without spoiling anything, the ending of the film, there's an ambiguity insofar as where things go next. I think, for me certainly, the testament of a film being effective is when you're mentally mapping out what happens next.

That's wonderful. I like that. Thank you. What is the journey? What is the next step of the father of the child? Where does he go? That's almost a sequel, I suppose. [laughs] Because you're right. It is an important question. I mean, the thing with drones is people can get so hung up on the idea of the drone, but really a drone is a weapon in the way that a sniper's bullet may be a weapon or a tank.

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The question is not what is the weapon, but what is the strategy behind the weapon? What is the strategically wise way to use this tool or not use it? One should not confuse tactics with strategy, or technology with strategy. I think the film addresses that as well because so much of the conversation is not about the drone, per se. It's about what are the implications of using this weapon.

The political.

Yeah, what are the political and the legal? What are the moral questions? What are the propaganda questions? There's a great moment in the movie. It's actually the moment I like best, when a particular politician, played by Monica Dolan as the undersecretary of state for Africa, says...Throughout the film she's been arguing against using the drone. The feeling...One is playing on stereotypes in a way. Oh, well this is a woman who just doesn't want to get her hands dirty and lose the life of an innocent child.

And then she makes the argument, yes, I don't want to use this weapon. But I'd rather that Al Shabaab took 80 lives and were blamed for that even than that we took one and were blamed by the local population. You go, "Oh my God." It's a very uncomfortable moment. You could spin off into a whole other movie about strategy and counterinsurgency and hearts and minds. That's why I say you could pause the film at that moment and have a whole conversation, not about drone warfare, but about any kind of warfare that is supposed to ultimately be aimed at winning people over from one way of thinking to another. Is this strategy doing that or not?

And, when we talk about the different points of view being expressed, at the end, we have Alan Rickman, who says, "The things that I've seen as a soldier, you don't ever want that..." I'm doing a disservice to what he says. My thought was: Do you feel like, just by virtue of the authority that he embodies onscreen and his persona: do you feel that that's sort of putting the thumb on the scale a little bit in terms of the film's point of view?

I think that's a very, very, very fair question, because he delivers that line, "Never tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war," with such authority and power that it's a winning line. Certainly if you're in the military, it's a winning line. But no sooner has he said that then he leaves and we go to consequence of war. When he says never tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war, well what is the real cost of war? The film ends with the loss of that innocent life in a hospital and the devastation on those civilian parents.

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You know the cost of war, Mr. Rickman, from attending the aftermath of various suicide bombings? Well, here's the aftermath. The cost of war to these folks far exceeds the cost of war to you, but not necessarily to another soldier. I hope that the film both frustrates and appeals to both sides. That's a dangerous thing to try to do. I acknowledge that. One of the things that's so frustrating in the current political discourse, to me, is this extreme binary approach. I'm right! No, you're right. No, I'm right. We should have these difficult conversations.

A real democracy is about trying to find solutions by acknowledging the point of view of someone else and then presenting them with yours, and then hopefully A plus B leads you to C. It's not A or B. Somehow in this current climate, everybody seems to have to be in this sort of positional bargaining business. This is my position! And you stake it out and defend it with your life.

No matter what.

Yeah, and I don't think that's helpful. These are difficult questions, as the simple trolly problem illustrates. If you think there's one solution to the entire problem, I think that's either naive or arrogant. We have to address these scenarios with intelligence and respect and a genuine search for a better way of doing things, as opposed to this perpetual positional argument...I think you know what I mean.

Shifting gears a little bit: This film has the unfortunate timing of arriving a few weeks after Alan Rickman passed away, this giant. It was gut-punch to me to read about his passing. I can't imagine what it felt like for you. I'd love for you to share some memorable story about working with the late, great Alan Rickman.

As you pointed out, the role of the general, I think it could so easily have been played in a fairly stereotypical way, a general with one position and this is his view. What Alan brings to a role that could easily have been played very simply is a huge degree of intelligence, humor, irony, wit. He makes you laugh in the film, at moments of extreme tension. He helps the audience just release that tension for a moment, just by a throwaway line that is dismissive of the politicians but in a very real way.

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"I'm told that's important," the difference between the one doll and the next. [laughs] The way he just curls his delivery in that way.

Isn't he fantastic? Yeah, I know. He's just amazing. Alan has the ability to play just absolute emotional truth and yet with real humor and never taking it to the slapstick level. We talked about that. It's very awkward for me in a sense, that this is his last film, because I wish he were here to talk to you about the film. He was a highly intelligent man, an extremely kind man, and he had a lot to say on this subject. He would have said it in that wonderful voice.

I do wish he was here to talk about it. In many ways, it's not a flashy role, but he fills it with such nuance and dignity and authority, as you pointed out. When he delivers that last line, it's quite chilling because he delivers it with such authority. That's a credit to him as an actor. He doesn't in any way cop out and suggest, "I as an actor think differently, but here we are." He just gives that line and you must deal with it. Let the story and the points of view of other characters, because that would be that character's position. That is the truth of that character's point of view.

It's chilling to hear, and yet it's true for a man that is able to compartmentalize. I don't mean Alan. I mean the general, who has succeeded in compartmentalizing his life at war from his life at home, where he's clearly going to his granddaughter's birthday with some doll under his arm, so bitterly ironic. It's awful and chilling, and Alan doesn't flinch from playing the power and horror of that idea.

The performance just speaks.

He speaks. He's committed to his performance. He doesn't comment on it. I said to him, when we were starting out, I said, "Alan, do you have any thoughts or concerns or notes? I'd love to talk about." There's nothing worse as a director than getting onto the set and then having an actor shut you down for five hours while they debate a line. I'd rather get that done beforehand!

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Talk all that stuff out in preproduction and make sure you're all on the same page. And he very graciously just said, "Gavin, I just feel my job is not to get in the way of telling the story." I mean, from such a great actor, it's a very humble thing. He's not searching for more lines for himself. He understands that this is an ensemble piece and yet he stands out because his presence is so powerful. I think we were very lucky to get the cast we got. Helen as well.

The frightening thing about Helen is that we really like Helen Mirren. When she starts doing things that twist us, it makes you very uncomfortable because you want to believe she's doing the right thing. Again, she doesn't flinch from playing the truth of her character. She plays it with total conviction as someone who's been tracking a particular terrorist that she truly believes is someone she needs to get rid of for six years, and that doesn't make her objective. She commits to that lack of objectivity, if you like, as an actor.

That's what the role of the military lawyer is, to step in and say I'm not sure you're being objective. The role of the audience is as jury. That's, for me, what it is. You present all these things with complete conviction based on the characters and the jobs that they do, and you say to the jury, what do you think? And hopefully it generates a conversation.

That's the idea, anyway. Ideally. And of course, ideally doesn't always come through. I accept that. I've been finding that, though. In the screenings we've had, people...you eavesdrop on conversations after the screenings and sometimes you find people having some heated debates. I'd much rather people have a heated debate than just sort of left and said, "Well, that was nice. Should we get a pizza?" [laughs] Let's rather have a heated debate or a good conversation than no conversation at all.

With that in mind, thinking about how you've worked on smaller, more intimate films. Obviously you've done the Wolverine movie and Ender's Game: do you put them in different boxes, in terms of the big blockbuster films, the big studio films, where you're answering to the overlords?

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Yeah, films made by committee. Yeah, I mean look, it's a great question and one that's obviously...Let me try and answer it as simply and truthfully as I can. I started off making small films. Because there was not as much, perhaps financially, at stake, I was allowed to do my thing. I perhaps came to Hollywood and the world of the blockbuster a little naive. Certainly when I went into my first big studio movie, I had not experienced that degree of paranoia, the number of people involved. I shouldn't really say that in a cynical way because the stakes are the survival of a studio.

Hundreds of millions of dollars.

They really actually are. But I did not love that experience. I want to be able to go and make a film with people who are making a film because they really want to engage in a conversation about the questions the film raises. Fortunately, we were able to make this film at a price that didn't terrify the financiers, although obviously they still need to make their money back and hopefully make some money, but the motivation behind making a film like this from everybody involved is to make the very best version of this film that they can, because they're all engaged in the questions the film raises. That leads to a much happier filming experience, quite frankly. [laughs] And I think a better film.

And I think there's something counterintuitive about entering a situation where you've been brought in based on your resume and your skill-set and essentially being told, "Don't do what you do. Don't do the thing that we brought you in here to do.

Yeah, please direct the traffic. Then of course, as a young filmmaker, you push back against that and you push back. That's what makes the experience quite tricky is I hadn't yet figured out how the system worked. I learned a great deal, some good and some bad. But if you go to this movie and you don't like it, you're free to blame me entirely. I have nowhere to hide.

I think I started out with a great script from Guy Hibbert. I had wonderful producers in Ged Dougherty and Colin Firth. We were all trying to make the same film, which is a wonderful thing, and I hope that audiences will find it both a good thriller, keeping you on the edge of your seat, but also leave you with a great deal to talk about and discuss afterwards. For me, that's a reason to go to a movie, as opposed to good guy beats up bad guy and world is set straight. [laughs] That's just not how the real world works.

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My partner on my show: he refers to the blue beam shooting into the sky, which is kind of his shorthand for the big blockbuster, where the stakes are so ridiculous that it's hard to connect. He says, "Oh, I'm just tired of the blue beam shooting into the sky."

Oh, I like that. The blue beam. I'm going to steal that. [laughs] Well this is not a blue beam. This is multiple beams shooting up into the sky.

None of them are blue.

None of them are blue and it's up to you how you orientate them, I guess. Wow, what an attempt at an analogy. [laughs]

******
ASSOCIATED PRESS A crater is seen in foreground as officials inspect the wreckage of a bus in Dantewada district, about 350 miles (560 kilometers) south of Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh state, India, Tuesday, May 18, 2010. Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said Tuesday the government was prepared to enter into peace talks with Maoist rebels, but only if the insurgents halt all attacks for 72 hours. The offer followed a rebel ambush Monday on a packed bus in central India that killed 31 police officers and civilians. (AP Photo)

They were on a mission to save their four-legged comrade. But, it cost them their lives in a Maoist strike in Dantewada.

On Wednesday, the jawans were trying to arrange medical aid for sick Scout, a Belgian Malinois who had proved his mettle as an expert sniffer dog. He had been part of several anti-Maoist operations in the Red zone. Their four-legged comrade suffered a heat stroke and was seriously ill due to dehydration in the jungle heat.

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While the jawans were on their way to evacuate Scout, an IED blast blew up their vehicle.

The soldiers belonging to CRPF's 230 battalion were travelling in a tempo from their post in Nerli to Bhusaras Ghati camp, about 40km away.

Taking all precautions against the ultras, they travelled in a civil vehicle and wore plain clothes. They were not carrying any weapons either. However, the information seems to have got somehow leaked.

They stopped at the Bacheli bus stand, where six other CRPF personnel were waiting for a civil bus. They boarded the vehicle since it was headed to their companies. Later, three of them got down at Renganar to collect a cooler for the sniffer dog, after they were supposed to shift Scout to a veterinary hospital.

A few kilometres ahead on the Dantewada-Sukma road, as their vehicle crossed Mailavada village, the men were killed in the IED blast.

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"All three have gunshot wounds on head and chest. It seems the Maoists shot them after the blast, to make sure they were dead, said CRPF DG K Durga Prasad.

According to officials, extremists may have informed the attacking party after they saw the jawans leaving the Renganar camp. It could be that the jawans were identified by Maoist sympathisers when they had stopped at a market.

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Kanhaiya Kumar is no longer just a JNU student who was arrested on charges of sedition. Since he made his fiery speech on March 3, political parties made him the poster boy. They have been lining up to stake claim to his ideology, his oratory skills, and even his signature catchword--Azaadi.

All this while, poll bound states were calling dibs on him for their election campaigns, and now it seems advertisers are also not far behind.

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In a distasteful advertisement that has gone viral, travel website Yatra.com is trying to sell its app-based offerings by using a Kanhaiya Kumar knock-off and his catch 'Azaadi' chant.

The advertisement shows a man who is denied a window seat at the airport. He then takes to a mic and asks the crowd to demand freedom. The Yatra.com ad has a message: "Don't resort to sloganeering, use the app instead."

Watch it here:

The problem with this advertisement is, it not only belittles the students' protest but others across the nation as well.

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Naturally, JNU students and alumni are quite miffed with the Yatra advertisement. They are rating the app one-star and criticizing it in the review section.

To put things in context, the Azaadi slogan was originally popularised by renowned feminist Kamla Bhasin in the womens movement across south Asia to oppose patriarchy and injustice against women. She picked up the slogan from Pakistani feminists and improvised it.

The chant went like this  Meri behane maange Azaadi, meri bacchi maange Azaadi, naari ka naara Azaadi... (My sisters want freedom, my daughter wants freedom, every womans slogan is freedom).

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The slogan assumed a cult status with the Left parties and other groups fighting against social injustices lapped it up to further their struggle.

Using a Kanhaiya doppelganger and the same slogan to seek freedom from long queues is only a mockery of the struggles.

This isn't the first time advertisers have come up with the idea of scorning topical issues like this in an attempt to make it viral.

Last year, Pepsi did a similar thing with its "Pepsi Thi Pi Gaya" campaign, which poked fun at the Film & Television Institute of India protests, showing a student unable to keep the hunger strike going because he couldn't stop himself from drinking the soft drink.

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Hindustan Times via Getty Images NEW DELHI, INDIA - MARCH 19: Devendra Fadnavis, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, during a party's National Executive meet, on March 19, 2016 in New Delhi, India. The two-day meeting will discuss current political situation in the country and take stock of organizational issues besides fine-tuning party's strategy for the ensuing Assembly elections in five states. (Photo by Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

MUMBAI -- In a veiled criticism on the Bhumata Ranragini Brigade activists led by Trupti Desai, who were detained yesterday as they attempted to enter the premises of the Shani Shingnapur temple, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that no one must disturb the law and order situation for mere publicity but also added that there was no place for discrimination in Hindu culture.

"There is no place for discrimination in Hindu culture. Our government has taken a clear stand before the Honorable High Court and we will implement their decision in true spirit," Fadnavis said in a statement.

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"But it is my sincere request to everyone not to disturb the law and order situation for mere publicity," he added.

Meanwhile, Desai, who was on her way after a medical check-up, lashed out at Fadnavis for saying that the purpose of their movement was to gain attention.

Also Read: Activist Trupti Desai Detained While On Her Way To Shani Shingnapur Temple

"Yes the Chief Minister did express his support for us, but that support has clearly fallen short somewhere. You can see our condition since morning. He should have ensured that the police establish the court order. He should let go off the Home Ministry, if he is not able to perform his functions," Desai told the media.

She added that she along with the other activists, who were assaulted, will identify their attackers once they are shown the footage by the police.

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Meanwhile, the Maharashtra Police stated that the move was taken to prevent a possible stampede outside the Shani Shingnapur temple and ensure that the law and order situation remains under control.

"Tension was brewing here, which might have led to stampede and that is why we took her out from the temple. We had given a notice to Trupti Desai and Bhanu Dash Murkute under Section 149 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and had verbally told them that they shouldn't create a law and order situation in Shani Shingnapur temple," Additional Superintendent of Police Pankaj Deshmukh told ANI.

Earlier yesterday, the activists clashed with local villagers, who were staunchly opposing the entry of women inside the sanctum sanctorium.

Nearly 100 volunteers of Bhumata Brigade marched towards Shani Shingnapur temple, a day after the Bombay High Court stated that prohibiting women from entering places of worship is against the fundamental rights bestowed upon them by the Constitution.

The temple drew attention in November 2015 after a lady offered prayers in "breach" of the age-old practice of prohibiting entry of women.

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Kansas football heads toward a bye week it needs

A number of Kansas football players were either out Saturday due to injury or at least limited. The bye week should help them.
Hiring Alert: From SBI RBO to TNSURB SI, Major Govt Job Openings to Apply for This Week if the designations are correct
Press Release: IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde Letter to Greece Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras

Press Release No. 16/149

April 3, 2016

His Excellency Mr. Alexis Tsipras

Prime Minister of the Hellenic Republic

Athens, Greece

Dear Prime Minister,

Thank you for your letter of April 2, in which you ask about the IMFs position regarding the program negotiations with Greece.

My view of the ongoing negotiations is that we are still a good distance away from having a coherent program that I can present to our Executive Board. I have on many occasions stressed that we can only support a program that is credible and based on realistic assumptions, and that delivers on its objective of setting Greece on a path of robust growth while gradually restoring debt sustainability.

Otherwise it would fail to re-establish confidence, with the implication, among others, that Greece would soon again be forced to adopt yet more measures. Of course, any speculation that IMF staff would consider using a credit event as a negotiating tactic is simply nonsense.

As you and I have discussed several times, including recently on the telephone, I have been consistent in pointing out that, if it were necessary to lower the fiscal targets to have a realistic chance of them being fully met, there would be an attendant need for more debt relief. In the interest of the Greek people, we need to bring these negotiations to a speedy conclusion.

I agree with you that successful negotiations are built on mutual trust, and this weekends incident has made me concerned as to whether we can indeed achieve progress in a climate of extreme sensitivity to statements of either side. On reflection, however, I have decided to allow our team to return to Athens to continue the discussions.

The team consists of experienced staff who have my full confidence and personal backing. For them to be able to do their work, as you have invited us, it is critical that your authorities ensure an environment that respects the privacy of their internal discussions and take all necessary steps to guarantee their personal safety.

Finally, the IMF conducts its negotiations in good faith, not by way of threats, and we do not communicate through leaks. To further enhance the transparency of our dialogue, I have therefore decided to release the text of this letter on our website at www.imf.org. I also look forward to any personal conversation with you on how to take the discussions forward.

Sincerely yours,

Christine Lagarde
Imperial Valley News Center

ICE officers deport Mexican national wanted for homicide

Houston, Texas - A fugitive Mexican national wanted in his native country for homicide was deported Friday by officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).

Daniel Espino-Alferes, 26, was turned over to Mexican authorities April 1 on the Juarez-Lincoln Bridge at the Laredo, Texas, port of entry.

Removing foreign fugitives from the United States is an ICE priority, said Patrick D. Contreras, field office director of ERO Houston. The cooperation between the United States and Mexican government resulted in this foreign fugitive being safely returned to his home country where he can stand trial for his alleged crimes.

Mexicos Procuraduria General de la Republic (PGR) issued a warrant for his arrest for homicide in March 2015. On March 14, 2016, he was ultimately located and arrested in Liberty, Texas, by ERO Houston officers following a lead from the ERO Dallas office.

Espino was previously deported in December 2012. Illegally re-entering the United States after having been previously deported is a felony.

Since Oct. 1, 2009, ERO has removed more than 1,150 foreign fugitives from the United States who were sought in their native countries for serious crimes, including kidnapping, rape and murder. ERO works with the ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Office of International Operations, foreign consular offices in the United States, and Interpol to identify foreign fugitives illegally present in the United States. Members of the public who have information about foreign fugitives are urged to contact ICE by calling the ICE tip line at 1 (866) 347-2423 or internationally at 001-1802-872-6199. They can also file a tip online by completing ICEs online tip form.

In fiscal year 2015, ICE conducted 235,413 removals nationwide. Ninety-one percent of individuals removed from the interior of the United States had previously been convicted of a criminal offense.

ICE is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that targets serious criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, such as those charged with or convicted of homicide, rape, robbery, kidnapping, major drug offenses and threats to national security.
Imperial Valley News Center

ICE seeks public's help in locating badge counterfeiter believed to be in Germany

Washington, DC - In July 2013, a man was watching a movie at a theatre in Michigan, wearing body armor and carrying a firearm. When approached by police, he presented a counterfeit Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) badge and credentials.

In January 2014, a man attempted to gain access to the secure area of Reagan National Airport using a counterfeit CIA badge, but was prevented from doing so after Transportation Security Administration officers noticed inconsistencies with the mans statements and credentials.

In August 2015, a man was indicted for impersonating a federal law enforcement agent. He used a counterfeit Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) badge and credentials to enter the Naval Nuclear Training Command in South Carolina while armed with a Sig Sauer pistol.

All three of these situations have one thing in common; the badges and credentials originated from a German-based company called Master Equipment.

Master Equipment is operated by 34-year-old Roberto Craciunica, a Romanian man believed to be residing in Germany. Craciunica was indicted in October 2015 in the Eastern District of Virginia for a variety of charges related to manufacturing and distributing counterfeit badges, including trafficking in counterfeit goods; smuggling; and possession, sale or transportation of false seals. Interpol has also issued a Red Notice for Craciunicas arrest.

From January 2010 to September 2015, Craciunicas company, Master Equipment, manufactured and distributed counterfeit U.S. law enforcement badges from HSI, the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation without authorization. Craciunica sold these badges through websites like www.badge-police.com and www.master-equipment.org. Craciunica and his co-conspirators instructed buyers to pay for the counterfeit badges by sending funds through Western Union and Paypal. They then shipped the counterfeit badges from Kaarst, Germany, to buyers in the United States. Individuals utilized the badges and credentials to impersonate federal agents and officers of the U.S. government, and in some situations, attempted to gain access to restricted areas.

As part of this investigation, HSI Washington, D.C., special agents seized counterfeit badges and seals purchased from Web domains operated by Master Equipment and Craciunica.

The Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority, the U.S. Marshals Service for the Eastern District of Virginia and the U.S. Marshals Service Headquarters Tactical Operations Division assisted with the investigation.
California Wholesale Executive Pleads Guilty for Role in $9 Million Bank Fraud Scheme

Los Angeles, California - A California man who was a vice president of a wholesale equipment company pleaded to fraud charges in connection with a bank fraud scheme that resulted in more than $9 million in losses to a California bank.

Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Departments Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker of the Central District of California, Acting Special Agent in Charge Anthony Orlando of the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Los Angeles Field Office and Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) Christy Goldsmith Romero made the announcement.

Chung Yu Yeung, aka Louis Yeung, 39, of San Dimas, California, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder of the Central District of California to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and four counts of bank fraud. Sentencing was set for June 20, 2016, before Judge Snyder.

According to admissions made in connection with his guilty plea, from 2007 to 2012, Yeung was the vice president of Eastern Tools and Equipment Inc. (Eastern Tools), a wholesale equipment company based in Ontario, California, that sold portable generators to retailers across the country. Yeung admitted that beginning in 2007, he and his co-conspirators defrauded East West Bank, based in Pasadena, California, in connection with a line of credit for Eastern Tools by making and causing to be made material misrepresentations to the bank about Eastern Tools accounts receivable and its financial statements. The conspirators created numerous shell corporations to act as purported suppliers and retailers doing business with Eastern Tools, when, in reality, these shell corporations were entirely under the control of Yeung and existed for the sole purpose of creating the illusion of such business, he admitted. Yeung admitted that the fictitious companies allowed him and other conspirators to falsely inflate Eastern Tools accounts receivable and financial statements in representations to East West Bank.

To further the scheme, Yeung and other conspirators opened and caused to be opened post office boxes, phone accounts and email accounts purportedly associated with the shell retail companies, and provided information about these items to East West Bank auditors to promote the illusion that these shell customers were independent entities, according to admissions made in connection with Yeungs plea.

Eastern Tools defaulted on the promissory note after East West Bank discovered the fraud, causing more than $9 million in losses to the bank, Yeung admitted.

SIGTARP, IRS-CI and the FBI investigated the case. Senior Litigation Counsel David A. Bybee of the Criminal Divisions Fraud Section is prosecuting the case.
California Man Who Choked Woman on an Airplane Convicted of Assault

Los Angeles, California - A Northern California man has been convicted of a federal assault charge for choking and hitting a fellow passenger on a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Lawrence Wells, Jr., 54, of Richmond, California, was convicted by a jury Wednesday afternoon in United States District Court of federal misdemeanor assault.

According to the evidence at trial, Wells and the victim were passengers on board Southwest Airlines flight 2010 from Los Angeles to San Francisco on October 18 last year. Wells was seated directly behind the victim. The flight was scheduled to take off from Los Angeles International Airport at 7:10 p.m. but was delayed both in boarding and on the tarmac. While the flight was on the tarmac, the victim reclined her seat. Wells summoned a flight attendant and angrily pointed at the victims reclined seat. The flight attended instructed the victim to return her seat to the upright position.

The flight did not actually take off until 10:30 p.m. A few minutes after the flight left Los Angeles, the victim reclined her seat again. At that time, Wells reached around the victims chair and choked her for five to ten seconds. He also punched her in the head with a closed fist. The pilot returned the flight to LAX.

Defendants violent reaction to the frustrations of air travel was beyond the bounds of civilized behavior, said United States Attorney Eileen M. Decker. The victim was fortunate that she did not suffer greater injuries, because she had no way to defend herself from this defendants attack.

The victim testified that, as a result of the assault, she suffered a concussion and experienced persistent nausea, dizziness, headaches, neck pain, loss of appetite, significant anxiety, and ringing in her ear, among other symptoms. The jury, however, acquitted the defendant of the felony count of assault causing serious bodily injury.

After Wells conviction yesterday, United States District Judge R. Gary Klausner set sentencing for June 27, 2016. At that time, defendant will face a statutory maximum sentence of six months in federal prison.

This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
American Medical Association Testifies to California Department of Insurance

San Francisco, California - The American Medical Association (AMA) testified Tuesday before the California Department of Insurance in opposition of the proposed acquisition of Cigna by rival Anthem, warning regulators that the merger amounts to a grab for anticompetitive market power that threatens Californias health care delivery system.

The AMA opposes Anthems goal of dominating the California health insurance market by purchasing Cigna - the states sixth largest insurer. The AMA presented state regulators with an analysis that found the proposed Anthem-Cigna merger would run afoul of federal antitrust guidelines in highly-populated metropolitan areas across California.

California should act to block the harmful merger and foster a more competitive market place that will operate in patients best interests, said Henry Allen, the AMAs top antitrust attorney. The states fragile health care system should not be left vulnerable to a giant health insurance company with anticompetitive market power. The consequences of the proposed merger would have negative long-term consequences for health care access, quality and affordability in California.

The AMA noted that health insurer consolidation compromises the ability of physicians to advocate fo their patients. In practice, market power allows insurers to exert control over clinical decisions, which undermines the patient-physician relationship and eliminates crucial safeguards of patient care. Competition among health insurers, on the other hand, can lower premiums, enhance customer service, and spur innovative ways to improve quality while lowering costs. Patients benefit when they can choose from an array of insurers who compete for their business by offering desirable coverage at competitive prices.

Competition, not consolidation, is the right prescription for Californias health insurance markets and underscores what is ultimately at stake: the health and safety of the states patients, said Allen. The physician role as patient advocate is undermined as large health insurers replace clinical judgement with corporate policy. Conditions in most markets are now heavily tilted toward insurers, giving them an unprecedented advantage in determining the scope, coverage and quality of health care."

The AMA noted that in California, where most markets are dominated by Anthem, there are high barriers for new competitors to enter these markets. Potential competitors are typically unable to challenge Anthems market dominance due to the insurers entrenched position. Allowing Anthem to enhance its market power through the Cigna acquisition would represent an insurmountable barrier for new insurers to expand to California markets and offer competitive choices to patients.

Anthem has been unable to produce evidence to support its claim that the merger guarantee greater efficiency and lower health care costs, said Allen. To the contrary, economic studies have shown that rather than passing any benefits from efficiencies to consumers, health insurer mergers actually result in higher premiums.

The proposed merger between Anthem and Cigna highlights a significant lack of health insurer competition that already exists in two-thirds of Californias metropolitan areas. These markets are rated "highly concentrated" based on federal guidelines. The U.S. Department of Justice has recognized that patient interests can be harmed when a big insurer has a stranglehold on a local market.
Animal-assisted therapy can help healing and lessen depression and fatigue

Scottsdale, Arizona - Is medicine going to the dogs? Yes, but in a good way. Pet therapy is gaining fans in health care and beyond. Find out what's behind this growing trend.

What is pet therapy?

Pet therapy is a broad term that includes animal-assisted therapy and other animal-assisted activities. Animal-assisted therapy is a growing field that uses dogs or other animals to help people recover from or better cope with health problems, such as heart disease, cancer and mental health disorders.

Animal-assisted activities, on the other hand, have a more general purpose, such as providing comfort and enjoyment for nursing home residents.

How does animal-assisted therapy work?

Imagine you're in the hospital. Your doctor mentions the hospital's animal-assisted therapy program and asks if you'd be interested. You say yes, and your doctor arranges for someone to tell you more about the program. Soon after that, an assistance dog and its handler visit your hospital room. They stay for 10 or 15 minutes. You're invited to pet the dog and ask the handler questions.

After the visit, you realize you're smiling. And you feel a little less tired and a bit more optimistic. You can't wait to tell your family all about that charming canine. In fact, you're already looking forward to the dog's next visit.

Who can benefit from animal-assisted therapy?

Animal-assisted therapy can significantly reduce pain, anxiety, depression and fatigue in people with a range of health problems:

Children having dental procedures

People receiving cancer treatment

People in long-term care facilities

People hospitalized with chronic heart failure

Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder

And it's not only the ill person who reaps the benefits. Family members and friends who sit in on animal visits say they feel better, too. Animals also can be taught to reinforce rehabilitative behaviors in patients, such as throwing a ball or walking.

Pet therapy is also being used in nonmedical settings, such as universities and community programs, to help people deal with anxiety and stress.

Does pet therapy have risks?

The biggest concern, particularly in hospitals, is safety and sanitation. Most hospitals and other facilities that use pet therapy have stringent rules to ensure that the animals are clean, vaccinated, well-trained and screened for appropriate behavior.

It's also important to note that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has never received a report of infection from animal-assisted therapy.

Animal-assisted therapy in action

More than a dozen certified therapy dogs are part of Mayo Clinic's Caring Canines program. They make regular visit to various hospital departments and even make special visits on request. The dogs are a welcome distraction and help reduce the stress and anxiety that can accompany hospital visits.
Do Health Awareness Days Actually Impact Behavior?

Baltimore, Maryland - Take a glance at the calendar: World Autism Awareness Day is just around the corner. As are World Health Day, World Lupus Day and many more. One federal catalog lists 212 separate health-focused awareness days.

Health awareness days are ubiquitous. But does dedicating a day to a serious disease or to healthy living habits actually make a difference in the lives of people who hear about the occasion? Thats been difficult to determine because traditional methods, like telephone surveys, usually arent effective in gauging the effect of a single event occurring on a single day. A recent review of awareness days, for instance, found virtually no evidence of their impact.

But a new study, published today in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and other institutions, used modern Big Data analyses to confirm that at least one annual health awareness day does indeed trigger behavior among many of the people who hear about it.

The team of public health and computer science experts measured the impact of the Great American Smokeout, one of the longest-running awareness events, held annually on the third Thursday of November to promote smoking cessation.

Reviewing data collected since 2009, the team analyzed news reports on smoking cessation and tweets encouraging cessation emerging from the United States to see if the Great American Smokeouts message was heard and shared. Then they checked if Americans engaged with that message by seeking resources on Google and Wikipedia to aid smoking cessation, or by calling quitlines that offer live counseling on how to quit.

Compared to what would be expected on a normal day, the Great American Smokeout typically coincided with a 61 percent increase in news reports on cessation and a 13 percent increase in tweets encouraging cessation. In practical terms, this was the second-highest daily news coverage of smoking cessation in several years, including the last three, only falling short of New Years Day.

Cessation-related Google searches, like help quit smoking, typically increased by 25 percent on the Great American Smokeout, with visits to the Wikipedia cessation page and calls to quitlines typically increasing by 22 and 42 percent, respectively. This public engagement with smoking cessation translated into about 61,000 more instances of unique Google searches, Wikipedia visits and calls to quitlines annually than expected.

The research at Johns Hopkins was supervised by Mark Dredze, an assistant research professor in the Whiting School of Engineerings Department of Computer Science. He said the advent of the Big Data era not only impacted the teams ability to understand awareness days, but also potentially increased their impact.

For the first time in history, the public can access and share information immediately, and instantaneously engage in improving their health via their smartphones, as we observed, said Dredze, the data architect and a co-author for the study.

He added that this research showcases an effective new method for teasing out the impact of awareness days with Big Data.

This strategy allowed us to observe how awareness days typically unfold in both the media and in the minds and actions of individuals, said study co-author Benjamin Althouse, who earned his doctorate in 2013 from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We can track how a cessation message moves across news and social media, and ultimately how the public reacts by seeking out additional information on how to quit.

Althouse, currently a research scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling and the Santa Fe Institute, was lead analyst for the study.

First author of the study was John W. Ayers, a research professor at San Diego State University Graduate School of Public Health who earned his doctorate in 2012 from the Bloomberg School.

The Great American Smokeout is having a significant impact that far eclipsed our expectations for awareness days, Ayers said. But just as important, our study shows how we can rapidly and efficiently evaluate hundreds of awareness days, many for the first time.

Lee Westmaas, a scientist with the American Cancer Society and a co-author, added that newly available data mean awareness days can have even larger impacts going forward.

The Great American Smokeout is one of the nations oldest and most well-known awareness days, Westmaas said. Yet these data finally allow us to understand the reach of our efforts and make improvements.

These findings, moreover, reinforce the role of awareness days. A cost-efficient and well-focused message coming from the public on a single day, like the Great American Smokeout, can potentially yield impacts just as large as paid media campaigns, said Eric Leas, a student of health communication at the University of California San Diego and a study co-author. For example, Google searches for cessation during the Great American Smokeout rivaled those observed in the teams latest evaluation of the CDCs Tips from Former Smokers campaign. More work remains ahead, but these are some optimistic findings and implications.

Still, not all awareness days may be similarly impactful. For instance, there are nearly a half-dozen awareness days that promote smoking cessation alone, like Kick Butts Day. What is the impact of replicate days? Do all awareness topics similarly resonate across the public? These and similar questions are now open to study for the first time, according to Adrian Benton, a computer science doctoral student at Johns Hopkins and a co-author. Public health can readily adopt and expand our approach to evaluate like campaigns, and make data-driven decisions for planning and targeting awareness days, Benton said.

All this means that those pesky days filling up your calendar may be having an impact, and we can know for sure very soon, Ayers said. In fact, the team is crowdsourcing funds to continue investigating additional awareness days through Benefunder. More must be done to evaluate and improve awareness days, Ayers said.

The studys other co-author was Yunqi Chen, who served a summer internship with Dredzes Johns Hopkins lab team.

Funding for some of the work involved in this study was provided by Grant RCA173299A from the National Cancer Institute and the FDA Center for Tobacco Products.
Personality influences how one reacts to email errors

Ann Arbor, Michigan - When reading emails, do you become the "grammar police?"

You no who you aer: the person who thinks its her job too catch every typo or gramatical errur?

This behavior is partly the result of personality traits that influence how people react to written errors, according University of Michigan linguistics experts.

Extroverted people are likely to overlook typos and grammatical errors that would cause introverted people to judge the person who makes such errors more negatively.

"This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language," said Julie Boland, U-M professor of linguistics and psychology, and the study's lead author. "In this experiment, we examined the social judgments that readers made about the writers."

Eighty-three participants read email responses to an ad for a housemate that either contained no errors or had been altered to include either typos, such as mkae (make) or abuot (about), or grammar errors, such as to/too, it's/its or your/you're. They rated the email writers in terms of perceived intelligence, friendliness and other attributes, as well as provided information about themselves.

At the end of the experiment, participants were asked if they noticed any grammatical errors in the responses. If they answered "yes," they indicated how much the errors bothered them.

As expected, participants who reported grammar being important at the beginning of the experiment were more likely to be bothered by grammatical errors at the end, said study co-author Robin Queen, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics.

In addition, less agreeable people are more sensitive to grammatical errors, while more conscientious and less open people are sensitive to typos, the researchers said.
'What Rain?' Sun is Shining at the MCG and India-Pakistan Fans Finally Breathe a Sigh of Relief
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Councils and hospitals are to be encouraged by the government to buy British steel as a way of trying to save the industy.

The Government said all public sector organisations looking to buy steel as part of infrastructure projects will be required to look at both the social and economic impact on the UK before buying from abroad.

Guidelines introduced last year requiring central government bodies to take into account the true value of British steel will be extended across the public sector - including the NHS and local councils.

Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, said: By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects, we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies.

The push comes as a potential saviour for the Port Talbot steelworks has reportedly emerged, tycoon Sanjeev Gupta.

Mr Gupta has said he is ready to open talks with the Government about a rescue plan to save the plant, potentially saving thousands of jobs.

The founder of commodities firm Liberty House told the Sunday Telegraph he was in the process of opening discussions with Tata Steel, but said any deal would require a "proper partnership" with the Government to succeed.

Mr Gupta told the paper: "I haven't made a proposition that I want to buy all of [Tata Steel UK] because that's too big an undertaking to even put on the table at this stage.

"If the company, its people, its workers and the Government would be willing to consider my suggestions then I'm willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that."

Meanwhile, the German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp was in talks with Tata about buying Port Talbot and its other UK sites around three months ago, the Observer reports.

The paper cited a source saying Tata could potentially rescue the deal if the UK government provided substantial financial support.

Tata Steel put its entire UK business up for sale to stem heavy losses, blamed on high manufacturing costs and competition with China.

In January, the company announced more than 1,000 job cuts in the UK, including 750 at Port Talbot, where it employs 4,000 staff and a further 3,000 contractors and temporary workers.

Business minister Anna Soubry said "the dream" solution would be to find a successful buyer, but Tata says it is losing 1m a day in its UK operations.
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Liberty House owner Sanjeev Gupta appears to be the frontrunner to buy Tata Steel UK.

The 44-year-old was born in Punjab, India to an industrialist father who owned a number of businesses including Victor Cycles.

At the age of 12, he moved to England to become a boarder at St Edmunds College, Canterbury in Kent.

After finishing his A levels, he spent two years working in Turkey at his fathers bicycle company, before going to Trinity College Cambridge to study economics and management.

While still a student in 1992, he set up a commodities trading business called Liberty House from his student halls of residence flat.

And despite being sanctioned for using the halls of residence address for his VAT claim, he continued to run his business from new rented accommodation and graduated with a 2:1.

Liberty House has now evolved into a 4.2bn business employing 2,000 people around the world with interests in steel-making, renewable energy, financial services and property.

The firm has bases in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai, where Gupta lived with his wife Nicola and young family until last year.

He returned to the UK to oversee work at his recently-acquired Newport steel works plant, moving his family into a mansion in Chepstow on the Welsh/English border.

He said: Its important for the family to have a proper base.

I feel Indian and British and want our children to have strong roots in both cultures.

But asked earlier this week about his possible takeover of the Port Talbot steel works, he said:

"Our engagement will depend very much on what Tata and the Government are prepared to do to help save these businesses."
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The editors of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are facing criticism for an article linking the Brussels terror attacks to ordinary Muslims in Europe.

In an editorial entitled How did we end up here? the magazine which suffered its own terror attack on 7 January 2015 gave its response to the bombings in Belgium two weeks ago which killed 32 people.

In reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed, the article suggests, before describing a terror attack as the end of a philosophical line for a society which tolerates women wearing burqas or bakers not offering ham or bacon.

Charlie Hebdos authors argue: This is not to victimise Islam particularly. For it has no opponent. It is not Christianity, Hinduism nor Judaism that is balked by the imposition of this silence. It is the opponent (and protector) of them all. It is the very notion of the secular. It is secularism which is being forced into retreat.

The article has been condemned by campaigners for diversity in the media, particularly after Charlie Hebdo was last year awarded the PEN Freedom of Expression Courage Award.

Media Diversified suggested the article slandered individuals who practice Islam as well as Islam itself, adding that the former results in violence we have seen against young women and elderly men.

The Al Jazeera presenter Mehdi Hasan tweeted a range of criticisms of the article, including an opinion piece in response to Charlie Hebdo by the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole.

Brussels attacks victims Show all 11 1 /11 Brussels attacks victims Brussels attacks victims CONFIRMED DEAD: Adelma Tapia Ruiz Ms Tapia, 37, was from Peru and had lived in Brussels for six years. She was at the airport with her husband, Christophe Delcambe, and their twin four-year-old daughters, Maureen and Alondra. They were checking in to fly to New York to visit Ms Ruizs sisters when the blast struck. The death of Ms Tapia was confirmed by the Peruvian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and her brother Fernando Tapia Coral has told Peruvian radio that she had planned to return to Peru later this year. In a Facebook post, Mr Tapia called her death incomprehensible in a Facebook post. Her husband and children survived, but it has been reported that one of her daughters was injured by debris Brussels attacks victims CONFIRMED DEAD: Leopold Hecht Mr Hecht was a young Belgian student working towards a qualification in law at Saint-Louis University in Brussels. The university confirmed in a Facebook post that he was one of the victims of the Maelbeek metro bombing Brussels attacks victims CONFIRMED DEAD: Oliver Delespesse Mr Delespesse, 36, was confirmed dead in the metro bombing by his employers Wallonie Bruxelles Federation, an organisation which represents French speakers in the region. One of his colleagues, Olivier Dradin posted a tribute on Facebook: "I wanted to pay tribute to him and to his family and to all the other victims" Brussels attacks victims MISSING: Sasha Pinczowski A brother and sister from New York, who were at Zaventem to fly back to the US at the time of the blasts, are also missing. Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski were on the phone to their family when the phone went dead, according to Dutch media. Ms Pinczowski studied business and had previously completed an internship at the UN Brussels attacks victims MISSING: Alexander Pinczowski A brother and sister from New York, who were at Zaventem to fly back to the US at the time of the blasts, are also missing. Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski were on the phone to their family when the phone went dead, according to Dutch media. Ms Pinczowski studied business and had previously completed an internship at the UN Brussels attacks victims MISSING: Aline Bastin Ms Bastin, 29, a former employee of the European Chemical Industry Council, was on the metro at the time of the attacks. Her friends have launched an appeal on Facebook for news of her whereabouts Brussels attacks victims MISSING: Raghavendran Ganesan Mr Ganesans brother has set up an appeal for information on the whereabouts of his sibling, who was on the metro at the time of the attacks. He wrote on Facebook that he had spoken to the Indian embassy, who were still searching for Mr Ganesan Brussels attacks victims MISSING: Sabrina Fazal There has not been word of Ms Fazal, a 25-year-old Belgian student, since yesterday morning. She would have been on the metro at the time of the attacks, on the way to the Haute Ecole Galilee in central Brussels, where she is studying Brussels attacks victims MISSING: David Dixon The family of Mr Dixon, a computer programmer from Nottingham, has not heard from him since he left for work yesterday morning. He is believed to have been on the metro at the time of the blast. Its just waiting, which is heartbreaking, the sister of Charlotte Sutcliffe, Mr Dixons partner, told Radio 4s Today program. His friend Simon Harley-Jones told the BBC that Ms Sutcliffe had been driving around hospitals in the hope of finding him Brussels attacks victims MISSING: Bart Migom Mr Migom, 21, was on his way to Athens, but never arrived. He was texting his girlfriend, Emily Eisenman, from the train to Brussels airport however she haven't heard from him since the attacks. His cell phone rings, she said but there is no answer Brussels attacks victims MISSING: Justin and Stephanie Shults An American couple who lived in Brussels are among the missing, their family have confirmed. Justin and Stephanie had just dropped Stephanies mother, Carolyn Moore, off at the Brussels Airport when the blasts occurred. Mrs Moore, survived the attack, but the couple has not been found

Cole said he had to "carefully scrutinise" the piece before he believed it genuinely came from Charlie Hebdo, and that the authors "finally step away from the mask of 'it's satire and you don't get it' to state clearly that Muslims, all of them, no matter how integrated, are the enemy".

He wrote that reading the editorial it was hard not to recall the vicious development of "the Jewish question" in Europe and the horrifying persecution it resulted in.

Charlie's logic is frighteningly similar: that there are no innocent Muslims, that something must be done about these people, regardless of their likeability, their peacefulness, or their personal repudiation of violence, Cole writes.

 Charlie Hebdo team bites back with new issue

Such categorization of an entire community as an insidious poison is a move we have seen before.
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Millions of confidential documents have been leaked from one of the worlds most secretive law firms, exposing how the rich and powerful have hidden their money.

Dictators and other heads of state have been accused of laundering money, avoiding sanctions and evading tax, according to the unprecedented cache of papers that show the inner workings of the law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is based in Panama.

The documents, dubbed "The Panama Papers", reveal links to 72 current or former heads of state and accuse some of them of having vested interests in their own banks and looting their own countries.

The data shows links to families and associates of some of the most powerful people in the world, including the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, the former Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi and the current president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

In the UK, several elected officials are involved with the law firm, including Baroness Pamela Sharples and the MP Michael Mates. They provided responses to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and have either denied any financial benefit to the offshore companies or have completely denied the allegations of working with the law firm.

 What are The Panama Papers?

Two close allies of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, are linked to an alleged money-laundering ring thought to be worth $1billion, run by a bank based in St Petersburg, Bank Rossiya. One of those is the concert cellist Sergei Roldugin, who has known Mr Putin for many years, is godfather to Mr Putins daughter Maria, and introduced him to his now ex-wife Lyudmila. The bank in question has already faced sanctions from the European Union and the US after Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Show all 12 1 /12 Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Edward Snowden NSA leak Articles in The Guardian revealed that the US and the UK spied on foreign leaders and diplomats at the 2009 G20 summit. Reuters Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade WikiLeaks' US diplomatic cables leak In 2009, former US soldier Chelsea Manning, downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified US Government documents, and passed them on to Jullian Assange's whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Among the documents were 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. One disclosed the close relationship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Guardian reported. Allegations included "lavish gifts", lucrative energy contracts and the use by Berlusconi of a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italiango-between. Getty Images Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade WikiLeaks' US diplomatic cables leak WikiLeaks' US diplomatic cables leak: In a revelation which bruised the UK's 'special relationship' with the US, WikiLeaks published conversations by US commanders criticising Britain's military operations in Afghanistan. Getty Images Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade WikiLeaks' US diplomatic cables leak WikiLeaks' US diplomatic cables leak: One document disclosed startling levels of corruption in Afghanistan, including an incident involving the then vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, who was reportedly stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash. Getty Images Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade WikiLeaks' US diplomatic cables leak Another cable documented fears in Washington over Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, in a volatile country with a strategic position in the Middle East. PA Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade WikiLeaks' US diplomatic cables leak Day four of the gradual drip of leaks exposed allegations that Russia and its intelligence agencies are using mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations, with one cable reporting that the relationship is so close that the country has become a "virtual mafia state". Getty Images Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Edward Snowden NSA leak In 2013, The Guardian published classified US National Security Agency (NSA) documents, from a then anonymous whistleblower. Four days later he was exposed as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. A month after the initial leak, the New York Times allegeded that the NSA received emails, video clips, photos, voice and video calls, social networking details, logins and other data held by a range of US internet firms. Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Edward Snowden NSA leak Since Snowden revealed that the US had eavesdropped on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone, German-US relations have been strained. In May 2014, Mrs Merkel said still had significant differences with the United States over surveillance practices and that it was too soon to return to business as usual," according to the New York Times. Getty Images Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Edward Snowden NSA leak On 7 June, The Guardian published the Presidential Policy Directive 20, whcih included a list of potential targets for cyber-attacks by the US Government. Rex Features Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Samy Kamkar iPhone and Android expose In April 2014, hacker and researcher Samy Kamkar revealed that Android phones collect user location data every few seconds. Files are then transited to Google several times an hour. Getty Images Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Samy Kamkar iPhone and Android expose It is believed Apple and Google are using the data to better target adverts to smartphone users, according to The Guardian. Getty Images Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade Samy Kamkar iPhone and Android expose The two companies have since justified the collection of data. In a letter to the US congress Apple confirmed it collected the data and said that, in order to be useful, "the databases [of tower and network locations] must be updated continuously". A Google spokesman told the Guardian Android phones explicitly asked to collect anonymous location data when users turned them on. Getty Images

The papers were initially leaked via the German newspaperSuddeutsche Zeitung to the ICIJ. Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, who has been analysing the documents along with 107 media outlets across more than 70 countries, told the BBC: I think the leak will prove to be probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents. The leak will be the subject of a Panoramadocumentary tonight. The source of the leak remains unidentified.

Another accusation in the files is that the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, had an undeclared interest in the bailed-out banks in the country, hiding millions of dollars in Icelands banks via an opaque offshore company.

Iceland was one of the few countries following the 2008 financial crisis to jail several of its bankers, who were accused of taking excessive risk which led to the collapse of their economy.

Yet Mr Gunnlaugsson and his wife bought Wintris, an offshore company, in 2007 but did not declare an interest in the company when they entered parliament. The company was used to invest millions of inherited money. He then sold his 50 per cent stake in Wintris to his wife for 70 pence ($1) eight months later.

Mr Gunnlaugsson has faced calls for his resignation but has reportedly said he has done nothing illegal and his wife has not benefitted financially from the arrangement.

Offshore companies are often located in countries such as Panama and are subject to their own tax rules, often functioning as tax loopholes or requiring much lower taxes than in an investors home country.

The law firm documents additionally show how individuals could take out large amounts of cash without revealing who they are to the public. In one case, the firm acted on behalf of a man who pretended to be the owner of $1.8m so that the real owner could take out the money without revealing their identity.

The ICIJ has listed 140 politicians from more than 50 countries who are linked to offshore companies in 21 tax havens, including countries such as Argentina, Georgia, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar and Ukraine.

Mossack Fonseca said it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and has never been acused or charged with criminal wrong-doing.

If we detect suspicious activity or misconduct, we are quick to report it to the authorities, it said in a statement. Similarly, when authorities approach us with evidence of possible misconduct, we always cooperate fully with them.
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A drugs mule jailed in Peru for trying to smuggle 1.5m of cocaine has said she acted in a moment of madness.

Michaella McCollum, one half of a duo caught in 2013 attempting to smuggle the drugs to Spain, has spoken out for the first time since her release.

Ms McCollum, from County Tyrone, Northern Ireland and Melissa Reid, from Glasgow, were caught at Jorge Chavez airport in Lima with the stash.

"I made a decision in a moment of madness, she told Irish broadcaster RTE in her first interview since being released two years and three months into a six-year sentence.

"I'm not a bad person. I want to demonstrate that I'm a good person."

She admitted that, if she had been successful, she would "probably would have had a lot of blood on my hands."

"I potentially could have filled Europe full of a lot of drugs.

Melissa Reid (R) and Michaella McCollum Connolly are escorted by police (PA)

"I could have potentially killed a lot of people, not directly but I could have caused a lot of harm to people."

Ms McCollum also spoke of how she missed normal things.

"I've forgotten the things that everybody takes for granted in life. Seeing the sun, seeing the darkness, seeing the moon and the stars, things I haven't seen in almost three years."

Ms McCollum was working in Ibiza nightclubs when it is believed she was approached by drug traffickers.

Along with Ms Reid, she was caught attempting to smuggle 11kg of cocaine, hidden in packets of food, on a flight to Madrid.

Ms McCollum's early release is down to new Peruvian legislation. Ms Reid remains imprisoned.

The pair were first jailed in the Virgen de Fatima prison in Lima. They were later moved to the notorious Ancon 2 prison.

RTE will broadcast the full interview on Sunday night at 9.30pm.
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Charities and politicians are demanding urgent changes to housing policy across Britain and warning that thousands of homeless children's lives may be at risk because they are disappearing from support services after being rehoused.

The calls come after an investigation by The Independent uncovered cases of homeless children dying from neglect and abuse after families were moved out of their local authority boundaries. Other evidence in the report suggested that the transfer of homeless families to other parts of the country could have resulted in suicides and miscarriages.

Councils are shunting homeless families out of their local areas on an unprecedented scale to save money on accommodation, as the legacy of the housing crisis and the the Government's cuts to welfare are felt, but they are frequently neglecting to share records with each other, meaning thousands of vulnerable women and children are completely off the radar of support services.

Figures obtained exclusively by The Independent show that at least 64,704 homeless families were moved out by London boroughs between July 2011 and June 2015, with more recent data yet to be collated.

The Independent's research suggests at least one third of families are moved without information being shared with the receiving council, though it is not known how high that figure could potentially be. Councils are legally obliged to send notification under Section 208 of the Housing Act 1996.

Housing and children's charities are now calling for an urgent review of the practice. Barnardo's chief executive Javed Khan told The Independent: "Children's lives can be put at risk if homeless families fall off the radar of authorities."

"[Councils must] share information more effectively to stop that happening".

Shelter's chief executive Campbell Robb said that out-of-area moves are "far too common and can have a disastrous effect on health and wellbeing" but that one problem is the Government not giving councils "realistic budgets to find accommodation locally".

Mr Robb also said: "The modest proposals in the Budget to tackle homelessness are simply inadequate given the scale of this problem, and will not reach the thousands of homeless families hidden away in cramped B&Bs and dingy hostel rooms."

The Coalition Government cut housing benefit rates by 40 per cent, reducing the amount of housing available to councils and forcing them to look further afield for accommodation for their residents. Councils have responded by moving more and more homeless families out of the area in a desperate search for cheaper rents.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is calling for an "urgent review" of out-of-area homeless placements, warning of a "lifelong legacy" of problems for families. Evidence in the report suggested that the transfer of homeless families to other parts of the country could have resulted in suicides and miscarriages, as well as neglect.

Exactly one year ago, on 2 April 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that routinely moving homeless families out of area is unlawful, and numerous cases in senior courts have reiterated councils' duty to notify each other when they move families, many of which are extremely vulnerable. But several legal experts told The Independent that this judgement is being completely ignored.

London Councils, the representative body for London's 32 boroughs (from which around 90 per cent of out-of-area moves take place), refused to comment specifically on the problems with information sharing uncovered by The Independent. London Councils, The Independent understands, has been aware of issues for a decade, but problems were still being raised in reports and serious case reviews as recently as December last year.

Affordable housing: New social butterflies Show all 4 1 /4 Affordable housing: New social butterflies Affordable housing: New social butterflies 17643.bin Affordable housing: New social butterflies 17644.bin Affordable housing: New social butterflies 17645.bin Affordable housing: New social butterflies 17646.bin

A London Councils spokesperson said that the current information sharing database, called Notify, is "presently under review and the outcome of that review has not been decided".

Sadiq Khan, Labour's candidate for Mayor of London, said he was "shocked at what The Independent has uncovered in this investigation" and that the practice "is tantamount to social cleansing".

"Either the current Government, with the deep cuts they're imposing on local authorities, don't care or, worse still, are happy to sit by and let it [social cleansing] happen," he said. "What we need is nothing short of a complete overhaul of housing policy in London."

Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, told The Independent: "We're really starting to see the dangerous impact a Tory-only government is having on our country, and the chances young children have to succeed.

"The Chancellor is blinkered to the impact his policies are having on families who are struggling to get by.

"Enough is enough. It is time Cameron and Osborne realised that their dogmatic approach to welfare, housing and our vital public services will have a damaging and long lasting effect on children in Britain. Instead of improving life chances, Osborne is treating the poorest families in Britain as an afterthought."

 'Pop-up squat' in Knightsbridge for Housing Bill

Dave Hill, president of The Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), said: "The importance of close liaison and good communications between local authorities is particularly pressing where there are vulnerable children or safeguarding concerns, but we also have a role to play in finding school places and helping families access childcare."

The ADCS would not comment on whether it is already aware of an issue with information sharing for out of area homeless placements.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) declined to comment on The Independent's investigation and would not confirm or deny that policy is being reviewed, but admitted "we know more must be done on homelessness" and said it is "considering all options, including legislation, to prevent more people becoming homeless in the first place".
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A London councils education authority destroyed evidence of children being educated in illegal faith schools at the request of religious institutions, The Independent can reveal.

The Department for Education has been aware of the problem since 2010 but does not appear to have taken any steps to act against the destruction of these records.

An investigation by The Independent also found that more than 1,000 children are missing from schools in London and are at risk of abuse in illegal faith schools. The schools are ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith schools at which boys are placed from the age of 13, and where they receive no education beyond studying religious texts. A number of pupils leave school with little or no ability to speak English, and few  if any  qualifications or skills which equip them to work, or live independently.

Former pupils, campaigners and whistleblowers say that the schools have been operating in plain sight without government action for more than 40 years, despite the fact that running a non-registered school is a criminal offence, and physical violence and sexual abuse of children is alleged to have taken place inside the schools.

A redacted 'Action of Note' of a meeting between representatives from the Department for Education and Hackney Learning Trust reveals that both bodies have been aware of the issue for at least six years. Hackney Learning Trust is a private company in Hackney Councils Children and Young Peoples Service, which describes itself as having responsibility for the councils entire education function. At a meeting in May 2010, the issue of ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools operating illegally in Hackney was raised. The Trusts own 'Action of Note' of the meeting record authorities admitting at this meeting that they destroyed evidence of the abuse at the request of Jewish schools.

In the meeting, Trust representatives discussed that in an attempt to track the whereabouts of Jewish children when they go missing from education records, they had asked legal Jewish state schools to inform them when a child was taken away by their parents to attend an illegal one instead. A Trust representative says that although they were initially able to receive evidence tracking the missing children in this way which could have enabled them to act and protect children, some of the schools threatened legal action against the Trust and that they subsequently backed down and agreed to destroy all evidence it collected on the issue.

The 'Action of Note' records that a senior Department for Education staff member was present at the meeting and had agreed to inform the Department of all that was discussed. However, despite this, it appears that the Department of Education did not raise any objections to Hackney Learning Trust destroying evidence of children being placed in illegal schools, nor did they take any steps to intervene or act against the destruction of these records.

Furthermore, The Independent can also reveal data analysis of the Governments own records which show that more than 1,000 Jewish boys are currently missing from the education system in the London Borough of Hackney, and that thousands more have disappeared over the course of decades.

Campaigners and whistleblowers say that the Department of Education and Hackney Council have both refused to take these concerns seriously for decades, resulting in thousands of lost children over generations.

Former pupils, whistleblowers and campaigners have told The Independent that the boys, who belong to ultra-Orthodox Jewish families, are taken out of the schooling system by the age of 13. After this age, they attend extremely strict faith schools where lessons are conducted in Yiddish, speaking English is banned, physical beating occurs and children are encouraged to enter arranged marriages upon turning 18.

Data analysis by the British Humanist Association (BHA) reveals that the Governments own records show that thousands of Jewish boys drop off records of registered school children. Currently, more than 1,100 children are missing from these records in London.

Campaigners say that the boys often start off in legal, state primary schools along with their sisters.

However, their religious beliefs are that boys should dedicate their lives to intense study of religious texts exclusively once they reach their Bar Mitzvah age of around 13. Daughters are not expected to undergo the same education because it is not seen as theologically important for women to have a deep understanding of religious texts when their primary role is looking after their families and the home, and so girls largely remain in legal, state schools.

Data from the Department of Educations own census of children in education backs up these claims depicts how Jewish girls continue in education, while their brothers slowly drop off from the ages of 11 and 12, before figures plummet from the age of 13.

The Independent understands that this slow drop is because parents remove children during the summer holidays because it is harder to detect than taking them out during the academic year. Therefore, the boys are removed in the summer holidays immediately prior to their Bar Mitzvah, resulting in slow drops in numbers of children aged 11 and 12, before a huge drop at age 13.

As daughters from these families continue to go to local schools, it is extremely unlikely that the families have moved out of the local area or left the UK.

It is feared that even more will be missing as the most extreme families home-school their children from birth or send them to extreme religious schools from the age of three and the children therefore never make it to educational records in the first place.

The Independent has seen correspondence reporting these illegal schools to both Hackney Council and the Department of Education which dates back to 2013. Yet despite this and the meeting's 'Action of Note' revealing both bodies have been aware of this issue since at least 2010, it appears that no action has been taken to successfully protect the children.

Campaigners argue that Hackney council has turned a blind eye to abuse for decades and that when they have finally acted in recent months following publication of a report by The Independent in January, they have botched their response. In particular, one school in Stamford Hill was issued with a closure notice to cease operating by 12 February. However, more than a month on from this closure date, a reporter for The Independent saw dozens of children speaking Yiddish and wearing Orthodox attire entering the building for lessons at 6:30am and leaving again at 11pm.

Campaigners say that authorities may not be acting because they fear that they will be accused of anti-Semitism if they close these schools or investigate Orthodox Jewish families on child neglect charges.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, chair of the Accord Coalition which links religious and secular groups to promote inclusive education, told The Independent: There has long been an open secret in the Jewish world that ultra-Orthodox schools have been operating in Hackney and are not registered with the Department of Education. In essence, they are illegal schools, but authorities appear to be turning a blind eye.

He added: It could be that people higher up the educational chain fear that closing the schools could be branded as anti-Semitism. There is no reason why one cannot be immersed in Jewish life, but still speak the national language or be able to gain qualifications. As a rabbi I applaud those engaged in Jewish education, but as a rabbi I also condemn those who blinker childrens horizons and isolate them from wider society.

Jay Harman, Faith Schools Campaigner at the British Humanist Association, told The Independent: It is estimated that as many as 2,000 children could be trapped in these schools across the UK, so every year that the Government fails to act, thats thousands more children who are subjected to abuse, indoctrination, and the denial of even the most basic education beyond the study of scripture.

Weve been working with former pupils at unregistered faith schools for some time now, and their overriding sentiment is that they have been badly let down not only by the communities that these schools serve, but also by their local authority and the Government, whose approach continues to be one of inaction and indifference.

A former pupil who attended illegal schools in Hackneys Stamford Hill where he was physically beaten by teachers, left with no qualifications and unable to speak English, told The Independent: My childhood was stolen from me. I think that sometimes the Government misleadingly believes that by intervening they will be seen as intimidating minority communities, but they are doing exactly the opposite. They are being discriminatory against Jewish children and anti-Semitic by not intervening. Theyre saying that children like me dont have the same rights as any other child because we come from the Orthodox Jewish community.

 English State schools to become academies by 2022

A spokesperson for the Department for Education said: Nothing is more important than keeping children safe. It is the local authoritys responsibility to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect and they take these seriously.

Unregistered schools are illegal and unsafe  and we are taking unprecedented and direct action against them across the board to protect children, inform parents and support teachers, putting us firmly on the front foot. We have announced an escalation of Ofsted investigations into unregistered schools, with additional inspectors dedicated to rooting them out, a new tougher approach to prosecuting them and a call to local authorities to help identify any setting of concern. Anyone who has evidence that an illegal school is operating should provide it to us or Ofsted immediately.

The Department for Education said it was investigating the existence of the 'Action of Note'.

A spokesman from Hackney Learning Trust declined to comment.
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Police have warned the public not to use Santander's ATMs over fears of "potential criminal activity and vandalism".

Five Santander cash points have been shut down at the request of Lancashire Police, who made calls about suspicious devices on the bank's machines across the county after receiving reports of issues with some of the bank's ATMs last week.

Officers were concerned criminals targeted the machines in a bid to steal card details and cash, and urged those who have lost money to contact Santander.

The bank has said none of its customers have reported being the victim of fraud.

Santander was contacted this weekend by police who requested that five ATM machines in the North West and Lancashire area be shut down due to potential criminal activity and vandalism," said a spokesperson.

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The five ATMs in question were shut down immediately. The Santander ATM network remains fully operational and we are assisting the police with their enquiries in relation to the five ATMs in the Lancashire area.

Customers are always advised to remain vigilant and if concerned about any other ATM machines, they should contact the police immediately and not use them.

Earlier today, Lancashire Police tweeted that the security at Santander ATMs in Lancashire had been "compromised", and advised the public not to use them.

Cheshire Police also issued a warning on Twitter to avoid Santander machines in Wilmslow, near Manchester.

A spokesman for the Lancashire force said it is feared the issue could be more widespread. He said: We are advising the public to be vigilant, in particular of Santander machines, but of any cash machines.

Report anything suspicious, have a visual check of the cashpoint and if in doubt leave it and go somewhere else. It has spread across the whole of Lancashire so it's highly likely other forces may have had reports.

The force also issued advice to bank customers not to use a cash machine if it appears to have been tampered with and shielding the keypad when entering their PIN number.
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David Cameron's handling of the Libyan crisis was dealt another blow today after humanitarian efforts by the UK were branded as paltry bone-throwing by a United Nations insider.

Just weeks after the US President Barack Obama singled out the Prime Minister, suggesting he had taken his eye off Libya after being distracted by a range of other things, the fresh criticism will be a source of further embarrassment for Downing Street.

According to the Observer, despite urgent calls to provide humanitarian assistance to an estimated 2.4 million Libyans in need of aid, the Department for International Development (DfID) has set aside just 50,000 in aid this financial year to avoid food and medicine shortages in the country.

Speaking to the newspaper, a United Nations source said there was disappointment at the paltry bone-throwing from a European country whose bombers reaped so much destruction in Libya just five years ago.

Stephen Gethins, an SNP MP and member of the foreign affairs select committee, added: The governments intention to spend just 50,000 [for an adviser] on humanitarian aid following their bombing campaign of 320m is nothing short of disastrous in Libya.

Not only did the government undertake military action with little in the way of long-term planning, but it saw the UK spend 13 times more bombing the country than in reconstruction efforts in the four years after that, with the people of the country paying a heavy price.

The comments come only weeks after frank remarks from Mr Obama who sharply criticised Mr Cameron for the UKs role in allowing Libya to become a shit show after the fall of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

He added: "Your friends in Britain and France will stand with you as you build your democracy."

Mr Obama said that following a successful military intervention to aid rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt, Libya was left to spiral out of control  due largely to the inaction of Americas European allies.

In a candid US magazine interview, Mr Obama said: When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong theres room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libyas proximity, being invested in the follow-up.

The Prime Minister led international efforts, with France, to back rebels fighting to overthrow Gaddafi and impose a no-fly zone over the country. In a speech, in 2011, to cheering crowds in Benghazi's Tahrir square, after Gaddafi had been ousted, Mr Cameron said at the time: "Your city was an example to the world as you threw off a dictator and chose freedom."

A spokesperson for the DfID said to the Independent: This government has made substantial efforts to help the people of Libya during the recent humanitarian crisis. In the financial year of 2015/16 alone, the UK government spent over 4m providing humanitarian relief and protection to vulnerable populations in Libya. In addition, the UK government has allocated a further 10m to the Libyan response for 2016/17.

"The UK and the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) plan to co-host a Senior Officials Meeting in Tunis on the 12th April, where a package of international assistance will be agreed from the international community to the new Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA). As this financial year gets underway we will keep the humanitarian situation in Libya under review and adapt our response in order to meet humanitarian needs."
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The Government has exceeded its target for spending on international aid by 172 million, according to official figures.

Provisional figures, released by the Department for International Development (DfID), show aid spending in 2015 represented 0.71 per cent of the national income - putting it above the 0.7 per cent target.

Britain's total aid spending in 2015 was 12.2 billion, representing an overshoot of 172 million.

David Cameron pledged to spend 0.7 per cent of the UK's Gross National Income (GNI) on aid for developing countries. The excess spend represents 0.01 per cent of GNI.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty 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. 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The figures are likely to be controversial among Conservative MPs who have resented David Cameron's commitment to the 0.7 per cent target, arguing the money would be better spent at home.

More than 150,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Government to abandon the controversial target, meaning it will be considered for debate in Parliament.

The Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg told the Mail on Sunday: "There can be no more graphic example of the idiocy of setting such a fixed target.

"This overspend will anger taxpayers who do not want their money frittered away on politicians' vanity."

The news comes as the US cancelled its foreign aid pledge to Tanzania after the country was accused of staging rigged elections on the island of Zanzibar.

The Foreign Office told the Sunday Telegraph there had been no decision to reduce British aid worth 200 million in support for Tanzania.

International Development Secretary Justine Greening told the Mail on Sunday she had carried out a review into aid spending to "make sure taxpayers' money is being spent in the right way".

She said: "Britain faces a simple choice: either we wait for the problems of the world to arrive on our doorstep, or we take action to tackle them at source."
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Jeremy Corbyn could hold the key to Britain remaining in or leaving the European Union, according to new polling that shows the vote is on a knife edge, with the result potentially hanging on the decision and turnout of Labour voters.

The Labour leader is by far the most influential figure in the debate for his partys voters, according to the poll by GQRR, commissioned by the Fabian Society.

Nearly two thirds of Labour voters say they are likely to vote to Remain  around six million people. However, little more than half of them say they are very likely to turnout to vote. Researchers said Mr Corbyns full-throated support for a Remain vote could be crucial in getting Labour voters to the polls and swinging the vote.

The new poll also suggests that the arguments for leaving the EU are proving more decisive among voters. While initial voting intentions give the Remain camp a 45  40 lead over Leave, when the two campaigns main arguments were put to voters, Leave surges ahead, tying the vote at 42-42.

Union leaders warned that David Cameron and the Remain campaign were at risk of losing the referendum and called on the Prime Minister to change gear and focus on arguments for staying in the EU aimed at ordinary British workers rather than the boardroom and the City.

The findings will also pile pressure on Mr Corbyn to take a more strident pro-EU stance.

While officially backing a Remain vote, Mr Corbyn was ambivalent about the EU during his leadership campaign and was has been a vocal Eurosceptic in the past. He has so far maintained a low profile in the EU referendum debate.

 Corbyn on the EU

However, the Fabian Society poll finds that he is the most trusted figure in the debate for Labour voters, with a net approval rating of +17, well ahead of the partys official campaign chief Alan Johnson, on -10.

The polling reports author, Olivia Bailey, research director at the Fabian Society, said the Labour party was not doing enough to galvanise its voters ahead of the June referendum.

Jeremy Corbyns full-throated support is vital for Labour remainers, as is the strength of Labours electoral machine, she said. But there are few signs of either whirring into action.

In another worrying indicator for the Remain campaign, the poll, which surveyed more than 2,200 people, found that Leave voters tend to be more loyal to the cause and are more likely to turn out. Among those voters considered very likely to go the polls, Leave has a 47-45 lead.

Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, said the findings should be a wake-up call for Remain campaigners.

Leave's arguments appear to have more power to persuade than the arguments being used by Remain, and their voters are more motivated to vote. Without action from Remain, the EU race could shift in Leave's favour, he said.

Overall, immigration and control of our laws are the biggest issues in the EU debate for voters, but among Labour voters, the security of British jobs emerges as the main concern, the poll found.

Frances OGrady, general secretary of the TUC said: This research shows that ordinary British workers will be decisive in the European referendum  and campaigners should focus on workers rights and jobs.

But this will come as news to the Prime Minister, whos running a Remain campaign focused only on the boardroom and the City. He might just lose this referendum if he doesnt start telling working people whats in it for them.

This report also poses a challenge to Leave campaigners. They must come clean with workers that Brexit will mean the loss of European guarantees for important rights and protections at work.

Responding to the poll, Alan Johnson, leader of the Labour In For Britain campaign, denied his party were complacent about the referendum.

Unlike the Tories who are divided on this issue, Labour are united in our campaign for Britain to remain in Europe, he said.

If we want the UK to be a fairer and more progressive place we need to remain in the EU, and that's why Jeremy Corbyn, myself and the entire Labour Party movement will continue to make that case and why we believe Labour supporters should vote to Remain on the 23rd of June.
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A multibillion pound move to save Britains steel industry from collapse by underwriting some of its pension liabilities, cutting its energy bills and modernising its largest plant is being prepared by the Government.

Ministers have held initial talks with a potential buyer of parts of Tata Steels loss-making UK operation, including the giant Port Talbot steelworks in South Wales, with more discussions planned this week.

Sanjeev Gupta, the tycoon whose firm Liberty House has already saved several UK steelworks, said: We would need a proper partnership with the Government. I dont know what that would entail at this stage. Weve started the discussions, Mr Gupta said.

Recommended Read more More than half of all shares in UK companies are in foreign hands

The possible shape of a deal was signalled by the Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, amid mounting criticism of the Governments handling of the Tata crisis which threatens up to 40,000 jobs.

Labour called for his resignation after he admitted knowing a few weeks ago that the Indian-based conglomerate was considering shutting its entire UK business.

Mr Javid conceded he had not known the significance of the board meeting last Tuesday in Mumbai where the decision was taken to pull out of Britain.

The Government could offer to shoulder some of the 2bn deficit in Tatas pension scheme, which the company inherited from the nationalised British Steel, although it could face problems over falling foul of European Union state aid rules.

It could also help to foot some of the bill for modernising the Port Talbot works.

Dismissing attacks on his performance, Mr Javid confirmed the government was ready to offer financial support for any potential buyer of Tatas British interests, which are currently losing 1m a day.

He indicated its pension liabilities and the high energy costs faced by steel producers compared with European competitors would be crucial issues for any company contemplating acquiring the beleaguered business.

Mr Javid told BBC1s Andrew Marr Show: They are going to want to look at plants, they are going to want to look at pensions and they are going to want to look at power supply.

He added: What I hope is that you will have the offer document from Tata. Overlay on top of that the help the British government can provide and then you have the makings of a successful deal.

John McDonnell, the shadow Chancellor, said he was shocked that Mr Javid had pressed on with a trade mission to Australia last week while the fateful Mumbai meeting was taking place.

I think we need someone else doing the job. We need someone who is more dynamic. If I was David Cameron I would be looking to bring in someone who is more effective, Mr McDonnell said.
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Ministers were accused of spraying money around by a senior Conservative after it emerged that Tanzania received 200m in British aid despite facing international condemnation for election-rigging.

The East African countrys government suspended an election on the semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar last year in which an opposition candidate appeared set to win. A subsequent contest last month was boycotted by the opposition, enabling the ruling party to enjoy a landslide victory.

Its tactics attracted international opprobrium, and the United States has shelved future aid payments after accusing the countrys leaders of a pattern of actions designed to undermine democracy. The British government confirmed it was not preparing to take the same action in Tanzania, the fifth largest recipient of UK aid in Africa, although it signalled its concern.

We keep all aspects of our relationships with partner governments under constant review, a spokesperson said. This will be no exception. However, Liam Fox, the former Defence Secretary, claimed the Government was being profligate because of its commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national wealth on overseas aid.

Western taxpayers expect their money to be used in an ethical way, he told The Sunday Telegraph. When there are clear breaches of political rights or human rights they will expect a response in terms of the aid we contribute. Countries need to earn support from the British taxpayer rather than us spraying money around until we hit 0.7 per cent.

Owen Paterson, the former Environment Secretary, said: The Foreign Office says the election is not valid and we are carrying on spending the money anyway. That cannot be right.

An American aid agency, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, suspended co-operation with Tanzania last month. It said the African governments actions were inconsistent with MCCs eligibility criteria.

European Union observers said Octobers elections were generally well organised but with insufficient efforts at transparency from the election administrations.
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Sajid Javid has admitted the Government was informed about the possible sale of Tata Steel's UK steelworks "a few weeks ago" - yet he still left the country on a trade mission to Australia.

The Business Secretary said he was caught by surprise by Tata's decision to "go that far" in an announcement on Wednesday following a board meeting in Mumbai.

Mr Javid also refused to rule out nationalising the loss-making UK steel business being sold by Tata Steel, including the major works at Port Talbot.

The UK Government could step in to offer support to the 4,000 Tata Steel workers at the factory in south Wales, which loses nearly 1 million a day, he said.

And he told the Andrew Marr Show: "What we actually knew was that it was an important meeting. But when they made the announcement we didn't anticipate they would go that far.

"The strength of the announcement and how far they went - particularly what they said about timing - was much further than we expected."

David Cameron appeared to rule out even temporary nationalisation of the steelworks after emergency talks with ministers on Thursday.

But Mr Javid said he would not rule out anything at this stage, adding that the government could intervene to cover some costs, including pensions, to make it easier for Tata to find a buyer.

He said he believed nationalisation was rarely the answer in these situations.

I dont think nationalisation is a solution to this, he said. Having said that I also think it wouldnt be prudent to rule anything out at this stage.

Mr Javid said it could be a period of months before a new owner could be found to take over the Port Talbot steelworks.

We will look at everything we can do to allow a sale going ahead and I wouldnt rule out anything at this stage, he said.

Mr Javid said that Tata accepted that finalising any deal would take time.

"They know it is not just a matter of weeks. When they talk about weeks, that's the period you would take to get so-called expressions of interest. Then it will take much longer than that to work out a deal," he said.

The Government's aim, he said, was to find a buyer for the whole of Tata's UK business.

"I want to see steelmaking continuing in Port Talbot, I want to protect as many jobs as possible, I want to find a buyer for the whole of the business," he said.

Mr Javid indicated the Government was ready to provide further assistance with reducing the energy costs of running Port Talbot.

"Any potential investor would want to see movement on that," he said.

He also suggested the Government could help with the costs of the pension scheme - which dates back to the former nationalised British Steel.

"No-one is talking about nationalisation of pension schemes but it is something I absolutely recognise is a challenge," he said.

Additional reporting by agencies
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The Conservative flagship education policy to turn all state schools into academies faces a 1.1 billion funding shortfall, as signs of a growing revolt emerge within the party.

George Osborne unveiled plans to turn 16,800 state schools into academies in his Budget last month. Those who have not been converted must have plans in place to do so by 2022.

But figures obtained by Labour from a parliamentary question suggest each transformation from school to academy costs 66,000 on average. It added that councils would have to cover a further 12,300 in costs, such as legal fees, per school.

The Government has dismissed accusations of a funding shortfall as completely untrue.

The black hole in funding comes as Graham Brady, chairman of the influential 1922 committee of Tory MPs in Westminster, told the Observer the plans could lead to the creation of new and distant bureaucracies rather than greater autonomy.

Recommended Read more Teachers consider taking joint strike action with junior doctors

Mr Brady added he is writing to the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan to urge her not to rush the academy overhaul through Parliament, suggesting she could face a rebellion from her own colleagues.

Just last week the leaders of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, at a local government level, demanded the Department for Education drops the controversial policy. The council leaders said, in a joint letter, that there is no evidence to suggest academies perform better than council-maintained schools

Ms Morgan has insisted there will be no U-turn in the plans, despite considerable cross-party opposition.

Shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell said the added cost came at a time when schools were facing "huge challenges", including reduced budgets.

"This costly reorganisation of our schools is an unnecessary and unfounded distraction, which could harm standards in our schools," she said.

A Department for Education spokeswoman said funding earmarked in November's Spending Review and the March Budget would be enough to support a "high-quality, fully-academised school system".

"We have over 500 million available in this parliament to build capacity in the system - including recruiting excellent sponsors and encouraging the development of strong multi-academy trusts," they told The Independent.

It also emerged teachers may take joint action with the junior doctors as part of their campaign against the Government, National Union of Teachers general secretary Christine Blower said.

In her farewell speech to the NUT conference Ms Blower said she had received a letter of support from Yannis Gourtsoyannis of the British Medical Association's junior doctors' committee after her union had voted to back a ballot on strike action over the Governments proposals.
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The three-storey home at 2475 Glendower Place ought to be one of the most desirable properties in Los Angeles. Built in 1925, in the then fashionable Spanish Revival style, it sits in the leafy hills above the Los Feliz neighbourhood, at the fringes of Griffith Park and with a panoramic view of the city below. Birds chirp in the nearby trees, a bougainvillea tumbles over a neighbours wall. This week, the four-bedroom, three-bathroom house went on the market for $2.75m (1.94m)  a steal, given its size and location.

But theres a caveat, and its one that could be a deal-breaker for superstitious buyers. Although the surroundings are idyllic, the property itself shows signs of decay. The terraced lawn is patchy, the concrete driveway is cracked, and there are stains the colour of dirty dishwater on the stucco facade. Legend states that nobody has lived in the 5,050-sq ft. house for almost 60 years  ever since a grisly, unexplained murder-suicide took place there. Google the address and youll find 2475 Glendower has another name: the Los Feliz Murder House.

At 4.30am on the night of 6 December, 1959, the homes owner, Dr Harold Perelson, bludgeoned his wife Lillian to death as she slept. He next went to the bedroom of the couples teenage daughter, Judye, and attacked her with the bloody hammer. But he managed only a glancing blow  enough to wake the 18-year-old, but not to kill her. She screamed and ran from the house. When the commotion woke the Perelsons younger children, who were 13 and 11, their father told them: Go back to bed. This is a nightmare.

Judye, bleeding and distraught, raised a neighbour, who made it into the house in time to find Dr Perelson guzzling pills. The 50-year-old cardiologist was dead before the ambulance arrived. Police found him lying on the floor beside his wifes bed, with a copy of Dantes Divine Comedy open at the first canto of the Inferno: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

The motives for the awful crime were unclear. Police speculated that the doctor had become engulfed by financial difficulties. It is thought he had previously attempted suicide. Local LA historian Kim Cooper points to the case of Martha Taft, who, four months after the Perelson murder, bludgeoned her husband to death with a hammer as he slept in their Pasadena mansion  10 or so miles from Los Feliz  and then tried to poison herself.

At her trial, a toxicologist testified that based on her intake of prescribed drugs including Equanil  also known as Miltown  she would have been completely unaware of what she was doing and behaving as if in a trance, Ms Cooper says. The judge agreed, because at the time there were so many incidents being reported of people who were taking these drugs to regulate their moods and would have these terrible breakdowns. Martha Taft was freed. And a doctor like [Perelson] would certainly have had access to the same drugs.

2475 Glendower was sold through probate the year after the incident, to a couple, Emily and Julian Enriquez, who furnished some of its interior, but  so the story goes  never actually moved in. When Emily died in 1994, the property passed to their son, Rudy, a music store manager from nearby Washington Heights. He also never lived there permanently, and the house was allowed to descend further into neglect.

In more recent years, the home has become a destination for ghost-hunters, LA crime tourists and the morbidly curious. As its reputation spread, stories and images circulated online from those brave enough to have climbed the steep steps to the house, peered through the dusty windows and, in some cases, crept warily inside. One visitor examined packaged food and magazines, another claimed to have seen a Christmas tree surrounded by unwrapped presents. The furnishings were from the mid-Century, they said, suggesting the home had been crystallised in time on that gory night in 1959.

One of the propertys earliest owners was Frederik Zelnik, a celebrated silent film director, whose final work was the 1939 murder mystery I Killed the Count. Now, the story of the Murder House is being developed as a Hollywood horror movie, based on a long-form article by British journalist Jeff Maysh.

Though the deaths at 2475 Glendower were chilling, they are not nearly so notorious as several other LA slayings of the later 20th Century, such as the Tate-LaBianca killings, the OJ Simpson trial or the so-called Wonderland murders of 1981. What sets the Perelson murder-suicide apart, however, is the scene of the crime.

10050 Cielo Drive, where Sharon Tate and her friends were slaughtered by the Manson Family, was demolished in the 1990s, just like Simpsons Rockingham estate. The Los Feliz home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca  also Manson Family victims  was sold, renamed and occupied by new owners after their murder. So too was the house at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, where four people were beaten to death in July 1981.

The legend of the Murder House persists in large part because the house itself still exists  apparently, all but untouched. Its actually rare that these famous murder houses survive, because of the stigma, said Ms Cooper, whose company Esotouric runs several true crime tours of the city. Theres something very powerful about the idea of a place that hasnt changed. It hasnt been remodeled, no one else has lived there, its frozen in time  and thats probably why this myth has grown as much as it has.

And yet, and yet. Has the Murder House really remained untouched for more than five decades, or is its myth merely the wishful thinking of the Internet age? Several of the items described by trespassers cannot have been there in 1959, such as a packet of spooky SpaghettiOs, a product that wasnt even on the market until the 1960s. The Christmas tree, if it existed at all, probably did not belong to the Perelsons, who were Jewish.

Rudy Enriquez died last year, with no children, and 2475 Glendower is being sold by estate agent Nancy Sanborn of Berkshire Hathaway, who specialises in probate sales. From what she has heard, many of the ghost stories told about the house are untrue. According to the neighbours, the Enriquez family did move into the house. Mr and Mrs Enriquez lived there for years, Ms Sanborn said. Its an urban myth that the house has been empty since the murder.

Its true that Mr Enriquez never lived there, but he used the building for storage and often visited. The neighbours thought he really enjoyed the attention it got, Ms Sanborn added. Asked about the house by the Los Angeles Times in 2009, Mr Enriquez insisted: The only spooky thing there is me. Tell people to say their prayers every morning and evening and theyll be OK.

Its property listing says that 2475 Glendower is waiting for that special person looking for a wonderful opportunity to remodel or develop. The next owner will be presented with a choice: tear down the house and rebuild, or renovate the existing one and live with its history. Ms Sanborn has sold her fair share of murder houses before; most of her buyers arent bothered by ghosts, she says. Its all about the price at the end of the day. If somebody thinks theyre getting good value, they couldnt care less what happened there.
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Economic conditions in the US are so perilous that the country is heading for a very massive recession, making it a terrible time right now to invest in the stock market, according to Donald Trump.

His gloomy view of the economy contrasts with more buoyant mainstream forecasts. But the New York billionaire dismissed concern that his comments  unusual, if not unprecedented, for a major party front-runner  could potentially affect financial markets. I know the Wall Street people probably better than anybody knows them, Mr Trump said. I dont need them.

His go-it-alone instincts were a consistent refrain  Im the Lone Ranger, he said at one point  during a 96-minute interview flanked by senior aides and his son Donald Jr, in which he talked candidly about his aggressive style of campaigning and offered new details about what he would do as president.

Recommended Read more This could be the end for Donald Trump

He made clear that he would govern as non-traditionally as he has campaigned, tossing aside decades of American policy and custom in favour of a new, Trumpian approach to the world.

In his first 100 days, Mr Trump said, he would cut taxes, renegotiate trade deals and renegotiate military deals, including altering the US role in Nato.

He claimed that he would be able to pay down the nations more than $19 trillion (13trn) national debt over a period of eight years  something that most economists consider impossible, since it would require using more than half of the US governments $4trn annual budget merely to pay off the debt.

People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Show all 8 1 /8 People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Miley Cyrus 'God he thinks he is the f***ing chosen one or some shit!  Honestly f*** this sh*t I am moving if this is my president! I dont say things I dont mean!' Jemal Countess/Getty Images People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Whoopi Goldberg 'I dont think thats America. I dont want it to be America. Maybe its time for me to move you know' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Samuel L. Jackson 'If that mother**er becomes president, Im moving my black ass to South Africa' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Raven Symone 'My confession for this election is, if any Republican gets nominated, Im gonna move to Canada with my entire family. Is that bad? I already have my ticket. I literally bought my ticket, I swear' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Cher 'If he were to be elected, I'm moving to Jupiter' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Neve Campbell 'Im terrified. Its really scary. My biggest fear is that Trump will triumph. I cannot believe that he is still in the game ... [I'll] move back to Canada' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Jon Stewart 'I would consider getting in a rocket and going to another planet, because clearly this planets gone bonkers' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Randy Blythe 'He could just be a clown. If he is the president, though, I am leaving America 'till he's gone'

Mr Trump said: Im renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that were doing so badly on. With China, $505bn this year in trade. He said the economic growth he would generate would enable the United States to pay down the debt.

America had lost its standing in the world, he said, and he would use his aura of personality to make people respect our country. I want them to respect our leader.

After his campaigns most challenging week so far, Mr Trump said family, friends and Republican leaders were urging him to tone down his attacks and reach out to former rivals to begin reunifying the polarised party. But such overtures were overrated, he said, adding: The first thing I have to do is win. Winning solves a lot of problems. Of his remaining Republican rivals, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Governor John Kasich, he said: I have two people left Sometimes you have to break an egg.

Rather than pick another outsider as his vice-presidential running mate, he said he would choose somebody that can walk into the Senate and whos been friendly with these guys for 25 years ... and can get things done.

Asked when he first began to consider seriously a White House run, he said his interest picked up in the summer of 2014, when he was still busy with his hit NBC television show The Apprentice. The decisive moment came in February last year when he was asked to extend his contract with NBC and told them he was going to run for president instead. I just felt there were so many things going wrong with the country, he said.

Asked whether it was incumbent on him to tame the anger within his party, Mr Trump said: I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have I also bring great unity out, ultimately. Ive had many occasions like this, where people have hated me more than any human being theyve ever met. And after its all over, they end up being my friends. And I see that happening here.

Mr Trump acknowledged that he had been rough and nasty with rivals in debates  to the extent that some relationships with them were probably beyond repair. When I hit people, I hit them harder maybe than is necessary, he said. And its almost impossible to reel them back.

He believes the US economy is sitting on an economic bubble because bullish forecasts were based on skewed employment numbers and an inflated stock market. Unemployment was more like 20 per cent than 5 per cent, otherwise I wouldnt be getting the kind of massive crowds that Im getting.

His solution would involve rethinking trade deals with countries including China, and a very big tax cut which he unveiled last September. That proposal increases taxes on the very rich but reduces taxes for most taxpayers and companies.

He said: I dont want people to be afraid. I want them to respect our country. Right now, they dont respect our country.

The US should not retreat from the world but should re-evaluate its relationships and role in groups such as Nato. First of all, its obsolete, he said. Our big threat today is terrorism Nato is set up for the Soviet Union more than anything else. And now you dont have the Soviet Union.

But first he must finish the Republican fight. My natural inclination is to win, he said. And after I win, I will be so presidential that you wont even recognise me. Youll be falling asleep, youll be so bored.

The Washington Post
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The husband of a 17-year-old girl is being sought by police in Pakistan after she was found strangled to death the day after her wedding.

Khanzadi Lashari married her cousin, Qalandar Bux Khokhar, the night before her body was found in her bedroom when policemen forced their way into the house in the ADC Colony area of Jacobabad, the Express Tribune newspaper reported. Her husband was said to be missing.

Khanzadi's brother, Ali Sher Lashari, lodged a formal complaint with police, accusing Mr Khokhar and his four brothers of killing her.

Photographs of the dead teenager were shared on social media and some speculated that she could have been killed by her husband for not being a virgin. However others claimed that she and her husband had had a heated argument over the wedding arrangements.

The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) spoke out about the Khanzadi's death, saying there should "be zero tolerance to culprits involved in these inhuman acts".

A statement released by the party said its chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, had taken "serious notice of murder of newly wed bride Khanzadi Lashari under so-called honour killing in Jacobabad".

He said that his party wont tolerate the killing of innocent and helpless women in the name of so-called honour and those involved in such heinous crimes wont be spared by the law," the statement added.

Nearly 1,100 women were killed in Pakistan last year by relatives who believed they had dishonoured their families, the country's independent Human Rights Commission recently reported.

According to the report, most of the 1,096 victims were shot, but attacks with acid were also common, and it is believed that a large number of cases go unreported.

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, filmmaker and an Oscar-winner at this year's Academy Awards for her documentary film A Girl in the River, which was inspired by the issue of honour killings, shared the photographs of Khanzadi's body on Twitter with the hashtag "shame".

But more than 30 religious groups, including all the mainstream Islamic political parties, have threatened to launch protests if the law is not repealed.
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Several female Air France cabin crew are refusing to fly to Iran when service resumes later this month, after being ordered to wear headscarves once they disembark in Tehran.

Airline chiefs who ordered the ruling for its female employees have scheduled April 17 to resume flights between Tehran and Paris, following a thaw in relations betweent the two countries. Flights were suspended in 2008 when Iran was hit with international sanctions over nuclear ambitions.

Iranian women have been forced by law to cover their hair since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Recommended Read more Outrage in Saudi Arabia at appearance of female newsreader without

Christophe Pillet of the SNPC union, which is asking airline management to make it a voluntary measure, told AFP news agency: "Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the headscarf.

He added that Air France chiefs sent a memo to staff informing them that female employees would be required to wear trousers during the flight with a loose fitting jacket and a scarf covering their hair on leave the plane.

Flore Arrighi, head of the UNAC flight crews union, said: It is not our role to pass judgement on the wearing of headscarves or veils in Iran. What we are denouncing is that it is being made compulsory. Stewardesses must be given the right to refuse these flights.

 Anti-women laws that still exist in 2016

Air France told AFP news agency that all air crew were "obliged like other foreign visitors to respect the laws of the countries to which they travelled".

"Iranian law requires that a veil covering the hair be worn in public places by all women on its territory.

"This obligation, which does not apply during the flight, is respected by all international airlines which fly to Iran," the airline said. Air France added the rule was not new since it had applied before flights to Tehran were stopped and also crew flying to Saudi Arabia.
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The Icelandic Prime Minister is facing calls to resign after leaked documents revealed financial arrangements which one former minister said risked making Iceland look like a banana republic.

The files reveal that Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson purchased a company called Wintris in 2007 with his wife but failed to declare this as an interest when he became an MP in 2009. Mr Gunnlaugsson then sold his 50 per cent of Wintris to his wife for $1, or 70p, just eight months later.

A document signed by his wife in 2015 shows the company was used to invest millions of dollars which they had inherited.

 What are The Panama Papers?

Former Icelandic prime minister Johanna Sigurardottir said Mr Gunnlaugsson would have to resign if he was unable to regain pubic trust. Mr Gunnlaugsson has said no rules were broken and denied that he or is wife had benefited financially from his conduct.

Former finance minister Steingrimur Sigfusson told The Guardian the Prime Ministers actions could make his country look like a banana republic. He added: No one is saying he used his position as Prime Minister to help this offshore company, but the fact is you shouldnt leave yourself open to a conflict of interest. Nor should you keep it secret.

Mr Gunnlaugsson became Prime Minister in 2013 and has been involved in negotiations about the countrys banks which could affect the value of the bonds held by Wintris.
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The Turkish president has promised to back Azerbaijan as its conflict with Armenians over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh continues.

Fighting erupted over the weekend between the two countries in a conflict that has remained largely dormant for two decades.

Thirty troops and a boy were killed on both sides on Saturday over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, which has been under the control of local Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994. Conflict over the weekend is considered to be the worst outbreak since this period.

On Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged his support for Turkey's ally Azerbaijan.

We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties, said he said.

Remains of a downed Azerbaijani forces helicopter lies in a field in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region, on Saturday, 2 April, 2016 (AP)

The intervention will anger Armenia, which has historical enmity toward the Turkish president who has continually denied that the mass killing of Armenians by Turks during the Ottoman era was genocide, as claimed by Armenia.

Azerbaijans defence ministry announced a unilateral ceasefire against Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday, saying it will be unilaterally suspending a counter-offensive and response on the territories occupied in Armenia after pleas from international organisations.

However, officials in the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh have disputed Azerbaijans ceasefire.

David Babayan, a spokesman for the Karabakh president, said on Sunday they had not seen any signs that fighting had been suspended.

Nagorno-Karabakhs defence ministry also claims to have restored control over a strategic area near the front line.

It said Nagorno-Karabakh forces went on a counter-offensive around the village of Talish after Azerbaijani forces shelled their positions just before dawn on Sunday using rockets, artillery and armour.

Two Karabakh troops have reportedly been injured.

Earlier on Sunday, Vagif Dargyakhly, a spokesman for Azerbaijans defence ministry, said Azerbaijani positions came under fire overnight and that civilian areas were also hit.

Smoke rises after clashes between Armenian and Azeri forces in Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is controlled by separatist Armenians, in this still image taken from video provided by the Nagorno-Karabakh region Defence Ministry, 2 April, 2016. (Reuters)

Mr Erdogan has criticised the Minsk Group  a body under the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, led by the US, Russia and France tasked with resolving the conflict.

He said the flare-up could have been avoided if the Minsk Group has taken fair and decisive steps.

Additional reporting by Press Association
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Religious leaders from the sect of President Bashar al-Assad have reportedly sought to distance themselves from the Syrian leader, warning that they should not be associated with the crimes the regime has committed.

Unnamed members of the Alawite community were said to have issued a declaration of identity reform that affirmed their commitment to the fight against sectarian strife.

According to The Sunday Telegraph and the BBC, they declared the Syrian government does not represent us nor does it shape our identity.

Nor do we, the Alawites, substantiate it or generate its power, they added. The legitimacy of a regime can only be considered according to the criteria of democracy and fundamental rights.

Those behind the declaration, which was reportedly smuggled out of Syria in high secrecy, chose to conceal their names out of fears for their safety. It remained unclear to what extent it was supported by the wider Alawite population in Syria.

However, if discontent is growing among Alawites, it could further destabilise Mr Assad at a time when he is already facing deep uncertainty after Vladimir Putin, a key ally, announced a partial withdrawal of Russian troops.

Ever since protests against his rule erupted in March 2011, Mr Assad, himself an Alawite, has sought to cast himself as the guarantor of his countrys many minorities.

Alawism, which had roughly 2.5 million adherents in Syria before the outbreak of war, is often characterised as a heterodox branch of Shia Islam. As a result, Muslim extremists have characterised Alawites  along with Syrias Christians, Druze and members of other sects  as infidels.
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President Tayyip Erdogan has hit back at comments made by Barack Obama about press freedom in Turkey, saying the US President spoke out "behind my back".

Mr Obama said on Friday that he was troubled by the Turkish government's control of the media, while attending the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.

Turkey ranks 149th out of 180 countries on the 2015 World Press Freedom Index and has been subject to strong criticism by media advocacy groups over the clampdown on journalism.

"I was saddened to hear that statement made behind my back, Mr Erdogan told reporters. During my talk with Obama, those [press freedom] issues did not come up."

He added: "You cannot consider insults and threats [to be covered by] press freedom."

On Friday, Mr Obama admitted he was concerned by the crackdown.

"It's no secret that there are some trends within Turkey that I have been troubled with," Mr Obama said.

"I think the approach they have been taking toward the press is one that could lead Turkey down a path that would be very troubling."

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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. 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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. 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Mr Obama said he had expressed these sentiments to Erdogan "directly" but this was denied by Mr Erdogan.

Mr Erdogan also referred to a mysterious foreign mastermind seeking to destroy Turkey.

He said criticism of Turkey's press record was an attempt to "divide, shatter and if they could, swallow up Turkey". "This is what I mean by mastermind. A mastermind is playing games over Turkey.

Recently, the Turkish state has seized control of opposition newspapers and TV channels and cut the satellite feed of a pro-Kurdish channel, accusing them of terrorism-related activities.

 Turkey's Zaman: Editorial tone changes after takeover

Turkey has also drawn international condemnation for charging two journalists with treason for publishing footage that allegedly showed intelligence officers shipping truckloads of weapons to opposition fighters in Syria in early 2014. Can Dundar and Erdem Gul of Cumhuriyet newspaper face life in prison if found guilty, but their court hearing will be done in secret.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said at least 13 reporters are in jail in Turkey for their reporting and spoken of a "massive crackdown" and harassment of media-business owners.

Mr Erdogan has personally brought more than 1,800 criminal suits against individuals, including journalists and children, for insulting him since becoming president in 2014.

Even on the trip to Washington, there were reports of journalists trying to cover the summit being physically and verbally assaulted by Mr Erdogans security team.
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The possible discovery of a 1,000-year-old Viking site on a Canadian island could rewrite the story of the exploration of North America by Europeans before Christopher Columbus.

The unearthing of a stone used in iron working on Newfoundland, hundreds of miles south from the only known Viking site in North America, suggests the Vikings may have traveled much further into the continent than previously thought.

A group of archeologists has been excavating the newly discovered site at the Point Rosee, a narrow, windswept peninsula on the most western point of the island.

To date, the only confirmed Viking site on the American continent is LAnse aux Meadows, a 1,000-year-old way station discovered in 1960 on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

That settlement was abandoned after just a few years of being inhabited and archaeologists have spent the last 50 years searching for any other signs of Viking expeditions to the other side of the Atlantic.

American archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who has used satellite imagery to locate lost Egyptian cities, temples and tombs, applied the same technology to explore the island, seeking for traces of lost Viking settlements.

The only known Viking site to date in North America is located on the northern tip of the Canadian island of Newfoundland

Last June, she was drawn to this remote part of Canada after satellite imagery revealed ground features that appeared to indicate human activity.

Ms Parcak looked at modern-day plant cover to find places where a possible Viking settlement had altered the soil by changing the amount of moisture in the ground. This was a technique she had previously used in Egypt.

After identifying a potential site, archaeologists found a hearth-stone, which was used for iron-working, near what appeared to have been a turf wall.

 First complete Bronze Age wheel discovered at 'British Pompeii'

The sagas suggest a short period of activity and a very brief and failed colonisation attempt, Douglas Bolender, an archaeologist specialising in Norse settlements, told National Geographic magazine.

LAnse aux Meadows fits well with that story but is only one site. Point Rosee could reinforce that story or completely change it, if the dating is different from LAnse aux Meadows. We could end up with a much longer period of Norse activity in the New World.

A site like Point Rosee has the potential to reveal what that initial wave of Norse colonization looked like, not only for Newfoundland but for the rest of the North Atlantic."

In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Show all 12 1 /12 In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Ancient forest, discovered in February 2014 Ancient forest revealed by storms. The recent huge storms and gale force winds that have battered the coast of West Wales have stripped away much of the sand from stretches of the beach between Borth and Ynyslas. The disappearing sands have revealed ancients forests, with the remains of oak trees dating back to the Bronze Age, 6,000 years ago. The ancient remains are said by some to be the origins of the legend of Cantrer Gwealod , a mythical kingdom now submerged under the waters pif Cardigan Bay In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Medieval royal palaces, discovered in November 2014 Archaeologists in southern England have discovered what may be one of the largest medieval royal palaces ever found  buried under the ground inside a vast prehistoric fortress at Old Sarum. The probable 12th century palace was discovered by archaeologists, using geophysical ground-penetrating x-ray technology to map a long-vanished medieval city which has lain under grass on the site for more than 700 years In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered ca. 1950 The Dead Sea Scrolls are almost 1,000 biblical manuscripts discovered in the decade after the Second World War in what is now the West Bank. The texts, mostly written on parchment but also on papyrus and bronze, are the earliest surviving copies of biblical and extra-biblical documents known to be in existence, dating over a 700-year period around the birth of Jesus. The ancient Jewish sect the Essenes is supposed to have authored the scrolls, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, although no conclusive proof has been found to this effect In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Diamond, discovered in March 2014 This rare diamond that survived a trip from deep within the Earth's interior confirmed that there is an oceans worth of water beneath the planets crust In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Whale skeletons, discovered in February 2014 Chilean and Smithsonian paleontologists study several fossil whale skeletons at Cerro Ballena, next to the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Region of Chile In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Complete mammoth skeleton, discovered in November 2012 The first complete mammoth skeleton to be found in France for more than a century was uncovered in a gravel pit on the banks of the Marne, 30 miles north-east of Paris. Picture shows experts at work making a silicon cast of the mammoth's tusk In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Million-year-old human footprints, discovered in February 2014 Photograph of the footprint hollows in situ on the beach as Happisburgh, Norfolk In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Terracotta warrior, discovered in June 2010 Chinese archaeologists unearthed around 120 more clay figures in June 2010 excavations at the terracotta army site that surrounds the tomb of the nation's first emperor in the northwestern Shaanxi Province  Jason Lee / Reuters In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Neolithic 'lost avenue' - prehistoric stone circle, discovered in September 1999 The discovery of a Neolithic 'lost avenue' was described as one of the most important finds of the last century. Since the 1700s, archeologists and historians have argued over the existence of the huge sarsen stones, which were unearthed at the site of the world's biggest prehistoric stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Byzantine mosaic, discovered in February 2007 Plans for a walkway at the centre of the furious dispute over Jerusalem's holiest site were delayed by the discovery of a Byzantine mosaic In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Ancient gold, discovered in March 2014 Gold fitting for a dagger sheath (around 1900 BC.) found near Stonehenge In pictures: 12 amazing archaeological discoveries Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 The Rosetta Stone is a basalt slab inscribed with a decree of pharaoh Ptolemy Epiphanes (205-180 BC) in three languages, Greek, Hieroglyphic and Demotic script. Discovered near Rosetta in Egypt

However there is not enough evidence for archaeologists to prove the Vikings settled on the site, as other populations also lived on Newfoundland after them.

If the site is confirmed as a legitimate Viking settlement, this could lead to further search for other settlements, built five centuries before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World.
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The Independents investigation into illegal ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools throws out into the open what has long been a poorly kept secret in the Jewish world. In essence, there are a number of illegal schools in London which fail to provide the basic level of education which children deserve, whether it be command of English, understanding of mathematics, awareness of wider society or the ability to be able to enter the workplace.

There are many concerns about what happens in these schools, including whether corporal punishment is being allowed to occur, along with other allegations of serious neglect. What is even more astonishing is that the local authorities, and perhaps those in Whitehall, may have known about their existence yet have failed to take action. We must ask why.

There are several possible reasons. One is that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community form a significant percentage of the local population and have some of their members on the local council. There may be fear among councillors that, if they take action against the schools, they will be punished for it at the next elections.

Another possibility, which might apply to those higher up the educational chain, is that closing the schools could be branded as anti-Semitism. While there is no doubt that the schools are breaking the law, it may be judged that the volatile state of religious and ethnic relations in Britain means that now is not the best time for bold steps.There may also be a simple calculation that, frankly, it is not worth intervening.

What are the children studying instead of English and Maths? They are spending up to eight hours a day immersed in rabbinic texts about matters of internal Jewish life, such as how to determine an animal is fit to eat or whether it is permissible to carry house-keys on the Sabbath. In other words, they are not doing anything that poses a threat to British society.

To put it bluntly, none of those children will end up as suicide bombers. On the contrary, the ultra-Orthodox community is renowned for being law-abiding, with negligible rate rates of drunkenness, drugs or violence. From the authorities point of view, they are a very peaceful community, so why upset the applecart when there are plenty of other groups who are perceived as posing a potential danger?

This may all be true, but it ignores the fact that such schools do a major disservice to the children who attend them by denying them a rounded education. Just because the schools are not harming the wider public does not mean that they do no harm.

The findings of The Independents investigation reveal three major issues in the Governments response. First, why is it not insisting that the rules that apply to most children apply to all children? Second, why is it not concerned about the best interests of the children at these illegal schools?

The third question is much broader and goes to the heart of many assumptions in our education system, which are too often left unchallenged: why do we allow segregation along religious lines in schools in the first place? How can we educate children to value those who are different to themselves if we separate them from each other and give them terrible message of us and them every time they enter the school gate?

There is no reason why one cannot be immersed in Jewish life, but still speak the national language or be able to gain qualifications. As a rabbi I applaud those engaged in Jewish education, but as a rabbi I also condemn those who blinker childrens horizons and isolate them from wider society.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain is chair of the Accord Coalition, which links religious and secular groups to promote inclusive education
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There seems to be no limit to what Turkeys president Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks he is permitted to do. When Western diplomats attended the trial of two Turkish journalists accused of espionage  that is, reporting Turkeys arms traffic to Syrian jihadists, Erdogan lashed out at them.

However, as US State Department spokesman John Kirby retorted: This was not only not the first time, but it darn sure wont be the last time that we observe these kinds of judicial proceedings. The German ambassador has also defended his attendance at the trial and the Italian Foreign Ministry has pointed out its consul general behaved in full compliance with the Vienna Convention on diplomatic and consular relations.

Irrespective of Turkeys deal with the EU to stop mass immigration, there is widespread disenchantment with Turkey under Erdogans rule, which is a marked contrast to the euphoria his AK (Justice and Development) Party was met with when it first came to power in 2002. On his visit to Turkey in 2009 US President Barack Obama proclaimed that Turkey and the US could build a model partnership, but in the latest issue of The Atlantic Obama revealed the depth of his disillusion when he called Turkeys president a failure and an authoritarian.

Nevertheless, because of the key role played by Turkey in the Middle East, Obama kept up appearances and met with Erdogan on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington to discuss security issues. In an interview with CNNs Christiane Amanpour Erdogan maintained he was not at war with the press and was open to criticism. Yet when Erdogan spoke at the Brookings Institution his bodyguards manhandled two critical Turkish journalists and tried to prevent one of them from attending the event.

This kind of behaviour comes as no surprise, as when Erdogan was in Ecuador

in February to boost diplomatic and trade ties, his bodyguards attacked a group of female protesters. This, in turn, led to a protest by the Ecuadorean government over their irresponsible behaviour. After the mining disaster in Soma in May 2014 Erdogan visited the town but was forced to take refuge in a supermarket after being booed by a crowd of protesters. Here Erdogan allegedly hit one of the customers and an aide was photographed kicking a protester held on the ground by police.

Given Turkeys record for the brutal suppression of peaceful dissent, it is undoubtedly ironic that last month the UNHRC (UN Human Rights Council) passed a resolution tabled by Costa Rica, Switzerland and Turkey. This called on all states to promote a safe and enabling environment for individuals and groups to exercise their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, expression and association.

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

Erdogans previously cordial relations with Russias president Vladmir Putin have soured since Turkey in November shot down a Russian bomber in what Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov called a planned provocation. Tired of Erdogans self-aggrandisement, Putin has warned Turkey it would regret more than once this stab in the back, and now Russias sanctions are starting to bite. US Secretary of State John Kerrys recent visit to Moscow also demonstrates the growing community of interest between the two powers. As far as Syria is concerned, Russia is able to curb Syrian president Bashar al-Assads flights of fancy, such as retaking the whole of Syria, but who is able to curb Erdogans?

Since the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 Turkeys relations with Israel have been reduced to a minimum, but after the attack in Istanbul, when three Israeli citizens were killed, there are signs of a thaw. However, Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon has expressed his misgivings about the prospects for a rapprochement, mainly centred round Turkeys support for Hamas. His deputy chief of staff, Major-General Yair Golan, regards Turkey as a most problematic entity and believes Israel can expect problems as long as Erdogan is in power.

The vast reserves of gas and oil in the Levant Basin in the eastern Mediterranean are of strategic importance, and the billion-dollar question at the moment is whether a pipeline will be constructed to carry Israels export capacity of gas via Turkey or via Cyprus to Greece. Again, the answer to this question will depend on Cyprus and Israels relations with Turkey.

Resident scholar Michael Rubin at the Washington think tank AEI (American Enterprise Institute) has put the cat among the pigeons in an article, Will there be a coup against Erdogan in Turkey? In an unusual move, the Turkish General Staff has on its website declared that such reports are without foundation and expressed its commitment to democracy. Even so, the question arises as to whether the Turkish presidents shelf life already has an expiry date.
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Kareem is 11-years old. About the same age as my daughter. On Wednesday he went missing.

I met him just two weeks ago in Calais. He was wandering around by the old bus British volunteers are using as a kind of school, wearing a bright pink sweatshirt someone had given him. He had been in the camp several months - alone with no one looking after him.What struck me wasn't just his vulnerability but his desperate search for comfort and affection.

He followed round the British volunteers he knew, giving them hugs, making jokes. We talked a bit, and he hugged us before we left too. No one is quite sure how he got there from Afghanistan or where his parents are.

Through the winter months this child has been sleeping in a tent in Calais - no parent, no guardian, no action from the French Government, no outcry from the British Government. And then on Wednesday he disappeared. Aid workers have been told he was seen climbing on to a ferry bound for Kent. No missing persons report has been filed by the French authorities, so British charities contacted the Children's Commissioner to get the Kent police and social services to help.

Whatever you think about people climbing illegally onto ferries, whatever you think about whether the French or British Government is at fault, whatever you think about refugees, just think on this: the child is eleven. He has endured months alone in a cold tent vulnerable to traffickers, abuse, prostitution, and risking his life to find someone to care for him.

And it's not just Kareem. Charities identified around 400 unaccompanied children and teenagers in the Calais jungle. Many of them have family in the UK - but the legal process to reunite them takes months. Many have been trafficked. Some of them are taking crazy risks each night trying to jump on the back of trains, lorries or ferries. Most have scabies or bronchitis.

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

Now, Help Refugees say a third of these children have gone missing in the weeks since the French authorities began clearing the camp. As we warned, no provision was put in place to support these young people. Now neither the charities nor the authorities know where they have gone.

According to Europol, 10,000 out of an estimated 26,000 unaccompanied child and teenage refugees in Europe have gone missing as a result of the refugee crisis.

On Friday, we learnt that teenager Mohammed had died beneath the wheels of a lorry. In January 15-year-old Masud died in the back of a lorry. Both boys were trying to reach family here in the UK.

Too many children have died taking desperate risks to find someone to keep them safe, too many have disappeared into the hands of criminal gangs. It is not enough to blame the French or expect Greece or Italy to do it all. Britain should do its bit to help children too.

The French must put in place proper child protection. But British Ministers should be putting urgent pressure on the French to act, as well as sorting out the broken family reunification system for those with relatives here. And alongside other European countries, Britain should do its bit and take some of the lost children like Kareem.

Labour peer Alf Dubs was one of 10,000 Jewish children Britain rescued from the Nazis through the Kindertransport.

His amendment, calling for Britain to take in 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Europe will be voted on by MPs in the coming weeks.

Two weeks ago, when I pressed the Prime Minister to accept Lord Dubs's amendment, he refused to do so, saying other countries should take all the responsibility instead.

Yesterday Kareem was found in Kent. Social services are now trying to help him. But how many more children must go missing or die on European soil before the Prime Minister reconsiders these words?

Yvette Cooper chairs Labour's Refugee Task Force
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I am an Indian doctor. This is not uncommon.

But my story is a little different, as growing up in a patriarchial Punjabi family surrounded by male doctors, I was the first woman in my family to qualify from medical school. As a child, all I ever wanted was to be a doctor. In fact, I made the decision to become a doctor at the age of four-years-old (I wanted to be like my father) and my whole school career was based upon that ambition. At the eleventh hour, when I was seventeen, the decision was made by my father that perhaps medicine was not the best career for a woman and that I should think again.

I had the necessary grades, but this was the early 1990s. My father was a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist in a small town in England and could see the difficulties of the path I had chosen, from the struggle to maintain a family life alongside a demanding career, to the gender disparity in senior positions. There were very few female consultants at the time.

In the end, I decided not to apply for medical school. I was essentially being told not to be a doctor  but to marry one instead. Despite medicine being my lifelong dream, I acquiesced. I entered into pharmacy and accepted the part-time lifestyle more amenable to child care. Perhaps I thought I would learn to know my limits. Instead, I watched my younger brother become a doctor and reach dizzying heights of success.

As I grew older, I could not hold it in any longer. I applied successfully to Cambridge University and qualified as a doctor in 2007. As an Indian woman, I have always been so grateful for the chances offered to me in this country. Would I have had the courage to do what I did in the country of my ancestors? I know growing up in the UK has shown me that despite a gender gap, women still have the chance to rise and smash the glass ceiling.

Fast forward nine years and now as a junior doctor, I am locked in a bitter dispute with the government about the junior contract. Throughout the past six months, junior doctors have faced more vitriol, attack and disdain from the government and media than I ever thought possible. We are accused of being Moet medics, militant medics, or radicalised. I have even been charged with hijacking BBC Question Time on the 14th January for trying to correct some of the misinformation being propagated.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty 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. 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Last week the imposed junior contract was finally published, alongside an Equality Impact Assessment which undertaken by the Department of Health. The analysis acknowledges that changes in the contract will disadvantage women particularly those training part-time, carers and lone parents. However it states, "any indirect adverse effect which may occur is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim". This shocking phrasing reminded me of military jargon, with women being seen as collateral damage in the perceived aim of achieving an uncosted, unmodelled and as yet undefined 7 day NHS.

It went even further suggesting that increased weekend and evening rostering may impact upon single parents (who are disproportionately women). To hear such things in a contract imposed by a government that has pledged to end discrimination against women was quite astounding.

 Junior doctors' plea to David Cameron

Medicine has changed: in the Sixties less than 10 per cent of doctors were female. Now almost 60 per cent of registered doctors are women and most of those are of child-bearing age. Yet we still know that only 24 per cent of medical directors are women and in some surgical specialties only one in ten are women.

Women still struggle to gain equal treatment in the workplace as they still do the majority of child-rearing and may elect to work part-time. Until now, salaries for female doctors in training have kept pace with mens due to small annual pay awards to prevent part-time doctors - of whom the vast majority are women - earning less than their full-time colleagues over time. The new contract will remove these safeguards widening the gender pay gap in medicine. The Kings Fund suggest that the gender imbalance in medicine still persists due to stereotyaping and discrimination, organisational cultures play a part in perpetuating the imbalance.

We should be trying to make things better, not be going backwards with a draconian junior doctors contract that will hit women hardest. Commentators have accused female doctors as being part of the problem for choosing to work part-time and facing conflicts between domestic and professional duties. Some have even wondered how to persuade female doctors to lean in. I think most female junior doctors would say that they already lean in  day after day, year after year.
The largest military parade in the history of the state previously took place as part of the 1916 Easter Rising centenary commemorations in Dublin

The unveiling of the Necrology Wall at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin (Lensmen/PA)

A list of all those who died in the 1916 Easter Rising, including rebellion leaders and British soldiers, has been unveiled in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin.

Almost 500 people were killed in the uprising, the majority of them - 268 - were civilians caught up in the violence.

There has been some controversy about the inclusion of British soldiers on the "Necrology Wall" and a number of protesters gathered outside the historic cemetery in the north of the city to demonstrate as the interfaith service took place inside.

A significant Garda presence monitored the protest events.

The 488 names of those known to have died in the rising are listed in alphabetical order.

The names of 119 British soldiers, some of whom are buried in Glasnevin, are engraved on the reflective black granite stones.

The Glasnevin Trust has insisted the memorial is an attempt to present the historical facts, without hierarchy or judgment.

John Green, chairman of Glasnevin Trust, told the service the wall reflected modern Ireland.

"Behind each and everyone of these lost lives is a story of heartbreak, no matter what side the person served on or indeed for those innocently caught up in the conflict," he said.

"One hundred years on we believe this memorial reflects the time we live in, with the overwhelming majority of the Irish people wishing to live in peace and in reconciliation.

"But it is for each visitor to take from the wall what they wish."

Senior church figures from a range of faiths and humanist representatives were among those to speak at the ceremony.

The project has drawn inspiration from an international memorial near Arras in France that lists the names of 580,000 people killed in fighting on the western front in the First World War.

Acting Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny attended Sunday morning's service.

Mr Kenny laid a wreath after a number of local school children were invited to unveil the new memorial wall. A minute's silence was observed before the last post was sounded and the Irish Tricolour raised from half to full mast.

The service concluded with the playing of the Irish national anthem, Amhran na bhFiann.

Some minor scuffles broke out at a protest line outside the cemetery.

Gardai said a 15-year-old boy was arrested and taken to Mountjoy station.
On June 23, just 80 days from now, British voters will be asked to choose on their country's continued membership of the EU. With 14pc of our exports still going to the UK, employers' body IBEC has warned that 'Brexit' would reduce the competitiveness of Irish exports in the key British market by 30pc.

The longer the referendum campaign drags on, the greater the chance of Brexit. The most recent opinion polls show UK voters either evenly split or slightly in favour of EU withdrawal.

Until the IBEC wake-up call, we in this country seemed completely oblivious to the threat posed by Brexit. This is despite the fact that sterling has lost almost 12pc of its value against the euro since mid-November. This makes Irish exports more expensive in the British market and holidays in this country dearer for British visitors - 41pc of the 8.6 million overseas tourists who travelled to Ireland in 2015 came from the UK.

Over 90pc of Irish exports went to the UK when we first joined what was then the EEC in 1973. On the face of it, our EU membership has been extraordinarily successful in reducing our economic dependence on our nearest neighbour with the proportion of our exports going to the UK falling from more than nine-tenths to less than one-seventh.

Look again. While the multinational hi-tech sectors have successfully diversified away from the UK market, indigenous exporters are still heavily dependent on the British market with 41pc of our 2015 food and drink exports, about 4.4bn worth, going across the water.

The Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation calculates that the multinationals spent just 18pc of their sales, virtually all of which were exported, on Irish goods and services in 2013 while Irish-owned companies spent two-thirds of their sales, only half of which were exported, on Irish inputs. This means that 1 of indigenous exports, most of which go to the UK, is worth approximately 3.50 of multinational exports to the Irish economy.

When filtered through this higher expenditure by indigenous companies on Irish goods and services, our true dependence on the UK market is much higher than is indicated by the CSO trade statistics, probably closer to a third. Britain still matters a lot to the Irish economy.

Britain has had a problematic relationship with Europe ever since it refused to sign the Treaty of Rome, which first established what is now the EU, way back in 1957. Old-timers will remember that this is not the first British in/out vote, there was a previous referendum in 1975, which the "ins" won with two-thirds of the vote.

The complacent assumption in this country is that history will repeat itself on June 23. How realistic is such an assumption if, God forbid, there were to be another major terrorist atrocity or a further worsening of the Europe-wide migrant crisis between now and polling day? As the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan replied when asked what he most feared "events, dear boy, events".

Just how bad could things get for us if Britain votes to leave the EU? In its most recent 'Quarterly Economic Outlook', employers' body IBEC paints a bleak picture of what life could be like for us here in Ireland post-Brexit.

The first impact of possible British withdrawal from the EU, weaker sterling, is already being felt. The euro has already risen in value from 70p in mid-November to almost 80p on Friday. And it could get much worse. IBEC is forecasting sterling/euro exchange rate of 85p by June and, if Britain votes to leave, parity within two years. This combination of Brexit fears and a British current account deficit now running at over 7pc of GDP, the highest since records began in 1772, makes the prospect of a sterling collapse look frighteningly real.

Even at 85p, indigenous Irish exporters and the tourism industry would struggle. The consequences of parity don't even bear thinking about.

At the same time as a sterling collapse was wreaking economic havoc on this country, the EU and the UK would have to negotiate a free-trade agreement. Given the ill-will which would accompany Brexit, this could take two years or even longer. In the meantime, Irish exporters would have to operate in a very uncertain environment with all that this meant for jobs and investment.

"A UK exit would send Ireland, Britain and Europe into uncharted and treacherous waters. The value of sterling has already fallen significantly, a vote to leave would prompt a further significant depreciation, heaping pressure on businesses trading with the UK", says IBEC chief executive Danny McCoy. "The UK's continued membership of the EU is of overwhelming strategic importance to Ireland and Irish business."

Of course Brexit wouldn't be all bad news for Ireland. We would be well-positioned to benefit if UK-based companies, particularly in the financial services sector, choose to relocate in order to remain within the EU. On the other hand, no longer bound by EU state aid rules, the UK would be able to compete much more aggressively for overseas investment projects.

So just how real is the prospect of Brexit? IBEC puts the possibility at 30pc. Others put it even higher, with Citigroup chief economist and former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee Willem Buiter reckoning the chances of Brexit at 35pc.

So why aren't we doing to more to prepare for possible Brexit? While the absence of a government certainly doesn't help, the real reason for official Ireland's apparent passivity in the face of this threat almost certainly runs deeper.

Ever since the publication of TK Whitaker's paper 'Economic Development' in 1958 signalled the end of the protectionism of the De Valera era, successive Irish governments have pursued a policy of greater engagement with Europe. This policy has been strongly backed by Irish business. Unfortunately, the UK, which joined the EEC at the same time we did in 1973, has never shared our enthusiasm for all things European.

While the impact of a possible sterling collapse and trade disruption caused by Brexit would be severe, we would ultimately weather the storm. If the events of the past eight years have demonstrated anything, it is the extraordinary resilience of the Irish economy.

Far more severe would be the psychological consequences as Irish policymakers were forced to seriously question the main thrust of Irish foreign and economic policy for the first time in almost 60 years. We could be waking up in a very different world on June 24.
AIG is underwriting a new online reputation insurance product for Irish businesses, aimed particularly at SMEs. Photo: AFP

AIG is underwriting a new online reputation insurance product for Irish businesses, aimed particularly at SMEs.

The product allows businesses to protect themselves against the risk of social media and other online crises.

Negative sentiment towards a business on social media can have a serious and lasting effect on its bottom line. About 64pc of Irish businesses use platforms like Facebook and Twitter, according to Eurostat.

The product is being sold by new company RiskEye. Policy holders have access to an online media monitoring service performed by Cloud90, the company led by 11890 founder Nicola Byrne.

Customers are also entitled to access a legal team and public relations advisors, up to the value of 50,000, in the event that online posts threaten their reputation.

One in ten Irish businesses said they had experienced a social media crisis in the last year, in a survey published in March by Edelman and the Marketing Institute last month.

A fifth said they were unprepared to deal with a social media crisis if it happened.

"A business's reputation is its greatest yet most intangible asset" said RiskEye managing director Declan Kavanagh. "As businesses expand their online activity they also increase the risk of online threats or attacks to their reputation which can potentially lead to rapid and catastrophic loss. The risk posed by employees or customers can be significant and one comment or video clip distributed through social media can change or even destroy everything."

Irish companies who have faced social media crises in recent years include gift voucher supplier One4All.

In 2013 the business was hit with a false and malicious rumour that it was about to close. The rumour was first sent by text message but spread quickly through social media.

Chief executive Michael Dawson said the impact was so serious it would have collapsed a smaller company.

Through speedy action his team was able to correct the rumour and mitigate the damage, he said, urging other businesses to prepare for the risk of online reputational damage.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook was locked in a stand-off with the FBI over access to the iPhone operating system. Last week the FBI announced that it had managed to work around the issue

Cellebrite, the company which hacked the Apple iPhone operating system for the FBI, has been consulted by gardai in such cases as the Graham Dwyer murder case - and now gardai want increased access to forensic technology developed by the Israeli company.

Shares in Japan's Sun Corporation, which acquired Cellebrite in 2007, soared by nearly a third in recent weeks amid reports that a third party had helped the FBI access data on the iPhone belonging to the gunman in the San Bernardino, California mass shooting last year.

Cellebrite, whose parent company said it was not in a position to comment on specific criminal cases, reportedly worked with the FBI to crack an iPhone connected to the San Bernardino shooter.

The FBI had been locked in a major standoff with Apple for a month over accessing data on the smartphone used by Syed Rizwan Farook in the attack. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, who was also involved in the attack, died in a shootout with police.

Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to comply with a court order to unlock the iPhone, saying it was an unreasonable demand on the company and one that threatened the privacy and data security of millions of iPhone users.

However, the court order was abandoned last Monday when the Feds informed a federal judge that a technique developed by an unidentified entity was successful in allowing investigators to gain access to the phone.

The FBI was already a client of Cellebrite when the San Bernardino shooting occurred.

Read More

So too was An Garda Siochana. Last year, it emerged during the Graham Dwyer trial that An Garda Siochana was a client of Cellebrite, an Israeli government contractor.

The Department of Justice manages tenders to acquire forensic and other technology services for the gardai.

The Irish Government acquired a small number of licences to use Cellebrite's forensic technology on behalf of the gardai, who use its physical analyser software to extract and analyse data from phones and other mobile devices.

Cellebrite's software proved critical in the trial of Dwyer, who is serving a mandatory life sentence for the murder of childcare worker Elaine O'Hara, 36, on August 22, 2012, at a remote spot in the Dublin mountains.

Gardai, who normally use the XRY software forensic tool to perform forensic extractions of data from mobile devices, satellite navigation units and tablets, used Cellebrite in the Dwyer investigation to extract data from a number of devices.

More than 2,600 text messages were sourced from Ms O'Hara's iPhone, from an 083 number used by Dwyer, as well as from two Nokia phones recovered from the Vartry Reservoir and an iPhone.

Now, senior officers are seeking increased access to Cellebrite's forensics expertise as mobile phones and other devices are increasingly relied on in the investigation and prosecution of crimes.

Read More

The technology is set to fall under the spotlight in Dwyer's forthcoming appeal.

During legal argument in the absence of the jury at his trial, Dwyer sought to dismiss Cellebrite's forensic technology as "junk science".

He challenged the reliability of methods used by computer experts to forensically extract, examine and interpret the text messages that formed the backbone of the prosecution.

The application failed.

However, had it succeeded, it could have led to many significant text messages - including those between Elaine O'Hara's iPhone and a prepaid 083 number used by Dwyer - being excluded from the jury.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the scale, tenure or cost of the Cellebrite deal, stating that it was a matter for Office of the Garda Commissioner as the accounting officer for the force.

The Sunday Independent has learned that at least one payment was made to Cellebrite last year. However, the force did not respond to a series of questions about the tender.

Read More

The Government is facing a number of civil challenges, including a civil challenge by Dwyer, in relation to Ireland's data-retention regime.

Two years ago, the European Court of Justice found that the EU Data Retention directive was breached the EU charter of fundamental rights, especially in relation to privacy, and ruled it illegal. At his trial, Dwyer argued that the ECJ ruling meant that Irish legislation implementing the directive was illegal and that data collected on his phone had therefore been illegally acquired.

However, the State maintains that the Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011 - which gave effect to the directive - was a continuation of data-retention laws first introduced in 2005.
Luas operator Transdev is obliged to pay the state a 10m penalty if it fails to meet its contractual duties to deliver the light rail service. Photo: PA

Luas operator Transdev is obliged to pay the state a 10m penalty if it fails to meet its contractual duties to deliver the light rail service, the Sunday Independent has learned.

As part of the 150m contract to operate the Luas signed in 2014 by Transdev and the Railway Procurement Agency, now the National Transport Authority, Transdev maintains a 10m performance bond with its bankers which is payable "in circumstances where the company does not meet its obligations under the operating contract".

An industrial relations dispute between Transdev and Luas drivers has brought the service to halt for several days in recent months.

However the National Transport Authority (NTA) does not intend to seek payment even if the stoppages gets worse, a spokeswoman for the NTA said.

The 10m penalty payment will only be required in more extreme circumstances, a spokeswoman for the NTA said, declining to give further details of what would trigger the payment.

Instead the organisation will continue to withhold a daily payment of 100,000 from French-owned Transdev on strike days, the spokeswoman said.

The net cost of strike days to Transdev is less than 100,000 because the company does not have to pay staff wages or other running cost on those days.

But the cost of the current industrial dispute to Transdev now exceeds 500,000, according to sources close to the company.

Transdev reported a loss of around 700,000 in its last fiscal year.

Losses for this year are likely to be "signficantly higher" in light of strike action, one person familiar with the difficulties said.

The contract to operate the Luas "is, purely fiscally, not worth hanging onto" for Transdev, the person said.

Transdev's UK and Ireland chief executive Nigel Stevens maintained last week that the company is "100pc committed to the fulfilment of the current contract up to 2019 and hopes that its role in the Irish market can extend long beyond this."

The Department of Transport, meanwhile, is defending suggestions that it facilitate higher wages for Luas drivers by paying Transdev more to operate the service.

The current five-year contract to operate the Luas, awarded in 2014, went through a public tender process.

If altered now, the Department of Transport could be sued by the companies who bid but did not win the contract, a person with knowledge of the Department said.
Plastics and environmental services group One51 is eyeing up at least four specific acquisition opportunities alongside its goal of achieving a stock market listing, the company's chief executive Alan Walsh has told potential investors.

The company is mulling plastics acquisitions in western Canada, the United States and continental Europe, as well as one or two bolt-on acquisitions to its environmental business.

One51 has previously guided that it sees its recent acquisition of a majority stake in Quebec-based IPL, which makes products like wheelie bins and food containers, as a platform for growth in North America.

Walsh told investors that One51 leads the environmental waste container market in Canada, the UK and Ireland, and that it wants to grow in that sector in the United States and continental Europe.

The company will shortly seek shareholder approval to proceed with a stock market listing, aiming to raise an as yet undetermined amount of capital to drive both organic and acquisition-led growth.

However, Walsh has emphasised that no definitive decision has been made as to whether to proceed with an IPO, which ultimately depends on market conditions, and "the company's interests and performance at that time."

Earlier in the week, the company announced a 32.4pc increase in full-year revenue for 2015, taking in 366m. Earnings before interest, depreciation, tax and amortisation (EBITDA) rose 67.1pc to 36.1m.

The year saw the company realise 51.8m in cash from its investment in renewable energy company NTR.
The lights never go out at the European Central Bank HQ in Frankfurt. Photo: Ralph Orlowski

As stakeholders met in Dublin for a forum on tackling homelessness and the housing crisis, the problems don't look like being fixed any time soon.

The blame game around the contributing factors keeps rumbling on: constitutional property rights; planning; developers looking for too much money; developers not having enough money; building costs; lack of finance; greedy landlords putting up rents; reluctant and bust landlords trying to stay afloat; Nama and the Central Bank mortgage lending caps.

As a defender of the mortgage caps for some time in this column, I was a little concerned when senior Central Bank adviser Lars Frisell addressed the issue at an event in Sweden recently.

Defending the measures, he said they cannot be blamed for causing a shortage of housing supply, and I think he is right. He said they were aimed at protecting borrowers and ensuring the stability of the banking system. And I think he is right there too.

But he then went on to refer to how the mortgage lending rules "should contribute to a shift in both housing demand and supply towards rental accommodation. This highlights the need to remove unnecessary barriers to the provision of rental housing as well as the need for an appropriate framework of rights and obligations for tenants."

Is this part of the Central Bank's plan - to consciously encourage a shift away from home ownership and towards renting? Or is it just a side-effect of its mortgage lending caps?

The mortgage rules have worked well from the Central Bank's point of view by slowing down the rapid rate of house price growth in Dublin in particular. But it raises the question of whether there is something bigger going on here.

Would the Central Bank prefer to see more people renting? After all, fewer home owners would greatly diminish the chances of a boom/bust cycle. Given that the Central Bank is effectively answerable to the ECB, would the ECB like to see a situation in Ireland where there is less home ownership and a much greater level of home rental?

It is reassuring to think that the ECB is keeping a watchful eye to ensure we don't have another banking crash, but it would be very disconcerting if it were promoting policies aimed at shifting the patterns of home ownership in Ireland.

That would be overstepping the mark, and not the first time in its dealings with us in recent years.

In his presentation, Frisell talked about how important it was for the lending caps to slow down the rate of turnover of house purchases. In other words, it would take longer for people to find a buyer for their house. "This effect is an anticipated, if not necessary, result of the regulation. And in so far as longer lead times stem from households taking more time to reflect on how they invest their own, hard-earned money, it is arguably a good thing."

But the number of residential property transactions actually increased last year, albeit from a low base. Many of the buyers were investors who want to cash in on high rents.

Frisell also quoted work done by colleagues in the Central Bank last year before the caps were introduced. The paper he referred to said: "It has been argued that there will be an increase in demand for rented accommodation, which may lead to a rise in rents. In addition, any increase in rents could have implications for the affordability in the sector and government services that provide relief.

"On the other hand as discussed, it is not necessarily the case that the cost of renting will increase as a result of the proposed measures, since the supply of rental accommodation may also increase."

But this is exactly what has happened. Rents have been going up and the supply side is not being met.

It may well be that the Central Bank underestimated the purchasing power of the Irish landlord, who isn't always like their German counterparts, interested in a slow, steady rental income over decades.

It may be that a Germanic-style long-term renting market would be good for us. But that isn't going to happen for a decade at least. The transition is proving very painful.

The Central Bank is entitled to intervene to avoid a lending frenzy, but it shouldn't be the driving force behind a fundamental shift away from home ownership, even if it is something that Dame Street's bosses in Frankfurt might like.

Life after UTV won't be easy for Wireless Group

Wireless Group, formerly known as UTV Media, published a detailed set of 2015 results last week. But one figure missing was the extent of losses at UTV Ireland.

Back in August, they were expected to be around 11.5m. Having flogged off its television business last year, the accounts focus mainly on "continuing businesses" and don't dwell too much on what has been sold.

When it comes to UTV Ireland, this is a bit of a "don't mention the war" scenario.

But what a year for the company! The year began with the launch of a new TV channel and ended with the sale of its entire television division.

Wireless Group chairman Richard Huntingford strongly hints that the decision to sell UTV in Northern Ireland was partially driven by the losses racking up in the new TV business south of the border.

With losses in Dublin increasing, the date for when it would turn a profit was getting further away.

"With the path to profitability extended, your board considered a 100m cash offer from ITV for our television business as an opportunity to release immediate value for our shareholders while substantially improving our risk profile."

The prospects for the new slimmed-down group are better but it won't be an easy road. It is now focussed on radio, with good stations in Britain and Ireland. It has very low debt and a borrowing facility of 35m. The problem is what to buy?

Operating profit at its British radio business fell last year from 11.7m in 2014 to 11.3m in 2015. In Ireland, operating profit from radio fell from 4.3m to 3.3m.

So its radio assets hold good market positions but their profitability shrunk last year. Operating profits at its digital services business, Tibus and Simply Zesty, tanked from 954,000 to 124,000.

Wireless Group knows it will have to grow to justify retaining a stock market listing. Otherwise a break-up or sell-off of the group might make more sense.

It has a good track record in acquiring and running radio assets and plans to expand with new digital stations in the UK, which it knows will lose money initially.

The group is diminished without UTV in Belfast, but better off without UTV Ireland. Getting back to growth won't be easy.

Chadwick retirement is end of an era for Grafton

It really is the end of an era at Grafton Group with the announcement that Michael Chadwick is retiring from the board. He joined Grafton in 1975 and built up the business in the 1980s and 1990s.

Never a conventional chief executive or chairman, he retained a sizeable shareholding in the company, today worth around 180m, but for years he forfeited his entitlements to salary and bonus.

For example he should have received 444,000 in 2000 but only took 40,000. Even when he did take his full remuneration in 2003, he didn't take up executive share options which he could easily have enjoyed. He has saved the company millions in uncollected remuneration.

He was well paid through dividends in Grafton over the years and collected 2m in dividends last year alone.

Turnover when he became executive chairman in 1985 was 60m. Today it is a London-listed company with a market capitalisation of 1.6bn (2bn).

A keen sailor, and co-owner of the Dun Laoghaire Marina, he should enjoy sailing off into the retirement sunset.
Bosses at listed housebuilder Cairn Homes are in line for a big payout under a "founders' shares" incentive scheme set up by the company

Bosses at listed housebuilder Cairn Homes are in line for a big payout under a "founders' shares" incentive scheme set up by the company.

Cairn shares have closed over 112.5c for more than 15 consecutive days this month, meaning that the performance condition for the payout has been met.

The scheme runs over seven years, and the men are only entitled to a payout if the company achieves a 12.5pc increase in total shareholder return (encompassing share price rises and dividends), calculated in a test period each year on a compound basis. The IPO price was 1.

Under the scheme, the holders of founders' shares, chief executive Michael Stanley, executive director Alan McIntosh, and chief commercial officer Kevin Stanley, are entitled to 20pc of the total increase in the company's market capitalisation since its IPO, with the increase calculated from a test period running from March 1 to June 30.

They will receive the payout in the form of Cairn shares, and it will be split on a pro-rata basis - 50pc to McIntosh, 35pc to Michael Stanley, and 15pc to Kevin Stanley - based on the amount of founders' shares each man owns. That means that if the company's market cap were to increase by 100m since the IPO, the men would get 20m of shares split three ways. However, all the shares they receive will be a subject to a one-year lock-up period - meaning they can't be sold - and 50pc of the shares have a two-year lock-up period,

A spokesperson for Cairn Homes said the scheme was agreed with key investors, adding that the founders had contributed around 29m of assets at cost to the company and that the structure recognises the value contributed to the company by the founders at day one, but not taken by them prior to the IPO. The founders also invested 10m in cash on the same terms as the investors.

The company was in the news two weeks ago after raising 170m via a share placing that is subject to shareholder approval. It has been hoovering up land for housebuilding.

A number of assets were bought by the company from Michael Stanley and Alan McIntosh. Cairn Homes Holdings Limited, owned by an entity whose beneficial owners are McIntosh and his spouse, and another entity of which Michael Stanley and some of his family members own more than 96pc of the beneficial interest, was acquired for 26.7m, paid for with shares.

A business park in Artane, Dublin 5, and development land in Galway and Killiney in south Dublin was bought from other McIntosh entities for around 20m in cash.

In addition, the company bought an 18.1m loan due to a McIntosh entity, which was paid off in full with interest of 3.6m.
Ray Stafford, the man behind the Sudocrem brand, has joined the proposed board of Amryt Pharmaceuticals, which is poised to complete a reverse takeover of Irish-listed Fastnet Equity.

The deal, reported by the Sunday Independent earlier this year, will create a new drugs company focusing on treatments for rare (or 'orphan') diseases.

It will aim to develop its lead product - which has been approved as a treatment for certain types of skin wounds by the European regulator - as a treatment for epidermolysis bullosa (EB), a genetic skin disease that causes painful blisters to form at the slightest friction.

The disease was the subject of a well-known Channel 4 documentary entitled The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.

Stafford was chairman, chief executive and majority shareholder of the Tosara Group, which owned, manufactured and marketed Sudocrem.

Tosara was later sold to the American company Forest Laboratories, where he became executive vice president for global marketing. He will be a non-executive director of Amryt.

Also joining the company is Michele Bellandi, who will be Amryt's chief commercial officer. He is a former Head of Commercial for Europe at Shire, the company whose founder Harry Stratford will be Amryt's chairman.

Joe Wiley, who previously led the European office of life sciences venture capital firm Soffinova Ventures, will be the chief executive.

Rory Nealon, a former chief financial officer of Trinity Biotech, will be Amryt's chief financial and operating officer. He told the Sunday Independent that the company was "focused on building a pipeline of commercially attractive products in the orphan disease space."

He added: "For a company of our size, I would suggest we've a very strong non-executive board, and management team."

The reverse takeover deal will see Fastnet buy Amryt for 29.6m, with the consideration to be paid in shares, allowing Amryt to take control and gain access to public markets without the expensive IPO process. The deal is believed to have been brokered in part by Dublin-based Raglan Capital.

If the reverse takeover goes ahead, Amryt will then seek to raise 10m to accelerate its plan for the EB treatment, which comes to the company as the result of its proposed acquisition of German company Birken. That deal will complete when the reverse takeover process concludes.

Amryt is also working on developing products for treating other rare diseases.
NEW AGENDA: Dee Forbes, the Irishwoman who is currently head of the Discovery Channel in Europe, has been appointed the next Director General of RTE

RTE's finances, content creativity and gender discrepancies are all set to be on the agenda as the new Director General, Dee Forbes, who cut her teeth on the international market and is currently head of Discovery Channel in Europe, comes home to make her mark.

A source close to RTE explained: "The raison d'etre of the Discovery Channel is to sell content and she will look at making profits over the next few years - that will be her big focus - to sort out the station's finances. The station typically buys in content from abroad but as new DG, she will look at getting good ideas at home and selling them globally.

"Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, Deal or No Deal, First Date, shows like that, all generate big money for the original makers. But Irish TV stations buy shows like this in from the UK and other countries all the time. Dee will want to turn that around. I'll put it this way - creative producers and freelance production companies will be licking their lips at this appointment."

A separate television industry source said the move is widely welcomed by women in the organisation because, they said, women who felt they weren't being rewarded in promotions for their hard work were leaving RTE.

"There have been some positive changes in terms of gender equality in RTE within the last five years. Before this, women were finding it hard to infiltrate the top ranks.

"I know there was a lot of unhappiness over the fact that good, talented women weren't getting the promotions or jobs they deserved. It's the reason some left RTE. But I think that's changing now and it's because those women began speaking out, but it's still a long way off where we need to be."

The roles of RTE Chair, Director General, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Financial Officer are all now occupied by women and improvements have been made at the station.

But some believe there is more work to do.

According to a source close to the appointment, Ms Forbes, who is a native of Drimoleague in Co Cork, is the type of woman "who doesn't pull the ladder in" when she gets to the top.

The source explained: "She will nurture all upcoming talent, both men and women, but she recognizes the need to bring more good women, along.

"People often make the mistake of looking at the talent and the public faces when they are judging gender equality in an organisation but, and particularly in the media, you need to look at the management and staff too.

"The head of RTE 1, the head of RTE 2, the head of News, the head of TV, the head of radio are all men. You will never change women's voices on air until you change the make up of the organisation itself. There is no point in addressing equality in talent unless you are also looking at people making the big decisions too. And Dee has always been big on women in the workplace and everything that covers."

Meanwhile, there has been much speculation that deputy director general Kevin Bakhurst, who applied for the role of DG without success, will now move back to London to continue his career. But a well-placed source close to Mr Bakhurst has poured cold water over the suggestion.

"Obviously, he would have been disappointed he didn't get the job but he is not a rash man. He's very, very smart and I don't think you'll see him go to London because of this."

They continued: "He loves RTE and he loves Ireland and he genuinely really enjoys his job as deputy and he takes it very seriously, he is well liked here and has settled in very well, so I think he will continue on in that respect."

Described as "very warm and affable" by those in her circle, friends say Ms Forbes has a "great dry sense of humour" and a love of Cork where she "returns to reconnect with her soul" each weekend.

Before becoming president and managing director of Discovery Networks Western Europe, Ms Forbes studied history and politics at UCD before moving to the UK in 1989 to begin her career at advertising agency Young & Rubicam.

She spent 14 years with Turner Broadcasting, part of Time Warner, becoming general manager of Turner in the UK and Ireland and left to join Discovery Networks in 2010, where she progressed to manage all commercial and channel activities for Discovery Networks northern Europe's business.

Chair of the Commercial Broadcasters Association in the UK - and a former non-executive director of the Irish Times - she is on the board of children's charity Childline and Munster Rugby.

In the past, Ms Forbes has advocated a strong work ethic and has emphasised that women are often not confident enough, even when they have a higher level of competence in comparison to their male counterparts.

Currently Tatler Woman of the Year, in her first public outing as RTE DG, she is expected to attend the Irish Film and Television Awards (IFTAs) next weekend.

Meanwhile, there was a warm welcome on social media this weekend, with many expressing their delight at the appointment.
If you think the world of social media begins with Facebook and Twitter and ends with the likes of YouTube and LinkedIn, then think again.

While these platforms are indeed the most visible and better-known ones within the social media ecosystem, the proliferation of so-called 'dark social' platforms like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Viber and Kwik have marketers salivating at the lips at the prospect of tapping into what may be the last frontier in the world of social media marketing.

Dark social refers to the social sharing of content and conversations that occur outside of platforms like Facebook and Twitter - all of which can be measured by any number of analytics programmes.

By its very nature, dark social is proving tricky to measure - as every engagement, conversation and piece of content that is shared is done so in private, away from the prying eyes of the wider online community.

It is estimated that as much as 70pc of all content shared on social media is done privately. The other 30pc is what we see on a day-to-day basis on our friends' and colleagues' Facebook timelines, LinkedIn updates or Twitter feeds.

There are, of course, many reasons why people use dark social. Some use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, because they offer a more seamless and personal user experience. Prolific users might cite the costs involved, particularly those who share lots of data-hogging images and video. If there is a common denominator, however, it is likely to be found in a shared belief that dark social offers a private location that is well hidden from the clutter that permeates the rest of their online lives.

This minor detail, however, doesn't seem to be bothering the many dark social platforms that are out there. Keen to further monetise their offerings, they are now letting adventurous brands dip their toes in the water to gauge the temperature. For some brands, it's too big an opportunity to pass on.

Media brands like BuzzFeed and The Guardian have already toyed with dark social while others are likely to follow. One of the biggest ongoing test cases, however, involves Adidas which is the first global brand to embrace dark social as a possible marketing channel.

The German sportswear manufacturer is currently carrying out an experiment amongst selected groups of WhatsApp advocates in cities like London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan and Berlin. Over the coming months, the different groups will test and optimise the brand's dark social media presence.

Then, during the Copa America in New York in June, the company will use their insights and learnings to develop a strategy that will include personalised content, news and invitations to events which will be shared with these advocate groups. Assuming it is successful, Adidas will then ramp up its presence in the dark social world, particularly around major sporting events which it sponsors - such as the UEFA Champions League.

While it is a bold and brave experiment by the company, brands that jump on the bandwagon first may indeed reap the most rewards. But like any new play for unchartered territory, some pioneers will undoubtedly be shot down along the way. Given the personal and private nature of dark social, just one misjudged overture by an over-zealous brand could damage any relationship that existed and send people running for the hills.

On the other hand, if brands get it right, they could build legions or brand advocates and lay the ground for a whole new territory for marketers to explore.

For it to work, however, consumers will need to opt-in, by allowing a brand be their 'friend'. This may be a no-brainer for a brand they hold in high esteem. If you own a Harley-Davidson, for example, then you are more likely to let the brand into your personal space. But just because you like motorbikes, it doesn't mean Mr Honda can butt in because he thinks you need a new Goldwing.

Many would argue that there is also something inherently creepy and intrusive about all of this. While a one-to-one conversation between a brand and a consumer may indeed be the holy grail for many marketers, is this imminent assault on the dark social space just one step too far?

Given the industry's experience with ad blocking to date, brands need to be very careful.
Nama has sold land with the potential to deliver 20,500 new homes - in Dublin and other areas where the housing shortage is most acute - to private investors since 2014.

News of the agency's decision to offload lands - in the most sought-after areas of the capital, the commuter counties of Wicklow, Kildare, Meath and Louth and the cities of Cork, Limerick and Galway, as the worst housing crisis in the history of the State was taking hold - emerged during the housing forum convened on Thursday by acting environment minister Alan Kelly.

Addressing delegates drawn from a range of local authorities, housing bodies and homeless charities, Martin Whelan, Nama's head of public affairs, revealed how the State's so-called 'bad bank' had sold vast swathes of prime development land to investors at a time when demand for housing was surging.

Mr Whelan was seeking to defend Nama against accusations that it had been hoarding sites where much-needed new homes could already have been delivered. His comments will not be welcomed by those who now find themselves effectively locked out of the housing market due to the chronic shortage of supply.

He said: "Nama hasn't been hoarding development sites. Since 2014, we've sold sites with the potential to deliver up to 20,000 new residential units."

Of the 20,000 sites sold by Nama in the past two years, he noted that just 1,000 homes had been delivered to date by the investors who acquired them.

Having highlighted the apparent failure of the sites' private sector owners to deliver new homes, Mr Whelan reiterated Nama's ambition to fund the delivery of up to 20,000 new residential units over the next five years on lands owned by its remaining debtors.

He stressed that even if this target was attained, Nama would only be able to meet 20pc of the country's projected housing demand over the next five years.

On this, he said: "That reflects the land that is in the Nama portfolio. That reflects the sites that are ready to go, that don't have planning issues.

"So the reality is, going full steam ahead, delivering 4,000 residential units per annum, that Nama will account for one fifth [of demand]. So the solution has to be wider than that."

Nama's decision to dispose of lands with the capacity for 20,500 new homes since 2014 is alarming when one examines where those lands are situated.

Asked for a detailed breakdown of the sites' location, a spokesman for Nama said: "Approximately 9,000 of the potential new residential units are in Dublin, 7,000 are in the neighbouring counties of Wicklow, Kildare, Meath and Louth, 3,000 are in Cork, and the remainder are in the other major urban centres, including Waterford, Limerick and Galway."

The spokesman added that of the 20,500 sites sold, 1,100 were either built or under construction by their new owners.

Nine hundred of the 1,100 units are located in Dublin while the remaining 200 are in Kildare.

He added that there is a range of reasons why many of the sites sold had not yet been developed.

"These reasons include infrastructure constraints - for example, a potential 3,000 units at a major site in south Dublin are dependent on significant infrastructure investment, totalling tens of millions of euros, to upgrade existing roads, sewerage and water facilities and to build new infrastructure," the spokesman said.

In a number of other instances, the delay in developing homes on the lands arose following the decision by the new owners to submit revised planning applications to reflect the demand for particular house and apartment types in certain locations.

While Nama will invariably come in for criticism for selling lands in areas where the greatest housing demand exists, there is no guarantee that it will be in a position to fund the delivery of the 20,000 homes on the sites still under the control of its remaining debtors.

That plan is now the subject of a complaint to the European Commission by five of the country's biggest developers led by Michael O'Flynn and Paddy McKillen on the grounds that it may breach EU rules on State aid.

They claim Nama-funded developers enjoy an unfair advantage over non-Nama developers owing to the State agency's lower cost of financing.
Housing agency Respond has called on Nama to make Dublin development land available to it, rather than finished or partly completed units in other parts of the country. Photo: PA

A social housing provider has called on Nama to make Dublin development land available to it, rather than finished or partly completed units in other parts of the country.

Ned Brennan, chief executive of housing agency Respond, said that access to land in the Dublin and east coast region rather than finished housing units elsewhere would allow organisations like his to better address the acute shortage of social housing in these parts of the country.

"The most pressing demand for social housing is in Dublin and its surrounds, as well as Cork and Galway city," said Brennan.

In Dublin, the problem has increased from eight families becoming homeless per month in 2012 to over 80 per month in 2015.

"Nama controls large amounts of land in this region," said Brennan.

"Our preference is obviously for completed units in these high-demand areas. But since this is not available, access to land would also be of great assistance."

Brennan said his organisation had a good relationship with Nama and had acquired housing units from it in the past.

Nama has made housing units available for social housing purposes through a variety of mechanisms. In total, 6,600 units in its portfolio were identified; authorities accepted 2,500 of these and 2,000 have already been delivered at a cost to Nama of around 250m.

A spokesperson for Nama said: "It is open to any party who wishes to express interest in an undeveloped land site to make a commercial proposal to the debtor or receiver who controls that land.

"Nama is statutorily obliged to pursue commercial proposals that maximise the return to the Irish taxpayer.

"Local authorities and other public bodies have substantial land holdings within their portfolios that could be utilised for the provision of social housing."
Once the preserve of large corporations, Enterprise Resource Planning - or ERP software - has now become an important tool for many small and medium-sized enterprises.

With so much data being generated by businesses today, this type of integrated software is now widely used by firms to capture, store, manage and interpret information - information essential for the smooth running of business functions that include everything from purchasing, manufacturing and sales to customer relations management (CRM), inventory management, shipping, payments and accounts.

The fundamental advantage of ERP systems is that, by making data available in real time, management is in a position to make faster and more informed decisions as well as reducing the likelihood of errors occurring due to inaccurate or delayed information. Providing such increased visibility of data across organisations also helps avoid what is commonly known in organisations as 'silos' or 'islands of information' where one department doesn't know what the other is doing.

Last week I met up with Justin Lawless, the CEO of indigenous Irish business, Intact Software, to learn about how his company is taking on the global incumbents in this growing but highly-competitive sector. Set up in 1992, and with offices in Dundalk, Omagh, Cork, and Wicklow as well as in Manchester, the company now employs 60 staff and has annual revenues of over 5m.

"We are essentially a software company that develops enterprise-class business management software for the SME sector. This empowers these companies to manage and control every aspect of their businesses from the front door to the back door," Justin explains as he welcomes me to his company's new offices in the Blackthorn Business Park in Dundalk.

This modern business campus, now home to an array of professional and IT-based businesses was once the site of a thriving shoe factory - a striking reminder of just how much the nature of business in Ireland has changed in recent decades.

"The most important benefit of our software to our customers is that it gives them the right information at the right time to make substantial improvements in their businesses decision and ultimately their bottom line," Justin says.

"Instead of having a number of individual software packages that manage sales, purchases, stock and accounting, our system integrates all these functions into one system where each element talks to the other. That way, duplication in companies is reduced and the increased ability to share data results in better collaboration within and between various departments." he adds.

Justin introduces me to group sales director Mark McArdle. With the firm for almost 20 years, Mark demonstrates how the software works including elements such as the CRM system, supplier management function and a module that allows companies track their stock levels, locations of their stock and re-order points.

There is also a full job costing facility that allows business managers monitor labour, materials and other input costs while linking everything back to a general ledger.

The accounting module is an important part of the software and provides everything from full profit and loss accounts and trial balances to balance sheets.

"Our customers are typically organisations that employ between 500 to 300 employees with many operating in the retail, services, wholesale and distribution or building supply chain sectors," says Justin. "We are particularly strong in sectors who have omni-channel sales such as mix of web, field sales reps, telesales and point of sale." he adds.

Having already developed a strong customer base in Ireland, the company currently exports through a network of resellers in the UK, the Mediterranean, Australia and New Zealand. In addition, they are now looking to expand into Canada and the US markets.

It's been a story of slow but steady growth for the company. Set up by Paul Marry and Aidan Lawless (Justin's brother), both are still actively involved with the firm. Paul looks after UK business development while Aidan is Chief Technology Officer. Both men are from the Dundalk area. Paul studied accounting at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) and joined a local accounting practice. Aidan, on the other hand, was fresh out of college where he studied computer science, also in DkIT. Both were introduced to each other by a local man who ran a successful office supplies business. He wanted to develop an accounting solution which would have an additional sales and stock management function built in.

By introducing both Paul and Aidan, he hoped that their accounting and IT skills would be the perfect combination to develop such a solution. And he was right.

"The pair began by building vertical market add-ons using various software systems," says Justin. "However, they quickly realised that this didn't work effectively - so rather than building solutions around these existing systems, they developed their own system and added other features, such sales and purchase order processing. And things grew from there," he adds.

In 1998, Justin joined the company on a full-time basis. Prior to that, he had worked part time in the firm, while studying business and computer science in Dundalk. He gradually worked his way up, spending time in the sales, services and support departments. In 2009, he was appointed director of professional services before becoming CEO in 2013.

Looking back, were there any events or developments that helped the company grow?

"Y2K was a time of significant growth," says Justin. "Similarly, with Ireland's move to the Euro, many Irish firms who had used UK software systems realised they were not effective in dealing with punt, euro and sterling currency conversions. However, because of our location in the border county of Louth, we had considerable experience of dealing with this," he adds.

Customer referrals also appear to have played had a major role in the company's success, with over 80pc of all new customers coming by way of referrals from existing customers. Their route into exports also came about through their existing customer base.

As those businesses with whom they had worked in Ireland began to set up overseas operations, they invited Intact Software to install their software solutions in these new locations. As a result, they quickly built up a solid base in the UK from which they were able to grow. As more and more UK customers began to install their software, the distributors of the software systems that had just been replaced began to enquire about becoming resellers - which drove revenues even further.

In 2011, while on an Enterprise Ireland-backed trade mission to Australia, Justin and his colleagues were introduced to a leading reseller who helped them break into Australia and NZ.

As we talk, Justin tells me that the company is on the verge of announcing significant expansion.

After 18 years in the business, does he still enjoy what he does?

"I love it. I love how our business is all about solving problems. I love how we offer a flexible system that can be personalised like no other software in the SME space," he says. "But being in the technology sector, we are constantly facing challenges.

"To remain at the cutting edge requires us to continually innovate and reinvent ourselves. Our focus on innovation is deliberate and planned - it's part of our DNA. But it is this focus on innovation that separates us from our competition. And when it comes to competing with large billion dollar companies and winning out - well, you just can't beat that," he adds with a smile.

Looking to the future, Justin says that while he is fully committed to the Irish market, he is also focused on growing the business internationally.

"We have significant plans afoot to grow the business in the English speaking parts of the globe, because these regions follow the same accounting standards as Britain and Ireland.

"It's an exciting time for us now because we have recently begun discussions with potential partners in Canada, USA and South Africa. In revenue terms, we are committed to growing our turnover from our current level of 5m to 20m over the next three years," he adds.

With growth in technology set to continue and having seen what Intact Software can do along with its commitment to innovation and customer service, I believe they are well on their way.

For further information: www.intactsoftware.com
'Setting up a business from scratch is no easy task - but every challenge is a learning experience and you only learn by doing. It is all about the journey with your product to create your business.

"It's a long road and it's important to put in the time. I worked with a lot of experts, all of whom gave their time on a voluntary basis - including members of the Irish Navy, Coast Guard and rescue services - who advised me on the challenges of working offshore. The insight and advice of those who experience these conditions every day is very important.

"I am very grateful to them for taking time out of their busy schedules. It really taught me a lot about the importance of being patient and working with people.

"While raising finance and getting business support is always a challenge, there are lots of supports out there from different government agencies. InterTradeIreland and Enterprise Ireland in particular gave me great support.

"A big boost for Ocean Survivor was winning the InterTradeIreland Seedcorn competition. The overall prize money of 100,000 was really invaluable in allowing me to invest in the product and allowed the company to hire its first employee.

"In addition, the pitching and mentoring aspects of the competition really helped me to improve my business model. Winning the Seedcorn competition has opened a lot of doors.

"I get monthly advice from other entrepreneurs who help to steer me on the right path. They offer the benefit of their own previous experiences to help me to be realistic about my aims and prepare for experiences that are often very different to what I had originally thought.

"It taught me not to be afraid to ask for advice, as there are lots of experienced people who are happy to help. I hope, in turn, to be able to offer future entrepreneurs the benefits of my experience. Building a start-up is always a challenge but it's important that we support each other.

"There are lots of supports out there; they only need to be found. Social media is opening up new possibilities for mentorship and business support. I have been able to access networks of start-ups and new entrepreneurs in the same position as myself.

"There are a lot of hoops to jump through in order to get to where you want to go. However, I would not change my experiences. The process of seeing your vision become a reality is worth all the hard work."
'The large internet companies have faced sustained criticism that they are not doing enough to protect sole citizens and corporations alike from phenomena such as trolling, defamation, unauthorised leaks and even self-inflicted gaffes that cannot easily be removed once posted online' Photo: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

There was a degree of inevitability that a dedicated insurance product to help offset the costs of managing online abuse would emerge.

For years, companies have satisfied themselves that they have ticked the social media box by having an online presence on channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, to name but a few.

As someone with personal experience of the dreaded internet trolls (I came close to filing a criminal complaint against one such troll) I know only too well how social media - which I adore and use daily - can be something of a doubled-edged sword.

This is especially the case for small and medium enterprises that have embraced the commercial opportunities afforded by social media channels, but which lack the expertise or resources to deal with an attack upon their brand, operations or personel.

The cost of engaging expert legal and public relations advice in the midst or wake of an online attack - which can range from a one-hit wonder to a sustained campaign of harassment - are prohibitive.

The cost of retaining a PR firm for a month is at least 2,000 and there would be little change, if any, if a similar amount of money was handed over to legal counsel for their opinion.

The emotional, operational and financial costs of subduing a crisis, such as attempting to track and take down attackers or mounting a defamation action - with all the attendant risks they can entail - are beyond most small companies' reach.

The large internet companies have faced sustained criticism that they are not doing enough to protect sole citizens and corporations alike from phenomena such as trolling, defamation, unauthorised leaks and even self-inflicted gaffes that cannot easily be removed once posted online.

The Government has also been slow here to reform our laws to reflect the full realities of e-commerce, despite Ireland being the de facto European HQ for all things digital.

And yet we have some of the most draconian defamation and privacy laws that mitigate against fair comment on many matters of public interest, including business.

Perhaps that is why I feel slightly conflicted about AIG, the world's largest insurer, stepping into the reputation management breach and I suspect I won't be alone.

It is vital that businesses are able to respond effectively to all legitimate threats, including online ones.

The courts may ultimately be asked where to draw the line in the most serious or vituperative disputes.

But free speech and robust or otherwise fair comment matters too - let's not go viral on legitimate criticism.

Dearbhail McDonald is INM Group Business Editor
There is something very peculiar about the Clinton triumvirate these days. There they are on stage most weeks - Bill, Hillary and Chelsea - making their latest bid for the White House. Chelsea looks all-American and average, which only highlights the strangeness of her parents. When not actively campaigning, Bill stands slack, eyes blank, mouth open.

Hillary, meanwhile, has become a bewildering mishmash of all her former selves. After winning the Iowa caucus earlier this year, she gave a speech in which she rolled out, in quick succession, Hillary the stateswoman, Hillary the grandmother and Hillary the Oprah-style chat-show host, all sass and frisky head-tossing. That the Democratic hopeful has a pocketful of personas is not news, but it leaves the world wondering: who is the real Hillary?

This is a gift for any would-be biographer, and published last month, among others, are: Hillary by Karen Blumenthal; Hillary Rising by James D Boys; and Who is Hillary Clinton?, a set of essays from The Nation magazine, self-styled "flagship of the left". There is also Hillary Rodham Clinton: On the Couch by Alma H Bond, a fictionalised account of what Hillary might say in psychoanalysis, which, for the sake of your own mental health, you should leave well alone.

Karen Blumenthal's Hillary is fundamentally a feminist, the Hillary of the "glass ceiling" speech she gave in 2008 when ceding the Democratic nomination to Obama: "We weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest ceiling this time, but thanks to you it's got about 18 million cracks in it and the light is shining through like never before."

The book's blurb claims it is unbiased, "unflinching", but it's clear Blumenthal longs for Hillary to smash that ceiling and claim the presidency and this, as well as its oddly-childlike style, is what lets it down.

As Lakshmi Chaudhry points out in an essay in Who is Hillary?, some women find it inconceivable not to support Hillary on the grounds of gender alone. Chaudhry quotes Nora Ephron, who addressed the Wellesley class of 1996 with these words: "Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you."

It's the same fierce female solidarity that Madeleine Albright was channelling recently when she declared there to be "a special place in hell reserved for women who don't back Hillary". I suspect Blumenthal would agree. The Hillary Clinton of James D Boys' biography is a more nuanced and calculating character, closer - I'd have thought - to the truth.

In all these biographies, the stories from Hillary's early life seem to reveal most about her. Brought up in a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, young Hillary was earnest, clever and astonishingly self-confident. According to Blumenthal, even her mother, Dorothy, said: "Hillary always valued herself highly. I liked that about her."

She was voted "most likely to succeed" by her classmates, though there are hints she wasn't always popular. Her friend Betsy Johnson says her classmates thought she was conceited.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: On The Couch tells us that Hillary's high school nickname was 'Owl Face' on account of her enormous thick glasses. Here is Hillary in psychoanalysis, as imagined by Alma H Bond: "I tried to jazz up my glasses by picking out red or purple frames, but it didn't help. The kids and school teased me mercilessly. Would you believe that I still feel like Owl Face? Sometimes the feeling is so strong I have to look in the mirror to check."

Hidden amid the glutinous mess of Bond's book, there are some useful titbits. For instance, she informs us that another of Hillary's high school nicknames was "Sister Frigidaire".

The young Hillary stayed in place, roughly unchanged, from her birth in 1947 right up until Bill lost his job as governor of Arkansas in 1981. Until then, as a point of pride, Hillary had made no effort to pander to the south's idea of what a wife should be. She kept her maiden name and refused any kind of makeover. "I think she thought make-up superficial," her mother said, quoted in Blumenthal's book.

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Then came Bill's defeat, and a rethink: "I failed to appreciate how important in political terms an elected person's spouse is to voters," she later wrote. So she dyed her hair, ditched the glasses and - most significantly - became a Clinton. It's worth remembering as we watch primped and polished Hillary strut from state to state that inside her, somewhere, is young Owl Face, who might well consider her 68-year-old self a sell-out.

Also interesting for those who don't quite know what to make of her is the fact Hillary was once a staunch right-winger and, in 1964, even campaigned for Barry Goldwater, Republican senator for Arizona, who famously said that "extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue". There has been much speculation over the years about Hillary's hawkishness and her reluctance to admit she was wrong about the war in Iraq. Is there still a splinter of Goldwater in Hillary's Democrat heart? Another unhappy fact for many Democrats is Hillary was brought up, and remains, an eager Baptist. Blumenthal and Boys both remind us that she carries a Bible wherever she goes and seeks solace in it in times of stress.

Her religion makes some sense of her conviction that the world can be separated into good guys and bad, and that she can discern the difference: Barbara Ehrenreich's essay in Who is Hillary? describes her capacity for righteous aggression as Secretary of State: "Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to 'obliterate' the toddlers of Tehran - along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah-supporters. Hillary even forswore talking to presumptive bad guys. Watch out - was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-il and the rest of them - or I'll rip you a new one."

Boys reminds us that, as Secretary of State in 2011, she addressed the Doha Forum for the Future with these words: "People have grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order. They are demanding reform." This was prescient about the Arab Spring, but her tendency to see things in simple moral terms meant she underestimated the dangers.

The trouble with cheerleading biographies is that they become almost deceitful in the details they omit. For both Blumenthal and Bond, Hillary's decision not to pursue a stellar legal career after leaving Yale was entirely a product of her love for Bill, whom she married in 1975.

Boys' more interesting book has a different take, and one that fits better with what we know of the younger, ambitious Hillary. "When she moved to Arkansas, Hillary Rodham cannot have imagined that she would be there for long," he writes. "Bill Clinton was running for Congress in 1974 and the Democrats were expected to sweep the board as President Nixon faced impeachment. What could possibly go wrong? Surely she would be back in Washington DC as the wife of Congressman Clinton by 1975."

Neither Blumenthal nor Boys mention a fact much put about by the Clintons' former spin doctor, Dick Morris, who has pointed out - frequently - that far from turning her back on this stellar career in Washington law to follow her heart south, Hillary Rodham failed the District of Columbia bar exams, passing the Arkansas exams instead. (Blumenthal omits Morris entirely from Hillary's story even though he advised both Clintons on and off from 1978 and devised the "triangulation" policy that helped Bill win reelection in 1996.)Blumenthal also fails to mention Hillary's mishandling of the press when she first entered the White House. It's a telling story, and one that might have some bearing on her chances of becoming president. Boys writes: "Where reporters had once been free to roam from their press area in the White House, the new First Lady insisted a connecting doorway be closed, sealing journalists off from the various offices and work areas in the West Wing because, as she told her friend Diane Blair, in 1993: 'The press has big egos and no brains.' "

Well, perhaps. But perhaps it was egotistical and a little brainless of her to alienate the media on Bill's first day. But this seems to be the authentic Hillary, the one that has persisted, through all the makeovers, from Owl Face until today: determined, confident to the point of conceit and, often, her own worst enemy.

Hillary by Karen Blumenthal (Bloomsbury, 19.50)

Hillary Rising by James D Boys (Biteback, 23.70)

Who is Hillary Clinton? ed by Richard Kreitner (IB Tauris, 17.49)

Hillary Rodham Clinton: On the Couch by Alma H Bond (Bancroft Press, 31.55)
Out for a stroll along the wild Atlantic coast, they look a typical wealthy American couple holidaying in Kerry in the 1960s. But replace the gentleman's trilby with a derby, and give him a moustache and a walking cane, and he suddenly springs to life as the first global movie star, Charlie Chaplin.

The comedian brought his family to Waterville every year for more than a decade, each time bringing a dash of Hollywood colour to the resort hotel of the Butler Arms. They first came in 1959 because Chaplin's wife Oona O'Neill, daughter of Nobel laureate Eugene, was keen to spend time in Ireland.

Walt Disney recommended Waterville and they flew to Shannon and drove to the south Kerry town. "It took almost five hours through the windy roads," remembered daughter Geraldine.

Being high summer, the Butler Arms was full, and the receptionist didn't recognise the star. Without making a fuss, he left and drove off towards Kenmare to find alternative lodgings. One of the owners, Noel Huggard, realised what had happened and set off in pursuit. He caught up with the visitors and persuaded them to return, billeting the Chaplins in his family quarters. His quick thinking paid off for the hotel, as the star's annual return was wonderful publicity.

"They came for a month and instantly fell in love with the place," recalled Chaplin's grandson, Arthur Gardin, in a 2012 RTE documentary. "It became a constant holiday location for them. Every year, usually at Easter time, they would return for their fix of wild unspoilt countryside fresh air and fishing. He used to say he loved the feeling of the bracing Atlantic breezes and that the air was worth 1,000 a breath."

Chaplin was born in London in 1889, and moved to the US as a teenager. He developed the tramp character which made his fame and fortune and later made classics such as The Gold Rush, Modern Times and The Great Dictator, which satirised Adolf Hitler. He was accused of communist sympathies and his involvement with much younger women and paternity suits damaged his popularity. In 1943, aged 54 and with three failed marriages, he married O'Neill, who was just 18. Her father disowned her and never saw her again.

Charlie and Oona had eight children together, and when he was refused re-entry to the US in 1952 they moved to Switzerland. There was more controversy swirling around when this photo was taken in 1968. While he was in Ireland he instigated a defamation suit against a Miami magazine which published an interview with his mother-in-law headlined "My son-in-law leaves me to starve to death".

And romance was about too, with much newspaper speculation about the presence of millionaire Greek furrier Nicholas Sistovaris (30) who had been wooing Josephine Chaplin (19). "He is very charming, nice and kindly, and she might go a long way to do better," Charlie told the Irish Independent. "However, I think that Josephine is keen to go on to Oxford and Harvard Universities."

Josephine put academia to one side, however, and married Mr Sistovaris the following June in Switzerland. The owners of the Butler Arms, Billy and Mary Huggard, were guests at the wedding in Corsier.

The last visit to Waterville came in 1971, when the Troubles were near their height. "As a famous Englishman he didn't feel safe here anymore," explained Mr Gardin.

Chaplin died on Christmas day 1977 while Oona passed away in 1991, aged 66. Waterville hasn't forgotten the Little Clown, and a statue was erected in his memory in the village, where the annual Charlie Chaplin Comedy Film Festival has been held since 2011.

Josephine and Geraldine still have holiday homes in the area.
Garry Shandling, the American comedian and actor, who has died of a heart attack aged 66, plundered his own neuroses to create a comic persona - vain, self-centred and riddled with anxiety - which he exploited brilliantly in The Larry Sanders Show, a fly-on-the-wall-style spoof about a chat show and its egomaniacal host.

The series inspired a new form of self-referential, realist comedy that would be developed by British comic performers such as Ricky Gervais. "Without comedy as a defence mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive," Shandling said.

Garry Emmanuel Shandling was born in Chicago on November 29, 1949. His father ran a print business and his mother a pet shop. The family moved to the dry climate of Tucson, Arizona, because Shandling's older brother suffered from cystic fibrosis; he died when Garry was 10. The event had a profound impact on the comedian's life.

Shandling did not at first aim for show business but after school studied electrical engineering at the University of Arizona, switching to marketing and eventually working at an advertising agency in Los Angeles. He studied creative writing for a year and, having received encouragement from the stand-up comic George Carlin, began writing sitcom scripts. In 1973, he sold one to Sanford and Son, the American adaptation of the BBC's Steptoe and Son. He sold material to several sitcoms, but found writing formulaic jokes frustrating.

In 1977, he was involved in a car accident and while recovering decided to live the life he really wanted to. As a stand-up comedian he rose quickly. He did not do "shtick"; he was dead-pan and his jokes sometimes took a few seconds to roll around an audience before detonating.

By 1981, he was a regular guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Carson enjoyed Shandling's work and the young comedian might have taken the presenter's chair when Carson retired. But Shandling wanted to explore deeper themes, and was aware of the destructive effects of fame.

"The whole world is show business now,'' he said in 1998. "Everyone wants to be famous. They think being famous will change their life. I'm here to tell them that it doesn't.''

Shandling, in effect, turned himself into a sitcom character, first on It's Garry Shandling's Show, about a sitcom star supposedly playing himself and then, in 1992, on The Larry Sanders Show (HBO and BBC Two).

Larry Sanders was set backstage at a late-night television chat show much like Tonight. Shandling was the highly strung host who is tactfully protected from network interference by his vodka-swilling producer Artie (Rip Torn).

Much comedy derives from Sanders's interactions both with Artie and with his insensitive "sidekick", the announcer Hank Kingsley, played by Jeffrey Tambor.

Each episode was built around a work day and preparations for the arrival of a special guest. Real film-star guests playing themselves would willingly undergo the required humiliations, to rich comic effect. The tone was that of a documentary or "reality" television programme. Most of all, Shandling/Sanders himself was the wellspring of the humour; the scripts specialised in the comedy of insecurity, toe-curling embarrassment and the ever-present fear of unravelling under the pressures of performance.

The Larry Sanders Show gained a devoted cult following in Britain and Ireland and its techniques were taken up by writers and performers such as Ricky Gervais, Armando Iannucci and Sacha Baron Cohen.

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Among the staff writers on the show was Hollywood's current "king of comedy", the writer and director Judd Apatow. It went off the air in 1998, the year it won a Bafta, and Shandling himself an Emmy award for writing.

Shandling appeared in films, such as Town & Country (2001) with his friend Warren Beatty and Iron Man 2 (2010), but never enjoyed the same success again. He became a mentor to younger comedians and in recent years he worked with Apatow and Baron Cohen, helping them sharpen up their scripts.

He was a revered figure in his world. "Nice guys finish first," he would say. "If you don't know that, then you don't know where the finish line is."

Garry Shandling died on March 24

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
A programme to tackle the contemptible housing and homeless crisis should be at the centre of any new government's list of commitments.

It is chilling to reflect on Focus Ireland's figures released last Thursday: 83 families became homeless in February and were referred to its family services in Dublin during the month; 208 families and 363 children became homeless in the first two months of 2016.

The overall number of homeless children in Dublin has doubled in the last year - with 1,616 children in emergency accommodation compared to 803 in 2015, according to the Dublin Region Homeless Executive last week.

As Roughan Mac Namara, Focus Ireland advocacy and communications manager, told the Sunday Independent: "These figures show that the family homeless crisis is continuing to deepen with more than 200 families becoming homeless in the first two months of 2016 compared to a total of 739 becoming homeless during the whole of last year.

"It's not enough for this caretaker Government and the next Government to say they want to tackle homelessness and name check it as a priority. They have to commit to a coherent set of actions required to achieve this urgently."

In response to this depressing crisis, Independent News & Media has put together a concert called Rock Against Homelessness at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on April 24 in aid of Focus (through the One For Ireland campaign).

MTV and I'm A Celebrity... Get me Out Of Here superstar Laura Whitmore will MC on the night and a galaxy of stars will perform: The Strypes, Camille O'Sullivan, Something Happens, HamsandwicH, Mundy, The Stunning, Le Galaxie, Roisin O, Heathers, Jerry Fish, Brian Kennedy. (A major international star will also perform at the gig, which is fast selling out.)

"I'm so delighted to be involved in this gig," said Niamh Farrell of the brilliant HamsandwicH.

"Homelessness is a huge issue in Ireland at the moment. It's affecting so many people, so many families, not knowing where they will be from day to day. Living on the streets, in doorways, homeless hostels and hotels. Being moved around with children and whatever items they can carry with them.

"In this day and age, it's absolutely shocking," added Niamh.

Rock Against Homelessness is part of the One For Ireland campaign, which aims to raise 1m to fight youth homelessness throughout April (oneforireland.ie).

Proceeds from the concert (and from a charity CD that Independent News & Media is also releasing in three weeks featuring acts such as The Waterboys, Sinead O'Connor, Dolores O'Riordan, The Chieftains, The Saw Doctors, Tommy Fleming, Camille O'Sullivan, Mundy and Hometown) will go to Focus Ireland's youth projects. If you only go to one concert this year, buy a ticket and come to Rock Against Homelessness at the Olympia.

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Tickets for Rock Against Homelessness are 25 from Ticketmaster. Phone and internet bookings are subject to 12.5pc (of 2.15) service charge per ticket agents
'I was a young girl dreaming about Ireland when I heard Maud Gonne speaking by the Custom House in Dublin one August evening in 1903... She electrified me and filled me with some of her own spirit." With these words, one of the central figures of the Easter Rising was transformed from a bystander into a crucial participant in our shared history.

Helena Molony was 20 when she was awoken by Maud Gonne that evening and she went on to join Gonne's Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland), one of the few organisations that facilitated political engagement by women at a time when they were denied the vote and excluded from most political organisations.

Molony soon emerged as a natural orator and leader, a modern-day Granuaile. In 1908, she established Bean na hEireann, a monthly "woman's paper advocating militancy, separatism and feminism Friendly newsagents would say, "Bean na hEireann? That's the woman's paper that all the young men buy'."

Molony's political involvement thrived and the path she was on veered sharply to the left. She was working in Liberty Hall's food kitchen alongside Constance Markievicz during the Lock-out and became increasingly involved with the politics of James Connolly. She became general secretary of the Irish Women Workers' Union in 1915, as well as a very active member of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). The following year she would start the Rising.

Molony was due on the Abbey stage on April 24, 1916, for the matinee of Yeats' Cathleen Ni Houlihan. But, along with fellow actor Sean Connolly, she spent that afternoon marching to Dublin Castle. The story of that day is now resurrected in Rebel Rebel, a most timely play directed by Louise Lowe for Anu Productions (anuproductions.ie).

Starring Aisling O'Mara as the glorious Molony and Aonghus Og McAnally as Connolly, it runs daily at Bewleys Cafe Theatre until April 16th before embarking on a nationwide tour.

"We wanted to explore the notion of rehearsing for a revolution in the theatre, how these actors were performing these revolutionary acts on stage, how this fed into their idealism and how they would go home charged by it and talk politics through the night," says director Louise Lowe.

"Helena was so radical in her views and her thinking, she could never passively observe.

"In Rebel Rebel, we meet Helena in 1924, after she has been refused her state pension and is back playing Cathleen Ni Houlihan in the Abbey, wondering what has it all been for. She had started acting in 1909, she said she wanted to act not for art's sake but to learn how to make agitprop and political theatre. She was always very politically engaged. At the age of 15, she was campaigning for school milk for children.

"She was an inspirational woman, but she did struggle with alcoholism all of her life and that led to certain personal problems. At the time of the Rising, she was homeless and sleeping in Liberty Hall on a pile of coats in the co-op shop. There was a hole in the back of the shop that led into the printing room where The Proclamation was printed. Helena herself had set up the printing press and was in charge of guarding The Proclamation. Leading up to Easter week, the press was seized by eight Metropolitan policemen, but Helena held them up with her gun, she went everywhere with her own revolver."

On Easter Monday 1916, Molony and Connolly led the small second garrison from Liberty Hall to Dublin Castle. They both walked up to James O'Brien, a policeman from Limerick who was on duty at the Castle gate, a man that Connolly personally knew. Together, they raised their guns and Sean Connolly shot O'Brien straight in the face, the first bullet of the Rising.

They did make some attempt to take over Dublin Castle, but for some unknown reason they panicked and ran back out to City Hall. An hour later Connolly would die in Helena's arms as she whispered an act of contrition to him. As Yeats would later ask, "did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?"
A loud bang heard across west Belfast on Friday night was not caused by an explosion, NIE have said.

Social media was ablaze with reports of lights flashing in the sky and power outages. Many theories suggested there had been an explosion.

The incident happened at the power substation on the Suffolk Road but there were reports of it heard further afield.

There were no reports of any injuries as a result of the incident.

The incident resulted in brief power outages in many areas across Northern Ireland.

Jonny Daly uploaded the video online and said, 'Basically Facebook went into complete melt down and I seen tonnes of messages people freaking out about it. I checked my security camera and it had captured the moment.'

NIE's Sarah McClintock said a fault had caused a dip in power.

"Equipment failure could cause a bang and a flash which we believe is what people saw last night," she said.

"There was nothing sinister involved. It was a piece of equipment that failed in one of our sub stations and that would have caused the flash and could also have caused the dip in power that we have seen."

Sinn Fein MP Paul Maskey said online that he thought it was caused by a lightning strike.

Residents in the area described their rooms filling with flashing lights of many colours and their power cutting out.

One eyewitness said their feet were stuck to the ground due to the power of the bang.
After almost 1000 days behind bars, Michaella McCollum finally walked out of her Peruvian 'hell hole' prison last week. The famously dusty, smoggy air outside Ancon Dos maximum security facility, an hour north of Lima - which has been her home for over two years - must have tasted sweeter than ever.

No doubt the 23-year-old Co Tyrone native has been dreaming of this moment since being caught with over 11kg of cocaine with her friend, Scottish-born Melissa Reid, at Lima's Jorge Chavez airport in August 2013.

She's currently in Lima, spending some quality time with her mother, Norah, who flew out to Peru to see her daughter. The likelihood of her 'telling all' on the Late Late Show next week however is zero.

Her lawyer Kevin Winters said he was working with Michaella's lawyers in Peru and hoped to be in a position to "clarify further, as soon as possible", how long she will be there - but according to an ex-inmate of the famous prison, she won't be home before March 2020 at the earliest.

"This is Peruvian law, so any other outcome is impossible," said 'Daniela', who didn't want her real name identified. "No one, absolutely no one, gets out of a Peruvian prison and gets on a flight home anytime soon."

The girls received a minimum sentence for trafficking of six years and eight months in December 2013 - but as of 2014, a new law allowed inmates to apply for early release serving one-third of their sentence in prison and the rest on parole.

"It's called 'semilibertad,' so she is semi-liberated," 'Daniela' said. "I was caught with 3kg of cocaine in 2010, and got six years and eight months too, but I got out earlier on benefits. Prisoners don't have benefits anymore. The reason I ended up staying on for two years was to pay off my 3,500 penalties," she said.

Everyone stays on after prison, whether it's red tape, parole, to pay fees or all three. 'Daniela' said Michaella could also transfer to a Belfast prison to serve out her time, but she would still only be released when she serves out her original sentence.

"It's called 'translado' and there's a lot of paper work involved and there needs to be official agreement between prisons, so she won't just be able to come home and serve a few months and leave," she added.

"If I were her, I'd stay in Peru. She will be registered, so she can work legally, she can get her own apartment, earn money, go to college, go to cafes and travel around Peru. It will be a hell of a lot better than prison."

When I met Michaella and Melissa in a courtyard in Virgin de Fatima prison in Lima, in October 2013, before they were sentenced, she said it would be "amazing" to get out of prison within two years. At the time, she thought the possibility of up to 15 years was on the cards.

"I'd want to go straight home to my family, but if it's a choice of being out and living in Peru or being in here, I'd rather be out. Funnily enough neither of us had even heard of Peru before we came here, and now we're stuck here," she said. "You know the way when you see prisoners going back to visit the prison they were in years later after they've been released, I don't think I could do that. I don't think I'd ever come back to Peru," she added.

But stories last week appear to suggest she has adapted well to life in Peru, and according to Bishop Sean Walsh, who is based in Lima, McCollum will volunteer at the Eastern Catholic Church in Lima and will be working with people who are HIV positive with a Colombian priest in Peru, Fr Cathal Gallagher.

According to a source who spoke to the bishop, she will be living with Dr Walsh in his home. He said she had been an "exemplary prisoner".

After attending McCollum's hearing, Dr Walsh said she had learnt Spanish and also did a course in hairdressing. The Irish-American bishop recently told Vice news that he came to Peru to be a missionary - but now focuses on helping ex-prisoners, after he saw a group of European or American-looking men 'on parole' rummaging through bins because they had no money.

When I met McCollum, I found her to be extremely level- headed and grounded, where others could easily have fallen to pieces.

"This is why she came out early. In Ancon Dos, they like to see prisoners doing courses, learning skills and not losing the plot," Daniela says. "It's difficult not to, but it pays off.

"But she needs to watch herself. For the first seven months, a prison officer pretty much follows the parole girls around, so she will have to be really careful who she hangs out with. They check your Facebook page and take photos of you. I know Michaella has done very well in prison, I suspect she will be okay. But she needs to remember that even though she's not in prison, she's not free."

Some girls do really well during their parole time. One ex-prisoner is now a supermodel in Peru and is making TV ads, appearing in the social pages of magazines with local celebrities and living in a house with a pool.

But not everyone gets lucky. Belfast woman Lillian Allen, who was caught with 10kg of cocaine in her luggage in 2010, had to pay off corrupt officials to flee the country in fear of her life, vowing never to return.

Some ex-mules have escaped via a dangerous Ecuador border crossing - but the journey is fraught with risk, and if caught, they get 15 years in prison with no chance of parole.

"I'm home now for the last eight months and I'd give anything to go back to Peru. I had a life there. I opened a small restaurant. I had friends. Now I'm back in Europe, my friends have moved on," Daniela said.

She can't get work, because she's 43 and spent six years in a Peruvian prison for smuggling drugs.

"It doesn't look good," Daniela said. "Once you've been to prison, a strange thing happens. It's like the Shawshank Redemption, first you hate the walls that surround you, and then you grow to depend on them. You don't fit in anywhere anymore. You don't fit in when you get home, you don't fit in in a foreign country. Your friends get married; have children and work, while you stand still. It's strange and no one really helps you.

"Michaella is younger than me, so she will be OK. But I would advise her not to do too many interviews while she is there," she said. "She won't do herself or current prisoners any favours if she talks about corruption or illegal activity at official level."

When she is finally ready to go home, her original visa will have ran out and there will be more paperwork and fines. But after incarceration, at least being able to walk the streets of Lima will be a breeze.
Renewed garda overtime restrictions could hamper efforts to prevent further bloodshed following the return of two of the most notorious gang figures, 'Fat' Freddie Thompson and John Gilligan, sources say.

Gilligan (64) is believed to have returned to deal with the remaining legal and financial matters over the seizure of his properties by the Criminal Assets Bureau. It is also understood that he has fallen out with criminals in the Irish Traveller community around Birmingham where he had been staying since leaving Dublin in March 2014.

His arrival alongside, but not connected to, Thompson's return to Dublin is causing headaches for garda managers as armed units are being deployed to ensure that he does not become the subject of another assassination attempt. Two attempts were made on his life after he was released from Portlaoise Prison in October 2013 before he fled the country.

The armed units to watch Gilligan and prevent further attempts on his life are being diverted from operations to prevent further bloodshed in what is being termed the 'North-South' feud in Dublin since the Regency Hotel attack in February.

Restrictions on garda overtime were lifted in the run-up to the 1916 Centenary celebrations in Dublin and all garda leave was cancelled on the weekend of the main events. But this effectively ended last Sunday with almost all garda units returning to their regular rostered work.

One senior source last week expressed concern that it would be "only a matter of time" before the gangs - whose drug distribution territories are effectively divided by the Liffey - realised that the armed patrols that had been in place after the Regency attack have been reduced.

As well as effectively guarding Gilligan, gardai face the extra task of watching southside gang figure Freddie Thompson (34). Thompson was out socialising with a group of men in Dublin city centre last Wednesday night. His public appearance was seen as a deliberate provocation of the northside gang after Eddie Hutch (56) and Noel Duggan (55) were shot dead in retaliation for the killing of southsider David Byrne at the Regency Hotel on February 4.

The feud began in Spain last September when the southside criminals also murdered Gary Hutch (34), nephew of Eddie and Gerry 'the Monk' Hutch.

During the period when restrictions on garda overtime were lifted prior to the Easter weekend, gardai were very successful in preventing further retaliatory violence arising from the feud.

However, the rundown of the additional overtime budget left gardai trying to cope with the extra work of protecting high-profile targets Thompson and Gilligan.

One garda source summed up their return last week as a "pain in the arse".

Garda sources last week said the most immediate threat is actually in prisons where dozens of figures linked directly to the feud are incarcerated alongside each other.

Gardai praised the work of the prison authorities in preventing serious violence since Gary Hutch's brother, Derek 'Del Boy' Hutch, was attacked and stabbed in Mountjoy Prison two weeks after Gary was shot dead.

This attack came only days after the northside gangsters attempted to murder associates of David Byrne in southwest Dublin.

Gardai said last week both sides are being contained on either side of the Liffey with the river acting as a barrier.

With the extra armed patrols allowed by the additional overtime, gardai were able to control movement across the Liffey and to provide high-profile patrolling in the areas where the gangs are most active in the north and south inner cities.
With the passing of time the images take on a surreal quality - a car burning on the lakeshore in the dawn light, gunfire echoing through the trees, a girl with long, deep russet hair and bleeding feet being bundled to safety, a small figure dressed in green squirming on the roadway as he was pinned to the hard, flint road.

Later, the sound of trudging feet as a silent and disparate group marched through the shadows of a dark woodland towards the graves of Imelda Riney, her little son Liam and nearby Fr Joe Walsh, all anxious to witness the final act of a tragedy that unfolded in the hours and days before.

The events of that Saturday seem to be telescoped in those memories but it is a story that had taken years to reach this tragic climax.

It is 20 years yesterday, April 2, 1996, since Brendan O'Donnell, the squirming figure on that remote country roadway, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of those three innocents, a mother, her young son and a priest. Sixteen months later he died, largely unlamented, in the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin, of a heart attack while he was on prescribed tranquillisers.

He was 23-years-old.

In the woods between the villages of Mountshannon and Whitegate, Co Clare, there was a semi-derelict house that once belonged to a man named Willie Gleeson, which was often used by the semi-vagrant O'Donnell on his wanderings. Imelda Riney, who was separated from her husband Val Balance, bought it and was trying to restore the house while living there with her two sons, Oisin and Liam.

On Friday, April 29, 1994, Brendan O'Donnell broke into a house in the area and stole a shotgun and a box of bullets. He then wandered across the fields and called to Imelda Riney's house. They knew each other casually and he had told her of his troubled background, mental illness and time in jail. She was alone with Liam as her other son had gone off with his father.

Imelda told him not to bring the gun into the house and put the kettle on to make tea. He would later say that they then went upstairs and had sex, although her family disputed that she would have done this consensually. O'Donnell claimed that afterwards he heard voices in his head saying he would have to kill her because she was "the devil's daughter".

She told him "don't be raving" but he insisted she drive to Cregg Wood where he shot her in the head as she tried to wrestle the gun from him. He then shot Liam, explaining later: "I felt happy he wasn't growing up without his mother."

What became the saga of Brendan O'Donnell started as a simple paragraph in the newspaper some days later outlining the disappearance of a woman and child. The authorities seemed to treat it casually, a consequence of the 'new-age' lifestyle lived by those who bought small remote farms and properties in the woods and hills around Scariff and that part of Co Clare.

But locals knew different, they knew that lurking in the woods was a dangerously unstable young man from the nearby village of Whitegate, who some of them had come to fear with very good reason.

With news of the disappearance of Fr Joe Walsh from the nearby village of Eyrecourt, Co Galway, on the Tuesday night, reporters began to dribble into Mountshannon and I was among the first. Living locally was Declan White, a journalist who was trying to raise awareness of the missing woman and child.

But what really made the story was the photograph of Imelda Riney, with a big straw hat and flowing hair, artistic and looking like Picasso's muse, Francoise Gilot.

There was a surreal atmosphere in the days that followed. Reporters were crowding into the local hotel, the more energetic scouring the countryside for a story.

In the evening there was a party atmosphere in the bar as old hacks swapped 'war stories' and argued, some of them even accepting the official line "she'll turn up eventually".

Initially the garda authorities did not even connect the disappearance of mother and son with that of the priest because the investigations were being handled by different garda divisions.

But the penny dropped when Fr Walsh's car was found hanging over a pier on Lough Derg. By Friday, detectives with hard faces and tight lips began to arrive in the area. The casual atmosphere had been replaced with an urgency and alertness that had not been there in previous days.

A garda helicopter was on standby and went into action early on Saturday morning when the final episode in the drama kicked off. Shortly after 7.45am, O'Donnell broke into a house near the lake and kidnapped Fiona Sampson, forcing her to drive so fast that she eventually crashed. After dragging her barefoot through brambles, he hijacked a car belonging to Eddie Cleary, who had a farm in the area.

O'Donnell was spotted by the helicopter on the remote country road and pursuers and pursued met head-on. O'Donnell attempted to shoot his way out, but after the gun jammed he was wrestled from the car and onto the road where myself and Declan White knelt down and pleaded with him to tell us where Imelda and Liam were. He just grunted.

In that moment his was not the face of a cruel and callous killer, it was the face of someone unstable, troubled and confused. Unarmed, his power was gone. He was nothing now, just as he had been nothing before the events of that terrible summer's week so long ago.
The family of Margot Seery has questioned how many murders have gone undetected after an inquest last week heard how a doctor, gardai and a pathologist had failed to notice that the 48-year-old mother had been strangled.

They also question how her organs came to be missing from her body when she was exhumed and why aspects of the original post mortem report were incorrect.

Pa Guinane, Margot Seery's brother, told the Sunday Independent: "One of the questions we asked at the inquest was how the murder was missed by gardai, the doctor and the pathologist. How many more murders might have been missed? Whatever answer we get is not going to bring Margot back," he said, but it was "important" to her family, particularly to Margot's daughter, Niamh, who now lives in Australia.

Margot Seery was found dead in her flat on Kenilworth Square, Dublin in 1994. Gardai at the time believed that Margot was alone when she died and a Garda doctor had no suspicions. The inquest found that she choked on her own vomit following a night out with her friend.

But 20 years later, a clerk called Howard Kelly walked into Rathmines Garda Station to confess to strangling her. Kelly told gardai that he and his friend met Margot and her friend on their way home, he was drunk, and Margot took him to her flat to make tea.

When Gardai exhumed Margot's body, the grim discovery that Margot's organs were missing struck a chord with her relatives. Family members who prepared her body for burial recalled last week how empty and floppy Margot's body seemed as they attempted to position her in her casket.

"We were trying to make her look as nice as we could for her mum," said one relative. "I found it hard to get her straight (in her casket) and she kept falling over. And when we now that she had an empty cavity ... it was not pleasant. It was quite traumatic really."

Following his conviction for murder in November last year, a second inquest into Margot's death was held to amend the cause of her death from choking to murder.

The inquest heard from a senior garda that the original pathologist is a retired consultant at a teaching hospital. The inquest heard he could not explain why the post mortem report indicated that Margot's brain had been examined when it had not. The inquest also heard from the detective that "no explanation was found" for her missing organs. "I am sorry I am not able to assist on that," the coroner told the family, with whom he sympathised.

"I think the coroner should go a bit deeper," said Mr Guinane. "We really had no answers to the questions that we wanted answers to. We came away from the first inquest thinking she had choked on her vomit. We found that very hard to take at the time."

For her family, the second inquest into Margot's death has raised more questions.
Joan Burton is on course to hold on to power as the overwhelming majority of Labour Party supporters believe she should remain as leader, according to a Sunday Independent/Millward Brown opinion poll.

Almost two in five (38pc) Labour supporters said Ms Burton was their preferred leader as the acting Tanaiste faces into a possible leadership heave in the coming weeks.

Ms Burton is facing a challenge from acting public expenditure minister Brendan Howlin, who has been meeting with party colleagues to orchestrate his coronation as leader without facing a vote of the membership.

However, today's poll shows Mr Howlin trailing significantly behind the current Labour leader, with just 23pc of party members saying they support his leadership bid.

Acting environment minister Alan Kelly is on 13pc, while junior minister Sean Sherlock is on just 2pc.

Mr Sherlock, who has weighed in behind Mr Howlin's leadership bid, has even less support in the poll than former business and employment minister Ged Nash, who is on 3pc, despite not being elected in the General Election.

But among the general public, Mr Howlin leads the race to become the next Labour leader.

In the overall poll findings of 865 people surveyed between March 21-April 1, Mr Howlin is on 16pc, ahead of Ms Burton on 14pc and Mr Kelly on 12pc.

Almost half of those polled expressed no preference or interest in any of the frontrunners.

Ms Burton's spokesman said she would not make a decision on her future until the next government was formed.

Meanwhile, Mr Howlin has been secretly building up support within the party to launch a leadership challenge if Ms Burton does not step down in the coming weeks.

At Labour's post-election meeting last week, Pat Rabbitte led the charge on Ms Burton's leadership and was supported by Cork TDs Michael McCarthy and Ciaran Lynch. All proposed that Mr Howlin should take charge of the party uncontested in the interim.

While Mr Sherlock stormed out of the meeting during Ms Burton's address to highlight his frustration with her leadership, he later returned.

Last night, Mr Howlin's supporters denied they were behind the attack on the current Labour leader.

Since the meeting in the City West Hotel in Dublin, Mr Howlin told supporters he would decide over the weekend if he was going to launch a challenge to Ms Burton in the coming week.

Mr Howlin's team is anxious to remove Ms Bruton as soon as possible over fears she could still be in place when another general election is called.

But Mr Kelly is expected to take on Mr Howlin if he pushes to become leader without a vote. His supporters have been urging him to put his name forward to ensure there is an open contest for the leadership.

"Howlin should have the balls to come out and say he's contesting the leadership and stop all this underhand nonsense," a source close to Mr Kelly said.

Within the party, Mr Howlin has secured the support of Mr Sherlock and Longford Westmeath TD Willie Penrose.

Acting education minsiter Jan O'Sullivan will also weigh in behind him if there is a vote.

Mr Howlin has not pledged the deputy leader role to any TD in return for their support.

In fact, if he takes charge of the party, it is likely he will remove the deputy leader position held by Mr Kelly.

It is unclear if Dublin Fingal TD Brendan Ryan would support either candidate or Ms Burton.

"Howlin has it if he wants it. It will be a coronation," one of the acting minister's supporters said.

However, some party members are concerned he is "damaged goods" due to his close links to Fine Gael, specifically acting finance minister Michael Noonan.

One Labour figure described the pair as "the Chuckle Brothers of Irish politics" in reference to the nickname for Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness and the late DUP leader Ian Paisley.

Other Labour sources said Mr Howlin's perceived "arrogance and sense of entitlement" did not play well with the grassroots membership.

All seven of Labour's TDs will meet in Leinster House this week to discuss the party's future.
The people overwhelmingly want Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin elected Taoiseach ahead of Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, a significant Sunday Independent/Millward Brown opinion poll has found.

More than twice as many voters prefer Mr Martin (39pc) over Mr Kenny (17pc) to lead, according to the potentially influential poll.

The findings show that the public mood has decisively turned against Mr Kenny as he continues to struggle to put together a Fine Gael-led minority government.

In a most damaging finding, a little over half (54pc) of Fine Gael voters actually want Mr Kenny to be elected Taoiseach.

In fact, far more Fine Gael supporters would prefer health minister Leo Varadkar as party leader.

Last night the Sunday Independent learned Fianna Fail might consider a "partnership" government with Fine Gael if Mr Kenny stood down as leader and Fianna Fail Independent TDs were included in the arrangement.

The poll finds that more voters want a Fianna Fail-led minority government (14pc) than one led by Fine Gael (8pc). And the nationwide poll also indicates that Fine Gael could lose significant support in the event of a new election, particularly among well-off voters in Dublin.

The nationwide poll contains several results that will alarm Fine Gael and will also inform Independent TDs - whose support is crucial to the formation of the next government - on who the public are leaning towards.

This weekend, Mr Kenny still remains favourite to lead a Fine Gael-led minority government because Fine Gael has seven more TDs than Fianna Fail.

But the decision of 17 Independent TDs will determine whether Mr Kenny or Mr Martin leads the next government.

Fianna Fail leader Mr Martin is attempting to maximise support among Independent TDs and smaller parties.

Yesterday he told the Sunday Independent: "We're up for it." He directly appealed to Independents and others to support a "shared" government with Fianna Fail.

Mr Martin said: "This opinion poll shows that the people's mood for a change of government is still there - if anything it has hardened since the election."

Fine Gael is this weekend also in behind-the-scenes talks with Independents, and believes it has secured the support of at least four, which would see Mr Kenny win the race for power.

However, today's opinion poll will give all Independents food for thought and may influence their decision.

The opinion poll was taken among a sample of 865 voters between March 21 and April 1. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.3pc.

Asked for a preference to resolve the uncertainty over the formation of the next government, a quarter (27pc) favoured a new election.

However, a clear majority wanted a government now rather than another election.

According to the poll, 22pc favoured a Fine Gael/Fianna Fail coalition, rising to 43pc of FG voters and a significantly less 27pc of FF voters.

This finding indicates that Mr Martin has correctly judged that the mood in Fianna Fail is strongly opposed to a so-called 'grand coalition'.

A further 22pc of those polled favoured the formation of some form of minority government, while 11pc want some other combination and 18pc did not know or expressed no opinion.

However, more people favoured a Fianna Fail-led minority government (14pc), rising to 37pc of Fianna Fail supporters ahead, of a Fine Gael-led one (8pc), rising to 19pc of Fine Gael supporters.

The poll also found that 70pc of people would vote the same way if a new election was called, rising to 82pc of Fianna Fail supporters, 83pc of Sinn Fein voters but just 75pc of Fine Gael supporters.

It also found 10pc would change the way they voted, highest among well-off AB voters (17pc) and Dublin residents (16pc), while 5pc said it depended and 6pc did not know or expressed no opinion.

When preferences for the next Taoiseach were broken down by parties, a massive 84pc of Fianna Fail supporters said Micheal Martin, but just 54pc of Fine Gael supporters said Enda Kenny.

The poll also found health minister Leo Varadkar (28pc) is the preferred Fine Gael leader followed by Agriculture Minister, Simon Coveney (15pc), Enda Kenny (12pc), Frances Fitzgerald (6pc) and Paschal Donohoe (3pc). A breakdown of Fine Gael supporters finds Mr Varadkar (38pc) with a commanding lead over Mr Kenny (27pc), Mr Coveney (16pc), Ms Fitzgerald (6pc), and Mr Donohoe (1pc).

On the Labour leadership, the poll finds Brendan Howlin (16pc) ahead of Joan Burton (14pc), Alan Kelly (12pc), Sean Sherlock (6pc) and Ged Nash (4pc), but almost half of voters (48pc) said none of these, somebody else, had no opinion or said it depended. However, a breakdown of Labour supporters showed Ms Burton (38pc) the favourite ahead of Mr Howlin (23pc), Mr Kelly (13pc), Mr Nash (3pc) and Mr Sherlock (2pc).

Yesterday Mr Martin told the Sunday Independent: "For the last month I've been reaching out to Independents and smaller parties, like the Social Democrats and the Greens, on the basis that people voted for change. We are genuinely trying to reflect that change in the composition of a new government. As one Independent said to me during the week, people voted for a centre-left government, not a centre-right government.

"We believe a shared government of Fianna Fail, Independents and smaller parties is the obvious way to reflect the people's opinion. I've picked up from my dealings with Independents that they are wary of voting for Enda Kenny and of Fine Gael going back into government because they intuitively know that is not what the people voted for."

He said that while he was aware the formation of the next government was the duty of all TDs, and he would respect their decision, he said he was "taken aback" by the "very arrogant attitude" of Fine Gael that Independents must vote Fine Gael or there would be an election: "Some Fine Gael spokespeople simply haven't got the reality of the election result - they need to get that fairly quickly," he said. Fine Gael was in "no position to be dictating to anybody - they need to get that." Mr Martin spoke of parliamentary reform proposals which, he said, would "make the Dail a different place" and would "facilitate" a minority led government. He also said he was aware of the "limited financial resources" available, but said a "shared" government could "agree to the fundamentals" which he highlighted as "caring for disability and special needs people", investment in rural Ireland, and dealing with housing, homelessness and health issues. "We are up for it," he said.
Junior doctors want to break the silence around sexual harassment of female medics in Irish hospitals.

They have called on acting health minister Leo Varadkar to set up an expert group to investigate the extent to which female trainees may be afraid to complain because it will hurt their careers.

Fears that blowing the whistle on sex pests on the hospital wards will hamper career development is a very real one, delegates at the Irish Medical Organisation's (IMO) AGM in Sligo were told.

Dr John Duddy, a neurosurgical specialist registrar in Beaumont Hospital, who is the new president of the IMO, said the problem came to the surface in Australia last year and the view of experienced medics here is that it is no different in Ireland.

Doctors in male-dominated hospitals in Australia said they had experienced everything from inappropriate jokes to sexual advances from senior staff who could make or break their careers.

Some said they would not trust the complaint mechanisms in place at hospitals and colleges where there was an established culture of "untouchables".

Dr Duddy said: "We don't know what is happening in Ireland but it is something that needs to be looked at."

Irish hospitals continue to be "hierarchical" institutions and a trainee must rely on a good reference from a senior doctor when they seek a job.

The Australian probe found female surgical trainees had to give sexual favours.

Junior doctors at the AGM unanimously backed a motion calling on Mr Varadkar to set up a working group to find out the prevalence of sexual harassment across the health service. Dr John Donnellan, a trainee paediatric radiologist in Temple St Hospital said: "It is foolish for the HSE to presume that this is not an issue, when every other industry and profession recognises this, as that causes problems for their employees.

"There is no mention of support or facilities within hospitals with information on where to go," he added.

The junior doctors also want the minister to set up a task force to tackle the scourge of bullying.

It follows a survey by the Medical Council, the doctors' regulator, showing that one in three trainees is subjected to bullying at work.

Dr Duddy said the Medical Council referred to bullying as part of a "culture".

However, he said: "I do not agree with that. If you are bullied at work you are more likely to leave the health service."

He said there is silence around "doctor-on-doctor" bullying and he himself experienced it early on in his career.

"I know what it is like to have my performance in the operating theatre undermined."

Dr Duddy also condemned the low number of women in senior medical posts.

He said there needs to be a change in medical training and working hour regimes in order to make some medical posts more attractive to female doctors.
Chiefs at Glasnevin Cemetery have been left red-faced after Irish speakers spotted a spelling mistake in the unveiling of a 1916 monument.

A memorial wall for all those who died in the 1916 Easter Rising was unveiled at Glasnevin Cemetery this morning.

However, fluent Irish speakers spotted an embarrassing mistake in the title of the monument.

Unveiled as Eiri Amach Na Casca 1916, a fada features over the first I and not the E. The correct spelling is Eiri.

Expand Close The Remembrance Wall with the type. Photo: Stephen Collins/Collins Photos / Facebook

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When contacted by Independent.ie, a spokesman for Glasnevin Trust accepted the spelling mistake.

He said: There is a misplaced fada in the spelling of the word Eiri on the Necrology Wall unveiled today at Glasnevin cemetery.

It will be corrected immediately.

The typo has left organisers embarrassed after the unveiling was broadcasted on RTE.

Acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny was also present, alongside former taoisigh Bertie Ahern and John Bruton.

Fianna Fail TD and fluent Irish speaker Eamon O Cuiv described the mistake as crazy.

Thats wrongthats crazy, said Mr O Cuiv

It should be put right. These things are very simple to put right.

Theres any amount of books and dictionaries to tell you how to spell.

These things should be proofed and checked, he added.
When she first arrived in Ireland as a 17-year-old refugee, Ifrah Ahmed was frightened and unsure.

But what she remembers most was the cold - a biting merciless cold, never felt in her native Somalia. Nine years later, the cold is not a problem for the anti-female genital mutilation (FGM) campaigner, who found refuge in Ireland during the Somalian civil war.

Wearing a full-flowing traditional African dress and veil, 26-year-old Ifrah has accessorised with six-inch heels, a grey suit blazer, chandelier earrings and a nose piercing as she poses playfully outside the GPO.

In front of the camera, the former asylum seeker is full of confidence. Of course, she has to be, as she prepares to return home next month to her native Mogadishu, where she will be taking up the role of advisor on gender issues to the Somalian Prime Minister, Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke.

Somalia is currently recovering from a decades-long civil war and is still under sustained guerrilla attacks from Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al-Shabab. Ifrah's life will be under threat by her very presence in the country, especially given her outspokenness on women's issues. But for the young woman who counts Mary Robinson as her main inspiration, it is nothing she hasn't faced before.

"I grew up between our home in Mogadishu and the refugee camps. Whenever the militants would enter the city we would move to the outskirts and stay in a tent and when peace came we would move back."

At 17, while living in a refugee camp outside Mogadishu, militants pillaged the camp and she witnessed her sister being raped. It was then she knew she had to go.

Despite stepping off the plane alone in Ireland, she took to her new home quickly. English however was her biggest obstacle.

She dropped out of the Leaving Cert, choosing instead to enrol in English classes full-time to master the language. And one incident in particular which spurred her to get to grips with the language was when she found herself in hospital over a medical problem she never realised she had. Through a male translator and confused doctor, Ifrah learned of the term: FGM.

"For me in Somalia, FGM was a normal practice. What we used to think was FGM is good, it was like you being told you will have a Christmas gift, you will be so excited, you will want to have it.

"I was eight-years-old when it happened to me and was sent to a family doctor for the procedure with a group of nine other girls. Our legs were tied together after and we had to rest in a ward for a few weeks. I remember one of the girls, my neighbour, she died from the bleeding."

The problem with FGM is not just the instant risk of bleeding or infection when the genitalia is cut or sewn, but the long-term consequence of the wounds.

"Before when women got a long-term kidney infection, it was said to be kidney stones. When women gave birth and died of bleeding, they would say she died of childbirth. People are only now understanding the long-term effects of FGM on women's lives."

Now Ifrah had a higher calling. By mastering English she was able to go on and study social studies while raising awareness of the ongoing medical risks for FGM survivors living in Ireland.

It wasn't just the African community in Ireland that needed to be educated on FGM, but Irish medics themselves were confounded by the problem.

Setting up the Ifrah Foundation to support FGM survivors, Ifrah persevered to pass legislation outlawing FGM in Ireland in 2012. Her work brought her to the attention of the European Commission, eventually earning her the title of Humanitarian of the Year at the 2015 Women4Africa awards.

However, Somalia was calling her home. In 2013 she returned home to survey her country after a new parliament and president were installed.

Visiting the Internally Displaced Persons camps she had grown up in she began research into sexual violence and FGM.

So incensed by what she saw she set up a petition and on St Patricks' Day this year she met with the Somalian Prime Minister in Rome and told him how sexual violence needed to be prioritised and FGM should be tackled. Mr Sharmarke subsequently offered Ifrah a job.

Now, preparing to return home after nine years in Ireland, the campaigner is frightened but no less determined. "People say why go? I love Ireland, this is home for me, but I have to change hearts in Somalia and to do that, I must go home to Mogadishu."
Extremist preachers may be spreading hate in Irish universities and encouraging vulnerable young Muslims to join Islamic State conflicts, a leading Imam has warned.

Although previous concern over the potential radicalisation and recruitment of Irish Muslims has centred on social media interaction, Shaykh Dr Umar Al-Qadri, Chair of the Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council, says physical contact is also a "very real threat".

The Irish Muslim community are now taking practical steps to prevent radicalisation and they are calling on the Government to take immediate action.

According to official Department of Justice figures, up to 30 Irish fighters have left here to fight in Syria and Iraq.

Speaking at a seminar on preventing radicalisation at Trinity College Dublin, Dr Al-Qadri said: "We know already that more than 30 youths from Ireland have travelled abroad to participate in the conflicts but how were they recruited? How were they radicalised?.

"To say that it is solely down to social media is not fair because it does happen through physical contact also. We want to ensure foreign speakers that come here to preach in our universities, colleges, Islamic centres and mosques do not encourage our Muslims to travel abroad and that they will actually discourage them and they will not recruit anyone from Ireland," he said.

Although he stresses that radicalisation is not a major problem in Ireland, he says the fact that at least 30 have already been recruited is a "wake-up" call to the community.

"Things are very good right now but that can change rapidly and it's our responsibility to ensure that we live in a peaceful co-existing society," he said.

"In Ireland we cannot say 100pc that nobody will become extremist, but we can take practical steps to minimise the risk," he said.

Recent suicide bomb attacks in Brussels, Baghdad, Lahore and Istanbul falsely carried out "in the name of Islam," were the final straw for the Irish Muslim community, made up of approximately 65,000 members.

Dr Al-Qadri says the community "cannot stay silent anymore" and that they are committed to minimising the threat of radicalisation from a "grassroots level".

Muslim scholars have formulated an anti-extremism declaration to ensure that all visiting Islamic speakers to Ireland abide by norms of peaceful and respectful discussion and teaching.

It was signed for the first time by visiting Muslim speaker Shaykh Fakhruddin Owaisi, chairman of the Council of Sunni Imams in Cape Town, South Africa at the seminar in TCD's Irish School of Ecumenics.

US ambassador Kevin O'Malley, Belgium ambassador Philippe Ronald, Pakistan ambassador Syed Rizwan, Iran ambassador Javad Kachoueian, and French counsellor Philippe Ray were also in attendance.

"We want to avoid radicalisation in Ireland and prevention is better than cure," said Dr Al-Qadri.

"This declaration states that foreign speakers who come here to engage with our Muslims very clearly and unconditionally condemn and reject all terrorism," he said.

"It is a Muslim initiative to protect the Muslim community. I hope to see the Irish Government respond to this. I don't want you to respond when it is too late," he said.

Muslim scholars are calling on the Government to consider including the declaration as part of the visa structure. They're also calling on all universities, colleges, student organisations and mosques throughout the country to implement the declaration.

"Implementing this initiative is the first step towards closing the door on extremism," he said.
Just over five weeks ago, Fine Gael and Labour won a total of 57 seats. Or, to put it another way, between them they lost 56 of the 113 seats they had won in the 2011 election. Or, to put it yet another way, they lost half their seats.

In fact, no matter what way you put it - Fine Gael and Labour lost the last election. The voters overwhelmingly rejected their request to have their mandate renewed.

Most people in the Labour Party appear to have grasped this simple fact, yet it seems somehow to have eluded Enda Kenny and his dwindling band of acolytes.

It is as if Kenny is arrogantly clinging to the notion that if no one mentions this simple arithmetical fact out loud, then everything can stay as it was. Perhaps this is the natural consequence of being so obsessed with spin. You presume that the only reason something didn't appear on the TV or radio is because that particular something never really happened.

We saw it on the night of the election count. Rather than go on RTE's election results programme and face an open discussion with Dobson, O'Callaghan or McCullagh on the electoral mauling he had received, his media handlers were arranging for him to do a short and tightly controlled piece on The Nine O'Clock News.

We saw it too with Kenny's March 10 resignation as Taoiseach. There were no media or cameras present when he handed in his resignation to the President. There was no footage of him arriving at the Aras or meeting the President, so let's all pretend it didn't happen.

Except Kenny did lose the vote for Taoiseach, just as he lost the election. He has seen his parliamentary party decimated. The policy programme and five-year record that he and his ministers put to the people was roundly rejected. Instead, the people looked to the alternative offered by Micheal Martin and backed it to a degree that no one had predicted only a few months earlier.

Maybe it is this result, the resurgence by Fianna Fail, that they find so hard to face up to.

This perhaps explains the near-delusional arrogance of Kenny and his acting team of acting ministers over the past few weeks, including Richard Bruton's pronouncement last week of Fine Gael's superiority in all matters relating to negotiations, whether that be their timing or support for a government that is not centered around itself.

Here is the party that promised a break with the past five years ago, now clinging to its own pretensions of the past. Fine Gael's disconnect with today's political realities is breathtaking.

The voters have given their verdict. They have rejected the outgoing government, but have, in their wisdom, not voted in a clear replacement. Now it is up to the Dail and to all TDs and parties elected five weeks ago to take that result and make it work in the people's interests.

That is what we should be doing, but instead, we have the Fine Gael rump of the outgoing government telling itself that it has won an overwhelmingly minority, while the self-proclaimed harbingers of change in Sinn Fein and the Social Democrats rush to the sidelines to keep themselves pure and unsullied by resolutely refusing to do what they were elected to do.

The reality for most other European democracies is that forming a minority government is not difficult or complicated. Yes, it does take some weeks of negotiations, but they get on with it.

Sweden has had a minority government that is about 40 seats short of a majority since 2014 and it's getting on just fine. It has a government that has to listen to its parliament and its opposition and seek a consensus with them on major issues. It has to treat its parliament as an adult assembly and its parliament has to behave like one. The same is true elsewhere.

The reality is that the people have not given a single party or alignment of parties a clear mandate to govern. They looked at the alternatives offered by the two main competitors, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, and rated them about the same - with barely 1pc between them.

And so it is up to these two competing blocs to work to secure the support of as many other TDs and groupings as they can and - when one of them has secured that support - for the other party to behave responsibly and allow the prevailing will of the Dail to proceed and not act like the dog in the manger.

That is what I hope we will see happen next Wednesday, but I am far from confident that it is what we will see.

Willie O'Dea is the Fianna Fail TD for Limerick city.
Lily Ramirez-Foran is the author of the popular Mexican Food blog A Mexican Cook. She has been living in Ireland for over 16 years with her Irish husband and business partner, Alan Foran. Together, they run Ireland's first Mexican boutique grocer and cookery school, Picado Mexican in Dublin's Portobello (picadomexican.com).

Lily, who has appeared on RTE's Today Show and has given cookery demonstrations at the likes of Electric Picnic, passionately believes in the Slow Food ethos of good, clean and fair food.

Currently working on her first cookery book, this month she will be giving a Mexican masterclass at the West Waterford Festival of Food.

This prawn cocktail recipe is a favourite of my Irish family. It's fresh and very easy to make. The secret is in the sauce, which has a small amount of booze. Don't mock it until you try it. It's delicious!

Mexican prawn cocktail

Serves 4

You will need

For the sauce:

200ml ketchup

2tbsp lemonade such as 7-Up

1tbsp tequila

1tbsp water

 tsp hot sauce

For the rest:

400g king prawns, cooked and peeled

65g onion, finely chopped

5g fresh jalapeno chilli, finely chopped

Juice of 1 lime

200g tomatoes, finely chopped

2 ripe avocados, peeled and cut into small cubes

Method

Put the prawns, onions, chilli, lime juice and the tomatoes in a large serving bowl. Mix well and set aside while you make the sauce.

In a jug, put the ketchup, the 7-Up, tequila and water and mix well to have a thin but not runny sauce. Follow by adding the hot sauce and combine well.

Pour the boozy ketchup over the prawns and mix well. Follow by gently folding in the avocado cubes.

Chill until ready to eat. Serve this cocktail with home-made tortilla chips and watch it disappear in seconds.

Mexican entomatadas

This is one of my favourite mid-week dinners. Super easy and fast to make, plus really tasty. It's vegetarian-friendly and apart from your corn tortillas, you're bound to have everything else in the fridge already. Great for a meat-free day.

Serves 3

You will need

For the sauce:

6 medium size tomatoes, whole

1 garlic clove, peeled

1 fresh red chilli, whole

 cup hot water, from kettle

 vegetable stock cube

1tbs olive oil

1 small onion, finely chopped

Salt to taste

For the filling:

250g feta cheese, crumbled

 small onion, finely chopped

For the rest:

 cup vegetable oil approx

12 corn tortillas

Method

Put the tomatoes, garlic, chilli, water and vegetable stock cube in a blender or food processor and liquidise/blitz until you have a smooth sauce.

Heat the 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a non-stick pan, add the onion and cook for 2 minutes or until the onions are translucent. Pour the liquidised sauce and cook at medium heat, stirring occasionally until the tomato sauce has changed to a deeper colour and reduced and thickened a little, approximately 10 minutes. Season with salt and set aside. While the sauce is cooking, start making your filling.

Crumble the feta cheese into a bowl and mix it with the chopped onion. This will make a lovely vegetarian filling. Set aside.

Heat half the vegetable oil in a small, non-stick pan at medium to high heat. Drop a corn tortilla into the hot oil for about 15 seconds. Using a spatula, quickly, but gently turn it to the other side for another 15 seconds. Don't leave it too long or the tortilla will go crispy and it will be impossible to roll. What you are trying to do here is to heat the tortilla and make it flexible enough for rolling.

Lift the tortilla from the pan and gently shake any excess oil. Repeat this step, topping up the oil every now and then, until all your corn tortillas are heated making sure to overlap them in the plate to keep them warm.

I recommend you assemble the entomatadas on the plate you're going to serve them. Use warm plates. Take one of the tortillas and put some of the cheese filling in it. Carefully roll the tortilla to form a taco in the shape of a cigar. Repeat this until you have four cheese tacos on each plate.

Pour a generous amount of warm red salsa over the rolls. Be very generous with the sauce. Sprinkle any leftover of cheese filling on top of them.

Serve your entomatadas as soon as they're ready with a side of warmed refried beans and some some shredded iceberg lettuce.

Lily Ramirez-Foran joins Javier Garduno, creator of El Sombrero sauces, for a Mexican masterclass as part of The Cutting Edge of Cooking Demo in Waterford's Town Hall on Sunday April 17 at 2pm. Tickets are 20, visit westwaterfordfestivaloffood.com for details.

This recipe was conceived out of pure greed for something decadent and tasty. The torte is delicious, and if you can get Ancho chilli powder already made, you save a good 15 minutes from preparation time. Having said so, I find making my own Ancho powder quite easy and any leftovers can be stored in the cupboard for up to three months.

Chilli and tequila chocolate torte

Serves a party

You will need

2 dried Ancho chillies (20g)

200g dark chocolate, 70pc cocoa solids

200g butter, plus extra for greasing

Cocoa powder for dusting

4 eggs, room temperature

150g caster sugar

60g ground almonds

20g wheat flour

Pinch of sea salt

2 tablespoons tequila

Method

Prepare a round 23cm cake tin by buttering the bottom and sides and dusting it all with cocoa powder instead of flour. This will ensure your torte to be completely dark when it comes out of the tin. Preheat the oven at 170C.

Remove the stems and seeds out of the Ancho chillies. Gently toast the chillies on a hot skillet or pan at medium heat until they get slightly hard or crispy (takes about 5 minutes). Make sure you turn the chillies every few seconds to avoid burning them. Dried chillies are very easy to burn, which makes them bitter and not good for use.

Take the chillies off the heat and let them cool down for a couple of minutes. Pass them through a spice grinder or blitz them in your food processor or blender until they become a fine, dark powder. Set aside.

Melt the chocolate, butter and 4 tablespoons of the Ancho chilli powder you just made by placing them in a glass bowl over a pot of gently simmering water. Make sure the water does not touch the bowl or your chocolate will split. Use a spatula or a small whisk to combine all ingredients as they melt. Once ready, remove the bowl from the heat and set it aside to cool slightly.

Once the spicy, buttery chocolate mixture has cooled down a little, stir in the eggs one at a time, making sure you incorporate each egg well, before adding the next one. Follow the last egg by adding in the sugar, almonds, flour, salt and tequila. Mix well.

Pour the chocolaty mixture into the prepared tin and baked in the preheated oven for 30 to 35 minutes or until the torte is firm. Take it out of the oven, let it rest for 5 minutes and then take it out of the tin and let it cool down completely on a wire rack.

Serve with some berries, whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. Keeps well for up to three days, but as the torte ages, the chilli flavour dulls and the tequila taste matures. It's truly delicious.
Re-imagined histories are fertile ground for authors, such as the life - and death - of Benito Mussolini. Italy's fascist dictator was executed in April 1945 by partisans, but muddled circumstances gave birth to a conspiracy theory which persists to this day. Umberto Eco's final work, last November, centred on whether Il Duce was spirited away by a collusion of CIA, Vatican, Communists and God knows who.

That was fiction. But what about an alternate history, which might have been, in reality? A story involving a middle-aged Irishwoman, daughter of a Baron, who shot Mussolini three times, including twice in the nose, for no apparent reason, and ended her days in a British mental asylum.

That sounds more fictional than Eco's story yet it's all true. Next Thursday, April 7, marks the 90th anniversary of Violet Gibson's attempt to kill Mussolini. Amazingly, he survived the point-blank attack with minor injuries.

The Honourable Violet Albina Gibson was born in Dublin on August 31, 1876. Her father was lawyer and politician Edward Gibson. He was made 1st Baron Ashbourne 10 years later, and from 1985 to 1905 served as Lord High Chancellor of Ireland.

Violet grew up in well-heeled Merrion Square. Her early life was one of privilege and society events as part of a large Anglo-Irish family dividing their time between Dublin and London. At 18, Violet was a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria.

Often sick as a child - scarlet fever, pleurisy, bouts of ill-defined "hysteria" - she grew into a "tiny" woman, mentally and physically frail. Young Violet also had a "violent temper". She flirted with Christian Science and then theosophy, the ding-bat quasi-religion spearheaded by Madame Blavatsky (WB Yeats was a devotee). In 1902, then 26, she converted to Catholicism.

Three years later, after several deaths in the family, Violet moved to Chelsea. She got engaged to an artist aged 32; he died a year later, his name lost to posterity.

In 1913, Violet moved to Paris, working for pacifist organisations. She contracted Paget's disease; a mastectomy left a nine-inch scar on her chest. She returned to England, where botched surgery for appendicitis resulted in lifelong chronic abdominal pain.

During her forties, Violet grew evermore obsessed with religion. She went on retreats and became a follower of Jesuit scholar John O'Fallon Pope. She began fixating on martyrdom and "mortification" - which, in Violet's mind, meant "putting to death".

In 1922, she suffered a nervous breakdown, was declared insane and committed to a mental institution. Two years later, accompanied by a nurse called Mary McGrath, Violet was released and travelled to Rome, where she lived in a convent.

By this stage, she had become convinced that God wanted her to kill someone in sacrifice. This could be herself: Violet came by a gun and, in February 1925, shot herself in the chest. Miraculously, she survived. Violet told McGrath she "wanted to die for God".

By April 1926 - one month after her beloved mother passed away - the object of her ire had shifted to Mussolini. On April 7, she went to the Palazzo del Littorio, where the Prime Minister was giving a speech. Violet carried a revolver wrapped in a black veil, and a rock in case she needed to break his windshield; there was quite literally method to her madness. The rock wasn't needed: Mussolini walked through the adoring crowd, stopping a mere foot away.

And here the Great Author of Fate tweaks the story, just enough: right before the gun fired, Mussolini leaned back to acknowledge the crowd. The shot grazed his nose. Violet shot again; the gun misfired.

To his credit, Il Duce showed preternatural calm by staying on his feet and telling people around him, "Don't be afraid. This is a mere trifle". (To his discredit, he later said that, while ready for "a beautiful death", he didn't want it from an "old, ugly repulsive" woman.)

Violet was captured and beaten by a mob; the police smuggled her away before she was killed. Under interrogation, she claimed to have shot Mussolini "to glorify God" who had kindly sent an angel to keep her arm steady.

Her family wrote, apologising, to the Italian government. She was declared a "chronic paranoiac" and returned to England and St Andrew's Hospital. Violet died on May 2, 1956. Sadly, there were no mourners.

So that's the "why" of her attempt to kill Mussolini: God "told" her to do it. But what if Violet's bullets had found their mark?

Had he died in 1926, Italy might not have been fascist for so long without its "strongman" figurehead; they might not have entered the war. His successes inspired and emboldened Hitler. Today, Mussolini's influence is still felt, in Italy - granddaughter Alessandra is an MEP - and further afield (Greece's hard-right Golden Dawn are fans).

Worst of all, Violet's assassination attempt triggered a wave of popular support for Mussolini and a raft of oppressive legislation. So her actions probably strengthened Il Duce's grip on Italy. Now there's a twist worthy of any novel.
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Brendan OConnor Opinion The jig is up as Feis fixing has former winners like me reeling

As the holder of the Marie Cranny Perpetual cup for Extempore and Public Speaking (Under 15s) in Feis Maitiu in, of all years, 1984, I would like to use this platform to say this feis-fixing scandal has sullied my legacy, and that of all other holders of the cup down the years (you had to give it back at the end of the year).
My Week: Conor McGregor*

Monday: I wake up. Although, of course, I have not actually been asleep. No, no, my friend. Not in the way that other, mere mortal people sleep. Instead I have trained myself to metaphysicise; I have transmorgorified, I have metamorphisitised, I have fundamentally reimagined a way of resting my body, so that I am consciously wrestling with the inner movements of my muscles, even as my body believes it is sleeping. And while I do dat, my amigo, I am also full of the most beautiful feelings and emotions. My woman, my girl, the future first Lady of Ireland and myself, did go and promenade the town last night, with a pint of Guinness and my very good friend and training partner, Artem "The Russian Hammer" Lobov.
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Eoghan Harris Opinion Misery media fails to give due credit to the Taoiseach

Taoiseach Micheal Martin must drive his advisers mad. Unlike Leo Varadkar or Donald Trump, he never bigs up success stories such as the effect of Level 3 Plus on Covid or his visionary Shared Island project. Last Friday, Tony Holohan and RTE cheerleaders seemed to imply Level 5 was responsible for the improved Covid situation. Not so.
Premium

New hospital for a tenner may come at too high a price

The Taoiseach is under a lot of pressure  the kind of pressure that leads to costly mistakes. It perhaps explains why he has been saying things that are not quite true. Micheal Martin is in a tight political corner. From all sides hes being told he has to get the contract signed for the new National Maternity Hospital.
He was meant to be the guest of honour, but President Higgins withdrew from a civic reception in Belfast this week to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising after the event failed to receive cross-party support in the North. A spokesman for Aras an Uachtarain explained: "He does not want to become embroiled in matters of political controversy."

It was at this point that Irony threw up it hands in despair and said: "That's it, I'm out of here, I can't do this any more, things are getting too ridiculous even for me."

President Higgins wanting to steer clear of "matters of political controversy" is like Kim Kardashian suddenly announcing that she has a moral objection to taking selfies. Michael D has been pushing at the constitutional restraints of his office from the moment he gave a speech in 2012 to the achingly right-on hipsters of the London School of Economics in which he bent over backwards to reassure them he was on their side.

In that speech, Higgins shoehorned in references to a veritable top 10 of left-wing idols, from Karl Marx onwards, whilst criticising philosophers who were, in his words, "standing in support of unregulated markets".

In 2013, he went further, criticising so-called "neo liberal" economics and calling for a radical rethink of EU policy in order to create an "ethical economy". Whether he's right or wrong is not the point. He frequently gets involved in politics, whatever his spokespeople claim.

Predictably, he did so again earlier last week when marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was a shame, because he is, in many ways, the perfect President for the day. Like many of those involved in planning the uprising against British rule, this head of state is a poet, even leaving aside questions over the literary merit of his works. His visit to Britain also showcased his flair for big State occasions.

He couldn't let this opportunity pass, however, without seeking to put his own stamp on the event. Not speaking for the nation, as a President should do, but speaking for Michael D, specifically for Michael D's analysis of the nation's ills. It all began with a call for Britain to reassess its "supremacist and militarist imperialism", which was curious enough in itself.

Maybe Britain should, but it was akin to using a golden wedding anniversary love letter to your wife to have a go at your ex.

He then launched into a week-long extended riff on "the Republic that is yet to be realised", which attracted much less criticism than it deserved, considering what an ungracious tone it struck.

These were meant to be commemorations of events which, whatever disagreements there might be about them, ultimately brought into being an independent Irish nation. You don't hear French Presidents using Bastille Day to basically say that France isn't good enough, or US Presidents standing up on the Fourth of July and declaring that the United States has "yet to be realised".

Michael D effectively ran a finger along the mantelpiece of the nation, curled up his nose at the dust, and ticked off the parlour maids for not putting in enough effort, presumably before sitting down and writing another poem about the joy of egalitarianism.

His wife Sabina's intervention was even more astonishing. At an oration in front of the grave of Constance Markievicz in Glasnevin on Tuesday, she not only called on a strange group of people whom she called "us women" (are we an homogeneous gang now?) to be "fire(d) with enthusiasm" by the countess's example into tackling economic inequality, gender violence and climate change which threatens, she warned, "the existence of the planet"; Sabina even managed to throw in an insulting reference to "scab labour", before declaiming: "In this contemporary and globalised world of a new form of a capitalism, that seeks to undermine democracy itself, the Empires of greed are even more powerful and unaccountable."

She finished on an equally rousing note: "We must all become activists." Must, no less. Arise and follow Sabbie, indeed.

This was surely one of the most extraordinary speeches ever made by someone officially representing the office of the Irish President (Sabina's speeches are listed alongside those of her husband on the Aras website). Shouldn't voters in 2011 have been warned that they were voting for Posh as well as Becks?

Michael D may well be right about the mortifying inadequacy of the country that he represents - we'll redouble efforts to make ourselves more worthy of you, Mr President - and his wife, whoever the blazes she is, may be right about those "empires of greed". But please let's skip the pretence that all this is not political.

The President's sycophantic supporters routinely defend him against the charges of political interference by claiming that he is not "political" in the strict sense, because he doesn't interfere with legislation coming from the Dail. That, though, is a pitifully narrow definition of what it means to be "political", and one which Higgins would undoubtedly deplore in normal circumstances.

Nor has he shied away in the past from admitting that he is on an explicitly political mission.

In a speech on world hunger to the University of California last October, he made no bones about it: "What elements must be aligned to achieve the ambition of ending hunger and eliminating poverty in your lifetime? This task is an inescapably political one."

Inescapably. He said it.

What seems to be going on when he makes these speeches is that he genuinely doesn't think they can or should be considered controversial because, in his own head, he is simply stating things are as self-evidently true as saying that the sky is blue.

They are not political statements to the President so much as moral truisms to which all decent people must accede before passing the admissions test of humanity.

In doing so last week, he brushed over what is problematic about the Rising's endorsement of bloodshed as a national initiation rite and recast it instead as a crusade for "a more equal redistribution of the fruits of prosperity among all of its children", which - surprise, surprise - just so happens to mirror his own preferred ideology.

This is the same narrative of self-loathing that suggests Irish people should somehow feel ashamed in the face of the Proclamation, as if it was the word of God, inviolable and indivisible, handed down on tablets of stone for future generations to either implement in full or be judged and found wanting. James Connolly has become Christ, and Irish socialists are his priests.

Confess your sins, unholy capitalism, and be redeemed.

Higgins then has the cheek to warn against simplistic interpretations of a complex history, telling Thursday's Mansion House symposium Remembering 1916 that "there is always a risk that commemoration might be exploited for partisan purposes, and some historians have rightly warned us against the perils posed to historical truth by any backward imputation of motives, any uncritical transfer of contemporary emotions onto the past."

How is that any different from what he said moments later in the same speech when declaring that "my purpose is to salvage those elements within Ireland's rich and diverse nationalist tradition that are most meaningful to us today - elements from which we might draw; elements whose emancipatory potential, once retrieved, might better enable us to rekindle the purpose and joy of our living together as a nation"?

But of course the President doesn't see this as "partisan", because he is on the side of the progressive angels. His virtue protects him from being or doing wrong, like a deflector shield around his ethical Millennium Falcon. He's only speaking out for our own good. How can we possibly object?

Sniping at the failings of modern capitalism is hard to take from people who have spent significant parts of their careers living and dining well from the public purse; who have long since forgotten what it's like to live on below average earnings - if, indeed, they ever knew - and who even now sit on vast salaries, with multi-million euro pension pots.

Michael D's sociology papers did not make the filthy capital which pays for the privileged lifestyles of public sector socialists as, wrapped in cotton wool, they stroll from sinecure to sinecure with a bloated sense of entitlement.

The money to pay the bills comes from the very economic system which they decry as vulgar and immoral.

Higgins says that we are "invited" to "reach for the ideals and hopes that animated so many of the men and women of 1916 in their struggle for freedom, equality and social justice"; but an invitation can be turned down as well as accepted, and if the progressive socialists, traditional nationalists, Catholic reactionaries and proto-fascist "blood sacrifice" merchants who converged to start the Easter Rising really did die for something called "freedom", then it has to include the freedom to think that any or all of them were wrong - either because we do not agree with their ideals, or because we believe that prosperity and equality can be achieved in other and better ways - yes, even through free market capitalism - otherwise it's not freedom at all.

The idea of being so beholden to the men and women of 1916 that we should simply do as we're told by them is absurd.

They have no more right to make demands on what we should do in 2016 than we have to tell generations not yet born what they should do in 2116.

Michael D ought to understand the dangers of this sort of meaningless rhetoric. In that speech to the London School of Economics early in his Presidency, he quoted the words of Bertrand Russell: "If a crowd has gathered, particularly if music is playing, you can get them to believe in anything." That goes for simple-minded, crowd-pleasing utopian socialism too, Mr President.
What happened to the money? That was the question which people kept asking after reading how a fellow author clocked up sales worth almost $20,000 in a little over two months last autumn by plagiarising two crime novels that I'd co-written some years earlier.

The story was told in detail in last week's Life magazine in the Sunday Independent. It explained how I happened to discover, thanks to an eagle-eyed reader called Donna Patel in England, that the first two books my writing partner and I had published as "Ingrid Black" a decade earlier had been lifted and republished on the online bookstore Amazon under new titles, with all names and locations changed to hide the original source.

The plagiarist's name was "Joanne Clancy", and she'd received just under $2,000 in royalties by the time her deception was uncovered. (Amazon, being American, calculates everything in dollars). Because Amazon pays the authors of Kindle books every 60 days, that meant there was just over $18,000 still waiting to be paid. So where would it go?

My co-writer and I had been wondering that, too, since discovering just how many copies of our books "Joanne Clancy" had sold.

It wouldn't go to her, obviously, as she had been exposed as a fraud, but it didn't seem likely that it would go to us either. Then we discovered, accidentally during the course of a conversation with a representative from Amazon, that the company does actually pay out to the original author of a book if it could be proven that their work has been plagiarised.

Wasn't it proof enough that Amazon had removed "Joanne Clancy's" books from sale for having breached the company's policy on copyright? Apparently not. It was still up to us, as the authors, to pursue the matter to get justice. Luckily, we'd contacted "Joanne Clancy" last November by email - the only way we had to track her down - and she'd replied immediately, admitting she had stolen our work. That was sufficient for Amazon to pay us the royalties which she was due.

We were fortunate. We caught "Joanne Clancy" at a vulnerable time. She'd only just discovered that her books were being removed from Amazon and that she was banned for life from publishing her books in the online store, at least under that name. She was also worried about the prospect of legal action, and seemed keen to mollify us.

Had she taken a day or two to think it over, she might well have decided that silence was the best strategy. She certainly vanished off the radar shortly afterwards and ignored all email requests for further information.

What happens to the money made by fake authors when the real authors cannot establish an admission of plagiarism in the same way that we did? That's still unclear. It seems unsatisfactory that authors themselves should have to prove they have been the victims of copyright infringement before getting justice. Does Amazon not have software which can detect plagiarism more scientifically?

After last weekend's article appeared, other people got in touch to describe the programmes used by universities to ensure that students don't copy their essays from online sources. Was the software beatable? Not easily, was the answer.

Unless a fake author is highly adept at hiding their source material, it will return a match, or a "fuzzy resemblance" at least.

Surely Amazon could do likewise, making it easier for wronged authors to claim back ill-gotten gains that should be theirs by right?

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Others just got in touch to complain that we had been too "soft" on "Joanne Clancy", that we should have demanded more personal details from Amazon, before tracking her down and confronting her. One comment underneath my piece on independent.ie went so far as to say that we were "chicken" for not pursuing legal action! Some even said we had a moral duty to make sure she was punished, either by the police in a criminal case, or by solicitors in a civil case.

I'm still not convinced by that course of action. Legal action is time consuming, expensive, and mentally draining, with no guarantee of success, especially against a shadowy opponent who seemed to exist mainly in cyberspace. Because that was another problem.

The internet is a big place. Many people got into contact to explain how to trace people through their online fingerprints. "Joanne Clancy" had a website, which yielded some further clues, but nothing conclusive. Other authors were able to provide IP addresses from comments left by this "Joanne Clancy" on their pages and blogs.

One showed her location at various points over the course of a few days, ranging from Dublin to Florida to San Antonio in Texas. Had she actually been on the move in that period, or just hiding her location with computer trickery? If the latter, it would suggest that she wasn't an innocent who had strayed off the straight and narrow path into plagiarism, but a career faker who'd been preparing the ground for a quick getaway from the start.

Putting together all these pieces, along with what I already knew about her from biographical snippets picked up along the way, I thought I had a fairly good picture of "Joanne Clancy", even if I didn't know exactly who she was; but I also knew I couldn't make further progress without making the information public, and that was not possible legally, in case the fake author "Joanne Clancy" had stolen details from the identities and CVs of real people called "Joanne Clancy". Hence the quotation marks. I also didn't want any of the real people who happened to share the same name coming under suspicion or being targeted for online abuse.

Just one thing kept bothering me. The story in Life magazine was shared online almost 90,000 times, including by bestselling authors such as Joanne Harris, Val McDermid and US thriller writer Tess Gerritsen, as well as by many people both in the book community and around Ireland; I was contacted by hundreds of authors, bloggers, readers, reviewers and publishers, many understandably furious that they too had been deceived by a writer whose work they'd supported since she came on the scene in 2012 - one blogger who'd championed "Joanne Clancy", and even interviewed her by email, admitted she couldn't sleep the night she read the piece as she was so upset; this betrayal of trust was a common theme.

But out of all these thousands of readers, not a single person has contacted me to say that they know this woman, or have ever come across her, in real life. Some are closely involved in the literary community in Cork, which "Clancy" claimed as her home town. They can find no trace of her existence either. She seems to exist only online.

I was convinced all along that "Joanne Clancy" was a real woman, who had fallen, for whatever reason, into plagiarism, either because she never had the self-discipline or enough original ideas to write a book of her own, or because she started out with the best intentions and then began taking short cuts when she realised how hard it was. Others were of the opinion that she didn't exist, except as a pseudonym to conceal a professional gang of cheats, copying books to make easy money. The longer the week went on, the more I suspected they were right.

It has certainly been a surreal few days. To coincide with publication of the article in Life magazine, we'd been working round the clock to upload new editions of our original novels on to Amazon, discovering in the process that releasing your own books means being author, editor, designer, publisher, publicist and general dogsbody all rolled into one. Plus the children still seemed to expect that their dinner would be on the table at the usual time and that I'd have the freedom afterwards to watch another episode of Gossip Girl on Netflix. Unreasonable of them, but there you are.

Slowly we began to sell a few copies. During the course of the week, the book was featured on Amazon's "hot new releases" chart and even made it to number two on the Irish crime fiction bestseller lists. But selling books, it turns out, is just as hard as writing them.

It took "Joanne Clancy" five years to build up her own audience; but if she can do it, then so can we.

'The Dead' and 'The Dark Eye' are both available to download on Amazon Kindle for 1.99 each
In a week in which we learned our political leaders need to discover WhatsApp, we are slowly moving to a situation where Fine Gael and Fianna Fail talk to each other. The process of government formation has been messy and we should consider a more organised system. Perhaps if we had an informateur - an honest broker appointed by the President - to direct government negotiations when situations like this arise, the country would be spared this spectacle, which has all the panache of a slow-set at a teenage disco.

The process has been dominated by Independents, which is surprising because most of us said that Independents would be irresponsible when it comes to government formation. In fact, it has been the small parties - with the honourable exception of the Greens - that have been sitting out. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.

Labour met last week to discuss the election campaign. You don't have to have read reports of the meeting to know what sort of messages will have come out. They'll have said that they were surprised by the voters' anger, and that they will have to listen to what the electorate was saying. There'll have been calls to go back to its roots, and to reinvigorate the party grassroots. Some excitable souls will even have said the party should invoke the spirit of James Connolly. There will have been an attempt to blame the leader, and we'll hear that new leadership can take the party in a new direction. It's the same guff you hear coming out after any party loses an election. It's meaningless.

Feeling sorry for itself will butter no parsnips.

Labour needs to think about what type of party it is, what it is good at and what it can't be. Why do people vote for it? Whether it likes it or not, it is an establishment party. It appeals to people who are more liberal than those who vote for Fine Gael or Fianna Fail. But on the economy, it's hard to distinguish Labour from Fianna Fail. It's voters are predominantly middle class and urban.

It went into the February election promising stability. It hitched itself so closely to the Fine Gael wagon that voting for Labour became pointless. Because of the election result, it assumes that it has to go into Opposition. That decision seems to have been made without any thought.

It's assumed that government is bad for parties, especially small ones. But it might be that Labour is making a mistake staying out of government.

Before the 2011 election it was clear that it was an election to lose. Going into government might have been the right thing to do for Ireland but it was a disaster for Labour. 2016 was an election to win. Despite the fights over the 'fiscal space', it's clear that the country has more revenue and all the economic indicators are in the right direction.By choosing to go into Opposition now, Labour will have suffered all the pain for none of the gain. Labour took a lot of punishment for doing the hard work, and now it is rejecting the prospect of some power.

The logic is that it can rebuild and rebrand in opposition whereas in government it will be too busy to do this, and it can't rebrand because it will once again be linked to Fine Gael. It forgets that it is an establishment party. It can pretend or wish that it wasn't, but the voters won't go along with this. As well as its centrist position, its small size is Labour's other problem.

In Opposition, it could drown in a sea of noise. Opposition will have a big Sinn Fein that will dominate the left, and there is a more extreme alphabet soup left that will make it difficult for it to be heard. Even if it is heard, it will be irrelevant, because its moderate centre-left voice in Opposition is likely to be taken by Fianna Fail. The media will ignore it in favour of the more extremist voices.

And what exactly would it oppose in Opposition? The policies that it spent the last few years implementing? This won't be plausible for voters. Fianna Fail had to stay quiet for a few years before it could start to oppose Fine Gael.

It may realise that apart from the decision to enter government in 2011, its other mistake was not to carve out an agenda for itself that was both deliverable and distinctly Labour. In 2016 it could identify a couple of issues that it can be associated with in voters' minds. And despite its size, it might even win a few more battles in Cabinet because Fine Gael has been humbled by the election result.

In government it could have a distinctive voice, especially on social issues that Labour voters value, such as repeal the eighth. It could deliver a referendum on this. If it were to do this, it would need to carefully consider what portfolios to take and what could be delivered in 12 months.

It will need a new leader at some stage before the next election, but it shouldn't believe a new leader is an end in itself. Ditching Gilmore didn't transform anything but the head on the poster.

Who the new leader is will be important, but so too are the decisions it takes now. If Labour were to go into government, that new leader should not sit in Cabinet. That will allow it to maintain a separate voice for the party not constrained by government decisions.

As unpleasant as he appears to be, of the party's remaining TDs only Alan Kelly has the drive and ambition to rebuild the party, though he may not be able to resist the pull of office.

Government could also bolster its party's regrowth with some Taoiseach-nominee senators, and could even use the Seanad to broaden its top team by appointing a minister from the Seanad. The media would listen to Labour in government and the public will be aware of its existence.

Government might seem scary, but its alternative is irrelevance.

Dr Eoin O'Malley is senior lecturer in political science and director of Dublin City University's MSc in Public Policy.
What a difference a week makes. Last Sunday, the nation was surprised, and surprised by itself, by the way we conducted ourselves at the Easter 1916 commemorations. The event was arguably the most dignified, solemn and yet refreshing observation of any milestone that we have seen in living memory.

Now, we are back to normality. The week just gone has shunted back this sense of adulthood as we revert to the routine of Irish politics. We have had to endure the unedifying sight of the two largest parties having a spat before they even sit down to talk to each other about who rang whom, and who sent a text to whom. We really have come a long way.

So what does the population think about all of this? This latest Millward Brown Poll, conducted over 10 days up to and including Friday, sought to understand where we should go from here.

The results, whilst nuanced, are instructive. First off, the spectre of another general election looms large. Given the uncertainty over the last month, we asked what would be the preferred option in light of the current impasse.

Over one in four (27pc) are in favour of a new election. What this would achieve any differently is anybody's guess.

There are many newly-elected TDs that would baulk at such a development. Given the precariousness of the current set up, and what we know now, the political landscape would be a very different place to where we were just seven weeks ago.

The appetite to develop a new communications strategy (which would invariably have to happen for most), yet alone the financial and emotional considerations, will surely focus the minds.

So, the alternative needs to be compromise. Over one in five (22pc) endorse the notion of a grand coalition between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.

And this is where it gets interesting. Looking at those tending to support the two parties, the differences are stark - 27pc of those affiliated to Fianna Fail endorse this scenario, compared to 43pc of Fine Gael-minded supporters.

An FF-led minority government gets the nod from 14pc of the population, compared to 8pc endorsing an FG-led minority. This is where the narrative of this poll lies. The impetus is with Fianna Fail after this election. Of course, numbers don't lie, and Fine Gael is in the driving seat. They are by far the most likely to form a government, whatever its profile will be.

But the momentum has been sucked out of the party. Consider its demeanour and utterances going into the election compared to now. It is fumbling for power, as opposed to ascending to it.

Putting the assumption that an FG-led government is the most likely scenario to one side, we asked who the public would prefer to see as the next Taoiseach. Again the results point to a shifting of the sands. Just 17pc endorse Enda Kenny, versus 39pc nominating Micheal Martin.

We need to bear in mind that we framed this question as a straightforward shootout between the two leaders, and brought nobody else into the equation.

However, it points to the fact that Kenny has suffered damage in the election. One suspects that the endorsement of Martin is not based on his own pedigree, but rather is a reflection on Enda Kenny's lacklustre leadership of late.

It is even more interesting when you analyse the levels of endorsements among those tending to vote for either party. Among Fianna Fail supporters, 84pc would endorse Martin for Taoiseach (numbers you would expect to see). Yet among FG supporters, a rather underwhelming 54pc approve of Kenny.

Of course, being the leader of the party that suffered a bloody nose on February 26, attitudes will harden. The issue for Kenny was that he was totemic of that party's failure, in stark contrast to Martin's performance.

With that in mind we asked who people would like to see as leader of Fine Gael.

The younger flank of the party shone through - 28pc opted for Leo Varadkar, followed by 15pc nominating Simon Coveney. One in eight (12pc) endorses Kenny. Among FG supporters, Varadkar's popularity increases to 38pc, whilst Kenny makes up some ground (27pc).

Simon Coveney hasn't endeared himself to the party faithful of late - just 16pc would endorse him.

Turning briefly to Labour, the preferred leader of that party is less clear cut. Brendan Howlin is endorsed by 16pc of the population overall.

What is more illuminating is that nearly half the population (48pc) are ambivalent to all candidates put to them - illustrating the battle that lies ahead for Labour to become relevant again.

These results paint a picture of a population that is restless. We want to have a government in place, but are still unsure by whom.

Paul Moran is an Associate Director with Millward Brown
The public want Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin to be the next Taoiseach, according to the latest Sunday Independent/Millward Brown opinion poll.

But what the public want and what they get are two entirely different matters.

Martin is on the crest of a wave after his odds-defying General Election campaign, but no matter what way you look at it, he doesn't have the numbers to lead the next government.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny, acting or otherwise, is still in the driving seat to make history and become the only Fine Gael leader to run the country for two terms.

When every ballot box was counted, Kenny returned to Leinster House with 50 seats.

Martin had 44 seats but lost one when Sean O'Fearghail was elected Ceann Comhairle.

The race to lead the next government currently focuses on a group of 15 Independent TDs.

This is made up of six Independent Alliance TDs, the so-called Rural Five and the Healy-Rae brothers, along with unaligned Independents Katherine Zappone and Maureen O'Sullivan.

Extremely optimistic Fianna Fail TDs claim they could lure 10 of that group into supporting Martin in a Taoiseach vote.

This would bring Fianna Fail up to 53 seats and, bear in mind, this is a best case scenario.

Nonetheless, it would leave Kenny on 55, if he is to convince the other five to support him.

He also has the support, whether he likes it or not, from Independent Tipperary TD Michael Lowry, who pledged his support for Kenny even before government talks began.

So far he has not been invited to the table but his support brings Fine Gael up to 56 seats. On these figures, Martin still doesn't have the upper hand ahead of Wednesday's Taoiseach vote.

In the unlikely scenario he can convince Clare Daly and Mick Wallace to support Fianna Fail, he would still only have 55 seats.

The Social Democrats, Labour and the Green Party have ruled themselves out of government but will be asked by both sides to support from Opposition.

Apart from Lowry, it is also unlikely any of the Independents or smaller parties will nail their colours to the mast on Wednesday and vote for either leader.

Many believe there is no point in aligning themselves with any party before Martin and Kenny sit down and figure out how the next government - if there is to be one - will work.

This means the vote will produce the same outcome as when the Dail met on March 10: no Taoiseach.

After much farce last week, Martin and Kenny eventually agreed to talk after Wednesday's vote.

It is far too early to suggest the outcome, but the main subject of discussion will be whether Fianna Fail is willing to support a Fine Gael minority government.

Martin has notably not ruled out supporting Fine Gael in some capacity but a grand coalition is currently off the table - albeit to the disappointment of some Fianna Fail TDs who fancy seeing their names on the doors of government departments.

Kenny has ruled out supporting a minority Fianna Fail government, which was not the most diplomatic move given his tenuous position.

But the numbers are in his favour, and if some arrangement is not reached with Fianna Fail in the coming days or weeks, then it's back to the people for another general election.
In an open letter to Alan Kelly, the environment minister, the Master of the High Court Edmund Honohan says the Constitution cannot be used as cover for political inaction on the housing crisis

Dear Minister Kelly,

It is appropriate that you have, in this centenary year, called for a debate about property rights in the Constitution. Faced with repeated assertions about how the right to property is legally watertight, politicians need to recover control which they have ceded to the lawyers. To do so they need to understand that the position is a lot clearer than they have been led to believe.

Echoes of 1916: The Constitution in effect provides that the State may expropriate private property if the Oireachtas decides that to do so is for the "common good". Road widening is a good example.

Option A. At the moment there are long waiting lists for housing and the private rental market is unable to provide dwellings at affordable rents.

Consequently, if the Oireachtas is of the view that the State should itself (or its local authorities) provide public housing "in the Common Good", the State can (and probably, legally, should) decide not to wait the two/three years needed to build social housing but instead to immediately acquire houses now in private hands.

If the owners of these refuse to sell, acquisition can be by compulsory purchase with full compensation assessed by the arbitrator.

It so happens that there is a stock of such housing which has recently been bought by "vulture" property investment funds from Anglo, Irish Nationwide, Nama etc. at knockdown prices. "Compensation" for these funds would be that they would be repaid the price they paid for the housing portfolios. That is the extent of their Constitutional entitlement.

Option B. On the other hand, the Oireachtas might be concerned to enhance tenants' rights at the expense of the landlords. Rent controls and the like are also a form of expropriation if their effect is to rewrite contracts already operational. And the "common good" rationale for such interference with contracts is not as clearly unarguable as with Option A.

Option A wins hands down and the timing is right.

Cue now the lawyers' alternative analysis: that the Constitution enshrines marketplace rules; that the Supreme Court will determine what is the Common Good. Publish the Attorney General's advice to the Government and have a fully informed debate.

But given that the Supreme Court has already decided, in 2000, that the provision of affordable housing is an objective which is "socially just and required by the common good", what we do about it now is a political decision, not a legal one.

The Constitution cannot be used as cover for political inaction.
Ten years is a long time for any trend to stay relevant, not least a hairstyle. But this year it will be a full decade since the 'dip-dye' caught on with a certain type of fashion-conscious woman - think models such as Charlotte Free or the singer M.I.A..

However, now that Kim Kardashian has adopted the two-tone look, it seems set to become one of the defining hairstyles of the age.

A dip-dye involves leaving the roots undyed, or dark, and the ends bleached or coloured. "That whole two-tone look has evolved quite a bit," explains Alex Brownsell, founder of the London salon Bleach, who arguably invented the dip-dye as we know it.

"The first five years we did it, it was shocking. Now it's fashion-conscious, but it's not a trend any more." Her comments may be damning on one level, but are perhaps more indicative of the way the undyed-roots/dyed-ends look has moved firmly into the mainstream. Zoella, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga have all dabbled in the trend.

For the past few years dyeing has trumped cuts as the cheaper, less permanent way to change your look, says Brownsell.

But perhaps in reaction to that proliferation of dyed hair, Brownsell thinks that "the cut is coming back among young women. Dip-dyes have become mainstream in the sense that they're national. It used to be a London thing; now it's everywhere," she says. "That said, I don't think we've had anything that has come close to trumping it, and I can't see it happening for a while."

Samantha Cusick, a colourist at Taylor Taylor in Shoreditch, east London, says she has seen a shift in the past five years from dip-dyes to balayage, a subtler, more natural take on two-tone colour that derives from the French word 'to sweep' or 'paint'. Its popularity has grown, she thinks, because it lends itself to more bespoke styles. Bleach's Instagram, which acts as a sort of stylebook of colour trends, has more than 250,000 followers. Cusick's own has almost 25,000. "It is mainstream, but that isn't a bad thing," she says.

With its undyed roots and washed-out ends, the dip-dye look suggests fashion has reverted to that done/undone look that mirrors that other hipster-turned-mainstream favourite: the beard.

But why has the dip-dye, undeniable fashion shorthand for the female hipster, not met with the same level of derision as the beard?

Aesthetically speaking, they are poles apart, but both looks suggest a lax approach to vanity, even though both are high-maintenance. Two years ago, researchers declared that "peak beard" had been reached. "It appears that beards gain an advantage when rare, but when they are in fashion and common they are declared 'trendy' and that attractiveness is over," researcher Robert Brooks says. Yet the dip-dye has become mainstream while remaining an acceptable fashion statement.

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Perhaps it is because of the tendency to fixate on men when talking about the much-derided notion of hipster fashion. "When you write hipster, everyone immediately knows what - or who - you're talking about. And it's always, always a man," says culture journalist Leonie Cooper.

"Men still have such a limited pool to draw from when it comes to fashion. Women have always had permission to be more extravagant and outlandish.

"There's so much women can draw from in terms of style, hair included.

"But if a man suddenly decides to start wearing a 1940s three-piece suit or a James Dean white T-shirt and trousers, he's suddenly doing 'a look' and opening himself up to ridicule. I don't think men are as open to chatting about their style as women are presumed to be," he adds.
Former glamour model Tess O'Reilly has revealed the tough side to her former profession.

The 33-year-old from Carrick-on-Suir in Co Tipperary made her name in glamour modelling in the UK but has recently made the move from modelling to music.

When she started out in her career, she reveals she was "quiite naive" and found herself in some sticky situations - with both men and women.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent Life magazine, she says, "My first shoot was for a car magazine. The guy who introduced me to the photographer was really weird; it was a real eye-opener to the scene, what people will try to do."

She adds, "Another time, I was doing a shoot and the 'organiser' booked one hotel room for me and him. I managed to escape when he asked our taxi to stop so he could buy cigarettes. I explained the situation to the taxi driver, and he sped off and dropped me to my friend's house."

Tess reveals that there are many people who try to take advantage of the fact that lots of girls are desperate to get into the industry.

"Guys are always telling girls exactly what they want to hear, then asking them to sleep with them. People can try to exploit you, so you have to cop on quickly."

Whatever about the men, there have also been issues with women.

"I was glassed and attacked by girls before for absolutely no reason," says Tess.

"Someone just decided they didn't like the look of me. You have to put up with a lot of abuse in modelling and it's a shame, because if people just talked to us, they'd see we're really normal people, even if they don't like our job."

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Read the full interview with Tess O'Reilly in today's Sunday Independent Life magazine.
The co-directors and siblings have mainly avoided the press (Yui Mok/PA)

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 02: Writer/Director Lilly Wachowski arrives at the 27th Annual GLAAD Media Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on April 2, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images)

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 02: Lilly Wachowski speaks onstage with Keke Palmer and Lea Michele during the 27th Annual GLAAD Media Awards held at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on April 2, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic)

Matrix director Lily Wachowski has made her first public appearance as a transgender woman, at the GLAAD Awards in LA.

The Awards honour artists for their "fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community" and Lilly received an award.

She bagged Outstanding Drama Series for her Netflix series Sense8, which feaures a transgender lead character, Nomi Marks played by trans actress Jamie Clayton.

The director, previously known as Andy, is best known for her work with her sister Lana who is also transgender and came out in 2012.

Expand Close BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 02: Writer/Director Lilly Wachowski arrives at the 27th Annual GLAAD Media Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on April 2, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images) / Facebook

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Whatsapp BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 02: Writer/Director Lilly Wachowski arrives at the 27th Annual GLAAD Media Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on April 2, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images)

The 48-year-old, who is married to Alisa Blasingame, released a statement last month to announce her transition.

She said: Being transgender is not easy. We live in a majority-enforced gender binary world. This means when youre transgender you have to face the hard reality of living the rest of your life in a world that is openly hostile to you.

She added; I will continue to be an optimist adding my shoulder to the Sisyphean struggle of progress and in my very being, be an example of the potentiality of another world.

In her statement, Lilly highlighted the struggles faced by the transgender community, and said that while progress has been made, "we continue to be demonised and vilified in the media where attack ads portray us as potential predators to keep us from even using the goddamn bathroom."

Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close The Wachowskis in 2013. Photo: PA The co-directors and siblings have mainly avoided the press (Yui Mok/PA) Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski in 2013 / Facebook

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"So yeah, I'm transgender. And yeah, I've transitioned," she said, adding that she is out to her wife, family and friends.

Lilly said she feels lucky having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process.

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She added that those who do not have support often fall victim to the high rates of murder and suicide plaguing the trans community.
WATCHFUL EYES: Cameroonian soldiers from the Rapid Intervention Brigade operate a surveillance drone at their base in Achigachia. Outside Nigeria, Cameroon has been hardest hit by Boko Haram, which now operates out of bases in the Mandara Mountains and Lake Chad. Photo: Joe Penney

When Halime was a little girl, she used to accompany her father when he went fishing on Lake Chad. After hours spent plying its narrow, reed-fringed channels, they would gather enough fish to sell at the lakeside market in the nearby town of Bol.

At Christmas last year, Halime, now 19, returned by canoe to the same market. Only this time, she had a bomb strapped around her waist.

Civil defence volunteers spotted her and seven other girls as they approached, prompting two to detonate their suicide belts. Halime had no time to trigger hers: the blasts ignited by her neighbours blew off her legs.

The girls were among an army of suicide bombers -possibly in the hundreds -mobilised by Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group, to inflict bloodshed throughout the region.

Having lost its grip on swathes of northern Nigeria, Boko Haram has switched tactics to focus on suicide attacks often conducted by women or children as young as seven. Their bombs are hidden underclothing or disguised as babies on their backs.

Lying on a filthy mattress in a hospital room in Bol, Halime was emaciated and her skin pockmarked with sores and scars. "Are you police?" she asked.

"I'm hungry. I need soap to wash."

Speaking in a high-pitched whisper, she told of growing up in a Chadian village on the edge of the lake where Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon meet.

"My father was a fisherman," said Halime. "I used to go on the boat with him to market."

When asked how she lost her legs and what she understood about Boko Haram, Halime turned her face away.

"She is talking now, it's a big improvement," said Joel Konayel Belem, who works for a Chadian government organisation trying to reunite families who were scattered throughout the region while trying to escape Boko Haram.

"When she first arrived she would smear herself with faeces so no one would come near her."

Mr Belem said that Halime probably left her village of her own accord before joining Boko Haram, but was drugged to carry out her suicide mission. "We are trying to get her father to take her home but at first he rejected her," he said. "Everyone is frightened of being associated with those people."

In 2014, Boko Haram was ranked as the deadliest terrorist group in the world, killing over 6,600 people, compared with the 6,100 who died at the hands of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), according to the Global Terrorism Database.

As many as 2.5 million people have fled the ravages of Boko Haram for displacement camps in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon. At least 4,500 people fled across Lake Chad to the town of Baga Sola where today they live in a tented camp.

Even here, they are not entirely safe. Last October, 52 people were killed when two women and a child attacked Baga Sola's market.

Inside the market, Ndgara Salta Bintu, an 11-year-old girl, was a few feet away from one of the bombers and remembers seeing her body rise in the air with the blast.

"When I woke up there were people lying around me and running away. I was scared and tried to get up to run too but I couldn't," she said. Ndgara's right arm had to be amputated and her left arm suffered extensive nerve damage.

Dr Jean Luboya, the regional chief of Unicef, said the drugged and bewildered child bombers, like Halime, were as much victims as those they maimed.

"Many are unaware of what will happen, and even those children who knowingly set off explosives attached to their bodies are too young to be able to make rational decisions about such actions - especially after a process of indoctrination," he said.

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Donald Trump says he believes he will still end up with enough delegates to become the Republican presidential nominee even if he loses the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday.

Mr Trump acknowledged in an interview with US broadcaster Fox that last week was not his best of the campaign. He spent much of it on the defence over comments about abortion, Nato and nuclear weapons for Japan and South Korea.

He said it is always better to win and he wants to finish first in Wisconsin.

But the billionaire businessman said that even if he is defeated by rivals Ted Cruz or John Kasich in Wisconsin, "I think I get there anyway" - meaning the party's nomination.

The Republican race is overshadowed by a persistent effort by Mr Trump's rivals in the campaign and the party to force the nomination fight into the July convention.

Wisconsin has emerged as a proving ground for anti-Trump forces as the front-runner's campaign hit a rough patch. Mr Trump defended his campaign manager after he was charged with battery against a reporter, backtracked from comments that women should be punished for having abortions, encountered hostile interviews by conservative Wisconsin talk radio hosts and watched Mr Cruz rise in some preference polls in the state.

Mr Cruz has little chance to overtake Mr Trump in the hunt for delegates who will choose the party's nominee at the national convention. Ohio governor John Kasich has none. Both hope to deny Mr Trump a delegate majority in what is left of the primary season, forcing the nomination to be settled at a contested convention at which one of them might emerge as the nominee.

Amid talk of the Republican establishment trying to block the front-runner, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said the nomination process will be clear, open and transparent.

Cameras will be there "at every step of the way" at the convention, he said.

If the race is not settled after all the primary contests, then "we're going to have a multi-ballot convention", with more and more delegates free to pick a candidate of their choice in each round of voting.

But Mr Priebus was clear: "Nothing can get stolen from anyone."

On the Democratic side, the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has grown increasingly bitter, too, though it has not matched the Republican contest for raw hostility.

Their attention will quickly turn from Wisconsin to an even more consequential contest, in New York on April 19, where Mrs Clinton hopes to avoid an upset in the state she served as senator. But Mr Sanders, who was born in Brooklyn, can claim New York as his home state.

Mrs Clinton said she was confident the two campaigns could settle on a debate date before the New York primary.

In recent days, Mrs Clinton has taken issue with Mr Sanders's suggestions that her campaign is being aided by fossil-fuel interests, and in the broadcast interview, she accused Mr Sanders's aides of doing insufficient research about her record of standing up to oil and gas companies.

"We were not lying," Mr Sanders told US broadcaster CNN. ''We were telling the truth."

Among the Republicans, Mr Kasich expressed confidence that Republicans would have an "open convention", but suggested it would not involve the type of unseemly chaos that party leaders fear will play out on national television, dampening their prospects for winning the presidency and possibly House and Senate races, too.

Mr Kasich told ABC television that a contested convention will be "so much fun".

"Kids will spend less time focusing on Bieber and Kardashian and more time focusing on how we elect presidents," he said. "It will be so cool."
A North Korean soldier peeps into a conference room in the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission Conference Building as a South Korean soldier stands guard, at the truce village of Panmunjom, South Korea, March 30, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

A former North Korean political prisoner has revealed what he sees as the "biggest misconception" about people in his country.

Kang Chol-hwan, who was a prisoner at Yodok concentration camp, said the "outside world" often equates the Communist Party regime with the private mindsets of its citizens.

Yet many people are simply too afraid to speak out, while others hide former identities to avoid persecution, he said.

Mr Chol-hwan, now the director of the North Korea Strategy Centre in Seoul in South Korea, said in a question thread for Reddit that North Koreans were "the same as [people] anywhere else."

Expand Close North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the Paektusan Hero Youth Power Station, in Pyongyang / Facebook

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"I think it is lamentable that people think of the North Korean government and North Koreans as one entity," he said.

"North Koreans may seem loyal to the government, but because they fear the government, they cannot speak their minds."

Expand Close A North Korean soldier looks inside a conference room in the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission Conference Building at the truce village of Panmunjom, South Korea, March 30, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji / Facebook

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Whatsapp A North Korean soldier looks inside a conference room in the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission Conference Building at the truce village of Panmunjom, South Korea, March 30, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

The former inmate, who endured torture at the camp some 100 kilometres from Pyongyang, said one of South Korea's World Cup footballers had also been imprisoned with him.

But Park Sung-jin, who is reportedly now a national team coach, had to hide his past to keep his job.

Expand Close North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) speaks at an event declaring the construction of Ryomyong Street, in this photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) / Facebook

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Whatsapp North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) speaks at an event declaring the construction of Ryomyong Street, in this photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)

"He must hide the fact that he was at the prisoner's camp," said Mr Chol-hwan.

The realities of life in the Yodok camp were also revealed by the human rights campaigner, who described conditions as "another form of Auschwitz."

Prisoners were brainwashed by being given lessons on former leader Kim il-Sung and in particular his ideology of "Juche", which is usually translated as "self-reliance" and which critics say supports the Party's self-imposed isolationism.

Citing beatings, torture and public executions, Mr Chol-hwan said: "These work camps are like products of Nazism."

He said that for such a regime to crumble, the border to South Korea needed to be opened and North Koreans needed to read about the world outside their country.

"First, the government wants to prevent defection [...] so, they are focused on keeping the border shut," he said.

"Second, the government wants to prevent North Koreans from having access to outside information.

"The more North Korean citizens know, the more danger it is for the government."

The Workers' Party of Korea, which is now led by Kim Jong-un, founded and has ruled the Democratic People's Republic of Korea since 1949. It is centred on the primacy of the "Great Leader."

Some 200,000 prisoners are detained in the country's network of camps, many in "Total Control Zones" from which they will never be released, according to Amnesty International.

In March 2016, an American student and tourist in North Korea was found guilty of "subversion" by the regime and sentenced to 15 years in prison in a "politically motivated" trial strongly condemned by the US.
The curved piece of debris which may be part of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, in Wartburg, 37km (22 miles) out of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, Monday, March 7, 2016. (Candace Lotter via AP)

A piece of debris found on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius will be examined by investigators to see if it came from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australian officials have said.

The discovery comes less than two weeks after officials confirmed two pieces of debris found along the coast of Mozambique were almost certainly from the aircraft that vanished on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

"The Malaysian government is working with officials from Mauritius to seek to take custody of the debris and arrange for its examination," Australian transport minister Darren Chester said.

"This debris is an item of interest, however until the debris has been examined by experts it is not possible to ascertain its origin."

Mr Chester did not release any details of what the part looked like or where it would be examined.

The two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were flown to Australia and examined by a team of investigators from Australia, Malaysia and Boeing.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close A ground controller guides a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion on the tarmac upon its return from a search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 over the Indian Ocean, at RAAF Base Pearce north of Perth A family member of a passenger from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is cared for after fainting at Lido Hotel in Beijing, China. A crewman of an RAAF AP-3C Orion aircraft looks out from an observation window during a search for missing Malaysia Airways Flight MH370 on March 24, 2014 off the South West Coast of Perth, Australia. Co-Pilot, Flying Officer Marc Smith looks out as he turns his RAAF AP-3C Orion aircraft at low level in bad weather while searching for missing Malaysia Airways Flight MH370 off the South West coast of Perth, Australia. A family member of a passenger aboard Malaysia Airlines MH370 cries as she is surrounded by journalists after watching a television broadcast of a news conference, at the Lido hotel in Beijing. Photo: REUTERS/Jason Lee A family member of a passenger aboard Malaysia Airlines MH370 shouts at journalists after watching a television broadcast of a news conference, at the Lido hotel in Beijing A family member of a passenger aboard Malaysia Airlines MH370 falls down an escalator as he cries after watching a television broadcast of a news conference, at Lido hotel in Beijing Relatives of Chinese passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines jet, MH370, grieve after being told of the latest news in Beijing, China Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak speaks during a press conference for the missing Malaysia Airlines, flight MH370, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia A family member of a passenger aboard Malaysia Airlines MH370 shouts at journalists after watching a television broadcast of a news conference, at the Lido hotel in Beijing / Facebook

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Whatsapp A ground controller guides a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion on the tarmac upon its return from a search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 over the Indian Ocean, at RAAF Base Pearce north of Perth

Australia is leading the search for the missing Boeing 777 in a desolate stretch of the Indian Ocean far off the country's west coast, about 3,700 miles east of Mozambique and 2,500 miles east of Mauritius.

Authorities had predicted any debris from the plane that is not on the ocean floor would eventually be carried by currents to the east coast of Africa.

Last year, a wing flap from the plane washed ashore on the island of Reunion, not far from Mauritius.
At least 30 soldiers were killed as heavy fighting erupted between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh (AP)

Azerbaijan's defence ministry has announced a unilateral ceasefire against the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a claim that rebel forces there promptly rejected.

Fighting in what was a dormant conflict for two decades flared up over the weekend with a boy and at least 30 troops killed on both sides. Each side blamed the other for Saturday's escalation, the worst since the end of a full-scale war in 1994.

The defence ministry said, in response to pleas from international organisations, it will be unilaterally "suspending a counter-offensive and response on the territories occupied by Armenia". The ministry added it will not focus on fortifying the territory that Azerbaijan has "liberated". It did not elaborate.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994 with no resolution of the region's status. The conflict is fuelled by long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris.

Armenian forces also occupy several areas outside Nagorno-Karabakh proper. The sides are separated by a demilitarised buffer zone, but small clashes have broken out frequently.

Officials in the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh promptly disputed the reports of Azerbaijan's unilateral ceasefire. David Babayan, spokesman for the Karabakh president, said that they had not seen any signs that fighting was suspended.

The defence ministry of Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday also claimed to have restored control over a strategic area near the front line. It said Nagorno-Karabakh forces went on a counter-offensive around the village of Talish after Azerbaijani forces shelled their positions just before dawn. Two Karabakh troops were reported injured.

It also said Azerbaijan was using rockets, artillery and armour against the region.

Earlier on Sunday, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's defence ministry, Vagif Dargyakhly, said Azerbaijani positions came under fire overnight and that civilian areas also were hit.

On Saturday, Armenia said 18 soldiers were killed and Azerbaijan reported 12 dead.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Sunday to back its ally Azerbaijan in the conflict, saying that the flare-up could have been avoided if "fair and decisive steps" had been taken.

"We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties," he said.

The unresolved conflict has been an economic blow to Armenia because Turkey has closed its border with Armenia.
ROAD TO NOWHERE: Migrants block the highway near the town of Polykastro to press for the opening of the Greek-Macedonian border last week, after thousands of them were stranded by the Balkan border blockade. Waves of asylum seekers are stuck in Greece, after Balkan states sealed their borders. Photo: Kilic Bulent/Getty

When the kiosk outside the camp opened its shutters, Rashad from Damascus whistled and waved a five-euro note through the fence.

"A sandwich, please," he called. "There isn't enough food here. Some of us haven't eaten in days."

Soon a small crowd had gathered and the vendor rushed back and forth, squeezing sandwiches and juice through a hole in the wire.

Rashad and his family arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos just days after the EU struck a deal to send migrants back to Turkey, aiming to cut off the route across the Aegean. The plans, which have been heavily criticised by aid groups, will begin tomorrow. But they represent an enormous gamble and have yet to deter more refugees from arriving - or destroy the smugglers' lucrative business.

Hundreds continue to land daily on Greece's easternmost islands, while border closures have helped the smuggling trade flourish on the mainland.

Most refugees and migrants detained on Lesbos were oblivious to the conditions awaiting them before they crossed the narrow strait from Turkey. The island's detention centre, Moria, is already well over capacity: designed for 2,000 people, it struggles to provide for 2,500 occupants.

"There isn't enough for everyone," said Rashad, hungrily gulping down his sandwich. "There's no hot water, the toilets are filthy." He left Turkey because he was unable to pay for his daughters' education, he added.

Adnan Hussein, a Syrian student with a bullet wound on his stomach, said he had not eaten in two days. "The line for food is so long, the last few hundred don't get to eat," he said. "And half the people have to sleep outside."

Refugees in Moria hold a daily protest against the deteriorating conditions. So far, it has remained peaceful, but officials and aid workers fear unrest is only a matter of time. Last Thursday, several migrants were injured in riots on the islands of Chios and Samos.

"The influx hasn't stopped, but the outflow has. There is a potential for this to become unmanageable," said Ana Gomes, a member of the European Parliament visiting Moria.

On Friday, the Greek parliament voted to begin sending back migrants, but whether the agreement to return them to Turkey is practicable remains uncertain. Greece still lacks the staff to quickly process thousands of asylum applications; this coming week, only people who have not applied for asylum in Greece will be returned to Turkey. Out of 2,500 registered refugees in the Moria camp, 1,950 have applied.

Giorgos Kyritsis, a spokesman for Greece's refugee crisis committee, confirmed that returns would start tomorrow, but he added that not all details were clear. "We will see if it works or not. But we are confident it will."

Even if the returns from the islands begin as planned, Greece still hosts some 50,000 refugees and migrants stranded on its mainland.

Legal routes to resettlement are limited and aid workers on Lesbos said the already slow European relocation programme had come to a halt amid confusion over the new rules.

With the Macedonian border and the route across the Balkans closed, many refugees have begun to look for other options, fuelling a boom in smuggling in Athens and the border town of Idomeni, where more than 10,000 migrants are stranded.

Smugglers are reported to offer trips to Germany starting at 1,500 or to Scandinavia for 2,500. Ships to Italy are priced at around 1,000.

Refugees' Facebook groups abound with suggestions and advertisements for new routes. Smugglers are offering direct trips with large "ghost ships" from Turkey to Italy - a route that was shut by Turkish coastguards last year.

"Until legal options for refugees are established, a crackdown on smugglers will have a limited effect," said Boris Cheshirkov, an official for the UN High Commission on Refugees based on Lesbos. "Smugglers are a criminal enterprise and therefore flexible. As some routes close, others open." Heaven Crawley, a professor of migration at Coventry University, said: "The problem with this deal is that it just won't work. The migrants will keep coming, the push factors are too strong.All Europe will have achieved is the loss of the moral high ground."

On Lesbos, few knew of the planned returns to Turkey. Others had heard rumours, but believed their smuggler's tale that the deal was a fiction invented by Europe to deter them from coming. "Even if I knew it would be like this, I would still have come As long as I'm far away from that country of mine," said Jonathan, who fled from Eritrea to Uganda three years ago.

After receiving threats in Uganda he flew to Turkey with his wife and boarded a dinghy to Lesbos four days ago.

Turkey is currently negotiating with Eritrea and other countries, including Afghanistan, to send back failed asylum seekers, raising fears of "refoulement" - returning refugees to places where they are at risk, which is prohibited under international law.

Aid agencies have questioned the legality of the deal, warning that Turkey was not the "safe country" European leaders made it out to be.

On Friday, the United Nations voiced concerns that safeguards ensuring returned migrants' rights had not been put in place. "I don't know what they would do to me if I returned. They made me join the military in 1995. When I tried to leave, they put me in a prison and made me work hard for years," said Jonathan.

"There was no shelter, little food. But honestly," - he gestured at the detention centre's tall fence in front of him - "it looked a bit like this. I escaped prison in my country to another prison in Europe."

Meanwhile in Syria, the land many of them are fleeing, it appears that the partial ceasefire is unravelling.

Yesterday fierce fighting between government forces and opposition fighters, including members of the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front, erupted outside the country's second largest city of Aleppo and other parts in the country's north.

At least 25 pro-government and 16 opposition fighters died in the clashes south of Aleppo, where the Nusra Front and rebel militias captured a village overlooking a major highway.

The fighting was the most serious in the area since the ceasefire, engineered by the US and Russia, took effect on February 27. The violence in the north, along with heavy government airstrikes that killed more than 30 civilians near Damascus this week, threatened to completely dissolve the truce, which had sharply reduced overall violence across the war-ravaged country.

The rebel advances also risk drawing Russia back into the conflict after it shored up the government's position through a fierce bombing campaign that wound down nearly three weeks ago. The opposition's advances threaten to reverse some of the gains made by the government during the Russian campaign.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Brussels Airport should be back at about 20% of capacity from Monday and able to process 800 passengers an hour (AP)

The first passenger flight has left Brussels Airport since it was closed after the suicide bombings on March 22 which blew up its departures terminal.

A Brussels Airlines flight heading to the Portuguese city of Faro has taken off from the airport, one of three services scheduled for Sunday.

Airport chief executive officer Arnaud Feist said the flights leaving on Sunday are "a sign of hope" that even partial passenger service could resume so soon following "the darkest days in the history of aviation in Belgium".

The airport has been shut since suicide bombings at the hub and in the Brussels subway killed 32 victims and wounded 270. The attacks were claimed by the Islamic State group.

Security at the airport was tight on Sunday with completely new check-in procedures for passengers.

Other planes scheduled to leave included Brussels Airlines flights to Athens, Greece, and Turin, Italy.

Mr Feist also thanked all employees for their courage.

"We are more than an airport ... We are a family more bound together than ever," he said at an airport ceremony on Sunday.

Damage to the airport was extensive when double suicide bombs exploded near its crowded check-in counters 12 days ago, killing 16 victims and maiming people from around the world.

Another bombing that day on a Brussels subway train killed 16 other people.

Mr Feist said Belgium's biggest airport should be back to about 20% of capacity on Monday and able to process 800 passengers an hour.

New security measures at the airport aimed to minimise the chances of any repeat attacks.

Police on Sunday conducted spot checks of vehicles before they arrived. A large white tent was set up outside the terminal to screen travellers' IDs, travel documents and bags before they were allowed to enter the building.

A drop-off parking area outside the terminal was closed down and authorities said there would be no rail or public transport access to the airport for the foreseeable future.

The bombers entered the check-in area with suitcases packed with explosives and nails, and the resulting blasts collapsed the airport's ceiling and shattered windows.

The attacks have prompted a wider discussion among aviation authorities in many countries over whether to impose routine security checks at the entry to airport terminals.
Relatives of the 43 missing students at a protest in Mexico City on December 26 (AP)

Forensic experts who studied a dump in Mexico where government officials claim the bodies of 43 missing students were burned say a new investigation of the site is incomplete and inconclusive.

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team said the latest investigation by a team of experts "neither confirms nor denies" the official version of what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa.

The Argentines were called in shortly after the students disappeared in Iguala on September 26 2014.

A federal investigation concluded they were killed by a local drug gang and their bodies burned at the dump in the nearby town of Cocula.

The Argentines studied the dump and said the evidence did not support the official version of events.
Indian police are investigating possible murder charges against 10 construction firm employees who were either arrested or detained over the collapse of an unfinished overpass in Kolkata that killed at least 26 people.

Rescuers have continued clearing rubble from the scene of Thursday's accident.

Sixty-nine people have been pulled out alive, but authorities said they doubted more survivors would be found.

Judge Sanchita Sarkar of the Kolkata city court remanded three arrested employees of IVRCL Infrastructure Co, which was contracted to build the overpass, to police custody for nine days for questioning and investigation.

Seven other company employees were detained for questioning, police said.

The employees were being questioned regarding possible charges of murder and culpable homicide, punishable by death or life imprisonment, and criminal breach of trust, which carries a prison sentence of up to seven years.

Rescue workers pulled out two more bodies from under the rubble on Saturday, raising the death toll to 26.

The bodies were pinned under concrete slabs and were recovered by emergency workers at the crash site.

Police believe there may be more bodies under the debris.

While most of the injured have been discharged from the hospital, 18 were still being treated.

IVRCL Infrastructure, based in the southern city of Hyderabad, was contracted in 2007 to build the overpass, a project that was expected to take two years. But construction was far behind schedule.

The overpass spanned nearly the width of the street and was designed to ease traffic through Kolkata's densely crowded Bara Bazaar neighbourhood.

The structure fell within hours of concrete being poured into a framework of steel girders on Thursday.

"We completed nearly 70% of the construction work without any mishap," said IVRCL official KP Rao.

"We have to go into the details to find out whether the collapse was due to any technical or quality issue," said Mr Rao who was not among those detained on Friday.

Two West Bengal state engineers overseeing the construction of the overpass were suspended from jobs pending an inquiry into the disaster.

Around 100 residents of several buildings near the collapsed overpass were ordered to vacate the buildings, where some of them have lived for generations.

Government engineers said the buildings have been weakened from the impact of the overpass collapse and it would be risky for them to stay in the nearly 100-year-old tenement buildings.
Syrian troops have identified 45 bodies so far in a mass grave found in the city of Palmyra after it was recaptured from Isil, a military source told journalists yesterday.

Syrian government forces backed by heavy Russian air support drove Isil out of Palmyra last Sunday, inflicting what the army called a mortal blow to militants who had dynamited the city's ancient temples.

The communal grave, on the north-eastern edge of Palmyra, is the only one found so far in the city by the Syrian forces, the source said.

It held the bodies of both civilians and Syrian army members captured by Isil.

Syrian state news agency SANA said last Friday that the grave contained many women and children - and that some of the bodies had been beheaded.

In May last year, as Isil took control of Palmyra, the hard-line Islamist militants were reported by Syrian state media to have killed at least 400 people in the first four days of control.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said Isil had killed a number of people at an earlier time and buried them on the outskirts of the city.

The Observatory reported yesterday that fighting had broke out between Syrian forces and Isil around Qaryatain, to the west of Palmyra. It also reported Russian and Syrian air strikes in the same area and to the east of Palmyra around the town of Sukhna.

Government forces that were attacking Isil positions around Palmyra are aiming to move east across the desert to Islamic State-held Deir al-Zor, near the Iraqi border, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said.
Heavy fighting erupted yesterday between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan said 12 of its soldiers were killed and claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties on the Armenian forces.

The fighting was one of the worst outbreaks since the 1994 end of full-scale war over the region. Since 1994, mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military.

Armenian forces also occupy several areas outside Nagorno-Karabakh proper. The sides are separated by a demilitarised buffer zone, but small clashes have broken out frequently.

Each side blamed the other for Saturday's escalation.

In a statement, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said 12 of its soldiers "became shahids" - Muslim martyrs - and said one of its helicopters was shot down.

The statement also claimed that more than 100 Armenian forces were killed or wounded and that six tanks and 15 artillery positions had been destroyed.

Armenia in turn claimed to have inflicted heavy damage on Azerbaijani forces, but did not immediately give figures.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since 1994.

David Babayan, a spokesman for Nagorno-Karabakh's separatist president, said a boy of about 12 was killed and two other children were wounded in a Grad missile barrage by Azerbaijani forces. He characterised the fighting as the worst since 1994.

Russian President Vladimir Putin urged all sides to cease firing and "show restraint," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies. Russia's foreign and defense ministers contacted their Azerbaijani and Armenian counterparts in hopes of stabilising the situation, the ministries said.

"The situation along the entire length of the line of opposition between Karabakhi and Azerbaijani armed forces continues to be extremely difficult," Armenian defense ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan said.

Years of negotiations under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have brought little progress in resolving the territorial dispute.

Armenian forces also occupy several areas outside Nagorno-Karabakh. The sides are separated by a demilitarised buffer zone, but both claim frequent violations by the other.

The Armenian Defense Ministry said Azerbaijan used aircraft, tanks and artillery to try to make inroads into Nagorno-Karabkh and that "Azerbaijani authorities bear all responsibility for the unprecedentedly supercharged situation."

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said the fighting began when Armenian forces fired mortars and large-caliber artillery shells across the front line. Ministry spokesman Vagif Dargyakhly told journalists that more than 120 shots were fired, some of which hit civilian residential areas.

 Associated Press
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has published sensational details of financial arrangements that allow wealthy individuals around the world to avoid paying tax.

The biggest data leak in history has exposed the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders.

The leak from Mossack Fonseca, the worlds fourth biggest offshore law firm, reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin were involved in a web of secret offshore deals and loans worth as much as $2 billion.

The offshore trail, which involves a massive 11.5million records, starts in Panama, and also travels into Russia and Switzerland.

Sergei Roldugin, who is Putins best friend, is at the centre of one scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it shows up in a ski resort where Putins daughter Katerina got married in 2013.

The sensational findings are the result of a years work by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which involves more than 100 news organisations, including The Irish Times and German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung.

The massive leak is bigger than that of whistleblower Edward Snowden in the US, and the publication by Wikileaks of secret American documents.

Oxfam Ireland Chief Executive Jim Clarken described the revelations as a colossal betrayal of taxpayers.

This expose offers a rare glimpse into the murky practices of tax dodging  and the sheer size and scale revealed is staggering.

It shines a light on a toxic global tax system exploited by professional enablers on behalf of those rich enough to hire them. It is the wealthiest individuals and companies, who in a progressive tax system should be paying the most in tax, who have the biggest incentives to exploit this weak architecture to avoid paying their fair share.

It is not good enough to argue that tax avoidance is permissible because practices fall within the letter of the law. Legal loopholes abuse a broken system. Everyone has a responsibility to contribute towards the public services and infrastructure on which we all rely, he said.

More to follow.
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By Nikie Mayo of the Independent Mail

An Anderson County litter-control officer was driving down Plantation Road off U.S. 29 North when he spotted an abandoned car seat.

Inside, strapped in "just like a baby," was a dead raccoon.

"You know, I'm sure somebody thought that was funny," said Sgt. Sandy Hayes. "It wasn't to us. And of course, we have no way to track down who did it."

Greg Smith, Anderson County solid waste manager, says what South Carolina needs is a cultural shift. That's what it will take, he says, to keep the Palmetto State litter free. But until that shift happens, litterbugs, beware.

April is Zero Tolerance for Litter Month in Anderson County and throughout South Carolina. Gov. Nikki Haley has issued a proclamation to that effect. The annual campaign is done in cooperation with the nonprofit PalmettoPride and the South Carolina Litter Control Association.

"Basically, what zero tolerance means is that if we catch you littering, don't expect a warning," Smith said. "Expect that you are going to get a ticket and a fine. We're going to be patrolling hard, trying to catch the people who think it is OK to trash our state."

Generally, a litterbug in Anderson County can face a fine up to $1,093, Smith said.

Hayes has been a litter-control officer in Anderson County since 2002. In that time, he has encountered all kinds of litter on Upstate roads, from old tires to what he calls "window trash"  anything that can be held in a hand then thrown out the window of a vehicle.

He has also heard all kinds of excuses about why people throw out trash.

"'I didn't know cigarette butts were trash'  that's one I get a lot," Hayes said. "Or, if it is a teenager, you get, 'I'm going on a date and I was trying to get my car clean before I got there.' And if you catch an adult putting a bunch of trash on the side of the road, the No. 1 thing they say is, 'The dump was closed,' like they can't be bothered to wait until it reopens the next day."

Smith said he hopes the monthlong litter campaign will make a difference.

"I think the effort to clean up our county and our state has to begin with two things," he said. "They are education and enforcement."

Follow Nikie Mayo on Twitter @NikieMayo
BMW announces $1.7 billion investment to build all-electric vehicles

The $1.7 billion investment includes $700 million to build a high-voltage battery assembly plant with 300 new jobs in Woodruff.
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The Upstate region of South Carolina has had unprecedented growth over the past decade. Companies around the nation and globe have decided to do business here. And areas around our local region has seen more businesses, restaurants, and office buildings being built up all over the Greenville, Spartanburg and Anderson areas. And companies such as BMW and Michelin have decided to call our Upstate region home.

In Greenville county, the downtown area has recently undergone growth. And the various building up of restaurants, a shopping complex and apartment condo buildings over the last five years has happened downtown. And the Woodruff road area of Greenville county has experienced growth as well.

Spartanburg county last year experienced more growth in the area with $2.4 billion in new investment and 2,114 new jobs. The new businesses that are headquartered in the area include a new BMW expansion, Toray Industries, Inc. new carbon fiber plant and Bass Pro shops.

Let us all the residents of Upstate South Carolina continue to support our local communities public institutions in the expansion of business and growth for the Upstate region of South Carolina.

Steven Hawkins, Greenville
Prevent Unauthorized Transactions in your demat / trading account Update your Mobile Number/ email Id with your stock broker / Depository Participant. Receive information of your transactions directly from Exchanges on your mobile / email at the end of day and alerts on your registered mobile for all debits and other important transactions in your demat account directly from NSDL/ CDSL on the same day." - Issued in the interest of investors.

KYC is one time exercise while dealing in securities markets - once KYC is done through a SEBI registered intermediary (broker, DP, Mutual Fund etc.), you need not undergo the same process again when you approach another intermediary.

No need to issue cheques by investors while subscribing to IPO. Just write the bank account number and sign in the application form to authorise your bank to make payment in case of allotment. No worries for refund as the money remains in investor's account."

www.indiainfoline.com is part of the IIFL Group, a leading financial services player and a diversified NBFC. The site provides comprehensive and real time information on Indian corporates, sectors, financial markets and economy. On the site we feature industry and political leaders, entrepreneurs, and trend setters. The research, personal finance and market tutorial sections are widely followed by students, academia, corporates and investors among others.
Sam Manekshaws name arises every time we talk about the 1971 war. He was the man who made our victory against Pakistan possible that year. Fondly known as Sam Bahadur or Sam the brave, he served our country for four magnificent decades.



Today, on his birth anniversary, we recall the legend and tell you why we theres a lot that we need to know about him.

1. Sam Manekshaws full name was Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw.

India.com

Sam was born on April 3, 1914 in Amritsar to Parsi parents, Hormusji Manekshaw and Heerabai. His full name was Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw. It is believed that one of his aunts had named him Cyrus, but changed it to Sam later. He did his schooling from Sherwood College in Nainital alongside his siblings, Jan and Jemi.

2. Sam Manekshaw was the first ever Indian to become a Field Marshal.

en.r8lst.com

As an Indian army officer, Sam Manekshaw was the first one in the Indian Army rise to the rank of Field Marshal. He began his career during the World War in the British Army, fought five wars, and became the 8th chief of Army staff in 1969. Manekshaw led the Indian Army in the Indo-Pak war of 1971, which was his first as Army Chief. In fact, the military victory in East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh is considered as Sam Manekshaw's success as much as then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's. It was then, when Sam became the talk of the town.

3. Sam Manekshaw first exhibited his administrative skills during the partition.

indiatoday

During the partition in 1947, Sam Manekshaw was involved in offering administrative solutions, and decision making. On top of that, he proved himself as a warrior during Jammu and Kashmir operation in 1947 and 1948.

4. Sam was awarded a Padma Vibhushan by the President on India in the year 1972.

timescontent

President of India V V Giri had conferred Padma Vibhushan to Chief of Army Staff General S H F J Manekshaw at a special investiture ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on January 28, 1972.

5. Sam Manekshaw was born to be an Army officer.

indiastrategic.com

After entering the World War II, Manekshaw led the 4/12 Frontier Force Regiment as captain in Myanmar in 1942. There he witnessed live action by the side of Sittang River and was acknowledged for showing exceptional courage and bravery in the battlefield. Interestingly, as Sam was wounded, Major General David Tennent Cowan, took off his Military Cross ribbon and pinned it on Sam's chest saying A dead person cannot be awarded a Military Cross.

He commanded the A Company of his battalion in response to the Japanese Army, and was was able to achieve his objective despite facing close to 50% casualties. The battalion conquered the Pagoda Hill, the key site located on the left side of the river.

6. Sam Manekshaws father wanted him to pursue medicine.

mid-day

Sam has received distinction in the Cambridge Boards School Certificate examination after which he wanted to go to London to study medicine. His father refused to send him as he was too young. But as destiny had it, Sam cleared the Indian Military Academys entrance examination and secured a seat in the first batch of 40 selected cadets on October 1, 1932 in Dehradun.

As they say, legends never die, they stay with us to inspire us forever. India will never forget you Field Marshal.
Shivaji Bhonsle, popularly known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in our history books is known as a warrior king. He was the man who carved out a new chapter from the declining Adilshahi sultanate of Bijapur which formed the origin of the Maratha Empire.

In 1674, Shivaji Maharaj was formally crowned as the monarch or chatrapati of his realm at Raigad.

allindiaroundup

Shivaji is considered one of the greatest warriors in Indian history.

Shivaji was known for his innovative military tactics. He was a pioneer in guerrilla warfare methods that required the use of subjects like geography and speed. His strategies were more like surprises and focused on pinpoint attacks to defeat his powerful enemies. It is also believed that Shivaji revived ancient Hindu political traditions and court conventions. Further, he encouraged the usage of Marathi and Sanskrit, rather than Persian, in court and administration.

Shivajis death

godwallpaper

Shivaji's was sad and dejected due to his eldest son Sambhajis misbehaviour. There were rumours in his cabinet that Sambhaji was irresponsible and addicted to sensual pleasures. According to history, this was a strategy by opposition ministers to harm Sambhajis reputation. Shivaji was unable to control the situation and decided to send his son to Panhala.

In late March 1680, Shivaji had high fever, after which his condition worsened. On 3rd April, 1680, at the age of 52, he passed away.

There are several stories surrounding the reason of his death. According to Muslims he had died of a curse from Jan Muhammad. While, some Marathas thought that his second wife, Soyarabai had poisoned him so that the throne gets passed away to her son Rajaram.
Emraan Hashmis 4-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer. But Hashmi decided to battle this disease for his child, and with his child. Hashmi says he played Batman for his son, and that turned out to be the best role of his career. It affirmed his little boys belief in superheroes, and sometimes thats all you need.

indianexpress

Here are the excerpts from his memoir.

Who is this?' I waited for a split second before answering him. I needed to make sure I replied to him in the right voice. He might be young, but he's very sharp.

'I'm Batman,' I replied in a low, gruff tone. 'Is that Ayaan?'

There was a pause. I could imagine his eyes widen with disbelief. 'Y-yes? Is that really... Batman?'

'How are you, Ayaan?'

'I'm okay, Batman. Are you fighting crime in Gotham? Papa told me!'

A lump formed in my throat. I decided to tell him what I had called him for in the first place.

'Would you like to become a superhero like me, Ayaan?'

He breathed heavily with excitement. I could hear it over the phone.

'Ye 'Then listen to me very carefully. It will take some time, but once we are done, you are going to become better than Iron Man! You will be Ayaan Man!'

I knew Ayaan loved Batman. But I had already donned that cape. If I had offered him the chance to be Batman, he wouldn't have quite liked the idea of us playing the same superhero. The incongruity would get to him. That's how I decided we'll pronounce his name in a way that resembled another one of his absolute favourites  Iron Man.

'Okay,' he replied. 'What will I have to do?'

'Listen to me very carefully, Ayaan...'!'

I remembered the night before, when we had tricked Ayaan into believing that we had checked into a hotel. I had met the doctors and nurses in an adjoining room so that he didn't overhear my conversation with them. Once I went back to his room, he threw a fit when he was given the insipid hospital food. He demanded pizza and all the other junk that got him happy. It took us some time to get him to settle down, after which he asked me a simple question.

'Is it my birthday or is it Christmas, papa?' he inquired, earnestly. 'Is that why we are in a hotel? To celebrate?'

'Yes Ayaan,' I replied. 'It's gonna be your birthday soon and we will celebrate many many more birthdays together!'

My four-year-old baby boy was diagnosed with second-stage Wilms' tumour, a type of cancer that affects the kidneys and typically occurs in children. Wilms' tumour is very uncommon. Children of African origin are more prone to suffer from it than children of other races. It is named after a German doctor, Max Wilms, who wrote one of the first medical articles about the disease in 1899  it would seem unfortunate for a man to have a damned disease named after him. Because at that moment, I disliked the word itself.

Ayaan's cancer was my life's biggest hurdle. Suddenly, I had to prove to myself that I had in me the stuff that my role models were made off. I had to be Superman, in my own little way. I had to not just fight away the enemy that threatened my son's life, but also prove my mettle professionally... But the real hero was my son... Kids like him are made of sterner stuff than we adults are. They battle the disease one day at a time for months, sometimes years, enduring pain and sacrificing their moments of childhood that will never come back...

My son wanted to be Batman. In many ways, he has become him. He has coped with pain and has fought cancer. Just like all stories need a conclusion, the story of Batman needs to end too. I don't have the heart to tell him that Batman doesn't exist. I don't have the strength to tell him that after all those sessions of chemo, he won't have any superpowers. But probably, he will learn by himself, just like I did, that living your life responsibly is a superpower by itself.

So after writing this book, I am going to make one final call to him as Batman. That story needs some closure. This time, however, I won't be convincing him to have the meal that he's fussing about or I won't be calming him down before his chemo session. I am going to tell him, 'Son, you have endured it all. You are six years old now, and soon you will finish school and go to college. I will grow old and wither away, and you may have to face the big bad world out there by yourself. But you've got a great head-start. You have won the unlikeliest of battles already, so now, whatever it is that comes your way, you have to put on that cape of responsibility, hold your head up high bravely and give all of life's problems that knockout punch.'




On the last leg of his visit of the three nation tour, India's PM Narendra Modi visited a women-only IT centre in Riyadh.

"For the world it is considered to be a main headline news that in Riyadh today I am meeting those IT professionals who I can say today represent the glory of Saudi Arabia," Modi said while interacting with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) women professionals in Riyadh.

Timesofindia

He spent around 40 minutes at the centre and even posed for selfies.

"All of you must come to India, I assure you a very warm reception. The atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong message to the world," Modi said.

At the TCS Centre 1,000 women work in BPO Operations, 85% of whom are Saudi nationals.

"In this very competitive world today, if we are to progress then all forces have to progress together and have to move ahead and in it when I say forces, we are talking not only natural resources but also human resources. And in human resources human power plays a very important role, if the capacity of the woman are built and they are linked with the development process, then development of any country is speeded exponentially," the Prime Minister said.

"I would also like to heartily congratulate TCS that in India they have set up a training centre which trains young men and women, and those trained men and women, go out in the digital world and empower the entire world," he said.

thehindu

Modi stressed that in the IT profession, India has made its place in the world.

"I invite all of you to come together to India and you will see for yourself the impact you will make on Indians," he said.

"I have one suggestion, I have seen that in governance and for transparency, technology has a very big role to play and for me e-governance is easy, economic and effective governance. And I myself try my level best to update myself with technology and if you want any information in real time about India, me and the selfies that you took along with me today, and for all information, please download the Narendra Modi app," Modi said.

#WATCH:Employees of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) all women IT & ITES Centre in Riyadh take 'selfies' with PM Modihttps://t.co/48BgSvEShH  ANI (@ANI_news) 3 April 2016

TCS established the first all-women Business Process Services (BPS) centre in Riyadh in 2013.

The centre brings a unique business model to Saudi Arabia and serves as a rich training ground for building new capabilities, skills and careers for women in the country.
Despite the political rancour underlining Indo-Pak ties, a feeling of warmth and conviviality always shone out in exchanges between the people of the two countries. Is the situation changing now?

An Indian diplomat representing India's high commissioner was ridiculed and humiliated this week in Islamabad in the presence of top international diplomats with the host accusing him? of underpaying for his presence there.

The Kehkeshan Hall of Islamabad's swanky Serena Hotel was teeming with diplomats on Thursday evening. The occasion was Oxbridge Lecture organised by Pakistan's Oxford and Cambridge Society. They had gathered to listen to Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan Omar Zakhilwal on Af-Pak relations. Among them was an Indian diplomat representing India's high commissioner to Pakistan Gautam Bambawale.

While introducing the speaker, the chairman of the Society, Irshad-Ullah Khan, started to talk "on a lighter note" about the drop-box voluntary donation of Rs 500 and above from all guests. Leaving his audience bemused, Rhodes Scholar Khan whipped out his wallet saying he had with him an Indian Rs 10 currency note which he claimed had been contributed by the Indian guest when he attended the last Oxbridge Lecture in February this year, again representing India's high commissioner.

indiatimes

"How do you expect to resolve the Kashmir issue with a Rs 10 contribution," Khan said calling out the Indian diplomat from the audience.

Even as Zakhilwal waited to take the floor, Khan went on to talk about how his staff had been "more vigilant this time and used cameras to establish that the diplomat had contributed only Rs 100" on this occasion. A businessman and poet, Khan is a very popular figure in Pakistan. The invite to the guests clearly said that the donation was voluntary and was meant to meet the Lecture expenses.

It didn't end there though. After the lecture by Zakhilwal, Khan thought it proper to bring up India's contribution again saying he had finally found the Rs 10 note in his wallet and displayed it to the audience. He went on to say that the Oxford and Cambridge Society would keep it as a souvenir from the Indian high commission.

The humiliation has stunned India's diplomatic community. India believes that what Khan did was "intentional" and an act of frustration, or even intimidation at a time when the Pakistan government is under pressure to ensure Kashmir remains the centrepiece of its engagement with India. Indian authorities say the diplomat on both occasions had dropped Rs 500 into the box. The diplomat in fact accosted Khan after the event and, as a source put it, thanks him for his "kind words and warm hospitality".

"Diplomats from either countries regularly work in hostile conditions but this kind of humiliation is rare. And he was not there in his personal capacity," said a source here.

topnews

India and Pakistan diplomats, even at the level of high commissioners, have come to expect occasional harassment as an occupational hazard. Last year, a club in Karachi refused to host Indian high commissioner. Never before though in recent times, as sources said, Indian diplomats have felt so strongly about the humiliation meted out to the diplomat at the Oxbridge Lecture in full view of Islamabad's diplomatic community.

Pakistan too has repeatedly accused MEA of preventing its diplomats from travelling out of Delhi. High commissioner Abdul Basit recently called off his visit to Chennai after Indian authorities allegedly delayed permission for the visit.
A Sikh army captain, Simratpal Singh, who had decided to sue the United States military for discrimination in March has won the case. He can continue wearing a turban and beard while being in duty.

Victory! US Army makes exception to discriminatory ban for Sikh Officer. #LetSikhsServehttps://t.co/Olcjsh8KnK pic.twitter.com/E59wOAUmHw  Simran Jeet Singh (@SikhProf) April 1, 2016

The U.S. Army disclosed its decision on Thursday and granted Captain Simratpal Singh religious accommodation to their rules against facial hair and head wear. They further added that the Army intends to gather information to develop uniform standards for religious accommodations.

'My military service continues to fulfill a lifelong dream,' Singh, a West Point graduate who earned a Bronze Star in Afghanistan, said in a press release. 'My faith, like many of the soldiers I work with, is an integral part of who I am. I am thankful that I no longer have to make the choice between faith and service to our nation.'

After years of cutting his hair, and shaving his beard, Singh was finally allowed a temporary accommodation in December. Assistant Army Secretary Debra Wada had ordered tests in March to figure out whether Singh could safely wear a helmet and gas mask with his turban, uncut hair and a beard.

Sikh coalition

But, the good news is, that after Thursdays decision by the Army, Singh no longer needs to reapply for the accommodation.

Simran Jeet, the senior religion follow for Sikh Coalition said, In a political context where minorities are being marginalized and attacked routinely, it is critical that our nations largest institutions and employers  like the U.S. military  show the country that America embraces diversity.

He further suggested that, this decision is just an initial step toward ending the discriminatory policies related to religious faith of its serving members. .

In 2014, the U.S. military started giving greater freedom to wear turbans, head scarfs, yarmulkes and other religious clothing with their uniforms to individual troops. But, according to a spokesman for the Sikh Coalition,the religious accommodation needed to be approved each time a service member was assigned new or would default to the discretion of their commanders.

Just two days before the Army released its decision on Singhs case, three other Sikh soldiers had filed a similar lawsuit demanding accommodations from the Army. And Singhs victory came as a pleasant surprise and gave hope to the others.
Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps(NSCDC) in Borno State has said that Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are now stealing foods in residents houses in Maiduguri.

The Commandant of the NSCDC, Mr Ibrahim Abdullahi said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Maiduguri on Sunday. According to him, the command had so far recorded 10 complaints of food theft by residents of Jidari Polo Area in the state capital. Two culprits aged 25 have been arrested by the Command.

Explaining how they operate, Abdullahi said the culprits invade peoples houses on Sundays during the time Christian faithful are in the church.

What is very surprising is that they do not steal anything apart from food items.

Anytime we hear of such incidents, we always discover everything to be intact in the houses but the foodstuffs are stolen.

The culprits are IDPs who are mostly taken refuge in host communities, Abdullahi said.

He assured that the NSCDC would continue doing its best at fighting all forms of crime.
The Nigerian Army has described as false, reports that troops drawn from 154 and 155 Task Force Battalions, who were used to dislodge Boko Haram from their spiritual base in Alagarno Forest in Borno State, staged a protest against the acting General Officer Commanding (GOC) 7 Division, Maiduguri, Brigadier-General Victor Ezugwu.

Wed reported here that the troops were angry over shortage of food and water at their location in Alargarno and vented their anger by preventing the helicopter that brought Brigadier-General Eziegwu to address them on the issue, from leaving.

Reacting to the report in a press statement yesterday, the Director, Army Public Relations, Sani Usman, said: While acknowledging that indeed troops that captured the strategic forest of Alagarno experienced some logistics problem that include water shortage due to unforeseen circumstances, which is normal in a war situation, it is not true that the troops protested.

If Alagarno is truly inaccessible, how did the gallant troops rout out the Boko Haram terrorists in the forest? The concoction of this story and the release of yet another video by some remnants of Boko Haram terrorists could be more than mere coincidence. For the avoidance of doubt, the acting General Officer Commanding (GOC), 7 Division, Brigadier General V.O. Ezugwu indeed visited the troops and also supplied water to them.

Consequently, the Nigerian Army wishes to request the retraction of this story by the paper and also enjoin reporters to always crosscheck their facts before filing their stories, Mr. Usman, a colonel, added.
The dead arent above receiving a facelift, according to a Chinese funeral home using 3D printing technology to restore and reconstruct the bodies of its clients. Longhua, a Shanghai-based funeral home, is reportedly taking advantage of 3D printing advances to restore bodies damaged in accidents, natural disasters or fires. The results can make the bodies appear younger and more attractive posthumously, the funeral home said.

It is difficult for relatives to see incomplete faces or bodies of their loved ones when they attend memorial services, and makeup cannot always sufficiently repair them, said Shanghai Funeral and Interment Service Center official Liu Fengming to Shanghai Daily. The Longhua facility is reportedly the first of its kind in China and is capable of making its repairs look more natural, despite slight disparities, according to CRI English.

The technology can restore the appearance of disfigured bodies and faces to about 95 percent correctness, a close copy. Printing was used on the faces of firefighters last year who died from an explosion in Tianjin, Shanghai Daily noted.

A 3D printing procedure on a body in preparation for a funeral costs a hefty price, however, with some services costing between 4000 and 5000 yuan, or $620 and $775 dollars. The 3D printing process uses specially engineered machines connected to a computer to fuse layers of materials to develop three-dimensional objects. The printers have made a vast variety of objects from medical tools and implants to guns, cups, clocks and even cars.

UPI.
At least 30 soldiers have been killed in fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, officials of both countries said, each blaming the other for violence. Azerbaijan said in a statement on Saturday that Armenian forces had killed 12 of its soldiers and shot down a helicopter in the fighting, which broke out overnight.

said that 18 of his countrys soldiers had been killed and 35 wounded, not specifying if the soldiers belonged to Yerevan-backed separatist forces in Karabakh or Armenias armed forces.

Active combat is currently under way, Armenian Defence Ministry spokesperson Artsrun Hovhannisyan said on Facebook. The Armenian Army has launched a counter-attack. There are victims on both sides but the opposing side has sustained huge losses in manpower and equipment. An [Azerbaijani] helicopter has been shot down.

Azerbaijan said its forces had taken two strategic heights and a village in Karabakh. The Armenian Defence Ministry said Azerbaijani troops started an offensive with tanks and artillery. Azerbaijan denied those allegations, saying its soldiers were reacting to heavy attacks from the Armenian side.

Aljazeera.
The Benue State chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has said that the controversial religious bill proposed by Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, is an attempt to tear the nation apart.

The Benue CAN Chairman, Rev. Akpen Leva, in a statement yesterday, condemned the proposed bill, which is aimed at regulating religious activities in Kaduna State.

Leva said the proposed bill is not in agreement with the constitution of Nigeria, which provides for freedom of religion, freedom of expression as well as freedom of association.

He argued further that though the religious bill did not favour any religion, it has more damaging and long term effect on the church.

The CAN chairman, therefore, urged the El-Rufai-led government of Kaduna State not to substitute the existing preaching law of 1984 as amended in 1987, with the planned bill.

On the incessant deadly clashes between farmers and herdsmen in Benue State, Rev. Leva urged the federal government to set up a judicial commission of enquiry to look into the problems of communities affected by the crises.

According to him, the commission of enquiry would bring a lasting solution to the crisis, which he lamented has defied every proffered solution.
President Muhammadu Buhari and the state governors have agreed that ranches, rather than grazing reserves, should be established to address incessant farmers/herdsmen clashes, Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State, has disclosed.

Mr. Lalong, who made the disclosure on Sunday in Jos at the dedication of the new headquarters of Evangelical Church Winning All, ECWA, said that grazing reserves would not address the clashes and the killings.

A recent clash between farmers and herdsmen left about 200 people killed in Agatu Local Government Area of Benue State.

The President and governors agreed that there would be no grazing areas; ranches would be established by government where the cattle would be kept in one place and fed.

Government will provide facilities like medical, schools and other needs in the ranches, he said.

Mr. Lalong said that the ranches would not be for Fulani herdsmen alone but for whomever rears cattle.

He said that the Buhari administration inherited myriads of problems, saying that herdsmen/farmers clashes was just one of such problems and urged the people to be patient.

He urged Plateau citizens to pray for the state and the Federal Government as all the problems could not be solved in one year.

Also speaking, the Senator representing Plateau South, Jeremiah Useni, said that delegates at the 2014 National Conference agreed that grazing reserves should be a state affair, not federal.

He said that it would be difficult for farmers to support the establishment of grazing areas as they would not donate their farms for grazing purposes.

In his sermon, Anthony Farinto, former ECWA President, called on leaders at all levels to urgently address the difficulties Nigerians were going through.

The cleric, who condemned the recent killing of a military official, urged the Federal Government to do all within its power to address the security challenges facing the country.

If a serving Colonel could be kidnapped and killed, it portends serious danger for the country, he said.

The Kaduna State Deputy Governor, Bala Bantex, attended the service.

(NAN)
In the wake of recent fire outbreaks especially in major markets across the country, the federal government has made known its intention to collaborate with state governments to prevent future occurrences.

Recall that fire outbreaks had destroyed property and goods worth billions of naira in markets in Lagos, Kebbi, Kano, Cross River and Gombe States in recent weeks.

Reacting to the fire disaster in a fruits market in Gombe State on Wednesday, the Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazzau, on Saturday said the federal government would deepen collaboration with states.

He also condoled the victims of the fire incident.

In a statement signed by his press secretary, Osaigbovo Ehisienmen, the minister said this synergy will also involve industrialists and representatives of traders in the country.

The aim will be to build a platform for safety procedures and to also retool the nations fire service response mechanism at various levels, Mr. Dambazzau said.

The minister, who had earlier visited the scenes of fire incidents in Kano and Kebbi markets during the Easter holidays, stressed the need to embrace safety measures, and adhere strictly to international fire codes.

He assured that the government was determined to find lasting solution to this menace.
A former Governor of Lagos State and national leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has revealed how a working trip he made while serving as an auditor for auditing giant, Deloitte and Touche, instantly turned him into a millionaire.

A kingmaker and somewhat controversial political figure, Mr. Tinubu first served as a senator in the short-lived third republic and was one of the arrowheads of NADECO, a group of pro-democracy Nigerians, who confronted the late dictator, General Sani Abacha.

Following threats to his life, he went on exile and returned to the country only after General Abacha had passed away.

Following the return to democratic rule in 1999, Mr. Tinubu contested and won elections as Lagos State governor and served for two terms.

The former governor, however, has endured years of inquisition into the source of his stupendous wealth with many alleging that he made a fortune from politics, especially when he served as governor of Lagos  the nations economic nerve centre  between 1999 and 2007.

In response to the speculations surrounding the source of his wealth, the APC chieftain said At Deloitte and Touche, I chose to travel more than 80 per cent of my working years there. And that is because if a staff chose to travel, he would make more money because he would get travel allowances.

He stated this in a lengthy interview he granted TheNews Magazine on March 29 about his journey through life as he celebrated his 64th birthday.

According to Mr. Tinubu, it was during an assignment to help set up an accounting and auditing system for a joint-venture between National Oil and Aramco in Saudi Arabia that he got his financial break.

We had gone there to set up their accounting and auditing system. It was while on that service that I got my financial break. When I returned to the United States, my employers gave me a huge bonus, which instantly turned me into a millionaire.

The bonus was $850,000, before taxes. My salaries were also being paid into the bank and I was not touching them. At the time, my salary deposits in the bank had risen to about $1.8 million.

In response to a question if he was not frightened by the development, Mr. Tinubu said, No. This is because I had a strong grasp of financial matters. I was happy. I bought a house from the money and invested the rest in the U.S. I was living well. I was living in one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in the south of Chicago.

He added that he stayed back working for several years in the United States after completing his degree in Chicago and worked in Deloitte and Touche before returning to Nigeria to serve as an accounting executive for Mobil.
A two-year-old Nigerian boy who was found emaciated and riddled with worms after his family left him for dead has made an incredible recovery.



A picture of the starving toddler being given a sip of water by an aid worker broke hearts around the world when it was published in January.

The boy, now called Hope, was abandoned by his family because they thought he was a witch and was found in the streets by Anja Ringgren Loven, a Danish woman living in Africa, on January 31.

And now Ms Loven has shared a series of photographs showing Hopes miraculous recovery in just eight short weeks, and says he is really enjoying life now.

Heartbreaking: Hope (pictured), was emaciated and riddled with worms when he was discovered Unclad and wandering the streets on January 31 by Anja Ringgren Loven, a Danish woman (pictured right)



Rescued: Hope was abandoned by his family because they thought he was a witch and was found in the streets by Anja Ringgren Loven (pictured together)



Incredible transformation: This picture was published less than two months after Hope was found and shows just how much his health has improved since his rescue

Back in January, Ms Loven found the boy after he spent eight months fending for himself and living off scraps.

She bent down and gently began feeding him and giving him water from a bottle. She then wrapped up the disorientated toddler in a blanket and took him to the nearest hospital for treatment.

When Hope reached the hospital, he was given medication to remove the worms from his stomach and daily blood transfusions to incorporate more red blood cells into his body, Ms Loven said.

And two days after the aid worker asked for the communitys help with Hopes costly medical bills, she received $1million in donations from around the world.

Just eight weeks later, Hope is unrecognisable. He has gained weight and has been pictured smiling and playing with other children.



Big smile: Hope looks unrecognisable after gaining weight and he has been pictured smiling for the camera



Enjoying life: Hope has gained weight and has been pictured smiling and playing with other children (left)



Healthier: Hope is pictured looking at a book with two other children. He looks nothing like the starving boy found by Anja Ringgren Loven, a Danish woman living in Africa, on January 31

Ms Loven uploaded new photos of Hope on Saturday, and wrote: As you can see on the pictures, Hope is really enjoying his life now having 35 new brothers and sisters who ALL take such good care of him, play with him, study with him, and make sure he is safe and is getting a lot of love.

But she explained Hope has hypospadias, a genital birth defect meaning the urethra emerges somewhere on the shaft or even the base of the joystick, instead of at the tip.

She added: The doctors found this inborn condition on Hope, so next week Hope will have surgery.

This is an operation the doctors have performed many times, so Hope will be very fine.

Ms Loven is the founder of African Childrens Aid Education and Development Foundation, which she created three years ago to help children who have been labelled witches and therefore neglected or even killed by the members of their community.



Care: Ms Loven wrapped up the disorientated toddler in a blanket and took him to the nearest hospital



Treatment: When Hope reached the hospital, he was given medication to remove the worms from his belly and daily blood transfusions



Bath time: Ms Loven is pictured helping give Hope a bath after he was found walking the streets starving, disorientated and riddled with worms

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/embed/video/1265819.html

Thousands of children are being accused of being witches and weve both seen torture of children, dead children and frightened children, she wrote on Facebook, accompanying images of her feeding the young boy and appealing for donations to help pay for his medical bills in January.

With all the money, we can, besides giving Hope the very best treatment, now also build a doctor clinic on the new land and save many more children out of torture! she said.

Ms Loven runs a childrens centre where the youngsters she saves live and receives medical care, food and schooling.

She and her husband, David Emmanuel Umem, began building their own orphanage in late January.



Friends: Hope (right) is pictured sitting with African Childrens Aid Education and Development Foundation education officer, Don Udowan, and Felix, one



Hair cut: Hope is pictured having his hair cut at the centre in Nigeria after he was rescued on January 31

Source: Daily mail
Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, says Apostle Johnson Suleiman of the Omega Fire Ministries who has repeatedly said he will die for introducing the proposed Kadauna Religious Regulating bill, should tell him when the death will happen. El-Rufai said this while speaking to reporters in Kaduna state recently 

Most of the people that say I would die, as if I would not die, are people who call themselves Christian clergy. Of course, I will die. If that apostle is truly an apostle, he should mention the day I will die.

There is nothing in that law that prevents or infringes the practice of religion. It seeks to ensure that those that preach religion are qualified, trained and certified by their peers to do it. And some sections of the media have made it as if the law was drafted against Christianity. It is most irresponsible and I have nothing to say except to leave the matter to Godhe said

He maintained that the bill does not have any ulterior motive

Honestly, we do not have any ulterior motive other than to put a framework that will ensure Kaduna State citizens live in peace with every one practising his religion, but disallowing every Tom, Dick and Harry coming to say he can preach.he said!

Source: Channels TV
The representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to Nigeria and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Mrs. Angele Dikongue Atangana, on Saturday said the attacks in Agatu local government area of Benue State by suspected herdsmen left the area in total ruin.

The attack, which was reportedly a reprisal for the killing of herds of cattle by residents of Agatu communities, saw men, women and children massacred in their hundreds by the armed herdsmen.

Led on the tour of the affected area by Ezekiel Adaji, the Deputy Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Internally Displaced Persons, Refugees and North East Development Initiative, Mrs. Atangana also described the level of destruction as unprecedented.

The UN representative, who stated that the plight of Agatu people deserved national and international attention, stressed that it would be difficult for the affected people to rebuild their communities without external help.

In my 20 years of working as a humanitarian, I have never seen such a level of destruction. If steps are not taken, the crisis can affect the country as a whole, she said.

She noted that the damage to Agatu was similar to what was happening in the North-East, and assured that her agency would aid in the rehabilitation of the displaced persons.

In her address at the Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, at the Ugbokpo camp, Atangana said that the UNHCR-Nigeria had donated non-food items worth over N20 million to the IDPs, stating that the items were in the custody of the State Emergency Management Agency, SEMA, in Makurdi, the state capital.
The 12-year-old Nigerian girl, identified simply as Queen, who was allegedly raped serially by her father, Bamekpa, with her four-month-old pregnancy crudely aborted, has said she could not count the number of times Bamekpa allegedly forcibly had canal knowledge of her.

There has been public outrage against the incident, which occurred at Imiringi, Ogbia Local Government Area, Bayelsa State, since it was reported by The Nation, with many people calling for Bamekpas arrest and prosecution.

Although the suspect was said to have been arrested and detained at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the state police command, there were indications that the police had not taken the matter further.

The statement of the abused girl was yet to be taken at press time, while the police

was yet to meet officially with Operation Rescue (OR), the non-governmental organisation (NGO) handling the matter. Other persons indicted in the crime had also not been arrested.

But Queen relived her ordeal in the hands of her father and called on the Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, to step in and facilitate the process of bringing the man to justice.

I want my father to be thrown into prison, the traumatised SS1 student said. I feel pained that a man I called my father used me many times to satisfy his sexual urge.

She said each time her father came, she would cry and beg him to stop but he would not listen to her. She said on one occasion, her father beat her to submission before forcing himself into her.

Narrating how it all started in 2015, she said: He started sleeping with me in 2015. The first time he did it, I was in my room reading when he came in. He asked me the kind of school I would like to go. Then he came close to me. When I stood up to go, he asked me to wait and started touching me all over my body. I asked him what he was doing but he told me to keep quiet and immediately pushed me into the bed. He tied my hands backwards. When he saw that I was shouting, he covered my mouth with his hand, He started doing it increasingly from that time. I always cried and begged him to leave me but he would not listen. She said she was afraid to discuss her ordeal with anybody because her father threatened to kill her if she did. She, however, said the bubble burst when she began to show signs of pregnancy.

She said: When I became pregnant, I didnt know. My stepmother saw the signs and suspected that I was pregnant. It was when she began to ask me who impregnated me that I told her. I learnt she has moved out of the house.

The teenager said her life became more traumatic when her father allegedly commenced the process of aborting the pregnancy. She said the method was crude and opened a chapter of health problems in her life.

She said: My father, seeing that I was pregnant, took me to do an abortion. He took me to Elebele and handed me over to his female friend named Peace, who took me to a house in Otu-Aba. They did not allow me to see the process, but I saw the instruments. It was very painful. After that day, I started bleeding because he didnt abort the pregnancy completely. I was taken back to Otu-Aba on December 5 and from there, we went to Otu-Asiga to flush the remaining one. I discovered later that my body system had been messed up. I noticed I was no longer menstruating. It was just recently that I was taken to the Federal Medical Centre (FMC) where an operation was done on me with something like a container inserted into me. They called it a minor operation. I went back to FMC on Thursday to remove the container.

Queen said she could no longer go to school because of the problems created by her father. I feel very bad. I want the police oga (police boss) to put him in prison. He has been doing similar things to many people, she said.

Queens nephew, David Apigi, who reported the matter to Operation Rescue, asked the police to speedily and diligently prosecute the matter. He confirmed that her niece went through an operation at FMC.

He said: The operation was done on her private part and a container was inserted into her. She went back on Thursday to have the container removed, he said.

The Coordinator, Operation Rescue, Princess Elizabeth Egbe, said the police had promised to effect the arrest of other suspects after taking Queens statement. She said the Officer in Charge, Family Unity, Edith Washington, said the statement of the violated girl would be taken after her medical check.

She, however, said the NGO had no suspicion that the police were trying to sweep the matter under the carpet until they failed to effect arrest and commence prosecution within a reasonable time frame.

She said initially, the policemen in charge of the case said they had no money to go to the crime scene. She, however, said the police commissioner later made a financial provision for them to go there.

She said: The police said they would commence the arrest of suspects after they get the girls statement today after her medical checks. They have not got the statement of the girl. I dont have any suspicion that the police are trying to hide the matter. The police said the suspect is in the state CID but we have not sighted him. The police have not been able to invite us officially for a meeting. For now, I cannot hold them till after she has given her statement. The police said they didnt have money to go to the crime scene but the commissioner made a provision for them to go there. If they failed to arrest the doctor and the lady, we will commence our campaign.

Further lamenting her condition, 27-year-old Joy, who said she was raped serially by Bamekpa when she was between six and seven years old, appealed to the police to diligently handle the matter and ensure that justice is served.

Recalling the second time the suspect raped her, she said: While I was playing with other children, he called me and asked me to go to his room and get pineapple. When I went to his room, he came in and shut the door. He held me and pushed me into his bed.

While I was shouting, he was laughing at me, boasting that even if I shouted with all my energy, nobody would come and rescue me. I shouted but nobody came.

When contacted, the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Bayelsa State Command of the Nigeria Police Force, Butswat Asinim, a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), said the matter was being handled by the police. He assured that the matter would not be swept under the carpet, particularly because it involves sexual abuse of a minor.

Source:BreakingTimes
Punch

With the current fuel scarcity across the country, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, has come under attack on social media, especially since he told Nigerians that queues at petrol stations could continue till May.

Vanguard

President Muhammadu Buhari has said that the Federal Government is determined to significantly reduce the high bill for importation of food products to Nigeria.

Thisday

Sequel to revelations made by the embattled Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party, Dr Tope Aluko that the 2014 governorship poll in Ekiti State was rigged, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress , Mr Olusegun Osinkolu , has vowed that the party would resist attempt to subvert the will of the voters in the next elections.

The Sun

THERE was great jubilation in major towns and cities in Abia State last Thursday as news filtered into the air that the Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA) candidate at the Abia North Senatorial rerun poll, Dr. Orji Kalu has filed a suit at the tribunal against the controversial outcome of the March 5, 2016 rerun poll.

Daily Times

The Lagos State Government has clarified reports making rounds on social media that the monthly environmental sanitation has been outlawed, saying that the policy on the monthly exercise had not been reviewed for now.

Guardian

Governor Umaru Al-Makura of Nasarawa State has approved the appointment of Sole Administrators in 11 out of the 13 local government areas in the state.

Daily Trust

The leaders and members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Kwara Central senatorial zone have challenged the partys national chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, to rise to the occasion on the ongoing trial of the Senate president, Bukola Saraki, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT).

Leadership

Alhaji Bashir Rimi-Zaya, Publicity Secretary of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Bauchi state, has commended President Muhammadu Buhari for measures taken to curb insurgency in the country.

National Mirror

Police detectives attached to the Domestic Violence Unit of the Festac Police Station Lagos State Police Command are investigating a 27-year-old lady identified as simply as Sandra for allegedly battering her Indian lover.

The Nation

Several former high-ranking officials in the Jonathan administration have started returning looted funds, it was learnt last night.

Tribune

Renowned Lagos lawyer and activist, Dr. Tunji Braithwaite, will be buried on April 28, 2016.
President Muhammadu Buhari has reiterated the federal governments commitment to significantly reduce the very high bill for importation of food products to Nigeria.

Speaking at a bilateral meeting with the Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Rasmussen, on the sidelines of the 4th Nuclear Security Summit in Washington DC, Mr. Buhari also reaffirmed his administrations commitment to the rapid diversification of Nigerias economy.

We developed a mono-product economy and lost opportunities to diversify in the past, he said.

We have great potentials for agriculture and solid minerals. We are now determined to exploit them to the fullest. Addressing the past neglect of these two sectors will help to reduce unemployment and make us a more productive country.

We will welcome more investment in our agriculture and solid minerals sectors from countries with expertise in the two sectors. We abandoned them for petroleum. Now, we have to go back.

Our bill for the importation of food and dairy products is very high. We want to cut it as much as possible by developing our local potentials, the president told Mr. Rasmussen.

Mr. Buhari assured the Danish prime minister that the federal government would continue to work in partnership with other countries to further improve maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea.

While stressing the determination of his administration to stop the huge loss of revenue from crude oil theft, the president disclosed that he received assurances of international support to curb illegal shipments of Nigerias crude oil.

Remarking that his country is a major shipping nation, Mr. Rasmussen thanked Mr. Buhari for Nigerias current efforts to enhance security in the Gulf of Guinea.

He also assured the president that Danes would be very interested in investing in the development of Nigerias agricultural sector if the right policies and conditions are put in place.

We are quite experienced in agriculture. It is an area in which we can cooperate. If you pave the way and remove the obstacles, we will like to come in, the Prime Minister told Mr. Buhari.
The All Progressives Congress, APC, in Rivers State has said after a careful analysis of the facts on ground, it has come to the conclusion that the March 19 National and State Assembly rerun elections in Rivers were nothing but mere allocation of votes to the ruling party in the State, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

The party also said the INEC officials did so to avoid being killed by the state governor, Nyesom Wike and his gang of killers.

The Rivers APC Chairman, Dr. Davies Ikanya, who made the partys position known in a statement on Sunday in Port Harcourt, the state capital, outrightly rejected the results so far announced by the electoral commission.

Mr. Ikanya said nothing short of total cancellation of the process and the holding of fresh rerun polls would be acceptable to Rivers APC.

We wish to put on record our total and uncompromising rejection of the results of the March 19, 2016 rerun elections so far announced by INEC as these do not in any way reflect the current political realities on ground in Rivers State.

These results, which indicate a mysterious landslide victory for PDP, were allocated to the ruling party in the State following unrelenting threats by Governor Nyesom Wike to the effect that anybody coming to conduct any election that would not favour PDP should first write their wills before coming to the State.

The effect of these threats and their practical demonstration as seen in how people were burnt, beheaded and buried alive during the rerun elections can clearly be seen in the shameful manner INEC is awarding victory to PDP, he said.

The party said there was nothing different between what happened on March 19, 2016 and during the widely discredited elections of March 28 and April 11, 2015 cancelled by the courts, which also ordered the rerun elections.

It said this was not a coincidence considering that the apparatus used for both elections were basically the same.

From the Police leadership to most of the INEC officials and INEC ad-hoc staff, the characters that organised the 2015 general elections were the same characters that organised the March 19, 2016 rerun elections and it will be foolhardy to expect any different result. All these characters were set up by the former disgraced PDP administration rejected by Nigerians during the 2015 polls, Rivers APC said.

Mr. Ikanya also lampooned Governor Wike for claiming that APC was not in a position to win an election in the State, and for accusing Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, of sponsoring violence in the state in a bid to remain politically relevant.

Everyone knows that Wike is the one who has been sponsoring violence in Rivers State and not Amaechi, the APC chair said, adding: If Amaechi did not employ violence as Governor of Rivers State to stop Wike from succeeding him in 2015, is it now that he is far away in Abuja as a Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria that he would do so?

Rather than the vain attempt to drag his name into the mud, Amaechi should be commended for not encouraging APC members to retaliate the wanton killing of its members by PDP, which would have turned Rivers State into another Somalia.

If Wike feels that he is very popular let him allow free and fair election devoid of his gang of killers and he will see how he is hated in Rivers State.

Time will tell the heroic role played by Amaechi in this dispensation. As we watch the macabre dance in Rivers State, we expect the APC Government at the centre not to allow PDP to decimate our ranks any further in view of the strategic roles we played in freeing Nigeria from the inept PDP administration that would have completely grounded the country if it was reelected.
Ingenious surgeons have helped save a Brazilian mans hand from being amputated by putting it inside a pocket in his belly. Doctors decided to bury Carlos Mariottis left hand inside his abdomen and cover it with a flap of protective skin, after the machine production operator suffered a horrific work accident that ripped off all the skin on his hand. The 42-year-old who lives in Orleans in the south of Brazil, must now keep his damaged hand inside the soft tissue pouch for six weeks.

Orthopaedic and traumatology doctor, Boris Brandao, who performed the rare operation, explained: (Mr Marriott) suffered a de-gloving injury which left him with very little skin on the palm and back of his hand, exposing the bones and tendons inside. This was a very large and delicate injury and the only place we could fit the whole hand was in the abdomen. Without this procedure, there would be a high risk of infection and the tissue and tendons would rot away, Dr Brandao said.

Mr Mariotti who remains hospitalised in the Santa Otilia Hospital said he is a very lucky man: I still get very emotional when I think about the accident. But it was only when doctors told me I could lose my hand that I realised the gravity of the situation. When I woke up from the operation I didnt know whether it was still there. I couldnt believe it when they said they had tucked my hand inside me.

Heavy bandages around the mans midriff keeps his arm firmly in place. But doctors have warned that he must move the hand gently around to avoid [it] becoming stiff. Its a really weird feeling trying to wiggle my fingers inside my body and creepy seeing my tummy protrude slightly as I prod around, Mr Mariotti said.

UK Independent.
Islamophobia is on the rise in the United States and US presidential candidates have targeted Muslims during the election campaign, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said during a visit to the country. Speaking on Saturday at the opening of a Turkish-sponsored mosque and religious complex outside Washington, Erdogan also said recent attacks in Brussels and Paris cannot compare to countries such as Turkey and Pakistan had endured over the years, in terms of violent attacks by hardline groups.

The Turkish leader was in the US mainly to participate in a nuclear summit in Washington. Al Jazeeras John Hendren was at the opening ceremony of the complex, which includes prayer and cultural facilities, including a Turkish bath. Thousands have come here to hear him [Erdogan] speak, said our correspondent.

There are Turkish flags here with the words I love Turkey on them. He has generated some enthusiasm, on an otherwise controversial trip. On Thursday, US President Barack Obama reaffirmed the US commitment to Turkeys security during a meeting with Erdogan, while also discussing both countries efforts to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), the White House said.

The president extended condolences to President Erdogan on behalf of the American people for those killed and injured in todays terrorist attack in Diyarbakir, and reaffirmed the support of the United States for Turkeys security and our mutual struggle against terrorism, the White House said. The leaders also discussed how to advance our shared effort to degrade and destroy ISIL. In a statement on Friday, Turkeys presidential office said the two NATO leaders discussed cooperation on resolving the refugee crisis and how partners in the fight against ISIL can ramp up their efforts.
The head of the Ohios insurance fund for injured workers is stepping down from his job this month.

Gov. John Kasichs office announced that Steve Buehrer is resigning as administrator and CEO of the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation.

Buehrer has led the agency for more than five years. His last day is April 15.

In his letter of resignation, Buehrer told the governor he had accepted a position in the private sector. He didnt elaborate on the role.

The governors office released the letter to The Associated Press.

Buehrer thanked Kasich for the opportunity to lead the agency and said he was proud to be a member of his Cabinet.

Sarah Morrison, the bureaus chief legal officer, will serve as interim administrator and CEO.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Workers' Compensation Ohio
Francesi di nuovo alle urne per il secondo turno delle elezioni legislative. Esito scontato, secondo gli ultimi sondaggi che assegnano a La Repubblique En Marche del presidente Emmanuel Macron tra i 440 e i 470 seggi.

Tutta lopposizione dovrebbe spartirsi i restanti 100: meta ai Republicains, poco piu di una ventina ai socialisti, una decina ai radicali di sinistra di Jean-Luc Melenchon, il resto  da uno a 4  al Front National. Probabilmente sara Marine Le Pen a fare il suo ingresso per la prima volta in Parlamento (al terzo tentativo e in ballottaggio favorevole nella sua circoscrizione a nord). Ma se i quasi 11 milioni di voti delle presidenziali dovessero portare addirittura a una diminuzione della rappresentanza in Parlamento (attualmente per il Fn i seggi sono 2, ma rischiano di dimezzarsi) la disfatta degli avversari di Macron sarebbe completa.

Una maggioranza schiacciante rischia di escludere ogni possibilita di dibattito, Emmanuel Macron avra tutte le chiavi in mano lamenta Francois Baroin, leader dei Republicains che dovra anche occuparsi di mediare fra i Macron-compatibili del suo partito e gli irriducibili che vogliono stare comunque allopposizione. Melenchon arriva a mettere in guardia contro unAssemblee Nationale dove lopposizione avra meno deputati di quelli su cui puo contare lopposizione in Russia. Eppure, un sondaggio Elabe aveva svelato nei giorni scorsi che il 61% dei francesi avrebbe preferito correggere il voto del primo turno, nel senso di un riequilibrio della situazione in campo.

Ma non sara impresa facile, dal momento che spesso il candidato Lrm promosso al ballottaggio attirera molto piu del proprio avversario voti dispersi di chi e stato eliminato. Pesa poi lincognita astensionismo, dopo il record del 51,3% stabilito 15 giorni fa: secondo un sondaggio diffuso ieri sera, il 53% di francesi avrebbe gia deciso di non andare a votare domani. Lidea prevalente al primo turno che tutto sia gia deciso in favore di Macron e diventata ormai una convinzione generale.
Un ottobre da sogno per Antonio Conte: lex ct della Nazionale italiana, attualmente alla guida del Chelsea, nelle ultime quattro gare di Premier League ha collezionato solo successi, conditi da 11 reti segnate e addirittura nessuna incassata. Numeri da record che non sono certo passati inosservati alla Federazione inglese, la quale ha conferito al tecnico leccese lambito premio di Manager del mese.

Unavventura oltremanica iniziata in sordina, quella di Conte, pur a fronte di tre vittorie nelle prime tre gare di campionato. A far vacillare, anche se solo per un momento, le certezze del patron del club londinese, Roman Abramovich, i risultati conseguiti tra la 4a e la 6a giornata, coincisi con un pareggio sul campo dello Swansea City e, soprattutto, con le due pesanti sconfitte subite dal Liverpool, sul terreno casalingo di Stamford Bridge, e dallArsenal. In particolare, la debacle interna coi Reds, aveva irritato non poco il numero uno russo, poiche occorsa proprio nel giorno della sua 250esima partita da presidente della societa.

Come detto, solo un momento. Dopo lincontro dellEmirates, il tecnico salentino cambia modulo, adottando un piu equilibrato 3-4-3 e inserendo elementi di corsa come lo spagnolo Pedro. Una svolta totale perche, di li in poi, il Chelsea inanellera solo e soltanto vittorie: 2 gol allHull City e al Southampton in trasferta, 3 ai campioni dInghilterra del Leicester e 4 allo United in casa, con un meraviglioso numero zero nella casella delle reti subite. Un fantastico poker, ottenuto tra l1 e il 29 ottobre. Un cambio di marcia sbalorditivo, confermato dal 5 a 0 rifilato ai toffees dellEverton nel primo match di novembre, e una scalata che, man mano, ha portato i blues al secondo posto in classifica, a soli 2 punti dal Liverpool capolista.

E allora, non poteva mancare il riconoscimento di migliore allenatore del mese, ottenuto surclassando tecnici del calibro di Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool), Arsene Wenger (Arsenal) e Mark Hughes (Southampton). Tanta, ovviamente, la soddisfazione: E un grande onore e voglio condividerlo con i giocatori e con la societa  ha dichiarato Conte sul sito ufficiale della Premier League -. E la prima volta che lavoro in un altro Paese, con una cultura diversa, e portare la propria filosofia non e facile, ma ora sono contento di questa scelta.

A completare la festa, la premiazione del fantasista belga, Eden Hazard, come miglior giocatore di ottobre. Due risultati importanti per il club, ottimo incentivo per la rincorsa al trono dei campioni, occupato dal Leicester di Ranieri. Il prossimo appuntamento per l11 di Conte sara al Riverside Stadium, tana del Middlesborough neopromosso. Il tempo di festeggiare e gia finito.
Buying shares in mutual funds can be intimidating for beginning investors. There is a huge amount of funds available, all with different investment strategies and asset groups. Trading shares in mutual funds are different from trading shares in stocks or exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The fees charged for mutual funds can be complicated. Understanding these fees is important since they have a large impact on the performance of investments in a fund.

What Are Mutual Funds?

A mutual fund is an investment company that takes money from many investors and pools it together in one large pot. The professional manager for the fund invests the money in different types of assets including stocks, bonds, commodities, and even real estate. An investor buys shares in the mutual fund. These shares represent an ownership interest in a portion of the assets owned by the fund. Mutual funds are designed for longer-term investors and are not meant to be traded frequently due to their fee structures.

Mutual funds are often attractive to investors because they are widely diversified. Diversification helps to minimize risk to an investment. Rather than having to research and make an individual decision as to each type of asset to include in a portfolio, mutual funds offer a single comprehensive investment vehicle. Some mutual funds can have thousands of different holdings. Mutual funds are also very liquid. It is easy to buy and redeem shares in mutual funds.

There is a wide variety of mutual funds to consider. A few of the major fund types are bond funds, stock funds, balanced funds, and index funds.

Bond funds hold fixed-income securities as assets. These bonds pay regular interest to their holders. The mutual fund makes distributions to mutual fund holders of this interest.

Stock funds make investments in the shares of different companies. Stock funds seek to profit mainly by the appreciation of the shares over time, as well as dividend payments. Stock funds often have a strategy of investing in companies based on their market capitalization, the total dollar value of a companys outstanding shares. For example, large-cap stocks are defined as those with market capitalizations over $10 billion. Stock funds may specialize in large-, mid-or small-cap stocks. Small-cap funds tend to have higher volatility than large-cap funds.

Balanced funds hold a mix of bonds and stocks. The distribution among stocks and bonds in these funds varies depending on the funds strategy. Index funds track the performance of an index such as the S&P 500. These funds are passively managed. They hold similar assets to the index being tracked. Fees for these types of funds are lower due to infrequent turnover in assets and passive management.

How Mutual Funds Trade

The mechanics of trading mutual funds are different from those of ETFs and stocks. Mutual funds require minimum investments of anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000, unlike stocks and ETFs where the minimum investment is one share. Mutual funds trade only once a day after the markets close. Stocks and ETFs can be traded at any point during the trading day.

The price for the shares in a mutual fund is determined by the net asset value (NAV) calculated after the market closes. The NAV is calculated by dividing the total value of all the assets in the portfolio, less any liabilities, by the number of outstanding shares. This is different from stocks and ETFs, wherein prices fluctuate during the trading day.

An investor is buying or redeeming mutual fund shares directly from the fund itself. This is different from stocks and ETFs, wherein the counterparty to the buying or selling of a share is another participant in the market. Mutual funds charge different fees for buying or redeeming shares.

Mutual Fund Charges and Fees

It is critical for investors to understand the type of fees and charges associated with buying and redeeming mutual fund shares. These fees vary widely and can have a dramatic impact on the performance of an investment in the fund.

Some mutual funds charge load fees when buying or redeeming shares in the fund. The load is similar to the commission paid when buying or selling a stock. The load fee compensates the sale intermediary for the time and expertise in selecting the fund for the investor. Load fees can be anywhere from 4% to 8% of the amount invested in the fund. A front-end load is charged when an investor first buys shares in the fund.

A back-end load also called a deferred sales charge, is charged if the fund shares are sold within a certain time frame after first purchasing them. The back-end load is usually higher in the first year after buying the shares but then goes down each year after that. For example, a fund may charge 6% if shares are redeemed in the first year of ownership, and then it may reduce that fee by 1% each year until the sixth year when no fee is charged.

A level-load fee is an annual charge deducted from the assets in a fund to pay for distribution and marketing costs for the fund. These fees are also known as 12b-1 fees. They are a fixed percentage of the funds average net assets. Notably, 12b-1 fees are considered part of the expense ratio for a fund.

The expense ratio includes ongoing fees and expenses for the fund. Expense ratios can vary widely but are generally 0.5 to 1.25%. Passively managed funds, such as index funds, usually have lower expense ratios than actively managed funds. Passive funds have a lower turnover in their holdings. They are not attempting to outperform a benchmark index, but just try to duplicate it, and thus do not need to compensate the fund manager for his expertise in choosing investment assets.

Load fees and expense ratios can be a significant drag on investment performance. Funds that charge loads must outperform their benchmark index or similar funds to justify the fees. Many studies show that load funds often do not perform better than their no-load counterparts. Thus, it makes little sense for most investors to buy shares in a fund with loads. Similarly, funds with higher expense ratios also tend to perform worse than low expense funds.

Because their higher expenses drag down returns, actively managed mutual funds sometimes get a bad rap as a group overall. But many international markets (especially the emerging ones) are just too difficult for direct investmentthey're not highly liquid or investor-friendlyand they have no comprehensive index to follow. In this case, it pays to have a professional manager help wade through all of the complexities, and who is worth paying an active fee for.

Risk Tolerance and Investment Goals

The first step in determining the suitability of any investment product is to assess risk tolerance. This is the ability and desire to take on risk in return for the possibility of higher returns. Though mutual funds are often considered one of the safer investments on the market, certain types of mutual funds are not suitable for those whose main goal is to avoid losses at all costs. Aggressive stock funds, for example, are not suitable for investors with very low-risk tolerances. Similarly, some high-yield bond funds may also be too risky if they invest in low-rated or junk bonds to generate higher returns.

Your specific investment goals are the next most important consideration when assessing the suitability of mutual funds, making some mutual funds more appropriate than others.

For an investor whose main goal is to preserve capital, meaning she is willing to accept lower gains in return for the security of knowing her initial investment is safe, high-risk funds are not a good fit. This type of investor has a very low-risk tolerance and should avoid most stock funds and many more aggressive bond funds. Instead, look to bond funds that invest in only highly rated government or corporate bonds or money market funds.

If an investor's chief aim is to generate big returns, they are likely willing to take on more risk. In this case, high-yield stock and bond funds can be excellent choices. Though the potential for loss is greater, these funds have professional managers who are more likely than the average retail investor to generate substantial profits by buying and selling cutting-edge stocks and risky debt securities. Investors looking to aggressively grow their wealth are not well suited to money market funds and other highly stable products because the rate of return is often not much greater than inflation.

Income or Growth?

Mutual funds generate two kinds of income: capital gains and dividends. Though any net profits generated by a fund must be passed on to shareholders at least once a year, the frequency with which different funds make distributions varies widely.

If you are looking to grow wealth over the long-term and are not concerned with generating immediate income, funds that focus on growth stocks and use a buy-and-hold strategy are best because they generally incur lower expenses and have a lower tax impact than other types of funds.

If, instead, you want to use your investment to create a regular income, dividend-bearing funds are an excellent choice. These funds invest in a variety of dividend-bearing stocks and interest-bearing bonds and pay dividends at least annually but often quarterly or semi-annually. Though stock-heavy funds are riskier, these types of balanced funds come in a range of stock-to-bond ratios.

Tax Strategy

When assessing the suitability of mutual funds, it is important to consider taxes. Depending on an investor's current financial situation, income from mutual funds can have a serious impact on an investor's annual tax liability. The more income you earn in a given year, the higher your ordinary income and capital gains tax brackets.

Dividend-bearing funds are a poor choice for those looking to minimize their tax liability. Though funds that employ a long-term investment strategy may pay qualified dividends, which are taxed at the lower capital gains rate, any dividend payments increase an investor's taxable income for the year. The best choice is to choose funds that focus more on long-term capital gains and avoid dividend stocks or interest-bearing corporate bonds.

Funds that invest in tax-free government or municipal bonds generate interest that is not subject to federal income tax. So, these products may be a good choice. However, not all tax-free bonds are completely tax-free, so make sure to verify whether those earnings are subject to state or local taxes.

Many funds offer products managed with the specific goal of tax-efficiency. These funds employ a buy-and-hold strategy and eschew dividend- or interest-paying securities. They come in a variety of forms, so it's important to consider risk tolerance and investment goals when looking at a tax-efficient fund.

There are many metrics to study before deciding to invest in a mutual fund. Mutual fund rater Morningstar (MORN) offers a great site to analyze funds and offers details on funds that include details on its asset allocation and mix between stocks, bonds, cash, and any alternative assets that may be held. It also popularized the investment style box that breaks a fund down between the market cap it focuses on (small, mid, and large cap) and investment style (value, growth, or blend, which is a mix of value and growth). Other key categories cover the following:

A funds expense ratios

An overview of its investment holdings

Biographical details of the management team

How strong its stewardship skills are

How long it has been around

For a fund to be a buy, it should have a mix of the following characteristics: a great long-term (not short-term) track record, charge a reasonably low fee compared to the peer group, invest with a consistent approach based off the style box and possess a management team that has been in place for a long time. Morningstar sums up all of these metrics in a star rating, which is a good place to start to get a feel for how strong a mutual fund has been. However, keep in mind that the rating is backward-focused.

Investment Strategies

Individual investors can look for mutual funds that follow a certain investment strategy that the investor prefers, or apply an investment strategy themselves by purchasing shares in funds that fit the criteria of a chosen strategy.

Value Investing

Value investing, popularized by the legendary investor Benjamin Graham in the 1930s, is one of the most well-established, widely used and respected stock market investing strategies. Buying stocks during the Great Depression, Graham was focused on identifying companies with genuine value and whose stock prices were either undervalued or at the very least not overinflated and therefore not easily prone to a dramatic fall.

The classic value investing metric used to identify undervalued stocks is the price-to-book (P/B) ratio. Value investors prefer to see P/B ratios at least below 3, and ideally below 1. However, since the average P/B ratio can vary significantly among sectors and industries, analysts commonly evaluate a company's P/B value in relation to that of similar companies engaged in the same business.

While mutual funds themselves do not technically have P/B ratios, the average weighted P/B ratio for the stocks that a mutual fund holds in its portfolio can be found at various mutual fund information sites, such as Morningstar.com. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of mutual funds that identify themselves as value funds, or that state in their descriptions that value investing principles guide the fund manager's stock selections.

Value investing goes beyond only considering a company's P/B value. A company's value may exist in the form of having strong cash flows and relatively little debt. Another source of value is in the specific products and services that a company offers, and how they are projected to perform in the marketplace.

Brand name recognition, while not precisely measurable in dollars and cents, represents a potential value for a company, and a point of reference for concluding that the market price of a company's stock is currently undervalued as compared to the true value of the company and its operations. Virtually any advantage a company has over its competitors or within the economy as a whole provides a source of value. Value investors are likely to scrutinize the relative values of the individual stocks that make up a mutual fund's portfolio.

Contrarian Investing

Contrarian investors go against the prevailing market sentiment or trend. A classic example of contrarian investing is selling short, or at least avoiding buying, the stocks of an industry when investment analysts across the board are virtually all projecting above-average gains for companies operating in the specified industry. In short, contrarians often buy what the majority of investors are selling and sell what the majority of investors are buying.

Because contrarian investors typically buy stocks that are out of favor or whose prices have declined, contrarian investing can be seen as similar to value investing. However, contrarian trading strategies tend to be driven more by market sentiment factors than they are by value investing strategies and to rely less on specific fundamental analysis metrics such as the P/B ratio.

Contrarian investing is often misunderstood as consisting of simply selling stocks or funds that are going up and buying stocks or funds that are going down, but that is a misleading oversimplification. Contrarians are often more likely to go against prevailing opinions than to go against prevailing price trends. A contrarian move is to buy into a stock or fund whose price is rising despite the continuous and widespread market opinion that the price should be falling.

There are plenty of mutual funds that can be identified as contrarian funds. Investors can seek out contrarian-style funds to invest in, or they can employ a contrarian mutual fund trading strategy by selecting mutual funds to invest in using contrarian investment principles. Contrarian mutual fund investors seek out mutual funds to invest in that hold the stocks of companies in sectors or industries that are currently out of favor with market analysts, or they look for funds invested in sectors or industries that have underperformed compared to the overall market.

A contrarian's attitude toward a sector that has been underperforming for several years may well be that the protracted period of time over which the sector's stocks have been performing poorly (in relation to the overall market average) only makes it more probable that the sector will soon begin to experience a reversal of fortune to the upside.

Momentum Investing

Momentum investing aims to profit from following strong existing trends. Momentum investing is closely related to a growth investing approach. Metrics considered in evaluating the strength of a mutual fund's price momentum include the weighted average price-earnings to growth (PEG) ratio of the fund's portfolio holdings, or the percentage year-over-year increase in the fund's net asset value (NAV).

Appropriate mutual funds for investors seeking to employ a momentum investing strategy can be identified by fund descriptions where the fund manager clearly states that momentum is a primary factor in his selection of stocks for the fund's portfolio. Investors wishing to follow market momentum through mutual fund investments can analyze the momentum performance of various funds and make fund selections accordingly. A momentum trader may look for funds with accelerating profits over a span of time; for example, funds with NAVs that rose by 3% three years ago, by 5% the following year and by 7% in the most recent year.

Momentum investors may also seek to identify specific sectors or industries that are demonstrating clear evidence of strong momentum. After identifying the strongest industries, they invest in funds that offer the most advantageous exposure to companies engaged in those industries.

The Bottom Line

Benjamin Graham once wrote that making money on investing should depend on the amount of intelligent effort the investor is willing and able to bring to bear on his task of security analysis. When it comes to buying a mutual fund, investors must do their homework. In some respects, this is easier than focusing on buying individual securities, but it does add some important other areas to research before buying. Overall, there are many reasons why investing in mutual funds makes sense and a little bit of due diligence can make all the differenceand provide a measure of comfort.
Biotechnology companies use living organisms and molecular biology to produce a broad range of products, including medicine and pharmaceuticals. The biotechnology sector attracted heightened attention in 2021 as the industry produced emerging vaccines, treatments, and biomedical devices to address the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, some of these companies have seen explosive revenue and profit growth.

Well-known biotechnology companies include Moderna Inc. (MRNA), Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc. (AGIO), and CRISPR Therapeutics A.G. (CRSP).

Investors who expect biotech companies to continue to grow in in 2022 may be interested in mutual funds focused on the biotech sector. These biotechnology mutual funds provide professionally managed exposure to the sector. They help minimize costs while investing in a broad range of stocks in biotech, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare.

Key Takeaways Biotechnology mutual funds significantly underperformed the benchmark Morningstar US Healthcare TR index in the past year.

Three leading biotech mutual funds ranked by one-year trailing total returns are FBTAX, FBIOX, and FBDIX.

The top holdings of these funds are AbbVie Inc., Gilead Sciences Inc., and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., respectively.

We look at three biotechnology mutual funds as ranked by eachs one-year trailing total return (TTM) as of the close of market on Dec. 16, 2021. All three of these funds focus on biotech firms, and all significantly underperformed the benchmark Morningstar US Healthcare TR index, which provided one-year trailing total returns of 18.9%. The broader health category provided total returns of 5.3% over the same period.

The performance data above and all figures below are as of Dec. 17, 2021.

Fidelity Advisor Biotechnology Fund Class A (FBTAX)

One-Year Trailing Return: -6.0%

Expense Ratio: 1.01%

Trailing-12-Month (TTM) Dividend Yield: 0.38%

Assets Under Management: $2.4 billion

Inception Date: Dec. 27, 2000

FBTAX is managed by Eirene Kontopoulos. The fund invests at least 80% of assets in companies engaged in the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of biotechnological products, services, and processes, as well as companies that benefit significantly from scientific and technological advances in biotechnology. Nearly 92% of assets are invested in biotechnology companies, with pharmaceutical companies making up most of the remainder.

FBTAX invests in a blend of growth and value stocks. Its top holdings include AbbVie Inc. (ABBV), Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. (REGN), and Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. (VRTX), all of which are biopharmaceutical or biotechnology companies.

Fidelity Select Biotechnology Portfolio (FBIOX)

One-Year Trailing Return: -14.6%

Expense Ratio: 0.70%

Trailing-12-Month (TTM) Dividend Yield: 0.17%

Assets Under Management: $7.0 billion

Inception Date: Dec. 16, 1985

FBIOX is managed by Rajiv Kaul. The fund typically invests at least 80% of its assets in companies engaged in the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of biotechnological products, services, and processes, as well as companies that benefit significantly from scientific and technological advances in biotechnology.

Nearly 89% of FBIOXs assets are invested in biotechnology companies, with the bulk of the remainder targeting pharmaceutical companies. The funds top holdings include Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD), Moderna, and AbbVie, all of which are biopharmaceutical and technology companies.

Franklin Biotechnology Discovery Fund Class A (FBDIX)

One-Year Trailing Return: -19.5%

Expense Ratio: 0.98%

Trailing-12-Month (TTM) Dividend Yield: 0.00%

Assets Under Management: $1.1 billion

Inception Date: Sept. 15, 1997

FBDIX is managed by Evan McCulloch, Wendy Lam, and Akiva Felt. The fund typically invests at least 80% of its assets in securities of biotechnology companies and discovery research firms, including those involved in fields such as genomics, genetic engineering, and gene therapy, as well as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture. Nearly 90% of assets are invested in U.S.-based companies, with the remainder divided among companies based in Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and several other countries.

FBDIX invests in a blend of growth and value stocks. Its top holdings include Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Amgen Inc. (AMGN), and Horizon Therapeutics PLC (HZNP). The first two of these are U.S.-based biopharmaceutical companies, and the third is an Ireland-based biopharmaceutical company.



The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed herein are for informational purposes only and should not be considered individual investment advice or recommendations to invest in any security or adopt any investment strategy. While we believe the information provided herein is reliable, we do not warrant its accuracy or completeness. The views and strategies described in our content may not be suitable for all investors. Because market and economic conditions are subject to rapid change, all comments, opinions, and analyses contained within our content are rendered as of the date of the posting and may change without notice. The material is not intended as a complete analysis of every material fact regarding any country, region, market, industry, investment, or strategy.
Mark Twain once divided the world into two kinds of people: those who have seen the famous Indian monument, the Taj Mahal, and those who haven't. The same could be said about investors.

There are two kinds of investors: those who know about the investment opportunities in India and those who don't. Although India's exchanges equate to less than 3% of the total global market capitalization as of 2020, upon closer inspection, you will find the same things you would expect from any promising market.

Here we'll provide an overview of the Indian stock market and how interested investors can gain exposure.

The BSE and NSE

Most of the trading in the Indian stock market takes place on its two stock exchanges: the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE). The BSE has been in existence since 1875. The NSE, on the other hand, was founded in 1992 and started trading in 1994. However, both exchanges follow the same trading mechanism, trading hours, and settlement process.

As of November 2021, the BSE had 5,565 listed firms, whereas the rival NSE had 1,920 as of Mar. 31, 2021.

Almost all the significant firms of India are listed on both the exchanges. The BSE is the older stock market but the NSE is the largest stock market, in terms of volume. Both exchanges compete for the order flow that leads to reduced costs, market efficiency, and innovation. The presence of arbitrageurs keeps the prices on the two stock exchanges within a very tight range.

1:49 An Introduction To The Indian Stock Market

Trading Mechanism

Trading at both the exchanges takes place through an open electronic limit order book in which order matching is done by the trading computer. There are no market makers and the entire process is order-driven, which means that market orders placed by investors are automatically matched with the best limit orders. As a result, buyers and sellers remain anonymous.

The advantage of an order-driven market is that it brings more transparency by displaying all buy and sell orders in the trading system. However, in the absence of market makers, there is no guarantee that orders will be executed.

All orders in the trading system need to be placed through brokers, many of which provide an online trading facility to retail customers. Institutional investors can also take advantage of the direct market access (DMA) option in which they use trading terminals provided by brokers for placing orders directly into the stock market trading system.

Settlement and Trading Hours

Equity spot markets follow a T+2 rolling settlement. This means that any trade taking place on Monday gets settled by Wednesday. All trading on stock exchanges takes place between 9:55 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., Indian Standard Time (+ 5.5 hours GMT), Monday through Friday. Delivery of shares must be made in dematerialized form, and each exchange has its own clearing house, which assumes all settlement risk by serving as a central counterparty.

Market Indexes

The two prominent Indian market indexes are Sensex and Nifty. Sensex is the oldest market index for equities; it includes shares of 30 firms listed on the BSE. It was created in 1986 and provides time series data from April 1979, onward.

Another index is the Standard and Poor's CNX Nifty; it includes 50 shares listed on the NSE. It was created in 1996 and provides time series data from July 1990, onward.

Market Regulation

The overall responsibility of development, regulation, and supervision of the stock market rests with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), which was formed in 1992 as an independent authority. Since then, SEBI has consistently tried to lay down market rules in line with the best market practices. It enjoys vast powers of imposing penalties on market participants, in case of a breach.

Who Can Invest in India?

India started permitting outside investments only in the 1990s. Foreign investments are classified into two categories: foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio investment (FPI). All investments in which an investor takes part in the day-to-day management and operations of the company are treated as FDI, whereas investments in shares without any control over management and operations are treated as FPI.

For making portfolio investments in India, one should be registered either as a foreign institutional investor (FII) or as one of the sub-accounts of one of the registered FIIs. Both registrations are granted by the market regulator, SEBI.

Foreign institutional investors mainly consist of mutual funds, pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, banks, and asset management companies. At present, India does not allow foreign individuals to invest directly in its stock market. However, high-net-worth individuals (those with a net worth of at least $50 million) can be registered as sub-accounts of an FII.

Foreign institutional investors and their sub-accounts can invest directly into any of the stocks listed on any of the stock exchanges. Most portfolio investments consist of investment in securities in the primary and secondary markets, including shares, debentures, and warrants of companies listed or to be listed on a recognized stock exchange in India.

FIIs can also invest in unlisted securities outside stock exchanges, subject to the approval of the price by the Reserve Bank of India. Finally, they can invest in units of mutual funds and derivatives traded on any stock exchange.

An FII registered as a debt-only FII can invest 100% of its investment into debt instruments. Other FIIs must invest a minimum of 70% of their investments in equity. The balance of 30% can be invested in debt. FIIs must use special non-resident rupee bank accounts in order to move money in and out of India. The balances held in such an account can be fully repatriated.

Restrictions and Investment Ceilings

The government of India prescribes the FDI limit, and different ceilings have been prescribed for different sectors. Over a period of time, the government has been progressively increasing the ceilings. FDI ceilings mostly fall in the range of 26% to 100%.

By default, the maximum limit for portfolio investment in a particular listed firm is decided by the FDI limit prescribed for the sector to which the firm belongs. However, there are two additional restrictions on portfolio investment. First, the aggregate limit of investment by all FIIs, inclusive of their sub-accounts in any particular firm, has been fixed at 24% of the paid-up capital. However, the same can be raised up to the sector cap, with the approval of the company's boards and shareholders.

Secondly, investment by any single FII in any particular firm should not exceed 10% of the paid-up capital of the company. Regulations permit a separate 10% ceiling on investment for each of the sub-accounts of an FII, in any particular firm. However, in the case of foreign corporations or individuals investing as a sub-account, the same ceiling is only 5%. Regulations also impose limits for investment in equity-based derivatives trading on stock exchanges.

Investments for Foreign Entities

Foreign entities and individuals can gain exposure to Indian stocks through institutional investors. Many India-focused mutual funds are becoming popular among retail investors. Investments could also be made through some of the offshore instruments, like participatory notes (PNs), depositary receipts, such as American depositary receipts (ADRs) and global depositary receipts (GDRs), exchange traded funds (ETFs), and exchange traded notes (ETNs).

As per Indian regulations, participatory notes representing underlying Indian stocks can be issued offshore by FIIs, only to regulated entities. However, even small investors can invest in American depositary receipts representing the underlying stocks of some of the well-known Indian firms, listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. ADRs are denominated in dollars and subject to the regulations of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Likewise, global depositary receipts are listed on European stock exchanges. However, many promising Indian firms are not yet using ADRs or GDRs to access offshore investors.

Retail investors also have the option of investing in ETFs and ETNs, based on Indian stocks. India-focused ETFs mostly make investments in indexes made up of Indian stocks. Most of the stocks included in the index are the ones already listed on the NYSE and Nasdaq.

As of 2020, two of the most prominent ETFs based on Indian stocks are the iShares MSCI India ETF (INDA) and the Wisdom-Tree India Earnings Fund (EPI). The most prominent ETN is the iPath MSCI India Index Exchange Traded Note (INPTF). Both ETFs and ETNs provide a good investment opportunity for outside investors.

The Bottom Line

Emerging markets like India are fast becoming engines for future growth. Currently, only a very low percentage of the household savings of Indians are invested in the domestic stock market, but with gross domestic product (GDP) growing at 7% to 8% annually for the last few years, though in the 6% range for 2018 and 2019, and a stable financial market, we might see more money joining the race. Maybe it's the right time for outside investors to seriously think about joining the India bandwagon.
Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) is the largest and most profitable oil and gas company in the U.S., and one of the largest companies in the world. As of July 2, 2020, the company had a market capitalization of more than $186 billion, and more than 28 million shares traded in average daily volume.

Exxon Mobil is a major integrated energy company with many energy commodity interests, including electrical power generating operations, but at the core of its business is the exploration, production, and distribution of oil and natural gas. In 2017, Exxon Mobil earned $14.3 billion and had net oil-equivalent production of 4 million barrels per day. XOM paid a dividend yield of 7.89% as of July 2020.

This is a look at some of Exxon Mobile's top competitors, which include Chevron Corp. (CVX), ConocoPhillips (COP), and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A).

Chevron Corp.

Based in San Ramon, CA, Chevron Corp. is the second-largest U.S. oil company, with a market capitalization of $164.9 billion and an average daily trading volume of more than 5.7 million shares as of July 2020. The company has integrated petroleum, chemicals, mining, and power generation operations.

Chevron had total earnings of $2.9 billion in 2019, and its annual per-share dividend payout rose for the thirtieth consecutive year. The company's average oil-equivalent production was a record of 3.06 million barrels per day. CVX had total dividends and share repurchases of $13 billion in 2019.

ConocoPhillips

ConocoPhillips, based in Houston, TX, has positioned itself as an exploration and production company within the oil and gas sector. The company engages in the worldwide exploration, production, transportation and marketing of crude oil, bitumen, natural gas, natural gas liquids, and liquefied natural gas.

As of July 2020, the company's market capitalization was $44.8 billion, and its average daily trading volume was 4.7 million shares. COP paid a dividend yield of 1.68%.

ConocoPhillips earned a total of $36.7 billion in 2019, and it produced over 1,348 barrels of oil equivalent per day. The company also had another 5.3 billion reserves of oil equivalent during the year.

Royal Dutch Shell, PLC

Royal Dutch Shell is another major integrated oil company. However, it's not based in the U.S. Headquartered in the Netherlands and incorporated in London, the company had a market capitalization of more than $124.9 billion as of July 2020, with more than 4.2 million shares traded in average daily volume.

Royal Dutch Shell had net earnings of more than $15.8 billion in 2019 and ended with reserves of 11,096 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Unlike many other oil companies, Shell is actively looking into alternative energy sources. The company has interests in seven wind energy projects in North America and Europe. One project is an offshore wind project in the Netherlands. It anticipates that its future growth will come from its upstream operations, where technological advances will help the company find new liquid and natural gas reserves. The company also has growth strategies in integrated gas and underwater drilling.
A woman from Texas is currently traveling around Ireland with a stranger who has the same name as her ex-boyfriend, and her new boyfriend. Quite the vacation!

Laura Hall had booked the vacation to tour Northern Ireland for her ex-boyfriend, while they were still together. She and her ex are avid Game of Thrones fans. Sadly, the pair split up before the vacation, but this didnt deter Hall.

Determined not to let the tickets go to waste she decided to invite a stranger with the same name as her ex to join her on their dream holiday. Not only that but she was giving another diehard GoT fan a chance to experience the Ultimate "Game of Thrones" tour.

Hall told Dermy Tours, on YouTube, We bought the tickets and had only been dating for two months, but of course we broke up two months later because I get bored easily.

Anyway, I was left with this extra ticket which is non-refundable and also non-transferable.

I decided I wasnt going to let it go to waste. So I went on Facebook and searched for my ex-boyfriends name, Nathan Bayless. I found six living in America and one living in Austin.

So I sent him a message saying Hey Ive got this extra ticket, your name is Nathan Bayless, I broke up with my Nathan Bayless, do you want to come to Ireland?

Apparently Bayless responded with a little trepidation but eventually said yes. Hes currently traveling around Ireland with Hall and her new Irish boyfriend, Taylor.

Bayless said, When she asked me I was like Yes absolutely, can we chat about this for a second? So here we are.

This video just shows what a great time theyre having. The poor auld original Nathan Bayless!
A last desperate effort to solve the disappearance of Irish American Annie McCarrick when she lived in Ireland in 1993 is underway with a special police unit that deals with cold cases taking over.

Various theories, including that she may have been murdered by a serial killer who was apparently operating in the region during that time when several young women disappeared, have surfaced.

But Nancy, the mother of Annie McCarrick, a Long Island native whose disappearance is one of Irelands most high-profile unsolved cases, has said she knows she will never see her daughter again.

The 26-year-old Irish American was living in Dublin with two female roommates when she went missing in March 1993.

The last unconfirmed sighting of her was at 9pm on March 26 at Johnnie Foxs Pub in Glencullen.

The Garda Serious Crime Review Team or Cold Case Unit has taken over the case.

The Irish Independent reports that Annies mother Nancy traveled from her home in New York to talk to the Cold Case team and RTEs Crimecall, a crime-investigation program, about her daughters appearance.

Speaking on Crimecall, Nancy told presenters that she now just wants to get her daughters body back.

"And its been a long time, such a very long time. Im pretty sure you know that Ill never see her again, she said.

But I guess my greatest wish would be to be able to take her home. And have a grave that I could go to.

"So to find out what happened to her really would be a great gift at this point. It really would."

Detective Superintendent Walter OSullivan said: "Investigators investigating her disappearance collected information at the time, to say that Annie visited Johnnie Foxs Pub here, in the village of Glencullen, high in the Dublin Mountains.

"The information suggests that she was sometime here in the pub between 9pm and 11pm. It was Friday, it was the 26th March, it was 1993."

Det Supt O'Sullivan said that Annie loved to walk in the village of Enniskerry in Co Wicklow.

She was sighted on the 44 Bus from Ranelagh to Enniskerry at approximately 3.40pm.

"We are reasonably satisfied that her journey took her beyond Milltown, but did she reach the village of Enniskerry? said OSullivan.

"Would she have walked from Enniskerry to Johnnie Foxs on that cold, wet, miserable evening?

"Enniskerry is 6km away. It would have been dark. It would have possibly been between 8 and 9 oclock when she embarked on her journey. Would Annie have walked this road?"

OSullivan appealed to anyone with information to come forward and help solve the case.

Her mother was due to arrive for a vist in 1993, but on March 26th, days before she was due to arrive, Annie failed to pick up her paycheck from the restaurant where she worked and did not turn up at a dinner party.

Annie's parents immediately suspected something was wrong.

Annie's father, John McCarrick, who has since passed away, stated at the time: "She would never have gone a day without talking to someone. We were very, very concerned."
Annie Moore, a 17-year-old Irish girl, became the first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island in New York City on January 1, 1892.

But a new and important chapter was added to her story in April 2016, when her living descendants in the US met with her surviving relatives from Ireland.

Genealogist Megan Smolenyak, who also discovered in 2006 that history had pinned the Ellis Island legacy on the wrong Annie Moore, completed her years-long search for the family Moore left behind in Ireland.

And a few years previous, relatives of Moores from each side of the Atlantic finally met.

Paul Linehan, a 47-year-old tenor from Narraghmore, Co Kildare, and Michael Shulman, a financial analyst from Silver Springs, Maryland, had lunch with Smolenyak at the appropriately named Annie Moores Pub in Manhattan. They then attended the Irish America Hall of Fame luncheon, where Linehan sang a poignant rendition of Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears, the ballad about Annie Moores journey.

Moore set sail from Cobh (then Queenstown) Co Cork on board the Nevada with her two younger brothers, Anthony and Phillip. Today, there is a statue in Cobh commemorating their departure.

The siblings arrived in New York Harbor on January 1, 1892, the day that Ellis Island opened its doors, and Annie was the very first of close to 12 million immigrants who would be processed through Ellis Island between that day and its closure in 1954.

Annie was awarded an American $10 piece at the time and was written about in newspapers, but in the decades that followed her story was largely forgotten. By the time interest in the first Ellis Island immigrant was renewed, it was thought that Annie Moore died in Texas in 1923 after being hit by a streetcar.

The only problem was that records stated that this Annie had been born in Illinois, but this was largely overlooked and the Texan Annies descendants attended Ellis Island-related for the centenary in her honor.

IrishCentral History Love Irish history? Share your favorite stories with other history buffs in the IrishCentral History Facebook group.

Then, in 2006, Smolenyak tracked down the real Annie, who settled in New York City and led the kind of small, difficult life common to so many immigrants at the time. She joined her parents in a tenement in the Lower Eastside, likely never traveling farther than a few blocks beyond the neighborhood after her journey across the Atlantic. She married a bakery clerk, with whom she had eleven children, five of whom died before the age of three. And then Annie herself died in 1924 at the age of 50 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

Smolenyak was also able to track down the real Annies descendants, and in 2008 they were part of an official commemoration ceremony at Calvary Cemetery, at which Annies grave was marked with a proper headstone.

Read more The fascinating history of Cobh in Co Cork

Smolenyak then set herself the additional  much more complicated  goal of finding the living descendants of the Moore family who remained in Ireland. She chronicled her process in an issue of IrishCentrals sister publication Irish America magazine, and its a fascinating read.

Speaking with Sam Roberts of the New York Times, Linehan and Shulman expressed their mutual respect for Annie and amazement at meeting each other.

Two weeks ago no one was aware of this connection, Annie Moore was just a statue to us, Linehan said.

Stories of immigration in Ireland are 10 to a penny. But there was a strong push from my family to build a bridge between the Irish and American cousins.

As fate would have it, Linehan had visited Ellis Island on a trip to New York in 2000, never thinking that he was related to Annie Moore.

Shulman, whose full name is Michael James Patrick Shulman, knew of family lore that they were descended from Annie and tried to track down relatives during a trip to Ireland in 1978, bringing his mothers Bible with him, but he was overwhelmed by the vast number of Irish with the surname Moore.

A larger family reunion is in the works.

Sign up to IrishCentral's newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish! Subscribe to IrishCentral

* Originally published in April 2016. Updated in 2022.
Ireland is not the only country where St Patrick is a patron saint.

In 1961, the same year Ireland opened an embassy in Lagos, Irish bishops named St Patrick the patron saint of Nigeria.



NPR reports that the Irish have a long history in the country. In the 1890s, Roger Casement, who was executed in Dublin in 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising, served as a British consular officer in Calabar, in southeastern Nigeria. In the 1920s, Irish priests of the Order of the Holy Ghost set up a mission in the country. St. Patrick's Society for Foreign Missions, dedicated on March 17, 1932, became one of several Catholic groups in Nigeria providing both religious and secular education.

Today, there are around 20 million Catholics in the country, and Nigerian priests have even recently been assigned to churches in Ireland, where the clergy has long been in decline.

However, unlike in Ireland, St Patricks Day is not an official public holiday in Nigeria. Although Eoghan McSwiney, deputy head of mission at the Embassy of Ireland in Abuja, told NPR: Irish diplomats, of course, celebrate St. Patrick's Day. The Embassy organizes high-profile St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the capital Abuja, and in Lagos, as well as in Accra, Ghana. We are joined by friends and colleagues from the diplomatic corps and from the highest levels of the Nigerian public and private sector."

Although Nigerians dont celebrate St Patricks Day with a parade or the usual festivities, they will be drinking Irelands favorite beer. Guinness, brewed here with sorghum or maize instead of barley, is the second most popular beer in the country.

*Originally published in 2016. Updated in March 2022.
One of Americas most iconic stories, the struggle for the Alamo, has evolved over time to become one of the most defining moments in American history.

Consequently, the fact that the largest percentage of the doomed Alamo garrison consisted of Irishmen (either born on the Emerald Isle, or the sons and grandsons of Irish immigrant-both Protestant and Catholic) has seemed entirely incongruous to what generations of Americans have been told about the Alamo.

When you visit The Alamo the Irish tricolor is one of the seven international flags to acknowledge those from other countries who fought at the historic battle.

Despite the widespread scholarship devoted to the Texas Revolution, and especially the Alamo, the fascinating story of the Celtic-Gaelic people (both Irish Protestants and Catholics) has been excluded from the Alamo saga. Instead, popular historians have focused primarily on the well-known leaders of the 1835-1836 conflict between the Texian (Texas) colonists and Mexico and outdated, traditional views.

Unfortunately, the views from below  those of the ordinary people, and none in Texas were more common than those men and women from Ireland  have remained largely absent from the Alamos dramatic story.

Many notable Sons of Erin were the forgotten players of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, although their contributions were critically important and disproportionate to the ultimate victory.

Partly because of the enduring stereotype that the Irish immigrants who migrated to America remained ensconced in ethnic ghettos in the large northeastern cities like New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston instead of pushing west (just like the American people in general) has resulted in the misconception that these Celtic-Gaelic people were not leading players in the Texas Revolution.

Some of the Irishmen who fought during the Texas Revolution, including more than a dozen Ireland-born soldiers who died at the Alamo, still wore revered silver medallions of St. Patrick around their necks, spoke Gaelic, and still longed for the sight of their beautiful Green Isle homeland so far away.

Even on the southwestern Texas frontier, this resilient Celtic-Gaelic people, the western worlds longtime underdogs because of centuries of English imperialism and military power, still possessed the vivid memories of the past revolutionary struggles of their rebellious forefathers on the Emerald Isle.

Therefore, when the Celtic-Gaelic people faced the Republic of Mexicos soldados (soldiers) on battlefields across Texas in 1835-1836, hundreds of Emerald Isle volunteers still carried distinctive Irish folkways, egalitarian ways-of-thinking, value systems, and Celtic-Gaelic cultural legacies with them into battle.

Most of all, these Sons of Erin possessed an almost instinctive desire to free themselves of the arbitrary rule of a distant centralized government, remaining as militant and defiant on Texas soil as on Irelands Old Sod. A seamless and smooth transition of revolutionary sentiments, republican proclivities, egalitarian aspirations, and nationalistic aspirations deeply rooted in the Irish experience that were transferred from the Atlantics east side to the southwest frontier of Texas.

~~~~~~~~

Today, the Alamos legacy has remained alive and well in Ireland, where a close identification has long existed with the independence struggles of people around the world, including Texas.

During the early spring of 2004, an Irish nationalist site was about to be torn down by a demolition crew for progressive urban development. This ramshackle house was located at Number 16, Moore Street, Dublin, Ireland. Here, in the historic heart of old Dublin, beside the Liffey River, courageous nationalistic leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood saw their most idealistic dreams of an independent Republic of Ireland succumb to a tragic death in the doomed 1916 Easter Uprising, after bitter street fighting in Dublin.

Outgunned and outnumbered in a no-win situation, the surrounded Irish revolutionaries surrendered unconditionally to end the Easter Uprising. This bloody closing curtain of still another failed nationalist Irish revolt against British rule was fought around this nondescript Moore Street house during a final heroic drama, which thereafter became known as Irelands Alamo to the Irish people.

In a distinct historical parallel that was played out on Dublins streets, around 4,700 miles distant from the central plains of Texas and the little town of San Antonio de Bexar, the Alamos story has long struck a resonant chord with Irelands history-minded and liberty-loving citizens.

Consequently, the Irish have long identified with the Alamos heroic and defiant symbolism that represented a spirited defense of cherished republican principles and a tenacious last stand against the odds by homespun citizen-soldiers, who fought against the dictatorial rule of a powerful, centralized government.

Most importantly, this small Dublin house, which symbolized the heroic last stand of Irelands 1916 nationalists of the Easter Uprising, has been long revered as Irelands Alamo. While the Alamo has become an iconic symbol of liberty to freedom-loving people around the world, few Americans today have heard of the equally dramatic story of Irelands Alamo, which was located in an urban setting like todays Alamo in San Antonios congested center. Significantly, Ireland was disproportionately represented in the bloody struggle at El Alamo. And if the large number of Scotch-Irish and the descendants of those hardy Protestant immigrants, who had migrated much earlier to America from northern Ireland, were counted among the defenders, then no group of men more thoroughly dominated the Alamo garrisons ranksand the Texas Revolutionary Armys citizen-soldiers from 1835 to 1836 for that matter--than those citizen-soldiers of Irish and Scotch-Irish descent.

What has been even more ignored by Texas historians has been the disproportionate role played by the Irish and Scotch-Irish, including recent Green Isle immigrants, in regard to leading the way in declaring Texas independence at an early date. However, such a significant contribution to the Texas creation story should not be surprising because the Irish represented the largest white ethnic group in Texas by the time of the Texas Revolution. And likewise, no single episode of the entire Texas Revolution has been presented more devoid of its distinctive Celtic-Gaelic aspects, character, and Irishness than the Alamos story.

For generations, consequently, traditionalists have mistakenly viewed the Texas Revolution, including the Alamos dramatic story, as primarily an Anglo-Saxon (Protestant) struggle against Catholic Mexico in a much celebrated, but largely mythical, Texian Iliad (which was a distinctly Anglo-Saxon Iliad according to traditional Texas lore) without significant Irish, especially Catholic, antecedents, influences, and contributions: partly a legacy of the longtime prevalence of anti-Irish, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic sentiment that has so often dominated the story of America and Texas.

In a rather ironic distortion of the historical record, the overall importance of the Irish role throughout the Texas Revolution also has been overlooked in part because of the sheer dominance of the mythical Alamo, which has grown to legendary proportions, thanks in part to generations of myth-making Hollywood scriptwriters and uncritical historians: developments that have come at the expense of significant Irish sacrifices and achievements. Casting a giant shadow that has evolved into the realm of romance, the Alamos powerful appeal has obscured a good many of the Texas Revolutions hidden truths and complexities, especially in regard to ethnicity.

In a distortion of the historical record, historians have long traditionally portrayed the Alamo defenders during the 13-day siege as almost exclusively as Anglo-Saxon as freedom fighters of the Protestant faith. In this way, the men of the Alamo have been ethnically sanitized by presenting them as almost exactly like New Englands yeoman farmers (almost wholly of English, or Anglo-Saxon, descent), who first stood defiantly against British regulars at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in April 1775 to spark a peoples revolution: a popular stereotype and enduring romantic image in the American memory that early resulted in the Americanization of the true historical record at the expense of ethnicity. In truth, the Alamo garrison was more multi-ethnic than has been generally realized.

Of course, the emotionally-charged factor of religion also played a large role in explaining why the Irish Catholics became the most forgotten players of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. From the beginning and to this day, the Texas Revolution has been long interpreted by traditional historians primarily from the narrow Anglo-Saxon and Protestant perspective that excluded the vital contributions of the Irish Catholics, thanks largely to religious and anti-Irish prejudice. Consequently, the many Irish Catholics who fought with distinction for Texas independence suffered the same general obscurity in the historical record as those equally courageous Tejanos (Texas-born Catholics of Mexican descent), who served faithfully in the struggle for Texas liberty, including in the Alamos defense. Clearly, the true story of what happened and exactly why during the Texas Revolution, including at the Alamo, cannot be completely understood or fully appreciated without first exploring the long-forgotten influential traditions, legacies, and complexities of the Irish experience (especially revolutionary) on both sides of the Atlantic.

Distinguished by a legendary persistence to resist the dictates of arbitrary authority at seemingly every opportunity and a spirited defiance in the face of so many cruel twists of fate, the Irish proved to be a most exceptional and remarkable people throughout the course of history, and especially in the annals of the Texas Revolution.

Against the odds as historic underdogs, the Irish people were most of all survivors, including in Texas. The story of the courageous Irish who fought in the Texas Revolution was a remarkable Irish saga, because no participants in the struggle came farther or overcame greater odds than the Celtic-Gaelic soldiers, who fought and died at the Alamo and in the struggle against Mexico from 1835 to 1836. These brave Irish patriots won distinction as a diehard, moral soldiery, who were still devoted as much to St. Patrick as the adopted homeland that they loved, and were truly part of a distinguished Irish Odyssey on Texas soil.

* Excerpted from The Alamo's Forgotten Defenders: The Remarkable Story of the Irish During the Texas Revolution."
The Irish Mail on Sunday has apologised to Louise James, who lost five members of her immediate family in the Buncrana pier tragedy, for publishing comments she had thought were private.

Ms James had given comments to a reporter from the newspaper but had not consented to having those comments published, nor to being interviewed.

The Irish Mail on Sunday published an article containing her comments last weekend, and billed it 'exclusive'.

Its apology this morning reads: "Last Sunday, we published an article quoting from Louise James, who had lost her partner, mother, sister and two sons in the Buncrana tragedy.

"We wish to make it clear that Louise understood that she was speaking to our reporter in a purely private capacity and had not consented to being interviewed.

"She did not wish to give interviews to any media outlets.

"We are happy to make this clear and to apologise to Louise and her family for the upset caused."

Ms James lost her husband Sean McGrotty (46); their sons Mark (12) and Evan (8); her mother Ruth Daniels (57) and her little sister Jodie Lee Daniels (14) in the tragedy.

Her four-month-old baby Rionaghac-Ann was only saved by the actions of her partner Sean Mc Grotty in passing her out through the car window to local man Davitt Walsh.

Louise's family had requested privacy in the wake of the tragedy.

Meanwhile, writes journalist Linda McGrory, Louise's local priest has called for better self-regulation by the media during tragic events saying some press members "added to (her) pain", referring to previous press coverage.

Fr Paddy O'Kane has visited Louise (35) every day since the accident two weeks ago at Buncrana Pier.

He said the young Derry widow is "numb" and struggling to take in the enormity of the loss she suffered on the night of Sunday, March 20.

"I have visited Louise every day since it all happened. She is numb and cant take in the enormity of it all," said Fr O'Kane of Ballymagroarty parish in Derry city.

"She laughs when telling me funny stories about Sean and the children and she cries."

The tragedy was among the worst Ireland has seen and dominated news for over a week.

Writing in his weekly parish column, Donegal-born Fr O'Kane added: "While most media people were respectful of the familys need for privacy, some were not, and added to their pain.

"The media badly needs self-regulation. While so quick to point the finger of blame at others they are often slow to see their own short-comings."

Meanwhile, he said many people had commented on the strength Ms James had shown in the immediate aftermath of the accident.

"People have remarked how strong she has been, not only saying the poem and those words to Davitt at the funeral but also going to Buncrana on Sunday evening where she thanked those who came to the prayer service at the shore front. I also attended," he said.

"Just before that she went to the pier with her immediate family and floated out five little angel figurines," he added.

Fr O'Kane is in his 60s and has served for many years in the cross-border Derry Diocese. He thanked his fellow clerics including Bishop of Derry Donal McKeown for their support as the local tragedy unfolded.
That was the stark warning issued by Dublin-based GP Mark Murphy during a workshop on mobile health, telemedicine and patient confidentiality at the Irish Medical Organisations AGM in Sligo.

Dr Murphy described cyberchondria as a deep-rooted anxiety in the patient fuelled by a heightened perception that they are ill having googled their symptoms.

He said a study of 22 accredited online symptom checkers published in the British Medical Journal last year showed they overstated the risk to the patient, making them more anxious.

Dr Murphy said apps did not take into account the patients psychosocial issues.

And while he had no difficulty with patients turning to accredited websites for information on their condition, it should be after the doctor has delivered a diagnosis, to avoid situations where patients who have reflux disease think they have oesophageal cancer.

The workshop also heard from Dr Ray Walley, outgoing IMO president, who said while telemedicine had a supplementary role to play in the delivery of patient care, it was no substitute for a face-to-face consultation.

Dr Walley said GPs were responsible for raising almost a quarter of patient problems during face-to-face consultations, on foot of a physical examination or a chat with the patient.

Dr Walley said he knew of a patient who had been diagnosed with depression via video consultation with an online psychiatrist. The patient subsequently presented at Dr Walleys practice looking for a prescription and a face-to-face consultation revealed suicidal ideation. The woman, who was from overseas and had no support structure in Ireland, was referred to an acute mental health unit.

Dr Walley said while telemedicine had benefits in chronic disease management, it presented challenges in acute medicine.

Dr Murphy said to think that the initial GP consultation can be delivered via technology is just a fallacy.

Dr Walley said growth of up to 30% was projected for the telemedicine sector.

Doctors raised a number of concerns around data protection and patient confidentiality at the workshop.

Jim Gregg, professional development consultant with the Irish Computer Society, said EU General Data Protection Regulations 2016, which he predicted would be in force in Ireland by 2018, would mean presumed consent would disappear and it will have to be explicit consent.

In relation to data protection, Mr Gregg said it was a can of worms, but a can that has to be opened.
Most women have a love-hate affair with jeans.

Finding the perfect pair is not dissimilar to the pursuit of The Holy Grail  a legendary yet lethal quest  and with good reason. Heres why.

Jeans, when successfully sought and purchased, have alchemical powers, bestowing comfort, confidence and a sense of youthful vigour on the purveyor; not to mention total bragging rights.

And therein lies the rub. The search is as elusive as it is compulsive. It can be hard to keep up which is precisely whats so alluring.

Just when youve found a pair that fits, the fashion gods smite you with a series of new cryptic trends, requiring a PhD in denimology.

This season? Straight has replaced the skinny leg, hems are cropped and raw, flares are still a goer (provided they are cropped and raw), culottes remain cool (once they hit the calf  not the knee), medium waists rival higher counterparts; while fabric is as stiff as a corpse.

1950s 701 Jeans, Levis, 180

The Holy Grail? A pair of mid-waist, rigid, straight leg jeans cropped at the calf with a raw hem. You see?

Thats where I come in. Ive completed a dossier on four coveted jean styles for spring summer 16 with tips on how they fit, how to style them, where to buy them; and, most of all, how they make you feel.

Theres no point in embarking on a the mother-of-all-missions if it leaves you with a wedgie and a similar dent in your wallet.

The secret? The feeling comes first; it doesnt follow which is what makes a victim of us all from time to time. Jeans dont lie.

So prepare to heed the honest truth and choose a pair that looks best  on you. Thats the only crusade worth signing up for.

RIGID STRAIGHT LEG

Straight leg jeans have, for some time, been overlooked. Thats all changed.

This segue between skinny and wider styles now combines with sturdier selvedge denim for an anti-fit (no stretch, no give, no dice).

The result? A loud and proud, two fingers up to the skinny establishment vintage throwback.

Think rock-n-roll muses like Debby Harry, Joan Jett and rebel roadsters Thelma and Louise. Got it?

Raw hem straight leg jeans, New Look, 29.99

Factor in a distressed step hem and, ladies, youve got the money shot. The sell? Break em in and youll receive a shapely bottom in return.

The fine print? Time x body shape = slight problem.

Although one may appreciate their dude ranch appeal, the real question remains: Who has the patience to break the back of this beast?

Those of independent means may opt for a broken pair by sell-out denim brand Vetements (theyll also set you back approximately 1,200 and a lengthy waiting list); those of independent thinking may opt for a so-small-its-not-cheating modicum of stretch to help accommodate curves and general womanliness.

Everyone wins.

Petite straight leg jeans, Topshop, 60

Best bet: Levis lead the charge with their 701s (180), the first five-pocket jeans for women originally introduced in 1939. The 2.0 version boasts a high-waisted fit, curved top block and wide straight leg.

The rigid, heavyweight denim (12 ounces and up!) make them less accommodating for curves.

Commitment-shy? Raw hem styles with less heft (both in fabric and price point) and thus more give are available from New Look (29.99) and Topshop (60).

THE HIGH-WAISTED SKINNY

So skinnies are dead, are they? Someones got the wrong morgue.

Lest you cast yours off into the black sack of shame, consider the following hacks.

Rise to the occasion with a higher waist. Scary as it sounds, this silhouette can prove a boon for bigger bellies and apple shapes.

The trick? Premium denim (see: Best bet). The stronger the twill, the better the thrill. That said, Topshops cult maternity MOTO dark vintage Baxter jeans (55) come a close second (even if youre not pregnant) and dont mind committing to long shorts that disguise their clever elastic waistband. Theyve been a secret weapon of mine for a while now.

Rigid straight leg, Maternity Moto, Dark Vintage Baxter Jeans, Topshop, 55

To finish it all off? Hack em off. The hem that is. The preferred length is 7/8ths which is fashion speak for show some ankle. Cuffed, cropped or frayed.

Best bet: Levis Mile High Super Skinny (100) is remarkably flattering (I own a pair) and do magical things to ones tummy, bum and thighs.

Stretchy but not so much to cause ripples; stiff like Spanx but not enough to restrict blood supply, these beauties are well-cut and suitable for wider derrieres.

Result.

THE CROPPED FLARE

It all started with Rachel Comey  the American designer whose Legion jeans (Matchesfashion.com, 445)  recently inspired legions of loyal fans.

Add in the equally well-named Revolution pair by Alexa Chung for AG and, by golly, weve got a trend on our hands!

Lou cropped flare jeans, M.i.H jeans, 250

Its as if last summers hippie homage (see: floor-skimming bell bottoms) shrunk in the wash but, damn it, they look cool.

So, how does one go about wearing this wonderfully wonky style? Work it Jane Birkin-style with a 60s ankle boot and polo neck for era-appropriate style cred.

The cropped flare, Mozik jeans, Monki, 45

Wear one inch too high (beware long-limbed ladies) or one cream cake too tight and all bets are off.

Fickle as they are fabulous, this trend mania is best approached with a healthy dose of humour. What looks great on Instagram can translate into IRL fits of giggles.

Try them on for the craic, if for no other reason.

Still yearning for a pair? Get an alterations clinic to look at doctoring a pre-loved pair of flares in your wardrobe. Theyll know where to draw the (hem) line.

Rachel Comey, Legion highrise, Matches Fashion, 445

Best bet: Pricier brands like Paige and M.i.H. demand more in the way of shekels but also deliver more bang for your denim buck.

Try the M.i.H. Lou jean (250) which offers a democratic medium stretch.

For more bijou budgets, Monkis Mozik jeans (45) deliver less volume all round.

CULOTTES

Neither a skirt; nor a trouser be. Culottes have become the unsung bard of the bottom half. And here we were thinking these hybrids would die a death after their 2011 retail redux. Not a chance.

Culottes, Massimo Dutti, 79.95

That said, the abbreviated hem and A-line shape dont always jam with this seasons stiffer denim, so take these tips on board.

Avoid pleat fronts and side pockets (try a patch or jet pocket instead), unless you like the feeling of a fabric pooch nestling against your midsection.

Adopt an equally vigilant approach to silhouettes.

Blue denim dip dye raw hem culottes, River Island, 50.

Retro denim styles may be trending but they are body bullies in the presence of awkward lengths.

Dont be intimidated by these Mean Girls. Instead, adopt a more defensive approach with a 70s-inspired flat finish  clean-cut and anti-treated; the shape is simple and purist with a Scandi kick.

Tip? Ensure the hem hits slightly below the knee and always pair with a proportionate shoe.

Weekday, 55, Extend neat blue culottes.

Taller gals can go for a Stan Smith; less leggy compatriots might choose a Swedish Hasbeen clog or comparable chunky heel. No stilettos here. None at all.

Best bet: Brands like Weekday (50) and Massimo Dutti (79.95) nail fuss-free silhouettes with affordable prices; while Citizens of Humanitys less voluminous Melanie wide-leg crop ( www.Nosupply.com , approximately 215.81) is perfect for petites.
Such big business, in fact, that there are test kitchens in Britain and the US dedicated to developing recipes for publication, and it is even rumoured that some of the international household names see the recipes in their books for the first time when they turn up at their own launch party.

But what is it like for the Irish cookbook authors? We talk to four of the best-known authors and to Kristin Jensen, Irelands top cookbook editor.

NEVEN MAGUIRE

TV Chef Neven Maguire is also the chef/proprietor of MacNean House & Restaurant. He has written 12 cookbooks.

I have a great team, especially food writer Orla Broderick who is a great help writing up recipes and the synopsis.

We test all the recipes and then write them up while were doing the photography.

No doubt about it, its always a struggle to come up with new ideas but we try and keep it directed towards the home cook.

My MacNean Restaurant Cookbook was a personal dream, it was very special but it was one of the hardest. The recipes are quite cheffy. You have to keep the TV in mind  you need simplicity.

They want something quick, they want to get the basics right, but every programme is different and the problem is keeping things fresh and new.

Inspiration for recipes comes from all over  dining out or social media... But you dont copy. I have core values and I keep to them.

For example, Id never do an Indian book because I dont cook Indian food.

The audience pretty much dictates the type of book I do, and my editor, Nikki Howard, is a genius, a gem to work with and her finger is right on the pulse and shes kept me on the crest of a wave. Some day, the publishers wont want me any more!

When Im working on a recipe in the restaurant, me and (head chef) Glen will see whats available. Seasonality is the start  and whats

local  thats what food is all about. Then you try to evolve the recipe.

You can have great ideas but I have to love to cook and eat the dish, and the customers have to love it before I know its going to work. As a chef you listen to your customers, your front-of-house, and your chefs.

I love the spontaneity, the creativity, but the customers decide ultimately. After a night or two youll know.

Weve got a lot better at recipe-testing over the last three to four books. Were pretty well-tuned at this stage, to be honest. Experience has brought us to this level.

I remember in one of my first books, there was a brown bread recipe with oat bran flakes in it and people went out and got breakfast bran flakes instead.

I have a lot of good memories of baking with my Mum when I was small. Making flapjacks and shortbread from a little Ladybird book, great memories, but I havent made it since.

The best book I ever got as a chef was Marco Pierre Whites White Heat. My brother got it for me in Limerick where he was away in college. I sat up all night reading it, I was so excited. It was inspiring, exciting, different.

PAUL FLYNN

TV chef and chef/proprietor of The Tannery Restaurant & Cooking School, Dungarvan, Co Waterford, is the author of four cookbooks.

There is no money to be made writing books in Ireland so any books have to be your own endeavour. You write and test yourself and sometimes sales mightnt be all that big, it really is a labour of love.

Im a great man for taking a long time to do the right thing, either working in the professional kitchen or at home. I regret, sometimes, not having taken more notes  if I wrote down every recipe I ever came up with over the years, Id have ten books.

Inspiration comes from all over the place. If Im doing a recipe for the pro kitchen, I always stupidly believe Ill be in the kitchen to oversee it, but the nuances of the dish mightnt be in the recipe. A dish might call for four tomatoes but if they arent ripe, the dish will be different and poorer for it.

Flynns friend, La Campagne chef/proprietor Gareth Byrne has a bible and everything goes into it. But Ive become way more organized in the last six or seven years, especially for recipe-testing. I work intensively, getting into a groove.

You need to be able to stand over it. I do my shopping, go back to the school and test it. These days, Im way more technical, I weigh everything as I need to know the nutritional value as well.

Its very much like music: if you do a dish, you can give it variations and its the confidence to do that that gives you the virtuosity.

Ive had things come back to bite me in the arse. Starting off in the cookery school, I was using pro kitchen recipes and not giving as much detail as I should have.

Im used to cooking in large quantities and scaling every thing down, so things change. Yeah, Im the master of things coming back to bite me on the arse!

The first recipe I was ever given to do in a pro kitchen was a gratin dauphinois. I actually use that still as a basis for experimentation, putting in celeriac, parsnip, turnip. I remember there was a dauphinois craze in Dungarvan around 1982, and a sisters friend even got me in to do some for a party she was having.

I love Simon Hopkinsons Roast Chicken and Other Stories. I love it, its a big streak of old school, I love the comforting recipes. I also love Nigel Slater.

He approaches from a cooks perspective, not a chefs. He really is one of the best cooks in the world.

Chefs can be too cheffy at times, going over the heads of people. But if you ever see him on telly, it is so essentially simple, all these different recipes pour out of him and more so than any chefs books, it reminds me to keep my feet on the ground.

DOMINI KEMP

Chef and food writer Domini Kemp has written four cookbooks. The Ketogenic Kitchen (Gill) by Domini Kemp & Patricia Daly is out this month.

I do about 14 recipes in a single day for my newspaper column and I have someone who helps me prepare as were doing them from scratch, so we cook solidly from eight in the morning till 2pm. Doing a cookbook is a slower pace, totally different.

I come up with the recipes, cook them, test them. If Ive featured them in the column and received feedback from readers, I may make changes or incorporate the feedback.

As you can imagine, I have a mountain of cookbooks. I get all the new releases. Something will catch my eye and Ill ask myself, how I would do that dish?

Everything influences you: the weather, time of year, whether were feeling rich, poor, fat, thin. I tend to write out the recipe in very blunt, simple instructions.

The language is not flowery, and the emphasis is on measurement, times, oven temperature, yields. Then, later, it is easy to scribble on that page and write up the recipe at my leisure.

Ive definitely had one or two blunders over the years, Ive left out something vital or forget a bit of methodology. Its frustrating and I try not to let it happen. Its usually gone through a robust editing process.

My husband is an editor and writer and hell do some reading and hes not really a cook, so it can be good to get that feedback.

The first cookbook I ever had was The Wharf St Vegetarian Cafe Cookbook. I got it from my sister for a birthday or Christmas or something. It had nice little cartoons and I cooked loads out of it.

I remember a pasta dish with mushrooms and a yoghurt sauce. In hindsight it was probably awful but at the time I thought it was gorgeous. Im sure the yoghurt was splitting and everything and I wouldnt have known.

KRISTEN JENSEN

Kristen Jensen is a specialist cookbook editor and has worked with most of the big names in Irish food including Darina Allen and Neven Maguire.

She co-wrote Slainte: The Complete Guide to Irish Craft Beer & Cider (New Island), with Caroline Hennessy

I moved to Ireland straight after college to be with my boyfriend (now husband) who has an Irish mother and dual citizenship. It was supposed to be an adventure for a year.

After a while, I came to find food was a more immediate way of connecting with the culture and the country and enabled me to be a part of it as well.

I really learned to cook as an Irish citizen because college food doesnt count, so its had a huge influence on how I cook and what I cook, coming of age as an immigrant in a different country.

Ive always worked as an editor and I was working for Gill & MacMillan (now Gill) doing textbooks when I was handed Rachel Allens very first book.

This was back when cookbooks were still paperbacks, before cookbooks became the lifestyle bibles they are today, pre-hard covers, pre-food styling.

I picked up along the way as I was learning in the kitchen, reading cookbooks, buying cookbooks, but, like a lot of cookbook editors, Im not trained in any way, nor have I ever worked in the industry.

I come at it from a home cooks perspective, trying to fill in any gaps where it might not be clear enough  as well as making sure all the commas are in the right place.

Once Ive done my onscreen copy edit, it goes back to the publisher for the typesetter to lay it out.

When it comes back to me, it is the first time I see the photos, so then I check them against the recipes; if a cake dusted with icing sugar or some other garnish has that particular ingredient actually mentioned in the recipe.

Even if theres a scattering of parsley over a dish, I like to be sure its mentioned in the recipe.

When I come across a recipe, I might either replicate it or use it as a starting point for a recipe of my own but generally, I have a rule, first time, I make it the way the recipe says.

Ive been burned too many times in the past by substituting one thing for another. Then I taste it and think how I could improve or change it.

The first recipe I ever tried as a child was for popovers, they are almost like a Yorkshire pudding, very basic, very plain. I remember being so proud and making them over and over again. And Ive never made them since.

I would be the kind of person who has cookbooks on my bedside table, and I especially love those that have a personal story and context, not just page after page of recipes.

Nessa Robbins Apron Strings: Recipes from a Family Kitchen was very personal. Some of it had me tearing up. My favourite changes every year but Darinas Forgotten Skills of Cooking is a desert island choice.

Its a fantastic book that I turn to all the time. Nigel Slater, Im in awe of him, every recipe works and hes written thousands. Id be happy to be stranded with anything by Nigel.

NIAMH SHEILS

Niamh Shields is an award-winning food and travel writer and the author of Comfort & Spice (Quadrille).

Im almost completed my next book, Project Bacon, a book about bacon and bacon only; curing your own bacon, brunches, afternoon teas (salted caramel bacon eclairs!), suppers, even cocktails, desserts and sweets.

My editor said if I had an idea to pitch it to them, but I wanted to do it my own way so I used Kickstarter to crowdfund it and raised 24,000.

I hired an editor, a photographer and a book designer.

Unless you get a serious advance, book royalties arent going to pay your rent. I thought doing it this way was perhaps more a pure creative expression.

I have an editor whom I take seriously and listen to but at the same time it is not being filtered through a sales and marketing team.

If youre not on TV with a show on a primetime channel, your book is just not stocked in the same way. It doesnt get the prime placement and so on. But I thought maybe its worth a risk, doing it myself.

I used to be a project manager before I became a writer so I dont mind this extra stress. I do a lot of travelling and have met some amazing chefs and food writers whove published their own books.

When I started out, I was pretty much self-taught other than home economics so it was important that a recipe was easy to follow.

I found it frustrating when culinary knowledge was assumed. Now, unless its pastry, I like recipes that tell a story about a culture. Theyre the type I really love to read.

My background is in science so I work to make a recipe logical and easy to follow and everything is tested three times.

Even on the blog ( www.eatlikeagirl.com ), I test every recipe rigorously. If there is a preamble or story, I take time over that, I love that part of it.

Inspiration could be recreating something from a restaurant or my travels, around London or around the world. And then theres home and comfort and the things you see growing up, like potato gratin.

On a really crap day, there are very few things as good as a potato gratin. Maybe its growing up on a rain-clogged town (Dungarvan) on the south coast of Ireland.

Its a long time since I cooked someone elses recipe from a cookbook but when I first moved to London, I was worked for MacMillan and was given a 25 voucher for Christmas and bought a (legendary Italian cookbook author) Marcella Hazan book.

I knew nothing about her but it was wonderful. Her carbonara was such a wonderful inspiration  just bacon, eggs and cheese  and I really started to understand that with a few great ingredients, you can do anything. A couple of years ago, I dont know how it happened but we became friends on Facebook and she even left a comment on my page!

Ive heard it bandied around in the publishing industry that only three recipes are ever going to be cooked from a cookbook but you dont know what those three recipes are going to be!

I have some very cheffy books that I dont cook from but love the passion and the stories. (Cafe Paradiso chef) Denis Cotters first book was too cheffy for me but I love it. I love Simon Hopkinson, hes all heart and its great food.
The average cost of a significant Australian data breach is $2.82M  finding and remediating the breach quickly is the best start.

According to Rick Ferguson, country manager, Australia and New Zealand, Absolute, a persistent endpoint security and data risk management solutions provider, there is a direct correlation between how quickly an organisation identifies and contains a data breach and the resulting financial consequences.

With a global survey by the Ponemon Institute and IBM finding that the average cost of an Australian data breach is AUD$2.82m, it is imperative that companies be prepared in order to limit the damage from such an event.

Acting quickly is not only about containing the financial burden of a data breach. Its also about limiting the scope of damage, complying with notification regulations and protecting your businesss reputation, he said. The remainder of the article is paraphrased.

What does an effective data breach response plan look like? Regardless of your companys industry or size, your plan should be well-defined, concise and rehearsed. Much like a fire drill, all employees in your organisation should be well versed in the procedures and be ready to act immediately should the need arise.

While levels of urgency will depend on the severity and scale of the breach, there are standard operating procedures to follow during those crucial first 24 hours:

Diagnose the situation: Businesses need to diagnose the severity of a breach swiftly and accurately. Has a corporate device been stolen? Has your server been hacked? Have you been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack? Once the threat has been identified , you should enact automated controls: for instance, in the case of a stolen laptop, a company would activate any underlying embedded technology solution to either remotely delete the data, track the stolen device, or cut its connection to the corporate network.

, you should enact automated controls: for instance, in the case of a stolen laptop, a company would activate any underlying embedded technology solution to either remotely delete the data, track the stolen device, or cut its connection to the corporate network. Allocate roles: This is the stage where roles need to be assigned amongst your team to address legal and containment issues. Your organisation must also appoint someone with sound communication skills and thorough knowledge of the problem to interact with the relevant stakeholders, potentially including the media.

to address legal and containment issues. Your organisation must also appoint someone with sound communication skills and thorough knowledge of the problem to interact with the relevant stakeholders, potentially including the media. Document the analysis and investigation: Documentation is everything, and it is important to have all of the facts at hand. Depending on the type of data that has been compromised , your customers and the authorities will want the full picture. Evidence has to be comprehensively collected and logged not only for these reasons, but also so that the root of the cause can be properly identified and prevented from happening again. Once everything has been documented , you should ensure you have several people within the organisation that are empowered to liaise with all those who may be concerned about the breach including business partners, customers or third parties.

, your customers and the authorities will want the full picture. Evidence has to be comprehensively collected and logged not only for these but also so that the root of the cause can be properly identified and prevented from happening again. Once everything has , you should ensure you have several people within the organisation that are empowered to liaise with all those who may be concerned about the breach including business partners, customers or third parties. Get back up and running and review your response: Once the threat has been identified, contained, and analysed, it is time to get your systems back up and running . It is at this point that you also need to review your response and existing policy to establish what was handled well, and what could be improved in the future.

. It is at this point that you also need to review your response and existing policy to establish what well, and what could in the future. Learn from your experience: Youve made it through the first 24 hours, but theres still more work to do. Threats to your data do not remain staticthey are in a constant state of flux and require constant vigilance.

Here are three suggestions for applying what youve learned from the experience to improve your existing procedures:

Assess where you are  and arent -- in complying with any and all relevant governing regulatory bodies. With Australia likely to shift from a voluntary to a compulsory data breach notification policy in the near future, be sure to keep abreast of major developments in this area.

Implement a regular, robust security audit. Typically, these are done quarterly, however you should regularly audit your data security measures.

Educate your staff. Employees are often an organisations weakest link, so awareness of what is expected, what the risks are, and how employees can keep the companys data safe should be regularly reviewed and enforced.

Ultimately, you will never be completely immune from a data breach. However, it is possible, through policy and practice, to ensure that your business is ready to respond quickly and effectively to contain an attack.
According to Dell, mega-trends including social, mobile, analytics and cloud are rewriting the rules for IT and, as a result, pressure on IT to deliver superior performance on a day-to-day basis and rapidly respond to changes in the business environment is greater than ever before  and the design of the PowerEdge 13th generation servers helps customers address these challenges so they can focus on business growth and innovation.



Customers are driving the rise of the software defined data centre, using workload-oriented solutions that are increasingly compute-centric, said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions.



Dells global x86 leadership gains, particularly in blade servers, are a terrific indicator of how we deliver on these customer needs. Dell PowerEdge 13th generation servers include practical innovations, based on product knowledge that spans our 20-year history, to deliver the right functionality to enable customers future-ready datacenters, address the dynamics and trends impacting their data centre, said Dell Premier partner, Jim Andronaco, president, Sidepath.





Dell delivers an all-encompassing customer experience thats powered at the core by the PowerEdge server portfolio. By partnering with Dell, customers can be confident in the future of their data centre, one of the most important investments they can make.Dell cites use of its 13th generation servers by the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), a multi-sector partnership across academia, industry and government that is dedicated to engineering weather-sensing networks.The vendor says its 13th generation servers support CASAs installation of radars in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to help improve hazardous weather forecasts, warnings and responses in a densely populated urban environment.CASA is dedicated to revolutionising the ability to observe, understand, predict and respond to hazardous weather events, said Brenda Philips, co-director, CASA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.With Dell PowerEdge servers, we have improved resolution, sensitivity, accuracy, and timeliness of information, as well as gained greater ability to support multiple users and applications. As a result, we can help increase public safety and reduce weather-related economic losses.Use of the servers by the Fujian University of Technology in China is also cited, with the university wanting to create a high-performance cloud platform to mine and analyse real-time data on local road usage and deliver insights that enable residents to travel more efficiently through reduced traffic congestion.The university deployed Dell PowerEdge R730 servers and M1000e enclosures. Every 30 seconds, the servers process the stream of massive data, then move it to a Dell SC8000 storage array. The university engaged with Dell Deployment Services to maximise performance beginning on day one, and Dell ProSupport Plus to maximise daily productivity with automated support.We knew it would be easier to manage a cloud platform, but the challenge for us was to create a platform that was both reliable and easy to administer, said Professor Zou Fumin, vice dean of the College of Information Science and Engineering at Fujian University of Technology.We chose to run VMware vCloud on Dell PowerEdge servers because we knew they had the power to provide optimal performance. To date, the cloud solution has performed well - it is easy to manage, and we will look to scale the platform and connect it to other systems to support similar Smart City schemes in the future.
The state of North Carolina has become the latest entry in that cyclical process that temporarily renders itself an object of national embarrassment with a self-inflicted wound. The legislature passed a bill that was signed by Gov. Pat McCrory, during a special session, demonstrating everything that is wrong when one conducts the peoples business in a reactionary manner.

The law prohibits local governments from passing anti-discrimination rules to grant protections to gay and transgender people. The North Carolina law demonstrates that it is indeed possible to moonwalk into the 20th century.

The legislature wasted little time to convene in order to respond to an anti-discrimination ordinance recently approved by the city of Charlotte. Charlottes local ordinance provided protections based on sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity, including letting transgender people use the public facilities that correspond with their gender identity, not gender at birth.

Unlike the legislature, Charlotte took roughly a year to study the issue in order to arrive at a judicious decision, taking into consideration the well-being of all residents of the city.

Given the haste with which the state bill was written, its quite possible that many lawmakers did not read the bill before it was introduced during the special session.

All legislation, regardless of forethought, comes with unintended consequences. It is guaranteed when legislation is birthed in a reactionary and ignorant manner. The legislature reacted to the outcome without any consideration as to how Charlotte reached its decision. It was ignorant because it was driven by suppositions that possessed no basis in fact.

If this were an infomercial, now would be the time for me to say: But wait! Theres more!

In addition to the state prohibiting local municipalities from creating anti-discrimination policies, the legislature seized the opportunity to create an omnibus bill that also prohibits local governments from raising minimum wage levels above the state level for contractors with which it deals.

What happened to local control? Or is that merely the pabulum that one utters when running for office?

After signing the bill, the governor tweeted: Ordinance defied common sense, allowing men to use womens bathroom/locker room for instance. Thats why I signed bipartisan bill to stop it.

With all due respect, the governors statement defies common sense, which speaks to the hasty nature that created the bill. Suppose the legislature had used similar due diligence to that of Charlotte. The outcome may have been the same, but at the very least one could say it was conducted thoughtfully.

The price for the governors common sense may be a hefty one. There is already talk of moving the NBA all-star game, which was slated next year for Charlotte. What if the NCAA decides to forgo North Carolina during March Madness?

Several businesses have already expressed concern with the law. North Carolina is on the cusp of becoming the Silicon Valley of the East. How will this law impact the state, given that a number of tech companies have also expressed concern?

According to The Associated Press, Attorney General Roy Cooper, who will run against McCrory in November, stated that his office wont defend this national embarrassment against an impending federal lawsuit.

While I have problems with the law, I am also troubled by the position taken by Cooper. Isnt part of the attorney generals responsibilities to represent the state in federal court? Where does it state that he or she is at liberty to choose which laws they will defend?

But placed in an historical context, the Charlotte ordinance and the legislatures response to it becomes another data point in the tension created by We the People.

When those words were originally penned in the preamble of the Constitution, We the People, though not expressly stated, meant white, male landowners. Throughout American history, each time a group outside the we applied for admittance, they were met with hostility.

In the arduous pursuit of that amorphous more perfect union, change and discomfort became correlatives. It is impossible to have one without the other.

The discomfort created caused the legislature to move the state to a time that predated cell phones, while the city of Charlotte is moving forward.

In such epic pursuits, rarely does the status quo emerge as the ultimate victor.
A commemoration was held Tuesday to salute the military veterans who served during the Vietnam War, 50 years past. The event was a strong reminder that we should reaffirm our commitment to these vets.

Nearly 400 people attended the commemoration at the recently opened Kernersville VA Health Care Center, the Journals John Hinton reported. Though many of the vets wore parts of their uniforms or service insignias, one of the most striking features may have been the lines on their faces  many are now in their late 60s or early 70s, and time is catching up. At some point, they will be as rare as World War II survivors are now.

Today, we want to recognize you, our American heroes, and all that you have done, Brent Erickson, the administrator of the Kernersville VA Health Care Center, said during the ceremony. I join a grateful nation in honoring Vietnam War veterans and their family members. We also mourn those who were lost in battle, and those who are no longer with us.

Veteran Don Timmons of Clemmons spoke at the ceremony, saluting his fellow veterans and encouraging them to warmly welcome home veterans of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was a different atmosphere when we came home, Timmons said. Lets not ever let that happen again.

The Vietnam War occurred during a time of great social unrest in America that contributed to the anger and confusion that some still feel about our involvement in Vietnam. Our men and women in uniform were often on the receiving end of unfair and unwarranted criticism and abusive treatment. They had to fight a war on a foreign shore, then, too many of them felt, another war back home.

Those scars will remain for a lifetime.

Since then, America has taken steps to affirm our respect for those who served, but our commitment to them has been betrayed at times by political neglect. Even as recently as three years ago, thousands of veterans in North Carolina had difficulty receiving prompt and proper medical care, as well as the benefit checks on which they relied to pay bills. To the shame of our community, some of our local vets have found themselves without homes.

These problems have largely been addressed. Several local grants were administered by the United Way and other organizations to help. And the new Kernersville VA Health Care Center is a step in the right direction, one we hope will provide the care our wounded warriors deserve.

But they shouldnt have occurred in the first place.

Its proper to hold a ceremony. Officially, by presidential proclamation, well be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War from May 28, 2012, through Nov. 11, 2025.

But ceremonies and proclamations are not enough. We must be vigilant to show our veterans the gratitude and care they deserve.
Land and Space Journal Sentinel business reporter Tom Daykin talks about commercial real estate and development. SHARE Click to enlarge

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A neighborhood grocery is coming to Milwaukee's north side after a five-year wait that included the store's original prospective operator reneging on his promise to open a supermarket.

Petes Fruit Market, which operates a supermarket on Milwaukees near south side, announced Sunday it will be opening a new store in the Bronzeville neighborhood.

Petes will open at a remodeled former Walgreens drug store at the northwest corner of N. King Drive and W. North Ave. The 13,700-square-foot store is to open in late 2016.

Despite the "fruit market" name, the Pete's store at 1400 S. Union St. includes other items, such as fresh vegetables, fresh meat, dairy products, nonperishable foods and a deli. The King Drive store will be a similar full-service grocery.

The plans were announced by Pete's operator Theodore Tsitiridis, Mayor Tom Barrett and Ald. Milele Coggs, whose district includes Bronzeville.

The announcement comes after years of delays in bringing a supermarket to the space left vacant when Walgreens moved to a new store at 2826 N. King Drive.

An investment group, formed by Anup "Andy" Khullar, in 2011 bought the 34,500-square-foot strip shopping center at 2349 N. King Drive that includes the former Walgreens space. Khullar owns Priya Corp., which operates Andy's gas station and convenience stores

Khullar bought that property for $1.1 million, and planned to use 8,000 to 12,000 square feet for a supermarket.

His group, 2349 LLC, received approval for a $325,000 loan from Milwaukee Economic Development Corp. to help finance the $1.7 million project. MEDC is a nonprofit business lender, affiliated with the city, which operates a revolving loan fund without city tax dollars.

However, Khullar dropped that effort and in 2013 tried to lease the space to Dollar Tree, a discount chain that sells both food and general merchandise. That was opposed by Coggs and Development Commissioner Rocky Marcoux, who said Khullar was breaking a promise to open a full-service grocery.

The Common Council refused to issue a food license for Dollar Tree, and that space remained vacant.

2349 LLC spent around $218,000 of the MEDC loan to make renovations to the space to accommodate Dollar Tree. As of February 2015, the group owed $197,319 on that loan.

Khullar and the MEDC have been negotiating over repaying those funds and finding other uses for the building. An update on the loan status wasn't immediately available.

MEDC is helping arrange the sale of the building to Milwaukee development firm Vangard Group, said Jeff Fleming, Department of City Development spokesman. MEDC will help finance the new King Drive store through a loan to Vangard, he said.

JCP Construction is serving as general contractor on the project.
Wisconsin is a challenging state for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

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Wisconsin has a nearly unbroken modern-day record of voting for party front-runners in its presidential primary.

But that trend could easily be broken Tuesday.

What makes this state a challenge for Hillary Clinton and especially Donald Trump?

The answer may lie in a mix of timing, demographics, political culture and recent history.

Here is a look at some of the local factors at play on Tuesday:

GOP solidarity. While Wisconsin Republicans are divided on many issues, their battles with Democrats have forged an aware and engaged GOP electorate that stands solidly behind the partys two leading lights: Gov. Scott Walker and House Speaker Paul Ryan. That may be working against Trump, who has attacked Walker and been criticized by Ryan. Walker has an 80% approval rating among likely GOP primary voters in Wisconsin; Ryan is viewed positively by 78% of GOP voters, negatively by 13%. Those arent the markers of a party at war with its leadership.

Wisconsins distinctive climate  ultra-engaged, ultra-polarized, further hardened by years of warfare over Walker  has created problems for Trump.

Youre doing badly in job creation, Trump said in Racine Saturday, citing the states below-average job growth. But his rhetoric about poor wages and dying Rust Belt industry places him on the Democratic side of a long-running and highly politicized debate in Wisconsin over Walkers economic legacy.

The states robust conservative infrastructure has provided Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with a ready-made, anti-Trump machine, mobilized in recent weeks when party insiders and talk radio hosts made the tactical decision to coalesce behind the Texas senator, who was in single-digits here last fall.

Where the voters are. This has created a geography problem for Trump, too, polls show. Suburban southeastern Wisconsin is his Achilles heel, thanks to conservative media, high levels of income and education, and a partisan, pro-Walker tilt. Trump made a note of his weakness in the Milwaukee area during his rally in Racine, blaming it on misinformation from these crazy talk show hosts.

There are two reasons why his unpopularity in the region is a problem. Its the most Republican part of the state. And it turns out to vote at much higher rates in Republican primaries than the rest of the state. When Mitt Romney won the GOP primary in 2012, he carried the Milwaukee TV market by 22 points and lost everywhere else by 3. He won where the votes are. GOP turnout in the big three Republican counties outside Milwaukee  Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee  was 12 percentage points higher than it was in the rest of the state.

Dane County plays a similar role for Democrats. It was Clintons worst county in the 2008 Democratic primary: she lost it to Barack Obama by 36 points. Democratic turnout was 12 points higher than it was in the rest of Wisconsin. Clinton rival Bernie Sanders expects to run up the score in Madison Tuesday. A huge turnout and lopsided Dane County vote would be difficult for Clinton to make up elsewhere.

Trade and immigration. These two issues, so big for Trump, may not be packing the same punch in Wisconsin as they are in other states. Hard line, anti-immigration voters dont appear to be a major force in the GOP primary here. Last weeks poll by the Marquette University Law School asked Wisconsin voters to choose among three views: undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in their jobs and eventually apply for citizenship; they should be allowed to stay in their jobs as temporary workers, but not apply for citizenship; or they should have to leave the country.

Just 24% of GOP primary voters in Wisconsin said they should have to leave the country. Thats well below the national figure. In a new Pew poll, 41% of Republicans say undocumented immigrants should have to leave the country.

GOP opposition to trade, while significant, is a little lower in Marquettes Wisconsin polling than it is in Pews national polling. More importantly, Trump isnt dominating among these voters. Despite his sharp attacks on Cruz over the issue, Trump is leading him by less than 10 points among anti-trade Republicans here. Meanwhile, he trails Cruz by 25 points among pro-trade Republicans.

The makeup of the electorate. Two fundamentals spell trouble for Clinton in Wisconsin. It is very white (her best voters are African-American). And the primary is open to independents, one of her opponents best groups. Sanders is winning independents in the Marquette poll by 20 points.

On the Republican side, the states very blue-collar electorate is good in theory for Trump because he does well with white voters who lack a college degree. He has won that group in the vast majority of states so far, including Great Lakes battlegrounds Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. But in Marquettes poll, he narrowly trails Cruz with these voters.

Fence-mending. The Wisconsin polling is also full of general election warning signs for the front-runners. Trumps negatives among the electorate look like misprints: 77% of women view him unfavorably, as do 78% of college graduates and 83% of under-30 voters. Trump trails Clinton by 10 points and Sanders by 19 in November matchups.

Meanwhile, Clinton is viewed negatively by 66% of men and 66% of independents. She also fares worse than Sanders in matchups against Republicans.

Both have acquired some negatives in their own party (Trump far more so than Clinton).

On the Democratic side, only three-quarters of Sanders supporters in the primary say they would vote for Clinton in the general election against Donald Trump.

On the Republican side, only 65% of Cruz supporters and 37% of Kasich supporters in the GOP primary say they would vote for Trump in the fall against Clinton.

By and large, these defectors arent talking about crossing over to the other party; But they are refusing at this point to express their support for Clinton and Trump, a sign of the of the accumulated tensions and divisions in the primaries, and some work to do by both if they are nominated.

It does mean there has to be some fence mending, says Charles Franklin, who conducts the Marquette poll.

Only once in the past 44 years has this state failed to vote for the front-runner  and eventual nominee  in both parties (when Gary Hart won the 1988 Democratic Primary). In a year full of surprises, Tuesdays election could be yet another break from the historical pattern.

Follow Craig Gilbert on Twitter @WisVoter
All Politics Blog From Milwaukee, Madison and beyond, a daily dose of political news and glimpses behind the scenes SHARE

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While the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee rolled out the red carpet in February to host a Democratic presidential debate  noting it would give the campus valuable national exposure  several faculty members are upset that UWM is renting space to Fox News for a Donald Trump town hall event Sunday afternoon.

Fox News leased UWM's Mainstage Theatre for the 3 p.m. event moderated by anchor Greta Van Susteren, an Appleton native. While the rest of the media will not be allowed, the ticketed event is expected to have a live audience. And most likely, protesters outside.

UWM English Professor Richard Grusin said in an open letter to UWM Chancellor Mark Mone this weekend that "all UWM community members who oppose Trump's poisonous values have a right to protest him if he comes to campus. But responsibility for Trump's presence on campus belongs ultimately to you."

Grusin was responding to an email Mone sent to the campus Friday, detailing the closing of several campus buildings, streets and parking lots on Sunday because of the Trump event. Mone also said in the email that the campus had hosted several other presidential events, and that it has a commitment to free speech and academic freedom.

UWM was paid more than $50,000 to cover expenses and lease the Helen Bader Concert Hall in the Helen Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts for the Democratic debate in February hosted by the PBS NewsHour. Details of the lease agreement with Fox News for Sunday's Trump event were not immediately available on Sunday.

Grusin said leasing public university facilities to host a private political media event "has nothing to do with freedom of speech and even less with academic freedom."

"It is unseemly for a public university, which claims to be committed to building bridges among all of the diverse constituents of the Milwaukee community, to be lending its reputational capital to a presidential campaign devoted to walling out or imprisoning those who would displease, threaten, or oppose it," Grusin said in his letter to Mone, which he posted on his blog.

"The racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and fascist ideas and policies that Trump has expressed during his campaign are antithetical to the cultural and political values on which the University of Wisconsin in general and UW-Milwaukee in particular are founded," Grusin said.

Mone indirectly acknowledged opposition to Trump's appearance in his campus email Friday.

"As a public university, we allow outside entities to lease our facilities, and we do not restrict their use based on the content of any individual or entitys message," Mone said.

UWM does not endorse or promote any political candidates, the chancellor said. "We do encourage all students, faculty members, and staff to educate themselves about all candidates and to participate in our nations political process."

Grusin acknowledged complaints were not raised before the campus hosted the Democratic presidential debate Feb. 11.

That was different from hosting a "town hall" for a single candidate of either party, the English professor said.

"For a public university like UWM to be the site of a national party-sanctioned debate, 'broadcast' on public television, is to perform a 'public service' meant for a nation-wide audience." Grusin said. "When the Democratic debate was held on February 11, Wisconsins presidential primary election was still nearly two months away."
Carrie Mess holds her son Silas, 7 months, as mother and son look in on a calf named Pickle. Credit: Michael Sears

SHARE Cows feed on the farm of Pat and Carrie Mess near Watertown. The Mess family farm milks about 100 cows and raises 300 acres of crops. Michael Sears Carrie Mess (right) and her husband, Pat, look over a milking unit that had a leak in it. They have the equipment to milk 16 cows at a time. Michael Sears

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Carrie Mess, like most dairy farmers, is losing money every time the cows are milked on her farm near Watertown.

As farmers gear up for spring planting, those who sell crops on the commodities markets stand to lose buckets of money from low prices that are beyond their control.

Simply put, what many farmers are paid for milk, grain or livestock now isn't enough to cover their expenses. They're taking out loans and tapping savings to remain in business, going to work every day knowing that it's costing them money.

The Mess family farm milks about 100 cows and raises 300 acres of crops.

Even farmers born into the business are a little nervous about the downturn, according to Mess.

"We don't know when this will turn around," she said.

U.S. net farm income is expected to drop to $54.8 billion this year, the lowest since 2002 and less than half the record of $123.3 billion in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

While the outlook for grain farmers has improved some in recent months, the global marketplace is still awash in corn and soybeans  much of it left over from a bountiful harvest last fall.

Meanwhile, U.S. farmers plan to sow 93.6 million acres of corn this year, exceeding all analyst estimates and boosting prospects for higher supplies that could further depress prices.

Growers hope that better-than-normal yields will help them at least break even.

"We are swimming in corn, soybeans ...all of these commodities, and the U.S. dollar is so strong that nobody (overseas) can afford them," said Ross Bishop, a beef cattle and crops farmer in Washington County.

A drought or a flood that wipes out thousands of acres of U.S. crops could reduce the harvest and boost prices. Likewise, poor weather in South America or another part of the world might help.

"It's sad because you have to hope for a disaster somewhere," Bishop said.

Wisconsin livestock farmers benefit from lower corn and soybean prices because much of the crop that's raised here goes for feeding dairy and beef cattle.

Still, livestock farmers have felt the downturn. Last year, Bishop said, he lost $411 for every beef cow that he sold.

"You would have to go back to the 1980s to see anything like this," he said, although it was worse then because of high-interest loans.

"You basically paid the interest, and that's all you were doing," Bishop said.

The beating that farmers take from low market prices, which often stems from an oversupply of milk, grain and livestock, begs the question: Why don't they respond by slashing production?

It's not that easy, said Harwood Schaffer, an agricultural economist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Every spring, crop farmers face a dilemma.

Crop yields and profits are unknowns at planting time, yet decisions have to be made while the weather, hopefully, cooperates.

Some of the choices, such as what seed to buy and how much land to rent, are locked-in the previous year. But crops can't be planted early, to take advantage of better prices, or later to see if prices improve.

"While farmers only have one time to make the decision that has the most impact on production  to plant or not to plant  other industries have many more opportunities during the year to adjust the production and inventory they have for sale," Schaffer said.

Dairy farmers face tough decisions when milk prices are low because producing more milk lowers their cost of production, on a per-unit basis, but it adds to the oversupply problem.

They seek operating efficiencies to squeeze out a profit, or lose less money, rather than reducing the number of cows they milk.

"The number one rule in the dairy industry is you never cut back, especially in a down period," said Gordon Speirs, a dairy farmer from Brillion.

Speirs' farm milks 2,100 cows. In a year like this, when the farm milk price has fallen below a profitable level, he's reduced spending for anything that's not essential.

"It's going to be a skinny year. We aren't going to be buying new tractors or upgrading equipment," Speirs said.

In 2015, the number of Wisconsin dairy farms fell below 10,000 for the first time in more than a century, down about 33% from 2005. Yet milk production increased, largely from bigger farms with hundreds or thousands of cows.

Some farmers will be forced out of business by the current low prices, but those that can weather the downturn stand to make a nice profit when the markets eventually rebound.

"In agriculture, you make your money on the margins. It's pennies here and there," said Andy Herro, a dairy farmer from Clintonville.

Many farmers are fortunate to have paid down debt during recent profitable years.

Even if they're not making money now, at least they can cover their out-of-pocket costs and generate some cash flow, said Bruce Jones, an agricultural economist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Still, depressed commodity prices, ongoing high expenses, and low income projections have farmers feeling more pessimistic than ever before, according to the latest DTN/The Progressive Farmer Agriculture Confidence Index released last week.

Some commodity prices are about half of what they were a few years ago, yet farmers are paying the same, or more, for many things they need to run their businesses.

"It's just a tough year in trying to make everything work and not lose money," said Katie Micik, director of the DTN agriculture confidence index.

"How long will this last? I wish my crystal ball would tell me," Micik said.

It could take a widespread natural disaster, or multiple smaller disasters, to put much of a dent in global grain supplies, according to Micik.

"With ongoing global crop surpluses, farmers see little hope for their incomes to improve this year," she said.
Renaissance Theaterworks Censored on Final Approach dramatizes the stories of the Womens Airforce Service Pilots in World War II. Credit: Ross Zentner

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Midway through a tense exchange with a Women's Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) in Phylis Ravel's "Censored on Final Approach," a testy Maj. Stephenson (James Fletcher) notes "there's a war going on. And I'd like to get on with it."

There are many variations on this line and its accompanying theme in "Censored"  now on stage in a collaboration between Renaissance Theaterworks and Marquette University that opened Saturday night under Leda Hoffmann's direction.

Invoking a sorry historical record, "Censored" profiles the shoddy treatment that a quartet of WASPs endured during World War II, awkwardly interspersed with stilted scenes set in 1955 involving WASPs Gerry (Megan Kaminsky) and Catherine (Kat Wodtke) looking back.

Maj. Stephenson's sense of wartime urgency  a convenient excuse for men feeling threatened by high-flying women  is suggested here through numerous short, quickly played scenes, with many entrances and exits scored for snare drum, sometimes accompanied by both brass and relentlessly marching recruits.

In the military parlance routinely deployed through this play, that leaves these characters little time to be "at ease"  just as the WASPs' requests for permission to speak are regularly denied.

We therefore don't get much sense of who these women are; "Censored" is continually too busy marching toward its next scene. Or providing one of many exposition-heavy exchanges  most of which play as lectures rather than real speech. Or setting up clunky, contrived encounters between the WASPs and their superiors.

The result is a play markedly short on credible dialogue.

Instead we get stiff debates between singly dimensioned characters: piggish men and put-upon women, women willing to suck it up and rebels who've had enough, women trying to remember and others who want to forget. Written in fraught language, the result is some painfully stagey acting, involving pointed exchanges that one couldn't ever imagine unfolding in life.

The crammed "Censored" also never really chooses among the several plays  each itself potentially interesting  that it wants to be.

The back story explaining how these intrepid women became WASPs, which we best glimpse when one of them (Madeleine Farley) describes watching barnstormers as a Minnesota farm girl?

The dilemma confronting women like WASP founder Jackie Cochran (a fine Greta Wohlrabe) or the offspring of a military family (Jordan Feger), both torn between preserving the WASP project at all costs and the actual cost paid by women whose planes were being sabotaged?

A story of camaraderie among the women themselves? Or perhaps one featuring the survivors' guilt haunting those whose planes didn't go down (presented in contrasting flavors by Kaminsky's extroverted, overdone Gerry and the self-loathing of Wodtke's dark, introspective Catherine)?

Trying to be too many things, "Censored" often silences the voices of the very women it wants to honor  true to a history in which much of her story remains untold.

IF YOU GO

"Censored on Final Approach" continues through April 24 at the Broadway Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, visit www.r-t-w.com/.

TAKEAWAYS

"These Shining Lives": Much of "Censored"  including a remarkably similar ending  calls to mind Melanie Marnich's "These Shining Lives," another play featuring a quartet of pioneering women (from the 1920s rather than the 1940s) ground down by forces larger than their high spirits: In this case, radium in the paint they used in creating watches and clocks.

I saw both musical and non-musical versions of Marnich's play last year, the latter effectively directed here by Renaissance artistic associate Mallory Metoxen.

Renaissance staged a well-received reading of "Shining Lives" in 2009; I wish Renaissance had subsequently mounted a full production. As with "Censored," its stories of the four women at its center are frequently at risk of being hijacked by forces conspiring against any such sisterhood; also as with "Censored," "Shining Lives" sometimes tilts toward melodrama. But "Shining Lives" is ultimately a much better play, featuring more fully realized and moving characters.

"Gone to Soldiers": There are also better fictional treatments of the WASPs themselves, including Marge Piercy's wonderful "Gone to Soldiers" (1988), an epic that traces the lives of ten characters during World War II  including the unforgettable Bernice Coates, one of the prolific Piercy's greatest heroines. A WASP who also encounters the real-life Jackie Cochran presented in Ravel's play, Bernice eventually adopts a male persona so that she and her female partner can open a flying school. "Gone to Soldiers" remains available in paperback.

Greta Wohlrabe: Speaking of Cochran: As indicated above, Wohlrabe does a fine job in capturing the side of Cochran that Ravel wrote into "Censored": The tough, no-nonsense WASP leader who will let nothing threaten her program  even if that means turning her back on the women within it. Putting aside whether this account accurately and fairly represents Cochran, Wohlrabe conveys  without overplaying  the increasing frustration and anger of a woman who tries to play by the rules and is nevertheless continually undermined.

James Fletcher: One of those undermining Cochran is the other historical figure in this play: Major John Stephenson, given memorable lines like this: "I resent your presence. I don't give a damn if you turn out to be better than my men. You're still women. And in my book that means you are in the way."

Not much to like there, which makes it all the more impressive that Fletcher's Stephenson comes across as intermittently likable. He may be a dinosaur, and he is clearly threatened by changing gender roles he doesn't understand. But while conveying that incomprehension and consequent insecurity, Fletcher simultaneously suggests a man with a soft side, best seen in an exchange with Farley's Mary O'Connor about how she fell in love with flying.

Yes: Mary is the least threatening, least experienced, most diminutive and most demure of the quartet of WASPs we meet; and yes, Stephenson's kindness is patronizing as well as paternal (made possible in part because he is far older than the 28-year-old Stephenson called for by the script). But it's also genuine, as is Stephenson's acknowledgment toward play's end that he neither understands nor feels comfortable with the women he is charged with commanding. As presented by Fletcher, Stephenson's admission intimates, ever so slightly and all-too fleetingly, that he himself is partly to blame for what he cannot understand.

In the Belly of the Beast: Stephen Hudson-Mairet's scenic design, with its curved panels and evocative upstage window, suggests both a fuselage and a hangar, each extending out toward the audience and including us within the claustrophobic world in which these women were trapped and within which some of them would die. Lighting designer Chester Loeffler-Bell ensures that the women can see the gorgeously colored skies unfurling beyond that upstage window, tantalizingly close but also hopelessly beyond reach; they instead live and die grounded in the pooled shadows below, their dreams deferred because they cannot fly free.
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An Eau Claire County sheriff's deputy fatally shot a federal fugitive on Sunday after the man put a stun gun to the deputy's chest and kept coming, the sheriff said.

The deputy had stopped a minivan with Minnesota plates for a turning violation in Eau Claire at about 6:45 a.m. and learned the driver had a federal warrant for his arrest, Sheriff Ron Cramer said.

With the man outside the squad car, the deputy told him he was under arrest. But the man pulled out a stun gun and put it to the deputy's chest, Cramer said. The deputy separated himself from the man, but as the man kept coming, the deputy fired several shots, killing him.

The shooting happened in a parking lot outside a laundry on Eau Claire's west side. The suspect was in his 60s and from the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune reported. His name has not been released.

"The individual provoked the officer to use deadly force," Cramer said. "Why he was in Eau Claire, it may be as simple as we're along I-94, and it was for food or to commit another crime."

Cramer said the man was an "old-time criminal" whose record included bank robbery.

"He spent a lengthy amount of time in federal prison, and he knew the warrants were out (for his arrest)," Cramer said. "He was not going to go back to prison, based on his actions."

The sheriff said the deputy, whose name has not been released, acted appropriately, the Leader-Telegram reported. The deputy is on standard administrative leave.

The Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation is investigating the shooting.
With all that has changed, not so much has changed.

Last week, a relative trickle of students across Wisconsin began taking a set of standardized tests called the Wisconsin Forward Exam.

By the May 20 deadline, an estimated 370,000 students in third through eighth grade will have taken the tests  and their schools will have undergone major disruptions in their daily schedules to accommodate the testing.

Eleventh-graders in large numbers took the ACT exam during March. Once used only as a college entrance exam, it now serves accountability purposes as well. And ninth- and 10th-graders will take a test called ACT Aspire between April 25 and May 27 as their state tests.

Like or hate tests (I bet the needle points overall toward the latter among students and educators), schools have been through these routines for more years than any current student can remember.

Somewhere down the road (in the fall, state Department of Public Instruction leaders hope), the overall scores for each school and district will be released publicly. Student results will be given one of four labels  advanced, proficient, basic or minimal. The most widespread measure of how a school is doing will be based on the combined percentage of students who are advanced or proficient.

It's no profound prediction that the results won't look much different from in any recent year. Overall, students in well-to-do communities will do pretty well. Students from low-income communities will not do well.

Why do we go through this? For one thing, no one I know of has come up with a large-scale plan for a better way to get a picture of how schools are doing. Far more important, the United States Congress seems to feel the same way. After a lot of debate, when it passed a new federal education law a few months ago, it renewed the requirement for kids nationwide to take standardized tests, mostly in reading and math.

All of this makes up the "not so much has changed" part of the picture. What makes up the "much has changed" part? Let's focus on the third- through eighth-grade tests.

The Wisconsin Forward Exam succeeds the Badger Test, launched last year. Years in preparation, the Badger Test ended up carrying a lot of unhappy baggage  it was linked to the Common Core academic standards and to a nationwide consortium intended to allow consistent testing across many states.

It was killed after one round. The legislature decided we needed a test that was by and for Wisconsinites. At what is ramming speed when it comes to test development, a company named Data Recognition Corp. won the Wisconsin contract.

People may not want to say it loudly, but the test is still pegged to the Common Core standards. And is it a Wisconsin-based test? DPI describes Data Recognition Corp. as "a Midwestern company with offices in Wisconsin." Which is to say, it's based in Minnesota. But in the future, questions on the test are likely to be shaped by input from Wisconsin educators.

The new tests have been described as shorter than the Badger Tests. That's not so clear. There is no fixed time limit on taking the Forward Exam. But DPI estimated how much time students will spend on each section. For third, fifth, sixth and seventh grades, the total is four hours or a bit more, which is generally about a half-hour less than last year.

For fourth- and eighth-graders, who have to add science and social studies tests to their load, the estimates actually are longer than for the Badger Test  about seven hours, compared to six to six-and-a-half. (Not all at once; testing is generally spread out over a few days.)

I'm sure the amount of time for testing is a big concern for many educators. I heard from one last week, John Humphries, president of the Wisconsin School Psychologists Association, who works for the Dodgeville school district. Speaking for himself only, he said, "It's hard to disrupt learning over the course of many days to fit in seven hours of assessment....The testing time is going to be a big issue for a lot of people."

As ill-fated as it was, the Badger Test broke major ground on one front: With exceptions for specific circumstances, students took it on computers, not paper. That is also true for the Forward Exam.

The end of the No Child Left Behind federal education law means the complex and almost entirely futile set of sanctions for schools with low test scores is gone. Decisions on what to do about such schools now lie at the state or local level.

Troy Couillard, director of student assessment for the DPI, said test results shed light on larger patterns of how schools are doing and who is succeeding and can guide decisions aimed at improving results.

By the way, test scores can be a factor in evaluating teachers, but they have not emerged as a big factor. And the momentum behind connecting scores to ratings of teachers seems to have waned nationwide. (Why? Because it doesn't really work.)

With the new scores, the "report card" for each school in the state will be relaunched, after a year off. This time, private schools with publicly-funded voucher students are slated to get report cards. Don't expect the same level of data for voucher schools as public schools. Maybe that will take a few years to build up.

In the end, even as it is the third set of tests used in three years in Wisconsin, the Forward Test is pretty consistent with its predecessors. And, now on computers, the giant enterprise of testing our kids to get some broad handle on how they're doing is on the move again.

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu
Taft Parsons Jr. and his wife, Carol, are trying to get Associated Bank to honor a bank passbook that shows a balance of $10,038 from 1992. Credit: Jim Stingl

In this corner, weighing in with a passbook showing they have $10,038 that's been sitting in a bank account since 1992, are Taft and Carol Parsons of Milwaukee.

Their opponent across the ring is Associated Bank, which says it can find no record of the account.

This fight has gone many rounds over the past six years, but Taft Parsons says he still hopes to land a knockout blow and get what rightfully belongs to him and his wife.

"If I was president of this bank, I would not have a customer having this problem. It's too bad he can't find his own data. I brought in what I needed to bring in to get compensated. He should take care of me," said the 67-year-old retired engineer.

The bank isn't budging. In a letter last year to Taft Parsons, customer care specialist AnnMarie Dombrowski said:

"As we have explained previously, Associated Bank has extensively researched the information and documentation you provided. We have been unable to locate any record of your former First Financial Bank (which merged with Associated in 1997) passbook savings account ending in 9585. I apologize that we are unable to assist you any further with this inquiry. We have exhausted all of our research options and consider this matter closed."

In another 2015 letter to the couple, Dombrowski denied the account was lost and said Associated believes the account was closed by First Financial Bank before the merger. She challenged the couple to produce any documents showing the account existed after that.

If the couple holding the passbook didn't get the money, as they insist, then who did? The bank is not claiming it turned the funds over to the state of Wisconsin as unclaimed property, as is routinely done when accounts go dormant, and the state has no record of receiving it.

There appears to be a lesson here. Don't let your money sit around too long in a bank account without paying it a visit now and then. According to the U.S. Treasury's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, banking regulations say an account may be considered inactive if the customer initiates no activity for three to five years. Associated said it's required to maintain bank records for seven years.

In this case, the inactivity was 18 years. According to entries in the passbook, with shows the couple's names and full 10-digit account number, Taft and Carol Parsons made the opening deposit of $300 on May 26, 1990. In the two years that followed, they made 22 deposits and withdrawals. On June 24, 1992, $10,070 was withdrawn, leaving a balance of $10,038. No entries follow after that, and the passbook is not marked closed.

The passbook was discovered in 2010 in a safety deposit box where it was placed years earlier  and then forgotten  by the couple, who met as young adults working together at the gas company, married 47 years ago and now live near the former Custer High School. They have two children and four grandchildren.

"We noticed we had an account that was still open. You're happy. It's like finding 100 bucks in your pocket someplace," Taft Parsons said.

They brought it to a teller at Associated Bank, who refused to give them the money. Many letters have gone back and forth between the bank and the couple in the ensuing six years. Taft Parsons claims that neither First Financial nor Associated ever contacted him about having an inactive account.

Cliff Bowers, director of public relations at Green Bay-based Associated Bank, said company policy and privacy regulations prevent him from sharing specifics about the bank's dealings with the couple. He gave me the following statement:

"We can say that we have been interacting with the family on this issue for a number of years, and at all times we've been fair, responsive, respectful and comprehensive in our replies to them. Having said that, our position stands as stated to the Parsons. I would add that we have technologies and protocols in place, and have had them in place, that ensures our customers' money just doesn't go missing. In this particular case, one can rest assured that we have spent countless company hours and due diligence to ensure that we've treated this particular customer fairly."

Despite knowing he could not answer, I asked Bowers if there's no record for the account ending in 9585, then what about 9584 or 9586 or any old account from First Financial. If Taft and Carol Parsons are telling the truth as they insist, then it seems their money indeed has gone missing, along with any trace that the account existed, except the passbook itself.

The couple turned to U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, whose office tried to help them. They contacted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which takes citizen complaints about national banks, but that has not led to a solution. The bank should have insurance to cover matters like this, the couple said.

Taft Parsons already has an unrelated lawsuit going against Associated Bank over a townhouse project that went bad, but he's not inclined to file suit over the bank account. It would drag on, he fears, and his lawyer would get most of the money.

He has, however, gone to the top and written to Philip B. Flynn, president and CEO of Associated Bank. He told Flynn in a letter in September he now thinks he's the victim of bank fraud.

Flynn has not personally responded.

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or email at jstingl@jrn.com.
Jane Maher (left) looks over maps of Ireland with volunteer librarian Mary Kay Kuhfittig at the Irish Genealogical Society in 2010. Credit: Rick Wood

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By of the

During her 95 years, Jane Maher lived very much in the present, but her greatest impact might have been on the past  not by changing it, but by bringing it to families in search of their own.

As co-founder and former president of The Irish Genealogical Society of Wisconsin, Maher firmly believed that by connecting people with the experiences of those who preceded them, they could learn lessons that would help them live their lives, those who knew her recalled.

"She would take them on a journey," said Kris Mooney, Maher's friend, colleague and herself past president of the society.

"She opened a lot of windows and a lot of doors."

A funeral Mass will be held Monday for Maher, of Wauwatosa, a former Milwaukee Public Schools teacher and coordinator of the genealogy tent at Milwaukee Irish Fest. She died March 28 after a long illness.

"Many people look at genealogy as simply a matter of dates, deaths and names," said John Maher, her son.

"She sought to understand how people, her ancestors, worked, how they died, what issues were important to them at the time and to their families."

She was born Jane Catherine Mahar on July 24, 1920, in Rockford, Ill., the daughter of Walter Gregory and Irene Mahar.

Her family eventually moved to Milwaukee's Washington Heights area in the early 1930s. She attended St. Sebastian's Grade School in Milwaukee, what was then Holy Angels Academy in Milwaukee and later Marquette University, where she earned a bachelor of science degree and a master's degree in education before beginning a career as a biology teacher for MPS, her son said.

She taught at several elementary and high schools, including Dover and Bay View, before retiring in the late 1950s to raise her children and later assist in her husband's dental practice, John Maher said.

In 1981, three years after being diagnosed with breast cancer, Jane Maher began volunteering at Milwaukee's Irish Fest, and in 1983 became the coordinator of the festival's genealogy tent, where, without the aid of computers or the Internet, she began launching the curious on journeys through their family history.

"She chipped away at puzzles and brick walls," Mooney said. "She was just a delightful presence who embodied grace and kindness."

In 1991, she and others founded the genealogical society, with Maher as its first president.

She later edited the society's quarterly journal and, with her husband and others, oversaw the development of the Irish Emigration Library.

With a keen intelligence and remarkable memory, Maher "remembered and recognized virtually every library visitor and Fest genealogy volunteer, recalling with ease their families and their stories," said a statement posted on the society's website.

Maher continued to direct and staff the library until this year, despite, according to her son, another cancer diagnosis about a dozen years ago.

"She just kept moving ahead," her son said. "She was truly a remarkable woman."

Maher was preceded in death by her husband, William P. Maher. She is survived by sons John and Michael Maher and daughter Catherine Preussler.

Jane Maher

A funeral Mass will be celebrated on Monday, at 7 p.m. at St. Pius X Catholic Church (W. Wright St. at N. 75th St.) in Wauwatosa, with a visitation beginning at 4 p.m. and rosary at 6:45 p.m. A brief prayer service will be held on Tuesday, at noon at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in Beloit.

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Kasich's warts

The Journal Sentinel's endorsement of John Kasich on March 30 listed all the positive attributes about Kasich: his independence, his promises concerning the military, his pragmatism, his economic proposals, etc.

But nowhere is there even a suggestion that there is another John Kasich your readers should know about. Some of his views and actions are not those of a man who has a measured response to issues that could affect millions of people in our country.

After becoming governor of Ohio, he swiftly signed and adopted legislation that has drastically curtailed family planning funding and abortion access. These legislative actions have created obstacles for women by ruling when, where and by whom a pregnancy can be terminated.

He also favors the right to gun ownership and privatizing Social Security as well as keeping God in the public sphere. He strongly opposes same sex marriage and Obamacare, even though it is the law of the land.

Does anyone doubt that his Supreme Court nominee would be someone who espouses his set of values?

If the Editorial Board feels the obligation to recommend a candidate for the upcoming Republican primary on April 5, the readers have a right to know him, warts and all.

Leila Silverberg

Mequon



Clinton editorial off-base

It is obvious that the Journal Sentinel Editorial Board does not like or trust Hillary Clinton ("Clinton's abysmal record on open government," Opinions, March 31). The tone of this editorial is to get people to believe she is an untrustworthy criminal. She is not. She has given this country over 30 years of honorable public service. She is the most honest candidate running right now.

Her use of a private email server was similar as the two previous secretary of states. Check out what Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice used. All she wanted to do was be able to use her Blackberry, but the government's computer systems were not up-to-date enough for that to be feasible. Her server was approved, it was not a secret. There is no evidence that her server was ever hacked. You can't say that about all government servers.

Some of the laws involving use of a private server and preservation of documents were not in effect at the time she was secretary of state. They were adjusted after she left that office. How can she be prosecuted for breaking laws that hadn't yet been written and passed? The classified documents you could be referring to were classified several years after she left that office. (Why don't you research who classified them so late after they were promulgated and why? Was it just a political ploy to make her look bad?)

I am ashamed that someone on the Editorial Board would write and publish such a document based on someone's opinion rather than facts solidly researched. The writer picked people who are searching to discredit her to cite examples. The writer could have found other examples to cite but didn't try to find any from people who aren't trying to trash her.

She is the most qualified person running.

Bernie Sanders is a pie in the sky candidate. If his ideas are so great, why weren't they passed years ago? What about his background? He has been in Congress a long time. His big appeal is to those who want a free college education. The young. He is not qualified to be commander-in-chief or to be chief negotiator for international business.

Peggy R. Topham

Milwaukee



Board's lack of judgment

The Journal Sentinel's partisan editorial on Hillary Clinton's transparency lacked objectivity and balance. It failed to mention all the other candidates who are grappling with transparency issues. But then, the Editorial Board has a history of a lack of judgment, as we all remember its endorsement of Scott Walker.

Dr. Nancy Cannon

Mequon

Please email your letters to jsedit@jrn.com, or mail them to Letters to the editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, P.O. Box 371, Milwaukee, Wis. 53201-0371. Letters are generally limited to 200 words and are subject to editing.
Please vote on Tuesday. Please make sure you have updated registration and proper voter ID to do so, now that the new voter ID law is in place (gab.wi.gov). Not only does Wisconsin get to cast a deciding vote in the presidential primaries, the more immediately crucial vote will be for our state Supreme Court.

And this one really matters.

Electing Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg won't solve all of the problems currently plaguing our state, but it would be a major step in the direction of an important rebalancing process. A longtime state attorney with several years and hundreds of cases worth of experience under her belt, Kloppenburg has shown herself to be an able and independent jurist. She was even hired as a state's attorney by a Republican attorney general. This newspaper said she could bring independence back to a court "that sorely needs it," and she has been endorsed by several papers across the state, as well as the Wisconsin Police Association and others.

Our government only continues to function when the system of checks and balances between legislative, executive and judicial branches remains intact. Right now, the majority of justices on the Supreme Court have been marching in lockstep with Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators. This would be a problem regardless of the political party involved in that imbalance, and it's telling that even traditionally more moderate and conservative editorial boards and organizations are throwing their support behind Kloppenburg instead of Bradley.

Bradley owes her career to Walker for thrice appointing her to judicial positions in three years. Bradley wrote vitriolic and bigoted attack articles against LGBT people, those with HIV/AIDS, compared birth control to murder, and had several other extremist greatest hits, all while an undergraduate. Bradley claims her opinions on gay people have evolved and points specifically to same sex adoption cases she says she oversaw during her time as a judge.

A halfhearted apology once called out for the mistake is one thing. There's simply no real evidence of action to suggest that her thinking on these subjects has changed at all. You want to talk about the potential for an "activist judge" on the court, look no further for an example.

Worth mentioning, too, is the opinion column Bradley wrote in the Journal Sentinel back in 2008 decrying a move by the State Bar of Wisconsin to push for cleaner elections of judicial candidates. Specifically, Bradley thought it unnecessary to ask candidates for judge not to lie about their opponents or the issues during campaigns.

Call me crazy, but if we're going to elect justices in the first place, we should at least expect them to run ethical campaigns. Lying is not a look I like on my judges. And how, based on this, should we be expected to trust anything coming out of Bradley's campaign now?

Bradley left oral arguments early so that she could give a campaign speech in front of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a powerful business lobby that has since endorsed her. In another instance, Bradley cast the deciding vote in a case that essentially undid Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure even though she hadn't been on the court when the case was argued.

This is big, important stuff.

And yet she waves it all away, perhaps safe in the knowledge that the already out of balance, Republican-dominated system and all its dollars will continue to have her back. Between that and the almost inevitable disenfranchisement of certain demographics thanks to the new voter ID law, Bradley may not be sweating much. It's good to be the king's crony.

But it doesn't have to be like this. We can fight for balance on the courts as the last line of defense against an out-of-whack Legislature that doesn't remotely represent Wisconsin's far more diverse electorate. We can draw a line in the sand, right here, on Tuesday.

It starts with a vote.

Emily Mills is a freelance writer who lives in Madison. Twitter: @millbot; Email: emily.mills@outlook.com
By

American politics is standing on its head this year.

The Democratic front-runner swept the South in this winter's primaries and caucuses  piling up massive numbers of convention delegates in the power base of her Republican rivals. The top Republican candidate won liberal Massachusetts and industrial Illinois and Michigan  prevailing in states the Democrats have won in every election since 1992 and the party's power base in the 21st century.

The party that claimed younger voters and planned to use their loyalty to remain in the White House for a generation is about to nominate a presidential candidate who is 68 and has consistently lost the support of young voters to a 74-year-old challenger. The party that seemed demographically doomed because of its failure to win support from Hispanics had two Cuban-Americans as leading candidates this year, with one of them emerging as the likeliest challenger to Manhattan businessman Donald J. Trump.

The likely presidential nominee of the progressive party is conservative in style and outlook. The front-runner of the conservative party is radical in campaign style and political outlook.

The party that is the natural combatant to the banks and to Wall Street is about to nominate a candidate who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from those very interests. The party that is the natural party of business could nominate a real estate tycoon whose emphasis is on middle-class jobs, who is contemptuous of the financial elite and who flaunts his use of eminent domain, a potent symbol of big-government power that business interests and conservatives revile.

Suddenly, it is becoming clear that this year's election is an upside-down cake being served to a reluctant electorate.

And as slices of that cake are carved, it is apparent that geopolitical assumptions that have governed American politics since the Nixon years are being rendered obsolete, replaced by new assumptions that have a new logic and that promise a new political calculus.

This year, some of the most reliably Republican states in the union  Utah and Idaho, both of which have consistently voted Republican since 1952, with the exception of the Barry Goldwater debacle in 1964  are suddenly plausible pickups for the Democrats.

These are the two states with the highest percentages of Mormon voters, at once the most reliably Republican voting group and the group most antagonistic to Trump. The billionaire businessman's life and campaign style are incongruous in Mormon circles, and he antagonized many Mormons when he ridiculed former GOP Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the first Mormon presidential nominee.

Now consider two important Southern states. Since 1964, Georgia has voted Democratic only when a native son (Jimmy Carter) and a Southerner (Bill Clinton in 1992, but not when he ran for re-election in 1996) were on the top of the ticket. Since 1968, North Carolina has voted Democratic only twice, when Carter was on the ballot in 1976 (but not when he ran for re-election in 1980) and in 2008 (when Barack Obama took the state by three-tenths of a point, a feat he did not repeat in 2012).

And yet neither is safe for the Republicans if Trump is nominated. Nor is the bellwether state of Florida, which Trump claims as one of his homes and which, with the exception of 1960 and 1992, has sided with the winner every time since 1928.

In fact, neither party can completely count on its traditional constituencies.

Mainline Protestants, for generations the mainstays of the GOP, showed little interest in voting for Trump in the primary in Massachusetts, where they traditionally have supplied and supported Republican candidates.

Yet some states, like Michigan, which has voted Democratic in the last six presidential elections, now may be ripe for the Republicans if Trump is the nominee.

Michigan has the classic Rust Belt profile; Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show the state shed 231,752 manufacturing jobs, or about a quarter of its manufacturing work force, since the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a principal Trump target. Though the devaluation of the peso in Mexico's 1994 currency crisis may have been as much a factor in the job losses, the trade agreement remains under fire in Michigan.

Trump was the decisive victor in last month's Michigan Republican primary among voters whose incomes fall below $50,000  voters who otherwise would be considered natural constituents of the Democrats. Because Democrats with the same income levels did not exactly flock to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who in the Michigan Democratic primary narrowly lost that group to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, they, too, can be considered vulnerable to Trump's entreaties.

And though polls show Clinton with a comfortable lead in Pennsylvania, which has voted Democratic in the last six elections and where Clinton defeated Obama by 10 points eight years ago, both Clinton and Trump have high unfavorable ratings, according to the Franklin and Marshall College Poll. Many analysts believe the state is up for grabs.

Meanwhile, Republicans increasingly believe that Maine, which has gone Democratic in the past six elections, is within their reach, particularly since the state awards one electoral vote to the candidate who wins each of the two congressional districts. Paul LePage, the controversial Republican governor of Maine, has endorsed Trump.

Then there is the question of New York, which Clinton represented in the Senate and which has voted Republican only three times in the 14 elections since 1960. That is Trump's true home state, and GOP strategists believe that, despite a large Clinton lead, they may be able to prevail there in the fall.

Another crucial battlefield will be Wisconsin, which holds its highly contentious primary Tuesday. The state has been safely Democratic the past seven elections and early indications suggest Clinton has an edge there. But that could change if Trump prevails in the state this week; he is running behind Cruz, according to the Marquette Law School Poll released last week.

Taken together, all these moving parts are creating a complex new math and a vital new truth: In an era when so many Americans believe American politics needs to be fixed, there are no fixed points in American politics.

David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Email dshribman@post-gazette.com. Twitter: @ShribmanPG
In a distant corner of Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus' office, under a pile of newspapers and maps, sits a small, red metal box. On the front of the box is a glass panel that says "Break in Case of Electoral Emergency."

And inside the box is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Over the past few years, Ryan has demonstrated that he is the Winston Wolf of the Republican Party. Like the tuxedoed strongman from the movie "Pulp Fiction," Ryan is the one person in the GOP able to clean up gruesome messes others make. And currently, the party is a headless torso parked in a garage.

As the Republican presidential nomination race moves forward, the best the party can now hope for is for no candidate to receive the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. If the convention can't settle on a nominee at the convention in July, the proceedings are thrown wide open and delegates are free to vote for whomever they choose.

Enter the speaker of the House.

Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and John Kasich backers argue that there's no way the convention can pick a candidate for whom nobody has cast a vote in 2016. But a convention choosing a fresh face has been done before. As Kasich frequently has noted, in the 10 previously contested Republican conventions, the front-runner became the nominee only three times. And many of these conventions were before primaries and caucuses mattered much at all, when candidates were picked by party bosses.

This year, when the candidates reach Cleveland, the Republican Party will be plagued with three damaged candidates, all tainted by the odor of failure. After the GOP emerges from spending all its resources blocking Trump from engulfing the party in flames, delegates will look up and realize just how unpopular Cruz is with general election voters. In last week's Marquette University poll, Cruz's favorability rating was 30% among statewide voters, and his unfavorability rating was 48%. Even Republican voters aren't particularly enamored with Cruz  many are voting for him as if it were a condition of their parole sentence.

Kasich has the strongest electability case, as he fares best against Hillary Clinton in general election polls. But is the party really ready to hand the nomination to a guy who has won one state (his home of Ohio), and who fell well short of double digits in state after state early in the contest? A brand new candidate may have gotten fewer votes than Kasich, but that's the point. We know the Republican Party has a fever to win the presidency, and it's been proven that they think the cure isn't more Kasich.

But Ryan is one candidate who has been poll-tested on the national stage. Even after denying he had any interest in being Mitt Romney's running mate in 2012, Ryan took on the challenge. Later, Ryan unequivocally denied interest in succeeding John Boehner as the next speaker of the House; he is now referred to as "Speaker Ryan." Evidently, the surest way to tell if Paul Ryan is going to get a job is whether he denies wanting it. (Ryan has said the 2016 nominee is "not going to be me.")

Yet not wanting the job of president should be a primary qualification for having it. Columnist George Will is fond of saying that anyone willing to put themselves through the rigors and humiliation of a presidential campaign is, by definition, unfit to hold the job. Turning the campaign into a four-month sprint might provide a higher quality of candidate.

No doubt, as he has with the speakership, Ryan would see a truncated campaign as a public service. And in speech after speech since taking the job, Ryan has contrasted himself with the current presidential field, exuding strength, compassion and policy expertise. This likely hasn't been an accident.

Of course, invalidating primary results will hurt the feelings of a lot of people who stuck their necks out for candidates over the past two years. (Trump has predicted "riots" if he doesn't end up with the nomination.) But if the true goal is winning the White House, those people will have to get over it. And if they don't, they will be the reason Hillary Clinton wins in 2016.

Comedian Chris Rock jokes that he calls an insurance policy "In Case S---," since you only need it in case "stuff" happens.

Here's a news flash: for the GOP, "s---" is happening. It's time to call your most trusted insurance agent. He lives right here in Wisconsin.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger. Email cschneider@jrn.com. Twitter: @Schneider_CM
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who is running for re-election, talks to members of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial Board on March 10. Credit: Angela Peterson

In a recent debate, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett captured perfectly his tenure in office: He said he has been a "steady hand," a calm, hard worker who has been steering city government without drama.

Yes, he has. He has been a responsible steward of the city's finances; he has maintained city services at a reasonable level; he has pushed incremental improvements in neighborhoods and has helped along the development boom that is going on downtown, including the new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks. He has worked on job training, especially for young people.

Barrett has worked quietly and carefully, often behind the scenes, although he has not been afraid to challenge state legislators and the governor over their unwillingness to give Milwaukee the aid it needs. Good things are happening in Milwaukee  especially downtown, on the East Side, in the Third Ward and Walker's Point  and Tom Barrett can claim some credit for that.

But here's a question for Barrett: What does he want his legacy to be? We think Milwaukee needs more vision, creativity and leadership on a range of issues  from poverty, crime and housing, to education, job creation and entrepreneurship. The city is falling short of what it needs to compete with other cities and with giving its citizens a thriving urban environment. We think Barrett should commit to one final four-year term, make clear what he wants to accomplish to move Milwaukee forward, then show the drive and leadership necessary to make it happen.

Barrett's challenger, Ald. Bob Donovan, is not the man for the job. Temperament and character matter, as do vision and proven track records. And Donovan falls far short on all points. He is simply unqualified for the office. We recommend Tom Barrett.

Donovan is right, of course, when he says that crime hurts neighborhood development and that Milwaukee is more than its downtown. But he has no plan to deal with the city's issues. His wish list includes naming a "jobs ambassador" who will somehow create 10,000 new good-paying jobs in five years; putting more police officers on the streets without saying where the money will come from to pay those officers; and appointing secretaries for education, commerce and labor, and urban affairs (as opposed to the city's rural affairs?) to solve all the city's problems.

Donovan shouldn't be taken seriously as a candidate for mayor.

But certainly in a city with this much talent and so many smart people, there are serious people who could challenge the mayor. Where are the people who would really push Barrett by providing a more inspiring vision for the future of Milwaukee, along with the skills to get everyone moving in the same direction? There are plenty of critics, but who is willing to step forward to offer a serious challenge?

The city does have critical issues that need to be dealt with by Barrett and the Common Council, more boldly and dynamically than is happening now.

Crime:The city's homicide rate soared last year, with 145 deaths, and car thefts have been skyrocketing. The mayor's slow-moving negotiations with children's court officials to make sure there are consequences for juveniles after a third car theft falls far short of what's needed.

Poverty: Milwaukee was ranked as the seventh most distressed city in America, with 52% of the population considered economically distressed in a recent study by the Economic Innovation Group. Another study found that poverty in Wisconsin is the worst it's been in 30 years, with Milwaukee one of the poorest areas of the state. There's an eviction epidemic, with 16,000 formal evictions each year in Milwaukee, and more that are so-called quiet evictions, according to a recently published study of the city by Matt Desmond.

Business development: One reason those poverty figures are so bad is that Milwaukee ranked 39th out of 40 large metros for entrepreneurial activity, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation's 2015 report. Start-up businesses account for nearly all net new job growth in the United States. We must develop an environment to encourage and nurture those ventures.

Race: Milwaukee is one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country; the black male unemployment rate in the city is around 50%. "Our black infant mortality rate in some ZIP codes rivals sub-Saharan Africa; most of the victims on our yearly homicide list are young black males; unemployment among African-Americans in Wisconsin in 2014 was the highest of any of the 50 states; when it comes to educational and financial achievement, a national study ranks black children in Wisconsin dead last," the Journal Sentinel's James Causey wrote in a column last year. Wisconsin incarcerates the most black men in the country, and in Milwaukee County, more than half of all black men in their 30s and 40s have served time. In the 53206 Zip Code alone, 62% of all men have spent time in an adult correctional facility by age 34.

Are these problems solely the responsibility of the mayor? Of course not. A state government that has turned its back on the city bears responsibility. Community and business leaders must step up.

But what's needed at the center is a leader with vision who can inspire people to work together and coordinate those efforts.

Barrett's steady hand has helped keep the city above water. But the city needs more than that to rise. The mayor should do his best to lift Milwaukee in the next four years. In the meantime, it's time to begin the search for a strong, qualified leader with 20/20 vision to take the city into the future.
Presidential contenders (clockwise from top) John Kasich, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in the Republican field and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the Demcocratic contest will compete in Tuesdays primaries. Credit: Wire servies

By of the

Madison Wisconsin's presidential primary voters can choose on Tuesday from candidates across the spectrum of American politics.

The options run from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, one of the most conservative legislators on Capitol Hill, to his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist.

The contrasts come on issues both domestic and foreign: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the delegate leader for Democrats, and Sanders can debate the war in Iraq; and Cruz and Republican front-runner Donald Trump can also differ on wars in the Middle East.

Candidates' styles vary along with their substance: Ohio Gov. John Kasich has sought the center and touted his general election credentials while Trump, the real estate mogul, has embraced controversy.

Katie Packer, a veteran of Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 and 2008 presidential elections, said it's rare for voters in an April primary like Wisconsin's to have such a wide range of choices and such a good chance to affect who becomes their party's nominee.

"There's certainly something for everybody even if it's not their first choice," said Packer, chairwoman of Our Principles PAC, which is opposing Trump.

Modern political primaries are often marked by candidates with cookie-cutter agendas, leaving voters to decide based on their experience or style. Not so on Tuesday.

The differences are so stark that they can be quantified  and they have been.

By one respected system developed by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal for rating congressional votes, Sanders and Cruz are at extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. Based on their voting records in the last Congress, Sanders was the third most liberal member of the Senate, and Cruz was the fourth most conservative member.

Their uncompromising agendas may have made Sanders and Cruz into underdogs nationally, but not here in Wisconsin. Though trailing in the national delegate counts in their respective parties, both men led the state primary race in three different polls released this week.

Of the other candidates in the race, all but Trump have spent time in Congress, with Clinton serving as a senator from New York and Kasich as a member of the House of Representatives.

If Clinton and Kasich were still in Congress today, both would fit much closer to the center of each of their respective parties, according to the Poole and Rosenthal system of rating their votes.

Trump's politics defy easy descriptions. He's aggressively opposed illegal immigration, showed skepticism of American interventions abroad and said he wants to preserve entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.

Here's how the candidates stack up on several important issues:

Immigration. Trump has called for deporting immigrants in the country illegally and building a huge wall on the nation's southern border and, improbably, making Mexico pay for it. He's also called for freezing the entry of Muslim immigrants into the country, a move that critics say would violate the nation's tradition of religious liberty.

Cruz opposes a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally while Kasich, Clinton and Sanders all favor a path to citizenship or legal status for those immigrants.

Health care. Clinton backs keeping most of the federal Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, while Sanders favors a so-called single payer plan, under which one government agency would pay for health care provided by private entities.

All three Republicans favor repealing and replacing the ACA. As governor, however, Kasich expanded Ohio's Medicaid health program with federal money from the ACA, a step that some GOP governors resisted.

Trans-Pacific Partnership and trade. Cruz, a proponent of free trade, opposes the trade deal with Pacific Rim nations, saying President Barack Obama's administration did a poor job negotiating it. Kasich supports the TPP.

Clinton backed the effort as secretary of state but now opposes the deal, saying it falls short. Sanders and Trump have both harshly attacked it in their campaigns.

Taxes. Cruz favors a 10% flat tax and abolishing the IRS. Kasich and Trump favor cutting tax rates on ordinary income.

Clinton and Sanders both favor increasing taxes on the wealthy, with Sanders going the furthest in that direction.

Foreign policy. Trump has raised questions about NATO, the costs of American bases abroad, and other U.S. military efforts internationally. But he has also promised aggressive, unpredictable actions against the nation's enemies and drawn criticism for saying he would kill the family members of terrorists.

Cruz, a hawk on foreign policy, has criticized Trump as reckless. Kasich has criticized Trump for his proposed freeze on Muslim immigrants and Cruz for his call for police patrols in Muslim neighborhoods in the United States. Kasich argues that good relations with Islamic communities are needed for authorities to identify extremists.

Clinton has touted her experience as a former secretary of state while Sanders has said that she should have opposed the Iraq war in 2002 as he did.

Abortion. Sanders and Clinton say women should have a choice while Cruz opposes it in nearly all cases. Kasich opposes it except in limited cases such as rape.

Trump, who has drawn criticism from Republicans for his praise of Planned Parenthood, has said that he opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest or risk to the life of the mother.
Presidential contenders (clockwise from top) John Kasich, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in the Republican field and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side campaigned hard in Wisconsin Saturday in the run-up to Tuesdays primary. Credit: Wire servies

By of the

It turns out even in a presidential race, all politics is local.

As candidates sprinted across Wisconsin Saturday in a bid for votes and delegates, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton jumped straight into the hard-fought race for state Supreme Court.

During a speech to Milwaukee Democrats, Clinton launched an attack against Justice Rebecca Bradley over her controversial newspaper writings about birth control, rape and gay rights as a student at Marquette University more than 20 years ago.

"There is no place on any Supreme Court or any court in this country, no place at all for Rebecca Bradley's decades-long track record of dangerous rhetoric against women, survivors of sexual assault and the LGBT community," Clinton said.

She added, "No to discrimination, no to hate speech and no to Bradley."

Bradley has apologized for her writings. A spokesman for Bradley accused her opponent, Appeals Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg, of turning to Clinton to carry out her attacks.

"Kloppenburg's claims of independence have fallen flat with the voters. Now that multiple polls show her losing, she's turned to one of the most partisan figures in the nation, Democrat Hillary Clinton, to carry on Kloppenburg's personal attacks," spokesman Luke Martz said.

A Marquette University Law School poll last week showed Bradley leading Kloppenburg 41% to 36%, with 18% undecided.

The stunning back-and-forth between Clinton and the Bradley campaign capped a day of frenetic politicking across the state.

Republican front-runner Donald Trump hopscotched to three events as he tried to regain his momentum. Ohio Gov. John Kasich searched for votes in southern Wisconsin and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, leading in the polls in Wisconsin, met the media in Ashwaubenon.

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, barnstormed the state before joining Clinton at the Democratic Party Founders Day Gala 2016 in Milwaukee.

During an hourlong speech in Rothschild, Trump was not as harsh about Gov. Scott Walker and how Wisconsin has fared under him as he was earlier in the week. But Trump did again mock Walker for frequently wearing Harley-Davidson gear.

"He doesn't look like the bikers supporting me," Trump said. "The bikers love me!"

Trump took a tougher tone when he brought up his testy exchange with WTMJ-AM (620) host Charlie Sykes, whom Trump called a "whack job." Trump said he thought he'd done well in his interview with Sykes.

"Everybody who would listen to that show would vote for me," Trump said.

Trump reminded the crowd, "I'm self-funding. I hope people appreciate it. It means a lot. It means a lot. It means I don't owe anybody anything."

Trying to regain his footing after a very tough week, Trump told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd it was a mistake to retweet a photo of his wife, Melania, a former model, alongside an unflattering shot of Cruz's wife, Heidi, that said the two images were "worth a thousand words."

Trump  who earlier had tweeted that he might "spill the beans" about Heidi Cruz  was responding to an ad an anti-Trump group ran in Utah that showed a risque photo of Melania Trump.

"If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it," Trump said of the retweet in the column.

In Janesville, Kasich took questions for an hour on a range of subjects, including criminal justice reform.

"It's really easy when somebody is a criminal to just disregard them," Kasich said. "The only thing I try to remember is there was a time when a mother held a baby in her arms and thought that he or she was going to grow up to be special."

Kasich sprinkled quips and jokes throughout the event, drawing plenty of laughter, but the biggest came when he closed the town hall by playing "Sorry" by Justin Bieber. "I happen to like this song," Kasich said.

In Ashwaubenon, Cruz settled into a movie theater seat with a small tub of popcorn and a few hundred supporters surrounding him to watch "God's Not Dead 2," a movie about a schoolteacher prosecuted for quoting a Bible verse in response to a student's question.

"Absolutely we have a straightforward path to winning the nomination  to winning before the convention, to earning 1,237 delegates," Cruz told reporters, when asked about his chances.

Cruz said he is devoting his energy to "earning the vote, to winning the states and earning the delegates to win a majority before the convention."

"Wisconsin is going to have a powerful voice in that," he said. "Not just the 42 delegates. But all across the country, people are looking to this great state."

Cruz said he was energized by a new poll in Pennsylvania that put him ahead of Trump.

"But it is entirely possible that nobody gets to 1,237  that we go into the convention with nobody crossing that threshold and we'll have a contested convention," he acknowledged.

Cruz said Trump will bring his delegates to the convention, and he will bring his.

"Then it will be a battle at the convention to see who can earn a majority of the delegates  delegates elected by the people," Cruz said.

Cruz, who has rounded up establishment support in Wisconsin, picked an endorsement from Republican U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, who represents the 8th Congressional District in the northeastern part of the state.

Speaking to 1,500 Democrats in Milwaukee, Sanders made his pitch that polls show he's the best candidate to carry the fight to Republicans in the fall.

"We have to make sure Donald Trump doesn't become president of the United States," he said.

Sanders, his voice hoarse, said Democrats need a sense of vibrancy and energy that the party doesn't yet have.

"We need to bring in millions of young people who have never voted in their lives, and I'm proud many of those young people are coming into our campaign," he said.

Sanders also called out Walker, telling the crowd, "If you want to know what kind of president I would be, think about all of the things Governor Walker does, and I will do exactly the opposite."

Clinton said she would make it her mission to help Democrats up and down the ticket.

"I will have your back against Governor Walker and the tea party Legislature," she said, vowing to help Democrats regain ground in congressional and legislative races.

Ashley Luthern in Janesville and Mary Spicuzza in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

On the Campaign Trail Saturday

 At a Democratic Party dinner in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton launched a broadside against state Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed "grass-roots activism."

 Donald Trump tried to regain his momentum in three appearances across the state while Ohio Gov. John Kasich touted his experience and electability before supporters.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he had a "straightforward path to winning the nomination" as he met the media in Ashwaubenon.

Coming Sunday

Sanders has rallies in Wausau and Madison; Cruz has events in Green Bay, Wausau and Eau Claire; Trump has an appearance in West Allis.

Follow our coverage on JSOnline.com and on Twitter with

#JSPolitics.
Inflation is a top issue for voters, but politicians' solutions could make things worse

Voters have shifted their top priority from abortion to their wallets, but candidates are limited in what they can do about rising prices.
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By Peter Montgomery | (Otherwords) |  

The GOP frontrunner has turned white nationalists into political players.

The staying power of Donald Trumps presidential candidacy has surprised and unsettled people across the political spectrum. Many voters who are angry about the loss of middle-class jobs and frustrated with our broken politics have rallied to Trumps outsider campaign.

Theres a darker side to Trumps campaign that should disturb anyone thinking about supporting him: Its electrifying and energizing the white supremacist movement.

You cant help who admires you, says Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. But when white supremacists start endorsing you for president, you ought to start asking why.

Less than two weeks after Trump launched his campaign with ugly rhetoric about Mexican immigrants, the neo-Nazi news site The Daily Stormer endorsed him. Since then, hes attracted praise from icons of the movement like former KKK leader David Duke, who told whites it was treason against your heritage not to support Trump.

White nationalists have even invested in robo-calls promoting Trumps candidacy in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Minnesota.

Trumps incendiary rhetoric against Muslims and Latinos is bringing racist groups like these more openly into our politics. His campaign has become a great outreach tool for the KKK, gushes one Klan activist. According to Media Matters, its a fundraising engine for white nationalist media.

Trumps campaign against political correctness has given people permission to trumpet views they may once have kept to themselves  and rallies to gather together. Duke has encouraged his own followers to volunteer for Trumps campaign, promising them, Youre gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mindset that you have.

Given all this, its hardly surprising that Trumps rallies have drawn protests.

However, Trump didnt need to openly welcome violence against peaceful protesters. In case you somehow missed it, at recent rallies hes complained that its only political correctness that prevents people from beating up protesters  and that in the good old days they would have been carried out on a stretcher.

Of course, not all of Trumps supporters are racists. Some are fed up with dwindling economic opportunity and politics as usual. They think that a strong-willed outsider can somehow shake things up, or make America great again.

But how exactly would that work?

Trump has shown contempt for many of our defining constitutional principles: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equality under the law.

Trump has said hell re-write laws protecting the press to make it easier to go after journalists who criticize him. Hes argued for shutting down mosques and discriminating against Muslims on the basis of their religion. Hes a bully whos used his deep pockets and teams of lawyers to threaten and harass his critics.

Republican officials helped create the conditions for Trumps rise by promoting the angriest voices in right-wing media when they thought it was to their political benefit. This sea of anger is everyones problem now. We should all be concerned about the long-term impact of the forces Trump and his supporters are unleashing.

As Matthew Heimbach, a 24-year-old white nationalist who thinks America should be divided into ethnically homogenous regions, told The Washington Post: Donald Trump, whether he meant to or not, has opened this floodgate that I dont think can be restrained regardless of what happens in the 2016 elections.
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TeleSur |  

The Vermont senator fielded questions on social justice from members of the the African-American and Muslim communities at a Town Hall in Milwaukee.

Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders held a Town Hall meeting tonight in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The senator from Vermont was introduced by African-American Reverend Marcus Hart, and fielded questions from a diverse panel of members from representatives of local minority groups, including a Muslim-Americans.

Sanders said he wasnt going to allow people to keep summoning racial hatred, after he was asked a question from a Muslim-American woman, concerning what he would do to combat incitement from his Republican counterparts.

The democratic socialist said that people such as Republican frontrunner Donald Trump were using classic demagoguery to divide the country instead of dealing with significant issues surrounding economic justice.

The middle class in the U.S. is decliningwho can they scapegoat? Sanders asked. Young Muslim kids, For the first time in their lives, are scared. Hate-mongering from Trump and others is unacceptable.

In the next round of questions, panelists continued with the need for change.

Listening to you today, and I dont care if you cant get enough delegates to win, I think things need to change, so Ill vote for you on Tuesday,another African-American panelist said, going on to ask Sanders about his plans to ensure minorities had access to jobs and education.

Sanders promised that In the first 100 days that I am in office, Congress will have legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour.

In his view, everything is related to everything, and as long as minorities and women are without economic power, there can be [no] justice. Sanders concluded by thanking the panelist who asked him great questions along with his supporters across the U.S., and left to the song Starman by the late David Bowie.

Via TeleSur

-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

CNN:  Bernie Sanders entire CNN interview (Part 1)
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

The London pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat reports that the rebel opposition allied with al-Qaeda broke the ceasefire Saturday morning, taking several villages and towns in the southern hinterlands of Aleppo. The attack was launched with suicide car-bombers who detonated their payload, targeting Syrian Arab Army troops and their allies, Shiite militiamen fighting with guidance from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The attack south of Aleppo came as the Syrian army had announced, after taking Palmyra, that it was marching on Qaryatayn, a town held by Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) in southern Homs province just to its west.

The organizations that broke the ceasefire and took territory included the Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria), the Turkestani Islamic Party, the Levant Brigade, the Freemen of Syria (Ahrar al-Sham), Division 13, and other rebel groups. They managed to take al-Is, Tel al-Maqali` and Tel al-Is. Al-Qaeda had launched a broad attack that began midday Thursday, with both sides suffering dozens of dead and wounded. Some of the fighting was between al-Qaeda and the other rebel factions.

BBC Monitoring conveys from the Russian press on Saturday,

Syrian troops have been forced to abandon positions in the area of Al-Is in Aleppo province after artillery shelling and an attack by the Al-Nusra Front . . . , a Russian Defence Ministry spokesman told journalists on 2 April, as reported by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti (1607 gmt). Near the centres of population of Al-Is, Abu-Ruwayl and Khan-Tuman in Aleppo province, Al-Nusra bandit units, after 30-minute artillery barrage, went on the offensive and forced government troops, who were under orders not to respond to provocations, to abandon their positions near Al-Is and to retreat to the northeast, Sergey Kuralenko, chief of the Russian Centre for the reconciliation of the warring sides in Syria, said. The Al-Nusra Front has established control over groups that regard themselves as the opposition in areas south and west of Aleppo, Kuralenko told journalists, according to an earlier RIA Novosti report (1603 gmt).

Meanwhile, the Syrian forces advanced on Qaryatayn, which Daesh had been using to attempt to cut Homs off. Dozens of extremist fighters were said to be killed or captured. In Palmyra to the east, Syrian troops discovered mass graves with bodies of women and children, massacred by Daesh during its rule there.

Al-Qaeda, which is important in the northwest of Syria from Aleppo to Idlib, had been put at a disadvantage by the ceasefire. There was a danger that if the even slightly more moderate factions lay down their arms when al-Qaeda and Daesh did not, the latter could be isolated and targeted by the regime and the Russian air force.

Al-Qaeda has therefore been angling for an end to the ceasefire, and may have gotten its wish this weekend. That development might be good for al-Qaeda but it would be bad for everyone else.

-

Related video:

Associated Press: Raw: Renewed Fighting in Syria Near Aleppo
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By Anne Aly | (The Conversation) |  

Media outlets were quick to note the criminal backgrounds of the perpetrators of last weeks Brussels terror attacks. Drawing comparisons with those who undertook the November 2015 Paris attacks, this analysis suggested the rise of a new generation of terrorist recruits who are not radical Islamists but Islamised radicals.

A closer analysis of the perpetrators of recent attacks suggests that [the so-called] Islamic State (IS) has a different kind of appeal to that of its predecesor, al-Qaeda in Iraq. Apart from having little or no knowledge of religion, the new crop of IS recruits come primed for violence with a different set of skills, honed through criminal activity.

Evidence collected by the Countering Violent Extremism research program from more than 100 case studies of lone-wolf actors who have perpetrated foreign or domestic terrorism confirms this trend. It points to an important distinction between terrorist attackers who are driven by ideology and religion, and those for whom violence is less about ideology.

Early understanding

Terrorist and violent extremist groups have traditionally appealed to the elite and educated. Egypts Muslim Brotherhood, for example, drew its membership primarily from among university students.

Early profiles of terrorists tended to describe them as middle-to-upper-class university graduates. A 1977 analysis of 350 terrorists found that not only were they university graduates but that universities also served as major recruiting grounds for terrorist organisations.

Our understanding of religious terrorists has followed the logic that they are driven by religious conviction and radicalised to commit acts of violence through religion. The conventional wisdom has been that some individuals who are religiously radical will find the means and opportunity for violence.

According to this understanding, there is a difference between radicalisation in opinion and radicalisation in action. When an individual becomes radicalised in their opinion  once they accept the extreme interpretation of Islamic text that justifies murder, terror and violence  they then seek out ways to carry out murder, terror and violence.

The role of criminality

Brothers Brahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui, who carried out suicide attacks at Brussels Airport, had previously been in jail for violent offences.

Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, the alleged leader of the Paris attacks and connected to the Brussels cell, was a career criminal convicted of violent crimes including assault. Another of the Paris attackers, known radical Omar Ismail Mostefai, was arrested for a string of offences in his youth.

Violence and aggression as a personal factor in lone-actor attacks has not received much attention in analyses of radicalisation to violent jihadism. But studies of other forms of terrorism and violence have looked specifically at criminality.

One study of xenophobic violence in Germany found up to 10% of violent extremists had prior records for politically motivated crimes. Up to 35% had prior records for other crimes.

This study identified four types of extremists:

right-wing activists;

ethnocentric youth;

criminal youth; and

fellow travellers.

Three of these types had some history of criminal activity. Right-wing activists typically had prior records for multiple political crimes. Ethnocentric youth typically had prior records for juvenile crime. Criminal youth typically had multiple prior records of criminal activity.

Criminal youth with a history of violence do not appear to have marked right-wing ideological leanings or political interests. For them, violence is seen not as a means of achieving political or ideological goals. Instead, it is a normal part of their everyday lives. Criminal youth also tend to come from unstable family backgrounds and have lower education attainment levels.

Clues for the future

Using the case studies, we have distinguished between three different kinds of violent jihadist terrorists.

Type 1 were highly religiously motivated and tended to become violent as a result.

Type 2 had criminal or violent pasts or long-term signs of aggression and were not highly religiously motivated, though they still used religion to justify their actions.

Type 3 were extremely violent and were likely to declare their group or ideology affiliation during or after the attack.

Of all the case studies, 30% had a criminal record. A further 20% had violent or aggressive histories, according to reports and interviews. And 37% met all the criteria for being ideologically radicalised.

The smallest type were Type 3s. Only three cases met all the criteria.

The case studies also confirm that IS is attracting younger recruits more likely to have criminal or violent pasts. Compared to attackers and foreign fighters before ISs rise, those recruited after 2014 were more likely to have been involved in criminal activity.

The findings provide some useful clues to radicalisation and how we deal with it. Criminality and gang culture have replaced extreme interpretations of religion as the binding group identity that characterised earlier waves of violent jihadist recruits. The criminal element among this new wave means they are likely to be already known to law enforcement  though not necessarily for violence or extremism.

If the recruitment trends continue, police will have a greater role to play in countering terrorism and violent extremism. It also means that prisons  often considered breeding grounds for radicalisation  are possibly more prominent as incubators for networks of violent jihadists.

The shift in terrorist recruitment could prove helpful for law enforcement. Being able to identify criminality and violence as a key feature of new recruits means law enforcement agencies can know what to look for and take early action.

While terrorist attackers will try to avoid drawing attention before they act, their violent and criminal pasts could give them away.

Anne Aly, Professorial Fellow, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.



Related video added by Juan Cole:

Press TV:  Belgium charges 3rd suspect over foiled terror plan
[JURIST] The Netherlands will vote in a non-binding advisory referendum on Wednesday regarding Dutch ratification of the EU-Ukraine trade agreement. The EU-Ukraine deal [materials] will remove trade barriers between the European Union (EU) [official website] and the Ukraine. Many Dutch citizens view the EU unfavorably [AP report] due to its expansion and allegedly undemocratic decision-making processes. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte stated to the press [NU report, in Dutch] about the deal: [W]e believe that Ukraine should have both a good relationship with Europe and with Russia. [They] can not if they are in the European Union.

The EU is a partnership of 28 European countries for political and economic purposes, with its own currency adopted by 19 member nations. It began in the 1950s as the European Economic Community (EEC) to promote a single economic market without trade barriers. The Treaty on the European Union was signed in the Netherlands in 1992, and an EU Constitution was approved by the member nations in 2004. In the years since, many in the UK have voiced concerns about remaining in the EU, with critics saying it has too much control over UK citizens. In February the UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced [JURIST report] that the UK will hold a referendum on June 23 to vote on whether the nation will remain a part of the European Union. Last month the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) addressed the agreement [JURIST report] between the (EU) and Turkey, stating that it is important to ensure safeguards in executing the agreement and to respect international and European law in the process.
[JURIST] Polish citizens protested on Sunday a possible total abortion ban following the suggestion of the ruling legislative partys president. The ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party wants to bring the countrys abortion policies in line [Guardian report] with the Catholic Churchs views on the practice, and party president Jaroslaw Kaczynski recently backed the churchs position. The majority of Polish citizens consider themselves to be Roman Catholic. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydo supports [AP report] the total ban on abortions. Poland currently already has one of the strict abortion laws, but this proposed ban would eliminate abortion in all cases, cease state funding for in-vitro fertilization, and reinstate the prescription requirement for emergency contraception.

Abortion access and reproductive healthcare [JURIST backgrounder] remain contentious issues worldwide. The High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland in November ruled [judgment] that Northern Irelands abortion laws, which only allow abortion when the mother faces the risk of death or serious injury, are a violation of human rights [JURIST report]. According to an Amnesty International report released the same month, El Salvadors complete ban on abortion negatively affects [JURIST report] not only women and girls, but also their families. A Dominican court in December blocked [JURIST report] a new law that would have decriminalized abortion if a pregnant womans life was at risk, thus reinstating a total ban on abortion within the country.
LINCOLN  State lawmakers, as well as a state workers union official, are expressing concerns about a rash of recent assaults of corrections staff at Nebraska prisons.

Over the past three years the number of assaults on State Department of Correctional Services personnel has nearly tripled, according to state statistics obtained by The World-Herald, from 32 attacks with serious or nonserious injuries in 2013 to 94 last year.

In March, five attacks were reported by the department, including a melee on March 9 in which three corrections officers were injured in an altercation that involved four inmates.

Last week a special legislative committee probing the troubled Correctional Services asked for a briefing on the rising assaults. State Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln, who made the request, said lawmakers need to know not just the what but the why  of the attacks.

What is the source of this uptick in staff assaults? Once we know that, we can start to address it, said Coash, a key member of the Department of Correctional Services Special Investigative Committee.

I hope that the department will ask for the resources they need, if they need them, to address this issue, the senator added.

State Corrections Director Scott Frakes acknowledged the recent rise in overall assaults, but pointed out that only a few involved serious injuries, and that those had declined by one from 2014 to 2015.

As I have stated many times, one assault is too many, but context is important and all assaults cover a broad spectrum of behaviors, Frakes said in a statement.

The 185 serious or nonserious assaults reported over the past three years do not include 115 incidents from 2013 through 2015 of substances  including saliva and even feces  thrown at prison guards.

Figures for 2016 were not provided, but the state risk managers office said 17 workers compensation claims have been filed so far this year for injuries involving assaults on corrections workers, which is on pace to surpass the 62 claims filed during all of 2015.

Frakes said he recently changed department policy so that press releases are now sent when an assault occurs. That change, Frakes said, was taken as part of his effort to make the department more transparent and accountable.

Michael Steadman, a former state corrections caseworker who now works for the state employees union, said he appreciated the new openness about staff assaults. That didnt happen in the past, Steadman said, and the public never learned about some very serious injuries suffered by prison security staff.

But the increase in incidents is troubling, he said, and may be caused by inmates pushing in their own way to make sure that change happens.

If change doesnt occur, there could be more violence. But thats a personal opinion, said Steadman, who worked for the department 2001-2013.

State prison officials have said they have found no links between the recent assaults, but state lawmakers and Steadman say they want to know more details, such as whether the assaults involved inmates who had recently been in solitary confinement or who suffer from mental illness, and whether inexperienced staff were involved.

The report on prison assaults comes as the Legislature and the administration of Gov. Pete Ricketts are working to repair a prison system rocked by troubles, overcrowding and a deadly prison riot.

Overcrowding and the threat of lawsuits because of it have been an issue in recent years, and the department has struggled with high worker turnover, low morale and required overtime.

Inmate idleness prompted by a lack of rehabilitation programs and recreational activities was blamed as a key cause of the riot 11 months ago at the states highest-security prison. Two inmates were killed and over $1 million in damage was done when inmates ransacked and took over two housing units at the Tecumseh State Prison.

State lawmakers responded this year by approving $27 million to expand a Lincoln prison, $4.6 million to continue housing some inmates in county jails, and $1.8 million for other, shorter-term steps to address overcrowded cells. Correctional Services also was granted $1.5 million to provide incentive pay for corrections officers in hopes of reducing turnover and retaining seasoned staff.

Omaha Sen. Bob Krist, another key member of the special legislative committee, said the new spending will help, and that Frakes, since taking the job 14 months ago, has made progress, but that clearly more improvement in the agency is needed.

Some studies have linked overcrowding and staff shortages to increased assaults and safety issues, but Frakes said it would be irresponsible to associate the assaults with a single factor when there are many unique causes to physical confrontations.

Drawing attention to the assaults is a reminder of the inherent danger of corrections work, Frakes said. I am proud of each member our team.

Safe employees is a top goal, he said, adding that he hoped Nebraskans recognize the good work being done every day in state prisons.

Ricketts, at a press conference last week, said the March assaults highlighted that dangerous people are in prison and that strong laws are needed to protect corrections officers.

He said he hired Frakes to change the culture in the department, but that it wont happen overnight.

But Im absolutely confident in Director Frakes ability to be able to put the reforms in place that we need to do, the governor said.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne speaks to reporters as she arrives at the First Ministers meeting at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa on Monday, Nov. 23, 2015. Wynne is asking for a meeting this week with Ontario's opposition leaders to talk about reforming the province's political fundraising rules. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Elmo's Adult Books & Movies has been on Callow Avenue in Bremerton for 47 years.

SHARE The Turf News is another adult store on Callow Avenue in Bremerton that has felt the impact of the Internet.

By Josh Farley of the Kitsap Sun

BREMERTON  A loyal customer base and the ebb and flow of Navy ships has kept a small red-and-yellow storefront on Callow Avenue in business for nearly a half-century, Barbara Bowlan said.

But the branch manager for Elmo's Adult Books & Movies, a small chain of stores in Washington carrying pornographic titles, is frank about the economics of operating in the 21st century.

"It is very tough in this business, I'm not going to lie to you," she said. "I've watched it go down as the Internet has grown. We used to have a lot of movie renters, but now it's much easier to stream online."

The Internet has inflicted great pain on many brick-and-mortar retail businesses, yet a few pornography shops on Callow, including Elmo's, have managed to survive. Bowlan says that's due to a customer-oriented experience.

"You can buy anything on the Internet, but often, you have no idea what you're actually getting," said Bowlan, who also pointed out downloaded Internet porn can sometimes come with viruses.

Elmo's has been in Bremerton 47 years, she said. Its sister stores also cater to areas with a military presence in the Tacoma area, as well as one in Pasco frequented by some long-haul truckers, she said.

Their presence on Callow Avenue hearkens back to a day where Bremerton had more than just a few porn shops.

"Pornography, and the ladies of the night, go back to the very first day that Bremerton existed," according to Russell Warren, a local historian who specializes in the Charleston area, where he grew up.

Not long after the establishing of the shipyard, taverns in Bremerton  known to double as bordellos  sprang up rapidly around the turn of the 20th century, Warren said. Crime and disorder stemming from them reached a point that the shipyard leaders threatened to abandon Bremerton if the city did not cut off the saloons from serving alcohol, he said.

Throughout the city's history, prostitution, often in the form of "massage parlors," has maintained. As late as 2007, a health spa, on the 100 block of Callow, was raided and the operators arrested on suspicion of promoting prostitution.

Today, those on Callow doing business of the legal variety remain, though in one case the line has been blurred. Jerry Woodhead, owner of Callow's Turf News, was arrested by Seattle police in early March for promoting prostitution, according to the King County Jail's website. He's since posted bail.

City Councilman Dino Davis, who represents the area, believes businesses there have an "exclusivity of market" that's kept them profitable.

"There's no other choice," said Davis, who noted he views the pornography industry overall as predatory. "Not everybody has high-speed Internet at home."

Ron Kropp, who works at Turf News, said there's no doubt that the Internet's "cut into our bottom line." He believes the Navy of today has a "zero tolerance" position on debauchery, that at times, spills over into his line of work, leading to fewer customers.

Mayor Patty Lent noted that all towns with a Navy presence seem to have an "adult section."

Bowlan of Elmo's said retail demand does indeed change as sailors come and go from the area.

"We know the minute a ship docks," she said. "And we know the minute a ship leaves."
By Rachel Seymour of the Kitsap Sun

KINGSTON  While the Port of Kingston faces an investigation by the state auditor and lawsuits for its handling of public records requests in 2014 and 2015, a terminated port employee who fulfilled records requests plans to file another lawsuit, alleging she was wrongly fired, defamed and retaliated against.

According to a claim filed by the employee in January, the port fired her  the assistant manager  based on "mistaken or falsified allegations" that she took money from the port. The termination followed her complaints and attempts to follow the public records laws, the claim states.

The public records lawsuits allege that the port illegally withheld and deleted documents, failed to respond to records requests in a timely fashion and other violations.

The lawsuits come as the port says it has received an unprecedented number of requests  most from two individuals  in the last two years.

The mounting requests prompted port Commissioner Walt Elliott to testify in front of legislative committees, favoring changes to the state's public records law because of the increasing time and money the port has spent responding to requests.

But the lawyer for the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the port says it was the port's incompetence  not abusive requesters  that led to the effort and expenses put into the requests.

"Compliance with the Public Records Act isn't what's costing the port," said attorney Carl Marquardt. "It's the noncompliance that's costing them."

FIRING DISPUTE

In January, the former assistant manager for the Port of Kingston filed a claim against the port that she was fired following complaints and attempts to follow public records laws. As assistant manager, Christine Conners handled public records for the port until she was terminated in September.

Conners' attorney said she was fired based on "mistaken or falsified allegations" that she took cash from the port's drop box on three separate dates in June and July. Although the port did not have evidence of these allegations, it reported the theft allegations to third parties in a "negligent and reckless manner," according to Conners' claim against the port.

Conners' attorney, Judith Lonnquist, said she plans to file a lawsuit against the port this week.

RISING REQUESTS

The port received 151 public records requests in 2015, 98 requests in 2014, 12 in 2013, and 1 in 2012. Of the Port of Kingston's 249 public records requests over the last two years, Beth Brewster, of Kingston Adventures, and Tania Issa, a friend of Brewster, made a vast majority.

Brewster's requests were filed in search of information for a separate lawsuit against the port, while Issa's requests were aimed at assessing the port's compliance with its own resolutions and codes, as well as state regulations, according to Marquardt.

Marquardt said that had the port provided requested documents, there would have been "far fewer requests."

According to Issa's suit, the port withheld documents from her after a port resident filed a protection order against Issa. Issa had requested documents related to the port's dealing with the resident. Although protection orders do not prohibit individuals from making or receiving public records requests, the port notified Issa it would not be able to fulfill her request because of a pending protection order hearing.

According to Brewster's lawsuit, the port claimed some surveillance videos Brewster requested were "inadvertently deleted." For the video footage Brewster did receive  an eight day span in May 2015  the port charged her about $165, according to court documents.

Brewster's lawsuit also included a request for a witness statement from former Port Manager David Malone about an alleged crime at the port. Malone said he typed the statement on a port computer, according to the lawsuit, although the port later said Malone's statement did not exist.

Malone resigned from the port in October, citing harassment and complaints directed at him and port staff as his reason for stepping down.

RISING PORT EXPENSES

Elliott declined to talk with the Kitsap Sun about the port's public records requests because of the pending lawsuits.

"We learned our lessons the hard way," Elliott said during a legislative committee hearing earlier this year. "We made some mistakes and we're being sued."

During Elliott's testimony, he said the Port of Kingston was spending 80 percent of its property tax revenue on public records requests.

That's "wildly inaccurate," Marquardt said.

Port documents show it brought in $191,860 in property tax revenue in 2015, while spending $34,195  17.8 percent  on public records requests and associated legal expenses. Its total legal expenses for 2015 were $81,300. It had budgeted $107,100 for legal expenses.

Operating revenues  not including property tax receipts  in 2015 were $1.4 million.

Elliott told the Sun in emails that the port has a legal assistant helping with records requests, adding to the cost, along with other full-time staff members who have assisted with public records requests.

Nancy Payne, who handles the port's budget and finances, told the Sun that the port does not have an accurate way to break down the exact amount of money it has spent on fulfilling public records requests in the last two years. But it is starting to track its finances more closely.

The port also is working with its attorney to update its public records policy. The policy could be adopted during the port commission's April 27 meeting, Payne said.

Adam Wilson, deputy director for the state auditor's office, confirmed on Friday that an audit of the port is ongoing, and that "we are reviewing public records issues as part of that work."

The lawsuits filed by Brewster and Issa are in mediation, but Marquardt said Friday he expects them to continue in court.
SCOTT SNIVELY | PORT GAMBLE THEATRE COMPANY Aouda (Orla Budge) finds herself strangely attracted to her rescuer, Phileas Fogg (Mason Enfinger).

SHARE SCOTT SNIVELY | PORT GAMBLE THEATRE COMPANY Phileas Fogg (Mason Enfinger, right) bargains with the owner (Hank Hayden) of a potential getaway elephant.

By Michael C. Moore, mmoore@kitsapsun.com

PORT GAMBLE  On paper, the stage adaptation of Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" might not seem like much. Too narratively rushed to pack much dramatic impact and too logistically limited to seem much of a proper travelogue, the worry is that the piece might come off sort of dry, drab and talky.

It doesn't. At all. At least not in director Scott Snively's production at Port Gamble Theater Company.

There are times when the travels of Phileas Fogg take on almost a documentary tone  in fact, just about everyone in the cast take a turn or two as an ersatz narrator.

But even when they're narrating, they're keeping their tongues poked firmly in their cheeks. One of the best things about PGTC's "80 Days" is its sense of humor  both about the material and about itself.

Snively has opted for an old-timey, Vaudeville-esque ambiance, which works not only in concert with the antique confines of the historic Port Gamble Theater, but with the way the story would be told in such a setting  with self-aware humor and sight gags replacing the bells and whistles. Snively and his cast of six  most of them in multiple roles  keep the pace snappy, the comedy cheesy and the atmosphere relentlessly light. Like Fogg himself, the show doesn't see problems, only challenges, and is both unapologetic and nonchalant in using whatever means necessary to get over every hurdle.

What PGTC can't do that Fogg can is throw money at the challenges. Like Vaudeville, they lean on ingenuity and cleverness, which don't cost a dime, to augment the low-budget, high-effort aesthetic. Without giving too much away, the set  designed by Snively and Jim Wingren and beautifully slathered with paint by Joan Peterson and Glenna Snively (the director's wife and assistant director)  is simple but never boring, evocative and unobtrusive, as essential to the storytelling as are Beth Ann Galloway's rich period costumes. Techie stuff is minimal, but effective.

It's 1872, and Fogg (a stiff but affable Mason Enfinger) has accepted a challenge to trot himself and his manservant Passepartout (Michael DeLay, a PGTC newcomer) around the globe in 80 days time, with the 1870s English equivalent of about a million and a half U.S. simoleons on the line.

Not everything goes according to plan, because there really isn't one  Fogg, it seems, is adept at winging it, and eminently confident in his abilities to do so. Brisk tail winds help them get ahead of Fogg's ambitious schedule, but then there are setbacks (Passepartout is part passed out in Hong Kong, Apaches attack their train on the American frontier) and other delays (Fogg insists on rescuing a damsel in distress from a religious cult keen on barbecuing her) that put winning the wager into serious question.

There's also a detective, Fix, (a broadly comic, anything-for-a-laugh Hank Hayden) who's tailing Fogg, convinced he pulled a bank job in London and that his travels are an escape, the wager just a cover-up.

Just about everybody else who turns up as Fogg, Passepartout and Aouda (the damsel, not a fancy mayonnaise) span the globe is portrayed by the indefatigable Wingren, particularly successful as an unflappable English consulate gopher, and Joseph Graves, who has a vaguely Michael Palin-ish thing going that worked well in many of his cameos.

Some will say there's a Monty Python vibe to much of the show's humor. Overdone accents, racial and regional stereotypes (the cowboy-rancher who helps Fogg battle the Apaches is neo-redneck, who lumps the Britons in with Passepartout and calls them all "Frenchy"), misunderstandings and mispronunciations do abound. But they're sourced more from the English music-hall comedy and early absurdism that inspired the Pythons, as well as Americans like Woody Allen and Mel Brooks  whose running "which shoulder is Eyegore's hump on?" in "Young Frankenstein" came to mind when Wingren's eye patch switched eyes during the "80 Days" intermission. Come to think of it, the ultra-dumb cowpoke was right out of "Blazing Saddles" ...

The show isn't all smooth sailing. For all the taut pacing, it sometimes bogs down a little in all the talk  especially when several of the accents shoot themselves in the foot by being too thick or mush-mouthed to be decipherable.

Mostly, though, it's all great fun, cap-guns and clotheslines and turntables and pantomime elephants, turning what might've seemed like "80 Days in the Hole" into a highly enjoyable two and a quarter hours. It's goofy and simple, but it's the right show, in the right place, done with the right attitude.

REVIEW

'AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS'

Who: Port Gamble Theater Company

What: Adaptation of the novel by Jules Verne

Where: Port Gamble Theatre, 4839 NE View Dr., Port Gamble

When: Through April 17; 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $17-$15

Information: 360-977-7135, portgambletheater.com
LARRY STEAGALL /KITSAP SUN Matthew Daignault holds son Aden, 1, whom he calls the "clinger," outside his rental home in West Bremerton. Daignault's rental is being sold, and he is struggling to find an affordable living space for him and his four children. (LARRY STEAGALL /KITSAP SUN)

By Tad Sooter of the Kitsap Sun

In a white house perched on a hillside overlooking Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Matthew Daignault was running out of options.

Late last year, the owners of the rental house decided to put the residence up for sale. They gave Daignault a generous four months to find a new home for himself and the four young children in his care. It seemed like plenty of time.

The single father spent the winter scouring rental ads for homes in his price range with little success. He looked at listings as far away as Belfair and found even single-wide trailers were renting for $1,300 a month.

Daignault thought his search would get easier after he landed an entry-level job at SAFE Boats International that paid $16 an hour plus benefits. But he said income requirements adhered to by landlords stymied his search. It's not uncommon for landlords to require tenants to show income that's three times more than the rent they'll be paying. By that formula, Daignault calculated he could afford rent of $853 a month. Fair-market rent for a three-bedroom home  the minimum he'd need for his family of five  is about $1,500 per month in Kitsap.

When Daignault did find homes in his price range, owners balked at his bad credit history or the number of children living with him.

He started offering landlords extra cash just to rent to him.

None accepted.

With one week left before his move-out date at the end of March, Daignault still had not found a place to move. He would rent a storage unit for their belongings. Beyond that, he had no plan.

"I don't know what we're going to do," Daignault said.

A paycheck, as Daignault found, doesn't guarantee a place to live. Kirsten Jewell, who heads the county's Housing and Homelessness program, said affordability is increasingly an issue for working-class families, who've watched housing-cost increases outpace wage growth.

An analysis by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found Kitsap renters earn an average of $11.26 an hour. At that wage, they'd have to work 53 hours a week to make the typical one-bedroom rental affordable, and 70 hours to afford a two-bedroom, according to the report.

That means people working in restaurants, retail stores and child care centers might have to put in extra hours or find roommates to afford homes in the county.

"It's really hard, even for people doing jobs that support the community," Jewell said.

As a result, some families spend a larger portion of their incomes on housing than the federally recommended standard of 30 percent, leaving less money for other necessities. A 2015 Housing Needs Assessment produced by the state Department of Commerce estimated nearly 14,000 Kitsap renter households were "cost-burdened," spending more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing.

"I look at this number with a lot of alarm," Jewell said. "It means we have a lot of households living on the edge."

Ted Kelleher with the state Department of Commerce said communities across Washington are grappling with similar affordability issues. Kelleher worked on the state's 2015 Housing Needs Assessment. He said he wasn't aware of how widespread Washington's housing challenges were when the study began.

"We were surprised how much of a problem it is not just in the Puget Sound corridor, but all over the state," he said.

The assessment found that for every 100 "very low-income" and "extremely low-income" households in the state, there were about 51 housing units that were affordable and available. The gap in Kitsap was more striking, with 32 units available per 100 households, in line with the rate for King County.

Census data used in the study were three years old, Kelleher said. He suspects the state's affordable housing gaps have gotten wider.
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By Ed Palm

Recently, I went on a sentimental journey. I spent two days in Seattle attending the annual conference of the Popular and American Culture associations (PCA/ACA). Back when I was going around in academic circles, I was a regular at this conference. From 1995 to 2003, I presented papers on various topics related to our Vietnam involvement and on the literature of that war. Since I qualified for a press pass, I decided to look in to see what the attendees were up to these days.

Forget what you may have read or heard about the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, the professional organization for professors of literature. Its panels have gotten a lot of richly deserved derision for covering esoteric topics and for espousing pretentious political positions. The PCA/ACA is not like that. Most of the topics explored at its annual meetings are accessible and relevant to any educated person interested in who we are or claim to be as Americans. I came away from this year's meeting with some fresh insights into a few issues that should be of interest to us right here in Kitsap County.

A couple of the panel forums I attended were devoted to journalism and media culture.

At one of these panels, Kiyomi Maedomari-Tokuyama, of the University of the Ryukyus, analyzed the framing of news stories relating to the American military presence in Okinawa. She demonstrated how the American press has typically underreported Okinawan concerns and distorted the situation.

Contrary to popular belief, she argued, the American military contributes only about 5.3 percent to Okinawa's economy. Tourism now contributes twice as much. What we have heard too little about, she maintained, was the environmental damage the military does and the safety concerns relating to the new Osprey aircraft.

"Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers" was her theme. Discerning readers know that, of course, but we all need to be reminded occasionally.

Of greater interest to me personally was a paper presented by Ashley Kunsa, a doctoral candidate at Duquesne University. She tackled the Department of Defense's controversial practice of "embedding" journalists with the military.

The DOD is a distinctly unironic organization, but it could not have chosen a more ironic title for this practice. Embedding puts journalists "in bed" (figuratively, for the most part) with combat units, thereby compromising the objectivity professional journalists are supposed to maintain.

Embedding began with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and early on, some wag of a cartoonist put his finger on what's wrong with the practice. A reporter is shown sitting on sandbags and asking a soldier which of two equally laudatory adjectives he should use in describing "our unit."

This is a far cry from the coverage of Vietnam. Reporters there were free to roam at will, hopping on and off helicopters as if they were free taxis. If you think the coverage there was one-sided and superficial, read Michael Herr's "Dispatches." Then tell me if anything that insightful, empathetic, and honest made it into the press during the Iraq War.

Finally, I listened to a presentation that would have been of interest to anyone attending, or considering attending, Olympic College. Two faculty members from Cuyahoga Community College, Bridget Kriner and Kristina Ambrosia-Conn, debunked the stereotypical representations of community colleges in film and television.

The most egregious examples they shared were drawn from the Emmy Award-winning ABC sitcom "Modern Family." Haley, the popular older sister of the Dunphy family, has occasion to remark that her community college "tells you to bring a glue stick" and that the courses are pass/fail, meaning that everyone passes. In turn, her smarter, younger sister Alex, who is aiming for Princeton, claims Haley only had to "like" her college's Facebook page to be admitted. The implication is that, because community colleges are open admission, they're "consolation prizes" for losers who can't get into, or succeed at, four-year schools.

The stereotypes, the presenters argued, ignore the vocational commitment of community colleges and are belied by a number of sources. According to the website TheBestSchools.Org, nearly half of all undergraduates enroll in community colleges, and a 2009 Miami Herald study found that community college graduates command higher starting salaries than their four-year counterparts. What's more, a number of luminaries passed through two-year colleges: George Lucas, Tom Hanks and Amy Tan, to name just a few.

As a former community college dean, I couldn't resist jumping into the discussion. Community colleges struggle to be all things to all people, I acknowledged, especially with the draw down in state funding since 2008. But they can also be great places for academically underprepared veterans to start.

This sentimental journey made me realize I still have much to contribute. I just may join the presenters next year at the PCA/ACA conference in San Diego.
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By the Kitsap Sun editorial board

Last Tuesday evening more than 600 readers attended an event the Kitsap Sun organized at Bremerton's Admiral Theatre, where a panel of experts in emergency response and preparedness discussed earthquakes.

The impetus behind the panel discussion was a series published by the Sun in January, "The Danger Below Us," explaining the Seattle Fault that lies beneath our peninsula and its potential to devastate our community.

That's right  devastate. As explained in our reporting and emphasized often during the recent event, the potential for loss of life and property is immense, and very much real. At Tuesday's forum a skeptical audience member asked whether a tsunami following a Seattle Fault earthquake could really inundate Bremerton, perhaps poking a bit at the hype.

"Absolutely," deadpanned Tim Walsh, chief hazards geologist for Washington Geological Survey at the Department of Natural Resources, without hedging an inch.

Wright and his fellow panelists, from FEMA, the county's Department of Emergency Management, a local fire agency and a neighborhood preparedness organizer/author, weren't there to spread scare tactics or create overwrought fear. They answered questions about basic readiness and earthquake science, shared advice, and encouraged neighborhoods to unite on this issue as soon as possible. Part of the forum, including a preparedness checklist published last Sunday and online now at www.kitsapsun.com/earthquakes, was empowering for individuals and neighborhood groups who should start preparing for a situation where they may need to be self-sufficient for days.

An issue raised during the forum goes beyond personal preparation, and it's one that should alarm more of us. Too many of our homes and public buildings are inadequate to withstand a major tremor, including those housing first responders and equipment, and even renewed efforts from state and federal governments to fund warning systems remain underfunded.

For example, half of Kitsap County's fire stations are not up to current seismic code; only 30 of 3,000 schools across the state have been inspected for earthquake resilience; and a system that could detect a major earthquake and give a few crucial minutes of warning time, which has received funding for early testing of a communications app from the state and feds, is now delayed thanks to an appropriations bill hung up in Congress, where there seems to be ample time to raise campaign cash or take ideological votes against Obamacare rather than deal with this need, among many practical matters we face.

That system, called ShakeAlert, shows that the technology exists to make us incredibly more prepared  just imagine what it would mean to have two minutes to evacuate kids from an old school building, or get fire engines out from a station that may collapse. But expansion for such a system must be funded, and those preparing their homes and neighborhoods should push their elected officials to make sure that happens. That's going to cost money, likely seen by most of us through fire or school bonds for construction  but again, imagine the post-quake school or fire station, then picture your own home and family in such a scenario, and do the cost calculation.

The potential should be frightening, but the reaction doesn't have to be despair. Scott James, another panelist Tuesday, put this spin on it: "Start with a party." That is, get to know your neighbors, start a "Map Your Neighborhood" project with the county's assistance, understand how you could survive together. That doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming; the resource list the Sun has prepared outlines steps to take over a 12-month period to spread out the cost and effort.

After all, we still have lives to live. But we also have a responsibility to be aware of a very serious reminder that FEMA's Kelly Stone left the crowd with the other night: "In the Puget Sound region, every day is earthquake season."

Editor's note: Tim Walsh's name was incorrect in the original publication of this column.

The Kitsap Sun editorial board is Editor David Nelson; Opinion Editor emeritus Jim Campbell; and community members Martha Burke, Susanne Hughes, Bart Kale, Drayton Jackson and Jim Stark. Any opinion expressed here is the consensus of this group.
Two people were killed when an Amtrak train partially derailed near Philadelphia today, officials said.

Amtrak said Train 89, traveling from New York to Savannah, Georgia, partially derailed after striking a backhoe that was on the tracks.

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency said the two fatalities were reportedly the backhoe operator and another track worker. Travis Thomas of the Chester Fire Department said the two people killed were not passengers. Amtrak did not immediately comment on the victims.

Thirty-five people were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, officials said.

The train struck the backhoe in Chester, Pennsylvania -- approximately 15 miles outside of Philadelphia -- and came to a stop in the neighboring town of Trainer, the fire department said.

The train had 341 passengers and seven crew members on board at the time of the crash.

Passenger Ari Neeman, who was sitting in the second car, told ABC News the train got "extremely bumpy" and at one point the window in the aisle across from him "started to break apart."

He said it appeared that many injuries were in the first car. Ne'eman said most passengers were fine and that they were being moved to a local church.

Photos taken by a passenger on the train obtained by radio station WCHE showed the frightening damage to the train.

Two are reported dead according to philly.com after an Amtrak train derails this morning in Chester. A Chester County... Posted by WCHE 1520 AM Radio on Sunday, April 3, 2016

Federal Railroad Administration officials are at the scene. The National Transportation Safety Board was notified and planned to send a team.

Amtrak is working with the NTSB to investigate.

Amtrak said Sunday afternoon it had resumed limited service between Wilmington and Philadelphia, and then Sunday evening said it would operate regularly scheduled trains on Monday, though Acela Express, Northeast Regional and other services would be subject to some delays between Philadelphia and Wilmington. Keystone Service between New York and Harrisburg was not affected, Amtrak said.
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Downtown merchants will set up shop Monday 2-5 p.m. in Sorority Village on the University of Tennessee Campus. Ten percent of proceeds will support the UT Panhellenic Council philanthropy to build a school in Haiti.

Child sexual abuse prevention training will take place Tuesday at the South College Auditorium, 400 Goody's Lane, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Local youth-serving agencies will be on hand beginning at 5:30 p.m.

One of six finalists will be awarded a $20,000 cash prize by a panel of seasoned investors Wednesday during the 2016 Tennessee Venture Challenge grand finale at The Foundry 3-5 p.m. TVC is a business plan competition hosted by the University of Tennessee Research Foundation.

The Sevierville Fire Department will host a child car seat safety inspection Saturday 9 a.m.-noon at the Main Station downtown, 122 Prince Street, in Sevierville. Firefighters also will provide tips on fire extinguisher use and smoke alarm installation.

The Blount County Public Library and Blount County schools will cohost a disability-resources fair for all people with disabilities and their families, friends, service providers and educators on April 11 3:30-5:30 p.m. The fair will be in the meeting room hallway and meeting rooms at the library.

Knoxville-Knox County Metropolitan Planning Commission will meet April 14 at 1:30 p.m. in the Main Assembly Room of the City County Building, 400 West Main Street.
I was struck by two dumbfounding emotions last Wednesday.

The first occurred while reading the morning paper, the second that afternoon when answering a phone call from a longtime family friend.

These situations were polar opposites. Yet they were linked in principle as if by chain and padlock.

The newspaper account came from Nashville. It told how the state Senate was poised to approve legislation naming the Holy Bible as Tennessee's "official book." A similar bill previously passed the House.

Amazing.

You know and I know and every first-year law student knows this is unconstitutional on its very face. If approved and signed by the governor, it surely will be struck down by the courts  at a huge cost to taxpayers.

You also know if the guiding text from any religion besides Christianity were proposed for similar status, it would die the fastest of legislative deaths.

Still, the grandstanding continues on Capitol Hill.

Rare is the politician who would stand up to this shameless pandering. Too much fear of being falsely labeled "against the Bible!"

Nonsense. The Bible differs in every way from the yellow poplar (official state tree), mockingbird (songbird), tomato (fruit), even the Barrett M82 (rifle), ad nauseam.

It isn't merely a "thing." Rather, it's the living holy writ for those who ascribe to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Lawmakers may wish otherwise, but this doesn't include everyone they've sworn an oath to represent.

As for the phone call:

Our friend was seeking the cell number of a former associate. While Mary Ann perused her lists, the caller chatted about her retirement from the field of juvenile speech therapy.

It was a good career, she said. Some trying times, of course, but also a great feeling of accomplishment helping unlock the minds and mouths of youngsters.

When she cited one case in particular, it brought tears to our eyes.

A girl, about 5, was being raised in poverty. She had scant home support, let alone a grasp of basic educational skills. Our friend was working with flash cards showing colors and simple foods like apples and bananas.

"We weren't getting anywhere," she recalled. "One of my flash cards showed broccoli and cauliflower. I'd set it aside because I knew she wasn't ready for it. But when she saw it on the table, she immediately identified them.

"I asked how she knew, and she said, 'That's what we get from the dumpsters behind the grocery store.' "

If only the politicians who proudly wear their religion on their sleeves would instead roll them up and tackle the real problems facing Tennessee.

This is called practicing what you preach.

If the Holy Bible isnt the official Tennessee book, what book would you choose for the honor?
Sex Week co-founder Brianna Rader photographs a finished painting of the Rock Thursday, Mar. 21, 2013, at the University of Tennessee. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL)

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By MJ Slaby of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Lessons of consent, respect and boundaries are essential to Sex Week, known for its racy event titles and taboo topics, said student organizers of the University of Tennessee event.

But those lessons about sexual assault prevention get left out when critics talk about the event, which kicks off its fourth year this week, said Elizabeth Stanfield, a co-chair of the event.

"They really miss the point about consent and communication," she said.

Stanfield and Colleen Ryan, a junior, are leading the student-run event that runs Monday to Friday and is organized by the student group Sexual Empowerment and Awareness at Tennessee.

The pair said they joined the student group during the 2013-14 school year to help plan the second year of Sex Week because they had friends who were sexually assaulted. At the time, SEAT was the only student group pushing the conversation about sexual assault, they said.

Sex Week started four years ago and faced strong opposition and criticism from state lawmakers in its first two years. After a compromise on funding, the event has stayed an annual one on campus, helping spread the conversation about sexual assault. That conversation has come into the spotlight after a federal Title IX lawsuit against UT that alleges the campus has a "hostile sexual environment" was filed in February.

"We've been telling administrators for four years that something needs to change," Stanfield said, noting she has seen the university do more to prevent sexual assault and promote consent.

More people are noticing there's a need for sexual assault prevention on campus, and that's exciting for the group, Ryan said.

"It's our view that the only way to prevent sexual assault is to talk about it, and you can't talk about it without talking about sex," Ryan said.

She said education, like Sex Week, can help define healthy relationships and the difference between a sexual assault and a bad sexual encounter. Ryan said Sex Week organizers revamped the event's sexual assault roundtable with the Sexual Assault Center of East Tennessee to be more focused on victims and their supporters.

The event continues to cover a variety of topics from religion and sexuality to abstinence and virginity to "50 Shades of Orange," an event planned due to the popularity of the book and film "50 Shades of Grey."

Regardless of the topic, Stanfield said boundaries and respect are in every conversation. Consent is not boring, so it shouldn't be presented that way, she said.

This year is the second year of the event since a funding change, prompted by state lawmakers, that allows students to opt in to the student activity fee of $19.46 per semester that funds student-organized programs.

If students opt in, their money goes into the pool of funds allocated to student organizations for events by a committee of students, faculty and staff. If students opt out, they still pay the fee, which is used for other programs not organized by students.

This year, 81 percent of student opted in for both the fall and spring semesters.

State tax funds and tuition dollars are not used for Sex Week.

Ryan and Stanfield said they know some people still disagree with Sex Week, but said the event also has a lot of support on campus and in the community.

"We're at the point now where students say, 'I came to UT because of Sex Week,' " Stanfield said.
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By Tom Humphrey of the Knoxville News Sentinel

NASHVILLE  A bill denying pension benefits to teachers convicted of misdemeanor sexual crimes has been revised on the House floor to apply to state legislators as well.

The change to the bill  SB1656  was proposed by House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh, D-Ripley, and endorsed by the sponsor, Rep. William Lamberth, R-Cottontown, as a "friendly amendment." Lamberth echoed Fitzhugh's comments that "if we're going to hold teachers accountable," it is only fair that legislators face the same standard.

House Republican Caucus Chairman Glen Casada of Franklin, who normally rallies GOP opposition to Democrat-proposed amendments, commended the Democratic leader for his proposal, declaring Republicans "have long worked to address to sexual harassment."

But the bipartisan show of support for the bill and the amendment was matched by a bipartisan voicing of misgivings during Thursday's floor debate, perhaps most notably from Reps. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville, and John DeBerry, D-Memphis.

"We are constantly sending messages to the people of the state of Tennessee that we are idiots," said DeBerry, adding that "we have made the politician police pretty strong already." The discomfort, he said, came despite a personally inclined response toward anyone sexually touching a child, a focal point of Lamberth's debating points.

"I'd just get a 2-by-4 and whip 'em," DeBerry said.

Lamberth replied that the message being sent was: "Do not commit sexual offenses, whether you are a legislator or a teacher." That message should help deter such conduct, he said.

Current law denies pension benefits to those covered by the state retirement system  including teachers and legislators  if they are convicted of a felony involving their position. The bill, which has already passed the Senate 33-0, expands that to include misdemeanor sexual offenses  though another amendment adopted on the House floor excludes "public indecency" convictions, which can involve such things as urination in public view.

Typically, Lamberth said, those facing pension loss would be convicted of "misdemeanor sexual battery," which he defined as the inappropriate touching of an "intimate part" of another person's body. Fitzhugh said that can include "a hug made with the wrong motive."

DeBerry and Dunn both contended that the denial of pension benefits could have an unfair adverse impact on the spouse of the person convicted of a relatively minor offense, eliminating the pension that a family relies upon for support. Enactment, Dunn said, "punishes people who have done absolutely nothing wrong."

Dunn also noted that the law would apply only to convictions related to the teacher or legislator's position. For teachers, he said, that would be fairly clear in speaking only to their work at schools or with students. But for legislators, Dunn said, he said, the application might be "24/7" since lawmakers are asked about legislative matters constantly by constituents  in grocery store checkout lines and the like, for example  as well as when in Nashville dealing with more official functions.

Fitzhugh told Dunn "I think you're right" on the potential unfair impact on families of the accused, but he nonetheless believes that if legislators are applying the proposal to teachers, it should apply to legislators on the same basis. Fitzhugh said he would be willing to consider further changes to deal with that concern.

After that exchange, Lamberth put off a floor vote on the bill for a week. It will be up again Thursday.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks Saturday, April 2, 2016, during a campaign rally at Memorial High School in Eau Claire, Wis. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

SHARE State Republican Party Chairman Ryan Haynes of Knoxville Brent Leatherwood

By Tom Humphrey of the Knoxville News Sentinel

NASHVILLE  While controversy over appointment of Donald Trump delegates thrust some Tennessee Republican leaders into the national limelight over the weekend, all members of the state's GOP congressional delegation have quietly declined to serve as delegates for any candidate.

Though there have been exceptions, Tennessee Republican U.S. senators and representatives often have gone to the Republican National Convention as delegates, typically representing the assured winner of the nomination.

Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, along with the state's seven GOP representatives, were offered the opportunity this year, said state Republican Party Executive Director Brent Leatherwood, but all decided "not to be part of the (delegate) slate."

"All our elected officials are very interested in the process," said Leatherwood. "I'm sure, at the appropriate point, all will be speaking out as they see fit."

Republican members of Congress are still invited to attend the July convention in Cleveland, Ohio, by the Republican National Committee. But by dodging service as a delegate, the congressmen also avoid entanglement in the escalating uproar over the possibility of a contested GOP convention should Trump win more delegates than any other candidate but still fall short of the majority needed for nomination.

Gov. Bill Haslam, however, will potentially be in the thick of things. At Saturday's meeting of the Republican State Executive Committee, he was officially designated as one of nine Tennessee delegates representing Marco Rubio, whom the governor endorsed. Rubio finished third in Tennessee's presidential primary in early March and has since withdrawn from the race.

State Republican Chairman Ryan Haynes, a former state representative from Knoxville, and state House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick of Chattanooga were also appointed Saturday as Rubio delegates. Another Rubio delegate is former Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe, who led statewide voting as an elected delegate.

Most Tennessee delegates were chosen by Republican voters, but 14 "at-large" delegates were picked at Saturday's meeting, each assigned to represent a candidate based on results of the March 1 presidential primary.

Trump backers said Haynes had agreed to selecting the seven allocated to Trump from a list provided by the campaign.

Haynes on Sunday said there was no such deal.

"I wanted to be a Rubio delegate because that would give me the most flexibility" in follow-up ballots if no candidate achieves majority support at the outset of the convention, Haynes said, adding that "I think the likelihood grows with each passing contest" for a contested convention.

Rubio has notified state party officials that he is not releasing his delegates to vote for any other candidate. That means  unless Rubio changes his mind  that Haslam and other delegates representing the U.S. senator from Florida will be bound to vote for Rubio under state GOP rules for the first two convention ballots.

Most states require delegate loyalty for only one ballot. Tennessee is an exception in requiring two before bound delegates are unleashed.

Haynes was accused Saturday by Trump supporters of engineering the appointment of people with anti-Trump views as delegates to represent the New York billionaire in Cleveland. Haynes insisted that is not the case and he remains undecided, albeit dismayed and somewhat resentful of the "intimidation" tactics employed by Trump supporters over the weekend.

"I remain neutral. But I think we need to look at the maturity of the candidate, at his depth of foreign policy experience, at how he will be at recruiting independent voters and how attractive the candidate is to women voters," said Haynes, providing a list of what others have deemed Trump shortcomings.

Before Saturday's meeting, Trump campaign senior adviser Dan Scavino tweeted Haynes' personal cellphone number to Trump supporters nationwide, urging them to call the chairman and demand he stop efforts to "steal" delegates. Trump's statewide campaign manager, Darren Morris, also said Haynes had reneged on a promise to appoint only delegates approved by the Trump campaign and had surprised Trump supporters by revealing the proposed slate of appointed delegates at the last moment.

"That's not true," Haynes said Sunday. "I'm not in the business of cutting deals."

And, he said, the Trump supporters were advised well in advance of the proposed delegate slate  "that's why they reacted the way they did" before the meeting.

"Despite what has been said, there were no delegates stolen from Donald Trump," he said.

Trump will go to the convention with 33 delegates committed to back him on two ballots, just as state rules dictate. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has 16 delegates.

But Trump backers question the commitment of some appointed delegates to their cause.

Executive Committee member Ken Gross, who represents a portion of Knox County, figured prominently in complaints from Trump supporters after being appointed a Trump delegate.

According to various media accounts, Trump supporters, including Morris, cited a Facebook post  a "screenshot" copy that was attributed to Gross though not appearing now on his Facebook page  declaring Trump a "liberal Democrat."

Haynes said Gross is a veteran GOP political activist, a popular member of the executive committee and chairman of its bylaws committee, who warranted appointment.

Similar criticism was directed by Trump supporters toward Melissa Gay of Hendersonville, an executive committee member who ran unsuccessfully earlier for an elected position as a Rubio delegate.

On the other hand, Trump himself publicly approved one delegate appointed to represent him  John Ryder of Memphis, who is general counsel to the Republican National Committee and who served for years as the state's RNC national committeeman.

In a tweet, Trump said he considered it "a great honor" to have Ryder selected to represent him.

Peggy Lambert, who served for years as Tennessee's national committeewoman, also was designated to serve as a Trump delegate. So was Betty Cannon of Nashville, who serves as vice chair of the Tennessee Republican Party.

State Senate Republican Caucus Chairman Bill Ketron of Murfreesboro, who sought an elected Trump delegate slot but fell short, got an appointed position as a Trump delegate. State Sen. Mae Beavers, R-Mount Juliet, won election as a Trump delegate.

Among others given a delegate position was Chris Devaney, designated to represent Cruz and who preceded Haynes as state GOP chairman.

Former state Sen. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville, who ran unsuccessfully for a Trump delegate position, was appointed at Saturday's meeting to serve as an alternative Trump delegate. So was Susan Richardson Williams of Knoxville, a former state party chair who ran on the March 1 ballot for a Jeb Bush delegate seat only to see the former Florida governor abandon his campaign before the voting.

Haynes and Leatherwood described the Tennessee delegate slate as a reasonable compromise given the two-step process incorporated into state party rules. He said the first step requires state party officials to consult with the candidates  not to get their approval of a delegate list  and that was done. The second step requires the executive committee to approve the list and, on that matter, well-known individuals  in particular members of the executive committee such as Gross, Gay and Cannon  are included to bolster support for the overall slate, which won 40-25 approval by the committee.
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By Tom Humphrey of the Knoxville News Sentinel

NASHVILLE  The Tennessee Economic Council on Women, established in 1998 to study and advocate for women's equality with men on financial matters, will apparently cease to exist on July 1 after a bill to keep it alive fell one vote short of approval in the Senate Government Operations Committee.

The state's "sunset law" requires all government agencies to be periodically renewed; otherwise they "sunset" and are terminated. A bill to continue the council, which will sunset July 1 without renewal, passed the House 93-1 last year, but was blocked last year in the Senate with Sen. Mike Bell, R-Riceville, as a leading critic.

Legislative rules require that Bell, as chairman of the Government Operations Committee, sponsor all sunset bills. Thus, Bell was sponsoring a bill he opposed.

When the bill came up for reconsideration at a March meeting of the committee this year, Bell invited the council's executive director, Phyllis Qualls-Brooks, and others to step forward and defend the agency, which is budgeted to spend $232,000 per year in state funds.

They did, contending the organization works with multiple other state agencies and private groups to provide data on the economic status of women  "the social glue" that keeps our society functioning, said Qualls-Brooks  and to promote ways to improve that status to the benefit of women, their children and the state as a whole.

But Bell questioned why the state should be funding such an organization over advocacy groups for other constituencies, especially when women's financial status appears to be rising. He cited statistics indicating that 56.4 percent of those now enrolled in college are women as an indication the panel has outlived its usefulness.

"I don't see the state creating a council to look at why that's happening," Bell said of the disproportionate number of women in college. "There are any number of groups out there who, I think it could be argued, where we ought to have an economic council  a male economic council, a Hispanic economic council, an African-American economic council.  Each one could make an argument for their own special group."

The committee vote on the bill to extend the council's existence was 4-2 with two abstentions. Bell was one of those who abstained. The bill needed five positive votes to get out of the committee, thus it fell one vote short.

In theory, the measure could be brought back for another try. But given the committee chairman's stated opposition, despite his avoidance of an actual negative vote, and the general push for adjournment of the legislative session within the next three weeks, that would appear highly unlikely.
Vols fans didn't just help a UT Martin player in need  they went beyond
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No student should feel singled out at school for being different.

Unfortunately, some members of the Tennessee House of Representatives appear willing to single out students across the state for discrimination. On April 5, lawmakers will consider reviving a bill that would bar transgender students from using the appropriate restroom.

If the bill becomes law, students would be allowed to use only the bathroom that matches the gender identity on their birth certificate. Any transgender student attending a public grade school or state college or university would be affected.

This legislation is misguided and simply wrong. As a Tennessean, I know we can do better.

Everyone has a gender identity, but it does not always match the sex on a person's birth certificate. And, contrary to what some may say, it's not a ruse to sneak into the other restroom. Gender identity is a deeply felt sense of who you are as a person. And many transgender people begin to identify as another gender when they are very young.

Transgender children don't deserve to be stigmatized and targeted by legislators who exploit fear and prejudice.

However, that is exactly what this bill would do to students across the state. If our lawmakers are willing to single out students from grade school to college, it's hard to believe that others won't follow their example: classroom bullies, teachers and anyone else  inside or outside of school  who believes transgender people don't deserve the same rights as others.

There are other consequences that come from legislating bathroom access for an entire state. Students will fast, dehydrate themselves and avoid the restroom all day to avoid the attention and harassment that might come from complying with this law.

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit on behalf of a transgender student in Virginia whose school prohibits him from using the restroom that matches his gender identity. Working with other LGBT organizations, we compiled examples of the real-world effects of such policies. They included a transgender boy who avoided using the school restroom for three years. Another transgender youth developed a weak bladder from avoiding the school restroom. A 17-year-old transgender girl dropped out of school because of issues surrounding her gender.

The harm is clear. The need for this bill, however, isn't so clear.

One only needs to look at schools that allow students to use the restroom matching their gender identity. An official from the second-largest school district in the country  the Los Angeles Unified School District  reported that there have been no problems in the 10 years since the school district adopted its policy permitting transgender students to use the restroom and locker room that matches their gender identity. That's a compelling case from a school district with 732,000 students.

Closer to Tennessee, a high school principal in Louisville, Kentucky, has reported no problems with a similar policy at a school of 1,300 students. Quite simply, the dangers this bill is supposed to address are unfounded.

Even Gov. Bill Haslam has voiced his worries about this bill potentially endangering federal funding. His concern is warranted. A revised fiscal note explaining that the federal government may withhold federal education funding has been attached to the bill. Furthermore, recent rulings have shown that transgender youths are protected from discrimination based on their gender identity by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Title IX of the Education Amendments of l972.

In other words, this bill puts the state at risk of costly litigation.

Tennessee schools should be open and welcoming places for all students. Our leaders should oppose any effort that could subject students to discrimination, psychological or even physical harm. The state benefits only when our schools nurture and respect all students.

Rick Mula is an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center where he is an Equal Justice Works Fellow sponsored by the Mansfield Family Foundation.
Back in January, Tennessee's Office of the Repealer  an entity created by the Legislature's Republican Supermajority in 2013 to recommend stupid laws on the books that should be repealed  pointed out a statute enacted in 1828 that provides the following commandment for operation of state prisons:

"Each inmate shall be provided with a Bible, which the inmate may be permitted to peruse in the inmate's cell at such times as the inmate is not required to perform prison labor."

The Department of Corrections has ignored the law for decades, of course, since it's almost certainly unconstitutional. Officials told the repealer office that, as a matter of policy, inmates can request a Bible and one will be provided. But prison wardens don't issue a Bible to every prisoner as the statute dictates.

The repealer recommended trashing only one other law this year  a 1951 statute that sets specifications for marketing "fancy fresh eggs." Seems the law predates the federal government mandate setting up egg classifications many years ago through the Food and Drug Administration. It has been ignored by the state Department of Agriculture.

A bill jettisoning the old fancy eggs law (HB1733) zipped through the Legislature this year with virtually no comment and without any opposition. But nobody would touch the mandate for Bible distribution with a 10-foot political pole. Legislators unanimously ignored the repealer suggestion and no bill to repeal was even introduced.

Understandable, of course. No one wants to be seen as opposing the spread of God's word in any shape form or fashion. After all, as a recent National Conference of State Legislatures report stated, 96 percent of Tennessee legislators identify themselves as Christian, presumably reflecting generally the religion of voters who elected them.

At lot of those Christian voters are categorized as evangelical by political pollsters and, by definition, evangelicals are dedicated to spreading the teachings of Jesus Christ to those who do not know them. Surely that's what legislators had in mind back in 1828 when they mandated distribution of Bible to imprisoned sinners.

So the old statute was an overt expression of governmental preference for the Bible-based Christian faith. The same can be said for a still-standing provision in Tennessee's constitution that says "no person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments" can hold elective office in the state. It's been deemed unconstitutional, but it's still there; nobody's willing to try an ungodly repeal effort.

Today, we find the 109th General Assembly seemingly behaving as did the 16th General Assembly in 1828, presently poised to declare the Holy Bible as Tennessee's official state book. Except that the sincere Republican sponsors of HB615, Sen. Steve Southerland of Morristown and Rep. Jerry Sexton of Bean Station, insist that is not the case. The bill, they say, is to recognize the importance of the Bible in the history of Tennessee and the nation, not to promote a religion.

Attorney General Herbert Slatery has opined to the contrary, deeming the bill an apparent violation of provisions in both the state and federal constitutions. The biblical sponsors disagree, drawing a parallel to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows government to display a part of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, so long as the display is presented as a historic document, not a religious one.

To make this point, the bill has a lengthy preamble reciting in the "whereas clauses" the Bible's importance to Tennessee's economy and history. It doesn't mention the 1828 statute or the ban on atheists holding office.

In debate, most criticism of the bill is based on religious, not legal, concerns  indignation at the notion of putting a sacred text into the same category as proclaiming the salamander as the official state amphibian or "Rocky Top" as a state song. In other words, critics oppose on religious grounds; supporters defend on historic grounds, insisting religion is irrelevant.

Well, OK. One certainly wouldn't suggest that anyone is bearing false witness here.

Debate has also included references to the devotion the nation's Founding Fathers showed for the Bible. But they did not designate the Bible as the official United States book. And no other state has taken the step our Legislature seems prepared to take.

So the sponsors are clearly correct: This would be historic.

Tom Humphrey, retired News Sentinel Nashville bureau chief, may be reached at tomhumphrey3@aol.com.

Read more from Tom Humphrey at "Humphrey on the Hill."

If the Holy Bible isnt the official Tennessee book, what book would you choose for the honor?
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The state Legislature wisely has decided to take a closer look at police body cams before imposing secrecy on the videos they produce.

Legislation proposed by Rep. Glen Casada, the Republican Caucus chairman from Franklin, would have kept all footage away from the public for at least a year while the issue was being studied. The moratorium was needed, Casada said, to protect the privacy of bystanders who might be caught on camera.

The Tennessee Coalition for Open Government agreed that the issue needed more study, but it wanted to make sure videos could be made public if questions of excessive force or violation of rules arose.

The issue is undoubtedly complicated.

Even the strongest advocates of transparency  and we happily count ourselves among them  agree that many videos should not be open records. Officers might be using body cameras in people's homes, in businesses or in hospital rooms. They might be talking to rape victims or minors. Or they might be interviewing witnesses who would not cooperate if they knew their statements could be viewed by the public.

However, some videos must be open to public scrutiny. Otherwise, how would these expensive and burdensome devices improve police accountability and build trust with the citizenry?

Add in questions about redaction, storage and the costs of access, and the complexity of the issue is readily apparent.

There is an urgent need to address the matter. A few law enforcement agencies already are using body cams. Knox County Sheriff J.J. Jones, in particular, has deployed more than 150 cameras, and he plans to buy 600 within the next few years. Several others departments are weighing purchases.

It would be far better for the Legislature to craft sensible rules for access than to rely on sheriffs and police chiefs to develop a hodgepodge of policies, any one of which might be challenged in court and trigger a ruling based on limited facts and no compromise.

But last week, the House State Government Committee, chaired by Republican Bob Ramsey of Maryville, judiciously determined that there was no reason to act in haste, either. The committee killed Casada's bill and, instead, asked the Advisory Committee on Open Government to study the issue and deliver a recommendation before next years' session.

The choice was an excellent one.

ACOG was established by the Legislature in 2008 to advise the Office of Open Records Counsel, which is part of the state Comptroller's office. The group helped develop the "Schedule of Reasonable Charges" for copies of public records and more recently advised the Open Records Counsel on a proposal to start charging the public to see, as well as copy, public records, an idea that died after a series of public hearings showed strong opposition.

The 14-member committee appointed by Comptroller Justin P. Wilson consists of representatives of TCOG, the Press Association, the Municipal League, the County Services Association, the School Board Association, the University of Tennessee, the Association of Chiefs of Police, Common Cause, the Hospital Association, the Association of Broadcasters, AARP, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Sheriffs' Association and the League of Women Voters.

Ramsey; Sen. Ken Yager of Kingston, chair of the Senate State and Local Government Committee; and Janet Kleinfelter of the attorney general's office also serve as ex-officio members.

That's a broad and knowledgeable group of key stakeholders.

"I don't doubt that they will adequately discuss this," Ramsey said.

We very much agree.

It won't be easy to find a way to balance the competing concerns raised by body cameras. But the members of ACOG, acting in good faith, are in the best position to do so.
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Officials running Washington, D.C., want to pay people not to commit crime. No one is surprised that bureaucrats there would think of that. The scheme becomes more attractive when program administrators are to get twice as much as the non-criminals.

The idea comes from California, of course. The city of Richmond has been doing this for years. Here's a tip for anyone thinking of not committing a crime: The pay is higher in California.

President Barack Obama says he can build a prison for terrorists on U.S. soil for $475 million and then close Guantanamo Bay. Why waste all this money? It would cost only a fraction of this if its 91 prisoners would be given even a million dollars each not to be terrorists anymore.

If this catches on, something to watch for is what the mob will do. Demand back pay for crime-free prison time? Professionals wanting higher pay? A hit man who always made good money cannot be expected to take any less for a contract on somebody if he doesn't go through with the job.

To the saying "Crime does not pay" we can now add, "and no crime pays."

Joseph A. Thie, Knoxville
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The capitol of the European Union was rocked by the most recent terrorist attacks against civilians perpetuated by the dark forces of radical Islam. It's another reminder that the democratic West is increasingly becoming less safe. The attacks happened just when I was starting to write Donald Trump off completely and solidify my support behind the ultimate Democratic candidate.

Now I have to rethink whether one of the candidates of either party that contributed to getting us into this worldwide mess has the wherewithal to lead and solve this gigantic problem.

Is it time for a fresh perspective from a successful, insightful business leader who lacks worldly political experience and also has a few gnawing character flaws? Or is this the time to basically double down and elect another career politician with real-world political experience who acts more politically correct and continues with policies consistent with our current president?

Ian Gellis, Knoxville
By Choi Sung-jin

Foreigners made commitments of direct investments worth 23.8 trillion won in Korea last year, exceeding $20 billion for the first time (at last year's exchange rate), officials said.

According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, foreign direct investments reported to it totaled $20.91 billion last year, up 10 percent from 2014, to hit its highest level. The actual arrival of money also broke the annual record with $15.95 billion.

G2  the United States and China  took the lead in making direct investment in Korea. U.S. investors made investments of $5.48 billion, up 51.8 percent from 2014. Their Chinese counterparts made investments worth $1.98 billion, an increase of 66.3 percent. Middle East investors recorded a hefty 514.1 percent increase in direct investment, thanks mainly to Dubai Investment Agency's takeover of Ssangyong Construction. On the other hand, European and Japanese investment plunged sharply, by 61.6 percent and 33.1 percent, respectively, the ministry said.












Representatives from 144 South Korean firms and business entities will accompany President Park Geun-hye on her upcoming trip to Mexico, the government said Monday.

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy announced the list, which includes the heads of Samsung Electronics Co. and Korean Air Lines Co.

It also contains Park Yong-maan, chairman of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Huh Chang-soo, leader of the Federation of Korean Industries.

Park is scheduled to visit Mexico from April 2-5 following a stay in Washington, D.C. for the Nuclear Security Summit.














By Park Si-soo



A slew of environmental campaigns will begin this month to prevent further environmental pollution of the world. Earth Day, which falls on April 22, is a major event demonstrating global support for environmental protection.



Many companies are set to join the initiative, promoting their commitment to the program.



Aveda, an American beauty brand owned by Estee Lauder, has a strong commitment to environment protection. The Minneapolis-based company has focused on preventing water pollution, launching various campaigns in Korea and elsewhere since 2007, including raising money to help people suffering from polluted water and to help species endangered by water pollution. Beneficiaries include India, Nepal, Madagascar and Argentina.



The company launched a "Catwalks For Water" campaign this year, under which Aveda will raise money from client beauty salons in return for showcasing their inspiration, creativity and technical skills in hair, makeup and fashion. Money collected will be used to help reduce water pollution.



With the same aim, the company's Korean unit will hold a six kilometer walking race in Seoul on April 23. The company will donate 12,000 won for each participant.



Korean companies are also active in environment protection. Beauty brand Innisfree, owned by AmorePacific, has engaged in campaigns promoting recyclable products. Angel-in-us and other coffee house chains have launched campaigns encouraging customers to use reusable cups, instead of disposable ones.
By Lee Hyo-sik

On a recent business trip to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this reporter bumped into a group of UAE businessmen in an elevator at the InterContinental Hotel.

One of them began recounting a recent visit to Korea. The man said, "I went to Korea several months ago to visit the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul. Korean people are wonderful. But people don't speak English," suggesting that he had a hard time communicating with his Korean counterparts.

But the man didn't seem to have a good command of English either, despite complaining how poor the English of doctors and hospital administrators was.

Next day, this reporter went to visit the site of a nuclear power plant, a project undertaken by Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) and other local firms, located some 270 kilometers west of Abu Dhabi in the desert.

During a briefing on the $20 billion project, KEPCO Executive Vice President Lee Hee-yong and other company executives shared their "painful" experiences with English.

According to Lee, for the first three years after the project began in 2010, KEPCO employees were ill-treated by many UAE counterparts because of their poor English abilities.

UAE nationals and multilaterals at the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp. (ENEC), all of whom have high proficiency in English, kept picking on KEPCO workers for their mediocre skills in English, as a tactic to secure an edge in negotiations.












Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power President and CEO Cho Seok receives the achievement award at this year's Nuclear Industry Summit (NIS) in Washington, D.C. on April 1. / Courtesy of KHNP



By Jhoo Dong-chan

Cho Seok, President and CEO of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP), has received an achievement award at this year's Nuclear Industry Summit (NIS) for the company's efforts to improve nuclear security.

The NIS is the world's largest nuclear industry meeting, a subordinate conference under the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) where more than 50 international leaders discussed safe use of nuclear power and countermeasures against cyber terrorism on nuclear plants and weapons.

The two events are a biennial summit that has taken place since 2010. KHNP hosted the event in Seoul in 2012.

During this year's three-day nuclear industrial conference in Washington D.C., from March 31, the KHNP discussed and adopted a joint resolution with other international experts over safety measures on radioactive materials, agreement on nuclear security and minimizing the use of plutonium.

Receiving the achievement award in the NIS is expected to improve not only the company's but also the nation's prestigious position in nuclear power.

"KHNP has always participated in the event to join the international community's efforts in nuclear security since its establishment in 2010, and played an important role in the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul," Cho said.

"I believe the KHNP's efforts have been recognized by the award. The company will continue striving for nuclear security and its peaceful use as a global nuclear industry leader."

The KHNP also held an exhibition with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute to demonstrate its commitment in nuclear security and introduce Korea's nuclear history and its technology success in recent years.

KHNP is the nation's largest electric power company, a subsidiary of the Korea Electric Power Corp., which generates about 30 percent of Korea's electricity. It was formally established in 2001 as part of a general restructuring at KEPCO

Last October, Cho was also elected to head the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), the global body of international nuclear companies, and announced his plan to host the WANO event in Gyeongju, south Gyeongsang Province, in 2017.
Startup giants face competition regulations



By Yoon Ja-young



Mobile messenger operator Kakao and biopharmaceutical firm Celltrion have been listed on an antitrust watchlist.



While the designation means they have succeeded as startups, they now face a gauntlet of tough antitrust and competition regulations.



The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) on Sunday released the newly updated list of large business groups facing restrictions in mutual investment or loan guarantees between subsidiaries.



This year's list of business groups with over 5 trillion won in total assets includes conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai Motor, SK, LG, Lotte and GS as well as state-run enterprises such as KEPCO and the Korea Land and Housing Corporation.



The number of business groups on the list increased from last year's 61 to 65 this year, as the FTC added six companies while removing two from the list.



Kakao, which started as a venture firm 10 years ago, rose to the rank of a conglomerate through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Its assets snowballed to 2.8 trillion won in 2014 following a merger with Daum Communications, which operates popular portal Daum. Its assets recently reached 5 trillion won following its acquisition of Loen, a music content provider.



Celltrion, which started as a biopharmaceutical venture 14 years ago, was also designated as a large business group. Its assets reached 5.9 trillion won, increasing by 1.1 trillion won during the past year on surging share prices.



Harim, a poultry-processing firm, also joined the list as its assets increased to 9.9 trillion won following acquisition of maritime transportation operator Pan Ocean.



However, the inclusions are expected to spark controversy over whether businesses that have recently grown from startups should face restrictions equal to family-run conglomerates.



When designated as large business groups by the FTC, businesses face around 35 new regulations. These include a ban on mutual investment and mutual loan guarantees between subsidiaries as well as limitations of voting rights on stakes held by financial subsidiaries.



Hence, Kakao may face problems in launching its planned Internet-only banking service, as it won't be able to expand its own stake in the service as a large business.



It also plans to launch new online-to-offline businesses such as hair salon reservations and chauffeur services, but there is the possibility that it may defy the Korea Commission for Corporate Partnership which announces business areas that are unfit for large business groups each year.



In the case of Celltrion, its business structure may violate a regulation which bans business owner families from taking personal benefits through their companies. Conglomerates are banned from giving much work to firms where the owner family holds over a 30 percent stake, as this leads to more profits for the firm and eventually the owner family.



The government came to ban this practice, as conglomerate chairmen often handed over their wealth to their children this way, at the expense of other shareholders and depriving SMEs of fair competition.



Celltrion may face restrictions as it sells Remsima, its biosimilar copy of the world's third-biggest arthritis treatment Remicade, through the group's marketing and sales subsidiary Celltrion Healthcare. Celltrion Chairman and CEO Seo Jung-jin is the biggest shareholder of Celltrion Healthcare.



While the government has good reason to regulate conglomerates that dominate the country's economy, there thus have been demands that the government raise the criteria of large business groups from the current 5 trillion won to 10 trillion won. This would decrease the number of large business groups to 37 from the current 65 and Kakao and Celltrion would be excluded from the list.




By Kim Jae-kyoung

More foreign financial firms are considering closing their offices here or reducing operations because of an unfavorable market, amid the anemic performance of their head offices, according to analysts.

"I would not say that global banks see Korea as the number one country for exit but it is obvious that the country is in the upper ranks of the table," Choi Jung-kiu, head of Asia Pacific Financial Institutions Practices at AT Kearney, told The Korea Times.

"I think most foreign players do not exclude the possibility of downsizing operations or pulling out of Korea, because Korea's financial industry is losing attractiveness due to poor returns, complicated regulations and low predictability."

According to informed sources, BNP Paribas, France's largest banking group, is assessing the sustainability of its Korean operations every six months.

"BNP Paribas is known to have carried out an evaluation every six months about whether to maintain its Korean business or exit from Korea," a Singapore-based source said, asking not to be named.

"Korea has become less attractive to foreign players as they are unable to get the high returns they did before, while operating costs are going up."

The group, which entered Korea in 1976, denied the claim, saying it has no intention of leaving.

"Korea is an important market for BNP Paribas and we are committed to serving our clients in the Korean market," Philippe Noirot, country head of BNP Paribas in Korea, said.

"Even though there have been rumors of foreign banks withdrawing from Korea, the number of foreign bank branches is actually stable at 39, meaning exits are matched by new entrants or transformations of rep offices into full-fledged branches. Korea still is a market with growth opportunities."

This year, Barclays Capital decided to withdraw its investment banking division, following Citigroup (consumer finance) and Royal Bank of Scotland last year, and HSBC (retail banking) in 2013. UBS has also returned its banking license.
By Kim Jae-won





Ham Jong-ho

Deloitte Anjin CEO

Korea Development Bank (KDB) said Sunday that it canceled its plan to conduct due diligence with Deloitte Anjin on Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) because it had lost its trust in the accounting firm.

The state-run lender said that Deloitte Anjin's failure to uncover Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME) alleged accounting fraud is the direct reason for the cancellation. KDB is DSME's largest shareholder.

"Executives from Deloitte Anjin even testified that they found no problems in DSME's financial statements at the National Assembly," said the manager, asking not to be named. "Then, how can we continue working with them?"

Existing clients of the local accounting firm are considering canceling business deals after the consultancy was probed by the financial authorities over its breach of trust.

This may cost Deloitte Anjin greatly, with officials and sources who are involved with the issue not ruling out the possibility that the accounting firm will be forced to shut down its operations.

Deloitte Anjin said last month that it had already asked the DSME to rewrite its financial statements, saying the firm found errors in them. The announcement denies its report last year which said there were no problems in the company's financial statements.

The firm declined to elaborate due to the privacy of its client. Sources said that the firm requested the DSME to reflect operating losses worth 2 trillion won in its 2013 and 2014 financial statements. The shipbuilder accepted the request, announcing an operating loss of 754.6 billion won in 2014 and 789.8 billion won in 2013.

The cancellation came amid the financial regulator's investigation of the local unit of global accounting and consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu to see whether it intentionally neglected its duties in auditing DSME's financial statements. The Financial Supervisory Service is looking into both DSME and Deloitte Anjin over their alleged accounting fraud.

Deloitte Anjin is also losing clients in the corporate advisory market, winning no projects in four recent deals, they said.

Watchers said that Deloitte Anjin may shut down its office in the worst case, following Sandong Accounting Corp. which closed in 2000 after failing to root out accounting fraud in Daewoo Group. The group, whose businesses spanned from electronics and construction to trade and automaking, collapsed during the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

Representatives from Deloitte Anjin were not available for comment.

DSME said last week that it will strive to get back on a normalization track soon, playing down its controversial accounting errors. During a shareholders meeting on March 30, the shipbuilder's CEO Jung Sung-leep said the company will do its utmost to clinch a deal in the second quarter.

"We will make efforts to improve our business at an early date," Jung said. The shipyard operator has not won any shipbuilding deals so far during this year.

Earlier, DSME reported a record 5.13 trillion won ($4.24 billion) in losses last year due to increased costs from a delay in the construction of offshore facilities and order cancellations amid a prolonged slump in the global shipbuilding sector.

But last week in a regulatory filing, the company revised its 2015 loss down to 3.3 trillion won, citing accounting mishaps, while it swung to a loss of 863 billion won in 2014 from an earlier reported 33 billion won profit. For 2013, the company also swung to a loss of 683 billion won from a profit of 242 billion won.

Consequently, the shipyard has suffered losses for a third consecutive year.

"Because there will be no changes for losses, there will be no fundamental changes for us," Jung said, adding that the company's external auditor demanded that its 2013 and 2014 book-closing be revised.
The sodium content of instant "naengmyeon," or cold noodle, packages sold at supermarkets far exceeds the daily recommended intake, it was reported Wednesday.

According to the food industry, the amount of sodium in 12 one-person packages of cold noodle products made by Pulmuone and Ottogi ranged from 48 percent to about 109 percent of the daily 2,000 milligrams recommended by the World Health Organization.

Also, the water-based cold noodle products had more sodium than the mixed spicy ones.












By Park Si-soo



Korea's top immigration policymaker offered to step down Saturday after a controversy flared up over his recent sale of listed stocks through which he pocketed millions of dollars.

The Ministry of Justice confirmed Jin Kyung-joon, commissioner of the Korea Immigration Service, had offered his resignation.

The senior prosecutor-turned-immigration officer has come under suspicions of engaging in an inappropriate, if not illegal, business deal in the early 2000s that allowed him to purchase then-unlisted shares of a local online game developer.

Under a mandatory report, the 49-year-old said he sold all his 801,500 shares of the South Korea-based firm listed on the Japanese stock market for about 12.6 billion won ($10.94 million) in 2015, resulting in a 3.79 billion-won increase in his personal wealth from the previous year.

All ranking government officials and lawmakers are required to disclose changes in their personal wealth annually.

Suspicions arose quickly after it was reported Jin had worked at the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit of the Financial Services Commission, suggesting that the very chance to purchase such large quantities of unlisted shares may had been a favor from the company.

Jin has strongly rejected suspicions, claiming the investment opportunity had been initially offered to a friend of his, who then decided to share the opportunity with many of his own friends, including Jin.

"Jin has internally verified how he came to buy and sell those shares," the ministry official said. "But from what I understand, he decided to quit as he feels the ongoing controversy may undermine the reputation of the Justice Ministry and the prosecution."
The number of students entering high schools in South Korea is forecast to dip by more than 100,000 over the next two years, a government report said Sunday, signaling an upcoming demographic upheaval caused by the nation's falling birthrate.



The Ministry of Education said the number of new entrants into high schools nationwide will fall to 526,895 in 2017, down about 70,000 from this year's 596,066.



According to the ministry's prediction, the figure will again decrease by about 63,900 to 462,990 in 2018, meaning the population of high school freshmen will shrink by about 133,000 over the next two years.



Notably, the pace of the reduction will accelerate, as the number of new high school students decreased by around 10,000 over the past three years. Moreover, the number of new high school entrants slightly increased between 2015 and 2016, due to the so-called millennium baby boom.



"The so-called 'demographic cliff' phenomenon, which began in elementary schools in 2008 and 2009, appears to have expanded to affect middle and high schools," a ministry official said.



He noted that the local education authorities have begun measures to adjust the number of high school classes in anticipation of the upcoming demographic change.



The Seoul Metropolitan Office Of Education, for instance, recently recommended that the number of high school classes in the capital city be reduced by about 700 by 2018.



Education experts say the falling population of high school students will drastically pull down the competition ratio for entrance into domestic colleges and universities, starting in 2020. At present, about 550,000 people attend colleges and universities, including two-year colleges, in South Korea.



South Korea has one of the lowest birthrates among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development members, stoking concerns that it could cripple the country's growth potential and possibly result in more welfare expenses.



The government's latest data showed that the fertility rate, or the average number of babies that a woman is projected to have during her lifetime, stood at 1.24 in 2014, well below the proper level of 1.8 percent to sustain the current population. South Korea's population is projected to start to decrease in 2030, when it will peak at 52.16 million, with the pace of aging and the low birthrate to continue. (Yonhap)




Ruling Saenuri Party Chairman Rep. Kim Moo-sung, right, talks with main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea interim leader Kim Chong-in during a ceremony to mark the 68th anniversary of the Jeju Uprising at the April 3rd Peace Park on Jeju Island, Sunday. They paid respect to the victims of a brutal suppression of the popular 1948 uprising as part of their campaigns for the April 13 general election. / Yonhap



By Yi Whan-woo

Candidates from the ruling and opposition parties are neck-and-neck in most constituencies across Seoul, according to surveys released by the parties, Sunday.

The data collected shows that races in 32 out of 49 constituencies in Seoul are too close to call.

The ruling Saenuri Party claims to be dominant in seven districts while the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) says that it is leading in nine other constituencies.

The minor opposition People's Party said Nowon C where its co-chairman Rep. Ahn Cheol-soo is running for re-election is the only sure bet.

The remaining 32 restricts are now up for grabs, with candidates from the ruling and opposition parties competing within margins of error.

Observers said that the recent factional strife within the Saenuri Party and opposition parties' failure to join forces are creating a growing number of swing voters.

The eight districts in the combined area of Gangnam, Seocho and Songpa in southern Seoul have been a stronghold for the conservative Saenuri Party.

It, however, has not fielded a candidate in one of those districts  Songpa B  following a power struggle between loyalists of Park Geun-hye and party Chairman Rep. Kim Moo-sung.

Kim Moo-sung insisted on not nominating a candidate in Songpa B where Kim Young-soon, a pro-Park factional member, initially planned to run as a Saenuri Party candidate.

Kim Young-soon is making her parliamentary bid as an independent candidate.

The MPK said it is dominant in Yongsan, Dongdaemun B, Gangbuk B, Dobong A, Nowon B, Mapo A, Guro A, Guro B and Gwanak A.

The candidates there include high-profile figures such as Rep. Chin Young who is seeking re-election in Yongsan.

Chin, a former Saenuri Party member and also a former health and welfare minister under President Park, joined the MPK after the ruling party delayed to nominate him as its candidate in a bid to force him out.

"We believe the voters in Yongsan were tired seeing a power struggle in the Saenuri Party and is and decided to not support it," a MPK official said.

Rep. Ahn, a former MPK member, is seeking re-election in Nowon B. He founded the People's Party in February.
By Rachel Lee



The National Election Commission (NEC) on Saturday banned the use of the expression "unified opposition candidate" when referring to a joint candidate fielded by the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) and the Justice Party for the April 13 general election.



The election watchdog said that the expression should not be used for as long as another opposition party, the People's Party, does not agree with the blanket term.



Last week, the main opposition MPK asked the two minor parties to form an alliance to select single opposition candidates in constituencies in and around Seoul. But People's Party founder Rep. Ahn Cheol-soo refused the proposal.



"Unless the Minjoo Party of Korea, Justice Party and People's Party all agree to nominate single candidates for the 20th general election, the expression unified opposition candidate' cannot be used," the NEC said in a press release.



On March 29, Rep. An Gwi-og of the People's Party, who is seeking re-election in Incheon's Nam District B, filed for an injunction against Rep. Kim Sung-jin of the Justice Party for using banners that read "unified opposition candidate finalized."



"The National Election Commission accepted the Incheon District Court's decision to ban the use of such terms," an NEC official said.



The decision was made because the expression was "highly likely to mislead voters as if Kim is the only candidate running for the constituency," according to the court.



The MPK believes that without an alliance, it would suffer a major setback in the capital area where multiple opposition candidates confront one conservative runner.



Ahn speculated that the alliance will not lead to a win in the general election because he believed the People's Party supporters will not vote for the MPK candidates even if the two sides join forces.



The People's Party issued a warning to its own members that the party will expel anyone who agrees to form an alliance with an MPK candidate without consultation.




Leaders will hold summit Tuesday

By Rachel Lee





President Park Geun-hye

President Park Geun-hye vowed Sunday to expand economic and cultural ties with Mexico in order to help South Korean firms increase their presence in Central and South American markets.

South Korea and Mexico have been working to expand their strategic partnerships across more diverse fields, and consequently, cultural ties have become stronger with the growing popularity of the Korean cultural wave, she said.

"The two nations will expand cooperation in a wider range of sectors on the basis of firm bilateral relations so that people both countries can receive real benefits," Park said during a meeting with about 200 South Korean residents in Mexico City.

Park arrived in Mexico earlier in the day on a four-day tour after the Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington, the United States. This is her first official visit to the Latin American country, accompanied by a business delegation of 145 representatives from 144 companies.

Building a stronger partnership will be discussed at Park's summit with her Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto, scheduled for Tuesday morning said Cheong Wa Dae said.
Guatemalan Ambassador to Korea Gustavo Lopez, second from left, poses with Kanglilanm Organic CEO Lim Soo-book at the Paradise Hotel in Busan on March 23. / Courtesy of the Embassy of Guatemala



By Rachel Lee

Guatemalan Ambassador to Korea Gustavo Lopez has inaugurated a Korean honorary consul on March 23.

Guatemala's President Jimmy Morales appointed Kanglilanm Organic CEO Lim Soo-book as honorary consul in Busan. Lim is also Biocom CEO.

"The honorable consul Lim is a well-known altruist," the ambassador said at the inauguration ceremony at Paradise Hotel in Busan.

"Among other private sector achievements, he has also been honored by the government of Korea with many awards in his outstanding career, including the Director of the National Tax Service Citation, Prime Minister Citation and Minister of Commerce, Industry and Energy Citation.

The ambassador stressed the importance of honorary consul position since it plays a "critical role in providing consular assistance to Guatemalan citizens and to deliver trade, investment, tourism and cultural messages to new and diverse audiences."

"Consul Lim's appointment enhances this network of dedicated and articulate advocates for Guatemala and we are delighted to have him on board."

Lim said: "Guatemala has been one of Korea's leading Latin American trading partners. Last year our President Park Geun-Hye was able to visit Guatemala as a good friend of the nation  a true ally."

"The physical distance between our two countries is much bigger than the cultural distance. I believe that we can continue to strengthen the bonds that unite us through our continued interchange of culture."

The Embassy of Guatemala hosted an opening event for the consulate office on March 23.
The Romanian Embassy organized a wine-tasting event at the embassy in Seoul on March 28.

/ Courtesy of the Romanian Embassy



By Rachel Lee

Romanian ambassador to Korea Calin Fabian has hosted a wine-tasting event at its Seoul embassy to introduce the country's traditional varieties.

Romanian producer Senator Wine presented a selection of varieties including Feteasca Alba, Tamaioasa and Romaneasca. More than 50 Korean representatives from wine importers and distribution companies as well as sommeliers attended the event on March 28.

"Participants had a chance to taste the wines introduced by the representative of Senator Wine and expressed their appreciation for all the wines, especially the organic brands, which are being introduced to the Republic of Korea for the first time," an embassy spokesperson said.

The embassy said the tasting was the first leg in a series of similar events this year. Romania is to take part in the Seoul International Wine and the Spirits Exhibition on April 21-23.

Romania has one of the world'soldest winemaking traditions,dating back 6,000 years.

Romania is the sixth-largest wine producer in the European Union and 12th in the world, with more than180.000 hectares of vineyards.

Senator Wine is a private company established in 1991, which produces more than20 dtypes of wine including Crama Veche, Monser, Varius and Omnia.

The company exports to more than 20 countries, the biggest markets being China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and European Union.
By Rachel Lee



Turkey's Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu will hold the first humanitarian summit in May, the Turkish Embassy said.



The "World Humanitarian Summit," scheduled for May 23-24, aims to provide a "vital platform to address the challenges burdening the humanitarian system," according to the embassy. The meeting will address the question of dignity and safety in humanitarian action with user-friendly approaches.



"While major natural disasters continue to be a significant cause of death and displacement, what is most alarming today is that a great majority of humanitarian crises are conflict-related and of a recurrent or protracted nature," Turkey's Cavusoglu said.



"Nowhere is this more apparent than in Syria, where a mass murderer has, with outside help, targeted his own people indiscriminately and with impunity."



The embassy said more than 5,000 people from around the world  including heads of state and government, and leaders from crisis-affected communities and CEOs from the private sector  were to participate in the event.



"Beyond Syria, whether in the Middle East, Asia, Africa or elsewhere, humanitarian crises are transcending borders," the minister said. "Today, 125 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance around the globe. The number of displaced persons, 60 million, has almost doubled in just a decade."



"These numbers stand as testament to the human suffering caused by the growing complexity of humanitarian crises, our inability and unwillingness to tackle them, and the widening financial gap between increasing needs and limited resources," Cavusoglu said.



"We are all responsible for what happens next to those vulnerable people looking to us for help. Istanbul is an opportunity to step up and shoulder that responsibility."



He added: "We are calling on all leaders of the world to come to Istanbul for the UN Humanitarian Summit and to work with us to find solutions for those who desperately need humanitarian assistance."




Ambassador of Mexico to Korea Jose Luis Bernal contributed this article on the occasion of Korean President Park Geun-hye's visit to Mexico from April 2-4.  ED.



The Mexican people and government warmly welcome Presiden Park Geun-hye's visit to Mexico.



We are convinced that Park's encounter with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will open new ways of friendship and collaboration to continue enhancing the strategic partnership our two countries have decisively forged during the last 10 years.



This visit takes place at a moment in which international economic prospects and security threats pose new challenges to our respective countries and regions, and to world peace.



Thus, it provides a magnificent opportunity to strengthen cooperation in support of our respective development goals and to reaffirm our commitment to international stability, peace and prosperity.



Korea and Mexico distinguish themselves as emerging responsible actors that are promoting more than ever their mutual cooperation and economic, political and cultural relations. Both countries are placed among the 15 largest economies in

the world and they are recognized for their tireless activism in international affairs.



In the case of Mexico, many factors contribute to being a reliable partner in this relationship: its continuous ascendancy as an economic and social powerhouse with a privileged location, dynamic population, macroeconomic and political stability and many other sources of competitiveness that place it among the most sought-after investment hubs.



Our many coincidences have led both countries to strengthen every aspect of the strategic alliance launched in 2005, as reflected in the fact that in 2015 our bilateral trade was above $17 billion, making Korea Mexico's sixth largest trading partner worldwide.



With more than 1,700 joint ventures in Mexico, Korean companies continue to see Mexico as their preferred destination in Latin America.



The high-level delegation of Korean business people who will participate in a Business Forum in Mexico City on April 4, attest to the increasing relevance of these economic ties. On the other hand, the peoples of Korea and Mexico are discovering more and more their affinities and ways of enjoying life. Mexican activities in Korea include a wide array of cultural presentations and the popularity of Mexican food among Koreans is rising.



The same is true the other way around as Mexicans discover the tastes of Korean food and enjoy K-pop and the rhythms from south of the Han River. This mutual attraction resulted in more than 90,000 Koreans visiting Mexico last year, while 15,000 Mexicans travelled to Korea.



Our common interest is reflected in the promotion of the Global Agenda for Development, among many other collaborative actions such as the promotion of MIKTA; a novel group of like-minded nations (Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey and Australia) aiming to exert a positive influence in the multilateral agenda.



At their summit in Mexico City, Presidents Park and Pena Nieto will undoubtedly reconfirm the many bonds of the Republic of Korea and Mexico and our commitment to development, cooperation and long-lasting friendship as the fundamentals of our Strategic Partnership for Mutual Benefits in the 21st century.




By Yi Whan-woo



South Korean and Japanese officials recently participated in a missile defense exercise led by the United States and practiced sharing intelligence on their common enemy  North Korea, the Seoul military source said Sunday.



This prompted speculation that Seoul and Tokyo are preparing to resume talks on a bilateral military intelligence pact, which has been suspended for years due to conflicts over history-related issues.



Military officials here said the two Asian neighbors operated a joint communication channel in the Nimble Titan 16 exercise aimed at bolstering cooperation among about 20 U.S. allies to deter North Korea's submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) attacks.



They said the U.S. military officials "strongly called on" Seoul and Tokyo to team up in carrying out three major missions  information sharing, offense operations and anticipatory self-defense  during the five-day war game starting Feb. 1.



The revelation came after the leaders of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan met Thursday and discussed issues on stalled negotiations the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington D.C.



Seoul and Tokyo initially planned to sign the GSOMIA, a pact aimed at sharing sensitive military information about North Korea, in 2012.



But the plan was scrapped following protests from politicians and civic activists who have insisted on first resolving unsettled historical disputes involving the Japanese military.



South Korea still maintains view that "a relevant circumstance should be created" for Seoul and Tokyo to resume negotiations on the signing of GSOMIA, according to Kim Kyou-hyun, the senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and national security.



The Ministry of Defense also turned down the revelations on the joint communication channel between South Korean and Japan during Nimble Titan 16. It added the drill was not related to GSOMIA at all.



Analysts, however, said North Korea's growing military threats are likely to lead to political and diplomatic circumstances where Seoul and Tokyo may resume their talks over signing of the GSOMIA.



They said the bilateral military pact can supplement the trilateral security alliance among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan in addition to Seoul's security treaty with Washington.



"Pyongyang's increased military capabilities are raising awareness toward enhanced measures for national security," said Yang Uk, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defense and Security Forum (KDSF).



He cited North Korea's fourth nuclear test in January and a subsequent long-range rocket using ballistic missile technology a month later.



The Kim Jong-un regime is also believed to be accelerating in its development of miniaturized nuclear warheads, sold-fuel rockets and SLBMs.



"Under such circumstances, it is seen the Seoul-Washington-Tokyo alliance is also seen as not sufficient in a way that we must get information from Japan via the U.S. It will delay time in receiving time-sensitive information while allowing Washington to take control over the information that Japan has.



"The security climate has changed compared to 2012 and I'm certain people will understand it," he added.



Kim Dae-young, also a KDSF researcher, said voiced a similar view, adding "It's critical to show that the government is capable of making progress on historical and military issues involving the Japanese military separately."



He pointed out that Seoul and Tokyo reached an agreement to settle the Japanese military's sexual enslavement of Korean women before and during World War II, which was the biggest stumbling block in the relationship between the two ties.



"I understand controversy still lingers over the issues, but the government should try to show it can do better."



A total of 20 countries, including the Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, participated in Nimble Titan 16 organized by the U.S. Strategic Command in the U.S. mainland.



The South Korean participants included officials from the Ministry of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Navy, Air Force and the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA).



"There has been a consensus among participants that sharing information by regions and alliances is crucial and that such a joint communication channel should be set up prior to emergency," a source said on condition of anonymity.










Less cutting, more automation will certainly be the future of surgery'

By Jung Min-ho, Kim Eil-chul

Over the past 30 years, laparoscopic surgery  a surgical technique performed by making only a few tiny incisions  has changed both doctors' and patients' conventional ideas of surgery.

Now, robotic surgery is revolutionizing the concept of minimally invasive surgery.

"The efficacy of robotic surgery used to be doubted, but an increasing amount of data show that it is more effective and safer than laparoscopic surgery, which is the previous generation of machine-assisted surgery," Kim Seon-hahn, a surgeon who specializes in colon and rectal cancer at Korea University Anam Hospital, said in an interview.

"It is hard to predict how far robots will go from here, but less cutting and more automation will certainly be the future of surgery."

According to his study on 732 patients with rectal cancer at stages 1-3, those who received robotic surgery showed a higher five-year survival rate (91.3 percent) than those who received laparoscopic surgery (83.8 percent).

The surgery using a laparoscope, a thin tube carrying a small camera, previously emerged as an alternative to open surgery, which requires large incisions. However, the da Vinci Surgical System, which was developed by U.S.-based Intuitive Surgical, is making inroads into a growing number of medical fields as the most advanced surgical machine.

"The robot enables me to perform necessary procedures in the areas that I would not have been able to reach with rigid laparoscopic sticks, let alone entire hands, while getting a 3-D view of what's happening inside the body," Kim said. "It allows me to repair problems inside the patient's body with far less damage and with far better precision. Less damage means less chance of postoperative organ failure and faster recovery for patients."

The machine is not ideal for all types of surgery, but the total number of robotic surgeries performed has rapidly increased over the past decade. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the number spiked to 8,840 cases in 2014 from only 17 in 2005, when the device was introduced to Korea.

"Even the most skilled doctor with the steadiest hands cannot beat the robot. The number is only expected to continue to increase," Kim said.







Robotic surgery is common in the fields that require utmost delicacy, such as urology. Today, about 70 percent of prostate cancer surgeries in Korea is done with the aid of the machine.

Kim is one of the top robotic surgery experts in the fields of colon and rectal cancer in Korea, and his reputation goes far beyond the country's borders.

He performed surgery on more than 500 patients using the "single-docking full robotic low anterior resection" technique, which he also developed. His reputation has brought him to some of the world's finest medical institutions, including the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic, where he presented his techniques to other doctors. He also teaches a regular training course for doctors at National University Hospital in Singapore starting in 2008 as a visiting professor.

Kim believes the technological advancement will increasingly reshape surgeons' roles in operating rooms, urging them to adapt to the new era of medicine.

"Some surgeons are concerned that robots will limit their roles, but I see it differently," he said. "I believe robots will enlarge the capabilities of surgeons by enabling them to do more on their job, with better visualization, enhanced dexterity and more stability. The surgeons' main role is expected to change to that of a controller and supervisor, but their overall influence will strengthen."

All these technological advancement makes training important for surgeons. "That's why I have focused more on teaching my students over the past few years," Kim said.

"After all, if robots are good for patients, they have to be utilized. At this point, we should ask ourselves how to use technologies to benefit more patients rather than whether to use them."

From hands to laparoscopes to robots

Kim has always been at the forefront of using new surgical technologies, even early in his career.

In 1995, when few surgeons understood the concept of minimally invasive surgery in Korea, he had the opportunity to study the field at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

"I was fortunate to learn under the guidance of great teachers, including Jeffrey Milsom, who contributed greatly to establishing the concept of minimally invasive surgery in the United States," Kim said. "The concept was about changing a paradigm of medical services, from the convenient way for surgeons to the more beneficial way for patients. I thought it would be the future of surgery for sure."

He returned to Korea in 1997. "I was excited and ready to spread the concept, which was still new to the country," he said. But unfortunately, the Korea University Medical Center and patients were not ready for change.

"Few people knew what it was, and there were not enough facilities for laparoscopic surgery in the hospital," he said. "For years, there were few patients for laparoscopic surgery."

He decided to leave for Seoul's Hansol Hospital, which offered him an opportunity to use his laparoscopic surgery skills. For about four years, Kim performed surgery on 500 patients with colon or rectal cancer there, building his reputation as one of the country's top experts in laparoscopic surgery.

But Kim eventually returned to Korea University Anam Hospital because he wanted to train junior doctors. He has performed surgery on additional 1,500 patients at the hospital since then, while teaching medical students.

Meanwhile, the concept of minimally invasive surgery has since become known to many doctors and patients in the country. Today, laparoscopic surgery accounts for 65 percent of all surgeries for colon or rectal cancer patients, among the highest levels in the world. "It's not just numbers. The five-year survival rate of stage 2 colon cancer patients who received surgery is more than 90 percent, which is about 10 percent higher than the average level at U.S. hospitals," Kim said.

Kim also mastered and taught the da Vinci Surgical System, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000 and adopted by Korea University Anam Hospital in 2007.

"Some surgeons ask me why we should use robots when we still can do our job without them," Kim said. "I was a good surgeon before the emergence of laparoscopic instruments or robots, but from my experience, I came to know the limits of my bare hands. Surgeons need to embrace good technologies as good partners, and for our patients and ourselves, we should keep learning."
By Lee Hyon-soo

For Koreans, learning English is a long, tough journey. Having taken that journey myself, I would like to share my experience with my compatriots who are struggling to master English.

I worked hard to learn English in middle and high schools in Seoul. But English was taught as a subject to study rather than a living language. My English lessons were focused on grammar and reading comprehension as the single most important objective of English education in school was to enable students to earn high scores on college entrance examinations where spoken English was completely ignored.

The upshot was that I was unable to carry on simple conversations in English when I graduated from high school. So I set out to learn spoken English as soon as I entered college. Not only did I take many English conversation courses taught by native speakers, but I eagerly sought opportunities to practice speaking English with them on a one-on-one basis. I devoted more study time to English than to my major subject, business administration. My four years of hard work paid off. By the time I graduated from college, I was able to converse in English, albeit in a halting manner.

My English ability enabled me to land a job at an American bank in Seoul. While I worked for this bank, I polished up on my spoken English by rubbing shoulders with my American co-workers. I was also able to hone my English writing skills considerably because I had to write everything in English at work.












By Lee Hyon-soo

We, Koreans, have been interacting with the Japanese from the ancient times. So they are no strangers to us. But how well do we know them? What are the Japanese really like? There is an insightful book titled "Japan Unmasked" in which the author, Ichiro Kawasaki, gives a very candid portrayal of his people. The following passages are verbatim excerpts from Kawasaki's well-known book:

From the 14th century to the beginning of the 17th, Japan was divided into the domains of war lords, and internecine civil warfare was the order of the day. This prolonged period of incessant fighting did much to mold the character of the Japanese. Though courteous on the surface, the Japanese are unable to really trust each other and are bent on undermining others whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Japanese children are told by their parents and teachers not to do this or that for fear that "others may laugh at you." Indeed, this is one of the cardinal points of Japanese upbringing. Thus from the earliest youth the Japanese behave as unobtrusively as possible in public. They approach others with a courteous smile, but veil themselves in an atmosphere of secrecy, even when there is nothing to be hidden. In this way the Japanese' spirit of independence is nipped in the bud.

The Japanese have been subject to all sorts of regimentations, both mental and otherwise, within their own family or community. Thus they are placed under constant mental restraint in order to conform to prescribed etiquette and behavior. But once outside the confines of their home or community, they feel they are "liberated" from all these restraints and start behaving as if they were entirely different persons. For instance, Japanese soldiers sent to Southeast Asia during the Pacific War were capable of committing unbelievable atrocities for they were "shame free" outside their home and country.

The Japanese, by virtue of their feudalistic upbringing, tend to harbor feelings of inferiority to those in higher brackets of social strata, and tend to cover up their inferiority complex with feelings of superiority toward those in the lower brackets. This peculiar trait also applies when they are dealing with foreigners. The Japanese harbor an inferiority complex toward Europeans and Americans, while they tend to treat Asians with a superiority complex.

The Japanese generally lack individual initiative and tend to act in mass psychology. They are also gregarious by nature and tend to keep to themselves while living in foreign countries.

The Japanese have been taught to remember indebtedness. If someone was kind to them at some time or other, the recipients of the kindness are expected not only to remember but to repay the kindness whenever possible.

The Japanese generally like to indulge in expressions of curious condescension. For instance, they will say, "Please come to the dining room now, although there is nothing to eat." This is a very common Japanese expression, meaning that the food being offered is of no great value, although in actual fact the food is often very plentiful and sumptuous.

The Japanese are an extremely touchy people and are easily moved by emotionalism. When a Japanese athlete wins in some event in the Olympic Games, Japanese spectators almost always have tears in their eyes.

The Japanese smile when something is not particularly funny, or when they are not necessarily happy. They sometimes smile in order to gloss over an awkward situation. They also smile when they want to curry the favor of others. At an international conference they smile largely to make up for their silence and inactivity.

Is the foregoing self-portrait an overblown generalization? I can't tell. I would just point out that it is the brainchild of a Japanese diplomat of impeccable repute and integrity.

The writer is a retired international banker who lives in Toronto, Canada. His other writings are posted on http://blog.daum.net/tom_hslee. Write to tomhslee@daum.net.
K-water CEO Choi Gye-woon holds the closing ceremony of the first inaugural meeting of the Asia Water Council (AWC) in Bali, Indonesia, on Mar. 26.

/ Courtesy of K-water



By Lee Min-hyung

The Korea Water Resources Corp. (K-water) is moving to become a key player in solving Asia's water shortage problems by exporting its smart water governance systems.

The Internet-based water solutions include the smart water management initiative (SWMI), using information and communication technology (ICT) in every water management process, thereby increasing stability and efficiency in controlling water, K-water said in a statement, Sunday.

The state-run company has already demonstrated SWMI for the nation's smart water city project in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, increasing the city's drinking water supply up to 18 percent, according to K-water. The company is now in talks with regional governments to spread the project across the nation.

K-water said it aims to take advantage of such technological expertise and expand its presence into other Asian countries where demand for smart water management runs high.

This comes about a month after the company teamed up with a group of government organizations in Asia to establish the Asia Water Council (AWC), to take more concrete measures in tackling Asia's water supply problems.

"We are going to turn the AWC into the center of water governance in Asia, by closely teaming up with the member countries and other international organizations dealing with the issue," K-water CEO Choi Gye-woon said in his acceptance speech for the AWC chairmanship.

The K-water chief will lead the organization for three years, in recognition of his continued efforts to address water scarcity issues and develop smart water infrastructure across the nation.

"The AWC will prioritize solving water-related problems in Asia, thereby increasing the nation's footsteps across the globe," said the K-water chief.

The global water market is expected to grow four percent each year, reaching up to 1,000 trillion won by 2025, according to data from the global water market.

K-water said its ICT-converged water management will help not just solve environmental issues in some developing countries, but create thousands of jobs for Asian countries.

As the water-related infrastructure business is driven by governments, K-water plans to form strategic alliances with other Asian state-run organizations before tapping directly into the market.
By Kim Yoo-chul



SK Telecom, the nation's top mobile carrier, says company-supported startups are on track to earn profits by selling their products to leading technology firms and SK Group technology affiliates.



In a statement Sunday, the SK Group's telecommunications unit said three out of 12 startups were expected to generate 8 billion in sales by the end of this year.



"The three startups agreed with different companies to sell their products," said SK Telecom. "The value of combined deals is expected to reach over 8 billion won. We hope to see more good news from the others."



SK has run its "Bravo Restart" program since 2013 as part of SK Group's corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative to help those with business ideas but who need financial and technology support.



"What impressed SK management is that those three startups will bring substantial results without some investment from partners," said a spokesman at the telecom carrier.



One SK startup agreed with LG Electronics to supply its patented 24-bit aptX HD decorder, a solution to be used in improving the hearing quality of LG Electronics' Tone Plus-dubbed Bluetooth headset.



The venture startup is in talks with Audo Technica of Japan, to sign contracts for an additional deal.



The "Security Platform," the second SK-initiated incubating venture, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with a local chip designer.



The collaboration is calling for the venture to jointly develop open-based device platform that will work within the Internet of Things (IoT) framework.



The venture will release a new platform that activates various security solutions such as authorization of devices, encryption of firmware and text messages sometime in the latter half of this year.



The Platform venture also separately agreed with SK Infosec, the security solution unit of SK Group, to jointly develop gateways to transfer and receive data within IoT-equivalent devices.



Air Sketch is the last of the three. The venture, which is an operator of a fashion platform helping users check latest fashion items both in offline and online, agreed with a big duty free shop operator in China.



Under the agreement, the Sketch will exclusively sell fashion items, which are popular in Seoul, via offline and online channels operated by the Chinese operator.



"Beyond the three, additional ventures were in the final stage of striking contracts. SK Telecom will invest more for the ventures and the program," said the company.




By Kim Yoo-chul



Samsung Bioepis, Samsung's biosimilar drug affiliate, says European authorities have cleared a major hurdle for the sale of its latest biosimilar drug Flixabi.



"Samsung Bioepis' biosimilar version of Flixabi received a positive recommendation from the European Medicine Agency last week, setting up future marketing approval from the European Commission," Samsung Bioepis said in a statement on Sunday.



When the European agency makes its financial decision, the European Commission will authorize the sale of the drugs



Drugs authorized by the European Commission are commercially available in 31 European countries.



Samsung Bioepis is working to develop biosimilars, with 13 candidates in the pipeline including versions of "top blockbusters" including Humira, Lantus and Avastin.



In January, the Samsung affiliate won European Union approval for its biosim of Amgen's RA drug Enbrel.



"The latest recommendation by the European agency is good news for Samsung Bioepis," CEO Ko Hang-seung said in the statement.



"Samsung Bioepis hopes the Flixabi could help European countries cut their budgets in medicine and help patients get high-quality drugs for early treatment."



The company said the European agency recommended Flixabi for treating rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis.




The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary

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The City by the Bay is once again ranked as the most expensive U.S. destination for business travelers.

But the big surprise in an annual study of hotel, rental car and dining prices is the ladder-climbing by Detroit.

The latest report by the trade publication Business Travel News, which measures prices paid by corporate travelers visiting the countrys 100 biggest cities, found that the fastest increase in hotel rates  22.5% from 2014 to 2015  was reported in Detroit, a sign perhaps that the Motor City is bouncing back from its 2013 bankruptcy.

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Detroits average nightly hotel rate of $198 is still a bargain compared with San Francisco, the city with the highest corporate hotel rate of $370 a night.

When hotel and car rental rates and dining costs are added, San Francisco leads the country with business travelers paying a daily average of $547. Other California cities ranked this way: Santa Barbara, No. 6, at $409; Los Angeles, No. 8, at $402; San Diego, No. 23, at $348; and Anaheim, No. 35, at $319.

San Franciscos expensive real estate is partly to blame for its high hotel rates, said Joe Brancatelli, a business travel expert and online columnist.

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When corporate travel managers choose a meeting location, he said, they will try to save money either by choosing a cheap locale or by sending fewer employees to an expensive destination like San Francisco.

Say you are planning a meeting and someone says, Lets have it in California, Brancatelli said. Why not go to Los Angeles instead of San Francisco?

Despite the high prices, San Francisco reported a record 24.6 million visitors in 2015, an increase of 2.7% from the previous year.

The national daily average of $318 rose 3.9% over 2014, according to the report.

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The good news is that car rental rates remained mostly flat last year, at an average of about $47 a day.

To read more about travel, tourism and the airline industry, follow me on Twitter at @hugomartin.

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The South Coast Air Quality Management District voted late Saturday to allow Exxon Mobil to fully restore its refinery in Torrance after an explosion at the facility last year.

After nearly 12 hours of public comment and expert testimony at Torrance City Hall, the districts board voted 3 to 2 to approve the order.

ExxonMobil will also pay approximately $5 million in penalties for air pollution violations as a result of the 2015 explosion and violations that could occur during the startup of the refinery. Half of the monies will be earmarked for projects to benefit the communities surrounding the Torrance facility.

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We agree with the decision of the South Coast Air Quality Management District Hearing Board and appreciate its hard work and guidance as we work to safely restart the Torrance Refinery, Exxon Mobil said in a statement.

The public hearing started at 9 a.m. and the board listened for hours as dozens of neighbors of the Torrance facility testified against the proposal. The boards vote was taken shortly before 9 p.m.

The February 2015 explosion, which triggered state and federal investigations, led to higher gas prices in Los Angeles than the rest of the nation. The fully operational refinery provided a fifth of the refined gasoline capacity in Southern California and 10% of the statewide capacity.

But the explosion prompted neighbors to call for permanently closing the facility after reports revealed that harmful chemicals may have been released as a result of the blast.

The approval of Exxon Mobils request to fully restore the Torrance refinery could help tighten the gap in gasoline prices between the Los Angeles region and the other areas around the country.

The facility has operated at less than 20% of its normal capacity since the explosion.

A return to full service is expected to lead to a sale of the plant to New Jersey-based PBF Energy, which announced last fall that it was acquiring the refinery should it return to full operations.

Exxon Mobil and PBF said they expect to close the deal by mid-2016.

The acquisition, experts said, could help lower California gas prices, depending on how aggressively PBF decides to operate.

The company says it intends to fully utilize the Torrance plant.

PBF is a competitive, growth-oriented, merchant refiner that is excited to be expanding into Southern California, said spokesman Michael Karlovich.

After we purchase the Torrance refinery, we will begin selling into an established wholesale market, so having a new merchant refiner in the region ... should further increase competitiveness.

Gordon Schremp, senior fuels analyst for the California Energy Commission, said Exxon Mobils plans for safely returning Torrance to full operations appear to have regulatory support. Now that Exxon Mobil has approval, it will take several days for the plant to reach capacity.

stephen.ceasar@latimes.com

Twitter: @sjceasar

ivan.penn@latimes.com

Twitter: @ivanlpenn

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Through the window of his grocery store on Comanche Avenue in this town of 950 people and zero stop lights, Tom Wisted has watched the anemic economy force a lumber yard, bank and hardware store to close in the last seven years.

During that time, a plan to bring a Native American electronic bingo hall to a rolling corn field on the outskirts of town has been a symbol of hope and doom. Some see the Kansas-based Prairie Band Potawatomi Nations plan as economic salvation; others see it as the ruination of peaceful rural culture.

Id do better if it comes this way, Wisted said one afternoon between customers at Wisteds Country Market. But I really feel I have to remain neutral. I dont want to step on anybodys toes. Its a small community.

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It may be small, but Shabbona, 70 miles west of Chicago, is setting itself up as something of a national proving ground for Native American gambling. The plan for a 24-hour bingo hall would create Illinois first Native American casino, one that could set a national precedent for a growing $29-billion industry and introduce a new form of gambling to the state.

Perhaps the most critical issue is whether the tribe has the legal right to build a casino on the 128 acres it bought for $8.8 million in 2006. To obtain U.S. Department of Interior approval for the casino, the tribe must show, among other elements, that it has a credible claim to the land, that the land would be used to facilitate tribal self-determination, economic development or Indian housing, and that the plan would not harm the environment.

The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation contends the land, which borders a forest preserve and Shabbona Lake State Park, is part of 1,280 acres the U.S. government gave to the tribes Chief Shab-eh-nay  for whom Shabbona is named  and his band as part of a treaty signed in 1829. The Potawatomi back up their contention with a 2001 letter from the Department of Interiors solicitor stating that the band has a credible claim for ... title to this land.

A group opposing the bingo hall says the land was not formally considered a reservation, merely given to the chief for his personal use, and that he voluntarily abandoned and tried to sell it. Opponents also point to an Illinois attorney general opinion from 2007 that the tribe lacks a valid claim to build and operate a casino on the land.

Another issue stems from a federal policy change on where tribes can place casinos. In 2011, Larry Echo Hawk, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, scrapped an earlier guideline that allowed tribes to establish gambling facilities within commutable distance of the reservation, generally considered about 40 miles.

The change, made after consulting with tribal leaders from all over the U.S., created new guidelines that make no specific reference to the allowable distance between a reservation and the location of a tribes casino. Since then, the number of applications for tribes looking to place casinos off reservations has grown substantially, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs has approved more applications.

The Prairie Bands proposal would place the bingo hall about 500 miles from the tribes reservation in Mayetta, Kan., one of the longest distances between a reservation and its casino in the U.S.

At two states away, the Shabbona location would stretch that allowable distance considerably and, opponents claim, set a precedent for tribes to open casinos nearly anywhere in the U.S.

It also would bring a video gaming device to Illinois that state law does not cover. The 2009 law that legalized video gambling in Illinois does not specifically allow electronic bingo machines. The project would have 800 machines, plus two bars, a full-service restaurant and a quick-food outlet.

It introduces lots of financial stress, family stress [and] some crime. Casinos are hard on communities.  Peter Dordal, president of DeKalb County Taxpayers Against the Casino

A preliminary report on the projects impact is expected in October, Department of Interior spokeswoman Nedra Darling said, but a ruling from the department could take years. Documents from the Potawatomi Nation indicate the bingo hall would open in 2018 at the earliest.

Some say it cant come soon enough.

Right now, the town is stagnant, said Dirk Enger, president of Ironworkers Local Union 393 and a supporter of the bingo hall. Its not on the map for developers.

Potawatomi consultants estimate the casino would draw 930,000 people a year, more than twice the 400,000 visitors who come to the state park annually. More than 650 construction jobs would be created, followed by 400 jobs at the facility and a permanent payroll of more than $40 million a year, the consultants said.

As spelled out in a variety of written agreements, local governments and agencies also stand to gain millions of dollars.

Most businesses want to come into the community and have the community give them incentives to come, said Denny Sands, a former DeKalb County board chairman and sheriffs police sergeant who owns the cafe, bait shop and boat rental business at the state park.

This is just the opposite. The tribe is coming into the community to be a good neighbor, to give back to the community.

One of the more ardent opponents is Peter Dordal, 59, an associate professor of computer science at Loyola University Chicago who in 2000 moved a few hundred feet south of the land the tribe purchased six years later. He and his wife, Peg, share a red brick house and 8 acres with a menagerie of animals.

Dordal, president of DeKalb County Taxpayers Against the Casino, said the bingo parlor would be next to a forest preserve and state park  hardly compatible uses. In a letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Dordal said the casinos payroll would be closer to $8 million a year, well below the tribes estimates.

It introduces lots of financial stress, family stress [and] some crime, Dordal said. Casinos are hard on communities.

Intoxication, traffic and stormwater runoff from the proposed site to Shabbona Lake also would be detrimental to the natural areas and quiet, rural atmosphere, Dordal said.

Thomas Swoik is another skeptic. The executive director of the Illinois Casino Gaming Assn. said the state already has more than 34,000 video gaming machines in casinos, bars and other establishments.

The state is pretty well-saturated, Swoik said.

But Sands, a lifelong Shabbona resident, said he was impressed during nearly a dozen visits to the Potawatomi casino in Kansas and admires the tribes community commitment and respect for what they consider Mother Earth.

And he remembered concerns local residents expressed 40 years ago when officials proposed the state park that has become a place that brings economic vitality while preserving the environment.

There were the same fears that are being brought up now by certain groups, he said, and the state park is fine. Weve had no problems at all with traffic, or crime or other issues that tend to get exaggerated.

tgregory@tribpub.com

Gregory is a Chicago Tribune staff writer.

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The Library of Congress, saying a once common phrase had become offensive, announced it will no longer use illegal aliens as a bibliographical term.

The library will now use noncitizens and unauthorized immigration when referring to individuals and the larger phenomenon of people residing in the country illegally. The library called the words more precise as well as less offensive.

The change was prompted by a group of students from Dartmouth College, who urged the Library of Congress to scrap the term. The group  known as CoFIRED, for the Dartmouth Coalition for Immigration Reform, Equality and Dreamers  was assisted by the American Library Assn.

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Melissa Padilla, a student in her last year at the New Hampshire university, recalls her freshman year, when she decided to explore [her] identity as an undocumented immigrant.

While researching the topic, Padilla realized she frequently read the words illegal alien. She contacted fellow members of CoFIRED, and they made their appeal to the Library of Congress in 2014. I think a university should be free of the racist phrases I heard growing up, she said.

The Library of Congress established the catalog subject heading aliens, illegal in 1980 and revised it to illegal aliens in 1993.

Though the latter has been heard frequently during the current presidential campaign  along with illegals  it has fallen out of favor in the news media and elsewhere, and the Library of Congress noted the trend in an executive summary released on March 22.

The phase illegal aliens has taken on a pejorative tone in recent years, and in response, some institutions have determined that they will cease to use it, the executive summary said. For example, in April 2014 the Associated Press announced that illegal would not be used as a descriptor for any individual.

A number of news organizations made the change as well, including The Times, which no longer uses illegal to describe people but does use the term illegal immigration.

Its giving in to political correctness. Illegal alien is a proper legal term.  Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform

Dennis Hernandez, co-director of CoFIRED, called the librarys action an example for others to follow.

We are calling on politicians and the news media to continue the precedent set by the Library of Congress, Hernandez said. Now is the time for all to recognize that referring to undocumented immigrants as illegals is offensive. The word is dehumanizing, Hernandez said, and there is no excuse to keep using it.

The Dartmouth students had recommended undocumented immigrants, but the library had issues with that too, calling it imprecise. Not all undocumented people are, or intend to be, immigrants, and many of them do in fact have documents of some type, the executive summary said.

Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, called the change unnecessary.

Its giving in to political correctness, he said. Illegal alien is a proper legal term.

Mehlman also noted the exceptional role of the Library of Congress  its subject headings are used by libraries nationwide and internationally. The library is an important institution, and they ought to have some kind of allegiance to accuracy in language and precision, he said.

Entering the country without authorization is by definition illegal, Mehlman noted, and alien appears in the immigration code.

An effort to change that was launched last October by Texas congressman Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio, who introduced a bill that would remove alien and illegal alien from federal laws. The bill has not advanced in the Republican-dominated House.

serivera@hoyllc.com

steve.padilla@latimes.com

Rivera is a staff writer with Hoy Los Angeles and Padilla a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times.

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An Amtrak train struck a piece of construction equipment just south of Philadelphia on Sunday causing a derailment, killing two Amtrak workers and sending more than 30 passengers to hospitals, authorities said.

Train 89 was heading from New York to Savannah, Ga., at about 8 a.m. when it hit a backhoe that was on the track in Chester, about 15 miles outside of Philadelphia, officials said. The impact derailed the lead engine of the train that was carrying more than 300 passengers and seven crew members.

Chester fire commissioner Travis Thomas said two people were killed.

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U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters at a New York news conference on another subject Sunday that Amtrak board Chairman Anthony Coscia told him the workers killed were the backhoe operator and a supervisor, both Amtrak employees. He said debris from the crash flew into the first two cars, causing the injuries to passengers.

Schumer said its unclear whether the backhoe was performing regular maintenance, which is usually scheduled on Sunday mornings because there are fewer trains on the tracks, or whether it was clearing debris from high winds in the area overnight. But he said Amtrak has a 20-step protocol for having backhoes on the track, and no trains are supposed to go on a track where such equipment is present.

Clearly this seems very likely to be human error, Schumer said, calling for Amtrak to review its processes. There is virtually no excuse for a backhoe to be on an active track.

A message left with Amtrak officials has yet to be returned.

Thomas and Amtrak officials said more than 30 people were taken to hospitals with injuries that werent considered life-threatening.

The National Transportation Safety Board was investigating. Officials with the Federal Railroad Administration were also sent to the scene, said Matthew Lehner, a spokesman for the agency.

Service on the Northeast Corridor between New York and Philadelphia is operating after an earlier suspension. Service between Wilmington, Del., and Philadelphia remained suspended.

Ari Neeman, a disability rights activist heading to Washington after speaking at an event in New York, said he was in the second car at the time of the crash.

The car started shaking wildly, there was a smell of smoke, it looked like there was a small fire and then the window across from us blew out, said Neeman, 28, of Silver Spring, Md.

Some of the passengers started to get off after the train stopped, but the conductor quickly stopped them. Officials started evacuating people to the rear of the train and then off and to a local church.

It was a very frightening experience. Im frankly very glad that I was not on the first car, where there were injuries, he said. The moment that the car stopped, I said Shema, a Jewish prayer. I was just so thankful that the train had come to a stop and we were OK.

This derailment comes almost a year after an Amtrak train originating in Washington, D.C., and bound for New York City derailed in Philadelphia. Eight people were killed and more than 200 were injured in the May 12 crash. The exact cause of that crash is still under investigation, but authorities have said the train had been traveling twice the speed limit.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has signed three bills targeting abortion providers, including one requiring them to follow outdated federal guidelines for the most common abortion drug and prescribe it at much higher doses than needed.

The law boldly defies new FDA rules implemented this week on abortion drugs.

The signing of the bill, Senate Bill 1324, is likely to jump-start a federal court case that blocked a previous version of the legislation.

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The bill bars doctors from prescribing the drug commonly known as RU-486 after seven weeks of pregnancy and requires it to be taken only at Food and Drug Administration-approved doses in effect until this week. It also requires the two doses of the drug to be taken at a clinic, while providers now send the patient home with the second pill to be taken days after the first.

Much lower doses have been commonly used for years, and at up to nine weeks of pregnancy. The FDA adopted those medical protocols on Wednesday, updating the drugs label, and boosted the time it can be taken to 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Courts blocked a similar 2012 law, and a federal injunction remains in place against that legislation.

In a signing statement Thursday, the Republican governor said the Legislature acted in good faith in approving the legislation to deal with the lawsuit brought by abortion providers.

In such a case, I will always stand with those advocating life, Ducey wrote. I recognize that given the unexpected actions of the FDA, some changes may need to be made in a later bill, and I stand ready to consider those changes when they reach my desk.

The legislation was backed by the antiabortion group the Center for Arizona Policy, whose president, Cathi Herrod, is a powerful force at the Republican-controlled Legislature. In a statement, the organization said: Center for Arizona Policy stands with Gov. Ducey on his statement and will be working with legislative leaders to respond appropriately.

Ducey also signed two other bills targeting abortion or abortion providers. One, Senate Bill 1474, bars abortion providers from transferring fetal tissue for use in research. Planned Parenthoods Arizona affiliate said it doesnt provide fetal tissue for research.

The second, Senate Bill 1485, puts into law a ban on state employees directing charitable donations to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood Arizona through paycheck deduction. That ban was adopted by a board controlled by Ducey last year.

Planned Parenthood Arizona spokeswoman Jodi Liggett said the governor should have vetoed the abortion medication legislation, especially because he recognizes it likely will need to be immediately revamped to deal with the new FDA guidelines. She said she expected legislation to fix the issue to emerge quickly.

By fix it, we take it to mean theyll just lock the new label into place in perpetuity, which is pretty silly and is all about face-saving and not about any rational policy at all, Liggett said. Thats a lot of time and effort just to appease Cathi Herrod.

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker suggested Saturday that Ted Cruzs success in outmaneuvering GOP front-runner Donald Trump in internal battles for Republican convention delegates makes him a stronger candidate in fall battleground states like Florida and Ohio.

If you want to defeat Hillary Clinton, you need to have somebody who has an organization, Walker told reporters at a bear hunters convention in this small central Wisconsin town, a few hours before Trump was scheduled to arrive for a rally.

In a clear reference to Trumps trouble matching Cruz in the arcane but potentially decisive fights among party insiders for delegates, Walker said, When you start to see some of the weaknesses of some of the campaigns that really dont have real strong grass-roots organizations  thats what it takes to win in a state like Wisconsin.

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In Wisconsin, Ohio and other states with a history of close presidential votes, an army of volunteers knocking on neighbors doors and getting people to the polls is crucial, the two-term Republican governor argued.

Walker, who survived a costly recall election in 2012 and was reelected two years later, has put his substantial political operation to work for Cruz in Wisconsins GOP presidential primary on Tuesday.

A Marquette University Law School poll released this week found Trump running 10 percentage points behind the Texas senator.

A Wisconsin loss for Trump would embolden Republican forces trying to stop the New York billionaire from winning the 1,237 delegates he needs to capture the GOP nomination without a contested party convention in Cleveland in July.

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Barry Bennett, a Trump campaign senior advisor, used an epithet to dismiss Walkers remarks as unfounded.

Our organization has produced 2 million more votes than anybody elses, he said, referring to the once-crowded Republican field.

Trump currently has 736 delegates, compared with 463 for Cruz and 143 for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

But in some states where Trump won a primary or caucus vote, he could face a threat if he doesnt win the nomination on the first ballot.

In those states, delegates who must vote for him on the conventions first nomination ballot can abandon him and back Cruz or another candidate on subsequent ballots.

Even if its on the second ballot, I think Ted Cruz is in an excellent position to obtain the 1,237 delegate votes that are required, Walker said.

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In Milwaukee on Tuesday, Trump voiced frustration that although he won the Louisiana primary, he might wind up with fewer delegates than Cruz, whose local troops prevailed in an obscure committee brawl.

I call it bad politics, Trump told CNN. When somebody goes in and wins the election and gets less delegates than the guy that lost, I dont think thats right.

In Tennessee, another state that Trump won, his loyalists were fighting at a party gathering Saturday to block a committee of insiders from appointing convention delegates who would not be loyal to Trump after their first vote.

Dan Scavino, Trumps social media director, circulated a flier on Twitter, saying: We won the votes. They are trying to steal them.

Bennett, the campaign advisor, said members of Tennessees GOP establishment had locked themselves in a private room as Trump supporters were insisting the candidate should be able to choose his own delegates.

We want true Trump supporters as our delegates, he said.

For news of the presidential campaign follow @finneganLAT on Twitter.

For more political coverage, go to www.latimes.com/politics.

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Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders rally Wisconsin Democrats

With just days to go before the Wisconsin primary, both Democratic candidates for president came here to pitch themselves to hundreds of faithful party members.

Bernie Sanders, who spoke first Saturday evening at a downtown convention center, said the Democratic Party needs the enthusiasm hes generated among young voters to prevail in November.

I am the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump, he said.

Sanders served in the U.S. Senate as an independent before running for president as a Democrat, and Hillary Clinton has portrayed herself as the more loyal member of the party.

Im the only candidate in this race thats pledged to raise money for the rest of the party, she said during her speech.

Both of them kept their focus on criticizing Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin who has been a fierce opponent of unions and progressive activists.

There was little of the acrimony that has characterized the Democratic primary in recent days, when Clinton said the Sanders campaign had misrepresented her record on political donations from the fossil fuel industry and Sanders demanded an apology for the accusation.
Even before Southern California Gas Co. plugged the damaged storage well blamed for the worst methane leak in U.S. history, its executives promised to fully offset the emissions released during the break. It was a big commitment that the utilitys leaders said proved the company was a good neighbor and responsible corporate citizen.

Gov. Jerry Brown attempted to hold SoCal Gas to its word with an emergency proclamation in January. He directed regulators to develop a program, to be funded by the utility, that would cut greenhouse gas emissions in the state. Now that the California Air Resources Board has prepared that program, however, the utility has balked.

The state asked SoCal Gas to underwrite only projects that cut pollution in California, especially around Porter Ranch where residents suffered most from the leak. The utility said no, arguing that climate change is a global problem and so the location of the project is irrelevant. The state asked SoCal Gas to move quickly and pay for projects that cut pollution within five to 10 years. The utility said no, that time frame is arbitrary. The state asked SoCal Gas to focus on cutting methane emissions. The utility said no, it should have the flexibility to pursue any project that cuts greenhouse gases.

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The state said that if SoCal Gas funds projects that cut greenhouse gases other than methane, the projects must reduce emissions enough to the offset the damage done by methane  which has 84 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide  in the short term. Because the Aliso Canyon leak released an estimated 100,000 tons of methane, SoCal Gas should reduce about 8 million tons of carbon dioxide. The utility said no, arguing that other state programs require offsets based on the long-term effect of methane. Under that approach, the target would be 2.8 million tons of carbon dioxide. Thats significantly less emission reduction than state officials want.

SoCal Gas made its position clear in a letter to the air board: The mitigation plan is voluntary and the utility will make good on its pledge in any way it sees fit.

The company appears to be correct. When they crafted Californias ambitious greenhouse gas reduction program, state officials chose not to regulate leaks from natural gas storage facilities. Only in recent years have scientists recognized methanes power to hasten climate change, and policymakers havent yet caught up. So Brown and the air board dont seem to have the right to demand how, where or when the company offsets its emissions. The result is that SoCal Gas vaunted mitigation plan might reduce emissions significantly less than community members and environmentalists believe they are owed.

That could change. Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer filed a lawsuit against the utility in December that, if successful, could force SoCal Gas to mitigate the leaks climate impacts on the states terms.

But even if SoCal Gas is right about what the law requires it to do, its position is still hugely disappointing. Company leaders repeatedly said they recognized the tremendous impact the leak had on both Porter Ranch and on Californias effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Chief Executive Dennis Arriola said the company would work with state regulators to develop a mitigation plan. The company ought to follow through on the letter and the spirit of its promise to fully repair the damage of the Aliso Canyon leak.

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When the topic turns to American military intervention in other countries, political candidates of sometimes widely differing views like to assert that the United States shouldnt be the worlds policeman.

Its a clever catchphrase, but what does it mean? That the U.S. shouldnt ever intervene militarily in foreign conflicts? That it should do so only when vital U.S. interests are at stake or an ally is under attack? What about situations in which military force might be necessary to protect civilians or prevent genocide? Does it mean that the U.S. should no longer maintain a large military establishment to deter attacks on allies or that it should ask them to shoulder more of the burden of their own defense?

In his seven years as president, Barack Obama  rightly in our view  has taken a significantly more skeptical view of military intervention than his immediate predecessor, a natural reaction to the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost almost 7,000 American lives. Where he has ordered military action  as in the war against Islamic State or the ill-fated operation that led to the overthrow of Libyas Moammar Kadafi  he usually has done so in concert with other nations. He has sent mixed signals about whether military intervention can be justified purely on humanitarian grounds, though he cited such grounds in defending both the Libyan operation and the early stages of the air campaign against Islamic State.

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Obamas desire to avoid combat is clear. Even as he ordered air strikes against Islamic State and dispatched special forces to Iraq, he ruled out using U.S. troops in enduring offensive ground combat operations. His persistence in negotiating an agreement to place restrictions on Irans nuclear program was motivated in large part by a desire to make military action against Iran unnecessary.

At the same time, though, the administration has sought to support U.S. allies in Europe and Asia in the face of aggressive actions by Russia and China, proposing that U.S. forces be rotated into NATO countries in Eastern Europe and ordering patrols by U.S. vessels in the South China Sea. Obama has submitted a proposed Defense Department budget of $582.7 billion. U.S. forces continue to be stationed around the world, including in Japan, Germany and South Korea, where their presence serves as a symbol of U.S. support for its allies.

[Obamas] administration ... has continued to police potential international conflicts; in todays world, it has no choice but to do so.

So while Obama may be less interventionist than George W. Bush, his administration also has continued to police potential international conflicts; in todays world, it has no choice but to do so. But what of the candidates running to succeed him?

Although he is short on specifics about foreign policy, Sen. Bernie Sanders touts his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and warns that Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize that operation, might lead the U.S. into another war. Sanders says that although he is absolutely prepared to use force if necessary, he wants other countries to know that they cant just call up the American military and the American taxpayers and have U.S. troops come to the rescue. Clinton, although she opposes deploying U.S. combat troops against Islamic State, rightly refused at a town hall to promise a voter that she would never expand our military involvement abroad. She is widely viewed as more willing than Sanders to use force to right wrongs around the world.

On the Republican side, Sen. Ted Cruz has said that the U.S. should do what is necessary to win in the war against Islamic State  which does seem to leave open the possibility of ground troops  but he also has criticized Clinton for her role as secretary of state in pressing for the 2011 military campaign in Libya. For Cruz, the U.S. shouldnt play policeman if the mission is to oust oppressive leaders such as Kadafi and Syrias Bashar Assad whose overthrow might be followed by something worse.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is open to committing U.S. ground forces to fight Islamic State. But even Kasich doesnt see U.S. troops as the preferred instrument of U.S. foreign policy.

Then there is Donald Trump. Trump wants to lay down the policemans billy club  by curtailing U.S. support for NATO and withdrawing U.S. forces from Japan and South Korea if those nations dont pay more for their own defense. Trump has also has suggested that the U.S. should let Syria and ISIS fight. What do we care?  though on another occasions he indicated that he might deploy boots on the ground to knock the hell out of them. In national security policy, as in other areas, one looks in vain for consistency (or caution) with Trump.

This page has laid out some of the criteria U.S. presidents should seek to meet before going to war (other than in cases of invasion or to defend an ally). The provocation must be severe enough to justify putting American lives at risk; alternatives to combat should be exhausted first; allies should be carefully vetted; the U.S. should seek multilateral support and cooperation, and goals should be narrowly tailored, definable and achievable.

Not only Trump but other candidates need to be more specific about the circumstances under which they would use  or refuse to use  military force. Saying that the U.S. cant be the worlds policeman is only the beginning of the discussion.

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Science can tell us lots about how voters will make their decisions in 2016. To appreciate those findings, first free yourself of the idea that humans are rational beings.

Rationality has taken a hit in various domains of decision-making. Economics used to be thought of as a realm of pure rationality, something disproven, for starters, by the million-plus Pet Rocks sold around Christmas in 1975. Formal behavioral economics research comes to much the same conclusion more systematically. For example, people make radically different choices about an economic scenario depending on whether it is described in terms of risk or gain (you have a 50% chance of losing X number of dollars, versus you have a 50% chance of gaining X).

Human decision-making is subject to implicit influences in other realms as well. In one study involving thousands of cases of parole-board decisions, a highly significant predictor of whether an inmate was granted parole was how long it had been since the judge had eaten. Justice may be blind, but dont expect to get a sympathetic hearing from someone whose stomach is gurgling.

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Other research shows our sensitivity to all sorts of unconscious cues. People think potato chips taste better if they hear crunching sounds in the background as they eat, rate a beverage as tasting better if its served in more expensive-looking surroundings. Ask people their favorite detergent; if theyve just read a paragraph containing the word ocean, theyre more likely to choose Tide  and then concoct some supposedly rational reason why its the very best.

Which brings us to how people go about voting for a political candidate. Its a rare voter who carefully reads a candidates position papers on every conceivable topic. Instead, we typically vote based on a candidates stance on a subset of topics, assuming there will be a certain consistency on other topics. Or we follow party lines, or choose based on endorsements  if A agrees closely with Bs politics, and B is voting for C, A is on pretty safe ground voting for C even if C is a complete unknown.

Another conscious component of political decision-making is voting for experience or competence, rather than a platform. This is so common that one study found that candidates judged to look more competent had won elections 68% of the time (perhaps we dont so much vote for competence as for the appearance of it). Competence at least seems like a pretty rational criterion  after all, who wouldnt want competence in our leaders?  until you wind up voting for someone who competently implements things you oppose.

Studies in a number of countries show that people can identify liberals versus conservatives at above-chance levels merely by seeing their faces.

Even when judging competence isnt the goal, looks influence whom we vote for. This too isnt totally irrational, as studies in a number of countries show that people can identify liberals versus conservatives at above-chance levels merely by seeing their faces. But then rationality is completely left behind.

In one well-studied phenomenon, when voters consider two candidates with identical positions, they tend to choose the one independently rated to be better looking. For male candidates this means tall, symmetrical features, high forehead, prominent brow ridges, jutting jaw. Its part of a larger pattern  people judged to be attractive are typically rated as having better personalities, higher moral standards, as kinder and more honest. When job applicants present the same resume, the better looking is more likely to be hired. If miscreants are convicted of the same crime, the better looking tends to serve less time.

The predilection for good looks seems to be connected to a remarkable finding: Some of the same parts of the frontal cortex are activated when assessing the beauty of a face as when assessing the moral goodness of an act.

Other implicit factors come into play at election time. One study examined the campaign speeches of candidates in every prime minister election in Australian history. In 80% of those elections, the winner was the politician who used more collective pronouns (i.e., we and us). Then there are studies showing that raising the levels of the hormone oxytocin in peoples brains makes them more likely to perceive hypothetical candidates as believable and trustworthy; elevate testosterone levels, and the opposite occurs.

There are also what researchers call contingent automatic preferences. For example, in scenarios concerning war, subjects tend to prefer (male) candidates with older, more masculine faces; during peace time, its younger, more feminine faces.

Probably the most striking thing about any of these biases is that they are already in place long before we understand the first thing about economics or geopolitics. This was shown in a 2009 paper published in the prestigious journal Science, a paper that should be required reading just before election day each year. Show kids pairs of faces of candidates from various obscure elections. Tell them that they are about to take a long journey by boat; which of these two people would they want as their captain? And kids, ages 5 through 13, picked the winner a boggling 71% of the time.

Think about that. The automatic biases we bring to voting are already falling into place in 5-year olds considering who should captain their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to stop the pirates menacing to Candyland. Subterranean, unconscious forces are constantly percolating up to influence our decision-making, and yet research also indicates that the more were aware of it, the more we can resist it. Try to remember that as you cast your ballot this year: You may be falling for the crunching sounds in the background.

Robert M. Sapolsky is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. He is a contributing writer to Opinion.

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To the editor: Regarding The Times coverage of Bernie Sanders recent caucus wins in the West: While I agree that no one should be assumed the nominee of the party until all votes are counted, lets look at exactly how many votes were counted. (Trumped-up turnout, March 31 and This time, Trump may be at a turning point, April 1)

Take Alaska. All of 500-plus Democrats turned out for the entire caucus.

Hawaii adds further evidence of the undemocratic nature of caucuses. Again, an extremely small percentage of registered Democrats took part. A great victory for Sanders and his revolution.

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And as for Washington state, not even 30,000 Democrats participated.

Caucuses make it extremely difficult for most people to exercise their right to vote. A candidate with a small group of dedicated followers can distort the true preference of all Democrats. This contrasts greatly with states holding primaries; more than

1.5 million Democrats turned out in Florida (a must-win state) and about two-thirds voted for Hillary Clinton.

I find that many of Sanders policies belong in Fantasyland, not Tomorrowland, because they stand zero chance of being enacted by a Republican Congress. But I would vote for him if he got the Democratic nomination.

Our differences as Democrats are small compared to our differences with those who are enemies of progress, our rights and of the lives we aspire to.

Chris Gragg, Los Angeles

::

To the editor: At last, Donald Trump may be falling on his own petard. His latest blurt-outs about abortion and use of nuclear weapons in Europe  just to mention a few  may be the final straw in breaking his political back. If he fails to secure the nomination of his badly damaged party, it may well be his own miscues and total lack of preparation and insight that finally do him in. The polls, which are his obsession, are now telling him that he doesnt have a prayer of winning in November.

Thats bad news for him, but great news for America.

Bette Mason, Corona Del Mar

::

To the editor: I have lost count of all the above-the-fold articles youve run on that megalomaniac Republican presidential candidate. The Times is wasting way too much space on this buffoon.

Isnt someone starving somewhere? What about those young girls kidnapped by Boko Haram? What are things like in Iraq and Afghanistan at this time? Whats going on with Doctors Without Borders? There are loads of important, interesting topics to report on. Ive had enough of this drivel.

Lynda Obershaw, Pasadena

::

To the editor: Trump stated that if abortion is illegal then women getting an abortion will have to face a punishment.

This was the politically incorrect answer but is the logical answer. If a person violates a law, without a punishment, the law will be ignored. Trump was just not familiar with the artful response created by the anti-abortion lobby. Trump later changed his position to the acceptable response that the person performing the abortion will be punished, not the woman.

This structured response is an attempt to make abortion illegal and still get women to vote for the ban and those who support the ban.

Norwood Price, Burbank

::

To the editor: Whether the Trump Nation understands it, supporting Trump is an intentional or unintentional vote for racism, bigotry, religious intolerance, misogyny, torture, and disrespect for the law. Its mind boggling to read how easily many Trump supporters deny Trumps  and their own  bigotry. Id much rather have a hard-working undocumented worker as a neighbor than someone from Trump nation.

Ray McKown, Los Angeles

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Hillary Clinton said Sunday that the FBI has not asked to question her about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of State, a controversy that has dogged her presidential bid.

FBI agents looking into possible mishandling of classified information have begun to set up formal interviews with Clintons close aides, the Los Angeles Times reported last week, a sign that the inquiry is moving into its final phases.

Asked on NBCs Meet the Press if the FBI had reached out to her for an interview, Clinton replied: No, no, they havent.

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Clinton said she would agree to be questioned about her sending and receiving work-related emails on a Blackberry tethered to a potentially insecure server in the basement of her family home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Back in August, we made clear that Im happy to answer any questions that anybody might have, she said. And I stand by that.

The case has sparked private lawsuits for access to government records, and investigations by Congressional committees and State Department. The inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies referred the case to the FBI last summer after determining that some emails included classified information.

The FBI is trying to determine if a crime was committed in the handling of the secret material, and whether the basement server was hacked to gain access to email communications.

Clintons campaign has argued that she is innocent of any wrongdoing, and that other senior government officials also use private email. Her critics contend she ignored laws and regulations regarding classified material and the preservation of government documents.

The State Department has released thousands of pages of Clintons emails and determined that 22 of her emails contained top secret information. None of the messages were marked classified when they were sent, however.

Investigators may seek to determine if Clinton knew that classified information was on her private server and whether her decision to use her personal email account amounts to mishandling of secret material.

Clinton said Sunday that her use of personal email was a mistake, and she did so as a matter of convenience, not to evade government regulations.

I sent emails to government employees on their government accounts. I had every reason to believe they were in the government system. It was a matter of convenience. Ive said repeatedly it was not the best choice. It was a mistake, she said.

Clinton said she is not concerned about whether the FBI will complete its investigation by the Democratic National Convention, which is scheduled for July 25 to 28 in Philadelphia.

No, Im not, because I dont think anything inappropriate was done, she said. And so I have to let them decide how to resolve their security inquiry, but Im not at all worried about it.

Later on Sunday, Clinton campaigned at black churches in New York, which holds its primary on April 19. Taking the podium to a standing ovation at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn, she earnestly and humbly implored its congregants to vote for her.

Polls suggest rival Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders will best Clinton in the Wisconsin primary this Tuesday, and she appears to be trying to build a firewall in the state where he was born and she was elected senator.

Clinton sharpened her attacks on Sanders record on gun control, one of the few issues where she appears to his left.

We have to end racial profiling, and we have to retrain our police officers so they can do a job that doesnt require reaching for their gun when it is absolutely unnecessary. And thats a big difference between me and my opponent, Sen. Sanders, she said, according to a pool report.

He has voted with the National Rifle Association, the big gun lobby. He voted against the Brady Bill, which has kept more than 2 million guns out of the hands of people who shouldnt have had them in the first place. Then he voted to give immunity from liability to gun makers and sellers. I just disagree with that, she added.

brian.bennett@latimes.com

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Donald Trump refused on Sunday to rule out running as an independent if he fails to win the Republican presidential nomination, renewing a threat that party leaders thought they had quashed months ago.

I want to run as a Republican. I will beat Hillary Clinton, Trump said on Fox News Sunday.

When pressed to rule out an independent run, the New York billionaire said, Im gonna have to see how I was treated. Its very simple.

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The prospect that Trump will launch an insurgent third party run and draw his ardent supporters away from a rival Republican nominee, widening the divisions in the GOP, is a nightmare scenario for party leaders.

Some are supporting efforts to try to deny Trump the nomination if he cannot lock up enough delegates during the primaries to secure the nomination at the Republican National Convention, a movement that Trump has complained is unfair.

The latest lurch in the rocky GOP race began Tuesday when Trump publicly abandoned the pledge he signed in September to support the eventual Republican nominee even if he loses. All the GOP candidates then in the race made similar vows.

At a town hall sponsored by CNN on Tuesday in Milwaukee, Trump was asked if he still felt bound by his pledge.

No, I dont anymore, he said. Asked why, he responded, I have been treated very unfairly.

During the same town hall, Trumps remaining rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, also appeared to back off their pledges to support the GOP nominee. Neither was as direct as Trump, however.

Polls show Trump trailing Cruz in Wisconsin, which holds its primary on Tuesday. But Trump appears on solid ground in New York and several other states that vote later this month.

Trumps backsliding on the pledge prompted Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to warn Sunday that such comments could discourage rank-and-file Republicans and party leaders from supporting him if he wins the nomination.

Those kinds of comments, I think, have consequences, Priebus said on ABCs This Week. And so when you make those kinds of comments, and you want people to fall in line for you, it makes it more difficult.

At stake for a potential nominee is a valuable database of contacts and party machinery to get out Republican voters in the general election.

If you were running for president of the Kiwanis Club or the Boy Scouts and you said you dont know if you like the Kiwanis or the Boy Scouts, I think that makes your challenge even greater to ultimately win those kinds of posts, Priebus said.

Its not different for the Republican Party, he added.

Priebus did not say he would cut off support to Trump for abandoning his pledge.

Trump may be posturing, Priebus said, adding that he had a very good meeting with Trump last week.

Priebus appeared on all five major TV talk shows Sunday, in part to tamp down allegations that party leaders are trying to game the GOPs arcane candidate selection rules to deny the nomination to Trump.

Priebus insisted the GOP would select its candidate fairly and openly, although he made clear that Republicans are preparing for the possibility of a contested convention on July 18 in Cleveland.

If no candidate secures 1,237 delegates on a first ballot, many delegates would be free to pick another candidate in subsequent rounds of voting. So Trump, who has won the most delegates so far but may not reach the required tally, still could lose the nomination.

Kasich has banked his hopes on being an alternative candidate during a brokered convention in Ohio, his home state. So far, he has only won the Ohio primary.

We just have to keep going, and were going to have an open convention, Kasich said on ABCs This Week.

Its going to be so much fun, he added. Kids will spend less time focusing on Bieber and Kardashian and more time focusing on how we elect presidents. It will be so cool.

brian.bennett@latimes.com

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Two groups of California voters  women and Latinos  have powered the Democratic Partys ascent here and delivered a near-death knell to the states Republican Party.

A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll released last week showed that the prominence of those groups also explains why the two hottest candidates this year arent running away with the state.

Across the country, in the states contested so far, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have forwarded a similar message on the topic of the economy: that trade deals have decimated jobs in this country and that those making less money have been ignored as politicians have hewed to policies that benefit the rich and powerful.

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The two candidates may disagree on nearly everything else, but their echoing economic messages have boosted them among blue-collar workers, those who havent attended college and those lower on the income scale, overlapping groups.

But in California, the USC/Times poll found, Sanders and Trump are not gaining a huge advantage from those voters, at least this far out from the June 7 primary.

When the poll looked at Democrats and independents eligible to vote in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton won 45% of those making less than $50,000 annually, and 46% of those making $50,000 or more annually. Sanders carried 39% of those making less than $50,000 per year, and 38% of those making $50,000 or more.

Among Republicans, Trump won 38% in each income category. His main challenger, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, carried 28% of those making less than $50,000 and 32% of those making more. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third candidate still in the race, won 13% of both groups.

The distinction between who lower-income voters backed in other states and how theyre behaving in California derives from their makeup and political loyalties here.

Overall, whites make up just over half of voters making less than $50,000, but two-thirds of those making more than that. Latinos make up more than a third of those making less than $50,000, but only 16% of those making more than that. Women, like Latinos, are disproportionately in the lower-income group.

White working-class voters have been Trumps most passionate supporters. But in California, 57% of white working-class voters are women, who as a group have not embraced Trump as wholeheartedly as men have. Their presence appears to explain why Trumps standing among poorer white voters, 39% in the Republican primary race, is not that different from the 36% he wins among more wealthy white voters.

The muting of Trumps typical blue-collar dominance is also apparent in a hypothetical general election contest against Democratic front-runner Clinton. Among white working-class voters, Clinton defeats Trump by 12 percentage points, not much less than the 18-point gap among white voters with higher incomes.

In the Democratic primaries that have been held so far, Clinton has tended to corral richer and more educated voters, and Sanders has triumphed by huge margins among younger and lower-income voters. In California, shes losing voters younger than 50 by 15 points, so that deficiency remains true.

But among blue-collar voters, shes beating Sanders by 6 points because so many of those voters here are Latinos and women, two groups with which Clinton has relationships dating to her husbands 1992 campaign.

Among Latinos making less than $50,000, for example, Clinton won, 55% to 33%. Wealthier Latinos were split between the candidates. (Their numbers are too small to measure separately, but lower-income African American and Asian American voters sided with Latinos; taken together, lower-income minority voters backed Clinton by 15 points while wealthier minority voters were split.)

Had the states working-class voters been mostly white, as they are in other states, the results would have been different. The poll found Clinton lost to Sanders by 12 points among white voters earning less than $50,000 annually.

Its yet another mark of the impact Latino voters are having on California politics, said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

The demographic makeup of California voters also influences their view on issues that the candidates use to plead their cases. One of the issues with which Trump has successfully attracted blue-collar voters is illegal immigration. But voters here  even white ones  are less open to Trumps message than are voters elsewhere.

Six in 10 white voters, regardless of income, disapprove of Trumps positions on illegal immigration, which include deporting 11 million people currently in the country and erecting a giant wall to limit future travel over the Mexican border. And 6 in 10 white voters, regardless of income, favor a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally  a position opposed by the three remaining Republican candidates.

Though white voters are not as emphatically against Trumps views or in favor of citizenship as minority voters, the numbers suggest that familiarity with the issue and the Californians influenced by it have altered their views. All told, 22% of those making under $50,000 annually said they had a very close relationship with someone in the country illegally, well above the 13% of richer voters who said that.

Whether you are Latino or Latina yourself or spend a lot of time with people from other ethnic backgrounds, you are exposed to this issue in a much different way in California than people who live in a more homogenous community, Schnur said.

One of the biggest problems for Republicans seeking to expand their ranks in California has been the strongly anti-illegal immigration message put out by national Republican figures, including, this year, Trump and Cruz. The broad support here for a path to citizenship suggests the difficulties that remain for any Republican seeking a foothold in this diverse state.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter: @cathleendecker. For more on politics, go to latimes.com/decker.

ALSO:

In abortion stumble, Donald Trump shows glaring election weaknesses

Donald Trump leaders in California primary race but threatens GOP fracture

Among California votes, support for trade doesnt fall clearly along party lines

Live coverage from the campaign trail
Voters in Fresno County could elect a Republican to the state Assembly for the first time in four decades, thanks to a surprise resignation and an unusually condensed campaign season when few may even know a contest is in play.

Its rare for Republicans to have a shot at snagging a legislative seat in California, particularly during a presidential election year that promises to elicit the sharp increase in voter attention that allows Democrats to exploit their built-in voter registration edge.

But Tuesdays election to fill the remainder of Henry Pereas term has scrambled traditional campaign thinking.

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Fresno City Councilman Clint Olivier, a Republican, is facing Democrat Joaquin Arambula, an emergency room doctor and son of a former assemblyman in a contest for a seat that has been held by Democrats since 1976.

The race is situated in the heart of the Central Valley, where water woes and agricultural issues are paramount and the effects of unemployment are still being felt. The Democrats who have run and won here are of a different mold than their Bay Area or L.A. counterparts.

Perea, who stepped down in December to take a job with the pharmaceutical industry, rose to prominence as the leader of the influential business-friendly wing of Assembly Democrats who were central to scaling back Gov. Jerry Browns climate change proposal and stopping an effort to ban fracking.

If either Olivier or Arambula receives more than 50% of the vote Tuesday, he will fill the remaining eight months of Pereas term in Sacramento and be expected to vote on the state budget and other issues. But the presence of a third candidate, Democrat Ted Miller, who so far has not reported raising any money, could send the contest to a runoff on June 7 when the presidential race and other contests will also appear on the ballot.

The race plays into a long-held truism about Californias political parties: Republican fortunes often rise when voter turnout falls.

People say, Thats a Democrats seat, Olivier, 40, said in a recent phone interview. The reality is that people who live [in the Central Valley] have elected common-sense Republicans who they trust to carry their stories to Sacramento, and to represent their interests and not the special interest.

Olivier and GOP strategists point to Sen. Andy Vidak, who nearly won a majority of the vote in a 2013 special election primary with 22% turnout, and in a stunning upset, beat Democrat Leticia Perez in a runoff later that year, despite the Republicans 20-point registration deficit in the district. Less than a third of voters turned out for that contest, and it was decided by about 3,000 votes.

Other area Republicans  Assemblyman Anthony Cannella (R-Ceres) and Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford)  also have won seats despite double-digit voter registration handicaps in their district.

Historically, the state GOP has held to a familiar pattern: make gains where possible during special elections and in statewide election years, when interest is lower, and lay low during presidential cycles to maintain Republican seats.

But with Pereas departure speeding up the time frame, its possible that the Republicans could pull off a surprise win because of a difference in turnout, said Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist and editor of the California Target Book, which tracks races in the state.

In the end, Sragow says, the special election in the 31st Assembly District is a numbers game  and both sides are spending heavily to turn out their most dedicated voters.

Voters who show up at the polls in low-turnout elections are more likely to be older, whiter and more conservative, says Paul Mitchell, the vice president of Political Data, Inc. who analyzes voter behavior. And Republicans often exceed their voter registration numbers in these elections.

So who might prevail Tuesday? Early voting returns offer some clues.

About 20,000 voters  or 12% of the electorate  already have submitted ballots in early voting. For comparison, only about 33,000 turned out to vote in the district for the 2012 presidential primary and just over 86,000 voters showed up for the presidential election.

Of those who have turned in ballots since March 7, Latinos make up 37%. The districts voter registration is more than half Latino. Republicans are out-performing their registration numbers by a few points, but Democrats still make up half of those whove cast ballots so far, higher than typical, experts say.

Were pleased to see it, but I dont think were counting any chickens yet, says David Mermin of Lake Research Partners, which has conducted polling for the Arambula campaign. The special election is always a bit of a wild card.

Another potential data point that looks good for the GOP: Most of the ballots submitted so far have come from outside Fresno, where Oliviers name recognition as a city councilman and former TV anchor (most recently for KMPH-TV) is strongest.

Arambula, 38, is the grandson of immigrant farmworkers from Mexico running in a district with a majority of Latino voters, and his father, Juan Arambula, is a former assemblyman and county supervisor with a good reputation.

In an anti-establishment year, Arambula is positioning himself as an outsider who has spent his time serving his emergency room patients rather than building a name for himself.

I dont think we need more politicians or lawyers in Sacramento, he said in an interview. I think we need those of us who have had day jobs, who have been on the front lines of our respective fields.

Both candidates have amassed large war chests since Jan. 5, when Brown called the special election. Olivier has raised a total of $361,152; Arambula has raised a whopping $917,821. Both have large sums coming from their respective state parties looking to either bolster or protect their numbers in Sacramento.

Outside groups are spending heavily as well  more than $750,000 as of April 1.

Olivier and Arambula, along with their supporters, have traded pointed barbs that have grown increasingly personal, including a recent California Republican Party mailer highlighting a DUI citation Arambula received 17 years ago. Olivier says a committee supporting his opponent has misrepresented statements he made in a radio interview in political ads, and complaints have been filed against both campaigns with the states Fair Political Practices Commission. Olivier in an interview called Arambula an empty suit running with $1.5 million and his fathers name, and set up a website to combat what he calls Arambulies.

One election wont make a huge difference in the balance of power in Sacramento, but if the GOP wins, it could keep Democrats from coming one seat closer to regaining a supermajority.

Whatever the outcome Tuesday, this process will have to be repeated before years end. Thats because the candidates each are expected to run for the next term, which begins in January. That means a primary in June and the Nov. 8 general election.

We have three bites at the apple for this seat, says Ben Tulchin, a Democratic strategist who has done polling for the Assembly Democratic leadership in the past. He thinks Arambula will benefit from high Latino voter turnout in November.

Donald Trump, Tulchin says, is the best gift Democrats could ask for.

For more on California politics, follow me @cmaiduc and sign up for the free Essential Politics newsletter

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Pedro Moura sizes up the 25-man roster the Angels are expected to field on opening day:

STARTERS

No.; Player; Pos.; B/T; Age; Comment

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6; Yunel Escobar; 3B; R/R; 33; Off-season acquisition from Washington; the converted shortstops defense is a question but he has hit well.

25; Daniel Nava; LF; S/L; 33; The late bloomer was hampered by a hand injury last season but was in prime form during spring training.

27; Mike Trout; CF; R/R; 24; Baseballs best player over the last four years says he wants to get back to stealing bases.

5; Albert Pujols; DH; R/R; 36; Hit 40 home runs last season but didnt do much else particularly well.

56; Kole Calhoun; RF; L/L; 28; Top-flight defender brings power to a new place in the batting order. His strikeouts shot up in September.

24; C.J. Cron; 1B; R/R; 26; He hammers fastballs but must be better defensively this season because the Angels are counting on him to play more.

2; Andrelton Simmons; SS; R/R; 26; Arm fatigue prevented the slick-fielding Simmons from suiting up for much of the spring, but he is now fit to start.

58; Carlos Perez; C; R/R; 25; A competent receiver, he must be more patient as a hitter. He drew two walks in his first 33 big league games and has little power.

12; Johnny Giavotella; 2B; R/R; 28; His performance in clutch situations last season made him a fan favorite. Will it continue?

PITCHERS

No.; Player; Pos.; B/T; Age; Comment

43; Garrett Richards; SP; R/R; 27; The closest thing the Angels have to an ace, hell need to be a reasonable facsimile for them to have success.

28; Andrew Heaney; SP; L/L; 24; Was impressive during a solid rookie season, with a comfortable, repeatable delivery.

36; Jered Weaver; SP; R/R; 33; Veteran is slowing down  literally. His fastball velocity is in steady decline and rarely surpassed 80 mph this spring.

53; Hector Santiago; SP; R/L; 28; Flashed All-Star form during the first half last season, but regressed thereafter.

52; Matt Shoemaker; SP; R/R; 29; After a breakout 2014, Shoemaker struggled to limit home runs last season. The trend continued this spring.

35; Nick Tropeano; SP; R/R; 25; A longshot to win a rotation spot before the spring, he throws at maximum effort but has a vexing changeup.

16; Huston Street; RP; R/R; 32; Dependable closer isnt overpowering but could become the sixth pitcher to amass 400 saves. He has 315.

36; Joe Smith; RP; R/R; 32; Experienced a bit of a drop-off in 2016, but is expected to return to form in this, his contract year.

64; Mike Morin; RP; R/R; 25; Failed to limit enough inherited runners from scoring last season but could be ready for a breakout.

59; Fernando Salas; RP; R/R; 30; Had 74 strikeouts,12 walks and gave up less than a hit per inning in 63 2/3 frames, yet his ERA was 4.24.

48; Jose Alvarez; RP; L/L; 26; The only left-hander the Angels have in the bullpen does not consistently get left-handed hitters out.

62; Al Alburquerque; RP; R/R; 29; The hardest-throwing member of the bullpen is also the wildest.

36; Cory Rasmus; RP; R/R; 28; Had a strong spring training after battling injuries for most of 2015.

68; Cam Bedrosian; RP; R/R; 24; Shuttled between triple A and the Angels the last two seasons and may do it again.

RESERVES

No.; Player; Pos.; B/T; Age; Comment

18; Geovany Soto; C; R/R; 33; Figures to share playing time with Perez. He strikes out often but also walks and offers power.

7; Cliff Pennington; INF; S/R; 31; Proven to be versatile and capable, things the Angels havent been able to say about a reserve infielder in a while.

3; Craig Gentry; OF; R/R; 33; Expected to be Navas platoon partner in left field, facing left-handed starters.

51; Ji-Man Choi; 1B; L/R; 23; A Rule 5 selection, Choi must stay with the team all season or be offered back to Baltimore.

39; Rafael Ortega; OF; L/R; 24; Has the strongest throwing arm among outfielders and might be the Angels fastest player.

32; Todd Cunningham; OF; S/R; 27; Nursed a wrist injury for most of the spring, but he still hit well  and is out of options.

PROJECTED DISABLED LIST: LHP C.J. Wilson, LHP Tyler Skaggs.
Bar staff and restaurateurs look upon rows of empty tables, competing for the few people still walking the labyrinthine back streets of Istanbuls Beyoglu district, center of the citys normally humming nightlife.

People are afraid to come out, said one waiter, Akin Kul, watching over an empty bar at the end of a pedestrian mall, Nevizade Sokak, famed for its cheap beer and abundance of mezze restaurants. They think there will be more attacks.

A string of deadly suicide bombings in Turkey has subdued the people of this iconic mega-city  straddling Europe and Asia  and has raised fears that more assaults are still to come.

RELATED: MOST READ LIFE & STYLE NEWS THIS HOUR

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Two weeks ago, an Islamic State suicide bomber, Mehmet Ozturk, detonated an explosives vest packed with nails on Istanbuls Istiklal Street, a stylish boulevard and one of the busiest thoroughfares in Europe, packed with bookstores, restaurants, clothing retailers and masses of wide-eyed tourists.

Ozturks blast killed four tourists and injured dozens more.

Throughout the city, normally bustling streets are relatively quiet. In the famous fish market running perpendicular to Istiklal, men selling trinkets and rare stones, glittering Turkish coffee sets and handmade mosaic lamps lament the loss of customers.

I would estimate that we are selling 50% less since the attack, said a local jeweler, Mustafa Eren. People dont want to get killed.

Eateries normally packed with locals and tourists alike  enjoying stuffed mussels straight from the shell or fried intestine sandwiches  are nearly empty. Bored vendors sit beside crates of fish and lobster.

Along one popular back street, about 100 yards from the blast site, electronic music pumped at sundown Thursday from a usually crowded, but now empty bar. The beat echoed along the mostly deserted street.

It is just certain spots in the city that make me concerned, like crowded streets and squares, said 29-year-old Fatih Yalcin, who is setting up a restaurant in Kadikoy, a liberal area on the Asian side of the Bosporus Strait that has slowly returned to normality over the last two weeks. I think that feeling will pass in a few weeks, if there is not another attack.

Ozturk appears to have been linked to the so-called Dokumaci group, a cluster of young extremists radicalized by at least three Islamic State operatives in the conservative city of Adiyaman, in Turkeys southeast, and in Syrian training camps. Mustafa Dokumaci is believed to be their leader.

The cell, which brazenly recruited at a teahouse in Adiyaman, has carried out at least six bombings across Turkey since June, killing more than 150 people. Experts believe it to be embedded within a much broader network of extremists.

Its most lethal attack so far was the twin suicide bombing of a peace rally in Ankara in October that killed more than 100 people.

The day before the Istiklal bombing, security cameras captured Ozturk in Adiyaman, calmly buying a bus ticket. He was wearing a bulky jacket, had no luggage and was freshly shaved, his hair cropped short.

I believe the police will be able to stop future attacks, said Eren, the jeweler. The police are everywhere now. Maybe 8 out of every 10 people on this street are police officers.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has called on Turks to take to Istanbuls streets in defiance of the terrorism threat.

Lets go out, more than ever before, said Davutoglu on Wednesday, according to Turkeys Hurriyet Daily News. These streets are ours, these cities, these people are all ours.

Islamic State is widely believed to have penetrated cities throughout Turkey, establishing sleeper cells, as well as recruitment and smuggling networks, particularly in southeastern cities such as Kilis, Gaziantep and Sanliurfa.

Counter-terrorism police on Friday arrested about 15 members of the group in coastal Izmir, local media reports indicate, seizing documents and shotguns. Dogan News Agency reported that some of those arrested were in training for suicide attacks.

Izmir  a liberal city on the countrys western tourism trail  has become a smuggling hub over the last year. Many hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees use the bays and inlets along its coastal shores to begin hazardous trips to the nearby Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios.

And as Islamic State accelerates its attacks outside Syria, tourists, a vital part of the Turkish economy, are staying away.

Istanbuls historic district of Sultanahmet, normally bursting with tourists visiting the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, or wiggling through the crowds of the Grand Bazaar, is nearly deserted.

A scattering of tourists snap selfies and wander along streets, past some of the most quintessential symbols of Istanbul. There is a notable police presence.

In January, a Syrian Islamic State suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest beside the Obelisk of Theodosius, an ancient Egyptian monument of red granite, killing 13 people, most of them German tourists.

Look around, there is no one here, said tour guide Mehmet Orgun. Roughly 60 to 70% less tourists than we would have in the spring.

Members of the group he was guiding, however, said they are not daunted.

Of course we are saddened by the situation, said 61-year-old Rick Groger, vacationing with his husband and several other friends from the United States. But we will not let this interfere with our enjoying Istanbul.

Johnson is a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.



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Amid protests and widespread criticism, Greece on Monday is poised to begin implementing a plan that will see thousands of migrants returned to Turkey, part of a broader deal aiming to stem the massive flow of people from Turkish shores to mainland Europe.

About 750 migrants are expected to be deported to Turkey under tight security over the coming days aboard two vessels chartered by Frontex, the European Unions border agency, the state-run Greek news agency ANA reported.

The plan, forged between the EU and Turkey after months of tense negotiations, has drawn withering criticism from rights groups and spurred unrest in refugee camps and reception centers across Greece.

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We have seen growing tension, anxiety and even bouts of violence, said Boris Cheshirkov, a spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, on Lesbos, one of the Greek islands most acutely affected by the migration increase of the last year. Many people fear that they will be returned to Turkey.

Since Thursday, migrants and refugees have staged protests and intermittently clashed with local Greeks and even one another. Greek news media on Sunday broadcast images of migrants streaming toward Chios Islands main port in protest of the deal.

Riots on that island late last week left three people with stab injuries, said Melissa Fleming, the UNHCRs chief spokeswoman. We are very worried about the situation there.

In the last year, more than a million migrants have entered Greece from Turkey, most of them from violence-wracked countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. From Greece, they have followed a well-worn migrant path through the Balkans into Northern Europe, with most hoping to settle in Germany, Sweden or other countries that have been relatively welcoming.

In recent months, that welcome has become strained, especially after major terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels and attacks on women in Germany.

Under the deal, EU member states will resettle one Syrian refugee for every Syrian returned to Turkey. Chartered buses are scheduled to shuttle the migrants targeted for return to the ancient port city of Mytilene on Lesbos.

Reception and processing centers on that island are stretched beyond capacity. In one center, the overwhelmed Moria refugee camp, observers said it is about 1,000 people beyond its official capacity.

We have observed quite a large number of people sleeping in the open, said Cheshirkov, reached by telephone on Lesbos. There are additional shortages of food.

Lesbos has been at the center of the last years migration increase, which has seen about a million people fleeing war, poverty and persecution in their homelands undertake risky smuggling trips from Turkish shores.

From Mytilene, European police will accompany migrants on three daily sailings to the Turkish town of Dikili in Izmir province. The first boat was expected to depart at 10 a.m. Monday. Observers, however, suspect that departures may be delayed until later in the week.

Turkish authorities will then register migrants and provide medical checkups to the returnees at a processing camp before resettling them in Turkish refugee camps.

The plan has drawn widespread criticism from human rights watchdogs.

On Friday, Amnesty International alleged that Turkey had been returning Syrian refugees to their war-wracked homeland in violation of the non-refoulement principle of international law.

In their desperation to seal their borders, EU leaders have willfully ignored the simplest of facts: Turkey is not a safe country for Syrian refugees and is getting less safe by the day, said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty Internationals director for Europe and Central Asia, in a news release.

Others worry that the necessary time has not been taken to ensure that the rights of migrants and refugees  mothers, unaccompanied minors, the elderly and the infirm  will be upheld.

We are not opposed to the returns as long as human rights are upheld, Cheshirkov said. However, the required safeguards, which take time to implement, do not appear to be in place.

Greek officials have defended the deportations for the coming week, saying that they are enforcing a broader EU agreement.

These are people who have not applied for asylum or want to get asylum, said Greeces migration spokesman, Giorgos Kyritsis, in a statement broadcast on the Greek television station Alpha TV. This is not a voluntary process, but a compulsory one.

Other migrants and refugees  having previously undertaken risky smuggling trips aboard flimsy boats from Izmir in Turkey  wait anxiously on the Greek mainland, their hopes of making it to Western Europe increasingly at peril.

We are totally against these deportations, which violate international law, said Cem Terzi, a neurosurgeon who heads a Turkish nongovernmental organization, A Bridge Between Peoples, which has been providing free medical care to refugees and migrants in Izmir. They have taken huge risks to start new lives. Now the EU is killing these peoples dreams.

Implementation of the deal has proved fraught with logistical difficulties.

Thousands of interpreters and asylum experts have flown to Greece to process the new arrivals and determine whether they should be sent back to Turkey.

Frontex issued an urgent call on March 23 to European states for additional police to assist the deportation process, dubbed Poseidon Rapid Intervention. By March 18, EU member states are believed to have offered only 396 police officers of the 1,500 requested by the border agency.

Special correspondents Petrakis and Johnson reported from Athens and Istanbul, respectively.

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Bar staff and restaurateurs look upon rows of empty tables, competing for the few people still walking the labyrinthine back streets of Istanbuls Beyoglu district, center of the citys normally humming nightlife.

People are afraid to come out, said one waiter, Akin Kul, watching over an empty bar at the end of a pedestrian mall, Nevizade Sokak, famed for its cheap beer and abundance of mezze restaurants. They think there will be more attacks.

A string of deadly suicide bombings in Turkey has subdued the people of this iconic mega-city  straddling Europe and Asia  and has raised fears that more assaults are still to come.

Two weeks ago, an Islamic State suicide bomber, Mehmet Ozturk, detonated an explosives vest packed with nails on Istanbuls Istiklal Street, a stylish boulevard and one of the busiest thoroughfares in Europe, packed with bookstores, restaurants, clothing retailers and masses of wide-eyed tourists.

Advertisement

Ozturks blast killed four tourists and injured dozens more.

Throughout the city, normally bustling streets are relatively quiet. In the famous fish market running perpendicular to Istiklal, men selling trinkets and rare stones, glittering Turkish coffee sets and handmade mosaic lamps lament the loss of customers.

I would estimate that we are selling 50% less since the attack, said a local jeweler, Mustafa Eren. People dont want to get killed.

Eateries normally packed with locals and tourists alike  enjoying stuffed mussels straight from the shell or fried intestine sandwiches  are nearly empty. Bored vendors sit beside crates of fish and lobster.

Along one popular back street, about 100 yards from the blast site, electronic music pumped at sundown Thursday from a usually crowded, but now empty bar. The beat echoed along the mostly deserted street.

It is just certain spots in the city that make me concerned, like crowded streets and squares, said 29-year-old Fatih Yalcin, who is setting up a restaurant in Kadikoy, a liberal area on the Asian side of the Bosporus Strait that has slowly returned to normality over the last two weeks. I think that feeling will pass in a few weeks, if there is not another attack.

Ozturk appears to have been linked to the so-called Dokumaci group, a cluster of young extremists radicalized by at least three Islamic State operatives in the conservative city of Adiyaman, in Turkeys southeast, and in Syrian training camps. Mustafa Dokumaci is believed to be their leader.

The cell, which brazenly recruited at a teahouse in Adiyaman, has carried out at least six bombings across Turkey since June, killing more than 150 people. Experts believe it to be embedded within a much broader network of extremists.

Its most lethal attack so far was the twin suicide bombing of a peace rally in Ankara in October that killed more than 100 people.

It is just certain spots in the city that make me concerned, like crowded streets and squares.  Fatih Yalcin, 29

The day before the Istiklal bombing, security cameras captured Ozturk in Adiyaman, calmly buying a bus ticket. He was wearing a bulky jacket, had no luggage and was freshly shaved, his hair cropped short.

I believe the police will be able to stop future attacks, said Eren, the jeweler. The police are everywhere now. Maybe 8 out of every 10 people on this street are police officers.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has called on Turks to take to Istanbuls streets in defiance of the terrorism threat.

Lets go out, more than ever before, said Davutoglu on Wednesday, according to Turkeys Hurriyet Daily News. These streets are ours, these cities, these people are all ours.

Islamic State is widely believed to have penetrated cities throughout Turkey, establishing sleeper cells, as well as recruitment and smuggling networks, particularly in southeastern cities such as Kilis, Gaziantep and Sanliurfa.

Counter-terrorism police on Friday arrested about 15 members of the group in coastal Izmir, local media reports indicate, seizing documents and shotguns. Dogan News Agency reported that some of those arrested were in training for suicide attacks.

Izmir  a liberal city on the countrys western tourism trail  has become a smuggling hub over the last year. Many hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees use the bays and inlets along its coastal shores to begin hazardous trips to the nearby Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios.

And as Islamic State accelerates its attacks outside Syria, tourists, a vital part of the Turkish economy, are staying away.

Istanbuls historic district of Sultanahmet, normally bursting with tourists visiting the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, or wiggling through the crowds of the Grand Bazaar, is nearly deserted.

A scattering of tourists snap selfies and wander along streets, past some of the most quintessential symbols of Istanbul. There is a notable police presence.

In January, a Syrian Islamic State suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest beside the Obelisk of Theodosius, an ancient Egyptian monument of red granite, killing 13 people, most of them German tourists.

Look around, there is no one here, said tour guide Mehmet Orgun. Roughly 60 to 70% less tourists than we would have in the spring.

Members of the group he was guiding, however, said they are not daunted.

Of course we are saddened by the situation, said 61-year-old Rick Groger, vacationing with his husband and several other friends from the United States. But we will not let this interfere with our enjoying Istanbul.

Johnson is a special correspondent.

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When its time to distill their mescal, Manuel Ramos Sanchez and his father, Victor Ramos Lucas, stay up all night. Then they stay up for the next 11 nights.

Apart from a cat nap and a small break here and there, the second- and third-generation mescal producers stay by their still, carefully stoking the embers beneath, washing and rewashing the components between batches, and hauling fermented maguey to the vessel.

In the last few years, mescal, a centuries-old distillate of agave consumed predominantly by Mexicans, has found an international audience. Its stirred and shaken by mixologists from New York to San Francisco to Berlin, who prize its complexity, which derives from the traditional methods that artisans like Manuel and Victor still utilize.

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The father and son have met some of these enthusiasts, who must trek first to Oaxaca City, in southern Mexico, then drive for two hours to Miahuatlan, passing a prison, then a church, before they turn off onto dirt roads edged with the pale green maguey destined for distillation.

Tequila, far more industrialized than mescal, is made from a single type of maguey, the blue agave. As bourbon is a variety of whiskey, tequila is a variety of mescal, the mother beverage.

Though the value of Victors business has boomed, as consumers are willing to pay more, when asked about passing the palenque, or production facility, on to his son, Victor laughs.

His inheritance, Victor says, mockingly.

Victors own father worked as a day laborer for another mezcalero, then scrimped and saved until he could rent a piece of property, and eventually buy one. Victor, who is 52, left school in fourth grade to help his father. At that time, it was better to work than go to school, he says. For mezcaleros, he adds, the palenque is their school.

His 22-year-old son, Manuel, says he owes his own knowledge to his fathers careful eye.

Sometimes I have a few little questions, and I ask him, and everything comes out perfectly, he said.

Foreigners are pulled here by the drink itself, of course, but they also come because they wish to witness the creation of mescal, a process far more complex than can be fathomed from thousands of miles away.

Here they learn not only the sticky smell that hangs over production  heavy and sweet, like roasting squash bathed in syrup  but also its sounds, tastes and the variations in method from one family to the next.

As in winemaking, the type of maguey, terrain and fermentation method leave a thumbprint on each batch. Artisans are committed to using many types of maguey, some of which grow wild and can take 25 years to reach maturity. Theres no easy way of catching up to demand  just plant maguey now and wait, wait, wait.

On a berm above the distillation area, a massive hole has been dug out of the earth, and waits, surrounded by rocks, to be used as an oven when the maguey is ready to be cooked.

1 / 12 Manuel Ramos Sanchez, left, and his father, Victor Ramos Lucas, harvest a mature maguey to produce mescal in Miahuatlan, Oaxaca. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 12 Victor Ramos Lucas plows with bulls as he prepares to plant more agave. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 12 Victor Ramos Lucas packs maguey that has been roasted, crushed and fermented into a bucket along with fermented maguey juice. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 12 Natalia Sanchez Bustamante prepares breakfast while Victor Ramos Lucas talks about mescal production. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 12 The sun rises as Victor Ramos Lucas walks through his new baby maguey plantation. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 12 Manuel Ramos Sanchez bottles distilled mescal. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 12 Manuel Ramos Sanchez replants a small maguey after it has been uprooted by wild animals. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 12 Victor Ramos Lucas sits in the shade in front of his home after spending a long afternoon harvesting maguey for mescal production. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 12 Manuel Ramos Sanchez, left, and Victor Ramos Lucas stand in front of their maguey plants, an essential ingredient in their mescal production. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 12 Manuel Ramos Sanchez creates bubbles in the distilled mescal as a way to inspect its quality. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 12 Distilled mescal pours out into a funnel. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 12 / 12 Natalia Sanchez Bustamante prepares lunch. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Theres the task of journeying into the hillsides surrounding the palenque, to search for wild maguey  be it the tobala or tepeztate variety  ready to be harvested and carved down to its pina, the heart thats revealed when the spines are cut back. Victor and Manuel use a large stone wheel to crush the cooked maguey, a task accomplished with the strength of two bulls. The service of those bulls, who dont have names, requires its own set of tasks.

Mezcaleros use all manner of vessels for fermentation  barrels, clay pots, even large leather sacks.

At Mezcaloteca, a bar and mescal education center in Oaxaca, you can try so-called pechuga, a type of mescal usually made for celebrations, in which the distiller hangs a raw chicken breast over the batch as it ferments.

Later, a glimpse of this in person revealed a chicken looking not so raw anymore. It had hardened and turned brown, and chipped away from the bone when the distiller gave it a few hard taps. Iguana and octopus are sometimes used in its stead, depending on the region, along with fruit.

To know a good mescal, brush a bit against your skin. When it dries, take a whiff and see whether you detect alcohol or the deep scent of roasted maguey, a bit like a pumpkin pie in the oven at Thanksgiving. If you do, you can trust your drink was not watered down or mixed with inferior product.

When it is agitated, look for pearl-like bubbles that hang around for a few seconds. And then think of Victor, at 4 a.m., holding half a coconut shell out to collect the freshly distilled mescal, then sucking it up through a reed and blowing it back again into the shell to agitate. In this low-tech way, he ensures the bubbles are forming properly and the alcohol content is still up to his standard.

Mescal production has been changed by modern conveniences, Victor was quick to point out. As he tended the fire beneath the still, he pointed to the light bulb overhead. The shadows of bats danced on the walls as they dive-bombed mosquitoes.

When he was learning the trade as a boy, there was no electricity to light the long nights, just the orange embers and the moon. Water had to be pulled up from a well, whereas today a large cistern saves a few steps.

Victor says mezcaleros once used woven baskets to transport the slosh of fermented maguey into the still. Liquid leaked through the cracks and, by the time they finished, their clothes were soaked. The plastic buckets he uses today are more precious than they appear. He didnt always have bulls, just a large stone hammer and the force of his body to crush tons of maguey.

Another change profoundly affects the final product: Victor now elects just a single variety out of two dozen or so types of maguey when he makes a batch, rather than mixing several as he once did, as most producers once did. Foreign consumers want to taste a karwinski or cuixe, types of agave, as they would a Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio.

As Victor walks his bulls around and around, crushing maguey with each pass, he is asked how he met his wife. At a dance, he says. Each December, there are dances in the town, and it was one of the few ways men and women could meet one another.

Or youd write a letter, he says. A young man would spot a woman from far away, and write her parents a letter with a request for marriage. Did the letter contain certain personal information? A description of why he should be considered a worthy husband?

No, he says. Just the request. You looked at the way he worked in the field, if he was a hard worker. If the answer was yes, the parents responded. If the answer was no, they didnt. Now what matters is if you have a car.

Today, theres Facebook and text messages. Before, the women took care of the goats and when her parents werent around youd try to talk to her.

But one thing that hasnt changed is the time and care it takes to produce mescal the way Victors father taught him. So he and Manuel get by with little sleep until the 12-night process is through. They grind the maguey and tend the fire.

As international attention has increased, many mezcaleros are trying to establish their brand. But father and son dont have a name for their mescal. Or an email address.

But if you want to find them, drive to Miahuatlan and ask around until you find the right dirt road.

Tillman is a special correspondent.

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Teresa Giudice's $170,000 Lincoln Park, N.J. home just sold for $100 in a foreclosure auction.

The "Real Housewives of New Jersey" star and husband Joe bought the property in 2005 and recently listed it on the open market for $179,000. Lenders initiated foreclosure proceedings after the three-bedroom, single-bath property set for months and months without a buyer.

Couple Previously Lost a Home in Foreclosure

In August of 2015, the Giudice's also lost their Manahawkin, N.J. home in a foreclosure auction, with it too selling for just $100.

A lawyer for the couple previously told reporters Joe and Teresa were "eliminating excess" and "focusing on doing more with less."

Joe Giudice recently started serving out his 41-month sentence on bank fraud related charges. His wife also served 11-months on similar charges and was released from custody just before Christmas.

"Teresa and the girls are sad that Joe's gone, but they're doing their best to adjust," a source told PEOPLE magazine. A source later added, "Her life centers around taking care of them and making sure they get to their activities to keep life as normal as possible for them."

The two parents, both 43, were allowed to serve time separately so at least one of them would be able to be home with their four young daughters. Teresa has now resumed starring in "RHONJ."

Joe Releases Jailhouse Statement

Since starting his sentence, Joe has released a statement through his attorney where he reflected, "It was obviously a very emotional day, but this is a very strong family with a tremendous support system and they will get through this, just as they did when Teresa was away."

Though slapped with a 41-month sentence, Joe has previously expressed he hopes to be released after serving just 18 months. Several media outlets have also reported Joe Giudice could face deportation proceedings back to his native Italy whenever he is released.
Easton Area Community Center

Easton Area Community Center (Sue Beyer | lehighvalleylive.com)

Easton city officials are evaluating whether it makes sense to relocate the Easton Area Community Center to the Paxinosa Elementary School.

Easton Area School District Superintendent John Reinhart said he's had informal discussions with Mayor Sal Panto Jr. on the subject.

Paxinosa Elementary School at 1221 Northampton St., Easton, seen here in October 2014.

The mayor said in December the 75-year-old center at 901 Washington St. is showing its age. A new site would boost community pride in the city's West Ward.

West Ward resident Terrence Miller said on Facebook city officials have met with Easton Area Community Center officials about the relocation plan.

The mayor confirmed the plan in a phone conversation Sunday.

He said the city is waiting to hear back from the community center board. If the center endorses the plan, it will be vetted and discussed publicly.

Community center executive director Brooke Mitman didn't return a phone call Sunday.

The mayor said in December the Easton Boys and Girls Club got a brand new facility in 2011. Children in the West Ward haven't had a new place to play in decades.

"We believe the kids of West Ward should have the same opportunities as the kids on the South Side," the mayor said Sunday.

The mayor said the Paxinosa relocation plan came together quickly.

"The public will be heard but our administration is trying to make a big impact on the neighborhood," the mayor wrote on Facebook. "But if the public doesn't want it, then fine."

According to the mayor the current community center isn't handicapped accessible, needs new heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems and isn't centrally located in the West Ward.

The project would be funded by federal Community Development Block Grants, the mayor said on Facebook.

Reinhart said the Paxinosa Elementary School at 1221 Northampton St. in Easton has unused space that could be used for the community center.

"That space that could be utilized for afterschool activities or other things that people in the community could access," Reinhart said.

The center would help fit the school district's plan to make Paxinosa a community school with programs in the evening. The district recently unveiled plans for an Easton Hospital-run health clinic at the school.

Some residents are skeptical about the clinic plan. It will be discussed at a school board meeting Tuesday.

The mayor said on Facebook he appreciates the school district's collaboration and willingness to work with the city to improve neighborhoods.

"I'm really excited about the fact that the school district has really engaged itself in the community," Panto said when the health clinic was announced in March.

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
Drug offenses in Easton's West Ward dropped last year compared to 2014, but police say the figures come with a caveat.

City police released the data focusing on drug offenses and other crimes deemed Part 2 offenses last week.

Earlier last month, they released data on major crimes deemed Part 1 offenses, which include murder and rape. That data showed a reduction in such crimes in all the city's neighborhoods, something the police department's upper brass attributed in part to an increase in patrol officers.

The data on the Part 2 offenses wasn't as conclusive. Police Capt. Scott Casterline pointed out that although drug offenses dropped in the West Ward, his department doesn't see it as a problem that's going away.

Drug dealing, the captain said, is no longer stationary.

The drug business has changed, Casterline said. No longer do transactions happen over payphones and in stationary crack houses, he said.

Dealers are mobile -- cellphones are confiscated at many raids -- and are as likely to be living in an area hotel or motel as they are to be on the streets of the West Ward, according to Casterline.

They bounce from address to address to address, he said.

That came up again two weeks ago when drug buys allegedly happened on South 14th Street but the arrest happened at the Days Inn Downtown.

Like drug crimes, gun crimes have also roller-coastered in the past three years in the neighborhood, something police say likely reflects who's in jail and who isn't.

Police note that if someone is killed by another person using a gun, that case goes into the stats as a homicide, not a weapons offense. All crimes are recorded by the most serious offense.

As for other Type 2 crimes in the West Ward, vandalism, with 335 offenses from 2013-15, surpassed drug offenses. The neighborhood's worst overall crime over those three years was theft, with 459 incidents, about 32 percent of the city's total of 1,444.

Here's a breakdown of the other Type 2 crime figures the city released:

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Firefighters Sunday bid farewell to Whitehall Township's fire chief who died last week following nearly five decades of public service.

An honor procession for fire Chief Robert L. Benner began at 2 p.m. involving Whitehall Fire Department personnel and apparatus only. Benner died Wednesday at age 80 and served as fire chief up until his death.

The procession started at the Babies "R" Us parking lot in the Lehigh Valley Mall, traveled west on Grape Street north on MacArthur Road (Route 145) to Roosevelt Street, then turned around and retraced the route.

Mourners lined Route 145 waiving American flags in honor of Benner.

The procession preceded a public viewing scheduled 4 to 8 p.m. Sunday at St. John's UCC Church 575 Grape St. A second public viewing is scheduled 9 to 10:45 a.m. Monday followed by an 11 a.m. memorial service, at St. John's.

After the service, invited guests and the Whitehall Fire Department will escort the chief's remains from the church for private burial.

Benner served the township for nearly 50 years, including 30 years as fire chief, after joining the fire department in 1967 and being appointed chief in 1986. He led the department of 120 active personnel and managed the township's fire-training facilities named for him in May 2015.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Two people are confirmed dead after an Amtrak train struck a piece of equipment and derailed south of Philadelphia, according to a report.

Two people are confirmed dead after an Amtrak train Sunday morning derailed near Philadelphia, a report said.

ABC-6 TV is reporting the deaths Sunday morning in Chester, Delaware County. Chester fire commissioner Travis Thomas said two people were killed, but neither was a passenger on the train.

Authorities provided no additional information on the fatalities. Thomas and Amtrak officials said more than 30 people were taken to hospitals with injuries that weren't considered life-threatening.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Officials with the Federal Railroad Administration were also sent to the scene, said Matthew Lehner, a spokesman for the agency.

The crash occurred around 7:50 a.m. Sunday when Train 89 -- heading from New York to Savannah, Georgia -- struck a backhoe that was on the track. The impact derailed the lead engine on the train.

Amtrak representatives provided in a statement on the company's official blog, saying 341 passengers and seven crew members on board. Amtrak has suspended all service on the Northeast Corridor service including between Philadelphia and New York City.

Ari Ne'eman, a disability rights activist heading to Washington after speaking at an event in New York, said he was in the second car at the time of the crash.

"The car started shaking wildly, there was a smell of smoke, it looked like there was a small fire and then the window across from us blew out," said Ne'eman, 28, of Silver Spring, Maryland.

Some of the passengers started to get off after the train stopped, but the conductor quickly stopped them. Officials started evacuating people to the rear of the train and then off and to a local church.

"It was a very frightening experience. I'm frankly very glad that I was not on the first car," where there were injuries, he said. "The moment that the car stopped, I said Shema, a Jewish prayer ... I was just so thankful that the train had come to a stop and we were OK."

Philadelphia was the scene of a major Amtrak derailment in May 2015. Eight people were killed and an estimated 200 were injured in that incident.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Some injuries are being reported after an Amtrak train struck a piece of construction equipment just south of Philadelphia and its lead engine derailed.

Two people are confirmed dead after an Amtrak train Sunday morning derailed near Philadelphia, a report said. (AP Photo)

Train 89 was heading from New York to Savannah, Georgia, when it struck a backhoe that was on the track in Chester -- about 15 miles outside of Philadelphia, Amtrak representatives provided in a statement on the company's official blog.

The impact derailed the lead engine of the train. About 341 passengers and seven crew members were on board, according to Amtrak.

We are aware of the incident involving the Palmetto train 89 south of Philadelphia and we will provide update as they become available.  Amtrak (@Amtrak) April 3, 2016

Emergency responders are at the scene and an investigation is ongoing.

Amtrak on social media is asking those with questions about friends and family aboard that train to call 1-800-523-9101 for information.

Philadelphia was the scene of a major Amtrak derailment in May 2015. Eight people were killed and an estimated 200 were injured in that incident.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Hundreds across the Lehigh Valley remain in the dark Sunday after wind gusts totaling upward of 60 mph overnight took down various utility lines.

several vehicles damaged due to downed trees in the parking lot of Emmanuel Christian Church in the Valley View section of Phillipsburg. (Tim Wynkoop | For lehighvalleylive)

In Northampton County, 515 customers are without power and in Lehigh County, 674 customers are without power, said Jessica Long, spokeswoman for PPL.

Long said the majority of customers lost power overnight, however the company continued to receive new cases of damage throughout Sunday morning. Due to the high winds, Long said it's unclear when customers will have power restored.

"Hundreds of linemen are out working and will continue working until all customers are restored," Long said, adding she hoped to have more information later Sunday afternoon.

Various roads also remain closed due to downed power lines and trees.

In Northampton County, Route 611 between Frutchey Hill and Danser Hill roads in Forks Township remains closed, according to a county 911 dispatch supervisor.

In Lehigh County, several roads have reopened since being closed early Sunday. Orefield Road in South Whitehall Township continued to be shut down.

All the traffic lights along Airport Road have gone out and police are en route to direct traffic, said a Lehigh County 911 dispatch supervisor.

In Northwest Jersey, Hackettstown has shut down Washington Street between Church and West Plane streets. Also closed is Seber Road at Willow Grove Street (Route 604).

A witness reported several vehicles damaged due to downed trees in the parking lot of Emmanuel Christian Church in the Valley View section of Phillipsburg.

The National Weather Service Saturday had issued a high-wind warning effective for 12 hours starting at midnight. Weather forecasters predicted gusts as strong as 60 mph overnight.

Drivers throughout Sunday should allow extra time to reach their destination in case trees have come down along the route, the weather service warns. High-profile vehicles may have some difficulty with cross-winds on north-south routes, particularly on bridges.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Over 100 McCormack family members, spanning 4 generations and 5 countries, attended a family gathering recently in OLoughlins Hotel Portlaoise.

Over 100 McCormack family members, spanning 4 generations and 5 countries, attended a family gathering recently in OLoughlins Hotel Portlaoise.

Descendants of the McCormack family from Green Road, Portlaoise, came from as far as Germany, Spain and England, to join with their Irish relatives, many still living in Portlaoise for the Gathering 2013 event.

It was an emotional night of chat, performance and fond family memories, stirred up by an evocative picture slideshow organised by Jacinta Allen, granddaughter of Mick and Margaret McCormack.

Originally from Castletown Geoghan, Westmeath, Mick married Margaret Burke from Ballyduff, Portlaoise in 1927, settled in their modest home in Green Road.

The oldest surviving son of Mick and Margaret at the reunion was 82-year-old Micheal Weeshie McCormack who worked in the ESB and is now living in Athy.

Rosie and Peggy (Gretty) married and started families in England in the 1960s - becoming Rosie Conroy and Peggy Sweeney before returning to Portlaoise. Peggy worked for a time at the Worsted Mills on the Abbeyleix road and was a popular member of their annual pantomime.

Lily married fellow Laoisman Martin Casey and settled in Vicarstown, Lily worked for 15 years in the Arlington Factory.

Youngest children Tommy and Charlie left for England in the 60s to join the Airforce and Navy respectively. Tommy currently lives in Wales but was unable to attend on the night. Charlie returned to Portlaoise in the early 1990s and now lives in the original family homestead.

Remembered fondly on the night were deceased family members. Sean McCormack, who sadly passed away in 2005, worked in the ESB all his life and was well known for his work organising the retired ESB workers social outings.

Another sad year was 2008 when the McCormack family suffered two more bereavements, Jim and Mary. Jims Post Office job took him and his family around the country before settling in Tullamore as Postmaster.

Mary McCormack married Mick Donoghue from Clonad, and lived in England for a time before coming back to Ireland to settle in Roscommon. Sean, Jim and Mary were proudly represented by McCormack and Donoghue family members on the night.

A surprise feature of the night were impromptu party pieces from great grandchildren. Lee Donoghue performed Irish Dancing and banjo. Amelie Conroy did her Irish Dancing and Conor Allen delivered a stand-up comedy routine. Peggy followed in her fathers tradition and offered a witty poem to honour the occasion. With three generations of catching up it to do it was a late night and a joyous one in OLoughlins.
It's been a busy month for Mohill milliner Jennifer Wrynne; between attending the Cheltenham Races (where she won Best Dressed Lady last year), appearing on TV3's Xpose and the opening of her new boutique, aptly titled 'Jennifer Wrynne'.

Located in Powerscourt Shopping Centre, Dublin 2, this is a boutique with a difference. Not only does it stock hats of Jennifer's own design, but it also provides clothing and accessories so that it becomes a 'one stop shop' for all formal occasions.

Whether it's a wedding or a day at the races, Jennifer's boutique promises to hold the perfect look for all ages. Among International designers, the boutique will stock designs from Irish designer Niamh O'Neill's collection.

Handpicked by Jennifer, the clothing promises to have one common trait - made from luxurious materials and to a high quality standard. The boutique opened it's doors on Friday March 25 and opens Monday to Saturday (10 - 6) and Thursday (10-8pm).

Style advice and personal shopping is available free of charge to ensure customers find the right look to suit them individually. Customers will also be able to order bespoke hats from the boutique, and all dresses and accessories will be available online from April 7.

Lisa Cannon from Xpose interviewed the Leitrim native on the opening of her boutique, and a number of the dresses and hats which will be available were showcased. The interview will air on a date yet to be announced.

If Jennifer's past is anything to go by, this boutique is set for success. Jennifer's looks from the recent Cheltenham Races are available in her boutique, making it even easier to steal her style.

For more information on the boutique, her style diary and her hats visit www.jenniferwrynne.com.
Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams has slated the Conservative Government at Westminster and the Labour Government in Wales for its failures over the steel industry. She says its time to put British industry first.

She said that the Conservative Government had allowed the UK steel industry to shrivel on its watch, in response to the announcement that councils must now consider UK providers when when carrying out procurement for steel. She also blasted the Labour Government for doing nothing to ensure Welsh steel was used on infrastructure projects.

Once again the UK Government is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Its no good asking councils to use UK steel now after letting the industry shrivel on their watch. Of course councils and the UK Government should always be considering UK steel, but this is just a basic requirement to support our industry. Its time this Tory Government put British industry first, rather than just kowtowing to the Chinese Government. Labours record is no better. The Labour Government in Wales has completely failed to support Welsh steel. Time and time again Welsh Liberal Democrats have called for an audit of Welsh procurement, yet the Labour Government has done nothing. We called on Labour to publish new guidance when investing in steel, again nothing has happened. For 18 months weve called for reduced business rates on heavy machinery, again nothing. People are absolutely fed up of governments that offer warm words, but seem incompetent to realise how serious this crisis is.

Kirsty, and Tim Farron, earlier this week called for the UK Government to intervene to act as a temporary buyer for the Port Talbot plant if necessary.
The five main Scottish Party leaders participated in a hustings organised by Stonewall Scotland, the Scottish Transgender Alliance, the Equality Network and LGBTI Youth Scotland. Those four organisations do ground-breaking work to support LGBTI people. Their role in providing positive and practical help cant be under-estimated and they are helping to change the culture of the country.

If you are a young person struggling to come to terms with your sexuality or gender identity today, you can see that five party leaders, including the woman who runs the Scottish Government talk about how important it is that in school, at work, in society, you are free to live your life without discrimination. They agree that health services need to improve so that they meet your needs. Compare and contrast to even 20 years ago, when Section 28 (or 2A as it was in Scotland) was in force. Its such a powerful signal of acceptance for all leaders to participate in something like this. It will help those young people walk taller, with more confidence.

The event was chaired by journalist Louise White, who had clearly done her homework and knew her brief very well. It started with 3 minute opening statements from the leaders. Willie Rennie was last to speak. Thats a bit of a tall order to say something different when there is so much broad agreement on these issues, but he managed it. He talked about how joyous and colourful the LGBTI movement is, and how it has transformed Scotland by its engaging and reasonable campaigns. He looked back to what he called the dingy and desperate days of Brian Souters Keep the Clause campaign and highlighted the positive, assertive LGBTI campaigns.

He also had something to say to people who found the idea of LGBTI equality difficult, a straightforward statement of liberal values:

Im going to concentrate on the things that Willie said, but the truth is that I agreed with most of what they all said. They were all thoughtful and candid. Nicola Sturgeon said at one point that she didnt necessarily understand all the issues affecting LGBTI people but looked to the organisations who were running the event to keep her informed. Patrick Harvie recounted how he had been called a threat to the family by the Daily Mail and made the very important point that we tolerate far too much homophobic and transphobic comment where we would never tolerate views which were racist.

Poor Kezia Dugdale was obviously suffering  she had a chest infection and was clearly unwell. However, she had done her homework, highlighting the grim reality of poor mental health and suicide for LGBTI people who cant get the support that they need.

Ruth Davidson said that she hadnt expected her election as Tory leader to matter to people and spoke of the messages shed had from across the political spectrum congratulating her and saying how important it was to them that she was there. She also contrasted the way she was described in the media with her opponents. They were variously described by their roles as Committee chairs, or spokespeople. She had to contend with the lesbian kick boxer label for too long.

It was Ruth who caused the only real moment of tension. Louise White, understandably, had asked Nicola a couple of questions about what shed done in office. Thats fair enough given that Nicola has been in charge. She also asked Nicola about the SNP candidate for Aberdeenshire East who, it had been revealed, had used a transphobic slur in a blog post some years ago. Nicola actually handled that very well. She didnt let Louise get to the end of the sentence to repeat what Gillian Martin had said. She then said that Gillian had apologised (Im not sure she actually has, but happy to be proved wrong on that one) and talked of the need to be very careful about making sure that the language we use didnt cause deep pain to people.

Anyway, Ruth had a right go at Louise, saying that she wasnt treating everyone on the panel fairly. It was perhaps a little unfair to do that quite as aggressively as she did.

Willie answered the questions with his characteristic empathy and understanding of the practical issues involved. That was particularly clear when he talked about waiting times at the Sandyford, the only gender identity clinic which treats young people. Waiting times have gone up from 4 months to a year. All the panel agreed that had to improve. Willie talked very movingly about the race against time for young people who need puberty blockers.

There were a couple of points of disagreement. Willie, Patrick and Kezia were all very much in favour of mixed sex civil partnerships. Nicola said that she she had an open mind but didnt think there would be the demand. Willie said it didnt matter how few people wanted them, our laws should be compatible with our philosophical belief in equality. Ruth was also ambivalent. Gender neutral markers on passports, so important to those who dont identify as men or women, also divided the panel. Ruth wasnt persuaded that this was necessary.

There was agreement, however, that the next Parliament should totally overhaul the Gender Recognition Act with most being in favour of simple self-declaration of gender identity without going through the cumbersome, stressful, process. That was a great thing to see on the Transgender Day of Visibility.

As always, there are things that didnt get the attention they deserved. Intersex people barely got a mention, and there are specific issues affecting older LGBTI people that need to be addressed.

Im so glad that I was able to go. Thursday was the first day in two weeks that I had ventured very far from home after being floored by a truly horrible virus. It was well worth it to see such consensus, thoughtfulness and engagement from all our political leaders. We can be proud of them all  and it looks like theres a good chance that Scotland will lead the way.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
Tim Farron is undoubtedly in a more secure position as leader of the Liberal Democrats than Cameron or Corbyn are as leaders of their parties.

Cameron

If Britain vote to leave Europe on 23 June, the public think Cameron should resign as Prime Minister by a margin of 48:41.

I agree with that. By analogy, no self-respecting Chief Executive could remain in post if his shareholders rejected his advice on such a big issue.

Whichever way the referendum goes, it takes 50 Tory MPs to trigger a leadership ballot. 150 have come out against the PMs position of the EU. It seems very likely that the significant faction who have never come to terms with Camerons project to realign his party towards the centre would make their move and there are enough wannabe leaders, not just Boris Johnson, to encourage them.

Calling a leadership election is not the same as winning one. I dont know enough about the Kremlinology of the Conservative Party to predict an outcome but as an outsider watching Tory politicians take chucks out of each other each week it seems to me at least a 50:50 chance that Cameron will not be Tory leader by the end of the year.

Betfect gives 7/2 that Cameron will go this year, so punters are more confident that he is staying.

The Guardian has surveyed what is likely to happen in the event of different referendum results.

Corbyn

The newspaper articles saying that Corbyn will face a leadership challenge this summer are too numerous to count. In one recent piece the Huffington Post said:

In a race against time for both sides, supporters of the Labour leader want to make it harder to get rid of Mr Corbyn and are planning to tighten up the rules to ensure a sitting leader is automatically included on any ballot paper after a successful challenge. Current rules state that where there is no vacancy, nominations may be sought by potential challengers each year prior to the annual session of Party conference, as long as they are supported by 20% of MPs and MEPs  in effect 50 names.

However, even if he is challenged, Corbyn appears likely to be re-elected by party members according to yougov research. That presupposes the he gets the support of enough MPs to appear on the ballot. Last year he relied on gifted support from MPs who merely though he would add spice to the debate and didnt want him to win.

If he is forced off the ballot we will surely see the creation of a new Momentum Party of his supporters in Parliament and outside? If he is re-elected as Labour leader after the social democrat / New Labour wing of the party challenge him that group, which might be 100 MPs or more, that group seriously has to consider its future. Do they stay in Labour and cruise to a terrible defeat in 2020 with a leader they tried to oust? Or do they have the integrity to form and stand as an independent party from Corbynite Labour?

Tim Farron

We can be confident that Tim Farron will lead the Liberal Democrats into the New Year and I due course into General Election 2020. We cannot be so confident with regards to either of the other party leaders.

If Cameron is forced out or if Corbyn is not forced out, Liberal Democrats should make a strong claim to speak for the great majority of British voters who will not like to see the Tories taken to the right or Labour lurch to the left.

* Antony Hook was #2 on the South East European list in 2014, is the English Party's representative on the Federal Executive and produces this sites EU Referendum Roundup.
There are few people who understand how the world works better than our Paddy. He really gets how global power structures are changing and how vital it is that countries with liberal values work together, so its no surprise that he really wants us to vote to stay in the EU for our own and for international good.

Im not quite sure why hes chosen a Sunday afternoon in the Easter holidays to wade into the fray afresh with a cheeky tweet, but you cant really argue with him on this.

Britain's friends for BRIN: Obama & all leaders of NATO, Commonwealth, and EU plus China etc.etc. "Friends" supporting BREXIT? er Putin?  Paddy Ashdown (@paddyashdown) April 3, 2016

The by their friends you shall know them theme is one hes talked about before:

Not one of our friends, inside NATO or out supports Brexit. But Putin does. Message? Vote Brexit, its what Vladimir Putin wants you to do!  Paddy Ashdown (@paddyashdown) March 8, 2016

Paddy doesnt tweet very often, but when he does, hes usually bang on the money. Heres one I missed when I was ill that is worth a larger audience.

Ex-MI6 Dearlove says security cost of Brexit wld be low. Hmm. not sure we shld take the advice of the man who promised Blair, Iraq had WMD!  Paddy Ashdown (@paddyashdown) March 23, 2016

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
THE Centenary Bridge across the river Corbry in Glin will remain for generations to come, a powerful symbol of peace and reconciliation but also a memorial to two local men who took part, on opposing sides, in the the 1916 Rising.

The footbridge in the town park was formally named the Centenary Bridge at a commemoration ceremony last Easter Monday, when memorial plaques in honour of Constable James OBrien and Volunteer Eamon Dore were also unveiled by their relatives.

Addressing the hundreds of men, women and children who gathered in the Town Park for the ceremony, John Anthony Culhane reminded them that 2016 belongs to everybody on this island and to our friends and families overseas regardless of political or family background".

In a time of reconciliation and remembrance, we acknowledge two native sons of Glin who happened to be on opposing sides in the conflict, Mr Culhane said.

He also recalled Michael OConnor from Ballyhahill, a civilian who died in the crossfire during Easter Week and is buried in Kilfergus cemetery.

Mr Culhane told the crowd that Constable James OBrien, from Kilfergus, joined the Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1895 and was on duty at the gate of Dublin Castle on Easter Monday, April 24 1916 when he was shot by Sean Connolly, a leader of a group of Irish Citizen Army men and women who were trying to seize Dublin Castle.

Eamonn Dore, from Main Street, Glin was a young medical student in Dublin when he joined the Irish Volunteers. When the Rising began, he travelled back to Dublin over two days, arriving there on Easter Tuesday. He was a courier for Sean MacDermott, one of the signatories of the Proclamation of Independence.

He was imprisoned in Britain along with hundreds of Irish Volunteers but was later released and married Nora Daly, herself a rebel and sister of Ned Daly, the Limerick man executed along with Con Colbert and 14 other leaders after the Rising.

And Mr Culhane welcomed back Mairead Dore, Eamon and Noras daughter, who unveiled the plaque to her late father while Gus OConnor unveiled the plaque to Constable OBrien, his grand-uncle.

Eamon Dores grand-daughter Rianach Campbell recalled her grandfather as a very kind, very caring and very gentle man.

It was all about us kids, she said, adding that the events of 1916 were never spoken about in a negative or sad way.

Local garda Billy McElligott spoke on behalf of An Garda Siochana, and explained that Constable OBrien was one of three uniformed policemen who were killed during the Rising.

The ceremony included contributions by various local school pupils. Enya McIntrye recited the poem Mise Eire while Sean Adams recited his own poem, also as Gaeilge, about the Rising. Roise McIntyre read out a section of the 1916 Proclamation and Leo

Buckley sang the song Grace, about the marriage of Grace Gifford and Joseph Mary Plunkett on the eve of Plunketts execution. Earlier, a dozen or so musicians from the local Comhaltas Ceoltoiri craobh entertained the crowd in bright but chilly sunshine while a quartet of young dancers danced their reel around a square of grass.

It is a great day for Glin, said Cllr John Sheahan (FG). But he added that it was incumbent on all of us to take on board the words of the Proclamation.

One hundred years on, we still have work to do to fulfil the words of Pearse and his followers that nobody should be alienated. That is what we should strive to do, he said.

Fr Tom Crawford intoned St Francis prayer for peace and blessed the bridge in honour of all those in uniform who gave their lives and dedicated their lives to the building of our nation. A big price was paid by many, he said.

We are now beneficiaries, he said. Let us for ever treasure the gift handed on to us. Let us be people who work for and keep our freedom safe. A lot of bridges need to be built still.

The bridge is a symbol of crossing a divide, said artist Val OShaughnessy who wrote a poem for the occasion which she read.

I would be a listening ear, a compassionate heart, a grounding presence, it began, finishing with the words, Wherever you go, be a bridge.

The ceremony ended, teas were served and more singing and playing followed in the nearby sheltered housing complex.
BITTER winds and driving rain seriously challenged the stamina of the crowd who gathered for the Easter Sunday commemoration ceremony in Newcastle West.

The ceremony at the Oglaigh na hEireann monument took place to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising, Tim Mulcahy, vice-chairman of the organising committee, told the gathering and to remember and cherish the 17 young men whose names are inscribed on the monument.

Among those 17 was Con Colbert, executed following the rising and Capt Donal Sheehan from Monagea, who was one of the first casualties of the Rising when he died by drowning on Good Friday, 1916 at Ballykissane, Co Kerry while on a mission.

Thirteen others were men who died during the War of Independence and two men were remembered who died on opposing sides during the Civil War. Their names are included because, as Sundays memorial pamphlet pointed out, former President Sean T OCeallaigh appealed in 1953 for past dissensions to be forgotten. The monument was erected in 1955 and officially unveiled by the President on April 10 of that year.

Recalling the 1950s, Mr Mulcahy said there was emigration, unemployment and poverty and a level of hardship we do not experience today. But, he added, side by side with that there was a growing realisation that for the first time in many years, our destiny as a people was in our own hands.

The Civil War had ended only a few decades before, Mr Mulcahy continued, which had left physical and emotional scars. And it was against this background, he said, that comrades who had fought together and against each other decided to come together and erect this monument.

That is why, he said, it is gratifying to see people here from all political persuasions. It is a testimony to the wishes of the men who came together to erect the monument and their generosity of spirit.

No group, Mr Mulcahy added, has a monopoly on the legacy of our patriot dead. All 17 men were young, he said. All of them are equal in one respect. They all gave their lives for the cause in which they believed.

In the ceremony which followed, citations were read out for all 17 men and wreaths were laid in their honour by relatives. The Proclamation of 1916 was read by Able Seaman Declan Reidy and an oration was given by Dr William Murphy, from Monagea who is a lecturer in history at Dublin City University.

Making a plea that we remember well, Dr Murphy said: I cant speak for the dead generations, but I want to acknowledge their wisdom; their acknowledgement, in their own time, that life and history are complex.

Monuments that commemorate the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War in one place are not that common. Monuments to the Civil War that commemorate both sides are very rare indeed. But that is what we have in Newcastle West, he said.

The intentions of those who raised this monument could not then have been a call to shallow celebration, but it is a marker of achievement. It is a reminder of effort and idealism. It is a prompt to us to think about the contributions others made to shaping Ireland, he said.

Sixty-one years on we are further away from the events of the revolution. The past is an unusual beast in that the further we get from it the more clearly we are supposed to be able to see it. We certainly see it differently.

Each of us will approach this in our own way. For me, as a historian, the greatest respect we can offer to those who have gone before us is to seek to understand them, and their times, in all their complexity. We should remember them, as well as we can, for whom they were.

The roll of honour was: Donal Sheehan, Con Colbert, Daniel Neville, Liam Scully, David Brennan, Paddy Buckley, Liam Danaher, Mortimer Duggan, Tim Madigan, Richard Boyce, Sean Finn, Michael OShea, Patrick Dalton, Patrick OBrien, Paddy Naughton, Donal McEnery, Eddie Cregan.

The organisers were unable to trace relatives for three of the men, Paddy Buckley, Paddy Naughton and Patrick OBrien and members of the organising committee laid their wreaths.

Michael Guinane played the Last Post, the Newcastle West and District Pipe Band played the national anthem and the tricolour was raised. Monagea held a ceremony for Donal Sheehan.
A LIMERICK man who is descended from a man many describe as a significant figure in the 1916 Easter Rising was an invited guest at the Dublin commemoration.

Kileely man David Hayes is related to Clan Na Gael leader John Devoy through his great grandmother, Catherine Devoy.

A major fundraiser for the Easter Rising, John Devoy raised money for the rising from his base in the USA, while living in exile there. A Defence of Ireland bond raised $600,000, money which was used to buy German rifles and a shipment of arms on the captured Aud arms ship, said Bartle DArcy, who is curating the Revolution 1916 exhibition at the Ambassador Theatre in Dublin.

David Hayes, a photographer by trade, was one of 5,000 guests invited to Sundays commemoration. He sat in a grandstand erected for descendants opposite the General Post Office, the heart of the 1916 Rising.

He said: I was really proud to go there and represent John and be a witness to it all. I felt a great overwhelming sense of pride in my country, watching he military carry out its manouvres and seeing the president representing the Irish people. I really felt the emotion.

David described John Devoy as a forgotten hero of the seminal events of a century ago, pointing out that commander in chief Padraig Pearse said he was perhaps the greatest of all Fenians, something written on his headstone in the Republican plot at Glasnevin.

David wants to see perhaps a greater tribute paid, saying: I dont see any streets called Devoy Street.

I am not looking for OConnell Street to be renamed, but Id like to see some recognition for him. He gave up on love, he gave up on his fiance. He never married  if anything, he was married to the Irish cause.

Devoy is given a mention in the film which greets visitors to the Revolution 1916 exhibition, running at Dublins Ambassador Theatre until October, alongside the Limerick-based figures in the rising, Con Colbert, Edward Daly and Sean Heuston.

Mr DArcy says John Devoy was a remarkable character, adding: So important was his role is he is mentioned in the Proclamation.

He added that another less well-known anniversary taking place this year is that of the sailing of the ship Catalpha.

When John Devoy was in exile in America  where he founded Clan na Gael  as part of the Cuban Five he organised a rescue of other exiled Fenians from Australia.

Taking up the story, Bartle DArcy said: A lot of the Fenians were sent to Australia and they were kept in bad conditions. John Devoy organised a rescue from America.

He travelled on the whaling ship, the Catalpha. It landed at Freemantle [in Western Australia] on Easter Monday 1876. They managed to take the Fenians out of the camp, bring them on the ship, outrun the British naval gun boat, and they hoisted the American flag and dared them not to shoot as it was going into international waters. It was a heroic and legendary Fenian activity.

David has long been proud of his connection to the Rising, and is delighted that his ancestors role has been recognised in some quarters.

He said: Within Ireland, if you were not involved in the political side of it, it would not be a name which clicks off the top of your head. Outside of Ireland, he was the most recognised leader.
THREE years ago Qatar Racing bought 102 acres of prime County Limerick land for 1 million with the aim of nurturing equine stars of the future.

The first part of that dream was realised last week when Sheikh Fahad Al Thani arrived to see his first crop of foals born in Spring Lodge, Manister. The man in his mid-twenties is a son of the former prime minister and first cousin to the Emir of Qatar  ruled by the Al Thani family since the mid-19th century. Forbes magazine has named it the worlds richest country.

Qatar Racing  formed in 2011 by Sheikh Fahad and his brothers Sheikh Hamad and Sheikh Suhaim  has grown quickly to rival Coolmore and Godolphin.

Sheikh Fahad gave an exclusive interview to the Leader on his first visit to Limerick in 2013 and he did the same last week.

Time is of the essence as his flight was two hours late so we walk and talk on the way down to the stables.

I see a lot of work going on which is good. We didnt have the barns when you were last here and now the mares have foaled as well. I am looking forward to seeing a few of the foals for the first time. It is very exciting, really exciting.

It takes a whole year of planning, waiting for them to foal and hopefully the foal is alright. It is a lot of time and labour but this is the fruits of the labour hopefully. We will just have a look now and see what we have, says Sheikh Fahad, as he reaches the stables.

The radio is on. Matt Cooper talks on Today FMs The Last Word and there is no doubting today is a big day. Mares and foals are quietly brought out by Peter Molony  Irish representative of Qatar Racing, owner of neighbouring Rathmore Stud and manager of Spring Lodge  and his staff.

Sheikh Fahad speaks in hushed tones with Peter and David Redvers, racing and bloodstock manager for Qatar Racing, Qatar Bloodstock and Pearl Bloodstock. The beaming smile gives it away. The member of the royal family of Qatar is pleased with his own equine royalty.

That is a Dubawi [one of the world's premier stallions] foal, a nice foal, points out Sheikh Fahad.

Most of these mares, I have chosen their coverings so it is nice to see them, he whispers. The foals are surprisingly timid as they are surrounded by strangers and a man clicking a camera. No coltish behaviour to be seen.

For instance that one had an Invincible Spirit, I chose that and I chose to go to Gleneagles next so she can have her next foal by him hopefully. This one is a Sea the Stars, said Sheikh Fahad.

It is a whos who of some of the top sires in the world.

Are you picturing Derby and Guineas winners? I ask.

Exactly. That is the idea, hopefully  all the Classic races. We all hope they are correct, there are no problems and it is in Gods hands what comes but Im very happy, said Sheikh Fahad, who is also very content with his purchase of a Limerick farm.

We have got nice foals so it must be good land for them to grow up in. Peter and his staff are doing a good job, he concludes.

We take our leave and let Sheikh Fahad become more acquainted with his future stars.

After the visit Peter reflects on how far they have come in Spring Lodge in such a short space of time.

We are delighted with how it is going, the place looks really well. We are not quite finished developing it yet, there is a bit more work to do. It is up and running and operational and we are busy so we are very happy the way it is going.

Ten Qatar Racing mares are in-situ but they have more than 20 in total being boarded for two of the most successful farms in the UK and France as well  Newsells Park Stud and Haras des Monceaux.

Peter describes Sheikh Fahad as someone who is really keen and knowledgeable on breeding and choosing sires.

When you choose a mating and you get a nice foal it is very satisfying. He is really committed to developing it a bit more and investing more money.

It is really exciting, said Peter with a smile.

One that everybody is excited about is the Dubawi foal out of Purr Along  a Group Two winner for Qatar Racing trained by Johnny Murtagh. This perfect specimen of equine alchemy has all the traits of a superstar and if it does reach its potential on the racecourse it will be one of our own.
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Al Nusrah Front claims to have captured a small village near the Talat al-Iss hill in Syrias Aleppo province.

Al Nusrah Front and allied rebel groups launched an offensive in the countryside south of the city of Aleppo on April 1. The battle began when three Al Nusrah suicide bombers struck positions occupied by Shiite militias and Syrian regime forces near the Talat al-Iss hill.

The bombings cleared the way for other fighters to stream in. On one of its official Twitter accounts, Al Nusrah has released a series of images documenting the explosions caused by its trio of suicide bombers. According to jihadists on social media, one of the martyrs was a native of Albania.

Al Nusrah, which is an official branch of al Qaeda, claims that the operation was a success and its fighters have captured Talat al-Iss, as well as a small village close by.

Using a small drone to record aerial footage, the groups propagandists produced a short video showing the area after its liberation. The jihadists have also released a series of images documenting their preparations for the battle and the war booty captured, including arms and vehicles. Some of these photos are included at the end of this article.

A Syrian regime source explained to Reuters the strategic importance of the location, which is sparsely populated. This is the dividing line, the front position of the Syrian army in the southern (Aleppo) countryside, a Syrian military source said. In south Aleppo, armed groups in coordination with [Nusrah] Front attacked some military positions  in the direction of Talat al-Iss and the surrounding areas. Of course this is a clear breach of the truce.

Al Nusrah is not a party to the ceasefire that the Assad regime, Russia and a number of opposition groups agreed to earlier this year. It is not clear what other rebel organizations participated in the offensive, but Al Nusrah regularly relies on manpower from closely allied jihadists and Islamists. The al Qaeda arm also frequently cooperates with Western-backed rebels.

Sheikh Abdallah Muhammad al Muhaysini, an al Qaeda-affiliated cleric, celebrated the jihadists success at Talat al-Iss by delivering a talk at a local mosque that had been controlled by Shiite fighters.

Muhaysini posted the image on the right on his personal Twitter feed. The top photo shows him speaking from the pulpit. And the image on the bottom shows a Shiite commander delivering a talk from the same spot when Hezbollah and allied Shiite militias controlled the area.

The assault on Talat al-Iss is part of Al Nusrahs attempt to regain the initiative in the Syrian war. With the help of Russias intervention last fall, Bashar al Assads regime stymied the advances of the Jaysh al Fath (Army of Conquest) coalition, which seized the northwestern province of Idlib earlier in the year. Jaysh al Fath, which included a number of rebel organizations, was co-founded by Al Nusrah and another al Qaeda-linked jihadist group, Ahrar al Sham.

In early February, Assads forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias and Hezbollah, launched a major offensive in the province of Aleppo. Their aim was to recapture some of the towns and villages lost to various insurgents and to break the siege imposed on Shiite-majority towns in the northern part of the province. The Syrian government and its partners claimed some success in achieving these goals. Al Nusrah redeployed hundreds of jihadists to Aleppo in advance of the fight. [See LWJ report, Jihadists reinforce other rebels during key battle in Aleppo province.]

Propaganda photos of the three suicide bombings carried out near the Talat al-Iss hill:

Al Nusrahs fighters prepare for the battle:

These two images appear to show an American Humvee being used in the battle. In the first image, the vehicle can be seen in the shadows on the left:

Al Nusrah manufactures some of its own rockets and arms in advance of the fight:

Images of the war booty captured:

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
The US military targeted a senior al Qaeda leader who also serves in the Amniyat, a key security and intelligence organization within Shabaab, al Qaedas official branch in Somalia, in an airstrike last week. The US military has not confirmed the death of Hassan Ali Dhoore, the dual hatted al Qaeda and Shabaab leader, who was the focus of the airstrike.

The Pentagon announced that it targeted Dhoore in cooperation with the Federal Government of Somalia, on Thursday, March 31. Dhoore was described as a senior leader of Shabaab, who is part of al Qaeda and a member of Shabaabs Amniyat (security and intelligence) wing and was heavily involved in high profile attack planning in Mogadishu.

Dhoore had planned and overseen attacks resulting in the death of at least three US citizens, the statement continued. He was directly linked to two assaults, one in December 2014 at Mogadishus airport, and another at a hotel in the Somali capital. Two Americans were killed in the ambushes.

Leaders and members of the Amniyat have been the focus of multiple US airstrikes. Over the past two years, the US killed the previous two leaders of the Amniyat. The Amniyat is instrumental in executing suicide attacks inside Somalia as well as in Kenya and other African nations, conducting assassinations, providing logistics and support for operations, and integrating the groups local and regional commands. Additionally, the Amniyat has ben instrumental in suppressing internal dissent within Shabaab as well as challenges to its primacy in Somalia from the Islamic State.

The US killed the last leader of the Amniyat, Yusuf Dheeq, on Feb. 3, 2015, and also killed his predecessor, Tahlil Abdishakur, on Dec. 29, 2014. Additionally, the US killed Ahmed Godane, the co-founder of Shabaab and its former emir, in an airstrike on Sept. 1, 2014.

Like when reporting the deaths of previous Shabaab leaders, the US military said that Dhoores death would be a significant blow to the jihadist group.

While we are still assessing the results of this operation, removing Dhoore from the battlefield, a euphemism for killing him, would be a significant blow to Shabaabs operational planning and ability to conduct attacks against the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia, its citizens, US partners in the region, and against Americans abroad, the Pentagon stated.

Unfortunately the deaths of Godane, Dheeq, Abdishakur, and a number of senior al Qaeda and Shabaab leaders at the hands of the US has done little to disrupt Shabaabs command or control. The jihadist group has been waging an effective insurgency and still controls territory in Somalia despite the fact that the US began targeting Shabaabs leadership beginning in late 2006. In addition, Shabaab recently has gone on the offensive and regained control of several towns and villages in southern Somalia that have been lost over the past several years.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
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Nadir B. Godrej, MD of Godrej Industries Ltd., was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award by the All India Liquid Bulk Importers and Exporters Association (AILBIEA) during its 15th Anniversary celebration held on 1st April 2016 in Mumbai.



AILBIEA, whose members are responsible for most of the liquid bulk cargo that pass through various ports of India and which has hit a whopping volume of over 200 Million tons this year, made this rare gesture of conferring this momentous award on Mr Godrej for his monumental role in bringing up the country's liquid bulk business to its present status.



On the receipt of award Mr. Nadir Godrej said, AILBIEA under the leadership of Jayyannt Lapsiaa, the President has played an excellent role in bringing together the trade, service providers and the government. It has been my pleasure to work hand in hand with AILBIEA to facilitate Indias global trade over the last twenty years. I am honoured to receive this award and I am sure that AILBIEA will continue to facilitate Indias global trade.



The ceremony where top government officials along with the glitterati of the trade and commerce come in great numbers, has great significance as India is set to become a major Global importer of a wide variety of liquid bulk commodities such as biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel in the near future. This occasion served as a platform to project the urgent need to upgrade the country's ports infrastructure with state of the art technology. Changes in the infrastructure along with change in mindset of process owners is equally important, e.g., the customs department to change their drive into Facilitation gear.



According to Mr. Jayyannt Lapsiaa, President, of AILBIEA, Any countrys economic growth is intertwined with its infrastructure development. High transaction cost arising from inadequate and inefficient infrastructure, delays and hassles due to antiquated procedures and systems, is one of the major hurdles that our economy is unable to attain its full growth potential regardless of progress on other fronts. Port connectivity is still the soft underbelly of the port sector. Efficient infrastructure combined with quality and expeditious clearance procedures will help reduce costs and sharpen the competitive edge.



Mr. Lapsiaa went on to add, In addition, the association strongly believes in taking along other like-minded associations and trade bodies who pursue fostering of EXIM TRADE, so as to create a conducive and friendly environment for ensuring better results. In addition to infrastructure development, the Association has identified 3 issues which require urgent remedial attention for the Liquid Bulk industry particularly imports and exports to match global scales and standards. It is time that Government at the Centre and State modifies its out-dated policies and procedures and gives the right encouragement to trade.



Ever since its inception, AILBIEA has striven to address various technical, legal, infrastructural, administrative and procedural issues of liquid bulk trade. The stakeholders include importers, exporters, clearing and forwarding agents, shipping agents, installation owners, Surveyors, Barge operators and intermediaries connected with liquid bulk trade. The primary objective of this association continues to be that of playing a significant role of Catalyst between various Port Authorities, Governmental and Revenue Departments and provide more solidity and clarity in ensuring smooth and fair operations.


Watching what passes for politics today reminds me of two important lessons I've learned in journalism, one recent, one long ago.

In my first journalism class I was reminded to choose words carefully. They matter, they shade meaning, and they tell more than you think.

The other lesson  one that has been driven home for me personally  has been learned over the course of interviewing nearly 80 Vietnam veterans. If "Vietnam Voices" has taught me anything it's that most of us, thankfully, will never know what it's like to have your life threatened and face a daily possibility of dying.

Those Vietnam veterans have the right to use the phrase "under attack."

The rest of us? Not so much.

Montana 'attacks'

But it's a favorite political cliche to trot out these days when talking about the state of the country or state.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte has used the phrase "under attack" several times recently, including talking about Colstrip, even comparing it to Ground Zero.

When he launched his campaign, the guy who grew up on the East Coast reminded us that our Montana way of life was under attack.

But the careless use of the language was not done just by Gianforte. His opponent, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, also likes using the phrase. Bullock has said that our constitutional rights are under attack on issues like abortion. Apparently, schools and teachers are also under attack, although the last time I drove by my daughter's school it looked pretty peaceful and smelled only of hot lunch and not gun grease.

I have never once felt truly under attack. No one is telling me I can't believe what I want. I haven't been stopped from travel. My home is safe. I am not threatened in any way, especially not from some political conspiracy. When I look at Billings or Montana, I see a place that is just the opposite of attacked: It's growing and has great things to do, and I brought my kids back to Montana not because it's way of life was endangered but because it was richer and fuller than when I grew up here.

Like all beliefs, mine are challenged. Yet, that's what it's meant to be American since about 1776  hardly any new siege.

Using the phrase "under attack" does a disservice to all those men and women who have volunteered to be put in harm's way and have truly been under attack. It trivializes the life-and-death situation they were in. As if sitting in Billings is somehow equivalent to the Tet offensive in 1968 or Kabul a few years ago.

Trivializing war

Employing the language of violence and war begins to either normalize or trivialize it. If you tell people for long enough that they're under attack, they run the risk of seeing the world as more combative, dangerous and hostile than it is. Since when did disagreement equal war?

And I can hear the critics  that this concern of mine is nothing more than the language police or thought police. Or that it's even worse (get ready to gasp)  political correctness.

Recently, after a protester was punched by a Donald Trump supporter, the GOP would-be nominee had a chance to denounce this type of behavior. Instead, he downplayed what was an assault, essentially excusing the behavior because his supporters have such "passion and love" for their country. Besides, Trump reasoned, some of the protesters are "bad dudes."

When we use patriotism to justify assault or violence, it's a slippery slope as to what happens next. Seems like a whole bunch of history's villains have used love of country to justify heinous crimes. Patriotism, as Samuel Johnson said, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Condoning violence

I guess we shouldn't expect more from a man who has said he wants to punch protesters, or that he wanted to knock the crap out of people. And, it almost makes me defend those who show up at a rally and get fist-happy. They are merely doing what their leaders tell them, and if it's good enough for Donald, then it surely must be OK for them.

And that's precisely why as attention-getting as the phrase "under attack" may be, it's hyperbole and dangerous overstatement. People might actually take their leaders at their word.

The words we use matter. They shape our thoughts. Those thoughts shape our actions.

If we are under attack, then we must be at war. But war  real war  has life-and-death consequences that should never be trivialized. It's not something to be slipped into press releases, op-eds or sound bites.

You want to know about being under attack? Go ask a veteran.
Holland America Line celebrated the delivery of ms Koningsdam with an official Handover Ceremony, luncheon and shipyard workers party aboard the ship Saturday, April 2, 2016, at the Fincantieri shipyard in Marghera, Italy.



In attendance at the ceremony was Italys Minister of Infrastructures and Transport Graziano Delrio, who expressed his appreciation for the long-standing relationship between Carnival Corporation, including Holland America Line, and Fincantieri. Other speakers included Giuseppe Bono, chief executive officer, Fincantieri, and Arnold Donald, chief executive officer, Carnival Corporation. A video was shown of the Italian flag being changed to the Dutch flag, as flown by all Holland America Line ships. Fincantieri also presented ms Koningsdams Captain Emiel de Vries with a bottle containing the first water that touched ms Koningdams hull.



The Official Handover Ceremony was a celebration of the years of planning and hard work that went into building our gorgeous new ship and a chance to honor all those who made this day possible, said Orlando Ashford, president of Holland America Line. Thank you to Fincantieri for being an exceptional partner. We look forward to beginning work soon on our second Pinnacle-class ship scheduled for delivery in late 2018. 



Invited guests at the Handover Ceremony also witnessed a contract signing between Fincantieri S.p.A. and Carnival Corporation to build five new cruise ships as part of a memorandum of agreement announced in 2015. The five new ships include two that will be built for Costa Asia for deployment in China, two ships for Princess Cruises and one designated for P&O Cruises Australia, with deliveries expected in 2019 and 2020.



Following the official ceremony, the shipyard employees who worked over the past two years to build Koningsdam were invited on board with their families to celebrate their accomplishment. Guests were treated to dinner in the Lido Market, and a performance in World Stage, showing off the venues 270-degree LED projection. A tour of the ship allowed the shipyard employees to share the final result of their hard work with their families.



The ship will sail from the yard Sunday, April 3, to make its way to Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy, for its Premiere Voyage departing April 8. Following a series of premiere Mediterranean voyages, Koningsdams official naming ceremony will take place in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, May 20.


Following on a March 2015 agreement and a memorandum of agreement last December, Fincantieri, a leader in cruise ship design and construction, and Carnival Corporation & plc, the worlds largest cruise company, have finalized contracts for the construction of five next-generation passenger ships.



The contracts finalized today envisage one further unit compared to the memorandum of agreement of December and mark the most important goal reached by the two groups in the last years, having a total value which exceeds 3 billion euros.



Crucial, once more, for the finalization of the agreement, the supporting of the export credit system lead by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (Cdp). This support represents for Fincantieri, like for every Italian exporter, an essential element for the efficiency of the Italian system.



Two of the new ships will be built for the Costa Crociere brand Costa Asia, other two for Princess Cruises and one for P&O Cruises Australia. They will all be built at the shipyards in Monfalcone and Marghera between 2019-2020, and will operate on the emerging cruise markets, among which China, Australia and others, once entered in their respective fleets.



The announcement was made on board of Koningsdam, the new ship of Holland America Lines fleet, other brand of the Carnival Group, delivered to the shipowner on March 31, and presented today at Fincantieris shipyard in Marghera.



The contracts were signed by Micky Arison, Chairman of Carnival Corporation, and Giuseppe Bono, CEO of Fincantieri, in the presence of Graziano Delrio, Minister of Infrastructures and Transport, personally delegated by the Prime Ministers Office, to represent the Italian Government.

Also attending the ceremony were several authorities and, among others, Arnold Donald, CEO of Carnival Corporation, Stein Kruse, CEO of Holland America Group, which comprises the Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, P&O Cruises Australia and Seabourn brands, Michael Thamm, CEO of the Costa Group, which includes AIDA Cruises and Costa Crociere, and Orlando Ashford, President of Holland America Line.



The new units will be specifically designed and developed for each brand and the guests they will serve. The ships for Costa Asia and P&O Australia will be 135,500-ton vessels with the capacity to carry 4,200 passengers on board.



The ships for Princess Cruises will be 143,700-ton and 3,560-passenger ships and will be the brands fourth and fifth vessel of the Royal Princess class, after Royal, Regal and Majestic, all built at Fincantieris shipyard in Monfalcone, the last of which due to delivery in 2017.



Giuseppe Bono, CEO of Fincantieri, stated, This result, which is by far one of the most important ever achieved by an Italian industry, makes us proud of the strong commitment made over all these years, which helped to make Fincantieri an excellence acknowledged worldwide for product diversification and quality, with an unparalleled workload in terms of time, which ensures full development and a long-term strategic perspective. Today - concluded Bono  we further strengthen the relationship with our friends in Carnival, a partnership that has enabled both groups to grow over the years and which is further reinforced by an unprecedented strategic agreement. Thanks to it we look at the future in order to develop new projects together and meet the new challenges that the market will present us.



Arnold Donald, CEO of Carnival Corporation, commented, Today has been especially exciting for our company, our partners and our guests, as we celebrated the arrival of our amazing ms Koningsdam ship and officially signed agreements with Fincantieri to build five new cruise ships for the future. Supporting our goal to exceed guest expectations on every cruise  continued Donald - these new ships will create a whole new level of excitement and opportunity to deliver experiences that our guests will not only remember for the rest of their lives, but will also share with others. Using our strategic fleet enhancement plan to delight our guests is an important part of our measured growth strategy, which includes replacing less efficient ships with newer, larger and more efficient vessels over a very specific period of time.



The cooperation between Fincantieri and Carnival Corporation has a strategic value not only for the shipbuilding industry but for the entire national economy, as the contracts outline long-term activities from one of Italy's major foreign investors: the American group, thanks to the partnership with Fincantieri, invested in the country  also counting todays announcement  almost 30 billion euros. Fincantieri has built 72 cruise ships since 1990, 60 of which for Carnivals different brands, while other 24 ships are currently being designed or built in the groups yards, 11 of which for the shipowners of the American group.
What New Economic Recovery?

The rise of the dollar store business model caters to a disappearing middle class who are incurring shrinking incomes. This has made dollar stores prosper, in the last decade. Dollar stores, for most Americans, have carried an odd sort of stigma. In the past, these stores were seen as shopping for the poor, only. We are all now aware that many people who were in the once strong American middle class were thrown off of the prosperity path and into lower income brackets from business layoffs, downsizing, and salary reduction. While regular product companies struggle the expanding dollar stores have found a niche in this economic climate. The shrinking middle class means more customers for dollar stores.

A big part of the new recovery is lining up at midnight at Wal-Mart stores in order to purchase food. There are families not able to feed their families by the end of the month. They are literally lining up at midnight at Wal-Mart stores, waiting to buy food along with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) Cards when their funds are deposited into their accounts.

EBT cards are an electronic system that allows state welfare departments to issue benefits via magnetically encoded payment cards, used in the United States. The average monthly EBT payout is $125.00 per person!

Common benefits provided (in the United States) via EBT, are typically of two general categories: food and cash benefits. Food benefits are federally authorized benefits that can be used only to purchase food and non-alcoholic beverages. Food benefits are distributed through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program. Cash benefits include state general assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits, and refugee benefits.

There appears to be a growing great divide within the current U.S. economy. The financial sector is swimming in their bailout-induced profits. Within their elite circles, it appears as if the recession is over.

However, within the average American family, they are not experiencing available access to new credit cards, equity in their homes is vanishing and they do not have a store of available capital they can access like a stock portfolio.

The table below clearly shows the middle class making less money year after year while the wealthy earn more each year. The money is slowly shifting from everyone to just the one-percenters  YIKES

Conclusion:

In short, the average American is slowly earning less and becoming financially stressed about their future outlook.

If you are one of these hard working individuals experiencing a decline in business/income its best you do some research and change what you are doing because things will likely get much worse before they get better.

Mainly because of Trump thousands of Americans are looking to leave the country with the search term How to Move to Canada up over 1000% last month. While I love Canada, myself being a Canadian and all, there are many other great places to live and a very full life at a fraction the cost of Canada/USA.

Couple years ago I went to the DR (Dominican Republic) to see if it would work for my family in the winters to escape the cold and be surrounded in palm trees, ocean and kitesurfing. It was an awesome experience with a huge amount of development, tons of Canadians, retirees, and elegant vacation properties available at Holden Sothebys.

There are many ways to preserve capital and also ways to grow it substantially no matter what the economy does and I share this information in the video on the home page of my Trading Newsletter Website.

See how we made money in the last 5 days trading  Click Here

Join my pre-market video newsletter and start your day with a hot cup of coffee and my market forecast video: www.TheGoldAndOilGuy.com

Chris Vermeulen

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Chris Vermeulen is Founder of the popular trading site TheGoldAndOilGuy.com. There he shares his highly successful, low-risk trading method. For 7 years Chris has been a leader in teaching others to skillfully trade in gold, oil, and silver in both bull and bear markets. Subscribers to his service depend on Chris' uniquely consistent investment opportunities that carry exceptionally low risk and high return.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this report should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any securities mentioned. Technical Traders Ltd., its owners and the author of this report are not registered broker-dealers or financial advisors. Before investing in any securities, you should consult with your financial advisor and a registered broker-dealer. Never make an investment based solely on what you read in an online or printed report, including this report, especially if the investment involves a small, thinly-traded company that isnt well known. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report has been paid by Cardiff Energy Corp. In addition, the author owns shares of Cardiff Energy Corp. and would also benefit from volume and price appreciation of its stock. The information provided here within should not be construed as a financial analysis but rather as an advertisement. The authors views and opinions regarding the companies featured in reports are his own views and are based on information that he has researched independently and has received, which the author assumes to be reliable. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content of this report, nor its fitness for any particular purpose. Lastly, the author does not guarantee that any of the companies mentioned in the reports will perform as expected, and any comparisons made to other companies may not be valid or come into effect.

Chris Vermeulen Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




Will North Korea and Cuba Ever Be Wealthy?

Ryan W. McMaken writes: After years of claiming to embrace revolutionary Marxism, the Cuban state is, for reasons of necessity and pragmatism, moving toward becoming a more traditional authoritarian state. Even once Raul and Fidel Castro are dead, it's rather unlikely that the Cuban government will suddenly turn to a political system that leans heavily in favor of relatively free markets. As has been the case with China, the ruling class of Cuba will find ways to perpetuate itself and maintain political control while keeping for itself a substantial amount of the wealth produced by the labors of the common people. It will likely loosen up on its control of the economy because it recognizes that more-free economies are more productive than less-free economies. But, don't look for Cuba to become a haven for entrepreneurship any time soon.

Even as the economy becomes slightly more free, however, Cuba will remain poorer than most of its neighbors indefinitely, and even if Cuba turned into a Caribbean version of Singapore  something that's exceedingly unlikely  it would remain far poorer than even many of its Latin American neighbors for decades.

This is because, in spite of what our politicians may tell us, people cannot be made more prosperous by the government's simply wishing it to be so. After all, if wealth could be produced by government fiat, then the Cuban and North Korean regimes, neither of which have faced any organized political opposition, have both enjoyed nearly untrammeled power to "improve" the economy without limit.

In real life, though, wealth can only be built through the arduous process of work, saving, and capital accumulation. There is no question that some people can benefit from government mandated redistribution of wealth, but to have wealth, it must first be created by producing things or services of value, and by foregoing consumption now in order to invest and obtain more consumption later.

It's easy to state this, but it is far more difficult to actually do it. And most frustrating of all: even after a society embraces relatively free markets, it can still take decades to achieve a wealthy society by modern standards. And worse yet: in the process of building wealth, many ideologues and politicians will point to the discrepancy between rich and poor countries and blame markets.

The Case of East Germany and Eastern Europe

While there is no such thing as a truly controlled experiment in the fields of economics or politics, we do have some cases that convincingly demonstrate how political revolutions are insufficient to effect an economic one all by themselves.

For example, even 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the areas of Germany that once groaned under the soviet-style regime known as the German Democratic Republic remain poorer than the areas of Germany that once formed what was commonly called West Germany.

In 2014, the Washington Post reported how East Germany has lower levels of disposable income, high unemployment rates, and is generally less prosperous. This in turn has led to the old East Germany having fewer young people, many of whom move west for better jobs.

Fortune's Chris Matthews went on to observe "If you look at statistics such as per capita income or worker productivity, they also point to the large disparity in economic development between east and west."

And Claudia Bracholdt further notes: "Today, Germanys east has many structural problems similar to those of countries like Greece and Spain, though on a much smaller scale."

During the Cold War, numerous opponents of Communism pointed to Germany as the perfect example of how soviet-style communism destroyed economic prosperity. But that was then. Nowadays, the East German regime is gone, and Germany is, relatively speaking, one of the most market-oriented economies on earth. Eastern Germany shares a government with western Germany. So, why is eastern Germany still poor compared to its western German neighbors?

The answer lies in the fact that even though the legal and political systems in eastern Germany are the same as in the West, the East suffers from the fact that it lost out on decades of capital accumulation and growth in worker productivity while under the boot of the Soviets.

The German case offers the most excellent comparison of course, because prior to World War II, western and eastern Germans enjoyed similar political systems for many decades. Moreover, the western and eastern Germans were similar both ethnically and culturally. Thus, the comparison allows us to focus on regime differences in the age of the Cold War.

We can look beyond just the East Germans as well. We might ask ourselves, for example, why Poland, with its Western orientation and long tradition of parliamentary and decentralized governments remains so relatively poor.

The same might be said of the Czech Republic as well, where the principal city, Prague, was once the second city of the Austrian Empire and was a center of European wealth and culture. The Czechs too, have never regained their relative place in terms of European wealth.

Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the legacy of an abandoned political system can live on for decades even after regime change. As Nicolas Cachanosky has observed in the context of South American regimes:

Institutional changes ... define the long-run destiny of a country, not its short-run prosperity. ... For example, as China opened parts of its economy to international markets, the country started to grow, and we are now seeing the effects of decades of relative economic liberalization. It is true that many areas in China continue to lack significant freedoms, but it would be a much different China today had it refused to change its institutions decades ago.

Clearly, the fact that the old Eastern Bloc countries have moved toward liberalization has set those countries on a path toward greater economic prosperity. That by itself, however, cannot put it on a par with countries that never suffered the effects of decades of communism.

Korea: An Extreme, but Relevant, Example

This will become all the more obvious if and when North Korea's regime collapses, at which point it is likely to be absorbed into South Korea. When that happens, we will then be looking at a country in which the northern areas, in spite of an identical ethnic makeup and an extremely similar long-term history, will be much, much poorer than the southern areas.

Some Germans to this day are resentful of how much in taxpayer wealth poured out of the west into the east. But that will look like nothing compared to the taxpayer wealth that will flow from the South to the North following a reunification of Korea. As the BBC observed:

Incomes in South Korea are 10 to 20 times higher than they are in North Korea  a much bigger gap than that between East and West Germany. That means that if reunification happened, the economic jolt would be much, much greater. Already, North Koreans who defect find that their skills aren't adequate for South Korea. Doctors who defect from the North often fail to pass standard South Korean medical exams. This all indicates that the immense effort and money required for reunification would dwarf the scale of the task in Germany.

Under such a scenario, all the same issues found in Germany would be magnified many times over in Korea. Younger workers would flock to the south in search of work and education. The North would become a land of impoverished pensioners living off social benefits paid for by southern workers. Only over many decades would capital slowly move north, and North Korea might even take on the characteristics of a frontier state where the economy is based largely on resource extraction, and where labor must be imported from other parts of the country, or even from abroad.

Certainly, this process could be sped up by forced transfers of wealth and capital paid for by the South, but this would of course come at great cost to the southern Koreans.

The Political Backlash

But even when it is self evident that market systems bring greater wealth and prosperity, such changes in Korea and Cuba will bring a political backlash, just as happened, to a certain extent, in Eastern Europe. The social ills present in the newly Westernizing countries will be blamed on "excessive capitalism" as workers migrate to follow capital, leaving behind a hollowed-out economy in the formerly communist areas. Since wealth cannot be made to magically appear everywhere at once, significant poverty will still persist in many areas, but now, instead of being blamed on domestic bourgeois reactionaries, it will be blamed on capitalism in general, and now, the the actual presence of capitalism will make the argument far more convincing. The relative poverty of the old communist areas will endure, in spite of immense gains in standards of living. Capitalists will be blamed for these inequalities as well. As Andrei Lankov wrote in the Korean context:

Affluence and poverty are, essentially, relative categories. There is little doubt that in the first years that follow unification, the average North Korean assembly line worker or rice farmer will compare their new lives with what had been the norm under the Kim family  with such comparisons being decisively in favor of the new system. However, it is only a matter of time, perhaps merely a few years, before the focal point shifts to the contemporary South. North Koreans will begin comparing their lot not with their pre-unification past, but with South Koreas present, and these comparisons are not going to be very favorable or seriously encouraging.

In other words, scratching out a subsistence under the North Korean regime will be replaced by a drive to keep up with the Joneses. With it will come nostalgia for a "simpler" time and a drive to blame capitalism, yet again, for persistent inequality. The lessons of what prevented affluence in the first place will be quickly forgotten.

Something similar is likely to happen in Cuba. If Cuba continues to slowly liberalize (economically, if not politically) it will nevertheless remain far poorer than the United States, and also Mexico, Chile, and all the so-called "Pacific Pumas" that continue to move toward more market-based economic systems in Latin America.

Consumed by the perceived inequality, the Cubans will then demand "change," but rather than liberalizing further, they may instead go down the path of Venezuela looking to yet another quick fix in what could unfortunately be a nearly endless cycle.

Ryan W. McMaken is the editor of Mises Daily and The Free MarketSend him mail. See Ryan McMaken's article archives.

You can subscribe to future articles by Ryan McMaken via this RSS feed.

http://mises.org

 2016 Copyright Ryan McMaken - 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.




Trumps First 100 Days As President

Should a billionaire be entrusted to lead the country? Perhaps his only redeeming quality is hed likely not start WW III.



Interviewed on April 2, he said hed govern like he campaigns if elected president, a nontraditional Trumpian approach, he explained.



During the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelts first 100 days were historic, a unique post-electoral period. More on it below.

Trump barely touched on his first 100 days if elected president. Whoever succeeds Obama enters office during Americas second Great Depression, a Main Street one, affecting tens of millions of unemployed, underemployed struggling people in a nation systematically being thirdworldized.



Half the population is impoverished or bordering it. Most households need two or more jobs to survive.



Most good ones were offshored to low wage countries. Most remaining are rotten low-pay, poor or no benefit, temp or part-time ones.



Nearly a fourth of working age Americans cant find work. Monthly Labor Department employment reports turn reality on its head. Most so-called new jobs dont exist. Willful misinformation claims otherwise.



Obama was more jobs destroyer than creator. Trump said nothing about addressing Americas most pressing economic and social issue.



Instead he claimed in his first 100 days hed cut taxes (favoring business and high-income households), renegotiate trade deals andmilitary deals.



Hed change Americas role in NATO, maybe alter the Alliances mission. Longer-term he pledged the impossible - eliminating the national debt (now at over $19.2 trillion) over a period of eight years if reelected for a second term.



Trump is no FDR. Roosevelts New Deal didnt end the Great Depression but gave people most in need hope.



Landmark laws were enacted, including the Bank Act of 1933 - Glass-Steagall, insuring deposits up to $5,000 and separating commercial from investment banks and insurance companies, among other provisions to curb speculation.



The Homeowners Refinancing Act stopped most foreclosures, preventing the loss of over a million homes.



The Emergency Conservation Work Act put unemployed people to work building roads, bridges, dams, state parks and various other projects. It was Roosevelts favorite initiative, unaddressed today at a time of rampant unemployment, suppressed by phony government reports.



The Civil Works Administration, Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration created millions of full and part-time jobs.



Roosevelt called the National Recovery Administration the most important and far-reaching (measure) ever established in America - an initiative to revive economic growth, encourage collective bargaining, set maximum work hours, minimum wages, at times prices, and forbid child labor in industry.



The Tennessee Valley Authority provided navigation, flood control, electricity generation, economic development, and promoted agriculture in the depression-impacted Tennessee Valley area, covering most of Tennessee as well as parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.



The Agricultural Adjustment Act restricted production by paying farmers to reduce or destroy crops and livestock - a plan to raise prices at the worst time, when people were impoverished and hungry.



The Farm Credit Act let farmers refinance mortgages over an extended period at below-market rates. The Emergency Farm Mortgage Act provided refinancing for farmers facing foreclosure.



Despite its flaws and failures, New Deal measures helped millions of desperate Americans in need. Post-100 days included the Wagner Act letting labor bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the first time.



The Social Security Act to this day remains the most important federal program helping retirees and other eligible recipients financially.



Other social legislation throughout the decade helped millions of Americans in need - polar opposite bipartisan anti-populist policies today.



Militarism, corporate favoritism and the greatest ever wealth transfer from most people to its privileged few reflects how America is run today.



A Trump administration will continue dirty business as usual. So will Hillary Clinton if she succeeds Obama, neither aspirant addressing vital needs of ordinary people.



Americans are ill-served. Duopoly governance betrays them. Their needs and welfare dont matter.



Differences between New Deal and current practices are stark during the two gravest economic periods in US history - one acknowledged, the other left unaddressed.



Roosevelt promised change and delivered. Wall Street, war profiteers and other corporate favorites alone today are served - ordinary Americans increasingly on their own out of luck.

By Stephen Lendman

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

He lives in Chicago and can be reached in Chicago at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.



Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday through Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national topics. All programs are archived for easy listening.

 2016 Copyright Stephen Lendman - 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.




Enough Americans Have Already Voted  Stock Market Chaos Is Coming!

Once the majority of Americans have made up their mind and voted it will be almost impossible to change the direction of the outcome and change their minds. Unfortunately, the majority has voted and are in agreement with the next major event that will catch most people off guard. While this may sound bad and negative, I feel it is an opportunity of a lifetime.

You may be thinking Im talking about who will be the next president but that is not it. Although the same theory applies to that as well.

Hear me out because this is equally important in terms of your financial future. This video is a great example of how you can benefit from this next major event unfolding  Bear Market in US Stocks, continue reading to fully understand my reasoning.

How do you read these data points?

Everyone reads data very differently than each other and I think that is one of the reasons why I can navigate the market so well. I look at data and try to figure out who are the individual generating the data within the information presented. For example in this article, I want to show you how I perceive Google trends and what its telling us.

Typically traders look at mass market sentiment leaning in one direction to be a contrarian indicator. Meaning if everyone is bearish on the market then we are likely to see a new bull market start sooner than later. While I do agree with this theory/strategy you must take into account what type of data you are using in order to come to that conclusion.

To me, there is a big difference between the average investor being bearish on the market which we typically see right at the end of a bear market when trillions have been lost because of falling stock prices. But, compared to those who are searching the keyword phrase in Google bear market at any given time I look at it as a leading indicator.

You see, I think people searching on Google for specific topics specifically bear market are not the average Joe investor who does nothing but ride the emotional and account value roller coaster as markets fluctuate and dont even know what a bear market is or even think to search it.

Instead, I feel those searching Google are the educated and active investors and trader who are the ones who create market trends and significant turning points in the market. These are people being proactive learning and adjusting their portfolios to avoid losing money and/or to profit generously during market downturns just as I do.

Stocks Are In A Bull Market When Google Tend Looks Like This:

The graph below shows different shades of blue. The lighter blue colors mean fewer searches for the term bear market. This is when the educated traders are bullish on the market and continually buying more shares, thus supporting the market trend. The dark shaded states are where specific regions of people are more bearish than the rest of the states. When the chart looks like this (light blue) we expect higher prices in the stock market.



Stocks ENTERING A NEW BEAR MARKET If Google Tend Looks Like This:

Take a look at the two charts and graphs below. Both of these look very similar to each other. The one on the left shows us what the educated investor was thinking and doing with their money just before the bear market of 2008 and the final washout low in 2009.

Now, if you look at todays Google trend which is the image of the US on the right-hand side you will see both look very similar to each other. To add more depth to this analysis if we were to compare the market breadth and internals for the US stock market they are also very similar in nature. Both of these types of analysis combined paint a clear bearish picture for stocks looking forward 6 to 12 months from now.

Just look how much darker blue both of these charts are compared to that during a bull market when investors are putting new money into stocks, which is the first graph explained above.

Now lets look at the bottom of this image where you see the interest over time line chart for the number of searches on bear market in the USA. From what this data is telling us, we are days or weeks away from a significant market top in stocks and the start of something that will wipe-out most individuals life savings once again This will be my third time experiencing this type of event as a trader  2001 tech crash, 2008 financial crisis, and now the 2016 economic crash.

Concluding Thoughts:

In short, I feel the US stock market specifically the large-cap stocks are going to provide a huge opportunity for investors who understand what is happening and how to take advantage of it.

Google has provided us with some excellent information to help identify and time major market turning points for long-term investors and short-term active traders like you and me.

In 2008, we had a very similar situation set up in the market and I was able to generate life-changing returns from these moves, I should note there are two major plays here, not just one.

These incredible trade setups are a once in a decade opportunity and more money can be made during some of the roughest times in the stock market and economy if you know which simple trades to place and when to buy and sell.

Learn more at my ETF Trading Newsletter Website

Join my pre-market video newsletter and start your day with a hot cup of coffee and my market forecast video: www.TheGoldAndOilGuy.com

Chris Vermeulen

Join my email list FREE and get my next article which I will show you about a major opportunity in bonds and a rate spike  www.GoldAndOilGuy.com

Chris Vermeulen is Founder of the popular trading site TheGoldAndOilGuy.com. There he shares his highly successful, low-risk trading method. For 7 years Chris has been a leader in teaching others to skillfully trade in gold, oil, and silver in both bull and bear markets. Subscribers to his service depend on Chris' uniquely consistent investment opportunities that carry exceptionally low risk and high return.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this report should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any securities mentioned. Technical Traders Ltd., its owners and the author of this report are not registered broker-dealers or financial advisors. Before investing in any securities, you should consult with your financial advisor and a registered broker-dealer. Never make an investment based solely on what you read in an online or printed report, including this report, especially if the investment involves a small, thinly-traded company that isnt well known. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report has been paid by Cardiff Energy Corp. In addition, the author owns shares of Cardiff Energy Corp. and would also benefit from volume and price appreciation of its stock. The information provided here within should not be construed as a financial analysis but rather as an advertisement. The authors views and opinions regarding the companies featured in reports are his own views and are based on information that he has researched independently and has received, which the author assumes to be reliable. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content of this report, nor its fitness for any particular purpose. Lastly, the author does not guarantee that any of the companies mentioned in the reports will perform as expected, and any comparisons made to other companies may not be valid or come into effect.

Chris Vermeulen Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




Im using this space today to express regret for something I wrote last week. It was a joke that, in hindsight, was published too many days ahead of April 1st. I riffed off some current events, but some readers didnt get it.

The March 29 column was about Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, who is enamored by his A-rating from the heroic National Rifle Association, and Andy Parker, a gun-control activist from Henry County, who is not enamored.

Seems that last October, about two months after his adult daughter was killed by a gun-wielding madman, Parker sent some less-than-kind Facebook messages to the stalwart senator. One was, Im going to be your worst nightmare, you little bastard. The other was WHEN YOU SEE ME AGAIN, YOU BEST WALK THE OTHER WAY LEST I BEAT YOUR LITTLE ASS WITH MY BARE HANDS.

Stanley said later that taking the comments together, it was clear to him that Parker meant to do him physical harm. So he reported the threats to both Capitol police in Richmond and the Franklin County Sheriffs Office.

And then he obtained applications for concealed-carry permits for both himself and his wife.

Though Parker subsequently apologized, a judge appointed a special prosecutor. That was surprising, given that Parkers apology seemed so sincere and full of regret. The prospect of potential criminal charges for some bits of hostility and hyperbole, expressed online, seemed ripe for ridicule.

In poking fun at that, I planted tongue firmly in cheek and wrote that a homing pigeon took an elevator to the third floor of The Roanoke Times, dropped a transcript of Stanleys secret grand jury testimony on my desk and spoke English to me.

Regretfully, those were fabrications. There was no homing pigeon. It didnt take the elevator to the newsroom. The bird didnt speak English. It doesnt even exist. Nor does the transcript.

Everything in that was made up, except for a smattering of facts and quotes I pulled from stories published last fall about the incident.

The truth is, Stanley was never so unnerved by Parkers comments that he donned a bulletproof vest and locked himself in his house. He never testified he had nightmares that were oddly similar to movie scenes from The Incredible Hulk and Psycho, but featuring Andy Parker as a villain.

I wrote all that stuff in the spirit of mocking the ridiculous appointment of the special prosecutor.

Mistakenly, I thought the humor would be entertainingly obvious to readers. In my wildest imagination (and I have a pretty wild one), it never occurred to me someone might actually believe pigeons talk or that a senator had a nightmare of a critic who morphed into the Incredible Hulk.

But I forgot that in 2016, there are lots of people who believe Hillary Clinton would make a better president than Donald Trump  ha! And that scientists have persuaded many others that man has influenced global warming.

Clearly, I underestimated a segment of my audience.

One person who missed the joke was an editor at Guns.com. That website rewrote the column, excised the stuff about the elevator-using, talking pigeon, ditched the transcript format and presented it as a news story.

They put quote marks around Stanleys ersatz grand jury testimony and attributed everything to documents obtained by the Roanoke Times.

Based on online comments that version garnered, readers there took it seriously. Even the part about Stanleys movie-themed nightmares starring Andy Parker.

Because of that, someone in the gun-control crowd mocked Guns.com on Twitter on Thursday afternoon. Thats when the folks there realized the whole thing was a put-on. The editor tweeted to me, I sure wish it was labeled satirical.

And that began a Twitter conversation that went on for a couple of hours, during which he politely counseled me on journalistic ethics.

So I apologize to all readers who felt misled, including the thousands who read the Guns.com version before the website tacked on an editors note explaining the column fooled them because it wasnt labeled satire.

As a result of this imbroglio, there have been some consequences. Henceforth, Im forgoing all the raises Ive gotten since 2009, when I started writing this column. Im also going to abandon my plan to pitch the publisher on buying me a desk-side kegerator.

And theres no way, now, that the bosses will give me a summer intern assistant, or a limo and driver for my community speaking engagements, or a business attire allowance. I dont even dare ask.

I hope you readers wont abandon this column. This upcoming Tuesdays is a real good one. Its a modest proposal that recommends a solution to the twin problems of welfare spending and hunger in America. Both could be solved with a presidential order requiring that poor people sell their children to the wealthy, as a food source.

In the meantime, Ill bone up on journalistic ethics. I reckon I missed that class in college, where I majored in English and studied Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton and Jonathan Swift instead.

Its funny how something so obvious could have gone over my head.
Two Billings business owners, including a luggage manufacturer that has received national recognition, were among the award winners celebrated as the Small Business Administration announced its annual awards for each of the 50 states.

Greg Thayer, chief executive of Great Falls-based Montana Milling Inc., a family-run business that deals in organic and conventional grains, was named Montana Small Business Person of the Year. Thayer is now in the running for the 2016 National Small Business Person of the Year.

Red Oxx Manufacturing, which designs and manufactures rugged and popular soft luggage, was named as Montana Veteran-owned Business of the Year. The owners are Jim Markel and Perry Jones. Red Oxx has received nationwide recognition, including a national award for luggage. Red Oxxs Safari Beano bag was Outside Magazines 2004 Bag of the Year.

Lena Wharton of Wharton Asphalt LLC of Billings received the Montana Woman-owned Business of the Year award. Wharton Asphalt is an asphalt construction and maintenance company, specializing in asphalt construction and maintenance services such as patching potholes, sealing driveways, crack sealing and paving. Wharton Asphalt does work in Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho and Utah.

John and Courtney McKee of Headframe Spirits of Butte received the Montana Small Business Champion of the Year award. Headframe Spirits operates three separate business units. They produce distilled spirits made from Montana-sourced grains. They operate a tasting room, which is one of Buttes top-ranked tourist attractions. Headframe also manufactures distillation equipment for the distilled spirits industry, with all fabrication work taking place in Butte.

I congratulate Greg Thayer, and the other awardees for being named Montanas Small Business Week winners, said Wayne Gardella, SBAs Montana District director. Montana has a long and rich history of entrepreneurship and innovation and we are proud to honor these small businesses with these awards. All of the award winners will receive their awards during a luncheon celebration in Missoula on May 2. On that date, communities statewide will celebrate the spirit of small business and the positive impact they have on creating new jobs and opportunities.

Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet, the head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, announced this years Small Business Person of the Year winners from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The winners from each state are now in the running for the 2016 National Small Business Person of the Year.
Jane Dittmar plans to use her experience and business background to bring jobs and increased internet access to the 5th Congressional District.

Dittmar, who is based in Albemarle County, is the Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives for the commonwealths 5th District. Republican Rep. Robert Hurt currently is the 5th District Representative, though Hurt has announced he will not seek another term.

The 5th District is massive, Dittmar said, bigger than the state of New Jersey and many foreign countries.

Ive identified arguably five regions within our one congressional district, she said. Well be approaching each of those regions with different services. The ones that they want. The ones that we can help them with the most in terms of access to resources.

However, she said, there are a few uniform needs across the entire district. Everyone, Dittmar said, wants a good economy, good jobs and a better life for their children.

In Southside, she said, We have good job training resources, but we dont have the jobs. People go into the pipeline of training and then they have to leave the area to go get a job somewhere else. We used to export furniture and textiles and tobacco, and now were exporting our kids. We need to look at that in a systemic way.  I wrote the plan for the Central Virginia Economic Development Partnership, and thats exactly what we did. We looked at infrastructure, we looked at targeted industries, and then we looked at how to communicate that to bring in employers and to help our existing industry expand. And thats what well do in Southside as well.

A University of Virginia graduate with a B.A. in economics, Dittmar has owned several businesses, served on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and was president and CEO of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce for nine years.

As chamber president, she said, I got very involved with the issues that impact small businesses, all the way to our largest employers: Why they expanded jobs, when they expanded jobs, what environment allowed them to expand jobs. We were fortunate during the time I was president to have the lowest unemployment rate in the country. We had Canadian television stations coming to interview, asking what we were doing in this region that had heated up the economy so much.

I think the key attribute that I hope to bring to my work as a Congressman is to work with our local and regional economic development officials to see what  Washington can do to help heat up the economy, she added.

Dittmar already has a few plans in the works, she said.

Dominion Power is getting ready to open a solar power farm in Fauquier County, she said. With Southsides abundance of underutilized flat tobacco fields, there is the opportunity to build solar farms locally, which would potentially provide a large number of jobs for both engineers and installers.

Additionally, Dittmar said, this year, a project to expand the width of the Panama Canal is slated to be completed. That project will allow the canal to accommodate increasingly common supertanker cargo ships.

Virginias deep water ports provide easy access for those supertankers, she said, and we could build whole industries based on what will be coming through and unloaded and shipped by truck or rail from our own ports here in Virginia, coming across the base of the state and then being distributed along I-81.  Ive already talked with Senator Warners and Senator Kaines offices about how we might combine both the Senate-side and the House-side efforts to really put a focus on that.

One common issue that the entirety of the 5th District faces, Dittmar said, is a lack of adequate, reliable internet access. Expanding that access is one of her main goals.

I was in Franklin County earlier this week, and I was meeting with a group of maybe 45 to 50 people, she said. I always introduce this topic by asking, How many people here feel like they have adequate internet service? Not surprisingly, no one raised their hand. I said, How many of you at least have reliable internet service? Several people that had DSL raised their hands. Afterward, by the way, some people came up and said that during portions of the day, they cant even use their cash registers  because they dont have internet service thats reliable.

There are third world countries that have better internet access than the 5th District, Dittmar said, and as internet access only becomes more necessary to daily life, that situation needs to change.

We have parents  that have to drive their kids to libraries at night  if theyre still open  so they can do their homework.  70 percent of teachers assign homework where you need to use the internet at home to do it. People cant telecommute if they have sick children. People that dont have good jobs and are seeking better jobs have to look on the internet to find those jobs. People that want to keep up with what governments doing  whether its supervisors in Henry County or city council in Martinsville  have to be able to get online and go to the websites and see what local government is doing. Or state government. Or federal government.

While in Buckingham County recently, Dittmar said, residents told her that they used to be able to get tax return forms at the post office or library. Now, those forms can only be downloaded from the internet.

Without this access, we are going to be further and further left behind, she said. The solutions are within our reach.

Every time someone pays a cell phone bill, she said, they are paying a variety of taxes and fees. Most of that money goes to the Federal Communications Commission to a fund called Connect America, a program designed to expand internet access in areas like Southside.

Its already part of the budget, she said. Its already got a stream of revenue. And the checks are being written from the federal government to communities all over the country. All we have to do is get our name on the Pay to the order of (line) and we will have resources to be able to help our local governments deploy internet.

A resident of the 5th District for about 40 years, Dittmar originally is from rural Illinois.

My father moved us to Virginia when he came to work for the Kennedy administration, she said. My first sense of politics was through my parents. My mom worked for a United States Senator from Illinois, Paul H. Douglas. That was a very active time with regard to civil rights and changing social dynamics in the country. Growing up, we were hearing about that at the dinner table, at lunch, at breakfast.

Dittmar was among the fourth class of women to be admitted to the University of Virginia, she said. She and her husband, Frank Squillace, have six children, four of whom currently are in college.

Dittmar said she has been touring the district extensively, including several trips to Henry County, and plans to continue speaking with 5th District residents over the months leading up to the November election.

I want Southside to be ambitious, she said. I want to help achieve some goals through actionable initiatives  by using the seat in Washington to team up with state government resources and local government resources. Were going to connect all three to put things on the right trajectory for the region.
A judge in Patrick County Circuit Court has denied, for an upcoming first-degree murder trial, commonwealths motions to allow prosecutors to introduce evidence of prior bad acts and former crimes of the defendant and for the court to prohibit a jury instruction on second-degree murder as a lesser included offense.

Judge Jonathan Apgar on Wednesday denied the motions filed by Patrick County Commonwealths Attorney Stephanie Zipperman in the first-degree murder case against Anthony Octavius Joyce, according to court records and Patrick County Circuit Court Clerk Susan Gasperini.

Joyce, 37, is charged with first-degree murder in the strangulation death of Shelly Dawn Gravely, 34, of South Mayo Park Drive in Patrick County, as well as robbery, and concealment of a dead body  all on Nov. 15, 2014. Joyces address is listed in court records as 879 Stella Loop, Spencer, and 1355 Norwalk Street Apartment H, Greensboro, North Carolina.

The commonwealths motions allege the following details about the cases:

Gravely and Joyce had been involved in a romantic relationship off and on for about five years. Most recently, Gravely broke up with Joyce on Nov. 14, 2014. Joyce went to work that morning with an understanding that he would come back later to pick up his things.

While at work, Joyce left on his lunch break. He called his workplace pretending to be his brother Tommy, asking that Anthony Joyce call him when he returned. Anthony Joyce made a phone call and then told his supervisor that Gravely had been in a car wreck and went off a ravine in Patrick County. Anthony Joyce left work at 12:33 p.m.

Amanda Foddrell, a friend of Gravely, was the last person to speak to her. They spoke at about 9 p.m. Friday and last texted around 10 p.m. Gravelys mother reported her missing the next night, Saturday, Nov. 15.

Foddrell visited Gravelys house after growing concerned. There, Foddrell found Gravelys car door and trunk lid open. The back door to the house also was standing open and the dog was loose outside. Inside, the bed linens from the master bedroom were missing, as well as her cell phone and wallet were missing.

Gravely disappearance was ruled suspicious at that point, and multiple officers and law enforcement agencies became involved.

Investigator Terry Mikels of the Patrick County Sheriffs office spoke to Joyce, who said he was last at Gravelys house about 5:30 p.m. Friday, that he didnt see Gravely then and had not been back to Patrick County. Joyce indicated he stayed with Melanie Wolfe in Collinsville on Friday night, then drove to Cholanna Wallaces apartment in Greensboro on Saturday morning. When asked about the missing bed linens, Joyce said they were in his car back at Wallaces apartment in Greensboro. Mikels asked if he could follow Joyce back to Greensboro to retrieve the linens, and Joyce agreed.

Mikels followed Joyce back to Greensboro. There, Mikels noticed the passenger seat of Joyces car was completely pulled to the rear and the back rest was completely down. When Joyce opened the trunk, no bed linens were there. Mikels asked Joyce why he lied and he said they were inside the apartment. Joyce said he had thrown the linens in a dumpster on Martin Farm Road in Patrick County. A crime scene unit went to the dumpster and carefully went through every box but never found the bed linens.

Mikels left Greensboro, and the sheriffs office continued its investigation with Joyce as its main suspect. Records from Joyces debit card from Ameristaff showed a purchase at The Old Country Store in Horsepasture at 3:08 a.m. Saturday, and Gravelys debit card from River Community Bank was attempted to be used at a gas pump at M&M Convenience Store at 5:30 a.m. Saturday. A review of video surveillance from M&M showed a vehicle similar in size and color to Joyces vehicle at the gas pump at that time.

Joyces cell phone records indicated his phone was turned off at 1:59 a.m. and not turned back on until 5:30 a.m. when it began hitting off a tower near M&M.

Gravelys cell phone records indicate her phone was hitting off the same tower near her home until 4:45 a.m. when it started to move. From 5:30 a.m. until it was turned off at 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 15, 2014, Gravelys cell phone was hitting the same towers as Joyces cell phone.

Investigators interviewed Joyce again, and Joyce changed his description of what took place several times. Joyce eventually said he had Gravelys phone and threw it in a lake on Route 220 on the way to Wallaces apartment. Joyce said he got a hidden key on the back porch, of Gravelys home, went inside to talk with Gravely, that they started to argue, and he took the phone and went outside. Joyce indicated he found some pictures of Gravely that she sent to another man. Joyce said Gravely stayed on the porch, he left, and they never got into a physical fight.

Investigators continued to speak to Joyce, but he continued to deny knowing where Gravely was. Finally, seven hours later, warrants were obtained for Joyces arrest. Joyce was arrested and was read his Miranda rights, which he agreed to waive.

Joyce became emotional, cried and said he would take the officers to where he put Gravely if they would put the handcuffs in front of him. Joyce said her body was in Henry County off a bank on George Taylor Road, not visible from the road. Deputies were dispatched there and found Gravelys body.

An officer continued to ask Joyce what really happened, and Joyce said he wrapped his hands around Gravelys neck and choked her until she took her last breath. Joyce claimed he didnt mean to kill her but just flipped out. Joyce indicated he put her body in his car, drove her to the bridge location and left her body there.

Fingernail clippings from Gravelys body showed Joyces blood under her right hand fingernails. Investigator Mikels saw scratches on Joyces cheek, near his nose, when he first interviewed Joyce on Sunday morning, Nov. 16.

Joyce denied ever punching or hitting Gravely although he could never explain any of these injuries on her body: half-inch cut on her right forehead; left black eye; right side of face and both eyes had small pinpoint hemorrhages under the skin; cut on inside of upper lip; cut and bruise on left side of mouth; bruises along collarbone measure up to six inches in greatest dimension; bruise on right lower abdomen; multiple circular and irregular contusions on upper arms; scrapes on left hand and forearm; recent bruises on lower extremities, particularly along the inside upper thighs and lower calves.

Gravelys neck had non-circumferential, upward tilting ligature bruises ranging from a quarter-inch to four inches. The cause of death was ruled asphyxia (suffocation) due to ligature strangulation. Gravely was wearing a camisole with thin straps when her body was found.

The commonwealth alleged in a motion these prior bad acts of Joyce show his strong tendency for violence:

Sarah Reynolds, a confidant of Gravelys, said Gravely told her on five or six occasions Joyce blacked her eye, strangled her and busted her lip. Reynolds observed the black eye and saw bruises on Gravely. Gravely said Joyce strangled her long enough for her to pass out and this happened in summer 2014. Gravely said the abuse had been going on since she started dating Joyce.

Carolyn Simmons had seen bruises on Gravelys arms, and Gravely told her she was scared to tell Joyce to leave.

Joyce was convicted of misdemeanor assault and battery by Henry County General District Court on Jan. 9, 2002.

A commonwealths motion in the current cases against Joyce argued that that the judge should refuse to give an instruction on second-degree murder as a lesser-included offense  because of the very significant amount of physical effort used to kill Gravely; her substantial internal hemorrhaging in the throat area from the strangulation, an amount not commonly seen by the medical examiner; the amount of time it took to kill her (minutes); the differences in their height and weight; the concealment of the body; and Joyces efforts to avoid detection,.

In opposition to the commonwealths motions, Assistant Public Defender Caitlin Reynolds stated in a document that testimony of Sarah Reynolds and Simmons would be inadmissible because it would contain inadmissible hearsay and that the remainder of their testimony would not be relevant to any fact in issue. As for the 2002 assault and battery conviction, Caitlin Reynolds said, among other things, there is no causal relation or logical or natural connection between the 2002 case and the current cases.

As for prohibiting a jury instruction on second-degree murder as a lesser offense, Caitlin Reynolds stated that until evidence is actually presented at trial, there is no basis for granting or denying jury instructions, and that if evidence at trial fairly supports an instruction on second-degree murder, the court should give an instruction on second-degree murder.
Whether it is the first trip or the 20th, the short-track action at the Martinsville Speedway continues to draw fans from across the country.

On Saturday, the Speedways parking lots were filled with fans excited for the start of todays STP 500.

Theresa and Dennis Frost of Boca Raton, Florida, said their trip to Martinsville is the centerpiece of a weeklong vacation.

Thursday, Theresa Frost said, they stopped at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Theres a lot of nostalgic stuff there, Dennis Frost said, adding that his favorite sight was Smokey Yunicks 1967 Chevelle that was banned from use in NASCAR.

I think somebody ought to run it just to see what it would do, he said.

The Frosts visit a number of racetracks in their native Florida, including Daytona International Speedway, Homestead Miami Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway.

However, they said, this is their first trip to Martinsville. According to Dennis Frost, the trip was a Valentines Day gift from his wife.

I always wanted to visit this short track, he said. She gave it to me as a present.

Thirty years of marriage, and he always does vacations for me, Theresa Frost said. Cruises, whatever I want to do. So I gave him this. This is his week.

Theresa Frost was born in Norfolk, she said, and while in Martinsville, she got the chance to meet her fathers cousin for the first time.

Hes a dentist here in town, Dr. George Stermer, she said. I called him up, and he took the time (to meet us) and we spent an hour with him. He offered us a place to stay. Hes an awesome guy.

Weve had a great trip, she added. I love Martinsville.

Today, Theresa plans to root for Kasey Kahne  shes been a fan since he started. Dennis Frost is a long-time Mark Martin fan, but now that Martin has retired, he roots for Kurt Busch.

Father and son Bill and Anthony Longenette of Columbus, Ohio, are also spending their first weekend at the Martinsville Speedway. They try to attend two races per year, Bill Longenette said, and look forward to attending Pocono Raceway in July.

Bill Longenette is a Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan, he said, while Anthony is pulling for a Jimmie Johnson win today.

While many fans will be enjoying their first races in Martinsville today, others are Speedway fixtures. Rick and Mary Hewitt of Buffalo, New York have been coming to the Martinsville Speedway for about 20 years, they said.

Mary Hewitt is rooting for Jimmie Johnson, while Rick Hewitt is a Martin Truex Jr. fan.

What keeps them coming back after all these years?

Short track racing, Rick Hewitt said. Youve gotta love the paper clip.
Cyndi Grace could count on two hands the number of times she and Chad P. Dermyer took a lunch break at a sit-down restaurant during the four years they were partnered at the Newport News Police Department.

Instead, they bagged their meals most days, eating in their squad car. They often cut their meals midway for a traffic stop or for other police work. They shared a strong work ethic and a deep desire to make Newport News a safer city.

They bonded quickly and became inseparable, and were known on the force as Gracemyer.

Sometimes, you get lucky when you meet someone you connect with, she said, adding that they shared a similar sense of humor  a cops humor  and outgoing personalities.

A day after Dermyer, a Virginia State Police trooper, was fatally shot at the Greyhound bus station on the Boulevard in Richmond, Grace remembered her former partner as someone who possessed an unrelenting sense of right and wrong.

As a police officer, he was dutiful and always kept going. As a friend and partner, he was uplifting and had a genuine smile that made you feel good, Grace said.

He exemplifies everything good you would want in a partner or a son or a best friend, she said.

Others who knew Dermyer similarly recalled him as a skilled and talented law enforcement officer who had a memorable spirit.

Dermyer was a Marine Corps veteran who worked for a time at the police department in his native Jackson, Michigan.

A former Newport News police officer, he graduated from the Virginia State Police academy in 2014 and was transferred to a counterterrorism and criminal interdiction unit after working patrol in the Newport News and Hampton areas. He was married with a daughter and son.

He was a very good individual. Had his head on, squared away, said state Trooper Benjamin Canning, who graduated from the same state police academy class as Dermyer. He was going to do big things in the state police organization.

Dermyer volunteered for and was elected by his peers as the class vice president, Canning said. At the academy, he was one of the most accurate marksmen in his class and often motivated his classmates.

Canning was among several hundred civilians and law enforcement officers who turned out to a prayer vigil at Virginia Commonwealth Universitys Siegel Center on Friday organized by Richmond United for Law Enforcement and United Communities Against Crime.

Many in the audience wore navy blue to show support for police and held white roses in their laps as dignitaries from the state police, Richmond and surrounding localities expressed their condolences.

State police Maj. Lenmuel Terry talked about Dermyers public service, describing him as remarkable.

He was a great man and I cant say enough about him, he said. I ask that you remember his wife, Michelle, and his two children.  Theyre a wonderful family because of him.

Mayor Dwight Jones said Dermyers death was a reminder of the risks law enforcement officers often assume.

For those of us who are not sworn officers, we get up with the expectation that we will return to our families at the end of the day. But when I look at persons who are in this audience tonight and when I think about Trooper Dermyer, I think about people who leave their houses every morning, kiss their children, kiss their wives, not knowing if they will return in the evening.

During a news conference Friday , Flaherty praised Dermyers accomplishments as an officer and noted his role in the case of Tonya Slaton.

A Hampton grand jury indicted her in February on a charge of murdering her son, who was last seen in 2004 while attending Virginia Beach Middle School. His remains were found in her trunk during a traffic stop by Dermyer last summer on Interstate 64 in Hampton. Slatons last known address was in Richmond.

Had it not been for his thoroughness and his perseverance in that stop, more than likely that case would have gone unsolved certainly for a longer period of time, Flaherty said.

Dermyer called Grace after the body was found, asking her to guess what happened. She jokingly asked if he found a dead body.

No, seriously, she said he responded.

The Newport News Police Department, where he worked from June 2003 to June 2007, posted photos of Dermyer to its Facebook page hours after his death.

Colleagues within the department have shared stories among themselves about Dermyer, recalling him as a skilled officer who always wore a smile, said Assistant Police Chief Joseph Moore.

He was the best of the best, Moore said. There was nothing bad to say about him. He was a genuinely good person.

Dermyer progressed quickly through the ranks in Newport News. Early in his time there, he was assigned to a high-impact patrol unit that consisted of five or six officers and a sergeant who were often dispatched to the highest crime areas.

Officers in that unit, Moore said, have good police instinct and skill but also a temperament such that they treat criminal suspects with the utmost respect and dignity.

Chad was the epitome of that, he said.

Newport News Police Chief Richard Myers said in a statement that Chad epitomized what we strive for at the Newport News police: a tireless pursuit in reducing crime while compassionately and humanely engaging the community as partners in improving our quality of life.

Outside of law enforcement, Dermyer focused all of his remaining attention on his family, Grace said. Some of her fondest memories with him are of being at his house and watching him go outside and play ball with his children.

He was family man, she said, who adored his wife.

He was so thankful she was his.
If you havent been to the library in awhile, you could be forgiven for thinking that its just a place to check out a book.

At the February Henry County Board of Supervisors meeting, Blue Ridge Regional Library Director Rick Ward and Bassett Branch Manager Karen Barley spoke to the board about the programs and services the library offers to the community.

Books still are on the menu, of course, but the library system has vastly expanded its offerings over the years.

According to Barley, our local libraries have become central gathering places for the community and offer a host of free resources, everything from beginning computer classes and GED preparation classes, to job hunting assistance, to arts and crafts classes, to healthy living programs and summer lunch programs for children.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Martinsville Branch library added a public computer  just one  to allow patrons the opportunity to investigate that new-fangled Internet thing. There was a 30-minute time limit per Internet session, and considering how slow dial-up modems were back then, that would allow folks to fully investigate about three websites, if they were fast readers.

Today, every branch offers a bevy of computers, and they are well-utilized by the public.

For most library patrons back in the 90s, the Internet was just a neat lark. Today, however, many library patrons need those computers desperately, because the Internet has become a necessity.

In an interview with the Martinsville Bulletin, Jane Dittmar, who is running for the House of Representatives 5th District seat in Virginia, spoke about how the district is in desperate need of better Internet coverage.

According to Dittmar, 70 percent of teachers assign homework that requires the Internet. For many, that means a trip to the library. If a parent has to stay home with a sick child, they cant telecommute unless they have Internet access at home.

If someone is looking for a job, theyll want to check listings on the Internet. If they plan to apply for a job, chances are, theyll have to apply over the Internet. Even if the business just requires that they submit a resume, its likely that resume will need to be submitted electronically  over the Internet.

According to Dittmar, even some government forms that once were available at the local post office or library now must be downloaded over the Internet.

For those who dont have internet access, this is a major problem.

While computers have become vastly more affordable over the years, Internet access remains expensive and limited. According to the website www.multitest.co, which compares the cost of internet plans in different areas of the country, the most popular internet plans in Martinsville and Henry County range from $50 to $130 per month.

That would put even the most affordable plan at $600 per year. For those among us who struggle to survive on minimum wage, $600 can easily become an insurmountable obstacle.

Dittmar has plans to use the Federal Communications Commissions Connect America fund to help expand internet access across the 5th District. If she is elected, we certainly hope shes successful in that mission.

In the meantime, it is fortunate that we have the Blue Ridge Regional Library system to help connect area residents with the services they cant afford to go without.
SUNDAY'S WORD is shrapnel (shrap.nl). Example: Shrapnel from the explosion wounded many people.

FRIDAYS WORD was sniveling (sniv-ul-ing). It means to speak or act in a whining, sniffling, tearful, or weakly emotional manner. Example: In a statement to reporters, Ted Cruz said: I dont get angry often. But you mess with my wife, you mess with my kids, thatll do it every time. Donald, youre a sniveling coward. Leave Heidi the hell alone.

As in the past, its sure to be a hootthat is the annual Mr. Bulldog Womanless Talent Show at Martinsville High School to benefit MHS After Prom.

The MHS After Prom Committee will present the show at 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 10, in the school auditorium. The cost will be $5 per person at the door.

If you are looking for an entertaining evening to benefit a good cause, you cant go wrong by attending this event that will feature junior and senior boys in competitionsome a bit reluctant, and a few that will end up with red faces when a few of their macho friends try to rib them. It is not a beauty pageant and the judges will not be looking for beauty, but for some kind of talent. Here are a list of the judges they must impress: Jennifer Bowles, Johnny Buck, Rives Coleman, Margie Eason and Ann Gardner.

Dont forget to pick up a baked item at the bake sale booth. Also, a cornhole board raffle will be held.

The Stroller recently had an article about a Massachusetts woman who was researching folk healers (sometimes referred to as root women), and said she had been told about a woman, possible in Henry County, that fit the profile.

On Friday, we received an interesting story from Linda Fain about some Patrick Countainians who she said she thought was interesting.

She wrote that the piece about folk healers in the March 31 Stroller intrigued her.

Fain said she was not aware of any folk healers, per se, in Henry County, but there were a couple of sisters in Patrick County who were well known for taking the heat out of a burn or something to that effect, she said. They were DeHart sisters and lived in the Meadows of Dan area. When I was a small child, more than 50 years ago, one of my cousins fell against a wood stove at my grandparents house. The DeHarts were called immediately to take the heat out of the burn. I think these sisters were quite well-known for their abilities. Im not sure what else they may have been capable of doing. I do remember going to their home once and I was frightened by their long black dresses and long black hair. Im not aware that the Bulletin ever had a story about the DeHart sisters.

Fain said her paternal grandpa, Madison Lee Matt Burnette of Meadows of Dan, was a very interesting person, with all kinds of crafting skills and was a very adept storyteller. He used to scare the crap out of me and my cousin when we stayed overnight and wed be up all night watching for ghosts. Grandpa (who died Feb. 1987) had a lot of superstitious beliefs. He used to carry small (tiny) potatoes in his pants pockets to ward off arthritis pains. My dad, 88 years-old now, has some of those petrified potatoes that Grandpa used to carry. As for leg cramps at night in bed, the solution was simple, according to my grandpa. Before getting in bed, turn your shoes upside down at the bedside.

Stroller: Hopefully well be getting more information on Lindas dad, as well as others with old stories, tales and remedies.

Since the race will be held at Martinsville Speedway today, we thought about car culture racing locally in years past. The following piece appeared in the 1978 Blue Ridge Folklife Festival book.

In the 1950s when the film Thunder Road was released, Americans found a new folk herothe driver of the cars that hauled illegal alcohol. In Franklin County, the people had Curtis Turner and Paul Radford The Ferrum Flash. Both of these men became well known NASCAR drivers with skills attributed to training on the back mountain roads of Virginia hauling moonshine. There are still folk heroes in Franklin County and some of them are still related to the auto industry. Whether they are stock car drivers that people can watch on Friday and Saturday nights or people that build street rods and circle the drive-ins, these people are looked up to both by the youth and adults of this region.

A report of a 4-year-old missing child locally on Friday, sent police scurrying to the scene. Police and others searched nearby grounds and mobile homes and was ready to put out a missing child alert, when the child was found---guess where? According to police, the child was just hiding from its mother somewhere in the home.
There are tides in the affairs of the globe as well as those of nations and of individuals. Right now, the tide of international cooperation and of multilateral institutions is ebbing. Preference for national autonomy is flowing. For some, these currents entail isolationism and even xenophobia.

This is perhaps most salient in the United Kingdom, as it awaits a referendum to approve its newly negotiated position within the European Union. A no vote calls for the UK to leave an entity of which it has been a member for more than 40 years.

In our country, populist presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have made criticism of U.S. participation in trade agreements a foundation of their campaigns  often appealing to the emotions of those voters hurt by these agreements without full disclosure of the benefits of trade or the context of the agreements. Both candidates, in somewhat different ways, appeal for a reduction in U.S. military commitments overseas, including NATO, which has been the cornerstone of U.S. defense policy for two-thirds of a century.

What is going on?

One answer involves Arnold Toynbees argument that history is a process of challenge and response. Societies respond, consciously or by default, to political, social and economic challenges. How effectively they respond determines how well they fare.

The global move toward multilateralism 70 years ago was not necessarily a mistake. Nor is retreating from it now. Circumstances change, and as they do, so do appropriate responses to the challenges posed. But it is good to reflect on why and how we change.

Splendid isolation was the default political stance for our country for its first 150 years. President George Washington, in his farewell address, warned against entangling alliances, and we took it to heart. As late as the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, our country took pains to emphasize that we were not an ally of France, Britain and other foes of Germany and Austria. We were an associated power. And our disregard for the views of other nations was manifest in the unilateral declaration of a trade war embodied in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

That tariff increase did not cause the Great Depression, but it helped ensure that it was deep and global. The reaction to this challenge, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, acknowledged the error and, perhaps inadvertently, established a precedent that runs unbroken to todays Trans-Pacific Partnership debate that has become central in this years election.

There was widespread recognition that we needed to undo the collapse of international commerce that followed Smoot-Hawley. But Congress and the Roosevelt administration needed political cover. So the 1934 act authorized the administration to lower tariffs as long as it could do so as part of a treaty that involved reciprocal lowering by some other nation. This is when trade policy became deals with other countries rather than a unilateral act by the U.S. Congress. They became bilateral or multilateral, in other words.

It also became clear that the failure to establish a reasonably just and stable international financial order after World War I was a major cause of the Great Depression and of World War II. The repeated inability of the major nations to act together financially or militarily in the 21-year inter-war era posed a clear example of what to avoid.

So at the end of World War II, the idea of multilateral cooperation and established international financial institutions found great support.

One also can consider the EUs progression from a post-war coal and steel agreement to a free trade area to full economic union and then, at least for some members, to full monetary union.

Perhaps things went too far. Economists certainly erred in discounting the social costs of adjusting to more free trade and ignored how unequally the costs  and benefits  were distributed within society. Most ignored clear evidence that Europe was not an optimal currency area for which a common currency would work. And its clearly not working.

Regardless of who gets elected president in November, the ebb away from multilateralism is likely to continue, in populism if not politics. In moderation, that is not all bad.

The issues are complex, and we could use thoughtful insights from political candidates about the trade-offs we face. It is too bad we are not getting them.
At the intersection of U.S. 70 and the five lane, an attractive retail building now stands at a place that once was a used car business. This building is the home of a new pizza and sub sandwich restaurant and a new yogurt shop for Marion while also providing a better location for two businesses already established here.

During the beginning of 2015, Brian McKinney and his brother Jimmy started working to convert the old Sonnys used cars site into a new and attractive place for retail businesses and eateries. Workers were soon busy constructing a new 7,000-square-foot building with four suites for such businesses as a restaurant, a retail store or some other use. A new parking lot was prepared, landscaping work was done and a new sign erected out front.

Now, all four spaces are occupied and the new location seems to be working out well for both the business owners and their customers alike. Pepperonis Gourmet Pizza opened its doors a couple of weeks ago as the last of the businesses to locate at 2080 N. Main St.

The Marion restaurant is the third for the small chain but the first one for McDowell County. The other two Pepperonis are in Black Mountain and East Asheville/Oteen. There was also a location in south Asheville but it was closed and the operation was moved to Marion.

Kara Bennett-Bonura is the owner, along with her husband John. She said Marion is her hometown and is happy to bring her business here. The small chain has gotten impressive reviews online and in 2015 received a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence award.

Were fresh and local, she said. We do all of our toppings.

She added her eatery offers gluten-free food. Pepperonis also delivers.

True to its name, Pepperonis has 19 different styles of pizza. You can order the Kitchen Sink, the Philly Steak, the Pig n Cow, the Great White or the Crybaby. There is a Greek pizza, a margherita pizza, a Hawaiian pizza and a veggie pizza. You can also create your own from a long list of toppings or order a dessert pizza.

But there is a lot more than just pizza here. The menu also has a variety of hot sub sandwiches, wings, pastas, calzones and salads. There is a good selection of domestic and craft beer available.

Pepperonis Gourmet Pizza has creative decorations and atmosphere that is different from other pizza places. There is a table up front that was made out a part of an old car. The kids section has some old soapbox derby cars where the young ones can sit and enjoy watching TV along with their food.

We are a family oriented restaurant, said Bonura, adding it has a Website and a Facebook page.

Pepperonis is located on one end of the building. On the opposite end of the building is the first business to open up there, Polar Freeze Frozen Yogurt. This yogurt shop started up in September of last year. It is owned by Scott Price.

Inside Polar Freeze, folks can enjoy different flavors of yogurt and add all kinds of toppings. They can eat inside or outside or take their yogurt with them.

Then around the first of December, two existing Marion businesses relocated to 2080 N. Main St. They are Salon 103 and Blue Ridge Outdoor & Survival.

Helen Ledford, owner and stylist with Salon 103, moved her business from another location on the five lane to where she is now.

It is working out better, she said as she worked on a customer. The traffic flow is better. Our clients are enjoying the new building.

Salon 103 offers hairstyling, hair products, tanning and massage therapy. There are four employees who work there.

Then next door you will find Blue Ridge Outdoor & Survival. This business, owned by brothers Josh Clark and David Clark, specializes in camping gear, knives, guns, ammunition, survival foods and survival books. It was previously located for more than four years on East Court Street.

Josh Clark said the new location is a lot better.

In addition, he is a certified gunsmith and can make and repair firearms.

Thats brought in a lot of business, said Josh Clark. I stay busy just doing that.
by Steffan Berelowitz , Columnist, April 1, 2016

Baby boomers were once the most coveted demographic group for the hospitality industry, but in recent years millennials have become the largest age group in the US with one of the strongest purchasing power. There are now over 83 million Americans in the millennial age range and they represent an enticing, yet challenging, effort for hotel marketers.

The average hotel booking experience is vastly different for millennials than for their older counterparts. This leads hospitality organizations to find new ways to market to this new generation as outdated techniques have fallen on deaf ears. Millennials are remarkably adept at using mobile technology, which allows them instant access to almost any information that exists. They have grown up in a culture where the expectation for on-demand services is constant. Savvy hotel marketers can use these traits to their advantage in order to present a compelling message to millennials.

Spontaneity over planning

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On average, it has been reported that the booking window for a millennial traveler is 75 days, or significantly shorter than the 93-day period that was the standard for older generations. They are much more likely to book something on the fly when presented with a promotion. In all, approximately 20% of millennials browse the web exclusively on their mobile device, meaning hotel companies must have a user-friendly and streamlined mobile site in order to stay competitive.

Industry giants such as Starwood and Hilton have recently made a big push to enhance their mobile app experience, but companies don't have to break the bank on fancy app development to woo digitally savvy customers. Whats paramount is the experience and accessibility of the browsing and booking experiences through mobile websites; seamless, simple, and secure are the key attributes. Creating an easy to use, value-added mobile experience for the consumer is a way to stand out from the crowd and motivate customers to purchase.

Engaging, authentic experiences

Long gone are the days when a clean room and a competitive rate were all you needed to survive. Most millennials are looking for more when deciding where to book, and they typically dont mind paying a premium for it. They are most interested in authentic experiences that make their stay unique. In order to influence booking decisions, these experiences and other unique amenities can be advertised in a more prominent manner than relying on low rates to draw in the consumer.

Business travel that isnt only about work

According to a report from Expedia in 2013, travelers under 30 take 4.7 business trips per year and 4.2 leisure trips per year, which is more than those in either of the older age groups. During these trips, business travelers arent content with staying confined to their hotel room during down time. These customers are increasingly looking for hotels to provide opportunities to socialize and network. Hotels should engage with these customers by suggesting unique shared spaced or activities where they can relax and network.

The primacy of peer review

Due to the over-saturation of advertisements during their youth, millennials have become hardened and hard to reach, which leads them to trust peer reviews as a trusted voice. Younger consumers check an average of 10.2 sites before making their decision to book, leaving them with numerous opportunities to be influenced by both positive and negative information. This digital word-of-mouth is often the defining factor in a millennial making the decision to book a room, so hotel marketers must carefully monitor their social media presence and actively respond to both rave reviews and disappointing experiences.

Additionally, having your customers leave feedback on popular social review sites can be beneficial for your brand. In fact, these reviews can boost your SEO performance. Also, placing a badge from a trusted entity like TripAdvisor or Yelp on your website will make your brand more trustworthy to visitors who haven't had exposure to your brand.

While it is vital to have positive reviews about the quality of your guests' experiences, its important to remember that millennial habits are fluid. Having a multi-platform experience is necessary to reach such a lucrative consumer. The industry is quickly moving towards an integrated model and if hotels dont evolve with the times then they will find themselves missing out on a huge profitable market.
Researchers from 25 centers throughout France conducted a prospective study involving 264 women who underwent UFE to treat benign fibroid growths. A common condition, fibroids develop in the uterine muscular wall, varying in size from a quarter of an inch to larger than a cantaloupe. Most women with uterine fibroids also have more than one.During UFE, an interventional radiologist makes a tiny nick in the skin in the groin or wrist and inserts a catheter into the artery. Using real-time imaging, the doctor guides the catheter into the uterine arteries and then releases tiny particles, the size of grains of sand, to block the blood flow that supplies oxygen and nutrients to the fibroid tumors, causing them to shrink and die.Study participants completed the Uterine Fibroid Symptom and Health-related Quality of Life Questionnaire (UFE-QoL) to report their quality of life before and one year post treatment. The women were also asked to complete the Female Sexual Function Index, or FSFI (a brief questionnaire developed for the specific purpose of assessing sexual function in clinical trials), to track their sexual function, including items such as desire, arousal, lubrication and orgasm.At the beginning of the study, 189 of the 264 women suffered abnormally heavy menstrual bleeding and 171 experienced pain, among other symptoms associated with pelvic pressure. When researchers followed up with participants a year after treatment, only 39 of those 189 continued to experience abnormal bleeding and only 42 of the 171 women still dealt with pelvic pressure.Nearly eight in 10 (78.8 percent) women who completed self-reported assessments at the one-year mark demonstrated improvement in sexual function, including pain, desire, arousal and satisfaction--as measured by the FSFI. Additionally, about nine in 10 (90.2 percent) women who completed the UFE-QoL assessment reported a better overall quality of life, with average scores increasing from 45 at treatment to 71 one year after. UFE-QoL scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a better health-related quality of life."Through our expertise in performing image-guided therapy, interventional radiologists pioneered the treatment of uterine fibroids using this much less invasive technique. Compared to surgery such as hysterectomy, which requires significant recovery time and increases health care cost burdens, UFE gives women the opportunity to return to their daily routine as quickly as possible after treatment," said Marc R. Sapoval, M.D., Ph.D., one of the study's co-authors and an interventional radiologist at Hopital Europeen in Paris. "My patients have told me their general well-being has improved because they are not as tired and feel less depressed because of the reduction in bleeding, pain and the other related symptoms of uterine fibroids.""The significant quality of life improvements demonstrated in this study should help put an end to any debate on the effectiveness of UFE and its numerous benefits for women with symptomatic fibroids," said Alan H. Matsumoto, M.D., FSIR, an interventional radiologist and professor and chair of the department of radiology and medical imaging at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville and an expert in minimally invasive treatments for uterine fibroids. "Although in use for more than 20 years, UFE is rarely offered as a treatment option to women in the United States, despite the fact that it is a proven, safe and effective treatment that spares women from the risks and long-term consequences of a hysterectomy," said Matsumoto, who is also the SIR 2015-16 president.Source: Eurekalert
If women can do everything a man can accomplish, so can the men. Even if it be dancing in heels. These 3 insanely talented boysYanis Marshall, Arnaud and Mehdion Britains Got Talent totally set the stage on fire with their smashing performance in high heels! Smooth, sharp, and absolutely stunningtheir moves are making women go green with envy!

Way to break gender stereotypes, boys!
A quarter of the worlds married women were child brides. (Statista).

Over one quarter of women in the world have been child brides. This depressing statistic was announced by Unicef, who surveyed women aged between 20 and 24 in 122 countries, covering 79 percent of the global population of women. The results reveal the drastic scale of child marriage around the globe.

Such practices were found to be most prevalent in South Asia, where 44 percent of women surveyed had been a child bride  17 percent were under the age of 15 at the time.

At the current rate, girlsnotbrides.org estimates that there will be an additional 1.2 billion girls married globally by 2050.



Turkey has one of the highest rates of child marriage in Europe with an estimated 14% of girls married before the age of 18.

However, statistical data available may not be representative of the scale of the issue since most child marriages are unregistered and take place as unofficial religious marriages.

The crisis in Syria and subsequent influx of refugees into Turkey and other neighboring countries has caused a dramatic rise in the number of child marriages.

Child marriage increases dramatically in emergencies due to increased poverty levels and a need to reduce household expenditure as well as parents wanting to protect their daughters honour and avoid sexual harassment and violence in an increasingly fragile environment.

A UNHCR survey conducted in 2014 revealed that the average age of marriage for Syrian refugee girls in Turkey was between 13 and 20 years with many respondents saying if they had the money, they would not have resorted to marrying off their daughters at such a young age. Read the full story here.
I'm guessing I'm going to be getting a lot of negative feedback on this review. Because I've come not to bury 'Heroes: Reborn', but to praise it. I didn't watch this 13-episode "event series" reboot on NBC when it aired, primarily because I was one of those fans who gave up on the original series when it more or less went off the rails in its final couple of seasons (I gave up at the mid-way point of Season 3 and still have not seen a single episode of Season 4). I'd heard so much negativity about 'Heroes: Reborn' that I thought it would be a chore to review this Blu-ray release. And maybe some of my reaction is due to the fact that I expected it to be bad, but I can honestly say I enjoyed 'Heroes: Reborn' quite a bit, and think it returns to both the fun and drama that got many of us interested in this series to begin with.

For those of you who (like me) didn't see the end of Season 4, the events of 'Heroes: Reborn' are a direct result of Claire Bennet's (who does not appear in this reboot, although her character does play a big part in what transpires) actions, as the original series ended with her jumping off a Ferris wheel and showing to the world her regenerating abilities. This new series picks up several years down the road, with a big gathering of Evos (as those with special powers have now been dubbed) arriving at a summit that is intended to foster a better relationship between them and ordinary human beings. Noah Bennet (aka 'HRG' for the horn-rimmed glasses he dons, and played by Jack Coleman) is in attendance hoping to patch things up with his daughter, but an explosion rocks the building, killing thousands  although Noah manages to survive. One of the driving plot devices of 'Heroes: Reborn' involves Noah not only trying to find out what happened at the summit, but find out what happened to Claire, who died in a hospital room the same day. Unfortunately, for reasons he can't figure out, Noah has had his memory wiped of that day's events...and he spends much of the first half of this new season trying to figure out why.

As was the case when 'Heroes' first came on the air, this reboot has a lot of different stories in different parts of the world going on at once  and it's only later in the run that we begin to find out how all these different tales merge together. For newcomers (or those, like myself, who only watched some but not all of the original show), things can be a little confusing early on, as I was unsure just how much of what was being said tied back to Season 4 of the series and how much was brand-new info, but once things get rolling, it's hard not to find something appealing in all of the various storylines being presented. There's teenager Tommy (Robbie Kay), who has the ability to teleport people by touch to anywhere that he thinks of. There's Carlos Gutierrez (Ryan Guzman), who doesn't have any powers of his own, but becomes a real-life superhero (including costume) in the streets of East L.A. There's Luke Collins (Zachary Levi), whose son was killed at the summit and who now roams the countryside eliminating Evos with the help of his wife, Joanne (Judith Shekoni). There's Malina, who has the ability to control the elements. And over in Japan, there's young Miko (Kiki Sukezane), who is able to actually enter into a video game with a sword (that loyal fans may find familiar) in an attempt to free her father, who is trapped inside the digital world. Of course, all these characters have secrets on top of their secrets (which I wouldn't dream of revealing here), which provides for a lot of "ah-ha!" and "wow!" moments as the story unfolds.

In case you're wondering if any other regulars from the original series pop up along the way, other than the already-mentioned HRG, rest assured that they do  and most of them are far more than just cameos  they're pivotal roles in what transpires. Creator Tim Kring does something very smart here...he spends the first half of the season developing his new characters, then he uses the second half to bring back many of our favorites from the original series and get them involed in the mix. Of course, the argument can also be made that the fact that Kring didn't bring back the other players much earlier probably hurt 'Heroes: Reborn' in the ratings (and, indeed, the show is not being brought back for another season  at least that was the official word from NBC at the time of this review), but story-wise it works...because by the time the characters/actors do show up to reprise their roles, each appearance is a nice surprise.

As for Jack Coleman, I love the fact that he plays a major role in 'Heroes: Reborn'. He was always my favorite character from the original (yes, even in those early days when he essentially played the bad guy), and he's nothing short of the leading man here  essentially being the viewers' guide to this new 'Heroes' world. There's also a point in the show where he goes back in time (you might be able to guess what famous character assists him on that trip) to try to stop the summit explosion and the death of his daughter that is simply wonderful and probably my favorite couple of episodes of the 13 we get. I was pretty happy that both HRG the character and Jack Coleman the actor were given so much to do this time around.

While 'Heroes: Reborn' is not without its share of problems (for one, it's a little too F/X-heavy, and often those effects are rather cheesy looking...even for a TV series), I must confess to liking it quite a bit. When 'Heroes' first hit our TV screens, much of its popularity had to do with the fact that there weren't many  if any  other superhero-themed shows on the air. Now, the opposite is true, yet 'Heroes: Reborn' still felt fresh and exciting to me. At the very least, it managed to get the bad taste out of my mouth that the old series left me with. If we never see these characters again, I feel that this reboot gave them a decent  if not quite perfect  send-off. If you skipped this show because of equally bad memories about the original, I encourage you to give this a look.

The Blu-Ray: Vital Disc Stats

'Heroes Reborn' comes to life on Blu-ray inside a standard keepcase, which houses the first two 50GB discs on a plastic hub, while the third disc is on the inside right of the case. A single insert contains a code for an UltraViolet copy of the 13-episode season. The flip side of the keepcase's slick (seen from inside the box) contains a short synopsis of each episode, along with the disc they appear on and the bonus materials on that disc. A slipcover matching the artwork of the keepcase slides overtop.

Upon loading each disc, viewers will be posed with the odd question of whether they want "U.S.A. & Canada" or "English." This is on all three discs, but the only difference I could find between the two options is that there are slightly different front-loaded trailers on Disc 1. The U.S./Canada option gives viewers trailers for 'Shades of Blue', The Expanse, Grimm, Mr. Robot, and 'Kubo and the Two Strings'. The English option gives viewers only the trailers for Grimm and Mr. Robot.

The Blu-rays in this release are region-free.
Genres : Sci-fi

Starring : Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac

Director : J.J. Abrams

Plot Synopsis

Thirty years after the defeat of the Galactic Empire, the galaxy faces a new threat from the evil Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and the First Order. When a defector named Finn crash-lands on a desert planet, he meets Rey (Daisy Ridley), a tough scavenger whose droid contains a top-secret map. Together, the young duo joins forces with Han Solo (Harrison Ford) to make sure the Resistance receives the intelligence concerning the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), the last of the Jedi Knights.
Jason Dalton told detectives that he had asked the woman "if she could spare a dollar to make America great again," The Kalamazoo Gazette reported Friday.

State police Sgt. Kyle Gorham wrote in the report that Dalton said he was going to leave after shooting Mary Lou Nye, but he heard other people screaming, so he turned his gun on them.

In all, four people were killed inside two cars parked outside the restaurant. A fifth person  14-year-old Abigail Kopf  was wounded.

The statements were included in reports released Friday through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Dalton is accused of killing six people and wounding two others on Feb. 20 between stints driving passengers for Uber.

Documents released in March by the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety and Kalamazoo County sheriff's office contained a police report in which Dalton told investigators he was being controlled by the ride-hailing app through his cellphone.

Dalton told authorities after his arrest that when you "plug into" the Uber app, "you can actually feel the presence on you." He said the difference between the night of the shootings and others was that an icon on the Uber app that is normally red "had changed to black."

He has been ordered to undergo a mental competency exam.

Gorham wrote in his report that Dalton also described how the Uber app on his cellphone took him over the day of the shootings. Dalton also said that at one point he went to his home, put several guns into a bag and put them in his vehicle.

In the report he describes the shootings at each of the three locations.

The first victim, Tiana Carruthers, 25, was asked if she had called Uber for a ride before she was shot multiple times outside an apartment complex. Carruthers survived the shooting.

Later, Richard Smith and his 17-year-old son, Tyler, were shot and killed while looking at vehicles at a car dealership.

Gorham wrote that Dalton said he told them, "hello," before they were shot.

Their slayings preceded the shootings outside the restaurant.

Dalton said "he came back to reality" when police arrested him early the next morning, according to the report.

At the end of the interview with Gorham, Dalton was asked how he felt about the shootings.

"Jason stated he felt that people are going to look at him like he is a monster," Gorham wrote.
The Ann Arbor News reports that Saturday's 45th annual Hash Bash was attended by an estimated 8,000 people on the school's campus.

Actor-musician Tommy Chong returned to the event and spoke about how marijuana kept his appetite healthy during cancer treatments.

A fundraiser for a November ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in Michigan is planned for Saturday night in Ann Arbor.

Voters in six Michigan communities passed marijuana decriminalization measures in November 2014. Voters in two Oakland County communities passed similar measures that August, while voters in Lansing were among residents in three cities who approved decriminalization proposals in 2013.

Michigan bans marijuana use and possession unless it's medical marijuana.
Yet now he's a willing recruit in a fledgling effort to see if the gun community itself  sellers and owners of firearms, operators of shooting ranges  can help Colorado and other Western states reduce their highest-in-the-nation suicide rates.

"Suicide is a tragedy no matter how it's done," said Carey, whose adult daughter killed herself with a mix of alcohol and antidepressants a few years ago on the East Coast. However, he sees the logic in trying gun-specific prevention strategies in towns like Montrose, where guns are an integral part of daily life.

"It's very expedient for people to commit suicide by a firearm, without too much forethought," Carey said. "Unfortunately, it's generally effective."

At the urging of a local police commander, Carey agreed last year to participate in the Gun Shop Project, a state-funded program in which gun sellers and range operators in five western Colorado counties were invited to help raise awareness about suicide. It's a tentative but promising bid to open up a conversation on a topic that's been virtually taboo in these Western states: the intersection of guns and suicide.

Carey's shop counter now displays wallet-sized cards with information about a suicide hotline. A poster by the door offers advice about ways to keep guns away from friends or relatives at risk of killing themselves.

Carey says some customers take materials home, or ask a few questions. The conversations tend to be brief.

"Suicide is one of those morose subjects that a lot of us don't want to talk about," he said. "But it's all too common. I believe any method of suicide prevention is worth a good hard try."

___

Across the U.S., suicides account for nearly two-thirds of all gun deaths  far outnumbering gun homicides. In 2014, according to federal data, there were 33,599 firearm deaths; 21,334 of them were suicides. That figure represents about half of all suicides that year; but in several western Colorado counties, and in some other Rocky Mountain states with high gun-ownership rates, more than 60 percent of suicides involve firearms.

Along with Alaska, the states with the highest rates form a contiguous bloc  Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. All have age-adjusted suicide rates at least 50 percent higher than the national rate of 12.93 suicides per 100,000 people; Montana's rate, 23.80, is the highest in the nation.

Between 2000 and 2014, gun suicides increased by more than 51 percent in those states, while rising by less than 30 percent nationwide.

Theories abound as to why such high rates. Commonly cited factors include the isolation and economic hard times in rural areas of these states. There's also belief that a self-reliant frontier mindset deters some Westerners from seeking help when depression sinks in.

"We embrace the cowboy mentality," says Jarrod Hindman, director of Colorado's Office of Suicide Prevention. "If you're suffering, suck it up, pick yourself up by your boot straps. But that doesn't work very well if you're suicidal."

Underlying all these explanations is the fact that firearms are more ubiquitous in the West than in most other parts of the country.

Catherine Barber, a suicide prevention expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, says residents of gun-owning homes are at higher risk of suicide than other people  simply because a suicide attempt is more likely to involve a gun. According to federal estimates, suicide attempts involving firearms succeed 85 percent of the time, compared to less than 10 percent of attempts involving drug overdoses and several other methods.

"It's not that gun owners are more suicidal," Barber argues. "It's that they're more likely to die in the event that they become suicidal, because they are using a gun."

Colorado's Gun Shop Project is modeled after a program pioneered in New Hampshire. Barber helped design the initiative and hopes collaboration on firearm suicide prevention can spread nationwide.

"In the past, people shut up about this issue because they thought raising it meant raising the issue of gun control," she said. "It makes so much more sense to look at gun owners as part of the solution."

Hindman said that when he joined the state health department in 2004, talking about the role of firearms in suicide was discouraged. It's still a sensitive topic, he said, but some funding has materialized for gun-specific initiatives.

In Montrose, Police Commander Keith Caddy has been around guns since childhood. Now he's doing outreach for the Gun Shop Project  and most of the businesses he has visited agreed to display suicide-awareness materials once they were assured it wasn't a gun-takeaway program in disguise.

"It's my duty to protect the community I serve," Caddy said. "If I can go out there and spend a little time talking to the gun shops, maybe the reward will be saving someone's life."

___

Suicide presents a distinctive challenge for shooting ranges: Occasionally, someone will rent a gun, then use it to commit suicide.

At the Family Shooting Center in Denver, there have been three such incidents, including two since Doug Hamilton began managing the range in 2004. Hamilton is open to letting his staff get suicide-prevention training, though he's unsure it would help. Those who killed themselves at his range exhibited no signs of stress beforehand.

"Suicide prevention brochures aren't something that anyone's going to pick up who has come out to our range to kill themselves," he said.

Such challenges are familiar to Dr. Michael Victoroff, a Denver-area physician whose leisure-time passion is competitive shooting. He was at the Family Shooting Center in Denver when one of the suicides occurred there.

Victoroff belongs to the American Medical Association and the National Rifle Association, and has qualms about both.

"The medical community has been content not to know anything about gun culture and gun safety," said Victoroff. As for the NRA, he'd like to see suicide prevention highlighted in its training materials.

Over the years, firearm suicide has not been a high-profile issue for the NRA; it worries that the topic might be used to advance a gun-control agenda. Though the NRA has no position on Colorado's Gun Shop Project, it has endorsed a bill in Washington state encouraging gun dealers to participate in suicide prevention efforts, said spokeswoman Jennifer Baker.

___

Throughout Colorado, prevention efforts are fueled to a large degree by people who've lost friends and loved ones to suicide.

Cindy Haerle, a teacher and board member of the Grand Junction-based Western Colorado Suicide Prevention Foundation, grew up in "a real gun family" in Salida, Colorado, and had her own gun by the time she was 5. But she gave up shooting after her brother John killed himself with a pistol in 1980 at age 29.

"Nothing is as final as a gunshot," said Haerle, who was 13 at the time.

In the northwest counties of Routt and Moffatt, the Gun Shop Project is coordinated by Meghan Francone, who constantly reassures gun owners and sellers that the outreach program poses no threat. She got involved after her 15-year-old brother-in-law fatally shot himself in 2010.

"Keep your guns. Keep a dozen. I don't care. But please make sure they are locked and out of the reach of someone who's in crisis," she said. "I'm not asking any gun shop owner to be a psychologist. I'm asking them to be their brother's keeper."
Photographer Gertrude Kasebier received permission from Buffalo Bill Cody to photograph the native tribes people in his Wild West Show. This collection, from the Library of Congress, is wonderful.



From The Vintage News:

Many of the "Show Indians" were Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Agency, and welcomed the opportunity to travel with Colonel Cody. Native American performers and their families were able to free themselves for six months each year from the degrading confines of government reservations where they were forbidden to wear tribal dress, hunt or dance. Show Indians were allowed to wear traditional clothing then forbidden on the reservation, and lived in the Wild West's tipi "village", weather permitting, where visitors would stroll and meet performers. When not performing, Native Americans were permitted to freely travel by automobile or by train, for sightseeing or visiting friends. Interpreters translated for the Native American performers inside and outside the Wild West camp. Show Indians agreed to obey the rules and regulations of the Wild West Company and Indian Police were organized to enforce the rules. The number of police chosen depended on the number of Indians traveling with the show each season, a usual ration being one policeman for every dozen Indians. Indian policemen selected from the ranks of the performers were given badges and paid $10 more in wages per month. Chiefs Iron Tail and Short Man were the leaders of the Indian Police in 1898.
GOSHEN  A man who shot and wounded another man outside the You You Asian Restaurant and Bar in the Town of Wallkill because he
Military families ordered out of Turkey have begun arriving back in the U.S. in a precautionary move taken in response to the growing ISIS threat in the region marked by the death of an Air Force wife in the Brussels terror attacks and the conviction of a terror plotter in Britain. The first groups of military dependents and their pets from Adana, Izmir, Mugla and the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey arrived Friday at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in Maryland aboard an Air Mobility Command C-17 Globemaster III and charter flights after a stop in Ramstein, Germany, officials said. Air Force Lt. Col. Barry Flack, commander of the 305th Aerial Port Squadron at BWI, said his team worked with the USO and the Red Cross to assist the families in making connections, according to a release from the Air Force News Service. The partnership with the BWI airport authorities has been outstanding, Flack said. Brittany Fowler, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross in the Chesapeake Region, said, We know theyve had a long journey, and for them to come out and smile at us and just say thank you is huge. At the request of Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, commander of NATO and European Command, the Pentagon on March 29 ordered the departure of about 670 of the 770 military families stationed in Turkey out of an abundance of caution. In making the announcement, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in coordination with Secretary of State John Kerry had decided to move the families due to continued security concerns in the region in Turkey and across Europe. I don't believe it was specifically triggered by the Brussels attack, Cook said of the ordered departures from Turkey. There's no specific (ISIS) threat that triggered this, but the threats out there have increased, he said. You all have seen some of the things playing out in the region, Cook said, adding that the ordered departures would make sure that service members can focus on their mission, (and) not worry about the safety and security of their individual family members. The departures from Turkey came seven days after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, claimed responsibility for the nail-laden bomb attacks on Brussels Zaventem International Airport and the Maelbeek stop on Brussels subway that killed at least 32 and possibly 35, including four Americans, and wounded more than 300. Last Wednesday, family members confirmed to Rep. Blake Farenthold, a Texas Republican, that Gail Minglana Martinez, 41, the wife of Air Force Lt. Col. Kato Martinez, had died of injuries suffered in the airport bombing. Lt. Col. Martinez and four of the couples children were also injured in the terror bombing. The Air Force, European Command and the Pentagon have all declined to give the conditions of Lt. Col. Martinez, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and the four children because of privacy concerns and at the request of the family. Lt. Col. Martinez was assigned to Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum in the Netherlands. The identifications of the fatalities from the Brussels attacks and the disclosure of information on the conditions of the wounded have been a painstaking process complicated by the various protocols of the State Department and the U.S. military. Belgian authorities have the initial say on confirming a death or injury but the victims come from more than 40 different countries, making the work of the Belgian Crisis Center more difficult in obtaining photos and X-rays. The Belgian authorities also prefer to use biometric data, such as dental records or DNA, rather than visual identification, which can also cause delays, according to U.S. officials. Its then up to the State Department to confirm the death of an American, but the State Department will not release the identity without the approval of the family. The U.S. military is also bound by the wishes of the family. The family needs to have some control over what information goes out and when, said Joyce Raezer, executive director of the National Military Family Association. Theres so many different people involved in this, she said of the release of information. That makes it a lot harder. It seems that the military has really tried to do whats right in this situation. In response to the Brussels attacks, European Command announced travel restrictions prohibiting all unofficial travel by military personnel to Brussels until further notice. NATO headquarters in Mons south of Brussels also went on higher alert. The growing risk to U.S. military personnel and their families, as well as the increasing cooperation on intelligence among the allies to get at the source of the ISIS threat in Iraq and Syria, was evidenced by the conviction in the British courts Friday of British delivery truck driver and alleged ISIS plotter Junead Khan. Khan, 25, of Luton north of London, was convicted on evidence of his exchange of chilling messages with an ISIS operative in Syria on a plot to kill U.S. airmen and civilians along his delivery route which routinely took him past the Lakenheath airbase and other facilities where U.S. personnel are stationed. Commander Dean Haydon, of the British Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command, said Junead Khan had also done extensive research on how to make a bomb, the BBC reported. The court record showed that Junead Khan In July 2015 had conducted an encrypted online conversation with Junaid Hussain, a British national and an ISIS operative in Syria. A month later, a U.S. drone strike targeted and killed Junaid Hussain. In a Pentagon briefing last Friday, Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, declined to give specifics on the attack that killed Junaid Hussain but said it was a great illustration of the intelligence partnerships among the U.S. and the allies. We know these operatives are planning operations outside of Iraq and Syria, which is why we target them, and it is why we're going to continue to target them, Warren said in a video conference from Baghdad. It's why we're going to continue to work very closely with all of our partners and allies in this region -- on the intelligence front, on the targeting front, and on the training and equipping front, Warren said. When asked if the U.S, would target a terrorist based on intelligence provided by Britain, Warren said: Absolutely. I mean, we have our own set of checks that we have to run, but assuming that the proposed target got through all of the  the very rigorous targeting criteria that we have -- then of course we would strike them. --Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
The new version of the Marine Corps Commandant's professional reading list is out, and one title is conspicuously absent.

For the first time since the list debuted in 1989, "Message to Garcia" is nowhere to be found on it.

The 42-page essay penned by Elbert Hubbard in 1899 tells a simple story of a US military officer tasked with delivering a message to the remote leader of the Cuban rebels on the eve of the Spanish-American war. It has been hailed as an example of obedience to orders and task accomplishment, and reportedly is a favorite of former Florida governor and recent presidential candidate Jeb Bush.

But in an essay published in the February issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, Marine Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Conroy argued it was time to take "Message to Garcia" off the list for good. The literary work, he argued, reinforces the wrong kind of ideas about leadership and how to follow orders.

Conroy takes issue with the essay's central premise, which encourages troops to complete tasks without asking questions.

"This unquestioning moral is particularly interesting for leaders who are reading the essay, as it raises questions itself," he writes. "Namely, 'Why didn't the soldier ask how or why?' and 'What can I do to replicate that kind of unquestioning confidence in my subordinates?' Sadly, the test of the essay itself stops short of answering these questions."

The essay, Conroy continues, isn't even historically accurate, and is challenged on key points by the account of the officer himself, Army 1st Lt. Andrew Summers Rowan.

"As leaders of Marines in the 21st century, we are in a unique position to leverage the education, versatility, and intellect of our subordinates," Conroy concludes. "Rather than shunning questions, we must teach Marines how and when to ask questions and embrace questions through the training and mentoring process in order to eventually deploy Marines who are confident in their leaders, their tactics, and their mission."

Reached for comment by Military.com, Conroy, now serving as a systems integration chief for Marine Corps Communications-Electronics School, declined to elaborate further.

"While I'm obviously excited to have possibly influenced change in the professional reading program, and hoping that this isn't the most epic April Fool's joke that the Marine Corps has ever pulled on me, I think I'd prefer to let my essay stand mostly on its own," he said in an April 1 email.

A spokesman for Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, Lt. Col. Eric Dent, said the change didn't come about as a result of the editorial. Neller had removed the essay from the "Commandant's Choice" section, where it had been under previous commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford's tenure, Dent said, and it was dropped from the list entirely as a result.

Neller's "Commandant's Choice" section features the US Constitution, the Marine Corps publication "Sustaining the Transformation," and retired Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak's leadership study, "First to Fight."

The reading list is divided by career level, with separate lists at each level for officers and enlisted troops. Marines are expected to read a minimum of three books per year at their designated level.

Other notable additions to the list are the science fiction novel "Ghost Fleet," which Neller has publicly recommended to Marines as a glimpse into the high-tech warfighting future; and former Marine public affairs officer Phil Klay's short story collection "Redeployment," which received the 2014 National Book Award for fiction.

The book list has also added two new professional categories: Cyberwarfare and Security, said Maj. Anton Semelroth, a spokesman for Marine Corps University. In all, the updates to the list included the addition of 36 new titles and the removal of 31 old ones, he said.

"All existing titles are reviewed and recommended additional titles that have been received in the preceding two years are considered for inclusion to the list. The criteria used to determine the updated reading list include availability, impact, readability, scholarly merit, suitability and timelessness," he said in an email.

The biannual list review process takes about six months to complete, he said, and the commandant has final review and approval.

--Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.

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GRAND RAPIDS, MI - In 1946, sociologist C. Wright Mills and economist Melville Ulmer concluded the fortunes of two of Michigan's largest cities, Flint and Grand Rapids, were headed in opposite directions.

Seventy years later, their predictions are getting new notice from academics.

The researchers warned Flint was overly dependent on its big employers even though its workers made 37 percent more than the national average at the time.

The warning seemed out of place. By 1950, Flint was labeled "the happiest city in Michigan" and the "epicenter of the American Dream," thanks to its thriving auto industry.

Grand Rapids, whose economy was defined by its numerous small businesses, was less flashy. But it offered its citizens more mobility and opportunity for its middle class that would help it survive tough times, the researchers concluded.

That 29-page study, commissioned by a congressional subcommittee in the wake of World War II, is getting dusted off these days as Grand Rapids enjoys an economic resurgence and Flint struggles with the aftermath of GM's divestment in its factories.

Although Mills and Ulmer did not name Flint or Grand Rapids at the time, their identity was revealed in later research, says Michael DeWilde, director of the Koeze Ethic Initiative at the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University.

"Coming out of the war, the question with all of these returning GIs, was: 'What's going to provide for a higher quality of civic well-being? These towns with one or two intensive big industries or this economic diversity that Grand Rapids had already established?'" DeWilde said.

The study, which compared 37 indicators of civic well-being, concluded that cities like Grand Rapids would have stronger economies and a higher quality of life despite their lower wages, DeWilde said.

"They were pretty clear that a place like Grand Rapids would always have an advantage," says DeWilde, a Pontiac native whose father worked for General Motors.

DeWilde graduated from GVSU and got a masters degree from Harvard University before joining GVSU's faculty in the mid-1990s.

DeWilde, who refers to himself as a "GM baby," said he did not dig up the old study to disparage Flint while promoting Grand Rapids.

"Our intent is to better understand what the factors are that allow for long-term economic and civic prosperity, which of those factors may be unique to a given region and which may be transferrable," DeWilde wrote in a recent article in the Seidman Business Review.

Flint and GM would enjoy another 30 years of prosperity after the study was published. But DeWilde said the seeds of Flint's corporate dependency were sown when General Motors became the dominant employer.

Meanwhile, Grand Rapids offered its residents more independence and opportunity for homegrown business ventures, DeWilde said. That led to a higher level of civic engagement and a "social capital network" that helped the region survive tough times.

Although that tight-knit culture has opened Grand Rapids to charges of paternalism, it also has resulted in a culture where residents felt they were "part of the family," DeWilde said. "To this day, employees of privately held companies say 'I could make more money elsewhere, but the quality of life is higher here.'"

Meanwhile, GM executives argued they owed Flint nothing as they closed plants in the company's birthplace. "Their sense of ties to the community was much weaker," DeWilde said. "In a one industry town, everybody fortunes rise and fall on that dime."

While Flint's economy rose and fell on GM's fortunes, the Grand Rapids business community developed around a varied and more diverse economy based on shared values.

"In Grand Rapids, you've got all these families here that say, 'Let's make Grand Rapids as shiny as we can.'" DeWilde said.

"Whether one ultimately lays the blame for Flint's challenges at the feet of global capitalism, the unions, bad management decisions or some combination of those and more, it is clear that the kind of adversarial relationship that characterizes Flint even in its good days are less evident in Grand Rapids," DeWilde wrote.

Looking ahead, DeWilde said the 1946 study suggests opportunities for Flint and warnings for Grand Rapids.

Grand Rapids still has difficulty dealing with racial issues, he said, noting there's a large disparity in the incomes of blacks and whites in Grand Rapids that is not found in Flint.

"It's a hugely complicated question," DeWilde said of Grand Rapids' racial disparities. "It's a question of opportunity more than anything else."

And, while the Grand Rapids business community is still highly entrepreneurial, there's an increasing emphasis on starting up a business and selling it instead of keeping it in the family for future generations, he said.

Grand Rapids also needs to attract more outsiders to sustain its growth, he said. That may make it more difficult to maintain its entrepreneurial culture and sense of shared values.

DeWilde jokingly suggested there's another lesson other cities could learn from Grand Rapids' experience.

"Have six or seven billionaires who live in your city who are civically and philanthropically inclined -- and hang onto them for all you're worth."

What should Flint have done differently in 1946 to change the course of history? DeWilde is reluctant to point fingers or place blame.

"I'm loathe to say the unions priced themselves out of the labor market. I have a lot of respect for what the workers did in the 1930s to provide for that middle class," he said.

Flint has the opportunity to rebuild its economy with the help of entrepreneurial newcomers and outside forces, DeWilde said.

"There really is kind of a sincere optimism," said DeWilde, noting most of his research took place before the crisis over Flint's water system. "They're quite optimistic about what can happen in the long-term."

Jim Harger covers business for Mlive Media Group. Email him at jharger@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook or Google+.
PITTSFIELD TOWNSHIP, MI - Michigan State Police are now investigating the November 2015 death of a Michigan inmate, according to a report by the Detroit Free Press.

Two Michigan Department of Corrections employees were fired on March 10 after an internal investigation into the apparent suicide death of 25-year-old Janika Edmond.

Edmond was found lying on the floor with underwear tied around her neck on Nov. 2, 2015 in a segregation shower area of the Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility, according to documents obtained from the Michigan Department of Corrections.

She died several days later at a hospital, although there are discrepancies as to which day.

The MDOC confirmed that corrections officer Dianna Callahan and acting resident unit manager Kory Moore were suspended - and later fired - after The Ann Arbor News obtained 196 pages of Edmond's prisoner file and critical incident report through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Callahan was suspended on Nov. 9, 2015, and Moore was suspended on Dec. 21, 2015, MDOC spokesman Chris Gautz previously said.

The department has not confirmed why the employees were terminated or allegations that Callahan made a bet that Edmond would ask for a suicide prevention vest.

The Edmond family's Detroit-based lawyer, David S. Steingold, previously said inmates told him that Callahan jokingly made a bet with another guard that Edmond would ask for the suicide prevention vest.

Steingold said when Edmond asked for the vest - which is tear-resistant and heavy - on Nov. 2, 2015, Callahan said someone owed her lunch and walked away. He said she did not receive the vest.

A critical incident report showed Edmond was taken to the segregation shower area to await a segregation cell "due to allegations of assault on staff."

A segregation unit is a housing unit for inmates who have violated prison rules. No report on the alleged assault was included in her prisoner file.

Callahan was recorded in the area of the segregation unit shower area about four times prior to Edmond's injury, according to MDOC critical incident reports. She was also the last officer recorded there before Edmond was found about 16 minutes later.

Reports show Moore was in the area once, for one minute, and spoke with Edmond and another inmate. The records did not indicate what the exchange was about.

According to an MDOC police directive, a prisoner who threatens or engages in suicidal behavior which does not require medical treatment must be promptly placed on unrestricted face-to-face visual observation in an observation room.

Attempts by The Ann Arbor News to reach Moore and Callahan have been unsuccessful.

Steingold has said he expects a lawsuit to be brought in the death.

"Had the personnel at the jail followed their own policy and procedures -- their own mandatory policies and procedures -- Ms. Edmond would still be alive today," he previously said.

Edmond was serving one year and five months to four years in prison for a probation violation on a previous charge of assault with a dangerous weapon, MDOC records show.

Her prisoner file revealed she had history of mental health issues and a growing number of misconduct reports at the prison.

Darcie Moran covers cops and courts for MLive and The Ann Arbor News. Email her at dmoran@mlive.com or follow her on Twitter @darciegmoran.
SCIO TOWNSHIP, MI -- Roger Rayle still remembers his neighbor nagging him to go to that meeting about the Gelman dioxane plume back in August 1993.

The toxic plume of pollution in the area's groundwater had been discovered nearly a decade earlier, and the state of Michigan already had taken Gelman Sciences to court to force a cleanup, but Rayle wasn't actively involved yet.

That meeting nearly 23 years ago was his wakeup call.

"I was so distraught by what I saw," said Rayle, who lives off Wagner Road a few miles north of the Gelman Sciences property west of Ann Arbor. "I had this notepad. I couldn't sleep at night, so I filled it up with ideas and thoughts."

At the time, Rayle recalls, the company was proposing a cleanup plan that would have dumped partially treated water with dioxane levels up to 60 or more parts per billion into a tributary of Honey Creek, which flows to the Huron River.

"And we thought that was a really bad idea," said Rayle, whose home is on well water and backs up to Honey Creek.

Rayle was busy working and raising two young children, but he immediately decided to get involved after that first meeting.

"It was like fate tapped me on the shoulder, because I used to live where the plume was heading (on Faye Drive) in Ann Arbor, and where I worked was over the plume, Parkland Plaza, and I had the knowhow," he said.

For more than two decades now, Rayle has been the leader of watchdog group Scio Residents for Safe Water, keeping pressure on government and corporate officials to clean up the mess Gelman Sciences created by dumping hundreds of thousands of pounds of dioxane into the environment between the 1960s and 1980s.

Rayle has done a considerable amount of technical analysis using plume data reported by the company and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and he's the keeper of literally thousands of records related to the plume.

"I take all of the data I can, whether it's spacial maps or sampling data, well data, that can be plotted on a map, and I put it all on Google Earth," he said. "That's one of the main things I do. I do that at least once a year, so you can see with your own eyes where the dioxane has been and where it's going."

Rayle was the vice president of First Computer Inc., a company that did software and management consulting for local governments.

"So, I had some knowhow to get all the plat maps for Scio Township, and we drew like a 1,000-foot radius, I think, along the entire tributary and Honey Creek, and went to all the homeowners, all the property owners, and had them sign this declaration that's really like a petition," he said of his early activism.

"That's when we joined the contested case, and that's when we started forming Scio Residents for Safe Water the following year."

The issue has been in and out of court over the years, while the scientific understanding of the chemical 1,4-dioxane and the Gelman plume has changed and evolved, and the state's cleanup standards have been weakened.

Pall Corp., the company that acquired Gelman Sciences in 1997, has been doing some pump-and-treat remediation, but many argue it's not enough.

The pollution continues to spread, contaminating people's wells and inching closer to the Huron River, Ann Arbor's primary drinking water source.

For many years, Rayle has stayed vigilant as a watchdog and activist, reviewing and analyzing every bit of data about the plume that's made available.

Also a co-founder of the local Coalition for Action on Remediation of Dioxane, he's helped a rotating cast of public officials better understand the problem.

Using Google Earth, he creates interactive, three-dimensional maps showing where the dioxane is most heavily concentrated and where it's barely detectable.

"He's been way ahead of his time in terms of why you need good data so you can literally see what's happening underground, yet unfortunately the judges in these courtrooms have never seen all this work," said Matt Naud, the city of Ann Arbor's environmental coordinator for the last 15 years.

Now more than 30 years after the plume was discovered, there still were monitoring well readings showing dioxane levels as high as 11,000 ppb last year.

The state is in the process of changing its groundwater standard for dioxane from 85 ppb to 7.2 ppb, with plans to take the company to court again.

Both state and local officials credit Rayle for his dogged determination and the technical expertise he's brought to the table over the years.

"In a lot of ways, while this has been clearly a collaborative effort through the years with citizens and local governments and even the DEQ, I think Roger has single-handedly been the keeper of the data," Naud said.

"And it's been that kind of Herculean effort that has been really the backbone of the local effort to be vigilant," he said. "I think a lot of other people would have quit a long time ago, and a bunch have, and Roger never has. So, he deserves a lot of the credit for any progress we've been able to make at this site."

"Roger is a true environmental champion whose long-term commitment and actions have made a significant difference in the protection of local public health and the environment," adds Dan Bicknell, the man who first discovered the Gelman plume in the 1980s and now the president of Global Environment Alliance LLC.

"Roger's command of the facts and vigilance made sure that the governments did not minimize the real dangers presented by the Gelman site."

Mitch Adelman, district supervisor for the DEQ's Remediation and Redevelopment Division, said he and his staff appreciate the collaborative relationship they've had with Rayle over the years. He has worked with Rayle on the issue since 2001.

"I really respect Roger's dedication and passion for the environment, especially related to the Gelman site, and the tremendous amount of work he does, on a volunteer basis, to help hold us and the liable party accountable," he said.

"Given the evolution of the state's remediation laws and court orders over the past 25-plus years, and the DEQ's role in adapting to the edicts of the Legislature, multiple governors signing amended legislation, and Washtenaw County court orders, we don't always agree on site-related matters," he acknowledged.

"That said, we appreciate working with Roger to learn from his experience, understand his perspectives, and will continue to do so to hopefully address the challenges associated with this complicated site in a mutually agreeable manner."

'It's going to outlast all of us'

Rayle grew up in Traverse City and came to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan in 1965, right before Gelman starting discharging dioxane.

He earned a bachelor's degree in 1969 and a master's degree in industrial engineering in 1971, and went to work for a nonprofit that provided industrial engineering solutions for the public sector.

A Google Earth map showing the varying concentrations of the Gelman dioxane plume in Ann Arbor and Scio Township.

"And then we got spun off as a separate division. The company was Community Systems Foundation, which is still headquartered here in Ann Arbor," he said.

Rayle, who is now semi-retired, uses the skills he honed during his professional career to analyze the plume data. He said there still are gaps in the data and more needs to be done to track and monitor the plume.

"There are 20,000 data points that we have that are plottable. There are some that aren't plottable, so that's one of the holes," he said.

"There are some wells where the XY (coordinates) and the elevation exist maybe in well logs, or maybe we've seen it on some of Pall's maps, so the consultants or the staff have it, but we're not getting it as part of the database," he said.

"One of the things I've advocated is that everybody should be using the same, central, up-to-date, accurate database."

Rayle said he thought that was going to happen when Pall Corp. converted to a new database about five years ago. He said the DEQ provided a snapshot of it and he found hundreds of anomalies before the company cut off access.

"There's always been issues like that. You know, there are things they don't want to explain or they want to hide," he said.

Farsad Fotouhi, Pall Corp.'s vice president of global health, safety and environmental engineering, said the company shares all of the data it collects each month with the DEQ and others, including Rayle's group.

Rayle has lived in his home off Wagner Road since 1979. His tap water comes from a well along Honey Creek, but he doesn't drink the water.

He said that's not because of fears about dioxane, which hasn't been detected in his well yet.

Rather, his wife just doesn't like the taste of well water, so they fill up jugs of water at local grocery stores.

"I can't remember when we started doing that. It's been years," Rayle said.

Rayle was 45 when he first got involved in the dioxane issue. He'll be 69 in September, and both his children are adults now.

"It's kind of scary when you look at the timeline because it's already been 50 years, and 30 since it was discovered," he said.

"That's why it's important to get this right, because this is going to be there a long, long time. We're talking about decades or centuries. It's going to outlast all of us."

Rayle calls it "an intergenerational problem."

"You've got to have some controls and monitoring and remediation in place so that, as systems change, as methods change, as wells come and go, and as people come and go, there's some continuity here to make sure the right outcome happens instead of just letting it go," he said.

It's been estimated that about 850,000 pounds of dioxane were discharged by Gelman Sciences on Wagner Road between 1966 and 1986.

More than 110,000 pounds have been removed from the groundwater since then, and several billion gallons of treated water have been discharged.

As required by a consent judgment, Fotouhi said, Gelman Sciences has provided the state with a letter of credit in an amount sufficient to give the state enough money to complete the cleanup if the company ever was financially unable to finish the job.

Michael McClellan of the DEQ's Remediation and Redevelopment Division provided information via email on Wednesday indicating the third amendment to the consent judgment in March 2011 requires Gelman Sciences to provide and maintain a financial assurance mechanism to cover the costs of remediation for 30 years, as if performed by contractors working for the state of Michigan.

"The DEQ has been working proactively with Gelman since then to ensure the proper mechanisms are in place," McClellan said.

McClellan confirmed Gelman Sciences is the corporate entity that remains responsible for all aspects of the Gelman site, even after Gelman's acquisition by Pall Corp. and Danaher Corp.'s acquisition of Pall last year.

He said Gelman has provided a letter of credit for $28.4 million. For 2015, the annual remediation cost reported by Gelman was $1,232,438.



As required by the consent judgment, Gelman has provided a long-term cost report to the DEQ for approval, and that report is now under review.

Rayle responded by saying 30 years and $28.4 million isn't enough, and the DEQ and the company have to think longer term.

'We held ground'

As he reflects on his advocacy over the years, Rayle said he and his group have seen some tangible results.

"We kept them from dumping huge quantities of dioxane into the creek, which would have ended up in the Huron River upstream of Barton Pond, where Ann Arbor gets 85 percent of its water. That's a big one," he said.

"We've kept this in front of decision-makers. We've analyzed the data for the DEQ when they didn't seem to have the wherewithal to do it themselves.

"We joined the contested case. Scio Residents was the lead on the first contested case, because the city and the county couldn't react fast enough. We held ground until they were able to join in and we won the major part of that contested case, which again was to limit the amount of dioxane that was going into the tributary."

There have been many disappointments, too, Rayle acknowledges. For instance, he still laments the fact that dioxane in a deep groundwater aquifer known as Unit E wasn't caught earlier, allowing the plume to spread farther into Ann Arbor.

"The E plume was thought to be uncontaminated, and they had us all convinced of that," Rayle said. "In 2000, they still hadn't detected it. And then in 2001 to 2003 is when it started showing up."

But it was there all along, just not being monitored, he said, noting the only well deep enough to catch it was near the Dolph Nature Area.

"Up until 1993, there were hits on this well and it was on an upward trend, and it was 9 ppb in 1993, and they didn't sample it for seven years," he said.

Had there been better monitoring, Rayle said, the investigation of the E Unit could have begun sooner, and maybe the contamination of a municipal supply well that's now shut down on Ann Arbor's west side could have been prevented.

A dioxane plume map created by Washtenaw County and last updated in February 2016. The Unit E plume is shown in pink on this map.

Rayle is still pushing for better monitoring of the plume as it spreads north in Scio Township toward more people's wells.

"We can't let the contamination get anywhere near Barton Pond, because it's going to affect dozens of township wells long before then," he said. "And we'd like to have a goal of no more wells contaminated with detectable levels of dioxane."

Rayle said it concerns him that there already are low concentrations of dioxane entering Honey Creek.

"Especially as the erosion happens and the creek gets closer to my well. It's about 15 feet closer than it used to be," he said.

Even after the state groundwater standard for dioxane changes, if it does, Rayle notes that still means it's going to be considered acceptable from a state regulatory standpoint to have dioxane in people's wells up to 7.2 ppb.

"Back in 1995 and before, when it got to 2 ppb, people were given replacement water. I'm not sure that would happen anymore," he said.

The state's groundwater standard for dioxane used to be 3 ppb. It went up to 77 ppb in 1995, and then to 85 ppb in 2000.

Rayle also argues more needs to be done to aggressively attack the core of the plume where the highest concentrations of dioxane are found, and he doesn't think the pump-and-treat remediation happening now is doing enough.

"They're permitted to pump 1,300 gallons a minute. They're only pumping 500," he said. "And where are they pumping from? They're not pumping from these higher concentrations. Their own maps show the higher concentrations are not where the purge wells are located."

'Something we have going for us'

Inside a room in his house, Rayle has several boxes and containers filled with documentation about the Gelman plume, including old monitoring well reports, hundreds of news clippings, and tapes of meetings going back decades.

Rayle acknowledges he and some other people once bought stock in Gelman Sciences to find out more information about the company and see what the annual reports were saying about the dioxane. He said they showed up at a shareholder meeting in the mid-1990s dressed in suits and ties.

"At the end of the meeting, Chuck Gelman said, 'I understand there are some people here who want to ask some questions about the cleanup, so here are the rules: You get to ask one question.' So, I asked my question, and the answer was kind of prevaricating," Rayle said. "So, I stood up to get a followup clarification, and he said, 'No, no. You've had your one question. If you continue to disrupt the meeting, I'll have the sergeant of arms physically remove you.'

"So, I'm looking around and all these bankers' and lawyers' mouths are going, 'What is going on here?' That was here at their offices on Wagner Road at that time. So, anyway, that didn't go well."

Rayle said he had a cordial relationship with Kim Davis, the president of Gelman Sciences who was responsible for the cleanup in 1995.

He said Davis made a commitment at a public meeting that the company was going to use re-injection as its primary disposal method.

"And if and only if that didn't work, then they would go to the creek, and only at 3 ppb or less," he said.

But in early 1996, Rayle said, the cleanup was taken away from Davis and the company decided it was going to try to go to the creek.

"And I think that's probably when the contested case came about," he said.

Pall Corp. acquired Gelman Sciences in 1997 and Davis left the company in early 1998. Davis didn't return a phone call seeking comment for this story.

"He stayed with Pall thinking he could get them back to his solution. And when that didn't happen, then he left," Rayle said. "Dealing with Gelman, we kind of knew at all times who was in charge. When Pall took over, we didn't know who was making decisions or what kind of information they had."

Rayle said it also was disappointing when the state's cleanup standards were weakened in 1995, and he considers it unfortunate that the cleanup of the Gelman plume ended up in the courtroom of Judge Donald Shelton.

"It has worked out to Pall's benefit," he said, adding that's partly because of how it was handled by the DEQ and the attorney general's office. "And it's partly because I don't think the judge had the time or the interest to learn the details. He never saw any unified maps. He never saw any of the animations."

Rayle said he still doesn't have a lot of confidence in the DEQ, which he thinks is more interested in issuing permits than protecting the environment.

The DEQ has made several promises recently that it's taking the ongoing concerns about the Gelman plume seriously and it believes Michigan's new dioxane standard will be among the most protective standards in the country.

Gov. Rick Snyder's proposed fiscal year 2017 budget also includes an extra $700,000 for monitoring and other activities related to the Gelman plume.

Rayle notes both of his children have left Michigan are living in other states now. His son is in Chicago and his daughter is in San Francisco.

"One of my goals in life -- now that I'm retired, even though I still do a lot of consulting-type work -- is to keep the young people here," he said.

"This is a great place to raise families, but clean water is important and we should make that a No. 1 priority. Michigan can't change its weather, but it sure can protect its natural resources, and that's something we have going for us. Most states don't have what we have, and we need to do a better job of protecting that."

Ryan Stanton covers the city beat for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at ryanstanton@mlive.com.
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.
DETROIT, MI - A father of seven who identified three women as his "wives" has been indicted in U.S. District Court on allegations of several child pornography crimes.

Early last month, police while investigating a fraud case found multiple images of sexual acts involving a "very young" child on a phone belonging to Ryon "Dontrez" Lenell Travis, according to an affidavit filed March 18 in the Detroit federal court.

A grand jury on Thursday, March 31, indicted Travis on four offenses, including production, transportation and possession of child pornography, and sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, court records show.

In one of the discovered images, the child is on a sheet with a distinctive pattern that matches a sheet seen on a bed in a room of Travis' house, the affidavit states.

West Bloomfield police on March 2 used a warrant to search Travis' home on Tuller Street because of unspecified "state of Michigan fraud violations." Three women, said to be Travis' wives, and Travis were there and identified the owner of two cell phones as Travis.

When a subsequent examination of one phone revealed the pornography, police obtained a second search warrant and continued the exam, according to the affidavit, signed by Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Daniel Ghareeb, based in Detroit.

The indictment specifies the unidentified child subject is a girl born about five years ago.

Travis, who does not have custody of any of his seven minor children, is accused of employing, using, persuading, inducing, enticing and coercing the child to engage in sexually explicit conduct from about January 2015 to March 2. His alleged purpose was producing a picture or pictures knowing the images would be transported and transmitted.

Further, authorities allege Travis recruited, enticed and "solicited by any means" a woman to engage in a commercial sex act, according to the indictment.

Magistrate Judge Mona K. Majzoub on March 23 ordered Travis detained as his trial is pending.
DETROIT, MI - Prosecutors are asking the Court of Appeals to review a judge's decision to maintain a plea agreement despite state former Sen. Virgil Smith initial failure to meet a condition by remaining in his government position.

The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office contends Circuit Judge Lawrence Talon abused his discretion when he refused to require the Detroit Democrat's resignation and then "compounded the error" when he denied prosecutors' motion to vacate the plea.

Prosecutors on Friday, April 1, filed an application for leave to appeal, requesting the higher court reverse Talon's orders or consider arguments in the case.

Smith, who submitted his resignation while in jail on Thursday, pleaded guilty in February to malicious destruction of personal property for allegedly shooting an AR-15 in the direction of his ex-wife, Anistia Thomas, and her Mercedes vehicle last May. In exchange, the prosecutor's office dropped charges of felonious assault, using a firearm to commit a felony and domestic violence.

As part of the agreement, Smith had to resign as state senator and refrain from holding an elected or appointed office during his five-year probation and 10-month jail sentence.

Talon, however, found the prosecutor was unconstitutionally interfering with the legislative branch and the rights of Smith's constituents by attaching these conditions and on March 14, did not sentence Smith in accordance with all the terms of the plea agreement.

Prosecutors argue the provisions about Smith's position do not violate the separation of powers or public policy. "The prosecutor is not pressuring the official to resign from office; the official is instead offering to exercise his right - the right not to hold public office - to secure what he believes is a favorable resolution of criminal charges," the application states.

Talon believed vacating the plea would compromise his integrity by "involving (him) in an act that violates public policy and offends the constitution."

A judge does not have to order an official to quit, the prosecutor's office responded in its motion. The official can do so without a court directive, according to the document, signed by Jason W. Williams, Prosecutor Kym Worthy's chief of research, training and appeals.

Smith resigned last week, on the third full day of his 10-month jail sentence. This will be effective April 12.

By then, Smith will have made roughly $2,987 during the two weeks he spends in jail while serving as a state senator.

Smith was elected senator in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.

The altercation with his former wife occurred May 10, after she arrived at Smith's home and found another woman in his bed.
FLINT, MI - Retired NASA astronaut Story Musgrave will try to encourage graduates not to be afraid of the unknown after they leave the University of Michigan-Flint.

Musgrave, an astronaut of more than 30 years for the space agency, is scheduled to deliver the commencement address during the university's May 1 graduation ceremony at Dort Federal Event Center in Flint.

"If they are confused, they don't need to be," said Musgrave, in a statement, who took part in six spaceflights, led repairs on the agency's Hubble Telescope, and performed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger's inaugural flight.

Musgrave also served as mission control communication for 25 missions, conducted two Department of Defense classified missions, worked as a part-time trauma surgeon during his astronaut career, and holds six advance degrees and 20 honorary doctorates. He retired from NASA in 1997.

He currently works as a multimedia director and producer, a landscape architect, an Applied Minds, Inc. innovator, delivers corporate presentations, and enjoys parachuting in his free time. Having transformed himself after his NASA days, Musgrave encourages graduates to keep expanding their horizons.

"For all of them, there will be careers, things for them to do, that don't even exist today," he said.
BUENA VISA TOWNSHIP, MI -- Rick Myron has gone to the Kroger near his home for years.

Not for food so much as for his prescriptions.

"It's my pharmacy," 69-year-old Myron said. "The pharmacist knows me and my wife Nancy."

But that's coming to an end April 23 when Kroger will close the locale at 3860 Dixie for good -- a move that Myron hopes the company will reconsider.

"They keep track of me," he said. "They take care of me. They let me know when my prescriptions are due."

Myron was among a handful of customers who came out to a rally on Saturday, April 2, in the far end of the store's parking lot near the street.

Myron said he attended because he is tired of seeing businesses leaving Buena Vista.

Saturday's rally was the first of four planned by the township's treasurer Christina Dillard. It was scheduled from noon to 5 p.m. but was shortened because of snow and cold weather.

After a little more than an hour of holding signs and receiving honks from passing traffic, the group traveled a few yards down the road to McDonald's to warm up.

Refusing to meet

State Rep. Vanessa Guerra, D-Bridgeport Township, said she is frustrated with the lack of communication Kroger officials have had with elected officials.

"I'm most disappointed that Kroger officials are refusing to meet with myself and Sen. Ken Horn," Guerra said. "They are unwilling to respond to our phone calls and emails."

Guerra said a response is "the least they could do."

Over warm coffee, hot chocolate and burgers, the group discussed strategy and the plan of action for the next rally taking place from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 9.

Alexis Thomas, board president for Saginaw School District, responded to a person present during the rally who asked about how was Kroger communicating.

"We have been asking and they have not been replying," Thomas said.

"That's not fair," said a woman seated amongst the group inside of McDonald's.

Why are they closing?

When it was announced on March 14, that Kroger was closing the location, Ken McClure, customer and communication manager for Kroger Co. of Michigan said the location has not been performing well for years.

However, employees at the location said they were told in a meeting that one of the reasons for the store's poor performance was theft. Kroger officials have not made a comment to the claim, and have not been readily reached by The Saginaw News since mid-March.

Township Clerk Gloria Platko said she isn't convinced the store is closing because of theft.

"If its theft," Platko said, "why aren't they prosecuting anyone?"

In a March 23 interview, Buena Vista Township Supervisor Dwayne Parker, told The Saginaw News that Kroger officials also told him that the store had not been performing well.

Parker said after talking to McClure and Chris Albee, a vice president responsible for the region, he was told the store "has been in the red for the last four years."

Parker said in that interview that he did not agree with Kroger officials, but that he "did not see the books either."

"They always seem to be busy and active." he stated.

Township Trustee Greg Carter isn't convinced the store is closing because of poor performance either.

During a board of trustees meeting for Buena Vista Township on March 28, Carter said the store seemed to be doing very well every time he shopped there.

Other reasons Kroger could be closing the location were discussed during the rally. The one that seemed to gain the most discussion was the notion that there was a landlord tenant dispute about Kroger not being allowed to place a gas station on the property.

Officials in Buena Vista have not been able to contact the owner or owners of the property to confirm a dispute.

Dillard said she does not know who owns the plaza where Kroger is located but the township sends bills to two different addresses.

The water bill is sent to L&W Management, 4111 E. Andover, Suite 3606, in Bloomfield Hills. The tax bill is sent to J&W Management, 505 Park Avenue, #302, New York, NY.

Attempts to contact either by The Saginaw News were unsuccessful.

The plaza, named Tri-City Plaza, is listed for sale on several websites. The asking price is $3 million.

'A community store'

Tanisha Jackson Brooks, 40, has also seen stores come and go during the lifetime she's lived in Buena Vista.

"I shop at Kroger all the times," Brooks said. "This one has a lot more of the fresh products."

Brooks said the location is important to the community and her family.

"Because I don't want to go to the liquor store to try to find fresh produce," she said. "It's important that this Kroger stays in the community."

The nearest Kroger to the soon-to-be-closed location is about four miles down the road at 6370 Dixie in Bridgeport Township.

Veronica Hamilton lives in nearby in the city of Saginaw. She said she visits the location three to four times per week.

Hamilton said the store is a major part of the Buena Vista community, which still hasn't recoverd from losing its school district in 2013.

"I want it to stay open because it's is such a community store," she said.

Rally organizers hope to have results from a survey they have been handing out to residents in the store's surrounding area.

"We are collecting demographics and where people shop," Dillard said.

Dillard said they will use the data to show Kroger how important the location is to the community.

Bob Johnson is a reporter for MLive/The Saginaw News. Contact him at 989-395-3295, by email at bob_johnson@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.
Ilorin is located in North Central Nigeria was founded in 1450 and is dominated by the Yorubas, one of the three major Nigerian ethnic groups from South West, Nigeria. In spite of the large presence of the south-westerners, you will find that other ethnic groups especially of Hausa extraction call this quiet town home.

Officially known as the capital city of Kwara , it is a predominantly Muslim community and is a major destination that many Muslims from other parts of Nigeria who visit to learn the about Islam. The people are hospitable and warm and this is why it is tagged the State of Harmony. It is a choice destination to escape the buzz of Lagos and Abuja and has a population of 847,582. Jovago.com, Africas largest hotel booking portal unveils Ilorin, Nigerias state of harmony.

Top 3 destinations

Owu Falls

Owu Falls is arguably the biggest tourist attraction in Kwara state. It is 112 kilometers from Ilorin. The wonderful fact about this fall is that the water pours from about 330 ft and the hill from which the water falls from is about 120 metres.

National Museum, Esie

The Esie National Museum, was set up in 1945 which makes it the oldest museum in Nigeria. The museum holds about 1,500 soapstones whose source is unknown till today. The stones were discovered in 1933 and the museums purpose is to preserve these stones. The stones are images of children, men, women and animals.

Sobi Hills

Sobi hills is 394 metres above sea level. Its lush green vegetation and spectacular landscape makes it a premium destination in Ilorin. There are different points from which water gushes out to the delight of visitors. The hills derives its name from the town of Sobi.

Hotel

Ilorin offers a mix of urban and rural life. Many of the hotels are in the city centre and these hotels are quite suitable for everyone no matter their taste. There are over 140 hotels on Jovago.com which you can select. Some of the hotels include Kwara Hotel, Princess luxury hotel, Sity Inn, and Fairyland hotel ltd. You also get as much as 15% discount if you use the these hotel booking portal.

Shop

Kwara Mall where Shoprite domiciles is the biggest and best place to shop in the city. Other spots you can shop are Adisco shopping mall, Ramond Best boutique, Silvertex boutique, and Kalia Ventures.

Unwind

Most of the restaurants are located in Ilorin. One of many classy restaurants isChronicles Restaurant situated along Ahmadu Bello way, Ilorin, Kwara state. You can also walk into Yinkus Canteen, Lox Chaws, and T and K restaurants to have a taste of Ilorin cuisine or take a stroll by the Niger river running through the city.

Fun fact

His Royal Highness, Ibrahim Sulu Gambari is the 11th Emir of Ilorin emirate. He has spent 20 years on the throne of his father since 1995.
Accra, April 2, GNA - The Strategic Power Solutions (SPS), has launched an ultramodern solar panel manufacturing plant at Kpone near Tema to promote development in the country.

The over $20 million privately owned project, currently generates 30 megawatts peak/year (MWp/year) and it is expected to be upgraded to 100 MWp/year; to offer a range of solar modules using an internationally certified line.

In addition to modules that are produced in Ghana, SPS also provides a variety of top-of-the-line building integrated photovoltaic (PV) modules.

It will also focus on the packaging of solar solutions that will promote development and human security while providing unlimited power and customised solution to satisfy the different segment of society.

The solar modules of SPS, which are of all sizes, includes micro/macro solar grid system and also the supply and installation off-grid and grid systems, PV systems and PV streetlights.

SPS is a subsidiary of Strategic Security Systems International (3SiL), an independent Ghanaian-owned conglomerate and a leading supplier of specialised goods and services including solar lighting systems and other associated bespoke products.

Dr Francis Akuamoah-Boateng, the Chairman of SPS, said his inspiration for the project was born out of his desire to make a meaningful contribution to the socio-economic growth of Ghana.

'In my eyes, success that does not impact my country and its citizens is no success at all,' he said.

The company has through its innovation improved the lives of Ghanaians, especially rural dwellers through its installation of 20,000 solar street lights in the Northern Region and other part of the country.

Dr Akuamoah-Boateng said the production and supply of alternative power sources and clean energy was one of the areas in which Ghanaians could take the future into their own hands, and called for support in that regard.

Mr Oheneba Ofori Boateng, the Chief Executive Officer of SPS, said there was the need for more 'approaches towards the use of renewable and clean energy at a time when Ghanaians were still looking for alternative, stable and affordable energy solutions to complement what was produced by the national grid; and luckily in our part of the world we are fortunate to have such resources in abundance'.

'SPS brings on board lessons learnt from previous attempts made by other companies as well as results from intense consultations from diverse stakeholders which we have woven into a robust strategy.

'This is what makes us work for greater contribution and penetration into the Ghanaian market,' he said.

Former President John Agyekum Kufuor said the private sector was the engine of growth for the economy and called on government to continue creating an enabling environment for it flourish.

He called for the promotion of safer and affordable means of energy generation such as solar, to help save the planet from further deterioration from the effects of greenhouse gas emission from industries.

Dr Mensah Otabil, the General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church, appealed to Ghanaians to renew their faith in the nation's foundational principles of freedom and justice in addition to work and happiness.

He said Ghana did not have big problems but 'we have little problems that have grown into national crises'.

He said the government must create open doors for the people to go into entrepreneurship because 'we don't want government to feed us; because we can feed ourselves if the doors are opened for us to work.'

Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene in a speech read on his behalf by the Akyempimhene, Nana Adusei Poku, lauded Dr Akuamoah-Boateng and his son Mr Ofori Boateng, for coming out with such a laudable and innovative initiative to help address the energy needs of Ghanaians and the West Africa Sub-Region.

He hailed their spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity which according to him is the essential component needed by the country to attain greater economic heights.

GNA
02.04.2016 LISTEN

Accra, April 2, GNA - Kuoru Kuri-Buktie Limann IV, the Paramount Chief of the Gwollu Traditional Area in the Upper West Region, has lauded President John Dramani Mahama for his tremendous efforts in promoting the growth of the shea industry in the country.

He said the recent announcement by the President to establish two new shea nut processing factories in the Upper East and Upper West Regions, in addition to the one in Buipe in the Northern Region, would help add value to the processing of shea nuts in the country; declaring that "this is a step in the right direction, which deserves commendation".

Kuoru Kuri-Buktie Limann IV gave the commendation in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra on the sideline of a day's seminar organized by the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) Africa and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on, 'Managing Agribusiness in West Africa'.

The seminar provided opportunities for both academics and practitioners to debate some of the theoretical and policy issues that are of relevance to agribusiness development in the sub-region.

'Well, we are very happy and our people are now very happy that the President has said that they are going to establish a shea nut processing factory in the Upper East and West Regions,' he said.

He appealed to the President to ensure that the shea nut processing factories also produce shea butter oil and other products for both local consumption and the export market.

He called for value addition to the butter by converting it into cosmetics, edible oil and pharmaceutical products before export; to generate more foreign exchange for the nation's socio-economic development.

Kuoru Kuri-Buktie Limann IV, who is also the Executive Chairman of the Takhila Farms and Seed Oil Limited, an agro-products and oil processor, appealed to government to help promote local industries, small and medium enterprises and agri-businesses by creating the congenial atmosphere for them to grow.

'It is very difficult for agro-businesses in the country to obtain loans from banks, due to high lending rates and demands for landed properties as collateral,' he said.

He also urged research institutions such as the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) not to allow their findings to gather dust on the shelves, but rather make them available to shareholders like SMEs and the farmers for them to utilize for the nation's benefits.

He said highly reputable research institution like the CSIR must make its presence felt across the lengths and breadth of the nation by disseminating its findings.

Professor Shashidhara Kolavalli, Senior Research Fellow, Development Strategy and Governance Division, IFPRI, hailed Ghana for ensuring that over the years, food production had always met the demands of the people.

He said better technological innovation and more adoptive trials could get the agriculture industry growing in the country. GNA
03.04.2016 LISTEN

It is deeply regrettable that not much can be said about politics as a positive genius of creative anthropogenesis.

This is apparently so because politics and humanity are intrinsically mutual in ontological possibilities of material projection. Nuances and subtleties in the overlapping space shared between politics and humanity are therefore normative fixtures of latent materialism.

Thus, that miasmic mutual space can only be hygienized via populist acceptance of humanism in political activities.

The nature of politics is such that it leaves humanism behind in the congealed and static immorality of sweeping medievalism.

Politics has also become a criminal activity for many a person in many a situation. Actually politics is fundamentally a criminal activity.

The environment of the psychosocial genetics of politics in human relations is that it seems to expose that basest of human instinct, and here, let us quickly mention greed and deadly Machiavellianism and kleptomania and lies and hatred and politically motivated murder, killings, and assassinations, the most.

In the end politics is that which closely takes after the lockstep ambulatory rhythm of a walking stick with its anthropogenic handler. There could actually be moments of stochastic unpredictability in the material behavior of a walking stick from the exclusive viewpoint of the virtual reality of anthropogenic parallax, a highly provable hypothesis when considered as a strict question of existential immanence.

That is to say, at some points in the joint lives of the walking stick and its anthropogenic handler also appear points of teachable nodality directly or indirectly pointing to an interactive if reciprocatory psychosocialization, a process which we believe is somewhat intrinsic to the existential immanence of mortal finitude, in the joint lives of these two partners.

Technically, if not rather more phenomenologically, are subtle yet overt moments of existential tableaux in the joint lives of these two.

First of all, the walking stick is a dead partner in the complicated immanent dialogue of psychosocialization which the anthropogenic handler ostensibly exclusively remote-controls, yet the anthropogenic element is not dead. Yet the dead wood once came from a living tree. And the anthropogenic element will certainly expire some someday, much like its assuming the totalized apoptotic conditionality of the once-living dead wood, an irony of imaginable proportions so to speak.

It is interesting to acknowledge the antecedent genetic or cellular paterfamilias giving birth to an existential if spatial game-theory guiding the immanent interactions of both elements. It is also interesting to acknowledge both leaving behind their cellular imprints in the genetic proliferation of posterity.

The central point of it all is that somehow, somewhere, we also find both the once-living dead wood and the dead-man-walking anthropogenic handler who is yet to die in the proliferating genetic geography of other related or interactive spatial bodies, namely paterfamilias and posterity.

At the mutual point of immanent tableau however, it is not clear or even ascertainable who in fact remote-controls the dialogue. This may be so because the walking stick assumes a state of intricate personified mentalization at this point. On the one hand the dead walking stick may be doing the remote-controlling. On the other hand the exercise of remote-controlling may be a question of reciprocative interdependence approximating Isaac Newtons Third Law of Motion.

Whatever the line of interpretation one adopts to fit this immanent profile of phenomelogical dialogue, one thing that is certain in our minds is that Ghanas duopolistic culture perches on this static and uncompromisingly congealed tableau of crushing developmental challenges and intellectually uncreative dogmas!

FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE COMPLEX NATURE OF POLITICS

Politics behaves similarly. In other words politics does not die. In this sense politics has always been there, namely contemporaneously with human evolution, and will certainly outlive the conceit of mortal finitude.

One sticking point about the complex nature of politics, though, is the difficult tradeoffs of compromises and sporadic disowning or renouncing of time-tested and workable personal and collective ethos that usually accompany the exercise, privileges and prerogatives of progressive nationalism.

If giving up this progressive personal and collective ethos succeeds in underwriting the comparative advantage of the nation, a concession which in turn also positively or richly accrues to Ghanas political economy, then so be it.

But if not, the country records serious deficits in its balance sheet of development priorities. Let us be clear here, though: This is not an alternative allusion to or call for any deadly strain of political adhocracy.

Far from it. Otherwise, therein lay the myriad of conundrums confronting the postcolonial African nation-state. That is not to say all is lost yet.

It is rather to say Ghanas political animals can look up to the rich teachable legacy of the great Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Africas most profound, imaginative, and visionary political hygienist, for intellectual inspiration.

We will move to agree wholeheartedly with Prof. Edmund N. Delle, the National Chairman of the CPP, and his advisory statement to the effect that:

In everything we do as politicians, let us always put the interest of the country first and above our political parties interest.

This clearly enunciated statement is a hallmark of political genius.

THE IMPENDING DANGER OF AKUFO-ADDO AND HIS POLITICAL AMBITIONS TO GHANAS SOCIOPOLITICAL STABILITY

It is not even clear if the leadership of the NPP intend to establish a paramilitary unit alongside the nations military and army, in which case it will not be too farfetched to entertain another possibility of a clandestine collaboration between the leadership of this speculative paramilitary organization and hypothetical members of the army or military who may be sympathetic to the NPP.

The notion of double agent is real in the political economy of intelligence mechanics.

We should never forget this. The Denzel Washington character in the movie American Gangster loudly speaks to this fact as well.

The high-profile instance of Nigerias facing similar intelligence and security challenges and conundrums is no mere accident, and also of Nigerias visible example offering a teachable blueprint is even clearer.

It is generally believed that certain persons in the federal government of Nigeria, who are generally sympathetic to Boko Harams uncompromising pursuit of Islamic hegemony in some parts of the country and close to the seats of the presidency and of the military superstructure (top brass), have been steadily stealing privileged intelligence information compiled by the military and other security arms of the federal government, high-level intelligence information to neutralize and dismantle the terrorist group, and handing this information to the leadership of Boko Haram piecemeal.

But then also, alas, there exists this complicated political history of international relations where the British, together with the State of Israel and America, successfully impressed upon Idi Amin to set up a secret military unit within the Ugandan national army, the same intra-military unit the abovementioned countries used to overthrow Milton Obote, via the externally managed leadership of Idi Amin.

This is why we believe the BNI investigation should move beyond the prompt deportation of the three South African mercenaries.

This has contributed in no mean way to the enhancement of Boko Harams unconventional warfare or asymmetric engagement. This explains in part why defeating or neutralizing Boko Haram has been such a prohibitive costly affair and extremely difficult undertaking.

Ghana needs to be on perpetual guard against creeping vigilante paramilitarization and gangsterization of partisan politics. The antiquated model of Ancient Greeces politics of elitist tribal ghettoization should not be replicated and tolerated in our modern politics, to say the least.

That unenlightened era, a traditional anachronism if you like, of ghettoized tribal political antiquation is long gone.

We need to encourage ourselves to live within the elastic limits of the modernizing critiques of tolerance, inclusive politics, respect for the rule of law, gender equality, equitable distribution of national wealth, political de-ethnicization, equality before the law, political representation, while at the same time leaving the politics of insults and hatred and acrimony, schadenfreude politics, and duopolistic ethnocentrism behind in the zoological cage of medievalism.

OTHER RELEVANT QUESTIONS

And here we go again:

Godwin Boboobi, a member of the communication team of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who recently interpretively tagged National Democratic Partys Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings criticism of the Mahama administration as her exhibiting some menopausal symptoms is not only rhetorically improper, uncalled-for, primitively anachronistic, insensitive, and childishly stupid, but also that in this day and age such remarks are uncompromisingly and morally sexist.

It is not a crime to be menopausal in that the experience of menopause and its unsettling symptoms are undeniable facts of biologic realism. If Boboobi somehow thinks menopause is exclusively a womens thing, then he had better wait and experience it, firsthand, as he inches asymptotically toward Madam Rawlings age, if he is in fact lucky enough to have a student of biology, the science of biological aging (e.g. senescence), and endocrinology educate him on this subject matter. Is this not what the proverbial trite remark experience is the best teacher say in essence?

Inclusive politics is such a complex philosophy for male chauvinists like Boboobi to grasp. Also true is the fact that such privileged men do not appear to understand the complex politics of biology, endocrinology, and senescence (gerontology and geriatrics). These male chauvinists only thinkas a matter of convenient posturingthat aging is a captivating province of youthful exuberance and that their continuing privileged political statuses do not and cannot confer mortal finitude on them.

On the other hand, and ironically, when the cold hands of mortality stared Akufo-Addo in his Machiavellian face he quickly owned up to it, saying: Where I am and how old I am at least, this is not the time I will start stealing anybodys wealth. Stealing has nothing whatsoever to do with age. Perhaps stealing has more to do with the circumstances of ones environment, ones psychological and material predispositions. Neither does stealing have anything to do with menopause.

As a matter of fact, some of our male politicians who are raping the country with reckless abandon may not be menopausal or old. And then there are these other unresolved critical questions of duopolistic euphebiphobia and adultism in fully assessing the political equation of democratic expression.

Where are all these questions leading us anyway?

Neither can the political enemies and detractors of the sacked NDCs voluptuous and bootylicious kleptomaniacal daydreamer, Victoria Hammah, prove with any degree of scientific or mathematical certainty that, much like her female counterpart Dzifa Attivor, an ex-Minister of Transport who resigned over the bus re-branding controversy, her rhetorical dream of making a million dollars in politics before resigning from politics was induced by the symptomatic experience of menopause.

In Ghanaian politics women are punished for dreaming but hardened and recidivistic male political criminals caught red-handed in the act of stealing are retained and celebrated.

Abudu Nelson Baani, an NDC Member of Parliament who called for legislating the stoning of adulterous women in Ghana, no doubt shares the primitive misogynistic psychology of Boboobi. It appears, then, that for all we care to know both Baani and Bobbobi may have forced themselves into a transient intellectual fix by reading philosophical anarchist William Godwins book, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

The primitive politics of misogyny should have no place in modern politics. The morale of our discursive contentions here is that it is possible to disagree with ones opponents without resorting to sexist or misogynistic insults.

We shall definitely return with the concluding part (Part 3)Stay tuned!

REFERENCES

Ghanaweb. Reduce Political Tension: CPP To NDC, NPP. March 31, 2016.

Ghanaweb. Im Too Old To StealAkufo-Addo. September 4, 2015.
03.04.2016 LISTEN

Have you ever questioned people about the inspiration behind their casting of vote for a preferred candidate during elections especially the Presidential and Parliamentary election? I personally had interactions with students who participated in our recent presidential and parliamentary elections on the reason why they voted for a particular candidate.

Some indicated they voted based on the promises and campaign messages of the candidate and the impact on their lives. Others confessed they voted based on the directions of their parents and other close relatives. Some were influenced by tribe and general acceptance of a candidate in their communities. Again, some had no idea or reason for voting for a particular candidate.

Some of these reasons are not unusual as similar cases had been reported in our dailies and other media houses. I recall a group expressed their willingness to vote for a particular candidate because he constructed a public toilet in their community. There had also been reports where people voted based on tribe, religion, personality and fluency in a particular language.

Again, there had been reports where people voted for a particular candidate because of handshaking encounter with the candidate. It is also not uncommon to find people voting based on job promises and as usual, vote buying. Others look at their businesses and personal interest to decide where to cast their votes. Based on these reasons, I would not doubt a report which states that majority of Ghanaians vote not based on the common interest of the country but on their own interest and selfish needs.

Ghana is like the human body, made up of several parts with different functions but work toward a general goal. If the interest of the head become paramount, the growth of other parts would be deteriorated consequently affecting the entire body system. In other to build a healthy body, decisions are made based on the general welfare of the body instead of a part. This should be our ideal reason for voting, Ghana must come first. When Ghana is healthy, all parts become healthy but if only one part is healthy, it negatively affects other parts and therefore affects the general growth of the body.

One component of the developmental status of a nation had to do with the motivation that guide their voting pattern. It is crystal clear that when the general growth of the nation become the ultimate goal of the electorate, there would be no way an elected government would not perform during his term of office. But if his election is based on selfish desires of some section of the electorate, the elected governments goal is just to satisfy that part of the electorate without not focusing on the general welfare of the country.

We have had time with the present government, we have seen some major decisions, projects and engagement involved and therefore we should be in a better position to determine whether these actions affected positively or negatively the general welfare of this country. We have also heard the decision and counter statement of the opposition parties, we have heard them debating and expressing their views based on government policies and decisions, we therefore can make projections on whether they indeed have a better plan for this country or not. When Ghana comes first, we can clearly see the direction of our vote.

Remember, you might acquire a job as promised by a candidate but if the general economic situation of this country is depleting, unemployment become huge, escalated bills and taxes, many dependents on your small meagre salary, you have achieved nothing for your country. Again, what happens if we vote based on a tribe? Would that solve the issues of this country? Remember that the problems and challenges the country face are not immune to a particular tribe, they affect us all.

In fact, in the ballot box, there is no Akan, Ewe, Ga, Dagomba, etc, it is Ghana we see. Why not think about the interest of this country when you get into the ballot box? Does religion or Christian denomination matter? Yes, lets assume the president donated and helped built an uncompleted building for a denomination he belongs but yet the country is in crises? Will that denomination be immune from that disaster?

How many hours and days do we spend with people in our denomination and tribes? Dont we encounter people from different backgrounds, denominations and tribes even more than those we share common with? That shows we are one, we are more Ghanaian than our tribes and denominations. What about if you voted because you were dashed an amount of GH 50.00? How long would that amount satisfies you? We are grow well if we think about Ghana first and make our choices on the general welfare of this country.

I acknowledge that our sense of judgement might be different but our inspiration and thoughts on voting should be one, Ghana first. I have seen opposition party members whose businesses flourished and acquired jobs under the regime of their rival in government due to good policies and directions. When Ghana becomes successful, we all enjoy!

Lets not our selfish interest take the lead and fill our thoughts as we approached November 7. Dont just think about yourself but about the future of this country. This election is not about your children, is about the children and youth of this nation; it is not about your job, it is about the entire jobs in this country; it is not about your tribe, it is about Ghana; it is not about your money and businesses, it is about the money and businesses of this country; it is not about your health but the health of citizens of this nation; it is not about your party in power, it is about Ghana in power; and it is not about you, it is about Ghana.

Lets put off the cloth of our own interest and cloth ourselves with the interest of Ghana to decide the leaders for tomorrow. If we have sacrifices to make for our future, then we need to put our desires out and think about the future generation of this country. Ghana first! Ghana first! Ghana first!

Jeffery Amo - Asare
03.04.2016 LISTEN

Very soon, the country may have to be divided into the Socialist Republic of the National Democratic Congress (SRNDC) and the Federal Democratic Republic of the New Patriotic Party (FDRNPP), if we are to go by the opinion of Mr. Abdul Latif Abdullahi, chairman of the so-called NDC Media Monitors (See Akufo-Addo and NPP Must Apologize to President Mahama Modernghana.com 3/16/16).

According to Mr. Abdullahi, President John Dramani Mahama got thunderously booed when he appeared at the funeral of the late Bantamahene to pay his respects recently. The NDC Media Monitors chairman claims that those who booed Mr. Mahama were members of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). He would therefore have the 2016 Presidential Candidate of Ghanas largest political party apologize to President Mahama.

I dont know the practical and/or objective basis upon which Mr. Abdullahi arrived at the curious conclusion that those who allegedly booed the President were card-carrying members of the New Patriotic Party. Were these alleged hecklers and cat-callers wearing the known colors and/or insignias of the NPP? And if they were, did Mr. Abdullahi ask to see their NPP-membership IDs? We ask the foregoing question because in the past National Democratic Congress agitators and propagandists (or agitprop agents) have been known to mischievously deck the colors and insignias of the New Patriotic Party and wantonly misbehave in public, hoping that they would be mistaken for members of the Akufo-Addo-led party.

What I clearly see here is a flagrant element of ethnic bigotry or tribalism on the part of the critic. In other words, Mr. Abdullahi, whose Islamic sounding name also marks him out to be either a northerner or a non-Akan/Asante  he could well be of Akan ethnicity, by the way  facilely assumed that just because Kumasi-Bantama is a stronghold of the New Patriotic Party, it automatically stands to reason that those alleged to have booed the President were NPP members and supporters. No such prejudicial presumption could be at once more scandalous and irresponsible. Does this decidedly capricious trend of reasoning imply that if tomorrow Nana Akufo-Addo traveled to any party of the country predominated by non-Akans and was also widely known to be the stronghold of the ruling National Democratic Congress and got booed, that it would be logical for anybody to automatically assume, without any scientific proof or objective evidence, that such hecklers and booers  my profuse apologies to the Boer-Afrikaners of South Africa  were card-carrying members and supporters of the NDC?

This trend of thinking is inexcusably retarded, and one hopes that the rascally likes of Mr. Abdullahi could be reprogrammed to think like civilized rational humans. Or better yet, people like the chairman of the NDC Media Monitors group ought to be given lessons in critical thinking and common sense. He should also inform his audience about his reaction when President Mahama stood in the royal capital of the Asante Region, and the heartland of Ghana, and rudely and churlishly described Asantes as a people who were pathologically incapable of appreciating the legion good deeds and projects undertaken in the region by governments of the National Democratic Congress.

Then also, where was Mr. Abdullahi when President Mahama stood on the sacred soils of Kyebi and smack in front of the Okyenhene, Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, and indecorously called Akyem-Abuakwa the Galamsey Capital of Ghana? You see, Mr. Abdullahi, the exhibition of respect is a two-way street. President Mahama can simply not disrespect our traditional rulers and the Ghanaian people and not expect to be reacted to in kind. That would be rather curious and unpardonable. It would also defy common sense.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
03.04.2016 LISTEN

"...Ghanas petroleum fiscal regime should be reformed to ensure maximum long-term revenue generation... The regime can also achieve greater take by increasing the states share in production sharing agreements...", Sara Zedingle Ghebremusse, Faculty of Law Thesis, University of Toronto, Canada, 2014).

GIGS (Ghana Institute of Governance and Security)

FTOS-Gh/PSA Campaign/Petition

When Deputy Dagadu Haggles For Their "Price":

The attention of the Fair-Trade Oil Share Ghana (FTOS-Gh/PSA) Campaign, including the Ghana Institute of Governance and Security (GIGS), have been drawn to award-winning journalist, Mr. Maxwell Adombila's 8 Mar 16 article in the Business News section of the Daily Graphic. Titled, "Haggle over type of oil contracts delay E&P bill", the Deputy Minister of Petroleum, Mr. Benjamin Dagadu, complained bitterly that among other civil society groups, GIGS, the core of the FTOS-Gh/PSA pressure group that met with government representatives 20 Feb. 16 in Ada, Greater Accra Region, have caused a 2-year delay in the Ghana Petroleum Exploration and Production (E&P) bill the NDC government under President Mahama has been intending to enact into law.

For online media, we are publishing our response as a "3-Part Dagadu-Contract-Price-Haggle Series" because of the complexity of some of the ideas and the length the FTOS-Gh/PSA pressure team determined to be appropriate for a more informed coverage for the average reader. Those interested in the full/complete paper, all 10 pages, can obtain a copy of the FINAL, with "Haggling Graphics" at ( http://ghanahero.com/FTOS_GH_Campaign.html , see under MEMORANDUM FTOS-Gh).

Moving forward, our simple online English dictionaries inform us that "to haggle" means "to talk or argue with someone especially in order to agree on a price; to dispute or bargain persistently, especially over the cost of something."

From the perspective of the FTOS-Gh/PSA Campaign, the question whether Ghana ought to demand and take more of its own oil revenues from foreign Oil and Gas interests can never be a "haggle."

This is a policy debate involving billions of dollars of significance to all Ghanaians. It can only be a haggle to those receiving funds from private interests and as well, skimming from the top of so-called "Hybrid System contracts.

Long-Term Oil Revenue Loss at Just 1%, at Jubilee Alone:

This is a policy debate of such exceptional importance that even a 1% over-invoice, mis-reporting of costs, broken ring-fence, and other such differentials for the $8.9 billion project (Petroleum Commission's own estimate of total cost of Jubilee Field alone), is a whopping $89,000,000. Yes, $89,000,000 would be the loss to Ghana, potentially, due to lack of diligence and abrogation of fiduciary responsibility to the Ghanaian tax payer directly as a result of a mere 1% error, fraud, or "mishap".

Fact is, Ghana funded part of the $8.9 billion, through the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC).

Fact is, Ghana now has more than Jubilee!

Talking about Ghana losing twice, thrice, and them some!

The FTOS-Gh/PSA Campaign 14-Point Response to Dagudu and Co:

To be continued......

Sources/Notes:

1. Maxwell Akalaare Adombila. 2016. Haggle over type of oil contracts delays E&P bill, ( http://www.graphic.com.gh/business/business-news/59731-haggle-over-type-of-oil-contracts-delays-e-p-bill.html ).

2. Sara Zedingle Ghebremusse. 2014. Assessing the Petroleum Fiscal Regimes of Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon. Thesis, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, Canada.

GIGS/Prof Lungu /ANON /GUNA /FTOS-Gh /PSA/

www.GhanaHero.com . Visit for more information.

(Read Mo! Listen Mo! See Mo! Reflect Mo!).

Subj: RE: Haggle Over Type of Oil Contracts Delays E&P Bill (1)

@professorlungu - Twitter (#FTOS_Gh)

Brought to you courtesy of www.GhanaHero.com30 Mar 16.
A deep grief engulfed Rwanda and for that matter the whole African continent during and after the ignoble act of the 1994 genocide. Indeed from April 7 and for three consecutive months more than 800000 people- overwhelmingly Tutsi and moderate Hutu, Twa and others- were systematically killed across Rwanda. In order to honour the memory of the victims of that despicable act and recognize the pain and courage of those who survived, the United Nations General Assembly, on 3rd December 2003, adopted resolution A/RES/58/234 designating April 7 as the International Day for Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda.

This should serve us, as an occasion, to ponder on the fundamental causes of such violent and criminal behaviors. Therefore the diagnosis of the past must enable us to squarely defy the challenges of the present, renewing our collective resolve to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

There is no gainsaying that Africas predicaments including the Rwanda genocide are, amongst others, the direct consequences of the policies of divide and rule of the former colonial masters. Africans, in particular the youth, must be conscious of this sad situation in order to bring back the spirit of oneness amongst themselves and face their common enemies namely poverty, diseases, foreign exploitation of their resources etc.

Bafflingly it seems that a little has been learnt from the painful Rwanda genocide experience. Today in many places, around the world, people have being exposed to the cruelty of violent conflicts and the indignities of poverty mainly in developing countries. Intolerance persists in societies torn apart by war as well in democracies that largely enjoy peace.

However it is heartwarming to note that, in the midst of this confusion, due to its selfless, hardworking and visionary leadership, Rwanda is, today, undeniably an illustration of peace, stability and sustainable development in Africa worth of emulation by others. While applauding Rwanda, AASU deplores the lack of policies capable of uplifting the people from miseries and the persistence of corruption in many African countries.

On this occasion, AASU urges African leaders to do more than just speak about the integration and prevention of conflicts on the continent;

AASU calls African leaders to summon the courage to always act in unison in promoting and defending the interests of their people and use their rich cultural and ethnic diversities as a source of their strength and unity;

AASU hails the people of Rwanda for their courage and determination to put behind the sad event of 1994 and position their country on the path of sustainable development and use their diversity to cement their unity forever.

Never again genocide on the African continent!

All for African unity now!

Awaah Fred

(Secretary General)

www.aasuonline.org/ [email protected]/[email protected]; +233(0)243102626
03.04.2016 LISTEN

The Member of Parliament (MP) for Ellembelle,Mr. Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah has pledged his unflinching support towards the development of the Samenye community in the Jomoro constituency.

According to him,development is a collective responsibility therefore,he is poised to extend his developmental agenda to the community whenever the need arises.

He said the entire development of Nzema land should be the prime motive of any body who has the development of the area at heart irrespective of boundaries.

Mr.Buah,who doubles as the Minister for Petroleum,told a cross-section of the Samenye community as part of the annual get-together of their festival dubbed."SAMENYE A,YE WC A-to wit,We Are In Samenye town.

He used the occasion to remind the community the need for peace and unity in the run-up to the November 7 general elections and beyond adding that a number of countries in Africa have been plunged into chaos due to misunderstanding over the outcome of elections.

Mr. Buah told the people that the NDC party is not in any way interested in fomenting trouble adding that any party member who will fuel electoral violence before,during and after the elections, will be dealt with according to law.

On behalf of the Jomoro NDC Parliamentary candidate and the sitting Member of Parliament,Mr. Buah pledged financial assistance towards the development of the town.

The MP for Prestea Huni-Valley,Mr. Francis Adu Blay ,who accompanied Mr.Buah on his trip,also donated unspecified amount of money to support development of the community.

Present at the ceremony,was the former CPP Parliamentary candidate for Jomoro,Samia Yaaba Nkrumah.There was an appeal for funds in aid of a community center.
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03.04.2016 LISTEN

Many successful books took a long time to be written and then followed by editing, design, lay out, proofread and set up for publication. When a book is eventually published, comes the end of a long journey. Rev. Dr. E.K. Nkansah after a long journey, is officially releasing his debut book.

The Title of the Book - "A Student of Prophecy" Written By Rev. Dr. E. K. Nkansah

Published by In the Gap Publishing. Cover Design by Brandsquire.com

Date: Saturday; April 30th, 2016

Venue: EJM Event Center, 563 Ritchie Road, Capitol Heights, Maryland 20743

Time: 2pm-5pm - VERY IMPORTANT

ABOUT THE BOOK

Christianity is an educational institution of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Matthew 24:19-20 Jesus said to the disciples Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. The Bible also enjoins us to, Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman who needed not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15) Furthermore, the Bible said, Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:11)

A Student of Prophecy is a study book of the prophetic messages delivered by the Bible days prophets. It is also about the things Jesus said would happen before his second coming in the end times. How are they going to happen, where are they going to happen and who are those that will be used to make them happen? A Student of Prophecy takes the time to analytically explain and bring the end time prophetic message to the level of every student. By the time you finish reading this book you will be able to compare, and find answers to your many unanswered questions about Bible prophecies. (Matthew 24:1-51) Timothy 2:15) Furthermore, the Bible said, Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:11)

ABOUT THE AUTHORRev. Dr. Ebenezer Kyere Nkansah is a Ghanaian, from Kurofa in the Asanti Akim Religion. He received a call to preach the Gospel in the early age of his childhood and preached in the Methodist Church at his home town, Kurofa between 1987 and 1990. He continued as a local Preacher at Dzorwulu Methodist Church when Rev. Daniel Kwabena Essandoh was pastor in Charge. From 1991 to 1996, He helped establish the local Evangelism outreach and was a founding member of the Dzowulu Methodist Youth. As an Accounting student from Dorme Memorial Zion College (Domezco) in Asamankese, his ambition was to be an Accountant, but the call of God was strongly upon him, and he was directed to attend Faith Bible College in Accra, where he received his first Degree in Theology.

He moved to the United States of America in November, 2003, after he planted Hope of Glory Ministries International in Ghana. To further achieve his Theological ambition, Reverend Nkansah joined the International Miracle Institute (IMI), where he received the Christian Degree of Doctor of Christian Theology, and the Christian Degree of Doctor of Divinity in Florida, Pensacola.

He is the Pastor/Founder of The Hope of Glory Network Ministries, Hope of Glory Baptist Church, and the CEO of the Hope of Glory Network Radio, in Maryland, USA.

Dr. Ebenezer Kyere Nkansah is a seasoned teacher and preacher with eschatological knowledge to digest the prophecies of the Bible to help educate the present generation for our way forward.

He is the Author of A Student of Prophecy.
03.04.2016 LISTEN

Being a man of his words, a puppet goaded by his Overlord and ready to do his master's bidding all of the time, Dr Yaw Sarfo, who is masquerading as Kumawuhene going by the stool name Barima Sarfo Tweneboa Kodua, has incited his handful of supporters to start violence in Kumawuman.

Going back in time, he announced that he was going to prove to the people of Kumawuman who the owner of the land is. This is following the clearly irresponsible court ruling by one Justice Charles Wilson on the contempt of court case filed against Dr Yaw Sarfo, Kumawuhemaa Nana Abenaa Serwaah, Kumawu Nifahene and Kumawu Gyasehene, in his favour. Even though he disregarded a court injunction restraining him from any attempts to be sworn in as Kumawuhene until a case pending before the Judicial Committee of the Ashanti Regional House of Chiefs had been determined (Kumawu palace items and stool properties inventoried), Justice Charles Wilson in his ruling dismissed the case and purportedly referred them back to the Judicial Committee.

Dr Yaw Sarfo then published in some Ghanaian newspapers that he has won all the court cases brought against him with regard to his doubtful enstoolment as Kumawuhene and that from that instance forward, he was going to assert his authority in Kumawuman.

He allegedly issued a verbal declaration to stop the popular and publicly accepted Kumawuhene Barima Tweneboa Kodua V from celebrating his sister's funeral. He said he would prove to him that he, the masquerading Kumawuhene Barima Sarfo Tweneboa Kodua, is the only, and one Kumawuhene. He said he is determined by all means possible to ensure that Barima Tweneboa Kodua V, a true royal from the Ananangya royal family, the matrilineal descendants of Barima Tweneboa Kodua I, the originator of the Kumawu Kodua Stool, never attended the funeral as Kumawuhene with a kingly umbrella over his head.

Truly as alleged, his "Ahenfie" (palace) boys numbering about twenty descended on Kumawu-Bodomase where the funeral was being held on Saturday 2nd April 2016 with machetes, guns folded and tied to their thighs/legs and other dangerous weapons with intent to disrupt the funeral. They said to have come to spy on, and to ensure that, Barima Tweneboa Kodua V, has no umbrella over his head or else, they would deal with him mercilessly. They went to Bodomase in two pick-up vans and a taxi.

Again, intelligence information received indicated that they had planned to physically eliminate (kill) Barima Tweneboa Kodua V and Kumawu Akwamuhene Nana Bafo II. In the morning, they chased Nana Akwamuhene who then drove to the Kumawu Police Station. These boys followed him up to the police station but the District Police Commander in Kumawu even though was informed of their intentions through a complaint lodged by Nana Akwanmuhene, he couldn't be bothered. He did not arrest them. He only advised Akwamuhene that if the boys had decided to injure or kill him if he attended the funeral, he will only advise him to stay away from the funeral as human life is precious.

Yes, human life is precious and his advice credible. However, is it how the police should behave; refusing to even verbally warn those intending-murderers? Nana Akwamuhene went back to Wonoo deciding not to attend the funeral as admonished by the Police Commander. Later, he decided to go when the supporters of Barima Tweneboa Kodua V were alerted to what had happened and they rushed down to Wonoo in a car to fetch him.

In a nutshell, the supporters of Dr Yaw Sarfo picked a fight with the supporters of Barima Tweneboa Kodua V in Kumawu-Bodomase, his own home turf. The alleged Kumawuhene Barima Sarfo Tweneboa Koduas (Dr Yaw Sarfo) boys were overwhelmed by the supporters of Kumawuhene Barima Tweneboa Kodua V. They then ran away to lay ambush at Mpapremu for those who would go to bury Diana, the deceased younger sister of Barima Tweneboa Kodua V, whose sorrowful death occurred in Brussels in February 2016.

They fired warning gunshots into the bush and used other deadly weapons to fight the supporters of Barima Tweneboa Kodua V when they took Diana to her final resting place at Mpapremu in Kumawu, the burial ground for the matrilineal descendants of Barima Tweneboa Kodua I.

Serious intelligence information indicates that Dr Yaw Sarfos boys have vowed to eliminate both, or one of, the following persons, Barima Tweneboa Kodua V and Akwamuhene Nana Bafo II, without whom there will be no longer any legal or physical challenge to Dr Yaw Sarfo and his bogus enstoolment as Kumawuhene. The Kumawu police have been alerted to this but the Police Commander who not long ago accepted a free gift (sheep) from Dr Yaw Sarfo and who is a lapdog to Kumawuhemaa and Dr Yaw Sarfo, is keeping a blind eye to it.

Dr Yaw Sarfo has not even 5% of Kumawuman to his camp as against about 95% supporting Barima Tweneboa Kodua V yet, he is courting disaster. He should bear in mind the law of self-defence and the natural law or principle of ACTION AND REACTION.

Could Dr Yaw Sarfo be that naive? Is using his small number of supporters to initiate violence the most appropriate way to assert his nonsensical authority? Who is advising him to take that line of action? Is it Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, Kumawuhemaa Abenaa Serwaah Amponsah, or his Spokesperson Dr James London? Should the violence escalate, or any death takes place, Dr Yaw Sarfo will be held squarely responsible. He must take care before the violence he has absurdly started engulfs him. He is playing with fire and fire will surely burn him.

Barima Tweneboa Kodua V who although is not a coward, listened to the admonition by the Police Commander. He never went to the funeral with his usual umbrella as advised by the police. This was to ward off any trouble yet the bunch of ignoramuses presided over by Dr Yaw Sarfo still went there looking for a fight.

They have been laying ambush stopping any car that looks like the one driven by Barima Tweneboa Kodua V. Dr Yaw Sarfo had better stop his boys before the worst happens. If the worse does happen, he will live to regret the day that he was born.

Are there not two chiefs in Tuoabodom in the Brong-Ahafo region? Are there not two chiefs in Suhyen in the Eastern region? Were there, or are there, not two paramount chiefs in Accra? In these mentioned areas, has any rival chief been terrorising the other? No! Then why is a faceless person inciting Dr Yaw Sarfo to play the fool by causing trouble that will in the end consume him? He had better wise up for he has not the public support and any violence or his stupid initiatives will not gain him the public support but rather public condemnation.

Rockson Adofo
03.04.2016 LISTEN

Dear Mr. President,

This is one of your most loyal supporters writing to you all the way from the Empire State (New York). I hope everything is going on well at the palace? Please say hi to the first lady and everyone in the first house for me. We are so proud of you and the efforts you are taking to put Ghana among the countries to watch. May God help you on that adventure.

Your Excellency, today I am not writing to praise you as I usually do on Facebook; I am more than angry this time round  and trust me I did not lose my last 1 Ghana cedi. I will try as much as I can to say what I want to say without being overpowered by the anger in me. So help me God. My anger is sparked by nothing more than Ghanas inability to produce passports on time and escalates when I remember that they dont even know when things shall normalize. I know in 8 out of 10 instances, we dont really do things on time, but sir, this situation is shameful, insane and for the first time, and to agree with the elephant family, incompetence at the highest level; not on your part though, but on the part of Ghana, well you are the president and commander in chief, so you might not be far from this.

Sir, I have some few questions for you and would be glad if you could help me with that: Question1: Please are you aware that the wait time for one to obtain a passport in Ghana, including at the various embassies abroad is about a year and or indefinite? Yes Sir I mean a year or indefinite!! People who applied for passports since June last year are yet to receive them and some offices say nothing than apologies for their incompetence. Question2: Please ooo, I just want to know, dont you think Ghanaians deserve an explanation as to why this is happening? Is it as a result of dumsor, or the machines to produce the passports are dead? I really cannot wrap my head around this issue. It seems so confusing and cannot be explained beyond incompetence on the part of whoever you have placed in charge of that area. My final question, Mr. President, do you know the effect of what is happening on the economic and socio-political lives of Ghanaians? Well I will tell you; maybe because of your busy schedule you have not given it a thought.

To begin with, imagine a Ghanaian business man who cannot travel outside the country to transact business because of a passport that needs renewal. With the current wait time of a year, it means he has to forget of whatever business he needs to transact until, if he is lucky, one year time. He will lose loyal customers, lost income, his family will lose their source of livelihood, people employed by him will lose their jobs and their families will lose their source of livelihood as well; no revenue means no taxes, and as such, the government will lose source of revenue. Sir for God sake, do you see the chain effect of this issue nobody cares about? Have you seen what incompetence in one sector can do? Hmmmm!!

Secondly, Your Excellency, there are several Ghanaians who are exploring different avenues to continue their education outside the country. So imagine someone who is just months away from getting into his dream school having to lose that opportunity because you kept an incompetent person in charge of issuing a document every rightful Ghanaian is entitled to. Sir, most of the people who man the affairs of Ghana today had their education abroad. The knowledge that such people bring back cannot be underestimated in Ghanas search for development theories and action plans. So by the action of that incompetent person in charge of passports, an individual loses a dream school, Ghana loses a resource and our development is deprived of one more advanced thinking head; waaa look, you see our lives??

Thirdly, Mr. President, there are thousands of Ghanaians outside the country who are far away from their wives and kids just like me  I mean those suffering from lack of vitamin wives due to the decision to seek greener pastures away from home. These people have been following the authorities of their new homes to permit them to reunite with their families. Because of this lack of vitamin wives, we sleep like dirty clothes that are packed and readied for the laundry when the temperature reaches ear-freezing levels. Please sir, how will you feel if you discover that a man who struggled for 5 years to get his family to cross the oceans to his new home is losing that opportunity because of the gargantuan incompetency on the part of someone you can easily replace or a problem you can easily fix? The last time, I read an article that nearly sent me to the Bronx Lebanon hospital that smiles at the grand concourse and the roaring cars that climb it like baby monkeys in the jungle; well I did not, but the bucket of fufu I consumed that day disappeared. The article came with a video in which angry passport applicants mentioned that workers at the passport office had misplaced their bio-details. Koi Mr. Dr. Mahama! Misplaced personal information paa? In this era of modernization, Ghana is still using Museum species in processing passports? Ahh hmmm, what is even our crime?

Sir, permit me to compare a bit; in the US here, there is an express passport service that takes 2 weeks or less. And there is an emergency one where you can walk to the office and come out with a passport in hand, if you can justify the need for that. Why cant we fix this issue once and for all? Your Excellency, the incompetence on the part of your employees is breaking marriages, closing businesses and denying families the opportunity to reunite again after years. As a matter of fact there is no excuse for this, it is gross incompetence. Kaashirigu!!

As someone who has constantly maintained that I want to return home and contribute my part to the development of a nation that gave me more than any country can, nothing scares me away from home than the weaknesses in our essential institutions. The truth is that when you get use to where people do what they are required to do without even requesting for a thank you, you find it hard to accept people who want you to beg and bribe them to do what they are paid to do; such breaks my heart and tears me apart. We dont deserve this as citizens, we did nothing wrong to merit this treatment from people who live on our taxes. That is unfair; Please sir God does not like this ohhhhh!!

To conclude, please tell the boys not to run radio/TV stations to explain; please fix this. There is nothing much in processing passports than capturing the information, doing your confirmation of details, and printing the booklets. If the machines are dead, replace them, and do it now. This does not need a committee  just do it! It is penned-robbery to continue paying the people in charge of this task when they are doing nothing. Ahhh, Ewurade! Fine! Naawuni nyeya. Okay bye!

Your Disappointed Supporter,

Abubakari Sadiq Iddrisu

Assurance/Audit Staff, Ernst and Young LLP, NY.

Certified Public Accountant, NY, USA.

Member, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

MBA Public Accounting, Iona College, NY.

B. A Economics, Lehman College, NY.
GE Oil & Gas global footprint is a key asset in underpinning growth and development in key energy regions the world over. It leverages their global network of facilities and expertise in support of customer operations in existing and emerging countries with oil and gas interests.

On Friday (18 March), leaders from both GE and GE Oil & Gas took the opportunity to reinforce our organizations commitment to supporting Ghanas energy potential, during a visit to Aberdeen, UK by His Excellency President John Dramani Mahama.

With Ghana keen to tap into the oil and gas expertise built up in the North-East of Scotland over more than 50 years of offshore operations, the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce organized a Growth in Ghana forum as part of the Presidential visit to Scotland, designed to provide a platform for companies to come together to discuss the multi-sector opportunities available in the country.

CEO & President of GE Oil & Gas Subsea Systems & Drilling, Neil Saunders, and CEO & President of GE UK & Ireland, Mark Elborne had the opportunity to meet with His Excellency President Mahama in person, discussing GEs focus and commitment to supporting the growth and development of Ghanas industrial sector.

Mark Elborne said: I was honored to meet H.E. President John Dramani Mahama today. At GE we share the people of Ghanas desire to develop the critical infrastructure needed to power the countrys future.

GEs long history of investment in Ghana dates back to the 1960s, with the provision of equipment for the construction of the Akosombo Dam. Today, it continues to work closely with the countrys leaders on plans to develop the critical infrastructure needed for continued energy management in the country.

More recently, in 2014, GE opened a new 200-capacity permanent office in Accra. Today GE counts a total of over 70 employees in the country  the vast majority of whom are Ghanaians. In April 2015 GE announced the award of an $850 million order for the supply of equipment to the Offshore Cape Three Points (OCTP) block.

This project is currently being executed and, as part of this activity, GE Oil & Gas has committed to long-term capacity building in the region, including the construction of a manufacturing facility in Takoradi Port, due for completion by end-July.
03.04.2016 LISTEN

Today, we gather to remember and give thanks to God, for a man who touched the lives of many. A man whose selfless devotion to public service, whose acts of good, endeared him to many.

Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, has left his mark on a generation of Ghanaians who hungered for democracy and good governance in the affairs of our nation, a generation whose hopes and aspirations dwelt on the ideal of a just and fair society, where individual liberties, equality of opportunity, and prosperity would flourish.

Jake was a man who excelled at his craft. He had a distinction that is increasingly rare in the politics of our nation - dignity, truthfulness, a high sense of purpose - and a unique ability, arguably unparalleled - to package a message and make the complex simple and easy for all to understand!

The fields of our nations history, are well harvested by the many great men and women who have gone before us. Jake was born into a pre-eminent political family, his father being one of Ghanas big six. We will remember Jake in many ways as an heir to a political tradition that blazed the trail of Ghanas independence, and one whose own forays into our contemporary politics, advanced the dream of our forebears, and left a mark worthy of the courage, bravery and the high expectations they set.

Jake was a teacher, a mentor, a strategist and master tactician. He, in many ways encapsulated the essence and values of the NPP  a man whose acts in high office, and achievements as National Chairman and Campaign Manager of our Party, bear testimony to all he represented.

Those who had the honour, indeed pleasure to know this decent man, deeply ache at his passing. He was an honest and selfless man who was passionate about public service and who fought to see the welfare of our people improved. He led our Party to two electoral victories, as Presidential Campaign Manager, but that accolade, was never one of which he would boast. His electoral campaign successes were born out of skill the human touch! He rose to the office of National Chairman, but in this, he was most approachable. Always one to call to commiserate ones loss, one to meet a need, one to share and stretch a helping hand, one to encourage!

I vividly recall when I was elected Chairman of NPP UK, he was among the first to call from Ghana with his congratulations and good wishes! Unlike many, he had a poignant message, one deeply steeped in the wisdom that only he could muster. His advice to me focused on the task ahead, the need for a leadership that would make unity of purpose our goal. He recalled the role NPP UK has played in the history of our Party, and urged me to continue to uphold the pre-eminence of NPP UK among external branches, and to seek to make a difference.

We can still hear his voice of reason over the cacophony of noises that have flooded the airwaves of our national political debate. We will miss his calmness, his wisdom, and his cool head! He was a unifier! He resolved conflict by always looking for a common cause. Always looking for the good, for reason steeped and rooted in the values and traditions of our Party.

My last meeting with Jake, was a chance meeting at Kotaka Airport. I was returning to London, and he and Auntie Ester were travelling to Johannesburg. We sat in the lounge and chatted, reminiscing, while occasionally discussing the finer details of what it will take to win the coming elections. Simple, yet potent and deep truths  the very currency of Jake.

We cannot know what the future holds. What we can do is to live this life with purpose, to bear fruit, fruit that will abide. Jake has gone home now. He is gone, leaving those who knew him with enduring memories of the good he did, the light he shed on so many, the hope he projected. He kept our hope alive, and delivered in his contribution to our goal of building a strong Party, and a prosperous Ghana!

We share in the loss of Auntie Ester, his dear wife, and the entire family, and mourn with them. The NPP has lost a leader. The nation has lost a statesman. Another gentleman of Ghanas politics, has gone to rest.

The light of Jakes life that has shone on our political landscape for three decades is a light that has gone out of our lives. Yes there is darkness today, but his was no ordinary light. His light will continue to shine in the lives that he sowed in, his wife, Auntie Ester and family, the many he mentored, the fruit he bore! For that light he represented, stood for values that endure  love, democracy, individual liberty and freedoms, and above all, a light that represented truth and selflessness in public service!

May God bless the soul of Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey.

Michael Ansah

Chairman, NPP UK

All Saints Church ,London, 2 April 2016
Mr Patrick Komla Seddoh, 91, a retired public servant and distinguished career diplomat was honoured as the oldest pioneer of the Patrician Society of the Adoration Chapel of Christ the King Parish in Accra, on Saturday, March 19.

The day marked a special feast day Mass to commemorate St Patrick, a missionary, bishop and a patron saint of Ireland.

Thursday, March 17 was St Patricks Day, which means a lot to the Patrician Society as well as associates and affiliates. The event was characterised by morning Mass at the various parishes.

St. Patrick was born near the west coast of Britain and was the son of a Roman civil servant.

At 16 years he was carried off by Irish raiders and sold as slave in Ireland, where he worked as a shepherd for six years. During this time he became very religious, spending long hours in prayer and meditation.

Patrick finally escaped Ireland by means of a ship sailing to the European continent. He was reunited with his family then spent 15 years in a monastery.

In 432 he was consecrated a bishop and sent to preach the gospel to the Irish people. He visited the northern and western parts of the island where Christian missionaries had not yet reached.

His efforts were opposed by pagan druids and even by other Christians, who criticised his methods.

Patricks preaching bore great fruit and he ordained the clergy, established dioceses and founded a number of monasteries.

Reverend Father Patrick Quarcoopome in a sermon asked Catholics to emulate St Patrick by meeting the needs of the public through practical help.

He said they should also accept suffering to make sure the gospel reaches everyone, be empathetic towards one another and strive to be ambassadors of peace.

Rev Fr Quarcoopome said Christians should not let their uniqueness or differences such as colour divide them since their diversity bring beauty to the world.

He said St Patrick like Jesus Christ challenged the political and religious authorities of his time and suffered the consequence in his drive to promote the welfare of the people.

He said as church people should stand against the powerful in society to seek the welfare of others.

Rev Fr Quarcoopome asked the congregation to be like St Patrick by evangelising to change the conscience of the people.

Rev Fr Bonaventure Quaidoo, Interim Secretary of the society asked Catholics to strive to be a friend of Jesus Christ just as St Patrick.

The day was marked with intercessory prayers for the sick and needy as well as charity work. At the organ during the celebration was Mr. Patrick Anumel, the C.E.O. of the GN Bank.

Seddoh was Ambassador to several countries and was also the first African-South of the Sahara, to be elected to the prestigious post of Chairman of the Executive Board of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

He was born at Keta in the Volta Region in January, 1925 and began his basic education in 1930 at Keta Roman Catholic School. He completed with Standard Seven School Leaving Certificate in 1941 and entered St. Augustines College at Cape Coast in 1944.

He was among the exceptionally brilliant students that gained Cambridge School Certificate Grade One with exemption from London Matriculation in 1948. This earned him a three year scholarship to the prestigious University of Paris Sorbonne and Alliance Francaise in Paris, France.

After an intense academic work, he earned an Advanced Diploma in French Studies in 1950 and a Diploma in the teaching of French as a foreign language in 1952. He continued his education at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he graduated in 1955 with a masters degree in Political Economy, Moral Philosophy and French.

He has been a great supporter of the Church in Ghana. He and his wife are noted financiers of the Holy Family Catholic Church at Woe in the Volta Region. In Accra, he worships at the Christ the King Catholic Church in Cantonments.

He was for several years a member of the Christ the King Parish Pastoral Council.

In April 2004, on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of Christ the King Church, the Holy Father Pope John Paul II, now a saint, imparted his apostolic blessing on Patrick Seddoh. (See marshallan.org for more information on Patrick Seddoh).
With his personal experience of how he acquired formal education, Hon Emmanuel Kwasi Bedzrah, the Member of Parliament for Ho West Constituency commits a chunk of his share of the District Assembly Common Fund annually to paying school fees of needy students at the tertiary and second cycle levels.

At the second cycle level, about eight hundred persons from across the constituency have benefited from the scheme since its inception in September 2007. Presently, about hundred persons fees is being paid in Awudome SHS, Kpedze SHS, Dzolo SHS, Abutia SHTS, Tsito SHTS and Akome SHTS all of which are in the Ho West District. The scheme also pays fees of three persons in two schools outside of the district which are Mawuli SHS and Keta SHTS.

Meeting with Second Cycle Beneficiaries

For the first time since 2007, Hon Bedzrah has met with the present beneficiaries of the scheme in the Assembly Hall of Awudome Senior High School on Thursday, March 31, 2016. The meeting offered him the opportunity to listen to the specific problems of the beneficiaries and to also educate them on the structure of the scheme. It also offered him the opportunity to gather first-hand information on what the beneficiaries think of the scheme as he sets out to streamline its activities. Hon Bedzrah challenged beneficiaries to study hard and score good grades in their final examinations to justify their inclusion in the scheme. He admonished them to take full advantage of the scheme to achieve their dreams saying their inclusion in the scheme is not a right, but a privilege which they must not waste.

On his part, the Headmaster of Awudome Senior High School, Mr Emmanuel K Amu who welcomed the beneficiaries to the meeting asked them to forever remain grateful to the MP for instituting such a scheme which has become their saviour and through which they can achieve their ambitions.

Touching on the structure of the scheme, Hon Bedzrah was full of appreciation to Mr Kafui Kwawu (Shaka), the Youth Organizer of the ruling National Democratic Congress in the Ho West Constituency for sacrificing his time and other resources in coordinating activities of the scheme since its inception until this year when he transferred that responsibility to officers at his Constituency Secretariat. The MP hinted that he has tasked his officers to define the selection criteria of beneficiaries to make the scheme much more representative and to ensure the neediest persons become the beneficiaries. He also said plans are advanced to make the scheme performance based where beneficiaries are withdrawn from the scheme if they fail to meet an average pass mark at the end of an academic year. According to him, these measures are being put in place to ensure beneficiaries dont take the scheme for granted knowing they risk missing out on completing senior high school if they failed to perform.

The MP said to ensure the investment he makes in the students doesnt go waste, he has arranged with members of the University of Ghana chapter of Volta Students Association of Ghana to hold extra class sessions for them during long vacation periods. This is to augment the efforts of their teachers and to enable those of them who are slow learners to catch up with their mates. It is also meant to serve as an opportunity for the students to be taken through all the required topics in their syllabuses to get them fully ready for their final examination. He challenged the beneficiaries to take advantage of this opportunity when the time comes to make good grades that will enable them to enter tertiary institutions of their choice.

Developing a Tertiary Attitude

Mr Moses Adzei, a lecturer in the Music Department at the University of Education, Winneba who spoke on why senior high school students should develop the right attitude that prepares them to fit into a tertiary environment cited himself as a beneficiary of a scholarship scheme which made it possible for him to complete secondary school. According to Mr Adzei, the tertiary environment requires self-discipline and purposefulness since no one will chase you to go for evening studies and or to do your assignments. He therefore challenged the beneficiaries to begin to develop such qualities if they are to make good tertiary students.
Tripoli (AFP) - Libya's National Oil Corporation and Central Bank, backbones of its wealth, have thrown their support behind a UN-backed unity government in a blow to a rival administration refusing to cede power.

The two institutions, which have struggled to remain neutral since Libya's 2011 armed revolt and subsequent turbulence, said they welcomed the Government of National Accord, in separate statements.

Prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj and members of the GNA arrived Wednesday in Tripoli where a rival government, unrecognised by the international community, has ruled since mid-2014.

The Tripoli administration, established after the powerful Libya Dawn militia alliance overrun the capital that year, has demanded that Sarraj leave or surrender, branding the GNA "illegal".

Founded in 1970, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) is based in Tripoli where Libya's Central Bank -- the depositor of the country's oil wealth -- also has its headquarters.

They have continued to operate independently despite the chaos that engulfed Libya after the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

"We have been working with Prime Minister Sarraj and the Presidency Council to put this period of divisions and rivalry behind us," NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla.

"We have been looking to the future, and now we have a clear international legal framework in place," he added in a statement published Saturday on the NOC website.

The Central Bank of Libya also "welcomed" the GNA and wished them "all the success in carrying out the difficult tasks ahead of them".

It urged Libyans to "now more than ever to unite and collaborate by working together to ensure that security and safety prevail in Libya, to stop fighting and bloodshed, to empower the judicial system and to embrace the rule of law".

A Libyan financial expert said the NOC and Central Bank support amounted to "a resounding vote of confidence" in the GNA.

"The two institutions are the basis of Libyan livelihood and without them the GNA would not be able to function," he said, asking not to be named.

- Battered economy -

Oil is Libya's main natural resource, with reserves estimated at 48 billion barrels, the largest in Africa.

The North African nation had an output capacity of about 1.6 million barrels per day before the uprising, accounting for more than 95 percent of exports and 75 percent of the budget.

But production has slumped amid violence as rival forces battled for control of oil terminals.

Control of the oil industry is key for the GNA, which not only needs to unite the country but also shore up an economy weakened by the drop of oil prices on the international market.

Since the revolt, and the emergence of two rival administrations, the central bank struggled to keep the country afloat, urging tough spending cuts and hinting that it dipped into foreign reserves.

On Thursday, Sarraj met the head of the Central Bank to discuss measures to safeguard banks and tackle the country's "cash flow problem", his office said.

"Difficult times lie ahead. The immediate challenge is to end the cash crisis," Mattia Toaldo, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said earlier in the week.

Following Sarraj's arrival in Tripoli, pledges of loyalty began pouring in and supporters rallied in the city although his government still needs the formal approval of the house of representatives (HoR).

"The HoR remains the legitimate body to endorse the GNA. I urge the HoR to hold a comprehensive session to vote on GNA in free will," UN envoy to Libya Martin Kobler said in a tweet Sunday.

On Thursday, the mayors of 10 coastal cities that were under the control of the Tripoli authorities called on Libyans to "support the national unity government".

The following day, guards in charge of securing installations in Libya's so-called eastern "oil crescent" also offered their support and said they would hand over to the unity government three oil terminal.

The UN Security Council has passed Resolution 2278 stating that oil exports from Libya must be placed under the authority of the GNA.
The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has boycotted two radio stations in Accra belonging to the Despite Group of Companies, owners of Accra-based Peace FM.

According to the NPP, the radio stations, which are Neat FM and Okay FM, consistently discuss all matters of the NPP with a negative slant.

The party in a statement signed by its Deputy Communications Director, Anthony Abayifaa Karbo further ordered its communicators to stop speaking to the stations.

They claimed that several attempts to ensure a balanced representation of the NPP has proved futile hence the directive.

Several letters, phone calls and face to face discussions between us and other management members, the producers and host of the programmes, to desist from this unethical practice of journalism have gone unheeded, the statement added.

The NPP is a firm believer and practitioner of multi-party democracy, with freedom of expression as its cornerstone, but the Party also believes in the exercise of this freedom with responsibility, and in this case, professionalism.

NPP boycotted Asempa FM in 2011

This is not the first time the NPP has taken such stance against a radio station in Ghana.

In 2011, the party boycotted Accra-based Asempa FM and directed its communicators not to represent the party on the stations political programme Ekosii Sen.

The action, according to the party, was because Asempa FM continually focused its programming agenda on attacking the Presidential Candidate of the NPP, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the party as a whole.

Below is the full statement:

NPP BOYCOTTS OKAY and NEAT FM

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) wishes to inform its members, supporters, and sympathisers that the Party has decided to boycott all political programmes on Okay FM and Neat FM, with immediate effect.

Programs on the two stations which are hosted by Kwame Nkrumah Tikesie and Adakabre Frimpong Manso respectively have in recent months developed a format to consistently discuss all matters of the NPP with a negative slant. These programs have also concentrated on encouraging submissions which denigrate and insult the Party and its Flagbearer.

Several letters, phone calls and face to face discussions between us and other management members, the producers and host of the programmes, to desist from this unethical practice of journalism have gone unheeded. The mission and vision of the stations currently seem to be to destroy the NPP.

The NPP is a firm believer and practitioner of multi-party democracy, with freedom of expression as its cornerstone, but the Party also believes in the exercise of this freedom with responsibility, and in this case, professionalism.

Party executives, communications officers and members have been advised to desist from speaking or patronizing the stations political programs with immediate effect.

Signed

Anthony Abayifaa Karbo

(Deputy Director of Communications)
03.04.2016 LISTEN

The arrest of Dr. Edmund Ayo Ani, Managing-Director of Marbles and Granites, a quarrying company, by a SWAT Team from the Ghana Police Service (GPS) makes for a quite fascinating reading (See I Ordered Arrest of Marbles and Granites MD  Baba Kamara MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/2/16). It makes for fascinating reading because the man who caused the arrest of Dr. Ayo Ani, Alhaji Baba Kamara, is a National Security Advisor who apparently believes that he can take the law into his own hands.

Well, whoever put such criminal thought into Alhaji Kamaras head ought to promptly disabuse him of the same. In other words, this National Democratic Congress vigilante ought to be thoroughly deprogrammed before he irreparably runs himself over the proverbial cliff.

Dr. Ayo Ani is accused of having taken photographs of some 500 Mahindra 4x4 pick-up trucks, reportedly belonging to the National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE), and making these pictures readily available to those of us who are avidly concerned about the salutary development of Ghanaian democracy. We are further told that the photographed trucks were being illegally rebranded in the party colors of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), which simply means that the NCCE personnel would be criminally circumvented from undertaking their comfortably salaried work of educating the Ghanaian public and the general citizenry on their right and need to exercising their franchise in the lead-up to Election 2016. Actually, this is only one of the legion civic responsibilities of the staff of the NCCE.

We must also quickly point out that this was the very statutory establishment headed by Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei before President Mahama transferred her to the Electoral Commission (EC). My intention here is not to accuse Commissioner Osei of any wrongdoing, absolutely none whatsoever, but to merely point out the fact that the connection here is eerily unmistakable. Now, Alhaji Kamara has just announced to the world that he intends to have Dr. Ayo Ani arraigned before a legitimately constituted court of law and rigorously prosecuted beginning this coming Monday. And so the tough-talking National Security Advisor can rest assured that those of us avid scholars, students and amateur observers of the national political scene are studiously watching.

Alhaji Kamara also says that he caused the summary arrest of Dr. Ayo Ani because the yard or landed property on which these NCCE-consigned Mahindra pick-up trucks were being kept for covert rebranding is his bona fide private property. We dont doubt his ability to distinguish his own private property from that of the Ghanaian State and its citizenry at large. In short, what is more important here and in dire need of explaining by Alhaji Kamara, is how these vehicles allegedly belonging to the NCCE found their way onto his personal property and, as well, why he and/or his assigns decided to have vehicular properties belonging to the Republic of Ghana branded in the partisan colors of the National Democratic Congress. And, by the way, how much has the Government of Ghana been paying to Alhaji Kamara by way of monthly rent?

Indeed, Dr. Ayo Ani may well have done our nation and Ghanas fledgling democratic dispensation and culture the greatest service of his life; and if ours were a delectably functioning democracy, our parliamentarians would be studiously deliberating on how to fittingly honor Dr. Ayo Ani with our highest national civic merit award. You may not believe this, dear reader, but you had better believe it; and it is the fact the man who is really in serious trouble here is Alhaji Baba Kamara, not Dr. Edmund Ayo Ani, who was laudably playing the yeomanly role of a patriotic citizen to the putridly corrupt para-executive scam-artistry of the man presumptuous and shameless enough to show him where power lies.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
03.04.2016 LISTEN

There is no doubt that Ghana has wandered in its effort to enlist into the group of developed countries. There is also no doubt that Ghana has all it takes to become a developed country and an economic superpower in the world. What is missing in Ghana's quest in the past five decades to become what it has always yearned to be, as many would readily point at as its weakness, is ineffective leadership after its first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Dr Kwame Nkrumah is a special character to many Ghanaians and many people in the world.

His political and economic achievements are unmatched by that of all black Sub-Sahara African Presidents.

He became the first Prime Minister on the attainment of independence in 1957 and the President in 1960 when Ghana became a Republic.

Ghana witnessed very impressive achievements under his administration. The economy saw visible improvements during the early years of his rule.

His government set out to establish an egalitarian and socialist society that was to provide better life and happiness for all Ghanaians.

The government set up many public corporations and state institutions to cater for the industrial and agricultural needs of the country.

Under Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, a number of social services were established.

Ghana became the first country in Africa to provide free education and medical care for its people.

Two universities, one at Cape Coast and the other in Kumasi, were established during his rule.

Also a well-planned network of roads and an international airport in Accra.

He led Ghana to attain one of the highest standards of living in Africa.

Since his overthrow in 1966 none of the Presidents after can be measured to him. In fact, all tried, in a way or another, to associate with him.

He supervised the building of the Harbour and the Tema township for industrial workers, the gigantic hydroelectric Volta Dam at Akosombo and a progressive housing scheme was rolled out in all regions. These and many more are some of the monuments for which Dr. Nkrumah is highly rated in Ghana and the entire world.

Dr. Nkrumah relentlessly pursued his idea of Pan-Africanism both internationally and locally and emphasised the need for African Unity which greatly contributed to the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963.

As if he had control over the future, he left Ghana with his last wonder in Egypt. He hid Onsy until the year 2000 when he ordered him to take a journey of no return to Ghana. The instruction was: Go and complete my unfinished business."

A meeting with Onsy revealed a wealth of knowledge and intelligence to lead Ghana into the comity of developed nations.

Onua Kojo Nkansah

[email protected], http://www.facebook.com/Onua Kojo Nkansah
Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, Education Minister

03.04.2016 LISTEN

Accra, Ghana, April 4, 2016 - Last week, there was a public uproar over the content of a Primary 1 textbook titled "Natural Science for Primary Schools written and published by one Albert Joseph Quarm. According to the said book, the function of the human head is for carrying objects. Both the Author and the Ghana Education Service (GES) have since said they find nothing wrong with the description, despite public concerns.

VIAM Africa (Ghana) joins others to strongly object to this inappropriate description of the functions of the head. The function of the human head includes ingestion of nutrients, intake of air, use of senses such as vision, hearing, tasting, feeling, and smelling. The human head also provides communication, mind and brain functions.

Given that the functions of the sense organs, mind and brain are extensively treated in Primary 3 and later years, the Author could have emphasised the communication function of the head such as nodding (up and down), and shaking (from side to side). This can easily be mimed by the kids during lesson delivery in the form of a role play. It is not the case that the human head cannot be used to carry objects but that example is inappropriate given that an important purpose of education is to instil good habits and moral values.

So the Author could not have equally said the mouth is used for smoking Marijuana; or the leg for kicking ass! Indeed, there is some evidence , especially in African context, suggesting that carrying objects (e.g. containers with water) on the head over a certain distance is associated with musculoskeletal disorders, such as spinal (neck or back) pain or other joint problems, with recommendation for desisting from carrying things on the head.

We contend that the role of the body parts including the head must be taught within the context of healthy lifestyle. A large body of studies has shown that promoting positive health behaviour of pupils within schools has the potential to improve their educational outcomes, and their health and wellbeing. It is in light of this that we reject the pontification of the function of the human head as a load carrier.

An important observation about the present issue is the fact that, the specific content in question was captured in a Primary 1 textbook, although it falls under Unit 3 of the GES Syllabus for Primary 2. To think that the GES approved this content together with the obvious inappropriate examples stated above is very worrying. This comes at the back of a similar report published on citifmonline.com (24th November, 2015), in which a Junior High School(JHS) teacher, Mr Phanuel Ayawly, petitioned the Ministry of Education, requesting the withdrawal of a set of integrated science textbooks for JHS.

According to the petition, the book titled "New Integrated Science for Junior High Schools: Discovery series, authored by Theodore E.T. Kom-Zuta and published by Sedco and Pearson were full of grammatical and typographical errors. Till date, little or nothing has been said about it and the books are still in used.

VIAM Africa (Ghana) holds the view that the blame for all these problems in the textbooks should be laid squarely at the door step of the Ministry of Education and GES. A textbook is generally conceptualised as a standard work on a particular subject designed for classroom use with appropriate vocabulary, illustrations and student exercises. They are supposed to be used as the primary material for referencing and instructional delivery. The implication is that textbooks must necessarily be purged from factual inaccuracies, grammatical errors, misrepresentations and inappropriate illustrations. At present, there is a textbook development and distribution policy for pre-tertiary schools published by the Ministry of Education. Section 7 of the policy highlights the processes that textbook manuscripts go through before final approval for printing in wholesale.

The testing of the manuscript according to the policy is carried out by the Curriculum Research and Development Division (CRDD) and is supposed to be done for a period of not more than two months and covers not more than five units per textbook (Section 7v). The policy further states that, every textbook selected should meet a minimum evaluation standard which includes 80% conformity with the syllabus.

However, the recommended duration and the scope of coverage for evaluating the quality of the textbook manuscript are likely to undermine critical scrutiny of the textbook. Hence, important details and information might skip the personnel from CRDD who are mandated to carry out this exercise. We contend strongly that this policy imperative and arrangement has not made CRDD perform this function effectively.

It is also questionable for the MoE to be accorded the right to waive the entire process of assessing the quality of the textbook for use in the Basic schools as contained in the policy document. The questions that we wish to ask are, why should evaluation criteria cover not more than five units of the entire textbook? What constitutes the pre-evaluation stage of the manuscript testing? And under what circumstances would the MoE waive the entire process of post evaluation?

VIAM Africa (Ghana) wishes to make the following policy recommendations:

To align the curricula with the aims of education in the 21st Century, the MoE should conduct a holistic review of the curricula and developed an open and flexible curriculum framework that caters for students diverse needs. The MoE must re-evaluate all government approved textbooks as practically as possible. Textbooks which contain factual inaccuracies, inappropriate illustrations and poor proofreading should be withdrawn from the school system immediately. The minimum evaluation standards established in the textbook should be revised to take account of the components of the curriculum (aims, content, learning/teaching activities, assessment) as the main benchmarks of quality textbooks. Teachers must be the final point of the textbook evaluation criteria and the post evaluation should cover all the units in the textbook.

Signed

Dr. Prince Armah

Executive Director
03.04.2016 LISTEN

A total of 142 incidents of free expression violations were recorded across West Africa in 2015. Almost 90 percent of the incidents were violations against journalists and media organisations, a development that further highlights the important issue of safety of journalists in the region. The press freedom violations were predominantly in the form of arrests, attacks, threats, suspensions and censorships among others.

The Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), Sulemana Braimah made the figures known when he made a presentation on safety of journalists in West Africa at the Legon Centre for International Affairs (LECIAD).

Mr. Braimah was speaking at a two-day training workshop for 18 journalists selected from seven West Africa countries on March 30 and 31. The training workshop which was organized jointly by the School of Information and Communication Studies and LECIAD was focused on training journalists in conflict reporting and peace journalism.

The situation in many countries either remained the same or got worse than the previous year. The violations recorded in 2015 represent a 40% increase over the previous year, 2014, he explained. This is the trend and this is why the issue of safety of journalists remains very important.

The worst perpetrators of violations were security officials, state agencies and organized groups. The countries with the highest incidents of violations were Nigeria (34); Niger (16); and The Gambia (15). Both Guinea and Senegal recorded 11 incidents. Ghana, Burkina Faso and Cote dIvoire each recorded 10 violations. The rest were Benin (7), Sierra Leone (6), Togo (4), Mali (3), Guinea-Bissau (2), Liberia (2) and Mauritania (1). No incident was recorded in Cape Verde.

The figures represented only the incidents that were reported and therefore the situation in the region could be worse than presented.

Mr. Braimah urged the journalists to be interested in supporting advocacy around journalists safety. He also challenged them to advocate for their media organisations in the region to develop and implement safety policies for their workers.

At a recent meeting of the leading press freedom organisations in West Africa, the issue of safety of journalists was highlighted as a major concern affecting press freedom and media development in the region. The organisations from the 16 countries of West Africa, issued a joint communique urging governments in the region to prioritise safety of journalists in all countries.
03.04.2016 LISTEN

Long before the Constitutional Court handed down its damning decision on the theft-prone profligacy of the Supreme Leader of the African National Congress (NDC), at least that is how he well appears to envisage himself, revered national leaders of global renown like Archbishop Desmond Tutu had called for the prompt resignation of President Jacob Zuma. Now an even more politically hefty personality in the country has added his voice to those calling for Mr. Zuma to stand down (See Anti-Apartheid Veteran Urges Zuma to Resign Al-Jazeera / Ghanaweb.com 3/3/16).

I know two of his former associates who may be having that proverbial time of their lives. Going primarily by what has so far been dished out into the public domain by the global media, the 73-year-old successor to President Thabo Mbeki  actually, there was an interim leader before Mr. Zuma  is not by any measure one who ought to have been elected the preeminent citizen of Mr. Nelson R. Mandelas South Africa. In the past, Mr. Zuma has been furiously dogged by allegations of bribery and corruption and influence peddling. He was once even charged with raping the girlfriend of his own daughter who had gone to spend the night at the Zuma residence.

Mr. Zuma would later claim in court that the sexual intercourse with his daughters then-best friend had been perfectly consensual; he would be let off the hook, against the vehement protestations of the victim, her lawyers and supporters and sympathizers. But what made this case all the more remarkable was not the shocking luridness of it all, but rather the fact that his victim was also a clinically certified Aids patient. Her alleged rapist had not used any prophylactic or condom. He would also claim not to have been the least bit concerned about the fact that he could well have contracted the deadly Aids virus.

The two men who may well be having a jolly time with the increasingly deafening calls for Zumas resignation are, of course, the rabidly anti-white racist radical African nationalist Mr. Julius Malema, a onetime staunch ally of Mr. Zuma and the latters protege who had a falling out with Mr. Zuma over Mr. Malemas intemperate tirades and virulently hostile language and provocative public pronouncements against white South Africans. Not surprisingly, Mr. Malema would earn the loyalty and enjoy the unwavering friendship and support of Mrs. Winnie Mandela. Today, Mr. Malema is the founder and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. He may be aptly envisaged to be the political avatar of Zimbabwes President Robert Mugabe, at least the latter-day Mugabe.

The Nkandla Scandal was so viciously and selfishly insensitive that it may well have made some frontline or diehard advocates and champions of the erstwhile Apartheid political culture feel divinely vindicated. It involves the inexcusably criminal misappropriation of public funds for private and invidious ethnic self-glorification. Mr. Zuma would be accused of having deliberately and unconscionably diverted public development dole for the renovation and massive expansion of his private residence in his Nkandla homeland and a quite remarkable number of homes of his neighbors and clansmen and women. If you did not either belong to his ethnic group or neighborhood, then you might as well literally go chew grass.

We must also not lose sight of the vicious hostility visited on the distinguished Black South African woman legal expert appointed to independently probe the Nkandla Scandal. The man is also allegedly so thoroughgoing corrupt that like a Swazi royal chieftain, he takes a new wife just about every couple of years and keeps producing children by women young enough to be his own daughters and children tender in age enough to be his own grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. In sum, there is almost nothing redemptive or attractive about the man, except being used as a prime butt of jokes by standup comedians.

Now Mr. Ahmed Kathrada has also called for the immediate resignation of President Zuma. The call was reportedly contained in a letter published on the website of the foundation created in Mr. Kathradas name. The Robben Island graduates voice carries considerable weight with the front-row leaders of the ANC because Mr. Kathrada was present when the oldest Black-African political party on the primeval continent was transformed into the fairly formidable anti-racist and anti-settler-colonial fighting force that this originally civil liberties and rights protest organization later became.

Mr. Kathrada was one of the Rivonia Eight convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor on Robben Island in 1964. The Rivonia Revolutionaries would have been sentenced to death if the South African judicial system had had capital punishment on its books, as it were. At 86 years old, Mr. Kathrada has witnessed how real humiliation and powerlessness looks and feels like.

The other man who may be gaily having the time of his life is former President Thabo Mbeki, the man whose widely perceived short-shrift treatment of a grassroots-hatched Mr. Zuma precipitated the painful political debacle of the former. At each fateful turn and/or twist, it is the imperative necessity to preserving the integrity of the African National Congress, as a revolutionary vehicle for a post-Apartheid society of multiracial and multicultural equality before the law, that ought to matter more than all else. And it is for this reason why Mr. Kathradas call for his immediate resignation cannot be indefinitely postponed or cavalierly ignored by President Jacob Zuma.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is a former Honorary Member of the African National Congress (ANC), New York City (CCNY of CUNY) Chapter.

*You may visit his blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, 3 April 2016, -/African Media Agency (AMA)/- The 17th Session of the Regional Coordination Mechanism for Africa (RCM-Africa) kicked off in Addis Ababa , amidst calls for better coordination in the implementation of the African Union's Agenda 2063 and the global Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030). The meeting is been held during the ongoing African Development Week .

The RCM-Africa - a platform for the UN system to support the African Union and its member countries to implement global and continental development goals in Africa - will play a key role in making this a reality.

"There is no doubt that global partnerships can provide the impetus for tackling the key socio economic challenges currently facing Africa. Global partnerships can work for Africa if they are aligned with the strategic objectives of the continent and buttressed by a unified continental voice", said Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Executive Secretary, Carlos Lopes. "We have the opportunity to model what such a partnership could be", he stressed.

Speaking on behalf of UN Deputy Secretary-General, Jan Eliasson, UN Special Adviser on Africa, Maged Abdelaziz, said: "What is critical for us today is what the implementation of the UN-AU partnership and the implementation of Agenda 2063 and 2030 agenda for sustainable development entail: both agendas are wide and comprehensive. Together they will therefore address a range of political, economical, social, and environmental challenges for Africa".

Mr Abdelaziz recommended that RCM Africa prioritizes multi-stakeholder and public private partnerships that facilitate joint programmes. These will support national efforts to domesticate and implement both Agenda 2063 and Agenda 2030, while helping to address the perennial problem of lack of resources.

"The implementation of Agenda 2063 will really help us meet the Sustainable Development Goals of ending poverty, zero hunger, quality education, water and sanitation, protecting the planet, gender equality, reducing inequalities and ensuring prosperity for all , added African Union Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. "An integrated, peaceful, prosperous Africa that is driven by its own citizens is in the interest of the whole of humanity , she added.

The RCM-Africa took place with the participation of high level representatives from the African Development Bank, the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, African economic communities as well as several UN system agencies and organizations including the World Bank and the IMF.

Participants will discuss the UN-African Union partnership for the implementation of Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Objectives (SDGs). Also discussed will be the African Year of Human Rights, with a particular focus on the Rights of Women, Movement, Migration, Youth and Gender Empowerment, Regional Integration, Infrastructure and Trade, and Strengthening the Regional Coordination Mechanism for Africa for an effective Implementation of Agenda 2063 and the SDGs.
03.04.2016 LISTEN

A number of extremely bright commentators have been busily pointing out how Ted Cruz could find his way to 1237 delegates and the nomination. Or earn more, or nearly as many, delegates than Donald Trump and contest his way to the nomination, perhaps with Kasich as his VP nominee.

Or how the Convention could deadlock and be brokered to deliver the nomination to  just about anyone. In which case, as Trump demurely has pointed out : I think youd have riots. (Unless, of course, Cleveland delivered the nomination to Ivanka Trump, clearly well qualified to be president and turning of Constitutional age comfortably a week before the general election. Ivanka would be a One Woman Unity ticket.)

The pundits analyses are correct as far as they go. That said they are missing a key point. They are missing the key point that has propelled Trump to dominance. The Washington Posts Dan Balz reported recently , As one former member of Obamas campaign team put it, I feel like in some ways my brain has to think differently than it ever has."

Just so. Here's the "differently."

Donald Trump shrewdly has deployed the most powerful force in politics. The most powerful force in politics is the power of Narrative, a dramatic story that appeals to the popular imagination.

Trump offers a great story. Cruz offers a great argument. Arguments win arguments. Narratives win votes. Trump throws the ultimate political curve ball: a compelling Narrative.

Conservatives love to win arguments. Lawyers live by winning arguments. Ted Cruz is a rock-ribbed conservative. And hes a lawyer. Double whammy.

Entertainers love to tell, or enact, stories. Reagan was a movie star who instinctively grasped the power of Narrative. Trump is, among other things, a reality TV star. Trump instinctively grasps the power of Narrative. He uses it brilliantly to neutralize both his rivals and, like MoveOn, his adversaries.

Politico recently published a piece by Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf headlined Trumps Week of Errors, Exaggerations, and Flat-out Falsehoods . It is a misplaced analytic. Politico applies the rules of debate  argument  to the genre of Narrative. By the rules of argument Trump fouled out. But Narrative allows for dramatic license.

America was created with the Declaration (a subset of Narrative), not the Explanation, of Independence. As the old saying goes, nobody ever argued anybody into falling in love with them. Narrative appeals to the imagination and, thus, has unsurpassed power to move people.

Trump somewhat resembles Napoleon in a 21st century context where mass media has replaced armies for political leverage. Napoleon, too, understood Narrative. While leading his army over the Alps  a logistically dangerous and daunting process  to invade Italy, Napoleon, according to the John Abbott biography:

It was the genius of Napoleon which thus penetrated these mysterious depths of the human soul, and called to his aid those mighty energies. It is nothing but imagination, said one once to Napoleon. Nothing but imagination! he rejoined. Imagination rules the world.

Trump set out to fire the imagination of the rank-and file Americans. He succeeded, at least with a dominant plurality. Cruz set out to persuade the conservative base, a weaker lever on a smaller subset. Cruz surely planned to grow his support from that base. Yet this left a populist populace an uncontested happy hunting ground for Trump.

As my professional colleague Maggie Gallagher writes Can Cruz hone a message that lifts us above that spiral? It cannot be about Ted or about Trump. It has to be about America.

The Cruz campaign is a politically sophisticated one. Had Hurricane Trump not unexpectedly blown in, upsetting the conventional calculus, Cruz likely by now would be nominee or frontrunner. Notwithstanding Trump, had Marco Rubio and other conservative aspirants wholeheartedly united behind Cruz, Cruz likely would be the frontrunner now. Not a bad campaign strategy.

Yet the GOP, and American politics, has entered uncharted waters. The waters are roiled by Hurricane Trump.

In theory Cruz might still have time to fashion and deploy a Narrative that could enable him to gain the Big Mo. The right Narrative can change a campaign dynamic on a dime. Will he?

Right now Trump controls the Narrative. He has cast himself as the candidate of prosperity, economic justice, and champion of the little guy.

Cruz would need to write a Narrative recasting himself as the true candidate of prosperity, one who wisely has mined the authentic Kemp-Reagan economic policy ore and brought forth the very best across-the-board growth plan. Bonus, Cruzs flat tax plan, unlike Trumps tax plan, is scored by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation as almost deficit neutral.

As the Washington Posts Jim Tankersley recently observed : Ted Cruz is running a 'rising tide lifts all board economic message straight out of the Arthur Laffer playbook , including an aggressive tax plan that would slash income tax rates."

Cruz, as well, has reached into the playbook of Rep. Jack Kemp, prime sponsor of the Gold Standard Act of 1984, telling Rick Santelli last October that We need sound money. And I think the Fed should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold.

This is a dramatic proposal from which a strong Narrative could be spun. Cruz has referenced it too few times on the campaign trail to make it propel him. He has not made the gold standard, or even sound money, a signature issue.

Cruz, authentically and uniquely, is proposing to resurrect the Kemp-Reagan economic policy mix abandoned by George W. Bush (and certainly not restored by Barack Obama). The Kemp-Reagan policy mix, perpetuated by Bill Clinton, generated something like 37 million jobs . Strong stuff if declared and featured.

A rousing fight for lower tax rates without busting the budget, plus good, sound, money, could be the beating heart of a winning Narrative. Trump proclaimed that I will be the greatest jobs president that God has ever created I tell you that. No such compelling declarations from the lawyerly Cruz, whose declared platform would make such a claim more credible.

Cruz, reportedly a proficient poker player, could see, raise, and call Trump on his claims, crusading on equitable prosperity. But will he?

Cruz would need to restrain his hunger to explain and steal a page from Trump. Trump trafficks almost exclusively in declarations and in dramatic narrative.

Explanations are for wonks, not voters, and tactically are best used, by a candidate, as a brief but credible counter-move to challenges. Let proxies and outriders deploy explanations as fodder for wonks and pundits like me to chew on.

John F. Kennedy campaigned for the presidency on a pledge to get America moving again (out of the doldrums of Ikes sluggish economy ). Kennedy delivered. He more than doubled Americas average rate of GDP growth from the Eisenhower era. JFK didnt stupefy the voters with the details as to how. Neither has Trump. To win Cruz quickly must learn to campaign on declarations. (He can counterpunch with -- brief -- explanations.)

Complement the promise of equitable prosperity with a promise of economic justice, even vengeance. We voters want some revenge against the parasites both of the left and the right who are sucking the lifeblood out of the American, and our own, economy. As I previously have written here Trump captures a lot of voter allegiance by implicitly presenting himself as the guy who is going to take out the parasites.

Cruz, who (for better or worse) shut down the federal government, has the credibility to fashion a narrative to outbid Trump on evening this score. To do so Cruz has to go beyond the undifferentiated mass of what he calls the  Washington Cartel  and get more specific. Will he?

Last but not least Trump thrillingly has cast himself in the role of champion of the little guy. Can Cruz rip off his grey flannel suit and display himself in spandex, cape flowing in the breeze? Does he have it in him to portray himself as able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? (Trump does.)

Will Cruz project himself as the real champion of Truth, Justice, and the American Way  and the Little Guy who controls the outcome of this election? Does Cruz have it in him to overcome his conservative-lawyer double whammy, enter the phone booth as the ever-so-decent Clark Kent and emerge as Superman?

The window is closing. Donald Trump has captured the popular imagination. Trump has accomplished this through declarations, not explanations. He has built himself Yuuge in the imagination of voters through Narrative, not argumentation. This is Trumps secret weapon.

I leave it to pundits far smarter than me to crunch the delegate math. All I know is what I learned from Napoleon:Imagination rules the world. Will Ted Cruz get this message?

If not here comes Donald Trump, GOP nominee. And, since Hillary Clinton also lacks a strong Narrative, likely here comes Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States.

Originally appearing at Forbes.com
The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has officially announced its decision to boycott all programs of two radio stations operating on the license of the Despite Group.

The station, Okay and Neat FM, according to a statement signed by Deputy Communication Director, Anthony Abayifaa Karbo consistently discuss all matters of the NPP with a negative slant.

The statement also said several letters, phone calls and face to face discussions between us and other management members, the producers and host of the programmes, to desist from this unethical practice of journalism have gone unheeded.

The party has therefore asked its executives, communications officers and members to desist from speaking or patronizing the stations political programs with immediate effect.

Below is the full statement

NPP BOYCOTTS OKAY and NEAT FM

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) wishes to inform its members, supporters, and sympathisers that the Party has decided to boycott all political programmes on Okay FM and Neat FM, with immediate effect.

Programs on the two stations which are hosted by Kwame Nkrumah Tikesie and Adakabre Frimpong Manso respectively have in recent months developed a format to consistently discuss all matters of the NPP with a negative slant. These programs have also concentrated on encouraging submissions which denigrate and insult the Party and its Flagbearer.

Several letters, phone calls and face to face discussions between us and other management members, the producers and host of the programmes, to desist from this unethical practice of journalism have gone unheeded.

The mission and vision of the stations currently seem to be to destroy the NPP.

The NPP is a firm believer and practitioner of multi-party democracy, with freedom of expression as its cornerstone, but the Party also believes in the exercise of this freedom with responsibility, and in this case, professionalism.

Party executives, communications officers and members have been advised to desist from speaking or patronizing the stations political programs with immediate effect.

...Signed...

Anthony Abayifaa Karbo

(Deputy Director of Communications)

Story by Ghana/Myjoyonline.com
03.04.2016 LISTEN

When 26-year-old Abigail Olori met Alhaja Latifat and her husband three years ago, she felt she had met an angel in human form who would turn the odds of her life for good.

Considering the fact that she had lost her parents and was saddled with the responsibility of catering for her siblings, she jumped at the offer to travel to Italy to work as an auxiliary nurse for the couple. Unknown to her, however, she was making the biggest mistake of her life.

A look into the eyes of the frail looking Abigail revealed misery, pains and betrayal that she has been subjected to in the last three years.

Coughing intermittently and straining herself to be audible, she narrated her ordeal in the hands of her traffickers. I met Alhaja Latifat and her husband in 2013 when they came to Nigeria; then I was 23-years-old. I knew them via a relative of mine, Rofel, when I was residing in Bayelsa with my siblings. Rofel invited me to Lagos; it was during the visit to Lagos that I was introduced to Alhaja Latifat who promised to take me to Italy, she stated.

Before the journey, they said they wanted me to become an auxiliary nurse for them in Italy but unfortunately I found myself in Libya. They took me via the desert. We were about 30 that were taken to Libya from Nigeria.

Abigail

Since I didnt have parents, I was only able to raise N10, 000 which the alhaja claimed was for the passport she procured for me. The agreement was that I will work and pay her N2.4 million once I get to Italy which included the amount she spent to take me abroad and the return on her investment.

Before we left Nigeria, they took us to a native doctor called Ewe in Abeokuta, Ogun State where we were made to swear an oath. It was after the oath that we were taken to Libya instead of Italy.

Initially when I got to Libya and found out that my responsibility was to abort pregnancies for young girls, I refused but Alhaja Latifat and her husband locked me up in a room and beat me severely with a mop stick I had no option but to bulge. Each time I refused to perform abortion for any of the girls, they will lock me up and beat me.

That was how I started assisting them to terminate unwanted pregnancies for the young girls who were working as call girls for Alhaja Latifat.

We had girls within the ages of 10-15 working as call girls, sleeping with all sorts of men unprotected. Most of the girls were forced to sleep with elderly men as old as 60 years-old. Some of these girls confessed to me that they were hairdressing apprentices and fashion designers before they were deceived to come to Libya to work as prostitutes. Any of the girls who refused to work, they will beat her up. Some of the girls who attempted to escape got into more trouble as they were resold to other traffickers in Libya.

My main responsibility was to carry out abortion for the girls forced into prostitution. By my calculation, I would have aborted 320 pregnancies in the process. They built instrument which I used to perform the abortion on the girls. If a pregnancy was about a month, and the girl in question notified Alhaja Latifat about the development, the Alhaja Alhaja will not allow me to abort the baby till the pregnancy was about four or five months old.

Apart from carrying out abortions, I also performed the job of a physician to the girls.

They had about three houses which were used as brothels to house the girls who worked as call girls. I resided in one of the brothels called New York. The second was called White House. I cant remember the name of the third one.

I worked for the alhaja for about three years and I was able to raise the amount from the abortion I was performing on the girls and the money I got from my male friends who were into armed robbery in Libya. Like the call girls, I was not allowed to operate a bank account. Since I didnt operate any bank account, the money I earned was kept with Alhaja Latifat. Within two years I was able to pay the N2.4m agreed amount on the contract and also give her N1.5M which I kept with her as my personal savings.

Meanwhile, trouble started after I demanded that she gives me back my N1.5m which was with her as I wanted to return to Nigeria. Immediately after I demanded for my money, this strange sickness started. I began to grow thin and lose weight. And then skin rashes began to appear all over my body. Look at me I am now a shadow of myself. I dont know what is wrong with me. I feel very weak too.

I was rescued alongside two other girls weeks after Basirat and Omobolanle were rescued through an NGO, Alliance for Rights Defender, owned by human activists and lawyer, Mr. Ojay Akinwale. Mr Akinwale has been the one working with operatives of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP). Since I was rescued and brought back to Nigeria, Alliance for Rights Defender has been instrumental to providing medical care for me. I want to get well first and I also want the Federal Government to investigate Alhaja Latifat, her husband and others running this human trafficking as a family business by taking advantage of young girls from indigent families.
Businessman and Director of Marbles and Granites Dr. Edmund Ayo Ani has been freed by the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI).

Its unclear the conditions under which the BNI let him go, but his lawyers had been pushing for this all weekend.

National Security Coordinator Baba Kamara had accused him of circulating information on social media that he has diverted vehicles meant for the NCCE to the NDC.

The said vehicles, numbering about 50, were re-branded at a facility belonging to Baba Kamara on the Spintex Road, next to the premises of Marbles and Granites.

According to the BNI, the angles from which the pictures were taken indicate there were taken from the office of the Director of Marbles and Granites.

The National security advisor has confirmed to Joynews he ordered the arrest.

He alleged it was not right for Dr. Ayo to take pictures of vehicles in the facility and post them on social media.

But Senior Law Lecturer at the Ghana Law School Opoku Agyemang maintained that the act by the national security advisor is blatant abuse of power.

Meanwhile, JOYNEWS is also learning Mr. Ayo Ani has told the BNI that he did not take those pictures but one Reginald Randoph who is said to be the in-law of NPP presidential candidate, Nana Akufo Addo did that.

The BNI is also holding a Chinese Consultant of Marbles and Granites who was with Dr. Ayo when he was arrested.

Story by Ghana/Myjoyonline.com
The National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) is not a mouthpiece for government contrary to observations made by former First Lady Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings to that effect, NUGS has denied in a statement.

Mrs Rawlings recently said student bodies in the countrys tertiary organisations have now become mouthpieces for government. Speaking at the 14th Prestigious Lecture series at the Ghana Telecom University College (GTUC), Mrs Rawlings said the umbrella body for student groups  NUGS  has now become emasculated due to its hijack by politicians.

Historically, student bodies served as a litmus test in judging the effectiveness of government or otherwise. Student bodies were the conscience of the society.

They led demonstrations, yes, but they led it for and against government policies, it was not consistent; some were for, some were against. And they always had a united front.

Today, political parties have taken over student organisations and sadly, political party youth groups are more powerful than the SRC's and the mother organisation, the NUGS. NUGS no longer serves as a unified politically unadulterated front for students, she said, wondering: How then can such a huge resource of young people help to inform national debate when these organisations themselves have turned into mouthpieces for a sitting government?

But in a statement, NUGS said: We at NUGS do not recall the day or on which issue the Union became a mouthpiece for Government. Instead, with specific reference to this academic year's leadership, we have unreservedly stood firm and maintained our stance on the non-payment of Utility Bills by students. We have made a case on the need for Government to timely release the stipends meant for Ghanaian students studying abroad. Again, we have recently exerted the necessary pressure on Government to release Teacher Trainees' Feeding Grant. We are very optimistic that the UNION is surging on despite the challenges it faces. As students and, therefore, intellectuals, it is our resolve to ensure the unconditional emancipation of the students and youth of Ghana through the philosophy of dialogue.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

3rd April, 2016.

NUGS DOES NOT SPEAK FOR GOVERNMENT.

It's a simple truism and a matter of fact that the students of Ghana and therefore the National Union of Ghana Students has not become and will never be the mouthpiece of the government or any opposition movement for that matter.

Our attention was drawn to a statement made by a former First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings alluding that student Unions with specific references to NUGS, has become the mouthpiece for the sitting Government.

The serene political and maturing democracy our nation Ghana is enjoying today could not have come this far without the previous and the current deep contributions made by the National Union of Ghana Students.

The Union over the years since its formation, has contributed largely in shaping the conversation on National Development and we can without mincing words, say that the current leadership of NUGS is still doing same.

It is important to place on record that the challenges of the students of Ghana and therefore our nation some years ago vary from the current challenges, hence the need to relatively engage government and all other stakeholders in a more contemporary approach in pressing home our demands and shaping the developmental agenda of Ghana.

We at NUGS do not recall the day or on which issue the Union became a mouthpiece for Government.

Instead, with specific reference to this academic year's leadership, we have unreservedly stood firm and maintained our stance on the non-payment of Utility Bills by students.

We have made a case on the need for Government to timely release the stipends meant for Ghanaian students studying abroad.

Again, we have recently exerted the necessary pressure on Government to release Teacher Trainees' Feeding Grant.

We are very optimistic that the UNION is surging on despite the challenges it faces.

As students and therefore intellectuals, it is our resolve to ensure the unconditional emancipation of the students and youth of Ghana through the philosophy of dialogue.

We wish to use this medium to assure and urge all students of Ghana and Ghanaian students abroad that;

Let nothing stop us from the struggle.

Let us irrespective of our differences forge ahead.

Let us put our pieces together and rise above all forms of divisive characters, persons and group of individuals.

Let us remember, we have a union to run and a nation to build.

May God bless our homeland, Ghana and make us all responsible to all mandates assigned us.

SIGNED

PAA-QUECY ADU

NUGS PRESIDENT
Accra, April 3, GNA - Lepers Aid Committee, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) is constructing a Leprosy Unit at Kokofu in the Ashanti Region at the cost of GH548,067.00 .

The project which is expected to be completed by the end of next year, is being financed through voluntary contributions and fundraising activities.

The Reverend Father Andrew Campbell, founder of the NGO, said this at a fundraising musical concert in Accra.

The occasion also coincided with the 70th birthday of Rev Father Campbell who came to Ghana in 1971 to begin his charity work.

He said the Lepers Aid Committee has led to the creation of many leprosy units in the country including one at Weija in the Greater Accra Region, Ho in the Volta Region and Nkanchina near Kpandai in the Northern Region.

Rev Fr. Campbell said leprosy was an infectious disease that causes severe disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms and legs.

'The disease has been around since ancient times, often surrounded by terrifying, negative stigmas and tales of leprosy patients being shunned as outcasts'', he said.

Rev Fr. Campbell said outbreaks of leprosy have affected and panicked people on every continent adding that today about 180,000 people worldwide are affected with the disease.

He expressed the hope that the project when completed, will help break the transmission chain of the disease by identifying, treating and managing lepers at the early stages of the infection.

This, Rev Fr, Campbell said, would also help prevent disabilities and the stigma attached to the disease.

He appealed to the government, benevolent organizations and NGOs to contribute generously to the project.

Former President Jerry John Rawlings commended Rev Fr. Campbell for initiating and executing many projects in the country and also for winning many awards.

He also called for support for Rev Fr Campbell to enable him complete his projects.

GNA
Oyibi (GAR), April 3, GNA - The Valley View University (VVU) is embarking on a student-centred culture that would foster personal growth and promote independent, critical thinking, creativity and innovative problem-solving.

This would help the students to be 'thinking and not mere reflectors of other [people's] thoughts'.

Professor Daniel Bediako, Vice Chancellor of the VVU, disclosed this at the 21st matriculation of the University at Oyibi.

He said the work-study programme which is currently being strengthened would enable them to instill the passion for physical work in students and provide opportunities for students to support themselves financially.

Prof Bediako said the Sandwich and Distance study modes is also being re-examined to identify ways to enhance quality delivery and to reduce the stress on students.

The Vice Chancellor said the VVU would embark upon a strict on-campus accommodation policy for certain categories of undergraduate students to enhance quality education.

He enumerated some of the challenges facing the university as lecture halls, library, student hostels and a fence wall.

Prof Bediako urged the matriculated students to demonstrate the spirit of fortitude and resilience in marching steadily towards their goals.

About 9,472 students drawn from Oyibi, Techiman and Kumasi Campuses as well as Takoradi Learning Centre, were matriculated.

GNA
Accra, April 3, GNA - Airtel's Customer Experience Team on Thursday toured Abossey Okai and its environs to bring world class customer experience to the doorsteps of its cherished customers.

The team joined by employees from all sub brands of the telecom giant spent the day engaging with customers, resolving challenges some customers faced and educating them on the unparalleled offers the company provides.

Mr Frank Gyan, Head of Customer Experience, said 'at Airtel, providing unmatched service excellence to our customers is our hallmark. We back our promises to delight our customers with world class customer service. But what truly sets us apart from competition is our closeness to our customers.

'We used the opportunity to educate our customers on Airtel Premier, Airtel Rewardz, Airtel Money and Airtel Data,' a statement issued in Accra by Mr Richard Ahiagble, Head of Corporate Communications, said.

It said premier customers were updated on the amazing benefits available to them and those not yet on the service were enrolled.

"We also enrolled customers onto Airtel Rewardz - the biggest and most exciting loyalty scheme in the industry and assisted those who have built up points to redeem them. Some customers redeemed shopping vouchers, spa treatments among others.

"We have seen at firsthand how effective these Service Clinics are and we will continue to roll this out in other localities', it said.

GNA
President John Dramani Mahama is cautioning against complacency in the fight against possible terrorist attacks on Ghana.

He says the surge in global terrorism attacks should be enough warning for Ghana to be on alert.

Speaking at a ceremony to celebrate the birth of Prophet Mohammed at Aboabo in Kumasi Sunday, he observed while guarding against religious extremism and fundamentalism especially among the youth, it is important to also ensure seed of rebellions are not sowed in the youth.

Last year, I spoke about the need to live peaceful with our neighbours and unyielding to the pull of religious extremism and fundamentalism. The call this year is even more important, following the surge in global terrorist activities. It is important we in Ghana guard against complacency so no one sow a seed of rebellions among our youths through its teachings and indoctrinations.

According to President Mahama, though the Islamic sect is that of peace, he was worried at some Muslims are exploited to carry out extremist agendas.

Islam is and remains a religion of peace, unfortunately, however some misguided elements have precipitated its beautiful image to promote their wicked terrorist agenda. He said.

Terrorism activities have increased globally this year with Ghana two of Ghanas neighbours, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso been hit by such attacks.

President Mahama says Ghanaians should resist being influence into any act of violence against each other while promising the readiness of the security agencies to ward off terrorist attacks.

These fundamentalists do not discriminate in their choice of victims, they kill children, women and young and old, they attack people with all religious persuasions, be it Muslims or non-muslims and people of other faith.

I wish to assure you that our security agencies are firm and are doing all possible to keep us safe. We must all support them to be able to realize this objective.
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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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Clayton Williams Energy Inc. announced the resignation of Robert L. Parker from the companys Board of Directors. Parker had served as a director since 1993 and at the time of his resignation served as chairman of the audit committee and served on the compensation committee and the nominating and governance committee.

The company also announced the appointments of Nathan W. Walton and P. Scott Martin to its board, effective immediately. Walton and Martin were appointed to the board in connection with the previously announced transaction with funds managed by Ares Management, L.P.

Kinder Morgan halts work on $1 billion Palmetto Pipeline

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) - Kinder Morgan says it is halting work on the $1 billion Palmetto Pipeline after Georgia lawmakers approved a one-year moratorium on permits for petroleum pipelines in the state.

Houstons Kinder Morgan said in a statement it has suspended further work on the Palmetto Pipeline project, which would have carried gasoline, diesel and ethanol across 360 miles from South Carolina through Georgia and into Florida.

The project met stiff opposition from both environmental groups and landowners whose property the company hoped to build upon using eminent domain laws. The project had already received setbacks from the Georgia Department of Transportation and a Fulton County judge.

The company blamed unfavorable action by the Georgia Legislature for its ultimate decision to halt the pipeline.

Oilpro.com founder indicted for hacking Rigzone

By Jordan Blum

Houston Chronicle

The founder of the Houston-based Oilpro.com networking website was indicted for allegedly hacking Rigzone, a competitor that he created and later sold.

David W. Kent, 40, of Spring, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit computer hacking and wire fraud for allegedly stealing information from more than 700,000 customer accounts in order to build up Oilpros network. He then recently tried to sell Oilpro, which he created in 2013, to Rigzones parent company, New York-based DHI Group, using beefed-up membership numbers, according to a U.S. Department of Justices statement.

Kent founded Rigzone in 2000 with his father and sold it in 2010 for about $51 million to DHI. Kent left Rigzone one year after the sale.

Oilpro, which was offline Thursday, is touted as a professional network for oil and gas professionals  essentially LinkedIn for the energy sector. Rigzone features oil and gas information as well as details on jobs in Houston and worldwide.

The investigation and arrest were led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Manhattan-based U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York.

Instead of relinquishing control of his former company, subject David Kent continued to illegally access data and information from his former business to help benefit a competing business he formed after the sale, FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Diego Rodriquez said in a prepared statement.

Unauthorized access to a protected computer system is a federal crime, he added. The FBI will investigate and bring to justice criminal actors who commit computer intrusions, whether the unauthorized access is to a personal computer or a corporate server.

The hacking charge carries a maximum term of five years in prison, and the wire fraud charge has a maximum term of 20 years.

Nebraska approves new regulations for oil and gas industry

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP)  Nebraska has adopted new regulations for the states oil and gas industry.

Gov. Pete Ricketts signed the measure into law on Wednesday.

The law by Sen. Ken Schilz of Ogallala will require periodic sampling and reporting of fracking waste fluids and monitoring of produced water transporters.

It also reduces the promotional duties of the Nebraska Oil and Gas Commission and refocuses the agencys purpose on promoting health, safety and protection of natural resources.

Schilz has said he introduced the bill in response to public input last year during a series of hearings focused on the state oil and gas industry.
HOUSTON  Sub-$40 oil claimed more than 1,100 jobs across Texas in recent weeks, the Texas Workforce Commission detailed on Tuesday.

The lost jobs included 500 jobs in Harris County at international supermajor BP, 608 positions at the tank car division of Trinity Rail in Gregg and Harrison counties in East Texas, 60 jobs at Cudd Energy Services in Bexar County and 65 at Rotary Drilling Tools in Fort Bend County.

BP spokesman Jason Ryan said the cuts were part of the about 4,000 upstream jobs its plans to eliminate in 2016. The company is also aiming to trim about 3,000 downstream jobs by the end of 2017.

The notifications that we are making in the Houston area are part of that plan, Ryan said in an emailed statement. This is what is required to adapt to the protracted low oil price environment, and BP is taking the steps necessary to reduce costs and ensure we are structured to compete as efficiently as possible.

BP has taken around $1.5 billion in restructuring charges over the past five quarters and expects the total to approach $2.5 billion by the end of 2016. The company has also sold $10 billion in assets since October 2013 and plans to sell an additional $3-5 billion during 2016.

Overall, the company said it has lowered the cash costs its controls by $3.4 billion in 2015 compared to 2014, and said it expects to hit $7 billion in savings by 2017.

Trinity Rail is a subsidiary of Dallas-based Trinity Industries, Inc, which has a number of rail and logistics businesses. The company told investors in February that it had seen record revenues, operating profit and earnings, in 2015, but cautioned that the outlook for 2016 looked darker.
WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump and Ted Cruz oppose a carbon tax, putting them in league with the Republican National Committee on the issue but at odds with some oil companies and economists who view a levy on those heat-trapping emissions as an effective way to combat climate change.

The top two Republican presidential candidates positions on that and other environmental issues were detailed in their responses to a survey by the American Energy Alliance, a free-market, fossil-fuel advocacy group that shared the results with Bloomberg.

The circus-like atmosphere of the 2016 campaign has so far overshadowed substantive debate over energy and environmental issues, including the future of oil and gas development and how the U.S. should tackle climate change. Completed questionnaires were not returned by John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, or Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont.

The survey responses provide the deepest details yet on where Trump stands on energy subsidies, biofuel mandates and the management of federal lands. Unlike Cruz, a senator from Texas who has cast votes on environmental regulation and introduced legislation to expand oil and gas drilling, Trump has been viewed as a wild card on energy issues because he lacks a track record that could foreshadow his approach if elected.

The answers provide useful insight into how some of the candidates will handle the most pressing energy issues if elected, said American Energy Alliance President Thomas Pyle. Although Cruz has more of a track record on these issues, Trumps responses give us a sense of the way he is thinking about these things, said Pyle, whose group has received funding from billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

Cruz has made no secret of his skepticism of climate change and previously signaled that he opposes taxing the carbon dioxide emissions blamed by scientists for rising global temperatures. The biggest surprise, Pyle said, was Trumps flat rejection of a carbon tax, a position that runs contrary to the views of BP Plc, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Statoil ASA and other companies, which favor the policy as a predictable way of tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

The carbon tax is a legitimate threat, because there are companies that have basically been building it into their books as a liability, Pyle said. Theyre all sort of individually picking a number, and I think some of them would love there to be a uniform number thats lower than they price.

Both Trump and Cruz took aim at regulatory overreach by President Barack Obamas administration on environmental issues, including the Clean Power Plan that slashes carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Each promises, if elected, to review the administrations conclusion that carbon dioxide endangers public health and welfare.

The two candidates also said they opposed the administrations decision to use the social cost of carbon -- an estimate of the potential costs of rising seas, intense storms and other climate change effects -- to justify regulations that can impose high initial costs on energy companies and manufacturers. But Cruz went a step further by disputing the science of climate change, volunteering in a survey response that the observed temperature evidence does not support the claims that carbon dioxide is dangerous.

There were stark differences in Cruz and Trumps approach to the Renewable Fuel Standard, an 11-year-old mandate that requires refiners to blend steadily escalating amounts of ethanol and next-generation biofuels into gasoline.

Cruz maintained the position he staked out while campaigning through Iowa cornfields that the program should be phased out over five years then repealed, rather than leaving biofuel quotas to the Environmental Protection Agencys discretion after 2022 as ordained by current law. I support ending all energy subsidies and mandates, Cruz said.

Trump said Congress shouldnt repeal the biofuel mandates. Until this nation sets its sights on total energy independence, we must support all energy sources, the billionaire said in a survey response. If we can truly achieve energy independence, then there would be no need for subsidies or any other form of mandate or market interference.

There were subtle distinctions in the two candidates approach to management of public lands, where federal regulators oversee oil and gas development. The Obama administration recently halted new coal leasing on federal lands, and environmental activists have lobbied Clinton and Sanders to thwart new oil and gas development there. Some Republicans, meanwhile, want to see the U.S. pare its land holdings.

Cruz said the federal government should divest most of its current land holdings, while Trump suggested the first step should not be a widespread sale but rather establishing a shared governance structure with the states.

Trump cast overregulation as a major business cost with an outsize effect on smaller companies. Large companies have the wherewithal to mitigate these burdens, but smaller companies do not, he said.

The candidates also disparaged energy subsidies, such as tax incentives for wind and solar power, with Trump saying they distort markets and Cruz saying all energy sources should compete on an even playing field.

It wasnt clear from the survey responses whether their skepticism would extend to tax deductions used by oil and gas companies, including an accelerated depreciation of some drilling costs. Cruz previously has likened those breaks to ordinary business deductions used widely by other sectors.
Inactive wells that U.S. oil companies drilled but arent yet producing oil couldnt drown the market in oil this year even if rising crude prices prompt a surge of well completions, analysts say.

Drillers can afford to bring 2,000 to 3,000 dormant wells into production at $40 oil, completing about 200 wells a month and raising production by 600,000 to 650,000 barrels a day by the end of the year, Barclays said Wednesday, citing data from Norwegian energy consultancy Rystad Energy.

But a jumpstart in U.S. well completions is not going to be able to fill the entire production void thats opening up from all this other supply thats coming offline, said Michael Cohen, an analyst at Barclays. The market will be surprised that those incremental volumes are not as big as expected. People forget that U.S. shale is less than 5 percent of the entire market. Oil is declining in Canada, Russia and Brazil.

Cohen believes about half of Rystads predicted 600,000 barrels a day could come online because the oil bust has left completion crews in tatters and has severely cut into the industry capacity to bring up more oil quickly.

Rystad Energy recently said oil companies in February completed wells at a faster rate than they were drilling new wells for the first time in five months, meaning drillers have started to eat into their backlog of drilled but uncompleted wells again. But when oil companies started pumping more crude from dormant wells in the second half of last year, U.S. onshore production still fell by 540,000 barrels a day, Barclays noted.

Many in the oil market fear a rebound in completions could crash crude prices, Cohen said, and until that perception is proven wrong, its going to cap rallies.

There are other reasons rallies could be capped, like demand concerns and the overhang in inventories - but not drilled but uncompleted wells, Cohen said. It was a lumpy adjustment for shale production on the way down, and its going to be just as lumpy on the way back up.
Chapter 313 of the Texas tax code allows school districts to grant property tax relief for certain types of corporate locations and expansions. Under these agreements, schools can agree to forego taxes on a portion of the incremental value of a new facility for a certain period of time through a value limitation, thereby encouraging capital intensive investments.

First, a general note about incentives. In an ideal world, we might prefer that economic development incentives did not exist. However, in the real world, they are a fact of life. Economic development is highly competitive, incentives are widely used, and communities need such tools to level the playing field.

I have studied economic development and related policy for about 35 years, and my firm has been involved in hundreds of studies from both the community and the corporate perspective. I have helped to shape economic development legislation on many occasions and seen the process at work, so I understand both sides of it.

Companies are highly scrutinized by shareholders and investors and have a responsibility to try to control costs wherever possible (including taxes); incentives can (and often do) spell the difference between locations or whether to go ahead with a project. Communities that want to see desirable economic growth and opportunities for residents need targeted strategies to encourage corporate locations and expansions. While incentives are only a piece of the decision process, they can be a crucial part.

Texas has a comparatively high property tax burden, with much of the revenue going to school districts. Property tax agreements such as those allowed by Chapter 313 enable school districts to hold off on taxing a portion of the incremental property value associated with certain investments in new facilities for a set period of time (up to 10 years). After that time, the school taxes the full value. There are often other supplemental payments to schools by the companies during the value limitation term, and the State compensates schools for foregone tax revenue. School districts always come out ahead given the way Chapter 313 works. Furthermore, to be approved, projects must be reasonably likely to generate tax revenue within 25 years which exceeds the tax revenue lost as a result of the agreement.

Clearly, a well-structured decision process is needed to ensure that incentives offered are in the best interest of communities and the state. The Texas Legislature amended Chapter 313 in 2013 (effective January 1, 2014) to enhance the role of the Texas comptrollers office in deciding whether to grant tax value limitations. As per the tax code, the comptroller can only approve such agreements if the limitation on appraised value is a determining factor in the applicant's decision to invest capital and construct the project in this state.

Schools end up with incremental revenue during the abatement period (some from the company and some from the State) and a larger tax base going forward. In addition, communities benefit from the economic activity during construction and operations, which generates tax effects irrespective of any value limitations.

Texas proactive economic development efforts over the past decade are a notable factor in the states current success. Although the oil surge has ended, the Lone Star State is adding jobs and continuing to experience economic growth. For those of us who remember prior cycles in the oil and gas business, the difference is notable. There are a variety of reasons for the successful diversification of the states business complex, but economic development policy has certainly played a large role.

With that said, there are almost certainly ways to improve on Chapter 313. Past legislative actions have amended the tax code to eliminate problems that have been identified, and we can expect further tweaks in the future. However, the underlying rationale for allowing schools to agree to tax value limitations is sound, and the need for such tax relief is an undeniable fact of todays competitive market for quality corporate locations and expansions. Moreover, because of the competitive landscape for desirable capital-intensive firms (which include many technology and high-end manufacturing sectors with high-paying jobs), a mechanism to reduce the property tax burden is essential. This program does not always garner the headlines of some other development initiatives, but is absolutely critical to the long-term success of the Texas economy.

Dr. M. Ray Perryman is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Perryman Group (www.perrymangroup.com). He also serves as Institute Distinguished Professor of Economic Theory and Method at the International Institute for Advanced Studies.
A month after Senior U.S. District Judge Robert Junell upheld his September 2015 ruling overturning the listing of the lesser prairie chicken as threatened, a second-year update offered good news on the species.

The Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which oversees the Lesser Prairie-Chicken Range-wide Conservation Plan, said in its second annual report to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the lesser prairie chicken had another successful year in 2015.

In the report, WAFWA said the chickens range-wide population had increased by 25 percent to just more than 29,000 birds, industry partners had committed nearly $51 million in fees to pay for mitigation actions, and landowners across the five-state range agreed to conserve more than 67,000 acres of habitat.

WAFWA is really pleased with the progress being made with the implementation of the RWP, Bill Van Pelt, WAFWA grassland coordinator, told the Reporter-Telegram by email.

Those industry participants within the RWP are demonstrating they can be both economically viable and conserve the lesser prairie chicken even with the downturn in oil prices, which extends to other energy-related industries, he said.

The PBPA is very pleased so see these positive findings in the WAFWA report, Ben Shepperd, president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, told the Reporter-Telegram by email.

The PBPA, along with Chaves, Eddy, Lea and Roosevelt counties in New Mexico, had sued the Department of the Interior and Fish and Wildlife Service to overturn the chickens listing.

This is a tribute to WAFWA and all of the stakeholders who work every day to ensure the success of the Range-Wide Plan. This is good news for the Lesser Prairie Chicken, the habitat and everyone who lives, works and plays in these areas, he added.

PBPA members consistent commitment to conservation remains unchanged, Shepperd said.

Van Pelt reported landowners are stepping up and implementing conservation practices benefiting the chicken. Eight landowner contracts were finalized covering 67,512 acres. Conservation measures are being implemented range-wide, including habitat restoration on 8,214 of 15,911 prescribed acres. A total of $1,821,737 was paid to landowners managing their lands to generate credits for lesser prairie chicken conservation, he said.

In June, WAFWA also acquired title to a 1,604-acre tract of Texas native rangeland near the Yoakum Dunes Wildlife Management Area in West Texas.

Van Pelt said the agency has also initiated our annual lek surveys range-wide. While it is too early to speculate on numbers, surveyors are reporting good numbers of birds on the leks.

Aerial surveys of the chickens population began March 17 and are expected to continue through mid-May in the five states that contain the birds habitat: Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

The surveys will be conducted by helicopter in locations chosen randomly within lesser prairie chicken range, which is part of the methodology strategy.

Last years aerial surveys found an abundance of spring rainfall in 2015, along with ongoing efforts associated with the range-wide plan and other conservation initiatives, helped increase the lesser prairie chicken population by approximately 25 percent from 2014 to 2015. Results from this years surveys will be available on July 1.
When it comes to the topic of public education there is no shortage of opinions. Over time, opinions turn to convictions, convictions turn into matters of fact, matters of fact turn into hardened positions, blame is directed toward the assumed culprit of our demise, collaboration ceases to exist, and the greater good of the future is sacrificed. Over time, party lines are established, polarization becomes the accepted norm, convictions take on a nearly religious tone, and most progress is stopped.

The tragedy in this cycle of polarization is that there are rarely any winners, and in the case of education thousands of losers. Day after day and year after year, while polarized opinions rule the debate, students from across Midland, the Permian Basin, the state of Texas and the United States languish in a public education system crippled by the hardened convictions of all sides resisting the call and opportunity to collaborate for the better future of our kids. If we never fight the fear to collaborate for the transformation of the greater good, we will simply continue to believe our opinions and another generation of students will be released into a world unprepared under our watch.

Whatever we perceive to be the shortcomings and failures of public education, there will never be a change until we as a community realize that the problem is ours and not someone elses. The fault is ours, not Austins or Washington, D.C.s. The responsibility for the education of our kids rests solely on the shoulders of the citizens and not on a superintendent, school board or even a classroom teacher. While we still live in a free society with open elections, freedom of association and the freedom to demand and make change happen, the success or failure of public education must move from a blame game and indifference to community responsibility with an action plan. That opportunity for an action plan is now ours right here in Midland.

Through the unprecedented foundational efforts of members of our community and the cooperation of our school board and superintendent, the time is now upon us to collaborate together as a community to return our public education system to the pride of Texas and the envy of the country. It is my sincere hope we are turning a corner away from finger-pointing and blame and onto an avenue of listening, working together and moving forward. It will not be easy, and it will not come without hard discussions and difficult give and take; but it can happen and it must happen for the sake of 24,000 students.

This new day does not start in the Legislature in Austin or the chambers of Congress in Washington; this new day starts with each one of us choosing to attend one of the informational meetings taking place throughout our community. It starts with each one of us choosing to listen and inquire with an attitude toward collaborative action and not polarized opinions of winners and losers. It does not matter whether you have kids in the MISD system or not -- the issue of public education is our collective issue as a city. Public education is not someone elses problem to fix; it is our challenge to face. The kids are our kids, the district is our district, and the future is our future. Choose now, to attend a meeting. Choose now to enter the discussion with an open mind and willingness to do whatever it takes to work together for our future. Choose now to be part of the change that returns Midland to the national conscious not for matters of oil and gas, but because together we have returned our public education system to the top of the charts and the envy of the world for the success and well-being of every child under our watch. Dont doubt the possibility before you engage the opportunity.

---

Patrick Payton is a member of the Business and Funders Initiative Initiative.
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Midland is about to undergo the most significant education initiative in the communitys history.

Not through bond campaigns, facilities improvements or a tax increase, but true ideological and applicable changes to improve the local education environment.

The initiative is called collective impact, and quite simply, it is an approach to achieve significant and lasting change. For collective impact to be successful, officials told the Reporter-Telegram, it will require acceptance by the entire community. It also will require patience.

For more than a year, business, community and school district leaders have met, deliberated about the best path forward and ultimately created the foundation for a plan that, if successful, will reverse a downward academic achievement trend that has been years  and allegedly decades  in the making.

Leading the effort to this point have been Midlanders representing a number of our communitys highest-profile oil companies (Pioneer, Concho, Chevron, Apache, EOG, Cimarex and Oxy), another top employer (WarrenCat) and three prominent foundations (Abell-Hanger, Henry and Scharbauer). These companies and foundations followed up the millions of dollars they donated to the school district in previous years by funding the education initiative, including the cost of partnering with Educate Texas, which has a record of using collective impact to achieve education reform across the state. The Business and Funders Initiative expects to donate more than $24 million through 2019.

During the next few weeks, the Reporter-Telegram will spotlight this initiative as part of the lead-up to the Midland Chamber of Commerces State of the Education luncheon on April 19. This will include coverage of four community forums, where Midlanders will get their first exposure to Educate Midland  a collaboration of Midland ISD and Educate Texas with the goal of strengthening Midlands public education system. Educate Midland is the backbone of the collective impact process. Its makeup and voice will be independent of the school district, and its purpose will be to coordinate participating organizations and agencies to support and improve a struggling school system.

To date, too many people have said that an MISD problem is not our problem, said Rick Davis, Midland ISDs board president. For things to improve, it has to be a community-engaged solution, not a finger-pointing exercise without any contribution or engagement.

1 out of 4 elementary schools are failing

To understand the need for reform, one must understand the depth and gravity Midlands poor academic performance.

In 2002, Midland ISD earned a recognized district rating  the second best rating the Texas Education Agency handed out at the time. Sixteen campuses earned the same rating, and another three earned the TEAs top ranking  exemplary. That year, no MISD campus received the lowest rating of academically unacceptable.

In 2009, the downward trend became apparent in ratings. MISD, as a district, and four of its campuses were rated academically acceptable.

By last year, the TEA rating system had changed  to a system highly criticized by school leaders  and the number of MISD schools receiving the poorest ratings possible continued to grow.

Ten schools, including nine elementary campuses, were designated IR or improvement required. To put this in perspective, El Pasos three districts combined had five schools designated as improvement required.

Greatschools.org indicated 18 of MISDs 33 schools were below average (scoring worse than 3.5 on a scale of 1 to 10). Only two schools (Carver Center and Early College High School) were above average (scoring 7.5 or higher).

Education Resource Group, a company that creates educational products and aggregates data based in The Woodlands, reported in its District Achievement Index that Midland ISD fell from the 55th percentile in 2007 to the 11th percentile of the largest 200 largest school districts in Texas. When using TEAs economically disadvantaged identifier for students as part into the District Performance Index, Midland dropped from the 47th percentile in 2007 to the zero percentile  199 of 200 schools included  in 2015.

(MISD students) are not graduating at the rate we want them to, they are not graduating with the skills we want them to, they are not becoming the next generation of people to keep Midland or build Midland where we want it to be, said Ronnie Scott of the Henry Foundation. We can dance around that, but by any measure, we are not where we want to be. ... One out of every four elementary schools is failing. That is our fault. ... There are 24,000 children here and they need our help.

Collective impact not a new concept

The Abell-Hanger Foundations Mark Palmer, a former classroom teacher, said the community has become disengaged from its school district. Hes not the only one. Davis admitted he was once among the disengaged. Before making the decision to run for school board, he hadnt attended a school board or PTA meeting.

Some of the most involved and most passionate send their children to somewhere other than to MISD, Davis said.

For collective impact to work, parents will have to be involved, but they are not the only ones. All residents, as well as nonprofits, churches and education support groups will be asked to work together for positive change.

It takes a village, Palmer said. That is the epitome of what the process is about.

The process thus far has included monthly meetings this year with the Educate Midland leadership team, a group of about 35 community leaders identified as education partners. At the four meetings planned for the next two weeks, Educate Midland will be introduced to the public with information about the district  such as a student population that is minority majority and 50 percent economically disadvantaged. Educate Midlands presentation also likely will provide details on the guidance it has received from Educate Texas, which stresses five factors as part of the collective impact process. These factors are:

 establish a common vision across a single community or region;

 measure key milestones to achieve the vision;

 utilize data-driven findings to inform and refine strategies;

 align stakeholders and resources to expand successful practices and improve communication; and

 identify a supporting organization to assist in the alignment of community resources.

The initial three Educate Midland committees are teacher recruitment and retention, data collection and analysis, and facilities.

We have to redefine what education looks like and means, said Chris Coxon, Educate Texas chief program officer.

Coxon said collective impact works better when more people are involved, not because they agree, because they dont. The end result, however, is better ideas and sustainability.

Educate Texas has always believed it is better to bring more people to the table, Coxon said, not easier but better.

MISD Superintendent Ryder Warren said longtime Midlanders will say the collective impact model will resemble the district when it was created. He recalled conversations that previous generations crafted a multi-decade plan to build MISD and that the community members went decades without paying attention to what worked well.

We had a collective impact plan for MISD, Warren said. That is what we have to go back to. ... We have been a district trying to do things on our own.

No short-term fix

It will take time for Educate Midland and collective impact to show results, Coxon said. Theres no buying the latest and greatest program and calling it a day, he said.

Educate Texas began working in the Rio Grande Valley 10 years ago to help establish an early college high school. In 2011, RGV Focus -- that communitys version of Educate Midland -- was established to serve a four-county, 4,316-square-mile portion of the Rio Grande Valley.

Getting back to the ERG data, two of the top three districts on the Performance Index in 2014-15 have ties to Educate Texas and its programs  Valley View and Brownsville.

Luzelma G. Canales, executive director of RGV Focus, said collective impact is collaboration at an authentic level. She said 88 percent of the students represented by the districts working with RGV Focus are economically disadvantaged, and on average they are outperforming their economically disadvantaged and Latino peers around the state.

Collective impact is built around what already is working well. In the Valley, that means one district implementing 100 percent early college high school strategies so all kids can benefit from that model.

Early College High School at Midland College is was one of the two top-performing schools in Midland.

(Collective impact) is about principles you have to abide by, Canales said.

Coxon describes the practice as finding a place where the process can anchor on to.

Scott said Midland will have a leg up on other communities going through the process because of the inherent risk-taking nature of the people, who have stayed with a challenge after initial failures and until it worked.

But Scott also said it requires something we havent seen from Midlanders  concern. He references a recent series of meetings held at struggling elementary schools. All totaled, 13 parents showed up  an average of two per meeting.

Lack of community involvement will be one of the biggest obstacles, Scott said. It is harsh to say but it is true  people in Midland dont care about their schools results. People have to care.
Fairness typically projects an image that everyone gets the same size slice of pizza and the same treatment. Educator and lecturer Rick Lavoie disagrees, and plans to elaborate on his concept of fairness when he visits Hillcrest School on April 12.

Kids believe fairness is when everyone gets the same (thing) ... but if youre a parent, to be fair you have to treat everybody differently, said Lavoie in a phone interview. Fairness is if everybody gets what he or she needs.

Family dynamics can be best described in a water bed scenario: All family members are lying side by side on a water bed and when one family member is tossing or turning (struggling), the other family members feel the effects, Lavoie said.

Even though families have gotten smaller and more complex and face problems that families never faced before, one thing that continues to be true is that if one person is having trouble, that really impacts everybody, Lavoie said.

The best cure, according to Lavoie, will be to execute fairness by spending more time with students who struggle in school because the resulting success affects all family members.

It has a tremendous impact on the kids self-concept, Lavoie said. Thats what I did for 30 years. It was just a miracle to see some of the changes in the kids and families that we saw.

Lavoie will visit Hillcrest, a private school that helps students with learning difficulties such as attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, to discuss fairness, differences in the family dynamic and the different ways that children think and learn -- particularly if they have a learning difficulty.

Lavoies books and films centering on children with learning disabilities are what attracted Hillcrest to request him as speaker, according to school officials.

This lecture isnt just for educators, said Paige Sumner, director of programs at Hillcrest. A lot of it is not just for children with learning disabilities. We wanted to do (a lecture) on the whole dynamic, one that is really applicable to everybody.

Lavoie, who holds three degrees in special education and two honorary doctorates, had a similarly positive view of Hillcrest.

I dont know if folks in Midland realize it, but Hillcrest is known as one of the finest schools in the country for those kinds of kids who struggle with learning, he said.

Lavoie previously worked at Riverview School in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a school similar to Hillcrest, and has held administrative positions at residential programs for 30 years, according to his biography on his website, ricklavoie.com.

Lavoie worked as adjunct or visiting lecturer at universities such as Syracuse, Harvard, and University of Alabama, as a consultant on learning disabilities for the Public Broadcasting Service and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, among others.

Follow Cassie on Twitter at @Cassie_Burton51
In December 2014, community leaders sat down with the Reporter-Telegram to discuss an education initiative unlike any this community has seen.

Leaders in business, foundations and education sat around a long boardroom table at the Concho Resources building to describe a unique partnership that would change education for the better in our community.

For good reason, we were excited. Midlands leaders were stepping up to the table. We, as a community, wanted to see the best in our community addressing the top priority -- education.

What we learned nearly 16 months later was that our greatest expectations for what could be needed to be tempered by a comparable dose of patience. There arent easy answers to education, no blueprint and no switch to flip, and no matter the amount of talent at the table, it was naive of us to think otherwise.

We credit the Business and Funders Initiative and Midland ISD school board for realizing their differences and working together to advance the education initiative to where it stands today. We believe both groups are working with the communitys best interest in mind. We also believe that 16 months ago it was easy to get caught up in the what could be.

As Midland ISD Board President Rick Davis told the Reporter-Telegram, all parties overpromised and underdelivered in the ability to reach a consensus in a shorter period of time.

We put people in the theater and the curtain never opened on time, Davis said. The reason was that everyone at the table, we were all in agreement we wanted to do whatever it took to improve public education in Midland. We just struggled on how best to do that.

Ronnie Scott of the Henry Foundation said the members of the BFI came to the table without the necessary structure. He said the BFI members spent months becoming educated on the broader topics, including collective impact (the approach to making collaborations work).

We have taken a lot of missteps, Scott said. Hopefully we are all moving forward and moving more judiciously than we were.

This will be a slow process, but we are willing to move a little slower if that means we are doing it right. Have no doubt about the importance of the process that will result in Educate Midland. Midland residents need an independent voice that engages the community, speaks to the results in the classroom and continues to be the backbone organization that keeps our community active in education.
We need to calm down after hearing this news about the collaboration! Just hours before the release of Taylor Swift's Midnights, the pop star gave a first look at the music videos for her highly anticipated 10th studio album. In a teaser
Someone should sue the President for ...
A new Lone Sailor memorial in Orlando is honoring service men and women, a reminder of the Navys presence in Central Florida.

With eyes on the horizon, a lone sailor looks ahead to where Orlandos Naval Training Center once stood.

I am just glad this field is left cause I marched on this field," said Dale Dunn, a veteran who trained at the center. "And I am glad that I can run on it today, one more time.

And while now its the Blue Jacket Park, a new Lone Sailor monument serves as a reminder of what it once was.

Orlando was such a big navy town, especially back in the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s, and people dont realize that a lot because we built the great community of Baldwin Park, said Bill Reuter, the president of Central Florida Navy League.

Orlandos Naval Training Center also served as the first co-ed bootcamp. This is why theres a goal to add another sailor, a female one on the other side of the pier and a history wall behind the monument.

Richard Roberts, 102, came out to see the dedication. Roberts served a quarter of his life in the Navy and spent three years on an aircraft carrier during World War II.

While some memories arent the best - World War IIthat was pretty terrible, really" - Roberts says he wouldn't trade the experience for anything in the world.

To be a part of the USA is the best, Roberts said, adding that he's glad that another fellow sailor now keeps watch over Orlando.

The next Lone Sailor monument will be the 15th in the country and will be placed in Pearl Harbor.


A Sanford police lieutenant accused of head-butting and punching a woman in the face is expected to be released from jail Sunday afternoon.

Lt. Joseph Santiago appeared before a judge at the Seminole County Jail Sunday morning where his bond was set at $500. He is charged with battery-domestic violence.

Santiago was placed on administrative leave after deputies say an alleged night of drinking turned violent.

He was off-duty when he was arrested early Saturday morning at the intersection of H E Thomas Jr. Parkway and Interstate 4 after a disturbance call.

According to an arrest report, a woman said she was drinking with Santiago at a bar in Daytona Beach when he head-butted her for saying something he didnt like. He later punched her when the two arrived back in Sanford, the woman told deputies.

Deputies said Santiago smelled of alcohol and refused to answer any questions without a lawyer.

The judge set conditions to Santiagos bond, including he have no contact with the alleged victim and no alcohol.

Santiago has been with the Sanford Police Department for 17 years.
April 3, 1946: Merl Holloway has purchased the Conoco station at 10th and Columbia and his two brothers, Alton and Ernest Holloway, began operating it Sunday.

--Bob Farmer used an ad to thank the community for its patronage during the past 12 years as operator of the Plainview Bus Co., and to announce that he has sold the operation to C.A. Robinson.

--Capt. J.D. Worley was discharged from the Army on March 21 after terminal leave.

April 3, 1956: Arvin Don Oliver of Hale Center has been awarded the Eagle Scout Badge. The presentation was made by Plainview Mayor C.L. Abernethy during The District Court of Honor in Plainview.

--Cooper Pontiac-Cadillac has opened its newly completed body shop at 613-15 Baltimore, with 10 working stalls, a painting room and frame straightening facilities. Horace Curley Sloan is shop foreman, assisted by Oliver Massey, Glenn Manning, Jack Hilland and Willard Huckobey.

--The City Council at its regular session on Monday was requested to order another election on the proposed Canadian River Municipal Water Authority water contract for Plainview. City voters defeated the proposed contract in a March 13 election.

April 3, 1966: James Thornton, 51, of Hale Center died about 3:30 p.m. Saturday when the 1966-model car he was driving collided with a Santa Fe freight train at the intersection of FM 1914 and the tracks on the east side of Hale Center. The auto belonged to the victims brother, Al Thornton.

--Plainview will select a mayor and three councilmen in city elections Tuesday. None of the places are contested. M.B. Hood is seeking his fifth term as mayor. Keltz Garrison is seeking a third term and councilman James Davenport a second. Neal Williams has filed for the seat being vacated by Maurice Hanna.

--A drive is now under way to raise $150,000 to support the work of the newly-organized Plainview Industrial Foundation. Jim Collins is foundation president. It was formed last September.

April 3, 1986: Gebos retail store at 428 Ash will be relocating to 1605 W. Fifth, the building formerly occupied by Buddys supermarket, according to company president Brent Gebo. He said the company originally planned to build a new facility at Fifth and Yonkers before opting for the existing structure. Corporate offices will remain at the downtown location.

--Hospital board members in Tulia will host an open house Sunday at Redmon Clinic, a new $378,687 four-doctor facility west of Swisher Memorial Hospital. It is named for the late Mr. and Mrs. Newt Redmon, who donated a section of land and funds toward the clinic.

--Sgt. Charlie Simmons is the new Department of Public Safety supervisor for the Plainview area, taking over for Thurman Keefer who retired in January. A Borger native, Simmons, 36, has been with DPS for 12 years with prior duty assignments in Dumas, Slaton and most recently Houston.

Compiled by Doug McDonough
In case you missed it, here are some of the highlights from last weeks Record-Journal news coverage.







16 educators leaving Wallingford schools



Sixteen teachers and administrators collectively employed for nearly 350 years will be retiring or resigning by the end of the school year. Over time, the retirements will save money as the departing staff are replaced by less experienced educators at reduced rates, but the immediate impact will be a net loss of over $100,000 as the district pays severance packages to retirees.



Jersey Mike donates sales to Meriden Public Schools



Jersey Mikes South Broad Street location donated 100 percent of Wednesdays sales to the Meriden public schools as part of the restaurants Day of Giving campaign. The day caps Jersey Mikes sixth annual Month of Giving campaign, which supports more than 180 nationwide charities.



Last year, more than $3 million was raised for more than 150 charities.



Properties to be razed for future Meriden CVS



Demolition of three Broad Street buildings to make way for a CVS Pharmacy will begin soon.



Assistant City Planner Tom Skoglund said that demolition should start by early next week. Demolition preparations, including chain-link fencing around the site and a tarp over a section of one building, has already been done.



Wallingford prepares for police K-9 unit



Tate, an 11-month-old Labrador, looked as anxious as any other puppy in the veterinary hospital waiting room Monday afternoon  sniffing diligently, jumping on furniture and excitedly trying to explore everything within the range his leash would allow.



After three months of training, Tate will become the newest addition to the Wallingford Police Departments K-9 unit.



Officer Lou Brangi will serve as Tates handler.



The town hasnt had a police dog in more than 30 years.



Demolition of McDonalds in Wallingford completed



Demolition of McDonalds on Route 5 has been completed.



Only the entrance sign remained as of Tuesday afternoon. Rubble near the center of the site had yet to be cleared. The former restaurant closed for demolition on March 11. It was built 40 years ago and underwent several interior renovations.






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A documentary published online in January features several San Antonio teenagers who believe they are real-life vampires, some of whom have drank other peoples blood.

The documentary follows several young self-identified real vampires, with some even drinking donated human blood or cutting friends arms to drink from them. The video has garnered more than 590,100 views since being posted on Jan. 28.

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The film also meets with some of these young peoples parents and friends to see how they have reacted to this subculture.

San Antonio resident David, 17, said he believes vampires are half-human, half-demon.

My soul is corrupted, David said in the documentary. I am not a human.

I like blood. Blood makes me feel stronger, better, more healthy, more awake, more confident, like it makes me feel good inside, he said.

One girl, Michal, said Hollywood vampires cant have garlic, but she loves the aromatic food.

Its good for your heart, she said.

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Michal also explained her first time trying another persons blood at a young age, saying she got a rush from the experience of licking a friends open wound.

David also describes his girlfriend, Ookami, as looking like food at times, even though he cares about her a lot.

The vampires also hang out with a group of wolves who wear tails on their hind ends.

The documentary shows the vampires washing knives in preparation to cut friends arms so they can drink some blood. Michal said using teeth to puncture a persons skin to drink blood is frowned upon, but she likes to use glass because it cuts clean and theres digging involved with the cutting.

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The documentary also points out that San Antonio has a reputation of being one of Americas most haunted cities.

As a pastor this is definitely something I believe is from Satan, Anthony Cobbs, a local pastor said in the documentary. This is something that is being used to take young people away from focusing in on god and focusing in on a relationship with Christ.

One parent who supervises the kids said it doesnt bother her, and that she is OK with whatever makes them happy.

You can watch the full documentary in the video above.

twhite@mysa.com

Twitter: @tylerlwhite
A sleeping homeless man in the downtown area awoke to a man pointing a gun at him a little before 5 a.m. on Sunday morning, San Antonio police say.

The gunman shot the homeless man in the arm. The victim fought back cutting the suspect with a knife before the suspect fled the scene, according to police
Brace yourself. The way things are looking we might be stuck with a Trump presidency. If voters choose this fellow, history will say that it happened because Americans were so angry, they went off the deep end.

Did we become so angry that we elected a total newbie  an angry, divisive and pompous apprentice to occupy the White House and become the worlds leader?

Many Americans think they have a right to be angry. If you are so disposed, you can find plenty of things to get mad about. Voters will tell you they are angry because weve lost jobs to China. Angry because our borders are not secure. Because taxes are too high. Angry because Congress cant get things done. Angry because Congress is doing the wrong thing. Angry because they feel a loss of power and loss of control.

Still, look at the facts. Our economy has rebounded. Unemployment is at new lows. Home values are up. Cars, trucks and homes are selling like hotcakes, and more and more of our youth are attending college. We live longer lives than ever before. People no longer die of AIDS at rapid rates, and a diagnosis of cancer is no longer a foregone death sentence. Crime is down to unprecedented lows. It is hard to find an American with fewer than two TVs, with at least one of them being a big flat-screen. Most of us live in a home with three bedrooms and have enough food and drink to make ourselves ever bigger and less healthy.

Instead of counting our blessings, we get angry.

Could we ourselves be part of the problem? Is it possible weve gotten spoiled as Americans?

Suspend disbelief for a moment. We complain about losing jobs to China. Yet we buy stuff made in China from Walmart and others because its cheaper. We want the high-paying jobs and, at the same time, we want stuff that costs less. Simple arithmetic tells us it cant happen. Yet we demand it.

Lets take the idea of a totally secure border wall that Mexico will pay for. If you buy that line from Trump, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Heres the reality: Theres no such thing as a 100 percent secure border. There never has been. And there never will be. Besides, last year, more people crossed the border to Mexico than came from Mexico to the U.S. And so far, no terrorist has ever come from Mexico to hurt us in America. Most terrorists, as we now know, come in legally or are American-born.

Angry about taxes being too high? Try France, Switzerland or most European countries, where 50 percent to 70 percent tax is the norm. And the bureaucracy to start a business or buy a home is so full of traps and turns, folks just give up rather than mess with trying.

Consider the term American dream. It was coined in the mid 40s right after World War II when America was looking forward to a new beginning. At that time, the American dream was a two-bedroom home with a front yard in the suburbs. One bath, a carport and one car was the dream. Today, if thats all you have, youre angry because you might be living in poverty, or because there are people who have more stuff than you.

Heres something else to consider. The original Social Security Act allowed Americans to claim retirement and medical benefits at the age of 65. That sounded great. However, life expectancy was 62, meaning most people never collected. Now we demand many times the benefits starting at 62, even when life expectancy is 78 for men and 84 for women. Do the math again. It doesnt work. Heres something else. Medicare now pays routinely for open heart surgeries and lifelong cancer treatments that run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per family. The government pays out these huge sums as routinely as they pay for aspirin. We are living longer because of the amazing medical advances we gladly take, but wed rather not pay taxes for these advances.

Perhaps the anger that Trump is exploiting is a deep, irrational anger based on fear. Fear of cultural change, fear of people not exactly like us moving into the neighborhood. A fear that can too easily turn to hate. A fear that is fanned by Trump and by all would-be despots, aided and abetted by both the liberal and conservative media channels. Heres an idea for all you angry people: Turn off those big flat-screen TVs and pick up a newspaper  hard copy or online.

I, for one, would rather have an experienced, optimistic and composed president who can bring both parties together to get Congress working again. Thats pretty much all we need. For now, Id rather be thankful for what I have, and not live in perpetual fear due to change, or live in anger because of what I wish I had.

Lionel Sosa is a San Antonio marketing executive and political consultant.
Posted on 04/03/2016, 1:00 pm, by mySteinbach

With the number of older adults quickly growing, the next Manitoba government must address the need to improve transportation options in the province. That was the message from Seniors Vote 2016, a coalition of six organizations representing more than 30,000 older adults in Manitoba, which met at the Gwen Secter Creative Living Centre to draw attention to their message.

If were serious about people living long, active lives, then we have to get much more serious about transportation issues, said Lionel Guerard, president of Transportation Options Network for Seniors. There needs to be a focus on the needs of seniors and others who do not drive. There are few transportation options in rural and urban areas, apart from the support of friends and family and volunteer driving programs where they exist.

Many seniors do not qualify for Handi-Transit, and using taxi services is not an option for many seniors  especially those on fixed incomes who cannot afford it, said Guerard.

Seniors Vote 2016 has identified transportation as a gateway issue to many other challenges facing older adults. The World Health Organization says transportation is one of the main things that determines healthy, active aging. It is a determinant of health and is pivotal to social inclusion and active participation in our communities.

We are happy that some of the parties have already pledged to lower ambulance fees which are the highest in Canada, said Tom Farrell, President, Manitoba Association of Senior Centres. But lets give seniors a way to stay connected and involved before they need an ambulance.

Research by the Centre on Aging  University of Manitoba (August 2013) has shown there are wide-ranging health benefits for older adults who continue to participate socially as they age, including:

enhanced quality of life and better self-rated health

longer survival; lower morbidity

decreased risk of disability and functional and mobility decline

decreased likelihood of depression and generalized anxiety disorders

decreased risk of cognitive decline and dementia

Seniors Vote 2016 is a group of six seniors organizations, representing tens of thousands of Manitobans, that has come together to ensure issues facing older adults are central to the current provincial election campaign.
Posted on 04/03/2016, 10:00 am, by mySteinbach

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is pleased to share February enforcement highlights from its Manitoba operations.

CBSA officers in Manitoba seized personal quantities of steroids and suspected narcotics from travellers throughout the month. On February 1, Emerson officers seized a small amount of suspected ecstasy pills from a returning Canadian, and 30 ml of steroids from a U.S. man on February 5. On February 25, Boissevain officers seized a stun gun from another U.S. traveller (knuckle-handled stun gun device). All items were seized with no terms of release.

In Winnipeg, CBSA officers intercepted varying amounts of narcotics and weapons concealed in courier shipments, including 600 ml of a liquid substance containing suspected marijuana on February 2, and 90 tablets of suspected steroids on February 3. On February 17, officers also intercepted a pen knife, a prohibited weapon in Canada, from a shipment destined for Alberta.

CBSA officers made several arrests and kept inadmissible people out of the country:

*At the Winnipeg International Airport on February 5, officers arrested a returning resident wanted on an outstanding warrant for driving while under the influence of alcohol. On February 11, officers arrested a returning resident on a Canada-wide warrant for possession of property obtained by crime. Both individuals were turned over to the Winnipeg Police Service. On February 22, officers also denied entry to a U.S. man who had a previous conviction for burglary, which made him criminally inadmissible to Canada.

*At the Emerson border crossing on February 8, CBSA officers denied entry to a U.S. man with a previous theft conviction, and on February 12 a second U.S. man was refused entry for a previous assault conviction. On February 29, officers arrested a Saskatchewan man on an outstanding warrant and turned him over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency continues to prohibit the importation of poultry products from Indiana. Travellers will be required to surrender these to the CBSA upon entry into Canada.
Lambert here: To prepare students for the workplace of tomorrow?

By Kali Holloway, senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet. Originally published at AlterNet.

One of Americas great paradoxes (or perhaps hypocrisies) is its claim to be a global beacon of freedom, even as it jails more of its citizensby population percentage and in raw numbersthan any other country in the world. This tendency toward suspicion, hyper-enforcement and punishment is so pervasive it even trickles down to our kids. CNN cites a National Center for Education Statistics report that finds 43 percent of U.S. public schools have some form of security personnel patrolling their halls and grounds, a figure that rises to 63 and 64 percent, respectively, in public middle and high schools.

In addition to the school resource officer, the over-policing of American society has now given rise to a new figure: the educator-interrogator.

As the Guardian noted last year and the New Yorker discussed recently, school administrators are increasingly being trained as interrogators to extract confessions from students for so-called crimesmost often, minor offenses from schoolyard scuffles to insubordination. Instruction in the interrogation arts is provided by John E. Reid and Associates, a global interrogation training firm that contracts with police departments, armed services divisions and security companies around the country. According to the New Yorker, the company has taught its patented Reid Technique to hundreds of school administrators in eight states. That training may be leading to an increasing number of students fessing up, even when they have nothing to confess to.

As the New Yorker notes, like the adult version of the Reid Technique, the school version involves three basic parts: an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed, according to Reids workbook, to obtain an admission of guilt.

Reids methods are built on what Bloomberg writer Drake Bennett calls the twin poles of interrogation styles: minimization and maximization.'

Forms of coercion that correspond, roughly, to good cop, bad cop. Minimization plays down the significance of the crime and offers potential excuses for ityou just meant to scare her or anyone in your situation would have done the same thing. Maximization plays it up, confrontationally presenting incriminating evidence and refusing to allow any response except a confession. The two are the most widely used tools in the American police interrogator toolkit.

The New Yorker spoke with Jessica Schneider, an attorney at the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who attended one of Reids educator-focused training sessions early last year. The instruction included a run-down of telltale body language signs indicating a studentor as they were referred to in the session, suspect or subjectis lying.

Many of these purported indicators can be found in Reids Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. The list includes closed, retreated posture (crossed armsreflect decreased confidence or lack of emotional involvement), constant forward lean (a controlling and defensive posture) and frozen and static (the subject who is so intent on not incriminating themselvesmay, essentially shut down nonverbally). Interrogators are cautioned to look for poker-like deception tellshand wringing, scratching, wiping sweat, knuckle popping. An anxious liar, according to the Reid Technique, is a squirmy liar.

One of the many problems with this approach is that its notoriously fallible. Typically nervous behaviors are not surefire indicators of guilt, mostly because theres no universal litmus test for lying. Bennett points to a 2003 study from the Universities of Virginia and Missouri-Columbia which found that many of the behaviors associated with lying dont necessarily tell us anything at all. Behavioral cues that are discernible by human perceivers are associated with deceit only probabilistically, researchers wrote. To establish definitively that someone is lying, further evidence is needed.

In other words, there is no definitive liars pose. TV police procedurals and cop movies get it wrong all the time, and when they expect similar results, so do real-life interrogators.

Minimization and maximization interrogation methods, like those used by Reid and others, are good at yielding confessions. But an increasing number of experts suggest that in far too many cases, those confessions are false, resulting from a blend of fear and coercion. Psychologist Melissa Russano devised a study that found the Reid Technique often produces false admissions of wrongdoing in innocent subjects. Guilty people are more likely to confess, Russano told Bennett. The problem is, so are innocent people.

That was certainly true in the case of Juan A. Rivera, who in 1993 was convicted to life in jail for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. After serving 20 years for a crime he didnt commit, Rivera sued a number of law enforcement agencies and other organizations for $20 million, a figure he was granted in an out-of-court settlement. John E. Reid and Associates paid $2 million of that sum. The false confessions of the Central Park Five, who were all teenagers at the time of their arrests, were also likely obtained using Reid-derived methods. Its no wonder the U.S. Supreme Court has written that mounting empirical evidence proves that certain forms of interrogation can induce a frighteningly high percentage of people to confess to crimes they never committed.

Another glaring issue is that children and adolescents are often easily influenced and compliant toward authority figures. Theyre easy to intimidate and coerce, and often prioritize immediate rewards (having the interrogation end; getting to go home) over future penalties (suspension/expulsion/etc.)

The Innocence Project, highlighting figures provided by the National Registry of Exonerations, notes that in the last 25 years, 38 percent of exonerations for crimes allegedly committed by youth under 18 years of age involved false confessions, compared with 11 percent for adults. A University of Virginia review of research on the subject found a study of exonerations between 1989 and 2004 discovered 42 percent of the cases of juvenile exonerees involved false confessions, compared with 13 percent of the cases of adult exonerees. Among the youngest of these juvenile exonerees (12- to 15-year-olds), 69 percent confessed to homicides and rapes that they did not commit.

A 2013 American Prospect piece titled Teacher, May I Plead the Fifth? cites yet another example:

In a 2012 study of interrogations of around 300 juveniles charged with felonies in Minnesotathe largest such empirical study availableUniversity of Minnesota law professor Barry Feld found that, after suspects waived their Miranda rights, officers used maximization techniques in 69 percent of cases and minimization techniques in 15 percent. Seven percent of all the interrogations studied were performed in schoolsIn the Minnesota study, 93 percent of juveniles gave [their Miranda rights] up. Juveniles waive at such high rates either because they do not understand the warning, do not grasp the gravity of their situation, want to tell their side of the story, or are terrified, says Feld. After they start to talk, confessions almost always follow (88 percent of the time in the Minnesota study), making the states case easy to put together and often leading to a quick plea bargain.

These issues are particularly relevant in schools, where protocols such as reading kids their Miranda rights and securing authority for searches dont apply.

Theres also the highly important question of how transforming school administrators into interrogators informs their view of students. A 2009 study cited by the New Yorker suggests that among police, training in the Reid Technique skewed perceptions of juveniles, making them appear more adult and less trustworthy. University of Virginia psychologists reported that Reid-trained police were less aware of the developmental differences between adolescents and adults than police who did not receive the training. The researchers also found that officers trained in the Reid Technique tended to believe that adolescents were just as capable as adults of withstanding psychologically coercive questioning, including deceit. Thats not a particularly surprising outcome to casting every student as a potential criminal. If even well-trained law enforcement personnel have their ideas about minors shifted in this way, imagine the likely impact interrogation training has on school administrators.

If all this isnt enough to show how problematic interrogations in schools are, consider how the practice contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline, a cluster of education policies that combine to deliver studentsoverwhelmingly poor, African American, Latino, or coping with physical and mental disabilitiesdirectly from schools to jails. Zero-tolerance policies, which criminalize and disenfranchise already vulnerable students, have resulted in an unprecedented rise in suspensions and expulsions. The Vera Institute of Justice finds that around the country, the number of high school students suspended or expelled each academic year increased from one in 13 in 1972-73 to one in nine in 2009-10a nearly 40 percent rise.

From preschool throughout their years of schooling, black and Latino students are more likely to be punished in this way. Though schools have multiple options for disciplining students, under zero tolerance they often resort to the harshest available, despite evidence that interventions such as counseling yield better results for student health than criminalization. From the Vera report:

A rigorous and detailed study of students in Texas published in 2011 by the Council of State Governments and the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University shows how the culture of zero tolerance became so pervasive in that state that harsh punishments are meted out even when they are not strictly required. Twelve researchers tracked every student who entered seventh grade in 2000, 2001, and 2002 for six years. They found that more than half (60 percent) were suspended or expelled at some point in middle or high school. Moreover, the majority of those suspensions and expulsions appear to be for offenses that did not involve behaviors that fell within the parameters of the state of Texas zero-tolerance mandate; instead, they were simple violations of the schools code of conduct, such as using tobacco or acting out in ways that teachers find to be disruptive. In other words, school administrators chose to use harsh punishments even when they had the discretion to do otherwise.

Considering that a 2012 study from Johns Hopkins found that a single suspension in ninth grade potentially doubles the chances a student will drop out, the stakes are incredibly high.

In 2014, the Obama administration suggested teachers and schools abandon zero-tolerance policies and consider less extreme actions. Even at the highest levels, theres new recognition that turning schools into prisons simply isnt working, and neither is turning educators into interrogators. Instituting low-grade forms of school-sanctioned terror just creates a culture of mutual distrust and antipathy and ensures that the first lesson kids learn in school is one rooted in fear.
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John R. Wood Properties

The company has added the following agents to its team.

Angela Graziano has joined the company's Central office. From Chicago, she brings more than 16 years of experience in the residential real estate sales industry. Upon her arrival in Naples, Graziano joined forces with her fiance, Realtor Scott Twait, working with clients in The Moorings, Park Shore and Old Naples areas. She is a member of the Naples Area Board of Realtors (NABOR).

Scott Twait has joined the Central office. He also relocated to Naples from the western suburbs of Chicago. Twait served for 11 years in the U.S. Army Aviation Branch as a Non-Commissioned Officer, and is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. Upon separation from the military, he worked for the U.S. Army in Hanau, Germany as a management analyst. Over the last 16 years, Twait founded two companies in the automotive industry, an Internet marketing company, and also became a real estate investor. He is a member of NABOR.

Raymond Lazowski has joined the North Naples office. He came to Florida from Canada in 2005 to attend Ave Maria University and has been a resident of the community since 2009. He also attended Ave Maria School of Law. Lazowski is a member of NABOR) and will specialize in listings and sales in Ave Maria.

Brandon DeJesus has joined the company's Old Naples office. DeJesus has been a Realtor since 2001 representing both sellers and buyers. He has also earned the designations of Certified Residential Specialist (CRS) and e-Pro in addition to obtaining a Broker Associate license and achieving the Five Star Award for professional service. Originally from Pennsylvania, DeJesus acquired a bachelor of science in legal studies at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is a member of NABOR.

Kathleen Stanton has joined the Old Naples office. She brings 12 years of real estate sales experience, selling luxury properties throughout Old Naples and the waterfront neighborhoods in Naples. Before her career in real estate, Stanton spent 10 years in the marketing and communications field. She also holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin. Having resided in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Germany and now Naples, Stanton's relocation experience provides her the understanding to assist clients in finding the right location for their lifestyle.
Naples resident Sharon Mahars daughter, Jennifer Jenkins, and her friend Kathleen OCallaghan were killed in a December 2011 crash in Hardee County. (David Albers/Staff)

It took ten months for authorities to arrest Michael Phillips, the driver of a semi-truck that plowed into Toyota Corolla on Dec. 30, 2011, killing Jennifer Jenkins, 35, a Naples nurse, and her childhood friend, Kathleen O'Callaghan, 34.

The wait seemed interminable to Jenkins' mother Sharon Mahar. But that wait was just beginning.

In a case where unspeakable sadness is heaped upon unspeakable sadness, delays in bringing Phillips to trial continue with no end in sight.

On Tuesday, Mahar will make the trip to Hardee County, where the crash occurred, for yet another hearing for Phillips, 51, who is charged with two counts of DUI manslaughter and a slew of other counts. She's made the two-hour drive to the courthouse in Wauchula at least 20 times, she estimates, and expects to make it many more.

"It's draining. It's just frustrating there's been no progress," Mahar said Thursday at The Conservancy of Southwest Florida, where she works as an executive assistant.

But Mahar, or Jenkins' husband Dan, or someone else from the victims' families, will be at every hearing until the case is concluded, she said.

Related:

By being there, family members have raised questions and corrected mistakes that might have led to more delays. "If someone wasn't there to represent the girls and follow up on things, we'd be farther behind than we are, I guess," Mahar said.

A review of the court file offers insights into the system's failings and a heart wrenching account of the accident itself.

Jennifer Jenkins and O'Callaghan were driving east on State Road 64 heading to Orlando for a friend's birthday party. Following them was Dan Jenkins, traveling with the couple's 2-month-old daughter Ashley, the answer to their prayers after experiencing fertility problems.

"It was going to be the first time Jen was going to be able to show off Ashley to her friends," Sharon Mahar recalled.

The group took two cars so they'd have the flexibility to visit different people over the New Year's holiday, Mahar said.

At the same time, Phillips was traveling west in a Kenworth tractor without a trailer attached.

There were ominous signs even before the fatal wreck. Herbert Baker, an employee of the Hardee County Clerk of Courts office, was driving home after work when he spotted the truck driven by Phillips in front of him, swerving across lanes, speeding up and slowing down erratically. Baker tried to call 911 but couldn't get his "horrible" cellphone to work.

He passed the truck, only to find it bearing down on his rear bumper moments later. It ran him off the side of the road, brushing his car as it went by at around 70 mph.

Within seconds, he witnessed the wreck.

Florida Highway Patrol troopers investigating determined Phillips had drifted into the opposite lane, hitting the Corolla almost head-on.

The first deputies on the scene knew immediately Jennifer and Kathy were dead in their car. Dan Jenkins' Ford Escape was on its side.

The Kenworth ended up in an orange grove a few hundred feet from the point of impact.

There was nothing they could do for the two young women, so the officers helped the medics with Phillips, who was still in the truck cab. He resisted efforts to remove him, grabbing a female medic by the hair. He cursed and flailed at the rescue workers before they finally got him strapped to a backboard and into an ambulance.

Other officers had to keep Dan Jenkins away from the car where his wife had died.

Mahar has spent hours reading through the court file, not only familiarizing herself with the legal morass of delays and repetition, but culling out the moments of humanity found in the witness accounts.

"When I read the deposition of the man who got (Ashley) out of the vehicle, that touched me. Even though this terrible thing happened, there were kind people there. It's those things I concentrate on. The people that were helpful. Not the defendant."

Even now, more than four years after the crash, Mahar won't say Phillips' name out loud.

She maintains notebooks full of details from the case, emails she's exchanged with the authorities and updates posted on a blog about the two women and the quest for closure.

Ultimately, she'll give them to Ashley, so that she has a record of what happened beyond the family's oral history. Looking at the child, Mahar sees much of her daughter. "Everyone wants to say their kid is special, but there was something about Jen. She drew people to her."

Though 4-year-old Ashley doesn't understand it yet, she plays a key role in keeping her family positive through the ordeal. "What would Jen want?" Mahar asks rhetorically. "She would want us of course to take care of her family. Not that we don't grieve, but we try to keep things upbeat."

So far, four trial dates for Phillips have come and gone.

Other hearings have been put off for various reasons. Free on just $20,000 bail, Phillips missed a hearing in June of 2014, causing the judge to revoke bond. Months of delays ensued before he was found and jailed with no bond.

The very fact that bond was so low in a case involving two deaths stunned Mahar. "It was like a slap in the face," she said.

Other postponements occurred when the defense attorney failed to show up.

The latest string of delays centers on a defense expert who is to review the toxicology reports showing Phillips had methamphetamines and a form of Valium, but no alcohol, in his system at the time of the crash.

Since at least last November the expert, Dr. Stefan Rose of Palm City, has claimed he hasn't been able to produce a report because he hasn't gotten the material he needs from the state.

Brian Haas, chief assistant state attorney for the 10th Circuit, said he understands the family's frustration with the case. "We're mindful of the fact that the victims' family is interested in seeing this case brought to a close," Haas said.

David Ward, the prosecutor in the case, intends to ask Judge Marcus Ezelle for a very tight schedule to force the defense to get its expert prepared and to move forward, Haas said.

A year ago, Phillips wrote to Ezelle from the county jail, calling the lack of access to religious services a "travesty."

"From my perspective, he's the travesty," Mahar said. "He's never owned up to this.

"As a parent, you want justice for your child. I would just like it said in a courtroom he's guilty," she said. "These young women deserve to have this end."

(Connect with Brent Batten at brent.batten@naplesnews.com, on Twitter@NDN_BrentBatten and at facebook.com/ndnbrentbatten)
<p>Artist Nicholas Petrucci is pictured with his most recent installment of "Guardians of the Everglades", an exhibition of those who work to protect the Everglades, is pictured in Naples on Friday, Oct. 9, 2015. The piece will be featured at an event in New York City honoring Mary Barley, an environmentalist and the subject of the painting. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff)</p>

SHARE Dorothy Edwards/Staff Photographer Connie Bransilver and artist Nicholas Petrucci stand in front of some of the portraits in aGuardians of the Everglades,a an exhibition about people who have worked to protect the Everglades. Artist Nicholas Petrucci and photographer Connie Bransilver are pictured among some of the portraits of "Guardians of the Everglades", an exhibition of those who work to protect the Everglades, in Naples on Friday, Oct. 9, 2015. The most recent installment piece will be featured at an event in New York City honoring Mary Barley, an environmentalist and the subject of the painting. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Dorothy Edwards/Staff Nicholas Petruccias most recent installment of aGuardians of the Everglades,a a North Naples exhibit about people who have worked to protect the Everglades.

By Harriet Heithaus

One characteristic radiates from every countenance in this gallery of guardians: vigilance. These Everglades preservationists, in life-size paintings, loom even larger because of it.

Nicholas Petrucci, who painted them, never mentions that constant. But he must see the watchfulness he has brushed into those eyes. He has spent more time on this series than the work-to-value ratios he thinks he should allow himself.

I didnt pay attention to my own artistic principles, he said two weeks ago, having fretted over the sheen on subject Mary Barleys hair for most of a day. I got home at 10 last night.

Mary Barley, like most of the others in this gallery, is not on the radar of Americas name culture. The Wisconsin native, now living in Islamorada, lobbied successfully for Restoring the Everglades, the bill that authorized $8 billion for a comprehensive Everglades restoration plan. Her awards include the Audubon of Floridas Lifetime Achievement and its Champion of the Everglades. She has won the Everglades Coalitions stewardship award and was named a 1999 Hero for the Planet by Time magazine.

Like the rest of the people in this group, Barley has no Twitterati telegraphing her moves, no legion of followers, petitioning history book committees, no contract for a film version of her life. Still, what she  and the seven others currently in this gallery  have done is realized every time we pour a glass of clean water, catch a healthy fish or see a nearly extinct ghost orchid bloom.

On their own, Petrucci and his wife, photographer Connie Bransilver, are creating the visuals of a gallery meant to make the world mindful of what these conservationists have done for them.

An artistic vision

Petrucci captured some of his subjects none to soon. Miccosukee Chief Buffalo Tiger, whose campaign to publicize the Everglades and its dwellers even took him to Fidel Castros office, died in January at age 94.

There have been dilemmas over how to best present each one. Petrucci had to winnow down his subjects trademarks, such as Sen. Bob Grahams fondness for Aristotle, and back country guide Frank Adams shotgun.

For Florida panther biologist Deborah Jansen, who has spent more than 30 years studying and advocating for the cats, Petrucci had to use a stuffed animal to simulate the panther kitten she holds in the portrait.

The usual questions started to arise: Would a real kitten have its claws out? (With a house cat, no; in the case of a Florida panther, yes.)

Petrucci, who is as tall as Bransilver is petite, says the gallery originated from his own head-scratching about collections.

This idea came about standing in New York looking at a lot of artwork. What I noticed was there was no cohesiveness to the work. Youd have flowers and still lifes and portraits. But there was never a theme to anything, Petrucci said. I just felt a serious portrait should be done about one idea, and the idea came to us at that moment  lets do something for the Everglades.

Each guardian recommended his or her successor in the gallery.

He was lucky, he said, that his wife, an internationally known photographer, knew nearly all the people involved. That gave them an introduction to wade through swamps with them, see their libraries and even spend a weekend with Barley, a longtime angler who first discovered, with her late husband, George, the algae bloom beginning to choke the aquatic life in the Florida Bay.

Both undertook the campaign to save the waters. But George Barley was killed in a small plane crash in 1995, on his way to meet the Corps of Engineers District Commander in Jacksonville.

In her portrait, his apparition gently wraps an ethereal arm around her as she muses.

Props for Rembrandt

There are things to learn artistically as well as ecologically. Petrucci follows an Italian classical style of painting, known as verdaccio. It uses a green-tinted gray underpainting, which makes the colors painted over it reproduce differently.

If you want the nose to recede, and you have a dark area over the nose, you put the skin color over that dark green, he said. You just tap it, and that green will come through. And weve learned over time, that green and red together is almost is like sort of a vibration, and it brings the skin color to life.

Bransilver has shot all over the world, and recently released her second book, Wild Love Affair: Essence of Floridas Native Orchids. She has created an 8-by-14-foot silk banner series of endangered species to supplement the portraits. She has spent decades, among her other travels, sloshing through the Everglades scouting out Fakahatchee ladies tresses, orange-faced crested caracara birds and a raft of rare orchids such as cowhorn and clamshell.

Bransilver and Petrucci hope to make the gallery a multimedia one, with help from Pure Image Productions. Pure Image Productions is a collaboration between Marine Team International, an international marine filming team with a Naples office, and Scoular Image Inc, a Hollywood videography company.

We have the paintings that would travel. We have the banners that would travel. We have all kinds of stories about the Everglades, he said.

For this, he admits, the project would need a sponsor, someone who would see it as his or her own legacy for the Everglades.

Until then, the guardians in the gallery are watching.

See the guardians

Where: Nicholas-Bransilver Gallery, 1719 Trade Center Way, Unit 3, North Naples

When: 2-7 p.m. Wednesdays or by appointment

Information: 239-405-2010 or 239-405-2003

Harriet Howard Heithaus writes about arts for the Naples Daily News. If you have an idea or topic, call her at 239-213-6091, email at harriet.heithaus@naplesnews.com. Twitter: NDN_HarrietHeit; Instagram: Flascribe.
In this file photo, a jogger runs past 3100 Gordon Drive on Tuesday, September 16, 2014. (Scott McIntyre/Staff)

SHARE The estate at 2200 Gordon Drive can be seen from the beach Thursday, March 31, 2016 in Naples. (Luke Franke/Staff) In this 2011 file photo, a view of 3400 Gordon Drive in Port Royal. (David Albers/Staff) In this 2012 file photo, a view of 3100 Gordon Drive in Naples . (Greg Kahn/staff) The estate at 2200 Gordon Drive can be seen from the beach Thursday, March 31, 2016 in Naples. (Luke Franke/Staff)

By June Fletcher of the Naples Daily News

As April turns thoughts to taxes, here's something cheery to consider.

Few Southwest Floridians, if any, have to pay as much property taxes for their home as the owners of 2200 Gordon Drive, a sprawling mansion with a Gulf view and its very own lake and tiny island.

Last year, it had an ouchable property tax bill of $575,733.18, according to Collier County tax records.

And its owner, Westbury Properties, Inc.  a group led by Canadian tycoon and Bermuda resident Michael De Groote Sr., who made his fortune in trucking, school buses and hauling solid waste  got to pay it.

Six-figure tax bills are hardly unique for owners of Collier County's most dazzling and well-located residences. But because of various caps and exemptions  including a $50,000 homestead exemption any permanent Florida resident can apply for  as well as length and type of ownership, tax bills can vary wildly for properties that have roughly equal market values.

"The effect can be dramatic," said Annabel Ybaceta, the county's director of exemptions.

For instance, both 2200 Gordon Drive and 100 Bay Road both have a market value of slightly over $60 million, according to county assessors.

But 100 Bay Road's annual tax bill is only $92,739.60.

2200 Gordon Drive has a market value of $60.97 million, the highest in Collier County, according to county assessment records. Of that, $59.2 million is attributable to its lushly landscaped 8.53-acre site; the rest to its 12,616-square-foot home, which was built three decades ago.

With a 10 percent annual cap on assessed value, the estate has a taxable value of $46.7 million.

But the assessed value could have been much less if the property were owned by Florida residents who also qualified for a homestead exemption, instead of a corporation, Ybaceta said.

While corporate owners of properties have assessment increases capped at 10 percent, for Florida residents with homestead exemptions, the cap is 3 percent, or the Consumer Price Index for the prior year  whichever is less.

Known as "Save Our Home," or SOH, the cap limits the increase in assessed value of a homesteaded property to no more than 3 percent a year, regardless of how high its market value has risen.

The base year is considered the year the property qualifies for a homestead exemption; for long-held properties, it's 1994, the year SOH went into effect.

Meant to mitigate sharp spikes in property values during boom times, SOH favors those who bought their homes years ago when prices were much lower, and those who have lived in them for a long time, said Ybaceta.

But it also tends to favor owners of more expensive homes over less expensive ones in rapidly rising markets, she said.

"Three percent of a larger number is a larger number," she said.

At the southern tip of Port Royal, 100 Bay Road has a total market value of $60.91 million, the second highest in Naples, the assessor's office shows.

That includes $56.6 million for the 4.28-acre site, and $4.3 million for the nine-bedroom, 9,700-square-foot house.

But the owners, Federated Investors founder John F. Donahue and his wife Rhodora, face a much lower tax burden than Westbury Properties.

"One reason the Donahues' bill was so much lower is that they've owned the home longer," said Collier County Property Appraiser Abe Skinner.

The Donahues purchased the property in the 1980s, and so their base year for SOH was 1994.

Although the Donahues conveyed a remainder interest in the property to a limited liability partnership in 2006, they remain the legal owners and are still entitled to the SOH and homestead exemptions.

With their $52.2 million SOH exemption, plus the $50,000 homestead exemption, its assessed value for tax purposes dropped to only $8.7 million, leading to its relatively low five-figure tax bill.

Conversely, 3400 Gordon Drive has a whopping tax bill of $487,416.95 because it is relatively new, at least for its storied street.

Built in 2003, the 30,000-square-foot home didn't qualify for SOH until 2004.

To qualify for SOH, owners of a newly built house must first obtain homestead status and hold legal title by January 1, Ybaceta said. Typically that means that the base year for the SOH exemption is the year after the home is actually built.

In the case of 3400 Gordon Drive, which is owned by Sandy Gerry, wife of Cablevision founder Alan Gerry, the taxable value totaled $54.725 million last year.

The county valued the 17 acres at $32.23 million, and the six-bedroom, 10-bath house, which has a bowling alley and two pools, at $22.49 million.

Once a homeowner establishes Florida residency, plus homestead and SOH exemptions, they continue even if the owner goes to jail in another state, Ybaceta said, because the property wasn't voluntarily abandoned.

That was the case for the 23,000-square-foot Island Colonial-style house at 3100 Gordon Drive owned by a trust for industrialist Randall Bellestri, who was sentenced to prison by a Michigan court in 2014 for tax evasion.

Put up for sale for $68 million the day he was sentenced, 3100 Gordon is now on the market for $60 million. It's valued by the county at $48.6 million.

The valuation includes $32.89 million for a little more than four acres with 277 feet of beach frontage, and $15.73 million for the five-bedroom, seven-bath mansion with a seven-car garage.

Because Bellestri bought the home in 2012 for the then-record price of $47.25 million, his SOH exemption wasn't very big  only $5.9 million.

So his tax assessment was $42.6 million, resulting in a tax bill of $453,546.35.

Another home at 2500 Gordon Drive has a total market value of $44.99 million, equating to $40.38 million for the 5.5-acre lot and $4.61 million for the Low Country house with wide verandas and pool house with Grecian columns.

But with an SOH exemption of $17.45 million, and the $50,000 homestead exemption, the taxable value dropped to $27.49 million last year.

That still leaves a substantial property tax bill of $292,572.06.

The 16,000-square-foot plantation-style house and guesthouse was purchased by Carole Allen and her then-husband, software company founder Arthur Allen, in 2007 for $40 million. It features a life-size, three-story-high mural of a tree and hand-carved egg-shaped marble master suite tub.

The house drew headlines when the couple tried to sell it for $80 million, furnished. But it was picked up last year by a limited liability company for $45.6 million. The sale reportedly satisfied three outstanding mortgages that totaled close to the asking price.

However, since limited liability companies, like corporations, are not eligible for the SOH cap on assessments, it will be removed from 2500 Gordon during the next round of assessments, she said. All properties in the county are reassessed each year. Preliminary values for 2016 will be mailed out in August.

Yet couples who sell their home can take up to $500,000 off their SOH exemption and apply it to a new homesteaded Florida residence, said Ybacata.

In the case of divorced couples  and the Allens are now divorced  the SOH exemption is split in half, she said. Each can apply his or her share of the so-called "portable" SOH exempt value to a new home.

Regardless of what a previous owner paid for property taxes, when a new owner takes charge, the assessed value becomes the market value in the following tax year. Usually that means the new owners will face a higher tax bill than their predecessors.

Yet Judy Green, president and chief executive of Premier Sotheby's International Realty in Naples, said that most buyers of top-tier properties aren't fazed by giant tax bills  especially if they come from high property tax states like New Jersey or New York.

"They certainly ask, but it does not become an issue very often," Green said. "They know what they want and are willing to pay for it."
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Pat Lyons, Naples

Trump's antics

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, that the nonsense and nasty demeanor of Donald Trump had risen and sought its own level, his rallies burst into full bloom.

They've become increasingly raucous, and ginned up by the ringmaster (candidate) himself and mixed with growing numbers of protesters, have morphed into ugly confrontations, culminating in the cancellation of a Chicago event.

During the pandemonium, Trump called a network to say "you can't even have a rally in a major city in this country anymore without violence or potential violence."

Yes, you can. The other candidates, especially Sen. Bernie Sanders, with his wild energy and enthusiasm pervading his events, have done exactly that, staying on message without referencing any mob mentality.

Trump blamed the disorder on anger in the country, an anger he said that's been going on for years. What nonsense. He has choreographed this routine for weeks, generally shouting at protesters with the familiar "get 'em out of here," then basking in the thunderous roar as his "security" swarm the protester(s) and push them out of the hall.

Trump boasted to the media that he could shoot someone in New York and not lose a single vote from his core base. Based on what I've been seeing, he's exactly right.

I don't support or subscribe to the views of Sen. Ted Cruz, but he stated that the candidates own the responsibility for the tone of their campaign, and they bear the responsibility for the culture. Cruz absolutely nailed it.

In keeping with some of the vague and somewhat murky endorsements Trump has recently received, such as Ben Carson's mystifying "two Donalds," should a Jerry Springer endorsement live from Panama City surprise anyone?
NATO Secretary General Mr. Jens Stoltenberg will visit the United States from Monday 4 April to Thursday 7 April 2016.

On Monday 4 April, Mr. Stoltenberg will meet with the President of the United States, Mr. Barack Obama at the White House.

He will also have meetings with other senior U.S. Government officials.

On Tuesday 5 April, the Secretary General, will visit Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He will observe a Global Response Force Training Exercise (Platoon Attack) at West McKethan Pond Training Area and visit Pope Airfield.

On Wednesday 6 April, Mr. Stoltenberg will meet with Members of the Armed Services Committee and Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill.

He will also deliver a speech at an event organized by the Atlantic Council.

Media Advisory

LOCAL TIME

Monday, 4 April 2016

11h10 - Beginning of meeting. Pool spray statements at the end of meeting in Oval Office.

Wednesday, 6 April 2016

16h00 - Speech hosted by the Atlantic Council  Ritz Carlton Hotel

The speech will be webstreamed live on the NATO website (www.nato.int) and on the organizer website: www.atlanticcouncil.org/events/webcasts/a-conversation-with-nato-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg

Still and video imagery of the events will be available from the NATO website.

Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg)
David Newman

The investigation

(NaturalNews) A shocking story has recently been reported by theregarding an ER doctor in New York City who has been accused of sexually assaulting four women at his work. The horrifying incidents happened over the course of five months and saw the doctor allegedly abusing his position as a caregiver and taking advantage of women while they were vulnerable and unable to defend themselves.The 45-year-old doctor has been named as David Newman, who is the father of two children and worked until recently at Mount Sinai Hospital. He has already been charged with sexually assaulting two women in his care and has now been indicted on new charges involving two other female patients.Newman is a prominent doctor in his field and actually wrote a book on patientdoctor relationships, aptly titledaccording to Reuters. Newman is no longer employed at the hospital, and his medical license was suspended in February 2016 during a state medical board investigation.Newman has been accused of sexually abusing four women aged between 18- and 29-years-old, during the period between August 2015 and January 2016, as reported by Reuters. Two of the women only came forward very recently, after Newman was first charged in January 2016.The investigation began after the police were informed of a women who was being treated for shoulder pain and given morphine before being sexually assaulted. Newman is said to have masturbated on her while she was under sedation, and semen found on the woman's face has tested positive for his DNA.In his defense, Newman claimed that he had been masturbating in the lounge of the emergency room and that it was possible that his semen may have still been on his hands when he was treating one of the women , coming into contact with her blanket and face. According to the, he told investigators, "I am embarrassed because I whacked off in the lounge, and it was possible that the ejaculate may have gone from my hands to the woman's blanket. ... Semen may have also transferred from my hand to her face during the time I treated her."Why the doctor's hands were not washed before he came into contact with a patient is further cause for concern, especially as superbugs are thought to spread rapidly through hospitals and are a major risk for patients, combated by doctors washing their hands frequently to prevent the spread of bugs.According to the police report, as reported in the, Newman explained that he had given the woman an extra dose of sedative  something not actually recorded on her chart. He also suggested that, because she was sedated, her account of what had happened was unreliable.The other women were in the emergency room for a headache, a rash and a cold  yet suffered similar assault including fondling of their breasts. Eun-Ha Kim of the Manhattan Supreme Court stated that there was "no legitimate medical reason to fondle these women's breasts" and that Newman had "preyed upon young, vulnerable, minority women."According to Reuters, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said, "As alleged in this indictment, four young women who came to the hospital for medical treatment were sexually abused by the very doctor entrusted with their care.""I would like to thank these brave women for their strength in coming forward," Vance stated, according to the
A young girl found the decapitated head of a Junipero Serra statue during a low tide Saturday afternoon off the coast of Monterey, a Monterey police sergeant said.

Officers responded at about 3:30 p.m. to a report of the found statue head, said Monterey police Sgt. Mickey Roobash.

Roobash said the girl was wading in the shallow water near the Coast Guard Pier when she spotted the stone head.

The head of the Roman Catholic missionary was lobbed off a statue in the lower Presidio of Monterey in October 2015, following Pope Francis' canonization of Serra on Sept. 23, Roobash said,

He said it was found "virtually across the street" from the entrance to the presidio where the statue stands.

The incident followed another act of vandalism against a Serra statue at San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo Mission at 3080 Rio Road in Carmel-by-the-Sea on Sept. 26 or 27, according to police.

In November, Santa Cruz police officers responded to a report of vandalism to a Serra statue at Santa Cruz Mission, located on School Street between High and Mission streets. Police said the vandals splattered red paint on the mission's front wooden doors and spray-painted a side wall with the message, "Serra St. of Genocide."

Several Native American groups had protested the canonization of Serra, who they said killed and enslaved thousands of indigenous Americans during the founding of California's missions.

The statue head from Monterey is currently being held as evidence, Roobash said. No suspects have been identified, but officers are investigating the incident.

Roobash said it was too early to say whether the head would be reattached to the statue any time soon.
A 42-year-old man was sentenced today in a San Francisco courtroom to 202 years to life in prison for molesting two underage family members.

Following a three-month trial, San Francisco resident Jose Melara was found guilty of intercourse, sodomy, oral copulation and molestation involving two girls who were both 4 years old at the time of the molestations, according to prosecutors.

In addition to the prison sentence, Melara must also pay restitution to the two victims, totaling $1,027,129 for each victim, prosecutors said.

During the trial, one of the victims, a niece of Melara, said the molestation lasted for five years and included oral copulation, intercourse and sodomy.

The victim, now an 11-year-old, said the molestation began the very first day Melara moved into the family's San Francisco home. After dropping off his wife, his children and the victim's other

siblings at their school, Melara would drive the girl a short distance to commit sexual acts inside his van, before bringing her back to school, according to prosecutors.

The victim didn't tell anyone in her family about the molestation until the summer of 2013. Melara also molested a cousin of his, who was also 4 years old when the molestation began.

Prosecutors said Melara would show the girl pornographic films before committing sexual acts on her. At one point, the victim's mother caught Melara assaulting her daughter.

"The fear and trauma these children endured is impossible to quantify," District Attorney George Gascon said in a statement. "These children demonstrated an immense amount of strength to come forward, and we will continue to assist them as they focus on recovering."
A North Hills man was charged Friday in the shooting death of his son, whom he allegedly killed because he was gay, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

Shehada Khalil Issa, 69, was charged with one count of willful, deliberate and premeditated murder, officials said. Prosecutors said the felony complaint includes a special allegation that Issa personally and intentionally discharged a shotgun and an allegation that he murdered his son because of his sexual orientation.

His son and wife were found dead Tuesday in his home in the 15000 block of Rayen Street, prosecutors said.

Amir Issa, 29, was shot outside of the house and his body was discovered in the front yard. His mother was found dead inside the bathroom, investigators said.

Prosecutors said Shehada Issa allegedly threatened to kill his son on prior occasions because of his sexual orientation.

Neighbors heard multiple gunshots that morning. They said they often hear arguing at the home. Investigators were determining whether the shootings were a result of a domestic dispute.

An investigation into the mother's death is ongoing, prosecutors said.

Shehada Issa was being held without bail. If convicted as charged, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole, prosecutors said.
Eleven people have been displaced from their home after an early morning fire in Hartford.

According to Lt. Thomas LeConche, fire crews were called to 194 Bond St. at 1:12 a.m. for a fire in the pantry on the first floor of the home.

When crews arrived, the fire had already spread to the rear porches and second floor of the home. Firefighters were able to quickly extinguish the fire, getting the blaze under control in just 19 minutes.

A total of 7 adults and four children were displaced as a result of the fire. The Hartford Fire Department Special Services unit and the American Red Cross are assisting them.

No injuries were reported.
A Meriden man admits he made a major mistake when he fired gunshots into a mosque next door to his home. The incident took place in November in the hours after the terror attacks in Paris.

Now he has done something that many in the mosque had been hoping he would do.

"I just ask for your forgiveness," said Ted Hakey Jr., apologizing to the members of the Baitul Aman Mosque.

"I'd like to apologize to the whole community," said Hakey. "It just shouldn't have happened."

Hakey said he was sorry for firing gunshots into the empty mosque next door to his house in the hours after the Paris terrorist attacks in November.

"Of course there was initially fear and then the police came right away," said Dr. Muhammad Quereshi, the President of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Connecticut.

Hakey told the mosque members on Saturday that he had been drinking alcohol on that November evening and that he was frightened of a religion that he knew nothing about.

"I wish that I had come on knocked on your door and if I had spent five minutes with you, it would have been all the difference in the world and I didn't do that," said Hakey.

In February, Hakey pleaded guilty to intentional destruction of religious property with a dangerous weapon.

"I'd like to go forward with learning and helping other people not make the same mistake I did," he said.

Hakey is currently out on bond but he still has to be sentenced. Federal guidelines suggest that he serve eight to fourteen months in prison.

A judge is scheduled to sentence Hakey on June 7.
Wet, heavy snow caused big problems for drivers early Sunday morning.

State police responded to several crashes along Interstate 84, including two tractor trailer crashes on I-84 West near between exits 66 and 68 in the Vernon and tolland areas.

In Torrington, Route 4 was closed after a crash near Lover's Lane, according to Torrington police. A car crashed into a utility pole, taking down wires, police said. There was no word on when the road would reopen.

Trees and wires were reported down on Route 30 in Stafford and on Pinney Road in Somers.
Police in Manchester, Connecticut arrested a husband and wife after an argument at Royal Buffet got out of hand on Saturday night.

Manchester police say they were called to 410 West Middle Turnpike for a dispute that started as an argument over crab legs at the buffet table and escalated into a physical confrontation. During the scuffle, a 21-year-old man was punched in the face and lost a tooth.

That man's mother jumped in and used pepper spray on her son's attackers. Her actions were in self-defense and she is not facing any charges, according to police.

Police arrested Clifford Knight, 45, and Latoya Knight, 38, both of Windsor. Clifford Knight is charged with third-degree assault and disorder conduct. Latoya Knight is charged with disorderly conduct and threatening. Police said the suspects are husband and wife.

Clifford Knight was released on a $5,000 non-surety bond and Lataya Knight was released on a $2,500 non-surety bond. They are both expected in court on April 14.

The Manchester Fire Department responded to vent out the restaurant after the pepper spray was deployed.

The restaurant had to close while the health department assessed the air quality, but the restaurant said they opened for business at the usual time Sunday.

Editors note: Police previously thought the injured victim was a juvenile but have since determined the victim was a young adult. This story has been updated to reflect this.


An Amtrak train struck a piece of construction equipment just south of Philadelphia Sunday morning, leaving two Amtrak employees dead and nearly three dozen passengers hurt.

Two workers were killed while dozens were injured after an Amtrak train crashed into a backhoe just south of Philadelphia Sunday morning. NBC10s Randy Gyllenhaal has the latest on the investigation.

Around 7:50 a.m., passengers aboard Amtrak's Palmetto Train 89 felt a jolt as the train slammed into a backhoe on the tracks between Booth Street and Highland Avenue in Chester, Pennsylvania  not far from the Highland Avenue Station, officials said. The impact derailed the lead engine of the train.

NBC10s Drew Smith spoke with passengers who were on board an Amtrak train that crashed into a backhoe just south of Philadelphia Sunday morning, killing two people.

U.S. Representative Bob Brady, D-PA, told NBC10 the two people who died were longtime Amtrak employees, one with around 40 years of service and another with around 20 years of service. Brady also said they were doing scheduled maintenance on the tracks at the time of the crash.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters at a New York news conference on another subject Sunday that he was told by Amtrak board chairman Anthony Coscia that the workers killed were the backhoe operator and a supervisor, both Amtrak employees. He said debris from the crash flew into the first two cars, causing the injuries to passengers.

Passengers were transported by ambulance to local hospitals after a Delaware County Amtrak crash Sunday morning that left two workers confirmed dead. Passengers say they heard a bang and felt a jolt.

Schumer said it's unclear whether the backhoe was performing regular maintenance, which is usually scheduled on Sunday mornings because there are fewer trains on the tracks, or whether it was clearing debris from high winds in the area overnight. But he said Amtrak has "a 20-step protocol'' for having backhoes on the track, and no trains are supposed to go on a track where such equipment is present.

"Clearly this seems very likely to be human error,'' Schumer said, calling for Amtrak to review its processes. "There is virtually no excuse for a backhoe to be on an active track.''

Two people died after an Amtrak train headed to Savannah, Georgia crashed in Delaware County Sunday morning. Train 89 was headed from New York when it ran into a backhoe on the rail. The train was carrying 341 passengers and seven crew members.

The train, which was headed from New York to Savannah, Georgia, had 341 passengers and seven crew members on board at the time, Amtrak said. At least 35 passengers suffered non-life-threatening injuries, Chester Fire Department Commissioner Travis Thomas said.

NTSB investigator Ryan Frigo said at an evening news conference that the event data recorder and forward-facing and inward-facing video from the locomotive have been recovered.

He said the locomotive engineer was among those taken to hospitals. Officials said earlier that none of the injuries was deemed life-threatening.

Frigo said he did not know why the equipment was on a track the train was using. He said scheduling, the track structure and the work that was being performed at the time of the accident would be part of the investigation. The event data recorder has been sent to the safety board's laboratory in Washington and will answer such questions as to how fast the train was going at the time of the crash, he said.

Passengers told NBC10's Randy Gyllenhaal they heard a bang, felt a jolt and then saw a plume of smoke and a fireball as the train proceeded past the point of impact. The force of the wreck caused the train engine to derail, Amtrak said. NBC10 cameras captured the smashed windshields of the derailed engine and damage to the front cars including smashed windows. [[374415721, C]]

Ari Ne'eman, a disability rights activist heading to Washington after speaking at an event in New York, said he was in the second car at the time of the crash.



"The car started shaking wildly, there was a smell of smoke, it looked like there was a small fire and then the window across from us blew out," said Ne'eman, 28, of Silver Spring, Maryland.

Some passengers started to get off after the train stopped, but the conductor quickly stopped them, he said. Officials started evacuating people to the rear of the train and then off and to a local church.

"It was a very frightening experience. I'm frankly very glad that I was not on the first car,'' where there were injuries, Ne'eman said. "The moment that the car stopped, I said Shema, a Jewish prayer. ... I was just so thankful that the train had come to a stop and we were OK.''

Businessman Steve Forbes told CSPAN's ``Book TV'' by phone that he was in the next-to-last car when the train "made sudden jerks'' as if it was about to make an abrupt stop.

Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, said the train then made another abrupt stop and "everyone's coffee was flying through the air.''

"The most disconcerting thing ... (was) not knowing what had happened,'' he said.

Since the public address system was knocked out, he and other passengers were left to speculate for 20 or 25 minutes before a crew member came back to tell them what had happened, he said.

Linton Holmes, a 15-year-old boy from Wilson, North Carolina, was near the back of the train after a visit with his mother in Sicklerville, New Jersey.

"The train was like rumbling... there was dust everywhere," he said.

Holmes said some people were cut up and he saw some people bloodied.

Local emergency responders on the scene assessed passengers. Concerned family members and friends of passengers who were on board the train were advised to call 1-800-523-9101 for information.

The nearby Trainer United Methodist Church at W 9th and Langley streets served as a staging scene. Emergency crews could be seen loading people on to waiting SEPTA buses to take them away from the scene.

SEPTA suspended trains along the Wilmington/Newark Line and Amtrak suspended all Northeast Corridor trains between Philadelphia and Wilmington for hours before beginning to operate limited service around 2:30 p.m. Keystone Service between New York and Harrisburg was not affected and is operating on schedule. Amtrak later announced Sunday night that service between Philadelphia and Wilmington would be restored Monday with some residual delays. SEPTA also announced they would resume service on the Wilmington/Newark Line for the Monday morning commute.

Individuals with questions about their friends and family on train 89 should call Amtraks Emergency Hotline at 800.523.9101.  Amtrak (@Amtrak) April 3, 2016

NJ Transit said it would accept Amtrak tickets for travelers going between New York and Trenton during the suspension. And SEPTA would honor Amtrak tickets for service on the Paoli/Thorndale Line to Trenton.

Unharmed passengers told NBC10 that Amtrak was helping them with rental cars so they could continue on their journey south. Other passengers were returned to Philadelphia, said officials.

It wasn't immediately clear why the backhoe was on the tracks. Federal Railroad Administration investigators joined local and Amtrak investigators in the search for clues Sunday. The National Transportation Safety Board took over the investigation once NTSB investigators arrived at the scene Sunday afternoon.

This derailment comes almost a year after an Amtrak train originating from Washington D.C. bound for New York City derailed in Philadelphia. Eight people died and more than 200 were injured in the May 12 crash. The exact cause of that crash remains under investigation, but authorities have said the train was traveling twice the speed limit.
A plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries Saturday, two days before the deal brokered by the European Union is set to be implemented.

At the same time, migrants stranded at a makeshift camp in this small town on Greece's border with Macedonia staged a protest demanding that the border be opened and that they be allowed to continue their journeys to central and northern Europe.

The migrants' continued presence led several dozen local residents to stage a protest Saturday morning. They blocked a road for about an hour to demand the evacuation of more than 11,000 stranded migrants to "transit centers" across the Greek mainland.

"The police know what they must do ... they must be issued orders," said Georgios Georgantas, a lawmaker with the conservative opposition New Democracy party, who joined the protesters. He called for the "immediate" evacuation of the Idomeni camp "using violence, if necessary."

Idomeni residents alleged that some migrants had broken into empty homes in the town and said they no longer felt safe.

In the coastal Turkish town of Dikili, hundreds demonstrated against the prospect of hosting people expelled from the nearby Greek islands, especially Chios and Lesbos, where there were over 5,000 migrants on Saturday morning.

Turkey is due to receive the first batch of returned migrants and asylum seekers on Monday. A plan to build a reception center in Dikili is unpopular with locals.

"We definitely don't want a refugee camp in Dikili," said the town's mayor, Mustafa Tosun.

Demonstrators expressed concern over the impact the EU deal could have on the economy, tourism and security in their town.

The EU-Turkey deal stipulates that those who reach the shores of Greece unlawfully will be returned to Turkey unless they qualify for asylum. The deal aims to break the lucrative smuggling operations that now operate out Turkey.

In Idomeni, more than 200 refugees and migrants staged a protest on a highway linking Greece and Macedonia, demanding that Macedonia open its borders. The protesters blocked trucks from crossing into Macedonia, but not passenger vehicles. In a counter-protest, the truckers blocked the road to other vehicles as well.

Near the camp itself, some migrants have camped on the rail tracks, blocking passenger and cargo traffic for the 13th day in a row.

Quite a few migrants, including war refugees from Syria and Iraq, are still hoping that Macedonia, and other Balkan countries to its north, will open their borders. There are rumors circulating in the camp that a "European summit" on Monday will decide to open the borders, but no such summit is scheduled.

But many others are giving up hope. Among them is Muthanna al Hashemy, 36, a refugee from Iraq, who has been waiting for 43 days, along with his wife and two boys, aged 4 and 6. He is getting desperate.

"I do not know what to do. The only solution is to return to my country. Here, the situation is worse than the war...They want us to go to the (transit centers) where it is worse than here. I no longer have any money," he says, adding that he spent "over 2,500 euros" ($2,800) to get to Idomeni. Still, a glimmer of hope persists.

"I will wait until Monday, see what happens and then return to my country," he said.

Dominique Soguel, in Turkey and Demetris Nellas in Athens, Greece contributed to this report.
With summer on the horizon, Southern California waves are beckoning a slew of Angelenos, including a French bulldog who has made surfing her charitable hobby.

Cherie, the 5-year old Frenchie, literally started from the bottom after being left at a dog shelter by a family who could not take care of her.

Cherie was placed into the French Bulldog Rescue Network at a very young age. That's where she was rescued by a Newport Beach couple with great love for Frenchies.

Under the care of Amy and Dan Nykolayko, Cherie made frequent trips to Rosie's Dog Beach in Long Beach where they saw how much Cherie enjoyed the water and wearing a life jacket. After her owners learned of dog surfing lessons in Del Mar, Cherie began her surfing career.

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In 2013, Cherie began competing, not only for her own, but for dogs across the nation. With the help of the Nykolaykos, Cherie has raised nearly $7,000 since 2013 for rescue organizations by participating in many canine surfing competitions.

"Surfing is crazy, awesome fun but it is very important to me to help raise money for animals in need at all of the events that I compete in," reads Cherie's mission statement on her website. "Many dogs aren't as lucky as I am so I do my very best to give back every year."

Cherie won first place in the medium dog category at the 2015 Surf Dog-A-Thon and has placed in many competitions for her fundraising efforts as well. She has appeared at the All-Star Dog Rescue Celebration as well as on Nightline and Good Morning America.

The Nykolaykos, who do everything from coordinating Cherie's outfits to surfing alongside her, are both fundraising coordinators at the French bulldog Rescue Network where Cherie was placed before finding her forever home with them.
For years, running has served as a coping mechanism for Phil King.



Now, the Crystal Lake, Illinois native is running for more than himself. And he's doing so with a Delaware connection.



The 33-year-old kicked off a cross-country run at Cape Henlopen State Park to promote awareness for suicide prevention.



King's mother, Lisa, was diagnosed with cancer when he was 8. Over the years, the cancer spread and her health began to decline. Ultimately, she was left with health issues which made the organic chemist feel unlike herself. She committed suicide Jan. 8, 2014.



"She was so important to me," he said. "I could go to her with anything and get great advice and be completely honest."



About six months later, as life was starting to get normal for him, again, his best friend also committed suicide.



He is running in their memory and to support the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.



It's something the avid runner has never done, to this extent. He's run 100 miles a week for a few years now.



But on this trip, he plans to run 26 to 30 miles per day, totaling about 4,800 miles through 12 states along the American Discovery Trail. He's brought 16 pairs of shoes with him, as a way to try to prevent injury.



His friend, Steve Wizniak, will follow him in a RV.



"Over the years he's become a brother to me. He's been just insane about running since I've met him," Wizniak said. "He's the only one I know that could do it, that's for sure."



Part of the point of the run, King said, is to suffer and persevere from it. He knows the run will be a trip of adjustments.



"I want to step well outside my comfort zone and get to the point where I'm going to be struggling," he said. "It will be symbolic, no matter what obstacles are in the way, to keep going every day."



He's excited to see new scenes and countless towns, spreading his message and bringing attention to suicide prevention.



"You take it in differently on foot compared to in a car," he said. "I get to slow down and appreciate the sense of time everywhere I go and get to know the people."



King plans to be transparent about the progress of his run. A GPS monitor attached to him will update every 10 minutes to the web with his location. He plans to shoot videos and be diligent on social media as a way to spread the word.



These measures are put in place both to keep himself accountable and to give people a first-hand look at what it's like to do a cross-country run.



"I want to meet as many people as possible who are involved and care about mental illness in general," he said.



In the moments leading up to the start of the run, he embraced his father, Daniel, and they shared some words.



Daniel King worries about the unknown, but knows his son is prepared for the journey. He plans to meet him at least once a month to check in and deliver supplies.



"A 20-mile run, to him, is pretty much a walk in the park," he said. "He's going to have to kick himself in the butt here and there and I'll have to give him a kick in the butt either from long distance or closer."



Phil King then walked out to the Atlantic Ocean and took out his phone to snap a photo. He stood at its break, embraced a few waves, turned west and ran.



He plans to arrive at the west coast in mid- to late-October.



But for now, he will explore the country by foot for his cause.



"It's not exactly why I want to be doing something like this, but I couldn't be more excited," he said. "I know this journey is going to be the time of my life."
Iraqi forces took the northern edge of the Islamic State-held town of Hit, west of Baghdad, on Sunday in an operation led by the country's elite counterterrorism forces, military officials said.

The operation to recapture Hit was relaunched last week, but the troops' progress has been slowed by hundreds of roadside bombs and efforts to safeguard thousands of civilians trapped inside the town.

"We've never had a delay like this on one of our targets," said Gen. Husham al-Jabri of Iraq's counterterrorism forces. Al-Jabri carefully plotted progress towards Hit on a map in a temporary operations center just south of the city.

The initial push to take Hit was launched last month, but was quickly put on hold when Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi pulled forces back to Baghdad after anti-government protests threatened instability in the Iraqi capital.

After the operation resumed, Iraqi forces had to deal with hundreds of roadside bombs laid by ISIS fighters along the main roads leading in and out of Hit, forcing convoys to veer off into the surrounding desert terrain. Even there, the forces' advance was repeatedly brought to a standstill by booby-trapped explosives. Progress was further complicated by muddy conditions after days of rainfall.

"The roadside bomb is the only weapon they have left to depend on," said Ayad Ghazi, a sergeant with one of the leading battalions inching toward the town. Just a few hundred meters ahead of him plumes of orange smoke rose from controlled blasts. He said it took his men 12 hours to travel just three miles (five kilometers) on Sunday.

While initially used on a limited basis by al-Qaida in Iraq, the predecessor to the Islamic State group, ISIS now produces roadside bombs on an industrial scale. ISIS fighters use these bombs defensively, placing the devices to essentially create mine fields to impede advancing government forces. ISIS also litters cities and towns with the explosive devices to hinder pursuit of their fleeing fighters.

Iraqi forces have struggled to train and equip enough units to deal with the sheer volume of the bombs.

The U.S.-led coalition said Iraqi forces were in the outskirts of Hit and working to surround the town, seeking to build on recent gains made by government forces with the recapture in February of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province in central Iraq.

Hit, 85 miles (140 kilometers) west of Baghdad, lies along a supply line linking the extremist group's fighters in Iraq with those in neighboring Syria. Iraqi military officials say retaking Hit would cut ISIS supply lines and allow anti-IS forces to link up to the west and north of Baghdad.

Iraqi and coalition officials said that retaking Hit will be a key step before an eventual push on Mosul, the largest Iraqi city held by ISIS.

Associated Press writer Khalid Mohammed in Hit, Iraq, contributed to this report.
Airbnb launched a crackdown Saturday on some Airbnb hosts who violate San Francisco's laws on short-term rentals, the online vacation-rental service says.

The popular site is pledging to investigate people who list multiple San Francisco homes on Airbnb, as well as purge its listings of hosts who have turned private homes into illegal hotels, the San Francisco Chronicle reports .

The move follows a similar self-policing effort by the 8-year-old vacation-rental giant in New York City to remove "unwelcome listings."

Chris Lehane, Airbnb's global director of public policy, said Airbnb is seeking to adapt its policies "so it serves the best interest of each city we're in.''

"This is a step in that direction, to make sure that each host has only one listing in San Francisco,'' Lehane said.

Tech booms in nearby Silicon Valley have helped create one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation in San Francisco. Housing advocacy groups say the city's shortage of affordable homes for residents is in the thousands.

Critics accuse Airbnb and other short-term rental sites of worsening the housing shortage, by giving property owners a financial motive to convert homes into lodging for out-of-town visitors rather than residents. San Francisco toughened laws on short-term rentals last year, but city officials have pleaded with the vacation-rental sites for more information to help the city catch violators.

Airbnb has cited privacy concerns, but increasingly is indicating it will do more to police its own listings in some cities.

Airbnb told the Chronicle that 1,149  or one-fifth  of its house listings in San Francisco are controlled by hosts who list more than one home for rental on the site. Local law says homeowners are allowed to list only their primary residence for short-term rentals.

The company removed almost 100 questionable San Francisco listings in January, and another 118 in 2015, officials said.

San Francisco's Office of Short-Term Rentals, meanwhile, served 59 notices between November and February to property owners it suspected of operating illegally.

The company spent $8 million in 2015 to defeat a ballot measure that sought to further crack down on use of the city's housing stock for vacation rentals.

"This will be a learning experience," Airbnb said in a news release. "We arent perfect, but we are committed to learning and being a good partner with cities around the world to ensure short-term rentals do not impact the cost and availability of long-term housing."

NBC Bay Area's Rhea Mahbubani contributed to this report.
A small plane that crash landed on a San Diego freeway Saturday, killing one and injuring five, previously landed safely on the same freeway 16 years ago.

The single-engine, two-seat Lancair IV crashed into a car on Interstate 15 North near State Route 76 at approximately 9:15 a.m. Saturday morning, about 50 miles north of San Diego.

The driver, Aaron Meccann, had pulled over to sync his Bluetooth when the plane crash landed in the fourth lane of the freeway, sliding 250 feet and hitting the back of the Nissan, California Highway Patrol (CHP) authorities said.

See photos from the scene of the crash here.

Watch video from moments after the plane crash here (Warning: graphic language).

Saturday's crash was not the first time the Lancair IV was spotted on the I-15.

Matt Nokes, a San Diego resident and former MLB player, told NBC 7 San Diego he believes he was the original owner of that plane, based on the identical tail number of the plane and the model.

He said at one point, he was flying near Rancho Bernardo when he had to make an emergency landing on the I-15 during the plane's second flight in February 2000.

"I just looked around, and it was all rolling hills," he told NBC News.

He told NBC 7 he saw a break in traffic and deployed landing gear, safely landing between cars.

After the landing, Noke said he had some machinery replaced and flew it regularly for four more years before he sold it in 2004. A fuel flow problem led to the crash, he said, but he never did learn what caused the problem.

Antoinette Frances Isbelle, 38, a passenger sitting in the back of the car, was crushed to death on impact, CHP officials said. Meccann, 43, the driver, suffered lacerations above his eye. A 45-year-old woman and 36-year-old man, both passengers in the car, were also injured and taken to the hospital, officials said.

The pilot, identified as Dennis Hogge, of Jamul, suffered life-threatening injuries and severe head trauma. His passenger, a woman in her 50s, was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Noke told NBC 7 San Diego he knows Hogge and called his an excellent pilot and master plane builder.

"Something must have gone horribly wrong," Noke told NBC News.

Authorities on scene told NBC 7 San Diego that a 38-year-old woman, identified as Antoinette Frances Isbelle, was sitting in the back passenger seat and was crushed to death at impact. Meccann, 43, who had pulled over to sync his Bluetooth, was taken to Palomar Hospital with lacerations above his eye; a 45-year-old female sitting in the front left passenger seat was taken to Sharp Linda Vista; a 36-year-old man sitting in the back passenger seat was taken to Sharp Linda Vista Hospital.

Hogge, 60, suffered severe head trauma, CHP officials said; his injuries are considered life-threatening. He was taken to Palomar Hospital. The passenger in the plane, a woman in her 50s, suffered non life-threatening injuries and was taken to Palomar Hospital.

CHP officials said there was no evidence landing gear was deployed in Saturday's crash; it appeared the plane had mechanical issues.

"I can't get into the pilot's mind, what he saw at a particular time; I don't know how he was, I don't know what his airspeed was, so I really don't know what his options were at the time," Howard Plagens, a NTSB investigator, said.

Noke said the plane was a high-performance machine built much like a BMV, constructed by a master builder over four years.

NTSB officials said it is unclear if there was a black box on the plane. Investigators may be able to use radar data to look at the pilot's flight profile, they said.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the cause of the crash. Investigators performed an initial inspection of aircraft and engine Saturday, but will do a more thorough inspection at their facility in Arizona. A preliminary report is expected in five to seven days.
Amtrak said its trains will run as regularly scheduled Monday, as federal officials investigate the deadly derailment outside Philadelphia after a train struck heavy equipment on the tracks.

Chester fire commissioner Travis Thomas said two people were killed, but neither was a passenger on the train. An NTSB official confirmed that one was the equipment operator. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, of New York, said Amtrak board Chairman Anthony Coscia told him the other person killed was a supervisor and both were Amtrak employees.

Service was suspended for most of Sunday, but Amtrak said its trains will run as regularly scheduled Monday.

In travel alerts on its website, Amtrak advised that services would resume on the heavily traveled start of the workweek, although commuters may encounter delays on Acela Express, Northeast Regional and other services between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware.

At a brief press conference, Amtrak officials said 35 passengers were being treated for injuries and transported to area hospitals. They said none of the injuries are considered life-threatening.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the derailment.

Individuals with questions about their friends and family on train 89 should call Amtraks Emergency Hotline at 800.523.9101.  Amtrak (@Amtrak) April 3, 2016

"As of now we have recovered the event data recorder, the forward facing video, the inward facing video from the locomotive to send to our laboratory in Washington, D.C.," an NTSB official said at the scene.

Seven crew members and 341 passengers were on board. Some passengers were being treated for injuries.

Local emergency responders were on the scene and the crash is being investigated. Federal Railroad Administration officials had arrived at the scene, said Matthew Lehner, a spokesman for the agency.



Ari Ne'eman, a disability rights activist heading to Washington after speaking at an event in New York, said he was in the second car at the time of the crash.



"The car started shaking wildly, there was a smell of smoke, it looked like there was a small fire and then the window across from us blew out," said Ne'eman, 28, of Silver Spring, Maryland.



Some of the passengers started to get off after the train stopped, but the conductor quickly stopped them. Officials started evacuating people to the rear of the train and then off and to a local church.



"It was a very frightening experience. I'm frankly very glad that I was not on the first car," where there were injuries, he said. "The moment that the car stopped, I said Shema, a Jewish prayer. I was just so thankful that the train had come to a stop and we were OK."
Storm Team4 has declared a Weather Alert due to strong wind gusts and freezing temperatures expected Saturday night and into Sunday in our region.

Meteorologist Amelia Segal expects some rain Saturday night as extremely cold air and very strong winds move in.

A High Wind Advisory is in effect for the D.C. Metro area and surrounding areas from 9 p.m. Saturday until noon Sunday.

Wind gusts of 50 to 60 miles per hour were reported in the D.C. area around 11 p.m. Saturday and those stong winds are expected to continue into Sunday. Segal said there are already numerous reports of damage to trees and downed power lines.

Montgomery County fire officials said a utility pole snapped in half Saturday night and there are reports of wires down on roads throughout the county.

In Prince George's County, a tree fell onto a vehicle and trapped one person inside, officials said. They were extricated and taken to a trauma center, along with another person who was in the vehicle. There were numerous trees and wires down in the area, officials said.

As of 12:10 a.m., Pepco reported on its outage map that thousands of customers were affected by power outages.

Residents are advised to secure trash cans and lawn furniture and drivers of high-profile vehicles should be careful, Segal said.

There is also a Freeze Warning for areas west of I-95 from midnight until 10 a.m. Sunday. Potted plants should be brought indoors as temperatures will dip into the low 30s.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Partly cloudy skies with gusty winds. High 79F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies in the evening, then becoming cloudy overnight. Low 63F. Winds S at 15 to 25 mph.
Reporter/Columnist

Julie Wurth is a reporter covering the University of Illinois at The News-Gazette. Her email is jwurth@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@jawurth).
A research group led by Kobe University Professor MORIOKA Ichiro (Graduate School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics), Associate Professor OSAWA Kayo (Graduate School of Health Sciences, Department of Biophysics), and Clinical Technologist SATO Itsuko (Kobe University Hospital, Department of Clinical Laboratory) is proposing a new criterion for diagnosis of bacterial infection in preterm infants. Using this method could lead to early diagnosis and treatment for bacterial infection and improve the prognosis for preterm infants. These findings will be published in the online version of the journal Scientific Reports on April 1, 2016.

Infants born prematurely do not have fully developed immune functions. Compared to full-term infants, if preterm infants suffer a bacterial infection there is a higher chance of fatality or negative impact on future growth and development. However, in the case of preterm infants, it can sometimes be hard to detect the signs of bacterial infection visible in adults and other infants: fever, white blood cell count, and increase in C-reactive protein (CRP). An alternative method was needed to detect infection.

Professor Morioka's research group focused on monitoring serum concentrations of procalcitonin (PCT), a marker used for early detection of bacterial infection in adults and children. Between June and December 2014, they examined 1267 serums from 283 newborns at the neonatal intensive care unit in Kobe University Hospital. The results demonstrated that PCT levels in full-term infants rose temporarily 1 day after birth, returning to the normal level for adults within 5 days (0.1ng/mL). However, for preterm infants it took 9 days after birth for PCT to return to normal levels.

Based on these results, the group plotted two reference curves: 50th percentile and 90th percentile values. When they superimposed 3 cases of preterm infants with bacterial infection on these curves, it clearly showed that in all three cases the serum PCT concentrations were higher than the 95th percentile values.

Use of this new criterion for detection of bacterial infection in preterm infants could help to improve their prognosis. "We could also potentially use this method to limit unnecessary use of antibacterial agents" commented Professor Morioka. "Our next step is to verify the precision of diagnoses based on these reference curves."
Chesterfield County police officer Chris Murphy rests his hand on the cruiser of slain Virginia State Police trooper Chad P. Dermyer after placing flowers on the vehicle at VSP headquarters on Midlothian Turnpike.

An Illinois man with a lengthy criminal record who fatally shot a Virginia State Police trooper in the Richmond Greyhound bus station Thursday was traveling from North Carolina to Chicago and carrying 143 rounds of live ammunition in one of his bags, the superintendent of the Virginia State Police said Friday.

James Brown III, 34, of Aurora, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, was initially seated in the restaurant area of the terminal on North Boulevard when he got up to move toward his bags, which were nearby in the front of the depot, Col. W. Steven Flaherty said at a news conference.

Trooper Chad P. Dermyer, 37, then approached Brown, Flaherty said, and within seconds Brown pulled a Beretta .40-caliber semi-automatic pistol, turned into him and fired shots ... struck Chad multiple times. Other state troopers nearby then shot Brown, who went back toward the restaurant area before he could be taken into custody. He died at VCU Medical Center.

Dermyer, who was shot near the entrance of the bus station about 2:40 p.m. Thursday, was pronounced dead at a hospital. He had been taking part in a training exercise at the bus station and was not wearing a protective vest. But whether that would have saved his life was uncertain, according to Flaherty: We are talking about a .40-caliber weapon fired inches from his chest.

Flaherty said Friday that state police troopers are recommended to wear protective vests whenever in uniform, but it was not required of Dermyer in this situation. Whether the requirements for protective vests should be changed is being discussed, Flaherty said.

During the exchange of gunfire inside the bus station, two women suffered injuries that were not life-threatening, Flaherty said. They are a 21-year-old from Wingdale, N.Y., and a 47-year-old from Jacksonville, N.C.

The women, who were bus passengers passing through Richmond, were not identified by police, but Binghamton University in New York said a member of its track team was injured and released from a hospital Friday. The student-athlete was headed to a track meet at the College of William and Mary.

Flaherty said Dermyer was a new member of a group of about 16 other troopers, supervisors and special agents in a criminal interdiction unit training at the bus station. Part of the training is engaging citizens in such a setting, he said, adding that he did not know what prompted Dermyer to approach Brown.

Asked what might have been said, Flaherty said: If there was anything, it was probably small talk to try and engage him. ... The two of them werent together for more than a few seconds, so any conversation was very slight.

Why Dermyer approached Brown in particular was not entirely clear, Flaherty said.

During the training, law enforcement officers were looking for people that may have been acting suspiciously. But we dont know really what drew him to Mr. Brown. And, of course, we dont know the words of the conversation (between Dermyer and Brown).

While law enforcement officers at the bus station Thursday were doing a training exercise, Flaherty said, it had an operational component. If that training led to some violation of the law, then they would deal with it appropriately.

Brown, traveling from the Raleigh-Durham area to Chicago, was carrying two bags. One contained two partially loaded 30-round clips and two boxes of ammunition, Flaherty said. The gun was legally purchased 13 months ago by another person, but authorities have not yet been able to determine how it got to Brown, he said.

Its very troubling he would have a gun, Flaherty said. Its troubling that he was out, having the history he had, and able to travel on the bus line.

Brown, Flaherty said, had an extensive criminal history in Illinois and was well-known to Aurora police. He described Brown as having a history of drug charges and a variety of violent offenses, including some involving guns.

But what prompted Brown to open fire remains a mystery. As far as state police have been able to determine, there were no outstanding arrest warrants against Brown, and no drugs were found in his possession after the shooting. There was no indication of terrorism.

Authorities believe Brown was traveling alone.

Flaherty said an incredible amount of work has taken place in the first 24 hours after the shooting. In addition, the agency has received countless expressions of kindness and prayers to carry us through these dark days, he said.

***

An online records search of Brown in Kane County Circuit Court in Illinois turned up more than 80 criminal charges and traffic violations. More than half were for traffic infractions.

Thirty-three of the charges resulted in convictions, but only four of those called for Brown to spend a significant period of time behind bars. The court records do not show what portion of sentences was suspended. The remaining 29 convictions carried sentences that can be measured in days or no time at all. Brown was fined in 14 cases, though many of the fines remain unpaid.

In 2001, Brown was charged with murder but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of aggravated discharge of a firearm. He was sentenced to four years in prison. But just a year later, he was cited for several traffic violations.

Flaherty said Friday that he believes Brown had served an active sentence of about two years for the gun conviction; however, police are still trying to gather information about Browns extensive record. Online court records show that he also had received credit for the jail time he served leading up to the conviction.

In 2003, he faced six years in prison for manufacturing heroin. Then three years later, he was out again and sentenced to another 5 years for possession of between 15 and 100 grams of cocaine. Court records do not indicate why he was released early.

In 2009, he received a 30-month sentence for intimidation/physical harm.

Soon after his release, he was locked up again, this time for 2 years after pleading guilty in 2012 to domestic battery and aggravated battery of a pregnant woman.

A woman who dated Brown around the time he was charged with assaulting a pregnant woman told The Associated Press that he frequently expressed his hatred toward police and once nearly choked her to death years after she broke up with him. She spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying she fears for her safety.

In 2011, on the same day that Brown was accused of strangling a pregnant woman, a judge granted his former girlfriend a protection order against him. He was released from prison in March 2014, the AP reported. Six months after his release, Brown again broke traffic laws.

Brown previously said he would rather die fighting police than return to prison, the ex-girlfriend told the AP.

He wanted to be one of those guys that just died killing police officers because they are not taking him back to jail, she said.

***

Among the work remaining to be done is to slow down surveillance video from inside the bus station to better understand the sequence of events, Flaherty said.

Police are trying to determine the source of the gunshots that struck the two women  whether those shots were fired by Brown or the troopers who reacted to Brown.

Dermyer is the 62nd Virginia trooper to be killed in the line of duty during the departments 84-year history. His patrol car was placed on display in his memory in front of the state police administrative headquarters on Midlothian Turnpike in Chesterfield County and covered with bouquets of flowers and balloons.

A native of Jackson, Mich., Dermyer graduated from the state police academy in 2014 after four years of service in the Marine Corps and work as a police officer in Jackson and Newport News. He was married with two young children.

He had recently been assigned to a counterterrorism and criminal interdiction unit after serving on patrol in the Hampton and Newport News areas for the state police.

A Greyhound spokeswoman said late Thursday that she was unaware of the troopers training but that such an exercise would not be unusual.

We were not made aware of a training exercise taking place, Lanesha Gipson said. However, we do sometimes allow authorities to conduct trainings at our stations or use a bus for that purpose.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was not involved in the police interdiction training exercise at the terminal, said spokeswoman Gillian Christensen. But Christensen said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided on-scene assistance following the shooting through its Homeland Security Investigations unit and assisted state police with the investigation.

Gipson said the company has invested government grants and private funds in more than a half-dozen security measures to keep our customers safe since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, including voluntarily participating in a program of the Transportation Security Administration that has conducted federal security inspections in 33 of its bus terminals. Gipson did not know whether the Richmond station was among those inspected.

Other security measures include having space for police substations in bus terminals, hiring security guards, and installing surveillance cameras.

The company also has installed driver shields on all vehicles and a DriveCam that records video of any situations both inside and outside the bus when activated. The company conducts random screenings of passengers and searches of hand-carried luggage, and requires passengers to check bags and remain with them until they are loaded onto the bus.

Greyhound received $86,000 last year from a Department of Homeland Security grant program for security measures on inter-city bus service to high-threat regions such as Northern Virginia.

Virginia also could use its general Homeland Security grant allocations for bus security outside of designated high-threat regions, including the Richmond area, according to a spokesman for the federal agency.

Greyhound employs private security at the Richmond terminal, but they were not on duty during the time of the incident, Gipson said. This has no relation to a training exercise taking place.

After the shooting, the bus station remained closed to the public until Friday afternoon. Several Richmond police officers patrolled the bus station along with about a dozen security guards who were patrolling inside and outside.
By the time children can recite their addresses, nearly everyone born in the United States has been told, often at school, that if they work very hard, they could grow up to be president.

But some children are more likely to believe it than others.

Thats one message coming from ethnic and religious minorities in Lynchburg after a popular, white middle school teacher made an ambiguous objection to gospel music during a Black History Month assembly at the end of February, and resigned after being placed on leave.

Religious controversies appear to be on the rise in Virginia schools this year, according to Jonathan Zur, the president and CEO of the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, an organization that assists communities with controversial issues including race and religion. While in the past 10 years religious issues have usually been around 5 percent of cases, Zur said, in the past three months hes spent about 25 percent of his time on them.

The school system has sought help from the VCIC with a Listening Tour to get community feedback with an eye to clarifying procedures, changing religion policies  last updated almost a quarter-century ago in 1993  and maybe even its approach to religion in the classroom.

In some ways, I think that the political climate and some of the rhetoric were hearing on all sides of the political spectrum has increased some levels of fear and  divisiveness, and so that has meant that on all sides and on all religious identities, and people of no religious identity, folks are feeling marginalized and attacked in ways [they werent before], Zur said.

The administration has promised the meetings arent just for people to hear themselves talk, but will produce some kind of action. In over a dozen interviews with community members, administrators and experts; the comments of more than three dozen people who spoke at school board, parent-teacher organization, and community meetings; and hundreds more comments on social media and via email, no consensus has emerged on how, or how much, religion belongs in Lynchburg City Schools.

Though the issue has risen to new prominence recently, schools around the country have been seeking clarification and balance around religion for 20 to 30 years, according to Charles Haynes, founder and vice president of the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute, a nonpartisan national organization that studies and educates about religious liberty and the First Amendment.

People should not have to choose between leaving religion out of public schools altogether or promoting one religion over others, said Haynes, who helped write some of the first consensus guidelines on handling religion in schools and has worked extensively with schools around the country.

Both of those models have failed, both are unjust, and in many respects unconstitutional. We dont have a choice. We cant just exclude all religion  and we cant just impose one faith, he said. It has to be where people of all religions and no religion are treated with fairness and respect, and that takes work. It doesnt happen just by saying it; the district does have to sit down with its constituents. When that happens, I can tell you that the trust level goes way up and theres much more understanding.  Conscience and religious freedom are fundamental to who we are. So we work a little harder, but we need people to know they are respected.

With one meeting down and two to go, a cross section of the community has spoken up in respectful, thoughtful ways. And in interviews with The News & Advance, members of the Jewish, Muslim and black communities have opened up even more about students desire to have their religious or ethnic affiliation be a part of their identities rather than be defined by them; their fear of calling attention to themselves or standing out when issues arise; and the role they believe understanding one another plays in creating a more peaceful world for generations to come.

***

After the February incident when teacher Jason Tyree interrupted a Black History Month assembly at P.L. Dunbar Middle School, the disruption of a usually mutual understanding between some members of different minority groups has put them, uncomfortably, on different sides.

The historic role of churches in the black community put many of its members, used to being in the minority, in the majority religion in this case, while some people of minority religious views felt they were the ones who had lost support.

Religion is something that weve worked with and work on quite a bit, [but] this particular incident has some unique elements to it, Zur said. I think the interplay of race and religion and what some are calling a third aspect of respect or protocol bring some unique elements to this.

Lynchburg City Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand said the incident speaks to the complexity of peoples feelings on such issues and the difficulty of balancing them, as well as needed clarity on school policies.

Youre trying to be equally inclusive and sensitive to both race and religion, and I think the event merged an obligation to try to do both, he said. I think there are very few people who are experts  on both racial inclusivity and sensitiveness and religious inclusivity and sensitiveness. Even among those that are, I think its a skill set honed over time.

Many of the teachers supporters felt if he wasnt objecting to race, but religion, then it was unjust to criticize or punish him for racial offense.

But some members of the black community felt whatever his motivation, the rudeness of the teachers interruption betrayed a lack of respect for and understanding of black history that felt all too familiar.

After a Black History assembly at E.C. Glass High School one week after the incident at Dunbar, Owen Cardwell, who was one of two black students to desegregate the school system in 1962 and afterward became a respected civil rights leader and a pastor, said after hearing of the interruption at Dunbar he was disappointed in the teacher.

Im really kind of surprised that a teacher does not understand that  a big part of the African-American story is steeped in spiritual tradition. And for him to take offense at the religious nature of that says to me that hes ignorant of a culture, Cardwell said. It disturbs me that he possibly could be limiting the exposure that students that he teaches would have if he didnt have that depth of understanding.

Younger members of the black community may feel differently, however. Nakesha Moore, the mother of two children who attend R.S. Payne Elementary School, feels the importance of not imposing religion on others may outweigh the importance of the music in this case.

My family does believe in God [but] we have separation of church and state, so that should be kept separate, she said. If they were singing songs from the Koran everyone would be in an uproar.

While most of the people she knows share her view, she said, shes seen a lot more to the contrary expressed on social media.

Older people  lived a different life, she said. They have the hardest time seeing beyond black and white. I think a lot of the outrage comes from a racial standpoint because its a different generation.  Theyve seen things that we havent necessarily lived.

Almost everyone who spoke to The News & Advance independently brought up the importance of studying religion without performing religion, a distinction Zur said is tricky.

What I see as simply telling someone about my religion, someone else may think, Hes trying to promote his religion onto me, or vice versa, he said. This is an area where theres still a lot of room for interpretation.

The skill to approach that interpretation is lacking, Brabrand said; while working on his dissertation on school law in 2003, he found through surveys religion was the area of law where principals had the least knowledge.

While these issues might rarely mix around one incident this way, the superintendent said, this serves as an eye-opener on the level of the citys diversity.

One positive of a Listening Tour is there may be greater diversity in the Lynchburg community than weve fully recognized, when it comes to both race and religion, he said. I think weve seen race in Lynchburg more as a black-white thing, and its certainly a big, big part, probably the biggest part of Lynchburgs history, but I think as part of Lynchburgs future, weve got to look at that through multiple perspectives.

***

Theres a reason those perspectives have gone unspoken: fear  and its more mundane cousin, anxiety.

Abdullah Ehtesham, 17, no longer attends the city schools, but his three older sisters graduated from E.C. Glass, and he was in public school until ninth grade.

Abdullah had friends in the schools, and hes not sure whether other children really knew he was Muslim. His father recalls hearing of an incident in third grade where another student called him a terrorist, but Abdullah doesnt remember it; he just remembers avoiding the topic to keep the peace  and his friends.

In public school I didnt really want people to know I was Muslim, he said. [Now] Im proud of it because you kind of get to represent something.  Its kind of a power, like a responsibility.

Though he was born in Kentucky, Lynchburg is the only home the young American remembers. Being Muslim is part of his identity, but far from the whole thing, he said  a sentiment black students have expressed about the color of their skin.

He feels some of the weight of representing the worlds second-largest religion, including hundreds of countries, cultures, and as many variations of interpretation as Christianity.

But mostly, he feels like a teenager. And he doesnt fear the future, although hes a little concerned his name might make it hard to get a job.

His father, Asad, however, a physician and American citizen by way of Pakistan, is more worried  especially during the current election, which has caused far more anxiety than the scattered incidents of years past.

About six years ago, one of his daughters, then in her first two years at E.C. Glass, came home deeply upset to tell him a teacher had equated all Muslims with terrorists during class.

I was so angry, he recalled. I think if I had taken it up he would have lost his job.

But his daughter begged him not to, and they argued before he allowed her decision to stand. She feared reprisal, from that teacher, others, or her peers, he said.

Such moments have been blessedly rare in Lynchburg, he said, where the family has found people respectful and loving almost all the time. The last thing he wants is for that tide to change.

As an adjunct professor at Liberty University, when the universitys president, Jerry Falwell Jr., made a comment in December that included the phrase end those Muslims  instead of using a word that did not generalize the religion  in reference to a mass shooting in California, he didnt think the comment was malicious, only careless.

Far more painful, he said, was the audiences standing ovation.

Its just hurtful, he said. It completely makes you feel that you are a total outsider. It gives you a sense of alienation.

A counselor at his sons school called the few Muslim students together and reassured them they were safe, which reassured him and his wife as well, he said.

Ehtesham said if all someone knows about Muslims is to equate them with terrorists, then of course they would be afraid.

I think the more you can know about something, the less youre afraid about it. Now everyone equates Muslims with terrorists. If you see people who are Muslim and hear about their background  obviously my Islam, my religion, is completely different, he said. This concept of committing suicide is one of the biggest sins in Islam, its a ticket straight to hell.  I think people dont know where Islam stops and all of this malignant mess starts.

Even more Muslims are killed by what he called these animals than people in the West, he said; everyone is facing the same enemy.

Concern for those who feel they cannot speak up is one thing that drives Amy Cohen, who has three children in the city schools  two at Dunbar, one in high school  and is Jewish. It wasnt so long ago that Jewish people were seen with suspicion, rejection and disgust, but the turn of history has changed that, Cohen said.

People understand a little better because they know what happened to us, Cohen said, referring to the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Theres a shorthand there. So if I can stand up, as a Jew, for my kids Muslim friends and those families who in the current climate may not feel like they can say anything, then that is my responsibility.

People of Jewish heritage  including Zur, who said his grandparents survival of the Holocaust motivated his interest in his field  say the stakes might be higher than they seem. Education, Cohen said, is what stops such things from happening again.

Despite the example of an outspoken mother, her children tend to shy away from religious discussion socially, she said. One child at the assembly thought about leaving but told her, I didnt want to stand up, because I didnt want to stand out.

My children have said  they dont want to talk about these things  because they dont want to lose friends, she said. There is an insistent, very visible Protestant majority here.  One of the things that is so very difficult for many Protestants of all stripes to wrap their heads around, but particularly evangelical  even though the impulse to spread the good news and bring people in is a kindness to them  to us it feels like saying everything that we are is wrong. And its very difficult, Im sure, when what you know is This is whats good, this is what helps people to see how that could be hurtful to anybody.

***

Any decisions about policy changes must come from the school board, the superintendent said, though its likely the division will adjust practices and may consider creating a comparative religion course, similar to this years revitalization of an African-American Studies class after a listening tour on race last year.

Its critically important to understand religion as its impacted countries and its impacted cultures, Brabrand said. The question is, are we trying to have a discussion that elevates and improves awareness for everybody  or are we using it to label people and categorize people solely based on religion and then attach to that label whether its something thats positive or negative for our country?

For Cohen, knowledge benefits not only minorities somehow in need of protection, but majorities who can live with less fear of their neighbors if they have greater understanding.

More education, less war. I really do think thats true. Less conflict, less actually hurting each other out of misunderstanding, less time feeling like youre under threat, she said. Our schools are meant to be teaching our children about the world they are growing up into. That means they should understand people unlike themselves, and if we do that clumsily about religion, or forget to do it at all  its almost too obvious to say how important that is right now.

An idea recently presented to Brabrand for the first time, he said, was that of Christian privilege, similar to white privilege.

For some white folks, [the concept of white privilege is] very off-putting. But its a part of the discussions that take place around race, he said. Were all products of our own experience and our own life. We have to acknowledge that were limited by that, and then we need to try to go beyond our own identities to understand the perspectives of others.

Whether an incident around race or religion took place within the last year or the last half-century, people need to recognize it still carries weight for those involved, he said.

If it happened to you and it was based on race, its as real today as it was yesterday, and its hard, even after a number of years  to let that go. I think its the same thing with religion, he said. And I think if youve been in the mainstream, youve been in the majority in both race and religion, it might be harder to appreciate how much that sears in the memories  of those who have been in the minority.
When librarian Jennifer Nelson arrives at the tiny library at Crewe Primary School each morning, she is confronted with a cart of first-generation iPads. The detritus of attempts to infuse technology into one of the poorest and most rural schools in Virginia, the tablets are hopelessly obsolete, worth little more than the cart on which they reside.

The White House recently announced the launch of Open eBooks, an app giving access to thousands of free e-books to any educator, student or administrator at one of the more than 66,000 Title I schools or any of the 194 Defense Department Education Activity schools in the United States. Its an admirable endeavor and recognizes that we have a literacy problem. However, it brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridges famous line: Water, water, everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink.

On that list of Title I schools: Crewe Primary. The whole of Nottoway County is a high-poverty tract; there is no public transportation, no fiber-optic Internet available for the countys 16,000 residents. In Southside Virginia, the commonwealths poorest region, most schools dont have broadband; Crewe Primary School has DSL but little more than 40 usable iPads (not counting the old and obsolete ones) for its 318 students.

The Nottoway County Public Library is the only location in the 316-square-mile county with publicly funded Internet access. To use Open eBooks at home, primary school students would have to rely on their parents phones and tablets. Older students may have their own devices, but downloading the e-books would eat into very pricey and limited data plans.

Open eBooks is part of the ConnectED initiative, which empowers teachers with the best technology and the training to make the most of it, and empowers students through individualized learning and rich, digital content. Its a bold mission for a country in which, the Census Bureau reports, nearly 55 million people lack access to broadband service and 17 percent of households dont have a computer. According to the Federal Communications Commission, of Americans making less than $25,000 per year, 48 percent do not have access to broadband at home. In poor regions such as Southside, thats a lot of people.

Even if our poorest schools had broadband and ample devices, believing that free e-books are the key to ending our literacy crisis is dangerously misguided. Technology is repeatedly touted as a cure for the United States educational woes, promising everything from banishing boredom to widespread reform. Interactive whiteboards were the hope a few years ago, and Google Earth was supposed to make our children masters of geography. There is more technology in our classrooms and homes than ever, but too often these expensive technologies yield few gains in learning or gains not commensurate with cost.

Serving as the executive director of the Virginia Childrens Book Festival, in the heart of a literacy desert, has taught me two things: Literacy is an instilled value, and too frequently reading is a luxury instead of a necessity. Reports from the National Center for Education Statistics are clear: Children raised in homes that foster literacy are better readers and better students than children raised in homes where literacy is not promoted. Children who see their parents reading and engage in reading with their families have higher than average reading scores, regardless of their parents occupational status.

If a love of reading is not learned in the home, even technologically advanced schools are hard-pressed to make up that deficit. Despite the almost universal view about the importance of reading for pleasure, it continues to be given a low priority in schools. While teachers focus on testing and mechanics, school libraries such as Crewes are desperately underfunded or are being shuttered altogether. While there are no figures detailing the total number of public schools affected by library cuts and closures, the American Association of School Librarians data indicate an alarming trend. In Philadelphia, only 16 of 214 public schools have a certified school librarian. Of Los Angeles 545 elementary and middle schools, 316 are staffed with library aides.

The Open eBooks initiative is laudable, but it fails to address the root of the countrys literacy crisis. While it will make textbooks and storybooks accessible to those lucky enough to have the technology, without critical intervention to create a culture of reading in every home and school, that access has little chance of making any meaningful change. At best, the program and ConnectED must be seen as supplementary solutions to a problem we havent addressed in a sustained and intensive manner. At worst, Open eBooks will go the way of Crewe Primarys iPads: well-intentioned but extraordinarily insufficient.

Giles, a resident of Keysville, is executive director of the Virginia Childrens Book Festival. She wrote this commentary for The Washington Post.
Even the most determined shopper, with grocery list in hand, will occasionally spot something interesting on a shelf and make an impulse purchase. Few would argue that the placement of retail items in stores is not important.

Which is why some eyebrows have been raised at a recent proposal by Kroger Co., the nations largest grocer and a popular presence in the Lynchburg region, for a private distributor called Southern Wine & Spirits to oversee how much shelf space alcohol brands get in the aisles of its stores.

Under the current system, representatives of the leading beer and wine manufacturers are in charge of assigning shelf space and displays. They use their own analyses of sales and brand popularity to determine which products get prime real estate on store shelves.

Krogers proposal would shift that influential job to an outside third party, Southern Wine, which would then ask the alcohol companies to pay a voluntary fee for the service, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.

A spokesman for Kroger said he could not provide information for this story because the arrangement is not final. Attempts to reach Southern Wine were unsuccessful.

But in the past few months the grocer has told other media outlets that the plan could benefit smaller brewers and regional wineries by making the process easier and quicker to reflect consumer tastes. The Wall Street Journal reported that Kroger currently makes display changes twice a year, but the changes are inconsistent among stores and the new system would allow stores to update displays more frequently.

But in a rare united show of support, liquor, wine and beer industry groups of all sizes have rebuffed the idea and questioned its legality.

The Brewers Association, which represents national craft brewers, joined several other alcohol trade associations this winter in drafting a letter to the U.S. treasury secretary to raise questions about whether Krogers proposed system violates federal rules.

Association director Paul Gatza said it sounded like a pay-to-play system, which could hurt small craft brewers that could not pay large fees. The association represents a lot of small businesses, which tend to be less sophisticated when it comes to understanding the rules or fighting large grocers, who often make up a chunk of their business.

Gatza said one big concern is that if Krogers proposed system is allowed, other retailers could implement similar plans, which would lead to a lot of money changing hands for products to get on the shelves. This is not something that alcohol manufacturers of any size seem to want.

Kroger told the Wall Street Journal that no one who refused to pay the fee would be adversely affected.

Pulling back the curtain

Krogers plan may never see the light of day, but the proposal has led to a new look at the complicated rules of alcohol distribution.

Following Prohibition, the specifics of alcohol laws were largely left up to the states, leading to a patchwork of policies. Virginia operates under a commonly used three-tier system of alcohol manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers. State code says the system is designed to prevent suppliers from dominating local markets and excessive sales of alcohol from overly aggressive marketing techniques.

The alcohol producer makes the beverage, then contracts with a wholesaler to distribute it to the retailer, which sells it to the public. In Virginia, producers cannot sell directly to retailers, so wholesalers are the often-unseen middlemen, advocating on behalf of the brewer or winemaker for shelf space or attention from restaurants. It is distributors, for instance, who work with local Kroger stores to decide which regional microbrews win the limited shelf space assigned to small producers.

We often get overlooked, in my humble opinion, as who helped these brewers get where they are today. And thats OK. But I do know we get overlooked, said Bob Archer, president and CEO of Blue Ridge Beverage, a Salem-based distributor.

Kroger is one of Blue Ridges largest customers, and Archer didnt want to get into specifics about the grocer. But he and others who worked with Kroger said the chain has been good about getting craft beer into its stores.

George Ellis, the general manager of Roanokes P.A. Short Distributing Co., said craft beers represent one of his companys fastest-growing areas. Kroger is aware of this, he said, but under the current system new beers are slow to make it onto store shelves. For example, Roanokes Soaring Ridge Brewing Co. is canning its beers, but Ellis said it will be at least fall before those show up at Kroger. The retailer is so large and is given such a wide selection of beer choices that it needs time and proven sales to get beers into stores, he said.

Gatza also said Kroger has come to realize that a lot of shoppers want to buy local products, which is likely a major reason behind the proposed changes. That ideally would benefit new craft brands. However, the fees have been a big turnoff.

What we dont know is, what is the hidden objective, said Ellis. It may be as simple as its always been. But down the road, are they looking for the pay-to-play?

Im not going to say [Krogers proposal] is wrong because we dont know enough about it, he said. He added that from the distributors point of view, the big question is whether the plan is legal.

In the 1990s the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ruled against so-called slotting fees for alcohol  in which wholesalers would pay retailers for shelf space  although these fees are allowed for some other products. According to the Wall Street Journal report, Kroger claims its new system is legal because Southern Wine would collect the fees, which are voluntary, and Kroger would not profit from them.

Still, alcohol manufacturers are skeptical.

Gatza pointed out that the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau and Ohios Division of Liquor Control recently made statements that implied Krogers plans for a private distributor would not be allowed.

Virginia ABC spokeswoman Kathleen Shaw said the agency could not elaborate on Krogers proposal yet. Virginia ABC reached out to Kroger and received a response that made it clear Kroger does not have a definitive program it intends to implement in Virginia at this time, and if and when parameters of a program have been identified, they will contact us, she said.

Gatza said it is likely Kroger will have to rework its plan.

I definitely think it wont hold up legally as currently constituted, but will it come back in a different form is the question, he said.

He said that to some degree, Krogers request has pulled back the curtain on category management of alcohol, something federal regulators have been working to clarify for years.

Hayes Humphreys, the chief operating officer of Nelson County-based Devils Backbone Brewing Co., said more clarity in regulations would be nice.

To me the most important thing is that what is allowed and what is not allowed is really complicated, he said. So any spotlight that gets shined on it is a good thing. The fact that we are here and the [Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau] is issuing guidance is a good thing.

Devils Backbone is Virginias largest brewery, and Kroger is one of its largest customers. Even though the three-tier process can be burdensome, Humphreys said it has helped smaller alcohol producers get a fair shake when it comes to getting products into stores. He was said he wasnt that perturbed over Krogers proposed system  it could even help the brewery, he said, since it could possibly take away some of the power from the larger manufacturers.

Still, Humphreys said the brewery wouldnt pay a fee to Southern Wine if the program is implemented at Kroger because there would be no benefit to doing so.

Kroger has about 20 stores in the Roanoke and New River valleys. Humphreys said it has become the grocer of choice for shoppers for its large craft beer selection.

Grocery stores have been extremely important for small alcohol companies since this is often a place for many customers to see products for the first time. Kroger is one of the biggest accounts for Salem-based Parkway Brewing Co. Co-owner Lezlie Snyder said of Krogers plans, We dont worry about stuff that is beyond our control.

She is confident people would find their brand, especially in local shops, because of Parkways local name recognition.

Brian Powell, who owns Wine Gourmet in Roanoke County, said Krogers proposed system or anything similar at large retailers likely wouldnt affect smaller shops like his, which sell hard-to-find wines and beers that typically cant be found elsewhere.

Kroger is always switching things. Sometimes it helps us. Sometimes it hurts us, he said, but since its yet to happen, the results remain to be seen.
John Babb on his 70-year career

John Babb has the distinction of being the only journalist Trinidad and Tobagos first prime minister and leader of the Peoples National Movement (PNM) Dr Eric Williams ever trusted enough to give exclusive interviews.

This working relationship, balanced on respect, would evolve into a friendship.

Yes, Dr Williams was my friend, Babb recalls.

Sharing some of his experiences, Babb, Newsdays first news editor and veteran of other pioneering print media, including Trinidad Guardian, shares how his relationship with Williams began.

In the early 1970s, when Williams was known to shun local journalists, Babb, who had returned to Trinidad after a three-year sojourn in Canada, had good relations with the late PNM founding member and former government minister Errol Mahabir.

Babb wanted to report on the first oil boom and was seeking an interview with Williams. He knew he could not get it on his own and approached Mahabir.

Mahabir told him, You know damn well the prime minister does not like you local reporters. Babb challenged Mahabir saying, This is how I look at it. I see a nice young lady walking down the road. I walk across. I ask her something. All she could tell me is, no. All Williams could tell me is, no. Two days later, Mahabir told him Williams will see him.

On arrival at Williams home in St Anns for the interview, Babb said he saw Leslie Fitzpatrick of the Government Information Services with two big tape-recorders. I said to myself, Lord this man does not trust me. He has two tape recorders, Babb said. A shorthand expert, he took notes with pencil and notepad.

After the first section of the interview was published in the Trinidad Guardian where he worked at the time, Babb said he waited for a phone call from Whitehall. Once Williams had come across an error his office would call. The following day the second part of the interview was published and Babb waited again for a call, but none came.

He waited for a more few days, and then asked Mahabir for another interview with Williams, who agreed. At the second interview, Babb said Fitzpatrick was there again with his two tape recorders.

After the second interview was published, Babb said Williams called and invited him for a drink and to talk. That was how I got my third interview and our friendship started, he says.

About two or three years later, Williams offered Babb a job which he refused while thanking him.

Williams called him a smart man, but Babb explained to the prime minister that he dealt with logic. He told Williams, If I take that work, you become my boss and I become your employee. This relationship wouldnt continue. Three times, Williams offered him jobs. Babb turned all of them down.

Asked why he refused, Babb says he did not want any government job that would make him lose his freedom to report fairly and fearlessly.

I see reporters, journalists running for work when there is a change in government. That does not work well for me, he observes.

Williams, he says, called me any time, and I called him any time. Babb recalled the night of the 1976 general elections when results were coming out and then Guardian editor in chief, Lenn Chong Sing telephoned Williams for information and he told him, Dont you know I have a public relations department at Whitehall? and put down the phone.

Williams trusted Babbs reporting, and so in the 1970s on a visit to Cuba to meet with then president Fidel Castro, Babb was invited to join the Prime Ministers delegation.

On arrival in Cuba, Babb was placed in a hotel, away from the rest of the official delegation and was unable to cover the first day of the visit. When he got the chance, Babb told Williams chief security detail about his isolation.

When Williams heard about it, he ensured Babb joined him on the second night, at about dinner-time, at the heavily guarded housing estate where Williams was staying.

That night, Williams just wanted to talk and did through almost the entire night. What they spoke about is for Babbs memoirs, which the 83-year-old still has to write.

The next day Babb accompanied Williams to lunch with Cubas president on Isle of Pines, as it was then called. (The island, the second largest in the Cuban archipelago is now known as Isla de la Juventud or Isle of Youth).

Castro, who was eating like a bushman, Babb says dipping his hands into his food, told Williams, who was eating with a knife and a fork, You have to eat like a Cuban. Of the meal, Babb says, I ate the biggest and best shrimps, I have seen in my life. Noting the shrimp were fished in Cuban waters, Babb says Castro told him Cubans could not eat them because they were for export.

Another detail Babb shares is of the bottle of cigars, the best he has had, which Castro sent him before the the delegations departure for Trinidad. These cigars also Cubans could not use because they too were for export.

In the years before these early high-points in his career, Babb, while working at the Guardian in 1968, felt he was getting into a rut and saw no improvement.

He took advantage of an immigration recruitment drive by the then Canadian government and moved to Toronto, Canada, with his wife Lautnie, and two children.

Getting a job in journalism in metropolitan Toronto, he said, was difficult, but it taught him lessons in perseverance, and putting experience gained in Trinidad to work in order to beat his competitors.

Every media house he went to rejected him because he had no Canadian experience. They advised him to gain some experience with small newspapers and return after two years. One day, after almost half a year had passed since he and his family had arrived in Toronto, Babb went to the Ryerson Institute of Technology, formerly the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute to meet with the professor in journalism, John McCallum to see what the institute could teach him.

Having reviewed some of Babbs work, McCallum told him they could not teach him anything there.

I usually say he was the first genuine white man I met in Canada. He was a dye-in-the wool newspaper man who had spent 25 years at the Telegraph, he said.

After asking McCallum how in hell he could get back into journalism, McCallum referred Babb to Ted Earl, a senior editor at Mc- Graw-Hill Publishing House, Canadas largest publishing house. At the time Babb was working with the Canadian Pacific Rail as a scribe.

Earl could only offer him a temporary job to relieve staff members when they were on holidays.

I was so desperate to get back to journalism that I accepted the temporary job and left my permanent one, Babb said.

It did not take him long to join the permanent staff.

There was a three-day convention for advertisers and their thinktanks at a hotel, Inn on the Park.

The reporter slated to do the job called in sick and Babb covered the assignment.

During the sessions, Babb says, Once we got a break, the other reporters gone that way looking for coffee, and I go the other way looking for interviews. When the convention was over, and all the papers carried their stories, Babb returned to the office on the fourth day and waited all morning in the office for a call to get an assessment. He got none.

The pattern then and now is for all newspapers editors to check out the competition.

Towards lunch time, Babb says, Earl invited him to have lunch with him on another floor in the building.

In the elevator, he said, Earl asked him how it was that he had gotten 11 stories while his competitors had seven, six and five. Babb told him that where he came from in Trinidad and Tobago, Once there is work to be done, we do it prompting Earl to ask him, You come from a slave camp? Earl then asked him, if he would like to work full time on the staff, Babb said, I told him that is what I came to do in the first place. On another assignment with a white secretary in Montreal for another advertisers convention, Babb says he spent a lot of time explaining where Trinidad and Tobago was on the map. However, he established a number of contacts.

On his return to Toronto, he did a feature on sun tan lotion out of a telephone interview he did with a promoter in Montreal. The feature was well received, and Babb was happy with the commendations he got from the editor and staff, but two days later, he received by courier, a case of sun tan lotion.

That was the joke in the office, he said. Imagine, the only black man in an office of 12 people, gets a case of sun tan lotion. I shared it out among the staff. They need it more than me. Babb worked at McGraw-Hill for almost three years.

He returned to Trinidad after Chong Sing sent him a telegram to say the Guardian was searching for a senior political reporter and asked if he was interested. He was.

When his wife asked why he would go back to that place? Babb told her, You know why? Because I will be king in my own country. Not no second class citizen in Canada. The Guardian agreed to cover the cost of his return travel and for shipment of his household articles back to Trinidad.

One his return, he sought ways to get interviews with Williams and struck up working relationships and contacts with ministers of Williams government, which was how he approached Mahabir, the break that would lead to his first Williams exclusive.
I PLAYED DEAD 

Kuntie Bachans harrowing story now emerges as police last Friday nabbed one of the two men who it is believed beat the elderly woman with a piece of iron. The 28-year-old suspect, a labourer, is expected to be charged today.

The mother of five, grandmother of 15 and great-grandmother of 15 was asleep when the masked men broke into her home on Buen Intento Road, Princes Town. During the ordeal on Saturday last, one of the attackers sat on Bachans chest, striking her repeatedly about her head with the metal weapon.

Bachan did not want any photographs taken of her yesterday but agreed to share the picture of herself, bloody and battered, which one of her grandsons had taken after last weekends assault.

She bravely told Sunday Newsday her story.

I was sound asleep at about 3 am when I felt someone jump on my chest. It had to be a piece of iron that he started to lash me with. When I see blood so, I started to bawl and bawl. I was beating up and bawling while blood was spraying up. Then I stopped moving. I had to play dead and like they got frightened and ran, Bachan recalled.

Her bedroom is on the ground floor of the one-storey home she shares with her grandson, his wife and their two children who were asleep on the top floor when the men broke in.

No one heard her screams as the air-conditioned units in hers and her grandsons room were on, and the steady din muffled any sound in the house.

Bachan put up a good fight as, in an attempt to block the blows to her head, she pulled the mask off of the man who sat on her. She said she got a good look at his face, as she had a light on her room, but then pretended she had died, and the man stopped hitting her. He got off her and he and his accomplice ransacked her bedroom and stole more than $75,000 worth of jewellery as well as US$1,000 and about TT$900 before fleeing.

When she felt safe enough to move, Bachan went upstairs and alerted her grandson since he could not hear her.

I started to call out my grandsons name but he was asleep and could not hear. After I played dead and the men left, I climbed up the stairs.

When I reach up, I bawl and bawl and he too started to bawl when he saw my condition. They wiped out my face and then carry me to the hospital. If I did not reach in time to tell them about it, I would have bled to death, Bachan said.

She was rushed to the Princes Town Area Hospital where she was treated and discharged.

Police said the men gained entrance into the home by cutting the lock from the burglar-proof.

After a report was made to police, a party of officers from the Princes Town CID, among them acting Sgt Ramlogan, Cpl Nanan, PCs Balgobin and Mitchell, conducted investigations.

Last Friday, police arrested the 28-year-old suspect at St Croix Road, near Barrackpore, in a sting operation. He had fled the Buen Intento Road area after the attack.

I am so old and never went to court in my life. My belly started to wring when I went to the station to identify that child (suspect), Bachan said as she shook her head.

PC Mitchell is expected to charge the suspect today and he would be due to appear before a Princes Town magistrate tomorrow morning.

On March 30, the Spiritual Baptist holiday, Trinidad-born Canadian, George Hinkson, 69, was bludgeoned to death in a robbery at his home on Upper Bournes Road, St James. Attacks on the elderly have been on the rise in recent years and several ended in murder.
PNM goes for one-man, one-vote for Tobago leader

The convention, which begins at 10 am, will be held at St Johns Ambulance Brigade headquarters, Fitzblackman Drive, Wrightson Road, in Port-of-Spain.

And, one of the men seeking to become the next leader of the Tobago Council, former government minister Rennie Dumas, has again projected himself as the best man for the job.

I am ready to be the Chief Servant of Tobago, Dumas declared yesterday.

I have served for nearly twenty years as a servant of the PNM, Tobago, and Trinidad and Tobago, and I am ready for the role of first servant /leader of Tobago. The former Tobago East MP said believed passionately in the capacity of the Tobago people to create a positive future for the island.

The Tobago council is a critical institution in the process of Tobagos transformation and its leadership will play a serious role in that transformation, he said.

I have experience in organisational training, party leadership, institutional development, academic preparation, government experience, parliamentary experience, ministerial experience and Cabinet experience to the role of Tobagos servant/leader and I believe that I am prepared. In January, Dumas had called on the party to implement the oneman, one-vote system in the election of new Tobago leader ahead of the next THA election, constitutionally due in 2017.

Others that have expressed an interest in replacing Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly (THA), Orville London, as the next leader of the Tobago Council are two serving representatives in the Assembly, Secretary for Community Development and Culture, Dr Denise Tsoi-A-Fatt-Angus, and Deputy THA Chief Secretary and Secretary for Tourism and Transportation, Tracey Davidson-Celestine as well as former THA Presiding Officer Kelvin Charles.
'He Had the Chance to Go in

and Save the Children'
(Newser)  It seems like some sort of oxymoron: two inmates together in solitary confinement. But as a joint investigation by NPR and the Marshall Project found, "double celling" is anything but an anomaly: They cite a 2014 Federal Bureau of Prisons report in asserting that "over 80% of the 10,747 federal prisoners in solitary [that year] have a cellmate." As the report itself states, "Virtually all of the inmates in [Special Management Units] and [Special Housing Units] are double-celled." And that can have truly deadly results. In more than 4,000 words, NPR and the Marshall Project flesh out some of the jarring stories that result from the practice, chief among them that of David Sesson and Bernard Simmons. The two men were put together in a 51-square-foot cellthat's smaller than a parking spot, the article points outon Nov. 19, 2014.

Here's how small the space at Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois was: "If one stood, the other had to sit." The men, both 34, were in for life, for murder. Sesson was, as the article puts it, "desperate" to be alone, so much so that he told guards he'd harm any roommate he was given. And yet the men were put together, and less than six hours later, Simmons was dead. Sesson says Simmons swung first, but it was Sesson who removed a lace from his boots and used it to choke Simmons. It was the fourth such death in not even two years in Menard's solitary unit. Among the reasons and justifications for double celling: overcrowding, to erode the very label and implications of "solitary." Read the full article here. (Read more solitary confinement stories.)
(Newser)  More than a decade ago, scientists established a link between schizophrenia and the rare ability to tickle oneself. Now researchers in France have expanded on the findings, reporting in the journal Consciousness and Cognition that the behavior can be found not just in those with full-blown schizophrenia but in otherwise healthy people who score high on tests that look for schizophrenic-like traits. Examples of the latter might include a vivid imagination or mild paranoia, explains the the British Psychological Society's Research Digest. After studying 397 healthy students, 27 of whom scored highly on the Schizotypal Personality questionnaire and 27 students of whom scored very low, researchers observed all students being tickled by someone else with a feather and trying to tickle themselves with a feather. Those with the high scores weren't more ticklish in general, but they were more vulnerable to self-tickling.

The results don't mean such people are doomed to develop schizophrenia, but "they are consistent with the idea that the same brain processes (involved in movement control and monitoring) that may contribute to the symptoms experienced by patients with schizophrenia, may also contribute to schizophrenia-like beliefs and experiences in healthy people," says BPS. It turns out that fMRI scans have revealed most of us can't get away with tickling ourselves because our brains can predict what the sensation will be, and thus we are not fooled, reports Medical Daily. This is good; we're better able to distinguish between external threats such as an incoming jaguar's jaw and internal ones we have invented. That the ability to self-tickle is linked to, for instance, a higher rate of feeling controlled by outward forces may help psychologists better understand the brain mechanisms at play in a schizophrenic hallucination. (Scientists may have found the disease's genetic trigger.)
Raipur:

A 27-year-old BJP youth wing leader was today shot at and injured allegedly by Naxals at a temple in Chhattisgarhs Bijapur district, police said.

Bijapur district BJYM President Murlikrishna Naidu was shot at by ultras in Bhairamgarh town at around 8 PM when he had gone to a temple, Bijapur Superintendent of Police K L Dhruv told PTI.

Four rebels armed with country-made guns and sharp-edged weapons stormed the temple and attacked him, the officer said.

The ultras fired two bullets from behind which hit him in the shoulder and waist. They then tried to attack him with an axe but some persons present there came to his rescue, the SP said, adding the rebels then fled the spot.

Naidu was taken to a local hospital from where he was shifted to Jagdalpur district headquarters and was now being airlifted to Raipur for further treatment, Dhruv said.

The officer said prima facie the attack was executed by a small action team of ultras but details will be known only after a probe into the incident is completed.

A native of Bhairmgarh, Naidu is an active leader of the party in the region. He is also close to Chhattisgarh Forest Minister Mahesh Gagda, an MLA from Bijapur constituency.

Naidu was actively working for the party and looking after my activities in the region. Maoists have targeted him because of his close association with me, Gagda told PTI.

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Mumbai:

India will formally sign the Paris agreement, adopted by more than 190 countries at last years climate change summit in the French capital, at the UN Headquarters in New York later this month. Noting that the summit, held in Novemeber-December last year in the French capital, helped change Indias image of being negative and naysayer after Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced the concept of climate justice, Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar blamed the uncontrolled carbon emission by developed nations for the present state of the climate.

India, along with 100 other nations would ratify the Conference of Parties (COP) 21 global climate agreement on April 22. COP 21 would be ratified at a high-level signing ceremony to be convened at the UN Headquarters in New York, Javadekar said while addressing a symposium COP 21 Building Synergies, Shaping Actions organised at the University of Mumbai today. (Also read. LIGO project: India to play significant role in gravitaitonal wave astronomy)

The agreement sets out a global action plan to put the world on track by limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. Under the accord, at least 55 countries, accounting for an estimated 55 per cent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions, will have to ratify or approve the agreement before it enters into force. All countries have decided to walk the green path as per their common but differentiated responsibilities. India was always perceived to be a naysayer and negative in its approach and took a corner seat in most of the international conferences.

But in Paris, Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced the concept of climate justice driving home the message of sustainable development, Javadekar said while describing the Paris agreement as a victory of multilateralism and one which helped correct image perception of India. He said climate change was a reality with one degree rise in temperature caused by 150 years of uncontrolled carbon emission by the developed world. (Also read. New study suggests European colonisation decimated Native American ancestors)

While 30 per cent of cumulative contribution was that of the US, 50 per cent by Europe, Canada and other developed countries and 10 per cent by China, while India was responsible for only 3 per cent carbon emission, he said. Though India is not part of the problem, it wants to be part of the solution. Our commitment is reflected in every programme being pursued by the government, Javadekar said.

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New Delhi:

Maharastra CM Devendra Fadnavis is the latest to speak controversial Bharat Mata Ki Jai chantinmg issue. Fadnavis, while addressing a gathering in Maharashtra was quoted saying by news abgency ANI that if a you want to live in this country, you have to say Bharat MaTa Ki Jai.

If you want to live in this country then you have to say Bharat Mata ki Jai, otherwise you have no right to live here. Some people say we will not say Bharat Mata ki Jai. Then what? Pakistan ki jai or China ki jai?. He added: Went to a Mazar in Mumbai, hundreds of Muslim priests chanted Bharat Mata ki Jai.Those who say Bharat ke tukde honge will fail. (Also read. BJP, Shiv Sena hit out at Darul Uloom over Bharat mata ki jai fatwa)

Chief imam of the All India Imam Organisation (AIIO) Umer Ahmed Ilyasi was quick to slam Maharashtra Chief Minister the remarks saying that the people on responsible positions should avoid making such statements. No one has a right to decide as to who would live in this country or not. If you force certain things on people then it would give rise to hatred. People on such responsible positions should refrain from making such statement, Ilyasi told ANI.

Maha CM Fadnavis became the latest polictican to joining the ongoing debate on nationalism, which is being linked to chanting of certain slogans in recent times.

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Kolkata:

Ten persons, allegedly belonging to a Maoist frontal organisation, were arrested today for staging a demonstration against the state government holding it responsible for the Vivekananda flyover collapse, a senior police officer said.

The agitators also tried moving towards Chief Minister Mamata Banerjees residence, the officer added. Ten members of RADICAL, a Maoist frontal organisation, including three women cadres, were demonstrating in front of Hazra crossing over alleged government negligence regarding collapse of Vivekananda flyover on Thursday, the officer said. They were protesting at the Hazra crossing but suddenly started to proceed towards the Chief ministers house. They were declared to be holding unlawful assembly and were arrested, the officer said.

Kalighat Police Station personnel arrested them under IPC sections 143, 149 and 283 as punishment for unlawful assembly, guilty of offences committed in prosecution of common object and danger or obstruction in public way respectively.

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London:

A Spain-bound Ryanair flight had to make an emergency U-turn to Manchester, forcing it to fly over the city for an hour to burn fuel, after suffering a bird-hit.

The Flight FR3445, was travelling from Palma, Manchester to Mallorca in Spain on April 1, when the pilot had to abandon the journey shortly after taking off and return to Manchester airport.

The plane declared emergency over the city after 6pm. It was forced into a holding pattern spending an hour total in the air, burning fuel as it circled around 3,500 feet over north Manchester and Rochdalein to make it light enough to land again, the Daily Express reported.

The plane, was due to arrive Palma at 8.50pm, but it instead landed in Manchester at around 7pm.

Flight FR3445 was able to land normally and passengers departed safely. This flight from Manchester to Palma returned to Manchester shortly after take-off following a minor bird strike. To minimise delay, customers boarded a replacement aircraft which departed to Palma, Ryanair spokeswoman said.

Ryanair apologised to affected customers for any inconvenience caused. The aircraft landed normally and customers disembarked, she added.

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Rajkot:

A day after Indias largest Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband issued a fatwa saying Muslims should not say Bharat Mata Ki Jai, Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani today said everybody had the right to say the slogan for the sake of the motherland.

Chanting Bharat Mata Ki Jai is a matter of emotion. Every human being has the right to chant for mother or for the motherland, she told reporters at the airport here before leaving for Dwarka.

Motherland is no less than ones mother, she said.

Darul Uloom Deoband yesterday stated that Muslims should refrain from saying Bharat Mata Ki Jai as it was against the tenets of Islam. The controversy started after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwats comment that everybody should say the slogan which was opposed by MIM leader and MP Asaduddin Owaisi.

Irani was welcomed here by Rajkot mayor Jaiman Upadhyay and deputy mayor Darsheeta Shah.

The Union Minister said she hoped that BJPs performance in Gujarat will improve under the leadership of its new state chief, Vijay Rupani.

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Coimbatore:

Questioning Chinas move to block an attempt in the UN to get JeM chief Masood Azhar designated as a terrorist, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu has said Beijing should understand that today it is India (which is targeted by terror), tomorrow it may be your turn.

He also said Pakistan should give up its old habit of finding fault with India and stop aiding and abetting terrorism so that the two countries can have close ties.

I do not know the reason why China blocked the proposal to ban Azhar. He is a notorious terrorist and should be banned, the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister told reporters here.

Today it is India, tomorrow it may be your (China) turn, he added.

India had yesterday slammed Chinas virtual veto to prevent the banning of Pathankot terror strike mastermind Azhar, saying it does not reflect well on the determination that the international community needs to display to decisively defeat the menace of terrorism.

The statement, however, did not mention China by name.

Asked about claims by Pakistan that there was no evidence with India about its abetment of terror, Naidu said there is enough evidence against the neighbouring country and they should leave their old habit of finding fault with India.

If Pakistan puts a full stop on aiding, abetting, training and funding terrorists, India and Pakistan can come much closer, work together, since both the countries were once one and were separated for reasons, he said.

India wants to have good relationship with Pakistan, Naidu said.

He claimed that for the first time in the history of United Nations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had raised the issue of terrorism and said it was unfortunate that UN was still unable to define terrorism.

The entire world and international community should come together and crush the danger and menace of terrorism, Naidu said.

He (Fadnavis) did not say so. I know that. This is wrong information, he said.

On the fatwa issued by Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband against the Bharat Mata ki Jai chant, Naidu said it was unfortunate that controversy was being created over nationalistic slogans.

There is nothing to compel one to say Bharat Mata ki Jai. If somebody says I will not say it, then that is objectionable, he said.

It is a chant in praise of the motherland, Naidu said, It does not specifically say if it is a Hindu mother, Christian mother or Muslim mother. India is our motherland and we should be proud of her.

It is unfortunate that some people are trying to create unnecessary controversy over this.

On recent protests at universities, Naidu said students should focus on education, excellence and personality development instead of taking to organising beef festivals, kiss festivals and Mahishasura festivals.

Moreover, media is also giving more publicity (to these events) than they deserve, he said.

Some people are invoking the freedom of speech and right to dissent (over such events); dissent is okay, but disintegration is not acceptable and celebrating Afzal Guru, Yakub Memon... they are not seen as belonging to any community, but are regarded as anti-nationals and terrorists, he said.

Told that major political parties in Tamil Nadu are seeking a law against honour killing, Naidu said it was purely a state subject.

Still, if there is a consensus, a legislation can be brought. A Bill will not prevent the killing, but the political will can definitely, which was lacking in Tamil Nadu for the last few years, he said.

He quipped further, How can it be honour killing, a killing cannot be honourable.

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Baghdad:

Iraqi officials today denied reports that security forces freed prisoners from an Islamic State group jail in the countrys west, but some said civilians had been evacuated from the area.



Officials from Iraqs Anbar province said the previous day that security forces discovered a large underground IS prison in the town of Heet, which they are battling to retake from the jihadists, and freed people held inside.



Major General Ali Ibrahim Daboun, the army commander responsible for the area, said that no prison was found, but that civilians had been evacuated from Heet.



Raja Barakat, a member of the Anbar province security committee, gave a similar account.



And Malallah al-Obeidi, a local Anbar official, said that while initial information indicated that security forces freed prisoners, they turned out to be families who were evacuated.



IS seized large parts of Iraq in 2014, but security forces have since regained significant ground from the jihadists.

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Nasik/Mumbai:

Having stirred a controversy with his remark that those unwilling to say Bharat Mata Ki Jai have no right to stay in the country, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today stuck to his guns but said the slogan had nothing to do with religion.

He alleged the media put out only a section of his speech with the intention of creating a controversy.

There is still a dispute over saying Bharat Mata Ki Jai and those refusing to say it, should not have any right to stay here. Those living here should say Bharat Mata Ki Jai, Fadnavis had told a public meeting in Nashik last night.

He also criticised Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi for backing those who chant anti-national slogans.

In a statement in Mumbai today, Fadnavis said in his 50-minute speech in Nashik he had spoken about Bharat Mata Ki Jai slogan only briefly but it was picked up by the media.

In my 50 minute speech, for 45 long minutes I spoke about Maharashtras drought situation and development and just for 5 minutes I spoke on Bharat Mata Ki Jai and the Shani Shingnapur issue but media picked only Bharat Mata Ki Jai and that too only a part of it. It clearly proves that a section of media is interested in creating controversy only, he said.

Fadnavis claimed, in his yesterdays speech, he had also said the slogan had nothing to do with religion.

I also mentioned in my speech yesterday that Bharat Mata Ki Jai has nothing to do with religion because I salute those 500 plus patriotic, highly placed and highly respected Muslim clerics who not only did National Flag hoisting at Mahim Dargah (Mumbai) but also chanted Bharat Mata Ki Jai with a feeling of nationalism and patriotism on March 17 on the occasion of 603rd Urs of Hajrat Makhdum Fateh Ali Mahimi. No media is broadcasting this, he added.

Fadnavis said his objection is to those who refuse to chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai.

We absolutely have no problem if somebody says Jai Hind or Jai Bharat or Jai Hindustan, but all we object about is when someone says, I wont say Bharat Mata Ki Jai. There is a limit to appeasement too, he said.

It is not merely about the slogan but it is about those lakhs and lakhs of freedom fighters who sacrificed their life chanting Bharat Mata Ki Jai, about those thousands and thousands of soldiers who selflessly attained martyrdom chanting Bharat Mata Ki Jai. Those who are opposing it have malafide interests and intentions, Fadnavis added.

He said, They are those divisive forces who want to create a rift in our country and wish to break the unity. Why should we tolerate it?

Fadnavis had also said there was a plot to defame Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the issue of Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Vande Mataram slogans.

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Lucknow:

A team of Uttar Pradesh MLAs is on a three-nation tour of Japan, Australia and New Zealand, drawing sharp criticism from opposition BJP which dubbed the move as a clear case of misplaced priorities.

Dismissing the criticism, UP Assembly Speaker Mata Prasad Pandey defended the visit claiming that it was a study tour aimed at helping lawmakers handle the drought situation in a better manner.

The 17-member delegation, led by the Speaker, comprises 15 MLAs from ruling Samajwadi Party and one each from Congress and Rashtriya Lok Dal.

The 18-day tour has drawn flak from BJP, which said the visit came at a time when farmers in Bundelkhand were battling severe drought.

Attacking the government, BJP spokesman Vijay Bahadur Pathak alleged when the state is steeped in multiple problems, legislators including ministers were on a junket in the name of study tour.

BJP MLAs did not become part of the tour as we feel that relief should be first sent to Bundelkhand farmers before embarking on such pleasure trips, he said.

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Riyadh:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi left for home after wrapping up his final-leg of five-day three-nation tour of Belgium, the US and Saudi Arabia.



The Prime Minister had arrived here yesterday from Washington and today he held wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud during which they agreed to strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism.



Thank you Saudi Arabia. Joined several programmes during my visit, which will deepen economic & people-to-people ties between our nations, Modi tweeted both in Arabic and English before departing for New Delhi.



After the talks, both the countries signed five pacts including one on having cooperation in the exchange of intelligence related to money laundering, terror financing and related crimes.



Both the sides also called on all states to reject its use against other countries and dismantle terror infrastructures where they exist after talks between Prime Minister Modi and King Salman.



Energy-powerhouse Saudi Arabia is Indias largest crude oil supplier, accounting for about one-fifth of total imports and both sides also decided to expand cooperation in the sector.



The Prime Ministers first stop was Brussels where he attended the long-delayed India-EU summit and held talks with Belgium counterpart Charles Michel on March 30.



From Brussels Modi went to Washington where he attended the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31 and April 1.

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The word blackbird has real mystery.

Four and twenty of them got baked in pies. Paul McCartney wrote about them singing in the dead of night. The melody of Bye Bye Blackbird is jaunty, but its lyrics are steeped in melancholy. Wallace Stevens, Hartford insurance man and astounding poet, wrote Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird in stanzas close to American haiku.

But real birds  rusty blackbirds  are now migrating through the state on their spring trek northward to the great woods.

If you are a bird watcher, and you see one, it is important you let ornithologists know. The website www.ebird.com, has a specific place to record your sightings. Even if you check out a swamp  the rusty blackbirds favorite haunt  and dont see one, researchers would like to know. Sometimes, what you dont see is as important as what you do see.

The reason for this citizen science project, called the Rusty Blackbird Spring Migration Blitz, is this: Rusty blackbirds are going away, profoundly. Nationwide, the species numbers have declined by 85 to 90 percent over the past half-century. No other American songbird has seen such losses.

In the declines were seeing, its one of the steepest, said Patrick Comins, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut.

And while ornithologists can look to a loss of habitat to the southern hardwood swamps, where the birds winter, and in the forest wetlands in Canada and northern New England, where they breed, tracking where they show up while they migrate is important as well. Hence the blackbird blitz.

We have a lot to learn about them, said Scott Kruitbosch, who works at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, N.Y., and is coordinating the blitz in Connecticut. You can read more about the work at rtpi.org/rusty-blackbird-blitz-go-connecticut/

The blitz will last throughout the migratory season.

Well still see them in May and even into June, Kruitbosch said.

But there are difficulties involved in the work.

First of all, rusty blackbirds  members of the Icterid family, which also includes orioles, cowbirds, meadowlarks and grackles  are not attention-grabbers.

Their call, which is a song in name only, sounds like the creak of a rusty hinge swinging in the wind.

Its not a songster like the Carolina wren or cardinal, said Ken Elkins, education program manager at Audubon Connecticuts Bent of the River Nature Center in Southbury.

Unlike its cousin, the red-winged blackbird, it lacks brilliant scarlet epaulets. Ditto on the orange of orioles.

Rusty blackbird plumage in early spring will be mottled with browns and buffs and blacks mixed together. But by the end of April, the males will be a sleek iridescent black, with black bills and bright yellow eyes.

I like them more than grackles, Elkins said, comparing rusty blackbirds to the bigger, bulkier and far more common Icterids that live in Connecticut year-round.

Theyre also birds that like wetlands and swamps  not places that people normally troop around in.

I do encourage people to be aware of them, but theyre not feeder birds, said Margaret Robbins, owner of the Wild Bird Unlimited store in Brookfield.

Their disappearance can tell us the consequences of what humans are doing in the name of progress.

Rusty blackbirds winter in the hardwood swamps of the Midwestern and Southern states. Much of that habitat is disappearing, as wetlands are converted to agricultural fields.

Comins said farmers can also get permits to poison birds that damage their crops.

They can do a real number on sunflower and corn crops, Comins said of huge flocks of grackles and red-winged blackbirds. If rusty blackbirds mix in with those flocks, they get poisoned as well.

Rusty blackbirds fly north in the spring and build their nests in the wetlands of the great northern forest. That habitat is under continuing stress.

They like the pothole swamps in northern Vermont and Maine, and in Canada, Elkins said. But theres a lot of timber industry up there. And when you build huge hydroelectric dams, you lose a lot of that breeding ground.

Another threat is global warming. There is also evidence that climate change is drying up the wetlands of the boreal forest, depriving rusty blackbirds of places to breed.

Researchers have found high levels of mercury in the bodies of rusty blackbirds  mercury put in the air by factories and power plants. The northern wetlands, already acidic, may become more so because of global warming. That acidity raises mercury levels throughout the wetland food chain. Rusty blackbirds, eating boreal dragonflies, might get a dose of mercury as well.

Studying the rusty blackbirds in the blitz  now in its third year  may help stem these losses in the future, said Kruitbosch.

If we find there are big places where they gather in big numbers each year, we have to ask if we want to protect those places, Kruitbosch said. We have to ask Why are these places so important? 

Comins said other birds seen in the state and its coastal waters  saltmarsh sparrows, horned grebes, long-tailed ducks, semipalmated sandpipers  are having troubles as well. In many of these cases, the combination of habitat loss and climate change are at work.

Which means there may be more citizen science projects like the rusty blackbird blitz. More eyes on the swamps, more boots in the field can also mean more people learning about the complexities of bird life and human life.

Its hard to teach people about the importance of habitat when that habitat isnt in their yard or even in their community, Robbins, of Wild Birds Unlimited in Brookfield, said. But habitat loss is a double-edged sword for a lot of these migrants.

Contact Robert Miller at earthmattersrgm@gmail.com
The folks at Dictionary.com have released a list of the words that college students are looking up most on its reference site.

Theyve listed a number of the top colleges across the country, including many in Texas, where Texas A&M students seem to have trouble with the spelling of the word computer," or at least need the exact definition of it.
Donald Trump is a menace. Why should you be concerned about his popularity? He brings out the worst in people by encouraging racism, violence and vulgarity. These are not American values, and we hope they never will be.

Think about these two statements Trump has made, just for starters.
Governor Umaru Tanko Al -Makura has assured that President Muhammadu Buhari will not be derailed by the series of politically motivated ...

Governor Umaru Tanko Al -Makura has assured that President Muhammadu Buhari will not be derailed by the series of politically motivated sabotage and ill will towards his government in his efforts at reforming the country.Al-Makura who stated this on Sunday in Lafia, disclosed that Buharis resolve to remain focused on routing the evil that has bedevilled the country cannot be deterred by the propaganda being spewed by the opposition with the sole aim of inciting the public against the good intentions of the APC government.While calling on Nigerians to exercise patience with Buhari given the enormity of the cleanup needed to restore sanity in the country, the Nasarawa State governor, assured that the president would commence the implementation of his campaign promises soon and his critics would have no hiding place.He said: Given the decay this country has found itself, we thank God that we have in place President Muhammadu Buhari who has come with a sincere motive and objective to reform this country.I call on every citizen of this country to give us a chance for this reformation. It is not just mere talk that decay and maladministration that this country has been subjected to were so structural and fundamental and superficial corrections would not do us any good. That is why this administration has gone deep into the foundation of the decay that this country has been subjected to, he maintained.He explained that: All of us know what happened in the yesteryears and have seen the brigandage and impunity with which the previous administrations have subjected Nigerians.The governor therefore insisted that it is not fair to expect an automatic change simply because there is a new government in place, adding that certain things have to be done, but I can assure you that we are dogged, resilient and very optimistic that very soon Nigerians would have a sigh of relief.
The Catholic Church, has sent a strong warning to Kaduna State governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai over the move to enact a religious bill t...

The Catholic Church, has sent a strong warning to Kaduna State governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai over the move to enact a religious bill to prohibit preaching of religious ser-mons in the state. Addressing a press confer-ence in Abuja, the Director of Caritas International, a department under the Cath-olic Bishops Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), Rev. Fr. Evaristus Bassey said the peoples will is sovereign and must be respected, noting that the bill had enormous potent-ial abuses, therefore, it should not become law, because it would be misused against one religion by ambitious state officials. Fr. Bassey said: The dang-er in Nigeria is the mani-pulation of structures and institutions by strong ind-ividuals.Thus, the fear is that even if the proposed bill contains good aims, the proposed restrictions would play into the hands of officials of state who have a heg-emonic mentality and would allow them the freedom to persecute one religion in favour of another.The principle of separation of state and Church/Mosque which springs from the supposed secularity of the Nigerian constitution would be severely battered if this bill is pursued in the way it is. Gov. el Rufai, who is quite dogged in the pursuit of anything, given this tool, would pursue ardently both what is good and what may be divisive.We therefore advise that Kaduna State rely on existing laws and existing state instruments of law enforcement, to main-tain religious harmony in the state instead of reinventing the wheel.The majority of Kaduna people appear not to want this law, and their wishes should be respected, as no governor is an emperor but an elected official who should defer to the peoples will. The peoples will is sovereign; because of the potential abuses this bill could bring when it becomes law, we opine that it is not necessary.On the last National Con-ference, the Catholic Church called on President Muha-mmadu Buhari to revisit the report and institute measures which should stand Nigeria on the pillar of justice and peace, arguing that Niger-ian citizens should continue to engage political and state structures to become insti-tutions which are guided by the rule of law. Presently, our constitution is like a hermaphrodite, neither completely secular nor religious.A secular con-stitution guarantees the rights and dignity of all under the law, the Church said. In a similar development, the Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, Most Rev. Alfred Adewale Martins also frowned at the legislation, arguing that the Nigerian Constitution makes pro-vision for freedom of worship. Speaking during a Chrism Mass at the Holy Cross Cathedral, Lagos, Martins stressed that any law that will restrict freedom of worship, should certainly not see the light of the day.I hope the governor will seriously listen to what the people are saying because democracy is about the people and the good of the people. There may be good intentions behind the law but it is important that in making laws for the people, the laws can only be effective and just if the people have an input. Calling on government to take the welfare of Nigerians more seriously by enacting policies that will benefit the general populace, Martins lamented that Nigerians are facing numerous challenges which, according to him, is very worrisome.The government should take the welfare of the people more seriously; there is a lot of suffering, poverty, pro-blems among the people. Government should put in place policies that will indeed help ordinary citizens feel a sense of belonging in the nation, the archbishop appealed.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Saturday in Washington, United States assured Nigerians in Diaspora of his administrations determination ...

President Muhammadu Buhari on Saturday in Washington, United States assured Nigerians in Diaspora of his administrations determination to move the country forward as quickly as possible.Speaking at a meeting with a group of Nigerians who have distinguished themselves in various professions in the US, President Buhari said that the present administration is fully committed to correcting the errors that have hindered Nigerias progress as a nation.We are determined to get things done properly this time and God willing, we shall succeed.We are working diligently to correct our mistakes as a nation. We will rehabilitate and expand national infrastructure, and move forward as quickly as possible, the President assured the group.In a statement issued by Buharis Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, the President also said that his administration would maintain contacts with Nigerian professionals outside Nigeria and see how they can be best placed to contribute effectively to national development if they choose to come back home.Buhari congratulated five Nigerians he met with for their exceptional accomplishments, saying that he is very proud of them all.The Nigerians received by President Buhari included Prof. Austin Esogbue, the only African to have served on the board of the United States National Aeronautical Space Agency.Others were Jelani Aliyu, a leading car designer with General Motors; Prof. Nwadiuto Esiobu, a renowned microbiologist and biochemist; Dr. Yemi Badero, an assistant professor of medicine and 13-year-old Muriel Oduwole, who has interviewed 18 world leaders.
Ekiti State Governor, Mr. Ayodele Fayose, on Sunday identified himself as a target of President Muhammadu Buharis administration for wh...

He added that the realisation made him to be cautious of his dealings in office.The governor, who spoke during an interactive session with journalists in Lagos, noted that he had started the construction of a flyover in Ado/Ikere Road for N5.7bn and invited the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to be part of the project from the outset.Fayose said, I have started the construction of a flyover in Ado/Ikere Road for N5.7bn. I have also invited the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to be part of it, because I know I am a target of the current administration.You may not like my face or my style. But take the message and leave the messenger. If they have anything against me, they would have published it I know. I prepare for my defence. I am fully prepared.Criticising the President should not make an enemy. We will sue the government. We learnt this from Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. He is always in court either by proxy or direct. You cannot keep arresting my principal officers and members of my state House of Assembly.The governor also urged the President to devalue the naira without further delay, adding that he blamed him for the current economic woes in the country.The All Progressives Congress deceived us. They manipulated us. I blame the current economic woes in Nigeria on the President. No matter the past economic situation of a country, a good manager would have been able to normalise the situation. The way things are going in Nigeria, the economy may shut down soon, he stated.
Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, says Apostle Johnson Suleiman of the Omega Fire Ministries who has repeatedly said he will die ...

Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, says Apostle Johnson Suleiman of the Omega Fire Ministries who has repeatedly said he will die for introducing the proposed Kadauna Religious Regulating bill, should tell him when the death will happen. El-Rufai said this while speaking to reporters in Kaduna state recently Most of the people that say I would die, as if I would not die, are people who call themselves Christian clergy. Of course, I will die. If that apostle is truly an apostle, he should mention the day I will die.There is nothing in that law that prevents or infringes the practice of religion.It seeks to ensure that those that preach religion are qualified, trained and certified by their peers to do it. And some sections of the media have made it as if the law was drafted against Christianity. It is most irresponsible and I have nothing to say except to leave the matter to Godhe saidHe maintained that the bill does not have any ulterior motiveHonestly, we do not have any ulterior motive other than to put a framework that will ensure Kaduna State citizens live in peace with every one practising his religion, but disallowing every Tom, man-hood and Harry coming to say he can preach.he said!
Ahead of the second anniversary of the more than 200 abducted schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Chibok, Borno State, the United States govern...

Ahead of the second anniversary of the more than 200 abducted schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Chibok, Borno State, the United States government has reassured Nigerians that efforts are ongoing to locate and rescue the girls.The US said that it was providing a range of security assistance to Nigeria, and that it had stepped up information-sharing efforts.One component of our strategy is providing support to the Multinational Joint Task Force, which includes soldiers from Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Benin. We are providing advisers, intelligence, training, logistical support, and equipment. This is part of a regional approach to a problem that transcends borders.And as the second anniversary of the Chibok girls captivity approaches, we continue to actively support the efforts to locate these girls  none of us has given up on the fight to bring these girls home. We are equally concerned about the thousands of other victims of Boko Haram, which by some measures is the most deadly terrorist organisation in the world today, the US Assistant Secretary, Bureau of African Affairs, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said at the US Institute of Peace.According to her, through the Security Governance Initiative, which President Barack Obama launched in 2014 with six African partners, including Nigeria, the American government is exploring ways to enhance the management of security and justice systems so that Nigeria can provide needed services, including in the North-East, more efficiently and effectively.Thomas-Greenfield stated further that Nigeria needed to make important moves in its efforts to defeat Boko Haram.First, it is critical that the foot soldiers of Boko Haram  especially those who may not have joined wilfully  are able to leave the group and eventually be accepted back into their communities. The need for these pathways is one of the key lessons weve learned from conflicts across the globe. We are ready to help Nigeria support and encourage such defections and reintegration. This is difficult but necessary work.Second, people who have been forcibly displaced by Boko Haram must not be asked to return to their homes before those communities are safe and the displaced feel ready to return. Premature returns put IDPs in undue harm and are inconsistent with international norms. This, too, is an area where we look forward to working with Nigerians and the United Nations system.Third, Nigeria should invest more federal resources to meet the humanitarian needs of the victims of Boko Haram, while developing and implementing a long-term development strategy in collaboration with state governments and local authorities.Were optimistic about the commitment Nigeria is showing to improving its security, and we will continue pressing our Nigerian partners to respond to threats responsibly, professionally, and transparently.
UPDATE: Church destroyed in early morning fire

MILLVILLE -- Crews are battling a church fire that may have started as the result of high winds battering the region this morning, according to 6ABC.com.

The fire, reported around 5:30 a.m. at Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church, at Route 49 and Pearl Street, apparently began after a tree fell on power lines. Arcing power lines apparently sparked the blaze, officials told 6ABC.

The three-alarm fire is still burning at this hour. Fire companies from several surrounding communities are assisting Millville.

Officials have not indicted if anyone was injured.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
LAWRENCEVILLE -- Just weeks into his new job as Rider University president last year, Gregory Dell'Omo hinted life was about to get turbulent at the 150-year-old school.

Asked how his introduction to the campus had gone, the president said he didn't expect all of the smiles and warm greetings from the university community to last forever.

"The honeymoon lasts about 15 minutes at any university," Dell'Omo said in September.

What Dell'Omo didn't know at the time was his honeymoon at Rider would be exceptionally short.

In October, Dell'Omo shocked the campus when he announced Rider needed to cut 13 majors and lay off 14 professors to close a $7.6 million budget deficit. More than 100 underclassmen would need to either find new majors or transfer, Dell'Omo said during a town hall meeting.

Just two weeks later, as some students were beginning to look at other schools, Dell'Omo dropped another bomb. None of the cuts were going to happen, he announced.

The new president struck a deal with the faculty union that cut costs enough to avoid the layoffs and save the majors slated to the axed, he said. But the ordeal raised new questions about Rider's future and placed added scrutiny on the new president of a university that costs nearly $40,000 a year in tuition and fees.

As Dell'Omo prepares for his inauguration ceremony this Friday, Rider's new president continues to face what is likely the biggest challenge of his long career in academia. Tasked with rebuilding a mid-size private university beset by financial struggles and declining enrollment, Dell'Omo must also restore confidence to a campus still rattled by the specter of major budget cuts.

As students returned for the spring semester in January, many wondered when Dell'Omo's next big announcement would be coming, said Ryan Hopely, president of Rider's student government.

"I think students are just waiting for the next time they can get a sense of hope again," said Hopely, a junior majoring in public relations.

Coming home

These days, Dell'Omo appears at ease at Rider, whether eating a slice of pizza in the dining commons, visiting wrestling practice or meeting with administrators in his office overlooking the Lawrenceville campus.

But if not for a family wedding, Dell'Omo might not have taken the Rider job, which the New Jersey native considers a homecoming of sorts.

Dell'Omo, 60, grew up as the middle of three children in Rumson in Monmouth County. His father owned Dell's Pharmacy in neighboring Fair Haven, where the future college president stocked shelves and swept floors alongside his parents.



While in high school, Dell'Omo toured Rider's campus in Lawrence Township but ultimately choose to attend Montclair State University, where he majored in economics. He earned his bachelor's degree and enrolled in law school at Syracuse University until he got married and took a leave of absence.

Why private colleges have fewer students



From there, Dell'Omo spent seven years in retail at Stern Brothers, went to Rutgers part-time to get his master's and eventually earned a doctorate in industrial relations/human resource management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.



"I think I'm still on leave of absence from Syracuse," he said with a laugh.



After stints in the administration at Canisius College and Saint Joseph's University, Dell'Omo took over as president of Robert Morris University in 2005.



He spent nearly 10 years helming the private university in the suburbs of Pittsburgh before flirting with becoming president at La Salle, a Catholic university in Philadelphia in 2014. When contract negotiations with La Salle fell through, Dell'Omo withdrew his name from consideration.



Then, four decades after his campus tour, Dell'Omo found himself back at Rider, though somewhat reluctantly, he said. Dell'Omo balked when first approached about becoming president, he said.



"I was happy where I was," he said.



But Dell'Omo and his wife, Polly, were coming to nearby Lambertville for their son's wedding in October 2014, and he agreed to take a side trip to interview at Rider. He was impressed by how the campus had grown, he said.



"The rest is history," Dell'Omo said. "I thought it would be a nice time to come home."

Dell'Omo declined to reveal his salary. His predecessor, Mordechai Rozanski, earned $635,664 in annual compensation in 2014, according to the university's latest available tax returns.

The university also paid Rozanski another $105,414 in a deferred compensation bonus and $65,769 in benefits that year, bringing the total to $806,847 that year, according to the documents.

Financial challenges

Founded in 1865 as Trenton Business College, Rider is now a 5,000-student regional university with more than 100 undergraduate and graduate programs and 20 NCAA Division I teams.



But like many small and mid-size private universities, it's struggling with declining enrollment as students turn to less expensive public universities and larger campuses with more amenities.



Rider increased tuition and fees 4.2 percent to $38,360 this year, while undergraduate enrollment fell to 3,712, about a 9 percent drop from 2009, according to the university. One factor in the enrollment dip was the unexpectedly small 865-member freshman class, about 14 percent smaller than the year before.



Dell'Omo knew what he was inheriting from the retiring Rozanski and budget cuts were already being discussed before he arrived, he said.

See how tuition is rising in N.J.



Rider had a contractual obligation to notify the union by Oct. 31 if it planned to layoff faculty, Dell'Omo said. With no progress in the talks between the two sides, he called a town hall meeting for Oct. 29 to announce layoffs and cuts.



Some on campus said that was the moment Dell'Omo's honeymoon at Rider ended.



The administration and the faculty union quickly brokered a compromise to avoided the layoffs and cuts that includes a two-year wage freeze and other concessions from the faculty. But questions linger about whether Dell'Omo will reintroduce the budget cuts, said Bryan Spiegelberg, Rider's union president.



"I don't know that anybody at Rider or people who might be at Rider, prospective students or faculty members, thinks that this was anything other than a delay," Spiegelberg said.



The university and its faculty have worked together on problems in the past, and professors wonder whether Dell'Omo will continue that collaboration, Spiegelberg said.



"We all recognize that institutions change," he said. "But the question of how those changes are going to occur, I think, is where faculty are most concerned."

Looking ahead

Though Dell'Omo has helped steer Rider beyond the proposed budget cuts, it will take time for the university to solve its financial problems, he said.

"There is never any silver bullet," he said.

Still, when he speaks at inauguration in front of students, faculty, his wife, his three children and two grandchildren, his message will be markedly more positive than his October town hall, he said. Dell'Omo is already pointing to signs of Rider's stability.

The freshmen retention rate from fall 2015 to spring 2016 was 94 percent, despite the shockwaves from the proposed budget cuts, he said. Deposits for next fall's freshman class are up 14 percent over last year, and new gifts and pledges are up $1.2 million.

Rider has already announced new accelerated degree programs with a fixed tuition rate in its business school, and Dell'Omo envisions adding new academic programs in technology fields to meet a growing demand. Committees of administrators, faculty members and students are working on a long-term vision for the university, Dell'Omo said.

The new president said it's normal for students and faculty to be uneasy about the future. But he wants the campus to know that everyone is "in this together," he said.

"There is a lot to work with here," he said. "We have a strong foundation to build upon."

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Speed Art Museum

Anthony Van Dyck's portrait of an unknown woman from 1640, which the Frick Collection curator is calling "Miss Kentucky."

(Bill Roughen)

There has never been an age that has made as many portraits as this one: passport photos; Facebook icons; security camera screen shots; the list is endless. Coincidentally (or not), a pair of New York's most prestigious museums are hosting retrospective exhibitions of two of history's most famous portraitists just a short walk apart.

Painted portraits, of course, are the stuff of aristocrats, not selfie sticks. But interestingly enough, the chief subjects of both artists, who worked 150 years apart, were a generation of aristocrats who would shortly meet their doom.

Even if it weren't for that bit of unforeseen drama, the Frick Collection's "Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture" and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Vigee Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France" would set up an irresistible afternoon of art.

"Van Dyck" features over 100 paintings, drawings, and prints by the student of Rubens. Van Dyck lived from 1599-1641, dying just as his patron, King Charles I, provoked the civil wars that would lead to his own execution in 1649. This is the first major show devoted to Van Dyck in this country in over 20 years.

"Beautiful, rich, talented--and a woman," an early self-portrait by Vigee Le Brun.

Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (1755-1842), as Mary Flanagan of the Met says, was "beautiful, rich, talented, successful -- and a woman, just the sort of character you'd think they'd make a movie about." One needn't take the evidence of her self-portraits to accept her beauty (though they do indeed show her as lovely), because she is even more beautiful in a terra cotta bust by Augustin Pajou at the entrance to the show.

There are some 80 paintings, pastels, and drawings in "Vigee Le Brun," only the second major show devoted to her in modern times. Le Brun enjoyed a very long career, but she made her name as painter to Marie Antoinette. We all know what happened to her.

Marie Antoinette by Le Brun.

Le Brun was the daughter of a pastellist who died when she was only 12. Largely self-taught, her facility was encouraged by her mother, who made for Elisabeth a happy marriage of convenience to Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, the leading art dealer of Paris at the time. Le Brun happened to specialize in Flemish and Dutch painting, including Van Dyck. Elisabeth was unmistakably influenced by the older master's portraiture, which was famous very early on for its aristocratic "nonchalance," as curator Stijn Alsteens puts it.

"I believe many people have noticed a contrast between the melancholic expressions of Van Dyck's sitters and the sumptuousness of their costumes," says Alsteen, who is curator for the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Met. "Of course, he could not know that his very wealthy patrons were about to be destroyed in the English Civil War. But there was a very popular book at the time, Anatomy of Melancholy, read by the King's circle, and they believed melancholy showed a superior temperament. The contrast in the portraits between the settings and the mobile, sometimes sad faces seems to us to be prescient, but was simply fashionable."

Portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria of England by Anthony van Dyck, with her dwarf, Jeffery Hudson, from 1633. National Gallery of Art, Washington; Samuel H. Kress Collection

Still, Van Dyck's refined images (he set up an elaborate studio in London, staffed with trained Flemish assistants, and turned them out by the score) have ever since epitomized Cavalier noblesse oblige. His technique is the real subject of the Frick show. Van Dyck achieved a likeness quickly, as we see in many oil sketches done for engravers (the Frick has a very rare intact edition of Van Dyck's collection of engraved portraits, Iconagraphie, bound in calfskin, a recently discovered treasure). He would leave much of the background and costume work to his assistants, and come in to finish the heads himself.

"The drawing we have of King Charles I is very beautiful and very melancholic," Alsteens says. "By and large we think [Van Dyck] did a better job with male sitters than female--the women were more concerned about their features conforming to a beautiful type. Which is one reason we were so glad to get the 'Portrait of a Lady' from the Speed Museum in Louisville. Very few experts have ever seen it."

Alsteens is referring to a standard-sized 30x23-inch portrait done near the end of Van Dyck's life, probably in London, which the crew at the Frick have taken to calling "Miss Kentucky." The treatment of the unknown sitter's face is remarkably vivid, but the rest of it is sketchy, including a dramatic hand that still needs finishing glazes. The subject doesn't look melancholic, exactly--in fact, she seems to be barely repressing a giggle. But she is mesmerizing in her ambiguity.

Le Brun often mimics Van Dyck's signature elegance, but ambiguity is less her line. In life, most human bodies are about seven heads tall, but Van Dyck and Le Brun rarely fail to bump them up to eight. The change in proportions makes the clothes hang more appealingly.

Le Brun is a colorist, and a fashion plate. But the real difference between her and the Flemish genius is her finished sense of natural happiness. The tone of her paintings, including the most famous, showing Marie Antoinette with her doomed children, is formally informal: china-doll-perfect people caught in the dollhouse unawares. Even the late pictures, with just a hint of Romanticism bleeding into pictures of Russian nobles and Swiss ingenues, are downright bonny. They express what late 19th century French sculptor August Rodin referred to as the 18th century's perfect "lightness of an unburdened age."

Well, if you worked in the palace. Given what happened to the Queen and all those pretty little children, the pictures suggest a certain cluelessness.

Van Dyck engraving of Paulus Pontius, one of many such prints in a rare full version of the artist's Iconographie, a calfskin-bound book he used to convince patrons to sit for him.

That's perhaps no less accurate than Van Dyck's bored melancholy. Anyway, both artists seem to express a natural superiority that selfies, like the dozens of Facebook self-portraits that Bernie Sanders uses in his ads to express the support of average voters, cannot and would not want to claim.

"But if you look at fashion photography today, for example," Alsteens says, "you would see a level of formality, of artificiality, that is very like that we see in Van Dyck. So you have to say that drama goes on, even now."

Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture

Where: The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th St., New York City

When: Through June 5. Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-Sunday

How much: Admission $20 adults, $15 seniors, $10 students, pay what you wish 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Sunday. For more information see www.frick.org or call 212-288-0700

Vigee Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave. at 82nd St., New York City

When: Through May 15. Open 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday

How much: Recommended admission for adults, $26; $17 seniors; $12 students; children under 12 free. For more information call (212) 535-7710 or see www.metmuseum.org
gay-talese.jpg

Writer Gay Talese incurred the wrath of social media for his comments about women writers. (Joyce Tenneson/Twitter)

Acclaimed writer and journalist Gay Talese has drawn the ire of other journalists following his comments about women writers during a talk at Boston University on Saturday.

When asked about which women writers inspired him, Talese paused, then said: "In my generation, none," according to a tweet from another speaker at the event, journalist Sandy Tolan, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Journalist Anubha Bhonsle tweeted that Talese initially mentioned Mary McCarthy as a source of inspiration, but then struggled to think of another woman writer from his generation. Someone from the audience shouted "Joan Didion," she said, after which Talese acknowledged her as "a beautiful writer."

According to journalists tweeting from the talk -- moderated by Tom Fiedler, dean of the college of communication, as part of the university's Power of Narrative conference -- the comments from Talese, a pioneer of New Journalism, caused some women to leave the event.

Happening now at @narrativeBU: Dean Tom Fiedler speaks with renowned author and writer Gay Talese #narrativeBU pic.twitter.com/wtRmQw3f3t -- BU COM (@COMatBU) April 2, 2016

Talese, 84, who grew up in Ocean City, also said women writers of his generation were not comfortable dealing with uneducated people or "anti-social" "strangers," according to those present who were live-tweeting the event.

"Talese says writerly, educated women of his generation did not feel comfortable dealing with strangers," tweeted Lauren Dezenski, a reporter for Politico.

"Very taken aback by Gay Talese's comments on female writers," Dezenski added. "Educated women not comfortable covering non educated subjects? Wow."

Twitter erupted with backlash to Talese's comments.

"In many ways Gay Talese is a revolutionary, in others (eg his views of women nonfiction writers), he's an 84 yo guy from NJ," tweeted Chloe Axelson, a writer and Boston University alumna.

"Most of the tweets about Gay Talese are from women so maybe we do write about unsavory characters? (JK mostly.)," offered journalist Wendi Thomas.

"Male writers, get a better answer abt women writers you admire than Gay Talese's," said journalist Michael Erard.

"Journalism is avoiding, if you can avoid it, any kind of technology," Talese said at another point during the talk, as per a tweet from Karen Given, a reporter for a Boston NPR affiliate.

Likewise, more than one tweet endorsed a high likelihood that Talese would not be monitoring Twitter for a reaction.

[&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="//storify.com/NJentertainment/reaction-to-gay-talese-s-comments-about-women-writ" target="_blank"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;View the story "Reaction to Gay Talese's comments about women writers " on Storify&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;]&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;h1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Reaction to Gay Talese's comments about women writers &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/h1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;h2&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Speaking at Boston University, Talese said no women writers in his generation inspired him &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/h2&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Storified by &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="https://storify.com/NJentertainment"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;NJ.com&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;middot; Sat, Apr 02 2016 20:51:16 &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Really? Gay Talese says female writers of his era avoided tough subjects bec they don't like strangers. #narrativeBU https://t.co/Hjwm7BcVeGShirley Leung&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;In many ways Gay Talese is a revolutionary, in others (eg his views of women nonfiction writers), he's an 84 yo guy from NJ. #BUnarrativeCloe Axelson&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Very taken aback by Gay Talese's comments on female writers. Educated women not comfortable covering non-educated subjects? Wow.#BUnarrativeLauren Dezenski&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Male writers, get a better answer abt women writers you admire than Gay Talese's. #narrativeBUmichael erard&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Didn't think I'd ever walk out of a Gay Talese talk. Turns out misogyny will do it! #BUnarrative #narrativeBUAnne Ford&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Awkward, long silence when Gay Talese explains at length why there are no female journalists he respects. #BUnarrative #VIDALiz Prato&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;When you're catching up on tweets from the weekend and see this Gay Talese trend. https://t.co/a9lwtCxjGTAstead Wesley&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;The great Gay Talese looks swell in his suits, but his dumping on female journalists is straight out of the caveman era. #nowaygayWayne Coffey&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese was all good until he started talking about how women writers don't like to hang around under-educated, seedier types. Um, whut.Ida Bae Wells&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese, speaking live from 1950.Harold Itzkowitz&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Ah Gay Talese is trending, let's see what nuggets of wisdom this journalistic legend is-- https://t.co/egD17KATMqAdrian Chen&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese, asked about women writers of his gen who inspired him: &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;None...I think the educated woman wants to deal with educated people.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Amanda Katz&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Women don't write good NF bc they don't feel comfortable talking to strangers, Gay Talese tells largely female journo audience #narrativeBUAmanda Katz&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;World would be better off if we paid less attention to Gay Talese and more to the female writers whose existence he deniesSarah Kendzior&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese doesn't use technology, so as far as he's concerned that went pretty well #BUnarrativetwo feet tall&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Apparently Gay Talese is mired in 1968 vis a vis his understanding of women #Journalists.Amy Alexander&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Most of the tweets about Gay Talese are from women so maybe we do write about unsavory characters? (JK mostly.) https://t.co/32c6jjkPJzWendi C. Thomas&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese just fumbled hard a Q about what women journalists inspired him. #narrativeBURebecca Eisenberg&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Talese: Women reporters don't feel comfortable dealing with unsavory, interesting, dangerous characters.Rebecca Eisenberg&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese aced the Sinatra article in 1965, to give him his due. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Remember them as they were and write them off.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; - E. HemingwayMichael McKean&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese can't name one woman who inspired his writing over the past 50 years. 20 women get up and walk out of his talk. #narrativeBUKristina Goetz&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese Feels A Chill https://t.co/yNCX8ctF22Caro&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;@narrativeBU conf, q fort Gay Talese: What women writers inspired you? Long pause. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;In my generation, none. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; Say what? 1/2Sandy Tolan&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;@narrativeBU conf, Gay Talese can't think of a woman writer who inspired: &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Women...don't feel comfortable dealing with strangers.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Wha? 2/2Sandy Tolan&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;*Sees that Gay Talese is trending* *Goes to see why Gay Talese is trending* *Sees why Gay Talese is trending* https://t.co/elXjqb4t1GJason Pinter&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;It sounds like Gay Talese may be an 84 year old man.Josh Marshall&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Hey dudes. Stop saying Gay Talese is 84 years old. You don't get a pass for being old. There is no cultural progress retirement age.Scafe of the Union&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Get over being offended by Gay Talese. Not everybody is going to fit the modern idealist &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;narrative&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;, but that's the meaning of #diversity.Diana Death&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;The Gay Talese controversy: it proved a lot about what women have said for decades about men covering for other men re:sexism. #bunarrativeAngie Aker&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Sad to hear about Gay Talese. Turns out he is trending not because he is dead but bc our respect for him now is. #BUnarrativekr&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gay Talese: When your heroes fail you, Part 368. https://t.co/6iY1zDCfzyGrant Wahl&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Thought Gay Talese was trending because he was physically dead but it was just because he's culturally dead.Tom Ceraulo&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;#BUnarrative yes feeling like I just got kicked in the stomach by Gay Talese... https://t.co/yjVWEOPNzDNikka Landau&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup. Find NJ.com Entertainment on Facebook.
More than 2,000 "geeks" converged on the Woodbury Heights Community Center Saturday -- more than half of them in costume -- to celebrate the fifth South Jersey Geek Fest in three years.

"This is a grass roots show, but it grows every year because of you," said Fest Captain Ryan Harbinson, as he kicked off the bi-annual Geek Fest awards ceremony.

Trophies were presented for the Super Smash Brothers tournament, the cosplay kickball home run derby, and both the adult and children's costume contests.

But the most coveted of awards -- the highest honor of geekdom -- the Andrew James Kirk Geek of the Year award, was saved for last.

"Two years ago, AJ showed up in our store," said Ryan Morrison, Fest Captain and owner of Tiki Tiki Board Games in Woodbury. "He came in and said he was a professional yo-yoer."

Having never heard of such a thing, Morrison asked what exactly Kirk did as a pro yo-yo artist.

"He pulled out, literally a bag of tricks, which we still have at the store, and started juggling, balancing, and doing amazing things with a yo-yo," he said. "We knew he was special."

Kirk began hosting a Yo-yo Club at the Tiki Tiki Board Games store which started with three people, and now welcomes nearly 50 every Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Kirk was the first recipient of the Geek of the Year award.

Sadly, Kirk died suddenly in October 2015.

"After he passed away, we got permission from his family to rename the award the Andrew James Kirk award," Morrison said.

The Geek of the Year award is presented to someone who is "first and foremost a geek, and also represents the community in a positive way," according to Morrison.

This year's award was presented to Bill Bead, owner of Frankenstein Comics in Woodbury.

"I've been buying comics from Bill since I was 15," Morrison said. "I met him at a show and he sold me 40 comic books for $4."

Bead has been hosting the C.H.U.D. -- Comics Here Under a Dollar -- comic book convention since opening his store in 1993.

"He's known as a paper pusher, and a wise person," Morrison said while introducing Bead at the event. "He helped us with our business, and is a legend in the area."

Bead walked up on the Geek Fest stage to accept his plaque, but didn't stay there long.

"Thank you," he said into the mic. "I don't deserve this honor."

And then Bead quickly exited the stage to a rousing round of applause.

Later, Bead said he was "overcome with emotion."

"It's very nice to be appreciated," he said.

Bead said, at one time, there were six comic book stores in the area. Most of those have since closed their doors.

But thanks to the comic genre expanding to movies, television shows, and video games, comic cons help to keep the business alive.

"Now, it's so wide-spread with cosplayers and gamers," he said. "I'm like the cockroach of comics locally -- I just won't die."

Bead is hosting the South Jersey Comic-Con and Toy Bonanza on May 1 at the Holiday Inn on Route 70 East in Cherry Hill.

The next Geek Fest will be on Oct. 29. For more information, visit sjgeekfest.com.

Kelly Roncace may be reached at kroncace@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @kellyroncace. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
FAIRFIELD - A New York City man was arrested Saturday after leading officers on a high-speed chase down Route 46, authorities said.

Oshane Thompson, 25, of Queens Village, N.Y. was stopped around 6:14 p.m. after a Fairfield officers watched him make an illegal U-turn, according to Police Chief Anthony Manna.

As of the officer approached the car on foot, however, Thompson took off in his 2013 Nissan Altima, and continued speeding down the busy road with multiple officers giving chase, Manna said.

Thompson was forced to slow down due to traffic near Route 46's intersection with Two Bridges. Rather than stop, however, he allegedly took the car over a curb and into the rear parking lot of a PNC bank.

During the escape, however, the car's right front tire had blown out, and Thompson took off on foot, Manna said. After a brief chase, he was finally apprehended by three officers near the intersection of Passaic Avenue and Little Falls Road.

Manna said Thompson continued to resist officers during his arrest, and left two with minor scrapes and cuts after the encounter.

After being taken into custody, police found a small amount of marijuana, drug paraphernalia and 15 Visa and Mastercard gift cards on Thompson and in his car, according to Manna. It is unclear whether the cards may have been stolen, but officers also discovered an active warrant for credit card related offenses out of Lycoming County, Pa.

He was charged with eluding police, resisting arrest, obstruction of justice, possession of less than 50 grams of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. As of Sunday, he was being held at the Essex County Jail on $25,000 bond, according to county sheriff's records.

Dan Ivers may be reached at divers@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanIversNJ. Find
Horse file photo052.JPG

(file photo)

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. --A quarantine of 44 horses at a Bucks County boarding facility has been lifted.

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) placed the stable under quarantine after four horses that tested positive for equine herpesvirus type 1 (EHV-1) were euthanized in December, according to a Jan. 8 press release.

Quarantines for EHV-1 remain in effect for at least three weeks after the last clinical signs are noted.

According to an April 2 post by the Equine Disease Communications Center: no new clinical signs of EHV-1 have been seen in any horse at the stable since Feb. 10 with negative RRT-PCR tests on whole blood and nasal swab samples for all 44 horses. Previously positive horses tested negative twice at least a week apart. Three clinically recovered horses remain in quarantine in an isolated area of the property.

The stable was placed under quarantine after two horses at the stable developed signs consistent with equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy (EHM) on Dec. 22.

Two additional horses were euthanized on Dec. 24 and 31, respectively, after presenting similar clinical signs. They also tested positive for EHV-1. Other horses at various locations throughout Pennsylvania with suspect clinical signs have been tested but there have been no positive results.

In tracing back the positive horses, Pennsylvania animal health officials determined that one of the first two horses euthanized had participated in a horse show in New Jersey. Extensive tracing activity conducted by New Jersey animal health officials identified no suspect horses.

Clinical signs of the disease can range from respiratory to neurological impairment. In most situations, the disease is only mildly contagious and some horses make a full recovery. In this case the virus strain involved has caused unusually severe disease and high viral loads.

There is no threat to human health from Equine Herpesvirus.

Pennsylvania horse owners with concerns may contact the department's Bureau of Animal Health and Diagnostic Services at 717-772-2852.

More information on the Equine Herpes Virus can be found at the New Jersey Department of Agriculture website: http://www.ag.state.nj.us.

Also see AAEP.org for information on the disease and biosecurity.

For current equestrian news see Horse News or check out the online version of the print edition.

Horse News covers everything equestrian in the mid-Atlantic area and can be reached at horsenews@hcdemocrat.com

To subscribe to the print edition call 908-948-1309.

For advertising e-mail mchapman@njadvancemedia.com. Find Horse News on Facebook
WASHINGTON (AP)  The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued a subpoena to Donald Trump. The nine-member panel sent a letter to the former president's lawyers on Friday, demanding his testimony under oath by mid-November and outlining a series of corresponding documents. The decision by lawmakers to exercise their subpoena power comes a week after the committee made its final case against the former president, who they say is the "central cause" of the multi-part effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It remains unclear how Trump and his legal team will respond to the subpoena, if at all.
Dylan Moses explains why Texas is new No. 1, LSU back in top 5
The Iowa Department of Transportation and the Iowa Economic Development Authority are touring the state to gather input on a statewide energy plan.

Thursday evening, a group of about 40 people from the surrounding area met at Iowa Western Community Colleges Looft Hall to discuss the challenges of providing energy to the state. According to Iowa Energy Plan, the joint effort of the DOT and EDA, Iowa is a net importer of energy, producing about half of the energy consumed in the state. The wind energy industry has exploded in the state, while biofuels also continue to provide an alternative to oil.

Were seeking input from the public on Iowas energy plan, said Kanan Kappelman. The idea is to have a very comprehensive plan that gathers comments from the entire state, with perspectives on what we need to focus on.

Organizers plan to release a plan by November of this year.

The plan has to be actionable and it has to be implementable, Kappelman said.

The listening tour has four pillars of discussion:

 Transportation and infrastructure.

 Economic development and energy careers.

 Iowas energy resources.

 Energy efficiency and conservation.

The four tables at the meeting were abuzz, as conversations about kilowatt hours, green energy, energy efficiency and other topics were discussed. Early on, the energy efficiency and conservation table featured a number of rural electric cooperative representatives.

We know energys an important part of what happens in Iowa, said Joe Farley with the Harrison County Rural Electric Co-Op. Public policys a big part of that.

The Woodbine man said he attended the meeting because, being involved, being at the table is important. Instead of waiting to hear the outcome later.

At the Iowas energy resources table, ethanol plants, biomass projects and incentives were discussed.

Iowa can be a leader in energy and set the standard, said Rick Allely of Council Bluffs, who works for JEO Consulting Group of Omaha.

Laura Lutz-Zimmerman with the Iowa Economic Development Authority said the meeting was a chance to talk about energy in the state.

We really are trying to hear what folks have to say, she said. What are the opportunities and challenges related to energy in the state?

Input is still being gathered. Residents can go to iowaenergyplan.org for more information or to submit a comment. Materials on a number of energy topics are also available, and website users can sign up to receive updates on the plan.
Every year Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury takes over Plaza Bowl for its annual bowl-a-thon fundraiser. On Saturday 108 teams participated in the event, which went from 1:30 p.m. to midnight.

Every year Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury takes over Plaza Bowl for its annual bowl-a-thon fundraiser.



On Saturday 108 teams participated in the event, which went from 1:30 p.m. to midnight.



Its our largest fundraiser of the year, said Chantal Gladu, the organizations executive director.



Each year the annual bowl-a-thon raises between $25,000 and $40,000 for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury, Gladu said.



The event also has a different theme each year, and for 2016 it was Masquerade Bowl.



Many participants wore colourful masquerade ball masks as they did their best to bowl strikes and spares.



Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury currently matches more than 115 children  primarily from single-parent homes  with volunteers who help guide and support them until they turn 18.



But there are currently around 30 children on a waiting list to be matched with a big brother or big sister.



Gladu said the funds help match children with volunteers, but there is also a great need for adults to sign up.



They can do so by visiting the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury website, or by calling 705-673-6161.



Gilles Aubin has been a big brother for 25 years, and said it has been one of the most rewarding experience of his life.



Its fun to see the smiles on their faces, he said.



He was the best man for his first little brother, who is now a firefighter, and happily married with two children.



Aubin said he would often go fishing with his little brothers  hes had five over the years  and took them on annual outings planned by the organization, including an annual trip to Canadas Wonderland.


Royal Canadian Legion branches in Sudbury will be honouring the 99th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge during a parade and ceremony on April 10.

Royal Canadian Legion branches in Sudbury will be honouring the 99th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge during a parade and ceremony on April 10.



Between April 9 and April 12, 1917, four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force fought a fierce battle against three divisions of the German Sixth Army. The Canucks were tasked with taking control of the high ground to protect a British advance in the Battle of Arras, itself a diversion for a French attack against the Germans called the Nivelle Offensive.



Vimy Ridge was the first time the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together and ever since has been seen as a moment that helped define the Canadian identity. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial, at the site of the battle, is still visited by countless Canadians.



The sacrifice of those soldiers who fought at Vimy is being honoured April 10 when Legion Branch 76 and Branch 564 come together to recognize the 99th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.



Starting at 1:30 p.m. that day, representatives of both Legions, as well as the Irish Regiment, Greater Sudbury Police Service, Polish Combatants Association, and the Navy, Sea and Army Cadets, will parade from Tom Davies Square to the Church of the Epiphany, 85 Larch St. in downtown Sudbury.



A 2 p.m. church service will follow, with a luncheon to be served in the downstairs hall after the service.



The public is invited to watch the parade and attend the service and luncheon.

Legion members taking part in the parade are asked to assemble at Tom Davies Square before 1:15 p.m. Any veteran wanting more information can call 705-566-4010 and talk to Maryann.
Police warn to exercise caution on Sudbury roads

Greater Sudbury Police are reminding drivers to exercise caution on all roads and intersections due to deteriorating conditions.

The snow from last night is expected to tail off late this morning. Temperature will drop to -8 in the afternoon, then down to -19 in the evening. File photo.

Greater Sudbury Police are reminding drivers to exercise caution on all roads and intersections due to deteriorating conditions.



Police said due to recent rain and a drop in the temperature Saturday, combined with snow, road conditions throughout Greater Sudbury are poor.



Almost every collision can be attributed to human error and that includes driving too fast for road conditions and following too closely, to not cleaning off the snow from the vehicle or clearing the windshield/windows completely, police said in a press release.



Take a few extra minutes to clean off the car prior to putting the vehicle in gear and give yourself additional time to get to your destination  this could literally save lives, including yours or your loved ones.



Drivers should also slow down to drive to conditions, police said.




Veteran Zeb Taia has praised the mental fortitude in his new Titans team but says they will continue to be punished for giving good teams head starts.

The Titans' leading try-scorer through five rounds with four tries, Taia's first double in the NRL since Round 3, 2011 dragged Gold Coast back into the contest against Brisbane on Friday night but again they were forced to come from 10 points behind.

A bond forged in a three-day pre-season Army camp helped the Titans claw their way back from 22-6 down against Brisbane to get within striking distance at 22-16 before a late penalty goal secured the Broncos an eight-point win.

The crowd of 21,080 was the largest at Cbus Super Stadium in three years and Taia believes the young members of the Titans' squad can take plenty of confidence into Sunday's clash with Cronulla at Southern Cross Group Stadium.

"That was probably the biggest game of the year for us and we know what it tastes like now," Taia told NRL.com.

"They're the benchmark of the comp so we can take a bit of confidence from that game and take it into next week against Cronulla.

"We'll be going down to Cronulla really confident but we can't keep giving teams head starts like that.

"It's not a good way to win games. We want to grind them out from the first minute to the 80th.

"We've learnt over the pre-season with all those Army camps and stuff that we've got a mentally strong side here and the boys know when to step up and I thought they did that.

"It was a big stage, Friday night footy against probably the best team in the comp, there are good signs there. The boys are confident but there are a few things we need to fix."

Taia's performances on the Titans' left edge in the opening five weeks have been hailed by many as better than what he produced in his previous eight-year stint in the NRL with Parramatta and Newcastle.

In 77 games for Catalans in the Super League Taia scored 36 tries and has become something of a go-to man close to the opposition try-line for the Titans, scoring four tries in five games thus far, equalling his best try-scoring haul for a season in the NRL.

Now 31 years of age, Taia said that his determination to leave a mark on the NRL stems from watching games on TV from France for the past two years.

"It's just the drive that I had. Watching the NRL for the last two seasons I always wanted to come back and I was looking for an opportunity and when this came up I jumped at it," said Taia, who played 80 minutes for the third time this season against Brisbane.

"It is a bit of a challenge and I feel like I'm improving week in and week out but definitely need to fix a few things defensively."
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Hillary Clinton is agreeing to a presidential debate on NY1, ahead of the New York primary April 19. In an interview with political reporter Josh Robin Sunday, the Democratic frontrunner also slams rival Bernie Sanders, answers whether her relationship is strained with Mayor Bill de Blasio  and uses Donald Trump's recent remarks on abortion to criticize the entire Republican field.

Hillary Clinton will debate on NY1.

"I will be there. I think you've penciled it in for the 14th. I will be there."

Her democratic rival Bernie Sanders says he's busy with a rally on the 14th, and suggests four other days.

Clinton also agreed to debate on ABC.

Their race is closer than some expected. But Clinton suggests she's all but locked it up.

"I understand as we get closer to the end, there may be some anxiety and frustration and acting out on the other side  but he has to look at the facts," Clinton said of Sanders.

Fact one, Clinton says, she has a greater delegate lead than President Obama had in 2008. And fact two, she says, Sanders' record on guns merits him unworthy of New York's democratic vote.

"And his refusal to take on the NRA," Clinton said.

Sanders voted against numerous gun control measures, but says he's hardly a stooge of the gun lobby.

Clinton defends her record as New York senator.

She was not a leading voice against the NYPD's controversial policy of stop and frisk, which affected more than a half million New Yorkers in her last year in office  overwhelmingly black and Latino, and innocent.

"I have spoken out, I will continue to speak, and the courts were dealing as you know for a long period of time with that particular procedure," Clinton said,

Clinton talked with us after addressing a large, predominately African American church in Southern Brooklyn. After Clinton left the stage, its influential reverend offered some strong words against Sanders' politics.

"Socialism is great in theory," said Pastor A.R. Bernard, of the Christian Cultural Center. "But we've seen what it is in practice, with the birth and collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia."

We also asked Clinton about Donald Trump. He called for punishing women who get abortions, though later backpedalled.

Now Trump refuses to say whether he was ever responsible for a pregnancy that ended in abortion.

"I don't know anything about that," Clinton said. "I did find his statements on policy to be absolutely wrong."

And Clinton says he's not that far off from other Republican candidates.

As for New York State, which she says she loves, and New York City, which she says she adores, she says she wants to be a good partner.

And what of Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose later than expected endorsement drew attention?

"I have a great relationship with the mayor," Clinton said. "He's a friend of mine. We share a lot of the values."
In an exclusive interview, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she's ready to debate her top rival Bernie Sanders in New York before the state's April 19 primary.

"I will be there,'' Clinton said, of a possible showdown with Sanders on TWC News NY1 that the station is attempting to sponsor.

Speaking to political reporter Josh Robin, Clinton had tough words for Sanders about his record in the Senate regarding gun control.

"Contrasts are fair game. You know I really oppose his record on gun control, his refusal to take on the NRA. I think thats wrong for New York, wrong for America."

Clinton also took on the entire Republican field when she was asked about Donald Trump's reversal over whether women should be prosecuted for getting illegal abortions.

"They all went to make abortion illegal and if you make something illegal, you have to have consequences and that leads to punishment which is what Trump was advocating,'' Clinton said.

The former New York senator also praised Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo, singling out the mayor's universal pre-kindergarten program.

Watch the full interview above.
Karen Tongco Salva and Benjamin Josiah Stern were married April 2 at the Mystic Arts Center in Mystic, Conn. Dr. Andrew Engel, who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated; Hannah Smotrich, a cousin of the groom, assisted in a ceremony with Jewish influences by reading the wedding contract.

Ms. Salva, 28, and Mr. Stern, 30, do freelance work in New York for film, television and commercial shoots  she as a location scout and he as a location manager.

The bride also works as a makeup artist. She graduated from the University of California, Long Beach, and is the daughter of Luisa Coggan of Newport Beach, Calif.

The groom graduated from the University of Wisconsin and is a son of Kathleen M. McFadden and Gabriel B. Stern of Gales Ferry, Conn.
An unattended rental truck with wires protruding from its dashboard and gas canisters behind its seats touched off a brief evacuation in a part of Times Square on Saturday night, the police said.

The box truck, parked at a bus stop at 46th Street and Seventh Avenue outside the New York Marriott Marquis hotel, drew the attention of a member of the New York Police Departments Critical Response Command, a counterterrorism unit, for a number of reasons, the police said.

Wires extended from the trucks dashboard and there were gas canisters behind the seats. The trucks keys were in the ignition. The truck listed a Brooklyn address on its side but had a Georgia license plate, and it was unattended in Midtown Manhattan on a busy Saturday night, a police spokesman said.

Pedestrians and occupied vehicles were evacuated from the area, and traffic was blocked starting at 7:50 p.m. as the police investigated. An all-clear was given about 40 minutes later.
All this momentum might seem startling at a time when the traditional union movement is on its heels, with the percentage of private-sector workers in unions sliding to 6.7 percent. Indiana, Michigan, West Virginia and Wisconsin have all enacted anti-union, right-to-work laws since 2011. At least the Supreme Courts 4-4 decision last week saved the nations public-sector unions from a crushing defeat that would have hobbled their finances.

Theres still a lot of pro-labor, pro-worker sentiment, said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University who has written about populism and popular movements. Inequality is a big issue nowadays. The Fight for $15 has become the way that civil rights was in the early 60s  its an issue you cant avoid. For politicians  or at least Democratic politicians  you want to be on the right side.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans, including 84 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents, support a $15 minimum wage, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research group. Just 32 percent of Republicans do.

The movement for a $15 floor has been partly fueled by the same frustration over wage stagnation and income inequality that has spurred the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders. More than 50 million workers earn less than $15 an hour, and many Americans are upset about the loss of millions of factory jobs and the explosion of low-paying service-sector jobs. Mr. Sanders has championed a $15 minimum, but Mr. Trump has attacked the idea, at one point saying that wages are too high. Hillary Clinton has called for a $12 minimum, leaving states and cities to go to $15 if they like.

The issue has motivated thousands of protesters to join the Fight for $15s periodic strikes: What started in one city ultimately swelled to protests in 150 American cities. By many measures, it has become the biggest labor protest in decades, with a wide spectrum of supporters, from college students and inner-city workers to janitors and nursing-home aides. The movement helped to get voters in the Seattle suburb of SeaTac to approve a $15 minimum wage, and not long after in Seattle itself and San Francisco, followed by Los Angeles and Pasadena.
Wednesday was another in an endless blur of Wednesdays at the Greenville federal prison in Southern Illinois. An inmate named Jesse Webster, serving a life sentence without parole for a nonviolent first offense, was poised to take a typing test, his fingers hovering over the keyboard  when his name resounded over the intercom.

Report immediately to the assistant wardens office.

A longtime model inmate, Mr. Webster knew he was not in trouble, so maybe this was the call he had been dreaming of for years. Then again, the last time he was summoned to the office, a prison official heartily congratulated him  but only because he had been given the privilege to select the Christmas specialties to be sold in the commissary. He chose some smoked cheese and barbecue potato chips, and kept his crushing disappointment to himself.

This time, things were different. Soon his lawyer, Jessica Ring Amunson, was on speakerphone. She had toyed with making a joke about the commissary, but thought better of it.

I have some wonderful news, Jesse, Ms. Amunson said. Your sentence has been commuted.

Mr. Webster later said that he did not know quite how to respond. He had wanted this moment so badly for so long, but now, all he could muster was: Wow.
The sculptor Martin Puryear will receive the third annual Yaddo Artist Medal. Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., will celebrate Mr. Puryear at a benefit on May 18, which will also include a performance from musicians Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran.

Mr. Puryear began his career in the 1970s and is known for his work in wood and bronze. He was the focus of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 and had an exhibit last winter at the Morgan Library & Museum. Mr. Puryear has remained faithful to sculpture, and keeps probing the mediums capacity for revelation and beauty, Jason Farago wrote in December in The Times. His new sculpture Big Bling, which is 40 feet tall, will debut in Madison Square Park two days before the benefit.

The multimedia artist Laurie Anderson and the novelist Philip Roth have been the honorees in years past. More information and tickets for the benefit can be found at www.yaddo.org.
Every generation gets its own New York values panic. Mondays HBO documentary on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe begins in 1989, months after his death, with Senator Jesse Helms decrying his work on the floor of the United States Senate. The senator had started a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts funding of an exhibition by a known homosexual who died of AIDS, whose work included graphic depictions of sex and S-and-M. Look at the pictures! he cried.

Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, does just that. But where Senator Helms meant to point to the photographs content  the skin, the genitalia, the placement of a bullwhip or a fist  Pictures, an insightful work of biographical criticism, puts them in the context of a life and artistic vision. It finds the light behind the heat.

Read about this and other TV recommendations in our Watching newsletter.

Pictures lays out a straightforward narrative of Mapplethorpes life, starting with his Roman Catholic childhood in Floral Park, Queens. (One of his first works is a Picasso-esque portrait of the Virgin Mary.) When he was an art student, photography was considered as much craft as art. As Philip Gefter, a photography critic and a former picture editor at The New York Times, says in the film, the genre would gain stature concurrently with the gay rights movement.
After Diana Colbert died of leukemia in 2011, her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, began reading through the journals she kept when she was sick. Ms. Colbert had hoped to write an inspirational book about her experience, and she took notes while she was undergoing grueling chemotherapy and transplant procedures, often through the haze of medication.

It was a year and a half before Mr. Bock could bring himself to read them. When he did, the journals unexpectedly helped shape his novel Alice & Oliver, which comes out on Tuesday and is about a New York couple whose lives are upended when Alice is given a diagnosis of leukemia.

Much of the story unfolds in the claustrophobic confines of a cancer ward, where Alice struggles to stay upbeat for her husband and baby, and Oliver tries to suppress his grief and rage as he negotiates with insurance companies and tries to decode impenetrable medical jargon.

Reading the journals helped Mr. Bock pull off one of the most difficult narrative feats in the novel: writing from the perspective of a dying woman who is torn between accepting her fate and fighting it.
Leaving Cravath, which on Sunday confirmed Mr. Barshays resignation, is no small deal. With 442 lawyers, the firm is relatively small compared with behemoths like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. But it has had a long run as one of the best-regarded mergers practices in the country, advising blue-chip companies on takeovers and helping defend them against shareholder activists like Mr. Icahn.

Cravath ranked second among law firms in terms of deals announced last year, working on 97 transactions worth $926.5 billion, according to data from Thomson Reuters. That put the firm just behind Skadden and ahead of rivals like Sullivan & Cromwell and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

The firm is one of the most profitable in the country, earning nearly $3.4 million per partner in 2014, according to The American Lawyer.

Mr. Barshay has driven much of Cravaths deal volume. Last year alone, he counseled Anheuser-Busch InBev in its $106 billion purchase of its fellow beer giant SABMiller, and H. J. Heinz and the investment firm 3G Capital on their $40 billion-plus takeover of Kraft. His mainstay clients include IBM and Barnes & Noble.

Cravaths other deals partners, led by Faiza J. Saeed and Robert I. Townsend III, continue to work on other major takeover matters, including Yahoos potential sale of itself, Cignas planned $48 billion sale to Anthem and Mylans proposed $7.2 billion takeover of its fellow drug maker Meda.

In all, Cravath has about 50 partners in its corporate department, which handles deal work.

Cravath will continue to be an M.&A. powerhouse, given its depth of talent, great clients and unique franchise, said Robert A. Kindler, vice chairman of mergers and acquisitions and global head of mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley.

Unlike many law firms, Cravath is known for a lockstep system in which partners are paid based on seniority rather than the amount of business that they bring in. Other firms, including Paul, Weiss, tend to link pay more with performance.
The college student who killed six people before shooting himself in Isla Vista, Calif., in May 2014 saw multiple therapists; they disagreed whether he had emotional problems or high-functioning autism. The Sandy Hook shooter, who killed 26 people in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. in 2012, had seen numerous psychiatrists and psychologists for years before his mass murder, including therapists at Yales renowned Child Study Center. After details of the young mans childhood and home life emerged, some experts saw evidence of early psychosis or obsessive compulsive tendencies. But the only official diagnosis Adam Lanza, the shooter, had received was Aspergers syndrome, a mild form of autism that by itself does not dispose people to violent acts.

Dr. Michael Stone, a New York forensic psychiatrist who created a database of about 200 mass murderers, including spree and serial killers, has determined that about half had no clear evidence of mental illness before their crimes. About a quarter showed signs of depression and psychopathy  that is, hopelessness combined with a lack of remorse.

The spree killers in particular are odd types: moody, unpredictable, inhabiting an internal world that is not easily put into any category, Dr. Stone said.
The bronze doors of Immaculate Conception Church are always open during the day, a welcoming gesture to the surrounding Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx. Decorated with figures of the Virgin Mary, the doors are graceful  and heavy. My main issue is trying to open them in the morning, the Rev. Francis Skelly, the churchs pastor, said. They keep me in shape.

The bigger challenge is keeping them open: The parish is poor, and money for repairs and maintenance is tight. Twenty years ago, the churchs copper steeple had to be dismantled after pieces began to crash onto East 150th Street. It has yet to be restored because parish leaders have other priorities for the congregations 1,200 members  most of them Latinos and immigrants  who turn to it not just as a place to worship, but also for help with things such as citizenship classes and preparing tax returns.

Immaculate, as the faithful call it, has always been a church for newcomers, starting with the German immigrants who filled its pews when the current structure opened in 1888, replacing a wooden building that had stood there before. After decades of doing hard and unheralded work, the church is being recognized by New York Citys Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has proposed that the exterior be designated as a landmark.

As much as Father Skelly appreciates the nod, it is the last thing he needs: Landmark status, he said, would create financial and bureaucratic burdens if parts of the 128-year-old structure required repairs or renovation, making any alterations complicated and expensive.
CAPE TOWN  On Thursday, the 11 judges of South Africas Constitutional Court ruled unanimously that President Jacob G. Zuma had broken his oath of office. Mr. Zuma, the court found, had used his position to enrich himself and his family improperly, and had refused to abide by an earlier finding against him from the constitutionally mandated public protector. He had thus, said Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, failed to uphold, defend and respect the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

The matter had been brought to the court by the two major opposition parties, the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters and the right-of-center Democratic Alliance. They sought to compel the president to repay the state for nonessential spending on his private residence at Nkandla.

In an address to the nation, Mr. Zuma responded that he respected the Constitution and the judgment; that he had acted in good faith in his faulty interpretation of the public protectors powers; and that he had been poorly advised regarding the overspending on his house. He pledged to repay the money, and apologized for the confusion and frustration he had caused  though not for his unconstitutional actions.

Yet it was not the self-enrichment (the precise extent of which is yet to be determined) that outraged South Africans so much as the lengths to which Mr. Zuma went to avoid accounting for it, and thus tried to sidestep checks on the abuse of executive power.
The crash disrupted train service between New York City and Wilmington, Del., for much of the day, but Amtrak was working to restore service in time for the Monday morning commute.

The two Amtrak workers killed were an operator of the backhoe and a supervisor, said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, who said he had been briefed by Anthony Coscia, the chairman of Amtrak. Mr. Coscia declined to comment to a reporter before the safety board investigators had arrived.

Beatriz Munozcano, 29, said she and her husband, Alonso Ortiz, were braced together in the third row of the trains second car. We were waiting for something to hit us, she said. The train was moving from side to side like a roller coaster.

Officials said they did not know yet how fast the train was going.

Ms. Munozcano, who was making a day trip to see the cherry blossoms in Washington, said that after the impact, she saw a window fall onto a woman across the aisle. Dust from the crash was so thick that passengers could not see out of the train, she said.

Passengers who were able to walk were escorted out the back of the train and taken on foot to a nearby church, Trainer United Methodist, where they gathered in a gym and were given food and water. In turn, they were put on regional buses and taken to Philadelphia, Amtrak officials said.
With global temperatures rising inexorably, some scientists and national security theorists have pondered cooling things down by tinkering mechanically with the planets climate.

The goal of this geoengineering would be to create an effect not unlike when clouds suddenly block the sun and chill a warm afternoon. Average surface temperatures might be held down by a few degrees worldwide, these experts suggest  enough, they theorize (maybe with fingers crossed), to stave off environmental cataclysm.

How to do this? With smoke and mirrors. For real.

One idea is to launch giant mirrors into space, where they would bounce back some of the suns energy. Another suggestion involves spraying ocean water into the air to whiten clouds and thereby increase their capacity to deflect sunlight. Then there is a widely discussed plan to pump sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. Those particles, too, would reflect the suns radiation back toward space, comparable to the effects of natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions. The haze created by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 spread so widely that average global temperatures dropped by nearly one degree for more than a year.

Lets set aside these proposals for a moment to first note that the aerosols plan faintly echoes a terrifying scenario that informs the latest offering from Retro Report, a series of video documentaries that study the continuing impact of major news stories of the past.
BEIJING  A year and a half ago, negotiators from the United States persuaded the Chinese government to commit to a deadline for reversing the growth in greenhouse gas emissions from China.

The Obama administration portrayed the pledge as a major victory because China produces more of the gases that cause global warming than any other country, a quarter of the worlds total. Though the deadline was far off, in 2030, environmentalists said the concession by Beijing was a significant breakthrough in efforts to coordinate a global response to climate change.

Now, some researchers examining recent energy data and the slowing Chinese economy are asking whether emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, are already falling in China  more than a decade earlier than expected.

If so, there could be important consequences. Chinas success could energize worldwide efforts to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or two degrees Celsius, above preindustrial levels, considered a difficult mission but critical for forestalling catastrophic environmental changes.
Auburn Universitys School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences will honor its first African American graduate, Ernest Boyd, at a luncheon April 7. The milestone celebration of the schools 40-year history of diversity will be held for at 11:30 a.m. in the conference hall of the schools building. Invited guests will join in the celebration.

Boyd, a native of Tuskegee, graduated in forestry in 1976. After graduation, he served in the U.S. Army for 18 years and then became an elementary and intermediate school teacher. He says he feels race relations have improved since he graduated.

What my classmates and the instructors at Auburn learned is that you have to find out where the other persons values lie, Boyd said. They came to find out that my values were the same as theirs. I wanted a good education and livelihood for me and my family. Once they found out where I was coming from, they looked at me and said whats the difference? Nothing but the color of our skin.

Boyd says he sees parallels today with issues of immigration, that just as it had been for blacks and whites in the 20th century, he feels the basis of migrant relations is common ground. He says hes learned over a period of time that in order for people to tolerate each other, they have to learn to talk to each other. He says if we open that dialogue and learn to communicate, hatred will start to disappear.

The collegiate spirit of Auburn University is a unifying force for Boyd. He likes to see and use the phrase, War Eagle, because it breaks the ice with other people. I can talk to anybody; people open up once you break that ice.

In that spirit of unity and shared experience, the school is proud to celebrate Ernest Boyd, the schools First African American graduate, said Heather Crozier, director of development for the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences.

At the luncheon the school will also recognize Ken Day 81 and Dana Little 79, who spearheaded the schools African American Alumni Scholarship Endowment along with 10 others who contributed to the effort.

The goal of this scholarship is to foster a campus environment that respects differences and encourages inclusiveness, as well as to increase the recruitment, retention and representation of minorities and other groups within the school, Dean Janaki Alavalapati said.

For more information, contact Heather Crozier at 334-844-2791, email at sfwsdevelopment@auburn.edu or go to www.auburn.edu/sfws .
The idea of American exceptionalism has been embedded in our collective DNA for generations. It is the faith-based belief that, as Ronald Reagan put it, America is a shining city on a hill.

Do modern liberals believe that?

I almost never try to get into the other sides head or ascribe ill motives to those on the left. They are, Ive always believed, misguided, not malign.

But Im having second thoughts after listening to Barack Obamas defense of communism/socialism when he was in Argentina. He advised young people to get behind what works economically  as if there is some deep mystery here.

Obama didnt misspeak. The modern Left in America really has come to believe that communism, socialism, Marxism, totalitarianism or whatever ism you call the monopolization of power into the hands of a ruling elite, is superior to free-market capitalism.

The president of the United States is supposed to be the global spokesman for free enterprise. But, instead of traveling to Cuba to point out to the world the decades of stagnation, deprivation and dehumanization at the hands of the Castros, and instead of using this moment in history to showcase the triumph of capitalism 90 miles away, Obama praises Cubas health care and education systems.

He might as well have been praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time. Even more unbelievable: the media applauded.

How far the Democratic Party has fallen. Can anyone imagine Obama, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders having the gumption or wisdom to tell a Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down this wall?

It wasnt so long ago that leading Democrats  JFK, Harry Truman and even the AFL CIO  were staunch enemies of communism. Today, there is no place for such beliefs within the progressive Democratic Party. If it involves ceding power to the state, the Left is all for it  as evidenced by the rise of Bernie Sanders.

But for every action, there is a reaction, and the Lefts lunacy has given momentum to the tumultuous uprising on the right this year. Millions of voters who support Donald Trump want our government to put America first and focus on our own mounting problems at home, then worry about Europe, Israel, the melting ice caps, AIDS in Africa and so on. If your house is burning down, you put out that fire and save your own children trapped on the second floor, before you go down the street and put the fire out at your neighbors house.

Heres just one observational data point that, admittedly, is anecdotal but speaks volumes about the left-right divide in America. At a typical Trump or Ted Cruz rally, you will see American flags waving everywhere. These are patriotic gatherings. At Sanders events, you will see some flags, but not many  because if you are a leftist, its not cool to love America. What is much cooler is wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt.

At a Republican rally, you typically meet many veterans who served our country with honor and valor. Some who protest at Trump rallies detest those who are wearing military uniforms and call them fascists and give the Nazi salute. Ive seen it happen. I want to grab these brats and shout at them like Jack Nicholson did in A Few Good Men: A simple thank you would suffice.

Trump voters see America losing both the economic and cultural wars vital to national survival. We have a $19 trillion national debt that has doubled in the past decade. We have wages flat or falling for most Americans. We have a political class that is actively trying to destroy whole industries  coal production, oil and gas, community banks and so many others.

We have a president (along with the intellectual class) pushing a radical climate change agenda that will cost the middle class millions of jobs, but wont change the global temperature by one-one-hundredth of a degree. Trade deals seem to be drafted to benefit foreign workers and businesses over our own. America pays far more than its share for programs like the United Nations and NATO. Our public schools put teachers first, not kids, and they often dont adequately educate.

We have courts overturning the will of the people in state after state on issues like gay marriage. We have speech police. We have illegal immigrants who work here and live here and then wave the Mexican flag at rallies, as if to be intentionally offensive. (And Im in favor of immigration.) Then they wonder why Americans want a wall.

We have the TSA searching the underwear of infants, but let certain adults pass through uninspected because we wouldnt want to be accused of profiling. We have a Justice Department thinking about prosecuting people for questioning the climate change consensus.

This is the same crowd that seems to prefer the economic systems in Sweden and Greece and Cuba over Americas. They preach human rights, but they dont seem to understand that economic freedom is a core human right.

Stephen Moore is an economics consultant with Freedom Works and a Fox News contributor.
A 32-year-old burglary suspect was arrested early Sunday after ramming a truck into a deputys car during a South County chase that ended when he crashed into a tree, authorities said.

Deputies were called to a possible burglary in progress in Dana Point just after 12:30 a.m. near Selva Road and Malaga Drive, according to the Orange County Sheriffs Department.

A man was seen trying to break into cars in a residential area and was approached by deputies when he drove off in a tan 1980 Toyota truck, authorities said. Deputies chased the truck on surface streets from Dana Point through Laguna Niguel and Mission Viejo, where the suspect rammed a deputys car in a parking lot and fled again.

Two deputies were inside the car when it was hit on the drivers side door. One deputy had minor injuries.

The suspect, later identified as Joseph James Hart of San Diego, kept driving until he hit a tree about a mile away on Crown Valley Parkway and ONeill Drive in Ladera Ranch. The pursuit lasted a little under 20 minutes, deputies said.

Hart was treated by firefighters for a head bruise and taken to Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. After the crash, deputies found that the Toyota truck Hart was driving had been stolen from San Juan Capistrano.

Hart was booked on suspicion of felony evading, assault with a deadly weapon for ramming the deputies, vehicle theft and may face charges related to the attempts to break into cars.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7865 or afausto@ocregister.com
Re: Reject NRAs lies in November [Letters, March 27]: Gavin Newsom is making the typical government knee jerk reaction: Lets act on the law abiding citizens because theyre the only ones that will obey. Who do you really think lies to us the most, the NRA or our own, self-interested government. It isnt even close.

His list of initiative proposals is a mix of what we should already be doing and that which we should never do. Enforcing laws prohibiting felons and dangerous criminals from owning guns and providing law enforcement better data regarding these criminals is what law enforcement should be doing now. Prohibiting large capacity magazines and treating ammunition sales like gun sales is ridiculous. Does anyone believe this will keep criminals from getting ammunition or large capacity magazines? Most people would report a lost or stolen gun anyway, but if they didnt know it had been stolen, would the owner be facing a crime for not reporting it? Let us keep our guns and go to work to get rid of terrorism and criminals, thats where the problem lies. Taking away our guns or making it difficult to buy ammunition only makes the politicians feel more empowered.

Michael Noggle

Irvine

  

Gavin Newsoms letter is nothing more than a campaign ad for his run as governor of California. Attacking the NRA and every gun owner in California as liars is a tireless attack on commonsense citizens. The NRA gets blamed for actions that none of its members commits. This letter coming from a San Francisco politician is a slap in the face of every gun owner in the state. As if punishing the owners of guns in California will stop criminals from bringing guns in from out of state. This new law will not stop the bad guys from having guns. It will only enhance the control over gun owners with the goal of complete confiscation of guns. Here is a man from the most liberal city in the country putting forth his ideas to generate a fervor to bring him votes. He also wants to put a 2 cent tax on every ounce of soft drinks because he believe that it will somehow reduce obesity. We citizens have lost the ability to live a self-controlled life.

John Seibert

Laguna Niguel

  

I had to laugh at Gavin Newsoms feeble attempt to demonize the NRA for being obstructionists in passing new gun laws in the state. California already has more gun laws on the books than any other state, yet he believes his proposed new gun laws will reduce crime significantly. He apparently believes that our veterans and retired public safety citizens, along with the general population, cant be trusted to do the right things with respect to gun ownership. In reality, Newsom will add to the creation of an already massive state bureaucracy which cant enforce existing gun laws. I trust that the citizens of this state will see through this folly and reject his measures in November. I believe Newsoms time would be better spent helping to solve the debt crisis this state faces.

Bob Miller

Anaheim

  

Mr. Newsom said the NRA is lying about his common sense gun ballot initiative. Really? Because the article to which he was responding said the sheriffs association objected to it. Is he calling our state sheriffs liars? In the past he has shown that he is not above violating the law to push his agenda.

Kate Steinle was murdered in his former jurisdiction, with aid from policies he approved, by a multi-convicted illegal immigrant felon with a government-issued firearm.

This is not about preventing crime or catching criminals. It is about making the laws and barriers so complex and ever-changing that you will surrender your Second Amendment rights, or run afoul of the maze of laws so they can take your rights away. If they can infringe upon the one right that says it may not be infringed, what do you think they will care for your other rights?

Mark E. Edmiston

Fullerton

  

Re: Ballot measure on guns, ammo hinders law enforcement [Opinion, March 25]: I find it hard to accept Michele Hanisees criticism of Gavin Newsoms gun proposal. Her description of an information database that tries to limit firearms and ammunition purchases by people who should not possess such weapons is a bit too much. Her mistake is the claim the database would be expensive, flawed and complicated. I dont think so. A database of people who should not be permitted to purchase said firearms would be no more complicated and flawed than a simple phone book. And it would be even simpler because the book wouldnt have to be distributed to every house. The database would be managed and maintained by the state and would be available to those whose actions require the information listed in that database. Not very complicated.

Rob Macfarlane

Newport Beach
Lee and Audrey Morrison were excited last October as they moved into a brand-new house in a Sparks, Nev., subdivision.

It had wood floors, new carpeting, granite and marble countertops and stainless steel appliances  common fare in newly built homes these days.

But the Morrisons didnt buy their house on Cielo Falls Drive. They leased it.

We wanted something that was new, freshly painted and clean and (where) no one had lived there before, said Audrey Morrison, 66, a former Huntington Beach resident. We didnt have to do any work. They take care of the yard. All we had to do was start living.

The Morrisons are among dozens of families migrating to Lennar Homes Frontera at Pioneer Meadows project just outside Reno. Lennar completed 135 out of 236 planned new houses there, building them to rent rather than sell.

Lennar is one of at least four U.S. builders constructing new rental houses  and one of three with operations based in O.C.

Theyre taking advantage of a white-hot rental market due to an increase in renters and constrained homebuying because mortgages are harder to get.

Homebuilders and market experts say also that while families tend to prefer houses, they either cant come up with the down payment or prefer the flexibility of renting.

Meanwhile, the number of single-family rentals has been soaring.

Census figures show that 42,300 Orange County houses and 101,000 Inland Empire houses were added to the rental market from 2005 to 2014. Nationwide, nearly 3.9 million additional houses became rentals during that decade.

But most of those rental houses are in existing neighborhoods, owned by mom and pop landlords or by investment funds that snatched up foreclosures to create huge portfolios of rental houses.

A lot of people want to buy a single-family home, but for whatever reason, theyre credit challenged, said Jeff Roos, Lennars Western regional president. Theres a great deal of demand. Theres an underserved market.

Some homebuilders are stepping up to serve that market, with the number of U.S. houses built as rentals doubling from 2007 to 2012, numbers from the National Association of Home Builders show.

Rental house starts represented 3 percent to 6 percent of all single-family starts in the nation since 2007, up from 2 percent to 3 percent in the prior 17 years, the NAHB reported.

Irvine-based housing consultant John Burns estimated 25,000 detached homes were built to rent in 2014.

Would you rather live in an apartment with someone above you and below you and beside you and perhaps a single car garage you walk to? asked Spencer Rinker, co-founder and president of AHV Communities in Newport Beach, which is building more than 1,000 single-family rentals in Texas.

Or would you rather rent a single-family home with a backyard and direct access to a two-car garage?  We think its pretty straightforward.

Some firms became landlords decades ago by building apartments. For example, William Lyon Homes set up an apartment division in the 1980s that later branched off as an independent company, now called Lyon Living.

Others are new landlords but are building apartments, not houses.

Lennar, for example, has a pipeline of $6 billion to build 21,000 apartments across the country. Irvine builder MBK Homes owns or is building nearly 500 apartments in Corona and Riverside.

But housing consultant Burns argued in an August report that homebuilders are missing out on 10 percent of the housing demand, allowing existing homes to serve tenants who prefer rental houses to apartments.

Some dont qualify for a mortgage, he said. Others want the flexibility of being able to move or would rather spend what they earn rather than save for a down payment.

Clearly there is a subset of renters who will pay a premium to rent new, Burns wrote. If it works for apartment developers, why has there not been much attempt to build single-family homes for rent? Those days are now ending.

Homebuilders note that new rental house subdivisions have advantages over rental house portfolios amassed by investment funds such as Blackstone Groups Invitation Homes, which reportedly has 48,000 single-family rentals.

While those landlords have hundreds of homes spread throughout a metro area, the builders can cluster their rentals together, making them easier to rent out, maintain and repair.

Rinker noted that a portfolio landlord will have to pay high bills for each stopped-up toilet, since a plumber has to drive across town to make repairs.

You dont have the efficiency of having the maintenance person on-site, Rinker said. (And) you have newer construction, so theres less deferred maintenance.

Building new rental houses cant be done everywhere, builders said. Land and construction costs need to be in line with rents in communities with strong employment, Rinker said. Land costs in Orange County and much of Southern California, for example, make difficult if not impossible to build rental houses here.

Lee and Audrey Morrison owned and rented several houses before moving from Winnemucca, Nev., to the Reno area for Lees job managing safety and security at gold mines.

But they didnt want to buy since they dont necessarily want to stay in Reno when Lee retires.

We dont care for apartment living at all. We dont care for the close proximity and the noise and the paper-thin walls, said Lee, 66.

The Morrisons pay $1,984 a month for their 2,100-square-foot, one-story house, which they share with their Imperial Shih Tzu puppy, Madelyn. The management is OK with hanging pictures on the walls and upgrading locks and it takes care of the lawn and shrubs.

Its all taken care of, Lee said. Its a brand-new house.  It suited our needs perfectly.

***

Homebuilders who are becoming landlords

 Lennar, the No. 2 U.S. builder with its Western U.S. headquarters in south Orange County, began experimenting with rental houses last year, building the 236-house Frontera at Pioneer Meadows project just outside Reno.

Rental houses are an outgrowth of Lennars massive apartment construction initiative launched in 2011. Company officials say Lennar has a pipeline of $6 billion to build 21,000 apartments.

So far, the company completed five apartment complexes  including the new, 200-unit Malden Station near the Fullerton train depot. Twenty-six more are under construction from Boca Raton, Fla., to Seattle, 10 of which will open this year, said Todd Farrell, president of Lennar Multifamily Communities.

But not everyone wants apartments. Lennar CEO Stuart Miller told analysts in a conference call last year that the inability of families to get a mortgage is developing an appetite for single-family rentals. Miller called Frontera an experimental hybrid drawing on its homebuilding and rental expertise.

If the rental concept doesnt work as well as wed like, we can always convert to a for-sale platform, Miller said.

Lennar Western Regional President Jeff Roos said Frontera averages two leases per week since opening in March 2015. The company is pondering a plan to build more rental houses in Gossamer Grove, a master-planned development outside Bakersfield.

 AHV Communities in Newport Beach is involved in the construction of 1,000 rental houses in the Austin, Texas, and San Antonio areas. Two partners with a background in apartments and in finance formed the company in 2013 to tap into the unfilled demand for rental houses. The company is targeting millennials starting families and baby boomers looking to downsize into maintenance-free living.

Co-founder and President Spencer Rinker said his projects include all the amenities found in luxury apartments, including clubhouses with fitness centers, pools and walking trails. The company completed 50 houses so far, with the rest either still going through approvals or land grading.

The company hopes to expand eventually to Nashville, Tenn., North Carolina and possibly Southern California, although high land costs here make it challenging to build houses for rent.

We have a lot of people who are choosing to rent for its flexibility and not having to come up with a down payment, Rinker said.

 RSI Communities, a Newport Beach firm that builds walls and other housing components in factories, then assembles them on-site, has about 300 rental houses in three projects in San Antonio. AHV has an interest two of those projects, Vikery Grove and Village at Heritage Cove. The company plans to build 800 to 900 rental houses in central Texas by 2018, said Todd Palmaer, RSI president and CEO.

Well build the homes as fast as we can build them, and then well lease them out, Palmaer said.

 Camillo Properties in Sugar Land, Texas, has built more than 3,000 houses, townhomes and duplexes to rent in and around Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Fort Worth.

The firm is a division of Houston-based homebuilder Legend Homes and is affiliated with Triton Rental Homes.

Enjoy the comfort and convenience of your new rental home, the firms Facebook page says. No more noisy neighbors above and below you, and no more obscene pool parties at all hours of the night!

In addition, other firms are following Lennars lead by building apartments.

 MBK Homes of Irvine, builder of for-sale townhomes and houses in Southern California and the Sacramento area, recently began building apartments, with plans to build more than 2,000 units.

The firm, a division of the Japanese conglomerate Mitusi & Co. Ltd., completed a 288-unit apartment complex in Corona called Palisades and has a 187-unit complex called Metro Gateway under construction in Riverside.

Company president Tim Kane said MBK is responding to a housing shortage caused by a slowdown in building during the recession. Rentals give homebuilders a hedge in the housing market, Kane said. Apartments are very stable.

The occupancy rate in Southern California, even during the recession at the lowest point, was 92 percent. It indicates theres a need. And rents are very stable. They dont fluctuate much.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7734 or jcollins@ocregister.com
Right now, Americans are facing growing dangers at home and abroad because Islamist extremists have been given the space to plan, inspire and carry out terror attacks.

Deaths are mounting. Many of us are still struggling with pain and shock from the December terror rampage in San Bernardino that killed 14  including a mother of six and a father of three.

Recent attacks in Belgium, Pakistan and Ivory Coast have further demonstrated the reach  and sheer brutality  of these terrorists. Innocent men, women and children have been murdered at airports, subway stations and public beaches. Christians were targeted on Easter Sunday in a neighborhood park in Lahore, Pakistan, specifically because of their faith. The depravity of ISIS and other terror groups knows no limits.

And the sad truth is that the U.S. still isnt doing enough about it. While President Obama now says defeating ISIS is his top priority  two years after dismissing it as the JV team  the White Houses policies remain weak and ineffectual.

Take Iraq and Syria, for example. For years, the administration refused calls to use air power to take out ISIS convoys when they were moving across the open desert. Today, ISIS is embedded, and the U.S. is carrying out an average of just 23 airstrikes per day  a fraction of what a serious air campaign looks like.

Thousands of local Kurdish, Sunni and Yazidi forces are still fighting ISIS with antiquated weapons. These forces, many of which include women, have been driven from their homes and are highly motivated to take the fight to ISIS. Yet they do not have the support nor the tools they need. All the while, Obama administration efforts to combat ISIS recruitment and communications on the Internet remain disjointed, at best.

If were going to truly defeat and destroy ISIS, we need a comprehensive plan to combat these terrorists. Unfortunately, the presidents strategy  which he finally put forward after months of delay  offers nothing new. Its seven pages of the same old policies that arent working.

As chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Im committed to working with members of both parties to outline real alternatives to keep America safe. And in many cases, weve been able to reach bipartisan consensus.

In December, we passed legislation  which is now law  to help strengthen our Visa Waiver program and ensure that foreign fighters whove traveled to Syria and Iraq do not have easy access to the U.S. And recently, I successfully pressed the administration to apply extra scrutiny to individuals traveling to and from Libya. This is especially critical given that an estimated 5,000 Europeans have traveled to fight on the front lines with ISIS in recent years.

Weve also passed legislation to require the administration to step up efforts to combat ISIS use of social media, declare ISIS atrocities against Christians and other religious minorities genocide, and  just last week  we passed common-sense legislation to help improve border security by establishing minimum standards for foreign countries at airports and other points of entry.

Of course, we still have much more work to do. Especially as we are facing an enemy that is technologically sophisticated and always evolving. So Im advocating for strong policies that give our pilots and special forces already on the ground the flexibility they need to ensure terrorists have no sanctuary. Im also continuing to press the administration to get desperately needed weapons in the hands of the forces in Iraq and Syria  including the Kurds and Sunni tribes  that have been most effective in fighting ISIS, and step up training of African forces.

Ultimately, however, it is the president who must lead the fight to defeat and destroy ISIS. President Obama is the commander in chief. Instead of offering up tired half-measures, he ought to be working with Congress on a new approach.

Rep. Ed Royce, R-Fullerton, is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
ATHENS, Greece  An agreement between the European Union and Turkey to deport migrants currently on Greek islands back to the Turkish mainland is to take effect this morning, but the operation is threatened by a shortage of personnel.

Frontex, the EUs border management agency, is responsible for the implementation of the deal, but has less than one tenth of the 2,300 officers that it needs to do the job. The agency relies on the EUs 28 member states to provide translators and other officials to process asylum seekers, but these have not been forthcoming, even as the continent faces its worst refugee crisis since World War II.

The EU-Turkey deal aims to control the mass influx of people into Europe, many of whom have crossed the dangerous Aegean Sea with the help of smugglers. Under the deal, migrants arriving illegally in Greece will be returned to Turkey if they do not apply for asylum or if they make an asylum claim that is rejected.

For every person sent back, EU countries would take in one person confirmed to have made a legitimate asylum request.

The deal was originally supposed to take effect immediately, on March 20, but has faced delays due to the shortage of personnel and other problems.

The looming implementation of the deal and the closure of European borders have slowed the flow of people into Greece but not stopped it altogether. In the 24 hours leading to 7:30 a.m. Sunday, 514 arrived, according to authorities. There are now over 6,100 migrants in the Aegean islands, more than half in Lesbos.

Giorgos Kyritsis, a spokesman for the Greek governments refugee crisis committee, told The Associated Press that Frontex only has 200 officers in place to accompany the deported migrants, but almost none of the other personnel that would facilitate screening those who apply for asylum.

Other agencies, such as UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, are trying to help migrants go through the asylum application process. Many avoid even applying, certain they will be deported anyway.

Frontex has secured three vessels that will make the short trip from the island of Lesbos to the Turkish coast starting Monday morning. It aims to deport about 750 migrants, mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan, who either did not apply for asylum or whose applications have been rejected, in the first three days. To safeguard against unrest, the number of deported migrants will be matched by the same number of Frontex border guards on each ship.

We do not know how this operation will proceedThis is being done for the first time and it raises unprecedented legal issues as well, Kyritsis said.

The Greek government must also deal with the over 46,000 migrants and refugees now on the mainland, more than 20,000 of whom live in makeshift camps on the northern border with Macedonia and in Athens. They have become stuck after Macedonia and other counties have closed their borders, essentially closing off a popular route through the Balkans into Western Europe.

The Greek government wants to empty the makeshift camps and move the people to organized camps without using force. But many, especially in the Idomeni camp on the Macedonian border, refuse to budge, sometimes believing rumors that the closed borders will reopen.

Kyritsis said it appeared that some people are acting in bad faith in spreading false hopes.

If we find out they are also connected with migrant (exploitation) networks, we will use the full force of the law on them, he said.
FULLERTON  One person was injured Saturday when a vehicle crashed into a bank, police said.

An underage male was driving when the vehicle crashed into a pillar on the side of a Bank of the West in the 3000 block of Yorba Linda Boulevard around 2:25 p.m., police said.

The bank had been closed since 1 p.m. It was not immediately clear if anyone was inside. One person, who was not identified, was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, a Metro Cities Fire Authority dispatcher said.

The cause of the crash was not known and no one was arrested, police said.

A city building inspector was called to survey any damage to the structure.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2478 or lcasiano@ocregister.com
A new film  The Night Stalker, starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Richard Ramirez  is set to premiere in Orange County in early June after producers decided the movie should be seen in an area that the serial killer terrorized in 1985.

We wanted to open in a place where he had an impact, producer Matt Brady said.

The film will be screened at The Frida Cinema, the art house theater in downtown Santa Ana, about 20 miles from the Mission Viejo neighborhood where Ramirez committed the last of his horrific crimes during the summer of 1985. The date of the premiere has yet to be determined as Bradys production company tries to firm up a date that Phillips, who is on location shooting the television show Longmire, can attend.

The film will be shown at festivals around the United States in search of a distribution deal before it can open in wider release.

Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders and 11 sexual assaults. Most of the crimes, in which he broke into homes in the middle of the night, occurred between March and September of 85, when people from San Francisco to San Diego went to bed afraid. He made some of his victims pledge their allegiance to Satan. Newspapers dubbed Ramirez The Night Stalker, after a creepy but unrelated television series in the 1970s.

In Mission Viejo on Aug. 24, 1985, Ramirez was spotted by teenager James Romero III on Via Zaragosa. Romero gave police a description of Ramirezs orange car and a partial license plate number. Hours later, Ramirez broke into the home of Bill Carns on Chrisanta Drive.

Ramirez shot Carns three times in the head and raped Carns girlfriend. Carns miraculously survived, although severe brain injuries make his life extremely difficult.

Thanks to Romeros description and a media blitz by police, Ramirez was caught six days later by an angry mob in East L.A.

The movie focuses on a fictionalized story in which an attorney (Bellamy Young, who plays Mellie Grant on the popular television show Scandal) tries to persuade a dying Ramirez to confess to a crime from his early years in Texas to save another man from death row. The real Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma on June 7, 2013, while awaiting execution in San Quentin State Prison.

Flashbacks from Mission Viejo are in the film, and not everyone will be happy to see those images on the big screen.

Who would want to go see that? said Anne Carns, the 88-year-old mother of Bill Carns, now 60, who still carries one of Ramirezs bullets in his head. Bills short-term memory is very bad. He showers once a week because he forgets. He doesnt take his meds. I wont go see it because I know what Bill goes through every day.

A suburban street in Van Nuys served as a stand-in for Chrisanta Drive in Mission Viejo.

Van Nuys was chosen as the location in the summer of 2015 because of its streetlights, which were old school sodium vapor lamps  not the LED lamps that are used in most places today.

Director Megan Griffiths, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, insisted that all the flashback scenes be accurate.

Shooting in the period (1985) is really hard, Brady said. You have to have the right cars, signage, backgrounds and street lamps.

Griffiths said she has known about the Night Stalker since she was 10 years old.

He was my introduction to evil in the world, Griffiths said. For this film, I didnt want to just follow around an actor re-creating gruesome scenes. I was more interested in his psychology.

The Van Nuys house is the residence of a woman who alleged she saw the Night Stalker in the bushes outside the house in 1985.

Brady said Phillips, who achieved stardom playing Ritchie Valens in La Bamba, did a scary and credible job re-creating Richard Ramirez. A dentist fitted Phillips with fake teeth to emulate Ramirezs infamous rotting smile.

Hes fantastic, Brady said. Everyone who saw him just got the chills. He nails the voice.

The film is the most recent of several depictions of the infamous serial killer and his crimes. Manhunt: Search for the Night Stalker was a television movie from 1989. Nightstalker was a straight-to-video movie in 2009.

Brady, who also produced the film Dahmer starring Jeremy Renner, said the Night Stalker case got under the skin of so many people because Ramirezs modus operandi was unpredictable.

He used a knife. He used a gun, Brady said. His victims were old and young. He traveled from Northern California to Southern California. He had no particular MO.

Brady said The Night Stalker is a significant film because almost the entire crew is made up of women. The writer/director, film editor, director of photography and one of the producers are women.

Thats a rarity in Hollywood, he said.
The range of summer camps and day programs available to the community were highlighted Saturday afternoon.

The seventh annual Summer Camp & Activities Fair was co-hosted by OC Family magazine and The Orange County Register at The Market Place in Irvine.

Forty companies, schools, cities and nonprofit agencies gathered to exhibit to an estimated audience of 2,500 the camps and programs they offer. Popular booths included the Ikea lounge area, Galileo Camps, which emphasizes innovation and learning without fear, and CodeREV, a summer camp where children can learn to code and develop apps.

There were stage performances from the Southern California Chinese Cultural Association and Ovations Performing Arts and a 30-minute song and dance number by The Young Americans, a Corona-based youth performing arts school. The Young Americans offers summer camp experiences in Orange County.

The Irvine Public Schools Foundation manned an exhibitor booth to present its summer programs and raise awareness for its upcoming second annual STEAM Carnival, which will also be held at The Market Place on April 30 (learn more at ipsf.net/steam-carnival).
Can we actually learn anything from Donald Trumps views on foreign policy?

Because we now have a lot of them, on record, and, as incoherent as they are, they reflect a lot more than the belligerent musings of a single deal-worshipping candidate.

In fact, as some of our sharper political analysts have noted, those views align with the times in a truly bipartisan way. And the would-be pivot away from American global leadership that Trumps agenda would offer has actually been a long time in coming.

Begin with Trumps own words. You know, when we did these deals, we were a rich country, he told the New York Times. Were not a rich country. We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. Were not anymore. We have a military thats severely depleted. We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape. They dont even know if they work. Were not the same country, he concluded.

Based on the current administrations foreign policy, its safe to say that President Obama, to an important extent, agrees. The old saw that Obama doesnt believe in American exceptionalism doesnt fully cover the decision he has clearly made in his second term, Ben Domenech recently observed. Under Obama, Domenech argues, American leadership primarily amounts to getting out of the way. It might sound odd to say this overlaps with the message of Donald Trump  but to the degree Trump has a coherent message on foreign policy, it sounds a lot like taking things a step further in that direction.

Think of it this way. Where Obama has been criticized for leading from behind, Trump would take the approach to the next level, taking an incredibly proactive and hard-nosed approach to backing out of Americas various commitments and obligations that he  but hardly he alone  thinks are overextended, obsolete and cost-ineffective.

Theres an obvious appeal to this vision, even in bent and jangled form. For too long, our approach to global domination has just not been successful enough, to say nothing of the tab weve had to pay for the trouble. For a key constituency of elites as well as populists, its time for a major rethink. Thats one big thing we can learn from Trump on foreign policy. And anyone who wants to offer an alternative needs to deal with that reality.

One way someone could advance a competing vision is to focus on the central problem with Trumps vision. You can see the trouble rearing its head in the Mideast, where Obama thinks the smart move is to force the Saudis and the Iranians into a cold peace.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that hes right  at least relative to the alternatives. Actually going from merely right to objectively successful, however, requires that a core, but untested, assumption is valid. Obama is presuming that, if the Saudis and the Iranians are incapable of mastering the region alone, they can divide the labor and succeed. But theres no real indicator thats true.

What the Mideast needs is a dominant power that can maintain basic order, and it just doesnt have one. Its one thing to create a power vacuum in the knowledge that someone else is going to step right in. Its another to run for the exits, and hope for the best.

And the unfortunate fact is that, around the world, there just arent any clear successors capable of bringing stable regional order to places where the U.S. has an uncomfortably or ineffectively large footprint. In Asia, China is a tottering giant, with shaky fundamentals and a ring of small but ardent adversaries united in opposition to its expansion and dominance. In Latin America, both Mexico and Brazil are hamstrung by poor governance, corruption and an inability to organize neighbors and partners around common goals, visions, or objectives. Africa remains too big and too dangerous a neighborhood for any one continental power to impose geopolitical regularity.

Only in Europe is there a major country with the basic ingredients of regional leadership  and its not unpopular, uneasy Germany. Its France, which is responding to Europes daunting challenges by trending more nationalist.

The U.S. cant really get out of the way of intractable problems that others should manage if theres nobody to hand the mess off to. On foreign policy, the most important thing we can learn from Donald Trump is that he, as well as President Obama  and elites as well as populists  are sharing in a pipe dream of disengagement. Unless, that is, America can groom some countries to bear the burdens of local leadership. Now is the moment for a few good allies.

The populists do have at least one thing right: If it seems were conspicuously lacking in competent, first-rate allies at the moment, the buck ultimately stops with our own governing elites. But if youre unsure that Obama Democrats or Trump Republicans have what it takes to rectify that problem, youre certainly not alone.
For about a week, Democrats amused themselves by fanning a phony controversy about guns and political rallies. Wasnt it hypocritical, they asked with straight faces, for the pro-gun Republican Party to favor open-carry firearms laws  except at their own 2016 presidential nominating convention in Cleveland?

Its a silly talking point, even in this uncommonly superficial campaign season. Yet it wasnt clear how many of the 45,000 people who signed a petition demanding the right to pack heat in Cleveland were mischievous liberals or Second Amendment fanatics. Either way, the U.S. Secret Service mercifully put an end to it Monday by channeling their inner Nancy Reagan. The agency just said no.

That doesnt mean there wont be trouble in Ohio this summer. Even people without guns have fists, and, as weve learned at Donald Trump rallies, the concept of fighting words still exists.

Im thinking now of the classic barroom scene in Larry McMurtrys epic novel Lonesome Dove, when former Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae (played by Robert Duvall in the film version) breaks the nose of a rude and dawdling saloonkeeper. When the recalcitrant barkeep objects to having his nose busted by calling Gus a bad name, the former Ranger knocks him out.

Guss sidekick, another former Ranger named Woodrow F. Call (Tommy Lee Jones onscreen), observes drily that its fortunate they werent hauled off to jail. Whacking a surly bartender aint much of a crime, Gus retorts indignantly.

Lonesome Dove was set in the late 1870s. In the 21st century, Americans live in more litigious times, especially when politics are involved. Whacking anybody  or even touching them on the arm  will get you booked and fingerprinted these days. Just threatening to fire a surly public servant can get you charged with multiple felonies.

Thats what happened in Austin, Texas. To show how far Lone Star State Democrats have drifted from their tough-guy roots, prosecutors in Austin commenced the 2016 election season by trying to imprison a former governor who happened to be a GOP presidential candidate. Rick Perrys transgression? He tried to get a Travis County district attorney to resign after she was busted for drunken driving.

You dont have to be Gus McCrae to think Perrys persuasion wasnt a crime. By a 6-2 margin, a Texas appeals court agreed, although by then Perry has been knocked out of the ring himself, along with a dozen other Republican presidential wannabees, by the brawling Donald Trump. One obvious irony is that Trumps political career was jump-started by his star turn on a reality television show in which he literally fired employees on-air. So far, none of them has tried to bring charges against him. And none of the canned employees took a swing at The Donald, either.

Last week, Corey Lewandowski, Trumps campaign manager, found himself in legal hot water in Florida. Lewandowski was booked on a misdemeanor charge of simple battery for allegedly grabbing a female Breitbart News reporter by the arm as she approached the candidate. To back up their decision to prosecute, authorities in Jupiter, Fla., released a video from an overhead camera  footage which shows precisely nothing. Meanwhile, Michelle Fields, the 28-year-old reporter and her pals resigned from the conservative website, saying it had not stood behind Fields, launching days of back-and-forth on social media, complete with pictures of the reporters arm bruises. This, apparently, is how the Millennial Generation covers politics.

Historically, covering campaigns and conventions and the White House meant getting jostled in tight quarters by security types. Its infuriating, but part of the job. But Trump taps into this phenomenon with a menacing twist. When hes not issuing veiled, and unveiled, threats to stifle the press, hes egging his supporters on against the men and women covering his rallies. Trump also wistfully reminisces aloud about the days when protesters who interrupted political speeches would be taken outside and beaten up by the cops.

I dont recall such treatment being a staple of political campaigning in this country  although the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago stands as the great exception.

The real problem with Trumps dubious historic nostalgia is that it has set a tone. Its now a regular occurrence at his rallies for the more excitable pro-Trump and anti-Trump attendees to view one another as sparring partners. Taking their cue from the candidate, theres an unsporting aspect to the political pugilism: They tend to punch the other guys from behind, when theyre not looking.

Maybe Im just too old-school. I wondered that a week ago when Javier Manjarres, another Republican operative, was arrested in Broward County, Fla., and charged with multiple offenses. It seems that Javier got word that his sister was being menaced by her boyfriend. Javier climbed into the boyfriends pickup truck, punching him several times in the face.

Javier was an early convert to Marco Rubio in 2010, although he broke with Rubio over immigration and now pronounces himself pro-Trump and pro-Ted Cruz, perhaps the only conservative of my acquaintance who has positioned himself that way.

He is managing editor of The Shark Tank, an award-winning blog with Tea Party sensibilities. Away from the keyboard for a few days until he made bail, Manjarres now faces charges that include attempted murder and assault.

Javier apparently broke the mans nose, just like the bartenders in Lonesome Dove. Recalling my hero Gus McCrae, I couldnt help but think, Whacking an abusive boyfriend  or grabbing a reporters arm  aint much of a crime.

It turns out, however, that gunplay was involved in Manjarres case: Cops think he fired three shots. Although none of the bullets hit the boyfriend, it also reminded me that Gus also used his Colt .45 revolver to pistol-whip the bartender, and to shoot a whiskey glass hed tossed in the air, sending the saloons card players diving under the poker table. Maybe he should have spent a day or two in the cooler after all.

Staff opinion columnist Carl M. Cannon also is Washington editor of RealClearPolitics.com.
Proactive government takes account of changing social, technological and economic realites. Thats what Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer is doing with his proposal to deregulate county taxis so they better can compete with the ride-booking companies Uber and Lyft.

He asked on Facebook, Rather than regulate Uber and Lyft, which is a typical liberal response by imposing regulation, why not deregulate the burdensome  costs imposed by government on taxis? Your thoughts?

My response, Great idea. Deregulation levels the playing field and reduces the power of the crony capitalists, while cutting costs for customers. See Democrat Jimmy Carters deregulation of transportation in the late 1970s.

Someone pointed to the deregulation of the California electricity industry two decades ago, which led to blackouts and the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric. I responded, I wrote about that a lot. It was not the deregulation of the electric grid, but regulation of a different kind, and worse.

Spitzers idea, as KPCC/FM reported, is to find ways to relax rules and fees for taxicab companies and drivers.  In the last year, the number of taxi permits has fallen by 16 percent, according to a 2015-16 budget document from the O.C. Transportation Authority released in May. The proliferation of ride-sharing services like Uber is clearly the primary reason, it states.

It reported that Spitzer said at the Monday meeting of the Orange County Transportation Authority, of which he is a board member, Instead of allowing the Legislature to regulate Uber, the solution is to deregulate the entire market and make it a level playing field so we dont overburden the taxi industry.

Spitzer told me he came up with the idea after reading Steven Greenhuts Register column a week ago about state legislation and lawsuits aimed at grounding the ride-booking companies. Why dont we just do a free market for everybody? he wondered. I simply asked the OCTA to look at eliminating the meddling.

Some cities and counties nationally issue a limited number of medallions cab companies or drivers purchase. Orange County does not have a medallion system, Andrew Oftelie told me; hes executive director of finance and administration for OCTA. There is no maximum number of taxis that may operate in the county.

He added, The taxi company has to apply for a permit, and the cost of the company permit currently is $4,440.80, renewable annually for $1,482. A driver must be affiliated with a company to be considered for permitting. A driver would pay $111.25 for an annual permit. The application lists the items they are required to submit with their application. The annual cost for a vehicle permit is $417. The costs will go up in July.

By contrast, according to Ubers website, Its free to sign up. Once you start driving, a standard percentage of your fares (ranging from 5 to 20 percent) goes to getting you more riders, better tools, and legal advocacy to keep your business running. A $10-per-week service fee is automatically deducted to cover costs of the Uber phone and data plan. You keep the rest.

I used to take occasional cab rides in Orange County and found them efficient. The yellow cab vehicles were clean and the prices reasonable. But a couple years ago I signed up with both Uber and Lyft and have used them since. To me, its just convenient to pop up their apps on my iPhone, check out where they are and pick the lowest estimated price, then push a button. The drivers were local men and women with pretty nice passenger cars.

I understand the cab companies also have apps now, but I havent tried them.

Spitzer is right to work to cut the cab fees. As old Henry Ford said, Competition improves the breed.
What do we do with this worthless area, the region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts and these endless mountain ranges?

 U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster, on the American West, 1852

The drought, if somewhat ameliorated by a passably wet winter in Northern California, reminds us that aridity defines the West. Our vulnerability is particularly marked here in Southern California, where the local rivers and springs could barely support a few hundred thousand residents, as opposed to the 20 million or so who live here. Bay Area, were talking about you, too, since about two-thirds of your drinking water is imported.

The prospect of continued water shortfalls  perhaps made worse by climate change  poses something of an existential question for this state. In the past, California met the challenge of persistent dryness much as the Romans did in their heyday, by constructing massive waterworks that connected mountain runoff with the thirsty urban masses. Everything that made California the harbinger of the future, from rich farmland to semiconductors and our great cities, was predicated on water transfer.

Now there is a sense that Californias expansion, its ability to create new communities and industries  outside of a few fields, like media and software  faces insurmountable constraints on water and other resources. This perspective has been favored by greens, anti-development NIMBYs and those who seek to corral all California growth into ever-denser, family-unfriendly environments.

This mindset has been predominant over the past decade, as the state has invested little in new water storage or delivery systems, essentially doing nothing since the late 1970s, when the population was 16 million less. Like the Roman Empire in its dotage, we seem to have decided to live off the blessings of the past, a sure way, it seems, to guarantee a diminished future.

Politics of aridity

This drought has been described as the most severe in centuries, but aridity has been a fundamental fact many times in the areas history. One particularly nasty bout in the 1860s virtually ruined the old Californio livestock-based economy. Los Angeles, in particular, was devastated to the point that some saw a threat to its very existence.

Scientists suggest that the 20th century was a relatively wet period  perhaps the wettest in 1,000 years. So maybe that phase is over and things may get worse. Some climate scientists predict a future with smaller snowpacks, although more rain.

It is suggested that climate change, if not responsible for the drought, has made it worse by as much as one-third. There is talk of climate wars in the future, with some people alleging the Syrian conflict, for example, has its roots not in the Assad governments tyranny or Islamic jihadism but in climate change.

Of course, some climate activists predictions  such as the imminent disappearance of polar ice or an increase in hurricanes  have proved somewhat exaggerated, so some skepticism about the more extreme prognostications may be in order.

Still, the relevant question remains: how to deal with the possibility of increasing aridity. We cant launch an invasion of the Pacific Northwests rain forest and take its water. We are in a very different situation from the days when a big economic crisis meant selling off surplus cattle at low prices, or driving horses into the ocean to drown. We now possess an enormous agricultural sector and cities stretching for 100 miles, both in the Bay Area and the Southland. Perhaps we are ready to admit that California needs to be downsized, even if this occurs largely on the backs of its middle and working class residents.

Neither the green movement nor the Jerry Brown administration seems to have an answer that accommodates either human or economic necessity. Instead, they have largely adopted positions that have made the current water shortfalls worse. Brown for decades has fought new investment in water infrastructure, which marked his fathers years as governor. The severity of this drought represents, at least in part, the younger Browns legacy.

Even during the most severe cutbacks for farmers and urban residents, Brown and his clerisy have acquiesced to massive dumping of water into San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Delta in order to revive a long-lost salmon run. This policy has a cost, particularly in a severe drought, assuring the loss of upward of a million acres of farmland. Although building more infrastructure and cutting flows to the sea might not have reversed the drought  environmental concerns absorb roughly half of all state water supplies in normal years  they would have made things much better for the humans dependent on reasonable water supplies.

Reluctance to find ways to better cope with the drought reflects perhaps the most glaring weakness in the increasingly dominant green agenda, which seems to see more cutbacks as the best way to address shortfalls. If you believe climate change will dramatically impact water supplies  or any vital resource  it might make sense to mitigate its effects through a sustained conservation program, including steps to reduce highly consumptive crops such as cotton and alfalfa, as some greens have rightfully suggested. But it also argues for investment in storage facilities, including upgrades to existing dams and groundwater banks, which many environmentalists oppose but could shield us from ever-increasing volatility and painful cutbacks.

Sustaining California

Ultimately, our choice lies in having water constrain our growth, or finding ways to develop enough water to expand our economy. Not everyone wants more growth in California, particularly those who live in the cooler coastal areas and already have tidy nest eggs. But entire industries that employ many in the middle class and working class  manufacturing, homebuilding, agriculture  could see their prospects greatly constrained.

Fortunately, there are shards of reason crashing the ecoconsensus that now dominates the state. Even Jerry Brown advocates twin tunnels under the Delta to provide a more consistent water supply southward. Southern California does not have a captive water supply, like the Hetch Hetchy reservoir serving San Francisco, which, by the way, pumps water from iconic Yosemite National Park. Brown, in this case, seems to have recognized that the state cannot afford to go more dry without enormous social and economic ramifications.

By advocating some water investment, Brown, of course, is now opposed by his longtime allies in the ever more strident green lobby. Unlike the governor, who occasionally has flashes of reasonableness, most environmentalists refuse to abandon any of their anti-development orthodoxy. Instead, they remain fixated on the silly and hyperexpensive bullet train, forced densification and investments in underperforming solar electric plants; they are not concerned with augmenting a basic resource required by the vast majority of Californians. Theirs increasingly is a Pyrrhic California  creating a desert and calling it a victory for the planet.

But this drying out of the Golden State is not inevitable. Even if we face increasingly common, and more severe, droughts, much can be accomplished through greater conservation, which greens also support and, for the most part, most Californians have achieved. But adaptation also requires more water storage and, ultimately, desalination of ocean water.

Desalination, an energy-intensive process, raises the hackles of greens but has proven successful in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Israel. At least one new plant has become operational in Southern California, and more are on the drawing board, including in Huntington Beach. These facilities would help meet demand in coastal communities, allowing more water to stay in the rural interior.

California, as anyone familiar with its history knows, is not a naturally occurring urban area. Its greatness and creativity always have rested on human ingenuity and adaptation to our environment. Such resiliency, not purposely worsening water scarcity, is key to a brighter future for our state.

Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.
MISSION VIEJO  Trabuco Hills boys track and field team is blessed with weapons across the board.

Even without two of their top athletes, the Mustangs did not take a back seat to anyone in their host meet.

Cameron Hurd thrilled the hometown crowd in sweeping the hurdles Saturday in the Trabuco Hills Invitational.

The Mustangs were without state high jump leader Sean Lee and talented pole vaulter Chris Doerr, but the school was still well represented by Hurd. The Navy-bound senior set a personal best of 14.44 seconds in the 110-meter hurdles, and he was named the boys track athlete of the meet.

Hurd said that the key to his success was to not get into his comfort zone. He could hardly afford to with Walnuts Alan Tantiwassadakran on his shoulder. The duo came into the meet with matching times of 14.60 in the high hurdles.

If we ran this race 10 times, Alan would have beat me five of those times, Hurd said. I just got away. I got a great start for my 110 and kind of crept out on Alan.

The spotlight shined brightly over the pole vault with two of the top four vaulters in the state going at it. State leader Jett Gordon (Marina) defeated La Costa Canyons Kyle Brown.

Gordon cleared the bar at 16 feet, 6 inches. The jump broke the meet record of former Vikings vaulter Logan Odden (2000), whom Gordon recently surpassed for the school record.

Its great to be jumping those heights that were set years ago, breaking them, and just bringing more recognition to Marina, Gordon said.

Servites relays have thrived with the combination of Keyon Riley, Keith Taylor, Julius Irvin, and Xavier Hernandez. Riley demonstrated his importance to the 1,600 relay team by winning the 400 in 48.77, which moves him to 11th in the state.

Newport Harbors Emma Kratzberg was named girls track athlete of the meet after winning the 400 in 56.88 and taking more than a second off her best time.

The countys other sprints wins came from El Modenas Sydney Carr in the 100 and Woodbridges Alex Young in the 200.

In the distance races, Katie Camarena of San Juan Hills took first in the 800, while El Toros Michael Biedebach won the 3,200.

Mission Viejos throwing tandem dominated. Emma DeSilva took ownership of the countys top spot in the discus with a throw of 143-6. Ciera Williams was also victorious, posting 40-11 in the shot put.

You could call it a fairytale season so far, said DeSilva, a Cal signee. Its such a good environment when everyone around you is winning.

Anaheims Paul Magana joined the county leaders with a triple jump of 45-4. Sage Hills Chance Kuehnel won the high jump at 6-8.

Other county girls to win jumping events were El Toros Paula Pedrani in the triple jump and Oxford Academys Emily Huynh in the long jump.

Mater Deis McKenna Caskey jumped 12-6 to win girls pole vault.

*****************

Trabuco Hills Invitational

At Trabuco Hills High

BOYS RESULTS

100  1. Dean (Chaffey) 10.76; 2. Young (Woodbridge) 10.94; 3. Jackson (Pomona) 10.98

200  1. Young (Woodbridge) 22.14; 2. Davis (Gahr) 22.18; 3. Shakir (Gahr) 22.37

400  1. Riley (Servite) 48.77; 2. Cruz (Bishop Amat) 49.95; 3. Phillippy (Aliso Niguel) 50.37

800  1. Bradley (Ayala) 1:56.93; 2. Henry (Bishop Gorman) 1:57.35; 3. OBannon (Foothill) 1:58.81

1,600  1. Bradley (Ayala) 4:20.49; 2. Santoyo (Bishop Amat) 4:21.97; 3. Stein (Villa Park) 4:23.18

3,200  1. Biedebach (El Toro) 9:29; 2. Daseler (Bishop Gorman ) 9:30; 3. Diaz (Bishop Amat) 9:31

110HH  1. Ca. Hurd (Trabuco Hills) 14.44; 2. Tantiwassadakran (Walnut) 14.54; 3. Sun (Woodbridge) 14.96

300IH  1. Ca. Hurd (Trabuco Hills) 37.88; 2. Sun (Woodbridge) 38.43; 3. Rodriguez (California) 39.06

400 relay  1. Gahr 42.07; 2. Woodbridge 43.0; 3. Trabuco Hills 43.07

1,600 relay  1. Trabuco Hills 3:26; 2. Woodbridge 3:28.17; 3. Gahr 3:28.32

HJ  1. Kuehnel (Sage Hill) 6-8; 2. Laudermilk (ML King) 6-4; 3. Hlavin (JSerra) 6-2

LJ  1. Siverson (Royal) 21-10; 2. McCord (Sage Hill) 21-6.25; 3. Dean (Chaffey) 21-4.25

TJ  1. Magana (Anaheim) 45-4; 2. Rodriguez (California) 43-7; 3. Akahi (Beckman) 42-4.75

PV  1. Gordon (Marina) 16-6; 2. Brown (La Costa Canyon) 16-0; 3. Escalera (Sage Hill) 15-0

SP  1. Johnson (Valley View) 51-6.5; 2. Fine (Trabuco Hills) 46-7; 3. Garrett (Bishop Gorman) 46-7

DT  1. Payez (Downey) 157-1.75; 2. Garrett (Bishop Gorman) 153-2.5; 3. Cordova (Bishop Gorman) 144-2

GIRLS RESULTS

100  1. Carr (El Modena) 12.28; 2. LaBare (Costa Mesa) 12.65; 3. Nettles (Inglewood) 12.90

200  1. Bowens (Redlands East Valley) 25.09; 2. Carr (El Modena) 25.29; 3. Allain (La Sierra) 25.37

400  1. Kratzberg (Newport Harbor) 56.88; 2. Walker (La Sierra) 57.83; 3. Bolger (Northwood) 59.10

800  1. Camarena (San Juan Hills) 2:16.19; 2. Oefelein (Woodbridge) 2:18.13; 3. Gallardo (Bishop Amat) 2:18.54

1,600  1. Hill (Etiwanda) 5:02; 2. Palomino (Bishop Amat) 5:09; 3. Schmidt (Corona del Mar) 5:14

3,200  1. Ramirez (Ayala) 11:02; 2. Palomino (Bishop Amat) 11:09; 3. Powers (Corona del Mar) 11:13

100HH  1. Avila (Walnut) 15.51; 2. Scott (Beckman) 15.56; 3. Gagnon (Oxford Academy) 16.18

300IH  1. Walker (La Sierra) 44.55; 2. Avila (Walnut) 44.86; 3. Bolger (Northwood) 47.81

400 relay  1. Aliso Niguel 50.39; 2. Oxford Academy 52.01; 3. Valencia 52.02

1,600 relay  1. Dana Hills 4:01; 2. Woodbridge 4:02; 3. Trabuco Hills 4:04

HJ  1. North (Payson) 5-0; 2. DAmico (West Torrance) 5-0; 3. Newman (Trabuco Hills) 5-0

LJ  1. Huynh (Oxford Academy) 17-4; 2. May (Northwood) 17-2.5; 3. White (Downey) 16-10

TJ  1. Pedrani (El Toro) 36-2.5; 2. May (Northwood) 35-6; 3. Rathor (Trabuco Hills) 34-5

PV  1. Caskey (Mater Dei) 12-6; 2. Anderson (Chino Hills) 11-6; 3. Scott (Beckman) 10-6

SP  1. Williams (Mission Viejo) 40-11; 2. Green (El Toro) 38-10.25; 3. Soa (Bishop Gorman) 37-0.75

DT  1. DeSilva (Mission Viejo) 143-6; 2. Anderson (California) 138-8; 3. Truong (Esperanza) 131-4
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Chipotle is eyeing a fast-casual category thats growing fast and is only a small part of the market

A look through U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records revealed an interesting detail that slipped through the cracks early last month.

Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., which runs the popular Mexican-inspired fast-food chain, has been mulling a new concept.

The company filed an application to trademark the name Better Burger, a sign that Five Guys, Shake Shack and the rest of the upper echelon of fast-food burger chains may soon have a new competitor.

The news, which was confirmed by Chipotle  its a growth seed idea we are exploring, company spokesman Chris Arnold told Bloomberg on Wednesday  was met with excitement. News media outlets, rushing to cover the discovery, speculated about how soon the first Better Burger branch will pop up.

Some even wondered whether McDonalds, the largest hamburger slinger in the world, already had reason to worry.

But the news also raised an important question: Why is Chipotle directing its attention to the hamburger scene, one of the most saturated in the American food industry?

On the surface, the move is a bit perplexing. The market for burger chains is almost four times the size of the market for Mexican fare, according to data from market research firm Technomic. Theres a lot more money being spent on ground beef patties, but there isnt much wiggle room for growth. McDonalds, which has struggled to woo customers in recent years, can attest.

But zoom into the market for fancier burger chains, and a different story emerges.

Once you look more deeply, you realize that it actually makes a lot of sense, said Darren Tristano, who is the president of Technomic.

He points out that the fast-casual burger category, which includes the likes of Shake Shack, is growing quickly. Whats more, it still represents a small portion of the overall burger market.

The fast-casual burger category grew at nearly 16 percent last year, he said. If you looked at the overall burger market, you would see that fast casual only represents 5 to 7 percent of it.

In that light, the news makes a bit more sense. Chipotle isnt thinking about the McDonalds core customer; its dreaming of all the hamburger lovers out there who rarely, if ever, eat Big Macs.

Of course to succeed, Better Burger, if it ever comes to be, will have to distinguish itself from a field of competitors.

How it will do that remains unclear. Little is known (or anything, really) about Chipotles plans, other than what can be extrapolated from its current business model and gleaned from the name for which it recently filed a trademark. But its easy enough to guess.

The companys mission to serve food with integrity, which it has clung to even at the expense of its business sometimes, probably will play a role.

So, too, might the sort of food experience that has defined not only Chipotle but also ShopHouse and Pizzeria Locale, its two smaller sister brands. That would mean a narrow menu, high-quality ingredients and a high level of customization. It also could mean Better Burger wont experiment with breakfast or dessert.

Food aside, theres a suspicion that a Chipotle-backed hamburger joint might look to adult beverages for some edge. Namely, an alcoholic refreshment thats often paired with hamburgers.

Now that theyre selling hand-shaken margaritas at Chipotle, who knows? Maybe Better Burger will sell local craft beer, said Tristano. I certainly wouldnt be surprised.
A low unemployment rate, a strong housing market, booming car sales: Some pictures of the U.S. economy are downright rosy.

But there could be a storm brewing  a rumbler that has some people mentioning another r word: recession.

It has been whispered about at the highest levels for some time now. In February, the Wall Street Journals survey of global economists showed that the gurus of the green stuff pegged the odds of recession in the next 12 months at 21 percent  twice that of a year ago and the highest since 2012.

A recession is defined as a drop in business, trade and industrial activity signaled by a decline in gross domestic product for two consecutive quarters. And no one likes what comes with that: job cuts, wage freezes, reduced working hours and frazzled household budgets as businesses cope with low demand by reducing expenses.

The textbook definition hasnt happened yet. And most experts dont think there is an immediate danger. But the whispers are growing louder  train-whistle loud if you listen to what is coming out of two economic bellwethers with heavy ties to Nebraska.

Many see the health of Union Pacific Railroad and BNSF Railway as indicative of the health of the overall economy, because they haul the raw materials that make the world go: food, fuel, fiber and construction materials. Low shipments from producers to processors to end users, the reasoning goes, mean low economic activity.

Anyone can have opinions about the economy, but the freight data doesnt lie, said Matt Troy, a transportation industry analyst for Nomura Securities in New York City. If transportation companies arent moving it, no one is selling it and no one is buying it.

And freight shipments are way down  6 percent lower so far in 2016 for all U.S. railroads than at the same point in 2015.

As for how the railroads are behaving  as opposed to what some economic experts are saying about the broader economy  they already are in deep drawback on jobs: More railroad workers are on furlough, or temporary layoff, than at any time since the 2007-09 Great Recession.

Omaha-based Union Pacific, employer of 8,000 Nebraskans and the second-largest U.S. railroad, has 4,100 people on furlough. That is more than at any time since 2008 and 2009.

Texas-based BNSF, owned by Omahas Berkshire Hathaway and the largest U.S. railroad, has 4,600 on furlough, also the most since the last recession. BNSF employs about 5,000 Nebraskans.

Neither railroad had any comment for this story. Both are still profitable, and each employs more than 40,000 people overall to run their vast rail networks in the western United States.

But expectations for the near future are muted. BNSF Chairman Matt Rose told an energy industry conference in Montana last week that the railroad has stopped hiring and is offering buyouts to older employees. He said the rough patch might last for years.

And it cant be blamed strictly on lower shipments of oil  North American production trimmed due to plummeting prices  or on coal, which is way out of favor as an electric utility fuel. Shipments of both have fallen dramatically at both Union Pacific and BNSF.

Also down year-over-year at Union Pacific, according to recent regulatory filings, are grain (8 percent), stone, gravel and sand (20 percent) and metals products (14 percent). At BNSF, food shipments are down 3 percent, metals 17 percent, and scrap metal 13 percent.

It is getting harder and harder to trivialize these trends, said Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation industry professor at DePaul University. This is becoming cause of concern. I cant remember last when almost everything was down.

Gross domestic product is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a countrys borders in a specific time period. Its the best snapshot of a nations economic might.

The United States, by one widely followed World Bank measure, has the largest economy, worth about $18 trillion a year. Nations in the middle of the Top 50, such as Argentina, have economies worth about $1 trillion. Smaller countries, such as Macedonia, have annual GDPs of $10 billion  less than half the annual operating revenue of giant U.S. companies such as Union Pacific and BNSF.

Size is one thing, however, and growth is another. Economists say the important thing is for an economy each year to produce more and better goods and services, and the personal incomes that can afford to purchase them. And U.S. growth lately hasnt been snappy.

The last recession ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Since then  between 2010 and 2015  real annual GDP growth hasnt surpassed the 2.5 percent growth of 2010. It has now been 10 straight years that the nations GDP has not grown by the 3 percent a year that many economists say is indicative of a vibrant and expanding economy.

The thesis in favor of a coming recession is gaining traction among the worlds investors and money managers. Last week, economists at BNP Paribas, the France-based third-largest bank in the world, wrote in a report that the U.S. economy peaked at the end of 2014. Corporate-profit weakness, slow investment by private businesses and low consumer spending are worrying, BNP Paribas said.

Also last month, the oldest quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts in the United States, begun in 1968 and conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, showed muted expectations.

Based on surveys of 40 forecasters, the median expectation for U.S. GDP growth was trimmed for the first three quarters this year  with expectations for first-quarter growth sliced to 2 percent, from 2.5 percent. For the second quarter, the estimate has been pared to 2.5 percent, from 2.6 percent. In the third quarter, Philadelphia Fed forecasters expect 2.3 percent growth, from an earlier expectation of 2.9 percent.

Although none of that adds up to a recession, it does indicate a cooler outlook.

And that is a view shared by some area business owners.

Things are a little sluggish, said John Vyhlidal, one of the owners at Omaha metal fabricator Tri-V Tool & Manufacturing, which serves the ag, telecommunications and industrial markets, among others.

We are still hiring and still running some overtime, he said, but not hiring as aggressively and not running as much overtime.

Vyhlidal said the plant is running about 45 hours a week, down from the 52 hours when times were flush. Though he wouldnt call current conditions recessionary, he said, they are far from booming.

Contact the writer: 402-444-3197, russell.hubbard@owh.com
Its not Tyson. Not Perdue. Not Sanderson or Pilgrims.

Each of the countrys big-four chicken processors told The World-Herald that, nope, theyre not the company involved in a huge chicken-processing plant in the works for Fremont, Nebraska.

And Hormel, which processes pork in Fremont, said its not involved, either.

Fremont officials still are keeping a tight lid on the name of the company thats weighing a $180 million investment in a plant, which would process nearly 350,000 birds a day. That could be nearly 128 million a year  or about 1.5 percent of the nations annual chicken slaughter.

There are a few clues:

The firm identifies itself as a multibillion-dollar company in documents shared with area farmers and seen by The World-Herald.

State and Fremont officials said its an American firm.

And Cecilia Harry, the Fremont official working to attract the chicken plant, said it is a well-known company, known for being a good corporate citizen. But I would not assume that you would hear the name of the company and immediately associate it with poultry.

Who could it be? She declined to entertain guesses.

Maybe its a beef packer looking to get into the chicken business, said Tom Vukina, professor of agricultural economics at North Carolina State University. Like Tyson, he said, packers like to be involved in multiple protein sectors  beef, pork and chicken. That gives the company more sway with retailers, he said. The diversity also helps keep revenue and profits stable when one sector is up as another is down.

Cargill said its not involved.

Pilgrims owner JBS is Brazilian-owned, and said its not involved.

Smithfield is owned by a Chinese firm.

Greater Omaha Packing said it had no information about the project.

OSI  not a household name but a large, Chicago-based meat supplier to restaurants  said its not involved.

Neither is restaurant supplier Sysco.

Not responding to questions from The World-Herald were Keystone Foods, a Pennsylvania company that supplies fresh and fully cooked chicken to restaurants and supermarket deli counters; National Beef, the Kansas City, Missouri, beef packer; California chicken processor Foster Farms; and Illinois chicken processor Koch Foods.

But theres a chance the mystery firm might not be a typical meat processor at all; it might be a retailer.

Grocery industry analyst Paul Weitzel of Willard Bishop said it would have to be a large retailer, such as Walmart or Kroger, to support such a large project.

Walmart surprised the food industry last month with plans to build its own dairy in Indiana, to supply milk for its own private brands, which news service Reuters reported is Walmarts only planned foray into food processing. Walmart said it wasnt involved in the Fremont project.

Kroger, which owns Bakers stores in Omaha, also is expanding its private-label lineup and operates dozens of its own food plants; spokespeople did not respond to questions from The World-Herald.

Owning its own source of fresh chicken would make sense for a large retailer, as these stores are expanding their deli and prepared-foods cases to compete with restaurants for customers in a dinner-hour time crunch, Weitzel said. The stores may want to bring in more pre-prepared food  not have workers operating hot fryers.

Theyre trying to take the labor out of the store, Weitzel said.

Other pressures are changing retailers chicken supply chains: Costco, which sells more than 80 million rotisserie chickens a year, said last year it is working to source meat raised without antibiotics that are also used to treat humans. Costco said it wouldnt comment.

A major packaged-food company could be another contender, though most, like ConAgra Foods, are no longer in the fresh meat business and are on missions to slash costs in factories, not build more.

One clue about the prospective Fremont plant is in the business model the company is pitching to Nebraska farmers, said Vukina at N.C. State.

Most chicken companies use a tournament style system, often criticized by farmers, in which the amount farmers are paid per pound of chicken depends on how efficient they are compared with other farmers delivering chickens at the same time. Efficiency is measured by how much chicken they produce per unit of feed. For farmers, its like having a professor who grades on a curve.

A frequently-asked-questions document provided to Nebraska farmers by the Greater Fremont Development Council tackles the question, Does the company use a tournament style grower payment system? with the answer, NO! This company will introduce a unique model with a set pay for a set product.

Wow, Vukina said. If that happens, thats absolutely earth-shattering.

It makes him think the company is not a traditional chicken processor. If it were, that company would have to contend with a bunch of its chicken growers elsewhere crying foul, he said.

Dont expect officials to share the name until the company is ready. Harry said keeping a lid on things is important to keeping Fremont competitive on the project.

And, Weitzel said, when a company says its not involved, take that with a grain of salt.

That doesnt mean its true.

Contact the writer: 402-444-1336, barbara.soderlin@owh.com
It has been more than a year since the infamous press conference at the United Nations at which Hillary Clinton falsely asserted, I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.

For a year, the Clinton campaign has raised a number of specious excuses: It was allowed; other secretaries did the same (not true); the emails were only retroactively classified (not true); there was no risk classified information might have been compromised (unfounded); and her offenses were not serious (highly questionable).

Even the most loyal Clinton supporters should by now recognize the seriousness of her problems.

If it were obvious that no case against Clinton existed, the FBI would not have methodically gathered information and waited until the end or nearly the end of the investigation to interview the main culprit. Thats exactly what occurred here, according to the Los Angeles Times:

 The interviews are critical to understand the volume of information they have accumulated, said James McJunkin, former head of the FBIs Washington field office. They are likely nearing the end of the investigation and the agents need to interview these people to put the information in context. They will then spend time aligning these statements with other information, emails, classified documents, etc., to determine whether there is a prosecutable case. 

If the FBI had determined, like so many Clinton defenders, that there was no there, its agents would not bother interviewing the former secretary of state and now Democratic presidential front-runner.

If there were no pattern of deliberate evasion of classification rules, Clinton would not now be potentially facing legal jeopardy. But, as the Washington Post reported, Clinton was determined to avoid administration directives even about her BlackBerry. (From the earliest days, Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on accommodating the secretarys desire to use her private email account, documents and interviews show.)

Her contempt for the rules that the lowliest government employee must abide by suggests a shocking indifference to the law and the rationale behind security measures. (Throughout, they paid insufficient attention to laws and regulations governing the handling of classified material and the preservation of government records, interviews and documents show. They also neglected repeated warnings about the security of the BlackBerry while Clinton and her closest aides took obvious security risks in using the basement server.)

With the yearlong investigation reaching its conclusion, Clintons fate  likely the outcome of the 2016 presidential race  rests in the hands of the FBI, the one agency arguably beyond the political influence of Clinton or the administration.

Should it criticize or point out lapses of judgment in her conduct without recommending prosecution, she likely will continue her march to the nomination. In a general election against Donald Trump, even Republicans may find that as egregious as her lapse in judgment may have been, the danger inherent in a Trump presidency is so great that the country would be better off in her hands than his.

Should the FBI find, however, that she either intentionally compromised classified material or was negligent in her handling of classified material, it will be compelled to refer the case for prosecution. At that point it may make no difference politically if the Justice Department proceeds or not (although career Justice Department officials would be wary about the perception of covering up or ignoring evidence of a crime).

The finding by the FBI that there is the basis for prosecution in and of itself would make her candidacy problematic. (Would President Obama pardon her? What would happen if she were elected and then indicted?)

The potential for FBI action, incidentally, should influence her vice presidential pick, if it comes before a final decision by the FBI. With the FBIs action hanging over her head, the VP pick had better be someone who could plausibly win without her and/or govern in her absence.

As the potential for a Trump nomination increases, a great number of Republicans who will never vote for Trump (in large part because of his unsuitability to serve as commander in chief) may be faced with the unimaginable. Clinton has become the safety cord to pull, the least horrible of two horrible alternatives and at least a semi-responsible commander in chief, they reason, if Trump captures the GOP nomination.

What if their backup plan, Hillary, gets knocked out by the FBI and there is no third candidate? (Rueful voters may be asking themselves: Just because Clinton messed up with her server, does the country deserve to get stuck with Trump?)

The potential for a Trump-Bernie Sanders or Trump-Clintons VP pick general election should panic both Democrats and Republicans. Perhaps Vice President Joe Bidens staff should start figuring out how to parachute into the Democratic National Convention. He may be the backup to the backup for despondent voters.
Gujarat High Court notice to IAS officer Pradeep Sharma's wife in US

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Ahmedabad, April 3: The Gujarat High Court on Saturday issued notice to Shyamal Sharma, wife of suspended IAS officer Pradeep Sharma, to appear before it on June 15, 2016, in connection with a case against her husband being investigated by the state Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB).

Shyamal Sharma, who lives in the US, is the co-accused in the case where Pradeep Sharma had allegedly sold government land to Welspun Group in an arbitrary manner at a cheaper rate when he was the collector of Kutch district in 2003-04. This, as per the case, caused a loss of Rs.1.2 crore to the state exchequer.

[All you should know about IAS officer Pradeep Sharma]

According to the details of the case, Welspun returned the favour by granting Shyamal Sharma a 30 percent partnership in one of its subsidiaries and extended benefits of Rs.29.5 lakh to her.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had invoked the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the matter in 2012, hjolding the money was initially deposited in Shyamal Sharma's overseas bank account and later transferred to her husband's account in India, violating the PMLA.

The Gujarat ACB had arrested Pradeep Sharma in 2009 this case but he was later released on bail.

The ACB had filed a petition in a Bhuj court seeking issuance of a summons to Shyamal Sharma in connection with the investigation of the case. But after the district court rejected the plea, it moved the high court. The notice is expected to be served to her in US.

IANS
Hyderabad University: Locked inside campus for days, students cry for help

India

oi-Oneindia

By Maitreyee Boruah

Hyderabad, April 3: Perhaps for the first time in the history of independent India, students of a university are "locked" inside their campus, being denied contact with the outside world.

As the administration of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) continues to impose a blockade on the campus, students have invited members of the civil society to join their struggle on the university premises on April 6.

The social media connect

Since the students have very little access with the outside world, with the main gate of the university being locked and guarded by police personnel, students are interacting with the rest of society with the help of various social media platforms.

The press release posted on the Facebook account of the Joint Action Committee (JAC) for Social Justice, (UoH), stated the students are hosting a protest rally--Chalo Hyderabad Central University (HCU)--against the blockade imposed on the campus on April 6.

The members of JAC are spearheading the movement for justice for Rohith Vemula, after the 26-year-old Dalit research scholar committed suicide on the campus on January 17.

"This is an appeal to all the students, political organisations and people to come to UoH on April 6 to register your protest against the ongoing injustice meted out to Rohith and students of the university. Since the university administration has imposed a blockade on the campus preventing the students from having any contact with the outside world, Chalo HCU call is also against the imposed blockade on the university," stated the press release.

Return of power and the ensuing protests

The normal functioning of the university came to a halt on March 22, when the vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile, an accused in the suicide of Rohith, resumed charge on the campus.

The students protested against Podile's return to the campus. As a part of the protest, students were also accused of restoring to vandalism.

However, students alleged that police brutally attacked them, who were registering their protest in a non-violent manner.

The matter became worse after police arrested a group of 25 students and two faculty members and kept them locked in a police station, denying them bail for several days.

At the same time, the university administration imposed a blockade by deploying police inside the campus and denying free movement of the students.

"Since the return of Podile, the campus is in a state of emergency. Students have been assaulted, deprived of food, water, legal aid, medical aid, cut-off from the outside world and also put in jail and slapped with false cases. In this state of emergency, students feel extremely threatened and have been demanding the removal of vice-chancellor from the university premises and his immediate arrest," stated the press release.

"Podile has resumed his charge without getting any bail or legal relief. He had applied for bail six times and every time it was cancelled. His presence on the campus can be questioned legally. The police should arrest him as he is booked under SC/ST prevention of atrocities act. He is also one of the main accused in Rohith's suicide case," added the press release.

The press release says the students are seeking response from the administration on three main accounts-the filing and withdrawal of cases against students and faculty members, the blockade imposed on the campus by closing of the main gate and plans to deploy CISF personnel on the campus.

"The recent meeting with the registrar only reaffirms our doubt that the administration is in collusion with Podile, police and BJP. Together they're going to take anti-student decisions. The students do not recognise Podile as their VC and will continue their protest demanding his removal and arrest," added the press release.

OneIndia News
Kerala temples as iconic as beaches but who will tell the tourism industry

Kerala assembly poll: Talks to finalise remaining Congress candidates fail

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New Delhi/Thiruvananathapuram, April 3: The Congress has cleared most of its candidates for the Kerala assembly election but the deadlock over five names continued for the sixth day on Saturday with both Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and state unit president V.M.Sudheeran sticking to their positions.

Even a marathon three-hour session Saturday night held in the presence of party president Sonia Gandhi in New Delhi failed to resolve the deadlock.

Talking to reporters later, Sudheeran said: "Things are progressing well and now the AICC will decide."

Chandy however has decided to return home and while reaching Kochi early on Sunday, while Sudheeran and state Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala will stay back in Delhi.

The three top leaders of the party form Kerala have been in Delhi since Monday evening to finalise the list of candidates in 82 seats and barring in around a dozen seats, the candidates list for the remaining seats have been cleared.

Sudheeran is strongly opposing in renominating Excise Minister K. Babu, who is facing allegations in the bar scam, Revenue Minister Adoor Prakash, who is embroiled in a row over land transfer, Culture Minister K.C. Joseph who has been a legislator since 1982, Benny Behanan for allegedly having links with solar panel scam accused, and five-time legislator and former minister Dominic Presentation.

Babu told reporters in Kochi that he is confident of his victory if he is asked to contest.

Chandy on Saturday again repeated his position that if any of the above ministers of his cabinet have to stay out, then he should also do so and argued that he has contested every election since 1970 while facing numerous allegations.

According to sources close to Chandy, he informed the national leadership that he is prepared to step down and anyone can lead the party and he will campaign in all the 140 assembly seats.

But to cool down things, Chennithala told reporters that reports appearing in the media on Saturday is not true and things are progressing well.

Polls for the 140-member Kerala assembly will be held on May 16.

Meanwhile anger is mounting among the Congress workers in the state against Sudheeran for his impractical approach on issues ever since he took over from Chennithala as president in 2014.

"For eight years when Chennithala was the president, both he and Chandy worked in tandem and were able to win every election... after Sudheeran took over, there was a setback in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and also at the last year's local bodies poll. Sudheeran is not a practical politician, while Chandy is otherwise and acts according to the situations," said a Congress leader who did not wish to be identified.

IANS
Nalin Kumar won elections due to NaMo Brigade; Sulibele stands with Naresh Shenoy

India

oi-Shreyas

Bengaluru, Apr 3: Mentor of Yuva Brigade, Chakravarthy Sulibele is firmly standing with Yuva Brigade's adviser Naresh Shenoy after latter's name has been allegedly propped up in the RTI activist Vinayak Baliga murder case.

Taking jibe at the media for terming Naresh Shenoy as 'prime suspect' in their reports on the case, Sulibele asked how media can use the term 'prime suspect' when the Mangaluru police have not named him as same. Pitching technical argument, he said "police have not named him no where at this juncture as prime suspect and how a section of media can make him as a key suspect in the case," he questioned.

While police issued photographs of suspects in the murder, why they have not given the photo of Naresh Shenoy. "If the police have considered employees of Naresh Shenoy as suspects in the case, how Naresh Shenoy be made responsible for their alleged act?" Sulibele posed. Chakravarthy Sulibele spoke to OneIndia over the phone.

Chakravarthy Sulibele casting aspersions on the police department's moves in pursuing this case said why the police carried press persons along with them while they raided the house of Naresh Shenoy. He questioned the motive behind in police resorting to such act.

For a question on when OneIndia tried to contact Naresh Shenoy, he was unavailable to give his side of story and his absence in the house during the raid, Sulibele said journalists must not pen down speculative story. This is about one individual's image and his future.

Sulibele further delineated that If anyone go to Himalayas or to Kashmir alone, without informing, then there will be no availability of network to reach through mobile. And subsequently in a place where perosn belongs to, there unfolds a crime, someone tries fix that person in that case, then how he could be called as absconding, Sulibele asked.

"The police have not so far formally declared him as a suspect in the police website. But you (section of media) have reported that he is absconding," Sulibele argued. He added that there is a massive pressure to allegedly fix Naresh Shenoy in this murder case.

Sulibele said some...some people are e-mailing him and asking about the issue of temple (Venkataramana temple), then why bringing only Yuva Brigade's name, when temple angle is also attached in the case.

He alleged that those who are taking names of Yuva Brigade have been funded by vested interests. "Naresh Shenoy is into 28 organisations and only picking up the name of Yuva Brigade is because of funding by vested interests. For the simple reason that NaMo Brigade has toiled for Narendra Modi, now Yuva Brigade is being defamed to thwart its functioning in support of Modi, Sulibele opined.

Talking on Baliga's plaint on misappropriation of funds to the tune of 9 crores in the Venkataramana Temple located in Mangaluru, Chakravarthy said "I was in Mangaluru yesterday, April 2, I spoke to many people and I learnt that there was no single complaint filed by Baliga against Naresh Shenoy and he was not even in the committee of the temple."

On whose pressure the police are working? The police are facing colossal pressure in the case. It has to be noted that many RTI activists have been killed, but why only Baliga's case pursued hotly?, Sulibele asked. They want to target Yuva Brigade through Naresh Shenoy.

Sulibele said there is a systematic conspiracy against Naresh Shenoy to fix him in the case. He also suspected that one day conspirators may train their guns against him (Sulibele) as he is working for Narendra Modi and the country.

The efforts of NaMo Brigade was huge during 2014 elections and in Dakshina Kannada no one thought Nalin Kumar Kateel would mark victory in general elections and it is a pure game of NaMo Brigade that made Kateel the MP of the constituency . Hence all these, Sulibele viewed.

OneIndia News
Dalit man in Kerala beaten up by wife's brother allegedly for not converting to Christianity

In UP, ex-pradhan thrashes Dalit girl, throws her out of school over uniform

In Rajasthan, Dalit man thrashed for using water from pot 'meant' for upper castes

Tamil Nadu: Dalit youth murder: man surrenders in court

India

oi-PTI

Dindigul (TN), April 2: A man on Sunday, April 3 surrendered before a court in the district in connection with the brutal murder of a Dalit youth in a suspected honour killing last month in Tirupur district.

Kalai Tamilvanan, a native of the district, surrendered before Nilakottai Judicial Magistrate Regina Bervin who sent him to police custody for seven days.

Three persons had attacked 22-year old Shankar and his wife Kausalya with sickles in full public view near a bus stand in Udumalpet on March 13 allegedly at the behest of her father, a caste Hindu who was opposed to their inter-caste marriage.

Shankar died while being rushed to the hospital while Kausalya, who hails from Dindigul district, survived with head injuries.

As the video footage of the chilling attack went viral triggering an outrage, police arrested five persons, including the girl's mother while her father, Chinnasamy, surrendered in a court.

PTI
Crashed EgyptAir black boxes to go to France for repairs

Egypt: need more time to reach conclusions on plane crash

Egypt asks Cyprus to extradite suspected hijacker

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Nicosia, April 3: Egypt has asked Cyprus to extradite a man held by Cypriot police on suspicion of hijacking an EgyptAir plane on Tuesday and forcing it to land at Larnaca, Cypriot Attorney General Costas Clerides said on Saturday.

Clerides said Egypt's request to extradite Seif Eldin Mustafa, 59, will be examined after investigation into crimes on which Cypriot authorities have jurisdiction are completed, Xinhua reported.

"When investigations are completed it will be decided whether he will be extradited to Egypt," said Clerides.

He added that the decision will be taken in consultation with the government as a decision of political nature is involved.

Mustafa claimed that he carried out the hijacking because he wanted to see his ex-wife, a Cypriot, with whom he separated in 1994.

But on landing at Larnaca he demanded that Egypt release 69 women held in prison.

The hijacker tried to escape after all people on board were either released by him of left the plane, but was arrested while running away.

He is currently held under an eight-day court remand which is valid until Wednesday.

IANS
The persecution of Hindus in Pakistan continues with a Hindu girl forcibly converted and married

Pak army officer accuses India of stoking violence in Balochistan

International

oi-PTI

Islamabad, April 2: A senior Pakistani military official today accused India of stoking violence in the restive Balochistan province.

"The arrest of the Indian spy has proven Indian state sponsored terrorism in Pakistan," Inspector General Frontier Corps (IGFC), Major General Sher Afgan, said, addressing media at FC headquarters in provincial capital Quetta.

Afgan, who is leading paramilitary FC in the fight against extremism and militancy in the province, said there was no indigenous armed movement in Balochistan as those involved in violence were "supported from abroad". He said "in addition to India, Afghan intelligence was also involved in terrorism."

The IGFC also claimed that the arrest of Kulbushan Yadhav had led to arrest of his facilitators. The military official also alleged that India was trying to sabotage the USD 46-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Kulbhushan, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was the serving Indian Navy officer. In the video, Yadav said that he arrived in Iran in 2003 and started a small business in Chahbahar. India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.

PTI
Saudi foreign minister Adel Al Jubeir calls on PM Modi

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Riyadh, April 3: Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Sunday, the second and last day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

"Last month in Delhi, now in Riyadh. Saudi FM @AdelAlJubeir calls on PM @narendramodi before the ceremonial welcome," external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted along with pictures of the two leaders.

Jubeir had come to New Delhi early last month as part of the preparations for the prime ministerial visit and held meetings with Modi as well as External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

Last month in Delhi, now in Riyadh. Saudi FM @AdelAljubeir calls on PM @narendramodi before the ceremonial welcome pic.twitter.com/PBgMx2a7KJ  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 3, 2016

Modi will be accorded a ceremonial welcome on Sunday afternoon at the Royal Court here by King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who will also host a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister.

There will be a restricted meeting between Modi and King Salman followed by delegation-level talks and the signing of agreements.

The Saudi crown prince and deputy crown prince are also scheduled to call on the prime minister.

During the course of Modi's visit, ties between India and Saudi Arabia are expected to be elevated from the current strategic partnership to a more broad-based one.

Earlier on Sunday, Modi visited the Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) all-women IT centre here and then addressed the Saudi Chambers of Commerce.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

Modi leave will leave for New Delhi on Sunday evening.

IANS
Bengal election Phase 1A: A look at 2011 results in 18 seats going to polls on April 4

Kolkata

oi-Shubham

Kolkata, April 3: Eighteen constituencies of the West Bengal Assembly will go to the election on April 4 (Monday). These constituencies are situated in three districts, namely: Purulia (9); West Midnapore (6) and Bankura (3).

Know your state: West Bengal

The Trinamool Congress-Congress alliance had won 12 of the 18 seats that go to polls on Monday. The Left won six. [List of 18 constituencies going to polls on April 4]

Here are the details of the election results in these 18 seats in 2011:

Nayagram [ST] (West Midnapore): 2011 voters number: 1,75,005

vote percentage: 88.85%; winner: Dulal Murmu of Trinamool Congress (TMC) [vote share: 50.34%]; Difference: 16,274



Gopiballabhpur (W Midnapore): 2011 voters number: 1,77,748

vote%: 89.36; winner: Churamani Mahato of TMC [vote share: 56.70%]

Difference: 32,020



Jhargram (W Midnapore): 2011 voters number: 1,84,398

vote%: 84.34; winner: Sukumar Hansda of TMC [vote share: 44.67%]

Difference: 15,273



2011 voters number: 1,84,398 vote%: 84.34; winner: Sukumar Hansda of TMC [vote share: 44.67%] Difference: 15,273 Salboni (W Midnapore): 2011 voters number: 2,08,502

vote%: 92.89; winner: Srikanta Mahato of TMC [vote share: 47.54%]

Difference: 4,355



2011 voters number: 2,08,502 vote%: 92.89; winner: Srikanta Mahato of TMC [vote share: 47.54%] Difference: 4,355 Midnapore (W Midnapore): 2011 voters number: 2,15,287

vote%: 87.95; winner: Mrigendranath Maiti of TMC [vote share: 54.43%]

Difference: 28,220



2011 voters number: 2,15,287 vote%: 87.95; winner: Mrigendranath Maiti of TMC [vote share: 54.43%] Difference: 28,220 Binpur [ST] (W Midnapore): 2011 voters number: 1,79,861

vote%: 82.02; winner: Dibakar Hansda of CPI(M) [vote share: 41.17%]

Difference: 7,610

Bandwan [ST] (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 2,23,789

vote%: 80.52; winner: Sushanta Besra of CPI(M) [vote share: 48.38%]

Difference: 22,020



2011 voters number: 2,23,789 vote%: 80.52; winner: Sushanta Besra of CPI(M) [vote share: 48.38%] Difference: 22,020 Balarampur (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 1,75,111

vote%: 81.37; winner: Shantiram Mahato of TMC [vote share: 45.79%]

Difference: 10,528

Baghmundi (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 1,92,018

vote%: 81.53; winner: Nepal Mahato of Congress [vote share: 49.48%]

Difference: 17,644

Joypur (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 1,89,843

vote%: 78.81; winner: Dhirendranath Mahato of Forward Bloc [vote share: 41.48%]

Difference: 10,611

Purulia (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 1,93,014

vote%: 80.09; winner: K P Singh Deo of TMC [vote share: 53.95%]

Difference: 26,487

Manbazar [ST] (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 2,00,562

vote%: 83.26; winner: Sandhyarani Tudu of TMC [vote share: 47.02%]

Difference: 5,166

Kashipur (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 1,88,342

vote%: 82.5; winner: Swapankumar Beltharia of TMC [vote share: 44.73%]

Difference: 3,721

Para [SC] (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 1,84,196

vote%: 79.28; winner: Umapada Bauri of Congress [vote share: 42.6%]

Difference: 586

Raghunathpur [SC] (Purulia): 2011 voters number: 1,98,409

vote%: 81.42; winner: Purnachandra Bauri of TMC [vote share: 48.34%]

Difference: 12,743

Ranibandh [ST] (Bankura): 2011 voters number: 2,00,986

vote%: 84.77; winner: Debalina Hembrom of CPI(M) [vote share: 44.25%]

Difference: 6,859

Raipur [ST] (Bankura): 2011 voters number: 1,78,332

vote%: 87.19; winner: Upen Kisku of CPI(M) [vote share: 44.38%]

Difference: 182

Taldangra (Bankura): 2011 voters number: 1,79,758

vote%: 47.59; winner: Manoranjan Patra of CPI(M) [vote share: %]

Difference: 7,165

Oneindia News
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The IGaming Reign in Africa Launches next Week at WrB Africa

Published April 3, 2016 by Lee R

A dynamic approach and agenda will put Africa's best foot forward and pleasantly surprise many.

Lets get Africa into the picture!

WrB Introduces Africa

World Regulatory Briefing Africa (WrB), Africa's first ever iGaming summit, is set to take place in Lagos, Nigeria on April 11-12. Organised by Clarion events, the team behind the wildly successful ICE Totally Gaming Conference, this new conference will be dedicated to revealing the opportunities in the newly thriving African gaming market and encouraging a regulatory framework that will produce a sustainable gaming industry there.

Overview

WrB Africa will offer superb networking opportunities, as well as featuring executive-led presentations and debate about a full range of topical issues on the continent from setting up a sportsbook in an African country to marketing and anti-money laundering legislation. Representatives of the major iGaming companies in East, West and Central Africa, as well as the continents major regulators, will all be assembled under one roof.

Attendees

Those in attendance will include influential decision-makers representing global operators and suppliers, regulators from across the region among those seeking to benefit from the wealth of local knowledge and experience the panel of industry luminaries will be sharing about Africa's currently booming economy. Over 30 market-leading organisations on-hand to network, do business, and increase competitive advantage.

Keynote Speaker Addresses Corruption

To address Africa's well-known but sometimes overblown corruption issues, WrB Africa has announced that the Head of FIFA's Early Warning System Julie Norris, will discussing the benefits and of collaboration between sport, betting operators and regulating authorities to combat match-fixing.

Keynote Speaker: Successful Regulation

Lanre Gbajabiamila, the chief executive of the Lagos State Lottery Board (LSLB), will discuss the extraordinary regulatory achievements of his organisation. The LSLB has developed a robust licensing system through splitting its focus into the four areas of regulation, protection, promotion and generation in the development of the legal gambling sector.

Attracting Customers

Gbajabiamila believes that strong regulation has allowed operators to attract customers from across society, including wealthy individuals who may have previously been repelled by criminality within the sector.

With FIFA's Norris addressing corruption, and Gbajabiamila illustrating effective regulation, two of the biggest barriers in Africa are being resolved, making Africa more appealing than ever to iGaming executives who will gain a major foothold and competitive advantage by attending ArB.
I'm chuckling to myself. Well, now I'm chuckling onscreen, which is almost the same as chuckling out loud. COL? I'm not exactly feeling the Bern, and I am not particularly excited about a Sanders presidency. But man do I love watching the Clinton Machine crash and burn, the ClinThenardiers of modern American political theater, former Secretary of Death and her former Master of the House husband, hypocrite and toady and inebriate. Such an apt metaphor.

But more than all of this, I just love being proved right. It's like heroin isn't it? I mean speaking of hypocrites, who actually believes themselves when they say "I hate to say I told you so.." Bullshit. A college buddy and I used to call the lie on this by saying "I hate to say 'I hate to say I told you so,' because I f*cking *love* saying I told you so!"

Okay so here it is. Doubling down on earlier predictions that people laughed at. Back in December I said publicly that empire would settle on Sanders to sell its wars--a kinder, gentler salesman, if you will. I now say again that I believe Sanders will be the next president of the US. As I suspected (and said loudly), all the stars are coming into alignment. If you, dear readers, and I--and I trust you would probably not still be reading unless you are one of *us*--if we despise this charlatan and hold her in such abysmal contempt, then I don't think it should come as a surprise that the real money folks despise her just as much, albeit for very different reasons.

Now hang on, I said for very different reasons. So bear with me. She is without question the shittiest candidate produced by a major party in decades. They have to be sitting around the table, if that's how they still do it, saying ahh sh*t, is *she* still around? What are we going to do? All successful candidates for the Chair in the Oval, which is to say the sock puppet of empire, have at least one thing in common. I realized this in an uncomfortable epiphany I had while listening--painfully--to the Master of the House campaigning for the Obomber just before election day in November 2008 in Florida.

It was a creepy, unsettling feeling, and I actually felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. It was off the cuff, so I'm sure it never appeared in writing. And I have never, ever seen or heard it repeated in any other forum except my own writing, much as I have tried to track it down. But as friends who know me will attest, I have an auditory memory that is virtually absolute, the prose version of perfect pitch, or Luria's patient if you will. I know what I heard, and I will never forget it. Old Huckster Bill was waxing eloquent about his new buddy (after having tried to smear him for months, but hey, blood under the bridge I guess, right?) and why he was the perfect dude for the job.

When the real money guys took him aside in a back room (ah, so that is still how they do it) and surrounded him with all the "experts," [scare quotes mine], "He said [and I'm quoting M. Thernardie verbatim now] 'You tell me what the right thing to do is and I'll sell it!" Wait, whaaa? [record screech]. Are you f*cking kidding me? *That's* why he's the right guy for the job? I shuddered, flipped off the set and went back to knitting, or whatever it was. Just incredible. To me, this is the absolute proof that he is *not* at all the right guy, and in fact the most dangerous stooge to put in the chair at a pivotal moment in world history. Like Harry Truman being led around by Jimmy Byrnes, an empty vessel whose "experts" filled his empty head with bullshit and used him to change world history.

See, but that's why I'm not at the table. I would be wrong. The job of salesman-in-chief is the main--if not the only--criterion these bastards despearately need to keep their illusion of sham democracy going, and to keep the money flowing from their project of destroying the world for profit. Obama has it in spades, as Bill obviously did, and even George W (or so they thought). Reagan goes without saying, which is why they all praise his moronic, lying ass whenever they get the chance. So they basically need someone who can talk a dog off a meat wagon, and are stuck with The Thing, who, to use the british saying, couldn't sell a bucket of water to a bloke in flaming trousers. She just plain sucks, and everyone knows it. So I said a few months back that they would dump her at the first real opportunity. And now they will do just that.

And now we see the puzzle pieces coming into place to make it more palatable for them to do this. Reuters 5 day tracking has Sanders up 2.5 among Democrats, and 5 points including independents. Marquette now has the Bernster up 10 in Wisconsin, and Quinnipiac has him surging in NY, closing from 25 to 12 only days after opening his campaign there.

More importantly, Clintons inflated and baseless "firewall" of support from nonwhite voters is collapsing with all the deserved vengeance. The mainstream press (of course) missed what Marquette did not: Though Sanders is "only" up 5 in Wisconsin, support from nonwhite voters is up 10. In other words, his lead in this demographic is *fueling* his surge, not dragging it--the exact opposite of what we have seen to date in the deep south.

While I have spoken and written extensively on the need to end the Clintons' unearned pass on race [see video clip and transcript here: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article23488], this swift and devastating collapse is even greater than a certain self-congratulating Harvard dude expected. And I believe we are just beginning to see the tip of this voteberg. Given infinite time and access to social media it had to happen eventually. What a crock Brand Clinton has pulled over on black people lo these many years. To think that the architects of mandatory sentencing, three strikes, bringing superpredators to heel, 'ending welfare as we know it,'--to think that this pair who have visited viciousness on the African American community for two decades could get away with being a Friend to Black Folks is one of the marvels of modern marketing.

But that's all gone now. The Candidate herself is starting to leak hydraulic fluid, with the now viral meltdown at the eco-voter and Beneson's ridiculous "tone" comment on Monday. My godson recently compared the Killmeister to Edgar from Men In Black--an alien wearing a human costume. Edgar is starting to lose the mask, and will be retired and sent back to Zoron before any more damage is done.

Sorry, Sanderistas. If this all sounds like a calculating, cynical takedown of Her Horribleness rather than a spirited jig for the end of empire, it's for a reason. He's a great guy, but your boy is not the Second Coming (or is it First) and the revolution is not upon us. If it goes down the way I lay out, it is because the boys around the table have sanctioned it. That's how it works. They can deal with Bernie. A modest boost in the minimum wage and a little tweaking of the safety net is a small price to pay for keeping the money flowing. And they can hem him in nicely, so they might not even have to pay anything. My millennial friends will be disillusioned to hear him move sharply to the right in the run up to the general, talking about how 'drones do some good things' and how we have to continue to be Israel's staunchest ally. And even more sadly, he will convince too many of you that Russia and China are our greatest enemies, and that wars x and y are justified, but only in this case, and only because of the extreme circumstances. Get ready for an even bigger than normal tidal wave of bullshit on this front.

And if I'm wrong? Awesome then--yay revolution! I don't see it happening. But it could happen I suppose if we made it happen. If I'm wrong in the other direction? Win-win. The scary thing about me is that I don't care. My millennial friends will be devastated to see the blood on the floor at the democratic convention in Philadelphia. But it will be a much needed wakeup call, and may stoke the rage necessary to build an actual movement for real change. The Clintonmongers and their minions still have cards to play (viz DC ballot, superdelegates, media toadies etc etc), and they are ruthless. But it is increasingly clear that Sanders is the people's choice, and if they manage to wrest, i.e. steal the nomination at this point it will be epic. At the risk of sounding mean (oh, what the hell), I will gleefully prepare the popcorn at the prospect of watching the Demoncrat Party shelve its only two humanistic abberations and stop pretending to be the party of the New Deal and Civil Rights and revert to its true home as the party of the Klan. Democracy? Who needs it. Pass the popcorn.

also here: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article23493

(c) 2016 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted with credit and link to danielpwelch.com. Political analyst, writer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife. Together they run The Greenhouse School. Welch has also appeared in numerous television and radio interviews, and can be available for comment and analysis as his day job permits. Please contact to schedule.


That the mainstream media helped to create the political monster (and disaster) that today is Donald J. Trump is not in dispute. And, aided and abetted by its willing lackeys in the neo-conservative television and radio movements, they helped to over-inflate his insatiable mega-sized ego that told him he could win the ultimate prize -- the presidency of the United States.

Indeed, Republican hatred of President Barack Obama and his policies, and their spineless prevaricating cowardice to privately embrace what Trump is saying and vocalizing in public, allowed a loud mouth and blowhard mediocre businessman to hijack the Republican Party from its conservative moorings.

They both conspired and fornicated with each other to produce this bastard political horn-child now genuflecting to his every whim and outrageous pouting all in the interest of the continued cancerous metastasizing hating Barack Obama. Embraced by the most rabid sections of the Republican Party, the Tea Party zealots, traditional GOP establishment leaders were powerless to stop the rise of this ultra-Right Wing faction within the party that see Trump as "speaking their language" and identified with his particular odious brand of extremism and xenophobia.

They are ALL complicit in the rise of the GOP's Political Pretender. Establishment Republicans should have seen the writing on the wall when Eric Cantor, then the party's majority leader in the House, was defeated in his bid for re-election in June 2014 by Dave Brat, an unknown Tea Party member. They should have known that the extreme wing of the party was now calling the shots when a freshman senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, one year before Cantor's defeat, was able to orchestrate a temporary shut down of the Federal Government in October 2013. And they should have been put on the alert when the 40 or so Tea Party members in the House successfully hounded Speaker John Boehner out of office on October 31, 2015.

But even with all that these signs and developments Republican leaders still so hung up on hatred from Barack Obama did absolutely nothing. They continued to be an obstructionist force and rejected any and all compromise. Talk about unintended consequences! Now they have laughingly launched a "Stop Trump" movement to deny the party's present frontrunner the presidential nomination. The party's conservative wing, joined by a whorish mainstream media, and sundry political pundits and talk show hosts, are desperately seeking ways and means to stop Trump up to and including a controversial "brokered convention" -- not that they are calling it that.

If no GOP candidate -- Trump, Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich -- reaches the magical number of 1,237 delegates the party's national convention in July would be the last place where Trump can be stopped. But it will be very, very messy and unpopular with the Republican Party's base, especially its Tea Party section. It that happens, the political civil war will be waged between the white collar sections of the party and its ruling class elements pushing proxy candidates like Florida's former governor Jeb Bush, and, perhaps Senator Marco Rubio. What this will boil down to is a party willing to deny and reject the will of the vast majority of Republican voters, no matter how misplaced, in favor of a hand-picked, anointed, party establishment candidate.

The split, already evident, will be between white collar Republicans and their angry blue-collar brethren from where the Trump and the Tea Party draw its members and support. The ultra-Right Ted Cruz is now attempting to position himself as the Trump alternative and the "stop Trump" candidate. However, it appears increasingly that the GOP leadership and its establishment wing is in favor of a so-called "contested convention."

So what exactly is a contested convention?

Well, for starters, during the early days of American politics there was no need for the present system of primaries across the states. There was no 24-hour news cycle that hung on the every word of posturing, bombastic candidates and their surrogates. So for decades both parties -- the Democratic and Republican Parties -- chose candidates in large convention halls and negotiated, horse-traded, in smoke-filled hotel rooms near and around the main convention center.

Ultimately, these systems became corrupt and were simply mechanisms for protecting party favorites. They were ultimately replaced by primaries where delegates were selected and apportioned based on who won (or lost). This process was accelerated in the 1970s that literally did away with brokered party conventions. The last Democratic political convention to go more than one ballot round was in 1952. On the Republican side their last brokered convention was in 1976 when Ronald Reagan forced Gerald Ford into a primary contest. Reagan was unsuccessful and had to wait until 1980 before becoming the GOP's candidate and win the presidency for two terms.

Contested or brokered conventions are very messy things. There are still many arcane and obscure rules and procedures that govern delegate behavior depending on the state they come from. For example, there are rules instituted by party organizations in, say, Ohio, that may compel its delegates to behave in a particular way in the first round of balloting in a contested convention and if there are no clear results may or may not apply to them in future rounds.

Delegates may be "bound" to a frontrunner candidate in the first round of balloting and "freed" in the second round if no winner emerges. If they are "freed or unencumbered" then they can pretty much vote for who they choose. Here is where "politricks" and corruption sets in: candidates can woo delegates with promises that will materialize after they win the nomination. That's called bribery but its quite legal in BOTH parties since its called "negotiating and advocacy." It's "horse-trading" at its best.

When you add the anger that now permeates BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and the growing distrust of the American electorate then the recipe for political chaos looms very large are is a very real possibility. For the Republican Party this convention is about the battle for the heart and soul of the party. It's about how the party will look in the next decade and how far on the extreme will the Trump and Cruz wings take it.

On the Democratic side of things are different, but there is an important fight. The party is fighting to redefine its very identity having been caught in a socio-political crisis for more than a decade. In 2016 the party that once identified with poor and working class Americans is no more. That is why Democratic party establishment figures and leaders cannot understand or come to grips with the anger and dissatisfaction that has been the meteoric rise of Senator Bernie Sanders on the Left pitted against the establishment candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Right.

Today, the Democratic Party is the party of the hyper-educated elite and the so-called "professional class," a veritable meritocracy that is status driven and not welcoming of dissenting voices, especially from its blue-collar wing. It is a party that has and is now identified more with Wall Street than with Main Street. In many ways the political dialectics that drove the rise of Donald Trump are partly due to the unbelievable shortsightedness of policy decisions made by Democrats in government and on Wall Street.

For example, many Southern conservative Democrats in Congress did nothing when their Republican colleagues were excoriating and attacking President Barack Obama left, right and center. They stood by and twiddled their thumbs or abandoned the party's position and sided with Republicans. Their dislike of their own president (I'm loath to use the word "hatred") helped to legitimize people like Trump. They never condemned a member of Congress, Joe Wilson for South Carolina, who called the president a liar during a September 2009 speech. And they have done very little to help push the president's domestic and foreign policy agendas.

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Reprinted from Other Words

Inmates on their deathbeds should be free to spend their final days with their loved ones.





Over the past three decades, judges and juries have filled America's prisons with non-violent offenders.

Many are serving draconian sentences for first-time offenses. Indeed, while only about 5 percent of the world's people live in the United States, our country is locking up nearly 25 percent of the world's prison population.

President Barack Obama has at least begun to address this issue by creating the Clemency Project, which connects prisoners to pro-bono lawyers who can argue for them to have their sentences reduced. Inmates are eligible if their sentences would have been shorter today than when they received them -- as long as they've already served at least half their time.

That doesn't help prisoners who haven't yet served half of their sentences. It's an especially glaring gap for prisoners who are elderly and gravely ill. Where is their relief?

A handful of prisoners on their deathbeds might go free under a federal practice called compassionate release. To qualify, an incarcerated person must be at least 65 years old and suffering from a deteriorating medical condition that diminishes their ability to function in a correctional facility.

And they have to have served 10 years of their sentence.

Last year, the federal government released 110 prisoners under the compassionate release program. While this was a record high, it was also statistically insignificant as we've got 2.24 million people behind bars.

To make matters worse, although the regulations for eligibility are clear, the entire program is "clouded in secrecy and bureaucracy," according to the Clemency Report.

I watched the failure of this program unfold in real time when I was incarcerated for blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program. I was friendly with a prisoner I'll call Bill.

Bill was 68 years old and doing 30 years for a non-violent organized crime conviction. He'd served more than half his sentence.

I saw him in the hall one day, doubled over in pain. He told me that he'd never before experienced back pain like this. I suggested that he go to sick call in the morning and ask for Tylenol, the go-to painkiller in U.S. prisons.

He did, but he got no relief.

A couple of weeks later, Bill was walking with a cane and in obvious distress. He told me again that his back pain was excruciating. He'd asked the medical unit for an X-ray, and he'd been denied. The physician's assistant had just given him more Tylenol.

Two weeks later, Bill was in a wheelchair. I went to the chaplain and said that Bill was being denied medical care. He agreed to intervene.


Investigative Journalist Marcy Wheeler

(Image by davidswanson.org) Details DMCA



My guest today is Marcy Wheeler, independent journalist, author and blogger as Emptywheel at emptywheel.net.

JB: Welcome to OpEdNews, Marcy. We last spoke in March of 2015. A lot has happened in the meantime. The federal government and Apple have been at odds with one another since last December's mass killings in San Bernadino, California. The feds have requested Apple's help to hack into the iPhone that the shooters left behind. Is that it, in a nutshell? Why is that such a big deal?

MW: The Feds asked Apple to write a custom operating system so the FBI could brute force (guess killer Syed Rizwan Farook's four-digit password) the phone. It' s a big deal because rather than just asking a company to reset someone's password, as other All Writs Act requests have done, DOJ asked Apple to write new code.

JB: So, they used a cudgel when they could been much less intrusive and invasive. Not a particularly smart way to go about things, but again, why is that a big deal? I'm assuming there are larger issues at work here.

MW: Right. It turns out that, all along, there was a vendor or vendors that could have accessed Farook's phone without Apple's assistance, contrary to what DOJ claimed on 19 different occasions in court filings. But rather seeking that option, DOJ used what is called the "All Writs Act," which is a 1789 law that lets courts require assistance to implement their orders. Normally, AWA orders have been used to require companies to help with information or services they already have. What was new -- and particularly scary -- about this AWA was that Apple was being asked to create something it didn't have. If the order had stood, or if DOJ obtains similar orders in secret that stand, it would have been a way DOJ could have used the courts to obligate tech companies to modify their products in ways not otherwise required by law.

JB: The telecoms have long been suspected of aiding and abetting the government's ravenous appetite for surveillance - of terrorists, of activists, just plain citizens, minding their own business. Are we on a slippery slope regarding our civil liberties? Do we have much left at this point?

MW: The telecoms (AT&T and Verizon) are in a different position than the tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, among others), because phone companies have always been regulated more strictly. And there's also a lot of variation between companies: Verizon does more to protect your privacy from the government than AT&T, but recently had to be forced to give up an intrusive "super cookie" that tracked what you were doing on your mobile. Similarly, many tech companies have challenged the government in one or another ways, but Google and Facebook thrive on spying on you for their own purposes, far more than Apple does.

There were some limits imposed on government domestic spying with the USA Freedom Act, though "CISA," which allows companies of all kinds to share data in the name of cybersecurity, was a step back. The big struggle at this point is to understand all the kinds of ways the government spies and how much they impact non-targeted people. Without that understanding, we can't really pressure the government to adopt less intrusive methods.

JB: I'm not proud to admit this but, as a non-tech savvy individual, a lot of this makes my eyes glaze over. Even though I know how important it is. Bottom line: Are we better or worse off today, in terms of government infringement on our privacy? I find it hard to believe that the feds are going to back off just because Apple didn't concede and they weren't granted unfettered access. Or am I just being unduly cynical?

MW: We narrowly avoided a vast expansion of the government's authority to ask companies to build back doors into their products in secret. The FBI can still get into people's phones, and the NSA probably still has back doors into the products we use. But at least Apple -- and any other companies trying to make their products safe -- can still try to do that. The government will absolutely keep trying to change that, and there will be a big fight in Congress in upcoming months, as well, but for now, Apple will still be permitted to try to build secure products.

Our privacy depends on our own efforts, but for better and worse, for non-technical users, our privacy depends on there being big companies working to try to make their products secure against our own government. That's what Apple is fighting to be able to do.

JB: So, Apple is definitely wearing the White Hat, at least in this instance. How much does the average person understand about this constant eroding of our privacy? What can we do to wake people up? And, finally, what can people do to agitate on our own behalf?

MW: Let's not kid ourselves: Apple is doing this because their business model depends on people being able to trust the security of their smart phones. They're not doing this just to be a good citizen!

But on this issue, Apple is on the right side, yes, and Apple does make more effort to make their devices secure than some other companies. I think people can best think of this in terms of what thieves could get if they stole your smart phone -- things like your pictures, financial records, and metadata tracking your habits. Apple is trying to make it so that, instead of getting that information, thieves will be standing with a useless brick. Those are the stakes of the battle over encryption. People can work to support the efforts to ensure we can have secure software and hardware by letting Congress know it's important.

JB: Do you have any links or action pages people can access? And anything else you'd like to add before we wrap this up?

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Reprinted from Thom Hartmann Blog

As a member of our nation's highest court, Justice Antonin Scalia was a champion of so-called Conservative values. With his passing, however, the Justice's absence has led to liberal groups declaring victory on a number of cases.Since his death in February, cases about the EPA, Texas abortion restrictions, and class action lawsuits have all gone differently than they probably would have if Justice Scalia was still on the bench. And last week, his absence was a major factor in the Court's split decision on public sector unions.Back in January, Justice Scalia made clear his views on so-called "fair share fees." Those fees, also known as agency fees, help cover the legal costs of representing all workers in a union shop, even when some choose not to become a member of that union.Current law requires unions to negotiate on behalf of everyone in a workplace, and the agency fees, which are less than regular dues, make sure that the non-union workers aren't getting a free ride. However, Scalia appeared to side with the argument that those fees represent forced political speech because they subsidize collective bargaining.Back in January during oral arguments, he said, "The problem is that everything that is bargained for with the government is within the political sphere, almost by definition." But, thanks to his passing, the Supreme Court just issued a split 4-to-4 decision, which means the lower-court ruling protecting unions stays in place for the time being.The case will likely wind up back before the court in the future, but for now, our public unions will have the power to fight another day. And, if the U.S. Senate stops refusing to do their job, President Obama could appoint a new Justice who isn't opposed to our vital labor unions.In the meantime, let's celebrate these small victories from our nation's highest, divided court and continue to push the Senate to consider Obama's nominee.
Reprinted from Campaign For America's Future

Trade is again an issue in a midwestern primary state. The Wisconsin primary is Tuesday and Senator Bernie Sanders is pounding on his opposition to trade deals that have closed factories and cost jobs. A new poll shows this could be his path to success with voters.

Trade A Major Issue In 2016 Campaign

The New York Times on Tuesday explained that trade has become a major issue in the 2016 campaign, in "Simmering for Decades, Anger About Trade Boils Over in '16 Election":

"Anger about unbalanced trade has helped to fuel the rise of Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, and the success of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his bid for the Democratic nomination. The manifest anger also has pushed their principal rivals, Republican Senator Ted Cruz and the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, to toughen their own trade rhetoric."

The Times interviewed several people to get an idea why people feel trade deals have hurt jobs and wages. For example:

"Kevin White, a 47-year-old Democrat from Dayton, Ohio, said it was hard to find a job. He used to work at a hospital; now he gets federal disability payments. "'The jobs went overseas,' lamented Mr. White. "Then people couldn't afford their mortgages and we had a crash and nobody was able to buy anything.'"

Why has trade become such an issue? The Times explains:

"Between 2000 and 2011, imports from China grew to equal 2.6 percent of American economic output, up from around 1 percent. That 'unprecedented shock' was much larger than that from the increase in Japanese imports in the 1980s or Mexican imports in the 1990s ... China's rise, fueled in part by currency manipulation to make its exports cheaper, played a key role in the loss of roughly five million American manufacturing jobs. "Those losses, however, were offset and obscured during the housing boom by a rise in construction jobs. Now, both the factory jobs and the construction jobs have gone away."

The whole time, elite media and "economists" kept explaining that this was good for U.S. workers because it meant lower prices for consumer goods. The euphoria of cheap imports has finally worn off and people are looking around at the results -- the devastation of cities like Detroit and Flint and entire regions, and the stagnation of wages and lack of good-paying jobs that enable people to keep up.

The Times article itself demonstrates how elite media and "economists" explain how moving jobs out of the country is good for us even as people can see that it is not, writing:

"Mainstream economists regard the evidence as unequivocal that trade has produced significant benefits for the American economy and the average household. "Yet much of the American public has long been skeptical. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 61 percent of respondents favored more trade restrictions to protect domestic industry, just as a majority of respondents has favored increased restrictions in every such poll since 1988."

Sanders Using Trade In Wisconsin
Perhaps the biggest news story in higher education this week centered around a California state audit taking that state's university system to task for relying too heavily on out-of-state-residents to the detriment of Californians.

Out-of-state enrollment ballooned by 432 percent at the University of California system schools during the past decade, compared to a 10 percent uptick for in-state students.

Oregon's seven four-year public universities saw out-of-state enrollment increased by 105 percent from 2005-2015, while in-state numbers grew by just 5.9 percent, according to state figures provided to The Oregonian.

It's a national phenomenon, as the Washington Post reported earlier this year.

While Oregon's auditors haven't taken a deep dive into the resident/nonresident fight, the state's Audit Division has cited the issue in a past report. The phenomenon came up during a 2013 audit titled, "Opportunities to Control Costs, Imp[rove Student Outcomes and Clarify Governance Structure."

"Universities cannot demonstrate that reliance on non-resident students is not displacing residents in Oregon's larger universities," auditors wrote.

The auditors found that regional schools "appear able to accommodate increases" in out-of-state students, but the University of Oregon and Oregon State University "described themselves as at physical capacity" in 2013.

Perhaps a larger issue in Oregon: "We found that the Chancellor's Office does not analyze information about the demographics of admitted and non-admitted applicants. As a result, decision makers do not fully understand admittance patterns or the kinds of students who do and do not choose to attend OUS universities. This information could be helpful for decisions affecting enrollment, student outcomes, and competitiveness."

With the chancellor's office no longer around, it may be worth investigating what plans, if any, the Higher Education Coordinating Commission has to look into effect of the growing out-of-state student body.

According to Molly Woon, the Secretary of State's spokeswoman, Oregon auditors "do not have plans" to begin an audit similar to California's.

"As you know, because we don't have a Oregon University System anymore," Woon wrote in an email. "any plans to conduct a similar audit would have to take into consideration that each public university is now an independent public body legally separate from the State and each separately governed."

To be continued.

Ok, here are your links for this week.

The Oregonian: PSU student activists shut down meeting as board approves tuition hike

The Oregonian: State universities ask for $100 million more

The Oregonian Editorial Board: PSU foundation doubles down on payroll tax plan (opinion)

The Guardian: Universities vie for the metric that can't be measured - prestige

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Higher ed is overrun with liberals. So what

Inside Higher Ed: Women in industry still face stereotypes

Daily Barometer: OSU raises tuition

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen
Bernie as third-party candidate: Martha Peterson (Letters to the Editor, March 29) argues passionately that Bernie Sanders should break away from running for the Democratic nomination and run as a third-party candidate. She claims to believe that he could beat both Hillary Clinton and any Republican nominee and win the election. I am undecided as to whether this is just naivete about how our political process works or if people who think this way are shills for the Republican establishment.

No third-party candidate in the history of the United States has swept aside the other two parties to win the Electoral College, and it is not going to happen in 2016.

Were Sanders to do this (and, fortunately, he has repeatedly affirmed that he will support the Democratic nominee, no matter who that is), the two most likely outcomes (in order) are: 1) He would siphon off enough voters from Clinton to hand the election to the Republicans; or 2) He would win enough states to throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. This means that the Republicans would decide who would be president, and would not be bound by pluralities in the Electoral College.

For anybody other than a loyal member of the Republican establishment, this is an utter catastrophe.

James Kahan

Southeast Portland

*

Bernie as third-party candidate: Martha Peterson must be a Republican in disguise given her letter suggesting Bernie Sanders split from the Democratic Party and run on a third-party platform. I can't think of a better way to ensure the election of a Republican in November, even with their likely nominee being an extremist clown.

Hillary Clinton certainly has flaws, but I don't know a national politician who doesn't. None of them are perfect, including Sanders. Hillary Clinton has equal, if not more, experience in public office, including in foreign affairs, than Sen. Sanders. Peterson notes that Bernie Sanders graduated from "one of the very top universities in the nation." Hillary Clinton is also a graduate of "top" universities, including Yale Law School, and is equally bright and capable.

Frankly, I'm not overly enthusiastic about either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, but I will happily vote for whichever one wins the nomination. I want a Democrat winning the White House in 2016 for many reasons, chief among them the Supreme Court. If a Republican wins, upcoming Supreme Court appointees will take this country back to policies of the 1950s. I remember those days, and it wasn't pretty, especially for women and minorities. There is far too much at stake to sit this one out just because I don't agree with the Democratic candidates on everything.

One thing is certain, a third-party run by Sanders would ensure Republicans win the White House in November. Therefore, I will gladly take Peterson's advice and write to the Sanders campaign at the address she so nicely provided. I will urge him not to run as a third-party candidate!

Claire Cavanaugh-Neely

Northeast Portland

*

Bernie as third-party candidate: Martha Peterson urges letters to Bernie Sanders' headquarters asking him to run as a third-party candidate -- but that would result in a Republican president for the next four years. Sanders has said several times that he will support whoever the Democratic nominee is. His fans admire him for his consistency and for keeping his word; it is ironic that Peterson is urging him to break his word.

I'm tired of hearing from Sanders fans that the election is being stolen from him. I expect that Hillary Clinton will win the nomination without the superdelegates, given the makeup of the remaining primaries. She has so far received around 2.5 million more votes than Sanders. But even if the superdelegates put her over the top, why should we expect that Democratic elected officials around the country would support Sanders, who has done nothing to support them over the years? Sanders made his bed by retaining his purity during his political career. Now he and his supporters want to be rewarded for the support they didn't give to other Democrats.

Susan Piper

Southwest Portland
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Photo by Luke Hammill/Staff

'Multinational corporations' aren't the only beneficiaries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Editorial Agenda 2016

Foes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership 12-country trade deal like to paint it as an agreement that will only help the Nikes and Intels of the world, the editorial board writes. But smaller companies, including many of those who produce the goods and services in which Oregonians take pride, are also dependent on global trade and would thrive under the deal.

'Ultimately, for Oregon, it comes down to this,' the editorial states. 'You don't increase prosperity for your community by shrinking your borders. You don't influence the environmental and labor standards of other countries by sitting on the sidelines. And you don't help local companies by ignoring the potential for international business.' Read the editorial here.

Don't Edit

The Oregonian/OregonLive file photo

DHS' choice to leave Gresham raises questions: Editorial

A decision by the state Department of Human Services to shutter an office in Gresham and open again six miles away reflects the disconnect between state agencies and the communities they serve, the editorial board writes. City officials were not notified of the decision, which affects several hundred needy families as well as other city-provided services that support the state office.

'Backroom decisions to uproot and move elsewhere have immediate consequence not only for clients but the public agencies and nonprofits near clients and working, as well, to help,' the editorial states. 'In the Gresham case, that means Multnomah County's government, with social outreach programs of its own.' Read the editorial here.

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Photo by The Associated Press

Portland State foundation doubles down on PSU's anti-business tax: Editorial Agenda 2016

Not only is Portland State University backing a proposal to tax businesses to fund scholarships and faculty salaries, but its foundation is also backing it with a contribution to the campaign, the editorial board writes. Many of those donations come from businesses who would be hit hard by a payroll tax.

'The Yes for PSU campaign makes a weak argument that businesses benefit from a well-trained workforce and therefore should bear more of the cost,' the editorial states. 'That ignores, first of all, that PSU's job is to educate students; it's not taking students' money out of a philanthropic desire to help businesses. Second, PSU graduates go on to many places beyond the tri-county area that would get hit with the tax. Third, businesses hire people with a range of educational backgrounds, including degrees from area community colleges that won't get a seat on the PSU-only gravy train.' Read the editorial here.

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The Oregonian/OregonLive file photo

A new challenge to Oregon's outdated liquor monopoly: Editorial

A proposed ballot measure that would allow grocery stores to sell liquor could bring both convenience and price competition to Oregonians, the editorial board writes. While not perfect, the proposal is attractive to Oregonians tired of being gouged by the state and the 100 percent markup it imposes on liquor. One concern, however, is how to replace the revenue the state will lose.

'This argument and others will play out over the next several months as supporters gather signatures and November nears,' the editorial states. 'It's possible that a fatal flaw will emerge during that time, but it would have to be truly significant to justify maintaining the status quo. The delayed collection of liquor taxes certainly would not be a fatal flaw, though a lengthy tax holiday might be.' Read the editorial here.

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The Oregonian/OregonLive File photo

Portland poised to extend transit pass inequity: Editorial Agenda 2016

The city of Portland is about to contribute taxpayer funds, again, to pay for transit passes for Portland Public Schools high-school students while ignoring those in Portlands other school districts, including those with far higher percentages of poor families, the editorial board writes. While the city finally might get use of a vacant school property in exchange, the arrangement still is misguided.

'Portland leaders could affirm their commitment to both equity and fiscal responsibility by saying "no" to Portland Public Schools,' the editorial states. 'The district might not like that much, but school board members could always fill the funding gap with district money if they considered the Youth Pass program worthwhile. The city, in turn, could spend its savings on something more consistent with its mission, whether that's fixing streets or renting space to house the homeless.' Read the editorial here.

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Stuart Sugarman and why justice demands strong criminal defense attorneys: Editorial

Criminal defense attorney Stuart Sugarman was dedicated to fiercely protecting the rights of the accused, taking on cases with details so horrifying that some might wonder how he could defend the suspect. But thats exactly why people like Sugarman are critical to ensuring that the rule of law drives the justice system - not emotion or fear or governmental overreach.

'Sugarman's death, which is being mourned by colleagues throughout the justice system, is a deep loss to the bar, which will miss his principled stands and devotion to protecting defendants' constitutional provisions,' the editorial states. 'But his work should serve as a reminder to all those who would understandably recoil from those accused of horrific acts. How can they defend those people?If we truly value justice, how can they not?' Read the editorial here.

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Public contracts made public; no low-carbon voter showdown: Editorial peaks and valleys

The news that Portland Public Schools is finally posting contracts for public review is the board's peak this week. The decision to not ask voters to vote down the low-carbon fuel standard is this week's valley, sort of.

Though we've called this decision a valley, we're not really sure that it is. An up-or-down public vote on the program in November does have the virtue of simplicity. To some degree, however, it would let legislators  many of whom supported the carbon standard  off the hook.' Read the peaks and valleys here.
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(Thomas Boyd/Staff)

By Nicholas Eberstadt

Special to The Washington Post

The United States today is home to two huge but essentially invisible populations. Each of them is widely stigmatized and largely composed of people living in the shadows. The government does not know who they are, where they are or how well they are doing.

The first of these invisible tribes - illegal immigrants - at least has attracted more than passing comment in politics. By contrast, America's second invisible caste is almost never mentioned. Yet this group is far larger than the unauthorized immigrant population, and it is made up almost entirely of U.S. citizens.

I refer to our vast underground army of released felons - adult men and women convicted of serious criminal offenses for which they have been punished with prison time or probation, and who now form part of the general population. So hidden from public sight is this vast army, indeed, that many Americans are unaware of its existence.

Most well-informed readers know that the number of Americans behind bars has soared since the early 1980s and that the United States has a higher share of its populace in jail or prison than virtually any other country. But only a tiny fraction of Americans who have been convicted of a felony are incarcerated. Perhaps 90 percent of all sentenced felons are out of confinement and living more or less among us.

How can that be? To begin: Few felons are sent away for life. According to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, the average time that imprisoned first offenders serve in state penitentiaries is just more than two years. More than 600,000 convicts are released from prison every year, and despite high rates of recidivism, many do not return. In addition, many convicted felons are never confined in the first place; instead, they undergo "community supervision" (such as probation). Taken together, correctional release, parole and probation guarantee a steady annual flow of convicted felons into society.

What sort of totals are we talking about? Curiously, there seem to be no official estimates. Some researchers, however, have attempted to determine the approximate dimensions of this invisible population - and their findings may astonish.

In two studies on the demography of what they call our "criminal class," professors Christopher Uggen, Melissa Thompson and five colleagues estimate that the cohort of incarcerated and released felons in the United States had reached nearly 20 million by 2010 - four times larger, in their estimate, than just 30 years earlier.

If this estimate is even roughly accurate, and if the United States' total felon population has continued to grow at more or less the same tempo the researchers cited for 2004 to 2010, we would expect the number of convicted felons to surpass 23 million people this year. That would be roughly twice as high as the number of illegal immigrants in the country. And since the combined U.S.jail and prison population is about 2.2 million (including some non-felons sentenced to jail or awaiting trial there), these figures would suggest the number of non-institutionalized Americans with a felony conviction will almost certainly exceed 20 million by the end of the year.

If America's non-institutionalized felon population today were a state, it would be the third largest in the country - about the same size as Florida, and larger than New York. The adult population of this "state" would be the country's second largest - nearly tied with Texas. And its adult male population would be by far the nation's biggest - at least 5 million ahead of California. By the same token: If released felons were regarded as a minority, their numbers would well exceed the size of our Asian American population.

Given this reality, one might think policymakers would have an interest in knowing at least a little about this major segment of our population. Wrong: To judge by the data our democracy collects, the circumstances of this ex-con population are a matter of almost complete indifference to the rest of us. These individuals show up only in our statistics on crime and punishment - in other words, when they run afoul of the criminal justice system.

We don't know how many children they have, their marital status, who they live with, their housing situations. We don't know their mortality rates or life expectancy, their disease and disability profile, their mental-health status. We do not know their labor force participation rates, unemployment rates, jobs by sector or wages. Apart from broad generalities, we know roughly nothing about their education patterns, skills or training.

The irony here is not that felons who have paid their debt to society have need of a largely indifferent public: It is that this same public needs them, too. We need them to succeed: as fathers and mothers, as breadwinners, as citizens - as people who make the most of a second chance. Our society can't hope to flourish with 20 million modern-day outcasts in our midst.

Given its sheer scale, the task of reintegrating reformed felons has never been more important than it is today. But thanks to officialdom's statistical neglect, we haven't a clue about how well this task is working. And we can't gather evidence to learn what we could do to make "re-entry" work better either.

Our government is perfectly capable of compiling key facts and figures about conditions for Americans with felony convictions. Some of this could be done easily, quickly and at very low cost; other aspects would take more time, money and technical effort. But it's all eminently doable. All we need is the political desire - and social compassion - to see it done.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post
By Ben Cannon

By focusing solely on resident enrollment trends at the University of Oregon -- and not the rest of Oregon's public higher education landscape -- columnist David Sarasohn ("Oregon universities, California students, March 19") risks mistaking the forest for the trees.

When it comes to access to higher education, the state of Oregon's Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) is focused exclusively on Oregon resident students. And like Sarasohn, the commission has noted that resident students comprised a smaller proportion of UO's freshman class in 2014 (47 percent) than in 2004 (68 percent). While UO's modest overall growth during this period helped preserve spots for resident students, UO enrolled nearly 1,800 fewer Oregonians in 2014 than in 2004.

When we look more broadly at Oregon higher education, however, a different story emerges. Despite considerable state funding cuts to higher education during this time period, including a $5.8 million reduction in the annual appropriation to UO alone, Oregon's seven public universities today collectively enroll 8 percent more resident students than they did in 2004. Even more importantly, these enrollment increases have fueled significant growth in the number of Oregonians who earn degrees. Oregon's public universities last year awarded degrees to more than 14,000 resident Oregonians, an increase of 17 percent since 2004 that reflects not only overall campus expansion, but also the strategic focus our universities are placing on supporting students all the way through graduation.

Moreover, community colleges have played a vital role in expanding Oregonians' access to higher education during this era. In fall 2014, more than 97,000 Oregonians enrolled at Oregon community colleges, up from about 83,000 in 2004. Many of these students will transfer to a four-year university to complete their degree; in 2013, UO alone enrolled more than 900 new transfer students from Oregon community colleges.

By focusing exclusively on the composition of UO's freshman class, Sarasohn's analysis overlooks this important, and growing, access point for Oregon students.

Sarasohn's column sheds light on an important phenomenon within American public higher education: the tendency for institutions like UO to increasingly rely on higher-revenue, out-of-state students. While this trend certainly warrants concern, at the same time we shouldn't overlook the significant benefits that our state derives from attracting bright, diverse college students to Oregon from around the world, especially when many of them decide to make Oregon their permanent home.

Moreover, by focusing exclusively on Oregon's third-largest university and not the state's other 23 public higher education institutions, Sarasohn risks instilling the wrong impression about the condition of higher education in a state where access for Oregon students has actually increased, in spite of public funding cuts.

As the state's single entity for coordinating higher education across all sectors (two-year and four-year, public and private), the Higher Education Coordinating Commission closely tracks postsecondary trends for Oregon resident students. To truly understand how well our institutions are serving residents, it is critical to view UO's enrollment trends in their statewide context -- and to pay as much attention to degree completion as we do to those who walk through the door.

*

Ben Cannon is executive director of the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission.
Oregon's efforts to help low-income transgender people. "Whiteness History Month" at Portland Community College. And the latest on that creepy sound in Forest Grove.

Last year, for the first time, the Oregon Health Plan decided to cover medical services for low-income transgender people. The state opened the door to these broad new public health benefits for transgender men and women with the best of intentions. But regulators were caught off guard and ill prepared to help, interviews with 75 patients, physicians, activists and Medicaid employees show. Even today, gaps remain and necessary systems are lacking. As a result, patients haven't found doctors to provide even basic hormone treatments, let alone gender reassignment surgery. Transgender Oregonians said they have encountered

discrimination because medical staff have not been trained in transgender issues. They say they have been denied treatment by doctors who feared providing services in areas where they had no experience.

Google has acquired 74 acres in The Dalles, making room for the company to add considerably to its growing data-center campus along the Columbia River. The Dalles was home to Google's first corporate data center anywhere, opening back in 2006. The company steadily expanded on that original site and held a ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday on a new, $600 million facility near its original site. It will bring Google's total investment in The Dalles to $1.8 billion, consisting primarily of the expensive computers running the data centers.

It's a great time to eat outdoors. Here are some suggestions to get you started:



Newly released records suggest that Portland mayoral candidate Jules Bailey earned $78,000 in 2011 and 2012 from a now-defunct nonprofit that hyped Bailey's title and skills as an Oregon lawmaker while it chased grant funding. Bailey said he had no knowledge that his legislative position may have been used as a selling point, according to a statement he provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive. Bailey said he was paid for work exclusively outside of Oregon, eliminating any potential conflicts.

Portland Community College is ramping up the publicity for its "Whiteness History Month," which includes some 100 events scheduled at four PCC campuses and at community centers across the city. "Whiteness History Month: Context, Consequence and Change" is the overarching project title. Events will be held at PCC's Cascade, Rock Creek, Southeast and Sylvania campuses, as well as First Unitarian Church of Portland and other community sites.

State wildlife officials have killed four wolves in Wallowa County after members of a pack attacked livestock five times in the past three weeks. State policy allows the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to order wolves killed after two attacks on livestock, but does not require it. After members of the Imnaha pack attacked sheep and cattle on private land, the department obliged an outside request to kill them.

Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer, facing criminal investigation and possible action against his police certificate, Tuesday moved to set up a legal defense fund. Such a fund, which requires state approval, would allow Palmer to take contributions for attorneys and other costs. Palmer is the target of 10 complaints filed with the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training. They accuse Palmer of violating standards for police officers in his dealings with self-described militia members. One complaint said his conduct put the safety of his rural county in jeopardy.

A steadily spreading disease that's already killed millions of bats across the Eastern United States has made its way to the Northwest. Tests on a little brown bat that died at a Seattle-area facility March 13 confirmed the animal had been infected with white-nose syndrome, spread by the Pseudogymnoascus destructans fungus, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday. The fungus sickens bats by eating away at their skin and disrupting their biological rhythms.

Portland State University students and community activists took over a Board of Trustees meeting Thursday in protest of, among other issues, an upcoming vote on a 4.5% tuition increase. The tuition increase amounts to roughly $303 more per year for Oregon residents.

"No matter how many times hard-working "Talking Dead" host Chris Hardwick exclaims that each episode is an exciting thrill ride, or that fans are going nuts on social media about this or that character doing this or that thing, Season 6 of "The Walking Dead" has been mostly frustrating, choppy and repetitive," writes Krisiti Turnquist. Here's how to fix it.



After gaining worldwide attention, the creepy, high-pitched whatever-it-was has apparently disappeared into the Oregon night that it once terrorized. According to a Google Map of reported incidents maintained by a Pacific University physics professor, no one has heard the ungodly screeching sound in nearly a month. Police and fire officials -- who last month told Forest Grove residents on Facebook that they didn't think the noise was "a threat to our town or citizens" - said phone calls about the sonic scourge have stopped clogging the lines at City Hall.
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Police are investigating how 54-year-old Gyula Hatos died after crashing his car into a telephone pole in Southeast Portland. He did not sustain traumatic injuries in the crash, police say.

(Portland Police)

Portland Police identified a driver who died after crashing into a telephone pole on Southeast Johnson Creek Boulevard near 37th Avenue as Gyula Hatos of Southeast Portland.

Hatos, 54, was reported in critical condition on Saturday morning but died about three hours after the crash.

Police say Hatos' cause of death is undetermined as it does not appear he suffered traumatic injuries in the crash. Police have found no witnesses to the crash and the investigation is ongoing.

The incident happened around 5:14 a.m., and Johnson Creek Boulevard had been closed for several hours during the investigation.

-- Laura Gunderson

503-221-8378

@lgunderson
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School resource officers with the Portland Police Bureau arrested a 12-year-old girl at Beaumont Middle School on Wednesday, March 30, 2016.

(The Oregonian/File photo)

Portland police handcuffed and arrested a 12-year-old Beaumont Middle School student Wednesday -- days after she allegedly yanked another student out of her chair by her hair and shoved a substitute teacher.

The girl was arrested in the school office. She responded by throwing herself on the floor and stomping her feet, then spitting all around her as she sat in the back of a patrol car, said police spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson.

"For lack of a better term, she chose to have a tantrum," Simpson said.

The girl's mother arrived at the school to talk to officers.

"Mom was very much like her daughter -- verbally abusive to the officers," Simpson said. "They discontinued the conversation" and drove the daughter to the Donald E. Long Juvenile Detention Center in Northeast Portland.

The incident that spurred the arrest happened March 18, according to the girl who reported the attack. Twelve days later, on March 30, the 12-year-old victim told police that her attacker had dragged her across the classroom by her hair, Simpson said.

That led officers to go to the Northeast Portland school later that day and make the arrest -- under accusations of fourth-degree assault and harassment that will be heard in Multnomah County juvenile court.

As news of the arrest spread, some community members raised questions about the police action.

The ACLU of Oregon's legal director tweeted that he was interested in finding the girl's parent to talk to her.

Simpson told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Saturday that while most campus fights or assaults are handled by school administrators, police had to take action in this case because someone complained about a crime.

"I think it's important to point out that there's a victim of a crime here who called police for help, and officers took appropriate action," Simpson said. "Most fights do probably end up in the school office, but when a victim complains, it's not up to us to kick it back to the school and say 'You handle it.'"

In May 2013, two uniformed Portland police officers arrived at the home of a 9-year-old girl, handcuffed her, drove her to police headquarters in downtown over an assault on another child at a youth club six days earlier. The girl was fingerprinted and her mugshot was taken.

Community outrage over that arrest prompted Portland police to revise their policy. Now, Simpson said, officers won't arrest anyone younger than 12 without special permission. Simpson said it's his understanding that if a child is 11 or younger, police must consult the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office and talk to a judge.

Across the country, police have arrested children as young as elementary school age. In 2012, police in Georgia made headlines for handcuffing a 6-year-old kindergartner who police said assaulted the school principal, bit a doorknob and jumped on a paper shredder.

Portland Public Schools spokeswoman Christine Miles said that she wasn't aware of the specifics of the Beaumont Middle School case and couldn't talk about them if she did because of student privacy rules. Miles said parents were sent general information informing them that police had been to the school to deal with a private matter between students and that school safety wasn't at risk.

Miles emphasized Saturday to The Oregonian/OregonLive that school officials didn't summon police to the school.

Miles said school officials do call in police when there is a serious injury or threat of violence, such as a gun brought to school. But she said school principals typically deal with student behavioral problems -- including minor assaults or fights -- in-house. The process can take hours or days.

"Now if parents decide, 'Hey I'm not happy with this. I think police should be involved,' then it's their right to involve police," Miles said.

Although Miles isn't speaking about the 12-year-old who was arrested, she said it's important to remember that students who act out in school often have a lot of turmoil in their family life. Miles has seen an increase in troubled students as Portland's rents have skyrocketed, and more students are finding themselves without a home.

"These are hard-working parents with jobs and who can't find a place to live," Miles said. "They are couch-surfing, and their kids are traumatized."

Simpson, the police spokesman, said school resource officers made the arrest, and that they "probably have a better understanding of students than any other officer in the bureau." He said the officers likely chose to arrest the girl at school because "school is a more controlled environment."

Police handcuffed the girl because it's standard procedure when taking any person -- child or adult -- into custody, said Sgt. Greg Stewart.

-- Aimee Green

503-294-5119
SUNDAY

2016 Academy of Country Music Awards: Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley host, and nominees include Entertainer of the Year competitors Eric Church, Garth Brooks, Jason Aldean, Bryan and Miranda Lambert. (8 p.m. CBS/6)



"Call the Midwife": Season 5 begins, with more stories about babies on the way, and the women who bring them into the world. (8 p.m. PBS/10)



"The Story of God with Morgan Freeman": The actor hosts a new six-part series exploring the world's religions. In the opener, "Beyond Death," Freeman investigates how belief in an afterlife began and has developed. (9 p.m. National Geographic Channel)



MONDAY



"Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures": New documentary from Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato ("The Eyes of Tammy Faye") telling the story of the late artist and photographer, whose work was shocking in its subject matter, and influential in its style. (9 p.m. HBO)



TUESDAY



"The People v. O.J. Simpson": In the series finale, the jury delivers the verdict, and the lawyers, and Simpson, deal with the aftermath. (10 p.m. FX)



WEDNESDAY



"The Real Housewives of New York City": It's Season 8. Hoo boy. (9 p.m. Bravo)



THURSDAY



"Discovering Beverly Cleary": An "Oregon Art Beat" special marking the 100th birthday of the legendary Oregon author, whose books about Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins and more, have been part of children's lives for decades. The half-hour documentary examines Cleary's Oregon roots, and the impact of her work. (8 p.m. OPB/10)



"The Odd Couple": Season 2 begins for Oscar (Matthew Perry) and Felix (Thomas Lennon), as they stop their own fighting long enough to notice their neighbors battling. (8:30 p.m. CBS/6)



FRIDAY



"Catastrophe": Season 2 of the comedy for sarcastic grown-ups begins, with Rob (Rob Delaney) and Sharon (Sharon Horgan) living life as a married couple in London, dealing with the concept of being new parents, and trying to stay sane when Rob's mother (Carrie Fisher) decides to "help." (Streaming on Amazon)



SATURDAY





"Outlander": Season 2 of the popular romance/historical/fantasy saga begins, with Claire and Jamie in 18th-century Paris, getting embroiled in royal schemes. (9 p.m. Starz)



-- Kristi Turnquist





kturnquist@oregonian.com

503-221-8227

@Kristiturnquist
WASHINGTON (AP)  The photo is jarring: a teenage girl lying on a slab, her chest sliced open exposing bone and blood. There's a gaping wound in the left side of her head. It's hard to look at, but Nardyne Jefferies has made it her mission since her daughter was killed in a drive-by shooting to make sure Americans  especially politicians  are forced to see exactly what gun violence does.

Brishell Jones was 16 when she and several other teenagers were standing on a street corner in Washington, D.C., after attending a funeral for a friend who was killed over a missing bracelet. It was March 30, 2010, and in the years since, Jefferies has taken the picture to countless rallies, to meetings with members of Congress, to city council hearings.

The reaction she gets "is not a good one. The politicians cringe," she said. Some instinctively look away. "I say, no, don't look away. You need to see what was done to my daughter ... I want you to see what happens right here in the nation's capital."

Jefferies, 46, bristles at being called a gun-control advocate. She said she believes in the Constitutional right to bear arms and doesn't consider this a gun-control debate. She's in a motorcycle club that includes friends who are NRA-certified firearms instructors. She believes the cause is about better regulating guns and ensuring that the people who own them are responsible.

What she wants is universal background checks, including at gun shows and in private sales between individuals. She wants tighter limits on high-powered automatic weapons, such as the AK-47 that was used to shoot her daughter and three other teens that night.

Jefferies' effort evokes the 1950s actions of the mother of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy lynched in Mississippi for flirting with a white woman. She insisted that her son's casket be kept open, proclaiming "I just wanted the world to see what they did to my baby." Showing the autopsy photo also takes a page from opponents of abortion rights who have shown images of aborted fetuses.

Washington's police chief, Cathy Lanier, who has grown close to Jefferies, said showing the photo is something she can identify with as someone who sees firsthand the toll of gun violence.

"The horror that we see and the horror that Nardyne saw that day ... her point is one that resonates with me," Lanier said. "That is the shocking reality that I think the average person doesn't realize until she shocks them with that photo."

Among Jefferies' biggest supporters is another mother who lost a daughter to gun violence  Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was among the 12 killed in the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting. Phillips can't bear to view the autopsy photos that were taken of her daughter. She was among Aurora victims' relatives who pushed the court to seal them so they wouldn't show up on the Internet.

"We knew we had to have our daughter cremated because the wounds were so bad," Phillips said, "and that's all I need to know."

Phillips, a gun owner who lives in Texas, said it's important for people to know what happens when someone is shot. She's considering having someone put together a packet for politicians, to show the full extent of her daughter's injuries.

"You say, 'Oh they were so beautiful. Oh, they were so young.' But the bottom line is when they were killed, it was horrific," Phillips said. "It's important for those who don't understand ... to see what we live with on a daily basis."

Jefferies' daughter had a promising life ahead of her. Home-schooled in her last year, Brishell had hoped to become a chef. Jefferies and her daughter bonded as they cooked meals together, texted throughout the day, traveled to Pennsylvania to see one of their favorite musicals, Phantom of the Opera.

Jefferies, a database coordinator, was working out at the gym when she got word that her daughter had been shot. She ran to the scene on South Capitol Street in southeast D.C. in her bare feet but was separated by police and yellow tape. Still not believing her daughter could be dead, she went to the hospital with Brishell's father, Lennox Jones, and saw the body for the first time.

She was wrapped up and "looked so peaceful." In a daze, reality still had not sunk in and she still assumed her daughter would survive, that somehow the doctors would be able to patch her up and save her.

As she started to unwrap the bandage around Brishell's head, hospital aides warned her. "I told them no, I need to see it." She saw that her head was partially shaved on the right side and saw a small wound. She walked around to the other side of the table and realized the left side of her head was essentially gone.

She took some iPhone photos at the hospital, and insisted on being allowed to take more at the mortuary. Her decision to do that was nearly immediate, she said.

"I said that night, right on that street, I said, 'You know, Brishell, your death will not be in vain. They will have to see what was done to you,'" Jefferies said.

The years since have been a whirlwind of advocacy. At home, though, she still keeps reminders of Brishell everywhere. Her daughter's room still has clothes in the closet and dresser.

Jefferies has usually marked the anniversary of her daughter's death at a candlelight vigil, but this year, she'll be in Las Vegas with those with whom she shares an awful bond: a family whose daughter was accidentally shot and killed by a friend. They've organized a 5K run in their daughter's memory on what would have been her 16th birthday.

"We're there for each other," Jefferies said.
The Meridian Public Schools Music Department continues to receive outstanding reviews and honors.

For the second time, the department has been named by the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Foundation as among the Best Communities for Music Education (BCME) in the United States. Meridian also received the award in 2014 and this year was one of 16 Michigan school districts to be recognized including Clare Public Schools.

There is a special bond between our band and our community and I fully recognize that the support I receive from my administration and colleagues is not the norm in many school districts, said Meridian Public Schools band director Matthew Shephard. Meridian Public Schools recognizes the importance of arts education and has always been an advocate of our band program. I am truly blessed to work in such a supportive and uplifting environment.

The Meridian Instrumental Music Program serves roughly 400 students in grades 5-12. The program includes the Meridian High Mustang Marching Band with over 130 students.

In addition to the two NAMM awards, the Mustang Marching Band was named the 2015 Coolest Marching Band in Michigan.

This award was significant because of the tremendous outpouring of support by our community to persevere and vote tirelessly last fall to recognize our band program. Without local support, the Coolest Marching Band award could not have been given to the Meridian Band Program, Shephard said.

The BCME designation takes on added significance this year due to the passage of the new federal education law in December 2015. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) designates music as a recommended subject and as part of a well-rounded education. ESSA shifts more control to the states and schools and encourages policymakers to include non-tested subjects such as music to play a more important role in the curriculum.

The schools and districts that the NAMM Foundation honors this year with this award demonstrate a commitment to supporting music education and assuring opportunities for music learning in the curriculum for all students, said Mary Luehrsen of the NAMM Foundation in a release. Were moving away from a time when curricula were narrowed due to pressure from testing and test-prep remediation to a broader view of what is important for all children. That includes access to a well-rounded education  and an opportunity to learn and grow with music. These schools and districts we recognize serve as a model for other educators looking for ways to make music part of their school community.

This year, out of the nations 13,515 school districts, the NAMM Foundation designated 476 districts as Best Communities for Music Education and 118 individual schools as SupportMusic Merit Award winners.

The BCME program evaluates schools and districts based on funding, staffing of highly qualified teachers, commitment to standards, community support, participation and access to music instruction. A complete list of districts and schools recognized by the foundation this year can be found at bit.ly/1UOP0U6 (Best Communities) and bit.ly/1RspVfe (SupportMusic Merit).
Even though its based locally, The Midland AKtion Club has made its impact felt around the world.

Members cut out manufacturers coupons and deliver them to the Midland Shelterhouse for staff and residents to use. If coupons have expired during the past three months, they are sent to Coups for Troops, a national organization that sends them to American military bases. An agreement between Coups for Troops and manufacturers allows families on the bases to use the coupons at commissaries up to six months past the expiration dates.
Sentences may vary based on previous offenses committed by the defendant. Some sentences include other fees imposed by the state. Unless otherwise noted, defendants are from Midland.

The following people were sentenced recently in Midland Countys 42nd Circuit Court by Judge Michael J. Beale or Judge Stephen P. Carras:
The 9-month long budget impasse in Pennsylvania ended last Wednesday after the governor conceded defeat. The $30 billion budget package with no increase in tax has finally been approved Wednesday.

With oppositions from lawmakers, media, and the public, Governor Tom Wolf agreed to end the budget impasse after nine months since the start of the fiscal year on July 2015. The approval comes without the governor's signature, reports Bloomberg.

President Barron thanked students for their role in enduring the Pennsylvania budget impasse. https://t.co/cM3fE1PDYC  Onward State (@OnwardState) March 29, 2016

How the Budget Crisis Began

According to ABC News, first-term Democrat Governor Tom Wolf initially proposed a multibillion-dollar tax increase, the biggest proposed tax increase in America, which would boost public school aid and end long-term deficit of the state. However, the tax increase proposal was opposed by many Republican legislators.

Instead of increasing taxes, the lawmakers wanted to adjust benefits of workers to improve the underfunded pensions system. As Matthew Brouillette puts it, this was the start of the Lone-Wolf Doctrine.

While making his 2015 budget proposal last year, Governor Wolf was quoted saying "If you don't agree with my ideas, here is my request: please come with your own ideas." In response, the lawmakers proposed revisions to the budget which the governor all vetoed. This started the 9-month long budget impasse.

Effects of the Budget Impasse

While the budget has finally been approved, the budget impasse has greatly affected the nonprofit organizations and the education system. Such that school districts have accumulated mounting borrowing costs just to keep classrooms open. According to Bloomberg, this 9-month crisis may result to a credit downgrade by Standard & Poor.

The 9-month delay in the budget approval was the longest recorded since 1956. The governor may have relented in the face of opposition, layoffs, and school shutdowns, but he plans to veto the fiscal code, which outlines the allocation of funds for education.

ABC News states that the governor's office will distribute the funds in the "most appropriate manner possible." Governor Tom Wolf is now eyeing the 2017 budget, planning to veto a companion bill to the supplemental package. In three months time, a new budget will be evaluated with an opposition already set by the governor.

Illinois remains the last state without tax and spending plan for fiscal year that started July 2015. To know more effects of the budget impasse, take a look at the video below:
Patna: Dozens of legislators, both past and present, in Patna on Saturday took part in a blood drive organized by Bihar Speaker Vijay Kumar Chowdhary to deal with blood shortage in Bihar hospitals.

Among those who offered blood at a special camp built for the purpose were Deputy Chief Minister and Road Construction Minister Tejaswi Yadav. His brother and Bihar Health Minister Tej Pratap Yadav who has missed most of the Assembly session inviting criticism from the opposition leaders, however, was once again missing in action.

Interestingly, the minister's mother and former Chief Minister of Bihar Rabri Devi, was by the side of her son when he was donating his blood for a very charitable cause.

Others who also donated their blood on Saturday included senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and the leader of the opposition in Bihar Assembly Prem Kumar, Urban Development Minister Maheshwar Hazari, RJD leaders Mohammed Nematullah, and Lalit Kumar Yadav.
Nico Rosberg dream start to the 2016 season continued as the German took his second consecutive victory and his first in Bahrain and his first at the Gulf circuit. Kimi Raikkonen took his fifth second place with Lewis Hamilton recovering to third after a first-corner collision.Before the start there was disappointment for Ferrari as Sebastian Vettel, set to start from third, slowed on the formation lap with smoke billowing from the back of his car.His failure to start, the first of his career, meant a space opened on the grid beside Raikkonen and in front of Red Bulls Daniel Ricciardo, starting from fifth.The Australian couldnt capitalise, however, and when the lights went out he made a poor start. That allowed Williams Valtteri Bottas to surge past.Hamilton too had started badly and as Rosberg powered into the lead and Raikkonen stole second Hamilton fell back towards Bottas.The Finn tried to push past the champion on the inside of Turn One but they clashed. Ricciardo got involved too, losing part of his front wing.However, while Hamilton and Bottas, who would later be penalised for causing the collision, fell back, Ricciardo managed to hold position and he slotted into third.At the front Rosberg began to pull away rapidly and he soon built up a sizeable lead over Raikkonen, with the Finn later commenting that the Mercedes driver was a straight in front after a few laps.That set the pattern for the top two positions as Rosberg managed his pace and comfortably kept Raikkonen at bay for the whole race.Behind them, Ricciardo dived for the pits on lap six, but while he did take on new tyres, he chose not to take a new wing and he rejoined still nursing the damage but with greater pace thanks to hi new tyres. Across his first stint he battled back to third.Hamilton, though, was also recovering from his earlier travails and despite sustaining debilitating floor damage, the champion rapidly made his way through the order on medium tyres, which he took onboard on lap 13. He passed Ricciardo on lap 17 and that spelled the end of any hopes the Australian had of a podium finish.He settled into fourth spot and though he relinquished it twice as the strategies played out, his final stint on medium tyres, saw him solidify the result and he took his second fourth place in a row to score 12 points and to take third in the Drivers standings from the unfortunate Vettel.Although Hamilton got to within five seconds of Raikkonen at one stage, he could not match the Finns pace and in the final stint he dropped back as he save his tyres in the hope of a safety car period that never came.With Ricciardo fourth, fifth place went to Romain Grosjean, as Haas again surprised. The Frenchman worked his way through three sets of supersofts as he rose from ninth on the grid and though he couldnt find the pace to challenger Ricciardo he still managed to better his opening result in Australia by one position. The new team now sits fifth in the Constructors Standings, ahead of Toro Rosso, Force India, McLaren, Renault, Sauber and Manor.Toro Rossos Max Verstappen took another good result for the Italian squad with sixth place, though there was disappointment for the Faenza team as Carlos Sainz failed to finish.Daniil Kvyat delivered an excellent performance. Starting 15th, the Russian ran two stints on soft tyres to avoid traffic and rise through the order before using two superbly aggressive stints on supersofts to claim seventh place. The run included a brave pass on Felipe Massa on the final lap.Massa took eighth ahead of team-mate Bottas, while the final point went to McLaren rookie Stoffel Vandoorne who drove a faultless race to the points from 12th on the grid. It was a less successful day for team-mate Jenson Button, with the veteran racer exiting the race with power loss on lap six.
Patna: The Imam of Masjid al-Haram of Kaaba Sheikh Saleh bin Mohammad bin Ibrahim Aal Talib arrived in Patna on Saturday a day late from his actual date of arrival to participate in the ongoing Aman Conference aimed at promoting peace and communal harmony in today's world full of political and religious turbulence.

Speaking at the program organized by the Tauhid Educational Trust, the Imam denied Islam was a violent religion saying Islam prohibited killing of innocent people and blamed a certain section of the religion for hijacking the faith to give it a bad name by resorting to terrorism and other violent means.

"Islam prohibits killing of innocent people. Even in war, killing of women and children is not permitted. Islam is all about spreading peace and love as preached by Prophet Mohammed and not a philosophy as being spread by the terrorists," the Imam said.

Continuing to defend Islam, the Imam of Masjid al-Haram of Kaaba pointed fingers at the western countries saying terrorism was started by 'other' religions and Muslims were the biggest victims of terrorism.

"No other religion has been blamed for the rise of terrorism in the world in spite of the fact that Muslims had been the largest victim of terrorism worldwide," he said.

The Imam thanked the people of Bihar including Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) President Lalu Prasad Yadav for their support and for making his trip to Patna possible though a day late.

Meanwhile, Jan Adhikar Party (JAP) leader and Siwan MP Pappu Yadav took credit for the arrival of the Imam whose visit to Patna was delayed by one day due to visa technicalities.

JAP General Secretary Ejaz Ahmed said that it was Yadav who, after being told about the visa problem involving the Imam, took the matter in his own hand and put pressure on Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj who helped expedite the process allowing the religious leader to arrive in Patna on Saturday.
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A New Year brings A New Home for the New York Area Zoroastrian Community

04/03/16

Press Release by ZAGNY

Photo Credits: Shirin Kumaana-Wadia, Mahafreen H. Mistry, Malcolm Shroff, Urmez Davar & Arzan Sam Wadia

New York, March 26, 2016: Today, six hundred Zarathushtis (Zoroastrians), their friends and families from the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut came together to celebrate a once in a lifetime event - the opening of a Zoroastrian religious and cultural community center in Pomona, NY. The inaugural event held during the week of Nowruz, the start of the Persian new year also coincides with the birthday of Zarathustra, the Zoroastrian prophet. The goal of this new building is to house the active community of Zarathushtis which has grown tremendously over the past 40 years and is currently estimated to be about one thousand.

Dar-e-Mehr is believed to mean Door of Peace, and denotes a Zarathushti temple without a permanently consecrated devotional fire. The inauguration of the Arbab Rustam Guiv Dar-e-Mehr building was hosted by The Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York (ZAGNY), the Iranian Zoroastrian Association (IZA) and the Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple (DMZT). Thirty priests converged from all over North America to bless the building. The prayers were lead by the honorable Vada Dasturji Khurshed Dastoor the high priest and religious leader of the Zarathushti community who joined from Udvada, India. The event was interwoven with music, food prepared by community restaurateurs, performances by children as well as formal speeches by local dignitaries including officials from the Mayor of Pomonas Office, respected academians and revered community members. The event was made accessible to viewers worldwide and broadcast by a live stream - it was viewed in close to 1,500 households in 32 countries and garnered an average viewing time of 2 hours (out of the 6 hour event.) In fact, the social media engagement has reflected the tremendous interest in this event including: 5,000 YouTube views and growing, and a Facebook Weekly Total Reach of 98,000 for the week of the event.

It has been a long road for this community who has fought against the odds for its spot in the New York area community. Thirty nine years ago, the first Zoroastrian Dar-e-Mehr in North America opened in New Rochelle on December 3, 1977 with little over 200 in attendance. A generous donor, Arbab Rustam Guiv contributed $180,000 to purchase the simple house that was converted to a community center and served the community for 23 years.

A second center in Pomona was purchased in 2001. Based on the rapid growth of the community and unrealistic maintenance of the existing center, a new Dar-e-Mehr building was conceived - one that reflected a Zarathushti ambiance and created a sense of belonging, so as to preserve the faith and culture, grow the community, and create a legacy for future generations to enjoy and cherish.

Inspired by ancient Persian and Zoroastrian architecture of the fire temples of India and Iran, the new building was designed by award-winning architect Dinyar Wadia of Wadia Associates. It features a stone facade with a colonnaded portico, and decorative capitols, evoking the architectural style of Persepolis (the ancient Zoroastrian city and heritage site) as a nod to the long road traveled. It is a 22,000 square foot structure which has four classrooms, three meeting rooms, a library, a traditional prayer hall, chefs kitchen, recreation room and a main hall that can accommodate up to 400 guests. Special features include an Afarghanyu (fire vessel) based on the 250 year old prototype found at a historic temple in Mumbai, India, a custom crafted Winterstone panel inspired by the ancient Tripylon Palace in Persepolis and a traditional Persian-inspired water fountain (that is yet to be built).

The building took 2 years to construct and approximately $5M. The small but unwavering and dedicated community fundraised locally, nationally and internationally for close to 6 years to construct and complete the building. Zoroastrian populations are growing in numbers and acceptance generating a need for cultural and community centers throughout North America.

Today we take a moment to appreciate what we have built as a community. said Astad J. Clubwala, President of ZAGNY. This will be the legacy of our generation and can be seen as a gift from the generation that was born in our homelands of India, Iran and Pakistan to the generation of Zoroastrians born in North America.

This is a monumental achievement for the Zarthushti communities of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to be able to see the day that they have been dreaming about, and contributing their time, their work, and their funds towards. said Shirin Khosravi, President of IZA.







Inauguration: Arbab Rustam Guiv Dar-E-Mehr New York

Event Brochure





About Zoroastrianism

Zoroastrianism or the Zarathushti religion is considered to be the first monotheistic faith and one of the worlds oldest religions. The faith flourished through the rise and fall of many civilizations. For a thousand years (558BC to 652AD) it was the court religion of three Persian empires, however suffered a setback when Persia was conquered by Alexander in 330BC. After a revival, it reeled once again with the Muslim invasion of Persia in 652AD. At this time a few shiploads of devotees fled and landed on the western shores of India. Their descendents, the Parsis, still keep the faith alive in India. Today the total number of Zoroastrians in the world is about 200,000 with the majority being in India and Iran. Zoroastrians have also settled in USA, Canada, Pakistan, Europe, Africa and Australia. Wherever they have settled, Zoroastrians have well served the countries of their adoption.

The tri-state community has sought to maintain its Zarathushti identity and follow the teachings of the Prophet Zarathushtra, who preached the importance of Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds in the service of one God, over 3,000 years ago.

About ZAGNY

ZAGNY is a non-profit, cultural and educational organization, registered in New York. ZAGNY aspires to sustain Zoroastrian identity, preserve and share cultural traditions, and strives to create a sense of belonging for community members of the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. ZAGNY members are proud ambassadors of the Zoroastrian community at official events at the United Nations, at various interfaith events, and other social events like the Persian Day Parade in New York City, and the New York City Mayors Celebrations during Nowruz. Since its inception, ZAGNY has been a champion for worthy causes in India such as the B.D. Petit Parsee General Hospital, Parsi Ambulance Division, Udvada, Surat and Navsari Atash Behrams and has provided assistance to the priestly community - the Mobeds. ZAGNY is also an active participant in the local community through involvement with local Westchester and Rockland County schools in educating students about the tradition of Nowruz as well as supporting local causes such as with People to People of Rockland, Red Cross Blood Drives, Revlon Walk for Womens Cancers and the Bone Marrow registry.

About IZA

The Iranian Zoroastrian Association, originally functioning with ZAGNY, was formed in 1986. IZA aspires to meet the educational, cultural, and religious needs of the growing Iranian-American Zarathushti communities in the Northeastern region of the United States. Although IZA is based in the State of New York, its coverage also encompasses interested members and enthusiastic prospects from the States of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington D.C. As a non-profit, educational, religious and cultural organization, IZA conducts religious ceremonies, celebrates Persian holidays and rituals (Nowruz, Tirgan, Mehregan, Yalda, Sadeh, etc.), and organizes and/or sponsors cultural congregations and events. IZA strives to sustain and pass on the Zarathushti faith, preserve Persian cultural rituals, provide educational opportunities in the teachings of Zarathusht: Asha and harmony of the beings, the Persian language, and the culture and history of Iran.

About DMZT

The Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple is a Religious Corporation that holds title to the property. The Trustees of DMZT are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the premises. Both ZAGNY and IZA share the use of the premises.






















Pakistan Asks Tehran for Details About Alleged Indian Spy

04/03/16

By Noor Zahid, VOA

Pakistani authorities asked Iran to investigate a suspected Indian spy arrested last month in Baluchistan.

Pakistan's Interior Ministry sent a communique to the Iranian Embassy in Islamabad accusing Kulbhushan Jadhav of involvement in an Indian spy network and saying he was planning subversive activities against the recently launched multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. He had allegedly been living in Chabahar, an Iranian port on the Gulf of Oman, west of Pakistan, before illegally entering Baluchistan.





FILE - The Chabahar port in Iran is shown. Pakistani authorities accuse a former Indian Navy officer living in Chabahar of being an Indian spy



FILE - The Chabahar port in Iran is shown. Pakistani authorities accuse a former Indian Navy officer living in Chabahar of being an Indian spy

Reuters reported that Pakistan's government aired video footage this week of Jadhav saying he set up an office in Chabahar and later worked for the Indian spy agency. It was unclear whether he made the comments freely.

India has confirmed that Jadhav is a former Indian navy officer, but denied he is a spy and said he had taken early retirement from the military.

Iranian authorities have not publicly commented on the allegations, but the embassy in Islamabad released a statement criticizing Pakistani media outlets for their reporting of the case.

"During the past few days, some sections of the Pakistani media have spread content regarding the detention of an Indian agent and the matter related to it, which could have negative implications on the fraternal and friendly atmosphere of Iran and Pakistan," a statement by the Iranian Embassy said.

Pakistan, Iran pacts

News of the spy came after a two-day visit last month to Islamabad by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who signed a number of pacts to further economic ties with Pakistan.

Pakistani media reported that officials discussed India's alleged spying activities with Rouhani. Iranian media said the matter was not discussed.

Although ties between Iran and Pakistan have been relatively distant with brief periods of economic cooperation, Iran's recent expansion of economic and trade ties with India has drawn attention in Islamabad.

Analysts say that India's recent investments in the Chabahar port project are seen as a countereffort by India to sabotage the China-Pakistan economic corridor project, by providing an alternate route that would bypass Pakistan.

Analyst Saeed Nazir of the Islamabad-based Institute of Policy Studies says that India has invested around $150 million in Chabahar and wants to create an economic route to Afghanistan and Central Asian countries.

There has been little trade between India and landlocked Afghanistan, in part because Pakistan has been reluctant to allow goods to be transported between the two countries.
Actress among activists arrested for animal rights protest in Tehran

04/03/16 Source: Radio Zamaneh

Iranian actress Hediyeh Tehrani and 16 other environmental activists were briefly arrested for participating in a protest at Tehran's Laleh Park in support of animal rights. The Reporters Club reports that Hediyeh Tehrani and the activists were arrested on Friday April 1.









Meanwhile, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reports that according to an unidentified source, the detainees are supposed to appear in court on Sunday April 3 to face their charges.

The report adds that the officers checked the mobiles of the activists while they were being held in detention.

The protest was reportedly first supposed to have been held in Baharestan in front of Parliament but was switched to Laleh Park after a high concentration of police was observed in front of Parliament.

The police and plainclothes forces arrived at the park at around 3 PM, according to one protester, and dispersed the crowd after arresting a number of the participants.

"We were about 70 people and we were walking toward the park pool to take a picture with the hope that the new year will prove the government to be more active in upholding animal rights, but that's when the plainclothes people came and began attacking us and forced some people into a big white van and drove off," the source reports.



Hediyeh Tehrani





Hediyeh Tehrani issued a rallying call on her Instagram last Wednesday urging people to join her in Baharestan on April 1, the thirteenth day of the Iranian new year, when Iranians usually go out into parks and natural settings to mark the return of spring. Tehrani had called the gathering a chance to celebrate the day of nature.

Reports indicate the detainees were released on Friday after a few hours of questioning.
EU banks start re-engaging with Iran

04/03/16

Source: Press TV

European banks have reportedly started to re-engage with Iran after over two months from the removal of sanctions against the country. The Financial Times reported on Sunday that Belgium's KBC, Germany's DZ Bank and Austria's Erste Bank that they have started handling transactions on behalf of European clients doing business in Iran.





Iranian FM Zarif (in Oct 2015): "If you tolerate 2 more months, all issues will be addressed."

(cartoon by Salman Taheri, Iranian daily Shahrvand)





Nevertheless, bigger European banks remain on the sidelines, "scarred by a string of multibillion-dollar fines for earlier sanctions breaches in Iran", the FT added.

KBC, Belgium's biggest bank, has announced that it had "decided to support its well-established customers in its home markets" of Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia "in their genuine trade with Iran, respecting all EU and US sanctions".

"Such support is restricted to trade only and always subject to an in-depth screening of each transaction and all parties concerned," FT has quoted KBC as saying in a statement. "To this effect KBC indeed has developed correspondent relationships with several state-owned and private Iranian banks."

The daily has further quoted DZ Bank as announcing in a statement that it had started handling payments in euros via Iranian correspondent banks.

"We have started on-boarding Iranian banks in terms of trade finance co-operation, according to standard procedures. Going forward we might also seek to build correspondent banking relationships," the FT had quoted DZ Bank as saying in its statement.

Both banks, it added, have emphasized that they have "checked" every payment involving Iran for sanctions compliance.

Indications had been specifically growing lately that a legacy of hefty fines by the US on banks that are caught for violating Iran sanctions is deterring businesses from trading with Iran.

Reports said last month that corporate leaders have already become frustrated over this even though the sanctions removal against Iran would have naturally meant the doors are open for investments in Iran.

The failure specifically by European banks to play their due role in business with Iran has already provoked reactions from several EU leaders and business leaders.

British Prime Minister David Cameron in early March rebuked Barclays for hampering companies trying to export to Iran.

Also, Airbus which sealed an agreement with Iran in January to sell over 100 new planes to the country, has called on EU banks to dispel fears of doing business with Iran.
The FBI investigation into Hillary Clintons email practices while secretary of state is coming to a head. As they near the end of the investigation, the [FBI] agents are preparing to interview several of Clintons closest aides, and perhaps the candidate herself  a move Clinton campaign officials say she will comply with, Time reported Thursday.

These developments come as Mrs. Clinton faces increasing competition from Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Partys presidential nomination. Of six statewide contests from March 22-26, she won only Arizona. Her problem remains that she does best in red states that Republicans are heavily favored to win in November, while Sen. Sanders has done best in Democratic or swing states, such as Hawaii and Washington on March 26.

Although Sen. Sanders famously said in their Oct. 13 debate that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails, the controversy has been as persistent as her coughing during speeches. Thats because this really is a serious national security matter.

A long Washington Post article March 27 provided some details. Basically, as secretary of state from 2009-13, Mrs. Clinton disregarded longstanding policy requiring only government-secured devices be used for classified communications; she insisted on using her BlackBerry, tethered to a communications server kept in her home in New York. The Post quoted Donald Reid, the State Departments senior coordinator for security infrastructure, who said, The issue here is one of personal comfort, and that the secretary and her staff were dedicated addicts to their BlackBerrys.

Dozens of FBI personnel have been deployed to run down leads, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey, the Post reported. The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election in November.

The Post continued, From the earliest days, Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on accommodating the secretarys desire to use her private email account, documents and interviews show. Throughout, they paid insufficient attention to laws and regulations governing the handling of classified material and the preservation of government records.

Well know before too long whether the FBI, and the Justice Department under Attorney General Loretta Lynch, consider these security breaches worthy of prosecution. Meanwhile, the voters will have a chance to weigh in at Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Tuesday, and New York on April 19.
Some in the Republican Party have declared that abortion is a crime, and someone needs to be punished for it. I agree that abortion is undesirable and that the guilty party should suffer the consequences.

Ever since the human species developed, science tells us that (with one exception) a male is the cause of a female needing an abortion. Our criminal justice system is based on the principle that the perpetrator of a crime be punished and the victim receive all the benefits the law allows. Using DNA evidence, we can definitively establish which male assaulted the female and caused her grave injury. He should be punished to the maximum extent of the law, and the victim should have a say in deciding his punishment.

Politics should not be the issue. If a crime is committed, the perpetrator should be punished.

Bernie Waltzer

Riverside

Raises for other folks?

Now that the Democrats are handing out minimum-wage raises to millions of people, what about those of us who have worked all our lives and have no place to go to get a raise? They are also handing out raises to government employees, not to mention allowing them to retire a full generation before us (50 years versus 68 years).

The average Social Security SSI benefit converts to approximately $6.50 per hour, while those with absolutely no skills begin at $10 an hour today and eventually rising to $15. The SSI people did not even get a penny increase this year but had our Medicare premiums increased. When was the last time Social Security had a real increase? Maybe 20-30 years ago or more?

I do not begrudge these people a raise, I just would like the Democrats to help pay for me to move out of this state to somewhere I can afford.

James Clifford Preston

Perris
The Jurupa Unified School District, which provides schools in Jurupa Valley and a small portion of Eastvale, does not have a history of naming its schools after people.

With one exception: Ina Arbuckle Elementary School.

This school is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. It is a good time to remember the lady who spent nearly four decades teaching in the area  including one year at the school named after her.

Ina Arbuckles family in 1908 moved from Ohio to Jurupa, where it bought a 30-acre ranch on Mission Boulevard. Ina attended eighth grade at the Jurupa School, now known as West Riverside School.

At that time, elementary school  or grammar school as it was called  went to the eighth grade. The Jurupa School was housed in a three-room brick building.

Ina then attended high school in Riverside, the only high school in the area. She graduated in 1912. She went on to attend Los Angeles Normal School to receive her teaching credential. A normal school trained high school graduates to be teachers. Its purpose was to establish standards  or norms  for teaching; hence its name. Most such schools are now called teachers colleges.

Arbuckles first teaching job was at Perris Valleys little Antelope School in the 1916-1917 school year. It was a one-teacher school, and she had 18 pupils. She attended many Antelope-Menifee homecoming picnics over the years in honor of her year teaching in that area.

Arbuckle joined the staff of West Riverside in 1917. At that time, it had two teachers, one teacher-principal, one janitor and 90 students. With the exception of a year and a half after she married J.E. Arbuckle in 1920, she taught continuously in the West Riverside School District until she retired in 1957. By that time, the district had grown to more than 1,000 pupils.

When a new school was planned for the area in the mid-1950s, school district staff submitted a petition to name the school after the longtime teacher. Every staff member in the district, with the exception of the lady herself, signed the petition that recommended her name.

Ina Arbuckle, who also was active in many community organizations, was well-respected and was known for saying at the beginning of every school year, This is my best class yet.

When the school opened in 1956, Ina Arbuckle was on the teaching staff of the school named in her honor, having postponed her retirement to do so.

In an interview in 1955, she said, When one comes as close to retirement as I am, and only remembers the enjoyable and rewarding times of 36 years of teaching in the same school, it is indeed an honor to learn that the new school is to be named The Ina Arbuckle School.

She retired after teaching a year at her school. By then, she was teaching the grandchildren of some of her earlier students. She moved out of the area at that point, living at various times in Colton, Tustin and El Segundo. She died in 1985 at age 91.

If you have an idea for a future Back in the Day column about a local historic person, place or event, contact Steve Lech and Kim Jarrell Johnson at backinthedaype@gmail.com.
Riverside Repertory Theatres latest musical Man of La Mancha promises an imaginative, perhaps even transformative experience, according to guest director Bree Valle.

As artistic director of the CuestaCollege Theatre Program in San Luis Obispo where she lives, Valle recently won six national awards for the community schools production of Refried Elvis, an original musical satire of The Kings career.

This is the type of work I usually do, about creating our own realities, Valle said in a phone interview. Today, more than a half century since the original Broadway production of Man of La Mancha opened in 1965, Valle said its message of dreaming the impossible is just as relevant and possible. Were obligated to make a world a better place than we found it.

She is proud of her spot-on casting of 15 regional actors including John LaLonde as the dying knight Don Quixote and Rachel McLaughlan as his beloved Aldonza/Dulcinea. LaLonde of Riverside, is artistic director of the Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont, and McLaughlan of Los Angeles has performed all over the world. The actors are joined by a 10-member orchestra.

The story occurs in the 16th century during the Spanish Inquisition, when failed author-soldier-actor-tax collector Miguel de Cervantes and his servant land in a dungeon with all their possessions. The charge is that they have foreclosed on a monastery. When fellow prisoners stage a mock trial to determine the duos innocence or guilt, Cervantes offers a defense that he and his cellmates will dramatize, a play within a play.

Using makeup and costumes from his trunk, Cervantes transforms himself into Alonso Quijana, a knight-errant ready to battle injustices. Quijana renames himself Don Quixote de La Mancha whos on a quest with his squire, Sancho Panza.

In keeping with the original, minimalist format to better engage viewers, Valles staging is a climbable, 24-by-24-by-12-foot high steel cage. At one point, a stairway is lowered onto the stage. As part of their immersion into the show, the audience can sit on cushions around the prison cell.

Valle said the cast even limbered up for their roles, pushing past aches and pains to master of the shows strenuous movements.

Contact the writer: llucas@pressenterprise.comm 951-368-9559
It turns out if you can effectively control the medias first-hand access to asylum seekers in the way Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has, you can almost get away with saying anything you wish. Yeah, you can almost proclaim that for the first time in a decade, there are no asylum-seeking children in detention on Australian soil.

Almost.

Thanks to an immigration department leak to The Guardian, we now know this mornings announcement was kinda BS. More than that, it was calculated BS  while the official statement to News Corp celebrated bringing the nations children-in-onshore-detention count down to zero, its been revealed that release was allegedly a bureaucratic sleight of hand.

By that, the leaker means families at Sydneys Villawood Detention Centre who were in held detention were likely reclassified as being in community detention on Friday, without actually being released from the centre. If the leaker is to be believed, detainees were just given a flash-bang new title, Dutton got celebrate his milestone, and there was some good ol Labor slagging thrown in for good measure.

The Guardian points out that while some particular restrictions on those still detained may have been eased, theyre still very much within the confines of our onshore detention centres, whether its classified as community detention or not.

Needless to say, a few people are slightly miffed about the departments new nomenclature. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has come out swinging, saying this sort of deception is deeply unfortunate but unsurprising from this deceptive Minister for Immigration.

Elsewhere, head of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Kon Karapanagiotidis straight-up asked the Minister what the hell is going on.

.@PeterDutton_MP did you reclassify part of Villawood to claim all #kidsout? If so still 10 kids in detentionhttps://t.co/ULcRfMAYyA  Kon Karapanagiotidis (@Kon__K) April 3, 2016

However, according to Daily Mail Australia, the Human Rights Law Centre is currently on board with the original announcement, saying 267 of their clients have actually been released.

Well stay on top of this situation when  and if  new details come to light.

Source: The Guardian / Daily Mail Australia.

Photo: Anadolu Agency / Getty.
Mosque protest Dallas

This screen grab shows a Youtube video reportedly taken at a protest and counter protest outside a Nation of Islam mosque in Dallas, TX. on Saturday, April 2, 2016. The incident sparked a tense and armed showdown between groups of mostly white protesters and mostly black counter protesters, media report.

(Youtube)

A showdown between two armed groups at a Dallas mosque on Saturday ended peacefully, with a group of anti-mosque protesters retreating, but not before a tense and racially charged confrontation between the two, reports indicate.

The incident was reported outside a Nation of Islam Mosque in the city's southern end. It began with a mostly white group of anti-mosque protesters being confronted by a mostly black group of counter protesters, CBS' Dallas affiliate reports.

According to CBSDFW.COM:

Anti-Muslim demonstrators, dressed in fatigues and masks and most of them armed, were easily outnumbered approximately 10 to 1 by the mosque supporters, some of whom were also armed.

Mosque supporter Purlie Gates was very upset about the protest.

"These people came to our community under false pretenses. Could we do the same thing? Could we make some allegations about a group in Highland Park and arm a militia and say we are going to go over there with arms and protest? That would have been stopped at city hall. The police would have stopped that," said Gates.

Dozens of police officers stood in between the two groups and also perched on rooftops to ensure nothing more than verbal jabs were exchanged.

No violence or arrests were reported.

According to the Dallas Morning News, The Bureau of American Islamic Relations, or BAIR, was the group behind the anti-mosque protest.

The Morning News says the group, which claims to be opposed to what it calls radical Islamism, has protested multiple times outside the Islamic Center of Irving, TX. and had previously threatened a protest outside the Nation of Islam mosque where it was Saturday, but no one showed up.

The group accused the Nation of Islam mosque of "promoting violence against Americans openly and publicly," according to the Dallas Morning News.

BAIR is included in the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups in Texas.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Authorities say an elderly man was struck and killed by a shuttle bus in suburban Philadelphia.

Officials with the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority said the accident happened shortly after 1 p.m. Saturday in Glenside, Montgomery County.

Authorities said 93-year-old Edward Hill Sr. was trying to cross the street at the crosswalk as the SEPTA shuttle bus was turning left, and the left side of the bus hit him.

Officials said Hill became pinned under the bus and was pronounced dead at the scene. SEPTA said no passengers were aboard the bus.

Authorities said the bus driver stopped and was cooperating with the investigation.
UPDATE:

It's still unclear how or why an Amtrak train barreling along the busy Northeast Corridor came into contact with a backhoe working on an adjacent track.

The Sunday morning accident killed two and injured dozens, adding to the body count racked up on the same rail line during train crashes in the Philadelphia area.

The May 2015 Amtrak crash that killed eight and injured 200 happened along a sharp curve just north of the city.

A train derailed in that same area in 1943, killing 79 and injuring 117.

The Sunday crash happened south of Philadelphia in Chester, and a Delaware County church was quickly turned into a triage center, providing first aid to any of the 341 passengers and seven crew members who needed it.

"There was a big explosion. Some people were cut up," one passenger told Philadelphia news crews.

Another described a fire and "a bunch of dust."

Passengers from the derailed train were picked up by SEPTA buses and taken to Philadelphia.

Amtrak Vice President Stephen Gardner would not answer questions about the two deceased or the 35 people who were hospitalized.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating and will be providing all other information, he said.

A spokesman for the board was not immediately available Sunday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, information was being reported and changing quickly. At one point, service between Philadelphia and New York was suspended. A couple hours later it had been restored.

Service from Harrisburg to Philadelphia and New York was unaffected, but service from Philadelphia to Wilmington, Del., was still suspended Sunday afternoon.

"We're working to restore Amtrak service as soon as possible," Gardner said.

SEPTA also suspended its Newark regional rail service on Sunday.

The regional transportation authority was aware that a backhoe would be doing track maintenance in the Chester area, but Amtrak has not said why the backhoe was there or in the train's path.

It's also unclear if the high winds Sunday morning had anything to do with it. At times, gusts were 60 mph and knocked down trees, cable wires and power lines, causing more than 40,000 outages in the southeast region of the state.

Gov. Tom Wolf said the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and state police are coordinating with local authorities, Amtrak and rail safety officials.

"We are actively monitoring the Amtrak accident situation and are ready to provide assistance to officials on the ground," he said in a tweet.

"Frances and I send our thoughts and prayers to the families of those killed in this morning's Amtrak accident," Wolf said.

People who have questions about their friends and family on the train are asked to call a special Amtrak hotline at 1-800-523-9101.
By Charlie Gerow

For three quarters of a century Teflon has touched our lives in some way just about every day. The accidentally discovered substance has found its way from stove tops to outer space.

Republican strategist Charlie Gerow (PennLive file)

Its "no-stick" properties have also caused analogies to those in the public eye for whom little, especially negative stuff, seems to stick.

Ronald Reagan was the "Teflon President" according to his detractors, who mistakenly believed that his personal popularity was somehow disconnected from his policy initiatives.

John Gotti, the notorious boss of the New York Gambino crime family, was tagged "The Teflon Don," after several sets of charges against him "just wouldn't stick."

Recently the "Teflon Don" has been another New Yorker, Donald Trump himself.

Trump has made statements and done things throughout the course of the campaign that individually, much less collectively, would have undone any other candidate. Yet none of it has seemed to stick thus far.

In fact, some of his more outrageous remarks have served to strengthen rather than debilitate his candidacy.

With his worst week on the campaign trail now behind him and a pivotal primary in Wisconsin looming, the pundits and prognosticators are watching to see whether any of the Teflon has worn off. There are some signs that it has.

Trump's statement this week that he believes there should be punitive actions taken against women who have abortions should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned is at the heart of his emerging problem. Forget about the pro-choice reaction.

It was the reaction of ardent pro-life advocates that should concern the Trump campaign. They were aghast at his bellicose pronouncement.

It was a revealing moment for Trump. In a poker room they'd say it was a "tell." He betrayed his true lack of understanding of the pro-life position and demonstrated to many that he was merely pandering, as an increasing number of critics have suggested.

The fact that not long ago he was proclaiming himself as solidly pro-choice may not stick anywhere near as much as his over-the-top reach to suggest how far he's come in his conversion.

The problem for Trump is that it got people asking questions about him. It made some of his supporters begin to take another look. It caused some his staunchest defenders to criticize him.

That's not exactly where you want to be on the eve of the Wisconsin Primary, the bridge from Super Tuesday's One and Two to the "Colonial Primaries," which will be held within the next three weeks.

Four years ago Wisconsin celebrated its Golden Anniversary of electing delegates in open primaries -- a system it pioneered. Mitt Romney's 7-point victory there essentially ended Rick Santorum's campaign and all but locked up the nomination.

Wisconsin won't play that role this year, but it will be closely watched and the momentum for or against Trump that the results produce will be a major factor in the rest of the race.

In the wake of Trump's week of charges and counter charges, both political and legal, along with his most recent gaffes, polls show he has slid into second place by a double-digit margin.

Especially bothersome for the Trump campaign is the fact that Badger State women favor other candidates by nearly a two-to-one margin.

Ted Cruz, who now leads the Wisconsin polls, this past week got the endorsement of the state's popular governor, Scott Walker, himself a previous candidate for president.

The organizational might that the Walker support brings, added to the state legislators lining up behind him, should give Cruz a strong leg up.

Meanwhile, John Kasich has garnered the support of former governor Tommy Thompson.

When Donald Trump finished behind both Ted Cruz and John Kasich in Utah last week, eyebrows raised, looking to see if the Teflon might, just might, be beginning to peel away.

The debacles of the last week that had both Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich scratching their collective heads on national television didn't quell that speculation.

Wisconsin now looms as a once-again pivotal-role player. If Trump wins in Wisconsin he is back on track for a while and can use the momentum to bolster his strategy of "inevitability."

However, if the Teflon is indeed more than simply scratched up, it would signal the beginning of a very different phase of the campaign.

Should Ted Cruz beat Trump by a sizeable margin, getting close to or exceeding the 10-point edge he now holds, it will be a serious blow to the Trump effort and a major shot in the arm to Cruz.

If Kasich is able to get close to Trump or even nip at his heels, it would suggest real vulnerability on Trump's part.

Pennsylvania is right down the road. Polls out this week already show John Kasich neck and neck with the Teflon Donald here.

If more sticks to Trump between now and April 26, there would be a new dynamic to the race for the Republican nomination.
Muneer al Zahabi and his son Sami are shown in a handout photo. For nearly three years, his family had been in Jordan, among over half a million Syrians there crammed into apartments and camps. It was safer than sleeping in the bathtub in their house in Syria for protection from missiles, but they wanted out. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO
Lucy DeCoutere leaves the Toronto courthouse following the reading of the verdict in the Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial on Thursday, March 24, 2016. DeCoutere says she has resigned from the "Trailer Park Boys" just hours after one of its principal actors denied assaulting a woman in the U.S. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Quebec Finance Minister Carlos Leitao delivers a speech, March 21, 2016 in Montreal. A little-publicized bill that is making its way through Quebec's legislative process has digital-law experts and others worried that the concept of a free and open Internet is being threatened in the province. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson


Lagniappe Rory Cellan-Jones: Are electric cars

ready to go on mainstream? Tesla's Model 3 will determine the company's fortunes

Back in January, I visited the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, California, to interview the firm's founder and chief executive, Elon Musk. The design team were welcoming, but nervous about what we filmed - and in the background, as we sat down for the interview, were a number of cars draped in black sheets. One key reason for the secrecy was that Tesla was just a couple of months from unveiling the product on which its entire future now depends. Perhaps the Model 3 was under one of those sheets. The importance of a car that would reach a wider public was underlined in our interview. Elon Musk explains why Tesla had to make a more affordable car

"Unless there's an affordable car we will only have a small impact on the world," Mr Musk told me. "We need to make a car that most people can afford in order to have a substantial impact. If we could have made an affordable car straight off the bat we definitely would have, it's just that it takes time to refine the technology." But building a car that most people can afford is not just about fulfilling Mr Musk's mission to create a more sustainable form of transport. The Model S and Model X have won rave reviews and are credited with transforming attitudes in the motor industry - and amongst drivers - to electric vehicles. But all the while, Tesla has stacked up huge losses. While its sales nearly doubled in 2015, its losses nearly tripled to $889m (618m).

Tesla sold more than 50,000 Model S cars in 2015,

making it the year's best selling electric vehicle model They may continue to rise as the company gears up for the Model 3, which involves building one of the world's biggest buildings, the Gigafactory, and ramping up production tenfold. But what Tesla and its investors are betting on is that the car will sell in such numbers that the company can drive forward into the sunlit uplands, where revenues start leaping ahead of costs. The eager customers who have been queuing up outside Tesla showrooms to pre-order the car are a good sign, though early excitement may fade if the company is as slow in delivering the Model 3 as it has been with previous models. The other big question is whether there really is a mass market for electric cars, and if so whether Tesla is the company that will benefit. Two issues are holding back mass adoption of electric driving: cost and charging infrastructure. Potential buyers will want to be confident that finding a charging point won't be a problem And they are linked. Wealthy owners of the current Tesla models are very likely to have a garage or drive where they can plug in to charge overnight. The motor industry analyst Jay Nagley told me the Model 3 could be a tipping point for electric vehicles, and said Tesla had done the whole industry a favour. "They've massively improved the image and made people feel they are the future," said the managing director of the Redspy consultancy. But he thinks progress will now be steady rather than spectacular. "The cost of batteries is coming down and the range is going up, but battery management systems - the technology around them - won't get much cheaper," he noted. "And charging in the big cities is still a pain." Others are also targeting the electric vehicle mass market. In the US, the Chevrolet Bolt - about the same price as Tesla's new car - is already in production and should be delivered by the end of this year, 12 months before the Model 3. General Motor's Chevrolet Bolt should have a year's lead on the Model 3 in the US In the UK, we have a quarter of Europe's electric vehicle production and a fifth of all sales. The production is mostly the Nissan Leaf, made in Sunderland - though at around 25,000 for a car with a range of around 100 miles (161km) it may begin to look expensive when the Tesla arrives. What Tesla has achieved is already remarkable, forcing the likes of BMW, Porsche and GM to move their electric vehicle efforts from sideshows into the mainstream. But now we will find out whether the pioneer can end up as the dominant carmaker of the electric age - or merely a footnote in its history. Rory Cellan-Jones , BBC Technology correspondent. Petroleumworld does not necessarily share these views. Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published by BBC News , on April 1, 2016. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers. http://www.bbc.com All comments posted and published on Petroleumworld, do not reflect either for or against the opinion expressed in the comment as an endorsement of Petroleumworld. All comments expressed are private comments and do not necessary reflect the view of this website. All comments are posted and published without liability to Petroleumworld. Use Notice:This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues of environmental and humanitarian significance. We believe 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. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.



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Seven new medicines - including the first gene therapy for patients with an ultra-rare immune disorder - have been endorsed by regulatory advisors for approval in Europe.

The European Medicines Agencys Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) has recommended GlaxoSmithKlines orphan-designated Strimvelis for the treatment of patients with adenosine-deaminase-deficient severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID), who have no matching donor for a stem cell transplant.

Children born with this disorder - caused by a faulty gene inherited from both parents that stops the production of adenosine deaminase, an enzyme that a toxic substance called deoxyadenosine - have virtually no immunity to fight off everyday bacterial, fungal or viral infections.

Strimvelis was studied in a pivotal clinical trial involving 12 patients, all of which are still alive, with an average follow-up period of seven years. There is currently no authorised medicine to treat ADA-SCID in the EU.

Elsewhere, the CHMP issued a conditional marketing authorisation for Janssen-Cilags Darzalex (daratumumab) for the treatment of relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma. The monoclonal antibody has an orphan designation and was reviewed under EMAs accelerated assessment scheme.

Conditional approval allows the CHMP to recommend a medicine for marketing authorisation in the interest of public health where the benefit of its immediate availability to patients outweighs the risk inherent in the fact that additional data are still required.

In this case, the decision was based on two studies; in one, tumours shrank or could no longer be seen in 29 percent of patients taking the drug over an average of 7.4 months; and in the second, tumours shrank or could no longer be seen in 36 percent.

Janssen must provide results from two Phase III studies of Darzalex used in combination with standard treatments for the disease (lenalidomide/dexamethasone and bortezomib/dexamethasone) for regulators to consider a full approval.

Positive recommendations were also handed down for: Amicus Therapeutics Galafold (migalastat) for the treatment of Fabry diseaser; AstraZeneca's Pandemic influenza vaccine H5N1 MedImmune, indicated for the prevention of flu and intended for pandemic preparedness; Samsung Bioepis biosimilar monoclonal antibody Flixabi (infliximab), for rheumatoid arthritis, adult and paediatric Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, paediatric ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis; Novartis Neparvis (sacubitril/valsartan), for heart failure with reduced ejection fraction; and Accord Healthcares generic Palonosetron Accord (palonosetron), for the prevention of nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy.
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Introduction

Mama Rumi

Camino Del Rey

Canari trails - I-Line

La Paz Downhill

Where to Stay

Others parts

Compared to its other neighbours such as Peru and Bolivia, Ecuador is not as well known for mountain biking. Our outsiders viewpoint is that this could be due to a variety of reasons, lack of a critical mass of home-grown bikers; or the fact that the Galapagos is Ecuadors main attraction. There certainly is no lack of trails and certainly no lack of diversity in terrain and culture. Ecuador is a fascinating country in and of itself and the Ecuadorians are fantastic people and very welcoming to tourists. Our visit here showed us the possibilities and no doubt more people will come for the biking; it's just too good to be under the radar for this long. This is especially so when there are people like Mateo of Ride Ecuador who can provide very professional turnkey bike guiding services.A note on the weather, Ecuador is bisected by the Equator so the days are consistently around 12 hours long. The weather is fairly uniform other than a marked rainy and dry season. There are cooler temperatures in the rainy season (Oct/Nov in the Highlands; April to July in the Orient). Our tour was right between the start of the dry and rainy seasons and we were fortunate. During our visit rain was always forecasted but rarely came. When it fell it did not last long. What we found was that the country is so mountainous that weather forecasts were basically useless except for the wildest of guesses. We usually expected afternoon to evening fog due to the Nieblina (fog creeping up from valley floor towards the highlands) but we could always expect mornings to generally be better weather.Our next ride is an Ecuadorian classic and perhaps one of the most famous trails in the country. Mama Rumi (Mother Rock in Quecha) is a centuries-old Inca trail descending from 3023m above San Miguel de Bolivar in Ecuador to 1130m to Telimbela. Its 12km length and 1920m descent was lost for many years as the jungle took it back until Mauricio Gaibors grandfather re-discovered it in the mid-20th century. Now used primarily for downhill mountain biking, Mauricios granddad used it as smuggling route for alcohol. Brewers would distill in the lowlands in Telimbela and hike it all the way to more populated highlands starting at 9pm in the evening and finishing in the wee hours of the morning to evade authorities.Mauricio Gaibor, friends and local volunteers re-opened the trail after countless hours of work fixing holes and clearing back dense cloud forest jungle. Mauricio now holds the Downhill Mama Rumi race here annually attracting 284 participants in the 2015 edition. Over 600 people come to San Miguel and Telimbela over the race weekend and over 150 riders (international and Ecuadorians) come to the region over the year. Particularly for 102 person Telimbela, that is a huge tourism economic boost and has resulted in real quality of life changes. Only this year due in large part to the races media attention, the government is installing water pipes giving all the people in the valley clean water for the first time in their lives. Not only is mountain biking serious business, but it can change lives for the better.You can support Mauricio; the trail builder/worker, the community and the trail by going to local businesses. Mauricios Panchito Comida Rapida food truck is at San Miguels main square Friday and Sat evenings and at regional festivals. You can also try his locally brewed liquor  Lagrima del Inca. Thanks to Mauricio, Mateo of Ride Ecuador for educating us and to mountain biking - not just serious business but also making life better for everyone. Viva Ecuador! Viva Mama Rumi!Our next ride is a half day quickie that is perfect for when you have a long day to travel. Camino del Rey (Road of the Kings) is another rediscovered Inca trail, in the mountains above San Jose del Chimbo close to the Mama Rumi area. This was a perfect half day short 7.6km ride ending in the lower valleys, Starting at 3228m elevation the trail ends at 2217m at San Pablo and was another trading and transport route used by Incas; then rediscovered and cleared by hand and machete by its Castillon Marcelo Vargas. Marcelo is yet another dedicated local who doesnt even mountain bike but welcomes bike traffic on the trail. Marcelo also rides his horses and hikes on this trail so please dont run him over!On Camino del Rey, there are plenty of culunco (big ground ruts formed by the passage of years of feet and jungle rains). Culuncos are something that will be familiar to South American trail users and add dramatically to the technical nature of the singletrack. In this case, Camino Del Reys culuncos were awesome natural berms proving not only that the Incans ride bikes downhill, I suspect they liked dual slalom. One other word of caution, the soil type in this area is of the nature that if it's wet it becomes death-slippery. Be warned!Following our ride, we drove through Canar and Chimborazo province to overnight close to Ingapirca, the site of some well-preserved Incan ruins.Marcelo by the trail head sign. He does a lot of work on this trail and is its Castillon.More culuncos.Serious natural berms going on in this section.The trail is quite the brake burner.Our end of day visit to the Ingapirca Incan ruins.Our trailforks ridelog is here. In Chimborazo and Canar province, the Canari people were fierce fighters resisting the Incans for a great length of time. Their network of trails and roads above the Panamerican towns of Chunchi, Guasanto and Alausi gives some hint of their determination and fortitude. On our ride our guide, Andres 'Soto' Sotomayor is a DH racer and local in Cuenca who has been exploring and pioneering routes in the area for years. Soto and Mateo are friends (Ecuadors bike community is small, tight and everyone knows everyone and helps everyone else out) and share knowledge. Soto is also a somewhat competent rider having raced on the World DH circuit in the early 2000s. Soto has invested lots of time in building relationships with the communities, ensuring that bikers respect local trails and traditions and the land. We were fortunate to have been among the first few riders to have done the 20km I-Line route.The route started at 3613m at Pacchamama Bajo, crossed to Shusilcon and then descended to Nizag before ending at Pistishi at 1884m (terminus of the Nariz del Diablo trainride , descending a total of 1882m. Whats amazing is the link up of trails to minimize the amount of roads, maximze the amount of singletrack and yet achieve stupendous mind blowing views. This is among the most aesthetic lines that weve had the privilege of riding  ever.Trail route descriptions have been left out on Soto's advice pending the ok of local communities for bikers to use the trails. For the present please contact Mateo of Ride Ecuador for route information.We met Andres 'Soto' Sotomayor when he showed us around the I-Line link up of Canari trails. He has also been very active in the Cuenca area riding bikes downhill on the La Paz downhill trail for fifteen years. Through that time, hes tirelessly worked with the community and gained their trust so much so that the locals have helped with the La Paz race which is now in its 10th year. Starting from the caserio/mountain village of Portetillos the track descends 1700+ m to the small village of Sulupali Grande in the Yunguilla.Although we were on lighter all-mountain type bikes one never passes up the opportunity and privilege of riding a trail with the trail builder. Especially a trail like this where someone has put heart and soul into the route, the land, the track and its character. This proved to be a fun, technical, fast track. Something that a downhill mountain biker would route and build. Although most sections were fine on the lighter bikes there was the odd section demanding travel and aggressive tires. Govern your speed accordingly and dont get too entranced by views  youll need to concentrate in many spots!A word on this track - It's steep, loose and fast. More importantly, access has been won by careful and polite cooperation with local communities. Respect the fences. Don't chase cows. Don't trespass and respect people's land. A higher elevation of track has already been lost due to some rider's poor etiquette - it would be a shame to lose more. For more information on how to get to this track contact Mateo via Ride Ecuador or Soto via the La Paz downhill site.We stayed at the Casa Bella Vista , the homestead of Marcelo Vargas up on the hills above San Miguel. It has a grand view of the valley and has a western theme. It's rustic comfortable accommodations that was perfectly suited for biking. Of note, Marcelo.has opened trails around the area so by supporting him you also support local trail work. Accommodations at Bella Vista can be arranged by contacting Mateo of Ride Ecuador who has his guests stay there.We elected to stay close to the town of El Tambo on the Panamerican close to the Ingapirca Incan ruins at the Posada Ingapirca . This is an extensively renovated old homestead with great views, comfortable well-appointed rooms and good food.In Cuenca we stayed for two nights at the Hotel Victoria , a family-owned character luxurious hotel (owned by the same family which runs the Posada Ingapirca). We regretted not staying for longer. Hotel Victoria is in the heart of the old town and is right next to the river running through Cuenca. We had breakfast at the hotel and dinner. Its a fantastic location being walk-to-everywhere with superior service, comfort and ambience.More pictures, maps and details on Sharon and Lee's site are below: Camino del Inca - the ILine
During an interview on Meet The Press, Hillary Clinton demonstrated why Republicans fear her by taking out Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in a single swoop.

Transcript via Meet The Press:

CHUCK TODD:

Secretary Clinton, is that an ad, have you moved on? Are we going to view this ad as the first one of the general election? Its pretty clear youre targeting Donald Trump.

HILLARY CLINTON:

Well, certainly I havent moved on. I know that I still have work to do to win the nomination, and Im going to keep reaching out to every voter, everywhere in these remaining contests. But I also think its important to draw some pretty clear lines between what I think most Americans, and certainly what I know most New Yorkers believe about who we are as a people, what the values of our country are, against some of what were hearing from the other side.

And, you know, its both Donald Trump, as we are well aware, but also Ted Cruz. I know he made a critical comment about New York values some months back. So I want to really hold up the importance of New York and what we stand for. And, you know, we are a state that represents the diversity of America, the role that immigrants have played over the centuries in building our nation. And the Statue of Liberty stands in the harbor. So I wanted to start out with a very clear message about our values and

CHUCK TODD:

Well, in and

HILLARY CLINTON:

why I think its important we stand up for them.

CHUCK TODD:

In that ad, though, you do include footage, that awful footage, of a Trump supporter coldcocking, essentially, a protester at his rally. Why amplify that image?

HILLARY CLINTON:

Because I was horrified by it, Chuck, and I think most Americans were horrified by it. When you, as Ive said before about Donald Trumps appearances, his rhetoric, his demagoguery, when you incite violence, you are acting like a political arsonist.

And I want people to understand theres a very different way of working towards our common ground that we have to seek and find in order to move our country forward. We may have differences, of course we do. But we dont condone violence. We dont say well pay the legal fees of people who punch other Americans, who are protesting, attending an event. That is just not appropriate behavior when youre running for president.
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Guys, I know youre all wtf with Donald Trumps punishing women statement, because duh, Republicans know better than to say that stuff so bluntly even though they are already punishing women for alleged abortions all over the country, but his ex-wife Ivana Trump informed The New York Post that Donald loves women so please, give it a rest. Also, he may or may not be a feminist, depending on the minute you ask.

I hope you all feel duly shamed now.

Lets start off with the fact that Ivana is a self-proclaimed conservative, as noted by the Post writer Dana Schuster. Now lets move along to the rape accusation Ivana made against her ex-husband during their divorce. The one she hurriedly took back when the Daily Beast took her at her word. That was just lawyer stuff for negotiating, because The Donald knows how to deal, she explained to the Post. So forget the hair pulling and the nasty accusations about scalping while raping his wife. The Donald loves women. He loves them so much.

Ivana explained to Schuster that Donald has no problem with women! He loves women! He loves women so much as sexual objects, for example, that this led to the end of their marriage! So put away your fears that The Donald doesnt want to use you for sex ladies. He totes does:

I dont think hes feminist, Ivana says upon her return when asked of Donalds stance. He loves women. But not a feminist. (Ivanas reps called The Post two days after the interview to clarify that Donald was a feminist. Then they called to say he wasnt. An hour later, they said he was.) It was that love of women that led to the couples divorce. Ivana discovered that her husband was cheating on her with former beauty queen Marla Maples.

Being admired/used as a sex object is just like being equal politically, socially and economically, amirite?

Ivana also sought to tamp down the accusations of bigotry lobbed at her ex-husband. She has nothing against Mexicans, because someone has to clean up after us. No, really. She said that. Also she, who is an immigrant, doesnt think other female immigrants should be able to come here and just give birth because then she is stuck paying for their whole family. Using immigrant to mean Mexican probably has something to do this blind spot.

But who, if not immigrants, is going to vacuum our living rooms, I ask you?

As long as you come here legally and get a proper job . . . we need immigrants. Whos going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans dont like to do that.

So see, The Donald and Ivana love immigrants just as much as they love women. Someone has to do the work/take the punishment.

Ivana seems to have the same vague memory problems as her ex-husband. She recalls that President Reagan, or somebody brought her then husband a letter and told him to run for president. Surely if President Reagan had indeed done this, it would be a memory?

Reagan or somebody brought him a letter and said, You should run for president, Ivana told the Post while explaining that The Donald had always wanted to run for president, he just got waylaid by that Marla Maples affair scandal that ended her marriage. Oh, and by the way, she totes blames Marla for that and cant forgive her, but she is a cheerleader for The Donald, the man who broke the vows he took, unlike Marla. But why not blame the woman for the sins of the man? Its how they do things in The Donald world.

Ivana does know some things for sure though, and one of them is that while Donald can make decisions, President Obama cant. Trump will have advisers, you see? Unlike, say Obama. Thus, she told the Post, Obama cannot make a decision if his life depends on it. Its ridiculous.

Oh, yes, the Fox fictional President Obama is what is ridiculous around here. Totally. Not the guy telling America he wants to punish women for abortions or his ex-wife showing exactly why she is not a cheerleader for women since she only blames Marla Maples for her divorce and not her husband  only reinforcing The Donalds entitlement to punish women for the sins of all.

Thus we conclude this episode of the conservative mantra: I got mine, now screw you! With the cherry of using women for sex is the exact same as loving them so dont even worry about that punish women for an abortion comment that the Donald took back and then affirmed and then took back and then reaffirmed and then doubled down on.

By punish, you see, you have to remember that someone has to clean up after us. Capiche?
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Some of the medias pro-Trump bias was on full display as Bernie Sanders was attacked during an interview on ABCs This Week for telling the truth about Donald Trumps dangerous ideas.

Video:



ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

Transcript via ABCs This Week:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SANDERS: Some of you know Im Jewish. My dad came  my father came to this country at the age of 17 from Poland. He came over; other people in his family did not come over. Most people died. Children died. Relatives of my father. So that is in my heart to see what a lunatic can do by stirring up racial hatred. And were not going to allow that to take place in this country. (END VIDEO CLIP) STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Bernie Sanders in Milwaukee last night. He joins us live this morning. Senator Sanders, thanks for joining us this morning. Weve talked to you many times about Donald Trump. Youve called him a liar, youve called him a nutcase. Now comparing him to Hitler? SANDERS: Oh no, no, theres nothing to do  no, thats not right. What I talked about there was a Muslim woman there next to me, and she is telling me that, what is true, is that people in the Muslim community are very fearful now. She was describing a kid who now locks the door at night. And what I was saying is Im going to do everything that I can to kind of stop those Islamophobic attacks so that kids in this country who happen to be Muslim are afraid. No, I did not compare Trump to Hitler. But I will do everything that I can to stop this type of hatred and hate talk that we are hearing.

Of course, Sanders wasnt comparing Trump to Hitler. What he was doing was highlighting the fact that the kind of deport all the Mexicans and ban the Muslims rhetoric would have on Americans if the Republican frontrunner were ever in a position to put his ideas into action. Sen. Sanders did call Trump a lunatic, which judging from the polling, is a characterization that a large number of Americans would agree with.

What Stephanopoulos did was a perfect example of how the media elevates Trumps ramblings to the height of policy and then attacks anyone who points out that Donald Trump might very well be crazy.

Donald Trump is running a campaign of racism, sexism, and bigotry, yet, it was Bernie Sanders who was attacked for suggesting that the kind of authoritarian ideas that Trump was floating are dangerous to the country. The media needs to stop calling Trumps ideas policies. Donald Trump doesnt propose policies. He has never once explained in detail how he would build his wall, send undocumented people back to Mexico, or ban all Muslims. Trump spews buzz words and dog whistles that appeal to a segment of the far right. Donald Trump doesnt do policy.

Many people have compared to Trump to Hitler, but Bernie Sanders did not. Both Democratic presidential candidates have been dealing with the unlevel pro-Trump media playing field all through the presidential campaign, but attacking Bernie Sanders for pointing out how Trumps bigotry could impact Muslim-Americans was a new low for the corporate media.
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You cant have missed the multi-million dollar, decades-long Republican campaign to smear Hillary Rodham Clinton as untrustworthy. Its snared quite a few progressives as well, since it offers an easy opportunity to attack Clinton.

They say former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy, not transparent, that she will end up in jail for doing with her emails what most of the earlier 2016 Republican hopefuls had done with theirs.

In fact if the issue is an alleged security risk, Sarah Palin used a Yahoo server to conduct business as the Governor of Alaska, even during the 2008 campaign when she was the Republican VP nominee. That account was hacked, and we were told that the hacker was the bad person. No one suggested Palin go to jail. Every Republican who has used a public email or run their own server or system has done the same thing (and that list is too long to enumerate here).

But you cant get online without seeing an ad (or paid commenters) asking if Hillary Clinton should go to jail for this. The point of this smear is not that anyone thinks Clinton will actually go to jail, its to add to the publics vague perception of Hillary Clinton as untrustworthy. Its another way to reinforce this character attack, which is all Republicans have against a woman who has repeatedly won most admired politician.

Yet, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate in the 2016 race to put her full tax returns and medical records online. These are long and detailed reports. There are separate reports for the speech income. There is a doctors report saying she is fit to be president.

Republican front-runner Donald Trump claimed falsely that he cant release his because hes being audited. But the IRS said there is nothing stopping anyone from sharing their own tax information. Yet Trumps followers will tell you that Hillary Clinton is going to jail.

Ted Cruz has released his online but they are not complete. Cruz only released two pages from each year. Cruz documents, while better than none, leave a lot out. Politico pointed out that Cruz documents dont reveal many details like which tax breaks he claimed or how much he gave to charity.

Governor John Kasich also only released summary reports of his tax returns, which he did in an effort to pressure Donald Trump to release his. Prior to this, Kasich had only allowed reporters to review a copy of his 2008 tax return, though he didnt permit them to make copies at the time.

Senator Bernie Sanders has not released his full tax documents yet, which became an issue today on CNN:

Sanders: You know, we are not  you know, to be very honest with you, you know who does our tax returns? My wife does our tax returns. We have been a little bit busy lately. So, we will get out as much information as we can. There aint going to be very much exciting in that. I get a salary from the United States Senate. You know, theres not going to be anything new in it that there hasnt  people havent seen for the last many years, but we will get it out as soon as we can. Tapper: But nobody  nobody has seen them at all, I guess, is the point. And whether or not theres anything exciting in them Sanders: No, that is not true. That is  that is not true. Of course, we have released them in the past. Our financial situation, to the best of my knowledge, has not changed very much, but we will get out all of that information as soon as we can.

Although Sanders has previously reported less than $750,000 in assets, so its not as if he has a ton of hidden income that would be problematic for the voters, although he should release his info. He is, based on earlier reports, easily the closest to the financial situation of ordinary Americans of all of the candidates.

As senators, both Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz have to file disclosure forms.

Hillary Clinton has had all of her information vetted and public for so long, she knew the drill. She came prepared. People can attack her for what is in the documents, but they cant honestly claim shes not being transparent. The reason she is being attacked is partly because she is being transparent. But its also because shes the front-runner.

Republicans are not the only people attacking Clintons character based on nothing much but feelings and rumors. Its sad to see Democrats fall for decades of dirt thrown at the Clintons. Democrats have two good candidates this season. The differences between the two are procedural more than ideological.

But the truth is most Americans do not know candidates personally. The important thing is for a candidate to be a person who stands for what they say they stand for and to let the public know who they are and what they care about. A prepared candidate will know they have to release their tax returns and that the public deserves to see them.

Hillary Clinton is, by a mere one percentage point, the most honest of the 2016 presidential candidates according to fact checkers, followed by Bernie Sanders and John Kasich, who are tied. Now she has the most transparent tax returns and medical release. This does matter, because it makes it very difficult to claim shes not transparent or trustworthy without being disingenuous, especially if a candidate hasnt been as transparent as she has been.
There have been a lot of stories in recent days, typically second-hand from supposed insiders, that Trump ran for president mostly as a way of elevating his brand, hoping for a second-place finish perhaps to increase his political clout, but never thinking he actually might win this thing. John Fund quotes a former staffer to this effect:

Stephanie Cegielski . . . this week wrote an impassioned article describing how Trumps own staff intended for him only to place second in the primaries and have a major impact on the GOP race: I dont think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I dont even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all. He certainly was never prepared or equipped to go all the way to the White House, but his ego has now taken over the drivers seat, and nothing else matters. Cegielskis views are confirmed by Cheri Jacobus, a GOP strategist who had meetings with Trumps campaign about becoming its communications director. I believe Trump senses he is in over his head and doesnt really want the nomination, she told me. He wanted to help his brand and have fun, but not to be savaged by the Clintons if hes the candidate. He wouldnt mind falling short of a delegate majority, losing the nomination, and then playing angry celebrity victim in the coming years.

Perhaps this is accurate, but there is plenty of contrary evidence that Trump was serious about this run for quite a long time and is in it to win it. And if Trump was suddenly trying to throw the race with a string of blunders, how could you tell?

But I wonder whether, if Trump is crushed in Wisconsin next Tuesday, he might drop out of the race, posturing like Ross Perot did in the summer of 1992 when he (temporarily) withdrew from the race while almost endorsing Bill Clinton with the remark that the Democratic Party seemed at last to have reformed itself. Trump could claim, with some justification, that his candidacy has awakened the Republican Party, and he could pose as some kind of elder statesman, not wanting to fracture the party in Cleveland, etc.

I doubt it. But if Trump did drop out suddenly, it would probably make things worse for Republicans heading into the Cleveland convention. I wonder if more than one candidate, like Rubio, might jump back in. (Rubio right now has more pledged delegates than Kasich.) What would become of Trumps delegates? I happen to know that out here in California, the party leadership is trying to find delegates for the June primary who havent made public criticisms of Trump but who could be Trump delegates in name only, that is, willing to abandon Trump and play ball with power brokers in Cleveland if the contest goes beyond a first ballot.

Maybe Trump is a blessing in disguise for the disruptions hes brought to the GOP. This thought reminds me of Churchills reply to his wife Clementine when she said perhaps his surprise upset election defeat was a blessing in disguise. If its a blessing, he said, it is certainly very well disguised. Or maybe you like this version of the idea:
Barbara Hollingsworth of CNS News reports that Senator Richard Shelby has sent a letter to Loretta Lynch criticizing the Obama administration for commuting the sentences of 33 criminals convicted of firearm-related offenses. By my count, the President has commuted the sentences of over 200 of these non-violent federal inmates, of which 33 were convicted of firearm-related offenses, Shelby wrote. He also pointed to the hypocrisy of commuting the sentences of firearms offenders while pushing for gun control.

As we noted here, Obamas latest set of commutations puts a number of gun offenders back on the streets. Indeed, according to Shelby, 12 of the 61 recipients of Obamas leniency were convicted of one, if not more, firearm-related offenses. These include:

Seven convictions of possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime; four convictions of possession of a firearm by a felon; and two convictions of use of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking offense.

At a hearing in January of this year, Shelby quizzed Lynch about this issue. As Shelby reminds Lynch:

I. . .asked you how the President can say he is committed to using every tool at the Administrations disposal to reduce gun violence when his own Administration is not even following through with the sentences of criminals with firearm-related convictions. At the time, you said that you were not aware of the particular sentence commutations involving firearm-related convictions, but that you would look into these cases. We have yet to hear back from you or the Department [of Justice] about these or any other questions from the hearing, which were due at the end of February.

Evidently, Lynch has no good answer to the question Shelby posed.

In his letter, Shelby said that his subcommittee (on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies) will not approve any increased funding for the Justice Departments Office of the Pardon Attorney, which screens inmates applications for clemency before they are submitted to the president. He explained:

I have no confidence in the ability of the Office of the Pardon Attorney to properly screen requests for executive clemency or to effectively convey any recommendations throughout the Administration. I want to do everything I can to keep our communities safer, and that includes keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, the mentally ill, and violent offenders. Right now, I am unsure if the Administration shares this goal.

I suspect that Team Obama does share the goal in theory, but views it as less important than its leniency for criminals project.
Dianne Feinstein came up empty when asked by the San Francisco Chronicle what Hillary Clinton accomplished during her time in the Senate. Feinstein couldnt recall any bills [Clinton] authored. However, she noted that there are things outside of bills that you can do.

There are, indeed. A reader directs my attention to three such things Clinton did in the Senate.

First, she voted to authorize invasion of Iraq. Later, she said that her vote on this, the most momentous issue to come before her in the Senate, was a mistake.

Second, she opposed the successful Iraq surge. According to Robert Gates, Clinton later said she voted against the surge for a political reason  namely, that she was going to face Barack Obama, an opponent of the surge, in the Iowa caucuses.

Third, when General Petraeus testified on the progress being made against al Qaeda in Iraq thanks to the surge, Clinton told him that his progress report required a willing suspension of disbelief. In other words, she accused Petraeus of lying.

Petraeus didnt lie. The Iraq surge was succeeding.

In fact, as the New York Times pointed out the time, Clintons reaction to the cautious optimism of Americas top general in Iraq [was] a pivot away from the position she took last month, when she conceded that American forces had achieved some security gains in Iraq, particularly in the Anbar province. However, Clinton later backed away from those remarks after coming under fire from rival presidential campaigns and anti-war Democrats.

So dont let anyone tell you Clinton did nothing of note in the Senate. Basing ones votes on issues of war, peace, and national security on political considerations isnt nothing.
A Taushe Hausa musician, Sani Aliyu Dandawo, has died at the age of 72.

Dandawo died at his home in Yauri, Yauri Local Government of Kebbi State on Sunday evening after a protracted illness, a family source confirmed to PREMIUM TIMES.

He is survived by his aged mother, two wives, 22 children and 25 grand children.

He has since been buried according to Islamic right.

The Deputy Senate Leader, Bala Ibn NaAllah, who represents his area, described Dandawo as a musical legend who contributed to promoting peace and development through music.

He prayed to Allah to grant him eternal rest, and grant the family and the entire people of the state the fortitude to bear the loss.
The Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, in Borno has said that Internally Displaced Persons are now stealing foods in residents houses in the state capital.

The Commandant of the NSCDC, Ibrahim Abdullahi, made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, in Maiduguri on Sunday.

Mr. Abdullahi said the command had so far recorded 10 complaints of food theft by residents of Jidari Polo Area in the state capital.

He said the command had arrested two culprits aged 25.

He said that the culprits invade people houses on Sundays during the time Christian faithful were in the church.

Mr. Abdullahi explained that the command had arrested some of them who were confirmed to be IDPs.

What is very surprising is that they do not steal anything apart from food items.

Anytime we hear of such incidents, we always discover everything to be intact in the houses but the foodstuffs are stolen.

The culprits are IDPs who mostly taken refuge in host communities, Mr. Abdullahi said.

He added the NSCDC would be working round the clock to nip all forms of crimes in the area.

Millions of people have been displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency which has caused the death of about 20,000 people since 2009.

Some of the displaced persons have been returning to their homes since the Nigerian military retook territory once controlled by Boko Haram.

Food has always been a major challenge for the over two million IDPs currently living in various camps and host communities in Borno and other northern states.

The Government of Borno State, the major base of the Boko Haram insurgency, had claimed that it spends at least N600 million monthly to feed the IDPs, but the inmates had been consistent in their cries for better feeding arrangement in the camps.

The nearly 200, 000 IDPs currently being housed in various camps in Maiduguri for about two years now, have gradually become a huge burden to both the Borno State and Federal Governments of Nigeria. Both tiers of government have stated their eagerness to see a quick end to the ongoing insurgency so that the IDPs could be relocated back to their communities.

The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, Mission Director, Michael Harvey, was in Borno State last week where he announced the agencys commitment to spend over $200 million (N40 billion) in providing education, provision of healthcare, water supplies and sanitation for the displaced persons.

USAID had in 2015 donated about $10.2 million (N2.08 billion) to the government of Nigeria for the same purpose.

Going by the N600 million feeding bills it had picked monthly, before the federal government began to intervene through NEMA, the Borno State Government and the Federal Government may have spent at least N7. 2 billion for feeding displaced persons in 2015.
Four persons were killed at the weekend in Ilorin, during a fight that broke out between members of the two rival cult groups over supremacy claim.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that last week Sunday, suspected members of cult groups struck at Ikokoro/Sakamo area of Ilorin and allegedly killed a boy simply identified as Wasiu.

The latest cult clash occurred at Babaoko, Ita-Amodu and Agbo-Oba areas of Ilorin metropolis between Saturday night and 4 a.m. on Sunday.

The clash heightened tension in the affected areas while residents scampered for safety.

A witness said on Sunday in Ilorin that at the end of the clash, four persons including a 20- year-old man were allegedly shot.

The witness, who requested anonymity, said that members of Aiye Confraternity first struck at Babaoko around 9.30 p.m. on Saturday night and allegedly killed two persons.

He said that at the end of the operation at Baboko, the suspected cultists headed for Ita-Amodu and Agbo-0ba areas of the capital on revenge mission.

When contacted, the spokesperson of the state police command, Ajayi Okasanmi confirmed the incident, and one death.

I can confirm to you that one person has been killed by the suspected cultists and this happened at Babaoko area of Ilorin.

Men of the state police command have taken his corpse to the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital, he said.

Mr. Okasanmi warned cultists to stay away from the state, stressing that anyone caught would be made to face the full wrath of the law.

(NAN)
Argentine human rights commission, CIDPH, has kicked off a programme designed to promote justice delivery in select African countries.

The judiciary and other justice operators in Angola, Congo, Morocco and Cameroon will be the first set of beneficiaries of a capacity-building programme aimed at expanding Access to Justice across Africa.

In March 2016, an international meeting on Access to Justice opened in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with participants including different cadres of officials and authorities of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Cameroon and the Kingdom of Morocco.

Tagged Access to Justice: Different Approaches to Public Policy and Institutional Devices, the meeting was an exchange programme co-organized by CIPDH, UNESCO and the Public Defense Office of the Argentine Republic, MPD.

According to the CIPDH director, Adriana Arce, the meeting focused on promoting the creation of a space that allows the exchange of experiences on Access to Justice in different countries, analyzing success or failures in each case and establishing good practices. She added that the goal of expanding the justice frontier in Africa was in line with our South-South cooperation work.

The South-South cooperation is a broad framework for collaboration among countries of Latin America and Africa. The cooperation centers on political, economic, social, cultural, environmental and technical development.

Participants from the two continents shared experiences from their various countries with the resounding themes being crimes against humanity, institutional violence, protection to refugees, violence against women and alternative settlement of conflicts.

The exchange programme ended after setting a cooperation agenda between the organizing institutions and the participant countries.
The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Kayode Fayemi, has challenged security agencies in the country to come up with technology that could be deployed to track the use of explosives for which permits were given in the country.

The minister who disclosed that part of his tasks as minister in charge of solid minerals development is to sign explosives permits for use in quarries and mining sites, said it is important to also track their use as part of efforts to curtail activities of insurgent groups and violent crimes in the country.

Mr. Fayemi who spoke as a guest lecturer at the National Defence College, Abuja on Friday, said there should be a technological approach to tracking the use of explosives by those who sought and obtained permit for its use so that it does not end up in the hands of those who would use it for criminal purposes.

The Minister also assured the gathering that the President Muhammadu Buharis administration is committed to ensuring that the Ajaokuta Steel company works, in order to boost the countrys technological development.

This will also help us in the areas of arms and ammunitions. And the defence industry will also benefit from this when we get it right, he added.

The Minister who spoke on Solid Minerals and National Development in Nigeria, lamented that the country was losing a lot to illegal mining activities, being carried out by some citizens aided by some foreigners.

He said the ministry was collaborating with relevant security agencies to ensure that the ugly trend is stopped.

Specifically, he pointed out that about 100 kilogramme of gold leaves the country everyday without any record, adding that there is need to deploy technology, build capacity of staff of the ministry and get the required assistance from the security agencies to check the situation.

He disclosed that part of the efforts of the ministry is to also educate security agents on how to identify these minerals.

Many of them do not recognise these minerals. So, in most cases they do not know the value of what the person is taking out illegally.

so we are partnering with security agencies, the customs, immigration, police, civil defence, to assist us.

Once we get the regulatory frame work right and create a conducive environment for investment to thrive, we shall witness huge investment in the sector, create wealth and employment opportunities, he added.

Earlier in his opening remarks, the Commandant of the National Defence College, Rear Admiral S.I. Alade, said that the military was doing a lot to assist the ministry to curtail illegal mining.

He hailed the ministers enforcement of the use it or lose it clause in the mining Act, saying the country needs to make the best of the solid minerals sector now that the oil and gas sector is facing a challenge.

In attendance at the lecture were representatives of the service chiefs, permanent secretary of the ministry of defence and participants of Course 24 of the Defence College, among others.
A member of a suspected three-man gang that specialises in vandalising the Light Up Lagos Project, an initiative that lights up street lights at night, has told the police that he did not take part in the act.

Lucky Udeagwu who was arrested around the Ogudu area by operatives of the Rapid Response Squad said he works at a construction site at Ikorodu.

The police said in a statement Sunday that the suspects allegedly stole a 35 metre long armoured cable of the Light Up Lagos Project in Ogudu area of the state .

I got to Ogudu Bus Stop something to 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, said Mr. Udeagwu, 29, whose alleged accomplices are now at large, according to the police.

I got out early because I was searching for work. I wanted to get to Ikorodu early so that I can get site job. I saw those two boys brought that bag from a nearby bus and as soon as they saw the police, they ran and I followed them.

On the spanners and screwdrivers found in his bag, Mr. Udeagwu said they were used to service his generator which he had sold about a year ago.

 It is true I was arrested at about 3:11 a.m. because the officer a showed me the clock in his car. I am not one of those boys, Mr. Udeagwu added.

The police said the suspect was sighted coming out of the bush towards Ogudu Bus Stop by RRS operatives on routine surveillance around 3:00 a.m. carrying a big sack containing the armoured cable.

Early this Saturday morning, we saw Lucky and two other guys carrying a big sack coming towards Ogudu Bus Stop, said Bello Kabir, a police Inspector and the leader of the RRS team.

Because it was a straight road, we could see them from afar. They dropped the bag at the Bus Stop.

As they sighted RRS vehicle, they took to their heels in different directions but we caught Lucky. We were suspicious that what could make them run when they saw us must be something criminal. We checked the bag and we saw a 35 meter long armoured cable. Beside the bag was a camouflage cap.

Mr. Kabir said there had been reports of cable theft in some parts of Lagos metropolis, including the area where the suspected vandal was arrested.

We are under instruction, as RRS operative to monitor cable installations of Light  Up Lagos Project, Mr. Kabir said.

On the spot, we searched him (Mr. Udeagwu). We found in his small bag, screw driver, 10 spanner and a T  shirt. The 10 spanner is the size of the bolts covering the street lights in this area.

It was revealed through further investigations at the RRS headquarters that the supposed employer of Mr. Udeagwu saw him last before the Easter Break.

Nobody could identify the suspect in the three houses he said he lives, according to the police, with one of the houses being an uncompleted building.

While confirming the report, Dolapo Badmus, the Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, said the state would not tolerate vandalism and sabotage of governments efforts.

The suspect has been transferred to the State Anti-Robbery Squad office in Lagos.
The Trade Union Congress, TUC, has condemned the alleged victimisation of Joseph Ogunyemi an employee of TATA Africa Services, Nigeria.

A statement signed by TUC President, Bobboi Kaigama, and acting Secretary-General, Simeso Amachree, said the union was not in support of actions taken against Mr. Ogunyemi by TATA.

The statement was issued to journalists on Sunday in Lagos.

It queried the management of TATA for advertising in a national daily that Mr. Ogunyemi was no longer in its employment when he had not been served letter of termination.

The advert said that Ogunyemi is no longer in the services of TATA, though he has not been served letter of termination.

The cause of his victimisation is still being dialogued and congress is still expecting response to its petition from TATA regional office in South Africa, it said.

The statement said that Esther Obhiojeifor, Head, Human Resources of TATA, insisted that Mr. Ogunyemi be sacked for no reason other than being a former chairman of Automobile Union, TATA Branch.

It added that Mr. Ogunyemi had been denied promotion, queried severally, transferred to Port Harcourt and denied several benefits.

It said that the TUC was backed by the Trade Union Act to operate as watchdog in workplaces and would not allow any of its members to be victimised on account of performing his lawful union activities.

The statement urged the management of TATA to call Mrs. Obhiojeifor to order to avoid industrial crisis in the company.

(NAN)
Apart from the recent arrest of Khalid al-Barnawi, the leader of Ansaru terrorist group in Lokoja, Kogi State, the Nigerian military has confirmed that more terrorists have been arrested while other Boko Haram members have also surrendered to the security agencies.

The Director Defence information, Brigadier Rabe Abubakar who confirmed this development to PRNigeria, disclosed that: With ongoing aggressive military operations in the North-East, some Boko Haram terrorists have surrendered to the Nigerian troops just as some top commanders were arrested while fleeing from the theatre of war.

The improved synergy and inter-agency collaborations have enhanced the various operations towards the massive arrest of members of the terrorists groups.

We are conducting series of investigation including background checks on some of those arrested and those that surrendered to the security agencies for proper identifications. So far most of the operations are going on smoothly.

Our concern is for Nigerians to support the military and other security agencies with useful information especially now that most of the Boko Haram camps have been destroyed; while the stubborn members may be fleeing to new locations.

We urge Nigerians to report any strange movement and people, including suspicious objects in their localities to ensure that suspects do not have new haven to hide where they may later disrupt such communities.
The Gender and Equal Opportunity Bill recently rejected by the National Assembly is a contravention of the provisions of the African Human Rights Charter, the Foundation for African Cultural Heritage, FACH, a coalition of civil society groups, said on Sunday.

FACH comprises of Global Health Alliance, Nigerian Life League, Islamic Platform of Nigeria, Good Parenting and Youth Empowerment, Happy Home Foundation, and the Nigerian Association for Women Advancement and others.

The Bill, which was sponsored by Biodun Olujimi (PDP, Ekiti) was rejected by lawmakers recently for lack of merit.

Although the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, promised that the Bill would be represented, FACHs Regulatory Affairs Director, Nkem Agboti, on Sunday urged the lawmakers not to consider a re-presentation of the bill.

Apart from the bill contravening the provisions of the 1999 Constitution, Mrs. Agboti said in Lagos, it was also incompatible with the language of African Human Rights Charter.

Mrs. Agboti said since most sections of the bill already existed in the countrys Criminal Code, Marriage Act and the Maintenance Act, there was no need for a new law.

Some of the provisions of that Bill  Sections 4(a), 7(iii)  (vii), 8, 13, 14, 15 and 17 already exist in the countrys Constitution. It shows redundancy of the Bill.

Instead of spending time deliberating, analysing, passing, signing fresh laws, let us look at the laws we already have; try to improve on their enforcement; create awareness, so that we can take advantage of those existing provisions, Mrs. Agboti said.

The Director, Doctors Health Initiative, Nkechi Asogwa, also said the bill injected some provisions that were contravened the countrys constitution and moral code.

Mrs. Asogwa said that the provisions promoted abrasive western liberation of women, gay practices, legalisation of abortion and gender stereotyping, adding that all these were contrary to the Nigerian laws, religious, cultural and philosophical convictions of the Nigerian people.

Those applauding the Bill do not understand. They mistake it for a Bill promoting equality between men and women. They think the Bill is aimed at promoting the economic, political and cultural empowerment of the Nigerian women. But the Bill reveals otherwise. The public, especially women, need to be educated and enlightened on this issue. We need to rise up and ensure that Bill is not passed, Mrs. Asogwa said.

For the Director, Project for Human Development, Sonnie Ekwowusi, the group had already sent a memorandum to the National Assembly urging the lawmakers to disregard the bill.

If the Bill must be re-presented, it should be re-titled Women Empowerment Bill, while the long title of the Bill that promotes western liberation of women, abortion and homosexuality should be expunged completely from the Bill, Mr. Ekwowusi said.

Mr. Ekwowusi urged the media to be promoters of the countrys cultural heritage by investigating issues properly and educating the public appropriately.

(NAN)
The Director-General, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, IITA, Nteranya Sanginga, on Sunday said the Federal Government would launch N59.7 billion Youth-In-Agriculture Scheme in September.

Mr. Sanginga, who disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Ibadan, said the scheme would be sponsored by the federal government and the African Development Bank, AFDB.

The director-general said IITA would train those enrolled in the scheme, adding that beneficiaries would be trained on how to make agriculture a business with good networking.

The programme tagged Enable Youth Empowerment Agribusiness programme, will engage youths in agribusiness for 18 months to enable them learn how to make agric business plan.

Each will be given between 25,000 US Dollars and 300,000 US Dollars as loan to start a business.

The programme started by IITA in 2012, was taken over by the federal government and AFDB to create employment in agric sector.

To support this objective, the programme will be extended to 36 states and Abuja in September.

After the programme, we expect the youth to become chief executive officers of factories, companies and creators of jobs rather than job seekers, he said.

Mr. Sanginga urged the youth to develop positive mindset in agriculture and take good advantage of the programme.

They should be serious with the training because at the end of it only those who did well will be rewarded, he said.

(NAN)
Olusegun Osoba, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, on Sunday returned to the All Progressives Congress, APC.

Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun announced the return while briefing journalists after a closed door meeting of leaders of the APC at the residence of Mr. Osoba in Ikoyi, Lagos.

A time was when Osoba switched to another party, he was a foundation member of the APC and he was in the APC throughout my election.

Yes, he was for a time with the SDP, but with what we have just done today, Akinrogun Osoba, the Aremo himself is back with the progressive leadership of the Yoruba race, Mr. Aregbesola said of the former Ogun State Governor.

He said that the leadership of progressive politics in the Western part of Nigeria on the platform of the APC had resolved all their differences.

As such we are happy to tell the world that the leadership of progressive politics in the Western part of Nigeria is united.

We are ready to jointly prosecute the agenda for growth, purposeful leadership, development, good governance in the Western part of Nigeria.

The progressive leadership of the Yoruba race is now fully united and are ready and charged to lead our efforts to reposition our land and integrate with others nationwide to put Nigeria in its proper footing, he said.

Also speaking, the national leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu, said it was very crucial for the party to strengthen its front.

I am an unapologetic progressive and I will remain one and that is the only principle I abide with.

Wherever the progressives are, they must be united with their vision. Nobody is left out, it is all progressives and no one is left out, no matter your insinuation, Mr. Tinubu said.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that Niyi Adebayo, Bisi Akande, Lagos State Deputy Governor, Idiat Adebule, and a former Deputy Governor of Ogun State, Olusegun Adesegun, among others attended the meeting.

(NAN)
Workers in Ogun State have asked the state government to stop further deductions from their salaries.

The workers also accused the state government of lying about the resolutions reached at the meeting between the workers unions and the state government on Friday.

The Secretary to State Government, Taiwo Adeoluwa, had after the Friday meeting issued a statement that the two parties agreed that, henceforth, salary of workers would be paid with the provision of Bank Verification Number, BVN. The statement was silent of other things agreed at the meeting.

However, the Joint National Public Service Negotiating Council of workers on Sunday issued a counter statement, disclosing that government took a rigid position on how the issues would be resolved, but the workers rejected it.



The statement signed by Akeem Ambali (NLC Chairman), Olakanmi Abiodun (Chairman JNC), Olubunmi Fajobi (TUC Chairman), and Olusegun Adebiyi (Council Secretary) declared that the governments position was not accepted at the meeting.

The labour leaders said since the workers were being owed salary arrears and balance payments of some past salaries, they should be the ones to decide which should be paid first and not the government.

They said government should rather be more compassionate and devise means of offsetting the arrears of both gratuities and balance of salaries within the shortest possible time.

A situation where government now posited it is not disposed to using part of the expected reimbursement from the Federal Government to offsetting balance of salary is grossly absurd.

This stands in contravention to labours position that part of the huge reimbursement about to be received from Abuja could equally be deployed to pay arrears of balances of salaries.

The labour leaders also asked the government not to punish any worker desirous of withdrawing his/her membership of the staff cooperative society.

Conclusively, labour hopes that the state government would be more realistic and be more committed to peaceful and amicable resolution to the impasse and not necessarily continue to fire the embers of disagreement which constitute an open invitation to more trouble and industrial unrest in the Ogun State Public Service.
Striking medical doctors in Osun State under the aegis of Association of Medical and Dental Officers, on Sunday suspended their seven months industrial action.

The chairman of the association, Isiaka Adekunle, confirmed the suspension of the strike in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, on Sunday in Osogbo.

He said the doctors would report for duty on Monday..

Mr. Adekunle said that though the government was yet to meet any of their demands, their decision to resume work was in response to appeals from well-meaning people of the state.

He, however, said that the association would continue to dialogue with the government.

Mr. Adekunle said the association took the decision to call off the strike at its Annual General Meeting held on March 30.

He said: the Speaker of the state Assembly, Mr. Najeem Salaam and some other people prevailed on us to call off the strike.

We also observed that the people who are at the receiving end of our strike are the masses who can only access health care from state owned hospitals.

Based on this, the doctors unanimously agreed at our AGM that the strike be suspended despite the fact that none of our demands has been met by the government

While we pray for good fortune for the state and the nation as a whole, when the economy of the state improves, government will have no choice than to answer our demands.

Mr. Adekunle appealed to the government to keep to its promises by not victimising its members who participated in the strike.

We want a promise from the government that none of our members will be victimised for participating in the strike.

We believe government will keep to its side of agreement while we keep to ours, he said.

The doctors went on strike on September 28, 2015 to protest unpaid salaries and non-remittance of their cooperative and contributory deductions from their salaries to the appropriate quarters.

(NAN)
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.




NEW YORK, April 3, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Just released two-year follow up data comparing coronary-artery bypass grafting (CABG) with combined CABG and mitral-valve repair in patients with moderate ischemic mitral regurgitation (IMR) found no significant differences in benefit. The patients with CABG and mitral-valve repair had an early hazard of longer hospital stay post-surgery, a higher incidence of postoperative supraventricular arrhythmias and higher rate of serious neurological events than those with CABG alone. There was a three-fold higher incidence of persistent mitral regurgitation in this same group without evidence of higher mortality or adverse clinical events. The study authors conclude that physicians must weigh risks of adverse events "against the uncertain benefits" of combing mitral-valve repair during CABG.

These highly anticipated study findings, Two-Year Outcomes of Surgical Treatment of Moderate Ischemic Mitral Regurgitation, were presented today by Robert Michler, M.D. at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Session 2016 and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine by the Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network (CTSN).

This is the first study of its kind to provide evidence-based data on how best to treat patients needing CABG who also present with IMR. It is expected that this two-year data will impact how the medical community of physicians, surgeons and institutions will manage this patient population going forward.

"The results of this study suggest there is no significant benefit to what is often considered a routine addition to the open-heart procedure of CABG for patients with moderate IMR," said first study author Robert Michler, M.D., professor and chairman, Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery, and the Department of Surgery at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and co-director of The Montefiore Einstein Center for Heart and Vascular Care. "However, after two years, we did find that the addition of mitral-valve repair provided a more durable correction of mitral regurgitation."

IMR occurs when blood backflows into the left atrium from the left ventricle of the heart due to improper closure of the MV. The condition often develops as a complication of a heart attack and subsequent enlargement of the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber. Functional IMR affects 1.6 million to 2.8 million patients in the U.S. and is associated with a doubling in mortality among patients with mild or greater degrees of mitral regurgitation after a heart attack.

"The approach to managing patients with moderate ischemic MR at the time of coronary artery bypass grafting remains controversial. The results of this trial study should inform surgical decision making when caring for these complex patients," said Annetine C. Gelijns, Ph.D., the Edmond A. Guggenheim Professor of Health Policy and chair of the Department of Health Evidence and Policy at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the principal investigator for the Data Coordinating Center based at Mount Sinai.

Ischemic mitral regurgitation of moderate severity develops in approximately 10 percent of patients after myocardial infarction. Mitral regurgitation is caused by the displacement of papillary muscle, leaflet tethering, reduced closing forces, and annular dilatation. Over time, the condition has an adverse effect on the rate of survival free of heart failure. Because most patients with ischemic mitral regurgitation have multivessel coronary artery disease requiring revascularization, surgeons have to consider whether to add mitral-valve repair to coronary-artery bypass grafting (CABG).

The prospective, multi-center, controlled clinical trial randomly assigned 301 patients with moderate IMR to CABG alone or CABG with MV repair. The primary endpoint was left ventricular end systolic volume (LVESVI) at one-year, assessed using a Wilcoxon rank sum test categorizing deaths as the lowest LVESVI rank.

Two-year mortality was 10 percent in CABG/MV repair patients versus 10.6 percent in CABG patients. There were no observed differences in MACCE, death, readmissions, functional status or quality-of-life at two years. Overall rates of hospital readmission and serious adverse events were similar in the two groups, but neurologic events and supraventricular arrhythmias remained more frequent in the combined-procedure group.

The CTSN DCC is based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which has eight core clinical centers in the U.S. and Canada, including Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Columbia University, Duke University, Emory University, Montefiore Einstein Heart Center, Montreal Heart Institute, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania and 19 Consortium sites.

This study was presented at the Featured Clinical Research Session I: Two-year Outcomes of Surgical Treatment of Moderate Ischemic Mitral Regurgitation: A Randomized Clinical Trial from The Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network

The Moderate Ischemic Mitral Regurgitation trial was supported by a cooperative agreement (U01 HL088942) funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

About Montefiore Health System

Montefiore is a premier academic health system and the University Hospital for Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Combining nationally-recognized clinical excellence with a population health perspective that focuses on the comprehensive needs of the communities it serves, Montefiore delivers coordinated, compassionate, science-driven care where, when and how patients need it most. Montefiore consists of eight hospitals and an extended care facility with a total of 2,747 beds, a School of Nursing, and state-of-the-art primary and specialty care provided through a network of more than 150 locations across the region, including the largest school health program in the nation and a home health program. The Children's Hospital at Montefiore is consistently named in U.S. News' "America's Best Children's Hospitals." Montefiore's partnership with Einstein advances clinical and translational research to accelerate the pace at which new discoveries become the treatments and therapies that benefit patients. The health system derives its inspiration for excellence from its patients and community, and continues to be on the frontlines of developing innovative approaches to care. For more information please visit http://www.montefiore.org. Follow us on Twitter; like us on Facebook; view us on YouTube.

About the Mount Sinai Health System

The Mount Sinai Health System is an integrated health system committed to providing distinguished care, conducting transformative research, and advancing biomedical education. Structured around seven hospital campuses and a single medical school, the Health System has an extensive ambulatory network and a range of inpatient and outpatient servicesfrom community-based facilities to tertiary and quaternary care.

The System includes approximately 6,100 primary and specialty care physicians; 12 joint-venture ambulatory surgery centers; more than 140 ambulatory practices throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and 31 affiliated community health centers. Physicians are affiliated with the renowned Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is ranked among the highest in the nation in National Institutes of Health funding per investigator. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked as one of the nation's top 10 hospitals in Geriatrics, Cardiology/Heart Surgery, and Gastroenterology, and is in the top 25 in five other specialties in the 2015-2016 "Best Hospitals" issue of U.S. News & World Report. Mount Sinai's Kravis Children's Hospital also is ranked in seven out of ten pediatric specialties by U.S. News & World Report. The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked 11th nationally for Ophthalmology, while Mount Sinai Beth Israel is ranked regionally.

For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org/ or find Mount Sinai on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/mountsinainyc, Twitter http://twitter.com/mountsinainyc and YouTube http://www.youtube.com/mountsinainy.

SOURCE Montefiore Health System

Related Links

http://www.montefiore.org


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Chennai, March 30 : The Telugu version of superstar Vijay-starrer Tamil actioner "Theri", which is slated for release in theatres on April 14, has been titled "Policeodu".

"The makers are yet to officially announce the title. However, it has been titled 'Policeodu' in Telugu," a source from the film's unit told IANS.

Producer Dil Raju has bagged the Telugu dubbed rights of the film, which is directed by Atlee.

Although an action entertainer, "Policeodu" is tipped to be about the emotional bond between a father and his daughter.

Besides Vijay, the film also stars Amy Jackson, Samantha Ruth Prabhu and veteran filmmaker Mahendran, who debut as antagonist.

G.V. Prakash has composed the tunes for the film, which happens to be his 50th album.
Sydney, March 30 : Noting that India is currently rated as the most attractive investment destination by many global agencies, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday invited Australian businesses to invest in India to help the country become a low-cost manufacturing destination.

"India could manage to become a very low-cost service provider but failed to transform into a low-cost manufacturing," Jaitley said, launching a 'Make in India' conference here on the second day of his four-day Australia visit.

Describing the various recent reforms for attracting foreign investment, Jaitley said sectors like railways, defence and manufacturing now offer huge scope for investments with liberalised foreign direct investment (FDI) norms.

At a bilateral meeting earlier in the day with Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Jaitley listed various reforms by the National Democratic Alliance government.

He also said India faces three major challenges - to boost exports in a situation of shrinking global trade, increase private investment and the impact of two consecutive years of poor monsoons.

"For two consecutive years, we are the fastest growing economy in the world. When we measure ourselves by our own standards, we believe that 7.5 percent does not reflect our true potential," India's finance minister said.

India has to invest in its infrastructure in a bid to prepare a base for an economy of major size, he said.

"Manufacturing must occupy a space," he said.

Speaking on the occasion, Bishop said Australia can play a major role in providing various services to India especially in the field of innovations, research and development (R&D), vocational training and skill development, among others.

Jaitley thanked the Australian foreign minister for finalising the administrative arrangements on civil nuclear cooperation to facilitate uranium supplies to India.

Speaking to mediapersons here later, Jaitley dismissed reports that he would push for funds for the Adani Group's $16.5 billion coal mine project during his meetings with Australian leaders, saying this was not on his agenda.

"This is a subject which is internal to Australia and this is not the purpose of my visit," he said.

Last month, Australia's Queensland state Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (EHP) issued a final environmental authority (EA) for Adani's Carmichael coal mine project located near the ecologically sensitive Great Barrier Reef, but with about 140 conditions.
Islamabad, March 31 : The Iranian Embassy here on Thursday slammed "certain elements in Pakistan" for spreading "undignified and offensive" remarks, which it said were attributed to President Hassan Rouhani, regarding the arrest of Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav.

"Elements unhappy over promotion of ties between the two Islamic countries of Iran and Pakistan are trying in various ways, including the spreading of undignified and sometimes offensive contents, to fade out the significant achievements during the visit of President Rouhani to Pakistan," embassy spokesman Abbas Badrifar told media, Dawn reported.

The comments came just days after alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav's arrest was announced on March 25, while Rouhani was visiting Islamabad.

Badrifar said such tactics "will not impact the positive views of the two countries regarding each other."

He said since independence, Pakistan had always proven itself a "trusted partner and neighbour", adding that the "western borders of Pakistan have never been threatened".

"Iran considers its borders with Pakistan those of peace and friendship," the spokesman said.

Law enforcement agencies announced the arrest of Jadhav, saying he had been picked up during an intelligence-based raid in Balochistan's Chaman area.

Earlier the Indian government said it "categorically rejects allegations that this individual was involved in subversive activities in Pakistan at our behest", claiming that their enquiries reveal he had been harassed while operating a legitimate business from Iran.
Colombo, March 31 : Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on Thursday said that parliament will be briefed on the deals Sri Lanka is expected to sign with China and India.

Wickremesinghe told members of the ruling United National Party that Sri Lanka and China are to discuss an economic plan soon, Xinhua reported.

He also said that Sri Lanka and China are expected to sign a free trade agreement next month.

Wickremesinghe said that an agreement will also be signed with India and parliament will be briefed on the agreements in order to ensure the process is transparent.

"The draft texts of the agreements will be submitted to parliament and through parliament to the public," he said.

The prime minister said that Sri Lanka was in talks with the European Union to regain the EU Generalised Scheme of Preferences plus trade concession, while it expects the ban imposed on Sri Lankan fisheries products by the EU to be lifted by the end of this year.
Beijing, March 31 : Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe will pay an official visit to China from April 6 to 9 at the invitation of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on Thursday.

Chinese leaders will meet and hold talks with Wickremesinghe and exchange opinions on bilateral relations and issues of common concern, spokesperson Hong Lei was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying.

"We commend the Sri Lankan government's positive policies towards China and are ready to jointly consolidate the traditional friendship, and deepen pragmatic cooperation through this visit, pushing the China-Sri Lanka strategic cooperative partnership to new heights," Hong said.
Bengaluru, April 1 : There is still no information about the fate of Indian priest Father Thomas Uzhunnallil, who was abducted by IS terrorists in Yemen last month and allegedly crucified by them, said a official of his Catholic order on Friday.

"We do not have any information and updates on Father Thomas Uzhunnallil," Father Jose Koyickal, the vice provincial of the Indian Salesian Order of Don Bosco's Sacred Heart Province of Bengaluru - to which Uzhunnallil belongs, told IANS.

He said the unconfirmed news of Uzhunnallil's crucifixion at the hands of IS terrorists on Good Friday emerged from some Christian prayer groups in Dubai.

Koyickal said the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) deputy secretary general, Father Joseph Chinnayyan, is slated to meet External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Saturday to discuss the matter.

The 56-year-old Uzhunnallil, trained in technical education, has been with the order's Bengaluru province, which handles part of Karnataka and Kerala, for almost 30 years, he said.

"He worked for the poorer youth and skilling them was one of our primary activities. Uzhunnallil worked at Kolar Gold Fields in Karnataka and was the principal of Don Bosco Royal ITI. Then he moved to Bhadravati and Hassan... he worked in these three places five to six years each," Koyickal told IANS.

After this, Uzhannallil set off to Yemen in 2010 to become priest of the only Catholic Church approved by the Yemeni government -- the St. Francis of Assisi parish in Aden, and also caretaker of Missionaries of Charity Care Home in the same city.

"The care home was started by Mother Teresa at the invitation of the Yemeni government in 1992. It took care of the local destitute, disabled and abandoned people who are mostly Muslim," said Koyickal.

Mother Teresa opened four care homes and wanted Catholic priests to serve the spiritual needs of the nuns running the operations and to help them in coordinating the work, he said.

According to the Catholic News Agency, the Missionaries of Charity have been present in Yemen since 1973.

Koyickal said the war and violence in Yemen between Houthi rebels and the government forced almost everybody to leave, abandoning the place where the care home and the church are located.

"Uzhunnallil came back to India in January 2015 on expiry of his visa, stayed here for three months and returned to Yemen in April 2015 to volunteer at the church and the care home as there was no one to serve them," he said.

On March 4, the priest from Kerala was kidnapped after IS terrorists barged into the care home and shot dead many people, including four nuns of the Missionaries of Charity, one of them from India.

Most of the people who attended the church in Aden were foreigners and diplomats. It falls under the purview of the Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia headed by Swiss Bishop Paul Hinder, which oversees the Catholic Church in UAE, Oman and Yemen.

The vicariate operates multiple schools, parishes and churches in the region and has been receiving priests from the Sacred Heart Province of Bengaluru from the late 1980 on request.

Koyickal said the Indian Salesian Order of Don Bosco is 2,667 members strong, of which 1,561 are priests and 1,106 are in training to be ordained so.

Globally, there are 15,037 Salesian Order members - 10,249 priests and 4,788 brothers - while the Sacred Heart Province of Bengaluru has 233 priests and 133 brothers.
Baku, April 2 : Azerbaijan's Defence Ministry on Saturday dismissed media reports of a helicopter having been downed by Armenian armed forces.

"The information that the Azerbaijani helicopter was shot down along the line of contact is false and a provocation," Xinhua cited a defence ministry statement as saying.

Nevertheless, Azerbaijan's Defence Ministry said that the situation along the contact line has been very tense in recent days.

One civilian was killed and another wounded in Tartar district in a firing incident by Armenia, it said.

It also said the Armenian troops used mortars and large-calibre machine guns in the exchange of fire along the border and some Azerbaijani places including Krasnoselsk, Goygol and Khojavand "were under attack".

The Azerbaijani forces had carried out 130 strikes on Armenian positions, the ministry said.

The press service of the Armenian Defence Ministry said the active attacking actions were taken by Azerbaijani force, during which they used heavy weapons, tanks and artillery.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a bitter dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh since 1991.

Peace talks have been held since 1994 when a ceasefire was reached, but there have been occasional minor clashes in the past along the borders and across the volatile frontline of the Karabakh area. The clashes obviously escalated last month.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday urged the parties in the conflict to "observe an immediate ceasefire and exercise restraint in order to prevent further casualties," according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Moscow, April 2 : Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday urged all parties involved in the military conflict along the Azerbaijan-Armenia border to cease fire immediately and exercise restraint.

Putin is deeply concerned with recent reports on the renewal of hostilities along the front lines of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Xinhua cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.

The Russian Foreign Ministry also called for a cessation of any kind of violence in the region.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a bitter dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh seized by Armenia-backed forces from Azerbaijan in 1991. Peace talks have been held since 1994 when a cease-fire was reached.

Firefights have been frequently reported recently between the two ex-Soviet republics along their shared border and across Karabakh's volatile front line.
Yerevan, April 3 : A total of 18 Armenian soldiers have been killed, 35 wounded in border clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops on the Karabakh conflict zone, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said on Saturday.

During the National Security Council meeting, Sargsyan called Saturday's clash one of large scale since the ceasefire in 1994. "Due to the coordinated defensive actions, Armenian troops managed to take control of the situation," Sargsyan added.

He also called for the need to sign an agreement with Karabakh on mutual military assistance and gave a number of orders to prevent further escalation of the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops, Xinhua reported.

Earlier, the Armenian defence ministry reported that Azerbaijan launched attacks in the Nagorno-Karabakh region along their borders on Friday night, using heavy weapons, tanks and artillery, according to the press service of the Armenian defence ministry on Saturday.

The ministry said the Azerbaijani troops were repelled and sustained serious losses in the counter-attacks by the Armenian side.

According to reports from the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh ministry of defence, two helicopters, three tanks and two unmanned aerial enemy unit were destroyed, with casualties amounting to 200 people.

A 12-year-old was reportedly killed in a missile attack by the Azerbaijani armed forces, and two other children were wounded. On the same day, Azerbaijan's defence ministry dismissed reports of an Azerbaijani helicopter having been downed by Armenian armed forces, as the two countries blamed each other for an escalation of tension along their borders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday urged parties in the conflict to "observe an immediate ceasefire and exercise restraint in order to prevent further casualties," according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a bitter dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh seized by Armenia- backed forces from Azerbaijan in 1991. Peace talks have been held since 1994 when a ceasefire was reached.
Chennai, April 3 : Actor-producer Delhi Ganesh said Kamal Haasan's support for his forthcoming Tamil maiden production "Ennul Aayiram", which introduces his son Maha in the lead, worked as a confidence booster for the entire team.

"Kamal sir and I have worked together in several films and our relationship has always been very cordial. I've never told him anything until he has asked me. Likewise, when I was planning to launch my son, he got to know about it while we were working on 'Papanasam'," Ganesh told IANS.

"A common friend had told him that I was planning to launch my son, and Kamal sir said he already knew about it. I requested him to unveil the audio of the film and he immediately agreed," recalled Ganesh.

Months later, Ganesh was at Haasan's residence with his wife and the team of "Ennul Aayiram".

"We had originally planned to have the audio launch in an auditorium, but Kamal sir suggested that we do it in his house, with a banner of the film in the background, because he didn't want me to waste an extra penny more," he said.

It was a special day for Ganesh and his son.

"He patiently heard all the songs and later watched the trailer, appreciated the director and wished my son. He need not have to do all that, but he did it because of the mutual respect we have for each other. The support he showed really boosted our confidence," he said.

Slated to release later this month, "Ennul Aayiram" is about common problems a 25-year old encounters in his life.
Canberra, April 3 : Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester confirmed on Sunday that another piece of debris, found in Mauritius, will be examined in connection to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Chester said the Malaysian government was working with officials from Mauritius "to seek custody of the debris and arrange for its examination".

"This debris is an item of interest. However, till the debris has been examined by experts, it is not possible to ascertain its origin," Xinhua reported Chester as saying.

He did not mention whether or when the suspected piece of debris would be sent to Australia for examination.

Since the beginning of the year, a number of such pieces were found along the eastern coast of the African continent, including along the coasts in Mozambique and South Africa.

Experts in Australia have confirmed that the two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were "consistent" with panels from a Boeing 777 jetliner, and, therefore, these are "almost certainly" from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Last year, a flaperon washed up on a beach on La Reunion island off Africa has also been confirmed to be from the aircraft.

"That such debris has been found on the east coast of Africa is consistent with drift modelling performed by CSIRO (the Commonwealth of Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) and further affirms our search efforts in the southern Indian Ocean," Chester said last month when talking about the two Mozambique pieces.

The governments of Malaysia, Australia and China have been conducting a joint search operation in the southern Indian Ocean, where the flight presumably had ended its journey.

So far, more than 95,000 square km of the 120,000 square km search zone have been completed.

"As we continue the search in the days and months ahead, we remain hopeful the aircraft will be found," Chester said.

The Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, soon after take off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board.
Islamabad, April 3 : Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan reiterated that Iran was not working hand in glove with Indian intelligence agency RAW to stoke instability in Islamabad.

"Iran has nothing to do with the activities of Indian intelligence network. Kite flying regarding arrest of Indian spy and his links with Iran must stop now," he told reporters at a press conference here on Saturday.

The minister said that an impression was being given in a section of media that Iran was involved in certain negative activities against Pakistan, the Daily Times reported.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said some elements wanted to damage positive and historic brotherly relations and create misunderstandings between the two countries.

Nisar Ali Khan said the matter of relations between the two countries must not be linked with arrest of the Indian spy.

"I appeal to media not to create an impression as if Iran is facilitating RAW's activities in Pakistan. Pakistan and Iran are tied in decades-long religious, social, cultural and political bonds and nothing can come in way of our relations," he said.

The issue of arrest of RAW agent was taken up by Pakistan Army chief General Raheel Sharif with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

"There is one concern that RAW is involved in Pakistan, especially in Balochistan, and sometimes also uses the soil of our brother country, Iran," the army chief told the visiting dignitary.

"I request, they should be told to stop these activities and allow Pakistan to achieve stability," the army chief said, according to a release issued by the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) after their meeting.

However, President Hassan Rouhani at a press conference held later in the day denied that the issue of Indian spy agency's involvement in Pakistan was discussed during his meeting with the Pakistani Army chief.

"Whenever Iran comes closer to Pakistan, such rumours are spread," he said.
Mumbai, April 3 : With "Baahubali: The Beginning" continuing its success story by winning a National Film Award, actor Prabhas has been urged to pay a visit by some theatre owners who are still running the movie.

The movie has won the Best Feature Film at the 63rd National Film Awards, and Prabhas is overwhelmed.

He was also pleasantly surprised to receive special requests from the managements and owners of many theaters across India, who are still running the film in a matinee show. The owners have written to the actor, asking for his visit to the theatre, said a source close to the actor.

Prabhas shared: "Appreciation pouring in after so many months of the release of 'Baahubali' is an overwhelming feeling. Theatre owners are an important part of the industry and their acknowledgement means a lot."

-*-Tawang monastery on Shahid's mind

Actor Shahid Kapoor, who has recently finished a gruelling shooting schedule for "Rangoon" in Arunachal Pradesh, is keen to visit the famous Tawang monastery in the state.

On his first visit to Arunachal Pradesh, Shahid was awestruck by the beauty and the nature of the state. However, because of the extensive shoot and the schedule, Shahid couldn't get a chance to visit the monastery.

"Shahid is mesmerised with the beauty of the state and he loved every bit of it. The schedule was tight and so he hasn't got a chance to explore the state well," said his spokesperson.

However, once the film's shoot is over, he plans to take some time out and visit the place.

Shahid has already begun the film's next shoot in Mumbai. The actor has gone through an extensive look journey for his character in "Rangoon".

-*-Kabir Khan shares comfortable working bond with Salman Director Kabir Khan, who has delivered blockbusters like "Ek Tha Tiger" and "Bajrangi Bhaijaan" with superstar Salman Khan, says he shares a comfortable working relationship with the actor.

"I share a comfortable working relationship with Salman. Moreover, after two major hits, I am definitely going to make another movie with him. However, right now I cannot tell if it will be my next film or not," Kabir said here.

He also disclosed that apart from Salman, he is teaming up with another star, Hrithik Roshan. Kabir is working on the final draft of the script.

"We are discussing with Hrithik for another project. As soon I will be finishing my script, we will be working on that."

The "Kabul Express" director thinks that though a story is considered as a backbone of a film, it does not get much importance.

"I am sure there are some great writers out there but they do not get good opportunities. While a story should be a backbone of a film, unfortunately, scripts are not given much weightage. Also in terms of money, it does not make sense while you are making Rs.50 crore film, and paying a writer only Rs.25 lakh."

However, the director feels there is a shortage of good scripts at a time when directors are turning into scriptwriters.

"I don't get a good script to make a movie. I have to write my own script and it takes three to four months to finish the story. Someday I hope to get a script which I feel like making a movie immediately after reading. However, that has not happened until now."
Sydney, April 3 : India's Adani Enterprises may soon start work on the mega Carmichael coal project in Australia after securing leases following the final environmental clearance by the government.

Australian Natural Resources and Mines Minister Anthony Lynham approved the grant of three individual mining leases for the $21.7 billion Carmichael coal, mine and rail project, media reports said on Sunday.

The three approved leases are 70441 Carmichael, 70505 Carmichael East and 70506 Carmichael North, which are estimated to contain 11 billion tonnes of thermal coal, theage.com.au reported.

The approvals come after Adani secured final environmental approval and reached an agreement on compensation with a landholder last month.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the approved leases have undergone "extensive government and community scrutiny" and were a step towards securing jobs for the region.

Adani has said that more than 5,000 jobs are expected to be generated during construction and more than 4,000 during operation of the project.

According to the report, Adani's job creation figures had been the subject of debate since last year after revelations in court found the mega mine would create only 1,464 jobs per year, and not the 10,000 figure that was commonly associated with the project.

"I know the people of north and central Queensland will welcome this latest progress for the potential jobs and economic development it brings closer for their communities," said Palaszczuk.

Welcoming the premier's announcement, Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani said: "This final key approval reflects the confidence both sides of politics, at both the national and state level, have in our commitment to delivering major projects that will help drive exports and jobs in Australia, while delivering energy security in India."

An Adani spokesman said that with the leases approved, the company hopes to start construction on the mine sometime next year.

"The granting of a mining lease helps deliver the company certainty with respect to timelines, while moving to the next phase of the project, subject to the resolution of legal challenges by politically-motivated activists," he said.

The spokesman added that the mine's approvals were the "strictest of their kind" for a major Australian resources project.

"It is for this reason that conclusion of second tier approvals and resolution of politically-motivated legal challenges is the company's principal focus, prior to a final investment decision being made," he said.

"Delivering low ash, low sulphur, lower emitting coal to thermal generators in India, while delivering jobs in regions crying out for them, and taxes and royalties to Queensland, is paramount," he said.

First proposed in 2010, the Carmichael project will dig up and transport about 60 million tonnes of coal a year for export, mostly to India.

The mine, which will cover an area seven times the size of Sydney Harbour and includes a railway project, was first approved by the government in 2014.

Last year, the Australian federal government gave fresh approval for the project, but soon faced a fresh legal challenge from an environmental group seeking its cancellation on grounds that it would damage the ecologically sensitive Great Barrier Reef.
Imphal, April 3 : Maoist insurgents on Sunday said they lobbed a grenade at the residence of a medical college professor here to express their disgust with "rampant corruption" in the institute.

The attack on Friday night on the residence of M. Amuba Singh, professor in the department of biochemistry and medical superintendent at the central government-run Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) here, resulted only in some damage to the parked vehicles.

The professor's residence on the campus of RIMS, which is a medical college-cum hospital, is guarded by armed paramilitary personnel.

"There had been corruption in the appointment of nurses. There was also question paper leakage. Though an inquiry committee was instituted, the finding was not made public," said the Maoist Communist Party in a statement, claiming responsibility for the attack.

It blamed RIMS' director S. Rita Devi, deputy director Y. Rajendra Singh and Amuba Singh for the alleged corrupt practices in the instititute.

The Maoists said it was against "rampant corruption" in the RIMS and that its grenade attack should not be seen as an extortion bid.

RIMS sources, however, said the inquiry committee had established that there was nothing wrong in the appointment of the nurses. These new nurses have joined duty.

The employees, including director Rita Devi, on Saturday staged a sit-in protest against the grenade attack in the hospital premises.

"A fear psychosis should not be created among the patients," Rita Devi said.

The institute did get linked with a corruption scandal in 2014 when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered cases against some top administrators for irregularities in procurement of dental chairs.

Following the scandal, S. Sekharjit Singh was relieved of his directorship, and was replaced by Rita Devi.

Given the Maoists' resolve to "purge" the RIMS of the alleged corrupt practices, police told IANS that security measures have been beefed up.

The government is preparing to strengthen the security detail of the director, the medical superintendent and the administrative block.
New Delhi, April 3 : Uttar Pradesh Police are working "on all angles" to find out the motive behind the killing of NIA officer Tanzil Ahmad, who was shot 21 times in an attack by unidentified assailants post-midnight on Saturday.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh, in Lucknow, assured that the death will be probed while NIA spokesperson Sanjeev Kumar said in Delhi that Ahmad was a "martyr".

The shooting in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district took place when the officer, an assistant commandant in the Border Security Force (BSF) and currently on deputation with NIA as an inspector since 2010, was returning from a wedding with his wife and children. His wife Farzana received four bullet injuries, but his children were unharmed.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh, speaking on the sidelines of a function in Lucknow, assured that the murder will be probed.

"I have spoken to the officers concerned. Our teams have gone there to probe the matter and they will submit a comprehensive report very soon," he said.

The officer was laid to rest with full state honours in Shaheen Bagh area of south Delhi.

"He is a martyr," Kumar said referring to Ahmad.

"He will be given all dues that is given to someone killed in service," Kumar told IANS.

An official statement issued by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) called it a "great loss".

"Tanzil Ahmed was an asset to the agency. His killing is a great loss to NIA. We take it as a challenge to bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. We will not rest until that happens," the statement said.

"The assailants came on motorbikes and opened fire from a close range on Ahmad near Sahaspur town," Sanjeev Kumar told reporters here earlier Sunday.

Ahmad's wife who also received bullet injuries is undergoing treatment at Fortis Hospital in Noida. A neighbour meanwhile said that the children escaped unharmed because Ahmad instructed them to hide under the seat when the firing started.

Uttar Pradesh's Additional Director General of Police Daljit Chowdhary, meanwhile, said it appeared as a planned attack, and the police was working out on all angles.

"Nothing can be ruled out now until and unless we get absolute concrete evidence. We have to work on all angles. We have to see it from all the sides and work out the case," he said, adding the borders had been sealed, nearby areas were searched and senior officials from Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) have been put on the job to track the assailants and probe the attack.

"I am very hopeful that we will work out the case and arrest the accused. It looks like a planned attack. It was definitely not a robbery," Chowdhary said.

The NIA has also termed Ahmad's killing as a "planned attack".

"A planned attack took place on him when he was fired upon and killed," Kumar said.

The premier investigating agency is trying to find out how he was tracked by his assailants.

Doctors at Fortis Noida, where Ahmad's wife is being treated, meanwhile said she is being given the best treatment.

"The patient has been brought in a critical condition. Our doctors are providing the best medical treatment to treat the patient. As a matter of patient confidentiality we cannot comment anything further," a statement from the Fortis Noida said.

Ahmad was pronounced dead on being taken to a medical facility in Moradabad.

Before joining the NIA, Ahmad was part of the in-house team of BSF, providing vigilance cover. He also held tenures as instructor at BSF Academy at Tekanpur, near Gwalior, and training centre at Hazaribagh.
Mumbai, April 3 : Prabhudheva turned a year older on Sunday with a quiet lunch with his two sons who had flown in from Chennai to Mumbai.

"They were here, as it was a Sunday. They flew back on Sunday afternoon in time for their school on Monday," Prabhudheva said.

The actor-dancer-choreographer-filmmaker has been busy with his trilingual acting assignment in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. He started shooting for the film in January and has taken time off from direction.

"I did act in Remo D'Souza's 'ABCD 2' last year. But it has been a while since I faced the camera in Tamil or Telugu. I've been busy directing films. I took three months off to act in this film," he said.

He says he had no choice.

"I wanted a hero who didn't charge money. I was the only one willing to do this film for free, since I am the co-producer."

Prabhudheva says he was enthused to face the camera for this three-language film for its uniqueness.

"For the first time, the director, Vijay attempted the horror-comedy genre in Hindi cinema. We haven't really done a horror-comedy in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu."

Prabhudheva had a different team working with him on each of the three versions.

"We shot the three separate languages as three separate films. Though Tammanaah, Sonu Sood and I feature in all three versions, the supporting cast of actors playing our friends is different in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. Each of three three films will be culture-specific."

The dancer-choreographer actor says he enjoys acting.

"It frees me from the responsibilities that come with direction and choreography. After every shot, I can breathe easy and relax."

So enthused is Prabhudheva by his multilingual on-camera experience that he now intends to direct a film in Tamil or Telugu.

"For the last five years I've only directed Hindi films. I may direct a Tamil or a Telugu film next."
Riyadh, April 3 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday described an all-women IT centre set up by India's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) here as the "glory of Saudi Arabia".

"I am meeting those professionals who are now the glory of Saudi Arabia," said Modi in the first engagement of the second and last day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

"This atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong message to the world."

Modi said that in today's competitive world "we have to unite our strengths, both natural and human, for optimum progress".

He said that when women power becomes part of the development journey, it gathers fresh momentum.

The prime minister said that the atmosphere he witnessed at the all-women's centre on Sunday appeared to be a harbinger of a positive force for the world.

He invited the women IT professionals to visit India, and said their visit would make a huge impact even in India.

Modi emphasised the role of technology in governance, and said e-governance, for him, meant easy governance, effective governance, and economic governance.

He invited them to see the "Narendra Modi App" and even share their views on women empowerment in India.

"Vande Mataram. Matri Devo Bhavah (Salutations to Mother. Mother be the god)" wrote the prime minister on the message board at the centre.

Earlier, Modi was welcomed with cheers by the employees as he entered the centre.

Some of them took selfies with the prime minister.

The centre, opened three years back, initially had 80 people. The number has now grown to over 1,000.

Eighty percent of the employees are local Saudi women.

It is also the first BPO to be opened by any company in the world in Saudi Arabia and the significance is more so because it is run entirely by women.

Over 60 percent of graduates in Saudi Arabia are women.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Saudi kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

The prime minister will leave for India on Sunday evening after talks with Saudi King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and signing of agreements between the two sides.
Melbourne, April 3 : A violent brawl erupted outside the community event at the Melbourne Showgrounds on Sunday when a small group of anti-Islam protestors clashed with anti-racism activists.

The fight came as hundreds of people filled Federation Square as a counter protest to the anti-Islamic movement, which was put back in the spotlight when a "stop the mosques" banner was unveiled at the Collingwood AFL game on Friday night, the Australian Age reported.

Multicultural Affairs Minister Robin Scott said everyone had the right to protest, but it had to be peaceful and respectful.

"Violent conduct is completely unacceptable and has no place in our community," he said.

The brawl began in Ascot Vale when about 30 far-left protestors wearing black clothing and balaclavas, believed to be part of the anti-fascist Antifa group, swarmed the far-right protestors, including members of the United Patriots Front, Reclaim Australia and other anti-Halal activists, who had been picketing the Halal expo.
New Delhi/Thiruvananthapuram, April 3 : The Congress high command on Sunday agreed to the demands of Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and gave its nod to five candidates for the assembly polls though their selection was opposed tooth and nail by state party chief V.M. Sudheeran.

The party high command agreed to the five names after almost a week of numerous rounds of talks at various levels.

Since the time the state's top leadership reached Delhi on March 27, Sudheeran had been strongly opposing the re-nomination of Excise Minister K. Babu, who is facing allegations in the bar scam, Revenue Minister Adoor Prakash, who is embroiled in a row over land transfer, Culture Minister K.C. Joseph, who has been a legislator since 1982, Benny Behanan for allegedly having links with solar panel scam accused, and five-time legislator and former minister Dominic Presentation.

Even after two rounds of talks with party president Sonia Gandhi, Chandy stood his ground and said if any of the five is dropped, he will not contest the polls.

Sources said former defence minister A.K. Antony, who is also a former chief minister of Kerala, stepped in on Sunday morning and persuaded both party vice president Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi to allow Chandy the freedom.

Sudheeran, before returning to Kerala on Sunday, told reporters in Delhi that he has assured the party high command that he will not put pressure on it for the selection of candidates.

"I have assured the high command, I will not stand in the way of whatever decisions they take. It was not with any personal grudge, that I opposed a few names," said Sudheeran.

Chandy also left for Kerala on Sunday. After arriving in Kochi, he visited his home turf Puthupally.

Asked by the media if he was happy that he was able to "pressurise" the party high command, he said: "All what you are hearing in the news is baseless."

"No one can ever get the better of our high command. All what you hear is not true. We all said what we had to say and the final decision would be that of the high command," Chandy told reporters in Puthupally.

The three top leaders of the party from Kerala -- Chandy, Sudheeran and state Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala -- have been in Delhi for over a week to finalise the list of candidates for the 82 constituencies the party is contesting.

According to sources, the high command wanted to please both Chandy and Sudheeran, but the chief minister stuck to his stand.

A worried Indian Union Muslim League -- the second biggest ally in the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) -- meanwhile got in touch with the Congress high command and expressed apprehension that if Chandy is not going to lead the UDF, things could go haywire.

Chandy had informed the national leadership that he was prepared to step down and aside, and anyone else could lead the party to the polls. He, however, said he will campaign in all the 140 assembly constituencies.

Polls for the 140-member Kerala assembly will be held on May 16.
Riyadh, April 3 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday, the second and final day of his bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia, gifted King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud a gold-plated replica of the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kerala.

Situated in Thrissur district, the Cheraman Juma Masjid is believed to be the first mosque built in India by Arab traders around 629 AD, and symbolic of active trade relations between India and Saudi Arabia since ancient times, an official statement about the gift said.

According to oral tradition, Cheraman Perumal was the Chera king and a contemporary of the Holy Prophet who went to Arabia and embraced Islam after meeting the Holy Prophet at Makkah.

Some years later, he sent letters to his relatives and the ruling chieftains of Malabar through his friends Malik bin Dinar and Malik bin Habib who, along with their companions, were then given permission by the local rulers to build the mosque at Kodungallur.

The mosque has an ancient oil lamp that is always kept burning and is believed to be over a thousand years old. People from all religions bring oil for the lamp as an offering.

King Salman on Sunday received Modi and his delegation at the Royal Court here.

"A truly Royal welcome. PM @narendramodi is welcomed by His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at the Palace," external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

The Saudi monarch is hosting a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister. This will be followed by delegation-level talks and signing of agreements.

Modi will leave for New Delhi on Sunday evening.
New Delhi, April 3 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud led delegation-level talks here on Sunday, during which the entire gamut of the strategic partnership between India and Saudi Arabia was reviewed.

"Examining the full spread of a Strategic Partnsership. PM and King lead delegation level talks," external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Fighting terrorism, energy cooperation and trade and investment were high on the agenda in Sunday's talks.

Apart from being India's largest crude oil supplier, accounting for one-fifth of its imports, Saudi Arabia is also India's fourth largest trading partner with bilateral trade reaching $40 billion.

There are nearly three million Indians in Saudi Arabia, a large number of whom are blue-collar workers involved in the kingdom's various infrastructure projects.

The delegation-level talks were preceded by a restricted meeting between Modi and King Salman.

The Saudi monarch also hosted a lunch in honour of the visiting prime minister.

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.

Modi leave will leave for New Delhi on Sunday evening.
Kathmandu, April 3 : Nepal's intelligence agency, the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB), has arrested a person accused in the 1995 murder here of an Italian national.

A gang of 13 men, led by Tashi Gurung, had killed Carraro David at the Thamel-based Reggae pub following a dispute after they harassed his girl friend on October 13, 1995, The Kathmandu Post reported.

Police on Sunday said Gurung -- who holds a US Green Card and had been on the run -- was arrested a week ago from Kathmandu. He came back to Kathmandu around three years ago.

"The members of Tashi's gang had been absconding following David's murder," said CIB Chief Director Inspector General Nawa Raj Silwal.

"As many as eight accused are still on the run," he said.

It was found that Tashi had flown to the US one-and-half years after the incident.

The number of Italian tourists dropped sharply following David's murder as the incident sent a bad impression about Nepal in that country.
Jamnagar, April 3 : The Indian Air Force is all set to participate in an advanced aerial combat training exercise 'Red Flag-Alaska' with eight of its frontline fighter jets taking off from the Jamnagar airbase on Sunday all the way to Alaska.

Four Sukhoi 30-MKI fighters and four Jaguars, along with two military transport C17 Globemasters, and two IL 78 mid-air refuellers will represent India at the exercise.

The aircraft fleet is accompanied by around 200-member IAF team, flying to Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska in the US, via Bahrain, Egypt, France, Portugal and Canada, an IAF official said.

India last participated in a similar exercise in 2008, when the IAF joined Red Flag exercise at the Nellis airbase in Nevada, US. The Indian participation at that time cost around Rs.100 crore.

Red Flag-Alaska is a 10-day air combat training exercise of the US Air Force which is held up to four times a year.

It is held at the Eielson and Elmendorf Air Force Bases in Alaska.

The first exercise of this year is set to be held from April 28 to May 13 as per the website of the Eielson Air Force Base.

Originally named 'Cope Thunder', the exercise was moved to the Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska from the Clark Air Base, the Philippines, in 1992 after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991, forced the curtailment of operations.

'Cope Thunder' was re-designated Red Flag-Alaska in 2006.
Mumbai, April 3 : Veteran actor Rishi Kapoor urged a viewer, who enjoyed "Kapoor & Sons", to not just watch Bollywood films but other Indian movies too as the country makes "very good films".

A Twitter user, who rarely watches Hindi films, on Sunday praised "Kapoor & Sons" in a post to Rishi Kapoor during a virtual chat on social media.

"Don't watch Hindi movies but saw 'Kapoor and Sons'-superb! Such a sensitive portrayal of an Indian family. Rishi Kapoor, Fawad Khan and Karan Johar," the fan tweeted.

To that, Rishi Kapoor responded: "Start watching not only Hindi but Indian films. We make very good films too. Return to your roots."

"Kapoor & Sons" stars Fawad Khan, Alia Bhatt and Sidharth Malhotra in lead roles, with Rishi Kapoor playing a 90-year-old grandfather.
Brussels, April 3 : Amid tight security controls, Brussels airport reopened for three "symbolic" flights on Sunday, 12 days after terror attacks that claimed 34 lives.

Three Brussels Airlines flights were scheduled to depart for European destinations, with the first leaving at 11.40 a.m. (local time) for Faro in Portugal, BBC reported.

Strict security measures were taken as the airport reopened partially. The passengers were screened on an approach road and again before check in.

Both the Brussels attacks on the airport and a metro station on March 22, as well as the November 12, 2015 Paris attacks were claimed by the Islamic State militant group.

Airport workers gathered at Zaventem to watch the first flight take off.

The other two flights on Sunday are to Turin in northern Italy and Athens.

Airport chief executive Arnaud Feist said: "These flights are the first hopeful sign from an airport that is standing up straight after a cowardly attack."

Brussels Airlines has estimated that the closure of its hub cost it $5.7 millions a day.

The stringent new security checks were put in place after police threatened to go on strike if measures were not improved.

Passengers were asked to arrive three hours before their flight departure time. They can get to the airport by car or taxi -- the terminal is still closed to trains and buses.

Late on Friday, Belgian officials reached a deal with police unions on enhanced security at the airport.

Feist said that he hoped the airport would get back up to full capacity in time for the start of the summer holidays at the end of June.
Bhubaneswar, April 3 : The Federation of All Odisha Traders' Associations (FAOTA) on Sunday announced suspension of its strike on the VAT issue and decided to resume buying of essential food items from other states.

The traders went on strike on April 1 to protest against the five percent Value Addition Tax (VAT) levied by the Odisha government on the purchase of pulses, wheat and wheat products from other states.

The traders took the decision on the strike's suspension after a meeting with the government on Saturday.

"We have got a written government assurance that it will consider our demands. So, we suspended our strike till May 26 when the assembly budget session will end," said FAOTA general secretary Sudhakar Panda.

He said the traders will consider their future course of action if the government failed to act on their demands by then.

Finance Minister Pradeep Amat said the Biju Janata Dal government will discuss the demands with FAOTA after the assembly session ended.

The FAOTA said 25 states had exempted pulses, wheat and wheat products from VAT.

The state consumes about 67,000 tonnes of pulses and 12,000 tonnes of wheat products every month, with a large chunk bought from other states.
Riyadh, April 3 : Indian Prime Minister Narendra MOdi has said strengthening the strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia was a priority of India.

"Building further on this strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia is one of the foreign policy priorities of our government," Arab News quoted Modi as saying in an interview on Saturday.

Modi's visit to Saudi Arabia is a part of his three nations tour which also include Brussels and Washington.

Modi, who is on a two-day visit to Saudi Arabia, has described Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud as a visionary leader.

"King Salman has led Saudi Arabia with great maturity and foresightedness during one of the most challenging times," Modi said.

King Salman has taken personal interest in building the Indo-Saudi relationship and further strengthening bilateral cooperation and engagements in diverse fields, he said.

Replying to a question, Modi termed terrorism as the enemy of the entire humanity. "Both India and Saudi Arabia have been victims of the acts of terror resulting in the loss of innocent lives. The recent cowardly acts of terror in Lahore, Brussels, Paris, Iraq and the continuing violence in Afghanistan have shown that terrorists recognise no boundaries."

"They have no caste, colour, creed or religion. We need to delink religion from terrorism."

Modi acknowledged and appreciated Saudi Arabia's role in eradicating the scourge of terrorism. "We deeply appreciate the leadership role being played by Saudi Arabia in the region to fight this menace," he said.

Modi thanked the Saudi leadership for hosting a large Indian community and for ensuring their continued welfare and wellbeing.

"I have heard immense praise of our community for their educational and technical achievement; for their integrity and sense of discipline; and for their honesty and devotion to work. Such praise fills me with great pride," he said.
New Delhi, April 3 : The Congress on Sunday accused the BJP and its ideological mentor RSS of insulting national symbols and said "both are pursuing a cheap agenda to create a divide in the country and trying to twist the history of our independence".

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Sarkaryavah Bhaiyyaji Joshi on Saturday said the national anthem 'Jana Gana Mana' described the idea of 'rajya' (state) while the national song 'Vande Mataram' denoted India's cultural identity and our devotion to it.

"The Bharatiya Janata Party and the RSS in the past 23 months have been insulting the national symbols of our country. It is a cheap agenda to create a division in the country. Bhaiyyaji Joshi publicly insulted the Indian flag. It is clear now that the RSS is trying to ignore the history of the freedom struggle," Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said.

He added: "Joshi ji used insulting words to describe the national anthem and the national song. He said national anthem doesn't generate a feeling of patriotism as the national song does. This is a conspiracy to twist the history of our Independence."

The RSS leader had also said that "if one considered the true meaning, then Vande Mataram was the national anthem" since the "sentiments expressed in Vande Mataram denote the nation's character and style. This is the difference between the two songs".

Joshi had said while the Tricolour was India's 'state flag', the 'saffron flag' was the symbol of our ancient culture.

"The Constituent Assembly had 'adopted the tiranga (tricolour) as our state flag, and it was later retained as that of the Republic of India. It is mandatory for every citizen of India to respect this symbol. The saffron flag has been revered by the people of Bharat since times immemorial as a symbol of our ancient culture. We revere both the tiranga (tricolour) and the saffron flag," Joshi had said.
Riyadh, April 3 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi left here for New Delhi on Sunday evening at the conclusion of his two-day bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia.

During delegation-level talks earlier on Sunday, India and Saudi Arabia agreed to strengthen cooperation in the fight against terrorism and boost bilateral trade.

During his stay here, Modi also interacted with members of the three million-strong expatriate Indian community, including blue collar workers involved in the Gulf kingdom's infrastructure sector.

Saudi Arabia was the third and last leg of Modi's five-day foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. In Washington, he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This was the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.
Bijnor, April 3 : NIA officer Tanzil Ahmad, who was shot dead by unidentified assailants post-midnight on Saturday, was buried with full state honours on Sunday.

His body was on Sunday brought to his home in Delhi and his last rites were performed in Shaheen Bagh area of south Delhi.

National Investigation Agency (NIA) spokesperson Sanjeev Kumar, who was present during the burial to pay his last respects to the officer, called him a "martyr".

"He is a martyr," Kumar said while referring to Ahmad.

He said the officer's kin will get all dues that are given to the families of officers killed while in service.

Ahmad, 48, known for undercover operations, joined the NIA in 2010. He was an assistant commandant with the BSF but was on deputation with the NIA as an inspector.

Ahmad was shot 21 times near Sahaspur village in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district when he, along with his wife and two children, was returning from a wedding. His wife Farzana received four bullet injuries, but his children were unharmed.

His wife is undergoing treatment at the Fortis Hospital in Noida.
Riyadh, April 3 : A man was killed in a bomb blast in Al Kharj area near here, the Saudi Interior Ministry said on Sunday.

The blast targeted a police vehicle in the region on Saturday night, the ministry's spokesperson was quoted by Saudi Press Agency as saying.

The explosion left two other patrol vehicles damaged. The nationality of the victim was yet unknown.

Saturday's blast was the latest in a string of bombings the kingdom has been witnessing since last year.

All the previous blasts were planned by the Islamic State group through its sleeper cells in the country.
Jammu, April 3 : The Congress on Sunday said it will boycott the swearing-in ceremony of PDP president Mehbooba Mufti as Jammu and Kashmir chief minister on Monday.

"We will boycott the oath-taking ceremony for two reasons. Firstly because we oppose a government which is ultimately backed by the RSS.

"And secondly, Mehbooba Mufti's grandstanding for three months cost the state," Congress state president G.A. Mir told IANS here.

Mehbooba will head an alliance of her Peoples Democratic Party with the Bharatiya Janata Party, like her late father Mufti Muhammad Sayeed did after the 2014 assembly elections.

Jammu and Kashmir was put under Governor's Rule on January 8, a day after Sayeed passed away in New Delhi and she had not been keen to succeed him initially.
New Delhi, April 3 : Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani will address an international conference on the concept of 'zero' at the Unesco headquarters in Paris, officials said on Sunday.

The event is being organised by the HRD ministry through the permanent delegation of India to Unesco, in collaboration with the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, on April 4-5.

The high-level segment of the conference would be addressed by Irani and Unesco Director General Irina Bokova on April 5.

"The conference will share the rich and remarkable history of mathematics, through the participation of some brilliant minds, resonating with the Unesco's mandate to advance, transfer and share knowledge for the greater global good," an official said.

The conference would open on April 4 at Pierre and Marie Curie University with a session on "Gems of Ramanujan and their lasting impact on mathematics" by professor Manjul Bhargava from Princeton University in the US.

The second session on "Negative numbers, zero, infinity and beyond" will be addressed by Shailendra Mehta from Auro University in Gujarat.

A special session by Bhargava on "Mathematics in Indian music" will be a high point of the conference," the official said.

The event will close with the unveiling of a bronze bust by Irani and Bokova of the ancient Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata, which is a gift from India to Unesco.
New York, April 3 : A US school teacher accused of calling at class 7 student a terrorist during a class discussion on India has been sent on leave following a demand for her ouster from the student's family.

The student, Waleed Abushaaban, who is of Middle Eastern descent, stood and gave his input regarding the subject matter.

According to students, the teacher told him to sit down and referred to him as a terrorist. Some students then laughed and threw themselves to the floor screaming: "He's got a bomb!".

Abushaaban left the classroom and called his father.

Standing in agreement with the family, Minister Quanell X has asked for cultural sensitivity training to be implemented and for the removal of that particular teacher.

Earlier, the Abushaaban family demanded that the teacher should be fired, and the school removed the English and Language Arts teacher from the classroom while it investigates the incident. However, Waleed's family want her permanently dismissed.

"Just because my son is a Muslim doesn't mean he is a terrorist," said Malek Abushaaban, Waleed's father. "He's an American. He's as American as anybody else. He was born here... that's all he knows is how to be an American."

The Abushaaban family says Waleed will stay enrolled at First Colony Middle School and, in addition to firing the teacher in question, would like religious sensitivity training for both students and teachers.
New Delhi, April 3 : External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Saturday assured a Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) delegation that abducted Salesian Order priest Father Thomas Uzhunnallil is safe and all efforts are being taken to free him, a statement said.

"Sushma Swaraj has categorically assured the delegation that Fr. Tom Uzhunnallil is safe and that the government is adopting all possible means for the quick and safe release of Father Tom," said a CBCI statement.

However, she did not reveal the finer details of the negotiations and the technicalities involved in securing the release of the Indian priest, abducted by the IS in Yemen, as it may jeopardise the entire process.

"The minister also said that the wild rumours being spread about any harm done to Fr. Tom, are totally baseless," the statement said, thus quashing the rumours that Uzhunnallil was crucified by the IS terrorists on Good Friday.

The minister also told the delegation, led by CBCI deputy secretary general Joseph Chinnayyan, of the strenuous efforts being undertaken by the ministry and her personally to obtain the safe passage of the only surviving nun, sister Rema.

On March 4, the priest from Kerala was kidnapped after IS terrorists barged into a Missionaries of Charity care home in Aden for which he is the caretaker and shot dead many people, including four nuns, one of them from India.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Archbishop of Bengaluru, Father Bernard Moras, has called upon the general public in Bengaluru to join for a three-hour prayer vigil for Uzhunnalil to observe the completion of a month of his abduction.
Riyadh, April 4 : Saudi Aramco, the world's leading oil producing company with around 10 million barrels per day output, is looking at India as its number one target for investment. This was conveyed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by Saudi Aramco head Khalid Al Falih during their meeting here.

"Minister Al Falih to PM: @Saudi_Aramco looks to India as its No. 1 target for investment," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup with a picture of their meeting on Sunday.

The Dhahran-based company, which owns a stake in a refinery in China's Fujian province along with Exxon Mobil Corp. and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, was reported to be planning to establish a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund by offloading a stake of less than 5 percent in the company.

The $2 trillion fund, estimated to be more than double Norway's wealth fund, is reported to be used for investments in strategic financial and industrial assets abroad.

Saudi Arabia has been badly hit by a plunge in oil prices - from $114 a barrel in June 2014 to currently around $38 a barrel - over the last few years, which has pummeled its economy heavily dependent on oil.
London, April 4 : Actor Martin Freeman, who loves clothes and shoes, says that he likes people who have an affinity for good clothes and immediately tends to trust them.

"I like people who like clothes. I immediately trust men who are into clothes, even though they could turn out to be horrible people. There is an intelligence about caring about what you wear," The Times newspaper's Luxx menswear supplement quoted Freeman as saying, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

"I was always into fashion and, as I've got older, it's got worse. I know there are more important things in the world. Outside my normal life, aside from music, it's where most of my energy goes. I'm not very proud of that. Some people's energy goes on saving Syrian refugees. Mine goes on shoes," he added.

The 44-year-old actor described his fashion addiction as a "sickness", and shared that it infuriates his partner of 16 years, Amanda Abbington.

"I can't leave the house unless I'm happy with my appearance. It's a sickness. It's a nightmare for Amanda," he said.
Advantage Systems, a provider of accounting and financial management tools for the mortgage industry, and LendingQB, a provider of loan origination technology solutions, announced today the completion of an integration that enables mortgage lenders to seamlessly transfer loan-level accounting data from the LendingQB LOS to the AMB (Accounting for Mortgage Bankers) platform.

Most of the integrations we have done involve an LOS system pushing data to us. The integration between Advantage Systems and LendingQB allows us to reach in and get the information we need, said Brian Lynch, president of Advantage Systems. This tool allows us to minimize implementation costs to our clients and gives them the flexibility to make changes when needed.

LendingQB's open architecture API (application protocol interface) allowed Advantage Systems to quickly build a first-phase integration. "We specifically built our API to provide a simple but secure method for outside companies to access virtually any field in a loan file," noted LendingQB president Binh Dang. "Our API is ideal because all lenders perform their accounting and reporting in a slightly different way. It has built-in flexibility and extensibility to allow AMB and the lender to customize the data they want to access."

A benefit of the integration is that it encourages lenders to perform accounting functions on a more frequent basis. This reduces the work level at month-end and improves completeness of data. "Lenders have to staff for peaks, not valleys," said Lynch. When transactions and reconciliations are recorded on a daily basis, there is much less to do at month end and peak periods of activity are kept to a minimum.

This approach eliminates the veritable avalanche of data at months end that needs to be reconciled, Lynch noted. The books are closed more quickly, and because reconciliations are done more often, there is a higher degree of confidence in those financials. We believe the integration with LendingQB allows lenders to perform better accounting with less staff.

LendingQB noted that the integration with AMB is an extension of their Lean Lending solution strategy, which promotes operational efficiency through the implementation of best practices and partnering with best of breed industry providers. We want to provide lenders with technology solutions that do more than just exchange data with any third party company, said Dang. Advantage Systems is an innovator and respected provider of accounting solutions for mortgage lenders. We are proud to be the first LOS to partner with them to create a solution that helps our clients work smarter.

About LendingQB

LendingQB is a provider of 100 percent web browser-based, end-to-end loan origination software offering residential mortgage banking organizations lean strategies for optimal performance resulting in faster cycle time and lower costs per loan. For more information, please call 888-285-3912 or visit our website at: lendingqb.com.

About Advantage Systems

Founded in 1986, Irvine, California-based Advantage Systems is a provider of accounting and contract management tools for the mortgage and real estate industries. Advantage Systems' Accounting for Mortgage Bankers (AMB) was developed in response to the demand the company saw for a general ledger accounting product specifically designed for the mortgage banking industry. AMB has the ability and reliability to track costs at loan level in real time, eliminating redundant spreadsheets and providing financial data that can be used by CEOs, management and staff who may not be trained as accountants. For more information, visit http://www.mortgageaccounting.com.
International Title Partners just announced it is the first title company in the state of Florida to implement the ZOCCAM mobile app. This technology allows real estate agents to send earnest money deposits, at no cost, to the title company without the inconvenience of driving to the title company. It also provides increased security by preventing loss of checks or stolen private information.

"There are too many things that can go wrong when manually delivering or mailing paper checks for earnest money deposits, not to mention the time involved with Realtors or buyers driving checks to the title company," said Laurin Evans, Owner and Attorney of ITP. "We take information security very seriously as part of our compliance with ALTA Best Practices, and ZOCCAM makes our business even more secure. We are thrilled to be the first title company in Florida to offer this. Realtors are excited about ZOCCAM because it's another way to set themselves apart from the competition and provide additional value to their customers."

The technology is as easy as taking a picture of the earnest money check, and functions similarly to banking apps for deposits, making it simple from the user perspective. All parties immediately receive email notification that the earnest money has been deposited to escrow.

"Title companies like International Title Partners are the trailblazers embracing technology to heighten security and the overall closing experience. Delivery of funds securely is a big part of that experience, but so is the communication between the parties. ZOCCAM's email notification system provides transparency, aiding in consumer education, which is where our industry needs to be," said ZOCCAM CEO and Founder, Ashley Cook.

About International Title Partners: International Title Partners, LLC, located in Belleair Bluffs, FL since 2013, is a fast-growing provider of title insurance and full-service settlement services to the greater Tampa Bay area and west coast of Florida. The company is owned by attorney Laurin Evans and Kelly Kepler.
Our inclusion on the list of the best performing and prominent companies of the year is a wonderful acknowledgment of how our solutions are viewed in the network security marketplace said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of TitanHQ.

Cutting edge network security solutions provider TitanHQ, today announced it has been selected as a finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 Europe award, a prestigious list honoring the years most promising private technology ventures from the European business region.

The most innovative companies were selected from a pool of hundreds from across Europe. The nominees were evaluated on 20 main quantitative and qualitative criterion: including disruptive impact, market footprint, proof of concept, financial performance, technology innovation, social value, quality of management and execution of strategy. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record of a company which allows Red Herring to see past the buzz and make the list a valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

TitanHQ provides businesses worldwide with comprehensive network security protection through an award-winning suite of email and web security solutions. Our inclusion on the list of the best performing and prominent companies of the year is a wonderful acknowledgment of how our solutions are viewed in the network security marketplace. Our solutions are used to solve an increasing and complex range of network security problems in an innovative and robust way," said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of TitanHQ.

"This year was rewarding, beyond all expectations," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "There are many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products in Europe. We had a very difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. TitanHQ shows great promise and therefore deserves to be among the finalists. Now were faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring Europe. We know that the 2016 crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to make an impact."

Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, will present TitanHQs achievements at the Red Herring Europe Forum in Amsterdam, April 11-13, 2016. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony on the evening of April 13th.

About Red Herring

Red Herring is a global media company which unites the world's best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider's access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit http://www.redherring.com

About TitanHQ

TitanHQ provides small and medium sized businesses worldwide with comprehensive network security protection through their award-winning suite of email and web security solutions. In operation since 1999 TitanHQ has a deep understanding of the increasingly complex IT threats that face IT professionals today. Offering businesses a comprehensive, yet affordable subscription-based suite of security solutions that incorporates the latest spam and virus protection, web security and email archiving technology.

With an impressive 92.4 % customer retention rate the company has customer in 129 countries worldwide. Headquartered in Galway, Ireland, the company also operates a US office in Tampa, Florida as well as 75 partner offices worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.titanhq.com.
MaidPro believes that people who love their work do a better job. We want to keep people happy, healthy and engaged - that is our main goal. - Kay Lynch

The Boston Business Journal has released their 2016 list of Bostons Healthiest Employers. MaidPro ranked second in the small business category, and was one of only 26 companies acknowledged for their dedication to health and wellness. The Boston Business Journal went on to state, MaidPro has placed health and wellness at the center of its mission  literally: it built an employee gym right in the middle of the company. MaidPro offers its staff fitness classes and medication seminars and even weekend trips to the companys lake house in Maine. With a focus on creativity and passion, MaidPro has exemplified how small companies can provide large sized benefits. Kay Lynch, VP of Human Resources, says, We want to keep people happy, healthy and engaged  that is our main goal. As MaidPro continues to grow, they are always looking for new ways to improve and expand their wellness program. This is the second year MaidPro was named one of Bostons Healthiest Employers.

To get a free estimate for housecleaning services from MaidPro please visit http://www.maidpro.com.

ABOUT MAIDPRO

MaidPro is a Boston-based franchisor of house cleaning services with over 170 offices in 33 states, the District of Columbia and Canada. The company, which began franchising in 1997, takes pride in its strong owner community, cutting-edge technology and creative marketing. It has been honored with the Franchise Business Reviews Four-Star Rating and Franchise 50 awards every year from 2006 to 2014 for owner satisfaction. MaidPro was named one of the Top 50 Franchises for Minorities by USA Todays Franchising Today. MaidPro is also a proud member of the International Franchise Association and the New England Franchise Association. The company can be found online at http://www.maidprofranchise.com.
When your body feels good, its a lot easier to think

Friends and family of those who may be struggling with addiction in their lives may be interested in a new video released by Best Drug Rehabilitation, a holistic treatment center for substance abuse located in Western Michigan. This video, which is available for viewing on the Best Drug Rehabilitation YouTube channel and in the corresponding blog entry posted on their website, features footage of patients in the recovery centers fully equipped fitness center as well as clips from interviews with patients and the on-staff personal trainer at BDR, Jim Sonsmith.

When your body feels good, its a lot easier to think, Sonsmith explains in the video. The physical exercise and the yoga program that we offer here, as well as the other fitness programs, helps their body get healthy. Thats going to help them with their energy, thats going to help them sleep better at night, and it carries over into the other parts of the program.

The video and blog entry also discuss how, many times, physical therapy can be one of the most important aspects of the recovery program. According to data collected from their Patient Intake Department, the past few years have shown a remarkable increase in the number of patients admitted to Best Drug Rehabilitation due to addictions that began with prescription pain medication. Instead of addressing the cause of a persons pain, doctors are too quick with a pen and a pad, and simply try to mask the symptoms of a persons condition, commented BDR founder Per Wickstrom. We take a more holistic approach. We evaluate each patient individually, and then, using exercise and proper nutrition, we work towards repairing the damage instead of ignoring it and hoping it goes away.

Also featured is BDR patient Kenny M., who shares his first-person perspective of the benefit he found in the rehabilitation centers physical wellness program, specifically the ability it give to patients who need to relieve stress and anxiety, or simply blow off some steam. I get a lot more done, he says, and Im able to stay more focused. Youre going through an emotional rollercoaster, so the main thing to do would be to find certain things that take your mind off of stress and tension. For me, that would be working out.

The Best Drug Rehabilitation program was designed to address all of the needs of those who come to the recovery center seeking help in overcoming addiction. By focusing equally on mind, body, and spirit, BDR patients are able to discover an effective method of treatment tailored to fit their individual needs. Click here to see the full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrb5a0ieqiU
Brussels Airport said it plans to partially reopen Sunday, but the limited number of flights by Brussels Airlines following a 12-day shutdown is meant to be largely symbolic. The airport plans to be back up to 20 percent of capacity by Monday.

In the meantime, passengers whose flights on U.S. airlines are canceled can get a full refund. The airlines are also allowing passengers to rebook without paying the usual ticket-change fee, but the terms differ by carrier.

Customers who want to rebook or request a refund should call the airline rather than do it themselves online in order to avoid surprise charges or fare changes.

Once the airport reopens, it will take time for flights to build back up. British Airways says it won't fly to Brussels until Tuesday at the soonest.

The good news is that April is a slower travel time than the peak summer months, and there are seats available to many other European destinations. Arnaud Feist, CEO of Brussels Airport Co, said Saturday he hopes full service can be restored by the end of June or the beginning of July in time for the summer vacation season.

Here are the latest Brussels policies for several major airlines:

 Delta suggests customers reroute to or through Paris, Amsterdam, Dusseldorf or Luxembourg. Passengers with Brussels tickets through April 18 can rebook with no penalty  although the fare could be higher  if they begin their rescheduled travel by April 30. Or they can cancel their reservation and apply the ticket's value toward a new ticket for one year, according to Delta's website, although they could incur change fees and higher fares.

On Saturday, the airline said it was suspending service between Atlanta and Brussels until March 2017 due to continuing uncertainty around the re-opening of the airport and weakening demand. But it said it planned to resume service between New York's John F. Kennedy airport and Brussels once it gets clearance to do so.

 United says it will waive change fees and any difference in fare for passengers who reschedule a Brussels flight through April 30 if the new trip follows the same route or goes to or from London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf or Luxembourg. For trips after April 30 and within a year of the ticket's purchase, United says it will waive change fees but the fare could increase.

 American has canceled its Brussels flights through April 15. It is waiving change fees for Brussels trips that were bought before March 29 and scheduled to fly through April 22 on American, British Airways or Iberia. Passengers can rebook to or through several other European cities  London's two main airports, Paris' two main airports, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Liege Bierset, Belgium  with no change fee. In some cases, American says it will waive any change in fare as long as the passenger flies in the same class of seat covered by the original ticket.

 Air France says that passengers who bought tickets to Brussels before March 23 for travel through April 18 can get a refund or rebook their trip through April 18. Rebooked travel must be completed no later than April 30.

 British Airways passengers booked for Brussels flights through April 9 can claim a refund, rebook a later date at no extra charge, or pick another destination. The airline says it will operate flights to and from Liege, Belgium, through Monday.

 Lufthansa has canceled flights to and from Brussels until at least Wednesday and is offering passengers flights from Munich and Frankfurt to Liege instead. It has a shuttle service between Frankfurt and Brussels. Passengers whose Brussels flights on Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Germanwings or Eurowings have not been canceled can rebook in the same class for travel before Oct. 31.
Fighting in what was a dormant conflict for two decades flared up over the weekend with a boy and at least 30 troops killed on both sides. Each side blamed the other for Saturday's escalation, the worst since the end of a full-scale war in 1994.

The Defense Ministry said, in response to pleas from international organizations, it will be unilaterally "suspending a counter-offensive and response on the territories occupied by Armenia." The ministry added it will not focus on fortifying the territory that Azerbaijan has "liberated." It did not elaborate.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994 with no resolution of the region's status. The conflict is fueled by long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris.

Armenian forces also occupy several areas outside Nagorno-Karabakh proper. The sides are separated by a demilitarized buffer zone, but small clashes have broken out frequently.

Earlier Sunday, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry, Vagif Dargyakhly, said Azerbaijani positions came under fire overnight and that civilian areas also were hit.

On Saturday, Armenia said 18 soldiers were killed and Azerbaijan reported 12 dead.

Footage from the village of Gapanli, over 250 kilometers east of Baku, on the Azerbaijani side, showed Grad multiple missile launchers firing rounds from the field.

Officials in the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh promptly disputed the reports of the unilateral cease-fire, saying that the town of Martakert has been heavily shelled all day despite Azerbaijan's pledge. David Babayan, spokesman for the Karabakh president, told The Associated Press on Sunday that they had not seen any signs that fighting was suspended: "The situation is quite the opposite."

The defense ministry of Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday also claimed to have restored control over a strategic area near the front line. It said Nagorno-Karabakh forces went on a counter-offensive around the village of Talish after Azerbaijani forces shelled their positions just before dawn. Two Karabakh troops were reported injured.

It also said Azerbaijan was using rockets, artillery and armor against the region.

The self-proclaimed officials in Karabakh, however, said they will be ready to discuss a cease-fire with Azerbaijan as long as their respective positions on the ground are restored.

Armenia's deputy defense minister at a Sunday briefing with military attaches based in Yerevan said Armenia will be ready to send troops to Karabakh "if necessary."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Sunday to back its ally Azerbaijan in the conflict, saying that the flare-up could have been avoided if "fair and decisive steps" had been taken.

"We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties," he said.

The unresolved conflict has been an economic blow to Armenia because Turkey has closed its border with Armenia.
COLUMBUS, Ohio The Ohio Republican Party was riding high in 2012, two years after John Kasich was elected governor and Republicans won all other statewide offices. But Kasich wanted a state party and chairman who would be more helpful to him.

So the new governors team staged a campaign that targeted state central committee members, testing which ones were allies, and lining up candidates to run against them them, if necessary, to take control of the party and elect a new chairman. Kasich thinks that intraparty battle experience will help him win enough delegates to beat Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for the presidential nomination if Republicans have a contested convention in July in Cleveland.

The skills and strategies are the same, Kasich spokeswoman Emmalee Kalmbach said. Unlike Trump, who has never run a campaign before, and unlike Cruz, whos still a political novice, the Kasich team is battle-tested and knows how to run the kind of effort it takes to win the delegate contest on the convention floor.

Kasich, who is a distant third in delegates after winning only his home state so far, cant get the 1,237 delegates needed for the Republican nomination in the remaining state contests. So his strategy is to stay in the race, help keep Trump or Cruz from hitting that number, and collect enough delegates to have some momentum heading into the convention.

The former congressman and two-term governor is making the case that hes the best candidate to be commander-in-chief, and that only he can defeat expected Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in a general election, citing surveys showing Clinton beating both Trump and Cruz but losing to him.

The delegates really take this very seriously, Kasich said at a news conference in New York City on Thursday. They begin to realize they are making a choice that can affect the United States of America and frankly the entire world.

Kalmbach said the Kasich campaign has dozens of staff members and volunteers dedicated to the delegate-gathering process, including longtime Republican strategists Stu Spencer and Charlie Black. Both participated in the 1976 Republican convention, when Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully challenged President Gerald Ford for the nomination.

Many of the staff members who helped in the 2012 campaign to take control of the state party are also involved, Kalmbach said. In that fight, Kasich allies identified which members of the 66-member party committee were aligned with the governor or could be persuaded to back him, and then ran loyalists against those who werent.

After the election of committee members, Chairman Kevin DeWine, who had fought to keep his post, resigned when it became clear that the body was aligned with Kasich. The fight was so nasty that there were allegations of political arm-twisting by the losing side that were never substantiated.

While the presidential nomination involves 2,472 delegates and not 66 committee members, the process of winning majority support is similar, the Kasich campaign said. In states where delegates were named before primaries or caucuses, the task is to identify who is loyal to Kasich and who could be persuaded to switch allegiances.

In states where delegates are selected at local conventions or other meetings after primaries and caucuses according to how the state voted, the key is to identify party regulars who can become delegates and would back Kasich.

Trump has been saying he should be the nominee if hes the clear leader in delegates, and that choosing someone else as the partys candidate bearer would disenfranchise the millions of people who voted for him in the 20 states has already won.

Trump named Republican strategist Paul Manafort, who worked on conventions for presidents Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush and 1996 nominee Bob Dole, as his campaigns convention manager.

Cruz has touted his superior campaign organization and showed how effective it can be by being in a position to gain more delegates in Louisiana, despite the fact Trump carried the state, according to the Associated Press.

While most delegates will be pledged to a specific candidate at the convention in Cleveland, they will be free after the initial rounds of voting to back anyone they want. Kasich often points out that in the 10 previous Republican conventions that were contested, the leading candidate going in was nominated only three times.

Kasich can win if there are multiple ballots at the convention because delegates bound to Trump will be mostly party regulars and elected officials who arent likely to remain loyal once they are released, Black said. While some will go to Cruz, more will choose Kasich, he said.
ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL  Command Sgt. Maj. Dennis Defreese, commandant, U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy, discussed his top initiatives while serving as the keynote speaker for the U.S. Army Sustainment Commands March 17 senior-level Commanding Generals Leadership Professional Development training event.

Sgt. Maj. Defreese discussed his plans for keeping non-commissioned officer education relevant. He focused his overview on the USASMA and the Noncommissioned Officer Professional Development System.

As the top academy for NCOs education, the USASMAs mission statement is, To provide professional military education that develops enlisted leaders to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex world. NCOPDS is the framework of studies for NCOs, and it consists of several basic-level to senior-level courses.

We are adapting the NCO professional development curriculum to support what the Army needs, he said. We are not stagnating; we are continuing to update and develop for this 21st century complex world.

Sgt. Maj. Defreese said that, unlike other nations, the U.S. has an NCO corps with the expertise and leadership abilities to make significant decisions during operations.

Our ability to be successful has historically been based on our ability to have decentralized operations, he said. That is why it is important to continue education with the NCO corps now, so we can have that same capability.

Sgt. Maj. Defreese also said it is important for civilian and military supervisors to understand how NCOs are developed.

They have a lot of NCOs in their organizations, he said. If they dont know those NCOs full capabilities, theyre not going to use them to their full potential.

He said understanding how NCOs are professionally developed is particularly important during a time of declining resources for the military.

We want to utilize every resource we have because the Army is getting smaller  everybody has to pull their weight, he said. The civilians in here probably have NCOs who work for them, and they should know what they are getting. They should know how we are educating them, what they are coming in with, their knowledge, skills and other attributes.

Sgt. Maj. Defreese said one of the biggest changes he has already started to implement at his academy is eliminating multiple-choice testing to replace it with essay testing. He said this is for two reasons: Because he believes essay testing forces students to deeply understand course content, and because fewer students fail essay testing.

He also said the academy is building more partnerships with universities willing to give college credit for military courses. He said USASMA would not give degrees to graduates, but if a university requires minor changes in order to qualify courses for credit, he said he would support those changes.

Before the event, Sgt. Maj. Defreese had lunch with nine other sergeants major stationed at Rock Island Arsenal, including Command Sgt. Maj. Anthony Bryant, command sergeant major, ASC; Command Sgt. Maj. Myris Callwood, command sergeant major, Rock Island Garrison; Command Sgt. Maj. Sam Young, command sergeant major, U.S. First Army; and Command Sgt. Maj. Walton Jones, command sergeant major, Joint Munitions Command.

The group discussed the merits and challenges related to the new changes in NCO education programs. Sgt. Maj. Bryant said Sgt. Maj. Defreeses visit added a lot to ASCs LPD program initiative.

Weve been trying to bring leaders from all walks of life, not just commissioned officers or civilians, he said. We wanted a senior command sergeant major to talk about what is expected of sergeants major and NCOs.

Sgt. Maj. Bryant said he appreciated the presentation.

I think it meant a lot, to me and to the general, for him to come and speak here, he said. It was a great leader development class that gave us a larger vision of where we are going in the Army with our NCO corps.
ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL  About 180 Army personnel attended two separate Got Your Back Training sessions for preventing sexual violence March 23 and 24.

This is all about your role to be a part of the solution, Scott Welker, deputy to the commander, Joint Munitions Command, told participants. Like it or not, [sexual harassment and sexual assault] happen every day across the Army and our communities. We need you to be a part of the solution.

The training, part of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program, was presented in Heritage Hall by Courtney Abbott and George Zerante, senior educators from Catharsis Productions, a Chicago-based organization that educates military personnel, college students and corporate employees about sexual violence and prevention.

The presenters said negative language about sex can disempower both men and women, creating a hostile environment that might empower sexual predators.

We want you to challenge this language, not because it hurts peoples feelings, but because it gives rapists a place to hide, said Mr. Zerante. It keeps survivors away from getting help, and it keeps bystanders from stepping in to give someone help when they need it.

Ms. Abbott said she thinks it's important for people to openly talk about positive sexuality to prevent harmful misconceptions.

Very rarely do we talk about positive sexuality in the context of how to prevent sexual violence, she said. If we cant talk about positive sex, well have a vacuum, and we know the young folks of the world are going to fill that vacuum with information they get somewhere else, like other kids, television and online media.

Mr. Zerante said people sometimes dismiss rape as simply bad hookups because they are afraid to admit that there is a rapist in the community. The presenters said the difference between the two is that bad hookups are disappointing, while rape lacks consent.

They also addressed consent involving alcohol. Ms. Abbott said it is perfectly reasonable to believe responsible adults can drink some alcohol and still have consensual sex. Alcohol becomes a problem, she said, when it is used as a tool for rape.

Alcohol is the gun of the acquaintance rapist, she said, referring to the myth that rapists are strangers with hoodies and guns, hiding in the bushes.

The two also discussed how rapists target victims. Based on research using interviews with rapists, rapists first target the most vulnerable people they see. They can do that anywhere, but most frequently target people at bars and parties. Rapists then try to groom their targets and bystanders by instilling false trust and increasing the vulnerability of their targets.

Following this, they said, rapists isolate themselves with the victim.

"We need to understand the enemys tactics in order to interrupt what they are doing, said Ms. Abbott.

The presenters emphasized it is possible to interrupt rapists tactics. If suspicious, people can could approach the person directly, distract the person, or delegate the task to someone in a better position to interrupt by asking for help.

The presenters also discussed "delayed response  listening to survivors, offering them resources and being present for those in need of support.

When someone comes forward after the fact, how they are received speaks volumes, said Ms. Abbott.

The event counted is an alternative to the annual online SHARP training that is required by the Army. Bill Howard, SHARP program manager for the U.S. Army Sustainment Command and RIA, said he thought the in-person training was preferable to the online training.

You get more insight into what other people are thinking than just sitting there at a computer, he said.

Capt. Michael Rear, commandant, ASC Headquarters and Headquarters Company, said he enjoyed the training. Compared to online training, it was much more entertaining, he said. It had really good instructors who were able to engage the crowd.

Mr. Howard reminded the audience that April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
SOUTH MILWAUKEE, Wis.  Maurice King worked for Joerns Healthcare, a medical-furniture manufacturer, for nearly 43 years. Until suddenly one day, he didnt.

Joerns closed its plant in Stevens Point, Wis., in 2012 after years of gradually outsourcing work to China. It let go 175 workers. Now the 62-year-old former local steelworkers union president works a 2-11 p.m. shift at a fan factory.

No more local fish fries on Friday nights with his wife, or his side job for 25 years as town chairman in Dewey, population 975. He hasnt yet earned a week of vacation. Retirement has been pushed back.

You had the job, you figured you were planning out how things were going to go, King said. Now youve got to back up and rethink.

Establishment economists, government and business officials argue that trade deals are critical in a global economy, and great for America. But critics like organized labor call them death warrants.

And in blue-collar communities in Wisconsin and across the industrial Midwest, that economic angst, coupled with some sense of betrayal, helps explain the roiling politics of 2016.

Wisconsin votes Tuesday. Soon after come other industrial states, including Pennsylvania. And all could be battlegrounds this fall in the general election.

A lot will look like Milwaukee, once known as the machine shop to the world, now grappling with a new economy.

Wisconsin has lost more than more than 68,000 manufacturing jobs since the mid-1990s when the first of several trade agreements with Mexico, China and other nations took hold. About 76,000 Wisconsin workers in various fields lost their jobs because of imports or the work they do being shipped overseas, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Not all the layoffs and plant closings can be attributed solely to free trade. Some are due, at least in part, to slowdowns in specific industries such as housing and mining.

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Thats the case in South Milwaukee, a community of more than 20,000 people whose economy is built around the Caterpillar plant, which builds huge steam shovels and other mining equipment. Its predecessor, Bucyrus International, built shovels that were used to dig the Panama Canal.

Caterpillar has laid off about 600 of its 800-plus workers over the past two years because of a business slowdown.

Its had a pretty large impact, said Brad Dorff, an assembler at Caterpillar and the local United Steelworkers union president. Whether its small grocery stores, a hardware store down the street, local taverns  they used to get a lot of business from the people that live in this community who were making a good living, a good wage working here.

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Wisconsins manufacturing sector, once one of the countrys strongest, has taken a lot of punches in recent years. General Motors, General Electric, Chrysler, Joy Global Surface Mining and Manitowoc Cranes have all cut jobs or closed operations in recent years for a variety of reasons.

Hometown companies such as Kohler, the plumbing supply manufacturer, and Trek Bicycles have sent jobs to India, China and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, Madison, the state capital, will lose 1,000 jobs over the next two years as the 100-year-old Oscar Mayer meat processing plant closes. Just east on Interstate 94 in Jefferson, Tyson Foods will close its pepperoni processing plant, cutting 400 jobs.

Change is hard, Jefferson Mayor Dale Oppermann said. Something that unexpected like this is a challenge for people. A lot of the people I know havent filled out a job application for 30 years, much less done it online.

The turmoil feeds into a debate over trade in the 2016 campaign.

Politically, its an easy point to make: It isnt totally untrue at all to say that globalization has hurt American workers, said former Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat who served from 2003 to 2011. What you do about that is a lot harder to figure.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders have been the most outspoken against trade deals.

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Factory workers are skeptical of anything a politician says.

Weve had promises from some of the presidential candidates, said Wynn Sandahl, a machinist at the South Milwaukee Caterpillar plant.

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In Wisconsin, voters are about evenly split on whether free trade agreements have helped or hurt, according to a recent Marquette University Law School poll. In Michigan and Ohio, a majority of primary voters in both parties said foreign trade kills jobs in the U.S.

Thats the feeling inside union halls and communities with closed factories. Trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership mean only uncertainty and distress.

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Weve watched a lot of our friends lose their jobs, Dorff said. They have homes that now they cant afford. They have families they have to support. They lost their insurance. Their kids have diabetes and theyre trying to get medication. It literally breaks your heart.

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The Business Roundtable, an association of major-company executives, say international trade supports 1 in 5 Wisconsin jobs, and that lower manufacturing costs overseas lowers prices for U.S. consumers.

It is an economic fact of life that both businesses and their employees benefit when we sell more products overseas, and consumers enjoy a wider range of products at lower prices, Jerry Jasinowski, former president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said in a recent statement.

But since NAFTA, which removed tariff barriers between the U.S. Canada and Mexico, went into effect in 1994, and the granting of permanent normal trade status to China in 2000, a key question has been how much have those decisions contributed to job losses at home.

Economists generally say that overall, trade creates more prosperity, and that displaced workers will find other work. But competition from China has meant the loss of 2.4 million jobs, according to a recent report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit research group.

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It pointed out that industries are often concentrated in certain parts of the country and that local economies have not had the capacity to absorb those workers whom Chinese competition has displaced.

Julie Granger, senior vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, said that in a global economy, the notion that free trade encourages the loss of local jobs is not always the most responsible way to look at it. If we are not engaged in the global economy, we will lose more jobs. Theres no going back. Its the same story in Milwaukee as it in other cities: many of lowest-skilled jobs simply were disappearing.

So is organized labor, long the backbone of the working class, a force in Wisconsin politics and a persistent critic of the trade deals. From 2014 to 2015, union membership as a percentage of the Wisconsin workforce fell to 8.3 percent, from nearly 12 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But organized labor has been under siege in Wisconsin for a while.

At the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis., the company won significant concessions from the United Autoworkers to help keep the plant open. But the automaker closed it anyway in 2009, putting 850 people out of work.

Take it or leave it, is how Roger Hinkle, once a Milwaukee factory worker, now an employment training specialist for the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Labor, Education and Training Center, characterized management attitudes in an era when offshoring can be an alluring option.

We cant get wage increases. They took away our benefits. The overarching sense is these agreements are basically written and built for improving profitability for corporations. Thats the interest thats being served.
Trying hard to right himself after a difficult week, Trump said it was unfair for Kasich, the winner of only his home state's primary, to continue campaigning. He suggested that Kasich, who has pledged to make it to the summer convention, follow the lead of former candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush  and quit.

"If I didn't have Kasich, I automatically win," Trump said Sunday evening in West Allis, Wisconsin.

Trump said Kasich could ask to be considered at the GOP convention in Cleveland in July even without competing in the remaining nominating contests. He said earlier Sunday that he had shared his concerns with Republican National Committee officials at a meeting in Washington this past week.

Kasich's campaign countered that neither Trump nor Texas Sen. Ted Cruz would have enough delegates to win the nomination outright in Cleveland.

"Since he thinks it's such a good idea, we look forward to Trump dropping out before the convention," said Kasich spokesman Chris Schrimpf.

Meanwhile, former GOP candidate and Trump supporter Ben Carson warned Monday that "it would be a disaster" if the Republican party tries to put forward any alternative candidates to Trump or Cruz at the July convention. Speaking to ABC's "Good Morning America," Carson said that if that scenario plays out, "we have major problems brewing."

Across the political aisle, Democrat Hillary Clinton told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the FBI had yet to request an interview regarding the private email server she used as secretary of state.

Clinton and her Democratic opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, announced they'd agreed to debate in New York before the important April 19 primary, though their campaigns continued debating over when to schedule the face-off. Sanders, meanwhile, fired up a crowd in Wausau, Wisconsin, hoping to continue a string of recent campaign victories even as Clinton maintains a sizable delegate lead.

Trump's call for Kasich to bow out came as Republican concerns grew about the prospect of convention chaos if Trump fails to lock up his party's nomination  or even if he does.

Behind Cruz in the polls in Wisconsin, Trump faces the prospect that a loss on Tuesday there will raise further doubts that he can net the needed delegates, making it far easier for his party to oust him in a floor fight at the convention in Cleveland in July.

Cruz, Trump's closest challenger, has only a small chance to overtake the real estate mogul in the delegate hunt before the convention. Cruz spent Sunday rallying supporters, including conservative Wisconsin talk radio hosts who oppose Trump's candidacy.

Kasich acknowledges that he cannot catch up in the delegate race, leaving a contested convention his only path to victory. He has faced calls in the past to step aside, but those nudges became less frequent following his decisive victory last month in his home state.

Still, Kasich suggested that a contested convention would not involve the chaos that party leaders fear.

"Kids will spend less time focusing on Bieber and Kardashian and more time focusing on how we elect presidents," Kasich told ABC. "It will be so cool."

Republicans fear a bruising internal fight would damage the party in November's general election. Trump also isn't ruling out the possibility of running as an independent if he isn't the nominee, making it that much harder for the GOP to retake the White House.

Such talk has "consequences," said GOP Chairman Reince Priebus, though he tried to quell the prospect of a convention fight. He told ABC that the process will be clear and open, with cameras there "at every step of the way."

Frustration with the GOP field has stoked calls in some Republican corners for the party to use a contested convention to pick someone not even on the ballot. Priebus acknowledged that was a remote possibility, but said he believed his party's nominee would be "someone who's running."

Trump has been on the defensive as he struggled to explain away a week of controversies over abortion, nuclear weapons and his campaign manager.

"Was this my best week? I guess not," Trump told "Fox News Sunday."
MUMBAI, India  A growing number of states in India are imposing a new requirement on candidates for local office: They must use a toilet.

The western state of Maharashtra this past week became the latest to pass a law requiring those running in municipal and village-level elections to present proof that they have access toworking toilets. Five Indian states  with combined populations of nearly 400 million people, or roughly one-third of the country  have enacted similar legislation over the past two years.

Thats no small demand in a country in which an estimated 40 percent of people  including more than half in rural areas  lack access to safe, functioning commodes, according to WaterAid, a charity. In much of rural India, most people still defecate in the open due to a lack of toilets and widespread traditional beliefs that it is more wholesome to go outdoors.

Open defecation, however, has been linked to chronic diarrhea and other diseases that lead to stunted growth in children, as well as to violence against women who must leave their homes to relieve themselves.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched a Clean India campaign that aims to end open defecation and install 110 million toilets nationwide by 2019. Four of the five states that have introduced laws requiring local political candidates to use toilets are led by Modis Bharatiya Janata party.

State officials say they want local officeholders to serve as role models in following modern sanitation practices.

It is high time to have this basic amenity at home, said Maharashtras chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, a Modi ally. We are also promoting the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign. We want to make each and every village and city clean and garbage-free.

The bill Fadnavis initially proposed last fall would have required every local candidate to have a working toilet at home. That prompted resistance from some opposition parties, which said it would disqualify many poor candidates as well as those living in urban areas who use shared public toilets.

In Mumbai, Indias second-most populous city and the largest in Maharashtra, one-third of municipal officeholders belonging to the powerful Shiv Sena party reside in slums that have shared toilets, said a party official, Anil Parab.

The state government relented and the law passed would allow people to contest elections if they produced a certificate showing they had access to a functioning toilet.

But an independent state lawmaker, Kapil Patil, slammed the law as unconstitutional, saying any Indian adult should be able to run for office without conditions.

Is it not insulting to submit such a letter before applying for the candidature? Patil said in an interview.

Where I go to attend natures call cannot be anybody elses business. The governments responsibility is to provide toilets to everyone. One cannot hold the candidate responsible for the lack of toilets in the state.

Some who support the effort to improve sanitation also criticized the law for driving a wedge between rural Indians and those living in urban areas, roughly 80 percent of whom have access to toilets, according to WaterAid.

The bill polarizes the candidates between rich and poor, said Kiran Pawaskar, an opposition state lawmaker. The intent is good but the law is bad.

Opponents of such legislation in other states have had mixed success. In February, the government in the northern state of Bihar, which is not allied with Modi, withdrew a law requiring candidates in local elections to have toilets in their homes, saying the state had fallen short of its promises to build more toilets.

Last June, a court in the western state of Gujarat, which is led by Modis party, rejected a challenge to a similar policy, ruling that officeholders should serve as role models for citizens.

The states have the flexibility to make their own policies and rules, and its good that theyre trying to work in that spirit, said Nitya Jacob, head of policy at WaterAid India. But Jacob said states should work harder on implementing the central governments ambitious sanitation plans.

The laws are more symbolic than anything else. It sends a message that this is important and you need to have a toilet.

Part of the problem, Jacob and others say, is that while India has become better at building toilets, it has not had as much success getting people to use them. Many brand-new toilets lie unused due to drought or a lack of piped water. In some areas, local officials have not carried out adequate education campaigns to increase toilet use.

The cultural barriers remain significant. In a recent paper, researchers Anurag Banerjee, Nilanjan Banik and Ashvika Dalmia used Indian demographic survey data to rank 21 basic consumer goods in the order that Indian households would prefer to acquire them. According to their analysis, toilets ranked 12th  meaning a poor family would buy a television, a pressure cooker or a motorcycle before it acquired a toilet.
When Jorge Mario Bergoglio celebrated his first mass as Bishop of Rome, journalist Andrea Tornielli was in the congregation. He is a Vatican City veteran, reporting now for La Stampa. He also directs The Vatican Insider website.

He has written books and articles on popes from Pius IX to Benedict XVII. The Name of God Is Mercy is his fifth on the life and thought of Pope Francis.

The homily at that first mass centered on the gospel account of the woman taken in adultery. As Tornielli reports, Pope Francis spoke off the cuff, asserting that The message of Jesus is mercy. For me, and I say this with all humility, it is the Lords strongest message.

A year later, Tornielli attended another Papal mass and heard a sermon on the same subject. He was struck by the centrality of mercy in this new pontificate. It is a topic addressed by previous popes, but for Francis, it seemed almost a fixation.

This prompted the Vatican specialist to ask for the interviews on which his new book is based. Armed with three tape recorders, he questioned Francis closely, eliciting an elaboration on the way in which, for him, mercy seemed to answer everything. It is the size of a novella -- only 150 pages, with about 40 percent devoted to the full text of Misericordiae Vultus, the popes letter announcing the Year of Mercy.

Francis justifies his ideas as extensions of prior papal teachings, quoting from the letters of John Paul II and Benedict. Yet, he manages to be at least mildly provocative. In Shepherds, Not Scholars of the Law, he evokes memories of his early suggestions that church leaders not harp on doctrine, but on being open to everyone, especially sinners:

The conduct of the scholars of the law is often described in the words of the Gospel: they represent the principal opposition to Jesus; they challenge him in the name of doctrine.This approach is repeated throughout the long history of the Church.

He cites St. Ambrose: When it comes to bestowing grace, Christ is present; when it comes to exercising rigor, only the ministers of the Church are present, but Christ is absent. Later, he adds These are men wholly attached to the letter of the law but who neglect love.

He does not look past the reality of sin: He has said that going to confession is not like taking your clothes to the dry cleaners, after which everything is back to normal. Sin is more than a stain. Sin is a wound that needs to be healed.

Francis spends time trying to illustrate how mercy goes beyond forgiveness. It is like the sky: we look at the sky when it is full of stars, but when the sun comes out in the morning with all its light, we dont see the stars anymore. That is what Gods mercy is like: a great light of love and tenderness because God forgives not with a decree, but with a caress.

For Francis, mercy is all. That does not mean he condones sin, but that the emphasis should be on forgiveness. Corruption is another matter:

The corrupt man is so closed off and contented in the complacency of his self-sufficiency that he does not allow himself to be called into question by anything or anyone. He gets angry when his wallet is stolen and so he complains about the lack of safety on the streets, but then he is the one who cheats the state by evading taxes. ... He often doesnt realize his own condition, much as a person with bad breath doesnt know he has it.

Throughout the book, Francis cites one personal story after another. He backs his statements with scripture, but it is the personal anecdote which drives a point home. This is a man who has worked among desperate people: women who live such marginal lives that they must occasionally resort to prostitution to feed their children. One such thanked him because, despite her degraded status, he never failed to call her senora. That is the grace of a merciful man.

But how often can you keep forgiving the same sin? A Capuchin he knew asked him how a priest could keep forgiving people -- including priests -- again and again. Francis asked him how he resolved his doubts about forgiving too much. The priest replied: I go to our chapel and stand in front of the tabernacle and say to Jesus, Lord, forgive me if I have forgiven too much. But youre the one who gave me the bad example!

Francis said, I have never forgotten that -- as he proves every day.
Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain. Iowas state motto is powerful and succinct. This motto has seemingly been Iowas guiding star since our founding. Iowa eliminated a ban on interracial marriage in 1851. Iowa granted its Black citizens the right to vote years before the federal government. Iowa fought for liberty during the Civil War, sending more troops per capita than any other state to end the scourge of slavery, and played a role in the Underground Railroad. Iowa was among the earliest signers of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. Iowa became the first state to desegregate our schools, was one of the earliest states to recognize marriage equality and until recently was ranked among the most accessible states for voting access.
SPRINGFIELD -- Cuba should become the 51st state.

That revelation was shared with me last week by a man who knows Cuba and U.S. politics well -- former Illinois Gov. George Ryan.

I cant imagine why the people there wouldnt want to become a part of the United States. The people there are really suffering. Its only 90 miles off our shore. It just makes sense. And from a strategic sense it makes sense for us  it would keep other countries from putting their missiles there or establishing military bases.

Sixteen years ago, I traveled to Cuba with Ryan to write about his efforts to normalize relations and trade between the two nations. I called him to get his thoughts on President Barack Obamas historic visit to that communist country.

I think the president did absolutely the right thing in going there. Im glad we now have diplomatic relations with Cuba but now we need to get rid of that trade embargo. Its hurting a lot of innocent people.

Ryan was released from federal prison two and one-half years ago after serving five years on corruption charges.

During his time in office, Ryan made more than his share of mistakes, but he is a free man now who can express his own opinions.

Its worth noting that the idea of making a state out of Cuba is hardly a new one. At least three U.S. presidents during the 1800s attempted to purchase Cuba from Spain. They each failed. Even the Confederate States of America viewed Cuba as a potential future state -- if they were ever able to secede from the U.S.

Regardless, Cubans are a proud, patriotic people. I have trouble seeing them ever giving up sovereignty to become a state. But many Cubans I spoke with during my two trips to that island nation long for freedom from their nations communist regime.

Its worth noting that during his 2000 Cuba visit, Ryan pioneered normalizing relations between the two nations.

Bill Clinton was president at the time. Officially they didnt approve of our trip. But behind the scenes they were cheering us on, Ryan said. We talked to someone with the administration every day.

Someone who wasnt cheering Ryan on was Vicki J. Huddleston, the diplomat who headed the American Interests section in Cuba.

If the U.S. had diplomatic relations with Cuba then, she would have been our ambassador, he said. She was the ultimate ugly American. She prohibited the National Anthem from being played when we arrived. She didnt want any U.S. flags to be displayed. And she tried to get me to change the speech I gave at the University of Havana to one condemning (Fidel) Castro.

Ryan refused to condemn Castro.

Im under no illusions about Castro. Hes a dictator. Hes killed people, he said.

But he added he failed to see how publicly condemning him would make for better relations between the two nations.

During his trip, Ryan delivered $2 million in medicine, cleared the way for the Chicago Tribune to open a bureau in Havana and succeeded in getting Castro to allow more Catholic priests to work in the nation.

Those were hard-fought victories for compassion, a free press and free exercise of religion.

But perhaps the ultimate diplomat on the 2000 trip to Cuba was Ryans late wife, Lura Lynn, who brought her Midwestern sensibilities.

She displayed warmth and charm with Fidel Castro by showing photos of her family.

"We have six children and now 14 grandchildren. Family is very important to me and I have shown those pictures not only to Fidel Castro, but to both President Bushes, President Reagan and President Clinton. They are a good-looking family and all good-looking kids,'' she told me years ago.

Cuba is now ruled by Fidel Castros brother, Raul.

This month Obama met with him and called for a new beginning for the US and Cuba.

Its important to remember the beginning of that new beginning may have started here in Illinois with George and Lura Lynn Ryan.
Patty Duke's death Tuesday (at the too-early age of 69) robs us of not only one of my generation's great performers, but leaves us bereft with a sense of grief for our girlhood.

Times weren't necessarily easier then -- they certainly weren't easy for Duke, whose triumphs and desperate moments we followed in tabloids and legitimate papers -- but she is one of those public figures onscreen and off with whom many of us felt a lifelong connection. To say I feel a sense of personal grief is not an exaggeration.

Duke won an Oscar in 1962 at 16, playing Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker." She originated her role on Broadway before receiving Hollywood acclaim. But it wasn't Patty Duke in "The Miracle Worker" who captured my imagination; nor was it Duke's Neely O'Hara in 1967's :Valley of the Dolls," although that certainly mesmerized me.

No, the Patty Duke I idolized is the one I knew from "The Patty Duke Show," a popular television sitcom on ABC from 1963 to 1966 during my wonder years. Duke played identical cousins Patty and Cathy.

Cathy grew up in England and had a posh accent and fancy tastes. Patty had "only seen the sights a girl could see from Brooklyn Heights," according to the show's theme song. Patty chewed gum incessantly and could be counted on to mess up at least once during every program. Cathy wore her hair in a pageboy. Patty wore hers in a flip. This is how you could tell them apart. Cathy also had a much kinder, gentler look, whereas Patty looked ready to make a wisecrack and laugh out loud. Patty enjoyed loud, raucous rock 'n' roll music.

Cathy was the good girl, Patty was the bad girl, and "The Patty Duke Show" illustrated perfectly the divide between the two.

The show was a favorite in my crowd, and not only because many of us, like Patty, had only seen the sights from Brooklyn Heights. We were neither good nor bad but a mixture of both.

Maybe we were more Patty than Cathy -- after all, as the song said, "Patty liked to rock 'n' roll," "hot dog makes her lose control." Cathy, however, preferred "a minuet, The Ballet Russes, and crepes suzette" -- we had no idea what any of those things were. But we tried to behave more like Cathy because we knew that she was more feminine and therefore more desirable. If we acted out the show in somebody's garage, there was always a fight over who got stuck playing Patty. Playing Patty was almost as bad as having to play one of the boys. So why did we like the program? Why did we watch the reruns?

I think it's what could be called the Identical Cousin Syndrome. The Identical Cousin Syndrome is the working out of the good girl/bad girl split. The good girl/bad girl split presupposes that any one woman can't be both sweet and wicked, nice and bitchy, or generous and selfish at the same time.

We know traditional heroes can be both brave and cowardly or mean and melting, because a hero is hardly a hero if he doesn't have some vulnerability. But women are not allowed to have another side. We're supposed to be all good girl, all the time. Heroines, unlike heroes, are not allowed to show any emotional cleavage.

Thinking back, Patty didn't really behave that badly -- she came home late, but she never got pregnant. She was, nevertheless, as close as mid-1960s television could get to the bad girl. She was loud, uncouth and she expressed her emotions openly. Cathy could be counted on not to laugh at the wrong moments, because the good girl never lost control, not over a hot dog, not over anything.

Why did we love "The Patty Duke Show"? Maybe it'as why we also loved Patty Duke: sometimes she behaved badly and self-destructively and sometimes she was she was magnificent and admirable. She was, after all, two halves of the same woman, good and bad, just like all of us.
Hot 100

Its now week three at #1 for Lukas Grahams 7 Years. It maintains its lead ahead of Fifth HarmonysWork From Home ft. Ty Dolla $ign, which lands at #3 from #10 on its third week in the chart. DayasHide Away moves into the Top 10 at #8 from #14, as does Sias Cheap Thrills at #10 from #12, a new peak for both.

ZAYN sees success with Like I Would moving up to #18 from #45 this week. Samantha Jades Alwayssees a small bump to #32 from #41 followed by Hailee Steinfelds Rock Bottom at #44 from #65.

Most moved this week is Ariana Grandes new single Dangerous Woman, which sees a jump to #19 from #57 on its second week in the chart, a total of 38 places.

Disturbeds The Sound Of Silence debuts at #57 following a huge adoption across commercial radio last week. Alessia Cara enters close behind at #60 with Wild Things. The Chainsmokers latest bangerDont Let me Down debuts at #73.

ARIA Singles

The ARIA Singles chart sees another week of Lukas Graham at the top with 7 Years, holding the top for what is now its sixth week at #1. Fifth Harmony mirror their success on other every other chart with Work From Home ft. Ty Dolla $ign moving up to #3 from #6, picking up a Gold certification along the way.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Dance Off ft. Idris Elba & Anderson Paak enjoys a move into the Top 10 from #7 making for their fifth Top 10 single on the ARIA chart. This marks the last of the notable movement in this weeks chart though two debuts round off the bottom of the chart. The first of is Tinie Tempahs Girls Like ft. Zara Larsson at #37 followed by Justin Biebers Company at #41.

ARIA Albums

Taking #1 on the ARIA Albums chart is what is arguably the most hyped album in Australia right now, Violent Sohos WACO. Their fourth album is their first ever #1 and follows the success of 2013sHungry Ghost, which peaked at #6 and also marks the sixth Australian album to hit #1 in 2016.

The band are touring the album with DZ Deathrays, Dune Rats and Gooch Palms throughout May with nine out of the ten dates currently sold out.

Gwen Stefanis This Is What The Truth Feels Like debuts at #6. Its her first album since 2007s The Sweet Escape which saw a peak of #2. Her highest charting album is her debut solo release Love, Angels, Music, Baby which hit #1 in 2005.

Iggy Pops hyped Post Pop Depression album debuts at #7. His seventeenth solo album saw Pop collaborate with Queens Of The Stone Ages Josh Homme, the both of them recently in the country for a promo tour. Melbournes The Drones debut at #12 with Feelin Kinda Free, taking a new peak above previous best I See Seaweed which peaked at #18.

Click here to view all this weeks charts, including our HOT100 national airplay (by genre & state), iTunes, Spotify, Shazam, ARIA, AIR & AMRAP.

Singles to Radio

Gnash  I Hate U I Love U  WMA

Nick Jonas ft. Tove Lo  Close  UMA

Kanye West ft. Rihanna  Famous  UMA

DMAS  In The Moment  MUSHROOM

Saifa  Make Them Wheels Roll  WMA

Most added

Alessia Cara- Wild Things  UMA

Sneaky Sound System  I Aint Over You  IND

Gnash  I Hate U I Love U  WMA

Ariana Grande  Dangerous Woman  UMA

Iggy Azalea  Team  UMA
Dawn.com, April 1, 2016

By Ali Akbar



Haji Sher Ali, Afghan MP who raped a girl in Peshawar, Pakistan. (Photo: Hambastagi.org) Haji Sher Ali, Afghan MP who raped a girl in Peshawar, Pakistan. (Photo: Hambastagi.org)

PESHAWAR: City police are hunting a man accused of raping an 18-year-old dancer after inviting her to perform at his residence in Peshawar. The suspect is believed to be a member of the Afghan parliament.

A First Information Report (FIR) was registered at Hayatabad Police Station on the victim's complaint.

The victim said in the FIR that she is a dancer by profession and a resident of Peshawar's Tehkal area.

She claimed that an Afghan national invited her to dance at an event at his residence.

When she reached his house, where a "party-like" function was taking place, the accused forcibly took her to a room and subjected her to rape, said Hayatabad Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Hassan Afzal.

Police raided the residence of the accused in Hayatababad area, who had already fled, Afzal said. The police took into custody a driver and a cook from his house.

During the raid, police recovered a passport and other documents which revealed that the accused is an Afghan national and a member of the Afghan parliament, said the ASP.

However, details further reveal that the suspect, namely Haji Sher Ali, was also in possession of a CNIC issued in his name.

The police collected evidence from his house to be used in the probe. Results of the medical examination of the victim are awaited, he said.
Paul Salem is the Vice President for Policy and Research at the Middle East Institute. This piece has been published in collaboration with the Institute. The views expressed here are the author's own.

There are currently three tracks in the Syrian civil war: the cessation of hostilities between the government and the opposition; the negotiations in Geneva; and the war against the Islamic State group. The cease-fire is barely holding, and the war on ISIS is moving forward, but the talks in Geneva are fully stalled. The Assad regime's move late last month to recapture the ancient city of Palmyra from ISIS is related to all three tracks.

The pause in fighting declared in late February proved surprisingly durable, until a few days ago. The opposition was already dispirited and exhausted in the face of a sustained Russian-backed offensive, and thus welcomed -- and have largely stuck to -- the cessation. On the regime side, the Russian insistence on the cease-fire, followed by the partial Russian withdrawal, indicated to President Bashar Assad that Russia had reinforced the regime's battlefield positions, but would go little further in engaging in an open-ended war against the opposition. At the same time, the Russians have indicated their willingness to be more engaged in the fight against ISIS.

The cease-fire and the evolving Russian position affected Assad's strategy. His intention had been to maintain Russian help until a full battlefield defeat of the opposition, while leaving the fight against ISIS for a later stage. With the first lane closed, he was forced to reevaluate.

President Vladimir Putin announced the partial withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria on the same day that world leaders were meeting in Geneva for scheduled peace talks, with the Kremlin calling for "an intensification of the process for a political settlement" to the conflict. But the Assad government has effectively refused to negotiate. Assad himself has said that the war will continue until the regime subdues all of Syria, and his officials have insisted that any talk of a political transition is off the table. The government delegation doesn't even recognize the opposition as a negotiating partner, referring to them regularly as "terrorists."

With Assad being the clear spoiler at Geneva, to the ire of both Russia and the West, the campaign to retake Palmyra deftly shifted attention from Assad's unwillingness to negotiate, to Assad's role in defeating ISIS.

Indeed, there are already politicians and commentators in Europe and the United States who have forgotten how Syria and ISIS got to where they are today, and are now rushing to embrace Assad. They are mistaking the cause for the cure. While the Assad regime can play an important role in the war on the Islamic State, and the main institutions of the Syrian state must endure through any political agreement, only a serious resolution of the Syrian political conflict -- including a political transition and the eventual expiration of Assad's presidential term -- will stabilize the country and ultimately defeat not only ISIS, but the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front as well.

Furthermore, while Assad's forces took Palmyra, other groups were moving against ISIS strongholds elsewhere. The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which include Kurdish YPG forces and allied Sunni and Christian militias, moved closer to the ISIS capital of Raqqa. Other rebel units backed by the United States and Gulf states have pushed toward ISIS strongholds in Deir Ezzor and Dabiq. With the cease-fire freeing up fighting capacities on both sides, the war against ISIS in Syria appears to have finally begun in earnest. All sides will be scrambling to gain territory as this fight proceeds.

Although the regime has finally decided to engage the Islamic State group after allowing it to flourish for three years, it faces constraints. Palmyra was relatively close to the capital and fairly easy to capture. Campaigns to reclaim Raqqa or Deir Ezzor will be far more challenging. The regime's own fighters are stretched thin and exhausted from five years of combat; they are still willing to fight and risk death in defense of strongholds in Damascus, Aleppo, and the Alawite coastline, but embarking on ambitious campaigns in the north and east of the country will be a very difficult sell.

Among the regime's allies, Russia now regards the war on ISIS as the priority and has proven willing to provide extensive air support. But the Syrian government's Iranian and Hezbollah allies will be less enthusiastic about providing manpower. They have indicated a firm commitment to defending the core territories of the regime, but have expressed little enthusiasm for ambitious campaigns further afield. The defeat of ISIS in Syria will have to be a multiplayer affair with a role for the regime, but also important roles for the Kurdish and Arab rebel militias. Indeed, Interfax has reported that Russia and the United States are discussing concrete military coordination to liberate the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa.

Assad's recapture of Palmyra is, nevertheless, an important blow against ISIS. It has also enhanced Assad's position by shifting attention from his past brutality and his refusal to negotiate, to his belated role as a player in the war against ISIS. His role will be important, but one shared with rebel groups. And while the war against the Islamic State may draw attention away from a much need political resolution, if and when the campaign against ISIS is completed, the question of political change in Syria will then return front and center. Both the regime and the opposition will gain credit and territory in the fight against ISIS, but they will eventually have to sit down again to find agreement at the end of it. Assad can be part of the start of the negotiations, but it is difficult to envision a deal that will allow him to retain his seat indefinitely.

(AP Photo)
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As the job market changes and STEM  science, technology, engineering, and math  knowledge increases in demand, University of Georgia students also seem to be changing their major. The percentage of STEM field bachelors degrees increased steadily from 2000 to 2012 according to data from the Office of Institutional Research at the University
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Given the choice, I find that retirement plan participants would opt to align their investment decisions with their personal faith and values. Unfortunately, few retirement plans offer this opportunity and participants assume they must support enterprises and industries that directly conflict with personal beliefs.

If you want to minimize or eliminate this ethical dilemma then consider these possible solutions:

If your retirement plan offers a brokerage window, then you probably have access to outside investment options that include faith and values themed mutual funds. Dignity Healthcare, Shasta Regional Medical Center, Pacific Gas & Electric and California Savings Plus plans offer brokerage windows. Check with your financial adviser or retirement plan provider to easily determine if a brokerage window is available.

If you retirement plan does not offer a brokerage window, then consider routing surplus savings to an outside investment account that offers access to faith and values themed funds. You don't want to give up any of your employer's matching funds, but you also don't have to invest more than is necessary to fully realize the maximum match. If you re-route surplus savings to a personal investment account or Roth, then you may align at least some of your money with your faith and values.

If you care how your investment fund managers use your money, then say so. Most investors seem to ignore their voting rights as a fund shareholder, but you can use it to show management that a sustainable responsible investment approach is important.

Caring about where your money is invested involves knowing how your retirement account is managed. While there are opportunities and workarounds to align your retirement savings with your faith and values, the approach adds more steps to an already complex process. Seek the professional assistance of an experienced investment adviser who specializes in both brokerage windows and sustainable, responsible investing.

Lewis Chamberlain, AIF, CIS, is an investment adviser representative offering securities and investment advisory services through Cetera Advisors, LLC, an independent, registered broker-dealer. Member FINRA/SIPC. Next Level Investment Management and Cetera Advisors are not affiliated. He may be reached at 243-9888 or lewis@nextlevelinvestor.net. For more information about his practice visit www.nextlevelinvestor.net.
In this undated image provided by the History Channel, Elizabeth Shapiro, left, and Wayne Knight perform in the "King Louis XIV" episode of the television production "The Crossroads of History," scheduled to air on March 24, 2016. The new series chronicles the little-known back stories that played out behind some of the most significant developments in world history. (History Channel via AP)

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By TRACEE M. HERBAUGH, Associated Press

BOSTON (AP)  You've probably never heard of John Frederick Parker, but he lives on in infamy as the thirsty bodyguard who left Ford's Theatre  and President Lincoln's side  to get a drink at the bar across the street.

If Parker hadn't bailed on Lincoln during intermission, would assassin John Wilkes Booth have managed to fire the fatal shot?

Such seemingly innocuous moments are examined in "Crossroads of History," a new series airing Thursdays at 11:30 p.m. EDT as part of the History Channel's "Night Class."

"Moments like that are so insane to me," said creator Elizabeth Shapiro, who grew up near Boston. "It's been easy to find the humor in these moments because the characters involved are so deliciously unaware of how significant their place in history is about to be."

Another infamous coincidence that got the Shapiro treatment dates from the Civil War era. The Union was losing the war against the Confederacy. But the tide turned when Union soldier Barton W. Mitchell, walking around Best Farm in Maryland, found three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper that would later become known as Special Order 191.

"It really was 99 percent that the Confederates were going to win," Shapiro said. "Then this amazing thing happened."

The paper contained Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's detailed instructions for his army's next moves. After gaining the intelligence, the Union scored a victory at the Battle of Antietam, known as the bloodiest day in American history and a turning point in the war.

Shapiro, a Chelsea, Massachusetts, native now living in Los Angeles, said the inspiration to create "Crossroads of History" stemmed from a skit she wrote about the young Adolf Hitler's rejections from art school.

"No one could know this at the time, but the fate of the 20th century had been sealed," she said.

Shapiro grabbed some fellow comedy friends who helped film the skit. Then she started working on an expanded series.

"There's no shortage of these moments," she said.

Women's suffrage, for example, which it turns out almost didn't happen in 1920.

Harry Burn, a first term congressman in Tennessee, is known for casting the deciding vote in favor of the 19th Amendment. But before the amendment could become law, 36 states needed to pass it. Burn was squarely opposed  that is, until a letter from his mother arrived advising him to change positions. Because of that vote from an obedient son, Tennessee became the decisive 36th state to ratify.

"Crossroads of History" premiered on Feb. 25 and runs through June.

"We have to be careful with what we do in the world because the actions of one moron can completely send the world spinning in the wrong direction," Shapiro said.

___

Online: http://bit.ly/1T4d5VH
In this April 29, 2014, photo provided by Joseph W. Zarzynski, Liz Zieschang, left, and Claudia Young measuring one of nine mystery cannons at the Fort William Henry Museum in Lake George, N.Y. Research has determined nine historic cannons displayed for the past 60 years at the recreated French and Indian War fort in upstate New York were originally aboard a British warship that sank in the Florida Keys in the 18th century. (Joseph W. Zarzynski via AP)

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By CHRIS CAROLA, Associated Press

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)  Research has determined nine historic cannons displayed for the past 60 years at a recreated French and Indian War fort in upstate New York were originally aboard a British warship that sank in the Florida Keys in the 18th century, according to an underwater archaeologist who led the project.

Joseph Zarzynski, of Wilton, New York, said a study of all 68 cannons at Fort William Henry found that some if not all of the nine iron cannons likely came from HMS Looe, a British warship that sank after hitting a reef in 1744.

Zarzynski said it was known when the replica fort opened in 1954 on the southern end of Lake George that some of the cannons were believed to have come from a British shipwreck in the Keys. The exact source wasn't pinpointed until volunteer researchers deduced the guns came from the Looe (pronounced Loo), a 44-gun frigate built in England in 1741, Zarzynski said.

"All the evidence points to it," he said.

A 20-minute documentary titled "Iron Sentries: The Mystery Cannons of Fort William Henry" was recently released by Pepe Productions of Glens Falls.

The original Fort William Henry, built by the British in 1755 during the French and Indian War, was destroyed two years later after being captured by the French.

A full-size replica fort was built on the same footprint of the original in the Adirondack village of Lake George. Before the tourist attraction opened in the summer of 1954, the fort's owners sought Colonial-era cannons to display on the ramparts. Among the artillery pieces purchased were nine guns discovered a few years earlier off Looe Key, now part of Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Local newspaper stories about the fort's purchase said the cannons were bought from Art McKee, a well-known Florida treasure hunter who salvaged the weapons after the Smithsonian Institution recovered other shipwreck artifacts from Looe Key, named for the British ship believed to have sank there along with a captured Spanish vessel it was escorting.

The '50s newspaper articles also said the cannons bore insignia indicating the weapons belonged to the British Crown. Those markings have since disappeared after being exposed to decades Adirondack winters. A 1967 arson fire destroyed many of the fort's records pertaining to artifact acquisitions, adding to the murkiness surrounding the cannons' origins, Zarzynski said.

A project begun in 2014 to measure and document all the fort's 49 replica cannons and 19 historic artillery pieces led researchers to finally try to trace the origins of the nine guns purchased in 1954, he said.

The fort's researchers discovered the caliber of the nine cannons matched that of the armament known to have been aboard HMS Looe when it sank. That fact, and McKee's role in the guns' salvage, leads researchers to believe the Looe was the source, Zarzynski said.

"If Art McKee sold them, then they are most certainly from HMS Looe," said Charles Lawson, an archaeologist for Biscayne National Park who has studied 18th-century wreck sites in Florida's waters.

Zarzynski said it's hoped money can be raised to properly restore at least a couple of the rusting Looe guns, a project that could cost up to $30,000 for just one cannon.

___

Online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVcU9VSBShQ
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Q: My question is about the requirement that abalone may not be taken before 8 a.m. This year there are a few good minus tides that bottom out before 8 a.m. Is it legal to be on the abalone grounds to harvest sea urchins prior to 8 a.m., and then go abalone picking after 8 a.m.?

 Paul N., San Francisco

A: You can go out before 8 a.m. to harvest urchins, but you cannot take any action that will assist in your later take of abalone. For example, you may not search for abalone or mark the location of any abalone that you encounter while taking urchins. If you choose to dive before 8 a.m., don't be surprised if you are questioned by a warden. If your activities appear to a warden to be taking or searching for abalone before 8 a.m., then you can be cited.

Q: I know that it's illegal to waste harvested game animals, but what about non-edible, non-game animals, such as jackrabbits, rock doves and coyotes? What are the legal and ethical guidelines on what to do with these harvested animals? Should they be buried, left in the field, trashed or something else?

 Bill S., Rancho Cucamonga

A: Jackrabbits are small game, and if someone is going to kill them recreationally, then they should be used. They certainly are edible and many people hunt them for consumption. There is no standard way to dispose of legally taken non-game mammals. Some non-game animals like crows require retrieval while others don't. If they are a species that does not require retrieval, ethically, it is up to the individual. Hunters are encouraged to fully utilize all harvested wildlife. However, even if it's a non-game species, where retrieval is not required by law, hunters should still make every effort to properly dispose of it. To just let animals lay where they've fallen without retrieval or attempts to properly dispose of them reflects badly on the image of those of us who are conscientious and ethical hunters.

Q: I often go sport fishing around Santa Cruz with my kayak. I would like to catch live fish with a sabiki rig with multiple hooks, then use them with a drop shot rig with two hooks to catch rockfish, cabezon, greenling, lingcod and halibut. Is this allowed?

 Kota T.

A: Yes, you can use a fishing rod with multiple hooks as long as you don't take or possess a species that has a more restrictive method of take than the general gear restrictions  rockfish, cabezon, greenling, lingcod or salmon. If you happen to catch one of these species while using more than two hooks on your line, you must release the fish.

You are limited to no more than one line and two hooks when fishing for rockfish, cabezon, greenling and lingcod, or if these species are in possession. Once you begin fishing for the species that have hook restrictions, you will want to stow the sabiki rig so that it clearly is not in use.

Q: Can you legally harvest five birds a year by taking three bearded birds during the spring season and two birds during the fall season, or does the three bird limit apply to a full calendar year?

 Pete R.

A: You can legally harvest five turkeys in a year, but can never possess more than three at one time. So long as you are eating your game regularly, you should not have an issue so be sure to consume or gift your spring birds before the fall season.

Q: My friend recently received an interesting "hunter update" email directly from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife encouraging her to buy a license and go turkey hunting. Although I already have my hunting and fishing licenses, I am interested in receiving updates from CDFW. How do I get on this mailing list?

 Monica B.

A: The email your friend received is part of a larger effort by CDFW to increase outreach and education to California hunters and anglers. To receive these updates, reminders and other useful information from the department, you need to update your CDFW license profile on our website and provide us with your email address and communication preferences.

To sign-up, visit our online licenses sales page, click "Customer Login/Register" and then "Edit Customer Profile." If you are a new CDFW customer making your first license purchase online or from a license agent, you will be asked for your email address and communication preferences while creating your profile. Any personal information collected will never be disclosed, made available or used for any purpose other than as specified at the time it was collected, except with the written consent of the subject of the information or as otherwise permitted by law or regulation. Fish and Game Code and California Government Code prohibit CDFW from selling or sharing your information with any third party.

Purchasing your licenses, tags and report cards online is easier than ever and now comes with the added benefit of timely updates and information from CDFW.

Carrie Wilson is a marine environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. While she cannot personally answer everyone's questions, she will select a few to answer each week in this column. Please contact her at CalOutdoors@wildlife.ca.gov.
Residents watch the first meat vending machine installed in the French capital, in Paris, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. With their beloved baguette already available 24 hours a day, it seems only logical that Parisians can now get the Bayonne ham and Basque pate that goes so well with it from the first meat vending machine installed in the French capital. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

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By SAMUEL PETREQUIN, Associated Press

PARIS (AP)  With their beloved baguette already available 24 hours a day, it seems only logical that Parisians can now get the Bayonne ham and Basque pate that goes so well with the bread from the first meat vending machine installed in the French capital.

In a city filled with small shops where long lunches remain a crucial part of the French "art de vivre," the gleaming red machine set up on the lively Rue de Charonne in eastern Paris seems a bit incongruous.

The area has at least two dozen butcher's shops and no shortage of meat, but that didn't deter the owners of one of those shops, Florence and Michel Pouzol of "L'ami Txulette," from investing 40,000 euros ($45,000) to set up their project, selling vacuum-packed meat from the refrigerated machine.

"We're closed two days: Sundays and Mondays," Florence Pouzol told The Associated Press. "So this is to cater for customers over the weekend. ... The idea was also to serve people after the shop's closing hours. We close at 8 p.m. but some people leave work very late and find the shop closed when they walk past it."

L'ami Txulette specializes in products from the Basque Country. From their machine, which takes cash or credit cards, customers can also get a large choice of traditional delicatessen including duck confit and beef carpaccio. There are also faux-filet steaks on display, priced at 34 euros per kilogram. On average, the products are 20 euro cents more expensive than those sold inside the shop.

A majority of shops remain closed on Sundays in France, but the Pouzols are confident that France is changing fast and so are their customers' habits.

"Our customers are young. There are also quite a few bars and restaurants along the boulevard," Florence Pouzol said. "When we see them during the day, they tell us: "Last night, I bought this, or that, and it was really helpful." We also have those who work in the cafes and restaurants and who come off work at 2 a.m. They tell us they were happy to buy an entrecote or something else to eat."

But not all residents, especially the older ones, seem ready to stop running errands at their favorite shop and switch to the meat dispenser.

"I'm so happy that I can actually go to the butcher's shop now that I'm retired and go there in person", said local resident Lydie Aparacio. "I think that it can be useful for people who are busier than a retiree. I don't use it because I have time."

While baguette dispensers have enjoyed success across France over the past five years, the meat vending machines business remains in in the embryonic stage in France. The first machine of this type was installed three years ago in the small western town of Garat by a butcher who set it up outside a bar.

According to the bar owner, it adds extra comfort in an area lacking services.

"We don't have a butcher's shop in town, the first one is located three kilometers (two miles) away," Jo Ferreira told the AP in a phone interview. "When you finish work at 7 p.m., it's very convenient to have this machine available. I love their minced burger steaks."

In the central medieval town of Mennetou-sur-Cher, popular with tourists, Pascal Bidron has installed a machine to sell his locally made andouillette, a sausage prepared with pig's intestines.

He bought a second-hand machine and put it next to his shop, which is closed for more than three hours during the daytime.

"I have customers coming from afar to buy my andouillettes and I wanted to serve them even when the shop is closed" Bidron told the AP. "I recently went away for two weeks and managed to sell 250 andouillettes during my vacation thanks to that machine. It's more than I expected."

___

Alex Turnbull in Paris contributed to this report.
SHARE Adam Lynn Michaels Date of birth: May 20, 1981 Vitals: 6 feet; 196 pounds; blond hair, blue eyes Charge: Driving under the influence Danielle Nicole Dearman Date of birth: March 5, 1993 Vitals: 5 feet, 3 inches; 105 pounds; blond hair, blue eyes Charge: Petty theft Tyrone Harlan Corron Date of birth: July 9, 1978 Vitals: 5 feet, 8 inches; 160 pounds; blond hair, blue eyes Charge: Revocation of post-release community supervision Gregory Lewton Wears Date of birth: May 18, 1970 Vitals: 6 feet; 205 pounds; blond hair, blue eyes Charge: Spousal abuse

By Staff Reports

Shasta's Most Wanted, featured in the Record Searchlight in cooperation with local law enforcement agencies, targets people who have failed to show up in court for sentencing after being convicted.

As of Friday a total of 578 arrests have been made through the Most Wanted program since it began in September 2013. Authorities say they have seen an increase in criminals failing to appear in court since the onset of Assembly Bill 109. Also known as prison realignment, the state program shifted certain state prison inmates to county supervision.

Redding Police Chief Robert Paoletti said court appearances have been going up since the rollout.

Five new people are added each week. Those caught will be held until at least their next court appearances. Shasta County Secret Witness is offering a reward of up to $250 for information leading to an arrest. Tips can be provided anonymously at 530-243-2319 or at www.scsecretwitness.com/home/submit-a-tip.

Anyone with information also can call SHASCOM at 245-6540. The feature appears Sundays in the Record Searchlight's Northern California section and on Redding.com.
Sean Longoria/Record Searchlight Redding Fire Department firefighters investigate a house fire that broke out in an abandoned home in the Parkview neighborhood of Redding Friday morning.

SHARE Sean Longoria/Record Searchlight Redding Fire Department firefighters put out a house fire that broke out in an abandoned home in the Parkview area of Redding on Friday morning.

By Sean Longoria of the Redding Record Searchlight

A morning fire gutted a vacant home early Friday south of downtown Redding.

Dispatchers reported the fire just after 6:30 a.m. on the 2600 block of Russell Street, which shoots south off Smile Place just south of Redding City Hall on Cypress Avenue.

Responding firefighters found the home nearly engulfed in flames, said Battalion Chief Sean Coleman of the Redding Fire Department.

Firefighters had the fire knocked down in under 30 minutes, though the blaze tore through the single-story home.

"Because of the size, (firefighters) were able to knock it down pretty quick," Coleman said.

Police quickly closed Russell Street to allow for fire equipment to move freely.

The street remained closed until just before 9 a.m. when firefighters concluded the incident.

No injuries were reported and neighbors told firefighters that no one was inside the home when crews arrived, Coleman said.

Initial dispatch reports indicated someone may have been staying inside the vacant home.

An official cause of the fire remained under investigation on Friday.

Redding Police also interviewed neighbors and made an arrest nearby, though it was unrelated to the fire, officers said.

A Redding Electric Utility worker cut a power line leading from the home to a power pole.

The neighborhood is the same area recently visited by the Redding Fire Department and Red Cross of Northeastern California as part of a campaign to prevent house fires, Redding Fire Chief Gerry Gray said.
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By Soumya Karlamangla and Joseph Serna, Los Angeles Times

When the fifth overdose patient rolled into the emergency room at the University of California, Davis Medical Center last week, doctors knew they were dealing with something out of the ordinary.

They were used to heroin overdoses. But the patients admitted in the wee hours of March 24 showed symptoms of opiate toxicity that were far more pronounced than usual.

In about a week, 36 people overdosed, at least nine of them fatally, from street drugs in the greater Sacramento region. Doctors compared notes and quickly closed in on the prime suspect: fentanyl, a painkiller that is up to 100 times stronger than morphine and lethal even in very small doses.

Officials are now frantically searching for the source of the drug, which is being produced in counterfeit tablets that can be bought for as little as $5 each on the street.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration issued a public safety alert Friday warning that fentanyl-related overdoses are occurring at an alarming rate and urging the public to take only drugs prescribed by a physician and from a reputable pharmacy. The Sacramento-area overdose victims ranged from 18 to 59 years old and comprised equal numbers of men and women, according to the alert.

Authorities fear the rash of cases portends the move west of rampant fentanyl abuse that had largely been centered on the East Coast, its spread probably channeled through Mexican drug cartels, medical and law enforcement officials said.

In Los Angeles County, fatal overdoses related to fentanyl increased to 62 in 2014  the most recent year for which data are available  from 42 in 2011, according to coroners data. While not matching East Coast levels, the rise is troubling, officials said.

The prescription drug issue hasnt touched us in the same way, said Dr. Gary Tsai, medical director and science officer for the L.A. County Department of Public Healths office of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control. Our concern is that it will, that its only a matter of time.

Directors of West Coast drug treatment programs have been bracing for problems related to fentanyl, which can lower blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory function and lead to seizures, said Rachel Anderson, executive director of the Sacramento-area needle exchange Safer Alternatives Thru Networking & Education.

Prescribed to cancer patients since the 1960s, fentanyl is the most powerful painkiller available for medical treatment, and is typically administered as a lozenge, patch or injection. But an illegally manufactured version of the drug, often called China White or Apache, has begun spreading recently.

Between 2012 and 2014, the number of seizures of illegally used fentanyl nationwide increased more than sevenfold to 4,585, according to federal officials.

The painkiller offers an intense, euphoric high and the odorless, white powder is sometimes used to cut heroin and cocaine or passed off as another drug. Dealers mix it in to give their product an extra kick or to cheaply produce more usable heroin, Anderson said.

Is it new? Yes and no. Weve been aware of whats going on the East Coast and expecting it to show up in one form or another, Anderson said.

Health officials in Sacramento County say that many of the recent overdoses occurred after people purchased pills they believed to be Norco, a less potent opiate, but were in fact fentanyl. Officials are urging the public to be cautious about intake of any street drugs.

Sgt. Salvador Robles of the Sacramento County sheriffs major narcotics impact division, said investigators have a strong lead on a home where two of the recent overdoses occurred and are hoping to trace the cases back to the source of the fentanyl.

Robles was unsure if the cases stemmed from a single bad batch or were indicative of a larger problem.

My only tip is, if youre addicted to Norco or any pills, do not take them right now, he said.

Experts say the rise of fentanyl is fueled by an increase in doctor-prescribed painkillers over the last decade that has left many patients addicted to opiates and intensified a heroin epidemic thats ravaging many towns nationwide.

In 2014, 28,647 people died of overdose deaths from opioids, including heroin, the highest toll ever recorded, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of deaths involving synthetic opioids  mostly fentanyl, experts say  nearly doubled between 2013 and 2014 to 5,500 deaths, the largest increase in opioid deaths.

This is just another face of the opioid epidemic, said Dr. Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness.

In Sacramento County, heroin use has increased within the last decade as use of methamphetamines has dropped, Robles said. Fifteen years ago, seizing a few ounces of heroin in Sacramento County was rare, he said, but now were finding it in (kilos).

Officials across the country report similar trends, but fentanyl is a new wrinkle in the drug trade. About 700 people died from fentanyl and its analogs nationwide from late 2013 to late 2014, according to a recent report from the DEA.

In California, legislation was introduced in February to increase criminal penalties for dealing the drug.

Past investigations have revealed that Mexican cartels are purchasing fentanyl produced in China, then using traditional trafficking routes to bring it to the United States. In 2014, DEA officers seized 26 pounds of fentanyl in a stash house in Los Angeles.

Alexander, the Johns Hopkins physician, said that demand will remain strong until the prescription drug epidemic is under control. He said doctors should limit how often they prescribe opiates to patients and expand treatment programs for those who are already addicted.

Do we need to be worried about it? Yes, Alexander said. But I dont think  these deaths can be separated from the surge in overuse of prescription opioid. Its part and parcel of the same problem.

President Barack Obama has asked for more than $1 billion in the federal funding to help expand access to treatment programs.

Earlier this month, CDC officials released new guidelines strongly discouraging doctors from prescribing opiates, including OxyContin and Vicodin, for patients with chronic conditions such as back problems, migraines and arthritis.

Shelly Elkington, 49, thinks stricter guidelines could have saved her daughters life. While in college, Casey Jo was diagnosed with Crohns disease, an incurable bowel disorder that can require repeated surgeries.

She was prescribed painkillers, including fentanyl.

I always want to say her doctor meant well, said Elkington, who lives in Montevideo, Minn. His intentions were always good  to make her feel better.

But Casey Jo quickly became addicted to opiates, eventually turning to street drugs. She dropped out of school and began smoking fentanyl and buying heroin.

Everyday, we didnt know if we were going to get a call that she was arrested, assaulted, raped, everything, Elkington said. We were so afraid for her all the time.

In August last year, Elkington got that fated call: Her daughter was found dead in her apartment. She was 26.

I watched my daughter virtually slip away from us, she said.



2016 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

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Dry riverbed, Israel, elevated view

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By Laurel Hamers, San Jose Mercury News

STANFORD, Calif.  Stanford University researchers who studied trends in the atmospheric circulation patterns that affect Californias rainfall have found that conditions linked to the hot, dry weather during the states latest drought have become more frequent in recent years.

While this years El Nino-driven storms may have brought temporary relief to the states parched soil and depleted reservoirs, Californians can expect more frequent droughts in the decades to come, said the study published Friday by Science Advances.

The researchers examined the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge  a persistent area of high atmospheric pressure over the north Pacific Ocean. The ridge can divert the path of storms destined for the West Coast, like a boulder in a stream forces water to move around it.

We have a pretty narrow rainy season  really only a handful of months to see all of our annual precipitation, said Daniel Swain, a Stanford University researcher who participated in the study. This ridge can seriously throw off the years rainfall total if it sits off the coast at the wrong time of year, Swain said, which has been the case during the past few drought-stricken years.

Swains analysis found that the atmospheric conditions that lead to ridging have become more common since 1949  and that those triggering wet weather might also be increasing.

But Californias reservoir system, which relies heavily on the Sierra Nevada snowpack to gradually replenish, wasnt set up to handle such conditions.

While we can certainly fill up reservoirs with rain, that isnt going to last California in the long run, Swain said. Theres a lot of water stored in California reservoirs, but theres a lot more stored in the Sierra Nevada snowpack.

Even if enough rain and snow fall over several years, year-to-year inconsistency makes it challenging to manage. Steady precipitation year to year means the Sierra Nevada snowpack remains relatively constant. The melting snow provides a consistent trickle of water over the dry summer months, and wet winters build it back up again.

Prolonged drought wears that snowpack down, leaving less to melt each year. And with the higher temperatures that often accompany severe drought, the snow melts away earlier in the spring.

Then when a deluge does come, much of it runs into the ocean instead of the reservoirs, Swain said.

The new study is among recent evidence predicting a shift toward extremes for California, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford University climatologist who headed the study.

Its clear that California is now in a different climate than the climate we had a century ago when water rights were designed, and a different climate than we had half a century ago when Californias water reservoirs were built, Diffenbaugh said.

As the climate continues to change, Californians will have no choice but to adapt, said Jay Lund, a water expert at the University of California, Davic.

I think this is just another demonstration that California is a dry place and we have to learn to live with it for the most part, Lund said. But that can be done, he said.

All the studies seem to indicate that if we manage the water we have well, California will still be a prosperous place in the future, even with more severe drought, Lund said.



2016 San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)

Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com

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Yaku Keo, 36, a Laotian Buddhist monk meets with visitors Saturday.

SHARE A statue of Buddha was brought from Thailand to Shasta County. Women at the temple count donations they received Saturday.

By Amber Sandhu of the Redding Record Searchlight

The Laotian Buddhist community welcomed more than a hundred people at its cultural ceremony Saturday where visitors were greeted by a Buddhist monk who has been in Redding for two months.

"Today was about welcoming the Buddhist monk to Shasta County," Fasa Sengphachan, 36, said. The monk, Yaku Keo, 36, was sponsored by the Laotian community in Shasta County to help become part of their community temple, which they have been trying to establish in the county.

The current property, where the cultural ceremony took place, is off of Rebecca Lane and Highway 299, on 2.7 acres of property.

Baysy Sengxay, 43, of Redding said the Laotian Buddhist community comes to a trailer home on the property to worship, and had hopes to build a proper temple in its place. But after trying to seek permission from the city of Redding, they found that the area is zoned for residences, and they would not be allowed to build a temple.

Sengxay said he's already found an 8-acre property off of Old Alturas Road, but is having trouble rounding up funds to purchase the property.

"Right now, I just fear that somebody else might stumble across the property," he said. "I feel in my heart there is something out there that can help us get the resources."

Sengxay said the Laotian and Buddhist community in Shasta County is growing, but there is no central place for them to meet and see each other.

"Our community is so broken, we just meet each other here and there," he said.

But a temple could help serve as a unification point, not just for the Laotian and Buddhist community, but for Shasta County residents who wish to meet the monk and learn from him, he said.

"He's doing this for the broader community," Sengxay said. "He's here to serve, everybody's welcome."

Pam Sinantha-Hu, 43, said she is advising members of a local Redding nonprofit, Lao Buddharavanh Temple, on what steps to take to help establish a local temple.

It's something she hopes will happen soon. She said the community has shifted worship sites at least five times and needs a central location.

She said she's also noticing a gap between the younger and elder Laotian community, and it concerns her. "A lot of the younger generations are looking to connect with monks," she said. "Our concern is the bridge and connection."

But, she has hope, that something positive will happen for the community.

"The greatest thing about immigrants and refugees is their resilience. They thrive," she said.
'India's worst fears have come true because the Pakistan investigating team has, obediently and dutifully, done its masters' bidding by giving a clean chit to Pakistan, the Jaish, the ISI and all other well known actors,' says Rajeev Sharma.

Expect the expected!

Pakistan's Geo TV channel has just come up with a report based on unidentified and unnamed sources saying that India failed to provide evidence to the Pakistani Joint Investigation Team for the January 2-5 terror attack on the Pathankot airbase.

The Geo TV report can be accessed here: http://www.geo.tv/latest/103300-India-failed-to-provide-evidence-to-Pakistan-JIT-for-Pathankot-Attack

If this report is correct, it will virtually mean apocalypse for India-Pakistan bilateral relations.

If correct, it would mean a rude reality check for the Narendra Modi government that has invested huge political and diplomatic capital in improving relations with Pakistan by some out-of-the-box and unprecedented initiatives by Prime Minister Modi 100 days ago, climaxing in his impromptu visit to Lahore on Christmas Day.

The world will know shortly about the conclusions of the Pakistani JIT which completed a five-day visit to India which included a brief visit to the crime scene at the Pathankot airbase.

The Geo TV report mentions that the Pakistani JIT was at the military base for 55 minutes and this brief duration was only enough to take a walk through the airbase, but not enough for it to collect evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attack.

Interestingly, the Congress party had predicted a day before the Geo TV report that the Pakistani JIT had found nothing to link the main suspect, Masood Azhar's Jaish-e-Mohammed, with the Pathankot terror attack.

'Credible reports suggest that the Pak team has already reported/concluded that they have found nothing to link JeM/Azhar to the dastardly Pathankot attacks, despite this being a globally and universally accepted truth...' Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi said on April 1

India's worst fears have come true because the Pakistan investigating team has, obediently and dutifully, done its masters' bidding by giving a clean chit to Pakistan, the Jaish, the ISI and all other well known actors.

The Geo TV report is on expected lines and there is little to expect that the official version of the JIT report, as and when it appears in the public domain, will be any different.

However, it may well be possible that the JIT's official report may give the Indian government some elbow room.

It is extremely unlikely that Pakistan will allow an Indian investigation team access to Masood Azhar and his cronies, that is if the Indian team is allowed to travel to Pakistan in the first place.

This is a major dampener and a reality check for the Modi government. The other day BJP President Amit Shah had spoken reassuringly about Pakistan and its JIT. But now the chickens are coming home to roost for the Modi government.

One must not forget the wider strategic nuances that came to light in recent days. Pakistan must have been emboldened by China's blocking Indian efforts at the United Nations to seek UN action against Masood Azhar.

Obviously, the Chinese move was choreographed by Pakistan and it demonstrated yet again the 'sweeter than honey, deeper than the ocean and higher than the mountains' relationship between Pakistan and China.

Prime Minister Modi did not get a chance to meet with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Washington, DC on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit. Sharif cancelled his Washington visit after the deadly terror attack in a Lahore park.

This constricts the political and diplomatic space for Modi even further.

The focus will inevitably shift to National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his interactions with his Pakistani counterpart, General Naseer Janjua.

Doval will be under immense pressure to bring India back in the thriller of a Test match being played between India and Pakistan at political levels. Time is at a premium.

Rajeev Sharma is an independent journalist and strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha
Tom Uzhunnalil, who was abducted by a terror group in Yemen, is safe and efforts are underway for his early release, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told a delegation of Catholic Bishops Conference of India, the organisations spokesman said on Sunday.

Father Gyanprakash Topno, spokesman of CBCI, said that a five-member delegation had on Saturday met Swaraj who strongly refuted reports that the priest was not alive.

Father Tom is safe and efforts are on for his release as early as possible, Topno said quoting the minister who also told the delegation that government will facilitate the priests safe return to India.

He said the minister told the delegation that more details cannot be divulged at this stage.

Father Tom Uzhunnalil, who hails from Kerala, was abducted last month by a terror group in Yemen, a conflict zone. He had gone missing in Yemen after the Islamic State militant group attacked a care home run by Mother Teresas Missionaries of Charity.

Gunmen had stormed the refuge for the elderly earlier this month and killed a Yemeni guard before tying up and shooting 15 other employees.

Four foreign nuns, including an Indian, working as nurses were among those killed.

Father Tom was captured from the southern Yemeni city of Aden by gunmen who killed at least 15 people at an old peoples home in an attack that was condemned by Pope Francis.
India and Saudi Arabia on Sunday decided to ramp up their counter-terrorism cooperation as they asked all states to dismantle terror infrastructures where they happen to exist and reject the use of terrorism against other countries, seen as an oblique reference to Pakistan.

The assertion was made by the two countries after Prime Minister Narendra Modis wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and delegation-level parleys between the two sides following which five agreements were signed.

The two countries also called on states to cut off any kind of support and financing to terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice.

The pacts signed included one on cooperation in the exchange of intelligence related to money laundering, terror financing and related crimes and another relating to recruitment of Indian workers in Saudi Arabia, home to around three million Indian workers.

In the talks, the Indian side indicated to Saudis that India is facing attacks from terror infrastructure in Pakistan as both sides decided to enhance their counter-terrorism cooperation.

The two sides deliberated on enhancing trade and investment ties, particularly in energy and infrastructure sectors.

Saudi Arabia is a close ally of Pakistan and its strong denouncement of terror is seen as very significant.

An official quoted Prime Minister Modi as saying that the outcome of the talks had turned a new leaf in bilateral ties.

A joint statement issued after the talks between Modi and King Salman, both at restricted format and delegation level, said the two leaders rejected totally any attempt to link terrorism to any particular race, religion or culture.

They called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries; dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist and to cut off any kind of support and financing to the terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states; and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice, the statement said.

The two leaders agreed to further strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism, both at the bilateral level and within the multilateral system of the UN. The two leaders called upon the international community to strengthen multilateral regimes to effectively address the challenges posed by terrorism, it said.

The statement said the two sides agreed to work together towards the adoption of Indias proposed Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism in the United Nations.

The prime minister lauded the Kingdoms efforts in fighting terrorism in all aspects and its active participation in international efforts towards this end.

The Indian side was briefed on Saudi Arabias initiative in bringing together the Islamic Alliance against terrorism.

Modi and King Salman expressed strong condemnation of the phenomenon of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, irrespective of who the perpetrators were and of their motivations.

Amar Sinha, secretary, economic relations, in the external affairs ministry, said both sides looked at individuals involved in terror activities as well as financing, indicating that Riyadh was really serious in dealing with the menace.

He said the two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation in counter-terrorism operations, intelligence sharing and capacity-building and to strengthen cooperation in law enforcement, anti-money laundering, drug-trafficking and other transnational crimes.

The two sides also agreed to take action against illegal transfer of money. Sinha said the pact on cooperation in exchange of intelligence related to money laundering and terror financing was a major step.

Modi and the King also emphasised on the need to further cement bilateral strategic engagement, including in the areas of security and defence cooperation.

They agreed to intensify bilateral defence cooperation, conduct of joint military exercises, exchange of visits of ships and aircrafts and supply of arms and ammunition and their joint development.

In the talks, the two sides also agreed to promote cooperation in cyber security, including prevention of use of cyber space for terrorism, radicalisation and for disturbing social harmony.

The two leaders directed their relevant agencies to coordinate efforts to counter radicalisation and misuse of religion by groups and countries for inciting hatred, perpetrating and justifying terrorism for pursuing political aims, the joint statement said.

On energy security, the two leaders agreed to transform the buyer-seller relationship in the energy-sector to one of deeper partnership focusing on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries.

The Saudi side expressed its interest in investing in infrastructure development in India, especially in priority areas such as railways, roads, ports, and shipping.

Crown Prince and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed bin Naif and Deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman also called on Modi after the talks.

Acknowledging the ongoing positive transformation of the economies of India and Saudi Arabia, the two leaders also agreed to expand trade and investment ties to drive the strategic engagement forward.

Another pact was signed for Investment Promotion Cooperation between Invest India and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority as the two sides were keen on deeper trade and economic ties.

Two other pacts were also signed, one on technical cooperation programme between the Bureau of Standards of both countries and another on cooperation in the field of handicrafts.

Earlier, Modi was accorded a warm ceremonial welcome as the entire Saudi cabinet including the Crown Prince and the Deputy Crown Prince were present at the Royal Court.

The King also hosted a lunch for the prime minister where a lavish spread was laid.

Recognising the vibrant people to people contacts that provided strong bonds between the two countries, the two leaders lauded the valuable role of the Indian community in Saudi Arabia and its contribution to the progress and development of both India and Saudi Arabia.

The two sides also discussed the situation in Syria and the Indian side favoured a peaceful solution to the problem through dialogue.

Image: Prime Minister Narendra Modi receiving the Guard of Honour at the official welcome ceremony at the Royal Court, in Riyadh. Photograph: PIB
A National Investigation Agency officer, probing terror cases related to Indian Mujahideen, was today shot dead by two unidentified motorcycle-borne assailants who also wounded his wife when they were returning home from a wedding near Uttar Pradeshs Bijnor town.

In a planned attack, the killers pumped 24 bullets at 45-year-old Mohd Tanzil Ahmad and four at his wife Farzana, as their daughter, 14, and son, 12, watched the gruesome incident from the back seat of the Wagon-R car they were travelling in, police said, adding the children were not injured.

Late in the evening, NIA IG Sanjeev Kumar said Farzana was out of danger. There is no damage to her vital organs. She is recovering.

Ahmad was a brave officer who never hesitated in taking up any challenge. It is a big loss to NIA. We will rise to the occasion and both NIA as well as UP police has taken this as a challenge to bring the culprits before the law, he said.

Ahmad was returning home in Sahaspur village of Bijnor district with his family after attending his nieces wedding in another nearby village in the same district, which is about 150 kilometre from Delhi.

Police termed the killing of Ahmad, posted as inspector initially with the NIAs intelligence wing and later in its investigation department, as a planned attack and did not rule out the possibility of a terror angle behind the shootout.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh told reporters in Lucknow that he had been apprised of the incident. Whatever necessary is being done. We are talking (to NIA officials), Singh said.

Police suspect that Ahmads movements was being tracked by the assailants who used at least one 9mm pistol in the attack.

Tanzil Ahmad was shot dead by two motorcycle-borne persons when he was returning after attending a marriage ceremony with his wife Farzana, Inspector General (Law and Order) of UP Police Bhagwan Swaroop said.

The incident took place at 12:45 am when Ahmad, earlier posted as an assistant commandant in the Border Security Force and on deputation to NIA, was returning to Sahaspur from the wedding ceremony.

Ahmad, who has been with the NIA ever since the organisation was formed in February 2009, had been investigating many cases especially related to banned Indian Mujahideen terror outfit. His superiors termed him as a thorough professional in intelligence gathering as well as investigation.

According to the police, Ahmad left his home in the evening along with his family to attend a marriage ceremony at a guest house at Sohara village. On their way back, their vehicle was stopped barely 200 metres from his home by two youths who fired at a very close range.

In New Delhi, NIA IG Kumar said, When Ahmad was coming back from the function, a planned attack took place on him and he was fired upon. He was killed in the firing while his wife was injured. She has been admitted to FortisHospital, Noida.

Ahmad was taken to nearby Cosmos hospital where he was declared brought dead.

The Uttar Pradesh Police have sealed the borders of the district and launched a manhunt for the assailants.

Additional Director General of Police Daljit Chowdhry said nothing can be ruled out, when asked whether there was a possibility of terror angle behind the attack.

A very serious offence has taken place in the district and we have taken it very seriously. The body has been sent for post-mortem and details of what actually happened will soon come out. Borders of the state have been sealed and checking is on in the nearby villages to trace those involved in killing of the officer. We are trying to find out the accused and the motive behind the murder, he said.

Investigations are on. Right now the UP Police, UP ATS, NIA, the DIG of NIA from Lucknow and his team all of them are there on the spot, Chowdhry said.

He said the state police was also trying to ascertain whether the 9 mm pistol used for the crime was country-made or factory-made. It is definitely a planned attack and not a robbery, he added.

UP Director General of Police Javed Ahmad said IG Special Task Force and IG Anti Terrorist Squad have been sent to Bijnor and the matter is being probed.

We are also in touch with NIA officers and coordinating with them. We will go deep into it and ensure those involved are arrested, Ahmad said.

Superintendent of Police, Bijnor, Subhash Singh Baghel said Ahmad came to Bijnor on Friday to attend his nieces marriage.

Around 8.00 pm on Saturday evening, Ahmad and his family left their home for the marriage function. When they were returning home past midnight, their vehicle was stopped close to their residence by the two youths on a motorcycle.

When Ahmad stopped his car, they fired several rounds and escaped, the SP said, adding locals rushed to the spot hearing the gunshots.

Image: Tanzil Ahmed, an assistant commandant with the Border Security Force, was currently on deputation in NIA.
The Trimbakeshwar Temple authorities in Ahmednagar on Sunday imposed a restriction on mens entry too into the sanctum sanctorum of the Lord Shiva shrine with an aim to provide equal treatment to both the genders, a trustee said.

The decision, which takes effect from Monday, comes in the wake of the Bombay high court verdict giving women equal right to men with regard to entry into temples.

It was decided on Sunday morning after a board meeting of the Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust under Chairperson and District Judge Urmila Phalke Joshi, Lalita Shinde, one of the trustees said.

The meeting was attended by secretary N M Nagare as well as Trust members Kailas Ghule, Yadavrao Tungar, Shrikant Gaidhani, and Sachindra Pachorkar.

The decision was taken to ensure equal treatment to both men and women, Shinde said.

The development comes a day after Bhumata Ranragini Brigade Trupti Desai and 25 other women activists were taken into preventive custody to stop them from entering into the inner sanctum of the famous Shani temple in Ahmednagars Shignapur village. They were later released.

The ancient temple, located 30 kilometre from Nashik, is a major Lord Shiva shrine of the country, which has one of the 12 jyotirlingas, drawing devotees from far and wide.

According to Ghule, a member of the Trimbakeshwar Temple Trust, the ban on entry of women into the garbhagriha is an age-old tradition and not something enforced in recent times.

The ban goes back to the Peshwa period.

As per tradition, only men were allowed entry daily between 6-7 am into the area where the main linga is placed, that too by putting on a specific gear called the sovala (silk clothing).

Women, can, however have darshan from outside the core area.

Some priests in the temple town said most of the women devotees might not want to defy the tradition.

Seeking to give a scientific dimension to the practice, they said there are certain rays that concentrate in the core area which could probably be harmful to the health of women.

The Bombay HC had recently held it is the fundamental right of women to go into places of worship. It had also directed the state government to take pro-active steps for ensuring compliance with the law which prevents discrimination against women vis-a-vis entry to places of worship.

At the Shani shrine in Ahmednagar too, the temple management has shunned the practice of special pooja for men from the last two months after agitation demanding womens entry into the garbgriha gained momentum.

Now both men and women are offering prayers from an equal distance from the idol. As of now, only priests are allowed on the sacred sanctum.

The debate over the issue of womens entry into the sanctum sanctorum of temples in Maharashtra escalated after a woman last year tried to enter and offer prayers at the Shani Shingnapur temple in breach of the age-old practice prohibiting entry of women.

This had prompted the temple committee to suspend seven security men and the villagers to perform purification rituals.

Earlier on March 7, around 150 women under the banner of Bhumata Ranragini Brigade headed to the Trimbakeshwar temple seeking to break the bar on female devotees at the inner sanctum. Their attempts were, however, foiled by the police.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a two-day bilateral visit to Saudi Arabia, the third and final leg of his three-nation tour that began on March 30 with a visit to Brussels. This is the first prime ministerial visit to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of then prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2010.

Heres what Modi has been up to during his visit:

PM Narendra Modi sharing snacks with workers at the L&T residential complex, in Riyadh. Speaking to the blue-collared workers, he said, It is your sweat and toil that has brought me here. Your happiness is my happiness and when you are not happy, I feel the same. Photograph: MEAIndia/Facebook

Prime Minister Narendra Modi interacts with his supporters, and clicks selfies with the workers at the L&T residential complex, in Riyadh. Photograph: PIB

Immediately after his arrival, Modi visited the Masmak fortress, a clay and mud-brick complex built around 1865, that is a major symbol of recapture of power by the Al Saud royal dynasty which has been running the country for over a century. Photograph: PIB

PM Modi interacts with the employees at the All Women TCS IT Centre. Photograph: MEAIndia/Twitter

Modi signs a helmet during his visit to the L&T residential complex, in Riyadh. Photograph: PIB
Over 95 lakh voters will decide the fate of 539 candidates, including 43 females, in 65 constituencies spread across the state.

IMAGE: Election officials examine the Electronic Voting Machines ahead of assembly elections in Jorhat, Assam. Photograph: PTI

The ruling Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party-Asom Gana Parishad-Bodoland Peoples Front alliance and the All India United Democratic Front are locked in a keen battle as the stage is set for the first phase of Assam assembly polls to be held amidst tight security on Monday for deciding the fate of 539 candidates in 65 of the 126 constituencies.

An electorate of 95,11,732 including 45,95,712 women, will exercise their franchise in 12,190 polling stations with the number of hyper-sensitive and sensitive booths yet to be released by the election office.

Security has been tightened across the state with the Indo-Bangla border along Barak Valleys Karimganj district sealed and more than 40,000 security personnel deployed in the 65 constituencies spread across Upper Assam, hill districts, northern banks and Barak Valley.

More than 48,000 polling personnel have been deployed in the first phase with those in remote areas leaving for their respective polling booths since Friday evening.

The first phase will witness mostly direct contest between the ruling Congress and the BJP-AGP-BPF alliance though the AIUDF has put up candidates in 27 constituencies where the fight is expected to be triangular.

The Congress is contesting in all the 65 constituencies in the first phase while BJP is contesting in 54 and its alliance partners -- AGP in 11 and BPF in three, the AIUDF in 27, the Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India-Marxist in 10 each with Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist) Liberation in six along with 60 others of unrecognised parties and 13 independents.

Among the 539 candidates in the fray, 496 are males and 43 females in 45 constituencies of the Brahmaputra Valley, five in the two hill districts of Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao and 15 in the BarakValley.

IMAGE: Security personnel patrol through village Margherita in Tinsukia, Assam ahead of the polls. Photograph: PTI

The prominent Congress candidates in the fray are Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi from Titabor, Speaker of the outgoing assembly Pranab Gogoi from Sibsagar, former Union Minister and prominent tea tribe leader Paban Singh Ghatowar and Assam Ministers Gautam Roy, Sarat Barkotoky, Ajanta Neog, Khorsingh Engti, Siddeque Ahmed, Bismita Gogoi, Sumitra Patir and Girindra Malik among others.

The BJPs star candidates in the first phase are Union minister and partys Chief Ministerial candidate Sarbananda Sonowal from Majuli, Jorhat LS MP Kamakhya Prasad Tasa against the chief minister from Titabor, sitting MLA Prashanta Phukan

Dilip Paul, along with former AGP minister Hiten Goswami and those who joined the party last year, including sitting AGP MLAs Padma Hazarika and Naba Doley, Congress dissident and disqualified MLAs Kripanath Mallah, Bolin Chetia and Pallab Lochan Das and former ULFA militant Kushal Duwari.

AGPs prominent candidates are its Working President Atul Bora and sitting MLAs Keshab Mahanta and Utpal Dutta along with former minister Pradip Hazarika.

The run-up to the poll was marked by a high-pitched campaign with high-profile national and state leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi and the chief minister leading the campaign trail for their respective parties.

The campaign was characterised by a no-holds barred tirade of allegations and counter-allegations with Congress going all-out to retain power for the fourth successive term while the BJP-AGP-BPF alliance attempts to wrest it from the ruling party and the AIUDF claiming to be the king-maker in the next government formation in Assam.

The BJPs campaign called for a parivartan (change) to bring development while Congress highlighted its various achievements, including improvement of the law and order situation during last 15 years of its rule.

The BJP targeted the chief minister for his advancing age and accused his government of widespread corruption and failure to bring development in the state while the ruling party accused the Centre for its alleged failure to fulfil the various poll promises made before the last Lok Sabha polls and curtailment of funds and special category status to the state.

Infiltration and sealing of the Indo-Bangla border, security of the region, economic development of the state, skill-development and employment opportunities, power, health, education and welfare of the farmer were some of the major issues that were also highlighted during the campaign.
A 29-year-old Indo-Canadian Sikh was viciously assaulted by four men in Canada in an alleged racially motivated attack, drawing strong condemnation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Supninder Singh Khehra, an Indian citizen from Patiala and a resident of the Toronto suburb of Brampton, was verbally abused and beaten by a group of men who seemed to be drunk who targeted him because of his brown skin and turban.

Khehra who is still recovering, said he was out with friends in Quebec City after dark and trying to hail a cab when a car full of men approached and started shouting at him in French, swearing and pointing at his turban, CTV reported online.

I was punched in the eye and fell to the ground, where I was kicked repeatedly. It was all because of my race, my colour and the headgear I was wearing, he said.

He said his turban went flying off.

Im really worried about the safety and wellbeing of young kids of my community who wear turbans, Khehra added.

The incident has been condemned by Trudeau while he was speaking to reporters in Washington, where he was attending the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

Trudeau was quoted as saying that such hateful acts had no place in Canada. He said, We stand clearly against the kind of discrimination and intolerance that represents.

Trudeau had a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the summit in Washington.

Jaskaran Sandhu, a director of the World Sikh Organisation Canada, said he believes the men should be charged.

He added he is positive that the Canadian society will come together and say that this is completely against the fabric of this country.

Two men were arrested after the incident. One was let go without a charge, police said.

The other, a 22-year-old, faces charges of assault and uttering threats to a police officer. They said they are still investigating and more charges are possible.
Fashion conscious Kate Middleton will reportedly be packing 12-15 outfits for her six-day visit to India and Bhutan after an advance team completed a recce of locations, including the iconic Taj Mahal.

Kate, 34, and Prince William, 33, will fly into Mumbai next Sunday for the trip and the Duchess of Cambridge will be packing alongside her daytime dresses and evening gowns, a surprise addition -- a pair of hiking boots.

Kate will take 12-15 outfits for the six days of official visits, the Telegraph reported.

Whilst the Royal couple are in Bhutan they will go on a six-hour trek to Tigers Nest monastery said to require peak physical fitness and hiking gear, likely to be the Hillmaster boots the Duchess last wore when she visited Borneos jungle.

The official tour starts in Mumbai on April 10, and the Duke and Duchess will travel to New Delhi, the KazirangaNational Park and Thimphu, capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, apart from their visit to the Taj Mahal.

A small team have made a rehearsal trip to India and Bhutan, on which Kates private secretary Rebecca Deacon made notes on factors to consider about the locations the Duchess will visit, so that she has an idea of what outfits will and wont work, the daily said.

The team took a photograph of every place the Duchess will visit, so that she can use these images as a guide to determine how formal she needs to dress and what colours will look best against the backdrops.

She is in charge of it herself and takes an interest in paying tribute to the host country with nods to their culture and local style on at least a few of the engagements, a royal source was quoted as saying.

The important factor on this tour is the heat, so thats an issue that plays a big part in the choice of outfits, the source said.

On previous royal tours Kate has made a point of dressing diplomatically -- wearing a dress by Canadian born designer Erdem Moralioglu to touch down in Montreal, for example.

She wore a dress by Australian label Zimmermann whilst on Australias ManleyBeach, and on her three-day trip to New York in 2014 she wore two pieces from American designers, a Tory Burch coat and J Crew jeans.

Just a few days after it was announced the Duke and Duchess would be travelling to India, Kate wore a dress by Indian designer Saloni for a function in London, hinting perhaps that she will also rely on the designers print and colour filled collection for the upcoming tour.

The Duchess personal assistant, Natasha Archer, will accompany her on the royal tour, as will her hairdresser Amanda Cook Tucker.

Photograph: Chris Jackson/WPA Pool/Getty Images
Leland Harden saw what he considered the future of education when he applied for a job.

"I was applying for a job with College Plus that I eventually didn't get," said Harden, the chief operating officer of SpeedyPrep, an Abilene company that offers students the material to prepare for College Leveling Examination Program tests. "I saw this program called SpeedyPrep and I thought, 'This is way cool.' I told them, 'This is your gold mine.' "

Harden didn't get the job, but earlier this year, he contacted Jeff Rogers, the CEO of Mid America Learning and a trustee of the Wylie school board, and told him about a program he saw that helped students prepare for CLEP tests. It turned out it was exactly what Rogers was looking for. Harden and Rogers got some other investors and purchased SpeedyPrep from College Plus.

"It (SpeedyPrep) was succeeding in spite of them (College Plus)," said Harden. "And they would tell you that. It didn't fit their focus because they deal mainly with home-school students."

CLEP is a program of The College Board and its tests allow students to test out of college courses if they are able to pass the test. SpeedyPrep offers programs in 25 of the 34 CLEP tests and will ask students a question seven times, in various ways, to help ensure the student learns the material that will be on the test. The program also has 3,200 instructional videos to help students grasp difficult concepts.

Once a student achieves 90 percent mastery of the material, he or she is ready to take the test. CLEP tests are accepted by 2,900 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Rogers said they are accepted by universities that may not accept college credits from other schools.

The potential savings to students, and their parents, is significant.

"The average cost of a college hour is more than $300," said Rogers. And it can be higher, even locally.

As Harden said, "the cost of education is at a pain point."

The cost of SpeedyPrep is $19.95 a month and the cost of a CLEP test is $80.

"Let's say it takes a student a couple of months to prepare for a test," said Rogers. "The test is $80. That's $120, compared to a couple of thousand or more for a college course."

Rogers said that if a student uses SpeedyPrep and doesn't pass the CLEP, his or her money is returned. He said the program's success rate is more than 98 percent.

"It's the best kept secret in education," he said.

SpeedyPrep is self-paced and questions are presented as fill-in the blanks, rather than the multiple choice format of CLEP tests.

"It teaches you in a difficult form to prepare you for a test that will be given in an easier format," Rogers said.

The program accomplishes the same end as do dual credit courses in high school, but Rogers said the program has two advantages. One is that students don't have to spend an entire semester in a course, meaning they can pick up more college credit while they're in school. The other is that high schools are limited in the number of dual credit courses they can offer. Still, Rogers said that SpeedyPrep complements, rather than competes with, dual credit courses.

"This augments dual credit," he said.

Harden and Rogers have made a presentation of SpeedyPrep to the Region 14 Education Service Center in Abilene, which services most of the school districts in the Big Country. They hope to be able to pitch the program to the other 19 ESCs in the state.

However, high school students aren't the only audience for the program. Rogers said that members of the military can use the program even when they're deployed and that nontraditional college students, those who attend college years after they've graduated from high school, are using the program.

Harden said the validity of the programs is confirmed in letters he receives from customers, or the parents of customers, who have used SpeedyPrep.

"It's cool to get letters from people thanking you because you saved them thousands of dollars," he said.
First Financial Bank addition

The board of directors of First Financial Bank, N.A. has announced that Barry A. Wellins has been hired as executive vice president of retail banking. Wellins has more than 20 years of banking experience at several national financial institutions, having previously worked as ranch and district manager, retail market manager, business banking market manager, senior vice president of small business banking, national real estate sales manager, senior vice president of regional business, director of multi-channel sales and digital bank executive.

Wellins holds a bachelor of arts degree in legal studies from the University of California at Berkley, and is a graduate of the University of Texas McCombs School of Business Texas Executive Education Program School of Management. He has formal credit certifications in financial accounting for lenders and commercial loans to businesses from the Omega Performance Corporation, and also has Series 7, 66 and 24 investment licenses.

First Abilene Federal Credit Union president retires

First Abilene Federal Credit Union has announced that president and CEO Faye Smith has retired, effective Thursday.

Smith joined the company in 1989, and during her tenure the credit union has expanded to several times its previous size.

Facial Plastic & Cosmetic Surgical Center receives accreditation

Facial Plastic & Cosmetic Surgical Center, in Abilene, recently received accreditation from the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care. Accreditation requires meeting a set of standards in a self-assessment and an on-site survey by experts from the AAAHC.

Hope For Life names Mark Miller to council

The board of directors of Hope For Life, a Herald of Truth ministry, has elected Mark Miller to the organization's Council of Advisors. Miller, a native of Clovis, New Mexico, currently works as a financial adviser at Edward Jones in Abilene, and has been with the company for 28 years. He is a 1978 graduate of McMurry University.
Jim Clark, the executive director for the Christian Service Center, said watching the building being destroyed by fire Saturday afternoon was an emotional experience.

"It is like saying goodbye to an old friend," he said.

A fire started Saturday afternoon in the building at the intersection of North Ninth and Mesquite streets, which has been the home of Christian Service Center since 1968. Abilene Fire Department Chief Larry Bell said the fire started sometime between 3:20 p.m., when the cleaning staff locked the building, and 4 p.m. Bell said that would be Saturday night before firefighters would be able to enter the building and determine the cause of the fire.

He said firefighters were unable to enter the building because of the intensity of the fire, but were able to contain the blaze to the building, which consists of three World War II barracks from Camp Barkeley and a metal building constructed in 1999.

Even after two hours, flames still could be seen leaping from the building, and bystanders said the smoke could be seen at Lake Fort Phantom. Walnut Street, normally nearly deserted on a Saturday afternoon, had heavy traffic as police had to reroute motorists around the area.

Clark, who has been the director of the non-profit agency for more than 12 years, said the center closed at noon and was empty when the fire started. He said he received a text message around 4 p.m. informing him about the fire.

Fire at 9th and Mesquite. Christian Service Center fully engulfed in flames. Avoid area as responders work the scene. Video by Ken Grimm Posted by Posted by Abilene Reporter-News on Saturday, April 2, 2016

Clark said the center serves around 7,000 people a year, not only from Abilene but from surrounding towns as well.

"It's helped thousands and thousands of people through the years," he said.

Walt Worgull, the chairman of the Christian Service Center Board, said the center would release a statement mid-week about future plans.

"The board will meet on Tuesday and discuss this and pray about it," he said. "There are a lot people who use this center for their livelihood."

The center is planning to move into the Woodlawn Church of Christ on North 10th Street later this year after it is remodeled, but Clark said it was important to find a way to meet the needs of the people who are served by the center.

"We'll probably need to find a temporary place," he said.

Several of the people who were at the scene were volunteers, Clark said, noting that many of them were moved to tears watching the flames engulf the venerable building.

"I saw the lady who organized the toys, and she was crying," Clark said. "I saw the woman who organizes the blankets and sheets, and she was crying. They (the volunteers) love to help people."

Clark admitted he was emotional about the fire, but expressed gratitude for the work done by the firefighters and thankfulness that no one was injured. He also said he was reminded of the "in all things," part of Roman 8:28: "For we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

"That's a good thing to remember now," he said.
Halloween events, fall festivals pack October in Abilene, Big Country

From family-friendly to frightful, there are plenty of opportunities to don the costumes and scare up some treats.
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Forty years later, the political parallels are striking: a fractured presidential field, talk of a brokered convention, a contest that lasted until the party's quadrennial gathering began.

But the principal lesson of that 1976 race  which I covered closely for The Baltimore Sun  is how unpredictable the political process can be. It's a reason to be wary of forecasts as the GOP race unfolds over the next four months.

In that year, the Democrats had the kind of leaderless, unwieldy field the Republicans had last fall. By January, their chairman, the legendary Bob Strauss, was talking about brokering a multicandidate convention.

When the primaries ended in June, however, Jimmy Carter emerged as the clear Democratic winner despite substantial establishment opposition. But the Republican contest, with only two candidates, lasted until the GOP convention in mid-August.

It was primarily resolved in the two months between the primaries and the convention, a scenario that could well be repeated if front-runner Donald Trump fails to win 1,237 delegates by the time Republicans finish selecting delegates in June.

One unusual aspect of the 1976 race was Ronald Reagan's unexpected comeback. The former California governor nearly won the nomination after losing early primaries to President Gerald Ford. Sen. Ted Cruz hopes to do something similar, starting with next Tuesday's Wisconsin primary.

Ford's narrow victory in the leadoff New Hampshire primary triggered a series of Reagan defeats that produced premature requiems for his campaign.

"Even some of Mr. Reagan's staunchest supporters now believe it is unlikely he can recover from his string of setbacks, capped by last Tuesday's Florida defeat," I wrote in The Sun March 14, 1976. But nine days later, he won the North Carolina primary, launching a comeback featuring victories in winner-take-all Texas and California primaries that brought him within 100 votes of Ford by June.

During the next six weeks, the two sides fought it out delegate-by-delegate, at the state conventions that picked caucus state delegates and over delegates elected as uncommitted.

Something similar seems likely this year, if the primaries end without a clear majority for Trump, the only GOP candidate now capable of reaching that target. In a sense, it's already begun. Two main delegate pools are at stake:

Uncommitted delegates, elected as supporters of candidates now out of the race. As of March 28, there were more than 180, most of them elected supporting Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Trump may encounter trouble picking them up, judging from the initial successes Cruz's superior campaign organization scored in Georgia and Louisiana.

Delegates from state conventions. In 2012, supporters of former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas hijacked several state delegations. That is less likely this year under rules requiring delegations to reflect caucus results, at least for one ballot. Besides, all state GOP conventions will take place before the last primaries June 7.

But a major battle is looming next month for Colorado's 37 delegates because the state party banned a preference vote at the March 1 caucuses. And in some states, delegates required to back Trump are saying they won't necessarily do so if there is more than one ballot.

A third battlefield could be the convention preliminaries, where such battles have often been fought out in the Rules and Credentials Committees. Anti-Trump forces are working to elect their allies to those positions. In a closely divided convention, they might target the rule requiring a first ballot vote for the primary or caucus winner, in hopes of reducing Trump's total.

In 1976, Reagan's campaign tried various strategies, none successful. He named a running mate, moderate Sen. Dick Schweiker of Pennsylvania, and proposed a rule requiring Ford to follow suit, hoping to split the president's coalition.

But that failed when the closely divided Mississippi delegation agreed to vote as a bloc against the proposed rule. Ford won on the first ballot, 1187-1070.

How long the 2016 GOP race lasts depends on Trump's showing in the remaining primaries. If he is close to a majority on June 8, he probably can get the remaining votes. In 1976, Carter was just short after winning Ohio on the final primary day and achieved his majority a few days later.

But the further Trump is from 1237, the more likely a coalition of party leaders and defeated candidates could block him. The fight almost certainly guarantees a turbulent convention that would damage GOP chances of regaining the White House.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at: carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.
OK, now we move on to something else.

The mysterious 911 call made from the Austin and Susan King household last fall may not be solved until November, long after the race for the District 24 seat in the Texas Senate is decided.

Susan King and Lakeway's Dawn Buckingham are locked in the battle we expected for the seat that longtime Sen. Troy Fraser is vacating. The issue of King's brief suspension of her campaign last fall, before her filing for the race, seemed to be a potential issue, though it wasn't talked about much in the primary.

King announced she had chronic depression and, as a nurse, it was something to address, even to the point of stepping away from politics. The day before the Dec. 14 filing deadline, we were told she was back in and the time off was greatly helpful to her mental, and physical, health.

Still, would one of her five  or all five  opponents question her ability to serve in the Senate? No one swung that bat.

But it was discovered that a 911 call was made, and attempts were made to get the record of that call. That generally is public information, though, as the Kings have argued, not in medical situations. The question would be, were those calls only medically related?

Last week, the state attorney general's office, the city of Abilene  which keeps records of emergency calls to police, and a state district judge agreed not to release that information for now. The Kings have brought a lawsuit, which will be heard in November, that would deny access to those records once and for all.

King says she has nothing to hide and that the calls are medically related. She is protecting her information and the rights of others to have their personal information protected.

The Buckingham camp, which denied being the instigator in this issue, doesn't buy that. They believe the lawsuit purposely was brought up to delay resolution beyond the May 24 runoff. The wheels of justice sometimes take that long to turn.

As we have noted, the absurdities and nastiness of national elections that we decry often is displayed again in our backyards. We've seen that in the 19th Congressional District race, and we see it here.

A six-person race has been culled to two. Less than 3,000 votes separated King, the primary winner, and Buckingham, the runner-up. Their challenge is to secure the other votes. There were 119,366 votes cast  the top two candidates got 62,065 votes, leaving almost that many votes for the taking if voters return to the polls in the same numbers.

Jon Cobb, who finished third with 24,361 votes, has endorsed King.

Game over? Hardly.

A candidate who rests easy and believes numbers will repeat themselves is taking a huge risk. Remember David Dewhurst, who whipped up on Ted Cruz in the 2012 primary but did not get a majority? Guess who no longer is holding public office and who is in thick of the presidential race?

Thus, both candidates knew the 83 days between March 1 and May 24 were going to be workdays. Maybe even the Easter Bunny was going to be recruited to deliver campaign messages instead of colorful eggs.

King said last week that her opponent has sunk to an "all-time low" by egging on the 911 issue. Buckingham's camp has called King a "liar" for pointing the finger at them.

Now that the emergency response issue is on hold, there's a campaign to decide. There is no Democratic opponent in the fall, so May's winner gets the chicken dinner.

May we suggest that each candidate prove to voters why she should be elected, not why the other person should not be in office? We would like to hear Buckingham convince us why King, a 10-year state representative whom we believe has been an effective leader for her three-county district, should not move to the Senate chamber and do the same for the much larger District 24.

We would like to hear King talk more about her strengths as an advocate for the two military installations and the veterans who have made District 24 their home instead of having to rebut accusations. And why her opponent's spokesman calls King a liberal in this conservative vs. conservative race.

We may never know the text of those 911 calls, or we may find out in eight months there's more to the story.

But there is a race to decide in late May. Let's focus on that first.
Some female Air France flight attendants have been protesting an airline rule that they must cover their hair when Air France resumes flights to the Iranian capital, Tehran, on April 17.

"Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the head scarf," a union representative, Christophe Pillet, told AFP on April 2.

French media reported that Air France has sent a memo informing female cabin crew they would be required to wear trousers and long jackets, in addition to covering their hair with a scarf when leaving the aircraft in Tehran.

The hijab became compulsory for women in Iran after the 1979 revolution and the creation of an Islamic republic.

Foreign women traveling to Iran are also required by law to wear the hijab.

Flore Arrighi, head of the UNAC flight crews union, said: It is not our role to pass judgment on the wearing of head scarves or veils in Iran.

She said the cabin crew members are denouncing the policy because it is compulsory.

She also said female cabin crew must be given the right to refuse working on flights to Tehran.

Air France has defended the decision, saying that the rule is respected by all other international airlines that have flights to Iran.

Air France announced in December that it would resume Paris-Tehran flights after an eight-year gap.

Based on reporting by AFP, Le Point, and The Telegraph


Separatist forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh launched a counteroffensive and said they regained strategic high ground, as heavy fighting continued to rage between Azerbaijani and ethnic Armenian forces.

Azerbaijan, meanwhile, announced a unilateral cease-fire on April 3, a day after the fighting erupted in the South Caucasus mountain enclave, located within Azerbaijan itself.

It was the worst outbreak of violence in the two decades since a bloody ethnic conflict erupted into full-scale war and ended with ethnic Armenian separatists taking control of the territory in 1994.



At least 18 Armenian soldiers were reported killed a day earlier when Azerbaijani troops advanced with tanks and heavy artillery, officials said. The Azerbaijani side has announced 12 combat deaths.

Fighting on April 3 was described as fierce in the region's northeast and along the southernmost section of the Line of Contact, which effectively serves as a front line separating the opposing sides.



Officials with Nagorno-Karabakh separatist fighters said its soldiers pushed Azerbaijani forces back from tactically important positions near the northern village of Talish. The separatists also claimed they destroyed three Azerbaijani tanks and an armored personnel carrier in the south.



Azerbaijans military, however, rejected that claim, saying Armenia failed "to regain positions lost by it on April 2. Officials also claimed as many as 10 Armenian tanks were destroyed in the April 3 fighting -- a report rejected by a spokesman for the ethnic Armenian fighters.



Azerbaijans Defense Ministry said later on April 3 that it was calling a unilateral cease-fire in response to calls from international organizations.



Yerevan, however, dismissed the announcement as an information trick. David Babayan, a spokesman for Nagorno-Karabakhs ethnic leader, also dismissed the announcement, saying Azerbaijani operations were continuing.



Nagorno-Karabakh military officials later said they were ready to discuss the terms of a cease-fire but only in the context of restoring former positions.

WATCH: Residents of the Azerbaijani town of Terter said that shells hit their homes on April 2 as fighting flared in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Terter is located close to the Line of Control. Heavy fighting was reportedly continuing for a second day on April 3. (RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service)

RFE/RL correspondents in Nagorno-Karabakh said that ethnic Armenian forces have been reinforcing their frontline positions by calling up hundreds of reservists and deploying heavy artillery.



Hundreds of other Armenians, most of them veterans of the 1991-94 conflict, reportedly were heading to the front lines from Armenia, which is connected to Nagorno-Karabakh by a narrow strip of territory that crosses high mountain passes and deep river valleys.



A legacy of the Soviet breakup known as a frozen conflict, the dispute has seen sporadic, low-level fighting between the two sides ever since the 1994 cease-fire, but nothing of the scale that erupted on April 2.

The dispute has bedeviled regional and international leaders for years, with the United States, Russia, and France taking the lead in trying to reach a permanent settlement, and tamp down tensions.



Diplomats from the three nations, grouped together in whats called the Minsk Group, said they would convene a full-meeting April 5 in Vienna to discuss the breakdown of the 21-year-old cease-fire.



Along with Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan sit astride a key transit corridor in the South Caucasus, where oil, gas, and other goods move from South and Central Asia toward Europe.



Russia maintains strong economic ties with all three nations, particularly with Armenia, though Moscows war in Georgia in 2008 and its recent actions in Ukraine have worried leaders in all three countries.



In another potentially worrisome sign, the president of Turkey, which shares deep cultural, religious, and linguistic ties with Azerbaijan, has vowed to "support Azerbaijan to the end."

Turkey has enforced a border blockade against Armenia proper since the war in the early 1990s, and Turkish and Armenian nationalists have repeatedly torpedoed efforts by Yerevan and Ankara to restore trade ties.



Fueled by windfall revenues from its Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves, Azerbaijan has gone on a military spending spree in the past decades, buying new weaponry and equipment from Russia and elsewhere.



Thats worried analysts, who fear Baku might try to preemptively take back Nagorno-Karabakh, whose loss remains an unhealed 21-year-old wound for many Azerbaijanis.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, TASS, and Interfax
Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec says authorities in Prague will send a group of Iraqi Christians back to Iraq after they tried to move to Germany rather than staying in the Czech Republic.

About 25 Iraqis took a bus to Germany on April 2 but were stopped by German police immediately after crossing the border.

Czech authorities agreed to a request by the German police to take the people back.

The Czech Republic had agreed in December to accept 153 Iraqi Christian refugees who have fled part of Iraq controlled by Islamic State militants.

Chovanec said the 25 Iraqis abused Czech generosity and should go back to Iraq within seven days.

It was not immediately clear how Chovanec meant for them to return.

Thirty-seven Christian families are supposed to arrive in the Czech Republic from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and from refugee camps in Lebanon from January to April.

The CTK news agency reported on April 3 that Chovanec has suspended the relocation program following the April 2 border-crossing incident.

Based on reporting by Reuters and CTK
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have pulled their troops back from a disputed area along their common border. There were some tense days in the region around Kyrgyzstans village of Ala-Buka after 40 Uzbek soldiers backed by two armored personnel carriers appeared on March 18 and established a checkpoint on a road leading to the village. Uzbek authorities did not immediately provide a reason for the troop movement. In response, Kyrgyz authorities moved an equal number of troops and vehicles to the area.

In the end, after talks between representatives of the two countries, most of the troops departed and the incident fizzled out.

Ala-Buka was not an isolated event. Incidents along the borders in the Ferghana Valley -- shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan -- are common. Violence has broken out on occasion along various sections of the confusing frontiers. Border guards have exchanged fire, and local communities on opposite sides of the border have fought one another.

To look at the problems in the Ferghana Valley, why these problems continue to break out, and why it is so difficult to find a solution, RFE/RLs Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk, assembled a Majlis, a panel, to discuss the border situation in the Ferghana Valley.

Azatlyk Director Muhammad Tahir moderated the panel. From Dushanbe, independent political analyst Muhibolloh Kurban participated. Kurban is also a native of the Tajik village of Chorkuh, near the border with Kyrgyzstan. From Finland, where she is currently a visiting research fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki, Madeleine Reeves, a lecturer at Manchester University, joined the talk. Reeves is also the author of Border Work: Spatial Lives Of The State In Rural Central Asia, based on her work in the Ferghana Valley. Ive roamed the Ferghana Valley for a couple of decades, so I had something to say also.

The Ferghana Valley is a region long identified by analysts as the leading potential hot spot in Central Asia and the ill-defined and ill-suited borders are a major factor in such assessments.

Every year, people are killed along these borders. Usually it is border guards firing on alleged trespassers, but for villagers in these areas it is often unclear where the border actually is.

Kurban explained the situation along the Tajik-Kyrgyz border: Absolutely no sign, no delimitation, no demarcation.

In the Pamir mountains along the Kyrgyz-Tajik border, there are wedges of habitable land in the narrow valleys between the steep, stony mountains. One street, even [along] one street, on one side Kyrgyz[stan], on the other side Tajik[istan], but at the same time, on both sides of the street live both Kyrgyz and Tajik. It is very, very difficult to [demarcate] places near the border, Kurban said.

In other places, the two populations are not so mixed, generally staying on their sides of the unmarked border. As Reeves explained, in such areas conflicts often start from local political demands around access to water, access to grazing lands, access to public transport, access to markets being hampered in some way. 

The governments sharing the Ferghana Valley have often found solutions to these problems, Reeves said, by resorting to unilateral or de facto processes of delimitation through the building of infrastructure, through the building of roads and so forth to facilitate intrastate movement, movement from one part of the state to the other, but without really resolving the larger underlying legal issues.

It can be even more complicated than that, as Kurban explained: Tajiks rented out to the Kyrgyz side, for 50 years, a piece of land, which is about 200 meters. The Kyrgyz side built a highway on this. It is between Kok-Tash [Kyrgyzstan] and Chorkuh. Our Kyrgyz brothers should give a piece of land to rent out to Tajiks.

Bishkek has a different interpretation of this, but clearly there are issues here that will not be easy to solve.

Uzbekistans borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are usually much more clearly defined, largely because the Uzbek government has worked to fence off large sections of what Tashkent claims are its eastern borders. This includes not only fences but digging ditches and setting up additional border posts and watchtowers. During an insurgency by Islamic militants in the summer of 2000, Uzbekistan put land mines along parts of its borders with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan do not have the finances to keep up with Uzbekistans moves to secure the frontiers in the Ferghana Valley.

Kurban also mentioned there are three separate Soviet maps of Central Asia -- in the 1920s, the second in the 1950s, the third in the 1980s -- something that led some Kyrgyz officials recently to propose dispensing with maps and resolving the location of the border over a cup of tea.

But beyond the physical borders, there are other issues connected to the three countries' days as Soviet republics, as Reeves recalled: If we look at the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, we have a really significant increase at this time in the amount of area that was under cultivation.

She said, To do this, what one often had was the building of infrastructure, often irrigation infrastructure --- canals, reservoirs, and so forth -- that would be used by more than one republic and that might be, for instance, constructed in the territory of Kyrgyzstan, or the Kyrgyz Soviet Republic, as it was, but paid for by the Uzbek S.S.R. Which, Reeves noted, is the case we see with the Kasan-Sai reservoir, which is in the territory of todays Kyrgyzstan but was constructed from the budget of the Uzbek S.S.R.

The Kasan-Sai reservoir is the site of the recent standoff between Uzbek and Kyrgyz troops.

The first border post I ever saw in Central Asia was in the Ferghana Valley in the autumn of 1992. I was going from Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan. The border post was on the Uzbek side. By the time I left in late 1993, all the interstate asphalt roads had border posts on both sides of the frontier.

Nearly 25 years after independence, long stretches of the frontiers between these three countries are not demarcated and in many places ownership is openly disputed. This has not caused a huge problem yet, but it is a constant source of enmity between the three governments and too often the people living along the borders.

The panel discussed the border issues in greater depth, reviewing individual incidents and grievances and looking back at the historical events that shaped the current situation in the Ferghana Valley and offering possible solutions to the problem.

A recording of the discussion can be heard here:
KYIV -- Ukrainian officials said vile Russian missile strikes on civilian energy sites have caused power outages nationwide, leaving more than a million households without electricity, while Russian authorities ordered residents to leave Kherson "immediately" ahead of an expected effort by Kyivs forces to retake the crucial southern city.

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.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram on October 22 that Russia carried out a "massive attack" on Ukraine overnight and that "the aggressor continues to terrorize our country."



"At night, the enemy launched a massive attack: 36 rockets, most of which were shot down...These are vile strikes on critical objects. Typical tactics of terrorists," he wrote. "The world can and must stop this terror."



Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Zelenskiys office, said Ukrainian air defense forces had shot down 18 of the missiles.



Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a number of missiles had been shot down on the approach to the capital.



"Several rockets flying toward Kyiv were shot down in the region by air defense forces. Thanks to our defenders!" Klitschko said.



There was no immediate word on deaths related to the missile attacks, but officials said several people had been injured.



It was not possible to verify the reports on either side.



In the face of continued Russian strikes, Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba again urged Ukraine's Western allies to speed up the delivery of modern air defense systems.



"We intercepted some, others hit the targets. Air defense saves lives. In [Western] capitals, there should not be a single minute of delay in the decision regarding air defense systems for Ukraine," Kuleba said.



Local officials said power stations were hit in the regions of Odesa, Kirovohrad, and Lutsk, while other regions reported problems with electricity.



"Another rocket attack from terrorists who are fighting against civilian infrastructure and people," the Ukrainian president's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, wrote on the Telegram app.



Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told a government meeting that from October 10 to October 20, Russian strikes damaged more than 400 facilities in 16 regions of Ukraine, including dozens of energy facilities.



"The Russian Army has identified our energy sector as one of the key targets for its attacks," Shmyhal said on October 21.



"Russian propagandists and officials speak openly about the purpose of all these attacks: Ukraine, according to them, should be left without water, without light, without heat," he said.



Meanwhile, Russian-appointed authorities in the occupied and illegally seized southern Kherson region on October 22 ordered the estimated 60,000 residents of the region's eponymous main city to leave "immediately" in the face of Kyiv's advancing counteroffensive.



"Due to the tense situation on the front, the increased danger of mass shelling of the city and the threat of terrorist attacks, all civilians must immediately leave the city and cross to the left bank of the Dnieper River," the region's Russia-backed authorities said on social media.

Russina-installed officials are moving people out of the strategic city in what they are calling an evacuation but which Ukrainian officials label as deportations.



The order came in spite of a claim by Russia's Defense Ministry on October 22 that its forces had prevented an attempt by Ukraine to break through its line of control in Kherson.



"All attacks were repulsed, the enemy was pushed back to their initial positions," the Defense Ministry said, adding that Ukraine's offensive was launched toward the settlements of Piatykhatky, Suhanove, Sablukivka and Bezvodne, on the west side of the Dnieper River.



The ministry's statement said Russian forces had also repelled attacks in the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.



Kherson city, which had a prewar population of 280,000, is one of the first urban areas occupied by Russia at the start of the invasion.



Zelenskiys office said 88 settlements in the southern Kherson region and 551 settlements in the northeastern Kharkiv region have been de-occupied, while the Ukrainian forces' counteroffensive in the Kherson region moves ahead.



Ukraine is trying to drive Russian forces in Kherson back east across the Dnieper. Russian soldiers on the western bank, where the city of Kherson is located, are reportedly close to being cut off from supply lines and reinforcements.



Natalya Humenyuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraines southern operational command, said the Ukrainian military struck the Antonivskiy Bridge over the Dnieper in the city of Kherson during an overnight curfew Russia-installed officials put in place to avoid civilian casualties.



We do not attack civilians and settlements," Humenyuk told Ukrainian television.



Ukrainian strikes made the Antonivskiy Bridge inoperable, prompting Russian authorities to set up ferry crossings and pontoon bridges to relocate civilians and transport supplies.



Russia has sent in thousands of recently mobilized troops to reinforce the defense of Kherson, the General Staff of Ukraine's armed forces said on October 21.



Zelenskiy again on October 21 urged the West to warn Russia not to blow up a dam at the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant on the Dnieper River as this could flood settlements toward Kherson.



Zelenskiy said Russian forces had planted explosives inside the dam, which holds back an enormous reservoir, and were planning to blow it up.



"Now everyone in the world must act powerfully and quickly to prevent a new Russian terrorist attack. Destroying the dam would mean a large-scale disaster," he said in his nightly address.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, AP, and the BBC
For the Russian government, when a Soyuz rocket lifts off from the Vostochny launch facility in the Far East sometime in April, it will mark the dawn of a new era in the country's storied space program.

For others, the new liftoff sites long and twisting tale of delays, corruption, and management restructuring sounds a lot more like the past than a bright future.

Andrei Mazurin, the Roskosmos space agency's director of ground infrastructure, sounded like he was hedging his bets when discussing Vostochny's debut with journalists in Yakutsk on March 29.

"I hope we will open the cosmodrome with its maiden flight in April," Mazurin said. "In 2017, we will most likely conduct no launches. In 2018 and further on, a small number [of launches] will be conducted, depending on the program."

The next day, Roskosmos head Igor Komarov told journalists in Moscow that Vostochny should "be prepared" for a manned space launch "by the end of 2023."

The bottom line is that the project -- hailed as the jewel of Russia's space program since its conception in 2007 -- will remain officially "under construction" for the foreseeable future. Vostochny is intended to become the country's premier civilian space center, largely replacing the Soviet-era base at Baikonur in Kazakhstan -- an independent country since 1991.

The only existing space-launch facility within Russia, Plesetsk, is a military base and is too far north for certain types of missions.

As construction at Vostochny was getting into full swing in 2012, Yury Semyonov, one of Russia's leading rocket designers and a member of the Academy of Sciences, was asked his opinion of the Vostochny project. "Negative," he said. "It is obvious that it will be a feeding trough for bureaucrats. And much too heavy a burden for the economy."

Just how heavy that burden ends up being may never be known.

Vostochny is being built on the basis of an order that was issued by President Vladimir Putin in November 2007 -- but has never been published. The earliest budget projections in 2007 put the cost of the project at 170 billion rubles (about $4.8 billion at the time). In 2011, space agency Roskosmos asked the government for an additional 493 billion rubles ($17 billion). Just last year, former Roskosmos Director Yury Koptev, who is now chief science adviser to the sprawling state conglomerate Rostekh, projected Vostochny would need an additional 560 billion rubles ($9.6 billion).

Even as the predictions of an initial launch were being announced, however, Dalspetsstroi, the state company in charge of construction, was filing three lawsuits in Moscow against the facility, claiming it is owed 1.2 billion rubles ($17.9 million). On March 24, in turn, a Moscow court ordered Dalspetsstroi to repay a 3.5 billion ruble loan it took from the state-controlled VTB bank.

On March 22, a court in the Far East sentenced Sergei Terentyev, former director of one of the construction subcontractors, to 11 months in prison for misusing state funds and failing to pay employees. He was detained in April 2015 after 26 Vostochny construction workers launched a hunger strike over wage arrears.

Meanwhile, former Dalspetsstroi head Yury Krizman, his son Mikhail, and a former head of the Khabarovsk Krai legislature, Viktor Chudov, are all under investigation for allegedly embezzling about $1.6 million from the company. Yury Krizman was fired in 2013 for allegedly not informing the government fully about construction delays.

At the same time, in March, the government of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered Roskosmos to cut its 2016-25 budget by 30 percent, from 2 trillion rubles ($29.2 billion) to 1.4 trillion. Moscow's ambition of putting a human on the moon has been pushed back from 2035 to 2060 while plans to build a reusable spacecraft have been shelved completely.

The space program is overseen by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, and his rhetoric has undergone some transformations in recent times as well. In a major article published in the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta in 2011, Rogozin defined "the Russian cosmos" as a matter of the self-identity of our people and is a synonym for the Russian world," using the geopolitically loaded term "russky mir."

He associated the rebirth of Russia's space ambitions with the country's overall recovery from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In 2012, Rogozin gave his word that Vostochny -- which means "Eastern" -- would be completed by the end of 2015. Putin himself visited the site in September 2014 and declared Vostochny "a national-priority project." He also pledged the first launch would take place in 2015.

But by August 2015, Rogozin sounded like a different man -- one with more modest aims. "If they ask us what is the main goal of the civilian space program," Rogozin said, "I answer it is not the moon or Mars. The main goal is an affordable cosmos."

Rogozin himself was the subject of a recent investigation by the international nongovernmental organization Transparency International that charges he and his family acquired a Moscow apartment in 2013 that is valued at 500 million rubles ($7.4 million).

In a post on Facebook, Rogozin attributed the report to "the Americans and their agents" and said "I have not purchased any apartments during the time I have worked for the Russian government."

On March 31, state-run news agency TASS reported that Vostochny construction had entered its final phase, emphasizing the installation of viewing stands for the first launch. Just five days earlier, the same news agency cited the acting first deputy director of construction as saying that "more than 200 changes and mistakes" in the project documentation had led to further delays, despite the launch facilitys being "technically finished."

"Because of [the changes and errors], it is impossible to complete many aspects of the work and, as a result, it is not possible to commission the facility," engineer Aleksandr Mordovets said.
Local authorities at a penitentiary in Russias Sverdlovsk region in the Urals began an inspection of a penal colony on April 3 after a fire overnight.

The blaze at a residential barracks within the penal colony in the village of Bely Yar forced the evacuation of more than 100 prisoners.

Russian officials said the fire destroyed about 400 square meters of the two-story residential bloc.

There were no immediate reports of injuries from the fire.

Firefighters worked through the night and extinguished the blaze shortly after 3 a.m. on April 3.

Based on reporting by TASS and Interfax
Almost anyone living on earth two centuries ago never forgot the year 1816. Crop failures, disease, widespread hunger, financial ruin, civil unrest, and abnormally low temperatures throughout the year convinced many people that the world was doomed. Known as the Year Without a Summer, this natural catastrophe had its origins in the massive volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.

The largest volcanic explosion in some 1,300 years, Tambora followed a centuries-long period of global cooling and four other significant volcanic events since 1812. Tamboras eruption thrust an immense plume of gas and ash into the stratosphere, creating a great sun-obscuring dust cloud that circled the globe in a matter of weeks, and played havoc with weather systems for another three years. Worldwide temperatures plunged between 3 and 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Rainfall patterns were seriously disrupted.

Accounts in North America in the spring and summer of 1816 tell of a persistent dry fog that dimmed the sky during the day and turned a reddish hue at twilight. Even rain and wind could not disperse this fog, which scientists now say was caused by ash from Tambora creating a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.

The New England and Mid-Atlantic states experienced abnormally cool temperatures, frost, and snow all spring and well into the summer. Snow was reported in Maine, Massachusetts, and parts of New York state as late as the first week of June.

Killing frosts were even more widespread, especially at higher elevations. For a people accustomed to living through harsh winters, lower temperatures were not the real problem. Most of the worlds population depended on subsistence farming to provide their daily sustenance, thus the year-round cool temperatures were a disaster.

In upstate New York, temperatures dropped below freezing every day in May, destroying an entire range of budding crops. One farmer recounted that fields normally green with tender new shoots were barren like winter. Damage was extensive in Cape May, N. J., after five nights in a row of heavy frost in June. Thin layers of ice formed on some rivers and lakes in northwestern Pennsylvania in July.

***

Virginia could not escape the abnormal weather, experiencing wide swings in temperatures and lower than average precipitation. Reports of frost followed soon by daytime highs in the 80s came in from numerous locations in August.

In July, a Norfolk newspaper opined that we have not had what could properly be called summer. Easterly winds have prevailed for nearly three months past. The sun during that time has been generally obscured and the sky overcast with clouds; the air has been damp and uncomfortable, and frequently so chilling as to render the fireside a desirable treat.

Thomas Jefferson, who had retired to Monticello after serving two terms as president, suffered from sustained crop failures that year, which in turn helped plunge him deeper into debt.

The corn crop in the Old Dominion ended up only a third the size of the previous years harvest. As one account lamented, the cold as well as the drought has nipt (sic) the buds of hope.

If anything, the people of Europe suffered more. Great Britain and Ireland experienced bitterly cold temperatures and heavy rains throughout the year that led to widespread harvest failures and resulting famine.

The crisis was even worse in Germany, where food prices skyrocketed, causing great civil unrest. Riots, arson, and looting were reported in cities throughout the country. Some experts describe the 1816 famine as Europes most severe and widespread in the 19th century.

***

In the months following 1816, the veil of Tambora ash began to dissipate, and weather patterns gradually returned to normal.

Scores of scientists and historians have long studied how the Tambora eruption and subsequent Year Without a Summer shaped the course of history. Some scholars, for example, argue that the widespread crop failures may have helped persuade farm families in huge numbers to leave the eastern United States in search of more hospitable weather and better growing conditions farther west.

One result of this climatic phenomenon was creation of a literary classic that has terrified readers  and future moviegoers  for two centuries.

In June of 1816, writer Mary Shelley and a group of her literary friends were forced to spend most of their holiday inside their villa overlooking Lake Geneva because of the incessant rain and cold that wet, uncongenial summer. Someone in the group suggested they hold a contest to determine who could write the most frightening story. Two classics came out of that contest  Shelleys Frankenstein and John W. Polidoris The Vampyre, the precursor to Bram Stokers Dracula.

Could we experience another year without a summer? Historian Will Durant observed that, civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice. Most scientists agree that another massive volcanic eruption like Tombora is within the realm of possibility. The consequences are almost too frightening to contemplate given todays world population as compared to 1816  950 million then, 6.2 billion now.

It can also be argued that the human race may be acting as a Mount Tambora in slow motion. Since 1816, human activities have contributed to an estimated 40 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Over time it has created its own toxic veil that is heating rather than cooling the earth.

There is little we can do to mitigate another Tambora, but we should do everything we can to stop our own self-destruction.
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Fred Emory Etter, 92, of Rural Retreat, passed away Friday, April 1, 2016. He was born in Wythe Co., on December 27, 1923, the son of the late Guy Sanders Etter and Ada Blackard Etter. Fred was a member of the King's Grove United Methodist Church, a lifetime farmer, a retired bus driver with the Wythe Co. Schools and a former member of the Rural Retreat Fair Association. He also was a member of the Rural Retreat Masonic Lodge # 226 A.F. & F.M., and the Wytheville Order of the Eastern Star # 97. He was preceded in death by two sisters, Verna Ager, Lucille Newman; and a brother, John Etter.He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Kathleen "Mommy" Sexton Etter; a daughter, Lisa Etter Thompson and husband, John; grandchildren, Jonathan Emory Thompson and Emily Gail Thompson all of Max Meadows; sister, Jessie C. Etter of Rural Retreat; brother, Hal G. Etter and wife, Joyce of Helotes, Texas; a nephew, Sandy Etter and wife, Debra of Tazewell; several great-nieces and nephews also survive.Funeral services will be held 2 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, 2016, at the King's Grove United Methodist Church with Pastor Greg Ezell officiating. Interment will follow in the church cemetery with Graveside Masonic Rites being conducted by Rural Retreat Masonic Lodge # 226. The family will receive friends from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday evening, April 4, 2016, at the Lindsey Funeral Home with an Order of the Eastern Star Memorial Service to follow at 7 p.m. The family requests that those who prefer may make memorials to the King's Grove UMC Cemetery Fund.Lindsey Funeral Home, Rural Retreat, is serving the Etter family. Online condolences may be sent to the family at: www.highlandfuneralservice.com
A FATHER will trek 500 miles across his native Spain with his daughter in aid of Cancer Research UK.

Emilio and Katy Dauden are aiming to complete the El Camino de Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route in six weeks.

Former milkman Emilio (57) who moved to Britain 42 years ago and lives in Rawmarsh, said: For years, Ive wanted to do this.

I wanted to do it for Cancer Research. Ive lost family and friends to cancer, both when I was in Spain and since Ive lived here. Its a trip which I think will clear my mind.

Its a fantastic opportunity to spend time with Katy, too. It feels like people dont get time for family as much now.

But this is not an easy thing to do. Everybody is pushing the need to have insurance because it can be dangerous. The walk is not a walk in the park. A lot of it is psychological.

You have to be very careful. Ive been going to the gym for a couple of years now. Im doing nine miles one day and then 18 the next.

El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, which means The Way of St James, is a network of routes across Spain which were walked as a pilgrimage to the saints tomb in the Middle Ages.

Katy (33) who lives in London, said: Nowadays, tens of thousands walk or cycle the Camino de Santiago every year in an epic journey of 500 miles.

There are people from all over the world with all kinds of motivations: sport, culture, religion, nature, adventure.

The pair set off from Roncesvalles on Tuesday and hope to finish on May 9 - the birthday of Katys brother Sebastian, who died in 2012, aged 26.

Part of Emilios training saw him walk from his Kilnhurst Road home to meet Katy at Doncaster railway station - in the snow.

The Wickersley St Albans parishioner said: When I got to Conisbrough, my feet were on fire. I changed my shoes and then the sun came out for the rest of the way.

I think someone was looking over me and I hope that will be the same in Spain.

Visit justgiving.com/emilio dauden to sponsor Emilio and Katy.
THE councils new 120,000 childrens services deputy director says she is thrilled to help Rotherham in becoming a child-centred borough.

Mel Meggs has been appointed to the new role, which replaces the departments 90,990 assistant director for safeguarding children and families.

Ms Meggs will arrive in May from Derbyshire County Council, where she is service director for early help and safeguarding.

She has 30 years experience in early help and social work and was previously head of prevention at Leicester City Council.

Ms Meggs said she was thrilled to be joining RMBC, adding: As someone who has worked across many different pockets of childrens services across the UK in some of the most diverse and challenging areas, Im looking forward to bringing my experience, passion and values as a public servant to drive and deliver quality services for the people of Rotherham.

As Rotherham is working to become a child-centred borough, I welcome the opportunity to contribute personally to this vision and support the council and its partners in the great work they are doing.

Ms Meggs new job will be to deputise for childrens services director Ian Thomas.

Part of the role will see her spend time with frontline social workers.

The appointment was made by an all-party panel of councillors and commissioner Malcolm Newsam.
Great Consolidated Diamonds (GCD), formerly known as Ghana Consolidated Diamonds, is the West African countrys only commercial diamond company.

It owns the Akwatia diamond mine, which produced more than 100-million carats of diamonds since the inception of commercial operations in 1924.

The mine was closed almost a decade ago when Sapper and Associates, who had won the rights to the mine, failed to inject necessary funds.

This saw the new government, which came into power in 2009, opening bids for Ghana Consolidated Diamonds.

The Ghanaian owned company won the bid in 2011 ahead of international firms that had shown interest in the mine.

It is yet to resume production due to lack of funding and the company was open to investments to push the project forward.

GCD, which conducted some exploration work until last year, was said to be in talks with South African and Irish companies, who had shown interest in the mine.

Company general manager, mines Delali Komla Kabe told Rough & Polisheds Mathew Nyaungwa in an exclusive interview that once production resumes the mine was expected to record an annual output of between 400 000 carats and 500 000 carats of diamonds.

This was expected to rise to 1.5 million carats per year after five years of production resumption.

Below are the excerpts.

Can you shed some light on your company, Great Consolidated Diamonds Ghana Limited?

This is a company that took over from the government-owned Ghana Consolidated Diamonds Limited. So when this new investor came he didnt want to disturb (sic) the acronym (GCD), he removed Ghana and replaced it with Great. We took over in 2011 and we have been doing due diligence and exploration to see the extent of the deposits so actually we are looking for partners, investors to come and invest, it can be debt or equity so we can start work to take the diamonds.

Who is this new owner you referred to?

Its Dr Siaw Agyepong, he is a Ghanaian.

Is he the sole owner or the government still has a stake in the company?

The government owns 10 percent. Its a statutory obligation in the mining industry for the government to have a 10 percent shareholding. The remaining 90 percent is a private equity.

You said you are looking for investors either in terms of debt or equity? How much are you looking at in terms of debt?

We are looking at an injection of between $40 million and $50 million to set the project in motion.

What about equity, how much are you willing to surrender?

That one we will have to sit down and negotiate, you know the Ghanaian identity is important for us, so we want to talk about 50/50 for a start.

In terms of mining history, can you tell me what the annual production level at the mine was prior to your takeover in 2011?

At its peak in the 1970s, the mine produced over 2.5 million carats a year. Then, as you know, we had some political turbulence so things went down and it was during that period that the government decided to give it out. It was put on divestiture and until 2007 production was 300 000 - 5000 000 carats a year which was actually too low and the company was closed in 2007. In 2011 it was then acquired by the new owner (Siaw Agyepong) and we have done exploration, we got the figures right now, so we are ready for production. However, what we have done (exploration) is just a little part, the whole concession is about 400 square kilometers made up of gold and diamonds.

The diamonds occupy about 240 square kilometers then the gold take about 120 square kilometers. Mining only forms the core business but we are ready to go into what the land will offer us. Agriculture is in there just for sustainability, then what we call life after mining, that is alternative livelihood, so that when the mining ends the footprints will still be there in the form of agriculture and whatever we can provide. Currently we even have a very big tailings dump, now we want to use it for aqua culture, we want to use it as a tourist attraction. So you see there are many things we can use the land for. If you look at our mission statement, we didnt say we are here specifically to mine diamonds but we said to maximize our land use.

Can you provide some details on your diamond reserves?

The brownfield areas (Akwatia as well as lower and middle Birim) are estimated to host 14 million carats of both proven and indicated diamonds. Tailings are estimated to host 20 million cubic metres and 1.4 million carats of diamond.

When are you expected to commence production?

If you look at it we are bit late now, we actually wanted to start with a tailing, we have to do a lot of drilling to be sure. So the programme is late now and that is why we have jumped to the market to look for funding. If we can start producing 400 000 carats to 500 000 carats the better and then eventually our target is to mine 1.5 million carats annually.

When do you think you will reach your maximum production capacity?

Within five years, we should be able to get to that point depending on the level of funding that we put in.

Are you telling me that the delay was solely caused by lack of funding?

Yes, mainly funding issues.

When did you finish exploration?

We finished two years ago. We could have started mining in 2014, but the funding issue was our bottleneck, so we had to continue the exploration in 2015.

Have you received any offers from potential investors?

Yes, there had been offers and we are still talking with these people.

Do you have any names of the companies that you are talking to for a potential deal?

We have Limoz Resources of South Africa. They actually showed interest and we are still talking.

Any offers apart from Limoz?

There is a PW offer also, which is on the table and we are still talking?

PW? What does is stand for?

We just call them PW, I dont know what that stands for.

Are they from Ghana?

No, its an Irish company they also have business in South Africa. We are talking to them also.

So generally what is the state of diamond mining in Ghana? Are you the only diamond mining company in the country?

Yes, we are the only diamond mining company in Ghana. There is no other diamond company really. What we have done is to give certain areas to the local communities, mainly the youth. We have given them areas to mine on a small scale basis so they can do their mining and sell their products to us.

Have they started mining diamonds already?

Yes, they are mining diamonds. In fact, we are currently asking them to go and sell their diamonds to the Precious Minerals Commission (PMC) in Ghana and last year they sold about 1 million carats of diamonds.

What did you benefit from this arrangement, did you get a commission?

The arrangement is that sell 10 percent to us and then go and sell the rest at PMC, but the main purpose for this arrangement is to engage the youths and to protect our reserves. The areas that we give to them are areas, which we think are not economic for us to mine, areas that were mined by the previous owners. We gave them those areas which we know machines cannot go there and mine economically. Assuming we were also mining, we could have been in a position to buy all their products. So that would have added to our production. So the 1 million carats that were sold to PMC would have been ours.

So the whole idea is to ensure security, you wont have people mining your concessions illegally?

Yes, and apart from that you know there is lot of unemployment so u have to think of getting them engaged and where there is peace you will also have peace. The benefits are much, so why not? It is a good investment destination, we think that investors can come in and they will go to their banks smiling.

Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




50% of Indian mobile users wish to upgrade to new device in 5G era

About 50 per cent of smartphone users in India plan to buy a new device within the first year as 5G ...
Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, has praised a young woman who claims to be carrying the marks of Jesus Christs suffering during his crucifixion.

While Tuilaepa admits that no one fully understands such events, he said it is a miracle that should be celebrated.

We should be happy about these events that it has happened to a daughter of a pastor in Samoa, Tuilaepa told the media. If it happens to someone, it means they are holy.

Im thankful to the family and the parents for the spiritual upbringing of this girlin most cases the Catholic church knows best about the events and it happens to mainly preachers, nuns and especially those who are devoted (Christians).

But Tuilaepa rejected claims that the event could be a warning for a future disaster.

These events dont happen because of sins, he insisted. Only those who have no faith would feel that way but if it happens to someone, it is a reminder of the life we live in.

If you did wrong try and improve your waysthe most amazing thing that God did when he created us he gave man a soul so that they will live through to the everlasting life.

According to Tuilaepa stigmata happens to people and it is known to be miracles.

This is Christs answer to those prayers.

A member of the Catholic church, Tuilaepa made reference to several cases of stigmata that the Catholic church is aware of. One of them is St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin.

In September 1918, while hearing confessions, Padre Pio had his first occurrence of the stigmata in locations corresponding to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The phenomenon continued for fifty years, until the end of his life. The blood flowing from the stigmata smelled of flowers and often referred to as the odour of sanctity.

Padre Pios wounds were examined by many people, including physicians.

His close friend Padre Agostino wrote to him in 1915, asking specific questions, such as when he first experienced visions, whether he had been granted the stigmata, and whether he felt the pains of the Passion of Christ, namely the crowning of thorns and the scourging.

Padre Pio replied that he had been favoured with visions since his novitiate period (1903 to 1904).

He reportedly wrote that although he had been granted the stigmata, he had been so terrified by the phenomenon he begged the Lord to withdraw them.

He did not wish the pain to be removed, only the visible wounds, since at the time he considered them to be an indescribable and almost unbearable humiliation.

The stigmatic died in 1968 at the age of 81. On March 3, 2008, the body of St. Pio was exhumed from his crypt, forty years after his death, so that his remains could be prepared for display. A church statement described the body as being in fair condition.

Tuilaepa said the marks never fade and do not infect.

It (wounds) does not smell of blood but of fragrance and even their corpse are incorruptible.

The second case that Tuilaepa pointed to is one of a German nun, Therese Neumann.

In March 1926, the first Friday of Lent, Neumann reportedly had wounds appear slightly above her heart but she had kept this a secret.

According to her own testimony, she witnessed the entire Passion of Christ in her visions.

She consumed no food or water other than the Holy Eucharist from 1926 until her death, said Tuilaepa.

She died in 1961 without eating any food or drinking water for 35 years.
After six and a half years of struggles and sleepless nights Kamara Aniva Pouono can finally breathe easy now.

On Friday at the National University of Samoa gymnasium Ms. Pouono was congratulated by her family members, friends and especially her parents when she was announced as the top medical student in front of hundreds of people who attended the graduation.

She received a trophy and a certificate as a graduate from the National University of Samoa School of Medicine for completing six years of studies and gaining her Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery with seven other students.

Samoa has two medical schools. The other is the Oceania University of Medicine which is located at Motootua.

Ms. Pouono said she is very proud of herself despite the long, hard journey.

I feel quite happy and proud because it wasnt an easy journey at all, it took a lot of sacrifice especially time - times away from my family and friends, she said. As you all know medicine is not something that you can just take lightly, time is needed its something that requires a lot of time and a lot of sacrifice and time cannot be taken for granted. It requires a lot of hard work and dedication. Ms. Pouono said while she has been in the programme of medicine for six and a half years, she still has a long way to go.

The next step is to start my internship where we work in the National Health Services and from there well see what happens, she said.

I havent got my priorities set in which department I will take up but all I know is that I will just take one step at a time and see where I go from there. Ms. Pouono said there were times in her journey that she felt like giving up but it was through the support of her loved ones that she made it this far.

The most challenging part of my journey was the time factor, she said.

I didnt get to spend much time I would like with family and friends because I had to commit a lot of time to the work needed to make sure that I studied hard.

There were also times that I felt like giving up especially the hard work that I had to go through and the restless nights.

[But] the main thing that kept me going was the support from my family and friends which made me believe that I could do it.

The support from the senior doctors as well encouraged me. They are the ones who drove me to strive for the best and pushed me to become a better person. Ms. Pouono is from a family of five. She is 27 years old and is the daughter of Asuao Kirifi and Judy-Anne Pouono. She has two brothers and she hails from the villages of Siusega and Siumu.
According to analyst Alphaliner the idle containership fleet comprises 119 vessels over 500 teu, totalling 230,900 teu as of 28 July. It is the lowest level since August 2011 and the number of idle vessels in the 500  2,000 teu range fell to 85 from 97 units over the last two weeks

The fall is mostly caused by the extra ships needed to cater for severe port congestion at Manila and in Tunisia, where ships have to wait between two and four weeks for a berth, Alphaliner said in its weekly newsletter.

Manila has experienced severe congestion since February when a truck ban was enforced in the city centre of the Philippines capital leaving thousands of boxes stranded in the citys container terminals. Some lines have added calls at Batangas to try and deal with the problems.
The Idan Ofer and John Fredriksen controlled companies expect the gas to start moving by mid 2016, Don Ackah, ceo of Quantum Power Ghana, a subsidiary of Quantum Pacific, told Reuters.

Under the contract, Golar LNG will provide an FSRU for deployment on the project to provide 250m cu ft of LNG per day, amounting to 1.75m tonnes per annum. At the end of the last quarter, Golar LNG had one FSRU under construction without a charter, the 170,000 cu m Golar Tundra, which is due for delivery from Samsung Heavy Industries in November 2015.

According to Ackah the production unit is expected on site by January 2016 with subsea construction complete by December 2015, with talks underway with Technip to carry out the subsea and onshore pipeline work.

Once operational the facility will provide gas directly to the state owned Volta River Authority for power generation.
Press Release

April 2, 2016 POE WANTS MORE FISHERFOLKS INCLUDED IN CCT As one of the poorest basic sectors in the country, small fisherfolks and coastal communities will be among the focus of attention of Senator Grace Poe once elected. Poe, the leading presidential candidate based on surveys, said she would push for the inclusion of more fisherfolk families to the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program, increase their membership in the National Health Insurance Program and provide sustainable livelihood opportunities with the help of local government units and the private sector. Poe also called on the University of the Philippines (UP) and other state universities to help improve access to fisheries education by opening up additional courses and offering scholarships to the fisherfolks or their children. "It is ironic that in an archipelagic country where fishing communities dominate all islands, people are so poor and are unable to get essential government services," she said. "My platform of inclusive growth and my promise that the poor must not be left behind makes the plight of our fishing communities a centerpiece concern of my presidential campaign," Poe added. Earlier, Poe said that under her administration, P300 billion would be set aside from the national budget every year for the agriculture sector, which includes the fisheries sector. Alongside basic services for the fisherfolks, she said that resources should also be poured in educating coastal communities on the practice of sustainable fishing to help them adapt to climate change. Poe identified the following initiatives that should be done to uplift the condition of the fisherfolks: *Increase and conserve fishery resources by better management of local marine areas; *Rehabilitation and regeneration of coastal and inland ecosystems to address habitat degradation; *Provision of livelihood-related concerns. (e.g. swap of illegal gears with legal gears; fish processing); provision of infrastructure and post-harvest facilities development for municipal fisheries such as cold storage facilities and fish landing centers; *Making available incentives to deputized members of the Bantay Dagat (insurance, minimum pay); and, *Passing a Bantay Dagat Law that will protect the members in their performance of duties. As to access to education, Poe said that UP Visayas, particularly its Miagao campus is the leading fisheries school in the country and its linkages with the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resource (BFAR) and the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) located in Iloilo makes it a key academic institution that can promote fisheries development through teaching, research and extension programs. Central Luzon State University, Mindanao State University (Naawan campus), and Pangasinan State University (Binmaley campus) also have very strong fisheries programs and have been designated by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) as Centers of Excellence or Centers of Development in recognition of their expertise. Despite the presence of very good schools and the archipelagic nature of the country, fisheries education is underfunded and government has not been encouraging students to enrol in fisheries courses. Under Poe's plan, UP, MSU, CLSU, PSU will receive additional funding to: 1) expand its BS Fisheries program to enrol more students, particularly the children of fisherfolks, through additional scholarships, better laboratories and more faculty; 2) develop ladderized programs (with the help of CHED and TESDA) so that students can get jobs even before completing a four year course; and 3) provide training programs for fisherfolks in the proper use of technology and equipment and alternative livelihood for fishing communities. The Philippines is an archipelago of more than 7,500 islands with a coastline longer than the US coastline. It is 7th among the top fish producing countries with production of 4.7 million MT contributing 2.46 % of total world production. The country is also the world's 3rd largest producer of aquatic plants (including seaweeds), with production of 1.56 million MT contributing 5.78% of the total world production. "Sadly, our more than 1.4 million fisherfolks remain mired in poverty and unable to get the benefits of our economic growth," Poe said. "The next administration should do something to end their miseries and give them better lives," she added.
Press Release

April 2, 2016 Recto: Send humanitarian army, calamity aid, Cabinet men to Kidapawan Malacanang was urged to send a "humanitarian army" to North Cotabato and other areas in the South hit by a dry spell which has parched lands and raised peasant protests against government inaction to a boiling point. "Don't rush troops. Send in a humanitarian army instead. Let it be an invasion of kindness, hope and assistance," Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto said in the aftermath of a police dispersal Friday of a farmers' highway barricade in Kidapawan City that left one dead and scores wounded. Recto said Department of Social Welfare and Development (DWSD) and Department of Agriculture (DA) officials should lead the Malacanang contingent that "will address, with immediate aid, and not just Powerpoint presentations, the grievance of farmers." "For signalling purposes, that's the best response. Two Cabinet heads holding office there, on the ground, to address the concerns. Dinky and Procy are excellent troubleshooters. Both have good rapport with the grassroots," he said. Recto was referring to DSWD Secretary Dinky Soliman and DA Secretary Proceso Alcala. "Sila 'yung pwedeng umayos ng problema sa baba kasi hindi police or military solution ang kailangan, ngunit tulong at kalinga." Recto also called on Malacanang to release part of the P39 billion of this year's Calamity Fund "for food assistance, cash-for-work projects, emergency employment, farm aid" for farms hit by El Nino. "There is a calamity. The damage is obvious. Many local governments have placed their areas under an official state of calamity. These are enough to trigger the release of funds," Recto said. "Ang tanong: Magkano na ang naibigay para sa mga lugar na tinamaan ng El Nino? Para malaman natin kung may batayan ang mga hinaing ng mga magsasaka," the senator asked. In addition, Recto said the P6.7 billion Quick Response Fund (QRF) has been distributed among 12 agencies, with P1.32 billion given to DWSD, and P500 million each to DA and the National Irrigation Administration (NIA). Other QRF recipients are DepEd (P1 billion); DOH (P510 million); DPWH (P1.3 billion); DOTC, including Philippine Coast Guard (P200 million); PNP (P75million); BFP (P75 million); DND (P200 million); Office of Civil Defense (P530 million). "As its name denotes, it's for quick release. An emergency fund that is already prepositioned with the agencies for rapid use. Again, the affected agencies must disclose how much has been spent," he said. But even without the QRF, huge allocations for the DA and DSWD can mitigate the effects of El Nino, Recto said. "There are lots of programs within the DSWD's P104 billion budget for 2016 that can cushion the effects of El Nino," he said. "I am quite sure that most calamity victims have been enrolled under the Conditional Cash Transfer," Recto said. The whole DA, including attached agencies and the four offices under the Office of the Presidential Assistance for Food Security and Agricultural Modernization (OPAFSAM), has a budget of P91.7 billion. One of the biggest recipients, NIA, has a budget of P32.7 billion for projects, "which, if implemented, can generate short-term jobs for affected farmers," Recto said. But if the above allocations are not enough then national government should make public if it has approved the reported request of the DWSD and the DA for funds to address El Nino effects, Recto said. In an official statement last February, DSWD said it had submitted a P6.7 billion "action plan" to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) for funding. The plan involves the grant of a P10,000 livelihood assistance to each of the affected families and money for eight days of Cash-for-Work (CFW) per month to half of the affected households. Also last February, DA Secretary Proceso Alcala was quoted by the press that his agency will be needing an immediate budget of nearly P1 billion from the national government to mitigate the impact of the lack of rain on the country's agriculture sector. "DSWD and DA can only do so much without funding support. Pondo ang kailangan ng humanitarian army," Recto said.
Press Release

April 3, 2016 CHIZ HITS GOV'T FOR HIDING EXTENT OF EL NINO'S

IMPACT ON FARMERS Independent vice-presidential bet Sen. Francis "Chiz" Escudero has accused the government of hiding the truth about the extent of the damage brought by El Nino phenomenon to the country's agriculture sector. Escudero said the tragic dispersal of protesting farmers in Kidapawan City has exposed the sufferings of peasants from the devastating effects of El Nino-induced drought which, according to him, appeared to have been deliberately downplayed by the government. The veteran lawmaker is particularly putting to task Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala, who earlier painted a quite optimistic picture about the current state of the agriculture sector amid a strong El Nino being experienced in the south. "Secretary Alcala is known for sugar coating problems of the agriculture sector. Who would forget his much-publicized 'rice self-sufficiency' roadmap which turned out to be just a figment of his imagination?" Escudero pointed out. He noted that Alcala also came under fire for ignoring the infestation of scale insects, locally known as "cocolisap," until it had destroyed millions of coconut trees, mostly in Southern Tagalog. "It took the government two years to take a proactive stance against cocolisap, which had already damaged millions of coconut trees. Until now, coconut farmers are still fighting to save their plantations against the pest," Escudero said. Just last March 26, the Department of Agriculture (DA) issued a press release claiming minimal damage of the drought to the agriculture sector. In the release, the DA said it is "optimistic that only a negligible percentage in production and yield decrease will be felt" in spite of the strong El Nino episode. The department said that for one full year--February 2015 to February 2016--less than 195,000 hectares from combined rice and corn production areas were reportedly affected by the drought. "This is 361,046 hectares less than the affected areas during the 2009-2010 dry spell. The minimal damage, according to agri-experts, may be attributed to the prompt distribution of support and assistance, as well as the dissemination of information to farmers," the DA claimed in the same press statement. Escudero said that instead of confronting problems hounding the sector, Alcala is fond of projecting that everything is fine and dandy in the sector under his leadership. "Secretary Alcala is making himself look good at the expense of our poor farmers who suffer from the lack of support services from the government under his leadership," the leading vice-presidential candidate said. "It's unfortunate that the sufferings of our farmers from the effects of the drought were exposed through this tragedy," Escudero said of the Friday's violent dispersal of protesting farmers, including lumads, in Kidapawan City who were demanding immediate relief from the effects of El Nino. Three were reported deadtwo when police tried to break up the barricade and one from heatstrokeand 30 other protesters were injured during the clash. The farmers were dispersed on the third day of their protest along the Cotabato-Davao highway after they rejected an offer of three kilos of rice quarterly. Their immediate demand was for 15,000 sacks of rice to stave off hunger until they can resume planting. They also asked for free seeds and other agricultural inputs so they can replace the crops they have lost since the drought struck in November, as well as reasonable increase in the market prices of their produce. Escudero, who is running under the "Gobyernong may Puso" platforms of rapid and inclusive growth, poverty alleviation, transparency and global competitiveness, has been prodding the government to be more proactive in shielding farmers from the effects of drought on their livelihood. He had also pushed for the inclusion of farmers affected by El Nino in the government's conditional cash transfer program called Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps, to help mitigate the impact of the drought to subsistence farmers. "Binigyan ba natin ng alternatibong kabuhayan yung ating mga magsasaka na tatamaan ng El Nino? Sinakop ba natin sila sa conditional cash transfer dahil tatamaan sila ng El Nino? Lahat po yun ay wala pong nagawa ang gobyerno," he said.
An incredibly powerful painkiller responsible for thousands of overdose deaths on the East Coast in recent years is slipping into Californias illicit drug supply, a problem laid bare by a spate of overdoses in Sacramento that has killed at least nine people in just over a week.

Public health authorities dont expect California to see the same fentanyl crisis that has plagued the East Coast. But the presence of fentanyl  a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than heroin  in West Coast street drugs underscores the extreme risks of opioid addiction and the need for more, and better, options to help addicts stay safe.

Sacramentos fentanyl overdoses, which officials say may be traced to a batch of counterfeit painkillers spiked with the drug, definitely adds more urgency to growing concerns about an epidemic of painkiller addiction in the region and beyond, said Dr. Olivia Kasirye, Sacramento County public health officer.

San Francisco saw a rash of fentanyl overdoses in October, when three people were sickened and one died. In those cases, the fentanyl was found in counterfeit Xanax tablets. Similar outbreaks occurred in Orange County, and addiction experts who work closely with opioid users say theyve heard from their clients that fentanyl is in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

Street drugs

Its on our radar a lot. We get people who are desperate to switch off of expensive opiate pills, so theyre buying a lot of stuff on the street, and for some reason the street drugs are being laced with fentanyl now, said Patt Denning, director of clinical services and training at the Center for Harm Reduction Therapy, located in Oakland and San Francisco. It has been a much bigger problem on the East Coast. But it seems to have hit the streets here.

Roughly 19,000 people died from prescription drug overdoses in 2014, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a 15 percent increase from the previous year. Overdose deaths have tripled since 2000. Fentanyl is a much newer problem nationwide, but was still responsible for roughly 5,000 overdose deaths in 2014.

I fear this particular one is only going to get worse, said Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of the division of pain medicine at Stanford. The drug cartels are learning how to synthesize fentanyl, and its an incredibly potent opioid. Its a tragic situation.

Fentanyl is gaining popularity among drug dealers and suppliers because its cheap to produce, and powerful. But its potency is what makes it especially deadly. In medical settings, fentanyl is given to people with serious chronic pain, including pain from cancer, and often for end-of-life care. Its usually administered through a skin patch or a lozenge that patients suck on; both provide a steady, relatively low dose of the drug.

But fentanyl has a very narrow therapeutic index  the window between a safe dose and a deadly one, said Dr. Alex Stalcup, medical director at New Leaf Treatment Center in Lafayette. Most painkillers are dosed in milligrams, but fentanyl is so potent its measured in micrograms. And thats something only an experienced pharmacist with finely calibrated lab equipment should be doing, pain experts said.

A dealer selling illegally synthesized fentanyl, who doesnt know just how potent it is, can easily add a little too much to whatever drug hes trying to spike, Stalcup said. Complicating matters, he said, is that many people buying prescription drugs on the street arent necessarily experienced addicts who know how to protect themselves from bad buys.

AP

A sense of safety

Plus, many people have an assumption that a prescription pill  or a tablet made to look like one  is safe, at least compared with drugs like heroin or methamphetamine.

Theres a sense of safety when youre using a pharmaceutical. And that may not be warranted, said Gantt Galloway, executive director at New Leaf. Its a measure of security that some people think they have with Vicodin, Norco, whatever  and its turning out to be an illusion, at least in the Sacramento area.

Though California hasnt seen crisis levels of fentanyl overdoses, several outbreaks over the past year are drawing the attention of public health and drug enforcement officials. In the most recent outbreak, in Sacramento, 36 people have overdosed since March 24. In many of those cases, the drug was found in counterfeit Norco tablets, possibly from the same supplier. Norco is a popular painkiller that combines hydrocodone and acetaminophen.

For now, authorities say, their best option for attacking the overdoses is simply to advise people not to buy prescription painkillers on the street or take them from friends. The important thing is that these pills look almost exactly like the regular Norco pills, Kasirye said. We hope individuals will be careful and not take these pills.

Theres cause for optimism on the West Coast, though: The heroin supply here may be somewhat protected from being spiked with fentanyl. And if fentanyl isnt making its way into West Coast heroin, it may never take off in other street drugs like it has in other parts of the country, said Dr. Phillip Coffin, director of substance abuse research for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

On the East Coast, fentanyl largely has spread through the heroin supply. Dealers use it as a cheap mixer to cut into the more expensive heroin  and they dont always explain that to buyers. So users can overdose by taking their usual amount of heroin and getting a far stronger drug than theyd intended.

Heroin supply

But fentanyl hasnt seeped into Californias heroin supply, Coffin said. The reason may be simple: Black tar is the favored heroin on the West Coast, and its color makes it difficult to hide the white-powdered fentanyl. On the East Coast, white-powdered heroin is more popular.

Still, fentanyl is here, and addiction experts worry that efforts to keep drug users safe can be outstripped by such a powerful drug. At New Leaf, Stalcup said, he and his colleagues try to teach clients to be wary of drugs they purchase on the streets and to take precautions to prevent overdoses. They teach courses on using Naloxone, a medication that reverses overdoses, and hand out kits to deliver the treatment.

But fentanyl is too strong, too fast, Stalcup said. Theres no safe way to sell it. There is no safe way to use it, even with the protection of a kit right in the crook of your arm. Were just really very scared about it.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ErinAllday
Two weeks after signing its final licensing deal with a major record company, online music service SoundCloud has introduced its long-awaited subscription plan. The program gives customers access to a much wider range of music than is available on competing services like Spotify and Apple, and it offers artists and their labels the promise of royalties.

Under the plan, SoundCloud will operate on two levels. The free version will let people listen to 100 million songs, many of which are uploaded directly by artists or selected for promotion by their labels. Customers who pay $10 a month for the subscription version, called SoundCloud Go, will have access to all those songs, as well as to millions more from those labels catalogs. They will also have the ability to eliminate ads and save songs to their phone to listen to them offline. The service will have more than 125 million songs, the company said.

One example of how the new two-tiered system will work is Adele, whose music is released through Sony in the United States. Free users will be able to hear a few of her singles, as well as 30-second samples of the rest of her catalog; subscribers can listen to all of her songs.

The service, introduced last week, will at first be available only in the United States, but will be expanding around the world this year, according to the company.

The change is a significant departure for SoundCloud and gives it an unusual place in the already crowded market of online music services. Since it was introduced in 2008, SoundCloud has become popular with artists and listeners by setting itself up as a YouTube for music, with a huge variety of songs uploaded directly by artists and easily accessible through a free and elegantly designed online platform.

It has been particularly popular with dance DJs and rappers, who often post new tracks, remixes and mash-ups. It has attracted 175 million regular users, according to the company.

But the site drew the ire of the major record labels because none of its material was licensed and therefore paid no royalties. SoundCloud, from Berlin, was also facing growing losses by providing a free service, with hosting fees and a small amount of advertising as its only sources of revenue. In 2014, the last year for which it has reported its accounts, the company had $19.5 million in revenue, but it had a net loss of almost $44 million.

Since 2014, SoundCloud has signed licensing deals with the major record companies, as well as independents, which give the company access to those labels catalogs and allow it to sell subscriptions.

The music industry is keen to promote paid-streaming services, which pay much more in royalties than free versions. Streaming generates about 34 percent of the recording industrys revenue in the United States, more than any other source. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, about 13 million people in the United States were paying for music subscriptions by the end of last year.

SoundClouds size may be an advantage as it seeks new subscribers. But its many competitors that sell paid subscriptions to streaming music include not only Spotify, Apple, Tidal and Rhapsody but also the likes of YouTube, Amazon and SiriusXM, which have variations on the streaming model and wide audiences.
CHESTER, Pa.  An Amtrak train struck a piece of heavy equipment just south of Philadelphia on Sunday, causing a derailment that killed two Amtrak workers and sent more than 30 passengers to hospitals, authorities said.

Train 89 was heading from New York to Savannah, Ga., at about 8 a.m. when it hit the equipment that was on the track in Chester, about 15 miles outside of Philadelphia, officials said. The impact derailed the lead engine of the train that was carrying more than 300 passengers and seven crew members.

Chester Fire Commissioner Travis Thomas said two people were killed. A National Transportation Safety Board official confirmed that one was the operator of the equipment. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Amtrak board Chairman Anthony Coscia told him the other person killed was a supervisor and both were Amtrak employees.

NTSB investigator Ryan Frigo said at an evening news conference that the event data recorder and video from the locomotive have been recovered. He said the locomotive engineer was among those taken to hospitals. Officials said earlier that none of the injuries was deemed life-threatening.

Schumer said its unclear whether the equipment was being used for regular maintenance, which usually is scheduled on Sunday mornings because there are fewer trains on the tracks, or whether it was clearing debris from high winds in the area overnight. But he said Amtrak has a 20-step protocol for having such equipment, described by Amtrak as a backhoe, on the track, and no trains are supposed to go on a track when equipment is present.

Clearly this seems very likely to be human error, Schumer said, calling for Amtrak to review its processes. There is virtually no excuse for a backhoe to be on an active track.

Amtrak said service on the Northeast Corridor between New York and Philadelphia resumed operating after an earlier suspension and limited service was restored between Wilmington, Del., and Philadelphia by Sunday afternoon.

Amtrak said Sunday night that it will operate regularly scheduled trains Monday, although there may be some delays on Acela Express, Northeast Regional and other services between Philadelphia and Wilmington.

Ari Neeman, a disability rights activist heading to Washington after speaking at an event in New York, said he was in the second car at the time of the crash.

The car started shaking wildly, there was a smell of smoke, it looked like there was a small fire and then the window across from us blew out, said Neeman, 28, of Silver Spring, Md.

Some passengers started to get off after the train stopped, but the conductor quickly stopped them, he said. Officials started evacuating people to the rear of the train and then off and to a local church.

It was a very frightening experience. Im frankly very glad that I was not on the first car, where there were injuries, Neeman said. The moment that the car stopped, I said Shema, a Jewish prayer. ... I was just so thankful that the train had come to a stop and we were OK.

This derailment comes almost a year after an Amtrak train originating from Washington, D.C., bound for New York City derailed in Philadelphia. Eight people were killed and more than 200 were injured in the May 12 crash. The exact cause of that crash is still under investigation, but authorities have said the train had been traveling twice the speed limit.
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NEW YORK  Stung by setbacks related to their access to public restrooms, transgender Americans are taking steps to play a more prominent and vocal role in a nationwide campaign to curtail discrimination against them.

Two such initiatives are being launched this week  evidence of how transgender rights has supplanted same-sex marriage as the most volatile, high-profile issue for the broader movement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists.

One initiative is a public education campaign called the Transgender Freedom Project, which will share the personal stories of transgender people. The other, the Trans United Fund, is a political advocacy group that will engage in election campaigns at the federal and state level, pressing candidates to take stands on transgender rights.

We welcome the support of our allies, said Hayden Mora, a veteran transgender activist who is director of Trans United. But its crucial that trans people build our own political power and speak with our own voices.

From a long-term perspective, there have been notable gains for transgender Americans in recent years  more support from major employers, better options for health care and sex-reassignment surgery, a growing number of municipalities that bar antitransgender discrimination.

But recent setbacks have hammered home to transgender people the challenges they still face.

In November, by a decisive margin, voters in Houston repealed a municipal nondiscrimination ordinance that provided protections for LGBT people. On March 23, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed a law that barred Charlotte and other cities in the state from implementing similar ordinances.

In both cases, conservatives opposed to the ordinances focused their arguments on restroom access  contending that allowing transgender people to use public restrooms based on their gender identity would expose women and girls to discomfort and possible molestation.

Such problems have not materialized in any significant way in the 17 states already banning anti-transgender discrimination in public accommodations.

Its been an alarming wake-up call since November, said Dru Lavasseur, Transgender Rights Project director for the LGBT-rights group Lambda Legal.
Idomeni, Greece

A plan to send back migrants from Greece to Turkey sparked demonstrations by local residents in both countries Saturday, two days before the deal brokered by the European Union is set to be implemented.

At the same time, migrants stranded at a makeshift camp on Greece's border with Macedonia staged a protest demanding that the border be opened and that they be allowed to continue their journeys to Europe.

The migrants' continued presence led several dozen local residents to stage a protest Saturday morning. They blocked a road for about an hour to demand the evacuation of more than 11,000 stranded migrants to "transit centers" across the Greek mainland.

"The police know what they must do ... they must be issued orders," said Georgios Georgantas, a lawmaker with the conservative opposition New Democracy party, who joined the protesters. He called for the "immediate" evacuation of the Idomeni camp "using violence, if necessary."

Idomeni residents alleged that some migrants had broken into empty homes in the town and said they no longer felt safe.

In the coastal Turkish town of Dikili, hundreds demonstrated against the prospect of hosting people expelled from the nearby Greek islands, especially Chios and Lesbos, where there were over 5,000 migrants on Saturday.

Turkey is due to receive the first batch of returned migrants on Monday. A plan to build a reception center in Dikili is unpopular with locals.

"We definitely don't want a refugee camp in Dikili," said the town's mayor, Mustafa Tosun.

Demonstrators expressed concern over the impact the deal could have on the economy, tourism and security in their town.

The EU-Turkey deal stipulates that those who reach the shores of Greece unlawfully will be returned to Turkey unless they qualify for asylum. The deal aims to break the smuggling operations that now operate out Turkey.

In Idomeni, more than 200 refugees and migrants staged a protest on a highway linking Greece and Macedonia, demanding that Macedonia open its borders.
By 2012, Tim Huels was at a turning point. Hed spent 11 years working his way up from intern to area manager at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in northwest Arkansas, but, he says, I always said that when I turned 30 I would reevaluate my situation and if I was able to take a risk, I would. So after his 30th birthday, he found a risk he was willing to take: buying a franchise with Sculpture Hospitality, which helps bars and restaurants run more efficiently via its proprietary inventory-management system and sales and training programs.

But it was a calculated risk. The average startup cost of Sculptures home-based business is $50,500; that low overhead made Huels decision easier. If I had to worry about being $500,000 in debt right off the bat from building out and outfitting a store, that would probably make me question myself every day, he says.

He also talked extensively to both current and former franchisees, regional directors and clients of the company as well as Sculptures CEO, Dan Smith, and COO, Vanessa De Caria. And when he found out Smith and De Caria would be in Miami rewarding their top-performing franchisees with a cruise, he flew down to meet them all in person. To meet the top performers and hear about what theyd accomplished was very exciting to me, Huels says, because then I could see myself in their place.

In October 2013, he bought in, selling his house in Arkansas and relocating to Dallas to start his franchise. The customer base was greater in a larger city, and Texas also gave me space to expand, Huels explains. And expand he did. By the time Sculptures next annual convention rolled around, he and business partner Ashley West -- who co-owns one of his four Dallas territories -- received an award for the fastest start of any franchisee in the companys 29-year history. Then, just as he had imagined, Huels found himself on his own company-sponsored trip for top performers, this one to Jamaica.

In 2015, Huels and West purchased two territories in Houston, doubled their client base and saw triple-digit revenue growth. This year they hope to build that base from an already impressive 50-plus to at least 100 and clear $1 million in revenue. They now manage a team of nine people across the state, who perform inventory audits and help clients put systems in place to track and improve their operations. To keep their own disparate team running efficiently, they rent meeting rooms from their clients every two months for a staff meeting -- and always follow it up with a bit of company bonding, such as a trip to the local shooting range.

To anyone who finds themselves at the same crossroads as he did at age 30, Huels says, Lifes about taking risks. It would be harder for me to look back and wonder where Id be right now if I hadnt decided to start my own business than it was to actually take the leap. Just do your homework, trust your gut and do it.

Related:

How a Big Birthday Inspired One Man to Become a Franchisee

How One Woman Reinvented Her Career After Nearly 30 Years by Becoming a Franchisee

At 19, This Maaco Franchisee Began His Steady Rise to the Top



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BB-gun-wielding vandals who have damaged more than 125 cars around San Leandro in recent months have escalated their crimes by shooting people with the painful pellets, police said Sunday.

The attackers, usually seen cruising around in a light-colored sport utility vehicle, shot several people in San Leandro on March 24 and 25, Lt. Robert McManus said.

The attacks came after several months in which the assailants caused an estimated $60,000 in property damage, officials said.

None of the people hit by the BBs was seriously injured, but police said the victims could have been gravely wounded.

This is becoming dangerous, McManus said in a statement. Windows can be replaced. However, these suspects have become violent since theyve begun to shoot at people. A BB can cause serious injury.

The most recent attacks came on the evening of March 25. Around 8 p.m., a 29-year-old man was standing outside La Oficina bar on East 14th Street when a silver Toyota 4-Runner with black wheels drove past and unleashed a barrage of BBs, McManus said.

The victim was struck in the arm and had to have the BB surgically removed at a hospital, police said.

About two hours later, police said someone in the same Toyota shot a 49-year-old man in the head as he walked out of the First Methodist Church on Bancroft Avenue.

And less than half an hour after that, someone in the Toyota shot a woman in the hand at an AC Transit bus stop on East 14th Street.

On the previous day, someone in a silver SUV fired multiple pellets at a group of workers taking a break along the 900 block of Montague Street but missed, McManus said.

Then, a short time later, someone shot out the window of a car on the 400 block of Begier Avenue before putting a BB through the glass window at Knops Upholstery on East 14th Street.

Officials estimate that windows of more than 125 vehicles have been shot out by the vandals before the recent attacks on people. Police have stepped up patrols and released surveillance images of suspected vehicles and a still frame of one attacker.

Its crucial that the public help us in identifying these suspects as soon as possible before someone gets seriously hurt, McManus said.

In many cases, the attackers drove the silver Toyota. That SUV was described as having off-road tires and may have a missing fuel door on the drivers side or an aftermarket black door.

In other cases, they were seen driving a dark-colored sedan that may be a Lexus or Infiniti with silver star-shaped wheels and tinted windows. Police believe the criminals also have driven a mid-2000s white Ford Explorer.

Anyone with information about the attacks is asked to call San Leandro police at (510) 577-2740.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
A suicide bomber triggers a blast that kills more than 70 and injures more than 250. Children are among the fatalities and the wounded. A splinter extremist group says it was targeting Christians.

This happened last Monday. The death toll is more than double that exacted by the bombers in Belgium on March 22.

That you havent heard nearly as much about it  news coverage exists but is not rivaling that given the Brussels bombings  is likely about where it happened.

It happened in Lahore, Pakistan. Weve seen this dynamic before  for bombings and other terrorist acts in Iraq, Turkey, Nigeria, Mali ...

And the dynamic likely points to a couple of unsettling truths.

First, there does exist something of a hierarchy of perceived importance attached to terrorist acts. If it happens in a place unaccustomed to such attacks, there is more a sense of the unusual. It wasnt supposed to happen there. And when it happens in a place with which more Americans might feel a kinship  Europe  the realization dawns that it could happen here. Again.

Second, these perceptions miss an important point. Perhaps, we and Europeans ought to be paying more attention to where sectarian violence is more commonplace. Yes, we should be concerned whenever and wherever terrorists slay innocents. But also because such places serve as breeding grounds for terrorists who would, with the proper resources, gladly export their extremist philosophies and their terror. And increasingly do.

A 2015 report by the Global Terrorism Index  an effort by the Institute for Economics and Peace  revealed that of the 32,685 deaths attributed to terrorism in 2014, 78 percent occurred in just five countries. These were Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. The grisly tally is up significantly from the 3,529 killed in 2000.

We guess that the next report, on 2015s death toll, will show two things. Those countries will still top this gruesome list because their sectarian woes did not abate by most measures in 2015. And that more Western nations will join the overall list, though their death tolls still will not compare to those of the top five.

But note that three of those five are countries in which the U.S. and much of the rest of the West finds itself still battling mortal enemies. That would be the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibilities for the Brussels attacks and for the Paris attacks in November. And the San Bernardino, California, killers were reported to be inspired by the Islamic State.

Pakistans woes are partly fueled by the strife in next-door Afghanistan. And Nigerias chief terrorist group, Boko Haram, has alleged ties to another mortal enemy, al-Qaida, but has reportedly rebranded by claiming the Islamic State as ally, guide and mentor.

In Lahore, a splinter group of Pakistans Taliban claimed responsibility  and that it was targeting Christians on Easter, though more Muslims were killed in the explosion.

Dont think the killings in places where they occur more frequently dont matter as much as they do in Europe? The connections are hard to ignore.

Terror there can mean terror anywhere. And it should be a a worry  and cause for care and sympathy  wherever it occurs. People are people. Innocents are innocents.

Our hearts should hurt as much for Pakistani dead as when those dying are Belgian.
BAKU, Azerbaijan  Azerbaijans Defense Ministry announced a unilateral cease-fire Sunday against the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, but rebel forces said they continued to come under fire from Azerbaijani forces.

Fighting flared over the weekend in what was a dormant conflict for two decades, with a boy and at least 30 troops killed on both sides. Each side blamed the other for Saturdays escalation, the worst since the end of a full-scale war in 1994.

The Defense Ministry said, in response to pleas from international organizations, it will be unilaterally suspending a counter-offensive and response on the territories occupied by Armenia. The ministry added it will not focus on fortifying the territory that Azerbaijan has liberated. It did not elaborate.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994 with no resolution of the regions status. The conflict is fueled by long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris. The sides are separated by a demilitarized buffer zone, but small clashes have broken out frequently.

Earlier Sunday, a spokesman for Azerbaijans Defense Ministry, Vagif Dargyakhly, said Azerbaijani positions came under fire overnight and that civilian areas also were hit.

On Saturday, Armenia said 18 soldiers were killed and Azerbaijan reported 12 dead.

Officials in the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh disputed the reports of the unilateral cease-fire, saying that the town of Martakert was shelled all day despite Azerbaijans pledge. David Babayan, spokesman for the Karabakh president, said they had not seen any signs that fighting was suspended: The situation is quite the opposite.

Armenias deputy defense minister at a Sunday briefing with military attaches based in Yerevan said Armenia will be ready to send troops to Karabakh if necessary. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Sunday to back its ally Azerbaijan in the conflict.
Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

The Parsonage: 1855 vintage

"The Parsonage -- standing on its original site on Arthur Kill Road at the corner of Clarke Avenue -- was built in 1855 as home for the pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church (now demolished) that once stood nearby," Historic Richmond Town reports on its website.

"The Parsonage is an example of Carpenter Gothic style -- a form of Gothic Revival architecture -- with the characteristic exterior woodwork of the style (sometimes called gingerbread), as well as many original interior features. The building has two stories and a one-story porch on its front and two sides." (Staten Island Advance file photo).

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Official NYC landmark

The Parsonage in Historic Richmond Town was designated an official NYC landmark by the NewLandmarks Preservation Commission in 1969. (Staten Island Advance file photo)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Hilltop beauty in New Brighton

This remarkable Gothic villa is one of many which once adorned the Island, wrote the city Landmarks Preservation Commission when designating this home on hilltop Pendleton Place in New Brighton a landmark in 1969.

It was constructed circa 1855 and is known as the W.S. Pendleton House. January 22, 2015. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Diamond-shaped glass

Diamond shaped glass is used in all the windows, and there is an unusual variety in the shapes and sizes of the windows in this house. They are found single, grouped in pairs, in a bay window of four of four units with arched tracery at the top, and many are of the pointed-arch type with double-hung sash, the city Landmarks Preservation Commission has noted about this house at 22 Pendleton Place in New Brighton.

November 29, 2015. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Landmark stone: Livingston

Designated an official NYC landmark in 1967, the Dr. Samuel MacKenzie Elliott House at 69 Delafield Place in Livingston "is an excellent example of country Gothic Revival architecture," athe Landmarks Preservation Commission has noted. "Constructed of locally quarried random stone, the house was built about 1840 by Dr. Elliott, who was one of this country's first oculists." August 11, 2012. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Fanlight over entry door

The large entranceway is framed by diamond-shaped colored glass sidelights in blue and orange and is crowned by a transom displaying glasswork in fan pattern, the Landmark Preservation Commission noted in its report designating this house a landmark. August 11, 2012. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Ivy covered in 1978

The landmark home on Delafield Place as it looked in 1978. (Staten Island Advance file photo)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Belair Road, Rosebank

Gothic Revival architecture on Belair Road in Rosebank. Aug. 3, 2014. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Hideaway landmark in Clifton

This house, at the corner of Tompkins and Norwood avenues in Clifton, was built in the 1840s and touts authentic Gothic Revival architectural details. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Original shutters

This house, at the corner of Tompkins and Norwood avenues in Clifton, was built in the 1840s and touts authentic Gothic Revival architectural details. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Classic in Clifton

This home at 73 Greenfield Ave. in Clifton displays Gothic Revival architecture. Jan. 4, 2015. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

A closer look

The house at 73 Greenfield Ave. in Clifton was built in a style that the American Institute of Architects describes as "crisp Gothic Revival." Jan. 4, 2015. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Distinctive shutters

The home at 73 Greenfield Ave. in Clifton displays Gothic Revival architecture, including these shutters. Jan. 4, 2015. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

Can you identify this one?

This Gothic Revival house is in Rosebank. Nov. 22, 2015. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Built around 1845

Garibaldi-Meucci Museum at 420 Tompkins Ave. in Rosebank, was built circa 1845 in the Gothic Revival style. Nov. 22, 2015. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

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Virginia N. Sherry | sherry@siadvance.com

'Gothic' in Rosebank

Gothic Revival architecture on Belair Road in Rosebank. Aug. 3, 2014. (Staten Island Advance/Virginia N. Sherry)

Click here to view our gallery of Staten Island 'Greek Revival'-style homes and other buildings, constructed in the 1800s.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- On Friday we had summer with spring landscapes. Sunday morning winter has roared back among the blooming trees and flowers.

The National Weather Service has issued a high wind warning until 2 p.m. this afternoon for New York City.

NBC News is reporting those gusts have been measured at JFK Airport.

#BREAKING 60 mph wind gust reported at JFK...DAMAGING WINDS and snow squalls moving through this AM pic.twitter.com/HtZV7Rm5Uu  Raphael Miranda (@Raphael4NY) April 3, 2016

Here is what you need to know from the National Weather Service:

Winds: northwest 25 to 35 mph with gusts up to 60 mph.

Timing: Highest winds through this morning.

Impacts: downed trees and power lines. Scattered power outages and difficulty driving, especially high profile vehicles on overpasses and bridges.

Speed have been reduced to 25 m.ph. on the Goethals Bridge and Outerbridge Crossing as of early Sunday morning.

With high winds comes the danger of downed trees and power lines that can result in power outages. Notify NYC reminds residents to use caution when walking, biking, or driving high profile vehicles. Winds at these speeds can cause flying debris, turn unsecured objects into projectiles, and cause power outages.

The strong winds will accompany a push of winterlike air across the northeastern United States into Sunday afternoon, reports AccuWeather. Temperatures today, starting in the 30s are only expected to reach 41 degrees. With the winds, the temperature range will feel more like the upper teens to the 30s, according to AccuWeather.

The wind is part of a two part weather system coming out of Canada that is bringing tumultuous weather across the country.
Update: Power has been restored to most customers. There are currently about 40 outages around Staten Island, according to the Con Ed power outage map.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Downed electrical wires are causing power outages to more than 700 homes and businesses around Silver Lake Park, as high winds continue to rock Staten Island Sunday morning.

More than 700 customers without power near Silver Lake Park. (Con Ed)

The outages -- affecting a total of 750 customers -- are concentrated around Castleton Avenue and Silver Lake Road, according to the Con Ed power outage map.

Firefighters are also responding to reports of live wires downed on Bard Avenue, between Parkview Place and Birch Avenue. Con Edison crews are currently on scene to make repairs.

Scattered power outages are also being reported around Great Kills and Bay Terrace.

The National Weather Service has issued a high wind warning until 2 p.m. this afternoon for New York City.

--This is a breaking news story. Check back here for updates.
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The millionaire chairman of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, last year successfully helped push to get the drug, Keytruda, listed on the government's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme so that others could share in its benefits.

What's more, the drug, which carries about a 40 per cent cure rate, saved his life  he was last month declared cancer-free.

Not only was he accepted into the first clinical trial of a drug that had the potential to cure his melanoma, he could also afford the cost of both flying to the United States to participate, and the drug itself  a whopping $120,000 a year.

"I tried everything else except this new drug on trial..." Mr Walker said. "I remain the luckiest guy in the world to get it and have it work. It doesn't work on everyone and I just wanted to share my luck around."

Many more Australians are likely to face the decision of whether to enrol in clinical trials or obtain such drugs privately for a discount or free, with an Australian Medical Journal article revealing on Monday that hundreds more cancer drugs are expected to enter the market over the next five years.

"Of the cancer medicines being developed, 91 per cent will be targeted therapies, which is likely to make these medicines more expensive," the article, by Narcyz Ghinea and Dr Wendy Lipworth, from the University of Sydney's Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, said.

Given the launch price of cancer medicines grew 10 per cent a year over almost 20 years, they said that the federal government would come under greater pressure to subsidise the drugs.

It was important decision-makers "separate the real value of cancer medicines from the hype that often surrounds them", they said. The authors suggested using a tool developed by the European Society for Medical Oncology "that ranks the "clinically meaningful benefit" that can be expected from new cancer treatments."
A mother has reminded partygoers of the fast impact of drink spiking after her 18-year-old daughter was one of two women allegedly targeted at a Civic nightclub on the same night.

The women, students at the same Australian National University college, attended the club on March 17.

A mother has warned young women to watch their drinks after her daughter had hers spiked this month. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer

"She went out for dinner with friends, had three, maybe four wines. She was tipsy but not drunk," the 18-year-old's mother said.

"A whole lot of them went off to Academy, she bought one drink, and she went from hero to zero in 15 minutes."
Canberra business owners have expressed confidence in their future but admit broader economic concerns have dented their optimism, a survey shows.

More than 150 ACT businesses weighed in on the outlook for the region's small and medium enterprises during the 2016 first quarter as part of the Deloitte CBC Survey.

Canberra Business Chamber boss Robyn Hendry says a new survey shows ACT businesses have entered different markets. Credit:Jay Cronan

Canberra Business Chamber chief executive Robyn Hendry said participants indicated they had a high level of confidence for their own businesses and, largely, the ACT economy.

However, global and national economic factors had weighed heavily on their optimism levels.
Canberra clubs face a moral dilemma.

In its campaign to keep the ban on the city's casino having poker machines, ClubsACT argues changing the existing policy would harm local communities.

ClubsACT is resisting attempts by Canberra's casino to win permission to install poker machines. Credit:John Woudstra

But if the argument is a moral one, ClubsACT is on shaky ground. Its concerns regarding the potential for problem gambling to increase is rooted in self-interest. The funds the clubs pour into the community come from pokies, which hurt communities.

Last week, as the clubs movement stepped up its campaign against Canberra casino's bid for pokies, an Australian National University Centre for Gambling Research report showed thousands of residents were problem gamblers.
We identified that we needed more options open at night  museums, cafes, galleries and retail stores  activities that aren't centred around the consumption of alcohol.

We've seen what's possible  carefully co-ordinated events such as New Year's Eve, Sydney Festival and Vivid have shown that when people have somewhere to go, something to do, and there's adequate transport and police, it can be safe on the streets late at night.

That's because having more options creates a safer and more balanced late-night economy, which attracts a wider range of people into the city centre, for a range of different activities  not just to get drunk. And it means the thousands of people who start or finish work late to keep our global city running 24/7 are serviced too.

Rather than addressing the real problems, the NSW government's response was to introduce a blanket lockout across the city centre and in Kings Cross (with an inexplicable exemption for the casino). It was a sledgehammer when what we needed was a well-researched, evidence-based, flexible response using transport, planning, licensing and police.

There is no doubt the lockout law has made some areas, especially Kings Cross, safer and returned normalcy to residents and that must not change. However, the lockout law has hurt Sydney's cultural life and had negative impacts on businesses, including live music venues, small bars and restaurants, and many people have lost their jobs. It's a significant sector  in 2013, late-night activities were valued at more than $17.8 billion and employed more than 30,000 people.
With a federal election looming, we can expect to see plenty of hard hats and fluoro vests on the evening news, along with promises of new freeways and rail lines. But voters should think twice before accepting politicians' promises of a transport infrastructure bonanza, especially before spending plans can be independently evaluated. When politicians buy votes by spending on projects that don't stack up, the vast majority of us lose. The Grattan Institute's new report, Roads to Riches: better transport investment, shows just how poorly Australia has been served by this approach to transport infrastructure spending. Too often, money has been spent on country highways that are not especially important to the national economy, but are popular with local voters. A case in point is the New England Highway (pictured), Credit:Jonathan Carroll Australian governments spent unprecedented sums on transport infrastructure in the past decade  more than 1 per cent of GDP since 2009. But mostly, they have not spent wisely. Investment has not put cities first, though they are the engines of national economic growth. Our largest cities are increasingly congested yet government spending on new transport infrastructure has largely bypassed them. Only 43 per cent of new investment in road and rail infrastructure has been spent in our four largest cities, though they account for 60 per cent of economic activity, nearly 60 per cent of the population, and 64 per cent of population growth.

It's not that NSW has not had its share of investment. The Commonwealth has spent up big in NSW, one of the states where federal elections are won and lost  in the past seven federal elections, one of the major parties gained an average of five seats from the other. It's rather that Sydney has suffered at the expense of country NSW. Although 23 per cent of the nation's economy activity is based in Sydney, only 5 per cent of Commonwealth transport investment over the past decade was in Australia's biggest city, while 27 per cent was elsewhere in NSW. Too often, money has been spent on country highways that are not especially important to the national economy, but are popular with local voters. A case in point is the New England Highway, where more was spent per vehicle kilometre than on the far more heavily used Pacific Highway. While the people of New England no doubt value this highway, and why wouldn't they, everything comes at a cost. The cost here is all the better choices forgone  the better infrastructure that could have been speeding the movement of goods in and out of Port Botany, reducing commuter snarls in peak hour, or establishing viable public transport for people in Sydney's outer suburbs. We can do better. Governments should not be able to commit public money to a transport infrastructure project before tabling in Parliament a rigorous like-for-like evaluation of its benefits and costs, conducted by a genuinely independent body. Governments could then make  and defend  decisions on the basis of a clear and public rationale for investment. Once governments are only building projects where the community benefit clearly outweighs the cost, they should build all such projects. Quality assessment, not arbitrarily imposed budgetary limits, should determine the level of investment. In other words, if a project would deliver net benefits to the community, the government should build it.
There is much that is outstandingly good about the Australian Ballet's revival of Stephen Baynes' traditional production of Swan Lake. And some key aspects that are disappointing.

Adam Bull as Prince Siegfried and Amber Scott as Odette in the Australian Ballet's Swan Lake. Credit:Daniel Boud

To start with the best: the dancing is terrific. The corps of swans, so exposed in the synchronised phalanxes of the "white acts", two and four, was remarkable. I didn't see a foot or upraised wing tip out of place, and they caught the moods from poignant to frantic. They were stars.

On opening night, they shared star status with Adam Bull and Amber Scott as Prince Siegfried and Odette-Odile. He is lanky and light, powered by masculine grace and a much improved understanding of character portrayal. She dances with exquisite skill, dazzling in her fluent physicality, but not yet inhabiting the characters of her dual role. Together, they achieved touching tenderness in their duets.

The court dances of act one  led by Benedicte Bemet, Miwako Kubota and Rudy Hawkes  were stylishly done, with a dash of personality. Senior dancers in character roles offered a welcome injection of stagecraft: Olga Tamara as the nurse, Steven Heathcote as the Lord Chancellor, and Gillian Revie as the Queen, whose body language at the prospect of the scantily clad, flirtatious Odile becoming her daughter-in-law was a theatrical highlight.
Attenborough began in front of the camera in 1954 by accident. Working as a producer on BBC nature documentary Zoo Quest, he was forced to step in when the original presenter fell ill. Does he ever wonder what his destination would have been without this particular turn of events?

"It does come as a surprise to me that people who are now professors will say, 'I first got interested in the natural world when I was a boy of six seeing one of your programs', and that's perfectly possible. I mean, people who saw one of my programs in 1954 have now retired."

"You mean, how does it feel that I've been going at it for a long time?" he says with a chuckle amid that unmistakeable inflection.

How does 89-year-old David Attenborough feel about inspiring generation after generation with more than 60 years in broadcasting as the world's foremost and favourite naturalist?

"Yes, I do," he says. "Certainly, but it applies to all of us, really. You can find events which subsequently prove to be vital, which if they hadn't occurred would have totally changed the way the rest of your life would have been."

His latest series, David Attenborough's Great Barrier Reef, takes the presenter almost full circle to places he first visited in his burgeoning career in the 1950s. In 1957, he headed to the reef, again "by accident", he says, as a time-filling substitute when a trip to New Guinea was cut short. He says his experience then of scuba diving in the reef, when he put on a mask and went below the surface for the first time, still remains the most magical moment in his career.

"I was a total beginner and when I say it's one of the most memorable things in my life, I'm talking about how suddenly when you go underwater with scuba gear, that first moment is equivalent to you being able to fly, because you can just move anywhere in three dimensions.

"When you can do that over a coral reef, which is full of hundreds of different species which you've never seen before of the most beautiful kind, wonderful, vivid colours, shapes and so on, it's an unforgettable moment."

Returning to the reef almost 60 years later, he is still the great adventuring pioneer  descending to depths of 300 metres in a three-man Triton submersible featuring a glass sphere of less than two metres in diameter. It is the deepest point anyone has ever reached at the reef. The footage, particularly when the lights are streaming out of the state-of-the-art submarine in the relative dark, are pure science-fiction straight from Jules Verne.
The decision on Sunday to approve mining leases for Queensland's Carmichael coal mine is akin to "evil", according to one of the world's foremost marine scientists.

"It defies reason," said Dr Charlie Veron, former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. "I think there is no single action that could be as harmful to the Great Barrier Reef as the Carmichael coal mine."

The $21.7 billion project, which involves mine, rail and port facilities, would allow Indian multinational Adani to extract 60 million tonnes of thermal coal a year from the Galilee Basin, in central Queensland. Adani claims the mine will generate 5000 jobs during construction and more than 4000 during operation, with construction to begin next year.
Veteran author, playwright, speechwriter and former Herald columnist Bob Ellis has died from liver cancer at the age of 73.

He was pronounced dead at about 4.15pm on Sunday at his Palm Beach home, surrounded by wife Anne Brooksbank and their three children, Jack, Tom and Jennifer.

For nine months, Ellis chronicled his battle with cancer on his popular Table Talk blog, while maintaining his commentary on film and theatre - and his scathing appraisals of the Abbott and Turnbull governments.
Western Australian Liberal MP Dennis Jensen is threatening to quit the party after he was dumped by local preselectors ahead of the upcoming federal election.

Dr Jensen, who has held the safe suburban seat of Tangney since 2004, is refusing to go quietly, accusing his enemies of orchestrating a media campaign to ensure his downfall.

"I am not very happy about this sort of behaviour being allowed to fly and get rewarded," he told the ABC.
Some celebrities are really on the nose, though I never thought I'd put Sophia Loren in that category, let alone Cate Blanchett, Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and a whole lot more.

Indeed they are a pungent lot, especially when it comes to starring in what must rank as some of the silliest films ever made, all for the sake of selling perfume.

The legendary Sophia Loren's role in the new Dolce & Gabbana perfume ad takes silliness to a new level. Credit:AP

And with Mother's Day just around the corner, you can expect to see some or all of them on a screen near you real soon.

The latest advertising offering from Dolce & Gabbana features Loren in living colour, cavorting about with a bunch of hunky men young enough to be her grandsons who have apparently been enlisted to help her renovate a grand Italian villa, all in the name of flogging a new perfume.
The Bruce Highway has reopened at Elimbah after a horror crash that killed one man and injured another motorcycle rider on Sunday.

Police said preliminary investigations suggested five motorcyclists were travelling together in a group, making their way towards Brisbane from the Childers area.

"It appears as they approached the bridge over Beerburrum Creek, one of the motorcycles has veered right for unknown reasons, hitting a guard rail," a police statement said.

"A second motorcycle has collided with the first, knocking the rider off.
Jacenko "did miserably" at school with a score so low "that basically I may as well not have been there" she says. But Jacenko says studying wasn't of interest and instead she went to work in her family's fashion manufacturing business until her mother sacked her after six months. Roxy Jacenko started Sweaty Betty PR at the age of 24. Credit:Nick Cubbin "I had decided at 18 that I knew how to run her business better than she did," Jacenko explains. Jacenko then enrolled in a fashion manufacturing course at East Sydney Tech and got a job as a receptionist for Mark Keighery, the founder of Marcs and importer of Diesel, where she learnt "every spectrum of the business" and most importantly "to shut up and not tell managers how to do their job". Roxy Jacenko has built a stable of bloggers, including her daughter Pixie Rose. Credit:Caroline McCredie/Getty Images

"It gave me the opportunity to move and grow because it was a small business," Jacenko says. "There wasn't that notion of 'That is not my job', I made everything my job." Hungry and a hustler Jacenko took over public relations for Diesel and says "it was at that point I thought I had found my niche". From there Jacenko decided to go out on her own and started Sweaty Betty PR at the age of 24. There wasn't that notion of 'That is not my job', I made everything my job. Roxy Jacenko "I was fortunate enough that people were looking at Diesel and saying 'Who is doing the PR?' she says. "I was saying the press release is dead, I created 'news snippets' because I couldn't write a press release. I was just hungry and a hustler. I knew I had a niche and a new way of doing things that was disruptive and it was getting press and they were getting sales."

Sweaty Betty PR "grew and it grew and it grew", Jacenko says. "The media liked that you email Roxy and you get an answer in 30 seconds. I wanted to be the person the media went to, not because I had the best brands, but because I was the speediest and most efficient." Jacenko says she has learnt a lot along the way, at one stage representing 150 brands through Sweaty Betty PR. "I have learnt now to have less and less brands," she says. "I refined the business three years ago and I reduced the number of brands to 50 plus. I didn't want to be the girl that sent out a blanket press release and hoped to get a story. I wanted to send 10 media releases that are all different and get 10 stories. It's not rocket science." As Jacenko went through this process of whittling down she considered selling Sweaty Betty PR and still says "everything is for sale for a price". "But as you go through the process, it sounds lucrative from a big number perspective but [new owners] would also own me," Jacenko says. "I couldn't see myself fitting into a mould of spreadsheets and suits. My clients come to me because they want to know that I'm across every single thing. I live a very comfortable lifestyle off the back of what the business brings in now. I excel when I can be creative and fast and can close it on the spot."

Jacenko now employs a team of 18 people and admits high turnover has been an issue for her business. "I'm an obsessive compulsive and people can either like it or loathe it," she says. "If a train is not driven by a train driver it is delayed. Not every staff member can hack it. That's the truth. You've got to live it and breathe it in PR." Tough but soft on the inside After using social media to document every detail of her own life, Jacenko spotted the opportunity four years ago to launch Ministry of Talent, representing digital influencers. "I'm a proficient Instagrammer but I'm shit at everything else," she says. "What I noticed very quickly in the last three or four years was that the whole digital space was firing up in a big way. I thought 'you have to be at the forefront'. Did I know it was going to work? No I didn't. Did I know I needed to be in that sphere? Yes I did."

Ministry of Talent charges fees ranging from more than $2500 for Instagram posts by digital influencers with more than a million followers, and in excess of $500 a post for those with more than 100,000 followers, as well as co-ordinating longer term partnerships. "We do the deals between major organisations and influencers," Jacenko says. "It was something I knew I needed to offer. I needed to be the girl who said I have every base covered here." The dark side of social media hit home to Jacenko this year after digitally altered, indecent images of her daughter Pixie were circulated online by three people in the Sydney fashion industry. Jacenko reported the doctored photos to the police describing them as "cruel" and "creepy", saying "it's sick, it's utter paedophilia."



"I've weathered the storm in this Pixie situation only just," she says. "I am tough but I'm also soft inside." But Jacenko has no plans to close down her daughter's Instagram account or Pixie's Bows business.
Setting up an office overseas is not that common these days. It is not unusual for companies to simply set up a website and sell their products and services globally.

But for some businesses having a physical presence in a new country is vital to helping establish a viable presence that will help attract new customers. Sometimes the old ways of having a 'touch and feel' about you is exactly what your brand needs to convince new clients that you are worth investing in.

Taryn Williams, owner of Wink Models, is going global for her latest venture. Credit:Christopher Pearce

Adding legitimacy

"It was always Pulse Australasia's intention to expand overseas at an appropriate time," Stephen Besci, chief executive of Pulse Australasia, says. "The opportunity, however, presented itself earlier than expected when I was approached by the chief executive of Care England, Martin Green, when he was in the audience at an international care conference in New Zealand."
It is 7pm on a Thursday and WorleyParsons engineer Mihaela Carpo is hanging out with her workmates in the city.

It is a once-in-a-two-month ritual at the usual place  Flinders Street Station, opposite Degrave Street.

Corporate volunteer Mihaela Carpo serves food at The Big Umbrella mini pop-up restaurant for the homeless.

Tonight on the menu is a quick bite of dumplings from around the corner, and then helping out at The Big Umbrella street soup station, handing out "A Real Meal".

Before the night is over, the team of eight from the ASX top 200 company specialising in engineering, procurement and construction, will have served about 200 homeless people.
But at the moment, Victorian laws only allow Owners Corporations to make rules that completely ban smoking in common areas such as shared courtyards. They can only ban smoking inside private apartments and on balconies in more limited circumstances, so it is difficult to get a binding agreement for somebody to stop smoking in and around their home.

Quit Victoria and body corporate experts say housing density and the rise of apartment living is causing more complaints about smokers and cigarette smoke drifting into people's homes and outdoor areas.

People could be banned from smoking in their homes and on balconies under changes to property laws being floated by the Victorian government.

In a move that could change that, an issues paper released by Consumer Affairs Victoria about a review of the Owners Corporation Act 2006 has flagged the possibility of Victoria following NSW where owners corporations can now make rules about smoke drift as a nuisance. This means that if an owners corporation wants to, it can ban smoking in people's homes.

The Victorian issues paper, which is seeking feedback until the end of April, asks if there should be a "Model Rule" regarding smoking in Victoria. For discussion, it gives an example of an owners corporation experiencing complaints about a resident's cigarette smoke circulating through an air conditioning system into other people's homes.

Rob Beck, the general manager of Strata Community Australia's Victorian branch said he welcomed the state government's consideration of the issue because more people were asking for help to resolve disputes about smoking. However, he said it was a difficult issue given a new law could infringe on people's liberty to smoke in their own home.

Given almost half of all new housing stock is managed by an owners corporation now, he said the issue would be of growing importance. "The question is not is it OK for one owners corporation to do this, but is it OK for thousands of them to do it?"

Director of Quit Victoria Sarah White said people often contacted her organisation about annoying smoke drift. She said one man said he was planning to beg his neighbours to stop smoking for two days while he tried to sell his house because it was so off-putting.
Warsaw: Thousands of people attended a pro-choice rally outside parliament in Warsaw on Sunday after the powerful leader of Poland's ruling party backed a call by Polish Catholic bishops for a full ban on pregnancy terminations.

Poland already has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the European Union. Official statistics show only several hundred abortions are performed every year, but pro-choice campaigners say underground abortions are very common.

Thousands joined a rally in Warsaw on Sunday to protest against a possible tightening of the country's strict abortion laws. Credit:Alik Keplicz/AP

The debate around reproductive rights has been building up for months. The conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which came to power in October, plans to tighten regulations to bring them into line with the Catholic Church's teachings, infuriating liberals and women's rights activists.

Chanting "keep your hands off the uterus" and "my body, my business," the protesters waved wire coat hangers, a crude pregnancy termination tool widely seen as a grim symbol of the abortion underground.
Changing the Operating System of the Left after the Greek experience of 2015 Toronto  24 March 2016. View on www.slideshare.net The Greek case leaves no doubt about Europes present situation:  Watch video 

Changing the Operating System of the Left after the Greek experience of 2015

Toronto  24 March 2016.



View on View on www.slideshare.net





The Greek case leaves no doubt about Europes present situation: democracy has been successfully limited and a new kind of despotism is fast emerging. In this lecture Karitzis outlines key aspects of the current sociopolitical environment and presents a diagnosis regarding the time lag of the Left. The main focus is with the modifications needed to the political practice of the Left based on the SYRIZA experience. This entails an upgrade its operational capacities to meet the requirements of present day antagonisms. Building popular power, restructuring political representation and reviving the notion of transformation of the state are all major themes addressed. Lessons from the Greek case may be broadly valuable, facilitating the Left in other countries to initiate a process of systematic preparation and adaptation.

Moderated by Bryan Evans. Presentation by:

Andreas Karitzis has a MSc in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in Philosophy. He is the author of Logic and Method of a Left Government (in Greek) and a founding member of the Hub for social economy, empowerment and innovation. He was a member of the Political Secretariat of SYRIZA and of its Programme Committee until April of 2014. He was also a member of the SYRIZAs Central Committee until August of 2015. See Bullet No. 1236.

The Phyllis Clarke Memorial Lecture is held annually to honour the memory of Phyllis Clarke, a member of the Ryerson University faculty from 1977 until her death in 1988.
This one got lopsided in a hurry, and that was just what Notre Dame needed

football
A tweet sent out by Elon Musk in February set off some social media activity that could indicate a collaboration between Musk and comedian Nathan Fielder.

The private spaceflight company SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk may (or may not) be working on something with Nathan Fielder, host of the Comedy Central show "Nathan for You."

The potential collaboration has only been hinted at on social media, as the comedy news website Splitsider reported.

"Nathan for You" is an absurd take on the reality show genre in which a straight-talking host tries to turn around a failing business. (Examples are "Kitchen Nightmares," "Undercover Boss," and "Bar Rescue.") In "Nathan for You," Fielder takes up that mantle, but his ideas for helping these (real) businesses are completely absurd. In past episodes, Fielder convinced people to work for a moving company for free by telling them it was a new exercise plan; advised a pet shop owner to advertise his store on a custom-made gravestone in a pet cemetery; and made a haunted house significantly scarier by telling people who visit that they had contracted an airborne disease. [SpaceX's Manned Dragon Space Capsule Explained (Infographic)]

The show was recently greenlit for a fourth season, so it seems likely that Fielder is currently working on the next season's schemes. Now, posts on social media seem to suggest he's also working on something with Elon Musk and SpaceX.

On Feb. 18, Musk tweeted a photo of a coffee mug with what appears to be the Starbucks logo, and the caption: "My coffee tastes unusually good this morning."

But the mug actually says "Dumb Starbucks," which is a reference to one of Fielder's most famous stunts, in which he opened a coffee shop that looked exactly like a Starbucks (even using the Starbucks logo), but added the word "dumb" to every written label in the store. The shop sold items such as the "Dumb Frappuccino" and "Dumb Latte," which came in sizes "dumb Tall," "dumb Grande," and "dumb Venti." Fielder then claimed that the store was protected under parody law. The store opened on Feb. 7, 2014, and attracted national media attention.

When Musk tweeted that photo, there was no indication that he and Fielder actually knew each other. Fielder tweeted back at Musk, "Shoot me into space please." Musk then tweeted at Fielder, "Don't you already have a spaceship?" and a picture that referenced another episode of "Nathan for You" that featured a space shuttle-shaped bed.

The Twitter exchange petered out after that, but then on March 9, Fielder posted a photo on Instagram that looks like a SpaceX parking space with his name on it. The caption reads: "bye."

Could Fielder be hinting that he's saying "bye" to the Earth, and is headed on a journey into space? Well, considering that SpaceX has never flown human passengers, and has no plans to offer civilian trips to space, that seems highly unlikely.

But it's not outside the realm of possibility that Fielder is collaborating in some way with Musk and/or SpaceX for the fourth season of his show. Musk has put himself in the public eye as the face of SpaceX, and isn't afraid to drum up a little bit of media buzz for the company. There is no date set for the show's fourth-season debut.
Are the IMF's numbers any better? Regarding the primary budget surplus target (a crucial number that must be kept under 1.5 percent of GDP to give Greece any chance of recovery) Thomsen and Velculescu embrace precisely the number that I was proposing to the troika last year.

Why then did the IMF not back me in 2015 but are adopting the same 1.5 percent surplus target now? Because they also wanted something that I would never grant: crushing new austerity which is inhuman and unnecessary but which, today, the Tsipras government (according to Velculescu) seems ready to accept, having already surrendered once in July 2015.

The IMF's austerity package is inhuman because it will destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses, defund society's weakest, and turbocharge the humanitarian crisis. And it is unnecessary because meaningful growth is much more likely to return to Greece under our policy proposals to end austerity, target the oligarchy, and reform public administration (rather than attacking, again, the weak).

To give a monstrously exaggerated but terribly instructive parallel of the IMF's logic, if Greece is nuked tomorrow the economic crisis ends and its macroeconomic numbers are "fixed" as long as creditors accept a 100 percent haircut. But, if I am right that our numbers added up just as well, while allowing Greece to recover without further social decline, why did the IMF join Berlin to crush us in 2015?

For decades, whenever the IMF "visited" a struggling country, it promoted "reforms" that led to the demolition of small businesses and the proletarisation of middle-class professionals. Abandoning the template in Greece would be to confess to the possibility that decades of anti-social programs imposed globally might have been inhuman and unnecessary.

To recap, the Wikileaks revelations unveil an attrition war between a reasonably numerate villain (the IMF) and a chronic procrastinator (Berlin). We also know that the IMF is seriously considering bringing things to a head next July by dangling Greece once more over the abyss, exactly as in July 2015. Except that this time the purpose is to force the hand not of Alexis Tsipras, whose fresh acquiescence the IMF considers in the bag, but of the German Chancellor.

Will Christine Lagarde (the IMF's Managing Director with ambitions of a European political comeback) toe the line of her underlings? How will Chancellor Merkel react to the publication of these conversations? Might the protagonists' strategies change now that we have had a glimpse of them?

While pondering these questions, I cannot stem the torrent of sadness from the thought that last year, during our Athens Spring, Greece had weapons against the troika's organised incompetence that I was, alas, not allowed to use. The result is a Europe more deeply immersed in disrepute and a Greek people watching from the sidelines an ugly brawl darkening their already bleak future.
Daisy Cruz

BrightStar Care in-home care nurse Daisy Cruz, of Stamford, has received the Nurse of the Year Award for exceptional patient care in the Northeast region. Cruz was nominated through testimonials from her employer, Ray Boller, as well as patients and their families. She received the award at the BrightStar Care of Stamford office in a surprise event. The Stamford office at 45 Church St., Suite 205, is one of the more than 250 BrightStar Care locations nationwide assisting parents and grandparents in their own homes, as well as providing parents with child-care needs.

Valerie Saiz

Valerie Saiz, of New Canaan, has been promoted to vice president of commercial lending by Bankwell. Prior to joining Bankwell, Saiz was the director of lending at Housing Development Inc. and a commercial real estate lender at Citigroup and National Westminster Bank USA. Saiz will be based at the Bankwells 612 Bedford St. offices in Stamford. Bankwell is a commercial bank that serves the banking and lending needs of businesses and residents throughout Connecticut.

Derek Faulkner

Charter Oak Brewing Company of South Norwalk has announced the hiring of Derek Faulkner, who will be responsible for sales and marketing throughout the state. A Connecticut native, Faulkner joins the company as it introduces its Legendary Variety 12 Pack to the Connecticut market. Charter Oak Brewing Company is a craft beer brewery and features hand-crafted innovative beers such as pale ales, IPAs (India pale ales), brown ales, and several seasonal, more robust beers.
Brand evangelists are people who speak consistently, frequently, passionately and positively about your business. They arent paid spokespeople. The best evangelists are people with a personal connection to your company and nothing to gain by spreading the word.

In public relations, real brand evangelists are very powerful messengers who can do amazing things for the image and growth of your enterprise. Evangelists work because they have genuine energy and enthusiasm around what they are saying -- they believe it. The public can spot false (or paid) evangelists pretty easily so finding the real thing is as important as it can be potent.

Related: It's Not You, It's Your Story: Why Branding Matters

In other words, authenticity matters. While evangelists may benefit from advice about how to tell their stories, they almost never need to be told what to say. If youre telling someone what to say, they are not an evangelist, they are a spokesperson. Thats a big difference.

In looking for and cultivating brand evangelists, most PR experts and company leaders look to customers who have paid for the product or service and been delighted. Youve seen that before, I was so happy with company x, I really didnt expect them to do y, but they did and Im so happy.

But PR teams and business insiders often overlook another source of powerful brand evangelists -- employees. Done well, employee brand evangelists are just as good as customers. In some cases, they are even more so.

So how do you find employee brand evangelists? Here are four tips on how you can find, direct and unleash them:

Give employees a space to share, then listen

Because authenticity is the hallmark of brand evangelism, start by finding employees who already have real passion and good, personal stories to tell. To do that, make sure they have the internal space to share their thoughts and insights about the company, their co-workers, and managers  whatever is on their mind.

Related: The 7 Tenets of Branding

Creating that space doesnt have to exist on its own. Companies like Chairlift - a cloud based talent management platform, offer that type of opportunity as part of their HR/performance review and employee feedback system. As such, Chairlift is a great place for managers and PR teams to look for employees with the passion and voice to become evangelists. When employees post often and share great, unique stories about their personal experience at work, flag them  they are strong evangelist candidates.

Finding team members with strong voices is absolutely one of the real benefits to having an open, engaging, and ongoing review and feedback process in place, said Rita Ginsburg, the Director of Customer Experience and Chief People Officer at Chairlift, Inc. Meaningful, clear processes help make happier, more satisfied employees who can make a difference both inside and outside the office walls.

Give them external space

After youve identified a few potential evangelists, ask them if theyre willing to start sharing their thoughts outside the company  on their own. If they are willing, help them get set up. There are oodles of free, influential places for employees and others to share their stories including the well-regarded Medium (which works especially well with Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Related: The Secret Ingredients to a Successful Branding Strategy

In fact, the Daniel Roth, the executive editor at LinkedIn wrote a lengthy piece last year about how vocal employees were changing conversations. The best [companies] are actively encouraging their employees to get their voice out there he wrote.

Monitor/give feedback

While you absolutely want to stay aware of what your newly visible employees are saying, resist the urge to direct it. The last thing you want to do is turn an employees honest voice into PR mush.

Dont ask them to write about stock reports or company newsletters. Do make sure they understand and follow company guidelines and decorum in public -- about offensive language or revealing sensitive customer or employee information, for examples. Make sure they have access to someone who can proof-read and lightly edit for them. And make sure they understand how much they are helping the company and your mission  dont turn spreading the good word about your company into homework.

Also, share their work  both internally and externally.

Raise their profiles  make them part of the brand

If an employee really connects with sharing their stories and experiences at your company, elevate their works and words. Be assertive in finding new and higher-profile opportunities for them to engage the public.

Internal, employee brand evangelists make excellent speakers at conferences and guests on radio and television shows. As they get more comfortable telling their stories, these vocal and passionate leaders should make their way to the front of your public relations efforts.

Keep in mind, its their real voices and personal stories about working with you -- meeting your company and social missions -- that resonate with the public. As such, they can be far better at elevating the reputation and visibility of your company than even you are. Good brand evangelists are worth finding, cultivating and promoting and you can do it if you give them space to step forward on their own, support their efforts and give them the freedom to be who they are already.

Related:



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On March 20, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge visited the island in 1928, marking a historic moment in the diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Referring to a fragment of one of the best known Simple Verses of Cubas national hero Jose Marti, I Have A White Rose To Tend, Obama said: Ive come to Havana to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people. Im here to bury the last vestige of the Cold War in the Americas and to forge a new era of understanding to help improve the daily lives of the Cuban people.

Obama came to office in 2009 promising to review the U.S. policy on Cuba but made only a few modest changes on travel restrictions and allow remittances under certain conditions  because the U.S Congress refuses to rescind the trade embargo on Cuba.

However, Obama deserves credit for using his executive authority to establish U.S.-Cuba ties around trade, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and travel. But the need and the demand to make changes have been in the making for more than five decades.

The embargo against Cuba, imposed in 1962, shortly after Fidel Castros revolution, is the longest-standing and cruelest economic embargo ever experienced by any country. It infringed on rights of other countries preventing trade and investment, violating international law and trade rules. It seriously obstructed and constrained the efforts of the Cuban people to eradicate poverty, improve their living standard, and achieve economic and social development.

Also, in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war but ended with a declaration not to invade Cuba. The sanctions were further tightened in the 1990s under the pretext of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights in Cuba.

The devious practice of enforcing sanctions on any country has nothing to do with protecting human rights, promoting democracy and freedom.

I have written many times that the unilateral imposition of embargoes and sanctions as an ulterior motive for regime change is contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the United Nations Charter and the basic norms governing contemporary international law.

The UN Charter and International Law provide for settling conflicts between states through negotiations based on mutual respect for each others independence, sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of the other. Every year, for more than 25 years, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolutions denouncing the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

Speaking before the General Assembly in 2013, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez described the embargo as an act of genocide that provokes hardships and is a mass, flagrant and systematic violation of human rights. Saying the fact that 53 years later the same policy still prevails is something extraordinary and barbaric, he added that the blockade has been classified as an act of genocide under the Geneva Convention of 1948.

These sustained and unambiguous denunciations by the United Nations condemning the embargo against Cuba had to be heard loud and clear but the U.S. Government routinely refused to change its policy on Cuba saying that the United States maintains it is a bilateral issue and not a concern of the United Nations.

According to Cubas Minister of Public Health, Cuba makes 80 percent of the drugs they use, is the only country that has developed a lung cancer vaccine, and has developed 33 medical kits to test for 19 different diseases.

Even more remarkable is Cubas medical assistance to developing countries and during emergencies. For example, Cuba sent thousands of doctors, nurses and others to Haiti after its earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people, and last year Cuba sent a couple of hundred doctors to help in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

The Cuban Government has established diplomatic relations with more than 160 countries, expanded its economic, trading and investment relations with many partners in the region as well as with Russia, China and countries of the European Union, and reinforced its cultural ties educating thousands of foreign students in Cuba.

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, in 2014 alone, more than 3 million tourists visited Cuba which roughly translates to $2.5 billion in tourism revenue.

So, Obamas hand of friendship and a modicum of justice comes at a time when these developments are dramatically and irrevocably changing Cubas economic and political landscape.

Therefore, I am not surprised that Fidel Castro (in a 1,500-word letter to Brother Obama) has denounced Obamas conciliatory gestures, and wrote, We dont need the empire to give us anything . . . after a merciless blockade that has lasted almost 60 years, those who have died in mercenary attacks on ships and Cuban ports, an airliner full of passengers that detonated in mid-air, mercenary invasions, multiple acts of violence and coercion?

He concluded that Cubans are self-sufficient and able to produce food and material wealth we need with the effort and intelligence of our people.

But, I am sure, Cuba can use a helping hand to further develop the country and uplift the living conditions of its masses. Cuba may not change overnight but Obamas diplomatic engagement would no doubt facilitate economic development.

Last July, restoring diplomatic ties between Washington and Havana, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that although the two nations differ on basic issues ranging from human rights to political systems, both will be better served by engagement rather than estrangement.

Both American and Cuban entrepreneurs feel the sweet smell of massive gains in bilateral trade.

During Obamas visit to Cuba many trade deals were stuck: In the cards are 100 flights a day to Cuba from the United States; American cruise ships to dock in Cuban ports  potentially three to 4 million American visitors a year. The American Starwood hotels agreed to develop hotels in Cuba. The Cuban pharmaceutical companies, Rum and Cigar manufacturers are salivating to export their products to the United States.

There is a growing consensus and momentum to change U.S. policy with regard to Cuba. Obama ended his visit to Cuba saying that Cubas future must be in the hands of the Cuban people.

Therefore, instead of clamoring for regime change, Congress should lift the embargo and let Cuba and its people find their own path to development.

Stamford resident Somar Wijayadasa, an international lawyer, was a UNESCO delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1985-1995, and was representative of UNAIDS at the United Nations from 1995-2000.
A prisoner arrested on suspicion of killing a fellow inmate at Coldingley Prison near Woking has been bailed by police investigating the death.

Madala Washington, 25, from south-west London, died after being attacked at the prison in Bisley at about 1pm on Friday.

Surrey Police said he had been the victim of a "serious assault" at the prison, which houses about 500 inmates, and detectives have launched a murder investigation.

A 23-year-old man, who is also an inmate at the prison, was arrested on suspicion of murder and has been bailed until June 2.

A force spokesman said: "Officers from the Surrey and Sussex major crime team are continuing to carry out a thorough and extensive investigation to establish the circumstances surrounding the death."

The Prison Service said an investigation would be carried out by the independent Prisons and Probation Ombudsman.

Coldingley is a category C training prison, meaning inmates are considered unlikely to make a determined escape attempt but cannot be trusted in open conditions.

It has capacity for about 500 prisoners in five wings, where inmates are mainly housed in single cells, and is focused on the "resettlement of prisoners".

The death comes against a backdrop of concerns about rising cases of violence in UK prisons.

There were 257 deaths in custody last year including eight homicides, more than in any other year since records started in 1978.

In 2015 Coldingley's independent monitoring board wrote to prisons minister Andrew Selous over its concerns about the jail.

Its report blamed an increase in home-made weapons at the prison and illegal drugs on cuts to the number of prison officers and staff.

Steve Gillan, general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, said: "We do not comment on ongoing police investigations but generally there has been an increase in violence, and indeed homicides, in our prisons.

"We believe that is due to the lack of prison officers - some 7,000 have been made redundant since 2010.

"Our prisons are a more violent place than they have been. It is tragic that someone has lost their life."



Additional reporting by the Press Association.
T heft of mopeds and scooters is on the rise in London because gangs are increasingly using them to carry out serious violent crimes like murder and drive-by shootings, a top detective has said.

The number of mopeds and motorbikes stolen across London rose by 12 per cent last year despite a police operation to crack down on the problem.

Scotland Yard broadened its crackdown on scooter thefts, codenamed Operation Venice, last April as a result of its success in Camden, Islington and Westminster.

Its aim is to combat moped and motorbike theft and more serious crime associated with it, like drive-by shootings, stabbings and robbery.

It comes days after a youth was found guilty of manslaughter of Stefan Appleton, 17, who was stabbed to death with a "zombie killer" knife.

The killer, who cannot be identified due to his age, killed him after using a stolen moped.

However, despite these efforts, more than 11,000 vehicles were stolen in the capital last year  about a 30 a day.

More than half of the stolen vehicles were not recovered.

The figure is a 12 per cent rise compared to the previous year but the detective leading the investigation insisted London was safer because of breakthroughs in tackling organised crime.

Detective superintendent Raffaelle DOrsi, head of Operation Venice, told the Standard: There is more theft of mopeds or powered two wheelers than there was last year.

However we have detected more offenders across the majority of the boroughs than ever before and there is a more organised approach to deal with these offenders.

Stolen bikes are being used in significant criminality which is why it is a threat to us here in London and that is why we are responding.

London is safer because of the individuals we have managed to lock up.

He added more people were now likely to report a theft, which contributed to more recorded offences.

Mr DOrsi said gang leaders were paying youngsters up to 50 a time to move stolen motorbikes across the capital.

Since the operation was launched, more than 600 people have been arrested for vehicle theft but many more have been held for other associated crimes.

He added: What we find is mopeds are being used in robbery, burglary, smash and grab, drive-by shootings, attempted murders, murders and drug dealing.

It has been within London for a number of years, whether its a smash and grab raid or making off from police on a moped. This is serious criminality and often it is organised.

He added officers were risking their lives on a daily basis during high speed pursuits on streets across the capital.

One police officer suffered a broken ankle while another was on the back of a moped when it was driven off by an offender.

Last year, Scotland Yard estimated the value of stolen motorbikes and mopeds to be 28 million but a new estimate by the The Motorcycle Industry Association claims the cost is closer to 100 million.

Police said they are working closer with the industry to make it harder for thieves to steal the bikes.
A gunman opened fire on two plain-clothes police officers in a south London street this morning.

The officers were shot at after confronting two men acting suspiciously in Sandmere Road, Clapham, at about 4.20am on Sunday.

Police said a man aimed a gun in their direction.

A single shot was fired but fortunately the bullet missed and neither policeman was injured.

Officers near the shooting in Clapham

A police helicopter was scrambled and armed officers descended on the area this morning.

One local tweeted: There's police blocking my road and a helicopter circling above. What's happening?

The police have got guns, massive ones, and are hovering outside of their cars.

No weapons were found after police scoured the area.

Chief Inspector Roy Smith, who is based in Brixton, also tweeted about the incident.

I have just seen the two officers who were shot at during the early hours of this morning, he said.

Pleased to report both officers are uninjured.

A man has been arrested in connection with the incident.

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said enquiries were ongoing.
P olice spoke to a three-year-old for allegedly sexually abusing other children, it has been revealed.

Durham Police investigated a claim the toddler took part in sexual activity with two youngsters aged five and seven.

The case was among hundreds of alleged abuse between children in the UK last year.

According to a study, the number of youngsters investigated for sexual activity with other children has doubled in three years.

The allegations, which range from tricking a friend into undressing to performing sex acts, rose to 1,047 last year, up from 555 in 2013.

Children under five have been identified as suspects by police forces in West Yorkshire, South Wales and West Mercia in addition to the Durham case.

Javed Khan, chief executive of Barnardo's children's charity, told The Sun on Sunday: Children abusing other children is deeply worrying.

"They're getting distorted ideas from images online or, tragically, because they've been abused themselves."

It comes amid claims 500 sex offenders could be on the run in Britain.

The Sunday People reported 327 known offenders were on missing lists after 24 police forces responded to inquiries.

However, because 19 other forces did not answer, it is estimated the true total to be closer to 500.
D etectives investigating the murder of Ali Nasrollahi have today arrested two further men.

Scotland Yard said the men, aged 29 and 23, were held on suspicion of murder and currently remain in custody at a north London police station.

The investigation was launched after Mr Nasrollahi, known to friends as Ali Nasro, was stabbed to death in Woodside Park, North Finchley, on Tuesday shortly before 3pm.

He was found collapsed in the street and was taken to Royal London Hospital where he died two hours later.

A post-mortem examination at Northwick Park mortuary gave the cause of death as a single stab wound to the chest.

Todays arrests brings the total number to five since the probe was launched.

On Wednesday, a 21-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder. He was taken into custody at a north London police station and was bailed pending further enquires to a date in May.

On Thursday, another two men, aged 21 and 22, were also arrested and have been charged with murder.

The pair appeared at Hendon Magistrates' Court on Saturday and were remanded in custody to appear at the Old Bailey next Tuesday.
D ozens of people including baby twins are occupying a south London library for the fourth straight day in protest at Lambeth councils decision to redevelop it as a gym.

Carnegie library closed its doors at 6pm on Thursday for the final time before a planned reopening in 2017 as a healthy living centre with a self-service neighbourhood library.

However, around 40 protesters inside the building at the time refused to leave.

Chair of The Library Campaign, Laura Swaffield, who is one of the occupants, said they intend to remain inside the library for at least another week.

She said: Im just staggered by the publics support.

People are tweeting and donating items  we have all the food you could possible want, toothpaste, soap, and somebody even brought bells so we could make noise at the door.

Grandmother of baby twins at Carnegie library occupation

Grandmother Gilly Nash, seen in the above video holding 11-month-old twins Olivia and Millie, said: We want the library for these babies and for everybody elses babies because my children had it, my grandson has had it, its a fabulous resource and we want it to keep going.

A wonderful person gave us a double mat for the babies and the children are being brilliant  the teenagers are doing revision for their A Levels.

Libraries in London under threat incl Tate South Lambeth and South Woodford turned into gym

A spokesperson for Lambeth council said: These protesters are misleading residents and the public  Carnegie Library is not closing for good and we are one of the few areas of the country that has found a way to maintain a library service in all our current locations.

The building will re-open to the public, for longer hours, in early 2017 and will have a neighbourhood library service, health and fitness facilities and space for community groups to use.

It is unfortunate that a small number of people have decided to be obstructive, especially as Lambeth council has worked incredibly hard to minimise the impact of the cuts on Lambeth libraries.
A doctor at the centre of allegations he prescribed banned performance-enhancing drugs to as many as 150 athletes has had his contract with a London clinic terminated.

The Omniya Clinic, based in Knightsbridge, where Dr Bonar rented rooms to treat private patients, revealed it had ceased its professional services agreement with him on Friday.

Dr Bonar is said to have prescribed banned performance-enhancing drugs to as many as 150 athletes, The Sunday Times reported.

He had been secretly filmed allegedly discussing working with numerous professional athletes who used banned treatments.

He denied the allegations when they were put to him by the newspaper and said he had not breached rules laid out by the General Medical Council (GMC).

Tonight, tweets from a Twitter account in Dr Bonar's name said the allegations were "false and very misleading".

The GMC confirmed while Dr Bonar is registered with them, he does not have a licence to practise medicine in the UK.

GMC chief executive Niall Dickson said: These are serious allegations and we will follow them up as a matter of urgency. We expect all doctors to follow our guidance - if they fail to do so they are putting their right to practise in jeopardy.

Dr Bonar does not currently hold a licence and is therefore unable to practise medicine in the UK.

Any doctor without a licence who continues to carry out the privileged duties of a doctor is committing a serious breach of our guidance, and potentially a criminal offence.

The Government has called for an "urgent investigation" into the newspaper claims.

John Whittingdale, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, said: "I have asked for there to be an urgent independent investigation into what action was taken when these allegations were first received and what more needs to be done to ensure that British sport remains clean.

"There is no room for complacency in the fight against doping and the Government is already looking at whether existing legislation in this area goes far enough."
T his is the moment a young woman was allegedly subjected to "Islamophobic" abuse as she tried to buy sweets in a west London newsagent.

Ahlam Saed, 25, who wears a gown and face veil, went into a corner shop on Saturday to buy some Starburst when a man mocked her outfit in front of his two children.

She started filming after he called her Batman, in reference to her covered face, and hummed the superheros theme tune at the shop in Uxbridge Road, Shepherd's Bush.

In the video, the man says: My kids cant even see your face, who the f*** are you? Are you a man or woman?

He adds This is a Christian country. Christian, western world and also rambles about a Muslim couple with photos of an Isis flag displayed on their house.

Ms Saed, from west London, said she became petrified as he grew increasingly irate after she confronted him and called him "ignorant". He was filmed threatening to "knock out" and "batter" a man who tried to intervene, as the incident exploded into a four-way row in the shop.

But Ms Saed said she was determined to stand her ground and film the man to show others the abuse Muslims are sometimes faced with in London.

I only wanted to get a packet of Starburst, she said.

I walked in and he decided to call me Batman and started singing the theme tune.

I could not ignore him, thats why I decided to get my phone out, because I have had this abuse before in a pound shop [from someone else].

I had to stand my ground, I didnt want him to think he could continue hurling abuse.

Ms Saed said she was wearing a long brown gown known as a jilbab, a niqab veil over her face, and trainers.

The 25-year-old started wearing a face veil about four years ago and is the only person in her family to do so.

My parents dont want me to wear it because they fear for my safety, she said.

But why should I take it off because of other peoples opinions? Its my choice.

She added that she has faced more abuse in recent months than ever before, including from a man who accused her of being "strapped" with a bomb in a pound shop, and has become reluctant to use public transport.

"Its getting worse since the Brussels and Paris attacks," she said.
T his beautiful abandoned Victorian subway in south London could soon be reopened to the public after a 50,000 fundraising drive.

Behind an ordinary park gate, tucked away at the edge of Crystal Palace Park, lies the Grade II vaulted walkway held up by intricate pillars, patterned with orange and white bricks.

The 150-year-old subway first opened in 1865 to create access to the legendary Crystal Palace for first-class passengers travelling via the former High Level railway station nearby.

But after the Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1936, passenger numbers for the train station dwindled and fell to almost nothing during the Second World War, when the subway was transformed into an air raid shelter.

Following the war, the station deteriorated and finally closed in 1954. It was demolished in 1961, leaving the subway unused.

It became an unofficial children's playground, before welcoming a new generation of visitors in the 90s  partygoers who used it for illegal raves.

Visitors at one of the Crystal Palace Subway Open House events Photo by Sue Giovanni / Sue Giovanni

Electronic dance duo The Chemical Brothers once filmed part of the video for their single Setting Sun inside the subway and on the surrounding terraces.

The subway was shut completely over safety concerns around 20 years ago but currently reopens once a year for a guided open house event, with hundreds of people applying for tickets.

The fundraising drive was organised by the Friends of Crystal Palace Subway group, who want to reinstate use the money to make the entrance structurally sound so people can enjoy the space.

Donations towards the 50,000 cost of a new iron gate that will provide safe access have been received from Southwark Council, local businesses and an online crowdfunding campaign.

Jules Hussey, 47, the groups treasurer, told the Standard: We have got enough money to start the work and begin reinstating safe access to the subway.

We really want more people to be able to enjoy it as its a stunning site and we want to show its value.

Its the community that have really got behind this project and who are working really hard to get the site open again.

The group will continue to raise funds to pay for further works and activities inside the subway. For more details visit gofundme.com/cpsubway.
A teenager who died when the lorry he was travelling aboard crashed is believed to be the first refugee killed in Britain this year, a charity has said.

The man, named by charity Help Refugees as 18-year-old Mohammed Hussain, was found dead by police in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on Friday.

According to the charity, he was from Kurdistan and had been living in the refugee camp in Dunkirk, northern France, for about six months.

Volunteer Maddie Harris said he made the journey to be reunited with an uncle living in Manchester.

She said that when surviving family members in Dunkirk - a cousin and an uncle - called his mobile phone on Friday evening, it was answered by police officers.

Ms Harris, who works in the Dunkirk camp, said: "The police answered and I was asked to speak to them. He was underneath a truck, there was an accident and he was killed.

"He'd been in Dunkirk a long time - maybe he decided to go on his own. All Mohammed was trying to do was to find a better life and he felt this was his only option.

"The problem is we are aware of Mohammed because he was known in the camp, but how many more people has this happened to?"

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police would not confirm the identity of the man who was killed but said his next of kin had been informed.

A man arrested at the scene on suspicion of causing death by careless driving has been released without charge.

The lorry crashed at 4.35am in Banbury on Beaumont Road, at its junction with Southam Road.

Help Refugees said Mr Hussain's death is thought to be the first on UK soil in 2016.
A ir France stewardesses are refusing to fly to Iran when flights resume between the two countries after being ordered to wear headscarves when they arrive in Tehran.

Flights between the two countries were suspended in 2008 when Iran was hit with international sanctions over nuclear ambitions.

However, a thaw in relations has led to flights resuming from April 17.

Air France chiefs sent a memo to staff informing female employees would be required to wear trousers during the flight with a loose fitting jacket and a scarf covering their hair on leave the plane.

Iranian women have been forced by law to cover their hair since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Christophe Pillet, of the Syndicat National du Personnel Navigant Commercial (SNPC), union told AFP news agency: Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the headscarf.

Flore Arrighi, head of the Union des Navigants de lAviation Civile flight crews union, added: It is not our role to pass judgement on the wearing of headscarves or veils in Iran.

What we are denouncing is that it is being made compulsory. Stewardesses must be given the right to refuse these flights.

Air France told AFP news agency all air crew were "obliged like other foreign visitors to respect the laws of the countries to which they travelled".

A spokesperson said: "Iranian law requires that a veil covering the hair be worn in public places by all women on its territory.

"This obligation, which does not apply during the flight, is respected by all international airlines which fly to Iran.

The rule applied to crew before the flights were suspended and also when travelling to Saudi Arabia, the airline added.


S hocking footage has emerged of a woman in a hijab being mown down during a far-right protest in the Brussels district of Molenbeek.

The distressing clip shows a white Audi crashing into the woman. She rolls over the bonnet and hits the windscreen before being throwing into the road.

The car then speeds off although the driver was later arrested according to local reports.

The woman, who was reportedly Muslim, looked to be conscious but in heavy pain as she was treated in the street.

Victim: The woman was treated in the street for her injuries / REUTERS/Yves Herman

The footage  viewed tens of thousands of times online  was recorded moments after the car had been surrounded by armed riot police on Saturday.

Officers were pictured aiming guns at the car after it allegedly broke through a police barricade, before driving off and hitting the woman.

Belgian police point their guns at the car before it hit the woman / REUTERS/Yves Herman

Another clip (top) showed the moments before and after the crash - and recorded the screams of distressed onlookers.

Police had been attempting to shut down an anti-immigration protest which was taking place in the area, which is associated with the Islamic State militants who carried out the Paris attacks.

Surviving suspect Salah Abdeslam was arrested in Molenbeek in March after hiding out for four months following the November bomb and gun attacks which killed 130 people.

Two suspected far-right activists were arrested with Molotov cocktails and weapons as police cracked down on the protest.

The protesters defied the mayor of Molenbeek who had attempted to ban the demonstration from going ahead.
CURTIS  Curtis Aggie crops judging students were undaunted by a pre-Easter blizzard that hit during Spring Break.

When team members left for their homes on March 18, returned to the Curtis campus of the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture on March 24, they loaded up their vans and headed to Manhattan, Kansas, for the annual K-State Crops Judging Contest.

The team placed second overall in the 2-year college division. Team members for the K-State contest were sophomores Nolan Breece of Holdrege, Aaron Jensen of Goehner, Dalton Johnson of Gering, and freshman John Paul Kain of McCook.

Breece was the top individual overall in the competition, and Jensen earned a fourth-place finish.

The team did very well, which is a reflection of all the hard work they accomplish during practice sessions, said Dr. Brad Ramsdale, NCTA associate professor of agronomy and crops judging team coach.

The competition served as another great learning experience for the students as we prepare for the upcoming national competition. The Aggies topped the previous month among the two-year colleges winning first place at the Iowa State University contest.

Individual students compete in four categories, with 60 minutes for completing each section. Four other freshmen also participated in all phases of the contest, but were not eligible for prizes.

First-year competitors were Maggie Brunmeier of Bayard, Kyle Krantz and Brent Thomas, of Alliance, and Vincent Jones of Kirwin, Kansas.

The next Aggie competition will be at the National Association of Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture events, April 14-16 at the University of Minnesota-Crookston.

NCTA also will have students competing in agricultural business management, knowledge bowl and livestock judging competitions.

For information about NCTA agronomy programs or the crops judging team, see ncta.unl.edu, or contact Dr. Ramsdale at bramsdale2@unl.edu .
Snow amounts from the March 30 storm varied widely in the North Platte River Valley. One measurement at 5:30 p.m. in Torrington was 4.5 inches of snow. This after it had been melting and snowing for at least 12 hours. The Universiity of Wyoming Sustainable Agriculture Research and Extension Center southwest of Lingle reported 1.37 inches of precipitation. The National Weather Service in Cheyenne had no official measurements, explaining that only readings from an automated system are collected.
LARAMIE, Wyoming -- The United States Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) this month will present honorary membership to John Tanaka of the University of Wyoming in recognition for making rangeland science more widely accessible, collecting local knowledge and strengthening knowledge networks.

Tanaka is a professor and associate director of the Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station, which oversees all research in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and director of the James C. Hageman Sustainable Agriculture Research and Extension Center (SAREC) near Lingle.

Tanaka and Karen Launchbaugh, professor and director of the Rangeland Center at the University of Idaho, developed Range Science Information System, an online bibliographic database of more than 1,400 journal articles and other documents about range management in the United States. It provides summaries of articles and provides links to most.

The RSIS bridges the digital divide between the scientific community and land managers and owners, said Sarah Williams of USAIN.

The term rangeland encompasses many open-space habitats grazed by domestic animals and wildlife. RSIS links to articles on rangelands such as Rocky Mountain grasslands, Alaska highlands, Nebraska Sandhills, Kentucky bluegrass and Gulf Coast prairies and marshes.

Tanaka is also leading Discovering our Nations Rangelands, a project to collect oral histories and local knowledge from ranchers and land managers. The project is funded by a grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The third awardee is George Ruyle, University of Arizona professor and Marley Endowed Chair for Sustainable Rangeland Stewardship.

All were recognized for helping the Rangelands Partnership (bit.ly/globalrangelands) connect librarians and rangeland scientists, and making range science available to researchers, educators, students and land managers.

The Rangelands Partnership is a collaboration of 19 Western and Midwestern land-grant universities in cooperation with national and international partners.

The honorary memberships will be presented at the USAIN 15 Biennial Conference in Gainesville, Fla.

For more information, contact Tanaka at 307-766-5130 or jtanaka@uwyo.edu.
A new science festival in the Panhandle is set to give children a hands-on experience with science.

The Panhandle Science Festival, in association with the Nebraska Science Festival, will be celebrating science with other local agencies April 18. Now in its fourth year, the statewide event is hosting events from April 15-23 to stimulate curiosity in children and adults with interactive activities. The festival features science- and technology-related activities in communities across the state.

Riverside Discovery Center was asked to host the first-ever event in western Nebraska.

The Nebraska Science Festival coordinator contacted us and asked if wed like to be a participating location, said Amber Schiltz, education curator. We were excited because every participating location has been east of Kearney.

After accepting, RDC reached out to its conservation and science partners and asked them to participate. North Platte Natural Resources District, UNL Panhandle Extension Center, 4-H Youth Extension, Nebraska Game and Parks, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, Scottsbluffs Stormwater Program and the National Weather Service agreed to participate.

We came up with a really nice group of people to have hands-on booths for the festival, she said.

The Nebraska Science Festival began in 2013 as an initiative of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which administers the festival with the assistance of organizations and individuals interested in the advancement of science literacy. The festival is designed to make science accessible, interactive, relevant and fun for children and adults alike.

Schiltz said the Panhandle Science Festival was chosen as a name because partners wanted to represent western Nebraska. Booths and activities will be featured throughout RDC.

The National Weather Service will be bringing a state of the art tornado simulator and lightning simulator, Schiltz said. They have to be done indoors, so it will most likely be done in the Heritage Barn.

Other booths at the Panhandle Science Festival will not only entertain students, they will provide science education as well. They will highlight specific areas of science, such as stormwater run-off.

The UNL Extension center will have something on insect science, 4-H will have sun science, NRD will have something on the water cycle, Agate has fossil science and we will have something on the science of animal body coverings with scales, skin and fur, she said.

Schiltz is looking forward to hosting the first-ever event in the Panhandle.

We would love to do this every year, and I hope it will grow in participation and agencies in years to come, she said.

Regular admission will apply: Adults: $6.50; Seniors: $5.50; Children (5-12): $4.50; Toddlers (2-4): $2.25; Babies (0-1): Free. School groups and other tax exempt groups will receive 50 percent off admission. For more information about Nebraska Science Festival visit www.nescifest.com. For more information about the Panhandle Science Festival held at Riverside Discovery Center on April 18 contact Schiltz at 402-310-6137 or education@riversidediscoverycenter.org.
The city of Scottsbluff will hold its regularly scheduled meeting on Monday, April 4 at the city council chambers at 2525 Circle Drive in Scottsbluff. Items on the agenda include consideration for the creation of a paving district in the Five Oaks Subdivision and name changes for several streets throughout the city. The council will also recognize the water department for being awarded the best tasting water in Nebraska and fourth best in the nation. It is also expected that the city will accept the resignation of City Manager Rick Kuckkahn, consider a contract between Kuckkahn and the city and appoint Assistant City Manager Nathan Johnson as Interim City Manager.
Some of the weekly visitors to this space let me know when I get a bit negative, so if you are one of those people I apologize and then suggest you may want to skip reading this weeks rant because I am sure this will reinforce your observation!

Yes, I am upset. The Nebraska State Legislature is about to address the outrageous property taxes with a couple of bills put on this sessions agenda at the request of Governor Ricketts. They have moved out of committee and are now to be debated, or should I say re-debated on the floor of the senate, even though several weeks ago I suggested these two bills remain locked up in committee as they offered little relief compared to the scope of the problem.

Some of you may believe baby steps are a good start to solving this three-decade-old problem. I am not one of those people because we have been baby-stepping, or should I say side-stepping, this issue for 30 years now. The time has come to put away the tin of Band-Aid solutions and move right to major reconstructive surgery.

You can look up all the details on LB958 and LB959, the governors two bills, just to save me some time trying to explain how absolutely inadequate they are. If passed and signed into law, yes they will offer minor tax relief, but there is no question among every single senator (and the governor) that well be right back next year trying to take yet another baby step, stumbling again, applying another Band-Aid because this problem seems to have grown too large to solve. At least too large to solve easily and there is no consensus to do the heavy lifting to put this behind us once and for all.

The problem isnt high property taxes. The problem is school funding. Since our state is one of the worst states in the country at using state general funds to pay for schools, we are forced to use property taxes to fund about two-thirds of the costs of education in our state. We will never solve the property tax issue in Nebraska until we change the way we fund our schools. Some senators openly acknowledge this, but words alone are simply not enough.

I share just a quick note. It appears to me that with over 200 school districts in our state, more than 70 of them receive no state aid. Zero, zip, nada! The other 160 or so districts get to split up about a billion dollars. Try to find anyone who can come close to figuring out how this money is divided.

Example: According to the NE Department of Educations School and Finance Organization Services, the 2016-17 state aid calculated by school system, lets take two schools. Minatare, which has, by the states student formula count, about 186 students, and Morrill, which has about 340 students, nearly twice the size of Minatare. State aid for Minatare (the smaller school) is calculated at $2.5 million, while larger Morrill will receive only $750,000 or about 1/3 of what smaller Minatare will get in 2016-17. Confused? I am. Then toss in the fact Valentine Schools, with 600 students, gets zero state aid dollars, and Mitchell, with about 600 students, gets nearly $5 million, and I throw up my hands!

So unless we solve the school funding issue which is directly tied to the amount of property tax you and I pay, well continue to hear things like this:

Ricketts saying, This is a step-by-step process. And, Theres nothing sacred in any of these bills, but we need to get something done. And anything we do this year doesnt mean we cant come back next year and do something else.

Sen. Kate Sullivan, who introduced one bill, Is it perfection? Well, hardly. Are there some solutions? Partly.

Sen. Laura Ebke, Its a tangled web.

Sen. John Stinner, This is a $500 million problem,

Sen. Paul Schumacher said promising property tax relief is an easy path to elected office.

Sen. Jim Smith, We need to look at comprehensive tax reform in our state.

Sen. Dave Schnoor, Its a Band-Aid, but its something,

Sen. Mike Gloor, This is hard

Come on Senators. Shelve these inadequate pieces of legislation. Use the rest of the year to follow Sen. Smiths advice and come up with major tax reform in Nebraska. Some surveys have Nebraska ranked second in the category of Worst State to be a Taxpayer. Are you waiting until we are the number one worst state until you do what we elected you to do? Or, I guess you can just say as Sen. Gloor did, This is hard.

Pass me another Band-Aid please, and an air-flight-sickness bag while youre at it.

Are you as upset about the lack of meaningful property tax legislation as I am? Share your thoughts with me. greg.awtry@starherald.com
NEW YORK  Wealth managers in the United States are cutting fees, relying more on technology to give advice and reducing the minimum amounts clients can hold in their brokerage accounts, all in preparation for a new rule governing how they advise retirement savers.

Some advisers are even job hunting, worried that the rules impending introduction could slash their compensation.

The U.S. Department of Labor is expected to publish the so-called fiduciary standard in the next few weeks. It requires wealth managers to put the interests of retirement savers ahead of their own.

Supporters of the new rule, such as consumer groups and retiree advocates, say it will promote transparency and protect investors from being sold unnecessary financial products that increase commissions for brokers and create conflicts of interest. The wealth management industry has opposed the proposal for years, arguing it will drive up costs, curb commissions and ultimately hurt customers because firms could abandon clients with smaller, less lucrative accounts.

But after five years of fighting, the industry has accepted that the end is in sight.

Were working down two paths  advocacy to keep fixing the rule as much as we can and helping members comply, said Scott Puritz, managing director at Rebalance IRA, a wealth management firm that offers low-cost IRA portfolio management.

If firms are paying attention, theyve set up internal DOL task forces that are inventorying clients and preparing for the rule already.

The Labor Department first proposed a new rule in 2010 but withdrew it in 2011 after wide criticism from industry officials and lawmakers.

A modified version was presented in 2015 with the goal of protecting retirees from buying unnecessary products that line brokers pockets with fees and commissions.

We have been committed to making changes and improvements based on public comment and feedback, but cannot say to what extent the final rule will differ from the proposal, a Labor Department spokesperson told Reuters.

The agency reviewed comment letters and live testimony from industry officials in support of and against the rule. In January, the revised proposal was sent to the White Houses Office of Management and Budget.

Ahead of the rules introduction, some firms are trying to a avoid losing accounts by cutting fees and reducing the minimum balance that clients need to have.

While some opponents have said the rule will force them to abandon clients with small accounts, others are opting to adjust their account offerings and include lower-cost, fee-based accounts.

St. Louis-based Edward Jones is piloting low-cost accounts and charging an annual fee for clients with a minimum of $5,000. Normally, customers have to have $50,000 in a fee-based account.

LPL Financial Holdings said it would allow clients to maintain less money in their brokerage accounts and cut fees in preparation for the rule.

LAST STRAW?

Small wealth management firms are expected to take the biggest hit after the rule goes into effect because they have fewer resources to pay for extra paperwork, training and new technology needed to comply.

As firms redirect resources to ensure they are compliant, some advisers worried about lower commissions and compensation have begun to ask recruiters about new opportunities.

The rule isnt the sole reason people are ready to move, but in every conversation we have, it is discussed because advisers will be impacted, said Louis Diamond, vice president of Diamond Consultants, a New Jersey-based recruiting firm.

For advisers who are already unhappy, the rule could be the straw that breaks the camels back.

While traditional financial advisers have fought the rule, automated or robo and other digital advisers have largely spoken in support of it, arguing that digital platforms are more transparent, affordable and lacking in conflicts of interest.

Traditional firms are developing robo advisers and for less well-off clients, robo-advice could be more affordable.

People will go to robo-advisers when broker-dealers stop taking on smaller accounts, said Bao Nguyen, director of risk advisory services at the Kaufman Rossin Group, a Miami-based accounting firm.

As proposed last year, the rule gave firms eight months to become compliant, a time frame both supporters and opponents agreed was too short.

We proposed an 18-month time-frame, said David Blass, general council for the Investment Company Institute. Thats the minimum for what it takes to change disclosure process, change compensation practices and train employees.
Benton Park Prints

Designer/owner  Daniel Jones

Age  32

Home  Lindenwood Park

Family  Kristen, married in September; two cats, Spooky and Mr. Waffles (dubbed head of shipping because he sleeps on printer); a golden retriever, Lilly

What he makes  Typography prints and city skyline silhouettes for home decor, but he comes from a T-shirt-making background. I planned to make more T-shirts out of the prints, but everything else takes up so much more of my time.

Where to buy  Check out the online shop, etsy.com/shop/BentonParkPrints; or visit Local Lucys, 18 East Main Street, Belleville; and some T-shirts and prints are available at the Missouri History Museum gift shop. Prices range from $14 to $80 for 8-by-10-inch to giant poster prints, respectively.

Powered by bacon  Jones, an Illinois State University graduate, has been doing web design work for nearly a decade. Hes worked with local small businesses, music bands and corporate sites, but one day I was like, I need to start doing something fun, and I just wanted to do it for myself. So I started with bacon prints in 2012. And apparently, he tapped an untapped bacon print demand. It was featured in national magazines, Within two months, the Food Network asked if they could use them, and it just took off like crazy. He sold a few hundred prints. One of the prints proclaims Bacon is duct tape for the kitchen and another features images of a chicken, cow and pig with the words Wings, Steak, Bacon. Jones still produces more than a dozen bacon-themed prints.

Didnt I see that?  Since the bacon-print bonanza, some other prints have been licensed by a company doing props for television shows in Canada, a cooking show in Europe, as well as the Barnes and Noble bookstores where you might find a simple print of a vinyl record on the wall near the music collection.

Australians prefer beer  Jones said that before shipping charges changed, he sent a lot of his beer and food prints to Australia. His prints have gone to 40 countries, but Australians really preferred the beer prints, he said. It did seem a little weird, I mean, youd think thered be a few closer printers between here and Australia, but its so easy to order online, and I guess they liked my prints. A lot of my prints for kitchen items like spoons, knives and forks go overseas.

No delusions of grandeur  Honestly, I didnt know if anyone would buy a print, but I really like making them, so Im grateful. When I started, Id make four or five designs a day and then wonder if anyone would buy them. He said that if items dont sell after a few months, he removes them from his shop. Its still a guessing game. I mean, some prints that Im sure will sell just dont and others that Im convinced will be a dud are popular. Hes currently sitting on a stack of prints of winter snow prints with a holiday greeting that he made three years ago. He sold one.

You should make   When youre in the business of making pithy prints and posters for home decor, your friends and loved ones will inundate you with suggestions. His wife persuaded him to make a print called Home is where the pants arent with an image of pants (presumably, recently vacated) on the print. I thought no one is going to buy that, and its been one of the more successful prints, he said with a little lament that he has to endure a fair amount of I told you so. His mom and dad are frequent idea contributors as well with varying degrees of viability. Dad suggested a bathroom print of how to properly hang toilet paper. His brother suggested a popular print, Im MO and youre OK, but oddly everyone who bought it is in Oklahoma, not Missouri.

Just ask  The beauty of having his own business and having a small shop to tinker in himself is that customizations are a specialty. He can print a neighborhood map, cityscape, state grid or U.S. map with a heart over a treasured location. He can add names and dates. Request your favorite cityscape or destination and Jones will compose it. Have a suggestion for a print that you think is brilliant, and hell bring it to life. And all of the designs can be rendered on T-shirts, just ask. Prints are also available in 40 colors and six sizes.
UPDATED at 10:45 a.m. Sunday

BRIDGETON  Police Sunday morning lifted the "endangered person" advisory for a mentally disabled man missing since his discharge last month from DePaul Hospital.

Bridgeton authorities announced shortly after 9:30 a.m. that the man, 57, had been "located and is safe."

Further details were unavailable.

His family had not seen him since he left DePaul Hospital on March 17.

The family was concerned that the man, diagnosed with schizophrenia, might have disappeared without his medication.

Alerts have been issued before for some patients after they left the hospital. In January, when overnight temperatures dropped to about 7 degrees, a homeless man could not be found after he was discharged just before midnight.

Stanley Higgins Jr., then 25, who police said suffered from memory loss and seizures, left the hospital on foot. He was found the next night, but family members were upset they weren't contacted about his release. A hospital spokeswoman at the time could not discuss specifics, but said the hospital offers shelter after people are discharged.

In December, a man found dead in a drainage ditch was identified as a patient who had walked away from DePaul against medical advice in October. That man, Remy Anthony Gooldy, 54, had been treated for worsening dementia and a recent stroke.

Denise Hollinshed of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
MEMBERS of a book group in Stratford-upon-Avon will be taking part in the 10km Spring Wolf Run, on Sunday 10th April, to raise money for Histiocytosis UK.

Six-year-old Archie Parsons, from Stratford, was diagnosed with Neuro Degenerative Langherans Cell Histiocytosis, in November. He is currently having chemotherapy for the second time in his life.

Histiocytosis is an umbrella term for a group of incredibly rare and devastating diseases.

Archies parents Rosie Parsons, who is a founder member of Books By The Bottle, and Steve Parsons, are among a team of book group members and friends taking part in the woods, obstacles, lakes and fields event, at Welsh Road Farm, near Leamington.

More than 1,300 has already been donated through their Justgiving page, almost tripling their original 500 fundraising target.

Among the familys supporters, are Noahs Ark Toddlers Group, who meet at Bishopton Community Centre, on Tuesday mornings during term time.

Parents, grandparents and childminders who attend the group raised 87.44 through a raffle and cake sale, organised by toddler group leader Sally Thomas.

To make a donation visit www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Books-By-The-Bottle-and-Friends

Meanwhile, Stratford Riding for the Disabled Group has taken the reins and will be the official charity partner for the Wolf Run, which is held on both the Saturday and Sunday next weekend.

Wolf Run organiser and director, Charlie Moreton said: We are delighted to partner with a local group of Riding for the Disabled Association for the inaugural Wolf Run of 2016.

"The work they do locally is incredibly important and we hope that our involvement will boost their profile as well as raise money for this worthy cause. We are very proud to support our charity partnerships.

Since 2011, the Wolf Run has raised and donated tens of thousands of pounds to a host of UK charities, including Myton Hospice and the Royal Marsden Hospital.

Wolf Run participants have raised money and awareness for more than 2,000 charities.
Graham Ruscoe and Derek Warren

Fly Welle Ltd is a small flying club at Wellesbourne Airfield with a focus on dispelling the myth that flying is just the preserve of the wealthy.

The 18-member club has one aircraft and aims to cater for aviators from all walks of life.

Ex-commercial pilots and amateurs are members of the non-for-profit club, which maintains links with many other airfields across the British Isles including in Jersey and Ireland.

The group also supports Project Propeller, a scheme which provides air transportation for Second World War RAF veterans for special events across the country.

Graham Ruscoe, Director at Fly Welle, said: It is not just rich people who are able to fly aircraft, I work 60 hours a week and I run this as a side line really. We are a flying club for like-minded aviators no matter what their income.

We are one of the tenants of the airfield and as one of the tenants we have rights here. I actually live near Wolverhampton so my closest airfield is up there, but I come to Wellesbourne because it is one of the best general aviation airfields in the UK. If the worst happened and the airfield had to close Wolverhampton might be able to accommodate us but it would take the life and soul out of what we do. There would probably be other restrictions too and it would be hard for us to continue our involvement with the Air Corps.

I came to Wellesbourne in 1988 when it was little more than a hole through a hedge, with few buildings here. I came because I was learning to fly and when my instructor moved to Wellesbourne, I came too and Ive never looked back, its like my second home.

We understand the airfield owners point of view, but so many pilots stationed at Wellesbourne lost their lives in the Second World War, it would be a tragedy if all we were to end up with at Wellesbourne was a concrete plaque saying this was the site of Wellesbounre Airfield.  We need to continue that living history here by maintaining it as a working airfield.

Derek Warren, a member of Fly Welle, added: I think its great that we take part in project propeller and are able to take veterans to these group events that they otherwise wouldnt be able to make it to.

There are other good airfields around dont get me wrong, but Wellesbourne is just special, when I was looking at which airfield to fly from it was a real no-brainer to choose Wellesbourne.
WASHINGTON, April 2, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has donated $10 million to establish a specialized center to combat nuclear terrorism at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna, Austria. Saudi Arabia has also donated $570,000 for the project to modernize the IAEA laboratories in Seibersdorf, Austria.

This announcement was made yesterday by Dr. Hashim Abdullah Yamani, President of King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy and head of the Saudi delegation to the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.

Dr. Yamani said Saudi Arabia was one of the first countries that supported international resolutions related to nuclear security. He said the Kingdom has ratified the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and supports the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism as a party to the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.

Dr. Yamani reiterated Saudi Arabia's commitment to international activities in the field of nuclear security, citing the Kingdom's support for the establishment of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Center in 2011. Saudi Arabia pledged $10 million to the U.N. to establish the Center in 2008. In 2014, Saudi Arabia donated $100 million to the Center to build its capabilities and effectiveness in helping countries combat terrorism.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/saudi-arabia-donates-10-million-to-fight-nuclear-terrorism-300245172.html

SOURCE Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, Information Office
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Burundi accepts the United Nations security council's resolution to send in police, the foreign affairs minister told Reuters on Saturday, after months of political tension.

The 15-member council unanimously adopted on Friday a French-drafted resolution asking U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to offer options for a police deployment to Burundi, where violence threatens to spiral into ethnic conflict.

President Pierre Nkurunziza said last April he would seek a third term, which his opponents said was illegal. Since then, at least 439 people have been killed and more than 250,000 have fled.

"This U.N. resolution is fine for us since it takes into account everything we have been saying," Alain Nyamitwe, Burundi's foreign minister, told Reuters.

"We have always been open to experts but never to sending of peacekeeping troops in Burundi," he said, adding "a few" U.N. police could help stabilize the country.

But Leonce Ngendakumana, chairman of the opposition FRODEBU party, criticized the resolution for failing to call for the deployment of peacekeepers.

"That U.N. resolution brings nothings to us," he told Reuters. "We don't want U.N. police but U.N. peacekeepers who would prevent Burundi from sliding into another civil war."

The opposition wants the peacekeepers to be deployed to disarm the different armed groups including the militia allied to the ruling CNDD FDD party, known as "Imbonerakure", Ngendakumana said.

"We need forces capable of restoring our army," he said, citing last month's assassination of a senior army officer and rising cases of desertion by troops.

Tom Malinowski, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, accused the government of going back on its commitment to resolve the crisis through dialogue.

"Denouncing everybody from the Catholic church, to the media... to foreign countries as enemies of the people of Burundi is not going to get us to a successful dialogue," Malinowski told a news conference in Bujumbura.

(Writing by Duncan Miriri; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - Two guards were killed in an attempted attack on an oil field in eastern Libya by suspected Islamic State militants on Saturday, a guards spokesman said.

Ali al-Hassi said guards had repelled the attack on Bayda field, about 250 km (155 miles) south of the major oil terminals of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf. A security official from the nearby town of Maradah said the militants were in a convoy of about 10 vehicles.

Militants loyal to Islamic State have carried out repeated attacks in the area, but have not taken control of any oil facilities.

(Reporting by Ayman al-Warfalli; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Andrew Roche)
LAGOS (Reuters) - Nigeria's state oil company has offered to talk to an international watchdog that says it failed to hand over billions of dollars in oil revenues despite government promises to tackle mismanagement and corruption.

President Muhammadu Buhari last year fired senior staff at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and approved a revamp of its structure last month.

But in a report published this week, the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) said NNPC withheld around two thirds of the $6.3 billion of oil proceeds in the second half of 2015.

NRGI said that was an increase of 12 percent from the proportion kept under the administration led by Buhari's predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, in 2013 and 2014.

The NNPC has previously said such accusations failed to account for its costs.

The oil sector in Nigeria, Africa's top crude producer, accounts for about 70 percent of national income.

The constitution requires NNPC to hand over its oil revenue and money is then paid back based on a budget approved by parliament. But the act establishing the company allows it to cover costs before remitting funds to the government.

On Friday NRGI posted a statement on its website in which it said NNPC had offered to hold talks.

"NNPC has invited NRGI to meetings where NNPC will clarify its position. NRGI appreciates NNPC's open doors and willingness to engage, and will post further updates based on these discussions," it said.

NNPC posted the text of the statement on its Twitter feed but a spokesman could not immediately be reached to confirm the details or say when the meetings would take place.

Last month, Nigeria's auditor-general and the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission both said NNPC failed to remit billions of dollars to the public purse during the Jonathan era.

The NRGI report said that until there are agreed rules governing how much money NNPC can keep, and how it must spend the money, it will continue to "leak" out of the system.

"NNPC spending on this scale raises questions about fiscal responsibility, especially at a time when public finances are stretched and the federal government is looking to fund more of its budget with debt," the report said.

NRGI praised Buhari's work to reform oil sales, notably efforts to cut out "passive, well-connected middlemen", and reforms of crude for oil product swap deals that have been replaced with revised agreements directly with oil refineries.

(Reporting by Libby George, in London, and Alexis Akwagyiram, in Lagos)
Riad Hijab, chief coordinator of the main Western-backed Syrian opposition, attends a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, February 14, 2016. REUTERS/Michael Dalder

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian opposition is not optimistic about upcoming peace talks in Geneva because there is no international will for a political transition, opposition member Riad Hijab told Al Araby Al Jadid television late on Friday.

The Syrian opposition has consistently said that it wants a halt in attacks on civilians and for the Geneva talks to result in a transitional governing body for Syria that does not include President Bashar al-Assad.

"There is no international will, especially from the U.S. side, and I do not expect anything to come of the negotiations," said Hijab, the coordinator for the Saudi-backed Higher Negotiation Committee (HNC), the main opposition bloc.

The HNC will attend the next round of talks, scheduled to start around April 9 in Geneva, Hijab said, but "I will be clear to our people: we have no optimism concerning the negotiations process."

Assad has said he thinks the Geneva talks can produce a new Syrian government that includes opposition, independents and loyalists, but has explicitly rejected the idea of a transitional authority.

Russia and the United States disagree on Assad's future but have jointly pressed the Syrian government and the opposition to attend the indirect peace talks in Geneva, which are being mediated by a United Nations envoy.

"We are not afraid of the U.S.-Russian rapprochement," Hijab said. "But we fear the secrecy, the lack of clarity and lack of transparency.

"We do not know what has been agreed ... what is happening in Syria is a proxy war."

A fragile "cessation of hostilities" truce has held in Syria for over a month between government forces and their opponents. The truce excludes Islamic State and al Qaeda's Nusra Front.

Air and land attacks by Syrian and allied forces continue in parts of Syria where the government says Islamic State and Nusra Front are present.

Syrian government forces with Russian air support took back the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra last weekend from Islamic State militants who captured it last May.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington in Beirut and Ali Abdelatti in Cairo, editing by Larry King.)
A drug company is being accused of taking advantage of vulnerable people after marketing pain relief medications with identical ingredients as different products - and charging extra for one of them.

Voltaren Emulgel is marketed as a pain reliever for muscle inflammation, such as sport injuries. Another product, Voltaren Osteo Gel is being marketed as pain relief specifically for people with osteoarthritis.

Both products, marketed by UK pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), contain identical ingredients in the same quantities.

SUPPLIED Voltaren Osteo Gel costs almost 20 per cent more than Voltaren Emulgel, despite having identical ingredients.

But the Osteo Gel costs nearly 20 per cent more than Emulgel - amounting to an extra cost of more than $8 per 100g.

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GSK acknowledged the products have an identical formulation, but said the Osteo Gel had a specific cap which made it easier to open.

"We believe this provides an additional benefit for osteoarthritis suffers who can experience difficulty and pain opening products. The difference in the cap impacts the price of the product," a spokeswoman said.

The products also had different usage instructions - Osteo Gel recommends use over a three week period, compared to two weeks for Emulgel.

But Christchurch nurse Rebecca Crowe said she did not believe the extra cost for a different cap was justified.

Crowe, who has had chronic arthritis since she was 12 noticed the products were the same on a recent visit to the pharmacy, however she was encouraged to buy the Osteo Gel.

"Because it's got a different name, it seems like a different product," she said.

"I don't think it's fair. It's definitely not worth it."

Arthritis New Zealand chief executive Sandra Kirby described the cost difference as "exorbitant," and said the minor differences did not justify the additional cost.

"We know people are prepared to pay a premium for accessibility, but we think this is over the top," she said.

"I would want to know the cap actually cost all of that, and there was no cheaper option - I find it difficult to believe, as it's not our experience from other international accessibility measures that the cost differences are that great."

She said there were few equivalent over-the-counter pain relief products for arthritics.

The price differential has drawn comparisons to a case last year, in which an Australian court ordered several variants of painkiller Nurofen be withdrawn after they were found to be identical.

They were being marketed for different types of pain, despite being the same product. The court deemed the tactic to be misleading.

Sue Chetwin, of consumer advocacy group Consumer NZ, said there were parallels between the cases, and it was a practice she was concerned about.

"It's the same as the Nurofen situation, where these things have the same ingredients but are supposably for treating different ailments," she said.

"We think it raises the same issues."

She said GSK was clearly targeting vulnerable users, and the Commerce Commission should investigate.

A Commerce Commission spokeswoman said it had been made aware of the products.

"We are making enquiries about a number of products that appear to have the same active ingredient but are being marketed differently. We are unable to comment further at this time."

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Tricia Phillips cared for the animals of a wealthy Canterbury man for year, but was suddenly cut out of his will.

Mike and Charmaine Smith loved animals so much, every year they would throw a birthday party  complete with cake  for their pet pig, Charlotte.

They had no children and Charmaine had a terminal lung disease, so their animals  dogs, cats, geese, 120 sheep  provided great comfort.

So much so that in 2011, Mike went to the offices of Russell Moon and Fail in Ashburton and signed a will gifting $50,000 to the SPCA to care for the animals after his death.



"None of the animals are to be put down or slaughtered ... the funds are to ensure they are looked after until good homes are found," the will stated, adding that he didn't want his dogs to be separated "and my geese are to be donated to a wildlife reserve".



The rest of his estate  he'd been director and shareholder of his family firm Smith Seeds  was to go to various charities, including the World Wildlife Fund, Red Cross, World Vision and Salvation Army.



Charmaine died in May 2014, aged 46, having battled the chronic lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans most of her adult life. She and Mike had been married 28 years.







Charmaine Smith was in a wheelchair towards the end of her life.



Mike had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer  he hadn't smoked  at the end of 2012.



On April 22 last year he returned to his lawyers  just a day before flying to Mexico in a desperate last bid to prolong his life with Vitamin C treatment  and signed a new will, much different to the last. It made no mention of animals or charities.



Instead, the sole beneficiary was his new wife, Corrine, whom he had met on an internet dating site a few weeks after Charmaine's death.



Other family and friends would inherit his estate but only if Corrine died before him.

Iain McGregor Tricia Phillips is challenging the will of her friend Mike Smith, after everything was left to a woman he'd only recently married.

Six weeks after signing the new will Mike died, aged 53.

THE PET SITTER

Tricia Phillips, 60, met Mike and Charmaine in 2001, when she answered their ad for a house and pet sitter. "We were so much alike with our love of animals. Probably for some people it was a bit crazy, because we were pretty over the top," says Phillips, an IHC carer.



She would housesit for the couple at their 5-hectare spread near Ashburton while they travelled overseas, taking time off work to care for the animals.



In 2013 the couple bought a new property near Rolleston, Christchurch, to be closer to medical treatment.



The couple invited Phillips to join them and she lived in a separate flat on the property, continuing to care for the animals and the couple as their health deteriorated.



"It was really a case of who was gonna [die] first."



Shortly after Charmaine's death, Phillips says, Mike told her he'd started talking to women on internet dating sites.



"It seemed totally out of character for Mike, he was so devoted to Charmaine, and he knew he was dying."

Iain McGregor Corrine Hanna, now Smith, married a terminally ill Mike Smith last year.

One of the women he met was Corrine Hanna, an administrator at AgResearch in Hamilton. After a while she flew down to visit Mike at the Rolleston property.

Property records show that in February last year Mike bought a property near Te Awamutu for $520,000, which Corrine's parents moved into.

The following month, Mike and Corrine were married in Waikato.

Staff photographer Phillips and the Smiths shared a love of animals. Here she is pictured with an alpaca at her rented Canterbury property.

Phillips says when Mike was first diagnosed with cancer in 2012 he was given only about a year to live. "It was already in his bones."

But he was still alive in April, 2015 and emailed Russell Moon and Fail estates manager Bruce Day saying he was travelling overseas and had better sign a new will.

Phillips believes the Mexican trip was a waste of time  that Mike was in the final stages of his life.



"Mike got this idea that juices ... and vitamin C treatments might cure him, but by that time he was critically ill."







Mike and Charmaine when they first got together.



FATE OF THE SHEEP



According to Phillips, the day Mike and Corrine flew to Mexico, Mike came to her with some big news  he was leaving the Ashburton property where they had first lived, valued at $820,000, and its contents to her.



"He told me I never had to worry again because that was a home for myself, my pets and his pets."



Phillips says she was stunned by Mike's generosity. "I was overcome and hugged him."



She emailed him after he left: "I can't believe that you would do that for me and the pets. I have been worried about where I would go ... as I've always said I would have to live in the car with the dogs etc as I couldn't ever part with them."

Iain McGregor One of Mike's geese at his Ashburton property, which is vacant and become overgrown.

Mike wrote back asking after his animals, saying he hoped to come home in "better shape than when I left" and saying he missed Phillips, his "special friend".

The couple stayed in Mexico for about a month but the treatment was unsuccessful.

The day after he returned to Christchurch, Mike was admitted to hospital and died a few days later. A picture taken at the funeral home shows his beloved "girls" - 13-year-old dogs Shiloh and Rocket, snuggling in the coffin.

Staff photographer The property at Rolleston near Christchurch is now for sale.

According to Phillips, Corrine and Mike's father, Ross, organised for a truck to come and pick up the sheep and for the other animals to be sent to various new homes. The contents of the Ashburton property were cleared out and items put on TradeMe, she says.

"They were going to take the sheep to slaughter. I said 'No, Mike and I had talked about it in the hospital and they'd be coming to [Ashburton] with me. Corrine said 'No, Ashburton's being leased out'."

In a text message to Phillips around this time, Ross Smith wrote: "Don't bother with the sheep. We will look after them and arrange their departure. They are part of the estate and will be found a new home. No reply [to this message] will change the situation."

Phillips insists the sheep were being sent to the works and says she launched a desperate plea on Facebook. "A woman from an animal rescue place contacted me and said she would take them. I was so happy."

Mike Smith died of cancer aged just 53.

After Mike's funeral Corrine gave Phillips the bad news  under the terms of the will, the Ashburton property would only have gone to her if Corrine had died first.

"I was shocked, that's not what Mike told me," Phillips says.

The will appointed Corrine and Ross Smith executors and trustees. The estate was substantial, although mostly tied up in the Ashburton, Rolleston and Waikato properties. Together they were valued at $2.33m, with mortgages totalling $655,000.

Mike also left $77,000 in cash and shares.

Phillips was served with court papers ordering her to leave the Rolleston property.

She has instructed a lawyer to investigate whether she can make a claim against the estate on the grounds of testamentary promise. A private investigator has been hired.

Approached at the Rolleston property, which is now on the market, Corrine said she had no comment and referred questions to Day.

Bruce Day said Corrine regarded it as a private matter to be kept confidential. "The estate does not accept that there was any testamentary promise made," he said.

He did not respond to questions about Mike's new will.

Ross Smith believes Phillips has done "damage" with her actions. "It's just been chaotic. She's done everything she could to create problems. We had to have her evicted. I don't know how many dogs she had in that place  we've had to re-do carpets."

He says Corrine and his son were in love. "She took him to Mexico. It didn't work but it gave him some additional time with Corrine  she was magic in looking after him."

Charmaine's brother, Paul Hammond, indicated he was not happy with the way things had played out but declined to comment, as did Mike's brother and fellow Smith Seed director Grant.

Sheryl Cooke, who sold the Rolleston place to Mike, says he told her he was renovating the flat on the property especially for Phillips, his wife's caregiver and companion. "He said there would always be a house for her."

Phillips says she is not motivated by the property or money. "I'm a very independent person, I look after myself."

She says Corrine and Ross Smith have tried to claim that she wasn't close to Mike and Charmaine, pointing out that she doesn't appear in photos and didn't attend family functions. That's because she preferred to stay in the background and look after the property while they were socialising or travelling, Phillips says.

Charmaine told her on her deathbed that their fortune was to go to charity and animal organisations, Phillips says, and she's contesting the will in her friend's memory.

"She trusted Mike to do what they had decided. She would be absolutely horrified and devastated."
Stephen Wells suffered terribly from arthritis until he started taking the drug Arthrem. Since then he's toured the world on his motorbike and got back into work.

Pakistan. Kazakhstan. The Isle of Man.

These are some of the exotic locations Auckland engineer Stephen Wells always dreamed of visiting, but knew he would never be able to while suffering from debilitating arthritis.

Wells, 50, had suffered unbearable pain for years after injuring his back at work, and could only get by with the help of painkillers.

CHRIS SKELTON / FAIRFAX MEDIA Arthrem, produced by a New Zealand company, is a herbal remedy based on Chinese medicine.

Not liking the side-affects, Wells decided to try a herbal remedy he heard about two years ago.

"I was listening to the radio one day and they were talking about this product so I thought I'd give it ago."

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123rf.com More than half a million New Zealanders will be affected by arthritis in their life.

That product, Arthrem, is made from an extract of the plant Artemisia annua and produced by New Zealand company Promisia.

Within a week of taking Arthrem Wells claims he was feeling like a new man.

He went back to work and last year flew to Wales to begin a 27,000 kilometre motorcycle trip across the planet.

"It's enabled me to continue doing the things I enjoy doing, enabled me to continue being useful, stay in the workforce."

User recommendations such as Wells' have now been backed up by a clinical trial at Otago University's School of Medicine.

Funded by Promisia, the independent 12-week study was conducted by associate professor Simon Stebbings, who said it had been a long-standing aspiration to find a herbal extract that could prove effective in relieving osteoarthritis symptoms.

While the extract used in Arthrem was taken from Tanzania, Stebbings said the Artemisia annua plant had been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years.

It had also been shown to have powerful anti-malaria properties and was used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War for that purpose.

Despite its long use in China it had not been popular in Western medicine, but the trial had produced positive results.

"I was surprised because I've tried a number of different medicines [that did not work]...so when the results came through I was very pleasantly surprised."

Hopefully further large scale studies would be undertaken to build on the initial evidence, he said.

Promisia chief executive Charlie Daily said the company received anecdotal evidence from its customers about Arthrem's success, but it was nice to have scientific proof.

Following the results the company was planning to invest significantly in marketing Arthrem in the United States.
Davey McCavitt of Common Ground performs some B-Boy in 2014.

A talented chef and champion break-dancer is in hospital with serious injuries after crashing his car into a tree in Banks Peninsula.

David McCavitt, 31, was flown to Christchurch Hospital after the crash on Charteris Bay Rd, between Charteris Bay and Governors Bay, about 3am on Saturday.

Police said he lost control on a bend and smashed into a tree. The vehicle's engine was catapulted about 10 metres into a nearby paddock.

John Kirk-Anderson The scene on Charteris Bay Road after a car hit a tree. The male driver was flown to Christchurch hospital with serious injuries.

About 24 hours later, a man died in a similar crash in North Canterbury.

READ MORE:

* Police probe Banks Peninsula crash

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SUPPLIED McCavitt, pictured in 2007, is head chef at Preserved Eatery and Cooking School in Diamond Harbour.

McCavitt is head chef at Preserved Eatery and Cooking School in Diamond Harbour. He worked on Friday, attended an after-work function and crashed on his way home, Stuff understands.

Co-owner Anna Mahy did not want to discuss the events of Saturday morning, but said they closed early on Sunday to allow staff to visit McCavitt in hospital.

JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON The car's engine was thrown 10 metres across the road, ending up in nearby paddock.

"The hardest part of work today was that we all really miss him," she said.

"He is a really valued member of the team, and also such a warm lovely guy."

McCavitt dances with Christchurch-based crew "Common Ground", who won a world title at the Las Vegas Hip-hop International Dance Championships in 2010.

He travelled to Korea in September 2015 for the R16 World Final, dancing with an Australian team.

There has been an outpouring of support for McCavitt from friends online.

The police serious crash unit was investigating. A hospital spokeswoman said McCavitt's condition was serious but stable.

Police were called to the second crash, in North Canterbury, about 2.30am on Sunday.

That driver was the only one in the car when it left State Highway 1 near the Conway River, north of Cheviot.

The impact caused "significant damage" to the northbound vehicle, police said.

"He had gone off the road into some pine trees and bounced back towards the road," Cheviot Volunteer Fire Brigade's chief fire officer Grant Burnett said.

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Global tea promotion to kick off in October By Sunimalee Dias View(s): View(s):

Sri Lankas long overdue global promotional campaign for tea will kick-start this October at a cost of over Rs.5 billion to be spent on television and digital media advertising for the next two years. Sri Lanka Tea Board (SLTB) Chairman Rohan Pethiyagoda told the Business Times that they would market Ceylon Tea as a brand that would be strengthened worldwide. In this regard, the industry is still working on identifying areas within the seven regions in the world to market Ceylon Tea. Ceylon Tea will enter new markets in Western Europe like Germany, which buys higher value tea, and China that has been growing by 30 per cent as part of the massive promotional drive for the next two years. Sri Lanka is currently facing adverse choices from the markets it sells to like Turkey, Russia and Iran due to their own tight economic situations.

In the wake of these developments and bowing to industry demands blending of teas in Sri Lanka will be permitted as long as it is different from the local teas, he said. On the issue of tea imports for blending which has stirred a lot of debate, Mr. Pethiyagoda noted that they would not completely open the door for blending of teas. On the other hand, the concept of blending with imports will happen based on the condition that it must be different from Sri Lanka tea. In this regard, he explained that the Tea Commissioner would be asked to analyse the teas brought into the country for blending to certify that this variety was not produced in the country. However, once blended with the Sri Lanka tea it would not be allowed to be marketed as Ceylon Tea either, Mr. Pethiyagoda said.
Sri Lanka seeks US$3 bln in bond investments to tackle debt crisis View(s):

Sri Lankas Central Bank (CB), amidst an emerging and serious debt crisis, is planning to raise up to US$3 billion through International Sovereign Bonds in the international market this year. In a statement on Tuesday, the CB said the issuances in single or multiple tranches would be in US Dollar and Chinese Renminbi (Panda / Dim Sum) with a fixed coupon and medium to long term maturities where non-resident investors will be eligible to invest at the primary issuance.

It has invited proposals from banks and investment houses for consideration to be appointed as Lead Managers/Book Runners on these issuances with the deadline for entries closing on April 11. Sri Lanka is facing a major debt crisis particularly due to a huge debt left behind by the former Mahinda Rajapaksa-administration while tax revenues are running low in recent times.
Sri Lanka tax enforcement confusion affects business, society By Bandula Sirimanna View(s): View(s):

Sri Lankan taxpayers are becoming increasingly confused with the lack of clarity in the implementation of tax proposals and subsequent amendments proposed with effect from January 1 this year. Drama and confusion continues to plague policy-making decisions governing Sri Lankas economy with the latest being an Inland Revenue Department (IRD) circular relating to the revision of income tax proposals made in 2016 budget removed hours before its implementation on Thursday. This development was exclusively reported on www.sundaytimes.lk. The IRD withdrew the March 28 circular on the implementation of the revised income tax proposals in the budget in accordance with the cabinet decision on March 4 without giving reasons. It was also removed from the IRD website.

According to this circular, income tax rates on sectors other than banking and financial services, insurance, liquor, tobacco, lottery, betting and gaming have been increased to 17.5 per cent from 15 per cent with effect from January 1. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had also proposed to increase statutory income tax to 17.5 per cent and it was endorsed by the cabinet, IRD sources said adding that the reason for withdrawal of the circular may have been the delay in the enactment of a necessary tax amendment bill in parliament. When asked for the reason behind the withdrawal, Commissioner General of Inland Revenue, Kalyani Dahanyake told the Business Times that the implementation was withheld on the directions of the Finance Ministry. She said the present income tax of 15 per cent will remain until further notice.

Government should shed some light on the way forward of its tax plans for this year as several tax and revenue proposals in the budget and post-budget phase are yet to be given legal status and is thus causing confusion, an eminent tax consultant who wished to remain anonymous said. Meanwhile the deadline on the implementation of new revisions introduced in the 2016 budget for new company registration, annual licence fees and the payment for the cancellation of registration has been extended on Thursday till June 31. Registrar General of Companies D.N.R. Siriwardena told the Business Times that the Treasury has directed the Department of Registrar of Companies in a letter on Wednesday stating that the deadline for these company payments which expired on Thursday, March 31 has been extended by three months.

He noted that the number of new registrations is around 40 per day (over the past few months) and his staff has been rushed to finalize the surge of various applications that were presented by the public who were eager to beat the deadline. However he noted that the implementation of the 2016 budget proposal relating to the voluntary cancellation of business registration by paying a penalty of Rs. 250,000 will be time consuming as the department has to consider the affidavits of such companies case by case and refer it to the IRD to verify tax liabilities. According to the Section 394 of the Companies Act, there is an obligation on the side of the Registrar of Companies to send a letter to a defunct company and wait for one month and if there is no reply then publish the name in the government gazette and within a 3-month period take the company out of the register.

He disclosed that around 70,000 private companies have been registered with the department while a large number of firms were not submitting annual reports and other relevant details regularly. In the meantime, Sri Lankas main supermarkets have informed manufacturers of fast moving consumer goods to absorb the 4 per cent VAT increase or raise their prices as it cannot bear the costs. Tax chief Ms Dahanayake said the present VAT rate of 11 per cent will remain as it is, adding that traders and supermarkets cannot charge more from consumer product manufacturers or consumers. Economic experts and tax consultants revealed that amendments made so far to the 2016 budget and the failure to enact amendment bills and issue circulars with guide lines bills are impacting on the countrys economy due to negative impact on 21 revenue proposals prepared by the Treasury to raise estimated revenue of Rs. 223 billion.
The Ides of April and the absence of governance View(s):

Sri Lankans were blithely reassured this week by President Maithripala Sirisena that they need not fear the Ides of March anymore, taking into account the annual critical focus on the country by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

But in truth, this claim is unduly optimistic.

Reducing of the yahapalanaya brand

If the concerns of the Wannis war afflicted are not prioritized in transitional justice initiatives and the end result contemplates superficially attractive packages stamped with the yahapalanaya (good governance) seal, international scrutiny may return, albeit in a different form.

More ominously, disaffection in the North will simmer. This will only allow unscrupulous politicians to take advantage if and when the occasion so presents itself. Our ill-omened history surely teaches us this. The Governments record so far is not reassuring. One recent example is the housing project in the former war theatre caught up in a tug of war for profits between competing political interests and corporate interests. This has left displaced people (the unfortunate would-be occupiers) out in the cold, with the possibility of having to settle for sub-standard housing units.

Matters are no different elsewhere. The destruction of the Wattala jogging track is a clear instance. Government agencies pass responsibility to each other for this wanton destroying of public property while law enforcement authorities are rendered impotent. What has the yahapalanya brand been reduced to? Is the law activated for fraud and corruption only against the Rajapaksas?

Justifying the unjustifiable

If the late Venerable Madulwawe Sobitha had been alive today, he would have been most vociferous in respect of these profound indignities. Unfortunately, those who aspire to wear his mantle are but waxen imitations of this firebrand personality.

Indeed, these pretentious moralists adopting various yahapalanaya labels must be told that their public legitimacy cannot be salvaged by a sanctimonious speech or two in front of television cameras or through proffering excuses for failures in governance. Rather, they must engage in relentless pressure on this Government.

But we see the contrary. In fact, some yahapalanaya activists justify the unjustifiable, such as the recent increase of allowances for parliamentarians at the very same time that the public was asked to accept enhanced taxes. True, this proposal was withdrawn when sanity dawned a trifle late but ruling party politicians do not deserve credit for the withdrawal. Such an astoundingly ill-judged decision should surely never have been made in the first place. Even now, some Ministers trumpet that they deserve these incentives. For what, one may well ask?

Potentially more perilous threats

Meanwhile, familiar March rhetoric on war time accountability has been replaced by potentially perilous threats amounting to a veritable Ides of April. Thus, unannounced power cuts and looming water cuts are accompanied by intimidating new taxes apparently coming into effect from the 1st of the month. The knavishly clever humor customarily attendant on that day surfaced when the Inland Revenue Department withdrew a circular on future tax increases issued the day before with no satisfactory explanation. Yet this was manifestly no April Fools joke. One can only pity public servants who look ludicrous in the public eye due to the ineptitude of politicians.

Now we have been told to expect a host of finance bills before Parliament mid month with no clear idea as to their contents. Worse, if taxes are directed to operate retrospectively, what will be the position of individuals and entities who have taken steps meanwhile in relation to their personal affairs and business deals? Without certainty in tax policy, how can the polity function with any measure of stability? Is this not a basic question that the Government must answer?

To be clear, the point is not only about the worrisome state of Sri Lankas economy. Unsettlingly, this is also about indecisive and secretive government decision-making which makes the pending Right to Information (RTI) law a cruel joke.

A singular absence of clarity

Generally in past years, trepidation over the UNHRC scrutiny in March was tepidly viewed by some as propaganda. Many would have been hard put to identify what the UNHRC does or where it is based. In contrast, the current absence of clarity on the economy with different factions of the Government pulling in different ways has dire immediate attendant consequences.

Other questions remain. Why should ordinary citizens literally pay for the sins of former rulers gone mad? Was it not enough that the people suffered so acutely during the past decade even as the political classes collaborated with each other, notwithstanding their ferocious snarls in public? Further, it was precisely because the (then) opposition did not perform its role properly that the Rajapaksa Presidency plunged Sri Lanka into such a calamitous chasm.

Now the UNP prides and preens itself on being brought into power on a yahapalanaya wave. Suffice it to be said that whilst this wave is fast receding, it was not its stellar performance that topped the Presidency in 2015. Mahinda Rajapaksa accomplished that all by himself, by his colossal arrogance and thirst for absolute power through a racist ideology. On his own part, President Sirisena was supposed to act as a commonsensical restraint on elitist UNP power brokers. But that is far from the case. What is this dark magic of this Executive Presidency which can negatively transform the most pedestrian individual?

The withdrawing syndrome

In sum, incoherence in government cannot be denied any longer. The Inland Revenue Department issues and withdraws circulars. The Ceylon Electricity Board issues and withdraws notifications of power cuts. The Government issues and withdraws Bills. This is not simply a case of a faulty communications strategy or of Rajapaksa saboteurs per se. In addition, there is a significantly growing disconnect within the Government itself as well as between the political leadership and the people.

If these twin disconnects are not properly addressed, airy boasts by the President and the Prime Minister that their alliance cannot be dislodged will count for little. Meanwhile, Rajapaksa rabble rousers wait salivating in the wings rubbing their hands in glee at the formidable Gordian knot now entangling this Government.

Caught between these two patently uninspiring forces, can enlightened Sri Lankans from the North to the South once again summon their revolutionary spirit of one year ago? This is a question anxiously awaiting an answer.
CP Conservationists protest imminent destruction of 8 1/2 acres of Pine View(s):

Hantanne Nature Conservation Society, an umbrella organisation of Environmental groups in the Central Province, yesterday launched a protest campaign against the imminent destruction of an eight-and-a-half acre Pinus plot in Sarasavigama.

They claimed that a Ministerial Secretary had approached the Land Reform Commission for the release of this plot for a housing project.

Section 11 of the Gazette notification of February 17, 2010, states that, When Pinus land is to be cut, it has to be done in blocks and then transplanted with indigenous varieties of trees. The deforested block has to grow to a certain limit before another block of land is cut, and the same procedure adopted.

The meeting was presided by Dr S.Yatigamana of the University of Peradniya.

Speakers alleged that the Central Environment Authority does not take action within specified times, and thereby, more damage is done. They alleged that even the Hantane Reservation Management Committee is looking after the interests of politicians.

They decided that the Kandy Municipal Council and Gangawatta Korale officials be informed of environmental issues as Hantanne Reservation comes within their purview.

They said the green cover should be the concern of everyone, where it should be encouraged to plant material in already diminishing forests around Kandy. Reforestation would cut off fuel emissions, resulting in clean air.

Among those who spoke were Hantane Reservation Society President, Amith Senanayke, veteran environmentalist Pradeep, and a number of Lawyers.
DPL costs slashed, envoys to work from Colombo By Our Diplomatic Correspondent Major step towards Singapore-style restructuring and streamlining of foreign service View(s): View(s):

Sri Lankans are to be named envoys to countries where there is no diplomatic representation now, but they will be required to operate from an office in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Colombo. This is one of the measures the Government will adopt under a re-structuring programme, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera said yesterday.

Those to be named, he told the Sunday Times, hours before leaving for Australia, would be persons with some financial ability. They would operate from an office in the Foreign Ministry and make at least two visits a year to the countries they were accredited to, he said.

Minister Samaraweera said Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was in favour of the proposal. The same practice, he said, was followed in Singapore. For example, its High Commissioner to Sri Lanka is resident in Singapore.

Among the countries to which the Government will give priority consideration will be those in Eastern Europe. Mr. Samaraweera said an ambassador would be named for the Czech Republic. Similarly there would also be an ambassador to the Vatican. At present, the Sri Lanka envoy in Geneva is concurrently accredited to the Vatican.

This new arrangement, Foreign Minister Samaraweera said, would ensure that Sri Lanka had a footprint in all important capitals of the world. This would also obviate the need for the Government to spend millions of rupees in setting up resident missions. The envoys would be competent enough to advise the Government whilst monitoring developments in the respective countries they would be accredited to.

Another measure is the revival of a system that was in practice to investigate complaints or irregularities in Sri Lanka diplomatic missions overseas. Three retired senior officers in the diplomatic service would be selected to serve as inspectors for this purpose. Mr. Samaraweera said this practice had been there in the past and was a procedure followed in most countries.
Photo focus: Courting accidents Story and pix by Anuradha Bandara View(s): View(s):

Accidents on our streets are common and the numbers keep increasing.

Some of these accidents are the result of sheer negligence. Others are caused by reckless drivers or motor cyclists. But yet some others are caused by pedestrians themselves.

Today accidents at pedestrian crossings too are also on the increase. A recent example of this being the case reported last week where a Buddhist monk was killed at the Pannipitiya pedestrian crossing.

Pedestrians using mobile phones as they cross roads, blissfully oblivious of traffic are a common sight these days. Not surprisingly this lack of concentration has contributed to the high incidence of accidents

Our photographer captured a number of these incidents which show how drivers riders and pedestrians collectively flout basic traffic rules and contribute to the growing number of accidents.

However, very unfortunately even local authorities too are responsible for causing road accidents as street lights do not function. Pedestrians have therefore no alternative but to cross busy roads in the dark as is seen in some of the pictures captured by our cameraman.

Traffic policeman Priyadhrshana Perera said, that though police manage traffic during the peak hours, pedestrians and motorists too need to co-operate with the police at all times to maintain th4 smooth flow of traffic.

He added that the use of mobile phones by pedestrians was one of the main problems in managing traffic as people were not concentrating on traffic while walking along the road or while they were crossing the road.
Visiting journalists capture Canons vision From Lakhsman Gunatillake in Japan View(s):

Media personnel from several countries, including Sri Lanka, were given an overview of Canon cameras and other Canon products during a recent tour of Japan.

The journalists visited the Canon Museum at Canon Inc.s Headquarters in Tokyo and saw all the Canon products produced since the companys inception in 1934. Among the exhibits were cameras , CCTVs, printers and devices used by the construction industry.

Masaya Maida, Senior Managing Director and Chief Executive of the Canon Corporation in Japan addressed the visiting journalists and explained the companys mission and the vision. The conference at the Canon headquarters was held in parallel to the Fair CP+CAMERA &PHOTO IMAGING SHOW 2016 in Yokohama. The Metropolitan Photo Hub Institute, the sole agent for Cannon products in Sri Lanka, arranged the Sri Lankan journalists tour following an invitation from the Cannon Company. About 44 % of cameras in the market are produced using the DILC technology and Canon accounts for 24% of the market share in the Digital Compact Cameras category Mr. Maida said.

Another area where Canon has found a niche market is the film industry. Its EOS FULL HD Film Camera and the EOS Cinema System are popular in the film industry.

Besides, the company has been credited with producing the worlds first Dual Pixel Camera and this has given a boost for Canon products in the world market.The company has plans to produce cameras exclusively for Asian countries  cameras which are suitable to capture dangerous situations such as protests and riots with photographers not exposing their expensive cameras to any risk.

The Canon company was earlier known as Seikikogaku Kenkigushow. It began its business by producing spectacles and other visual aids. In 1934 it produced a camera and named it Kwannon. It was the first ever camera with a 35 mm Focal Plane Based Shutter. It was in 1947 that the name of the company was changed to Canon which means Bodhisatwa in Buddhism.

Canons interchangeable-lens digital cameras (digital SLR and compact-system cameras) have maintained the No.1 share worldwide in terms of volume within the interchangeable-lens digital camera market for the 12-year period spanning 2003 to 2014.
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At least 2000 people of all ages took the chance to get up close and personal with the Trustpower TECT Rescue Helicopter at the annual Open Day, held at Tauranga Hospital, where the helicopter is based, on Sunday.

It is held annually to allow our supporters to meet the crew and see the helicopter at close quarter, says marketing and communications manager Vanessa Richmond.

The helicopter in all its glory. Photos: Cameron Avery.

The public normally only see the helicopter high up in the air and getting close up is an eye opener for most.

Other emergency services, such as Land SAR, Coastguard and Fire Service, took part in the Open Day and gave demonstrations of their techniques.

Everyone can get close to all the trucks and equipment and for the kids theres a ride in the wind turbine, says Vanessa.

The traditional face painting, raffles and colouring competition went down well with the younger ones. The day was busiest at lunchtime when the Ulysses motorbike club turned up to share lunch.

The helicopter service for the Bay of Plenty is operated by Philips Search and Rescue Trust, the countrys largest helicopter rescue service.
The job may be done, but its not necessarily dusted.

The Tauranga City Council has decided the new Greerton Library will remain just that  Greerton Library and not Greerton Village Library.
New Zealands dairy farmers are in for another tough financial year but milk prices are expected to improve over the next five years.

Internationally dairy commodity prices are trapped in a prolonged and very deep cycle but there is a glimmer of hope in the medium term Rabobanks dairy specialist Emma Higgins told those attending the Bay of Plenty Federated Farmers Dairy Section meeting at Awakeri.
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Well, it's not presidential politics all the time as you will see in this week's collection of cartoons. Darrin Bell, of the Washington Post Writers Group, shows Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal caught between the devil and an angel. Last week, the governor vetoed HB 757, also known as the "religious liberty" bill (HB 757) that would have allowed churches and pastors to refuse to perform same-sex marriages and religious organizations to fire employees who did not share its beliefs.

Gary Markstein, of Creators Syndicate, addressed North Carolina's passage of a new law, HB2. It's also commonly known as the Charlotte bathroom bill or, more officially, as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act. It denies transgender people who have not taken surgical and legal steps to change the gender on their birth certificates to use public restrooms of the gender with which they identify.

Dana Summers, of Tribune Content Agency, shows President Barack Obama being questioned about keeping America safe. To this, the president responds he intends to allow more refugees to enter the country. Mike Ramirez, of Creators Syndicate, does the math to determine how much of a threat ISIS is to America and sends the message to the president.

Dan Wasserman, of Tribune Content Agency, taps into the issue of the tainted water in Flint, Michigan. He shows schoolchildren in the lunchroom, with PB&J as the featured menu item. However, one of the students realizes PB is also the symbol for lead on the periodic table.

Turning to politics, Lisa Benson, of Washington Post Writers Group, shows Hillary Clinton as a trapeze artist confronted midair by the FBI on an opposite trapeze. Walt Handelsman, of Tribune Content Agency, sees Bernie Sanders as the Energizer "Bernie" Bunny. Chan Lowe, of the Tribune Content Agency, shows a woman, identified as having had an abortion, is in custody at a detention center. She can choose one of two options: waterboarding or watching President Trump's speeches.

Of course, there's more on the presidential politics front, so take a look.
Mideast Israel Palestinians Telecoms

A mural in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Thursday, March 31, 2016. The World Bank says the Palestinian mobile phone sector lost more than $1 billion in potential earnings over the last three years, largely due to Israeli restrictions.

(Nasser Nasser / AP)

To the Editor:

First some long overdue good news:

Thanks largely to the global boycott of corporations doing business in Israel and its illegally occupied Palestinian territories, on March 9 the low-profile, private British security company G4S - with offices in downtown Syracuse -- announced it was selling off its Israeli subsidiary.

Many readers have probably never heard of G4S, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate with 650,000 employees operating in over 120 countries.

G4S specializes in what the Financial Times, with British understatement, describes as "reputationally damaging work" -- in prisons, child detention centers and mercenary armies. This octopus even has security contracts here in Central New York (Bank of America and the Syracuse International Airport).



But other news isn't so good:

The Israeli government and its supporters are lobbying hard across many states here for legislation to suppress the Palestinian civil society led nonviolent campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

In January the New York state Senate passed a bill prohibiting New York state from doing business with companies supporting the BDS movement. The bill, if also passed in the NYS Assembly, would mean the state is developing a black list of businesses and individuals promoting or engaging in BDS activities. The bill would prohibit New York state from contracting with or investing in such businesses and individuals.

Such blacklisting, besides further undermining Palestinian human rights, would help revive the McCarthy era of the 1950s. The Justice for Palestine committee of the Syracuse Peace Council therefore urges our local New York state Assembly people - William Magnarelli and Pam Hunter - to vigorously oppose this malign bill.



Magda Bayoumi, Linda Bergh, Pat Carmeli, Julia Ganson, Dana Seidenberg and Ann Tiffany

for the SPC Justice for Palestine Committee

Syracuse


Syracuse, N.Y.  No. 7 Syracuse men's lacrosse lost its third consecutive game on Saturday as No. 2 Notre Dame won 17-7 in the Carrier Dome.

The loss marked the Orange's first three-game skid since the program went 5-8 in 2007. It was also the first-ever time the Fighting Irish won at SU in 14 games.

Senior attack Matt Kavanagh led the way for UND (7-1), which closed the first half on a 3-0 run to take a 9-4 advantage and never looked back. Kavanagh finished with three goals and six assists while freshman attack Ryder Garnsey (five goals) and sophomore attack Mikey Wynne (four goals) also tallied hat tricks. Junior goalie Shane Doss finished with 10 saves.

Syracuse (5-3) recorded five failed clears and nine total turnovers before the break, only pulling within three when junior midfielder Jordan Evans reeled off his second of three third-quarter goals  a flashy behind-the-head score.

But the Orange could get no closer than that. The defense struggled to get stops while senior goalie Warren Hill finished with just four saves to his 14 goals allowed.

SU returns to action at Hobart (5-4) on Wednesday at 7 p.m. After winning three in a row, the Statesmen lost to Saint Joseph's 13-5 last Saturday.

Contact Stephen Bailey anytime: Email | Twitter
Lefay.jpg

Forty-one-year-old Danielle Lefay, of Endicott, New York, was arraigned Friday in Broome County Court on second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges.

(Broome County Jail)

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- An Upstate New York mother who was under the influence of a mixture of drugs has been charged with causing her 6-month-old daughter's death, authorities say.

Danielle Lefay, 41, of Endicott in Broome County was arraigned Friday in Broome County Court on second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges.

Lefay is accused of suffocating her daughter after rolling on top of the baby while sleeping next to her on an air mattress in January 2015. Investigators said Lefay had taken a mixture of both prescription and non-prescription medications, along with marijuana, before going to sleep that night.

The child was found unresponsive the next morning and taken to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead,

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Lefay is being held on $50,000 cash bail or $100,000 bond.
Dear Judie: Mom is putting off surgery because her friend's husband got an infection in the hospital. I told her hospitals are safer than ever, but she doesn't believe me. How can I calm her fears?

 Jeannie, Stuart

Dear Judie: After his hip replacement, dad spent six months shuttling from hospital to nursing home to rehab until he finally came home. The hospital acknowledged his post-surgery infection by saying, "sorry, but it happens." What gives?

 Fred, Vero Beach

Dear Judie: Mom died in the hospital (Michigan) and now dad refuses to go in for treatment. He says he'd rather die in his own bed. I don't know where to turn.

 Dee, Fort Pierce

Dear readers: The majority of hospital staff are dedicated professionals who provide excellent care for their patients and work hard to avoid errors. However, modern medicine is so complex that many health care professionals recommend having an advocate with you whenever possible. Although millions of patients receive superior care in hospitals every day, data presented in 2014 at a hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging offered statistics noting 10,000 serious medical complications result from medical errors daily in the United States, and more than 1,000 of those errors result in fatalities.

Five basic tips will go a long way to help keep you safer:

1. Expertise counts: look for surgeons and hospitals that have a successful track record for your procedure.

2. Ask your advocate to keep a list of the medications prescribed for you and double check medications you receive against the list.

3. Ask the staff entering your room to wash their hands (regardless of gloves) before treating you and to sanitize their stethoscopes (which can pick up germs from each patient.

4. Ask visitors to wash their hands; be alert to the cleanliness of items in your room like the TV remote. Ask for a replacement for any item that has fallen on the floor.

5. Inform your nurse or the hospital's patient advocate about discrepancies between the treatments you were told to expect and the treatment offered.

Most professionals welcome your involvement; remember, their only goal is to help you get well as soon as possible.
FILE PHOTO In 2006, the St. Lucie County Fire District responded to a report of a house fire on Lucero Drive in Port St. Lucie and found about 50 marijuana plants inside two rooms of the house. .

SHARE FILE PHOTO Luis Montero, left with back to camera, Liseth Pupo, center, and Humberto Quinones, right, were escorted from the home where they were arrested in the 2100 block of Southwest Bayshore Boulevard for allegedly growing marijuana. The home was raided, July 6, 2006 based on information obtained from other grow houses. More than 100 marijuana plant root systems were found in addition to the growing equipment. FILE PHOTO Maegan Richardson, of the Port St. Lucie Police Department's special investigations unit, hauls boxes of marijuana plants out the front door of a grow house in the 600 block of Northwest North Macedo Boulevard in 2006. Police raided the home and found about 100 plants.

By Will Greenlee of TCPalm

BY THE NUMBERS

69 total grow houses (67 in Port St. Lucie, two in Lakewood Park)

85 grow house search warrants

77 arrests

$177,720 seized money

4,000 pounds of marijuana plants

PORT ST. LUCIE ? It was a time when pot plants the size of Christmas trees thrived in some Port St. Lucie homes, a time when millions of dollars of marijuana flowed from a city then known mainly for its fast growth and as the home of New York Mets' spring training complex.

"Unprecedented in Port St. Lucie history."

That's how acting Lt. Todd Schrader of the Port St. Lucie police described the massive marijuana grow house operation uncovered five years ago.

Schrader, then a sergeant, largely led the grow house investigation that also involved several local and federal agencies, including sheriff's offices in St. Lucie and Martin counties and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The busts began in May 2006 after officers dispatched to a report of a man chasing someone with a machete noticed a broken rear sliding door at a house in the 100 block of Southwest Glenwood Drive. Inside, they saw and smelled marijuana.

Paperwork and tips helped lead investigators from house to house over the next several months, ultimately uncovering 69 pot farms, two of which were in Lakewood Park. Authorities arrested 77 suspects.

"It was unfathomable how much money was being taken (in marijuana) ... from Port St. Lucie and being shipped out of state," Schrader said. "I don't think anybody really knows, in its heyday, just how big this was ? and it was big."

After the initial raids, top local law enforcement officials spoke to reporters at the police station surrounded by piles of marijuana plants and packaged pot, electrical equipment, liquid fertilizer, carbon dioxide generators, custom-made circuit breakers, peat moss, computer gear and a cash counter. Investigators even displayed two wood chippers thought to have been used to grind up the plants after the buds were harvested.

According to authorities, one of the main organizers locally ? Manuel Caro ? owned the first grow house police busted and he recruited many people to participate through the New Jersey business for which he worked.

Caro and others offered homeowners ? many Cubans who came from the northeast or were new to the country ? a "relocation" package to Port St. Lucie that arranged for home purchase and 100 percent financing in exchange for committing to grow marijuana for two years, according to officials. After that point, the homeowner could keep growing or agree to sell the home and get 50 percent of the proceeds.

Some growers were recruited through parties in Miami, conducted for newly arrived Cubans, who were told: "This is the way to make easy money."

Schrader said the growing operations exhibited a "whole different level of sophistication" from previously encountered efforts in Port St. Lucie. He recalled one home in particular.

"There was a fake wall ... like an old movie, you had to pull on a bookcase that was against the wall, you had to pull the bookcase out and then you had to duck down and you had to go in," he said.

The specialized lighting used in the growing process was so bright, investigators often donned sunglasses when entering.

"In some of these places it looked like Yankee Stadium," Schrader said.

Drug detectives quickly got skilled in spotting indicators that electricity was being diverted to power the grow operations, which often involved additional air conditioning systems. Schrader said just as detectives learned where growers would divert power, they would switch locations.

Schrader said investigators linked the Port St. Lucie growing operation to South Florida, Highlands County and northeastern portions of the country.

"I don't know why they chose Port St. Lucie other than at the time we were a rapidly growing city," Schrader said. "It was the influx of people from the north and the south ? all came to Port St. Lucie ? we were the melting pot of all the various cultures."

About one month into the grow house probe, investigators said items used in the Santeria religion, such as a life-size statue of a man with a cross around his neck in a seated position, adorned most of the pot farms encountered.

"They put these things up to ward off the police from coming there, to protect them basically from the police," Schrader said at the time.

Shortly after the first grow house was discovered in May 2006, police got a tip a "suspicious" package was being delivered to a home on Northwest Orchid Street.

The homeowner said she didn't know anything about a package, but said her sister was visiting and allowed detectives to speak to her. The sister said she received a package, and detectives found a box containing two shrink-wrapped bundles. Inside was $166,990, much of it in $20 bills, according to court papers.

The woman said it was the third such package she had received and told detectives she had been getting phone calls from a man she knew only as "Luigi" who offered her $5,000 for her help. She would receive packages from UPS and about a half-hour after getting them, Luigi would call to meet her in the parking lot of the St. Lucie West Walmart SuperCenter to pick them up.

"She stated that Luigi told her that he sells marijuana in New Jersey, and the money he gleaned from those sales was what he had delivered to her in Florida," police said in court papers.

Schrader said the growers kept a low profile ? until the machete incident.

"Up until that point in time, they never came on anybody's radar, (not) us, the federal government, the state, the county," he said.

Schrader said he'd seen paperwork indicating the operation had been going on for one to two years prior.

Those responsible sustained big losses as investigators took homes and equipment, Schrader said. Police ran out of storage room to keep the pot and growing items and created two more storage buildings.

"They were making easy money in the city of Port St. Lucie," Schrader said. "And we made it uneasy for them."

Schrader said fewer than 10 Port St. Lucie detectives conducted most of the investigative work, along with Mayor JoAnn Faiella, who at the time was a crime analyst. Still, he emphasized a host of other agencies also played key roles.

Lt. Bill Vega, who's been in a supervisory role in drug investigations since April, said most complaints the police department receives now focus on prescription pills, such as oxycodone and Xanax.

He said two investigators in the unit during the 2006 grow house explosion still are there.

"They know how to break them down. They know what to look for, but bad guys try to skirt and try to do different things to avoid us," Vega said. "But, for the most part, there's not much they can deviate from. There's certain things they use ? electricity and water ? that they have to use so those are the things that are still a staple."He said there's been just one grow house-related bust since April.

Police on Aug. 1 executed a search warrant at a home in the 300 block of Southwest Fairway Avenue, an arrest affidavit states. They arrested Jalidan Sieira Estrada, 34, on charges of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, possession of less than 20 grams of cannabis and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Estrada said he was growing pot in a bedroom but the plants were gone.

Investigators found cultivation supplies in a bedroom and in the attic. Florida Power & Light Co. was contacted to disconnect the electricity.

A .25-caliber pistol turned up in the room Estrada slept in. In 1998, Estrada was convicted for grand theft auto in Miami, the affidavit states.

"I think you're always going to have people taking a chance, and I'm sure they're out there," Vega said.

City Councilman Jack Kelly, who was a council member during the 2006 investigation, said he didn't think the city's image suffered because of the pot farms.

"We are extremely active in getting rid of our drug problem," Kelly said. "If everybody wants to make fun of the grow houses, we don't have them here now and we're going to have less and less all the time because everybody knows that the word is out if you have a grow house in Port St. Lucie, we're going to go after you."

WHO HELPED

A variety of agencies assisted Port St. Lucie police in the marijuana grow house investigation that began in May 2006. Those agencies include:

U.S. Attorney's Office

U.S. Internal Revenue Service

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

U.S. Marshals Service

Florida State Attorney's Office

Sheriff's offices in St. Lucie, Martin, Palm Beach, Highlands and Broward counties

Police in New York, Miami-Dade and Fort Pierce

Prosecutors offices in Bergen and Essex counties in New Jersey
Memorial announced for teen who died in Stuart crash

Emma Albritton was passionate about stopping domestic violence and caring for children in foster care. She played volleyball and basketball.
By the time it gets around to mid-June, you can bet that at least 60% of those sauntering up to the class lists outside the Senate House will be tired and emotional in some way other other, whether through horrendously cheap Sainsburys Cava, or the sheer horror of the hangover currently clouding all five of their senses.

The end of the Cambridge year is an enormously amicable time. Friends giggle merrily at each other as they cycle side-by-side over Orgasm Bridge, you actually almost mean it when you say dont worry its fine to whomever just spilled Pimms on your trousers, and theres a chance you even manage to break a smile as you saunter past the token college homophobe.

There is, naturally, a minority of the student population for whom this time causes immense distress focussed squarely on the issue of results. For these individuals, the publication of class lists outside the Senate House is genuinely distressing, and we should not cast aside their concerns lightly.

That being said, for the vast majority of the student population the Senate House experience is harmless, amicable, and nicely quaint, which makes the Universitys move towards abolishing the practice a little confusing.

What seems most surprising is that a University founded on tempered thinking and painstaking long-term research should have rushed into a decision without sensibly considering what other options might be available. Its undeniable that the publication of class lists is an outdated archaism, and that its something that a modern university should be trying to find alternatives for, but that doesnt mean that scrapping it entirely is the only answer.

The modern and intelligent university that Cambridge strives to present itself as being would come up with another path  a Third Way, if you like. The easiest thing to do would be to hugely simplify the process of opting out, making it as simple as an email to your DoS with no questions asked and no medical or other reasons needed. Alternatively, it could be a checkbox at the point at which you confirm registration for your exams on the Universitys internal systems, so you dont even have to deal with your DoS at all.

Going one step further, you could even have a checkbox on CamSIS by which you opt in to the system, so nobody can complain of being flummoxed by technical confusions. Combine this, of course, with a modern approach alongside the extant tradition. An email landing into your inbox is one thing, but what if everyone got a text from the University with their results in  a bit of clever programming wouldnt make it that hard to do, and the enjoyment of seeing horror on graduands faces the likes of which havent been seen since that text from NHS-No-Reply last week would be well worth the technical kerfuffle.

If they really wanted to commit to modernity, why not invest a few hundred thousand to build a comprehensive University app  downloadable to your smartphone with your lecture timetable, hermes email system, exam timetable and results notification all rolled into one. There are certainly enough vaguely benevolent CompScis rattling around the alumni network to find somebody to do it without splurging the entire contents of the Dear World Yours Cambridge coffer.

Fundamentally, it comes down to a boring old argument about democracy. The campaigning group who started the whole thing  Our Grade Our Choice  has seen active participation from only a very few students, as with most of these things. The petition they started has done reasonably well when looked at in isolation, with 1,300-odd signatures at the last count, but when you make that a percentage of the total current student body  let alone a percentage of all current and future students affected by this move  its a fairly small proportion.

CUSUs President, meanwhile, didnt mention anything about publication of class lists in the manifesto on which she was elected (with a surprising mandate by CUSUs standards), and has merely jumped on the bandwagon that the campaign has offered, leaping aboard as it trundles haphazardly down the optimistic yellow brick road to relevance.

Losing the old quirk of public class lists is no great devastation to the vast majority of people  in a way that I know for a very small minority, their continuation as was would be  but depriving the majority of students a quintessential hallmark of the Cambridge experience for the sake of a few loud voices sets a dangerous precedent for the way decision-making works at this University.

Its likely that such fringe views will continue to dominate student politics, as they have done in the past. Its just a shame that the University hasnt clocked that just because they shout the loudest, doesnt mean they speak for all of us. Its an even greater shame that the greatest minds behind the institution of great minds cant bash their heads together and work out a middle way that keeps whats special about the tradition whilst protecting the wellbeing of those for whom it is an unnecessary additional anxiety.
Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, and Microsoft, you'll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10. This will be more than just running the Bash shell on Windows 10. After all, thanks to programs such as Cygwin or MSYS utilities, hardcore Unix users have long been able to run the popular Bash command line interface (CLI) on Windows. ZDNet (also, The First Ubuntu tablet, BQ Aquaris M10, is available for pre-order now)

Bitcoin could consume as much electricity as Denmark by 2020 I'm an engaged environmental researcher and have recently become a bitcoin enthusiast. These are two possibly conflicting fascinations, as previously pointed out by Christopher Malmo here at Motherboard. That's because bitcoin is incredibly energy intensive: at the time of Malmo's piece, he calculated that a single bitcoin transaction requires as much electricity as the daily consumption of 1.6 American households... Vice

Microsoft launches HoloLens emulator so developers can test holographic apps, no headset required As promised, Microsoft today started shipping its $3,000 HoloLens development kits. In addition to sharing that bots are coming to the new platform, the company also released a HoloLens emulator, which lets developers testholographic apps on their PC without the need for a physical HoloLens. VentureBeat (also Starting today, anyone can turn their Xbox One into a dev kit for free)

Hacker reveals $40 attack that steals police drones from 2km away Black Hat Asia IBM security guy Nils Rodday says thieves can hijack expensive professional drones used widely across the law enforcement, emergency, and private sectors thanks to absent encryption in on-board chips. Rodday says the 25,000 (US$28,463, 19,816, AU$37,048) quadcopters can be hijacked with less than $40 of hardware, and some basic knowledge of radio communications. The Register

How to hack an election It was just before midnight when Enrique Pena Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Pena Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Bloomberg

Apple Turns 40: Reflecting on Four Decades of History Apple, co-founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1, 1976, celebrates its 40th anniversary today. The company hung up a pirate flag at its One Infinite Loop campus to pay homage to the Jobs-led team that worked on the original Macintosh, which was viewed as rebellious at a time when Apple was focusing on the Lisa. From near-bankruptcy to becoming the world's most valuable public company, Apple has been through a series of highs and lows over the past four decades. Macrumors

He always had a dark side For a man who built an empire in pixels, Paul Le Roux seemed like a digital phantom. After his name surfaced in the press in late 2014, I spent the better part of a year trying to understand him through the same means by which he'd directed his massive pharmacy business: the Internet. Late at night, I would open my laptop and plunge into an online wormhole, searching for clues about who Le Roux had been and what he became. Atavist

A programming language for living cells MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells. Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it. MIT

One gamer's quest to achieve the lowest graphics settings When Skyrim came out I played it on a pretty sweet rig, running it on its highest settings and eventually adding high-res mods so I could see every twist in every peasant's rope belt. Now I'm going back to it on a laptop with an Intel HD 4000 graphics card that struggles to run it on 'low,' dropping below 30 fps whenever a fight breaks out or I absorb a dragon soul in that swooshy display of lights and effects. Fortunately, there are mods for this situation too. PC Gamer

Tobii's EyeX eye-tracking controller reviewed When I volunteered to review the Tobii EyeX eye-tracking controller, I had no idea I was signing up for over a month of experimentation and frustration. I never would have guessed that I'd be thinking back on multiple trips to my optometrist and optician, plus the experience of trying out contacts for the first time in my life. I believe that it's important to note up front that part of what you're about to read is clearly not a typical EyeX experience. The Tech Report

Meet the blind gamer with a Killer Instinct Killer Instinct is a fighting game that requires expert timing and split second reactions to succeed online. Oh and sight. You need to see what's going on on your screen to win. Right? Wrong. "Sightless Kombat" is a completely blind gamer who in January hit the "Killer" rank in the Xbox One - and now PC - fighting game. That means he battled his way to the top bracket of Killer Instinct's online ranked play without the benefit of sight. But how? EuroGamer

Ethernet controller discovered in the ESP8266 The venerable ESP8266 has rocked the Internet of Things world. Originally little more than a curious $3 WiFi-to-serial bridge, bit by bit, the true power of the ESP has become known, fully programmable, with a treasure trove of peripherals it seemed that the list of things the ESP couldn't do was short. On that list, at least until today was Ethernet. Hackaday



Wireless tech means safer drones, smarter homes and password-free WiFi We've all been there, impatiently twiddling our thumbs while trying to locate a WiFi signal. But what if, instead, the WiFi could locate us? According to researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory(CSAIL), it could mean safer drones, smarter homes, and password-free WiFi. MIT

Taiwan's TSMC signs deal to build $3 billion wafer plant in China Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC), the world's top contract chip maker, said on Monday it has signed an agreement with the Nanjing City Government to invest $3 billion building an advanced wafer manufacturing facility in China. Reuters

To SQL or NoSQL? That's the database question Poke around the infrastructure of any startup website or mobile app these days, and you're bound to find something other than a relational database doing much of the heavy lifting. Take, for example, the Boston-based startup Wanderu. Ars Technica
If you pre-ordered the Oculus Rift and haven't yet received your order, you may be in for an extended wait. Oculus VR said over the weekend that an unexpected component shortage would slow deliveries of one of the most anticipated consumer technology devices in recent memory.

The Oculus Rift arrived on March 28 with founder Palmer Luckey personally delivering the first consumer model to a buyer in Alaska.

Over the weekend, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe said the first batch was going out slower than estimated. To help make up for the setback, the executive said it would be shipping all pre-orders free of charge. It's a minor consolation for fans that have been waiting months and even years for the device that singlehandedly jumpstarted the modern virtual reality movement.

The Wall Street Journal reached out to the Facebook-owned company but received no reply. As such, it's unclear which component is responsible for the delay, how long the delay will last or how many shipments will be affected. The publication points to a recent e-mail from the company that says affected customers will receive updated shipping information on April 12.

The Oculus Rift is the first of three high-end virtual reality headsets due for launch this year. HTC's Vive headset is scheduled to arrive on April 5 followed by Sony's PlayStation VR this October priced at $799 and $399, respectively. The latter platform requires a PlayStation 4 console although gamers likely won't receive the best experience unless they spring for a more powerful version of Sony's console expected to launch before the PS VR arrives.
It is not new to the society to see people with disability, disorders, and diseases. Some of it was acquired due to accidents and lifestyle, but some were genetically passed on to offsprings. It is unlucky for those people who develop these certain disorders from prenatal and postnatal stages, as what we can say, it is not their fault and they don't deserve it.

Here is one of the disorders acquired through genes and problems encountered by the mother when the child is still in the womb.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), or simply and commonly known as Autism, is a neuro-developmental disorder where one displays social communication and interaction challenges, characterized by repetitive abnormal behavior.

The term "spectrum" refers to a broad range of signs and symptoms of Autism. Based on the definitions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), ASD covers disorders such as Asperger's Syndrome, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS).

Researchers believe that ASD is acquired and transmitted through genes and caused by some other environmental factors that had disrupted the brain development during the early years.

Signs And Symptoms Of ASD

Toddlers with ASD may behave differently compared to their peers. Here are some of the things observe in children to check if they might have the condition and might need to undergo an expert evaluation.

 Too focused on a certain object

 Rarely makes an eye contact

 Social indifference

 Repetitive behavior, e.g., keeps on clapping, echoes words said to them

 Have trouble expressing their needs

 Short attention span

 Prefers to be alone most of the time

 Have a hard time adapting to change

 Have unusual reactions to sound, smell, taste, look and feel

 Unusual and repetition of language

How To Diagnose ASD

It is hard to identify people with ASD because it takes time and keen observation, unlike other diseases or medical condition that can be confirmed through usual laboratory tests. A physician needs to take note person's behavior, social interactions, level of intelligence, communication, actions and language before making a diagnosis.

ASD can be detected as early as 18 months old or prior, while diagnosis for those who are at least 2 years old is already considered reliable. The condition affects one out of 68 children, of which males are more likely to have it. ASD is found across different ethnicity, race and socioeconomic group.

Treating ASD

ASD is not curable, instead therapies and behavioral approaches are given to address symptoms. Early detection leads to early intervention therapies that could decrease symptoms.

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If you are the typical grammar police, you may not like what this study reveals.

A recent study named "If You're House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email" and conducted by Julie Boland, head linguistic researcher at University of Michigan, states that people who are sensitive to grammatical or typographical errors are most likely to be introverts.

The study involved 83 participants reading an email response to the housemate advertisement. Each email was drafted differently with some containing no mistakes at all, while others contained grammatical or typographical errors. Sixty-four percent of the participants were women and 96 percent of them spoke American English.

For the purpose of this study, the email had typographical and grammatical errors very similar to the kind we encounter in our day to day life, such as its for it's, your for you're, abuot for about, and the like. The study was split into three questionnaires.

The first questionnaire was used to acquire the demographic or behavioral information of the participants: age, gender, education, number of texts per day, time spent in reading, importance of grammar, among others.

The second was a 44-question survey of Big Five Personality index (BFI). This index included scales for conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeability and openness.

The third included filling out a short questionnaire called Housemate scale, wherein the participants had to rate the writer of the email on the lines of friendliness, similarity with oneself, intelligence, trustworthiness, likeability and conscientiousness from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly disagree).

The participants were also asked if they noticed any grammatical or typographical errors in the email and how that affected them. The responses varied from not being bothered about the errors to being highly disturbed by them.

On studying these subjects' behavioral traits, it was arrived at that the extroverts noticed fewer mistakes while the introverts, on the other hand, were conscientious and highly sensitive to these errors.

This is the first ever study that shows how a personality trait or an inherent behavior affects someone's interpretation of language. It is also an example of how people judge other people socially.

The findings suggest that introverts generally prefer not to deviate from the convention of perfection, whereas, outgoing people generally take everything in stride and do not really bother with details.

Photo: Derek Mindler | Flickr

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FCC will not investigate the throttling charges against Netflix since it is not covered by net neutrality rules, the agency said.

Tom Wheeler, FCC chairman, explained that the agency does not regulate "edge providers" or websites and that conducting an investigation goes beyond its open Internet order.

Last week, Netflix confirmed it is throttling video speeds of AT&T and Verizon users, which negated previous accusations to the carriers about the quality of Netflix videos their subscribers get.

According to Netflix, it has been throttling video quality for more than five years, which resulted in limiting the video quality on major wireless carriers worldwide. Netflix defended the move by saying it was protecting subscribers from exceeding the allotted mobile cap on their data plans.

Ken McEldowney, executive director of the advocacy group Consumer Action, said that Netflix's actions showed the company's total lack of transparency with customers. He added that the news is also confusing because Netflix settings had always provided users with the ability to choose between the quality of video and data usage.

Jim Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president, said that the carrier was outraged after learning that Netflix had deliberately throttled the video quality of the company's subscribers without their approval or knowledge.

Netflix said that watching two hours of HD video would eat up to 6 GB of data which is equivalent to the total allowed monthly data for Verizon subscribers who are under the carrier's $80 monthly plan.

The company also noted that mobile networks are notorious for charging their subscribers unreasonably for going beyond the limit of their data plan. Netflix said that those who use their mobile devices in viewing video content are at a disadvantage state.

Anne Marie Squeo of Netflix said that restrictive data caps are not good for consumers and added that the standard bit rate for mobile video streaming is at 600 kilobytes for every second at the most.

Netflix, as a content provider, has the liberty to decide on outlining its policies, separate and irrespective of data plan carriers.

In order to provide users more control of their Netflix experience, the streaming service will launch an update in May that allows subscribers to choose between high picture quality that would incur heavy data usage or low picture quality with low data usage.

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The Tesla Model 3 is arguably one of the most coveted vehicles this year, hitting the $7.5 billion mark in just a day, but the carmaker will have to take some measures to accommodate the demand.

To start things off, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the figures via Twitter, saying that 180,000 preorders were placed when things kicked off. With an estimated $42,000 price for each car, that's $7.5 billion within 24 hours.

Model 3 orders at 180,000 in 24 hours. Selling price w avg option mix prob $42k, so ~$7.5B in a day. Future of electric cars looking bright!  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

It doesn't end there either, as the good news for the company just went on rolling, reaching a preorder count of 198,000 roughly two hours after the first tweet.

Thought it would slow way down today, but Model 3 order count is now at 198k. Recommend ordering soon, as the wait time is growing rapidly.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

As the number just kept on growing, it seems that the intensive production may have dawned on Musk, as he makes another post on the social media platform following the updated preorder figure.

Definitely going to need to rethink production planning...  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

Back in 2015, Tesla managed to ship out 50,580 cars in total. That has barely met the company's sales projection of 50,000 to 55,000 units. This time around, the carmaker will have to push efforts in production by about fourfold compared to last year's result if it wants to deliver a Model 3 to every expecting owner so far.

"It's a big challenge to ramp up from 50,000 to 500,000," Mark Wakefield, an auto consultant at AlixPartners, said.

On that note, Musk announced that Tesla has a factory in Fremont, California that is capable of producing 500,000 units annually. That's certainly good news for those who preordered the Model 3, including Wakefield.

The Model 3 is the most affordable Tesla electric vehicle that is targeted at the masses, and it's definitely living up to that name. It's slated to hit the roads sometime in late 2017.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A Virginia school bus shuttled dozens of school kids over two days, all while carrying inert explosives the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) left under its hood. The Sheriff's Office has offered answers, which have raised a few more questions.



The incident occurred last week in Loudoun County after county officials and a CIA team participated in joint canine unit exercises.



The exercises took place ahead of spring break for the county's public school and the explosives were discovered on March 30, two days after classes had resumed. The bus, on March 28 and 29, carried kids to and from Rock Ridge High School and Pinebrook Elementary Buffalo Trail.



The CIA was then notified that a routine inspection of the bus had turned up explosive materials. The explosives were inert, or chemically inactive, so it didn't pose a threat to those who unwittingly rode on the bus with it, the CIA and Loundoun County officials point out.



"The training materials used in the exercises are incredibly stable and according to the CIA and Loudoun County explosive experts the students on the bus were not in any danger from the training material," says the sheriff's office. "As a precaution, all buses that were used or were near the training exercise at the Briar Woods High School were further searched and nothing was found."



It was later determined that the material left in the bus fell out of a container that had been planted in the engine area. The law enforcement agents apparently thought they'd removed the entire package, failing to realize that part of it had fallen deeper into the engine compartment.



"To prevent such incidents from happening again, CIA has taken immediate steps to strengthen inventory and control procedures in its K-9 program," the CIA says. "CIA will also conduct a thorough and independent review of CIA's K-9 training program."



It might be tempting to criticize the exercise's participants for not realizing that they'd only retrieved part of the training materials from the engine compartment. But that's what training is for: making mistakes and learning from them in order to be ready for the real thing.

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People have been asking John Wick if he is coming back. Good news to all those who have been waiting for the retired assassin to return, Wick is indeed officially coming back in 2017. The John Wick: Chapter 2 production released the official synopsis for the sequel on April 1.

No, it is not an April Fool's Day joke and, no, John Wick will not be losing another puppy that will lead him to seek revenge. Keanu Reeves is back as the titular character but he will be facing a new group of antagonists because of a blood oath he is bound to.

"[John Wick is] forced to back out of retirement by a former associate plotting to seize control of a shadowy international assassins' guild. Bound by a blood oath to help him, John travels to Rome where he squares off against some of the world's deadliest killers," the synopsis details.

As for Reeves, he already revealed  prior to the filming in 2015  that he has been training really hard to make the action sequences even better.

"I started training a couple of months ago [...] going to other levels of what the gun-Fu was, which was Jujitsu and Judo mixed with weapons and different styles of weapon training [...] I've been learning some other tools and different styles of that, and trying to develop some more techniques in terms of Judo and Jujitsu and bring those elements into the work," he said.

As a matter of fact, footage of Reeves working on his tactical shooting skills showed up on YouTube on March 3. Watch the video below.



There you go. The legendary hitman who finished an impossible task in order to earn his retirement in 2014's John Wick and wiped out pretty much everyone who was in his way when he sought vengeance is back. Reeves promises that the sequel will be even more action packed than the first film. If you don't remember just how action packed it was, refresh your memory by watching the trailer for the first film below.



John Wick: Chapter 2 is scheduled for release on Feb. 10, 2017.

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All Nippon Airways (ANA) unveiled its "Star Wars" themed aircrafts back in 2015 before the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but its flight routes have been mainly domestic until February 2016. Just as originally planned, ANA has finally gone international and is now flying the Tokyo - United States route, and it all began with the BB-8 jet landing in Los Angeles on March 28.

The exterior of the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner has the same color and circular patterns as the newest lovable Resistance droid from The Force Awakens. Its interior is not specifically decorated like a BB-8, though the flight attendants all wear Star Wars droid uniforms.

The #BB8ANAJET arrived in LA last night. Itll be flying to JFK, IAD, ORD, IAH soon! https://t.co/NgnKKloo7w pic.twitter.com/L7Ws0rmztw  All Nippon Airways (@FlyANA_official) March 29, 2016

The BB-8 aircraft is actually the third Star Wars themed plane from All Nippon Airways, which is part of a joint venture of ANA, Star Alliance and Lucasfilm Ltd. Take a look at all three special aircrafts together in Tokyo.

"From March 29 to April 8, it will be operated on Narita-Los Angeles route. On/after April 9 until further notice, it will be operated on various international routes, such as New York, Chicago, Washington D.C, Houston, and Singapore routes," ANA details the BB-8 aircraft's schedule.

If anyone is wondering where the Millenium Falcon is, ANA has an answer in its in-flight magazine, too. Just don't expect to ride it anytime soon because regardless of the events in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the Millenium Falcon is still Han Solo's aircraft.

Found something interesting when reading our #inflight magazine, a new friend has joined in July, the fastest one! pic.twitter.com/pcRwKpVUS3  All Nippon Airways (@FlyANA_official) July 2, 2015

As a celebration for the ANA's BB-8 international voyage, the airlines launched a campaign in which 50 lucky winners could win their very own BB-8 model plane.

Anyone interested who is a legal resident of the United States and is at least 18 years old has until April 17 to enter the sweepstakes.

"50 winners will win a BB-8 ANA JET Model Plane with a retail value of $23.00," the campaign page reads. Here is BB-8 excited to meet his aircraft counterpart.

The #BB8ANAJET arrived in LA last night. Itll be flying to JFK, IAD, ORD, IAH soon! https://t.co/NgnKKloo7w pic.twitter.com/akU35tL6ga  All Nippon Airways (@FlyANA_official) March 29, 2016

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The rumored Motorola Moto X3 smartphone makes an appearance on Indian import and export tracking website Zauba.

Lenovo-owned Motorola is yet to officially launch a mobile phone for 2016. However, the company suggests that smartphone enthusiasts could see a good number of Motorola and Lenovo-branded mobile devices hit the shelves this year.

A previous Tech Times report suggested that Chen Xudong, the senior VP of Lenovo Group and president of the company's China and APAC regions, confirmed that none of the Moto-branded phones launched in 2016 will have a screen size of less than 5-inch.

Zauba has a listing of a Motorola handset called Moto X3. According to the listing, the Moto X3 has a 5-inch display and it is a single SIM GMS device.

Other details of the Moto X3 remain unknown for now. But Chen Xudong has confirmed that all Motorola branded phones to be released in 2016 will have top-end specs, which means that the Moto X3 may have a powerful Snapdragon 820 processor and at least 3 GB of RAM. The majority of all top-notch smartphones of 2016 come running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Moto X3 may also come pre-installed with Android's latest operating system.

Almost all high-end smartphone launched in 2016 till now have a fingerprint scanner and all Motorola-branded mobile devices of 2016 will have an embedded fingerprint scanner.

Motorola has a number of Moto X smartphones but the company does not have a Moto X2 device, which will be succeeded by the Moto X3. However, in the past, some handsets appearing on Zauba listing have been launched with the same name.

The Moto X3 is not the only handset that Motorola is developing. Two new Motorola smartphones have been spotted on the GFXBench benchmark website but the names of the devices remain unknown as the website only mentioned the model numbers of the Motorola phones.

The models appearing on GFXBench website were XT1700 and XT1706. Both the models have a 5-inch screen with a 720 x 1,280 HD resolution. A MediaTek MT6735P SoC is and 2 GB of RAM are expected to power the device. The devices are expected to get 16 GB of internal storage, 8MP of primary camera and a 5MP selfie camera.

Motorola is yet to officially announce the existence of the Moto X3 or the models appearing on GFXBench. It remains to be seen how long Motorola will take to launch its first mobile device of 2016.

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The researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have nailed it. They might have just discovered the new-age Wi-Fi that renders passwords redundant and paves the way for safer drones and smarter Internet-equipped homes.

Named Chronos, the system simply needs one Wi-Fi access point to detect people "within tens of centimeters" without the assistance of any external sensors. This means it can automatically adjust the cooling and heating of a space by sensing the number of people in a room. Where an existing device will typically determine a person's position with the help of multiple Wi-Fi points, Chronos provides 20 times more accurate localization with the help of a single point.

Venkat Padmanabhan, who's a principal researcher at Microsoft Research India, said, "By devising a method to rapidly hop across these channels that span almost one gigahertz of bandwidth, Chronos can measure time-of-flight with sub-nanosecond accuracy, emulating with commercial WiFi what has previously needed an expensive ultra-wideband radio. This is an impressive breakthrough and promises to be a key enabler for applications such as high-accuracy indoor localization."

A test conducted by the researchers in a two-bedroom apartment showed 94 percent accuracy in detecting which room was occupied by an individual. A similar test in a cafe differentiated the "out-of-store" intruders from in-store customers with 97 percent accuracy  a remarkable way of eliminating Internet theft from such small spaces and businesses. Another usefulness of this system comes in the form of the drones maintaining a safe distance from its operator with a mere 4-centimeter (1.5-inch) margin error.

PhD student Deepak Vasisht, who's co-authoring the paper with the research lead Dina Katabi and former PhD student Swarun Kumar, summed up their findings with this statement: "From developing drones that are safer for people to be around, to tracking where family members are in your house, Chronos could open up new avenues for using Wi-Fi in robotics, home automation and more. Designing a system that enables one Wi-Fi node to locate another is an important step for wireless technology."

Photo: Vancouver Film School | Flickr

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Experts say that killer whale, also known as Dopey Dick, is living off the west coast of Scotland. The orca became famous in November 1977 when it was first seen by locals in pursuit of a salmon prior to remaining five kilometers (3 miles) upriver of Loch Foyle for two days.

Marine experts are tracking orcas, as they are the UK's only known resident population of killer whales in the west coast community of whales.

Since 1994, the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust has been continually monitoring the behavior of the west coast population of killer whales. Part of their documentation includes four males and four females that have never reproduced since their studies began. The orcas are not noted to interact with other orcas belonging in the north-east Atlantic community.

Early this year, Lulu, one of the females was stranded near Tiree where it subsequently expired. The agency expressed that the discovering Dopey Dick as part of the west coast population is an important piece of information to understand the relative age of that particular orca population.

Irish Whale and Dolphin Group sightings officer Padraig Whooley said that Dopey Dick's sighting puts the west coast community at the upper limits of the expected life expectancy of male orcas.

"Adult males generally live to around 30 years, but with an upper range of 50 to 60 years," Whooley said.

Based on Dopey Dick's initial sighting in 1977, he is believed to be an adult male back then. This present sighting places Dopey Dick to at least 50 years or older. A killer whale expert, Andy Foote shared that a photograph posted on Facebook showed Dopey Dick's white eye patch that sloped backwards is hard to miss.

"I couldn't believe it - he was already a full-grown male back in 1977, when I was just five years old," Foote added.

Dr. Conor Ryan of Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust said that Dopey Dick's sighting puts pressure on whale biologists to conduct more studies about this particular species before time runs out. He expresses concern that species like Comet may become extinct.

"Since records began in the '80s, we haven't had any new animals join the population and we haven't had new calves either," said Ryan. "The population is declining because as the older animals die, they're not being replaced."

Earlier this month, marine experts lauded the decision of Seaworld to finally stop breeding of orcas in captivity. The company also said that they are no longer training the orcas but instead showcase them in their natural setting. The decision came months after a trainer was attacked by a killer whale.

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President Barrack Obama concluded the two-day Nuclear Security Summit by addressing the pressing need of world leaders to join forces and eliminate the terrorist operations of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS.

The Obama Administration has taken an aggressive stance in its use of airstrikes in areas not marked as war zones, along with stepping up their attacks on Al-Qaeda and ISIS-led training camps that spew hundreds of trained "jihadis" in Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. These places typically face perennial political turmoil, thus providing ample opportunities for the terrorist groups to camp and set up their training dens. Obama further defended their action by stating that any mission led outside of earmarked war zones like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq are generally aimed at "high-value targets" or suspected terrorist masterminds.

The president is well aware of the fact that the increased pressure might result in pushing the terrorists to lash out anywhere in anger, as seen in the recent attacks in Turkey and Brussels where innocent lives were lost. "This means that the sense of urgency that we've shown in destroying [the Islamic State] in Iraq and Syria also has to infuse our efforts to prevent attacks around the world," said Obama, directing this thought towards other world leaders present.

The president spoke of the importance of intelligence-sharing when it came to countering the increasing inflow of foreign terrorist groups. "We're all going to have to do more when it comes to intelligence-sharing. We simply cannot afford to have critical intelligence not being shared as needed  whether between governments or within governments," he stated.

The U.S. has already deployed special forces in Iraq and Syria to carry out raids against the IS groups. In Syria, the U.S. army has been working closely with the Kurdish-backed Syrian-Arab groups. In this strategic alliance with the Arabs, the U.S. is said to be supplying ammunition to them since October. Obama believes that with such strong measures, the Islamic State has started to lose out on their infrastructure, revenues, and mostly morale, although the appalling acts of violence are still a long way from cessation.

Photo: Austen Hufford | Flickr

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Google Dorking helping hackers find out hidden information no one wants them to know

Earlier this week, the United States administration blamed Iranian hackers for a series of attacks in 2012 and 2013 on several targets, including a New York City dam. According to the reports, the hackers gained information about the water levels and the dams sluice gate from Google, which could have allowed the attacker to open the gate and flood part of the city, the US Department of Justice said.

Luckily for the city dwellers, the hacking was foiled because the sluice gate happened to be offline for maintenance during the hack.

But how could the hackers get such detailed information from Google? This method is called Google Dorking Though it may sound childish but this is a pretty serious tool in wrong hands.

What is Google Dorking?

Google Dorking is the practice of using advanced search techniques  more specifically, specialized search parameters  to locate hard-to-find web pages and information.

While the search parameters can be used for good by making a concerted search using various parameters. Google Dorking has a dark side  so dark, federal authorities are warning website owners of its dangerous nature. According to a report on Ars Technica, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert to law enforcement and public safety agencies that Google Dorking could help and abet hackers.

Malicious cyber actors are using advanced search techniques, referred to as Google dorking to locate information that organizations may not have intended to be discoverable by the public or to find website vulnerabilities for use in cyber attacksBy searching for specific file types and keywords, malicious cyber actors can locate information such as usernames and passwords, email lists, sensitive documents, bank account details, and website vulnerabilities.

The feds cited two examples, on from 2011 and one from 2013, where the hackers used Google Dorking to locate vulnerable website files and proprietary information. It also recommended website owners take advantage of The Diggity Project, a free online tool that lets users automate Google Dork queries to identify online vulnerabilities.

For instance, Google offers a feature called site, that lets you search a single website for a keyword or photos. Google also has special search commands called filetype and datarange.

In the case of the New York dam, the hacker used Google from the other side of the world to find US infrastructure sites that had vulnerable hardware systems attached to the internet, reports the Wall Street Journal.

There are websites dedicated to Dorking like The Diggity Project and the Google Hacking Database. These projects keep lists of pre-made dorking queries that companies can run on their own websites to see what turns up.
Meet the hacker who rigged elections in 9 Latin American countries for 8 continuous years without anyone noticing

Over 8 continuous years, the citizens of Latin American countries have been fooled by a hacker who rigged elections to make the right wing candidates win the elections. The Columbian hacker, Andres Sepulveda hacked the voting machines in Colombia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Honduras in return for hefty paychecks.

Sepulveda rigged Mexican President Enrique Pena Nietos election which saw Neito winning the election by a huge margin and becoming the president of Mexico. A Bloomberg Business article published Thursday told his story for the first time, forcing the Mexican government to deny on Friday that Pena Nietos campaign spied on rivals. Sepulveda, now in jail in Colombia, was in the business of the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see, he told Bloomberg Business.

Sepulveda started his hacking career with odd hacking targets in 2005, but quickly ramped up to helping presidential campaigns in Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela smear, hack, and spy on their left-wing rivals for a bill of at least US$12,000 per month, and often more.

His first hacking was for the re-election campaign of former right-wing Colombian President Alfaro Uribe in the lead-up to the 2006 election, which Uribe won. Sepulveda hacked a rivals website and campaign database.

In 2009, Sepulveda played a vital role in Honduras National Party President Porfirio Lobos campaign. In 2011, he started malicious campaigns against the socialist President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and in 2012 he worked for the ex-president of Venezuela president Hugo Chavez.

In 2012, he also spied, hacked and manipulated the social media platforms to help Mexicos President Enrique Pena Nieto win the presidential election. According to the Bloomberg report, he received US$600,000 as payment for this hacking.

Sepulveda has been sentenced to 10 years life imprisonment for his election hacking jobs. The list of his crimes includes espionage and conspiring to hack Colombian general elections in 2014.
Siri Now Understands Questions About Sexual Assault After A Study Found Its Answers Objectionable

Last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study claiming that four conversational agents: Apples Siri, Samsungs S Voice, Google Now and Microsofts Cortana  failed to offer helpful feedback for health and safety-related emergencies, especially when it came to rape and domestic abuse. The answers were inconsistent and incomplete, especially when it came to rape and domestic violence, the studys authors, concluded.

In the past, Siri would say things like I dont know what you mean by I was raped or How about a Web search for it? After Apple and the other providers faced swift criticism for the lack of response to sexual assault, Apple got in touch with the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) to collaborate on giving Siri a better and more thoughtful response to statements such as I was raped.

Apple also enhanced Siris diction when replying to an iPhone user who tells it he or she is being sexually assaulted. Now, instead of saying something like You may want to reach out to someone, Siri will say, You should reach out to someone.

Siri now responds with a link to the National Sexual Assault Hotline. A Twitter user pointed out the update to CNN on Tuesday. An Apple representative confirmed the changes have been in place since March 17.

The studys authors said they have been in touch with all four companies on how to improve the responses. Experts suggest validating the persons feelings and pointing the person to resources while leaving it up to him or her on what to do next.

Apple reached out to us, and they were very responsive with updating Siri to meet the needs of survivors. Were thrilled that Siri is now directing users in need to the National Sexual Assault Hotline, and we look forward to an ongoing collaboration with Apple, said Jennifer Marsh, vice president of victim services for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, which operates the hotline.

These updates are important, Marsh said, because people turn to technology when something bad happens. The same as everyone Googles their symptoms before heading to the doctor, some tell Siri first in an emergency because they dont know how else to get help.

The online service can be a good first step, Marsh said. Especially for young people. They are more comfortable in an online space rather than talking about it with a real-life person.

Theres a reason someone might have made their first disclosure to Siri, she added.

Stanford psychologist Adam Miner, who co-authored the study, said these kinds of changes were the goal of publishing the research.

Thats exactly what we hoped would happen as a result of the paper, Miner told ABC. Eleni Linos, a co-author on the study and physician and public health researcher at University of California, San Francisco, added that the speed with which Apple responded to the study was impressive. The updates only took three days.

It shows theyre listening and paying attention and responding. Were excited about the precedent this sets for companies to respond to public health needs. This is such a unique example where an under recognized public health problem can be highlighted by a research article and the companies involved can be part of the solution, added Linos.

The studys authors said they were satisfied by the collaborative response to a public health need.

We believe that the best way to develop effective evidence-based responses is to collaborate across crisis providers, technology companies, and clinicians, said Miner. This is a first step in that direction.

Meanwhile, it is also expected that other devices may soon provide similar updates.
The Conagua indicated that the atmospheric phenomenon registered maximum sustained winds of 140 kilometers per hour with gusts of up to 165 kilometers per hour. | Read More
TS Govt to upgrade 40 public hospitals

Hyderabad, April 3 (INN): Finance Minister Eatala Rajender informed that about 40 government hospitals across Telangana State would be upgraded with modern equipment soon.



Speaking to media persons in Karimnagar on Sunday, Eatala said that the State Government was taking steps to improve healthcare facilities in all public hospitals to ensure better medicare for poor patients. He said Karimnagar District Hospital has been equipped with a modern emergency ward and CT Scan, MRI and other equipment have been installed in the hospital.



The Minister also informed that a comprehensive Action Plan has been put into place to deal with drought situation in the State. He said arrangements have been made to provide drinking water in drought-hit areas. He said fodder and water for cattle was also being arranged. He said Rs. 11.7 crore have been released to all Zilla Parishads for drinking water facilities in rural areas.



Eatala appealed to the people to save every drop of water in view of severe drought conditions in the State.









News Posted: 3 April, 2016








Campaign for Muslim quota to be launched today

Hyderabad, April 3 (INN): TPCC President N. Uttam Kumar Reddy will launch the campaign "One Million Yes for 12% Muslim Reservation in Telangana" on Monday at 12 Noon at Gandhi Bhavan.



The campaign is being organised by Greater Hyderabad Congress Committee (Minorities Department). TPCC Working President Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, MLC Mohammed Farooq Hussain, ex-MLC and Jamiatul-e-Ulema president Hafez Peer Shabbir and other senior Congress leaders will also be present. Siasat Urdu Daily News Editor Amer Ali Khan, who has been running a consistent movement for 12% Muslim reservation across the State, will also attend the function as Special Guest.



GHCC (Minorities Dept) Chairman Shaik Abdullah Sohail informed that "Yes for 12% Muslim Reservation" campaign was aimed at collecting 10 lakh signatures/nods from different sections of the society to pressurise the TRS Government to fulfill its promise of giving 12% quota for Muslims in government jobs and education. Leaders and workers of Telangana Congress, at all levels, will actively participate in the campaign. "Besides collecting signatures manually, we will run a massive online campaign on all social media platforms. This will be one of the biggest and most aggressive campaign ever launched seeking Muslim reservation in India," he said.



Those in favour of 12% Muslim Reservation can support the campaign by sending e-mail to "yesformuslimreservation@gmail.com" Like the FaceBook Page "Yes for 12% Muslim Reservation" Send SMS or WhatsApp message to the number "+91 7842 369 212" or they can sign the online petition, he informed.



Abdullah Sohail said that the Congress party was not making a new demand for Muslim quota. "The ongoing 4% Muslim reservation in Telangana was introduced and implemented by previous Congress Government in 2004. It was KCR who had promised 12% Muslim quota during elections and based on his promise, Muslims of Telangana voted for TRS in last elections. Therefore, it is his duty to fulfill the election promise without further delay," he demanded.



"Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao had promised to provide 12% Muslim quota in just four months after coming to power. However, it took nine months for the State Government to appoint an Enquiry Commission led by ex-IAS officer G. Sudhir Commission to study the socio-economic and educational conditions of Muslims in Telangana. Despite getting two extensions, the Commission is still not in a position to submit its report," said Abdullah Sohail.



Further, the Congress leader said that the Sudhir Commission was constituted under Enquiry Act and therefore, it is not empowered to recommend reservation for Muslims. As per the road map proposed by the Chief Minister during just concluded budget session, the government would constitute a BC Commission only after Sudhir Commission submits its report. Later, the government proposes to move a resolution in Assembly which would be forwarded to Central Government. "This is not road map, but a clear attempt to put the 12% Muslim quota off the road. "One Million Yes for 12% Muslim Reservation" campaign is aimed at building pressure on the State Government to expedite the entire process," he said.









News Posted: 3 April, 2016








Minister lays foundation for Rs. 80 Cr works

Hyderabad, April 3 (INN): Transport Minister P. Mahender Reddy laid the foundation stone for various developmental works worth Rs. 80 crore in Shankarpally mandal of Chevella Assembly segment on Sunday.



Speaking on the occasion, the minister said that the State Government was spending huge funds for the overall development of all villages in Telangana. He informed that Rs. 77.15 crore have been sanctioned for the development of Shankarpally Road. He said as many as 1092 tanks and lake in Ranga Reddy district would be restored as part of second phase of Mission Kakatiya. An amount of Rs. 345 crore will be spent for the same.



The minister appealed to the people to participate and contribute in turning the State Government's dream of 'Bangaru Telangana' into a reality.









News Posted: 3 April, 2016








Vietnamese coastguards on Saturday said they seized a Chinese vessel and detained three crew members for illegally encroaching on the Vietnamese waters earlier this week.

Coastguards in the northern city of Hai Phong chased and seized the Chinese oil vessel, which carried more than 100,000 liters of diesel oil, while it was in the waters near Vietnam's Bach Long Vi island late on Thursday afternoon, authorities said.

The captain of the vessel and two other crew members, all Chinese, admitted that they had entered deep in Vietnamese waters to refuel several other Chinese boats which were fishing illegally there.

The Chinese vessel's captain admits to have illegally entered into Vietnam waters to fuel several other illegal fish ships. Photo provided by Hai Phong Coastguard

According the High Command of Border Guard, the Chinese captain failed to show the origin of the oil while his two crew members did not have work permit.

Further investigations into the case are ongoing.
The largesse at Caltex is not being restricted to its executive talent.

If you thought last year's $14 million remuneration package for chief executive Julian Segal was a bit rich, it will be interesting to see what shareholders make of a request from their newly installed chairman, Greig Gailey, to top up the board's remuneration pool a little.

By a little we mean, an extra $250,000 to $2.5 million.

Hang on a second, didn't their recently departed chair, Elizabeth Bryan, come cap in hand at last year's AGM to lift the board's pay pool by $250,000 to $2.25 million?
Tesla's new electric car is the industry's iPod moment, the start of a revolution that will kill the combustion engine and take the oil industry with it. It's an answer to global warming. It's the most important car the company will make.

Apparently.

Given that the first of Tesla's Model 3 cars is not due out until next year  and the company makes no promises  or not until 2018 in Australia, that is some seriously premature hype, backed by Apple-style queues outside its stores said to justify the parallels to the world's most valuable company.

By early on Sunday, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said it had 253,000 orders for its Model 3, each of which required a deposit of US$1000, 1000 or A$1500.
"What that means is we must now live within our means," Turnbull told reporters on Saturday, despite having also confirmed an increase in commonwealth funding to the states plus an extra $2.9 billion in grants right now which - while welcome and necessary - does seem a very roundabout way in which to hammer home a specific message of state-based thrift. Meanwhile Health Minister and Parliament House moth infestation vector Sussan Ley declared that state governments were "quick to ask the commonwealth to do their dirty work" and that "we should never make an apology for having big ideas and the courage to make a difference", even when presenting a surprise plan that not even the government can adequately explain. Labor, however, showed off their dry, cool wit with MP Jason Clare quipping "I think Britney Spears' first marriage lasted longer than this policy" - because nothing says "finger on the pulse" like a pop culture reference from 2004. Best Friends Forever! Labor do at least appear to be unified and focussed at this point in time, however, which is a message that the government are struggling to convey - despite organising a media photo opportunity of the PM and Treasurer getting in a car together - you know, like pals do!, which seemed er, not un-desperate.

And it's not like the nation are not pulling for the Coalition to get it together. In fact, according to a poll by The Australia Institute, a resounding 63.4 per cent of the nation would very much like Tony Abbott to retire quietly from politics now please. A majority also feel that he's just angling to get his old job back (just under 58 per cent), while 5.6 per cent think he's staying on because he genuinely wishes to serve the people of the Warringah electorate. And over half - 54.1 per cent, to be specific - think the continued presence of Abbott is doing damage to Turnbull's election chances. Still, 26.3 per cent of those polled declared that they thought Abbott should stay on, presumably because they're either diehard Tony fans or because they're popcorn magnates anticipating a mighty spike in revenue between now and July. The emissions trade But let's turn instead to one of the other things that the Turnbull government are determined to destroy: the stupid environment.

Anything about this seem terribly, terribly wrong to you? Not-blowin' in the wind Of course, we could focus on renewable energy now - an area which, unlikely coal, is becoming a strong export market for the countries that have been smart enough to engage with it - but instead we're still paying a lot of money to prevent wind farms from operating. How much? Well, here's what you the citizenry have paid so far: about $2.5 million. That includes $205,000 per year for the part-time Wind Farm Commissioner Andrew Dyer over the next three years, $507,000 for the scientific committee into looking at wind farm complaints (who've had two short teleconferences so far and made zero reports or recommendations so far), and the costs of the office itself - including IT, travel and accommodation.
Judicial appointments in the US and Australia tell a very different story. The death of Antonin Scalia, a leading conservative Justice of the US Supreme Court, attracted worldwide attention. Selecting his replacement has also provoked fierce debate among presidential contenders. Nominating someone to join the court is one of the most important powers enjoyed by a US president. A judge can serve on the court for decades, with Scalia chosen in 1986 by Ronald Reagan.

Unfortunately, US Supreme Court appointments are infected with the bitter partisanship that pervades US politics. Every selection is now seen as an opportunity to advance a Democrat or Republican agenda, especially in regard to issues such as abortion. The debate has reached fever pitch, with some on the extreme right even suggesting that Scalia might have been murdered to give Barak Obama a final opportunity to stack the court.

The process of appointing Scalia's successor is at an impasse. Obama has nominated the Chief Judge of the DC Circuit Court, Merrick Garland. Democrats and Republicans recognise his suitability for the office. However, Republicans form a majority in the Senate, and say that they will not confirm any Obama candidate. They hope that the nomination can instead be made in 2017 by a Republican president. In the meantime, the court will be left with an even number of justices, and will be paralysed in the event of a 4:4 split.

Australia also faces change on its highest court, but the situation could not be more different. In a low-key statement, Chief Justice Robert French of the High Court has indicated that he will retire on January 29, 2017, a few weeks before he reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70. He is leaving early so that his replacement can join the court at the start of the 2017 sittings.
The Australian Greens' campaign to retain their only federal lower seat has won a major boost with a powerful blue collar union promising up to $300,000 to incumbent Melbourne MP, Adam Bandt.

Labor's hope of reclaiming the former heartland seat looks increasingly remote after the Electrical Trades Union decision to bankroll Mr Bandt for a third time. The union is not affiliated to the ALP.

Adam Bandt. Credit:Penny Stephens

The ETU heavily backed lawyer Mr Bandt from his first election campaign in 2010, when he took Melbourne. In 2013, Mr Bandt increased his primary vote to nearly 43 per cent to win the seat comfortably despite being denied Liberal preferences.

The latest donation is an enviable war chest for a single candidate, giving Mr Bandt a major advantage over his Labor and Liberal opponents. That advantage could be further enhanced with Liberals and Greens flagging the possibility of preference deal at this year's poll.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ruled out establishing a national anti-corruption body to help pass the government's Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill, its potential trigger for a double-dissolution election.

He also rebuffed on Sunday suggestions that ousted former Prime Minister Tony Abbott would impede the Coalition's election campaign, saying he is "utterly undistracted" by the ousted former leader's ability to generate headlines.

Mr Turnbull has threatened to hold a double dissolution election on July 2 if the Senate maintains its opposition to the Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill in the April parliamentary session. The bill, which aims to re-establish a Howard-era construction industry watchdog, has been used to attack Labor on union corruption after the Royal Commission into trade unions.

The government needs the support of six of the eight crossbench senators to pass the bill, with both Labor and the Greens opposed.

Palmer United Senator Zhenya "Dio" Wang has suggested establishing a broader national corruption body that would uncover graft in all industries, modelled on NSW's Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), with independent Senator Glenn Lazarus saying he would only vote for the bill if it was widened.
A VicRoads spokesman said sections of the highway had seen 32 crashes betwen 2008 and 2012, including three fatalities. Victoria has simultaneously missed out on badly needed infrastructure, the report finds, because of its small number of swing seats. But Queensland and New South Wales, where several seats are critical to winning federal elections, have done well. In Queensland, the Commonwealth spent 46 per cent more on transport infrastructure than in Victoria, the report finds. More money was spent in the decade to 2015 on transport infrastructure than at any time since Australian records were kept.

Last financial year alone, Australian governments spent on $19.3 billion on transport infrastructure  $4.4 billion in federal tied grants to states, $1.1 billion from the Commonwealth directly to councils, and individual states $13.8 billion. But despite the unprecedented funds invested, "it would be difficult to argue that they have spent wisely", says Grattan Institute transport program director Marion Terrill. "Sometimes the decision to proceed with a project came before an assessment of whether it was worthwhile, and sometimes projects that were not worthwhile went ahead anyway." There was little evidence of any consistently applied methodology for deciding what to fund. Infrastructure advisory bodies set up by federal and state governments have failed to protect the public from projects that, while popular with voters, do not serve the economy. Despite the existence of infrastructure advisory boards at state level since 2011, the report finds that more than half the federal money spent was "on projects that do not have a published project evaluation". In Victoria, the East West Link was never assessed before being given $1.5 billion in federal funding.

An artist's impression of stage one of the East West Link. And its replacement project, Transurban's proposed Western Distributor, will not be assessed by Infrastructure Victoria because the organisation was set up too late by the Andrews government to review the project. The nation's capitals, where most GDP growth has been concentrated even during the mining boom, are missing out infrastructure funding, the report finds. Instead of concentrating new investment in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth  which account for 60 per cent of economic activity  Commonwealth and state governments spent disproportionately in country NSW and Queensland. Only 43 per cent of new investment in road and rail infrastructure has been spent in our four largest cities, it finds, despite their crucial importance to the economy.

The way Australian governments assess transport projects too often relies on secret assessments or "commercial-in-confidence" agreements. It has left the public unconfident funds are being spent wisely, the report finds. Complete transparency is needed on all projects if they are to be eligible for federal or state funding, the report says. "Promising projects on the basis of 'back-of-the-envelope' costings should not be the default mechanism of transport infrastructure planning," it finds. "There are still many examples around the country of politicians making promises in election campaigns or committing to projects on the basis of a poor-quality business case or no business case at all." Politicising infrastructure funding is more obvious now that so much money is being spent, but the Grattan Institute's researchers concede that pork barrelling is certainly not new in Australia.
Students and interns are being exploited, and patients in public hospitals put in danger, in a bid to save money and cover staff shortages, the union representing health professionals says.

The claims comes as the union, which represents professionals in roles including radiation therapy, physiotherapy, and social work, negotiates with the government for a new enterprise agreement.

Margaret Pozzebon has been a speech pathologist since 1984. She says there are no resources to deal with an increasing workload and ageing population. Credit:Paul Jeffers

Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association secretary Craig McGregor said unqualified university students and interns were being used to perform vital clinical tasks in the public hospitals.

"Patients in need of X-rays, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and other allied professional services are being routinely left to the care of unqualified students and under-trained interns," Mr McGregor said.
Indicating that the FBI was testing the new method before applying it to Farook's phone, the department said that if all went well "it should eliminate the need for the assistance from Apple", which starkly contradicted its oft-stated claim that only Apple could reveal the gunman's call history, contact list, texts, physical movements and anything else that might be stored in the phone which might, or might not shed light on the December massacre, in which the Islamic State-inspired Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 of Farook's work colleagues at a local government facility in San Bernardino, California. Demonstrators in Boston protest the FBI's attempts to require Apple to make it easier to unlock an encrypted iPhone. Credit:AP It can't have surprised Apple that the legal standoff amounted to an irresistible invitation to software engineers and cyber security experts around the globe to prove its products did not live up to the marketing hype. Resorting to Constable Plod talk that conveyed none of the excitement of the chase, FBI Director James Comey told reporters: "The attention that has been drawn to this issue, by the litigation and by the controversy that surrounds it, has stimulated a marketplace of creative people all around the world to try and come up with ideas  lots of folk have come to us with potential ideas." Apple chief executive Tim Cook seems prepared to fight to the bitter end to preserve his products' inviolability. Credit:AP

An Israeli security company, Cellebrite, has been named as the likely suspect  apparently because it struck a $US15 million deal with the FBI last week. But in a market awash with scepticism, it's also been suggested that the leaking of the name Cellebrite might just be a clever marketing ruse. Neither the FBI nor the company are commenting. Apple has argued that abiding by a court order to reveal the data in one device could lead to many iPhones being accessed which, it claims, would breach the privacy of its customers and the strength of its product security. There were several examples from around the country  including a reported 175 cases in Manhattan alone  of local investigators maneuvering to share the FBI's back-door access to the phone. The FBI have cracked an encrypted iPhone without Apple's help, but their methods are likely to be revealed. Credit:AP The pause in the legal stoush that has been billed as a clash of titans, Silicon Valley v the Federal Government, is expected to be just that  a pause. "This will only delay an inevitable fight over whether the government can force Apple to break the security of its devices," American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Alex Abdo told The New York Times. To that end, neither side particularly wants the Farook case to go away  the simplicity of arguing about one man's phone was perfect for Washington's campaign to drive a debate on how far it should be allowed to go in demanding trade-offs between personal privacy and investigating terrorism in a post-Snowden world; that simplicity also appealed to Apple and Silicon Valley in general.

Is your phone the ultimate private space? Credit:AP In a conflict in which there have been few gestures of good will, Comey did write in a post at the national security blog Lawfare in February that this clash could not be resolved by a corporation that made things to sell for a living, or an agency that investigated things for a living. "It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before," he writes. The issue deeply divides Americans  according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 42 per cent of respondents argued that Apple was obliged to help the authorities; 47 per cent argued the tech giant should not co-operate. More broadly, a 2014 Pew Research poll found 90 per cent of respondents shared a belief that consumers had lost control of the collection of their personal data. Early in March US President Barack Obama backed the spooks, warning against "fetishising our phones above every other value". The president argued that using technology to block access to a smartphone was akin to blocking the police from searching a house for evidence of child pornography. Obama told the techie South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas: "You cannot take an absolutist view on this  if your view is strong encryption no matter what and we can and should produce [inaccessible] black boxes, that does not strike the balance we've lived with for 200 or 300 years."

If there was no way to gain access to new communications devices, Obama asked, "how do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot? What mechanisms do we have to even do things like tax enforcement  if government can't get in, then everyone's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket?" These are tricky questions, hinging on the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans. Reasonable, warranted searches are allowed of people's cars, homes and offices; but on Apple's reading of the law as it applies in the digital era, Silicon Valley and criminals and terrorists should be beyond the law. Setting out a traditional law enforcement exercise, The New Yorker wrote: "Law enforcement agencies, in seeking to protect the public, also have a vital job to do and they have long had the right to violate people's personal space, with a court's approval. For example, in searching for incriminating evidence, they can, given a suitably tailored warrant, break down the front door of a person's home, rip apart walls and floors and rifle through personal possessions. "They can also make landlords assist them in gaining entry. In the San Bernardino case, the FBI effectively argues that a cell phone isn't much different from an apartment, and that Apple isn't much different from a landlord." Writing on the hacking blog Hackaday, self-described nerd author Elliot Williams argues that the FBI claim that this was a dispute about just one phone had no credibility  "we don't believe that for a second. The Farook case was intended to capitalise on the public's fear of terrorism and to force Apple to play along and to take actions that harm all of their customers.

"The FBI will be trying to establish precedent to compel decryption again, and will try until they find a judge to agree with them." But if that sounds like hackers running amok, former Clinton and Bush National Security Adviser Richard Clark told National Public Radio: "If I were in the job now, I'd have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They're not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent. "Every expert I know believes that NSA could crack this phone. They want the precedent that the government can compel a computer device manufacturer to allow the government in." In this case the FBI was not entirely helpless. Because Farook's employer owned the phone, investigators had details of all the calls he had placed and possibly his saved messages. And Apple chief Tim Cook acknowledged that Apple had also provided a "cloud backup and some other metadata" to the FBI. But Farook's contact list apparently remained elusive and the FBI suspected that some data was missing from the backup provided by Apple, because Farook apparently had changed his password and in so doing, might have disengaged the phone's automatic iCloud backup function.

Apple reportedly is prepared to risk being in contempt of court by ignoring any order to co-operate with the government and there is speculation that even if the company agreed to co-operate, its software engineering staff would refuse to do so. Arguing its case in a court filing last week, Apple charged: "The government seeks to commandeer Apple to design, create, test and validate a new operating system that does not exist, and that, Apple believes  with overwhelming support from the technology community and security experts  is too dangerous to create." On another level, the company that earned more than $US50 billion in 2015, argues a fascinating freedom-of-speech line. As explained by The New York Times, it goes like this  computer code, even a code written to scramble a digital conversation, is a form of free speech and for a government or a court to order people to write a code is no different to telling them what to say. Showing remarkable restraint, an unnamed Apple executive told reporters that Apple wanted to know more about the so-called outside party claiming it could crack the iPhone, so that it would know just how its security might be bypassed. The technology website Motherboard speculates that the mystery outside party is one of a breed of super hackers who on discovering what's called a "zero day", a way through proprietary software, which they offer for sale to intelligence agencies and others with an interest in outflanking the likes of Apple.

But Motherboard then defers to iPhone forensic expert Jonathan Zdziarski who in a recent blog suggested an alternate method  a process of "mirroring" the iPhone's NAND flash memory, effectively cloning the iPhone's memory. Motherboard explains: "This way, the FBI could make several passcode attempts, then avoid the auto-erase mechanism by simply flashing the original image back on to the chip, [thereby] resetting the number of attempts the system has detected [and so] would allow the government to make an infinite number of passcode guesses without worrying about the device being wiped." Maybe Zdziarski is more easily understood. He says: "This technique is kind of like cheating at Super Mario Bros with a save game, allowing you to play the same level over and over after you keep dying  only, instead of playing a game, they're trying different PIN combinations." The FBI has poked a stick in Apple's eye. But the debate is far from resolved. Justice Department spokeswoman Melanie Newman was strident in a statement: "it remains a priority for the government to ensure that law enforcement can obtain crucial digital information to protect national security and public safety, either with co-operation from the relevant parties, or through the court system when co-operation fails. "We will continue to pursue all available options for this mission, including seeking the co-operation of manufacturers and relying upon the creativity of both the public and private sectors."
Buenos Aires: President Mauricio Macri has repeated Argentina's claim to the Falklands, on the anniversary of the 1982 invasion of the South Atlantic islands by the country's then-ruling military junta, which set off a war with Britain.

"These islands, with which so many memories are bound, belong to us," he wrote on Saturday on Facebook.

Mauricio Macri, Argentina's president, has reiterated his country's claim on the Falkland Islands. Credit:Bloomberg

"We will return there, using the power of dialogue, truth and justice."

About 400 kilometres off the Argentinian coast, the Falklands, known in South America as the Malvinas, have been a crown colony of Britain since 1833, but Argentina has consistently claimed sovereignty.
LONG BEACH, Calif., April 2, 2016 -- Michelin North America today launched the new BeyondtheDrivingTest.com ahead of the 2016 Lifesavers conference and FIA Formula E Long Beach ePrix, continuing its ongoing commitment to improving road safety and raising awareness among teens, parents, educators and lawmakers of the importance of tire safety education.

Visit this link to experience the new Beyond the Driving Test campaign website.

Michelin unveiled the new online resource during a day-long tire safety workshop for California driving instructors and government officials hosted in association with Lifesavers and the American Driver Training and Safety Education Association (ADTSEA).

"Michelin is committed to advancing road safety worldwide. In the U.S. we have created Beyond the Driving Test to focus on teen drivers, who continue to lose their lives at alarming rates on our nation's roadways," said Scott Clark, chief operating officer of Michelin North America's passenger car and light truck tire division. "The new BeyondtheDrivingTest.com provides a highly engaging platform for sharing simple tire safety and maintenance tips that can help save teen lives."

The redesigned website features tire safety content, animated short films and a collection of innovative videos from teen YouTube stars, Michelin experts, and Katie Couric, who supported Michelin for a teen road safety campaign in 2015. The user-friendly platform also includes free downloads of the ADTSEA tire safety curriculum.

Visit this link to download a copy of the ADTSEA tire safety curriculum.

"Michelin's mission for BeyondtheDrivingTest.com is to connect young drivers, their parents, teachers and state lawmakers with the information and resources needed to reduce traffic fatalities due to tire safety and maintenance issues," Clark said. "The Lifesavers conference is an ideal venue for Michelin to unveil this online resource that aims to make our roads safer for teen drivers."

In addition to the ADTSEA workshop, Michelin will present the Beyond the Driving Test campaign during a Lifesavers road safety panel discussion and will exhibit in the main conference hall at the Long Beach Conference Center April 35. This is Michelin's second year as a sponsor of the Lifesavers conference.

Michelin launched Beyond the Driving Test in 2014 with the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) to improve road safety in the United States. In addition to educational outreach, Beyond the Driving Test also aims to ensure all 50 states and the District of Columbia include consistent tire safety information in their driver's education materials by 2020.

In 2015, Michelin and ADTSEA published the first formalized tire safety curriculum in the United States as a component of ADTSEA's national curriculum which has been delivered to driving instructors across the country. In addition to the Long Beach event at Lifesavers, Michelin and ADTSEA have provided free tire safety workshops for hundreds of driving instructors in Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina. The curriculum will also be delivered on April 910, in Honolulu to more than 100 driving instructors in conjunction with the state's annual Operation Driver Excellence event.

About Michelin

Dedicated to the improvement of sustainable mobility, Michelin designs, manufactures and sells tires for every type of vehicle, including airplanes, automobiles, bicycles, Earthmovers, farm equipment, heavy-duty trucks and motorcycles. The Company also publishes travel guides, hotel and restaurant guides, maps and road atlases. Headquartered in Greenville, S.C., Michelin North America (www.michelinman.com) employs more than 22,650 people and operates 20 major manufacturing plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
AIADA Announces California Dealer Greg Kaminsky As 2016 Chairman

















Las Vegas, Nev. (April 3)  The American International Automobile Dealers Association (AIADA) today announced El Cajon, California, auto dealer Greg Kaminsky as its 2016 Chairman. Kaminsky took over the position in February of this year, but was recognized at AIADA's 46th Annual Meeting and Luncheon, held today in Las Vegas.

"Organizations like AIADA bring dealers together, and foster a sense of community that truly benefits us all. I'm proud to be part of it, and I am committed to leaving it in even better shape than I found it," said Kaminsky.

Kaminsky is the President of Toyota of El Cajon and Honda of El Cajon, both of which he runs alongside his brother, Gary. A member of the AIADA Board of Directors for several years, he is an active member of the auto industry and was selected as a 2014 finalist for the Time Dealer of the Year Award, which recognizes the country's most successful auto dealers.

Founded in 1990, Toyota of El Cajon is the first LEED certified building in El Cajon. The dealership is the recipient of numerous awards, including Toyota's President's Cabinet Award, the President's Award, the Toyota Board of Governors Award, and the Better Business Bureau Torch Award. It also supports multiple community organizations and causes, including the Navy Seal Family Foundation and the YMCA.

AIADA's 2016 officers of the Board of Directors are: Greg Kaminsky, Chairman (El Cajon, California); Bradley Hoffman, Immediate Past Chairman (East Hartford, Connecticut); Paul Ritchie, Chairman-Elect (Hagerstown, Maryland); and Lisa Wardell, Secretary/Treasurer (Bethesda, Maryland).

Also during its Annual Meeting, AIADA presented Charlottesville, Virginia, dealer H. Carter Myers III with the 2016 David F. Mungenast Sr. Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is named after the late AIADA Chairman who was known throughout the auto retail industry for his commitment to his community and the industry. A third-generation dealer, Myers joined his family Ford dealership in 1965. Since then, he has grown the business into 12 franchises throughout central and western Virginia.

"H. Carter Myers III embodies the very best our industry has to offer. He has demonstrated a commitment to making a better workplace for his employees and giving back wherever possible to his community," said AIADA President Cody Lusk. "I'm pleased to present him with this year's award because I believe he is an example all dealers should emulate."

For more on AIADA, visit AIADA.org.
Woolworths plan to rebrand its private label ranges in an attempt to meet changing shopper demands and combat the growth of Aldi will simply play into the hands of this German discounter.

This new strategy, a replication of what Coles did in November 2015, will see their existing Homebrand and Woolworths Essential product ranges combined under the Essentials brand name. However, in focusing on price and private label ranges, supermarkets are in a race to the bottom where there are no points of difference in products except for price.

The risks with the private label strategy

The fastest, although not the smartest, way to compete with a competitor like Aldi is to replicate; and thats exactly what Woolworths and Coles have been doing for the past five years. With both major supermarkets driving a message of price and increasing their private label ranges, more shoppers also started frequenting Aldi.

Internationally, grocery discounters like Lidl and Aldi continue to steal market share from the major full-line supermarkets, while supermarkets continue to discount heavily. The practice of deep discounting and private label expansion limits the differentiation between the grocery players and accordingly reduces shopper loyalty. As such, with no supermarket providing a point of difference, more and more customers simply shop around for the lowest price.

The problem with no-name products

Franklins No Frills was Australias first low-cost grocer, with a narrow range of very low priced, generic, no-name grocery products. This concept of no-name products was new to Australian shoppers at the time and Franklins market position initially worked in its favour.

However, Aldis entry into the Australian market in 2001 changed the way we looked at private label products. While Woolworths Homebrand and Coles Smart Buys prices were generally as cheap, if not cheaper than similar entry-level private label products at Aldi, consumers considered the quality of these basic no-name products to be substandard to higher tiered private label products.

These lower perceptions are related to packaging. In a low involvement, routine shopping task, supermarket shoppers will often employ simple logic (often brand or price) to determine quality and aid selection.

Woolworths Homebrand and Coles Smart Buys were designed in plain packaging with no pictures to infer low price. However, shoppers also related low price and plain packaging to mean low quality.

In contrast, Aldis private label ranges mimic nationally branded products. As such, shoppers perceive Aldis private label ranges to look similar to the nationally branded alternative and correlate quality. The lower price then creates a positive value experience for the shopper.

Woolworths new strategy equally is about improving perceptions of brand, through new packaging, while maintaining, or even lowering price.

The rise and rise of supermarket private labels

Aldi has legitimised private label products and forced other players to lift their game. This left Coles and Woolworths scrambling to improve the quality and packaging of existing home brand ranges.

Where once private label grocery products were considered a cheap and nasty alternative for the branded product, supermarket quality assurance teams have changed this mind set. Todays supermarket private label products, offer quality on par with national branded alternatives, with some, so closely resembling the market leader, one would be forgiven for grabbing the wrong box.

Australian consumers appear to be warming to the supermarkets private label products. Research last year indicated that the number of Australians who tend to buy private label groceries over big name brands rose from 44% to 65% in the space of just six months. In comparable markets, like the UK, the proportion of private label sales is almost at parity with national branded products and across Europe, countries like Switzerland and Spain have already reached more than 50%.

The strategy of increasing the proportion of private label products will meet the needs of shoppers who seek value over brand, but also provides sufficient margin to allow supermarkets to slash prices further.

How will private label impact supermarkets in the future?

When it comes to choice in the supermarket, some is certainly better than none, but more is not necessarily better than less. Australian shoppers can expect less choice in the supermarket of tomorrow and this may not be a bad thing.

For many years, Australian supermarkets promoted vast ranges of brands and products, believing that broader, deeper ranges would satisfy shoppers. However, recent research suggests that, psychologically, this assumption was wrong. In fact, shoppers faced with excessive choice found it difficult to choose and were less likely to purchase.

Aldi has demonstrated the power of less. Selling only 1700 products, the supermarkets small ranges may deliver less choice, but saves shoppers time, this creates less confusion and satisfies most.

Globally, where German discounters like Aldi or Lidl have entered the market, incumbent supermarkets have slashed range. Recently, Tesco cut 20,000 product lines from their 90,000 range, similarly Coles in 2012 reduced its range by some 7,000 products.

While this strategy responds to customers who are looking to make their grocery shopping more efficient, it also reduces supply chain costs for supermarkets.

>> BACK TO THE NEWSLETTER: Click here to read other articles from this weeks newsletter

Originally published on The Conversation
A tragic Easter evening at a crowded park in Lahore, Pakistan, is the latest reminder that outside of the Western world, Christianity is increasingly a targeted minority.

The Taliban faction, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, claimed responsibility for the suicide attack that killed more than 70 and wounded hundreds, mostly children. More than 5,000 militants were rounded up in Pakistan and all but approximately 200 were released during the governments investigation.

Attacks against Christians are a pattern in Pakistan in recent years. In March of 2015, for example, 14 people were killed and more than 70 injured after suicide bombers targeted two churches in Lahore, and at least 80 were killed in a church bomb attack in 2013 in the city of Peshawar.

Human-rights organizations have an uphill battle when it comes to raising Western awareness of incidents like these. David Curry, CEO of Open Doors U.S.A., part of an international organization that tracks and brings awareness of Christian persecution, sees the Western focus on persecution in America and Europe as part of the problem.

I don't believe most Americans have an accurate understanding of the real state of Christian persecution around the world, says Curry. News coverage is selected according to consumer demand, he adds. But for news consumers to clamor for such coverage, they need to be aware of the extent of the problem.

Open Doors reports a significant increase in attacks against Christians during 2014-2015. Last year, more than 7,000 Christians were killed for their faith, which they note is almost 3,000 more than the previous year. The largest areas of growing Christian persecution occur in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. Those numbers are expected to scale upward.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI), an organization whose Campaign for Free Expression promotes the rights of religious and nonreligious individuals globally, has seen the same patterns. We were the sole secular humanist organization to press the State Department to label ISISs crimes against Muslims and Christians as genocide, says Paul Fidalgo, the communications director for CFI.

Open Doors agrees with the genocide assessment, noting that persecution in the Middle East and Africa, increasingly takes the form of ethnic cleansing.

In March, pressures from human-rights organizations finally succeeded in getting the U.S. State Department to apply this genocidal label to the Islamic State. Secretary of State John Kerry provided a laundry list of war crimes by IS that helped to secure that official condemnation, including the horrific beheading of 49 Egyptian and Ethiopian Coptic Christians in 2015.

The difficulty in addressing these human-rights violations is significantly stronger, however, when it comes to recognized states. In many countries, suppression of minority religious groups is codified in legal systems in the form of blasphemy laws. These laws serve as a means to justify and prosecute religious and nonreligious minorities. (The United States still has a few unenforceable blasphemy laws left on the books.)

A 2012 report from Pew Research shows that 22 percent of the worlds countries and territories have blasphemy laws, and 11 percent penalize apostasy. In many locations, punishments can result in fines, but in others, blasphemy is on par with treason and can result in death.

The safety of individuals in countries with blasphemy laws is difficult to secure by foreign advocates. Frequently, governments, like Saudi Arabia, whose human-rights record is repeatedly questioned by advocacy groups, see international pressure to improve human rights as a guise for challenging their sovereignty. (Saudi Arabia has a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council.)

State responses like these belie the significant individual human cost they dismiss. In a few individual cases, the end result is freedom. In Sudan, a 27-year-old Christian woman, Meriam Ibrahim, was sentenced to death for apostasy after converting and was turned in to the authorities by her brother. Groups like Open Doors and Center for Inquiry both called for her release, and she was eventually allowed to receive asylum in the United States.

Other individuals, like Pakistani Asia Bibi, a Christian accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad, are still uncertain what the future holds. Shes been on death row since 2010. Her strongest advocate, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, was assassinated for his support in 2011. She is the subject of protests and threats while her case is appealed.

Even in countries that boast a form of official secularity and religious freedomsuch as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Bangladeshthe state unofficial intolerance religious groups, or failure to address social intolerance, only increases the suppression of religious groups. Bangladesh is perhaps the clearest example, notes Fidalgo, where you have secular activists and Christians being murdered, more or less with impunity.

For those who are aware of this global situation, calls for change are growing. Through official statements and social media, many Muslims have expressed their support and solidarity with those who are persecuted. For example, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the exiled world head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Communitya group also persecuted in Pakistan for their belief in a prophet after Muhammad and which is constitutionally unrecognized by the state as Muslimreleased a statement expressing his sympathies and condolences, condemning the Lahore attack. Never can such attacks be justified in any shape or form, he says, and so all forms of terrorism and extremism must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

Effective international solutions, however, are still a long way away and those engaged in human rights want to see actions with teeth. Right now few leaders are offering more than condolences after major attacks on Christians, says Curry, They need to go to the countries, meet with its leaders and people to find bipartisan ways to protect Christians and promote religious freedom to all.

We have to look beyond our borders, adds Fidalgo. We need to recognize that people truly are suffering in unthinkable waysbeing beaten by mobs, imprisoned, executed, floggedfor holding certain beliefs or questioning the majority.

And then we need to start bringing to bear our diplomatic and economic influence and making serious efforts to make change. Sometimes we are doing that, but not nearly often enough, nor forcefully enough.

Brandon G. Withrow teaches religious studies at the University of Findlay, is the author of nine books, his most-recent (co-authored with Menachem Wecker) is Consider No Evil: Two Faith Traditions and the Problem of Academic Freedom in Religious Higher Education.
Is Donald Trump the new George Wallace? Silvio Berlusconi? Adolf Hitler?

Could be. But at least as much as a southern segregationist, rich pervert turned politico, or genocidal fascist, Trump resembles L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the pyramid-scheme-masquerading-as-religion known as Scientology.

Consider: both men are (or, in Hubbards case, were) narcissistic, autocratic, money-obsessed, pathological liars and would-be sexual conquerors who built business empires for the primary purpose of self-enrichment under glitz-drenched brands maintained by fraud and advanced by uncompromising litigiousness and occasional physical aggression against critics.

Hubbard died in 1986, though perhaps only corporeally. He claimed he was Cecil Rhodes in a previous life and today may be inhabiting the soul of Donald Trump for all we know; at the least the two men bear some resemblance.

Both are defined by compulsive acquisitiveness. MAKE MONEY. MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY, Hubbard wrote to underlings in an early Scientology Governing Policy document. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MONEY.

Trumps complaints of being unfairly audited by the IRS echo Scientologys decades-long battle with the taxman; Hubbard was himself named an unindicted co-conspirator to a covert, 1973 Scientology operation dubbed Snow White aimed at infiltrating the agency.

Hubbard was also one of the great frauds of the 20th century. A man who lied about nearly every aspect of his biography and repeatedly bragged about imaginary feats of daring and physical bravery, his breathless, downright Trumpian testaments to his own genius and courage were mere preparation for the greatest lie of them all: that he had unlocked the secrets of the human mind in the form of Dianetics, the pseudoscience at the heart of Scientology. Hubbard used to claim that auditing, a process in which one holds onto electrically charged metal cans and talks about past life experiences, could raise peoples I.Q. by one point per hour.

In one of the many legal cases brought by the Church against ex-Scientologists or critics, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge deemed Hubbard a pathological liar driven by egotism, greed, avarice, lust for power and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile. Sound familiar?

Much as Trump surrounds himself with sycophants and media supplicants, Scientologists venerate Hubbard as a sort of man-god; his portrait, which followers salute while shouting hip hip hooray, is ubiquitous in Church establishments.

One distinction: Whereas Trumps a talker, Hubbard was a writer, one who started out as a pulp fiction novelist and churned out hundreds of works of science fiction, crime potboilers, and sham sociology and religious texts over the course of his long career. For both men, the overflow of words is a function of an insatiable appetite for money, power, and acclaim.

When not making up stories about themselves, both men lied about the world around them. Trump persists with his false claim of witnessing thousands of Muslims celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers, one of countless fibs he has repeated effortlessly on the campaign trail. Hubbard, bitter at the psychiatric professions designation of Dianetics as crankery, declared psychiatry a devious plot to destroy humanity.

Trump also resembles Hubbard as a self-help guru who mostly helps himself. Like all religions, Scientology promises its followers spiritual illumination, the apex of which is the revelation that, 75 million years ago, a galactic warlord named Xenu planted the bodies of billions of aliens around the Earths volcanoes and detonated them with hydrogen bombs. The immortal spirits of these beings now adhere to humans in the form of Thetans that one can only release with the help of Scientology teachings.

Trumps Art of the Deal is to Trumpism what Hubbards Dianetics is to Scientology: a load of bullshit pretending to teach you how to fix yourself, just replacing the new-age homilies with odes to avarice.

What distinguishes Scientology from most other organized religions isstill more shades of Donaldits unambiguously transactional relationship with adherents. In exchange for moving up its ladder of enlightenment known as The Bridge to Total Freedom, Scientologists pony up ever-increasing amounts of money to the Church, which often pressures them into maxing out credit cards, taking on loans they cannot afford, or driving themselves into bankruptcy.

The most succinct and accurate description of Scientology remains that offered by investigative journalist Richard Behar in his 1991 Time magazine investigation, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power. Scientology, Behar wrote, is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner.

For Trump and Hubbard respectively, politics and religion are extensions of business empires. Trump University, the now-defunct branch of the many-tentacled Trump Organization that most clearly resembles the Scientology swindle, preyed upon unsuspecting consumers by guaranteeing them future riches in return for the money they handed over now. Today, Trump University, (which, despite its name, was never an accredited educational institution), is the subject of a class action lawsuit in three states; the New York State Attorney General has condemned it as a bait-and-switch scheme. A recent New York Times story revealed how instructors pressured students to turn in positive evaluations, much like how Scientology brainwashes and intimidates its own followers. The surveys themselves were a central component of a business model that, according to lawsuits and investigators, deceived consumers into handing over thousands of dollars with tantalizing promises of riches, the Times reports.

Hubbard and Trumpcamp figures to the corealso share a chintzy aesthetic. Scientology videos, promotional materials and edifices all share a grotesquely ersatz style thats been described as a pastiche of an Ikea catalog with a romanticized nineteenth-century English countryside. This is eerily similar, in tastelessness if not actual design, to Trumps gaudy and soulless properties. Visiting Trumps New York penthouse apartment a decade ago, Daily Beast founding editor Tina Brown memorably noted its Baath Party decor.

Most ominous is the connection between the two mens misogyny, racism, authoritarianism and the physical violence encouraged by their organizations.

A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out, the (like Trump) thrice-married Hubbard wrote in his Scientology: A New Slant on Life.

For several months in 1966, inspired by his belief that he was the reincarnation of imperialist Cecil Rhodes, Hubbard traipsed around Rhodess eponymous, white-ruled country, posing as a millionaire financier. Hubbard was also an admirer of the apartheid government in neighboring South Africa, and his writings from the time are full of racist ramblings. The following observation characteristic of the whole ignoble oeuvre: The Zulu is only outside the bars of a madhouse because there are no madhouses provided by his tribe.

Trump, like Hubbard, brooks no dissent within his organization, or of it.

If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace. Peace is bought with an exchange of advantage, so make the advantage and then settle. Dont ever defend. Always attack. Dont ever do nothing. Unexpected attacks in the rear of the enemys front ranks work best.

Thats Hubbard, articulating a callous philosophy the two men share. Scientology for decades operated under his ruthless Fair Game doctrine, which declared that church critics May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.

Trump, meantime, day dreams out loud about creating a federal slander law as president so when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because theyre totally protected Were going to open up libel laws and were going to have people sue you like youve never got sued before.

Over its decades-long existence, countless ex-Scientologists have come forth to recount horrifying tales of mental and physical abuse, imprisonment and torture at the hands of church officials, many of them recounted in a landmark Tampa Bay Times series and in New Yorker writer Lawrence Wrights recent book Going Clear. The Trump organizations shameful treatment of Michelle Fields, the former Breitbart reporter manhandled by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and who then saw her reputation dragged through the mud by Trump and his acolytes, was ripped straight from the gaslighting playbook of Scientology.

Trumps Manichean worldview, in which everyone who criticizes him is an evil loser and everyone who praises him is a terrific winner, calls to mind Hubbards personal vindictiveness towards Scientologys detractors, whom he labeled suppressive persons.

But the greatest similarity between these two egotistical, vamping monsters is that they have both tried to perpetrate a giant scam. With any hope, the American people will laugh away Donald Trumps nightmare vision of the world as soundlyand with as much humoras they have the science fiction space opera spewed by Scientologys Bare-Faced Messiah.
The little boy's cries pierced the early-morning peace of the Styron family home on Marthas Vineyard. Outside it was a summers day. Inside, John F. Kennedy Jr.John-John, then about 5 years old and staying there with his mother, Jackie Kennedy, and sister, Carolinehad realized his pet rabbit had gone missing.

Today, sitting at the downstairs dining table overlooking the choppy ocean on a gray, chilly, spring day, Rose Styron, the 87-year-old widow of author William Styron, recalls the pandemonium that unfolded next.

It was the summer or second summer after Jack had been killed, she says. Im not good with dates. John was in a room upstairs with his pet rabbit. I hadnt noticed the hole in the floorboards between the beds. The rabbit went down the hole. Afterwards, all the Secret Servicemen were stationed around the house trying to figure out where the rabbit would come out.

The rabbit eventually materialized near a hydrangea bush; the Secret Servicemen were triumphant, recalls Rose. Then Jackie said, Wheres John-John?

A fresh panic unfolded as it became clear John Jr. was now missing. He had, it turned out, walked all the way down the beach looking for the rabbit, sat and picnicked with some people eating barbecue food on the beach, and was eventually found by Terry, the Styrons caretaker.

The Secret Service guys got a black eye from Jackie after that, Rose says, laughing softly.

The Styrons certainly knew the great and the good, as not only Roses memories testify to, but also William Styrons Collected Letters, which Rose edited, and their daughter Alexandras memoir, Reading My Father.

In a New Yorker article, Alexandra recalled watching Frank Sinatra, a frequent summer visitor, naked in the Styrons outside shower. Other guests at the home included James Baldwin and John Belushi.

Philip Roth was a close friend, Norman Mailer was feuded withand later re-friended. The Styrons knew Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer from their non-summer home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

A picture of some girlfriends features Sawyer, Hillary Clinton, and Carly Simon, among others, in sun-hats and shades. On Bill and Roses first date, they were accompanied by Truman Capote. Lillian Hellman and Ladybird Johnson were friends and neighbors.

In her book, Alexandra recalled Leonard Bernstein playing on the family piano at Christmas, and boasting to a schoolteacher that Joan Baez had been at the house the night before.

The couple were great socializers, and Rose was an adept, graceful hostessas she is with me, generously inviting me for supper the night before we are due to meet.

Rose has lived in this house for 51 years, the first 48 of those summers. Now she lives here full-time.

Bill Styron, who died aged 81 in 2006, was most famous for writing Sophies Choice (1979), which went on to become a movie starring Meryl Streep, who won the Best Actress Oscar and Golden Globe for her role. (She and Rose are good friends, theres a lovely photo of them on the fridge.)

Styron is also known for his memoir of suffering a debilitating depression in 1985 (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, 1990).

Rose met Bill just after the publication of his acclaimed first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and was with him as charges of racism were made against him after the publication of the Pulitzer-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).

The criticism over Styrons portrayal of Turner, who led a slave rebellion in the 19th centuryand his sketching of benevolent slave ownersgrew so rancorous that hed worried for the physical safety of their family, Rose tells me.

Rose lives in their Marthas Vineyard home alone now, with friends always around to help her. Her four children and eight grandchildren visit: Theres a house for the children behind the main house, and Styrons writing shed is now piled with mattresses for the grandchildren. Rose sold their Connecticut home three years ago; it was too expensive to maintain.

Age has definitely not slowed herhaving first become an advocate around human rights with Amnesty International in the late 1960s, she still fizzes with life and enquiry.

She is newly interested in neuroscience, and the work of Tim Phillips, co-founder of Beyond Conflict, who applies neuroscience to conflict resolution. She pauses, smiled. Yes, Im interested in the brain having lived with Bill Styron for 50-odd years.

In Darkness Visible, Styron wrote explicitly about his experience of crippling depression. He recovered from it, and Styron went on to have 15 good years, as Rose puts it, until another, more severe bout caused his whole body to go into a frightening lockdown.

This led to Styron to ask a friend to help make a suicide cocktail.

He became, in the words of Alexandra, in her frank and also tender memoir, totally unhingedhelpless and infantile andafter electro-shock treatmentwas sprung from a medical facility by his eldest daughter, Susanna.

After Bill died, Rose came across a stack of letters stuffed in her daughter Pollys bureau, addressed to Bill from readers of Darkness Visible, thanking him for saving them one way or other; pointing out what had happened with children or spouses or their own lives.

The authors of these letters didnt understand that, says Rose, their letters had been so important in healing him from his first bout of depression. There were phone calls, too. He really saved a couple of lives in those phone calls. People still come up to me to thank Bill through me, which I love. Im always so happy to meet those people. Its a connection and fulfillment."

Styron and his troubled mind, and his death, eddies in and out of my conversation with Rose.

***

Rose has the theater of the seasons to watch outside here, bounded by the trunks of two trees, andweather dependingshe sits on the patio to work overlooking lawn and sea: the sailboats, the ferries, the Mallard ducks in the spring, and Eider ducks in the winter. Today, she is alarmed that her squirrel-proof bird-feeder is no longer squirrel-proof: an audacious, bushy-tailed invader is feasting on nuts with rapacious vigor.

Rose's children and grandchildren have sailed and wind-surfed here, and played football on the huge lawn. A hole in the hedge facilitated easy access to the next-door yacht club: her 14-year-old grandson Tommy is on the National Junior Sailing Team, she says proudlyand Rose herself has a luminous, outdoorsy, fresh, vigorous beauty.

I love it all day when Im working or walking or thinking, she says of living alone, but in the evening I miss company, so I go to the cinema or arrange to have dinner with friends.

In November, Rose published Fierce Day, a book of poetry about her grieving for Bill set against the natural world and seasons all around her. In Today, she writes: You would have loved today, / this twilight high in the wild-fever spring bruised field.

You don't stop grieving, Rose tells me. Im not Nancy Reagan. Im not going to be that public about things, but I loved my husband. We had a long, marvelous life together and I miss himthe affection, company, conversation, and mental stimulationas well as our family life.

While the children were growing up, Rose took care of them, Bill rose at noon, and decamped to his outside studywith the sign Verboten on it to ward off interruptionsand Rose misses the long evenings of conversation that would unfold after the children were put to bed.

She would read and type up whatever he had written (later a secretary was employed to do this).

I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, Rose says, when asked if she saw it as an equal marriage. I happily wrote my first book of poems in my childrens voices. I did not want to do anything else, and when I got involved in Amnesty International I had another calling.

In her book, Alexandra said her fathers declines coincided with her mother not being around.

I guess I wasnt aware of that as she saw it, Rose says, although she recalled that at the time of the 1985 breakdown she was in Budapest, and he called to her say she had to come home. Then I began to realize he needed me around more than he had in the previous twenty years.

While the episode seemed sudden, I began to think about the past, says Rose, and realized there were symptoms that neither of us had realized. A lot of it had been in his work: from Lie Down to Nat Turner and Sophie he had written about suicide or long thoughts of suicide.

It didnt occur to me that was Bill working out his own thoughts in those books, but it soon became clear with the year that followed. Any possible weapon from the house and garage I kept a firm eye on as he got more and more depressed. Neither of us had ever been to a shrink so had no idea what was happening. I was very ignorant and could have been more help if I had been more knowledgeable.

She says she never saw a sign of the darkness within her husband: He would disappear into the studio to write and come out of himself every evening. He would protest when she arranged dinners and travel sometimes, but he always rose to the occasion and had a great time.

A few times at the last minute he canceled trips to Yugoslavia, Israel, and Sicily, and today Rose thinks, I didnt see into them as maybe I should have done.

In Darkness Visible, she is barely mentioned, she thinks because the book is so about his inner experience. How was his 1985 breakdown for her? I was feeling like an inadequate but continuous advocate for him getting better.

Why inadequate?

Because it didnt work. Maybe things would have been much worse if I hadnt been his advocate but he still ended up in the hospital so often.

Bill went to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he was treated with antidepressant MAO inhibitors, and recovered within six months.

Rose wonders if the first episode wasnt at least in part triggered by Bill turning 60, and a fear of getting old. But between 60 and 75 he became perfect again and better, and I really think writing Darkness Visible helped to heal him. He got better and better, so it was a shock when it happened again.

The 1985 episode Rose recalls as a relative breeze when contrasted against all that flowed from Bills second breakdown, in 2000.

Rose thought Bill would come back after both depressive episodes, although the second was a long, complicated journey.

During the second episode, Rose regretted leaving him briefly in Martha Vineyards hospital to attend to some business in Connecticut, only to be called and told an admitting doctor had transferred Bill to the psychiatric ward of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston without letting anyone know.

Bill was so frightened that he seized up in the ambulance by himself. He was like a marionette. I asked myself, Why did I go to Connecticut at that moment? I felt totally inadequate.

***

Rose Burgunder and Bill Styron first met in 1951 at Johns Hopkins University, when Bill had been invited to speak to graduate students there, which included Rose. He was a former Marine from a middle-class family; she from Baltimore, and born of wealthy, assimilated Jewish stock, as Alexandra put it in her book.

I was doing a class in creative writing, and I was interested in poetry and criticism, recalls Rose. I sure wasnt impressed by Bill at all. She laughs. He was cute but so nervous, and didnt have anything intellectual to say. I cant remember even shaking hands afterwards. I wasnt thinking about him at all.

A year or so later Styron had received the Prix de Rome for Lie Down and the same professor who invited him to Johns Hopkins told Rose to go to the American Academy in Rome to look him up.

Rose left Bill a note in his cubbyhole, introducing herself. He called her the next day, and asked if she would join him for a drink.

At the appointed hour, Rose went to the venue, and found Bill sitting with a male painter with dark curly hair, and Truman Capote, looking like he was 12 years old, with white bangs, a sailor suit, and totally recognizable. I had a fantastic evening. I thought Bill was very cute. It was one of those romantic, electric moments people write about.

At the end of the evening, like five in the morning, Truman looked up and said, Bill, you ought to marry that girl. Bill, Truman, and I had a wonderful winter together walking all over Rome, Truman with his mynah bird named Lola on his shoulder.

In letters to friends, Bill said he had met an amazing girl whom he wanted to be with. However, the couple broke up temporarily after discovering Roses mother had hired a private detective to dig up dirt on Bill.

Reunited, they married in Rome in 1953, with Rose expecting to continue her career as a writer. I had two contracts, one for a book of poetry and one for a book about Wallace Stevens, and I didnt fulfill either. When Bill and I decided to get married, it never occurred to me that I would put my budding career on the side. But it never occurred to me wed be married more than a couple of years. I didn't think it would be forever.

Part of the ceremony included wording that she would follow her husband everywhere, and that he was the lead in the marriage.

That wasnt only the way they did it in Rome, as Rose puts it; she herself had been bought up similarly.

Roses mother had told her not to be first in her school classes, and to let men lead her. It was a Southern upbringing of my generation which I dont think would wash anywhere now. Im not proud of it, but in certain ways it stood me in good stead when talking to dictators and their minions. (She wont say whom.)

Glamour was nothing that came into my head, our heads. It was fun and games. We were lucky enough to have friends who did wonderful thingsthough we were sure people were angry or envying us. There was a lot of both.

She had first met Jack Kennedy as a student at Wellesley, though didnt meet him again until she and Bill were invited to the White House. Jack consulted Bill on race issues, and the last time we saw himtwo weeks before Jack diedhe had talked to Bill about those issues.

After JFKs death, Jackie Kennedy stayed with the Styrons. On one occasion, as related by Bill in a letter, Rose noticed while applying suntan lotion to the children that John Jr.s schlong, as Bill put it, was double the size of her own sons. Bills letters contain many great anecdotes, including being out on the town with Jackie till 5 a.m., and conversations with Jack before his assassination.

Jackie and Rose fell out of touch, and became summer friends again later on, when Jackie bought her own house on Marthas Vineyard, and their daughters (Caroline and Alexandra) became friends.

Just before her death, Jackie asked Rose to write a memoir that would fold in her adventures as an Amnesty ambassador. She wanted Rose to put more of herself into the book, which Rose felt she could not. A plan was in place to keep the conversation going, and revisit and develop the idea, when Jackie died. The book is still a work in progress.

***

Rose fought against playing second string as the marriage matured and her own self-confidence and desire for independence grew. When she attended Capotes famous Black and White Ball in 1966, she did so aloneBill hated balls and cocktail parties, events he called Philadelphia Ratfucks. She had such a good time, it helped her realize she could go out on her own; her good friend Maria Matthiessen (the wife of writer Peter Matthiessen, a close friend of Bills) also told her she should travel on her own after Bill had pulled out of one trip.

As their marriage progressed, Rose became more immersed in poetry and her human-rights work, beginning with her going to the Soviet Union in 1968 and meeting writers persecuted by the authorities, and later meeting artists and writers from all over world in conflict with their governments.

If in the beginning of their marriage she felt in Bills shadow, it didnt bother her: I thought he was brilliant and a wonderful writer and great companion. The minute she felt she needed to assert her own professional identity, she went out to do so.

Rose never felt this work was about having my own life, as Bill supported all she did. When Al [Alexandra, their daughter] said he would miss me and wanted me home, I think that may have been true too, but he never said, Don't go.

After he died, and Rose was very lonely and sad and when I didnt want to see anybody or do anything, it was her connections with her Amnesty work and other boards and activities that galvanized her and gave me a life after Bill.

Rose and Bill were "pretty different," Rose says, but had the same moral upbringing: both were against the death penalty, liked the same friends, and had the same attitudes towards life in general.

At first she was bothered that he didnt want her to read her poetry to him but when I began to have children I didnt care any more. It was just wonderful to have children and a husband I loved, and to have a life in the country. It didnt stop me writing poetry. I just put it in a drawer.

There were long gaps between Styrons works. Alexandra wondered if her fathers creative frustrationsparticularly his unfinished book, The Way of the Warriorwere a cause of his depression. His editor, Bob Loomis, disagreed with her: His illness made it impossible for him to finish anything. Not the other way round.

Bill himself never talked about or even sought the fame he found, Rose says.

He wasn't competitive at all. In fact, he shunned facing people in any position of conflict and retreated from anything like that. He was terribly hurt when he got really bad reviews, or when people misunderstood what he was trying to do.

This surfaced after Styron wrote Nat Turner, and the book 10 Black Writers Respond was published.

In retrospect that sparked a depression, says Rose. That was the first time I saw him not only really downwhich I didnt see as depression at the timebut also with enormous melancholy, sadness, and fear, which he hadnt had before.

Though he won the Pulitzer Prize for it, and black writers like Cornel West and Henry Louis Skip Gates Jr. later supported him, Rose recalls that the fractious social atmosphere of the timethe tumult around civil rights that ultimately was a wonderful time of changemade Bill scared for his family.

He would not let the children play out on the lawn in Roxbury if I was not with him, says Rose. He was so worried something was going to happen to the children or to me. If I took our kids somewhere and said Id be home by 5, and came back at a quarter to 6, he would be the door fretting, saying, Where were you? I was afraid something had happened to you. That was the first time I saw real fear and melancholy in him which he got over, but not over completely.

Sophies Choiceinspired by a dream Styron had of an upstairs neighbor in a boardinghouse he had once lived in, who had been imprisoned in Auschwitztook seven years to write, a journey for the whole family as Bill was so preoccupied, Rose says. If I really wanted to get his attention on some domestic issue I would approach him in the voice of Sophie to get his attention.

The first chapter Bill showed Rose was of Sophies choice itself, between her children. I said to him, If you start the book with this there isnt a mother in the world who will read to chapter two. Its too painful. Couldn't you possibly save it till the end? She smiles. He saved it till the almost end, and wrote the rest of a very fine novel.

In her memoir, Alexandra writes candidly of her father as an irascible, very frightening presence to grow up around. (She writes very tenderly about him too.)

I think he was, says Rose. I was always trying to break that, or laugh about it, or say to the kids, Don't pay any attention to this. Its just dad and his work. I often had to be the go-between, particularly between him and his son Tom.

Alexandra was seven years younger than her nearest sibling, so Rose thinks she had a very different childhood to the other three, who had each other.

In Styrons letters, we read how close he is to his first daughter, Susanna (whom he called Number One), and Rose thinks he wasnt close to Tom for years because Tom was close to her and her husband was jealous of this.

That mother-son closeness had come from her looking after him so carefully because of an early illness hed suffered. Bills mother had died of cancer when he was 13, and seeing Rose and Tommy perhaps reminded him of the closeness he and his mother never had. They became friends later when Tommy had a breakdown similar to his father in his late 20s, Rose said. Tom reached out to Bill, and Bill responded.

Alexandras book must have made painful reading, I say. Of her father, she writes: At times, querulous and taciturn, cutting and remote, melancholy when he was sober and rageful when in his cups, he inspired fear and loathing in us a good deal more often than it feels confortable to admit.

He was not an engaged parent: he didnt eat dinner with us or attend school plays, Alexandra wrote. He never threw a ball, built a tree house, or tucked us into bed. I cant remember him teaching me how to do anything except open a wine bottle, a job that I did on my tiptoes and with great dedication each night before I went to bed.

In her book, Alexandra also recalls her parents being in eternal battle mode, and her father shouting, I want a divorce. In his later life, mellowed and drinking less, Alexandra says, he showed some patience, was mild and expressed flashes of great tenderness, especially for Rose.

It wasnt easy, Rose says of reading Alexandras book. When I picked up the first chapter I found it so painful I had to put it down. Was it fair? It was totally her point of view and she is a very good writer and expressed it beautifully. Whos to say what is fair? We all have our own opinions of our lives with children and parents.

Alexandras siblings are seven to 12 years older than her, and while their relationships with their parents may have been different, Alexandras book upset heralthough she is proud her daughter wrote it. Like Alexandra, Rose was the youngest child, too, and she says now she had over-associated herself with her daughter.

But the two were very different. I knew she resented my absences on trips, but I made as few as possible, knowing I had been there all time for her siblings. Reading her book, I felt guilty, not for what Id done but what I didn't understand. If I had really understood how she felt I would have done things differently, and Im sorry about it.

Does Rose wish Bill had been a different kind of father?

I often wish that, sure, and I hadnt realized how deeply it had affected Al, cause he loved Al. He thought she was wonderful.

I ask if Rose had ever asked Bill to be a more present, active parent.

Sure, but it didnt work. We lived our lives as they were. Most of the family lived a pretty good life, and the kids became very close, partly because I was such a laissez-faire mother, especially in the summer.

Alexandra called Rose, affectionately, profligate in her book, and its true Rose saysshe took each of the kids to New York on their own, and, she laughs, she wanted to be part of their scenes much more than they wanted their mom to be. Later on I learned, with horror and amusement, what I had missed, she says.

After Alexandras book was published, Rose learned of the drinking, marijuana-puffing, and gambling that went on in the childrens house. It was apparently a famous gathering place for their generation, Rose says, smiling.

Styron himself gave up drinking just before his 1985 depression. He drank, but he wasnt an alcoholic, insists Rose. He never drank during the day when he was working. He sometimes drank too much at night, but there was never a time when he couldnt drive home.

He didnt, she says, fall down flat on his face at parties, yet she has seen him described as an alcoholic. Its not true at all, she says.

One woman who insisted Bill was an alcoholic encouraged Rose to attend a meeting of Al-Anon (the support group for family and friends of problem drinkers). She said I would understand after hearing people talk, and I did understand completely that Bill wasnt an alcoholic.

Styron had given up liquor, in his words, as it was no longer his friend, says Rose. He still had the occasional glass of wine, but never a stiff drink. But I think drink helped him stave off depression, Rose says. The depression really followed on after he stopped drinkingan ex-alcoholic friend of ours said that would happen because of withdrawal. Who knows whether there was that connection or not?

When we had dined together the night before, Rose had described her marriage as made up of two independent people within a tight, loving unit.

We respected each others privacy, she says. As long as we loved each other and had our family life together and each other, what we did when we werent together was our own business, not to be questioned or judged.

Does she mean they gave each other space to have relationships with other people?

I think Bill got more space than I did, Rose says. We both had space. I think it was OK. There was once I thought it wasnt OK, and once Bill thought it wasnt OK, but we got over it.

Youd fallen for those people more seriously? I ask.

No. It was very brief outside alliances for me, with no thought of pursuing, and maybe little longer ones for Bill, but not serious enough to interfere with our marriage.

They dont sound as if they were jealous of each other.

No, that wouldnt be the right word, or maybe it would have been. I didnt like it, but I felt different ways about it. But, whatever it was, I didnt feel it hurt our marriage. I may have wished it didnt exist, but I was away a lot. Whatever it was, was brief and never interfered with us.

Were they honest with each other about these other relationships?

We didnt talk about them, but we were very aware of each other, and I certainly never felt seriously about anyone else, and I dont think Bill didbut who knows? Im not Bill.

***

The traumatic cycle of physical and psychological events that Bill underwent between 2000 and his death in 2006 sound frightening and exhausting for both him and his family; Alexandra writes about them powerfully in her memoir.

Bill had electro-shock treatment because he was just catatonic, says Rose. It was frightening. He had begged me not to make him go on with electric shock, which he choseover my dead bodybut he chose it.

After the fourth session of the treatment, the doctor told Rose she would have to accompany Bill for his fifth session to make sure he did it. I left him at door of the lab, and he turned to me and said, Youre killing me, and I must say that was the worst day of my life. It was just awful. I was trying to do what the doctor said and I shouldnt have.

The family thought Bills condition was not improving, which led to eldest daughter Susanna springing her dad from the hospitalitself a mission fraught with complications.

At a red light, Bill bolted from the car (he hadnt been given a sedative before leaving the hospital). After Susanna found him, the pilot on their privately chartered plane was worried Bill seemed too crazy to be a passenger. Then the plane was held upfirst in New Haven, by politician Joe Liebermans plane; and then, when landing back in Marthas Vineyard, it was delayed by President Clintons plane, taking off from his summer vacation home there.

Rose could only find five letters Bill wrote between 2000 and 2006all written in 2002. He never really regained the use of his hand to write, she said. He went into terrible catatonia for months, and he came out of it OKand we had pretty nice last 2 years.

In his final stretch of illness in 2006, Rose left Bill with a nurse to attend Alexandras 40th birthday party in New York. He had not been well, but had rallied somewhat. She left him talking cheerfully to Peter Matthiessen.

The next morning the nurse found Bill in terrible shape, says Rose. He was having trouble breathing, so the nurse took him to the hospital in Marthas Vineyard.

A few weeks prior, Bill had requested not to be revived in case of emergency, but Rose says she told medical staff: Dont pay attention to that. He probably wasnt in his right mind. I am. Dont you let him go. Ill get there as fast as I can. Just keep him going till I get there.

As she was saying this, her cellphone was ringing: a friend had been taking the couples dog to the hospital to visit Bill when the dog, LadybirdBills best friend, a half-Irish greyhound, half-Labrador who looked like a deer, and who for some reason was terrified of the waterhad collapsed. (For two summers, Ladybird the dog also became the best buddy of Ladybird Johnson, former First Lady, who had a house next door.)

The vet wanted to put Ladybird down, butas with her husbandRose asked that nothing happen until she got home. On one phone, I was saying Dont let my husband die, and on the other I was saying, Dont you dare put the dog down.

More complications came when one of the worst storms in the history of Marthas Vineyard blew through that night. The next day, with flights grounded, an architect with his own plane flew Rose back to the island, he a more nervous pilot than she.

I had taken lots of flying lessons, Rose says. I never got my hours, but I loved it, and told him not to worry. I dont think I worried enough in my life. Im often accused of being a Pollyanna. I dont see myself that way, but I think Im usually on the upside of things.

She dates this optimism back to trips to Atlantic City with her grandmother, whenaged 5 or 6she would be let loose alone on the boardwalk with pockets full of change to spend on candy and games. Its where she fell in love with cinema, too: the first movie she saw was It Happened One Night, and she recalls Hedy Lamarr climbing naked out of the water in Ecstasy. I had a great time. I just thought, Life can be beautiful.

In Alexandras book, she writes that Rose asked Bill to say, I love you one final time to her, and that he opened his eyes.

That was the last thing he said to me, Rose tells me. The night before he lapsed into his final unconsciousness, she had been sitting up with him, but falling asleep as she did so. He said she should go home to rest.

At home, in bed, Rose had the worst nightmare of my life, featuring a former babysitter who was crazy about Bill, strangling Rose as she lay in bed. Alarmed when she awoke, Rose called the hospital and begged to speak to Bill.

The staff woke him, and the couple chatted. Rose wanted to come back to the hospital, Bill said not to worry, and to come when it was light. The last thing he said was, I love you, goodnight. And then at 5 a.m. they called me: he wasnt quite dead, but he was totally shut down and out of it and we knew that meant he was dying. He didnt respond to conversation, but the kids all came in and Polly said something and he woke up and smiled, then went back to sleep. My friend Lucy Hackney next door came and said something, he smiled, and went back to sleep. All four kids were round the bed with him when he died later that day.

The last nine years have been different, Rose says. She has four wonderful kids who are great to me and that means a lot. She has amazing friends, and attends engaging, energizing conferences, events (like Poetry and The Creative Mind, which she co-chairs with Meryl Streep), parties, and trips abroad. I love life, I dont plan to die, she says, laughing exuberantly.

She is healthy, having beaten Lyme disease, which knocked out her immune system and led to shingles, which went to her eye, leading to a cornea surgery.

A few years ago, Rose slipped and fell down the stairs of her former Connecticut home, leading to severed muscles and six months of operationsall this when she was organizing and trying to sell the home itself.

The profits from the sale are helping her children, who, Rose says affectionately, are all talented artists and academicians not making much moneyvery successful but not in finance in any way.

When the packing up at Roxbury had been done, Rose sat out by the pond and cried and cried and cried, but I havent looked back at that. Its not the house that I miss. I miss the good times we had as a family and with friends. It was the people who counted, not the house itself.

Now she does, as she put it, one thing at a time, including trying to knock her memoir and adventure chronicle into shape after it has already been batted around a number of different editors at HarperCollins. Ill give it one more try. If they dont like what Im doing, and if I dont do what they want, Ill be out of there. Ill try to take it somewhere else, or abandon it and save it for my grandchildren.

An Amnesty fellowship, named after her and in conjunction with Harvard, will start this summer for an undergraduate interested in human rights.

***

At the end of his Collected Letters, there is a note Styron stipulated only be published in future editions of Darkness Visible for readers after his death, which he intendsin the moment of that writingto be suicide. The illness finally won the war, he writes in the note addressed to his friend and biographer Jim West on June 5, 2000.

Bill beseeches readers suffering depression to carry on fighting for health.

He really believed that, Rose says. He had had a wonderful decade when everything was great. When he crashed again the worst thing for him was that he felt guilty for having assured everyone at the end of Darkness Visible that life would be good forever.

He felt he had betrayed them, and it was very hard to talk him out of that. He felt terrible that he had misled people. He was so sad.

Rose's voice hardens. "The thing that bothered me most were things he would apologize for in the last few months. We would be in bed talking, or down here sitting on the couch, he apologizing for whatever he thought had done wrong to me and kids.

He was very aware of who he was and what people thought of him, and how he felt keenly he had made things hard for us. I didnt want to hear that, and I wish I had let him just get it all out of his system, but I would stop him, saying Dont be ridiculous. If I had been a psychiatrist I would have let him talk it all through. Maybe that would have been better.

I ask why she didnt let Bill verbally atone in the way he wanted to.

I didnt want to revisit the times when I had been hurt or resentful, because of course in a marriage of 50-odd years there are times when you are hurt or resentful. I think that is true of everyones marriages. Its an up-and-down affair which resolves itself, but it certainly wasnt always smooth-going. I wont pretend that.

At the beginning, Rose kept the hurt and resentment to herself; later she would tell Bill or a girlfriend, then it always went away and things were good again. I was a very happy wife and very happy mother, and very happy social instigator. I feel very, very lucky that I had 53 years with him, and mostly positive recollectionsand of course I miss it.

Since Bills death, Rose hasnt met anybody new in a romantic sense: I dont have any strictures against it, but cannot imagine it. And I dont seek it, but of course I like male company and enjoy it tremendously, but I dont think theres a single man out there for me.

Anyway, her bucket list is still pretty full: She has never seen the Grand Canyon, or been to Australia and New Zealand. She wants to publish a really first-rate book of poetry. Politically, she wants to continue campaigning against the death penalty, against incarceration, and for human rights internationally. Im scared to death someone like [Donald] Trump or [Ted] Cruz could be elected in this country and lead us in exactly the wrong direction.

Ideally, Rose would like to be Bills protective custodian, and keeper of his literary flame. I wish I had the money to have a great memorial for himprobably an academic one at Yale or Duke [Bills alma mater]which I dont.

When Rose was researching her husbands letters at Duke, a librarian handed her a box marked with the instruction not to be opened for 40 or 50 years after Bills death. She chose not to open it.

I totally believe in peoples rights to privacy, mine and his. Its his legacy and his life and I want to preserve it as I knew it. I dont want to open a can of worse-than-worms or whatever is in there.

Maybe theyre love letters, who knows, but they are not part of the life I led with Bill, and why should I open another chapter I had nothing to do with?

I dont think anyone should read them for 50 years or however long it is, and the library should not have given them to me. I was not about to read them.

She laughed. Maybe my grandchildren will find out whatever it is, and write a different biography.

Was Rose perhaps worried she would discover something she didnt want to?

I probably had that thought when looking at whatever is in that box, and yes I didnt want that. So, I am either in denial or my head is in the sand, or I just want my life with him to be my memory, not his life without me or mine without him. I just want my memories to be of our life together She smiled. They were pretty good.

Rose does not think about her own mortality. Not any more than I have to, no, and I havent made plans or left any details. I have a will but I have to make it better and more detailed, which I have not.

She laughs.

My mother was such an atheist and believed in nothing above past this life. She didnt want us to believe in Santa Claus, much less God. She turned me into a little Buddhist as a girl.

The night she decided to die, on her 102nd birthday, she was in full possession of her senses. She was in bed, sitting up, talking. She reached for my hand and said, I think its time to go to sleep. Will you come with me? And I said yes.

Roses mother looked past the window to the birds flying in the sky. Do you think those birds are going to Heaven? she asked her daughter. Maybe, Rose said. I wish I were going with them, her mother said. It was the first time she had ever mentioned Heaven.

After that, Roses mother looked to the ceiling and said, Just wait a minute, darling, Im coming. Rose said she was talking to her husband who had died 50 years earlier. She died later that day.

Today Rose wonders how much her mother had thought about Heavenand not spoken about itin all her years of proudly proclaimed atheism.

Rose dreams about Bill all the time. He was such a dreamer and I wasnt, and now I am a very vivid dreamer. An awful lot of the times were traveling in strange places having strange adventures or looking for him in strange, Kasbah-like streets Ive never been in.

***

We walk around the house. Shelves jostle with books. Theres a kitschy figurine of a couple, inscribed Bill and Rose, given to the couple by Arthur Miller. Rose laughs looking at her wedding picture, on the day of whichno longer a virginshe felt she couldnt wear white, opting for a blue dress.

Lillian Hellman, a wild woman, is in another photograph. She was our neighbor down along the harbor here. She was a terror, great fun and awful and a wonderful hostess. A great fishing woman.

Hellman was the first person the Styrons saw when they landed in Marthas Vineyard in 1957. Susanna was 2, Bills editor failed to meet them, and Hellman zoomed past chasing her huge black poodle, whom she had named for her psychiatrist. She was screaming, Gregory Zilboorg, come back here!

The Styrons went to Hellmans house, alighting upon Dashiell Hammett on her porch. Susanna climbed into his lap. Hellman told them they had to stop going on holiday to awful Nantucket and come to the Vineyard instead.

More photographs, more stories: Teddy Kennedy, George Plimpton, Art Buchwald, the time the sons of Max Kennedy (Ethel and Bobbys son) came ashore from a boat asking Rose if it was OK if they used the famous outdoor showertheir dad had told them to ask permission.

Teddy used to use it all the time, Rose says, as we stand outside and she recalls happily boisterous afternoons of Kennedys and kids playing football.

Rose smiles as she summons up these anecdotal ghosts.

Then there was the time she saw Ladybird Johnson striding across the grass with pots and pans in her hands. Rose asked what she was doing. Mrs. Johnson was taking them to a neighbors house for safekeeping till the next summer.

Why arent the Secret Servicemen doing this, said Rose, aghast a former First Lady was laden down with pots and pans.

And they said, Oh, no, we need to have hands free in case we need to take our guns out.

Rose laughs merrily at this memory, and the past suddenly feels so present that Ilooking at a nearby bushhalf expect a little boys lost rabbit to burst into view.
When you think coffee, you might think of a multi-billion-dollar industry that spans the globe. You might think of the famous European coffee houses that housed the great artists and revolutionaries of the Renaissance. Or Bachs libretto, proclaiming that coffee tastes better than a thousand kisses. You might think of the political history of coffee, in particular of the American adoption of coffee in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, a period in which drinking tea was seen as unpatriotic. You might notice that the third world produces coffee for the first, and wince at the role that the slave trade played in the production. Or you might just think of frappuccinos.

What might not spring to mind is the role that religion has played in bringing you your morning cup of joe. (Full disclosure: I dislike coffee. I shouldnt be writing this article.)

Coffee was discovered in late antiquity. Legend maintains that a ninth-century Ethiopian goat-herder named Kaldi observed that his goats were perky after chewing the bright berries of a certain (coffee) bush. He sampled them himself and, having never been exposed to caffeine before, felt energized. He brought the beans to a local Islamic monastic community, who sampled them. Disgusted by the berries, they tossed them aside, inadvertently roasting them in the flames of the fire. The beans inside the berries emitted a delicious aroma and thus, by accident, coffee was discovered.
ROMEIt is hard to imagine two men more different than frugal Pope Francis and the Vaticans former spendthrift secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. The Pope lives in a spartan 750-square-foot apartment inside the Vaticans modest Santa Marta guesthouse. Cardinal Bertone, meanwhile, is caught up in a spending scandal surrounding lavish renovations for his penthouse apartment nearly 10 times that size.

Bertonewho served in the Vaticans No. 2 position as secretary of state from 2006 until Francis essentially retired him in 2013decided to combine two vacant Vatican-owned rooftop apartments for himself and his three service nuns at an estimated cost of around half a million euro, which was discounted by 50 percent, according to official estimates published by the Italian newspaper Il Tempo.

But despite the considerable savings, the renovations were apparently paid for twice, meaning the discount was likely down to creativeor corruptaccounting, which is being investigated by a Vatican Tribunal that opened a criminal dossier into the matter last week.

According to journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi, who first broke the news of Bertones lavish penthouse being funded by a childrens hospital in his book Greed last year, the renovation cost was funneled through a London-based holding company run by Bertones personal friend. The money destined for sick children was in actuality used for the renovations and then sent on to London, Fittipaldi wrote. Bertones name is not cited in the magistrates document but the Holy See will find it hard to overlook his direct involvement in the scandal.

Bertone says he can prove he paid around $340,000 for the work out of his own pocket, but the foundation that raises money for the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesu childrens hospital apparently also paid $455,000.

No matter who paid for what, or even where the money came from, it must surely be an embarrassment to Francis that his churchmen are not following his pleas for frugality. By any standard of measure, Bertones apartment renovations are over-the-top. According to the estimates that were published in the Italian press, each of the bedrooms has its own private bathroom, and the kitchen facilities are befitting a banquet hall. Bertone spent $22,000 on eight independent sharable audio programs and audio controls with LCD display for each environment. That essentially boils down to a sound system where each room in the lavish apartment, including the rooftop chapel, can be programed with its own mood music. This, for a prelate and three nuns who have no official role whatsoever in Franciss church.

The massive-for-Rome apartment is being floored with 2,400 square feet of expensive herringbone oak parquet which cost the cardinal and the hospital $28,000. A smaller 750-square-foot area is being covered with luxury white Carrara marble at a price tag of $11,000. The double-glaze energy efficient windows cost $80,000 and the front security door is priced at $6,000.

The high-efficiency silent heat pumps cost $32,000 and climate control dehumidifying system comes in at $19,000.

According to deputy director of the Vatican press office Greg Burke, the hospitals former president Giuseppe Profiti, and its former treasurer Massimo Spina, who were in charge of allocating funds for Bambino Gesu Hospital, are being criminally investigated for misappropriating funds meant for sick children.

Bertone is not under investigationnot yet anyway. But he quickly gave $170,000 to the childrens hospital in December. It is a donation that reflects my sentimental attachment to the hospital and its little patients, he said at the time of his generous donation.

The hospital president, Mariella Enoc, apparently didnt see it quite that way. Acknowledging that what has happened has been detrimental to the Bambino Gesu, Cardinal Bertone wanted to meet us half way, donating a sum of 150,000 euros," she said when the donation was made.

Bertone has been on the defensive since the allegations first came to light, pointing out that scores of other prelates live in even nicer apartments. In fact, both Nuzzi and Fittipaldi gave examples of countless other cardinals whose lifestyles are in stark contrast to the way Francis has chosen to live. "The apartment is spacious, as is normal for the residences in the ancient palaces of the Vatican, and dutifully restored (at my expense)," he wrote on a blog attached to the diocese of Genoa that he ran before being promoted to secretary of state. I may temporarily use and after me it will benefit someone else. In the words of the Pope Saint John XXIII, 'I do not stop to pick up the stones that are thrown at me.'"

Fittipaldi, along with another journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, are currently on trial for publishing leaked documents they were allegedly given by a Spanish Cardinal and pregnant public relations consultant. Their trial, dubbed Vatileaks II, after the first Vatileaks trial saw Pope Benedict XVIs butler guilty of leaking documents to Nuzzi, picks up again on April 6.
Stoli gluten free vodka launches in US

Stoli Vodka has launched Stoli Gluten Free marking the first time a global vodka brand is creating a completely new gluten-free recipe to meet the needs of gluten-free consumers. Made with 88% corn and 12% buckwheat, Stoli Gluten Free will launch in the US with availability at Stoli accounts nationwide starting this month (April 2016) followed by a US duty-free roll out shortly thereafter.

Innovating within the vodka category has remained an integral part of Stolis DNA for 80 years and counting, says Patrick Piana, president and CEO, Stoli Group USA. As with all of our innovations, we conduct consumer research and discuss with our trade partners to identify unmet consumer needs in the marketplace. Stoli Gluten Free will resonate with younger legal drinking age consumers who have an active lifestyle and greater focus on the products they consume.

Our distributors have given very positive feedback to-date. We believe that Stoli Gluten Free is an incredible opportunity for Stoli and that it will help us continue to grow our market share.

Stoli Gluten Free purposely includes the words gluten free on the front label to clearly communicate to consumers that it is a gluten-free product. The US TTB has classified the vodka for gluten-free labelling because it meets its standard of being made with naturally gluten-free ingredients, the only way a product can be classified as truly gluten-free.

The Stoli Gluten Free packaging will maintain Stolis iconic bottle, with a premium label that features a unique batch number and signature of Ronalds Zarinovs, production director of Latvijas Balzams, who oversees the production of all Stoli Vodka products.

Stoli controls the entire production process of Stoli Gluten Free and its entire range of premium Vodkas. Stoli Gluten Free is made with naturally gluten-free corn and buckwheat harvested in the Tambov region of Russia. The ingredients are then distilled three times at Stolis state of the art Talvis distillery and filtered four times, through quartz sand and birchwood charcoal, before being blended with pure, natural spring water from the Latvijas Balzams artesian well in Riga, Latvia.

In developing Stoli Gluten Free, we wanted to create a product that not only delivered on a consumer need, but also achieved Stolis incredibly high standards of quality and taste, said Michael Oringer, senior VP of innovation and trade marketing, Stoli Group USA. We experimented with a variety of gluten-free ingredients before finalising on a unique mash of corn and buckwheat. The result is delicious, old-world style tasting vodka that meets the needs of our consumers who live a gluten-free lifestyle.

We are excited to launch Stoli Gluten Free in US Duty Free where we see true potential for this innovative product that speaks not only to those suffering from gluten allergies but also those choosing to live a gluten-free lifestyle, says Dayna Dennington, regional director duty free North and Central America, Stoli Group.

Stoli Gluten Free will be available in 50 ml, 750 ml and 1L packages.

3 April 2016 - Felicity Murray The Drinks Report, editor
An upper-level finance professor at Texas A&M convicted of beating his wife will spend 30 days in jail and 20 months on probation.

Lawyers reached the punishment agreement for 40-year-old Yong Chen Friday morning. Chen will also have to pay a $1,500 fine and complete an 18-week program to learn about domestic violence and how to prevent it.

Chen was convicted Thursday of Class A misdemeanor assault of a family member, which carried a maximum punishment of a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. If Chen violates his probation, he could face up to 300 days in jail.

University officials said Thursday that they would review this situation "in accordance with system policy" before making a decision on the Mays Business School professor's employment status. He also holds the Gina and William H. Flores '76 Professorship in Finance.

U.S. Rep. Bill Flores released a statement Friday afternoon condemning the actions of Chen.

"We recently learned, however, that the holder of the professorship that we originally endowed to the Mays Business School in 2002 was convicted of abusing his spouse," Flores said in a statement. "Gina and I are appalled by his actions and do not believe that he is deserving of the benefits from our endowment."

Flores said that he and his wife, Gina, have asked Texas A&M and the business school to transfer the professorship to a "more deserving faculty member."

In the past, Bill and Gina Flores have not had a role in awarding the endowment, the statement said, but have asked the university to consider the family's values when picking the next professorship.

"Despite the actions and conviction of this professor, we continue to believe that Texas A&M is a world-class Tier 1 research and teaching institution," the statement says.
It was hard not to be entranced with the images the media sent from Cuba during President Barack Obama's visit to that island nation last month. He was the first president since Calvin Coolidge some 90 years ago to visit Cuba.

The pictures captured a society almost stuck in time. The cars are from 1950s America. The restaurants are family owned, not the chains which dominate America's communities these days. People actually smiled and seemed genuinely happy to see the yankees visiting from the United States.

You could almost sense the fecund air, the sense of a society ripe for renewal.

Finally, after more than 50 years of isolation from its neighbor to the north, that renewal will come, thanks to the wise decision by the president to begin the normalization of relations between the two countries. The U.S. embargo of Cuba no longer was working, if it ever did. Our embargo ultimately was doomed to fail since many other countries of the world ignored it.

There still are numerous issues to be worked out, especially Cuba's wretched record on human rights. But that is bound to improve as Americans visit Cuba in the months and years to come. It will be hard for the Castro brothers to maintain their strangle grip on their people once freedom begins to take hold. When, in the not-too-distant future, the Castros are gone, the Cuban people will have an idea how good their lives can be if democracy flourishes.

It is obvious from news reports that the people of Cuba are good, they are strong and they have afirm belief in community and each other.

As Cuba modernizes, it would be nice if the goodness of its people, that sense of kinship and community can survive and remain strong. Giving that up would be sad indeed.
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By Abbey Nickel, abbey.nickel@thegleaner.com / @abbeynickel

Henderson will be getting a little wild this weekend.

Peter Gros, the wildlife expert who is also the star of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," will be bringing his stage show to the Henderson Fine Arts Center at 7 p.m. Friday. His show will include a number of exotic animals on stage.

His stage show, which is described as fun, upbeat and entertaining for the entire family, also gives the audience a glimpse into some of the humorous realities of filming a wildlife show.

"It's nice to let children have the chance to see animals up close," Gros said in a recent phone interview. "I think it's part of my responsibility to help replace the fear of wildlife with the respect and understanding of wildlife."

He also wants to help deliver a message to children about how they can help preserve and maintain the planet.

"Each of us can make a difference in helping our natural world," Gros said.

Some of the animals he brings to the stage will be a surprise, but people can expect to see lemurs, lizards and an Eurasian eagle-owl.

Gros performs around 20 live shows a year across the country. His interest in wildlife conservation started at a young age and later snowballed into a career that has taken him around the world. Gros grew up in upstate New York, and his grandfather had thousands of acres that was reforested, which was what initially sparked his interest, he said.

He's no stranger to the national stage but it wasn't always that way. Gros was invited as a guest on the "Tonight Show" in 1985 after assisting with one of the largest litters of captive tigers. Not long after that, Gros found himself making contact with Jim Fowler, the host of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom." It wasn't long before Gros found one of his childhood dreams coming to life as he soon became involved with the show himself.

"It's just something I've always wanted to do," Gros said.

Henderson Area Arts Alliance executive director Greg Gibson said the show is the "perfect way" for area students to kick off their spring break, which starts for Henderson County students on April 11. He also said it was an ideal way for grandparents to have a fun outing with their grandchildren.

Both the inside and the outside of the Henderson Fine Arts Center will be teeming with animals on Friday. John James Audubon State Park, Mesker Park Zoo, Wesselman Nature Preserve, Henderson Humane Society, Pay it Forward, Blue Moon Stables, Gabbi's Boutique and more will be bringing animals and displaying them in the foyer and outside the HFAC.

Gibson encourages the community to come early to get a chance to see and interact with the animals.

Children's activities will also be taking place before the show in the Stagg Room through a partnership with the Thelma B. Johnson Early Learning Center that will focus on healthy living for animals and people.

Henderson County third graders will have a chance to see the show during a private school show Friday morning.

"If you're an animal lover and you want to see animals that have never been in Henderson, Kentucky, before, then this is your show," Gibson said.
The art of being creative is far from being a simple, cookie-cutter process  or at least, that's the case for two local artists.

The Mix & Match Exhibition, presented by the Ohio Valley Art League, opens Monday and features the work of Twila Black of Evansville, Indiana, and Conn D. McConaughy, of Newburgh, Indiana.

The exhibit will be in the Rotunda Gallery in the Henderson County Public Library.

The work of both artists will show a new approach to being creative and aims to encourage others to think outside the box when it comes to different forms of art.

McConaughy is a former art teacher who will be exhibiting several different assemblages based on recycled objects, such as windows and furniture. She said in a society that produces so much waste, being able to transform something used into art is a meaningful process.

'It's like breathing new life into something,' McConaughy said.

Black, also a former area art teacher, will be exhibiting several pieces that use batik, an ancient method of color dyeing on cloth by first applying wax to the parts to be left undyed.

'It takes forever and ever,' Black said. 'But it's an addicting form of art.'

Black used batik with some of her high school art classes, a project that many students called their favorite project, she said. In addition to batik, Black explores other types of art, including photography. Some of her photographs might be included in the exhibit.

She said the combination of both her art and McConaughy's will create a dynamic and creative combination in the exhibit.

'Both of our art is a different form of art people may not have seen before,' Black said. 'We will both be doing something a little bit different.'

McConaughy also uses different media and has considered herself an artist her entire life. Her art has appeared in galleries and exhibits across the country and also in Europe.

'The world seems so sad sometimes,' McConaughy said. 'If you have a gift, you're supposed to share it, and it costs me nothing.'

OVAL executive director Jule McClellan said both Black and McConaughy entered in an OVAL exhibition in the fall of 2015, and their artwork made a lasting impact on her.

'The techniques, innovative approach and use of material selections not commonly used caught my eye,' McClellan said.

Both artists are looking forward to sharing their work with the Henderson community.

'We want share our vision of how we see the world. Every artist has a different eye, come look through ours,' Black said.

The exhibit in the Rotunda Gallery open Monday. The Rotunda Gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 1:30 to 5 p.m. Sunday.
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By Gleaner Staff

Henderson County Schools is seeking community volunteers to help score senior projects.

Research projects will be presented May 2-13 at Henderson County High School. The deadline to sign up to volunteer is April 29.

Students will be presenting individually and in groups. The topics and purposes are varied. Copies of the scoring guide will provided the day of the presentation.

Each scoring panel will consist of the student's senior English teacher and two or three community volunteers or school personnel.

There's a link on the district's website called "community volunteers needed to help score senior presentations," that includes additional information, a schedule and a way to sign up to volunteer on line. The district's website is henderson.kyschools.us/.

Volunteers may also contact Cindy Williams at 270-831-5000 or cindy.williams@henderson.kyschools.us for more information or to sign up.
MIKE LAWRENCE / THE GLEANER Lt. Col. Heather Crooks Toews, a 1996 Henderson County High School graduate, talks with students at the school Friday.

SHARE MIKE LAWRENCE / THE GLEANER A film producer, director, writer and designer, 1984 Henderson County High graduate Gregg Hale talks with students at the school Friday. Hale produced the horror film, "The Blair Witch Project" and has also guided advertising campaigns for Fortune 500 companies among other projects. MIKE LAWRENCE / THE GLEANER A highly decorated Air Force fighter pilot and commanding officer, 1965 Henderson County High School Lt. Gen. John H. Campbell talks with students at the school Friday. Campbell has served both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency, April 1, 2016.

Six Henderson County graduates honored

By Erin Schmitt of The Gleaner

Don't be afraid to dream.

State Rep. David Watkins, a Henderson physician for 40 years and a legislator for the past decade, offered up those words of advice Saturday night at the Henderson Alumni Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

The Henderson Alumni Hall of Fame Class of 2016 inductees are Lt. Gen. John H. Campbell, Henry E. Cheaney, Gregg Hale, Mark Nunnelly, Lt. Col. Heather Crooks Toews and Watkins.

The Hall of Fame was created to celebrate the success of the county's local graduates in the arts, business and academia.

Watkins said he was humbled and honored by his inclusion. He noted that though neither his mother nor father received more than an eighth-grade education, it didn't keep him from pursuing his dream of becoming a doctor.

Asked to offer advice for high school students, Watkins responded, "Have goals in your life and don't be afraid to dream," he said. "I came from parents that were wonderful people but didn't have opportunities like I did."

Growing up, Hale always knew he wanted to be a filmmaker. Henderson County High was a supportive environment for him and helped sustain his creative pursuits.

The 1984 HCHS graduate has worn several hats in his lifetime, including film producer, director, writer and designer. Most notably, he produced the horror film, "The Blair Witch Project."

He talked to students on Friday and tried to connect his career experiences with his time spent in his hometown and attending HCHS.

Hale's inclusion into the Hall of Fame was made all the sweeter because his friend, the late Bently Tittle, was inducted last year.

"It's kind of cool that we're kind of in this kind of same group together," Hale said. "He was a really big part of my filmmaking career pretty much my whole life. So, it's nice for us to be included in something that's always going to be up there."

Each Henderson Alumni Hall of Fame class is represented on placards hung in the main hall. It's meant to be inspiring for students roaming the halls to see examples of fellow Hendersonians who have achieved great success in their chosen career fields.

Toews was excited to learn of her nomination.

"I was shocked also, because it seems like such a distinguished group and I was very humbled to be a part of," she said.

After graduating from HCHS in 1996, Toews earned an engineering degree from M.I.T. She is the chief test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base. Her next stop is at the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

She spoke to students Friday about her academic career, but they were most keen to hear about her time spent as operations officer and director of staff during deployment to Kabul, Afghanistan.

"They were really interested in hearing about when I deployed," she said. "I was in Afghanistan for six months and they wanted to hear the stories from that."

Campbell visited HCHS for the first time Friday to speak with students. Though Campbell is a HCHS graduate, class of 1965, the high school then was housed in what is now North Middle School.

"It was wonderful to talk to the kids," he said. "I basically told them about my experiences growing up in Henderson County and going to County High."

From there, he graduated from the University of Kentucky and then went into the Air Force for 32 years, becoming a highly decorated fighter pilot and commanding officer. Campbell also served on both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in the Central Intelligence Agency.

His distinguished career earned him a place on the shortlist for an earlier alumni class, but he had to defer because he and his wife were unable to attend the banquet. Campbell helped unveil the placard placed in the school's main hallway.

All of the inductees except for Nunnelly, the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, and Cheaney, who died in 2006, were in attendance at Saturday night's banquet and ceremony.

Several members of Cheaney's family were there to witness the distinguished educator, author and historian's induction. His niece, Sherry Johnson of Henderson, said the 1930 Douglass High School graduate was an inspiration to the whole family.

"My uncle was probably one of the greatest historians that I will ever know," Johnson said. "He didn't have to use a textbook and he could just give you history after history almost on any subject."

Johnson said it would have meant a lot to Cheaney to know he was in his hometown's Hall of Fame.

"This is certainly one of the highest honors you can achieve right here in Henderson, Kentucky, to be acknowledged for the work that he did and the seeds that he left planted here in this community," she said.
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By Donna Bryson, Associated Press

For the first time, the Kentucky Revenue Department this year is asking taxpayers to wait.

Kentucky and other states are becoming more forthright, telling taxpayers they'll have to be patient and allow time for verification before refunds are sent.

It's one of several new steps against what officials say is an upsurge in identity thieves filing false returns and directing the ill-gotten refunds to their own accounts. State officials also are turning to outsiders for help, quizzing taxpayers more closely about their identities and contemplating new legislation.

It's likely just the beginning of a long fight, said Edwin King, chief of staff of Kentucky's Finance and Administration Cabinet.

Kentucky officials decided to go public because the problem was growing: They caught $16.5 million in fraudulent claims last year  double the amount they detected the previous year.

States also are tapping the experience of the Internal Revenue Service, which has had its own problems with such fraud.

The investigative arm of Congress recently studied the issue following reports from the IRS that it prevented $24.2 billion in payments to identity thieves in 2013 but paid $5.8 billion in federal returns that were later determined to be fraudulent. The Government Accountability Office study called such scams a "large, continually evolving threat that is costing taxpayers billions of dollars per year."

In 2014, Susan Combs and her husband got a letter from the feds questioning a refund claim of about $4,000. The couple had not yet filed a return that year. The IRS letter stopped a fraud attempt.

The thieves couldn't have known Combs had a professional interest in the crime. She was Texas state comptroller from 2007 to 2014, and now is a fellow at the Center for Identity, a University of Texas think tank that specializes in questions about privacy and security raised in an age when so much personal information is online.

Combs said by speaking out about the extent of the identity theft they face, bureaucrats might get support from taxpayers when they ask for money for software and other measures to improve security. But she's not entirely confident.

"I think people now believe, 'I'm going to get hacked, no matter what.'"

Tax authorities looking for convenience and efficiency have increasingly shifted to electronic filing to save taxpayers, as well as government, time and money. One way they sought to persuade taxpayers to switch from paper returns was to promise quick, direct deposit refunds to e-filers.

Fraudsters, many based outside the United States, realized agencies sending deposits quickly would be unable to verify all the returns were legitimate, said Frank Abagnale, a security consultant who can think like a criminal. Today, impostors can create fake electronic identities and profit without going to the lengths Abagnale did in his days as the chameleon-like conman portrayed in the 2002 movie "Catch Me If You Can."

"We transfer money, we wire funds" on the Internet, said Abagnale, who has consulted with tax authorities in his home state of South Carolina. "It's not a secure system."

Abagnale advised South Carolina to slow down on refunds.

"If you're going to provide security, it's not going to be very convenient," he said. "It's not going to be fast."

Colorado has another tactic for combatting fraud. In cases in which returns raise suspicions, the state revenue department mails refund checks to the address it has on file for the taxpayer instead of making a direct deposit to a potentially fraudulent account. If the return is indeed fake, the agency counts on the taxpayer to flag it.

Colorado paid almost a million refunds by direct deposit in 2011, about 60 percent of all payments, according to figures the revenue department made available to The Associated Press. Direct deposits accounted for an increasingly bigger share of all payments over the next three years.

Then came 2015, when staffers started noticing more suspicious returns. The state used caution and made only half a million direct deposits that year, about 30 percent of the total.

Bank fees on each check are 8 cents, four times the direct deposit fee. In addition, mailing each check costs 47 cents, and that doesn't include the cost of paper and stuffing envelopes.

Still, the extra cost beats compromising people's personal information or having fraudsters snatch their refunds, revenue department spokeswoman Lynn Granger said.

Taxpayers can also help, by taking simple steps like devising hard-to-guess passwords and changing them regularly, and using different passwords for different electronic accounts, said Verenda Smith, deputy director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, an information-sharing and lobbying group for state tax officials.

Not that it's always the taxpayer who gives away crucial information.

A 2002 cyberattack on South Carolina's tax collection agency exposed the personal data of nearly 4 million individual filers and 700,000 businesses. It started with a phishing email to several agency employees. At least one made the fatal click that gave hackers an official username and password.

The private sector also collects data  in 2014, insurer Anthem reported a breach that exposed social security numbers, employment and income information of up to 80 million people, among them St. Louis lawyer Scott Jarboe.

When Jarboe got an IRS refund check last year for a "bunch of money," he hadn't yet filed his returns. He contacted the IRS to clear up that case of identity theft fraud.

Kentucky tax officials hope the state's heightened security measures will head off such crimes this year, though they declined to say exactly what steps they're taking. Releasing that information could tip off identity thieves, officials said.

Dan Bork, commissioner of Kentucky's tax agency, said he understands members of the public might find it frustrating that their returns could be delayed this year.

Still, "we would rather protect their refund than have it end up in the hands of criminals," Bork said in a statement.

Associated Press writers Seanna Adcox in Columbia, S.C.; Adam Beam in Frankfort, Ky.; Bob Christie in Phoenix; Kimberlee Kruesi in Boise, Idaho; Matt Volz in Helena, Mont.; and Ann Sanner in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
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The following information is based on public records from local and area law enforcement agencies and/or court systems:

HENDERSON DISTRICT COURT

Several cases were recently bound over to the grand jury from district court.

Keith L. Knepp, 36, Montgomery, Ind., faces a charge of second-degree burglary.

Sheila R. Utley, 45, 4800 block of Old Madisonville Road, faces a charge of fourth-degree assault.

Willie E. Cranicke, 43, Hanson, Ky., faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance (second offense), possession of drug paraphernalia, theft of an identity without consent and giving officers a false name.

Jeremy L. Romain, 30, 1600 block of Bruce Street, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance, possession of marijuana, tampering with physical evidence, violation of Kentucky EPO/DVO and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Roddrick D. Armstead, 19, 900 block of Pebble Creek Drive, faces a charge of first-degree robbery.

Christopher A. Sheridan, 32, 600 block of Lincoln Avenue, faces a charge of receiving stolen property $10,000 or more.

Kalandis E. Herrell, 25, 9600 block of Kentucky 136-East, faces a charge of theft from a building more than $500.

Several cases were recently waived to the grand jury from district court.

Jason O. Gibson, 40, Morganfield, faces charges of giving a police officer a false name/address, first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Chasity A. Khan, 28, Reed, faces a charge of first-degree possession of a controlled substance.

Travis Buckreis, 23, 800 block of North Adams Street, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Tommy W. Fulkerson III, 23, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Adrian C. Walker, 34, 2300 block of Adams Lane, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Holli A. Vignone, 34, 900 block of Pebble Creek Drive, faces charges of disregarding a stop sign, failure to stop at a railroad crossing, first-degree possession of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia and driving under the influence.

Joshua D. Downey, 38, 400 block of Meadow Street, faces a charge of theft of an identity without consent.

Louis Stokes, 40, 5500 block of U.S. 60-West, faces a charge of theft of identity without consent.

Blake J. Niswonger, 23, Evansville, faces charges of public intoxication, first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Lacey A. Powers, 41, Spottsville, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance and first-degree promoting contraband.

Justin W. Ralph, 22, 800 block of Constanza Drive, faces charges of theft of $500 or more, second-degree burglary and third-degree criminal mischief.

Mallory F. Hardiman, 22, Barboursville, West Virginia, faces three counts of first-degree possession of a controlled substance, one count of possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Elizabeth M. John, 28, 1700 block of South Green Street, faces charges of theft of an identity without consent.
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Reason has prevailed!

Guns will not be permitted at the Republican National Convention in July in Cleveland.

Perhaps this has not been on your radar, what with the embarrassing squabbling between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz over their wives, Trump's campaign manager being arrested for battery on a reporter, the total lack of any intelligent response from either man in the aftermath of the terrorist bombings in Brussels, and all the GOP candidates venomously attacking their rivals, then vowing to support the eventual nominee, and now repudiating that pledge.

Even so, more than 50,000 people have signed a petition demanding that guns be in the sulfurous mix when Republicans gather July 18-21, which some can foresee as being something like a zombie apocalypse movie.

Ignoring that Trump rallies have frequently turned violent (or perhaps because of that), so many Americans are terrified of losing the Second Amendment that protects the right to bear arms that they want to see gun-toting delegates swaggering around Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena, commonly known as "The Q."

Ohio, my home state, is an open-carry state. It is not unusual to see good ole boys with assault rifles in their pickups parked in Wal-Mart parking lots. Guns carried in motor vehicles must be unloaded and secured. Ammunition must be in a separate compartment. If you have alcohol in your system above the legal limit, you are not permitted to have a firearm in your vehicle or on your person. Guns are not permitted in establishments that serve alcohol; businesses may ban guns on their premises. But people who legally own a firearm may carry it loaded with or without a license. (But not in the statehouse in Columbus  lawmakers are not completely clueless.)

The Q has a policy against guns or weapons of any kind on the premises, and that has enraged a number of gun advocates. Petitioners are urging Ohio Gov. and presidential hopeful John Kasich to use his executive authority to permit guns at the arena, which holds about 20,000 people.

Surprisingly, or not, the three GOP presidential candidates left standing, Trump, Cruz and Kasich, were initially noncommittal, even ambivalent, about the petition and the idea of guns at the convention. They are terrified of getting on the wrong side of gun advocates, who see any curb on gun sales, ownership or possession as the camel's nose under the tent to total loss of their weapons.

Convention officials shot the whole thing over to the Secret Service, which handles security at the national political conventions. The immediate and quite obvious answer was, "No guns."

Despite the problems the Secret Service has been having, what with knife-wielding crazy people getting inside the White House and far too much partying going on among some agents, the service is not stupid. They put their lives on the line every day but are not going to let angry people who don't believe in political correctness, civility or polite discourse carry guns near the candidates or themselves.

Guns and Cleveland have a touchy recent history. In 2014, police shot and killed a 12-year-old child, Tamir Rice, who had a toy pellet gun in a city park. The U.S. Department of Justice investigation concluded that officers in Cleveland are too quick to shoot and beat suspects and rarely face consequences for their actions. The two officers involved in the shooting were not indicted.

The FBI says Cleveland ranks as the fifth most dangerous city in the nation because of crime. The violent crime rate is 1,478 per 100,000 people (Cleveland has a population of 389,000) and a murder rate of 14 per 100,000 people. The median household income is $26,556; one-third of all its residents are below the federal poverty line.

Republicans chose the city for their convention because no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying the state of Ohio

There is so much confusion, chaos, silliness and idle speculation already going on more than 100 days before Cleveland and the real possibility of rancorous debate and actual fighting over the nomination, that it is somehow reassuring to have a simple, well-reasoned answer to at least one issue. No guns.
West Burlington pool shooting suspect found not guilty

After two days of testimony, the suspect in the shooting at the West Burlington Swimming Pool was found not guilty of all charges.
Bluegrass is coming! Bluegrass is here! Discard that Rodgers and Hammerstein romanticism, throw out that Sondheim sophistication, get rid of that Lloyd Webber bombast. Visit the Deep South, toting fiddles and banjos, guitars and mandolins.

Three new musical productions one a revival, two premieres -- will get you hoppin' to country tunes, cracker barrel characters and tall tales about double lives and hidden desires. "The Robber Bridegroom," "Bright Star" and "Southern Comfort" have their virtues even when simplistic and repetitive. If nothin' else, they'll have yer feet tappin' and yer head swayin'. Above all, the wonderful onstage bands evoke an era and place both mellow and rarin' to please.

The delightful, mocking revival of "The Robber Bridegroom" (originally seen in 1975) is a self-described "Mississippi fairy tale" that even starts with "once upon a time." No wonder: though based on the novella by Eudora Welty, here are snippets of "Cinderella," "Snow White" and the Brothers Grimm's "The Robber Bridegroom" itself.

Unlike the latter, the musical's robber is not a murderer but a man of two faces, both brigand and hero. When disguised with berry juice, he's the outlaw; when clean-faced, he's the helpful Samaritan. "I steal in style," is his outlaw mantra, meaning not only money but women.

Meeting the fair Rosamund at her house, he's Jamie Lockhart, the good guy. Meeting her while she's picking herbs in the fields, he's the bad Bandit of the Woods who has her strip naked. Of course, she prefers the rough to the smooth, implying that women like to be swept away by coarseness.

It's all tongue in cheek or is it? With lively book and lyrics by Alfred Uhry and music by Robert Waldman, the evening is tuneful and amusing though death and thievery lurk. (There's a decapitated, talking head.) Alex Timbers' inventive, high-stakes direction owes much to story theater style (an undulating blue cloth suggests a river). Donyale Werle's jokey set is replete with trophy heads and turkey feathers.

Both studly and charming as bandit and gent, Steven Pasquale uses his powerful pipes and come-hither swagger to seduce anything that breathes. Ahna O'Reilly is a spirited Rosamund, Greg Hildreth is funny as the bumbling Goat, as are Andrew Durand and Evan Harrington as Little Harp and Big Harp. As the conniving Salome, Rosamund's stepmother, Leslie Kritzer is a Carol Burnett hillbilly, gold tooth and all, and she's terrific.

Story telling also pervades "Bright Star," the heartwarming new Broadway musical that starts with, "If you knew my story / My heaven and my hell / If you knew my story / You'd have a good story to tell."

Boasting a fine score by comedian/actor Steve Martin who co-wrote the book with lyricist Edie Brickell, the show dovetails a pair of narratives. In one, Alice Murphy leads a double existence: spinster magazine editor in the present, fun-loving and just plain loving teen 22 years in the past. A poor girl in love with rich boy Jimmy Ray, she's thwarted by scandal and greedy fathers.

The present-day story (1945-6) deals with aspiring author Billy and the girl he left behind, temporarily. Loyally, she continues to run a bookstore when he leaves town to find his fortune. (He comes back.) The two stories meld in ways both surprising and incredulous.

It's a cheerful, though not gritty evening that unfortunately ends with an awkward tonal change that wants to leave the audience in a good mood. The choreography by Josh Rhodes and the direction by Walter Bobbie are way too busy, with the chorus tearing about changing scenery or, worse, upstaging important moments.

Chief compensation is Carmen Cusack's star-making performance as the giddy young and the prim older Alice. Infectious and lovable, her switching from one aspect of Alice to another is not merely changing clothes and hair styles, but entire personalities.

A. J. Shively, Hannah Elless, Dee Hoty, Paul Aexander Nolan, Michael Mulheren and (Greenwich's) Stephen Bogardus are admirable, creating characters that avoid Hicksville stereotypes. That's saved for Jeff Bluenkrantz's cliche pouf.

Poufs are what "Southern Comfort" desperately avoids. As contemporary as it can get, this porch-swing musical at the Public Theater asks "What makes a family?" for these are transgender characters: birth males who have become females; females become males.

Based on Kate Davis' 2001 film documentary of the same name, what first appears to be a daring musical about a daring subject, soon wears out its welcome. Conceived for the stage by Robert Dusold and Thomas Caruso, with book and lyrics by Dan Collins and tuneful music by Julianne Wick Davis, the over-long evening suffers from having the same theme punched over and over again.

The real-life Robert Eads, who has transitioned from woman to man, complete with scraggly beard, is, in an ironic twist, dying of ovarian cancer. Before succumbing, he attends the SoCo transgender cotillion with his lover, Lola Cola, and select friends, an event that touchingly takes the gang squarely out of the closet and into the world at large.

As sensitively directed by Caruso, with apt choreography by Ryan Kasprzak, the evening is acted with open, unsentimental pride. Especially fine are Annette O'Toole as the empathetic Robert, Jeff McCarthy as Lola and Jeffrey Kuhn as Robert's daughter/son, Jackson.

But this is a drifty show, slow and meandering, lacking conflict and drama. The admirable idea of people striving for acceptance, being who they want to be and not what society wishes, is hammered home until we surrender.

For all three shows, the technical requirements sets, lights, costumes are top drawer. And the onstage bands deserve Tonys of their own. They're that good.

"The Robber Bridegroom" is at the Laura Pels Theater, 111 W. 46th St., N.Y. Call 212-719-1300 or visit roundabouttheatre.org

"Bright Star" is at the Cort Theater, 138 W. 48th St., N.Y. Call 212-239-6200 or visit telecharge.com

"Southern Comfort" has closed but may re-open next season.

Conn. Bluegrass Festivals (information on the Web):

Bluegrass Jam, Milford, April 23

Strawberry Park Festival, Preston, June 2-5

Podunk Festival, Hebron, Aug. 11-14
Melissa Hersch of Wilton, was recently initiated into The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation's oldest and most selective collegiate honor society for all academic disciplines. Hersch is pursuing a degree in Physical Therapy at Ithaca College.

Hersch is among approximately 30,000 students, faculty, professional staff and alumni to be initiated into Phi Kappa Phi each year. Membership is by invitation and requires nomination and approval by a chapter. Only the top 10 percent of seniors and 7.5 percent of juniors, having at least 72 semester hours, are eligible for membership. Graduate students in the top 10 percent of the number of candidates for graduate degrees may also qualify, as do faculty, professional staff, and alumni who have achieved scholarly distinction.
The terrorist attack on Belgium last week caused some European security officials to reconsider strategies for protecting air travelers, including the idea that perhaps the checkpoint perimeter should be moved further out to airport entrances or beyond.

It's a discussion that should happen here too.

The idea that many countries are risking disaster by not setting up checkpoints at the entrances or even on the outskirts of an airport came from Pini Schiff, the former security chief at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport and now the chief executive of the Israel Security Association, an organization that provides security for companies and government offices.

Schiff called the Belgium attack "a colossal failure" for allowing the terrorists to enter the Brussels airport's crowded departures hall with a huge amount of explosives. The rest of the world should reevaluate security procedures by setting up concentric circles, including checkpoints perhaps six kilometers from the airport itself, Schiff said in an interview with Israel Radio that was reported by Reuters and picked up in many papers. Others talked of the importance of profiling.

Jim Hutton, who is chief security officer for On Call International, a New Hampshire-based travel-risk consultant, said security officials have long talked about the appropriate point for setting up a "hardline" perimeter, through which attackers cannot pass. But they have to balance that impermeable limit with variables such as convenience, politics, economics and culture.

The discussion has sharpened since the March 22 attacks in Belgium when radical Islamic terrorists struck the airport outside Brussels and the city's subway, killing at least 35 people and injuring 340.

"I think that's going to be a rapidly emerging question: 'Where's the hardline in a free society?' And, boy, it's a loaded conversation," Hutton said. "But I think it's important to think about pushing that hardline out."

Hutton, whose clients include corporations, universities, faith-based and nongovernmental organizations that send people overseas, said airports could perhaps require people to park at satellite parking lots and undergo screening before boarding shuttle buses to the terminals. Baggage screening might also occur offsite, similar to the way that mail for the U.S. Capitol or other governmental installations is sorted and inspected off-site.

Pete Dordal Jr., senior vice president & managing director at GardaWorld International Protective Services, said he was skeptical about widening the concentric rings of security but wouldn't rule out such procedures in the United States.

But the Belgian attack yet again highlighted the consequences of failing to detect attackers before they reach the terminal. In this case, security personnel failed to notice a three-person team of terrorists wheeling a very large payload of explosives into the airport, even though two of them were wearing black gloves on one of their hands that some believe were used to hide detonators.

"I think my daughters would have caught that right away," Dordal said. "This is a failing of aviation security, not to be able to detect that, or at least not to be able to push that screening process out further and not have it in that common area."

But Dordal -- whose company helps provide security more than 40 airports around the world, primarily in Canada -- said he doubted Americans would tolerate security procedures, such as setting up security checkpoints on access roads, that for now are generally found only in conflict zones or developing countries plagued by terrorism. The location and footprint of most airports, especially at some of the nation's older terminals, wouldn't allow it.

"That's just impractical," Dordal said. "There's the convenience factor, and that's always there weighing on security, and not just at airports. It's the ability to conduct commerce, to live your life normally, to -- quote-unquote -- not let the terrorists beat us."

Furthermore, security officials could set up security checkpoints a mile from the airport -- as in conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Somalia -- and still not be foolproof, Dordal said. He said there are checkpoints a mile from Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu, and yet insiders there are believed to have assisted a suicide bomber who set off an explosive inside an airplane in February.

The Transportation Security Administration declined to say whether pushing back the outer ring of security to airport entrances or beyond has been under consideration in the United States.

"Unfortunately, this isn't something we can discuss publicly at this juncture," TSA spokesman Mike England said in an email.

For now, private security experts said it's more likely that the United States and other western nations will continue to monitor airports using other methods. That's likely to involve using highly trained security personnel to look for telltale signs of a threat. Or it might entail using more K-9 teams trained to detect explosives or high-tech sensors and robots at the entrances that can also sift the air for their chemical fingerprints. And it's likely to mean more profiling, some experts say.

"Someone who focuses on taking a water bottle away from some old lady will never find explosives," Shlomo Harnoy, another Israeli security consultant, was quoted by Reuters as saying. He told The Washington Post something very similar more than five years ago.

Fredrick Kunkle runs the Tripping blog, writing about the experience of travel. Freddy's also covered politics, courts, police, and local government. Before coming to The Washington Post, he worked for the Star-Ledger and The Bergen Record.

But profiling must be done in ways that can identify potential threats without engaging in blanket discrimination against people based on their nationality, religion, or ethnicity, Dordal said. To be done fairly -- and legally -- it has to focus on suspicious behaviors.

"You can't be selecting people because of their nationality, or religion, or how they look, their facial features," Dordal said. "And the pure security person in me says you can't discount the old lady."

Dordal said U.S. military forces learned the hard way that giving too much deference to customs regarding the treatment of women at security checkpoints allowed the Taliban to evade checkpoints by using men disguised in burqas.

Hutton, whose resume includes work in diplomatic security for the State Department, said profiling is acceptable as long as officials can articulate a logical reason as to why a person was given more scrutiny -- and share that criteria with the public.

"We need to do a better job of managing public expectations around this," Hutton said.

So no one's suggesting that the TSA set up roadblocks on the access road to Dulles International Airport. But perhaps there should be more debate in the United States about whether it's time to push the perimeter back at its airports, too.

Fredrick Kunkle runs the Tripping blog, writing about the experience of travel. Freddy's also covered politics, courts, police, and local government. Before coming to The Washington Post, he worked for the Star-Ledger and The Bergen Record.
It is clear that minimum wage jobs cannot adequately support families in a state like Connecticut. The Federal Poverty Level, which is used widely in determining eligibility for various kinds of assistance, for a family of three is $20,160 and for a family of two is $16,020.

A job which pays minimum wage in Connecticut of $10.10 per hour at 40 hours per week for 52 weeks of work per year would provide $21,008. So if there is one parent and two children in a household where the parent earns minimum wage, they hover at the poverty level.

Furthermore, many minimum wage earners cannot get 40 hours per week of work even if they have more than one job, so it is often the case that they end up working in poverty. In addition to poor wages, these employers are exacerbating the wealth inequality that hurts our economy - many of their workers have no choice but to seek government assistance and, in essence, the public is subsidizing low wage employers. Should we, as a society, stand by as these unethical practices take place?

There are a several studies across our country that examine the public cost of low wages for taxpayers. Highly regarded researchers at the University of California Berkeley and the Economic Policy Institute, to name a few, have examined this problem and conclude that by raising the minimum wage levels we can get away from the problem of low wage employers using the public assistance systems to augment their workers' needs.

We need to consider this argument carefully and enact policies that are humane to workers and help our economy. If we increase the minimum wage, the additional buying power will go back into the economy and that is a win-win for all of us. People will be able to spend more, more taxes will be generated, the need for various of types of assistance may be reduced, and our state's economy can begin to improve for its neediest residents.

The Connecticut Permanent Commission on the Status of Women's report, The Self Sufficiency Standard for Connecticut 2015, estimated what it would take for families not to have to rely on public benefits and found that in Bridgeport, in order not to have to rely on public benefits in a family consisting of one adult and one preschool aged child, that household would need to have an annual income of $58,142, something many of us cannot imagine.

All over Connecticut the Self Sufficiency Standard ranges from approximately $48,000 per year in the least expensive areas to over $70,000 in some of our most expensive areas for this same size family. Some expenses depend on the age of the children childcare is important and costly for young children, and the cost of food grows as students become teenagers.

Yet why are large, for-profit, corporations still getting away with making the public pay for the low wages they offer?

The time is now for Connecticut to join the national chorus for fair wages across the board. Empirical evidence shows that when we increase our wages, the median income goes up. It's happening right now in Minnesota, where Gov. Mark Dayton taxed the rich and increased the minimum wage. They now have the fifth largest-growing economy in the nation.

As citizens we must take action on measures that combat wage inequality in our economy. We must work towards an economy that works for all, not just those at the top.

One day many of us will need home health care. Or we may find ourselves buying clothes at a retail store, or ordering some food at a chain restaurant. To our opponents, do you want quality service? Then, you need to support a quality wage.

Louise Simmons is a Hartford resident and Professor of Social Work at the University of Connecticut (This is her personal opinion and does not reflect any position of the university).
For low-income homeowners, even the smallest exterior repair can be overwhelming. Thats why Habitat for Humanity offers a program to help.

Through an exterior repair program, income-eligible homeowners in Hall, Hamilton, Howard and Merrick counties may apply for no-interest loans for qualifying projects. Much like its other programs, Habitat uses volunteers and competitive bidding processes to keep costs down and loans affordable. Another way Habitat works to make loans affordable is by adjusting the length of the repayment.

The application period for the repair loans program recently opened. Projects that may be considered include reshingling, brush and tree removal, fence repair, sidewalk repair or replacement, grading for proper drainage, and handicap ramps. Other projects may be possible if they fall within Habitats ability to manage and within guidelines set forth by Habitat for Humanity International.

Some of the previous years projects have been in Wood River, Palmer and Hampton, with multiple projects completed in Aurora and Grand Island, said Dana Jelinek, executive director of Grand Island Area Habitat for Humanity.

Applicants must reside in the home for which they are seeking the loan and be current on the mortgage, property taxes and homeowners insurance. They must also fall within income guidelines of 30 percent to 80 percent of the areas median income based on number of people in the household. Since this is a loan program, applications must be completed and credit reviewed.

Although many of the program applicants have been older homeowners, the program has no limitations on age, Jelinek said.

Pre-screenings take place to determine if the project and applicant may fall within the criteria for the program. For information or a pre-screening, contact the Habitat for Humanity office at 502 W. Second St. or call (308) 385-5510.
There were many helpers along the way: Ed Klimek and Brian Maxin, Mike and Caleb from MRL, John and Deb from Concrete Critters, along with Ed and Maxine Beckler from Beckler Boulders, with guidance and professional help with the restoration. Harry and Darla Hansen were there with their special help and support. A very special and enormous THANK YOU to Chief Carriers for helping to get the memorial delivered to the Seabee Museum in Port Hueneme. We could not have done it without all of your help and support. Within a half hour after being unloaded off the truck, it was on display inside the Seabee Museum. We wish we could have shared this journey with more. Thanks again.
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Linkedin Dian Arthen (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, April 3, 2016

An Indonesian is among seven finalists in the annual Whitley Awards that recognize the works of conservationists around the globe.

Farwiza Farhan has been chosen out of 130 applicants from all over the world in recognition of her project Citizen Lawsuits: Defending local livelihoods and Sumatra's iconic species in the Leuser Ecosystem.

The Leuser Ecosystem is a forest area located in Aceh that is under threat of being cleared for the industrial development of palm oil plantations.

In an email to thejakartapost.com, Farwiza said that lawsuits she was supporting aimed to empower the local community to have a say in a regulation that would directly impact its members livelihoods.

"The threat of flood, landslides, drought and other natural disasters is a very real threat. We hope that members of government will open their hearts and minds and see these demands for what they are. No one person on the list of plaintiffs is expecting any personal financial gain from pursuing this lawsuit. We do this because it's important for us, for the people of Aceh and for future generations," she said.

The nine plaintiffs are all community and local leaders who live within and around the Leuser Ecosystem. They are part of Gerakan Rakyat Aceh Menggugat (Aceh Society Action Movement, or GERAM), a grassroots movement that started last year after numerous failed attempts to encourage the Aceh administration and Legislative Council to revise the Aceh Provincial Spatial Plan. The movement wants the spatial plan to designate the Leuser Ecosystem as a national strategic area for its environmental value.

Farwiza is the co-founder of Forest, Nature and Environment of Aceh (HAkA), an NGO that aims to create long-term sustainability in the region. Her organization and the Leuser Ecosystem have recently become the subjects of attention after Leonardo DiCaprio posted photos of his visit to the area.

"It was nice. I'm thoroughly impressed by his depth of knowledge and genuine intention," recalled Farwiza of her meeting with the Oscar-winning actor.

Held by UK-based charity organization the Whitley Fund for Nature, the "green Oscars" awards will present winners with a share of 245,000 pounds (US$351,110) in prizes. The award ceremony is slated to be held on April 27 in London and Farwiza is expected to make a speech about her Citizen Lawsuits project.

"I'll use the money granted to me to fund community empowerment through Citizen Lawsuits," said the 29-year-old PhD candidate when asked about what she would do if she won. (kes)
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Linkedin Agus Maryono (The Jakarta Post) Batang, Central Java  Sun, April 3, 2016

Fishermen in Batang regency, Central Java, have seen a significant increase in their hauls over the last two years, thanks to improved fishing equipment, an official has said.

The Batang administrations head of fisheries and maritime affairs , Achmad Taufik, said Batangs sea fishing production reached around 25 million kilograms per year on average. In the last two years, production has increased by around 25 percent annually, Taufik said on Friday, adding that sea fishing revenues contributed around Rp 80 billion (US$6.08 million) per year to the regencys locally generated recurring revenues.

We are targeting a 27.5 percent increase in our fisheries production this year. With their plentiful hauls, we hope that fish traders do not forget their responsibility to pay fees to the government, Taufik said.

To maximize sea fishing production, he went on, the Batang administration is set to renovate infrastructure facilities at fish auction centers in seven areas across the regency.

According to Taufik, Batang now has 11,765 fishermen, comprising 625 fishing boat owners and 11,140 crew members, and 765 fishing vessels with various gross tonnages.

The fishing vessels operate various modern fishing equipment, such as purse seines, mini purse seines, bottom long lines, gill nets and trammel nets.

Friday morning saw unexpected scenes at Batang port, with dozens of sharks laid out on the floor of a storage facility within the complex. Fishermen were seen unloading more sharks from large baskets and labeling their catches.

They are expensive. They will be sold in Jakarta, not here, said Abdul Kahfi, 40, a fisherman, adding that sharks were very much in season in the waters off the coastal regency.

Alhamdulillah, we're getting good hauls. We go fishing every day and return home with our vessels packed with fish, he told thejakartapost.com. He added that there were around 10,000 fishermen active in Batang, and that almost all of them were enjoying large hauls.

According to Kahfi, an adult shark can fetch between Rp 400,000 and Rp 500,000.

At risk of extinction  Abdul Kahfi, 40, a fisherman from Batang, Central Java, looks after sharks he caught at the Batang fishing port on Friday.

Shark overfishing among local fishermen, however, has put the species at risk of extinction. Indonesia catches more sharks than any country in the world, according to conservation group Save Sharks Indonesia.

Green Peace Indonesia data show that Indonesia produces at least 486 tons of dried shark fins per year. Meanwhile, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says at least 1.1 million tons of shark products are traded globally every year. Conservation groups have called on the government to take tougher measures to prevent shark fishing. (ebf)
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Linkedin Wahyoe Boediwardhana (The Jakarta Post) Surabaya, East Java  Sat, April 2, 2016

State-owned train manufacturer PT Industri Kereta Api (INKA) in Madiun, East Java, has begun its first passenger train exports by shipping 15 passenger cars to Bangladesh.

The shipment of the Shovon-type passenger cars is the first batch of the total shipment of 150 passenger cars ordered by Bangladesh Railways. INKA must completely fulfil the US$ 73-million order by August this year.

Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said the export order was one of the governments strategies to survive amid a decline in demand for commodity exports from Indonesias traditional export destinations.

We have to start improving this situation by, among others things, diversifying our export products. We have to boost our manufactured and processed product exports and no longer depend on commodity products, he said during the shipping ceremony for the 15 passenger cars at the Tanjung Perak Port in Surabaya, East Java, on Thursday.

The minister said the export of the trains to Bangladesh was INKAs first train export order. He further said Bangladesh was not one of Indonesias traditional export destination.

Indonesias trade promotional activities in the future must have new strategies. They should no longer depend only on traditional export destination countries but also non-traditional market countries, such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand, said Bambang.

INKA defeated a Chinese train manufacturing company in the tender process for the procurement of trains for Bangladesh after it obtained a Rp 300 billion (US$22.82 million) export credit financing facility from Bank Exim. The extending of the export credit financing was part of the governments moves to back up the domestic manufacturing industry.

With this national interest account [NIA] scheme, INKA will be more confident in facing the international competition. Currently, we are carrying out some preparations to win a tender process for the procurement of an additional 264 passenger train cars for Bangladesh Railways, which will be conducted in April, INKA president director Agus H.Purnomo said after the shipment of the first batch of the INKA-manufactured passenger trains to Bangladesh.

Agus said INKA needed financial support from the government to be able to compete against China. He said Chinese companies had always been supported by various incentives from their government each time they won export tenders.

Agus further said INKA was striving to reach other non-traditional markets such as Egypt, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Trade Minister Thomas J Lembong said the government was striving to penetrate non-traditional markets to assist Indonesian exports.

We will be continuously striving to penetrate non-traditional markets such as India, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, Russia and then African countries, he said.

Bambang gave a sign that the government would fully support the new marketing strategy by, among others things, providing a buyers credit scheme for countries wishing to buy Indonesian products.

Each time we offer products to those countries, Bank Exim will accompany us. If it is possible, they can buy products from us and Bank Exim will provide them with a financing facilities, said Bambang. (ebf)
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Linkedin Ganug Nugroho Adi (The Jakarta Post) Klaten, Central Java  Sun, April 3, 2016

A team of doctors from the central executive board of Muhammadiyah, Indonesias second largest Muslim organization, on Sunday performed an autopsy on the body of Siyono, a suspected terrorist from Klaten, Central Java.

The autopsy was performed to reveal Siyonos cause of death during an interrogation process conducted by the National Polices Densus 88 counterterrorism squad.

Up till now, the exact cause of Siyonos death still remains unknown. Digging up the terrorist suspects grave in Pogung village, Cawas, Klaten, Central Java, prior to the autopsy, attracted many local onlookers. The autopsy previously had been rejected by Pogung residents, supporting Siyonos parents, who rejected the autopsy. However, Siyonos wife, Suratmi, wanted the process performed.

Pogung residents packed around Siyonos grave in Brengkungan during the excavation process. While, 100 police officers from the Klaten Police and hundreds of personnel from the Muhammadiyah Youth Force Readiness Command (Kokam) Central Java branch took part in securing the site.

We are excavating this grave. An autopsy will be performed on the body by a team of doctors. We will only secure the location so that the autopsy process will run smoothly. Alhamdulillah [Thank God], so far the process has run smoothly and safely, said Klaten Police chief Adj.Sr.Comr.Faizal on location.

National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) commissioner Hafid Abbas said the autopsy was performed by nine doctors from the Muhammadiyah central executive board and one doctor from the National Police.

Hafid said the Siyono family, especially his wife, had the right to know the cause of his death.

Ten doctors performed the autopsy today. The result will be known within seven to 10 days. In principle, the autopsy was aimed at finding clarity on the cause of Siyonos death. The cause of his death has remained unknown until today, said Hafid.

Siyono was arrested by Densus 88 personnel on March 8. He was allegedly killed on March 10 while in custody, and buried on March 13.

Muhammadiyah Youth Movement chairman Dahnil Anzar Dahnil said all Pogung residents supported the autopsy process. There is no more problem. As you can see, the autopsy process ran smoothly and safely. Lets wait for the result, he said.

Siyonos autopsy was initially scheduled on Wednesday but residents rejected the plan, saying that the victims family members had written a statement not wanting the autopsy. (ebf)
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Linkedin Stefani Ribka (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, April 3 2016

After naming Agung Podomoro Land executives bribery suspects in a case centering on land reclamation in North Jakarta, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) is spreading its wings into other reclamation megaprojects on dozens of islands. The commissions investigation framework is based on collective evidence of similar modus in other regions.



KPK commissioner Saut Situmorang said the commission aimed to prevent corporation-driven infrastructure policies.



Well target all greedy deeds of businesspeople to prevent them from ruling the country, Saut told The Jakarta Post via text message on Saturday.



Its not only in Jakarta that businesspeople loot the nations land by cooperating with government officials and lawmakers. However, well always examine whether their acts have the potency to create state losses, he said.



The KPK named on Friday Jakarta councillor Mohammad Sanusi, Agung Podomoro Land president director Ariesman Widjaja and staffer Trinanda Prihantoro graft suspects.



The firm is alleged to have bribed Sanusi Rp 2 billion to smooth the passage of zoning and reclamation bylaws required for zoning in the North Jakarta reclamation area.



Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) executive director Abetnego Tarigan said that other than the Jakarta project, Indonesia had at least 16 reclamation projects under way. Regional administrations, according to Abetnego, permitted the construction of those projects by issuing bylaws that contravene the prevailing Spatial Planning Law. They include Losari Beach in Makassar, South Sulawesi; Palu Bay in Central Sulawesi; Benoa Bay in Bali; and Marina Beach in Semarang, Central Java.



The corporations argued that the areas needed revamping and investment for greater benefits, Abetnego said. However, the construction hinders locals and fishermen from enjoying the natural sites as the man-made facilities block views. Such expensive attractions and properties can only be enjoyed by the rich.



Unlike in Singapore, the Netherlands and Japan, where reclamation projects are carried out in line with measurable government policies, here in Indonesia, it is all corporation-driven. It is businesspeople who set the spatial planning and use laws, he said.



Saut said that in the case of the Jakarta project, the KPK had seen signs of involvement from other city councillors, the Jakarta administration and private firms to smooth out the project, and will question more people in the case.



The Jakarta reclamation project also involves PT Pelindo, PT Manggala Krida Yudha, PT Pembangunan Jaya Ancol, PT Jakarta Propertindo dua pulau, PT Jaladri Kartika Ekapaksi and PT Kapuk Naga Indah.



Despite the incomplete environmental impact analysis (AMDAL), the property giants have commenced construction on some of the planned 17 man-made islets.



The KPK could at any time during the investigation recommend that they halt construction or suggest that Jakartas leaders rearrange the management of the islets, Saut said.



Besides catching big fish on Friday, the commission also gained public appreciation by naming three others suspects in separate bribery cases involving fund embezzlement at state-owned constructor PT Brantas Abipraya (BA). BA finance director Sudi Wantoko, senior manager Dandung Pamularno and middleman Marudut were named suspects for allegedly bribing the Jakarta Prosecutors Office US$148,835 to stop probing the firms internal corruption case.



The KPK also questioned prosecutors office head Sudung Situmorang and his assistant on special crimes Tomo Sitepu as witnesses in the case.



We are never in doubt in naming people suspects. But the problem is that theres a lot of noise that forces us to reveal ones involvement in stages, Saut said.



Corruption researcher Febri Hendri from the Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) has questioned what Saut refers to as noise and suggests that the KPK not compromise revealing corruption in law enforcement institutions. ICW data shows there are 300 corruption cases stuck at the Attorney Generals Office (AGO) and prosecutors offices nationwide without any progress since 2010.

______________________________________

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Linkedin Nury Vittachi (The Jakarta Post) Bangkok  Sun, April 3 2016

I once went on a trip with a theatrical set designer. When her Mask of Tutankhamen appeared on the luggage carousel, I said: Check the label to make sure its yours.

And she did. I like women who do what I say, because of their extreme rarity.

Even my own daughters stopped obeying me when they reached adolescence, which happens between the ages of two and four these days. Thats when modern girls get perfume and earrings and start swanning around town by themselves.

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Linkedin Damar Harsanto (The Jakarta Post) Washington DC  Sun, April 3 2016

The 2016 Nuclear Security Summit ended in Washington DC on Friday afternoon, local time, with calls for all participating countries to unite and cooperate in the fight against nuclear terrorism and to safeguard nuclear material.

For Indonesia and Poland, the end of the summit means more work in the upcoming months.

US President Barack Obama, the host and initiator of the biennial event, specifically asked Indonesia and Poland to lead their respective regions in non-proliferation efforts.

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Linkedin Lita Aruperes (The Jakarta Post) Manado, North Sulawesi  Sun, April 3, 2016

Traditional and religious leaders must play a greater role in preventing violence against women and children in Indonesia, a minister has said.

Many cases of violence against women and children across Indonesia are not legally solved because they are hampered by problems related to tradition. Many traditional leaders want to solve them within a family atmosphere. This should not happen because it can trigger more violence in the future, said Womens Empowerment and Child Protection Minister Yohana Yembise on Thursday while speaking at the 2016 Womens Empowerment and Child Protection National Coordination Meeting in Manado, North Sulawesi.

Yohana said all traditional and religious leaders must unite to tackle violence against women and children in traditional meetings in their respective areas.

Such unity has been initiated in Papua and it is hoped that other areas, including North Sulawesi, which has a high number of cases of violence against women, can do the same thing, said the minister.

Yohana believes that the presence of traditional and religious leaders could change perceptions about the rights of women in Indonesia.

During the national meeting, participants from provinces across Indonesia agreed to three programs, collectively called Three Ends. The programs consist of a commitment to end violence against women and children, human trafficking and economic disparities between men and women.

Yohana said the Womens Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry had established a task force in areas across Indonesia. She said the task force would tackle violence against women.

We are also striving to develop more parks for children in every village. This will prevent them from being unduly influenced by foreign ideas penetrating Indonesia via the internet and social media, said Yohana.

She hopes that Manado residents can build an environment that protects children. It is our common commitment that all Indonesian children are protected. Lets end the culture of violence and build a harmonious family that is full of love. Lets end human trafficking and increase womens economic capacity to end poverty, she said, adding that mass media played an important role in spreading the issue and raising awareness of the rights of children. (ebf)
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Eau Claire, Wisconsin  Sun, April 3, 2016

Following one of the worst weeks of his campaign, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was on defense Saturday as he kicked off a three-day sprint to Wisconsin's primary.

Contenders in both parties crisscrossed the Midwestern state seeking an edge ahead of Tuesday's primaries, none more actively than Trump, who's had a rough week and faces a likely struggle against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the state, who has passed Trump in recent Wisconsin polls.

The Republican race is overshadowed by a persistent effort by Trump's rivals in the campaign and the party to force the nomination fight into the July convention  and by his equivocations on whether he will be loyal to the Republican Party or bolt for an independent candidacy if he feels mistreated.

Trump began the afternoon with a rally in the Milwaukee suburb of Racine, where he defended a series of controversial comments in recent days on NATO, abortion and his remark that Japan and South Korea should perhaps be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.

"This politics is a tough business," said Trump. "Because you can say things one way and the press will criticize you horribly. You say it another way and the press will criticize you horribly."

Off the stage, in a more reflective moment, Trump expressed regret that he had retweeted an unflattering photo of rival Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi, paired with a glamorous photo of his own wife, Melania, a former model, as part of a bitter feud between the two men.

"Yeah, it was a mistake," he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it."

Cruz sought favor in North Dakota, which is not holding a primary or caucuses in the 2016 Republican race. He addressed Republicans at a state convention that is selecting delegates who will go to the national convention unbound to any of the presidential candidates.

Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich sent supporters on their behalf to make the case that they should be backed by North Dakota's delegates at the Cleveland convention in July.

The Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has grown increasingly bitter, too, though it has not matched the Republcan contest for raw hostility. Their attention will quickly turn to an even more consequential contest, in New York on April 19, where the Democratic front-runner dearly hopes to avoid an upset in the state she served as senator. Sanders, who was born in Brooklyn, can claim New York as his home state.

Sanders urged rally-goers to come out in droves Tuesday.

"Here is the political reality," he told a young and pumped-up crowd of thousands on the University of Wisconsin's Eau Claire campus. "If there is a large voter turnout, if working people, many of whom have given up on the political process, if young people come, perhaps for the first time ... we will win on Tuesday."

Clinton sought to draw a contrast with Sanders by emphasizing her Democratic bonafides. Before hundreds gathered in a hotel ballroom in Eau Claire later Saturday, the former secretary of state stressed that she has been "a proud Democrat all my adult life and I think that's kind of important if we're selecting somebody to be a Democratic nominee of the Democratic Party."

That was a swipe at Sanders, a longtime independent senator from Vermont who is expected to make a strong showing in Wisconsin.

Among Trump's biggest recent missteps have been his recent comments on abortion, which have managed to unite both abortion rights activists and opponents in their criticism.

During a taping of "Face The Nation" on Friday, Trump said he believed that, when it comes to abortion: "The laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way." His spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, quickly issued a clarification that Trump meant that laws won't change until he's president and appoints judges who can interpret them differently.

It was the second time in days that he'd stepped in hot water over the issue. On Wednesday, he'd said women should be punished for getting abortions if they're ever banned  a position the notoriously unapologetic campaign quickly reversed.

Trump's comments raised concerns in the Republican Party about whether his unpopularity with women as measured in preference polling would make him unelectable in a general election match-up against Clinton.

In an apparent effort to address that concern, Trump said his wife will be campaigning with him Monday. His daughter Ivanka, who just had a baby, will also be returning to campaign with him in another week or so, he said.

Trump responded at length to criticism from both of his rivals as well as from President Barack Obama over his call to consider allowing South Korea and Japan to acquire nuclear weapons  a position the president said betrayed an ignorance of foreign policy and the world.

"Now I didn't say anything about letting Japan nuke," Trump said. "But I did say, perhaps if we can't do the right deal, we'll have to let them take care of themselves."

Trump said, "if that means they'll have to someday get nuclear weapons, in all fairness folks, I know the way life works, eventually they're going to probably want to do it anyway." And he later claimed that his much-panned assertion that NATO was irrelevant was suddenly being embraced by people who had "studied the organization for 30 years." (**)
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Linkedin Ruslan Sangadji (The Jakarta Post) Palu, Central Sulawesi  Mon, April 4, 2016

Amid a constant siege waged by a joint police-military team, Santoso aka Abu Wardah, leader of the East Indonesia Mujahidin (MIT) terrorist group, is growing frustrated, according to a senior counterterrorism official.

National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) chief Comr. Gen. Tito Karnavian said on Sunday that Santoso had reportedly threatened to shoot dead two MIT members of Chinese Uighur ethnicity who were determined to escape. The two Uighur terrorists are identified only as Abdul and Ibrohim.

Tito further explained that Abdul and Ibrohim were the only two remaining Uighur MIT members after four Uighurs, namely Alphin Zubaidan, Atlinci Bayram, Abdul Basyit and Bozoglan, were arrested in Parigi Moutong regency in 2014.

Four other Uighur terrorists in the Santoso group were killed in a shootout. There now remain just two with Santoso," Tito said in a press conference in Palu, Central Sulawesi.

The four Uighur terrorists killed in the shootout were Sobron alias Son Haji alias Abu Sulaiman, Joko Uighur alias Turang Ismail, Magalasi Bahtusan alias Farok and Nuretin alias Abdul.

The Uighur terrorists reportedly left their country by sailing to Cambodia before travelling overland through Thailand to Kuala Lumpur, from where they flew to Indonesia. In Indonesia, the foreign terrorists are reported to have travelled to Bandung, West Java. They later flew to Makassar, South Sulawesi, journeying onward to Palu, Central Sulawesi. From Palu, the Uighurs traveled to Parigi Moutong and Poso.

With their countrymen held or dead, Tito said, it was very unlikely any further Uighur militants would come to Indonesia to join Santoso in Poso.

They thought that Poso was just like Syria. They were tricked, said Tito.

More than 3,000 Indonesian Military and National Police personnel have been deployed in a security operation codenamed Operation Tinombala to pursue Santoso and his men in Poso. Despite the large number of personnel, Tito said, the thick forests, steep mountains and deep ravines of the region pose serious challenges to the hunt.

I know this very well because I was assigned to Poso for two years. Its not easy to arrest Santoso in such an area. Its like looking for a needle in a haystack, said Tito.

Given the obstacles, he went on, a team of even 10,000 men might not be able to isolate a group as small and hardy as the MIT. They would still need quite a long time to be able to track down Santoso and his men, he said. (ebf)
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Phuket Opinion: As easy as 1, 2, 3

PHUKET: News involving the Immigration Bureau over the past two weeks could have fooled anybody that April 1 had come early.

opinionimmigrationpolicecorruption

By The Phuket News

Sunday 3 April 2016, 06:37AM

Lt Gen Nathathorn Prousoontorn's new Immigration Bureau motto, 'To Serve, To Safeguard'.

First, we should praise the bureau for finally clarifying that overstay blacklist re-entry bans do not apply to children. Though, with the bureau having so many native English speakers on hand, it remains dumbfounding that the regulation maintains the wording that 3. These rules are not applied to: 3.1 An alien who departs the country before the age of 18.

Many foreigners will have figured out by now that this actually means that the rules do not apply to foreign children under 18 still within the country.

Yet the icing on the gaffe cake was the data breach of the Nakhon Sri Thammarat Immigration Office that exposed private information of thousands of expats and tourists in the South (see news pages).

To be fair, the Immigration Bureau is not alone in having its data exposed, as dozens of government websites insufficient security has been made public mockery by hackers in recent months.

In respect to the re-entry ban not affecting minors, it is pitiful that Phuket Immigration was unable to provide a single officer who could respond on the record to clarify the rules. After all, the Immigration Bureau is, as they will very quickly remind when enforcing the law, an entire division of the Royal Thai Police.

The sad irony linking the two incidents, however, is that all this has happened in a country whose Prime Minister repeatedly vows to fight corruption. At the same time, the powers that be have introduced the Computer Crimes Act, which allows up to 15 years jail be imposed on people who post on the internet any information likely to cause harm to another and willing to use this law even on Facebook Likes.

In case people arent aware of the definition, corruption requires an official to be involved. Yet, holding officials responsible for the consequences of their actions, or inactions, remains rare  like trying to sue the Highways Dept for an accident caused by a pothole in the road.

It seems that for the time being, expats and tourists will just have to take it for granted that the law is exactly whatever the officer standing in front of them says it is unless of course a superior officer says something different.
The Easter surprise: A changing landscape for British expats  The Latest UK Budget

PHUKET: Every year around this time, while British children are concerning themselves with what goodies the Easter Bunny left for them, their expatriate parents are fretting over what new surprises the Chancellor will have in store when he delivers his annual address to Parliament.

economics

By Phuket Expat Finance

Sunday 3 April 2016, 11:00AM

British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne holds up the ominous briefcase containing his taxation and spending plans for 2016 and beyond. Photo: AFP

While the recent budget offered no major changes for British expatriates, the past few years have heralded so many transmogrifications of the UK tax code that many people have found it difficult to keep up. Will we be better off or worse off?

But even though there were no surprises offered up in this year' budget, there are several areas under review which could have a lasting effect on anyone who is no longer classed as a UK resident.

UK Pensions

To most retirees, pension legislation is the main concern. For those have relied primarily on their UK state pensions, it has been suggested that the additional pension credit  which helps to guarantee a minimum income  may be in jeopardy. If a struggling pensioner now decides to spend time abroad, new proposals suggest that they could lose this pension credit. Currently, pensioners may spend 13 weeks overseas, but there are proposals to reduce it to just four weeks.

For someone not yet retired, it will now take more years to qualify for a full state pension. The required number of years to pay National Insurance Contributions is set to rise from 30 to 35 years, which will likely play havoc with many peoples retirement plans.

Yet another proposal suggests eliminating the personal allowances for British expatriates. For someone already finding it hard to make ends meet, removing the current 11,000 (B55,000) allowance would generate an immediate tax bill.

Furthermore, if you have a state pension, rent out your home in the UK and have a small company pension, you could find that you have moved up into the 40% tax band. Whilst many retirees live in a country where pensions are taxed locally, this is not the case for Thailand, so losing the personal allowance will negatively impact retirement income. Retiring expatriates will have to wait until 2017 to find out if this proposal becomes law.

The Pain

But the removal of the personal allowance is not the only concern for expatriates owning UK property. As of April 2015, the sale of UK property by an expat is subject to capital gains tax. So, for anyone renting out their property to generate extra income, and who planned to sell at a future date for extra cash, the new law means incurring a tax bill of 28% on any increase in property value between April 2015 and the date of sale.

Unfortunately, these new rules do not just apply to property, but also extend to other assets, such as large share portfolios.

Incredibly, the complete elimination of the Pension Commencement Lump Sum (PCLS)  the tax-free lump sum that pensioners may withdraw from their private pension pot upon retiring  is also being mooted. There is likely to be great opposition to a move like this, but the move is expected to generate a much needed GB4 billion (B200.24 billion) per annum, and more than once the current Chancellor has shown a readiness to use pensions to fund his budget.

One change to pensions which did take effect on the April 6 was to the Lifetime Allowance (LTA). The LTA is the total value of pension savings that can be accumulated in a lifetime without a tax charge, and this sum has been reduced from 1.25 million (B62.57 million) to 1 million (just over B50 million). This has steadily been reduced from a peak of 1.8 million (B90.1 million) since 2010, and further reductions are expected in the future.

Some experts fear that all of these moves could be counterproductive for the UK in the long term. Expatriates who no longer find any advantage to keeping their toe in UK waters may decide to sever ties altogether. Imagine the impact of all British expatriates simultaneously abandoning the UK property sector, share markets and the pension industry

The Gain

But not all changes in legislation are for the worse. For example, until recently, British private pension holders were forced to annuitise their pension after age 75. But pension overhauls now mean that no one, expatriate or UK resident, is forced into an annuity.

Furthermore, if an individual today has pensions totalling less than GB30,000 (just over B1.5 million), they may withdraw the full amount whenever they wish. If they have not exceeded their personal allowance, they will then be able to take the monies over three years, completely free of tax, providing their allowance isnt used elsewhere.

And of course, since 2006, UK expatriates have the ability to transfer their private pensions overseas into a QROPS, an HMRC-recognised pension scheme domiciled in one of the worlds premier tax-free centres.

If UK expats decide to do that, then much of the above becomes moot. For example, if a pension is transferred to Gibraltar  before any benefits have been taken  the tax-free lump sum would never be in danger, and all income would be subject to only a 2.5% tax rate.

As the UK government shows no sign of cooling in their efforts to shift more of a tax burden onto expatriates, anyone with a UK pension may want to consider striking while the iron is hot.

If you would like to learn more about investing, contact us at: chatwithus@phuketexpatfinance.com
Trailer Park Boys actor Lucy DeCoutere resigned from the Canadian television series Saturday, hours after the show released a statement in support of fellow actor Mike Smith, who has been charged with domestic battery in Hollywood.

If I find out that somebody is abusive, I cut them out of my life. Its very easy, DeCoutere wrote on Twitter.

Smith, known for his role as the odd but lovable Bubbles, has denied any wrongdoing after his Friday arrest. The alleged victim, identified by the show as Georgia Ling, said she did not feel in danger and there was no real issue.

Their joint statement came with words of support attributed to the shows actors and crew: The other members of the Trailer Park Boys and all staff stand behind Mike and look forward to the matter being resolved favourably, the statement said.

DeCoutere confirmed that her resignation was connected with Smiths arrest. Reached at home, she said the decision was influenced by her recent experience as a complainant in the high-profile sexual assault case against former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, which ended in his acquittal, and that she was quitting as a matter of principle.

I am not leaving the show lightly. I love so many people who work on the show. . . I just couldnt continue to work on this show based on these allegations and how it was handled.

The Trailer Park Boys 10th season debuted on Netflix last week and it is about to go into production on its next season.

DeCoutere said on Twitter that she had spoken with both Smith and Ling.

Smith was arrested early Friday morning in Hollywood and charged with misdemeanour domestic battery, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.U.S. celebrity website TMZ reported that the incident began at the citys historic Roosevelt Hotel when Smith allegedly pinned a female friend up against a bathroom wall in the midst of an argument. Citing hotel guests who claimed to have witnessed the altercation, TMZ also said bystanders at the scene described the two shouting over whom Smith had been texting.

In the Trailer Park Boys statement released Saturday, both Smith and Ling gave accounts of what happened.

Mike and I did indeed have a heavy argument but it saddens me the way things are being reported and the way it was handled by the police, Ling wrote. At no point did I feel I was in danger, otherwise I wouldve called the police myself, which I did not. The police were called by others not present in the room who mistakenly perceived the argument to be something other than what it was. When the officers arrived I tried to assure them there was no real issue, but they proceeded to arrest Mike.

Smith wrote: Georgia is a friend of mine and we had a loud and heated dispute. That is all. At no time did I assault her. I am not guilty of the misdemeanour charged against me.

Trailer Park Boys publicist Sheila Roberts refused an interview request Saturday evening, but said in an email that DeCoutere told the shows producers a few weeks ago she would not be returning for the next season. She also said the statement in support of Smith reflected the views of the shows main actors, John Paul Tremblay and Robb Wells, who play main characters Julian and Ricky.

The Trailer Park Boys is a mockumentary television series that follows the misadventures of a group of foul-mouthed trailer park residents. Main characters Julian (Tremblay), Ricky (Wells) and Bubbles (Smith) are a perpetually drunk and high pack of friends who are forever trying to get their lives in order through dubious quick-money schemes.

DeCoutere has played the character Lucy  Rickys girlfriend and mother to his child  for 15 years. DeCoutere is also a captain in the Royal Canadian Air Force in New Brunswick, where she works as a training officer.

I have learned a lot over the past 18 months regarding how intimate partner abuse happens, DeCoutere said of her experience as a witness in the Ghomeshi sexual assault case. The trial has impacted every part of my life.

Smith was released from a Hollywood police station a few hours after his arrest on $20,000 (U.S.) bail. He is scheduled to appear at a downtown Los Angeles court on April 29.

With files from Vjosa Isai and Michael Robinson

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When Jennifer Keesmaat was named Torontos chief planner, her Grade 8 teacher called to congratulate her  and remind her of an unusual speech she gave in class.

The topic was sidewalks and the role they play in our lives. It was a presentation she had long forgotten.

Why was I talking about that at that age? I dont know, Keesmaat says in an interview. You post-rationalize. I walked to school. It was a long walk and I loved that walk  Obviously it made an impact on me.

A walkable city, more bicycle paths, midrise developments, evidence-based investments in transit, improved laneways and sidewalks  theyre all concepts that Keesmaat champions. Loudly.

Not your typical bureaucrat, Keesmaat blogs, tweets prolifically (more than 11,000 tweets and over 28,000 followers), hosts roundtables and delivers TED talks.

Keesmaat, 45, has established a reputation as someone unafraid to state her views  even if they conflict with those of her ultimate boss, Mayor John Tory. Last spring, in front of members of the Urban Land Institute, a group of experts on planning and development in Toronto, Keesmaat twice interrupted Tory to correct him as he spoke about her planning department budget. (Tory says they were both correct).

Then in the summer, her outspokenness got her into hot water with the mayors office. She opposed Torys vision for the future of the Gardiner Expressway, and ended up having her wrists slapped for public statements and tweets where she seemed to be actively lobbying for an alternative Gardiner plan. In the end Torys vision won city council approval.

Tory says he and Keesmaat got off to a rocky start, but now their professional relationship is on the up. The mayor calls her a very imaginative, provocative, smart resource he can use for ideas.

Shes one of the best hopes we have to lead the way, Tory says in an interview.

At the beginning of this year she earned praise for proposing a compromise for transit in Scarborough. It pleased advocates of a subway, offering a one-stop extension from the Bloor-Danforth line to Scarboroughs city centre. It preserves some of Torys SmartTrack rail plan, and calls for light rail transit lines that connect underserved neighbourhoods in Toronto  a plan Tory said makes huge strides.

Her detractors charge that she craves the limelight and is burnishing her image for a future bid at political office  a claim she adamantly denies.

Keesmaat says she wants to foster a climate in which residents are engaged in making neighbourhoods better and improving the city as a whole.

A city isnt something that happens to you. You make choices every day that shape and make your city, she said during a TED talk at York University shortly after being named chief planner.

Some say Keesmaats family history provides clues to her penchant for speaking out  what one observer calls her rebellious streak.

Her Dutch relatives played major roles in the resistance movement after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940. Her grandfathers brother was shot dead for participating in the struggle.

Keesmaat has said her family history made her realize she has to stand up and stand out.

First moves

Its a cold February morning as Jennifer Rachel Keesmaat gets off the elevator at city hall and heads into the planning department.

Shes confident and sharply dressed in her brown blazer, white dress shirt and black slacks. On this day she eschews her trademark high heels for winter boots  its snowing. Shes photogenic and fit, often cycling to work from the Yonge and Eglinton area home she shares with her husband, Tom Freeman, 43, daughter Alexandra, 15, and son Luis, 10.

Her office has papers everywhere: TTC summaries, planning reports and other documents spread across her desks or pinned to the wall.

My office isnt usually this messy, but Ive been busy these days, she says.

She and her staff have been working intently to help develop new plans for transit in Toronto, including long-term goals.

Theyre part of what Keesmaat calls the motherlode of transit, plans that if funded by all three levels of government, would see miles of new rapid transit lines. The plans incorporate several proposed provincial and city directed projects including SmartTrack, a priority for Tory, and a downtown relief subway line  considered more of a priority by Keesmaat and TTC leadership. (A recent ridership study found both lines are needed to relieve congestion on the Yonge subway.)

Council last week endorsed several new lines, including an LRT along Eglinton Ave. E. in Scarborough and the first leg of a downtown relief subway line to run along Queen St. E.

The ability to move around ones city  especially on foot or by transit  is one of Keesmaats priorities. Its a theme she touches on in a TED talk in 2012.

In the talk, called Walk to School (delivered before taking on her chief planner role), Keesmaat points out that studies have shown that as walking has decreased, obesity, including childhood obesity, has increased.

As a child, she made her 1.5-kilometre trek on foot to Calvin Christian School, an independent Dutch school in Hamilton.

What type of pupil was she?

I was active, outspoken, Keesmaat says in an interview. I got bored fast. I need more than one thing happening at once. A had a lot of detentions for talking in class or not having my homework done. I was an average student. It wasnt until I got to senior grades that I started to excel.

In high school she found an outlet for all that pent-up energy  sports. Aside from playing and coaching basketball, she played volleyball and ran track and cross-country.

She was active at home, too. She has three sisters  Sylvia, Valerie and the youngest, Elizabeth. The three eldest rode their bicycles everywhere and plugged up a local culvert every autumn so the field would flood, later giving them a free place to skate.

Keesmaats father, Leonard, a builder and craftsman, treated them as he would have treated sons, recalls Sylvia Keesmaat, 50, a biblical scholar and professor at the University of Toronto.

He took us fishing and camping, Sylvia says. He had us put up the tents and had us handle our own fishing tackle. That created a certain confidence in all of us.

Whether outdoors or around the dinner table, Sylvia recalls her sister Jennifers incredible dramatic flair, passion and exciting detail when it came to storytelling. And their mother, Irene, an artist, encouraged Jennifers interest in public speaking.

Beginning when Keesmaat was about 9 her mother enrolled her in the Kiwanis Music Festival, where she participated in public speaking and storytelling competitions over the next few years.

Her mother was her coach.

I was fearless in terms of getting up in front of an audience and speaking publicly, in part because my mom just pushed me out there and I went and did it. She didnt do it with my other sisters; she just did it with me.

Roots in the Resistance

I see how the first light of the morning comes through the high window pane. My God, please make my dying light. I failed though I did try, like any other could have done. Please grant me your mercy so that I will meet my death as a man when I face the barrel of the gun.

These are translated lines from the late Dutch poet Jan Camperts De Achttien Dooden (The 18 Dead), an ode to 18 resistance fighters betrayed, tortured and ultimately forced to dig their own graves before being executed by the Nazis in March 1941, near The Hague.

One of the 18 was Leendert Keesmaat.

He was the brother of Jennifers grandfather, Arie. The two and another brother, Wim, were imprisoned for resisting the occupation in May 1940, though Wim and Arie were spared.

After the war Arie brought his family to Canada.

The Canadians liberated Holland  for this reason my grandfather was enamoured with Canada, Jennifer says.

Her late grandfather never recovered from guilt over the fact his brother was killed. Jennifers father is named after his slain uncle.

Im very conscious of my family history and culture, Keesmaat says. I do think it informs my values.

I was raised on stories about the role my family played in the resistance.

She learned more details about this chapter in her family history in 2014 when Anne van Leeuwen, consul general of the Netherlands, based in Toronto, showed her an article from a Dutch publication.

Its this past that explains part of why Keesmaat isnt afraid to be forceful, van Leeuwen argues.

Its not anarchistic, but rebellious. (Its about saying) if I have an opinion, if I think this is the right thing to do, Ill do it, no matter what authorities think of it. Thats exactly what made heroes during the Second World War, van Leeuwen says.

Keesmaats penchant for speaking out and her high visibility have left her open to accusations shes laying the groundwork for a future run at politics.

I think she has political aspirations and I wish her the best of luck, says Councillor Jim Karygiannis (Ward 39, Scarborough-Agincourt). But while youre working for the city youve got to be working for the city.

But supporters say her activist approach has given the chief planners role a much-needed reboot that has energized Toronto.

From my perspective shes done exactly what wed hoped she would do, says Liberal MPP Peter Milczyn (Etobicoke-Lakeshore), the ex-Toronto councillor and former chair of planning and growth, who was on a three-person panel that hired Keesmaat for the city in September 2012. She has taken on a real leadership role. She has promoted the cause of city building and good urban planning across the city, to the media, to the public and certainly (city) council.

Keesmaat, who worked years ago as an assistant in Councillor Joe Mihevcs office and for former councillor Jane Pitfield, says the professional profile she maintains isnt at all about future political aspirations. Rather, she has a strong desire to make planning and city building as transparent as possible by catering to members of the public who have a real thirst for whats going on in Toronto.

There has been an energizing aspect of her being at city hall, says Antonio Gomez-Palacio, with whom she formed Office for Urbanism, an urban planning and design firm in Toronto.

It has made the public truly feel their input is meaningful and they have an avenue to be part of the city-building conversation.

The Jacobs effect

Keesmaat became enamoured with planning after reading Jane Jacobs 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which analyzes urban planning.

In 1993 Keesmaat graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a double major in English and philosophy, and married her husband. (They wedded about two years after meeting at a summer camp in Muskoka, where at one point he turned to her, a person he barely knew, and said, Im going to marry you.) She gave up on the idea of a law career after a few tedious summers filing papers in her uncles law firm.

Inspired by Jacobs, Keesmaat enrolled at York Universitys environmental studies program in 1997 and studied planning. She developed tight bonds with some students in the program  ties that remain to this day  including Gomez-Palacio, a close friend as well as future business partner.

Her friends in the program were drawn together in part because they share a liberal sensibility, Keesmaat says.

We all had a shared intuition and a shared series of questions we were dealing with around community, individual and social well-being, and the (notion) that it was through cities and the urban environment that we could deal with these questions, Gomez-Palacio says.

After securing their masters degrees in planning, Keesmaat and Gomez-Palacio founded the Office for Urbanism in 2003. (Harold Madi, now Torontos director of urban design, was a third founder.) In 2004 the firm made a major splash  it landed the contract for the master plan for the revitalization of Union Station.

That was a huge coup, Keesmaat says. We worked around the clock on it.

Office for Urbanism also authored master plans for downtown Halifax; Moncton, N.B.; Regina; and Saskatoon, as well as studies for Toronto including Bloor St. W., Queen St. W. and Yorkville Ave.

In 2010 the company merged with three other firms to form Dialog, whose services include urban planning, design and architecture. Gomez-Palacio is a principal with the firm.

Keesmaat moved on from Dialog to become Torontos chief planner, where her salary, according to public records, was $240,041.45 in 2015.

Rubbing some the wrong way

In her recently launched blog, Own Your City, Keesmaat references a speech she gave last fall at a conference of the Ontario Professional Planners Institute, where she urged that planners assert their roles as experts and not let pressure and influence from their political masters sway them from doing so.

Its a line of thinking that has brought her into conflict with councillors like Jim Karygiannis, who believe the chief planner and any senior staff with the city should be taking their marching orders from councillors.

Youre there at councils direction, he says.

She does have testy, thin-skinned moments. For example, during the controversy last summer over her public statements on the Gardiner, a CP24 reporter asked Keesmaat if shed been muzzled by the mayors office.

Sorry, but Im not talking about this on the air. Sorry, could you just not roll the camera? Keesmaat said, and then put her hand over the lens. Keesmaat told the reporter: Im offended because youve monopolized me as Im running into a meeting.

She later apologized to the camera operator, adding she didnt have media training.

On his rough start with Keesmaat, Tory told the Star that as the former CEO at Rogers, he was more accustomed to being the head of a corporation where you would almost never find vice-presidents out giving a speech that challenged the orthodoxy of how the company had done business over time, or taking a position that was different from the CEOs.

I came to realize a couple things: First of all this isnt a corporation; its the city. And secondly, that particular position over time has been one where by definition it was almost expected the city planner would be looking to the future.

Councillor Shelley Carroll was initially critical of Keesmaat  she suggested the planner seemed to be engaged in a branding exercise  but has since come around, too.

Carroll says when Keesmaat first came into the job she expected the chief planner to be more hands-on in planning projects in Carrolls North York ward. But planning staff under Keesmaat do that work, in a manner Carroll describes as very smooth.

That process now leaves Keesmaat to focus on the broader picture across the city, Carroll says.

Two controversies at a glance

Often outspoken in her tweets, public statements and interviews, Jennifer Keesmaat has been at the centre of controversy on a few occasions:

1) The tweet: According to published reports, in November 2012, just two months after starting as chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat sent out the following tweet (since deleted) during a city council meeting break: Now that half of council is considering running for Mayor, the speeches at council are  insufferable. Did I say that out loud?

The backstory: Then mayor Rob Ford was facing possible removal from office amid conflict-of-interest charges after he spoke and voted at council in early 2012 on whether he should be forced to repay $3,150 to lobbyists and a company from which he had accepted donations to his football foundation.

The reaction: Keesmaat later told a reporter the word insufferable probably crossed a line and that she has deep respect for councillors when they speak. She said the tweet was meant to be funny. Councillor Jim Karygiannis says, looking back at the incident, Keesmaats poke at councillors was distasteful, adding, You dont criticize the people you work for. Noting that Keesmaat admitted shed made an error with the tweet, city of Toronto spokesperson Jackie DeSouza said at the time city staff should use good judgment on social media.

2) The statement: Last spring and summer, Keesmaat said taking down the eastern section of the Gardiner and replacing it with a grand eight-lane boulevard is the best choice for the city. She also tweeted her support for the idea. At the time she said her position is based on her professional expertise and analysis by her planning staff.

The backstory: After appearing at an international conference for landscape architects in May 2015 in Toronto, Keesmaat told reporters the grand boulevard could weave together the waterfront with the rest of the city and open new parcels for development. But concerned about traffic, Tory backed a costlier hybrid option, which would retain most of the Gardiner. (This week, council approved a $1-billion version of the hybrid plan.)

The reaction: Tory told reporters in June that while the chief planner and other senior staff have the right and duty to express their opinions publicly, I think theres a line that has to be drawn between what a public servant on any issue  not just the Gardiner  should be saying in terms of debating politicians. Later the mayors chief spokesperson confirmed Tory, his staff and another senior city official met Keesmaat over her tweets and public comments. During this time, according to reports, the city of Vancouver tried unsuccessfully to poach Keesmaat.

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BURLINGTON, WIS.Donald Trump is back on his always lively and often combustible campaign rally circuit as presidential contenders in both parties bid for advantage in Wisconsins primaries Tuesday.

Overshadowing the Republican race: a persistent effort by Trumps rivals in the campaign  Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich  and the party to force the nomination fight into the July convention  and the front-runners equivocations on whether he will be loyal to the Republican Party or bolt for an independent candidacy if he feels mistreated.

Wisconsin has emerged as a proving ground for anti-Trump forces as the front-runners campaign hit a rough patch. Trump defended his campaign manager after he was charged with battery against a reporter, backtracked from comments that women should be punished for having abortions, encountered a buzz saw of hostile interviews by conservative Wisconsin talk radio hosts and watched Cruz overtake him in preference polls in the Midwestern state.

On the eve of his Saturday events in Wisconsin and North Dakota, Cruz told a Milwaukee County Republican dinner that Trump as the Republican nominee would be a train wreck, quipping: Thats actually not fair to train wrecks.

Cruz, whos running second behind Trump in primary contests, said Republicans would hand the White House to Hillary Clinton with Trump as the nominee, a fear shared by many in the party who look at polls showing Trumps high unfavourable ratings, especially among women.

The Democratic race has grown increasingly bitter, too, though it has not matched the Republican contest for raw hostility. Saturday night, Clinton and Bernie Sanders attended a Wisconsin Democratic Party dinner. Their attention will quickly turn to an even more consequential contest, the New York primary on April 19, where the Democratic front-runner dearly hopes to avoid an upset in the state she served as senator. Sanders, who was born in Brooklyn, can claim New York as his home state.

Bundled up in winter jackets and gloves, Sanders supporters waited for hours on the University of Wisconsins Eau Claire campus, standing in several inches of snow, for a chance to hear the Vermont senator speak.

Sophomore Joseph Lehto said he probably will vote for an independent if Sanders doesnt get the nomination. Hillary Clinton is a conservative disguised by mildly social policies he said. She is a more of warmonger than just about anyone.

Trump had two afternoon rallies Saturday and one in the evening, in Racine, Wausau and Eau Claire. In Janesville, Wisc., earlier in the week, a man pepper-sprayed a 15-year-old girl as Trump opponents and supporters clashed outside his rally. About 1,000 people attended the rally while about as many protested outside.

In an interview Friday, to be broadcast on Fox News Sunday, Trump left open the question of an independent candidacy when asked about it. I want to run as a Republican, Trump said. But if he doesnt get the nomination? Im going to have to see how I was treated. Very simple.

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Its been nearly 50 years since the federal government first officially acknowledged Aboriginal overrepresentation in the Canadian corrections system. As we approach that anniversary, its worth pausing to reflect on why, in the half-century since then, things have mostly gotten worse.

In August 1967 the Canadian Corrections Association presented the Indians and the Law report to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (as it was then called). The report provided statistical evidence that Indigenous people were grossly overrepresented in provincial and federal facilities  a situation it characterized as of serious magnitude.

Sadly the description remains apt.

Overrepresentation refers to the imbalance between the proportion of the Indigenous population in Canada (currently estimated at less than 5 per cent) and their population within the provincial and federal corrections systems. The problem exists across Canada, but has long been particularly pronounced in certain parts of the country. In the prairie provinces, for example, Aboriginal inmates currently account for approximately 50 per cent of the federal corrections population.

The Correctional Investigators most recent report identifies that  when expressed as a national average  the total current population of Aboriginal federal inmates has now reached an all-time high of 25 per cent. The situation for Aboriginal females is particularly worrisome, as they comprise 35.5 per cent of the total female federal corrections population. Many of these women have young children; and so the cycle of disadvantage continues.

The Supreme Court of Canada has done its part, admitting in its Gladue decision in 1999 that Aboriginal overrepresentation is a crisis. The Courts ruling in that case gave rise to the so-called Gladue method to incorporate restorative justice and rehabilitation principles into the crafting of meaningful sentences for Aboriginal people, with the stated goal of avoiding incarceration. Despite this effort to tackle overrepresentation at the sentencing stage, the numbers and proportions of male and female aboriginal people in federal and provincial corrections facilities keeps rising. Much more needs to be done.

Specifically, Ottawa needs to more aggressively use the policy tools at its disposal to address the roots of the problem, which are by now well known. The final report of the TRC on Residential Schools has laid bare the connections between the colonization and over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples in Canada. The intergenerational impacts of the residential school system and the 60s scoop are now clearly linked to the ongoing institutionalization of Indigenous children in the child welfare system, in youth criminal justice facilities, and as adults in provincial jails and federal prisons. The upcoming inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women will undoubtedly also make these connections, adding more voices to the chorus identifying the serious magnitude of the problem.

We have for too long accepted the high costs of inaction. In 1991, the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba quoted lawyer Ovide Mercredi, who would soon become the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations: If you accept our assertion that much of the root cause of Indian peoples disproportionate conflict with the justice system lies in their poverty and marginal position in Canadian society, then what do you think is going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years, if radical changes do not occur? But radical changes did not occur, and the outcomes were predictable. Will we repeat the same mistakes?

The upcoming 50-year anniversary of the federal governments knowledge of Aboriginal over-incarceration will be a shameful occasion if it is not accompanied by a meaningful, well-funded plan to reverse the trend. The long-awaited significant investments in First Nations health, education, and infrastructure in the 2016 federal budget are a good start to address some of the root causes which contribute to involvement with the criminal justice system, but we have yet to hear anything concrete from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould about their plans to reduce the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in the corrections system. It's been half a century  we can't wait any longer.

Jacqueline Briggs is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto.

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Alaska Air Group (ALK) is poised to win the bidding war for Virgin America (VA) with an offer that values the target at more than $2 billion including debt, industry sources said late Saturday.

Burlingame, Calif.-based Virgin America began exploring options earlier this year after an unsolicited approach, one source said, and received interest from both Alaska and JetBlue Airways (JBLU) as well as a handful of domestic and foreign investors. One source said that though the deal wasn't finalized, Alaska and Virgin America are close enough that a transaction could be announced before markets open Monday.

A combination of Seattle-based Alaska and Virgin America would vault past JetBlue as the nation's fifth largest carrier, and provide scale for two previously niche operators to become more of a national competitor. Alaska and Virgin America have little overlap -- less than 15% of their available seat miles are in competition -- meaning regulators are more likely to look favorably on this combination than they would a deal involving one of the four industry titans that currently combine to control about 80% of the U.S. market.

Virgin America to date has been more of a success with customers than it has with investors, winning plaudits and loyalty for its focus on in-flight experience. But that level of service came at a cost to margins, and Virgin America is also saddled with a relatively high-cost fleet and concerns that it was overly reliant on transcontinental service and a few airports.

Shares of Virgin America, which only went public in 2014, were trading near all-time lows in February before deal talk becoming public.

Industry watchers pointed to New York-based JetBlue as a more likely acquirer due to the airlines shared focus on service, transcontinental routes and similar fleets. Both JetBlue and Virgin America operate Airbus A320 aircraft, unlike Alaska's Boeing fleet, meaning JetBlue and Virgin America could enjoy more economies of scale in the event of a combination.

But Alaska has a stronger balance sheet than JetBlue, with nearly $1 billion more in cash on the books, and ample reason to want to do a deal. Alaska has historically operated as a free agent outside of the U.S. alliances, partnering with various carriers to feed traffic to its predominantly west coast route network, but that status of late has come under threat.

Alaska is increasingly facing pressure f om Delta Air Lines (DAL) , traditionally one of its partners, aggressively building a hub in Seattle. Though Alaska so far has held up well against the new competition a growing threat from Delta, coupled with fears of an energy-induced slowdown in travel to its namesake state, could make the company vulnerable without the added scale and diversification buying Virgin America could provide.

A combined JetBlue/Virgin America, with a more national footprint and larger customer base, would have been a further threat to Alaska, giving the airline extra motivation to work out a deal.

Alaska has a reputation has a strong operator that can likely bring greater cost discipline to Virgin America, but the deal is not without risks. Integration will likely mean moving Virgin America pilots and other workers to much higher wage rates, further pressuring margins, and Alaska will face difficult choices over whether to keep Virgin America's popular branding and in-flight experience.

Sources said that Alaska could attempt to monetize certain Virgin America assets, including its coveted orders for next-generation A320s and potentially landing rights in Dallas, New York and Washington, to help pay down the acquisition costs. Partner-turned-rival Delta would likely pay a premium for any Virgin America slots Alaska made available at Dallas's Love Field, where Delta has been battling with Southwest Airlines (LUV) to provide service.

Southwest in its 2011 purchase of AirTran Airways proved that adding new fleet types in a merger doesn't have to be a stumbling block, quickly reaching a deal to transfer AirTran's Boeing 717 aircraft to Delta. With most of Virgin America's fleet leased, many at rates believed to be above current market prices, Alaska could be motivated to phase out the Airbus and could even receive incentives from Boeing (BA) to remain an all-Boeing operator.

British entrepreneur Richard Branson announced his intention to form Virgin America in 2004, but the effort initially ran into heavy criticism from rivals including Continental Airlines Inc. and, ironically, Alaska Air over claims that Branson was attempting to side-step foreign ownership rules. The airline took flight in 2007 backed by $177.3 million in funding from Black Canyon Capital LLC and Cyrus Capital Partners LP, with Branson's Virgin Group Ltd. owning 25%.

An Alaska/Virgin America tie up would leave little left for JetBlue to acquire, with most of the remaining independent discounters more focused on ultra-low costs and secondary markets outside of JetBlue's traditional focus.

JetBlue could try to acquire private equity-owned Frontier Airlines, which is considering an initial public offering and has a strong presence in Denver, but Frontier previously struggled when trying to operate a JetBlue-like premium cabin and has only found success emulating extreme discounter Spirit Airlines (SAVE) .

Many in the industry assume that Frontier and Spirit will eventually come together. The two companies share a similar business model and both were influenced by private equity firm Indigo Partners LLC, Frontier's current owner.
Remains of a downed Azerbaijani forces helicopter lies in a field in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region, on Saturday, April 2, 2016. In a statement, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said 12 of its soldiers "became shards" (Muslim martyrs) and said one of its helicopters was shot down. At least 30 soldiers and a boy were reported killed as heavy fighting erupted Saturday between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. (AP Photo)
Residents in the Aegean resort of Dikili, in the Izmir district of Turkey, wave national flags as they protest Saturday against plans to build a refugee camp under the new EU-Turkey deal. , April 2, 2016, Under the new deal, refugees and migrants who arrived on Greek islands after March 20 will be sent back to Turkey starting on Monday. The banner reads:  We dont want a refugee camp in Dikili! (AP Photo/Mehmet Guzel)
The Federal Aviation Administration announced Friday its easing limits on the number of hourly flights at Newark Liberty International Airport, and the airports operator said that should lead to greater competition and lower airfares.

The limits at Newark Liberty, which serves the New York City region and is one of the busiest airports in the nation, were put in place in 2008 to reduce congestion and delays. They restricted flight operations during peak times to 81 per hour.

The FAA said arrival and departure delays have decreased significantly since then. It also said the number of scheduled flights has been well below the limits and Newarks runways can handle more flights.

For example, on-time arrivals increased by 11 percent since 2007, and mean arrival and departure delays were down by about 33 percent, the FAA said. Delays greater than an hour were down 37 percent for arrivals and 38 percent for departures. However, the past year has had much better weather, leading to fewer delays across the nation.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Newark Liberty and the regions other main transit hubs, said lifting the restrictions could lead to lower airfares for passengers.

This action will help travelers by increasing competition and choices at Newark Liberty by allowing more flights by different airlines, thereby helping to reduce airfares, it said in a statement.

The easing of flight restrictions also will address an issue that is the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit filed last November against Newarks dominant carrier, United Airlines.

According to the lawsuit, Chicago-based United controls around 900 of the roughly 1,200 slots  takeoff and landing authorizations allocated by the FAA  at the airport, while no other airline holds more than 70.

The lawsuit says United doesnt use all the slots it controls, depriving passengers of flight options they would have if the slots were flown.

A spokeswoman for United said in an email Friday that the airline, whose parent company is United Continental Holdings Inc., will continue to work with the FAA, which recognizes this decision may cause further inconvenience to customers flying to and from Newark, along with the Port Authority and others, to minimize delays and provide them the reliability they expect when they fly.

Virgin America has long protested Uniteds dominance over Newark, saying it wanted to add more flights into the airport and lower fares. The airline, based right outside San Franciscos airport, has several daily transcontinental flights but wants more to compete with United, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and JetBlue. The routes are some of the most profitable in the country.

The flight changes will take effect at the end of October.

While more access to the Newark airport could lower prices for fliers it has the possibility to also bring about more travel headaches. New York has the most congested airspace in the nation, and Newark routinely ranks at the bottom of U.S. airports in on-time performance.

(AP)
On Thursday, 1 Adar-II, Honenu Attorney Sima Kochav assisted administrative detainee Meir Ettinger in filing an urgent petition with the Beersheva District Court, requesting that the Israel Prison Service be ordered to allow him leave for several hours to attend the bris of his first son on Monday, 25 Adar-II. The court scheduled a deliberation on the matter for 10:00 A.M. on Sunday, 24 Adar-II.

Ettinger has been under administrative detention since early August 2015 and has been held in solitary since October 7, 2015. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon signed the order for the administrative detention, which was authorized on September 20, 2015 by the Lod District Court. At the end of the first period of administrative detention, following the recommendation of the Jewish Department of the ISA, Yaalon signed a new four-month order extending the administrative detention. On February 23, 2016 Central District Court Judge Avraham Tal approved the order.

On the morning of Friday, April 1, Honenu Attorney Sima Kochav stated that, We filed an urgent petition with the Beersheva District Court to order the Prison Service to allow Ettinger to participate in the brit milah of his first son. There is no need to add any words on the importance of the brit milah to the Jewish People. An administrative detainee also has rights and I sincerely hope that the court will accept the petition and that Ettinger will celebrate the brit milah as it should be celebrated.

Ettinger is being held in solitary in a separate wing and is permitted to speak by telephone to only some of his closest relatives. On January 18 Ettinger went on a 17-day hunger strike in protest of his remand conditions.

Some 30 family members and friends protested on his behalf in the capital on motzei Shabbos demanding his release for the bris of his son.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Congress increasingly is being defined by what its not doing this election year.

The Senate returns this week with a strong majority of Republicans saying no to any consideration of President Barack Obamas nominee to the Supreme Court. No hearings, no vote and, for some lawmakers, not even a meeting with federal appeals court Judge Merrick Garland.

Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., insist that the decision on filling the court vacancy rests with the next president after voters have their say in Novembers election.

A bipartisan bill to aid Flint, Michigan, where the citys 100,000 residents are struggling with lead-contaminated water is being blocked by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who wants to ensure that the money is paid for without adding to the deficit. The dispute over Flint has snagged a far-reaching measure on energy.

In the House, where lawmakers return from their break April 12, conservative opposition probably will make it impossible to pass a budget, in what would be a major embarrassment for Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. A GOP proposal to aid debt-stricken Puerto Rico has drawn criticism from House Democrats and conservatives, raising doubts about Congress ability to resolve the issue.

The latest Gallup Poll shows public approval of Congress at an abysmal 13 percent. Yet, through a half-dozen state primaries, no incumbent lawmaker has lost.

A look at the issues in limbo in Congress:

THE FIGHT OVER GARLAND

Garland plans to meet with 11 senators in the week ahead, including two Republicans. Democrats are maintaining election-year pressure on the GOP for blocking the usual Senate committee hearings and vote on a high court nominee.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and John Boozman, R-Ark., are set to sit down with Garland on Tuesday. Collins is one of just two Republicans out of 54 who are open to hearings and a vote on Garland; Boozman is up for re-election this year. Eager to keep the fight in the news, Democrats say there might be 50 more Garland meetings with senators in the coming weeks, and they plan repeated Senate floor speeches on the issue.

Over the Senates two-week recess, both sides pushed their messages back home, but Democrats were particularly aggressive as senators held news conferences and wrote newspaper columns. Swing-state Republicans facing re-election were top targets, including Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio and Iowas Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, responsible for holding hearings on judicial nominees.

Garland has met with just one Republican: Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk. He is embroiled in a difficult re-election fight and has said the Senate should provide rational, adult, open-minded consideration of Garland, an Illinois native.

At least 15 GOP senators have said they are willing to meet Garland, though most oppose letting the confirmation process progress. Only Collins and Kirk are open to hearings and a vote. Under intense conservative pressure, Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas backtracked late last week, saying no to hearings and a vote after signaling support days earlier.



SPENDING

Its been years since Congress approved each of the annual appropriations bills  the 12 measures that fund the budgets of agencies and departments. The new normal is an all-encompassing bill at the end of the year. Republicans leaders such as McConnell want to get process back on track, and the Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to start the week of April 11.

Itll be a test for the Senate, and pitfalls await, including potential fights over immigration, environmental regulations, gun rights and display of the Confederate flag.

In the House, GOP leaders are still trying to win approval of a broader budget plan thats usually a precursor to action on the spending bills. Chances are iffy at best. Its not clear what the path forward on the appropriations bills will be.



PUERTO RICO

House Republicans unveiled a plan to help Puerto Rico with its $70 billion debt, but a draft bill by the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, GOP Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah, was rejected by Democrats, GOP conservatives and Puerto Rican officials.

The proposal would create a five-person board designed to audit the territorys government and create fiscal plans and budget measures  steps Republicans say are necessary for Puerto Rico to get its economy back on track. The board would have the authority to enact the plan if the territorys governor and legislature failed to do so.

The draft would not give Puerto Rico the broad bankruptcy authority it has asked for, but would allow the oversight board to decide whether debt restructuring is necessary

The House Republican Study Committee, a group of around 170 conservatives, expressed concerns about the debt restructuring provisions. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democrats said the oversight board would be too controlling.

Puerto Ricos government has defaulted on $37 million in interest on bonds issued by Puerto Ricos Infrastructure Financing Authority, as well as nearly $60 million in Public Finance Corporation bonds. The bonds are not protected by the U.S. territorys government. Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla has warned there is no money for future payments, including $400 million due in May in bonds issued by the Government Development Bank.

Bishop said he will continue to work on the bill to gain consensus.



CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Advocates for a criminal justice overhaul are hoping Congress will move legislation in both chambers before the summer, though the effort has run into roadblocks in the Senate.

The GOP caucus is split over a bipartisan bill that would give judges the discretion to impose lesser sentences than federal mandatory minimums and eliminate mandatory life sentences for three-time, nonviolent drug offenders.

Some conservatives, including Arkansas Tom Cotton and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz of Texas, say the bill could release violent offenders from prison. Its a charge that their GOP colleagues backing the bill strongly deny.

Senators are now rewriting parts of the bill, but even with the expected changes, its unclear whether McConnell will choose to move forward.

(AP)
With the application process for two major NYC nonpublic schools initiatives now open, or soon to open, Agudath Israel of America is grateful that nonpublic school children will benefit from some of the same safety protections and educational opportunities as public school children.

Agudath Israel has received word that the city will be sending letters to schools regarding the application process for Local Law 2 of 2016, a new program reimbursing eligible nonpublic schools for security guard services costs for the 2016-2017 school year. The details and timing of the measures implementation have been eagerly awaited by yeshivos and parents alike. Sponsored, and tirelessly shepherded, by New York City Councilman David Greenfield, and supported and enacted by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the law will reimburse nonpublic schools with 300 students or more for their costs of hiring security guards, providing a safer environment for their students.

Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel, thanked both Mayor de Blasio and Councilman Greenfield for their efforts in making this program possible. Many parents in our community will sleep better at night knowing that their children are more secure, a concern that has become increasingly acute in light of rising worldwide terrorism.

In another welcome development, Rabbi Zwiebel also acknowledged the mayors work in continuing to support the half-day UPK program, whose RFP was released earlier this week for the 2016-17 school year. The half-day option offers families and providers an alternative to the more broadly popular UPK full-day program. The full-day program, which requires 6 hours and 20 minutes of secular instruction, does not work for many in the religious community.

It is especially helpful to yeshivos that the city has opened the RFP process a month earlier than last year. Moreover, this year, contracts for the half-day UPK program will be awarded on a three-year basis, Agudath Israel has learned. This will save providers the administrative burden of annual reapplication and the annual apprehension associated with awaiting word if programs will be funded in the coming year.

It is reassuring, the Agudath Israel leader said, that Mayor de Blasio recognizes that one UPK size does not fit all, and that there is need for flexibility in the program. By adapting the program to allow a half-day option, the mayor is demonstrating an understanding of, and consideration for, the needs of our community.

(YWN Desk  NYC)
All Bituach Leumi branches nationwide closed on Sunday as a strike was launched. The strike is not about salary of benefits this time, but the absence of police in offices around Israel.

Strike organizers explains that without a continued police presence in offices the agency will remain closed  adding there are people in very difficult situations who come to offices seeking assistance and police are frequently called upon to respond and therefore, branches around the country will remain closed until police are assigned to each and every office.

Bituach Leumi Director-General Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef explains this has been the arrangement for the past twenty years, having police in each branch, adding I am unaware of a change in Israeli society for the better. 3.5 million citizens come to our offices around the country for assistance and therefore, the police presence is essential.

Bituach Leumi strike leaders indicate they will not permit offices to reopen until police are returned to branches in which they served.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Residents of the Middle East should not be too alarmed at the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters in Cairo on Sunday.

The Congress is going to be around no matter who is the president, Graham, who is leading a Republican congressional delegation touring the Middle East, told reporters after meeting Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Graham said he and el-Sissi discussed Trump, among other issues.

All of us, regardless of what Mr. Trump says or does, we are going to keep being who we are, so dont let the political scenes at home get you too upset. Thats what I told the president, said Graham.

Republican presidential front-runner Trump has stirred controversy both at home and in the Middle East by suggesting a blanket ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S.

Dont let the politics of the moment make you believe that America has fundamentally changed in terms of the way we view the world; it hasnt, said Graham

Graham also said he wants the U.S. to increase its military aid to el-Sissis government, which is battling a long-term insurgency by militants allied with the Islamic State group.

With $1.3 billion annually, Egypt is the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel.

(AP)
According to a report released by the German weekly Der Spiegel on Saturday, the German Intelligence Agency BND spied on the Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahus Office for a number of years. Officials in the PMOs declined comment on the report, which stated German also spied on NASA, the US Department of State, US diplomats in Europe, the US Air Force, Austria, Belgium the main offices of OPEC and more.

Der Spiegel reports the spying including constant monitoring of emails and other communications of some of the agencies listed. It adds the target was not the nations listed but organization like the International Red Cross in Geneva.

In 2013, the German government learned that the United States was spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel. This led to a major diplomatic row and President Barak Obama explaining friends do not spy on one another.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Beersheva District Court Judge Yisrael Pablo Axelrod rejected the petition filed by Honenu Attorney Sima Kochav on behalf of administrative detainee Meir Ettinger and ruled that he will not be permitted to participate in his sons bris, which is expected to take place on Monday, 25 Adar-II. Judge Axelrod ruled that Ettinger poses a danger to the public.

The ISA and the Prison Service opposed allowing Ettinger furlough to attend his firstborn sons brit milah, even with the accompaniment of prison guards, which is an accepted practice even for prisoners convicted of serious crimes, including prisoners convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. In contrast, Ettinger is being held in administrative detention, has not been indicted and there is no evidence against him. The Prison Service suggested that the brit milah be held at the prison.

Honenu intends to file an appeal on the decision with the Supreme Court of Israel demanding that Ettinger be allowed leave to participate in the brit milah.

Honenu Attorney Sima Kochav, who is representing Meir Ettinger, said in response to the ruling that, We are disappointed by the decision. There is a very hard feeling that the persons responsible for granting the authorization for the furlough did not act with integrity and are persecuting Meir Ettinger. It is important to stress that Ettinger is an administrative detainee and not a criminal prisoner.

Dangerous criminal prisoners are allowed furloughs and Meir Ettinger is being held behind bars, without being indicted, only because of his opinions, and not because of any specific danger he poses. Therefore, there is no cause to prevent his going on furlough for the brit milah.

In Jerusalem, on motzei Shabbos, approximately 30 relatives of Meir Ettinger demonstrated at the String Bridge at the entrance to Jerusalem in protest of his administrative detention. The protesters called on the authorities to allow Ettinger participate in the brit milah of his firstborn son, which is expected to take place on Monday.

Ettinger has been under administrative detention since early August 2015 and has been held in solitary since October 7, 2015. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon signed the order for the administrative detention, which was authorized on September 20, 2015 by the Lod District Court. At the end of the first period of administrative detention, following the recommendation of the Jewish Department of the ISA, Yaalon signed a new four-month order extending the administrative detention. On February 23, 2016 Central District Court Judge Avraham Tal approved the order.

Ettinger is being held in solitary in a separate wing and is permitted to speak by telephone to only some of his closest relatives. On January 18 Ettinger went on a 17-day hunger strike in protest of his remand conditions.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
This is Money rounds-up the Sunday newspaper share tips. Midas looks at a firm which makes essential products for the home and updates on a tip which has rocketed 83 per cent since being tipped.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times runs the rule over high street firm Card Factory and the Sunday Telegraph takes a look at insurance firm Direct Line.

MAIL ON SUNDAY

Only four in ten homeowners think their homes are well maintained, according to the Office for National Statistics. The rest  more than ten million people  believe their property would benefit from some refurbishment.

This widespread discontent is good news for Epwin Group, which makes essential products for the home, including window frames, decking, guttering, porches and chimneys.

However, unlike their more traditional counterparts, Epwins goods are all made of plastic or plastic mixed with other materials, such as wood or glass. Brands include PatioMaster, Safedoors, Spectus and Swish for windows and doors, and Kestrel for roof products.

>> Read the full Midas column

Learning can be an absolute bore for many people, but for organisations trying to improve the way they operate, imparting information to staff and engaging customers in new developments can be critical.

And the way that information is conveyed is changing fast, in a world where computers, tablets and mobile phones are a growing part of life.

Learning Technologies Group was founded in 2013 to help companies and other organisations with mass training and education programmes, many of which are delivered online.

>> Read the full Midas update column

SUNDAY TIMES

Former RBS banker Richard Hayes is retiring as chief executive of Card Factory, an enterprise that makes an extraordinary amount of money selling absurdly cheap products. Some of its cards go for 29p.

The will hand over the reins to Karen Hubbard, recently poached from discounter B&M. Her challenge is rare one for an incoming chief executive: how to spend all the money her new company is generating.

Card Factory makes nearly all of its own cards. With no middleman taking their cut  and ramping up the prices  Card Factory can sell its stuff for a fraction of the price of competitors.

Analysts expect Hayes to reveal this week that profits jumped nine per cent to 81million. It is opening about 50 stores a year, which has taken it to 800 locations across Britain. Its goal is to get to 1,200. Buy.

Storm trouble: Britain's biggest insurer Direct Line has taken a hit from Storm Eva. Pictured, Stuart Pearce in a Direct Line sponsored football kit as part of a PR stunt

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

The storms that battered much of Britain this winter have left insurers nursing millions of pounds in losses. Direct Line, the countrys biggest car and household insurance company by premiums sold, is at the sharp end of efforts to keep customers protected without veering over to the wrong side of the industrys already thin margins.

This winter saw the costliest flood damage since Direct Line joined the stock market in 2012. In March, it revealed its commercial business had paid out 104.5p in costs and claims for every 100p it took in premiums, while its car and household arms remained profitable.

Results overall were better than expected, with pre-tax profits rising to 507.5million.

Direct Line joined the market after unshackling itself from RBS with a value of 2.6billion, and it now worth more than double that sum. While its valuation is now a heady 13 times future earnings, the income stream it offers has been reliable.
British steel makers have called on the European Commission to use emergency rules to impose immediate quotas on Chinese steel imports in an attempt to stave off the collapse of the UK industry.

The call came as the Government this weekend announced new rules for public contracts designed to give a boost to UK steel and as Indian conglomerate Tata prepared to appoint advisers to help sell off or close down its loss-making UK business  including its Port Talbot site.

The Mail on Sunday understands Tata Steel is set to rule out putting its UK operations into administration  regarding this as too damaging to its public reputation  and instead seek an orderly wind-down of the business, though this is still likely to lead to thousands of redundancies at the group.

Crisis: Tata is preparing to appoint advisers to help sell off or close down its loss-making UK business  including its Port Talbot site (pictured)

In a bid to defuse the political row over steel, the Government this weekend announced new rules which will require all public sector projects including those in the NHS and local government schemes to consider the social and economic impact of where they buy steel.

They will also be required to consider the carbon footprint of steel providers. The UK industry has long complained that carbon levies in the UK have raised its costs and made it less competitive with overseas suppliers.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said: 'I am determined to make sure we do all we can to secure a sustainable future for UK steel and find a viable solution that supports the workers and wider community.

'By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel  opening up opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies.'

The measure were welcomed by the UK steel industry. Gareth Stace, director of UK Steel which represents the nation's steel makers, said the issue of public procurement was one where the Government had been strong in supporting the UK industry, but added that public procurement was only one part of the issue.

'Viable solutions': Business Secretary Sajid Javid talks to workers as he leaves Tata Steel in Port Talbot

He called on the Government to encourage the European Commission to use the rarely used power of so-called Safeguards, which allows member states to impose quotas on imports.

The Commission can take action if it agrees there has been an unforeseen and sudden increase in imports which are posing a threat of 'material injury' to domestic industry.

Stace said: 'Imposing Safeguards would have an impact straight away. When the Prime Minister says he will look at everything, he should be looking at this. Safeguards would stop imported steel in its tracks.'

The Department of Business, Innovation & Skills refused to say whether it would support calls for Safeguards.

Stace also said the Government needed to be prepared to spend public money to ensure the survival of the steel industry, including a temporary nationalisation of Tata Steel if that could give time to stabilise the company and find buyers for some or all of its operations.

The Indian conglomerate said last week that it would consider pulling out of the UK, putting 15,000 jobs at risk including 4,000 at its giant steelworks in Port Talbot.

It blamed world oversupply of steel, cheap imports into Europe and high costs. It said the value of its UK steel plants  acquired in 2007 for 6.2billion  is almost zero.

The Indian conglomerate said last week that it would consider pulling out of the UK

Tata declined to comment on who it would appoint to conduct a sale of its UK business, but it is thought likely to be one of the UK's big four accountancy firms. Both PwC and KPMG are rumoured to be angling for possible roles in the sale.

PwC is advising the Government on Tata's sale of its Scunthorpe business, set to be offloaded to turnaround firm Greybull. KPMG advised Tata on that process. PwC has separately been doing work for Tata on its UK steel business pension deficit.

Chinese steel shipments to the UK leaped from 334,000 tons in 2013 to 757,000 tons in 2014. The European Steel Association has said Chinese steel is being dumped here at below cost price.
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By Patrick Donachie

Several area medical centers were recently celebrated as being among the most welcoming and hospitable facilities for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients and family members in the country, according to a nonprofit fighting for LGBT rights.

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation singled out 10 Northwell Health hospitals in the area, including Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, Long Island Jewish Hospital in Forest Hills and North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. The medical centers were named Leaders in LGBT Healthcare Equality by the foundation. In all, 496 hospitals garnered the accolade, with 71 of them located in New York state.

Northwell Health released a statement marking the news and noted that the 10 hospitals earned top marks in four leadership areas: patient non-discrimination, equality of family visitation, employment non-discrimination and training in LGBT patient-centered care.

Northwell Health is the states largest health provider, with 21 hospitals throughout the region.

This is a major honor for our health system and reflects Northwell Healths commitment to advancing LGBT patient care, research and education within our community and beyond, Michael Dowling, the CEO and president of Northwell Health, said in the statement. We hope that our efforts continue to have a positive impact on the policies and actions regarding LGBT health.

Mount Sinai Hospital Queens in Long Island City and Queens Hospital Center in Jamaica were two other Queens-based facilities that received the designation and were praised for their work and approach.

Hospitals and medical centers earn the designation based on the answers given in the Human Rights Campaigns Healthcare Equality Index. According to the HRCs site, the index is the national LGBT benchmarking tool that evaluates health care facilities policies and practices related to the equity and inclusion of their LGBT patients, visitors and employees. The most recent index catalogued answers from 2,061 healthcare facilities throughout the country in the past year.
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By Sarah Johnson

Every other year, the Cattle Baron's Ball committee puts on an epic evening of food, music, dancing and auctions. But this party has a purpose and it's to fight cancer.

Much progress has been made over the past few years in cancer awareness and research, but the search for a cure is far from over. That's why Wichitans have let their boots walk them to the city's biggest cancer-fighting fundraiser in alternate years since 1992.

This year's event will be April 9 at the J.S. Bridwell Agricultural Center. The party kicks off at 5:30 p.m. with a VIP pre-party for sponsors and barons ticket holders. The main party begins at 7 p.m., when guests will be entertained by live music, midway and casino games, auctions, a photo booth and more.

Live auction packages include trips to Hawaii, Taos, New Mexico and the Hill Country of Texas, a party at the Stone Palace for 300 friends and a piece of art created by a pediatric cancer survivor. Several of the auction packages are in celebration or remembrance of community members who battled cancer. Bid board packages include custom-fitted cowboy boots and a weekend at Texas Motor Speedway. Benefit drawing prizes include a dove hunt and helicopter varmint hunt.

When you get the hankerin' to eat, feast on a Texas-style buffet and Blue Ribbon desserts made by Don Strange. Music fans will enjoy Hayes Carll when he takes the main stage at 9:30 p.m. The evening will begin and end with the music of the dance band The Rankin Twins.

Try your luck at the drink tent. For $50, drinks with names like "Ferris Wheel" and "Bumper Car" come with a ticket to win a trip to Nashville to watch the Country Music Awards or a piece of Kendra Scott jewelry.

Tickets to the Cattle Baron's Ball are $200 for a baron and $150 for a wrangler. Tables of 10 are also available. No tickets are issued, but check-in is required at the event. Tables and individual seating will be reserved as payment is received.

With your help, the American Cancer Society saves lives and creates a world with less cancer by helping people get well, stay well and finding cures.

For tickets or more information, call 782-1952.

No obstacles here

Get down and dirty at T.H.O.R.  Texoma's Hellacious Obstacle Run  when it hits Lucy Park April 9. The event features a run through various obstacles in the park, as well as maybe a little mud. The event is a product of Leadership Wichita Falls.

Pick your time slot by visiting wfthor.com. Registration is $50 per person or $30 for kids ages 4-12. Active military pay only $10.

Brainy adages

Passages from Alan Lightman's many science-themed novels can be found on BrainyQuotes, NotableQuotes, Goodreads and other Internet sites that gather memorable adages. On April 7, Lightman can be found at Midwestern State University when he headlines the Speakers and Issues Series. The physicist, novelist, and essayist will speak at 7 p.m. in the Fain Fine Arts Auditorium. Lightman is recognized internationally as a thinker on the meeting place between the scientific and creative processes.

For more information, call 397-4476.

Sounds of Speedway

The Sounds of Speedway live music series opens its season with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Bluegrass Band on April 7 at The Kemp at the Forum, 2120 Speedway Back by popular demand, Sgt. Pepper will fuse a smooth bluegrass sound with Beatles classics. The band will take the stage at 7 p.m. This is a B.Y.O.B. (beer and wine only) event. Hoagieslingers food truck will be on site.

Tickets are $25 each. For more information, call the forum at 766-3347.

Attention history buffs

The Kell House Museum invites you to take an active role in history by volunteering as a Kell House docent. Share the amazing history of this community and its leaders with visitors from both our local area and around the world.

The Kell House is offering a docent class from 6-8 p.m. April 5 and 12. Participants will learn about this history of Wichita Falls and the role the Kell family played in its growth, as well as the architecture and antiques of the Kell House.

There is no cost for the training session. For more information, call the Kell House at 723-2712.

The aftermath

The Wichita Falls Museum of Art at MSU presents an opening reception at 5:30 p.m. April 7 for Frank Gohlke's portfolio of 31 black and white photographs marking the 37th anniversary of Terrible Tuesday, April 10, 1979. Gohlke will speak about his photographs and a panel including city leaders from 1979, witnesses, and survivors will share stories from April 10.

For more information, call 940-397-8900.
<p>Contributed photo This sign shows the path of the Wichita Valley Rail Trail. The route of the 1890 vintage route is now a rural offering to bikers and hikers between Wichita Falls and Holliday.</p>

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Are you looking for a place to get out in nature, take a bike ride or maybe even saddle up your horse and have a secluded place to ride? Of course, the closer the better. Well, I just recently learned about the Wichita Valley Rail Trail, and you need to check it out.

The Wichita Valley Rail Trail is 7 miles of rail bed that stretches from the southwest corner of Wichita Falls (Stansbury Lane) to the south edge of Holliday (South Ford Road). The track and railroad ties have been removed, and what remains is the packed rail bed of lava rock, as well as the area along either side of the trail.

Now, dont think this is a manicured, smoothly paved trail for just anyone of any age. It may be some day, but it is an ongoing project. It offers parking at the Sisk Road entry, south of Farm-to-Market Road 369 and in Holliday at the South Ford Road entry. Other roads that cross or adjoin the trail are Turkey Ranch Road and Clyde Morgan Road.

There are exercise stations along the way for joggers and exercise enthusiasts. A couple of bridges have been restored, although there is one that currently limits easy access to the entire trail unless you come from opposite ends.

According to the Texas State Historical Association, the original railway was the Wichita Valley Railway Co. It was chartered on Feb. 8, 1890, to build from Wichita Falls west to the state line in Bailey County, about 300 miles, and to build a branch from a point in Baylor or Knox counties to Mitchell County, about 100 miles.

The Wichita Valley Rail Trail was formed as a nonprofit entity, and a committee of volunteer citizens oversees this long-term project. The group, currently headed by Charles Oldham, consists of Cyndi Schenk, Charles Finnell and Donna Adams. Over the years the committee has dedicated time and energy to being sure the land was secured in 1997 through a grant from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. Since then, steady improvements have been made. As you would expect, clearing tracks and railroad ties is not all that easy.

AgriLife Extension became involved because the group was seeking input to determine if the trail could be made to accommodate horseback riders and all who appreciate nature and wildlife. Our Extension Horse Committee and the Rolling Plains Chapter of Texas Master Naturalists provided a nonbiased sounding board to help assess the trail and gauge public interest. Also, AgriLifes ecotourism specialists have tremendous expertise in helping develop such projects across the state.

Depending on grants and donations, the board is working toward steady improvements on the trail. Plans are being discussed that would add bird watching and waterfowl stations, wild hog lookout points, and placards identifying native plants. Of course, your personal suggestions are always welcome.

The men and women of Sheppard Air Force Base are being mustered to help continue cleaning the fringes of the trail so horseback riders and those who prefer walking off the beaten path can do so more easily and safely. Their effort would be much easier and more efficient with the donated use of equipment such as loaders, backhoes, and trucks, if you know someone who can offer that.

If you get the time and you are looking for little adventure, slip out to the Wichita Valley Rail Trail and get some fresh air. For clarification, it is only for walking, biking or horseback. Vehicles are prohibited. The last time I went I saw a wild boar, a roadrunner, some ducks and lots of white wing dove. No telling what youll see.

CONTACT: David Graf or Maranda Revell Wichita County Extension 940-716-8610 or wichita-tx@tamu.edu
Claire Kowalick/Times Record News Wichita Falls Tax Increment Financing Board No. 3 meets Friday to discuss possible action concerning the demolition of A.E. Holland School. From front left are Michael Smith, Ricky Orr, Andy Lee, Christopher Guest, Kenneth Haney and Karen Gagne. The school has stood vacant since 2002, and the WFISD is requesting bids for tearing down it and other old district property. The TIF board is requesting the school district delay demolition of Holland until they can explore alternative uses for the building such as apartments or commerical use.

SHARE Times Record News archives The two-story red brick building, built in 1921, wasn't originally known as Holland. It was named Barwise in honor of Wichita Falls pioneer J.H. Barwise. CHRISTOPHER WALKER/TIMES RECORD NEWS The partially boarded A.E. Holland School sits vacant on Jalonic Street near downtown Wichita Falls. Wichita Falls ISD board members have discussed its demolition.

By Claire Kowalick of the Times Record News

Hope stirs for saving the A.E. Holland School building, a nearly century-old part of Wichita Falls history.

Empty but not forgotten, the building has stood student-less for more than a decade awaiting its fate.

In early March, the Wichita Falls Independent School District declared at a board meeting that they would be taking requests for proposals from companies for the demolition of Alamo and Holland schools. Alamo, the older of the two at 106, was closed to students in 2014. Holland was one of the first schools to close in the name of integration in 1969. It opened months later as Holland House, a place for troubled students, but shut its doors permanently in 2002.

The city's Tax Increment Financing Board No. 3, which oversees the Eastside Reinvestment Zone, met Friday afternoon to discuss possible action regarding the demolition of Holland.

TIF 3 Chairman Kenneth Haney said the building represents the largest asset for that area of town. The value of the land and building is assessed at $389,859.

The group agreed that the building remains visually appealing and has great historical value for the city.

The building was first named for town pioneer J.H. Barwise. It was renamed Holland in 1956, in honor of a longtime principal of Booker T. Washington High School.

In a 2014 TIF 3 meeting, board member Andy Lee said WFISD had previously turned down a request to deem the school "historical" due to the challenges of selling a historical building.

Michael Smith, a city council representative, said he works with the Early Head Start program and they are considering a new facility because of a possible federal grant to expand.

"There are about 100 young learners in the program and a waiting list. There is a need for facilities to meet the needs of this program," Smith said.

He said when he learned of the grant; his first thought was that it would be great to use one of the vacant WFISD buildings like Alamo, Houston, or Holland.

Due to some structural issues, Smith said Alamo was probably out of the equation for EHS use.

"Then I saw the article in the paper about tearing down the schools and thought, 'Uh oh,'" Smith said.

Since the Times Record News articles in March about demolition of the schools, Smith said he has received numerous calls and e-mails about saving the buildings.

Smith said perhaps the school district did not know there might be interest in preserving the buildings.

"Then it's up to us to educate them (WFISD board of trustees) that there are options. Try to sell the land and buildings before going out for demolition," Haney said.

City staff TIF 3 liaison Christopher Guest said Holland is visually interesting and while it may be dated, it is not obsolete. Board member Rick Orr agreed that from his observation of Holland, there were not too many structural problems with the school. If the property could be obtained for a reasonable price, Orr said revitalization of the building would be a tremendous addition to the city.

"It is a forgotten asset," TIF 3 board member Arthur Bea Williams said, "It's just close enough to East Scott. It is more attractive than anyone thinks it could be down there. If there is potential use for that building, it should be explored first."

The TIF board agreed to draft a letter to the school board asking for a delay of demolition for at least six months so they can research alternative uses for the building.

City Planning Manager Karen Gagne said Holland is not designated as a city landmark, but they hope to approach the Landmark Commission at their next meeting to get a letter in support of saving the building.
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After decades of shepherding an extended clan called the Israelites away from Egypt and toward a new homeland, Moses died. Along the way, he defined the people's identity through a code of laws revealed by a mysterious deity the clan's ancestors had worshipped, "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." After Moses died, the Israelites crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land. He was very old, the scripture says, but "his sight was unimpaired and his vigor was unabated."

By the time Mohammad died, his followers had gained control of the vast Arabian Peninsula and he was acclaimed as the Prophet of Allah. He was badly wounded in battle, but survived. When he died of natural causes at the age of 62, he was with the favorite of his nine wives.

Buddha died serenely when he was 80. He had been raised in great luxury, which he renounced when he was 30. When he passed, many seekers sought the source of his tranquillity.

In almost every case, the persistence of any great religion is determined by the strength of the community at the time its founder died. When Moses, Muhammad and Buddha expired, they had many acolytes who resolved that their witness would endure. So began the great religions of Judaism, Islam and Buddhism.

When Jesus died, he was likely in his 30s. His public ministry lasted no more than three years. In the backwater province of Galilee, he had gathered disciples, many of whom came to believe that he was the Messiah, the long-prophesied king who would restore the throne of David and establish God's righteous kingdom. When Jesus undertook his climactic mission to Jerusalem, he was hailed at the gates like a conquering hero. Palm branches were strewn as he processed into the city, and multitudes cried, "Hosanna to the King of Israel!" After entering Jerusalem, he went to the Temple, which had become a vast, profiteering enterprise. He overturned the tables of money-changers, drove out hucksters, decried that his Father's house had been "turned into a den of thieves," and foretold its destruction. His death was plotted by Temple authorities and carried out by Roman occupiers.

There was political logic in crucifixion. Its public agonies demoralized the victim's followers and annihilated his cause. It was never used against Roman citizens. Though the Empire didn't cavil at allowing a corpse to rot on the cross as an object lesson, observant Jews treated the dead with respect. Jesus' corpse would have come down in any case, but with the Sabbath (sunset Friday to sunset Saturday) fast approaching, speed was of the essence; any Jew who touched a corpse on the Sabbath was ritually defiled for a year. That Friday, sundown looming, Jesus' body could only receive cursory attention.

Many thought burial of the dead the highest mercy, for the beneficiary could never repay the kindness. Family members and friends washed the dead and wrapped them in linen with fragrant spices to reduce the reek. Most tombs were holes dug in a hillside, with boulders in the entry to deter feral dogs and carrion birds. After decomposition, the bones would be gathered, placed in a stone box called an ossuary and conveyed to the family's final resting place. The tomb was essentially a temporary storage locker. Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man, had lent one of his.

The women who went to the tomb the first day of the week to finish their sorrowful duty were some of Jesus' disciples. His mother Mary was not among them; others would care for her child. Such tenderness is an old story among womankind. The male disciples were lying low. All of Jesus' followers were grief-stricken and afraid, plotting their exit from Jerusalem. The people who hated him had won; those who loved him had lost. When Jesus died his ghastly death, his community shattered.

The world's other great religions have beautiful symbols: the Star of David for Judaism; the crescent moon and star for Islam; the lotus flower for Hinduism and Buddhism. The Christian symbol is a cross, the device on which its founder was tortured and died. Why?

Because of the resurrection. Without it, Christianity's existence is inexplicable. The proof of its truth comes from the amazingly transformed human lives whose effect on the world is a matter of historical fact. Peter, who timorously denied knowing Jesus the night before the crucifixion, became a lion of courage thereafter and bore witness to the resurrection the rest of his days. The Romans killed him. Paul, whose own relationship with the disciples began with his trying to eliminate them, became their greatest apostle when he encountered the risen Christ. The Romans killed him, too. Over the next two and a half centuries, in spasms of persecution, the Romans killed hundreds of thousands of Christians. Their ilk are still trying  children blown up in a Pakistani park after Easter service, a priest crucified by ISIS, schoolgirls kidnapped and sold into slavery. But Christians keep multiplying (or at least the ones who believe in the sanctity of life are). Two and a half centuries after the Roman Empire crucified Jesus, its emperor Constantine took his place beside the Christians. He also ended crucifixion.

This didn't happen because Christianity had better propagandists. It happened because those first Christians beheld their beloved dead leader as their risen Lord, and were instilled with his Spirit. Then they told what they had seen, and heard, and changed the world.
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Jim Mills, Wichita Falls

Trump best for country

If it didn't effect every U.S. citizen, it would be laughable. The press, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates hammering Trump for insignificant answers and actions. Even the local press, TRN editors cried foul, because Trump's campaign manager supposedly grabbed a reporter by the arm. TRN immediately stated he is not presidential material. Pardon me while I vomit.

Let's check the other front-runner candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hmm, does anyone remember Travelgate, Vince Foster's "suicide," Hillary's condemnation of Monica Lewinski and all other Bill Clinton lovers, referring to them as trash? Or the fact the Clinton's stole more than $263,00 in White House furnishings and had to return them? Or that they trashed all the White House computers? Is Trump under FBI investigation for mishandling top secret documents? Did Trump leave four Americans to die in Benghazi and then declare, "What difference does it make now? Did Trump lie right to the face of the relatives of the dead? I'm appalled at the blatant bias of the lamestream media.

Hillary is for open borders, nevermind how many Syrians enter the country. So, should Trump be eliminated and Hillary should be exalted? This is exactly what's wrong with America and only Trump can resolve this problem. Every other candidate is a politician. Look how well the last politician we elected worked out. I hope it scares some common sense back into the equation. Trump may be coarse and rough around the edges, but, at least he has the welfare of the country foremost in his heart.
Using streets and numbers for business names is nothing new, and I frankly find it helpful when a restaurant takes its address for its name. You aren't going to get lost on your way to 15 Church in Saratoga Springs or wonder which of Albany's Center Square streets is home to Lark & Lily. In that spirit, 13 North has picked something even more useful than a set of geocache coordinates: Its plum location off I-87 at Exit 13.

I know your mind is cranking. It's usually truck stops and diners tagged by their relevant highway exit, and  keep those cogs whirring  surely the only thing right off Exit 13N is the Roosevelt Inn and Suites, longtime home of the Packhorse Restaurant and more recently El Mariachi III. That's true. I've driven past the place a million times, not stopping once in the 20 years I've been heading to the track.

But let me dispel any notion of a disappointing motel cafeteria serving up rubbery eggs and other crimes against food. 13 North is in a remarkably convenient spot. And, in the hands of Larry and Patty Weaver, former owners of D-Line Pub in Ballston Spa, it's offering fast, family-friendly pub grub you'll be happy to eat.

I could start with a dinner tab that came in at less than $70 for a family of four, with two adult beverages to boot. The pasta and marinara on the $5 children's menu comes with a rich tomato sauce that could shame an Italian eatery or two, and one giant meatball so deeply flavored from a good pan-browning you'll dig into it long before your child gives up the plate.

More Information 13 North 2955 Route 9 Saratoga Springs Phone: 400-1746 Web: www.13northrestaurant.com Cuisine: Scratch-made "great American cuisine" featuring pub classics, bar appetizers, club sandwiches, burgers, steaks and pastas. $5 children's menu. Gluten-free bread available. Ambiance: Full bar and casual, no-frills, family-friendly dining. Price: $-$$$ Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily Credit cards: All major. Parking: Large parking lot. Handicapped accessible: Yes. Price ratings for inexpensive eateries based on average of entree costs: $: $9.95 and less $$: $9.95-$15.95 $$$: $15.95 and higher See More Collapse

I should mention the soft red carpet that stretches from car park to illuminated front door. Say what you will, but there is an undeniable thrill to walking it. And, skipping the diamond-plate metal panels in the hostess station, the Weavers have jumped on the industrial bandwagon and appropriated distressed indoor clapboarding, brick walls and caged filament bulbs, plugging them into a bar and dining scene that's more Wrangler jeans than Brooklyn lumbersexual.

I'd be remiss to not spotlight 13 North's signature Bloody Mary ($12), part meal, part cocktail, served in a pint glass packed with shrimp, bacon, celery, olives and pert slices of lemon and lime. I didn't say it was classy. I said it was awesome.

More importantly, the food is good. It's straightforward, reasonably priced and comes fast out of the kitchen. Call any day at lunchtime and it sounds like a party in full swing. Of course, it helps that the restaurant is child-friendly, with brown paper on tables and crayons in little silver buckets. And the kids fell into the sweet homemade cinnamon-sugar butter with ploofy white bread rolls.

No surprise to find potato skins, crispy calamari and nachos on the menu beside stacked burgers, fries and steamed clams, but you can also get a Cuban sandwich ($10), the pork slow roasted in-house, two stellar pork chops with applesauce for $18, or a 16-ounce chargrilled cowboy rib-eye for $28, cheap at the price.

13 North fries ($8), smothered in robust beef gravy, cheddar cheese and smoked bacon, feature green onions and sour cream in a mad hybrid of Canadian poutine and Irish potato nachos. Gratineed croutons swamp darkly caramelized onions in the beefy, salty French onion soup ($5), served, American-style, in a glazed crockpot, cheese dribbling down the side. Only a bowl of bacon corn chowder ($5) missed the mark, the soup flavorful but milky and thin.

Under the direction of a new head chef, Dominic Paduano, the team manning the grill has burgers down, flexing the muscle of 13 North's self-titled "great American cuisine." Cooked to order, a juicy handmade 8-ounce burger in the Pattimelt ($10) nailed the pretty pink of medium-rare and a meaty crust smooshed into Swiss cheese, sauteed onions and the caraway-anise of marbled rye. Breads are from Gambles in Glens Falls, though Patty Weaver is the baking force behind desserts: the apple pie and cheesecake, and her selection of cupcakes baked fresh daily.

We marveled at the pile of soft, chopped garlic  at least a half dozen cloves  clearly visible in a mound of pasta under chicken marsala ($17). It's a huge portion, plenty left for lunch the next day, and chicken medallions pounded scallopini-thin jostle mushrooms in the creamy sauce. I thought it strayed too sweet, but maybe that was nitpicking. It tasted great the next day.

The place was jammed on a Friday night with chattering families at every table and a ring of blue-jeaned men propping up the Weaver's new large, horseshoe-shaped bar. But service was efficient in that busy-diner-waitress, "What can I get you, hon?" sort of way, with food hitting tables impressively fast. Given the crowd, this has to be the place where all families go between 6 and 8 p.m. on a weekend night.

Forget the lazy appeal of fast-food fixes. I'm here to preach: Stop in the name of 13 North. They're not showcasing local farms or rolling their own pasta, but you'll be in and out in an hour, leaving full but not fleeced.

Dinner for four  including four appetizers, three entrees, one dessert and a bottle of wine  came to $150.30 with tax and tip.

Susie Davidson Powell is a freelancer writer from East Greenbush. Follow her on Twitter, @SusieDP. To comment on this review, visit the Table Hopping blog, blog.timesunion.com/tablehopping.
Donald Trump's presidential candidacy has stunned the Republican Party.

But if he survives a late revolt by his rivals and other leaders to become the party's standard-bearer in the general election, the electoral map now coming into view is positively forbidding.

In recent head-to-head polls with one Democrat whom Trump may face in the fall, Hillary Clinton, he trails in every key state, including Florida and Ohio, despite her soaring unpopularity ratings with swing voters.

In Democratic-leaning states across the Rust Belt, which Trump has vowed to return to the Republican column for the first time in nearly 30 years, his deficit is even worse: Clinton leads him by double digits in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Trump is so negatively viewed, polls suggest, that he could turn otherwise safe Republican states, usually political afterthoughts because of their strong conservative tilt, into tight contests. In Utah, his deep unpopularity with Mormon voters suggests that a state that has gone Republican every election for a half-century could wind up in play. Republicans there pointed to a much-discussed Deseret News poll last month, showing Clinton with a narrow lead over Trump, to argue that the state would be difficult for him.

Horse-race polls this early are poor predictors of election results, and candidates have turned around public opinion before. And the country's politics have become so sharply polarized that no major-party contender is likely to come near the 49-state defeats suffered by Democrats in 1972 and 1984.

But without an extraordinary reversal  or the total collapse of whoever becomes his general-election opponent  Trump could be hard-pressed to win more than 200 electoral votes.

Trump has become unacceptable, perhaps irreversibly so, with broad swaths of Americans, including large majorities of women, nonwhites, Hispanics, voters under 30 and those with college degrees  the voters who powered President Barack Obama's two victories and represent the country's demographic future.

In some states, Trump has surprised establishment-aligned Republicans with his breadth of support beyond the less-educated men who form his base. Even so, his support in the nominating process, in which some 30 million people may ultimately vote, would be swamped in a general election, when turnout is likely to be four times that.

"We're talking about somebody who has the passionate devotion of a minority and alternately scares, appalls, angers  or all of the above  a majority of the country," said Henry Olsen, a conservative analyst. "This isn't anything but a historic election defeat just waiting to happen."

What could ensure a humiliating loss for Trump in November are his troubles with constituencies that have favored Republicans in recent elections. Among independents, a group that Mitt Romney carried even as he lost to Obama in 2012, Trump would begin the fall campaign at a considerable disadvantage.

"We're talking about somebody who has the passionate devotion of a minority and alternately scares, appalls, angers  or all of the above  a majority of the country," said Henry Olsen, a conservative analyst. "This isn't anything but a historic election defeat just waiting to happen."

Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster, put it this way: "There is no precedent for this. In the modern polling era, since around World War II, there hasn't been a more unpopular potential presidential nominee than Donald Trump."
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Guilderland

A quiet office space in Star Plaza may soon be home to a hub for professionals needing to rent short-term space  for a month, for several meetings or just to crank out a few hours of work.

The Guilderland Chamber of Commerce's shared work space held an open house Friday, marking the latest development for coworking and shared office spaces in the Capital Region.

This year, a coworking space will launch in Troy in addition to the expected expansion of the Guilderland Chamber's space. The growth comes alongside existing spaces in Albany, Schenectady and Saratoga Springs.

Some remote employees and employees of startups and small companies have come to rely on offices filled with otherwise unconnected coworkers for conference rooms, collaborative energy and regular programming.

And several years after the membership spaces began leasing offices to consultants, remote workers and startups, area coworking offices are diversifying in nature, providing distinct models to potential members ranging from executive suites to accelerator programs.

The open atmosphere of The Beahive, at 418 Broadway in Albany, may initially be jarring to some, said Tracy Metzger, owner of the space that opened in early 2012. The office is in a former architect's studio and hosts meeting spaces and desks. Membership plans include $25 monthly for one day per month access and $350 per month for 24/7 access with a permanent desk.

"There are no private offices at The Beahive  it's a work space," Metzger said. "Although you have a sense of privacy, it's not private, and it's not designed to be that way."

The Troy Innovation Garage plans to divide its leased space to accommodate semiprivate suites and open office space. Five members launched Schenectady's Electric City Innovation Center, which offers large coworking areas and private offices, earlier this month.

In contrast, The Hub in Saratoga Springs has 25 private office suites, three conference rooms and one classroom, promoting an individual over communal work environment.

In Guilderland's case, tenants can share an office, have their own offices or rent conference space for meetings. The chamber has four tenants locked in, including real estate firm CMK & Associates, and says possible additional space will accommodate three more small businesses. Right now, the space resembles a traditional office, and interim chair Lowell Knapp said programming and other cultural characteristics will depend on the desires of the chamber's next leader, who has not yet been appointed.

That said, Knapp added, the chamber's space will not compete with the "free-flowing spirit" of The Beahive. "This is more business-to-business office space," he said. "But we do want to have open, shared space and play off each other."

Other niches connect to a field, not type of work space. Members of Sharatoga Coworking, which was open from June 2014 through the end of 2015, worked in the technology sector.

Founder Chris Thompson said his desire to focus on technology fields connected to his interests.

"If we go to lunch, I want to have a conversation about something cool," Thompson said, adding that he aims to reopen the space by early 2017 after he takes time to focus on a separate startup's growth. "I don't want to be sitting next to a sales person, I don't want to be sitting next to a marketing person. I'm a tech person."

Tom Nardacci, CEO and founder of Gramercy Communications, said the Troy Innovation Garage aims to attract "creative economy" workers when it opens in the fall.

Nardacci has said he plans to invest $1 million into the space, and Gramercy Communications plans to move from its River Street location to the second floor of the garage over the summer. He said he expects $400,000 in annual revenue. Passes range from $25 daily to $350 per month.

The garage plans to host a multimedia studio, space designated for software companies and, possibly, lifestyle benefits like massages and manicures. Windows pepper the walls between first-floor suites, which Nardacci says promotes collaboration. Members will be expected to give back to the community by teaching a class, he said.

"It's not about selling a desk or an office  it's about selling services," said Michelle Schroll, whom Nardacci hired to oversee the space's membership and programming.

"Stronger and more vibrant" coworking spaces often come with frequent programming, social functions and tutoring sessions, said Andrea Foertsch, the founder of Disruptive Space, which advises companies and other organizations on workplace strategies.

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Foertsch, who researched coworking spaces in a December 2013 report for the National Association for Industrial and Office Parks Research Foundation, said that an enthusiastic leader with an eye toward community can attract members.

"These are things that make people stick together as opposed to spinning out," Foertsch said.

Capital Region workers said they joined these spaces to work remotely from larger offices, bring clients to a professional atmosphere and boost productivity outside the home.

Kathleen Pingelski, 48, of Clifton Park, is president of MicroKnowledge, Inc. Though the training and consulting firm has Latham offices, employees often meet with downtown Albany clients in The Beahive.

"It's flexible  it fits how we need it and it works for us and our particular environment," she said.

John Luther, 44, of Schuylerville, works in New York City three days each week for JW Player, an online video distribution platform. On Mondays and Fridays, he works at The Hub.

The concept of coworking spaces is becoming more common in the Capital Region and in other smaller cities, he said. The model, he said, allows smaller cities to become "high-tech centers without necessarily an anchor company" like Apple and Google attracting large groups of technology workers.

He recalled meeting employees of Odd Networks at Sharatoga Coworking, where he worked for about two years. Like JW Player, that company delivers online video across platforms.

"It is nice to be in an office with people and meet more people," he said, "especially when there's interesting stuff going on under your nose and you don't know it."

lellis@timesunion.com  518-454-5018  @lindsayaellis
Albany

From his dark and cramped space in a warehouse setting in Montgomery County, Tommy the chimpanzee drew worldwide attention.

His human advocates fought in court to spring him from surroundings no chimpanzee would ever choose to live in. They asked judges to accept Tommy as a "person" for the purposes of granting him a writ of habeas corpus  a legal demand that a prisoner be produced so a court can determine if imprisonment is lawful  to achieve his freedom.

And the judges said no.

But the battle for the rights of animals is only beginning.

The fight is unfolding in a landscape of big-box pet stores, pet-friendly hotels and so-called doggie day-care centers. Americans spend billions on their pets each year, buying everything from staples like dog food to luxury jungle-gym style toy "hotels" for cats. And amidst the commerce, some vegans are pushing others to give up food or drink made of animal products.

It is being fought in courts where Tommy's supporters with the Florida-based Nonhuman Rights Project continue to argue their case for the legal "personhood" of Tommy and other animals, including an elephant.

And it is being waged in criminal courts and the state Capitol as animal cruelty cases draw wide media attention and outrage from millions of Americans who own cats and dogs and other household pets and who demand justice for crimes that victimize defenseless animals.

Look no further than the horrific February burglary in Montgomery County in which a woman in the sleepy town of Florida came home to find her beloved dogs, Kirby and Quigley, mysteriously shot to death by burglars. Assemblyman James Tedisco, R-Glenville, has since introduced a bill with Sen. Phil Boyle, a Long Island Republican, to increase the penalties for crimes committed to animals during the course of a felony. The bill passed the Senate.

Meanwhile, Curtis Lumber is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible.

Such reactions do not surprise law enforcement.

"I receive more communication in this office when there is an animal cruelty case in this community more so than any other member of what I would consider the vulnerable population," said Albany County District Attorney David Soares. "We get emails from as far away as New Zealand."

In 2013, Soares launched an Animal Cruelty Taskforce which is highlighted on the website for his office  complete with photos of four dogs, three cats, a rabbit, a bird and a quote from Mahatma Gandhi saying that "the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated."

Soares' website includes a link to the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society, which joined Soares in his most recent venture to aid animals: An emergency response van to serve as a patrol vehicle and ambulance for animals so they can be treated at the scene.

When it comes to animal rights, "it's a much different attitude today than it was 10 years ago, than it was 15 years ago," Soares said.

"These were cases that were thought to be nuisance cases when they were presented," he said. "The activism around animal abuse and animal cruelty cases has increased so much and then you add to that social media and technology and the amount of emails and correspondence. ... It's just so unbelievable and so that's forcing the issue."

Soares said the opposition to increasing penalties and fines for animal cruelty is often rooted in a strong farm lobby that fears "activists looking at cows and chickens and other animals and applying these laws to the animals that are routinely slaughtered for our consumption."

Soares said a big problem is that animal cruelty crimes are prosecuted under the state's Agriculture and Markets Law and not the penal law. Terence L. Kindlon, a veteran attorney who has represented several clients accused of animal abuse, also expressed concern.

"A lot of the section's language is anachronistic and, since most animal cruelty cases play out in justice courts presided over by non-lawyer town justices, the interpretation of the law doesn't really get much attention from the appellate courts and, because of that, it would not be too much of a stretch to say that the law often means what its most aggressive advocates say it means," Kindlon said. "So, if I ran the world, the first thing I'd do is put together a law revision commission, completely rewrite the animal cruelty statute and move it to the Penal Law."

At the Nonhuman Rights Project, founder and president Steven Wise is concerned solely with the civil rights of nonhumans. In his zeal to open a legal door few lawyers or advocates have attempted to open, he reached out to advocates of same-sex marriage  who successfully won the right to marry after decades of denial and opposition  to see what he could take from their success to help his own cause.

If it seems to be an unorthodox method to accomplish his goal, so be it, Wise contends. He is not afraid to be a pioneer. "Every aspect of law  every legal standard we have  at one point had never been done before," said Wise, an experienced attorney who has taught animal rights classes at Harvard Law School, among other colleges. "It's going to take a struggle and we understand that and we're in for a long, long struggle."

Wise, whose board includes his wife, Gail Price-Wise and world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, has been fighting on behalf of nonhumans for some three decades. Those efforts are chronicled in "Unlocking the Cage," a documentary by filmmakers D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, which debuted this year at the Sundance Film Festival and is now scheduled for release in theaters on May 25.

On its website, Wise's group proudly calls itself "the only civil rights organization in the United States working to achieve actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own.

"Our mission is to change the legal status of appropriate nonhuman animals from mere 'things,' which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to 'persons,' who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty," stated the group's website.

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Wise repeatedly argued to judges that corporations, books and a river have all been considered "persons" under the law. Indeed, he is not attempting to say animals are human.

Kindlon, for his part, said the effort falls flat.

"Tommy is a chimp, not a person, and it is my belief that that's conclusive," Kindlon said. "Tommy doesn't have any rights. Parenthetically, we have a hard enough time protecting the rights of adult and children human beings and I believe it's a misuse of the court system's limited time and energy to spend it trying to give human rights to a non-human."

When Wise brought Tommy's case to the Appellate Division level in Albany, Brooklyn and Rochester, he was denied by justices who made it clear they also wanted no part of his arguments.

"Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions," Presiding Justice Karen Peters wrote in a unanimous decision in 2014.

Wise hoped to have the Court of Appeals, the state's top court, hear his argument. He was rejected. So far, no judge in New York or the rest of the country has put his or her name on a legal decision to grant a habeas corpus for apes the way such writs are granted for humans. Tommy is now out of New York but his plight remains; he is in northern Michigan where he is part of a roadside zoo, far away from the "Save the Chimps" sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Fla., where Wise and other members of the Nonhuman Rights Project would like him to live with others of his kind.

Even in defeat, Wise has found kernels of victory. For instance, before Tommy's case went to the appellate level, Wise could not convince Supreme Court Justice Joseph Sise in Montgomery County to grant the writ of habeas corpus for Tommy. But he seemed to come close.

"You make a very strong argument," the judge said in 2013. "However, I do not agree with the argument only insofar as (habeas corpus) applies to chimpanzees. Good luck with your venture. I'm sorry I can't sign the order, but I hope you continue. As an animal lover, I appreciate your work."

"I think the main obstacle is this is something new. Judges are not sure what to make of it," Wise said. He noted that the three different Appellate Divisions all gave different reasons in rejecting his efforts. "Their instinct is, 'Wait a minute. This is really new and strange. We don't want them to win on this. Not yet.' "

He said his arguments fall within the mainstream of law and, he believes, judges will eventually be accept that.

"It takes a long time for them to really grasp it. We have a lot of patience," Wise said. "I'd say five years from now, 10 years from now, we may be well on our way. We're laying the ground work now."

rgavin@timesunion.com  518-434-2403  @RobertGavinTU
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Albany

Albany resident Richard Shirey recently wrote that my skepticism about a $15 minimum wage showed that I'm "rather unsympathetic to the low-wage worker."

I regret that I gave that impression to Shirey, a member of the Capital District Raise the Wage Coalition, because it's opposite the truth. I feared the $15 minimum wage because I believed it could be devastating for low-wage workers and the poor, especially upstate.

The perpetually job-starved region would have been a dramatically inappropriate place for what would have been an untested and radical economic experiment. Upstate, more than most places, can't afford to play the guinea pig.

More Information Contact Chris Churchill at 518-454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com See More Collapse

Thankfully, lawmakers and Gov. Andrew Cuomo came to their senses, somewhat, with a minimum-wage deal that only raises the upstate minimum wage to $12.50 after five years  with continued movement toward $15 in following years.

That's still a significant increase, but make no mistake: Upstate ducked a bullet.

If you don't believe it, consider that even many liberal economists are wary of what a $15 minimum would mean for rural and economically struggling areas. Consider that studies favorable to the wage hike conceded it would cost jobs.

Then, consider how poorly much of the upstate economy is already performing.

As noted by the Empire Center, an Albany-based think tank, the Binghamton, Buffalo, Elmira, Ithaca and Rochester areas all lost private-sector jobs over the course of 2015, and upstate continues to suffer from an out-migration of residents.

Meanwhile, census data show Rochester and Buffalo are the fifth- and seventh-poorest cities in the country, respectively, and Syracuse has the nation's highest rate of extreme poverty concentrated among blacks and Hispanics.

The statistics paint a grim picture, and a $15 minimum wage upstate would have made it worse. Businesses, farms and non-profits all warned that it would cost jobs and exacerbate endemic unemployment. It would have been particularly disastrous for the poor, who are always hit hardest when economic conditions worsen.

Here's a question I never heard adequately answered during the so-called "Fight for $15": How would upstate compete to attract desperately needed jobs and businesses with a minimum wage that matched the world's highest?

Here's another: If a $15 minimum made sense for Brooklyn and Queens, where the average one-bedroom apartment rents for $2,300 monthly, how could it also make sense in Utica, where you can buy a nice, four-bedroom house for $120,000?

It didn't, and the state-budget deal reflects that by allowing for varying minimum wages in different parts of the state  a compromise that has many on both sides of the issue feeling dissatisfied.

"There is some relief," said John Hand, a Greenwich fruit and vegetable farmer who I featured in a February column. "But it's still going to be painful for small businesses."

Hand noted that a $12.50 minimum wage  which he considers vastly better than $15  still puts upstate farmers at a disadvantage to farms in neighboring states. How will they compete?

Well, that's yet another question that was never answered during the debate. What's worse is that many proponents just didn't seem to care, or refused to believe that the wage hike could bring any unintended consequences whatsoever.

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There is, among some, a disturbing antipathy toward business owners. I heard often from people who argued that any business that couldn't pay $15 an hour didn't "deserve" the right to operate, and owners who publicly opposed the wage hike often faced a nasty social-media backlash.

That included Patrick Pipino, who owns the Ben & Jerry's franchise in Saratoga Springs.

The budget deal means little for him, because Cuomo has already ordered that fast-food chains statewide pay $15 hourly by 2021. But on Friday, Pipino was relieved that other upstate businesses wouldn't face the same fate.

"I still think (the wage increase) will mean the loss of some jobs and businesses," Pipino said. "But now, it not a disaster. It's just seriously tragic."

Now there's a rallying cry for the upstate economy. It's just seriously tragic!

I also talked Friday with Shirey, who said, unsurprisingly, that he was unsatisfied with the budget deal, expressing his belief that the $15 minimum is needed to combat growing income inequality.

"That's a political compromise," Shirey said, "but it isn't going to relieve the suffering of the people who are in that situation now."

Shirey and I have a different point of view, obviously. I think a $15 minimum upstate would have caused more suffering than it relieved, but that doesn't mean we don't both care about those who are struggling in a difficult economy.

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchill
Schenectady

In 2009, General Electric Co. entered into a seven-year agreement with the state's economic development arm, Empire State Development, that required paying back a $12.5 million grant if 350 jobs weren't created at its new battery plant.

The company said it employed 450 at its renovated facility in Building 66 in 2014. But less than a year later, production was stopped as oil and gas prices plummeted and GE said other battery technologies became more cost-effective. Some workers took separation agreements and others were moved from the battery plant to steam-turbine and generator plants.

In January, in response to Times Union questions about whether GE breached the 2009 agreement  which lasts until the end of this year  Empire State Development said that it had reviewed the project and GE exceeded its job promises for two years and its investments.

But a series of government emails released to the Times Union shows GE and ESD officials discussed how they would respond to questions about why GE was allowed to keep the state grant even though the factory closed. For example, GE and ESD shared their responses to the newspaper and edited a statement together, and GE asked that the state provide a response about the company's positive impact on the local economy. The records also indicate GE and state officials held multiple conference calls about the responses to the newspaper's questions.

For their part, GE and ESD said the emails simply outline their efforts to provide accurate information.

However, John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, a nonprofit that lobbies for more transparency related to government subsidies and the state budget, said the communications raise questions about whether ESD can be trusted with policing its grants and tax breaks, which amount to billions of dollars statewide each year.

"The sole criteria that the public has for evaluating these subsidies is job retention and creation," Kaehny said. "The idea that the ESD is colluding with General Electric in this case, and possibly other subsidy recipients, to polish job numbers is alarming."

Jason Conwall, one of the two ESD representatives copied on the emails with GE, said a committee was already reviewing the project at the time of the newspaper's questions to determine if GE had satisfied the agreement, which called for varying percentages of money to be paid back if job and investment commitments weren't met. Conwall said it's routine for the agency and the recipients of its support to consult on what information should be released to the public.

"The implication that we took direction from or we were pressured into certain statements I find to be patently false," Conwall said in an interview with the Times Union.

The emails, obtained through the Freedom of Information Law, outline GE's communications with ESD about information the company thought the state should disclose. They also indicate that GE asked to discuss ESD's responses that were being provided to the newspaper.

"I was going to include a statement that talked about the significant impact the project has had, and will continue to have, on the local economy, but figure that should probably come from you," GE spokeswoman Chris Horne wrote to Conwall and another ESD representative, Chyresse Wells, on Dec. 31. "I also assume you may want to reinforce the fact that economic grants are designed to encourage job creation, which has been accomplished beyond original targets."

In another email dated Jan. 5, GE's Horne wrote to ESD's Wells about a change that Horne made in one of the responses: "Chyresse, note that I removed the sentence in the Word doc we discussed," followed by a portion the state blacked out before releasing it.

Horne said the emails reveal nothing more than GE and the state double-checking the data that was provided.

"One of our top priorities is to be a transparent and accountable organization," Horne said. "This type of fact checking and verification of information is a necessary part of a rigorous due-diligence process when providing information for public consumption."

In 2009, GE said it was considering locating the battery plant elsewhere, possibly in Virginia or Georgia. GE entered into what was called a general project plan with the state. The plan included the $12.5 million grant as part of a JOBS-Now Program that required 350 jobs be created in the factory, which was to produce efficient sodium metal halide batteries, what it called the Durathon battery, for possible use in everything from trains to cellular towers. GE promised to invest $100 million and says it ultimately put in $170 million. Despite production being stopped last November, GE said it still has more than 300 former battery plant workers employed elsewhere in the company.

Assemblyman James Tedisco, R-Glenville, has countered that many of those jobs were absorbed by the steam-turbine business because of attrition there and would not be considered new positions. Tedisco's district until recently covered GE's main plant in Schenectady, where the battery facility was located.

GE received a total of $22.2 million in state and local grants and tax breaks for the project, in addition to $25.5 million in federal tax breaks.

New York is second to only California in the number of subsidies it hands out to private companies and local government entities, according to 2014 statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

ESD oversees billions in grants and tax breaks, from allocating $750 million on behalf of SUNY Polytechnic Institute for the SolarCity project in Buffalo, to the Regional Economic Development Council awards each year. Spending on economic development incentives in New York under Gov. Andrew Cuomo increased from $7 billion to $8.1 billion between 2010 and 2014, according to Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group.

GE is one of the most successful U.S. companies at obtaining tax breaks. The company received $115.3 million in potential federal tax credits in January 2010, including the $25.5 million for the battery plant.

In mid-December, in response to a Times Union inquiry, ESD said the agency was waiting for information from the battery plant before a determination could be made on whether GE met its obligations.

The state's message changed as its conversations with GE continued, according to a review of the emails released to the newspaper.

On Jan. 5, ESD sent the Times Union a second statement  which was unsolicited  that said the state was reviewing information provided by GE. The statement provided additional information intended to demonstrate the project's success, including, "GE exceeded its commitment to create 350 new jobs, hiring 450 new employees by 2014."

ESD had forwarded the revised second statement to GE's Horne, who responded to the agency in a lengthy email a day later, but much of the content in that email was blacked out before the agency released it to the newspaper. The email concluded with GE's spokeswoman asking, "Can we regroup in the morning to discuss?"

Three days later, on Jan. 9, ESD sent a third statement to the Times Union, saying, "GE far exceeded investment commitments ... and, for two years, its job commitment as well."

Conwall, the ESD spokesman, said the revised statements were a result of additional information being gleaned from GE. "The simple fact that our statement changed over time, that's not evidence of tampering by GE or anything," he said. "If anything, it would have been inaccurate and dishonest of us to not change our statement over the course of six weeks while things were progressing internally here."

Meanwhile, ESD's communications with the Times Union during that period gave no indication there was coordination going on between the state and GE. On Jan. 5, GE's Horne wrote to ESD's Wells: "I think Lauren (Stanforth) is finishing her story this morning. It will be important to get any other statements to her asap. Thanks for your support on this and please let me know if I can help with anything."

Twenty minutes later, Wells wrote an email to the Times Union: "I haven't seen a story run about this and I'm wondering if anything will run soon. We would like to make sure ESD's comment/response is still accurate, since we provided it a month ago."

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Some of the emails were copied to Schenectady Metroplex Development Authority Chairman Ray Gillen, with GE thanking Gillen in a Dec. 31 communication for "providing total wage information ... that helps demonstrate the amount of personal income tax the state had already, and will continue to reap." Metroplex, which is funded through a small portion of Schenectady County's sales tax, borrowed $5 million for a grant to GE for the battery plant.

ESD officials said significant portions of the emails between GE and ESD were blacked out before being disclosed because those statements "contain information that if disclosed would impair present or imminent contract awards," and that some of the information does not relate to the battery plant. Last week, Conwall said the redactions in the emails included information about a different contract that has yet to be announced or awarded.

The Times Union filed an appeal with ESD for the release of the emails in their entirety.

The newspaper also submitted a Freedom of Information Law request for any email communication between GE and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. NYSERDA provided GE with a grant, worth $2.5 million, for the battery plant. In mid-December, NYSERDA said it was in the process of reviewing final information submitted by GE for the project.

But on Jan. 9, the same day ESD's revised statement about GE was sent to the Times Union, NYSERDA sent out a revised statement that said GE met obligations associated with the project.

When the Times Union requested emails between GE and NYSERDA staff, NYSERDA responded last month that no such emails exist.

Ron Deutsch, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, said the emails between GE and ESD point to a larger issue about the need for a public database that would make jobs and investment reporting more transparent. The institute analyzes state tax and budget issues while advocating for low-income and vulnerable populations.

"We as a state need to be better stewards of the public's money when we're doling it out to private corporations in the name of job creation," Deutsch said.

lstanforth@timesunion.com  518-454-5697

GE and ESD emails about battery plant by lstanforth9925
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Rensselaerville

The undulating landscape of southwestern Albany County has drawn artists like Charles Lindsay forever.

Steep, forested hills offer striking views of the Catskill Mountains to the south  like the one from Lindsay's studio, an 1830 barn moved piecemeal from Guilderland and reassembled off Travis Hill Road.

Hilltops like Lindsay's, a winding 45-minute drive from Albany, reinforce the isolation of the hollows in between them. And one in particular has become ground zero in a now-familiar tug of war between the competing collective good of unspoiled vistas and public safety.

Scenic Rensselaerville  a coalition of property owners, residents and artists that claims 170 members  is suing to block a new 180-foot radio tower proposed by Albany County to remedy what authorities describe as dangerous blind spots in the county's antiquated emergency radio network.

The Edwards Hill tower is just one of a dozen in a new $19.3 million countywide system backed by state Homeland Security money that will replace 1950s-era technology and that Sheriff Craig Apple says will help save lives by allowing police, fire and EMS at all levels of government to talk to each other and by filling in dead spots in communities that currently lack reliable radio coverage.

"This is about being able to get to you if your child is choking," Apple said. "This about being able to get to you if you're having a stroke."

But opponents of the project accuse the town and county of big-footing years of planning efforts to protect Rensselaerville's greatest asset and employing bully tactics  most recently a bid to nullify local authority over the project.

Some view the radio tower as a Trojan horse, of sorts. The county, they fear, is using the mantle of public safety to build a tower it will lease to wireless companies eager for a foothold in the area.

"The value we have of this place is how beautiful it is," said Lindsay, whose property overlooks the tower site. He splits his time among the town, New York City and California's Silicon Valley. "This place feels like one of those last best places."

Supporters of the tower, meanwhile, characterize the resistance as a small but vocal minority  many of them transplants from New York City  that is placing natural beauty above human life.

"It's people that have their priorities totally out of whack," said David Bowdish, who has lived in town for nearly three decades and sees the opposition as fundamentally at odds with the small-town ethic that draws people to places like Rensselaerville in the first place.

"Life should be set up to where you watch out for your neighbors and where you are concerned about their health and welfare along with your own and not just frivolous stuff like whether there's a dinky tower out there that ruins your view," he said. "If you're a good painter, you could paint the picture without the tower."

The dispute  which echoes past tower battles in the Adirondacks and, more recently, a stalled plan to build a new tower near the Olana State Historic Site in Columbia County  has tentacles beyond Albany County's most remote town.

In neighboring Berne, opposition is percolating to another proposed 180-foot sheriff's tower on Jansen Lane, and the county says that changes to any one of 12 towers in the new network could hold up the entire system. (A third new tower off Biers Road in Coeymans has already been approved.)

For Dennis Wood the reality of the breathtaking topography of his hometown is this: Radio transmissions disintegrate into unintelligible crackles if they're not swallowed up entirely. Cell service is weak or nonexistent. Fire alarms vanish en route from the sheriff's dispatchers in Voorheesville; paramedics can't send EKG results to emergency room doctors 30 miles away in Albany.

During Tropical Storm Irene when surging creeks severed power and phone lines to the hamlet of Preston Hollow, emergency crews were forced to communicate with handwritten messages ferried by truck.

"The keyword is dangerous," said Wood, chief of the Tri-Village Fire Department who by day works as assistant commander of the sheriff's EMS service. "When you're putting guys in burning buildings, you expect radios to work."

Wood doesn't believe the battle lines are so neatly drawn between natives like him and downstate transplants lured north by the bucolic setting and affordable real estate.

Town Supervisor Valerie Lounsbury agrees the dynamics are more complex and likely rooted at least partly in the differences among town's distinct hamlets, which have different needs, are served by different fire departments and schools and sometimes even have different weather.

The hamlet of Rensselaerville in the southwest part of the town already has a privately owned communications tower, serviceable  though not good  radio communication and some cell service, Lounsbury said. It's a hub for the town's diverse art community and home to the Palmer House Cafe and The Carey Institute for Global Good  both landmarks likely familiar to daytrippers from Albany.

Deeper into town  in Preston Hollow, Potter Hollow, Cooksburg and Medusa  urgency for the tower increases as coverage gets spottier, she said.

"It's a very diverse area. That's what anyone has to understand before they understand the problem," said Lounsbury, adding that many people spoke in favor of the project at town meetings last summer and fall. "I just feel for the greater good for the town of Rensselaerville, this tower must go up."

But to Alberto Caputo, Lindsay's neighbor and fellow plaintiff, the tension between transplants and locals is an inescapable part of town life.

"I'm not saying that anybody is bad or that anybody is good, but there is that difference," said Caputo, a photographer who has been visiting since 1981 and retired to town from Manhattan in 1997. "We see the potential of this place. ... These people that are born and raised up here, they're all nice people, but they have no idea what they have. This is everybody's view."

The acrimony spilled into court in December when Scenic Rensselaerville and nine individual plaintiffs sued the town Planning Board, the sheriff's office and the owner of the tower site arguing that in approving the project the board failed to properly conduct the state-mandated environmental review, ignored the town's comprehensive plan and violated a 1999 town law governing communication towers.

While the county says it investigated seven other potential sites, Scenic Rensselaerville argues officials never convincingly established the Edwards Hill tower is the best or only way to fix the existing blind spots.

The Edwards Hill site is necessary, the county contends, to both provide radio coverage for the immediate surroundings and create a line-of-sight microwave link to at least two other towers to ensure redundancy in the ability to beam communications over the hills and imposing Helderberg Escarpment 20 miles back to Voorheesville.

Some of Scenic Rensselaerville's legal arguments echo those made by Scenic Hudson and the Olana Partnership to block a 190-foot replacement tower on a Livingston farm near the Olana State Historic Site, one-time home of famed Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church.

A state judge in 2014 dismissed the suit, but the groups, fearful the tower would mar the view from the National Historic Landmark took their case to the Federal Communications Commission, which ordered a more in depth review under the National Historic Preservation Act.

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The FCC has yet to sign off on that tower, which would be privately owned but carry Columbia County's radio equipment.

"There is no one who is against better communication," said Jeanette Rice, a longtime Rensselaerville resident and plaintiff in the lawsuit who helped draft the town's 2007 comprehensive plan, which calls for the protection of scenic views.

"We want regard given to the covenants of our comprehensive plan," said Rice, who is not convinced the tower could not be located elsewhere. "It's been totally disrespected, and it's not justice."

The Rensselaerville legal dispute has evolved into a question of whether county officials can now  retroactively in the eyes of opponents  declare the project immune from local control.

The County Legislature voted unanimously in February to seize on legal precedent for public safety projects to do just that, which it contends should squash the suit on grounds that it challenges a decision the planning board had no jurisdiction to make.

Jacqueline Murray, the attorney representing the sheriff's office, said he county alerted town officials that it was considering invoking that power before the Planning Board voted in October.

But in court papers contesting the county's position, Victoria Polidoro, the Rhinebeck attorney for Scenic Rensselaerville, blasts the maneuver as "an abuse of process."

It's among the reasons Caputo believes the county is not motivated purely by public safety.

The tower could accommodate commercial wireless equipment, and Apple said he would like to use it to beam high-speed Internet service into the under-served Hilltowns.

But Murray said no wireless companies have approached the county yet and that even if they did, the town would get to review the applications.

"I can smell a rat by the simple fact that I lived in New York for many years doing business with all kinds of people," Caputo said. "Without this view, you don't have that much up here."

As he sat behind the wheel of his SUV beside the charred remains of a home on Smith Road in Potter Hollow recently, Bowdish saw it differently.

The home burned in February when, according to the fire chief, witnesses could not get a cell phone signal to quickly call 911  a delay Wood said he believes proved costly.

"Beautiful view," Bowdish said. "But if you can't call the fire department ... "

jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com  518-454-5445  @JCEvangelist_TU
THREE SEPARATE KANSAS CITY SHOOTINGS HAVE KEPT POLICE BUSY THIS WEEKEND!!!

"Police said the first shooting happened around midnight near E. 64th St. and Bellefontaine Ave. One person was shot and sustained life threatening injuries.





"Within the next hour at around 1:20 a.m., police say another person was shot inside a car on the highway at I-70 and Blue Ridge cutoff. That victim was listed in critical condition.





"Police then responded to a third shooting near E. 43rd St. and Indiana Ave. One person was shot in the arm and went to a nearby hospital for medical assistance."

The return of warmer weather also brings more bullets flying three neighborhood streets.To wit . . .Anyone with information is urged to call theDeveloping . . .
"Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has a hundred stories to tell. Kansas City has millions of stories all wrapped up in its borders and the borders of the communities that sprung up because of it. While every one of these stories might not be a story about Kansas City, when you combine them all they come together to tell the story of our city. We all are A Kansas City Story.



We believe so passionately about that one simple idea that A Kansas City Story is a free service we provide to anyone. We select one person a month and tell a story centered around them and their life. Sometimes an event or a business gets highlighted, sometimes it is purely personal. It all depends on what we witness on our day with the person. Our goal is to do twelve this year. Everyone has a story to tell, so why not drop us a name, or your name!"

Check out this neat project from our buddy Brandon who shares his impressive video-making skill with locals looking to share their stories.Check the mission statement:We've featured some of his really great videos on this blog from time to time and look forward to his latest round of projects.Developing . . .
LIKE IT OR NOT, A KICK-ASS IMAGE OF THE TOY TRAIN STREETCAR SHOWS A TYPICAL AND IMPENDING TRAFFIC JAM!!!

What do you see???

A beautiful shot of Kansas City's streetcar has sparked debate among social media trolls and some Twitter critics.To wit . . .EPIC Photogposted and shared this image that has been tossed around social media circles:And so we put it to you, Saturday Night TKC Readers . . .Some imagine a bustling metropolis even though there's no traffic going the other way.Others are posting false flag comments about a stoplight where none exists. Like it or not, there's a backup behind the that streetcar.And, of course, a traffic jam that's plain to see is the real source of debate.As always, thank for reading this week and have a fun and safe Saturday night!!!
THANKS TO A BAD-ASS TKC READER FOR SENDING US THIS NOTE ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE MOVEMENT THAT'S HITTING IT OFF WITH MANY WORSHIPERS IN KANSAS CITY!!!

KANSAS CITY CHRISTIAN DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE TESTIMONY

"TKC, just wanted to thank you for your blog and offer something that I believe would interest you and your readers. I'm asking that you withhold my name and the name of my Church for the sake of my privacy but I believe the information I have will save many marriages or at least offer an alternative to the plague of quick divorces and broken families that's threatening the American family and one of the building blocks of civilization . . .

Damn.









On this Sunday morning that's part of the ongoingliturgical celebration one of our readers blessed us with an important note about popular trend that's finally hitting home for a great many people in Kansas City.To wit . . .Here's the word . . .I don't mind admitting that my wife and I had fallen upon hard times for many years and after so many counseling sessions, retreats and conversations we were preparing ourselves for what seemed like an inevitable divorce. We loved one another deeply but still couldn't seem to make things work with our hectic schedules, obligations to extended family and some significant financial difficulties.One Sunday, it occurred to us that maybe the answer was a return to something that we had both grown up with  The Church.It was a blessing for us to rediscover our faith with one another and our relationship with the Almighty brought us closer to one another.The story should end there but I know that your blog is a place where people engage in what you often refer to as "real talk" and that's what I'd like to share with you and your readers.People are creatures of habit and eventually, after a few months my wife and I began to grow bored with the constant ritual of Sunday Church and Bible study. It seemed like a chore and proved to be a reminder of why we stopped going in the first place. Our marriage problems resurfaced and once again we found ourselves having many pointless arguments filled with needless bickering about minor disagreements. Luckily, this time I was able to seek help from my faith community and talk with others, discretely, about the problems I was confronting. This changed EVERYTHING.I was invited to a counseling session offered only for husbands and fathers that I almost skipped. I had found so much of my previous experience with counseling pointless but some of my most trusted friends from the congregation encouraged me and I relented. What I heard saved my marriage and so much more: I needed to spank my wife.There are many verses, teaching and passages I could cite but I'll share the one that stood out the most to me."Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church." 1 Corinthians 14:34-35Now I want to warn your readers, this isn't an undertaking I advise without careful consideration. I'm not advocating abuse or physical harm toward anyone; I did not consult my wife about my decision to make discipline/spanking a part of our home life but may of the other men in my congregation thought that conversation was necessary. To each his own.I should also share that my wife disciplined our children with spanking and it's something that she vigorously defended from my relatives, her friends and even my own questions -- I was not brought up with spanking or corporal punishment in my house and I didn't like the site of seeing my children physically punished. Years ago, she very patiently explained to me over and over the there was biblical support for spanking the children. Again and again, she cited Proverbs 13:24: "Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them."I thought it was a stretch but her methods and reasoning seemed sound. She is an educated woman and her spanking and discipline was never done in anger. Over time, my objections ended and our children have all followed a straight and narrow path so far. Thank God.And so, after a few more meetings with members of my congregation, I was decided.Invariably, yet another petty argument arose with my wife over the weekend. I decided that it was time to enact what I had learned and carefully but firmly spanked her in order to end the constant nagging she was subjecting both myself and others to along with a few other indiscretions over the course of the past few weeks.I want to stress that my spanking was well considered, only on her backside and something was not done in anger or out of spite but alone, in the privacy of our bedroom and with an open hand.Needless to say, she was surprised but in the same way that she once explained her methods of discipline to me regarding our children - I calmly told her the principles of my actions were also based in and supported by our faith and my responsibility in upholding the Christian patriarchy that is a tenant of the Bible.It was a tipping point from our marriage. I knew that there was a distinct possibility that she could have called the police and falsely claimed abuse but in the end I had faith in both my marriage and my wife. Her only pointed question and criticism was a wish that I would have included her in the decision. I reminded her that she didn't include the children in her decision to spank them and by that same logic informing her would have been redundant. In the end, she accepted my correction and since that time I've only had to spank her on a few more occasions. I rarely hear complaints from her anymore, we no longer bicker and I believe that our family is stronger now that I have shown a firm hand, so to speak, as the head of home.I'm sharing this story with you because so many people have mocked the Christian Domestic Discipline movement without giving it the proper consideration or the same respect that's awarded to so many other religious traditions. I can only say that I believe Christians who practice this aspect of our faith should be afforded the same respect for diversity and tolerance that so many others now enjoy.TKC, I want you and your readers to know that there are two sides to every story and I believe that my practice of responsible, considered and careful domestic discipline is something that is far more effective than the pop psychology of the day. While it might not be politically correct, it's an option worthy of careful contemplation.###########And so . . . We took this guy's advice and it turns out Jesus might totally be cool with spanking your wife.Check the links . . .As always . . . Don't call TKC if your wife calls the cops or goes allon you. But as always, we merely offer theand. . .
Steinmeier told Heilbronner Stimme that he expected a full implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement which includes that "the EU actively supports Greece in addressing the refugee crisis

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has called for more European aid to Greece, which is struggling with a huge inflow of refugees.

Steinmeier told Heilbronner Stimme that he expected a full implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement which includes that "the EU actively supports Greece in addressing the refugee crisis."

Earlier this week, Steinmeier criticized the countries of the Balkan migration route for their decision to cope with refugee inflow by closing borders, which has resulted in a humanitarian emergency in Greece.

According to the German foreign minister, some 100,000 people would be trying to "survive" on the Greek-FYROM border if it were not for the Brussels-Ankara refugee deal.

In late March, Turkey and the European Union reached an agreement to put an end to the so-called Balkan route used by migrants to travel through Greece and Macedonia to wealthier EU states.

Under the deal, Turkey pledged to take back all illegal migrants who arrive in the European Union through its border and in their place send legal Syrian refugees to the bloc on a one-for-one basis.

Source: Sputnik

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Although the primary races for both parties are close to the finish line, the only remaining candidate to have formally engaged with the Greek American Community has been Hillary Clinton, according to greeknewsonline.com.

This engagement has come through three events. The first was a fundraising event in Northern California spearheaded by former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis. The second was a very successful January fundraiser organized in mid-January by prominent businessman Dennis Mehiel, attended by Hillary Clinton and many leading Greek Americans (Greek News, 1/17/2016). Finally, in March the campaign and Greek Americans for Hillary, headed by former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, invited the community onto a conference call. The conference call lasted for about 30 minutes and many Greek American leaders joined in the call with John Podesta (former White House Chief of staff and Hillary for America Chair), former nominee for President of the United States, Governor Mike Dukakis, and Ambassador Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis.

Eleni Tsakopoulos spoke warmly of the former First Lady and President Bill Clinton, who was the first sitting U.S. President to visit the Fanar the Primate of the Worlds Orthodoxy, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. Those of us who watched that happened really credit Secretary Clinton, Tsakopoulos said. In 2008 Ambassador Tsakopoulos was the chair for the Greek Americans for Clinton, an organization that raised one million dollars for Hillarys campaign. Most of all we advocated for the person we thought to best serve our country and the world. As Secretary of State she did just that. Now we have a chance again together to support her 2016 campaign, Tsakopoulos said.

John Podesta, Chair of Hillary for America and a Greek American, told participants that as a First Lady and as a Senator and a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton really demonstrated the unique bond that the United States has with Greece. She has always thought it was extremely important and she worked hard for it. Podesta stressed that she is the only person that has the knowledge, the depth, the values and the experience, to be able to handle foreign policy, keep America safe and deal with crises around the world. He commended Hillary Clintons care about American families, saying that the centerpiece of her campaign it to raise wages for people in order to live dissent lives. She has emphasized that in order for every kid to succeed you have to have families succeed. To give people a change by tearing down the barriers that holding them back, by building a fairer economy, by building a fairer society.

Recalling President Clintons own words, he said that Hillary has been an agent of change over her entire career. Podesta was confident that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and asked the participants to mobilize their friends and their communities. We need your efforts, we need you to get out and be leaders in your communities, to talk to your friends and neighbors, he said.

Long and strong effort

Governor Michael Dukakis described the campaign as a long and strong effort, expressing confidence that with the help of all of you Hillary is going to be the nominee. I am particularly concerned about who the next President is going to be in relation to Greece itself, as it struggles to get out of this very serious economic situation exacerbated by the insistence of part of the EU that adapts austerity policies that each one of us know they dont get you out the depression.

Michael Dukakis said a number of Greek Americans including himself are working with the White House and they have gotten very positive response. We need a president who understands Greece, loves Greece, supports Greece and while recognizing that Greece itself has to do some things to turn itself around, these kinds of policies make no sense. And that the United States can and must play a major role in helping Greece and the Greek people to get back on track and to build a strong future for themselves and their kids and grandkids. He added that Hillary Clinton is this kind of person. I dont have the slightest idea what the Republican candidates would do under the circumstances. Thats why it is so important for Greeces future and our future as Greek Americans, that we have someone at the White House to continue the work the President and the Vice President  who is deeply involved  are doing. Making sure that Greece has a very strong friend in the United States and we are all going to do all we can so Greece come back, Dukakis said, thanking at the same time the Greek Americans for everything they have done for him in his 1988 presidential campaign, and asking them to do the same for Hillary.

During Questions and Answers Endy Zemenides, Executive Director of HALC, thanked Hillary for America for being the only campaign reaching to the Greek American Community. Quoting Podestas line that Hillary is an agent for change, he pointed out that we need is a change in some policies on the Hellenic Issues and especially Cyprus. He mentioned the effort by Turkey to keep the world hostage regarding the refugee issue and the pressure that was put at that time on Cyprus to open chapters of the Turkey-EU accession talks.

John Podesta responded by saying that Hillary Clinton has believed for a long time that a Cyprus stalemate helps no one and that first of all a Cyprus settlement should be made a priority. You need to be tough and talk straight to people you know you need to do business with. I followed what is going on in Turkey and I think that the only way to be successful with Erdogan is to be tough with him. Thats the kind of a guy he is. Ultimately we need Turkey to in the fight against extremism in Syria, but that doesnt mean that we should give them concessions that they are not in the interest of the region and of the United States. The same is true for the question surrounding the refugee crisis. So, making it a priority, pushing for a resolution and being tough with Erdogan are the keys.

Eleni Tsakopoulos added that Europeans must work with Turkey on the refugee crisis. Turkey is NATO ally and they have a stake as well. They have 3 million refugees from Syria and they are taking care of them for five years. Tsakopoulos said that the preliminary agreement in the EU-Turkey summit has a lot of problems and it was not clear if they would be able to finalize it. But, one way or another, this is a shared problem that they do have to try to find a solution by working with them. Tsakopoulos agreed that when you are negotiating with Erdogan you have to come from a position of strength and praised the role of NATO in the Aegean. On Cyprus, Ambassador Tsakopoulos reminded that President Clinton was the one who laid the ground work for the accession of Cyprus to the EU. Secretary Clinton was all along a policy advocate for Cyprus. She knows the issue for more than two decades, she was very supportive of a Cyprus solution and she recognizes that Greece is part of Europe and an important strategic ally of the Unites States. She also has a personal relationship with its leaders and the Greek American Community. Things that will be very beneficial to all of us who believe in a strong and secure Greece and a liberated Cyprus.

Campaign position

After the conference call, the Clinton campaign followed up with The Greek News to provide even more complete responses to the issues addressed on the call. Clinton foreign policy advisor Julianne Smith answered questions on Cyprus and the Aegean.

With regards to Cyprus, Greek News asked what Podestas response about being tough with Erdogan would mean in terms of actual policy of a President Clinton on Cyprus. The campaign responded that Clinton was committed to solving the Cyprus problem because it would have significant ramifications not only for your immediate neighborhood but for a wide range of related issues more broadly. (One could think of a potential breakthrough on EU-NATO cooperation for example.) Although the present Administration has never pushed Turkey for tangible concessions  or even contributions  on Cyprus negotiations, the campaign stated that Clinton fully recognizes that Turkey has a very important role to play in helping to bring about a lasting solution, and she intends to press Ankara to engage constructively throughout the process. With Erdogan, she will be clear that solving Cyprus is a top priority and should be for Turkey as well.

During the conference call, Ted Diamantis of HALC raised the issue of Turkeys provocative overflights in the Aegean, and its attempts to set up gray zones in the Aegean. Greek News asked Ms. Smith how a President Clinton would deal with this. She noted that Clinton knows how difficult this issue has been for Greece and Turkey and that the refugee issue is bringing new pressure to resolve it and that Greece and Turkey have made substantial progress over the years to ease tension in the Aegean through increased bilateral cooperation. She noted that a President Clinton would privately and publicly discourage provocations, including overflights of Greek territory, that will undermine any chance for progress.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Bahrain's retail sector remained the standout performer with rents stable in all of Manamas main markets during the first quarter of 2016, according to the latest research from international real estate consultancy Cluttons.



The retail units at Al Seef continue to command the highest rents at BD12.50 ($32.8) sq m, representing a four per cent increase over the 12 months from the first quarter of 2015, stated Cluttons Bahrain Spring 2016 Property Market Outlook Report.



Following closely behind Al Seef is Amwaj Islands - which has seen a rental increase of 33 per cent since Q1 2015 - to stand at BD12 sq m ($31.5) in Q1 2016. However, the report indicates that the overall picture of stable rents suggests that the market may be approaching a supply-demand equilibrium, with the level of new entrants tailing off, it said.



Harry Goodson-Wickes, the head of Cluttons Bahrain, said: "We continue to see demand for retail across Bahrain with budgets remaining stable around the BD12 sq m mark. However, if supply continues to edge ahead of demand, headline rents may fall."



"Rents will also be impacted by the general economic slowdown that the kingdom is facing and it will likely cause increased downward pressure as demand stabilises this year," he added.



Cluttons report shows that existing food and beverage (F&B) operators are amongst the most active groups in the retail market at present. The Mesk Restaurant Complex (MRC) in Adliya for instance, has been registering strong interest from F&B operators looking to take up space.



"The kingdoms retail sector is still perceived as being a key retail and hospitality hub for Saudi Arabia, with the weekend tourist traffic being a particularly big draw for domestic and international retailers," remarked Goodson-Wickes.



"In addition, the government is focusing on its strategy to attract high-end tourists, which is driving an upturn in the number of five star hotels. However, we believe the family market remains vastly underserved, but there are signs to suggest that developers are now seeking to target this segment," he stated.



Elsewhere in the commercial market, Cluttons data shows that office rents have remained unchanged between Q4 2015 and the first quarter of 2016, with the Bahrain Financial Harbour and Bahrain World Trade Centre retaining the top spots as the most expensive buildings for occupiers.



Over the past 12 months, however, rents for fitted-out office space in Al Seef have risen from BD5.5 sq m to BD6 sq m , whilst shell-and-core space in the same area has climbed by BD0.50 sq m to BD5.50 sq m over the same time period.



The vast majority of occupier activity in Al Seef is being driven by a small amount of relocation activity within Manama, rather than by new entrants.



While cost saving is the main driver behind the relocation of many businesses, some are taking advantage of the record low rates and using the weakness in the market to upgrade to more modern facilities.



Faisal Durrani, Cluttons head of research, said: "There is no doubt that the office market in Bahrain is in a very challenging position. However, we see a significant opportunity for landlords to improve facilities for occupiers and focus on core pull factors such as high quality property management and adequate parking, both of which feature at the top of occupiers wish lists."



"Also, where possible, the provision of smaller fitted office suites is likely to be well received by the market as this segment of the market continues to perform well and is reflective of the growing number of enquiries we are noting of this type," he stated.



In the residential sector, the first quarter of 2016 marks the second consecutive quarter of rental stagnation. As a result, the annual rate of change decreased from 5.2 per cent at the end of last year to 4.4 per cent, at the end of Q1 2016. In Q1 2016, apartments on Amwaj Islands saw no change in rents, equating to an annual change of -2.3 per cent, which translates into a little over BD700 per month, on average.



Durrani continued: "While apartment and villa rents have remained stable thus far in 2016, once the regular season of tenancy renewals commences in April, it is likely that there will be an increased amount of rent negotiations at renewal as tenants move to rein in costs. In particular, the removal of utility subsides remains a complex issue, with little clarity on whether the increased cost should be borne by tenants or landlords."



"A set monthly allowance is something being considered by some landlords, rather than utilities being all-inclusive. This should, in some instances, help to soften the squeeze on tenants finances, while also curbing the risk of any sudden shocks to an increasingly fragile market," he added.



On the 2016 outlook, Durrani said: "It is our view that average rent declines of up to five per cent are likely this year, with some areas expected to remain stable. Our research shows that where landlords offer high quality property management and maintenance services, tenants are still willing to pay a premium and this is a trend that is unlikely to reverse."



"For instance, at the 110-unit Cebarco Towers, which offers luxury accommodation and the all two-bedroom scheme, Segaya Views, which caters to middle income families, we have seen strong demand since the schemes were brought to market," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Housing Services has announced the acquisition of AM Modular, Malaysia, a leading designer and manufacturer of prefabricated modular buildings.



The acquisition is Red Sea Housing Services first of its kind in Asia, and marks a significant expansion in the geographic footprint of the companys operations.



Under the terms of the agreement, the complete acquisition is valued at SR26.2 million ($7 million), which includes a down payment of SR11.2 million ($3 million) to be made this year. The remaining SR15 million ($4 million) will be made over the next three-year period for a total of 90 per cent of AM Modulars shares.



Don B Sumner, acting CEO of Red Sea Housing Services, commented on the acquisition: Our acquisition today of AM Modular serves as a catalyst for Red Sea Housing Services expansion in the Southeast Asian market. It also fits perfectly into our innovation strategy, thanks to the unconventional construction technology that AM Modular brings to the table. This unique technology will enable Red Sea Housing to create high quality structures up to 12 floors high, with rapid turnaround times and using less manpower.



This is an excellent opportunity for us to continue driving the Red Sea Housing growth strategy along with our new colleagues at AM Modular, while maintaining our technological superiority delivering increased value to our customers and shareholders with this acquisition, Summer added.



Rick Singh, managing director and CEO of AM Modular, explained the importance of the acquisition for AM Modular. This acquisition will allow the exponential growth of Red Sea in the Australasian region. Our strong presence in Malaysia will enable faster delivery to all Red Sea clients and offer a greater range of product, he said.



Red Sea Housing Services expects its 2016 revenues to increase by over SR100 million ($26.67 million) following this acquisition. The deal will be financed through existing facilities and internal cash flow. The acquisition will be made by the companys subsidiary based in Dubai, UAE.  TradeArabia News Service
MenaITech, a Jordanian company specialised in the development and provisioning of human capital information systems, said it has signed a partnership and sponsorship agreement with the Jordan Air Ambulance Centre (JAAC).



The centre was launched as part of a royal initiative to provide specialised air medical evacuation services to transport persons with medical and trauma emergencies from remote areas to hospitals and medical centres in Amman.



Under the deal, MenaITech will cover the cost for transporting some underprivileged patients from remote areas and cities to advanced hospitals in Amman, said its CEO Bashar Hawamdeh after signing the agreement with JAAC chief executive Rami Adwan.



The move is aimed at supporting the air ambulance unit's activities and falls in line with MenaITech corporate social responsibility, remarked Hawamdeh.



Lauding MenaITech for its support, Adwan said direct or indirect support to the centre contributes to saving lives of patients and injured persons.



Adwan further added that Jordan's King Abdullah had provided the centre with two helicopters equipped with state-of-the-art intensive medical care facilities capable of providing ICU standard medical care and of transferring cases to hospitals in the shortest possible time, an advantage that would enforce the Jordanian health sectors competitiveness.



MenaITech said it has developed special human resources management systems that include various systems which are available to companies either directly or through a special cloud computing platform.



These products include the human resources information management system, the payroll and personnel solution, the employee and manager self-service solution.-TradeArabia News Service
Oman-based Dhofar Steel has announced plans to establish a steel rolling mill in Sohar Industrial Estate with raw material sourced from Iran, said a report.



The multi-million rial investment will see an existing billet manufacturing plant at Sohar upgraded and expanded into a major rolling mill with its output of reinforced steel bars (rebars) targeted primarily at regional markets, Salim Al Mashekhi, group chairman, was quoted as saying in an Oman Daily Observer report.



Al Mashekhi said that the launch of a rolling mill will help position the growth of a strong and well-respected Omani brand in the domestic and regional markets.



He added that the Dhofar Steel was launched around two years previously with the acquisition of a small steel billet manufacturing plant in Sohar. During this period, the company has been testing the waters, and is now ready to upgrade into a modern rolling mill.



Al Mashekhi noted that the company is in discussion with its strategic partners in Iran for raw materials, and Turkey for equipment, to achieve its objectives.



He further added that the company envisages a rebar manufacturing capacity of 10,000-15,000 metric tonnes per month, slated for commissioning and launch within the next six to eight months.



The launch of a new rolling mill will also be seen to help strengthen domestic production capacity of a commodity that is billed as strategically vital to the nations ongoing modernisation and economic development, added the report.
A delegation from Dubai Airport Freezone Authority (Dafza) recently met with top Malaysian officials to discuss investment opportunities for the freezone, while also highlighting lucrative trade possibilities for the halal products sector.



Dr Mohammed Al Zarooni, director general of Dafza met with Dato' Sri Mustapa Mohamed, Malaysias Minister of Trade and Industry, at the ministrys headquarters, said a statement from Dafza.



Both parties discussed ways to develop and strengthen economic and trade ties between Malaysia and the freezone, and also spoke about Dafzas exceptional investment advantages for foreign companies, including Malaysian entrepreneurs and companies in all sectors of business, it added.



Dr Al Zarooni explained that this meeting demonstrates the pivotal role played by Dafza in furthering efforts to drive in economic development in Dubai and the UAE, particularly in the halal industry, which is one of the largest sectors of the Islamic economy in terms of vibrancy and investment, it said.



The delegation focused on improving partnerships and streamlining services for the halal trade. They also gained valuable insights on Malaysia and other countries business environments and its emergence as the worlds leading halal hub through their active participation in the 2016 World Halal Conference (WHC) and the 13th Malaysia International Halal Showcase (MIHAS).



The two events are vital platforms to review valuable insights about the benefits of the business environment in Malaysia, which is a leader in the halal trade, as well as of the business environment in some other countries. Dafza also had a visit to Malaysias Halal Parks, a community of halal-dedicated manufacturing and service businesses.



Dafza recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Malaysias Halal Industry Development Corp (HDC) to achieve mutually beneficial business objectives. They share a common vision in promoting business and investment opportunities within the halal industries between the UAE and Malaysia, said the statement.



Dr Al Zarooni said: Dafza is keen on building a strong relationship with the Malaysian business and investment community, stressing on the commitment to provide the necessary facilities to ensure the optimum utilisation of the emerging opportunities in Dubai, which has succeeded in building a reputation as a global gateway to reach the Middle East marketwhich is considered a main market for the world halal products.



The business mission had a major positive impact on reviewing the most successful experiences and best practices related to halal industries and its aspirations to study the future of this vital sector. This will serve our efforts to attract the pioneers of Halal products and services industry to Dafza and support Dubai's transformation into being the capital of global Islamic economy, he said.



We had the opportunity during our bilateral meetings with decision-makers and senior government figures, to get acquainted with the trade and economic strategies adopted in Malaysia in the Halal industry, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority (TCA Abu Dhabi) will be joined by key attractions and hotels from the emirate at the World Travel Market Africa 2016 (WTM Africa) this month to capitalise on the surging growth in visitor numbers from the country into the UAE capital.



Since TCA Abu Dhabi opened an office in Johannesburg, South Africa last year to help promote the emirate as a leisure and business destination, tourist arrivals into Abu Dhabi have increased by 50 per cent.



Joining the authoritys delegation between April 6 and 8 in Cape Town, South Africa will be Anantara Hotels, Resorts & Spas, Abu Dhabi; Shangri-La Hotel Qaryat Al Beri Abu Dhabi; Orient Tours and the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Center.



We witnessed highly impressive growth of 42 per cent year-on-year in the number of South African guest arrivals into Abu Dhabi to reach 26,147 in 2015 and we want to build on this momentum and increase our visibility to a huge potential market, said Mubarak Al Nuaimi, director promotions and overseas offices, TCA Abu Dhabi.



The number of guest nights they spent in our 167 hotels and hotel apartments also increased by 27 per cent to more than 91,000 nights. We have excellent air connectivity with our national airline Etihad Airways offering daily flights into Abu Dhabi from Johannesburg and can offer an excellent stop-off option en route to Asia and Australia, he added.



Maya Hoteit, director of sales at Shangri-La Hotel Qaryat Al Beri Abu Dhabi, said: We plan to meet up with our current partners in South Africa and other African countries while at the travel fair and also meet up with prospective new partners. Africa is a growing market for Abu Dhabi and an important one for us to help us achieve our target of 20 per cent growth on 2015.



We will be showcasing our property, which is located on a private beach overlooking the strait that separates Abu Dhabi Island from the mainland and which features 213 luxurious rooms and suites.



Anantara Hotels, Resort and Spas, Abu Dhabi will be appearing at WTM Africa for the first time to increase awareness of the hotel brand while exploring new markets and promoting their five-star Eastern Mangroves property in Abu Dhabi and the luxurious Qasr Al Sarab Desert Resort situated in Abu Dhabis Empty Quarter.



Also joining the delegation will be Orient Tours which has branch offices in the UAE and Oman. The company offers ground handling services including meet-and-greet at the airport, excursions, city tours, desert trips, overland tours between Dubai and Muscat, tailor-made round-trips and study-trips, exploring sea safaris, individual fly & drive programmes and cruise ship handling.



The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Center will also be joining the TCA Abu Dhabi pavilion in South Africa.



Yousif Al Obaidli, director general of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque Center, said: Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Center aims to build awareness about the services that the mosque provides to tourists and to find new opportunities to develop partnerships with similar associations in Europe and Africa for history and art exhibitions. It also aims to be a global pioneer in highlighting Islamic culture and enhancing cross-cultural communication. - TradeArabia News Service
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 2

Dental surgeons from the tricity today condemned the fatal attack on Dr Pankaj Narang, a dental practitioner, at his residence in West Delhi on March 23.

The surgeons met under the aegis of the Indian Dental Association, Chandigarh state branch, at Oral Health Sciences Centre, PGI, and extended their condolences to Dr Narangs family.

The association condemned the act.

Prof K Gauba, president of the IDA, Chandigarh state branch, said dental professionals of the country had faith in the judiciary and hope the culprits would not be spared and the justice would be delivered.

The members of the association observed a two-minute silence to pay homage to the departed soul.
Tribune News Service

Rohtak, April 3

The Rohtak Police on Sunday arrested a teacher who allegedly leaked the All-India Pre-medical Test (AIPMT)-2015 paper from an exam centre where he was on duty.

The teacher works at a private school in Rohtak, and was arrested from a hotel in Ambala.

The arrest was made after prolonged interrogation of paper-leak mastermind Roop Singh Dangi, who was arrested earlier this week.

After the Rohtak range police unearthed the hi-tech nationwide racket, the Supreme Court had cancelled the AIPMT conducted in May, 2015, and a fresh exam was conducted thereafter.

An SIT was constituted and nearly 30 persons had been arrested in connection with the case while the prime suspect, Dangi, had been dodging the police for several months.

Dangi, who had been declared a proclaimed offender and carried a reward of Rs 1 lakh, was arrested from Jakhoda Road near the Bahadurgarh bypass on March 31.

The AIPMT-2015 was conducted across the country on May 3. On that day, the Rohtak range police arrested four persons, including two dental surgeons and an MBBS student. An FIR was registered in this regard.
Samrala, April 2

The Samrala police claimed to have arrested a person and recovered 12 cases of country-made liquor from his possession.

The accused has been identified as Harpreet Singh of Samrala. As per the information, a police party of Samrala, on secret information, raided a house on Bondal Road. During the search of the house, the police party recovered 12 cases of liquor comprising 72 bottles of country-made liquor Marka Malwa No. 1 following which they arrested Harpreet Singh.

Investigating Officer Jaswinder Singh, ASI, said the accused had stored the liquor in his house after the rates got slashed on March 31. The ASI added that the accused was arrested under the Excise Act and was later released on bail after he furnished the required documents. OC
Riyadh, April 3

India and Saudi Arabia today decided to ramp up their counter-terrorism cooperation as they asked all states to dismantle terror infrastructures where they happen to exist and reject the use of terrorism against other countries, seen as an oblique reference to Pakistan.

The assertion was made by the two countries after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and delegation-level parleys between the two sides following which five agreements were signed.

The two countries also called on states to cut off any kind of support and financing to terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice.

Read: GST will be reality soon; retro tax thing of past: Modi in Riyadh



The pacts signed included one on cooperation in the exchange of intelligence related to money laundering, terror financing and related crimes and another relating to recruitment of Indian workers in Saudi Arabia, home to around three million Indian workers.

In the talks, the Indian side indicated to Saudis that India is facing attacks from terror infrastructure in Pakistan as both sides decided to enhance their counter-terrorism cooperation.

The two sides deliberated on enhancing trade and investment ties, particularly in energy and infrastructure sectors.

Saudi Arabia is a close ally of Pakistan and its strong denouncement of terror is seen as very significant.

An official quoted Prime Minister Modi as saying that the outcome of the talks had turned a "new leaf" in bilateral ties.

A joint statement issued after the talks between Modi and King Salman, both at restricted format and delegation level, said the two leaders rejected totally any attempt to link terrorism to any particular race, religion or culture.

They called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries; dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist and to cut off any kind of support and financing to the terrorists operating and perpetrating terrorism from their territories against other states; and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice," the statement said.

"The two leaders agreed to further strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism, both at the bilateral level and within the multilateral system of the UN. The two leaders called upon the international community to strengthen multilateral regimes to effectively address the challenges posed by terrorism," it said.

The Indian side was briefed on Saudi Arabia's initiative in bringing together the Islamic Alliance against terrorism.

Amar Sinha, Secretary, Economic Relations, in the External Affairs Ministry, said both sides "looked at individuals" involved in terror activities as well as financing, indicating that Riyadh was really serious in dealing with the menace.

Modi and the King also emphasised on the need to further cement bilateral strategic engagement, including in the areas of security and defence cooperation.

They agreed to intensify bilateral defence cooperation, conduct of joint military exercises, exchange of visits of ships and aircraft and supply of arms and ammunition and their joint development.

Acknowledging the ongoing "positive transformation" of the economies of India and Saudi Arabia, the two leaders also agreed to expand trade and investment ties to drive the strategic engagement forward.

Another pact was signed for Investment Promotion Cooperation between Invest India and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) as the two sides were keen on deeper trade and economic ties.

Two other pacts were also signed, one on technical cooperation programme between the Bureau of Standards of both countries and another on cooperation in the field of handicrafts.

Earlier, Modi was accorded a warm ceremonial welcome as the entire Saudi cabinet including the Crown Prince and the Deputy Crown Prince were present at the Royal Court.

The King also hosted a lunch for the Prime Minister where a lavish spread was laid.

Modi conferred highest Saudi civilian honour

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was conferred Saudi Arabia's highest civilian honour, the King Abdulaziz Sash, on Sunday, the second and final day of his visit to the Gulf kingdom.

"In a special gesture, PM @narendramodi was conferred Saudi Arabia's highest civilian honour, the King Abdulaziz Sash," external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

The honour is named after founder of the modern Saudi state, Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Among other notable recipients of this honour are US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Indonesian President Joko Widodo.  PTI/IANS
Islamabad, April 3

Iran is investigating whether an alleged Indian 'spy' arrested last month in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan province crossed the border illegally or was picked up from its soil, according to a media report here.

"Iranian authorities have directly and indirectly conveyed to Pakistan that they were investigating whether or not Kulbhushan Yadav crossed into Pakistan illegally," The Express Tribune reported, citing top government sources.

Yadav, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was a serving Indian Navy officer.

India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.

India, which has already claimed Yadav was picked up from the Iranian soil, is putting pressure on the Islamic Republic to register a case against Pakistani agencies, the paper said.

India is also seeking to enlist support of the US, the UK and France to convince Iran to go by its claim that Yadav was kidnapped from the Iranian soil, it said, quoting sources.

Pakistan Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif also took up the matter with Iranian President Hassan Rowhani during the latter's recent visit to Islamabad, the report said.

Iran has asked for the exact timing of Yadav's arrest  which was readily provided, according to sources.

The Islamic Republic suspected Yadav had been missing for a few months  and not since March 3 when Pakistan claimed he was arrested, the paper added.  PTI
New Delhi, April 3

India has secured the release of four Indians arrested in Syria for entering the war-torn nation without valid travel documents.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj welcomed the freed Indians home and expressed gratitude to the Syrian government for their release. Welcome home Arun Kumar Saini, Sarvjit Singh, Kuldeep Singh and Joga Singh, the Minister wrote on the micro-blogging site, adding that she appreciated the officers who facilitated their journey from Syria to India.

The Syrian government arrested the four Indians on the suspicion of joining the Islamic State terror group after crossing over from Jordan to Syria.

However, the Indian government in February denied that the arrested Indians wanted to join the Islamist group that rules large parts in Syria and Iraq.

The government in reply to a Rajya Sabha question said the four travelled to Syria without a valid visa and were arrested as illegal immigrants. They had gone to Jordan and entered Syria on their way to Lebanon for employment, the government said.  IANS
Dhaka: Bangladesh's beleaguered former prime minister Khaleda Zia will surrender before a court here on Tuesday and seek bail in a case against her for instigating a deadly petrol bomb attack on a bus during an anti-government protest last year, her lawyer said. The development came four days after an arrest warrant was issued against the 70-year-old chairperson of the main opposition. PTI

Rains kill 57 in northwest Pakistan

Peshawar: At least 57 people were killed and 27 injured after heavy rain across northwest Pakistan caused the roofs of dozens of homes to collapse, officials said pn Sunday. The deaths were reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province during a downpour that began last night, a provincial disaster management agency spokesman said. AFP

1st passenger flight leaves Brussels since attacks

Brussels: A Brussels Airlines plane heading to the Portuguese city of Faro took off from Brussels Airport on Sunday, the first passenger flight to leave the airport since suicide bombings on March 22 ripped through its check-in counters. Security at the airport was tight with completely new check-in procedures for passengers. AP
London, April 3

Britain on Sunday changed its procurement rules to encourage public sector bodies to use British steel products as part of efforts to revive the country's ailing steel industry and save thousands of jobs after India's Tata Steel decided to sell its loss-making businesses in the UK.

Under the new decision, public sector bodies are to be encouraged to buy British steel for construction projects in an effort to help save the industry.

Meanwhile, UK-based Indian steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta has come to the rescue of the troubled Tata Steel by opening discussions with owners of the steel giant to acquire its plants at Port Talbot, Britain's largest employing some 4,000 people.

The 44-year-old founder of steel, commodities and property group Liberty House, who has already saved a number of UK plants from closure, has said he is ready to discuss with the British government to rescue the plants where thousands of jobs are at stake.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said he was determined to ensure a sustainable future for the British steel industry and find a solution that supports workers.

"By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects, we are backing the future of UK steel  opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," the Pakistani-origin minister said.

The unions said the government's decision was "a small step in the right direction" but the measure should have been in place already.

Gupta, who is best known in Wales for buying the former Alphasteel works in Newport in 2013 and re-opening production there last autumn, has recently bought Tata's two rolling mills at Clydebridge and Dalzell in Scotland, facilitated by a temporary 'nationalisation' by the Scottish Government.

Tata Steel stated yesterday that although there was "no fixed timeline" for the sale process, "it needs to be implemented urgently as there are severe funding requirements affecting the UK operations.

Gupta said: "I haven't made a proposition that I want to buy all of (Tata Steel UK) because that's too big an undertaking to even put on the table at the stage. If the company, its people, its workers and the Government would be willing to consider my suggestions then I'm willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that."

Tata Steel UK is losing more than 1 million pounds a day and on Tuesday, the firm's parent company announced it would try to sell all or parts of its operations around the country.  PTI
If Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump fails to collect the 1,237 primary delegates necessary to essentially assure his nomination at this summers convention, it could create a scenario where multiple candidates compete for available delegates, including some delegates from Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Republican Party leaders said they aim to ensure the delegation sent to the Republican National Convention in July is representative of the states primary election results from last month.

We want to be as open and transparent as possible and make sure that the votes that Oklahomans cast (on March 1) matter, said Jake Parsons, director of operations for the state party.

Oklahoma delegates are required by law to support their assigned candidate, unless that candidate does not appear on the ballot, which could make some Oklahoma delegates unbound, creating complicated scenarios at the convention.
OKLAHOMA CITY  People arrested for felony crimes would have their DNA collected under a measure moving through the Legislature.

The measure passed the Senate Public Safety Committee last week by a vote of 7-1. It heads to the Senate Appropriations Committee for consideration. If approved, it would go to the Senate floor.

The authors of the measure, House Bill 2275, are Rep. Lee Denney, R-Cushing, and Sen. Clark Jolley, R-Edmond.

Denney said it is the fourth time she has carried the measure.

Meeting with families and victims of unsolved crimes prompted her to run the bill. She said the state ought to be using the technology to solve crimes.

I think solving these crimes is for the greater good of Oklahoma citizens, so people are not out there continuing to perpetrate crimes against our citizens, Denney said.

In addition, it could help solve cold cases, giving victims and their families some closure, Denney said.

Not only does DNA convict, it also exonerates, Denney said.

Jolley said he voted against the measure in the past, but has reconsidered his position and is supporting it.

He said he had been concerned about privacy, but those worries were eased by a U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming the taking of DNA upon arrest.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court in King v. Maryland ruled that privacy was not offended by the minor intrusion of a cheek swab.

The court ruled that taking a DNA sample of a person who is arrested is a reasonable search that can be considered part of the routine booking procedure.

The Oklahoma measure allows for the talking of saliva or blood.

If a person is arrested and not charged or goes to trial and is found innocent, the sample would be destroyed, Jolley said.

It is as easy as pressing the delete key, Jolley said.

Sen. Corey Brooks, R-Washington, debated for the proposal when it was before the Senate Public Safety Committee.

It is a more secure form of fingerprints, he said. This isnt too terribly crazy or outside the box. This is being more specific with those out there breaking the law.

The head of the ACLU of Oklahoma does not like the measure.

Ryan Kiesel, executive director and a former member of the Oklahoma House, said bills like this give law enforcement and the government a license to conduct a fishing expedition.

Kiesel said supporters of such measures contend that casting a wide net will catch criminals and solve crimes that may otherwise go unprosecuted, but it upsets a delicate balance.

We cant be entirely safe or entirely free at the same time, he said. There has to be a balance. We think bills like this upset that balance.

In February, the measure failed the House by a vote of 38-56, but Denney held the bill on a motion to reconsider the vote. It then passed the House by a vote of 52-36.

Rep. Eric Proctor, D-Tulsa, voted against the measure.

If someone is guilty, I have no issue with the DNA. But if someone is arrested, in this country you are still innocent until proven guilty, Proctor said. Even though the author says DNA can be expunged, in reality that is not the case. Once it is in the system, it is in the system.
Week ahead: The Senate returns after two weeks off and will take up a trade bill. The House remains recessed until next week.

Dots and dashes: Booker T. Washington senior Nathan Levit was one of the Oklahomans participating in the U.S. Senate Youth Program last month. Joining Levit in Washington, D.C., was Matthew Welborn of Norman. ... Marshall County Water Corporation General Manager Robert Moore is among those scheduled to testify Thursday to a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on the federal role in local water and wastewater infrastructure.
Watching a family receive the keys to a new house purchased through Habitat for Humanity still fills John Watts with the same feeling.

It brings you to tears when it happens, he said. When you hand them the keys, thats when your heart starts beating.

During the years, Watts has had a hand in more than 250 houses, either working on the job site, building the cabinets or supervising volunteers.

Watts has spent more than 20 years working with Tulsa Habitat for Humanity. He began has a volunteer before spending a couple of years as the organizations general superintendent. He then went back to the volunteer workforce as a member of the Tuesday Morning Miracle Workers.

My outlook on life is to help whoever needs helping, Watts said. I like to see people smile. If people are in trouble, I like to try and get them out of trouble if I can.

Watts, a retired mechanical contractor, started with the agency when he donated some heating and air-conditioning units to Habitat.

He recently turned 90 and has no plans of ending his volunteer service with the organization any time soon.

Ill keep on doing this as long as Im living, Im sure, he said.

Watts, who admits to getting bored if hes just sitting around, said he likes using his talents to help people better their lives and give their children a better chance.

With the cost of renting an apartment, these people cant afford to do anything else, he said. Ive seen them come and build and earn a Habitat house, and they have become very productive people.

He remembers one woman, a single mother with four kids, who became the owner of a five-bedroom home in Broken Arrow.

I saw her several years later, and by buying that house she was able to save and put her daughters through college, Watts said. Its nice to know that we were able to help make that difference in her life.

Larry Vitt, director of properties and real estate, said Watts has been an inspiration over the years.

Hes a ground-level guy. He was here at the beginning helping get this place up and running, he said.
Most mornings, the Tulsa World reports the continuing failure of the Legislature to fund government agencies. Today, its the stripping of millions of dollars from mental health and drug abuse programs.

A recent article said that Oklahoma has the second highest rate in the nation of adults with serious mental illness. But we compensate by being among the states that spend the least per capita on mental health. Any correlation between the two must either be a coincidence or a failure of empathy at the Capitol.

Previous reports detailed significant cuts to education, public safety and reimbursements to health-care providers, which has contributed to the closing of a few rural hospitals. Though unable to solve this crisis, the Legislature could still help alleviate the pain caused by the lost revenue.

Legislators work only a few months each year, but are paid and receive benefits all year. When not in session, legislators could work in schools, hospitals and other public places to help defray the costs of operation. They could help trash collectors, sewer plant operators and road crews, who would benefit greatly from both the free labor and the philosophic instruction in the efficacy of tax cuts and trickle down economics.

Its an election year. Ask your legislators how efficient they are with a mop and broom, and how they feel about raising taxes to pay for state government.

Letters to the editor are encouraged. Send letters to letters@tulsaworld.com.
Our esteemed Oklahoma legislators have come up with a brilliant solution to the teacher shortage problem: Simply quit requiring a license to teach (House Bill 1187).

In the same way, we could solve the doctor shortage by eliminating required doctor certification. All a doctor knows can be Googled on the Internet. Druggists do not need to be licensed. Most anyone can count pills. And lawyers do not need to be licensed. Anyone can read a law book and become a practicing lawyer as Abraham Lincoln did.

As for teachers molding the minds of young children: When the kids grow up, I am sure they will be as sharp as our astute legislators.

All of these brilliant incumbent Oklahoma legislators need to be voted out so that they can go home an enjoy the fruits of all their labor in passing HB 1187.

Letters to the editor are encouraged. Send letters to letters@tulsaworld.com.
Why has Bob Dylans archive come to Tulsa? Its a good question. Dylan has a few local connections, but you have to squint pretty hard to see them. He collaborated with Leon Russell a handful of times, and his early folk songs were published in the magazine Broadside by Sis Cunningham, who grew up in Oklahoma before moving to New York. He knew and loved Woody Guthrie, but only met him in a New Jersey hospital. Dylans tours still stop regularly in Tulsa, and he mentions the state in a few lyrics.

Still, all this hardly seems reason enough to declare the city the new capital of Dylans America.

The best answer to the question why Tulsa might be why not? The treasures held in these archives connect with and feed the ever-evolving arts and humanities culture that helps define this city.

The University of Tulsas McFarlin Library holds the papers of some of the 20th centurys greatest writers, and TU is known throughout the world as the center of James Joyce studies. Gilcrease Museum and the Helmerich Center for American Research contain dazzling riches that are just now being unlocked. Philbrook Museum, the Woody Guthrie Center, and the citys growing number of art galleries rub shoulders in the vibrant Brady Arts District with Cains Ballroom, AHHA, the Brady Theater, and the nascent OK Pops Museum.

So Dylans notebooks and recordings, his diaries and photographs, his lyrics and letters arrive in a city now super-charged by the arts. These materials, in fact, arguably lodge him just where he belongs: somewhere between James Joyce and Woody Guthrie, between modern poetry and popular music.

Most important, Dylans works now reside somewhere between the small towns of northern Minnesota where he was born and the Deep South where the blues music he reinvented first took shape.

Tulsa always has been a crossroads, and crossroads are magical places where people meet, mix and change. One of the things that most plainly singles out Dylans genius is his wildly creative embrace of change, his endless insistence on reinvention. After penning some of the greatest modern folk songs, he became a rock star; and when rock hit its crest in 1968, he was at home in a basement, inventing roots music. He is, in fact, our modern Hermes  a god of the roads, a rolling stone, always in motion, always changing, always inventing.

Here in Tulsa, his music, his art and his genius will remain at the crossroads of American creativity, intersecting not only with voices and sounds from the past, but with those from the future who will take up the challenges his work still poses to us all.

Sean Latham, Ph.D., is director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities and editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. An English professor at the University of Tulsa, he taught a course this fall on Bob Dylan. He is also a member of the Tulsa World Community Advisory Board. Opinion pieces by board members appear in this space each week.
It's Divali time so at TV6 over the next few days, we bring you some of the interesting aspe
There are two reports today that shed light on Nines interest in a merger with another media player.

Fairfax reports Nine advisers approached Fairfax Media in late January to explore what a $3.3 billion merger of the two media companies would resemble.

Fairfax, which has joint ownership of Stan with Nine, accepted the meeting as a courtesy. But according to a statement from Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood last year it has no interest in a merge.

So there can be no doubt: Fairfax Media is not interested in buying a stake of any size in NEC, he said.

Meanwhile The Australian reports CEO Hugh Marks recently briefed investors on a $2.2 billion merger with Southern Cross Media Group. He told potential investors in Hong Kong & Singapore there was a potential $90 million a year on offer from revenue and cost synergies.

But if Malcolm Turnbull proceeds with a double dissolution election for July 2, a media reform package, dropping the reach rule and 2 out of 3 rule, would be delayed.
Classic Sounds presenter Donnie Sutherland is interviewed this week on Studio 10. Sarah Harris also returns to the show on Monday.

Sarah Harris makes her full-time return to Studio 10 on Monday to share her experience of first-time motherhood. Her on-air family  Ita Buttrose, Jessica Rowe, Joe Hildebrand and Denise Drysdale  will all be on hand for a special welcome back to the show.

Also on Monday, former pop star and television music guru Donnie Sutherland talks exclusively to Studio 10 about his affairs, financial hardships and battle with throat cancer.

Tuesday and Wednesday feature a special two-part investigation into a 1966 UFO sighting in Westall, Victoria, in which over 200 witnesses were allegedly intimidated into silence by the Australian Department of Defence.

Fifty years later, Studio 10 has an exclusive photograph of a UFO hovering above Westall, verified by the CSIRO. Witnesses break their silence about what they saw and we explain how years of official research have allegedly been destroyed by the government.

On Thursday, creative genius Ben Elton joins the panel to share classic showbiz stories from his time working with some of the biggest names in television. And local soap star turned Hollywood leading lady, Melissa George, is live in the studio.

Sam Wood and Snezana Markoski captured the hearts of the country when their love story unfolded on The Bachelor Australia last year. Now engaged to be married, the happy couple stop by Studio 10 on Friday for their first television interview since Sams romantic proposal.

8:30am weekdays on TEN.
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SunEdison Inc., the fastest growing renewable energy developer in the US, is planning to file chapter 11 to seek bankruptcy protection in coming weeks. The news appears to be a dramatic one for a company whose market value has been estimated at $10 billion in July last year.

The solar energy company is in negotiations with two creditor groups to fund its operations during the bankruptcy processing. Creditors are rumored to take control of the company and its power projects' portfolio, reports The Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter as the source.

The Saint Louis based company has applied combination of a financial engineering and cheap debt in becoming the largest developer of renewable power plants in the US. However, investors have disfavored a proposed $1.9 billion takeover of residential-rooftop installer Vivint Solar Inc. and finally been terminated last month. Meanwhile historic low crude oil prices have led to a broad selloff for energy stocks and the Wall Street has raised concerns over its ability to continue financial acquisitions.
In the coming weeks, the solar energy company SunEdison Inc. is considering to file for Chapter 11. It is an ironic move for the company that once had a market value of almost $10 billion in July.

The company is about to file for bankruptcy and is already in discussion with two groups of creditors where it could acquire loans for financing during the process. Its stocks had declined in the past months and were included among the biggest financial meltdown. Its headquarters is situated about 20 miles outside St. Louis and used both financial engineering and inexpensive debt to accelerate as one of the country's renewable-power biggest developers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

SunEdison engaged on a debt-fueled obtainment spree which seemed to be manufacturing money excluding renewable energy. The solar energy company enticed some of the largest names in investing and hedge fund manager David Einhorn laid out his case for possessing the company at the Robin Hood Investment Conference where top hedge managers promote their best ideas behind closed doors.

SunEdison is being probed this week by the Securities and Exchange Commission believing that the company may have overstated its cash by almost $1.3 billion, when it had under $100 million. The company's CFO and the CEO as well of SunEdison's spinoff companies, brokers TerraForm Power and TerraForm Global exited downright under pressure from another big hedge fund investor from Appaloosa Management, David Tepper. The two sister companies claimed in a regulatory filing that SunEdison was at "substantial risk of bankruptcy", Fortune reports.

The possible bankruptcy filing of SunEdison have loomed darkness in India. Industry analysts and representatives are worried that the trickle-down effect on its Indian arm may haul down the growth pace in the solar energy sector.

Aside from having a large pipeline of solar projects in the country, the U.S. solar company is also bound to huge investments. The company's aggressiveness on solar projects bidding is seen as the main reason for solar tariffs dropping below Rs.5 per kWh, as reported by The Hindu.

A TerraForm renewable energy consultant said, "Their pipeline was very big. They thought that the projects they were developing or buying from outside could be sold. As long as you keep rotating the money, it is fine. If something stops, all the problems shoot up. With the fall of its arm, SunEdison is in trouble, and it will definitely have an impact on Indian business."

Even if SunEdison's aggressive bidding made the government and others glad because of the falling solar tariff, the example stayed an important issue across the sector since many serious players believe it is not a lasting exemplar.
Alaska Airlines is prepared to acquire Virgin America airlines for $2 billion. This move will merge two famous smaller airlines in the latest round of consolidation within the industry.

Virgin Airlines' acquisition would be the latest example of deal-making in an industry that has decline over the past 10 years, focusing power in the hands of less major airline. Aside from Alaska and JetBlue, huge airline companies joined the competition like American, Delta and United. However, due to the restriction by anti-trust regulators, these big companies backed out and allowed smaller companies to participate instead determined to expand their network.

Alaska and JetBlue battled in the final round of bidding. Alaska prevailed with an investment-grade credit rating and has more money on its books than some others. During the competition, Alaska also indicates that it only needs to expropriate fewer airport slots compared to JetBlue, according to The New York Times.

Virgin America is owned by New York-based Cyrus Capital Partners LP and Richard Branson's Virgin Group Ltd. The airline went public in November 2014.

Alaska Airlines which is based in Seattle has been in the business for 84 years and is one of the pre-deregulation carriers that have prevented bankruptcy court protection. The company has been narrowing costs for the past 15 years and counter invasion into its West Coast base by discounter Southwest Airlines Co. and others.

Some industry experts call Alaska Airlines a hybrid but have the ability to offer perks for passengers without the profusion of fees. Previously it flew from Alaska to Mexico but has filled out in its course map over the past decade and now serves most principal markets in the East and Midwest making a big bet on Hawaii a few years ago. The flight capacity now accounts 20% to that state, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Alaska Airlines is about to pay between $56 and $58 per share to obtain Virgin America. A deal could be made public as early as Monday according to the people involved who requested not to be identified since the deal had not been closed yet, as reported by Reuters.

As of the moment, no comments have been given by Virgin America, Alaska Air and JetBlue.




Authorities blocked off Paseo Noche in Camarillo after a man and woman were found dead in a home. Officials believe it was a murder-suicide.

SHARE PHOTO BY TOM KISKEN/THE STAR Deputies blocked off an affluent Camarillo neighborhood while investigating what they believe is a murder-suicide. ROB VARELA/THE STAR Two Ventura County Sheriff's deputies walk in front of a house on Paseo Noche in Camarillo where two bodies were found late Saturday night. ROB VARELA/THE STAR A Ventura County Sheriff's detective walks into a house on Paseo Noche in Camarillo as part of an investigation of two bodies discovered Saturday night. ROB VARELA/THE STAR An unmarked white van with its windows covered leaves the area where two bodies were found in Camarillo Saturday night. Related Coverage Authorities identify victims of Camarillo murder-suicide

By Tom Kisken of the Ventura County Star

Investigators believe the deaths of a husband and wife in an affluent Camarillo neighborhood late Saturday night were caused by a murder-suicide, officials said Sunday.

Ventura County Sheriff's Sgt. John Franchi said a woman came to the large two-bedroom home in the 2000 block of Paseo Noche Saturday night and found her parents dead in a bedroom.

Franchi released no information about the cause of the death, how it happened or who did what.

"At this time, detectives believe it's indicative of murder-suicide," he said Sunday morning, standing next to the crime tape and squad car that cordoned off the neighborhood.

Officials have released no names but said the husband and wife are senior citizens. Neighbors described them as quiet and friendly and said they had no idea what happened. They noted the couple moved to their home within the past two years.

"They were damn good neighbors and lovely people," said Morton Cook, who sometimes took walks with the man, describing him as a retiree.

The wife brought cookies to neighbors, Cook said. Her husband was a gardener who gave away lemons from his trees. They were Catholics and devoutly religious.

"It's a huge shock to everybody around," he said.

Nobody answered the door at the couple's home Sunday afternoon.

Several neighbors said they heard nothing Saturday aside from after-the-fact sirens and barking dogs. Franchi said the 911 call from the couple's daughter, who lives in a guesthouse in the back, came just before midnight.

"When we went in the house, we found the bodies," he said.

After obtaining a search warrant, investigators and crime scene specialists worked to piece together what happened. No information was released on what they found.

The community sits just off Upland Road. Palm trees alongside hilly streets punctuate expansive properties and attractive homes. Crime scene tape was in place Sunday morning. Traffic was diverted.

Neighbors gathered on either side off the cordoned-off area, at least one person in a bathrobe. They said the things people say in the eye of tragedy.

"It's a quiet neighborhood. I don't think we've had anything like this, not so close anyway," said Luanne Crockett, who lives on the other side of Upland.

Autopsies are expected Monday afternoon, said Zeb Dunn, Ventura County deputy medical examiner. He said it's likely names will be released then too.

"Not all of the family has been notified," he said.
KAREN QUINCY LOBERG/THE STAR Danny Seraphine, original drummer for Chicago, poses for a portrait at home in Newbury Park last month. With the exception of lead singer Peter Cetera, who has said he will not attend, the band will regroup and play for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Friday.

SHARE KAREN QUINCY LOBERG/THE STAR Danny Seraphine, original drummer for Chicago, poses for a portrait at home in Newbury Park last month. With the exception of lead singer Peter Cetera, who has said he will not attend, the band will regroup and play for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Friday. Danny Seraphine, original drummer for Chicago, poses for a portrait at home in Newbury Park last month. With the exception of lead singer Peter Cetera, who has said he will not attend, the band will regroup and play for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Friday.

By Robyn Flans, Special to The Star

On Friday, after a quarter of a century, Newbury Park resident Danny Seraphine will return to the drum chair of the band Chicago to play one last time and be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at Brooklyn's Barclays Center.

Formed in 1967, Chicago has sold more than 100 million records and has had 21 Top 10 singles, including five consecutive No. 1 albums and 11 No. 1 singles. Seraphine himself is known as one of the great drum pioneers for fusing rock and jazz music and is on the list of Rolling Stone magazine's Top 100 drummers of all time.

But Seraphine was unceremoniously let go in 1990 from the band he helped establish, and fences had to be mended for this Chicago reunion to take place. Only recently has there been communication between Seraphine and other members of the band.

IF YOU WATCH

What: 2016 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony

When: April 30 on HBO, check local listings for time

Performances: Inductees Cheap Trick, Chicago, Deep Purple, Steve Miller and N.W.A.

"Time is a great healer," Seraphine said. "Wounds heal, however scarred they are. Eventually, you have to let it go or they will eat you alive. I walked around with that cloud for decades. I recently came to the point of forgiveness. I had my role in it, but the way it was done was wrong."

The Hall of Fame rule is that only original members are inducted, but longtime members can join on stage. Seraphine will be inducted along with founding members Robert Lamm, Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Walter Parazaider and Peter Cetera, who has said he will not attend. Seraphine also will play double drums on two of three selections with Tris Imboden, who has been in the band for the past 25 years.

The Hall of Fame has asked that the iconic songs that will be performed be kept secret. HBO will air the induction ceremony and performances on April 30.

The band will get together to rehearse for the first time on Thursday. While Seraphine has played Chicago material with his own bands like CTA  California Transit Authority  he said it will be very different to perform them with his original bandmates.

"It's going to probably feel like I've finally come home, even if just for a day," Seraphine said. "Those songs are so much a part of me, and I'm so much a part of them."

Seraphine recalled some of the great highlights of his 23 years with Chicago, including the first standing ovation at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia and opening tours for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1969.

"I remember playing Carnegie Hall for a week," he said. "We were sucking air because the place was not made for electric music. For the first show and a half, we were horrible. We were out of tune, out of wind and then all of a sudden Terry (Kath) broke into a jam on 'Southern California Purples' and it took the band to another sphere and from then on, the band smoked."

Losing guitarist/vocalist Kath in 1978 to an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound is a devastating memory. Kath's absence at the induction will be a huge sadness, Seraphine said. Kath's daughter, Michelle will be there in her father's honor.

"It should be a great night that I will never forget," Seraphine said. "My wish is to walk away with a slate clean and us being friends.

"As I said in my book ("Street Player  My Chicago Story"), I'll never say 'never,' but I don't see a reunion happening, and I'm not pushing for one. To me, this is the last chance I'll get to play with my band, and what a great way to do it  at the induction of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."
JUAN CARLO/THE STAR People dance to the Barrelhouse Wailers Jazz Band during Saturday's family fair and picnic at Plaza Park in Ventura. The picnic was held to celebrate the city's 150th birthday.

SHARE JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Michael Smith from the Mighty Cash Cats performs during Saturday's family fair and picnic at Plaza Park in Ventura. The picnic was held to celebrate the city's 150th birthday. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR The Harmony Channel, Doug Van Bogelen (from left), Brent Burningham, Bruce Hunter, and Duane Ashby, sing during Saturday's family fair and picnic at Plaza Park in Ventura. The picnic was held to celebrate the city's 150th birthday. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR A large group takes a photo to celebrate Ventura's 150th birthday during Saturday's picnic. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR A large group takes a photo to celebrate Ventura's 150th birthday during Saturday's picnic.

By Anne Kallas, Special to The Star

Even when faced with a pie he didn't particularly like, Ventura Mayor Erik Nasarenko didn't flinch.

With the instincts of a competitive eater, he dove in face-first, giving it his all to easily beat out 10 former mayors of the city Saturday in the pie-eating contest at a family fair and picnic at Plaza Park in Ventura.

Cheered on by his 6-year-old son Andrew, Nasarenko emerged from the contest with a face covered with chocolate cream pie, which his wife, Julia, wiped off.

The secret to his success?

Nasarenko said he only had coffee for breakfast, forgoing his usual oatmeal.

"I wanted to leave room in my stomach," he said before reflecting on the 150th anniversary of San Buenaventura  more commonly known as Ventura  being incorporated as a city on April 2, 1866.

"One hundred and fifty years ago today, Ventura became a city. It's only fitting that we celebrate with an old-fashioned-style picnic, historic treasure hunt and pie-eating to celebrate Ventura's heritage," Nasarenko said.

City Council member Cheryl Heitmann, who made the 150th anniversary celebration a priority during her term as mayor, which ended in December, said she was pleased that the day was clear, with a cool ocean breeze wafting through the park.

"This is a typical day in Ventura. We have the greatest weather," said Heitmann, who noted that many celebrating in Plaza Park were people who moved to the city later in life. "This is Ventura, and we all can be a part of its history. It's nice to be accepted into the community, even if you didn't grow up here. It is so special."

While Saturday's celebration, which was to include a performance by Ventura band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy later, was the biggest city-sponsored event of the 150th anniversary year, Heitmann said there will be many other upcoming events held by other groups.

"This is the oldest city in the county. The Chumash and many others still live here," Heitmann said. "It's amazing that there are so many descendants of the original families."

As they bounced along to the music provided by the Ventura Jazz Orchestra, Michael Garland led his daughter and grandchildren through the many activities in the park. Garland explained that he has lived in Ventura for the past 35 years "because it's a small town on the ocean with good surfing."

Garland's daughter Megan Kniss said she enjoys raising her children, two girls, ages 8 and 5, and a 1-year-old boy.

"We love Ventura because it's small and on the beach and also because of this park," Kniss said.

Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, a Chumash elder, offered history lessons about the native people who inhabited the area for more than 13,000 years before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. She said the 150th anniversary of Ventura as a city is a good chance to remind people of the natural world around them.

"For me, it's a reminder for people to respect the spirit of the land," she said. "We need to stop importing invasive plants. We need to slow down development, weighing wants vs. needs. When you cut down trees, you are destroying native habitats."

Alan Salazar, a Chumash storyteller, said he finds the 150th anniversary celebration "kind of cute."

"People come up to me and tell me their families have been here for five to six generations," he said. "My ancestors have not even been here for 50 or 60 generations. They've been here for more than 600 generations."

Norma Fulkerson, of Ventura, was one of many museum docents wearing period costumes, giving Plaza Park a timeless feel as they strolled. Fulkerson said she was portraying Miriam Dudley, a member of the family that owned the historic Dudley House.

"Ventura has such a rich history," Fulkerson said. "Most people aren't aware of the everyday life patterns of the people who lived here."

The 150th celebration will continue from 1-4 p.m. Sunday during the monthly open house tour at the Dudley House Museum, 197 N. Ashwood Ave., while the "Dudleys" gossip on their party line about "corsets and crinolines" and an early presidential visit by Teddy Roosevelt. The tours will be free.

On the Net: http://celebrateventura.org
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The love of speed, the popularity of instantaneous social media posts, and the need to feed a 24/7 media demand for election news has changed politics forever. Emotion has trumped due diligence and decorum. Critical discussion about issues has taken a back seat to a public enthralled or enraged by the latest attack or insult. Whatever the response to the latest tweet, the Twitter world erupts with messages that can't be taken back.

It used to be that it took time to write or type out a letter to the editor. That time was an ally of clarity and civility. The heat of one's emotion is gradually dissipated in the process of composing, typing, addressing and sending a letter. A manager dictating an irate letter to a poor-performing supplier would benefit from a secretary who might ask, "Do you think 'Bug Brain' is the right opening salutation?" Thankfully, they'd have time to respond to their better angels and adjust copy before sending.

Our world today is built for immediacy. When you have only 140 characters and grammar is unnecessary, emotion reigns! By adding targeted hashtags to your tweets you can rally your like-minded friends or rile up your political adversaries.

Hashtags were designed as a community-driven convention that have morphed into a political weapon. By adding a media or talk show hashtag, you just may get your provocative message read on air. Headlines, positive or negative, get exposure and feed the faithful and enrage their adversaries.

If you want to start a political wildfire, the match is only a tweet away. No one is better at starting political fires than Donald Trump.

He doesn't need your money; he's self-funded. He doesn't need your opinions; he is the wisest, greatest deal maker in history. He doesn't need campaign advice; he'll make his own tweets because he knows how to win, win, win.

When Our Principles, an anti-Trump PAC founded by a former Mitt Romney campaign adviser, ran an ad in primary states showing a provocative, decade-old magazine photo of Melania Trump under the heading, "Meet Melania Trump Your Next First Lady." Trump wrongly attributed the ad to the Cruz campaign. Trump immediately took to Twitter to warn: "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!"

Cruz denounced the tasteless ad and claimed to have no knowledge or involvement. Not willing to accept his disavowal, Trump took to the Twitterverse to make good on his threat. Trump retweeted side-by-side images of a grimacing Heidi Cruz and a glamorous photo of his wife, Melania. The caption read, "No need to spill the beans. The images are worth a thousand words." This is campaigning at its basest level  My wife is prettier than your wife. What's next? My kids are smarter than your kids!

Campaigning in Wisconsin, Cruz let reporters deliver his response, "Leave Heidi the hell alone." One cannot blame Cruz for defending his wife. Who would not do the same?

Campaigns based on insults do no serve our country nor do justice to the critical issues facing America.

Trump has refused to participate in more debates. He claims there have been enough, but could it be that now that there are only three candidates, he just might have to face more tough questions about where he stands on substantive issues. Cruz and Kasich are ready and willing. Demand fewer insults and more issue-related debates.

As citizens, we don't control our candidates or the media's coverage and questions. The only person we control is ourselves, and even that is in question on bad days. We control our votes and how we express ourselves to influence the votes of others.

It's time for a renewed commitment to civility and dialogue over insults and isolation. The right to disagree comes from the liberty that sustains our republic. But you can disagree without being quite so disagreeable.

Donald Trump and all of us might take to heart the words of Thomas Jefferson before adding posts to the Twitterverse, "When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred." May it be so.

Terry Paulson, of Agoura Hills, is a speaker and author of "The Optimism Advantage." Email him at terry@terrypaulson.com.
The 490 hectare wildlife park, named Highland Safari, is expected to be located in Lac Duong District, Le Van Huong, director of the Bidoup  Nui Ba National Park, said at a meeting that set duties for its 2016 plan.

Bidoup  Nui Ba will team up with Dalat Tourist to develop the VND1 trillion ($44.64 million) facility, VND350 billion ($15.63 million) of which is funded by the government, according to the national park director.

The zoo will be zoned inside a protection forest in Lat Commune, and is slated for completion by 2020, Huong said.

Highland Safari will be a sanctuary for wild animals that can live well in the climate of Vietnams Central Highlands, according to the developer.

The zoo will be developed as a semi-wildlife park, in which the animals will live in the forests but under the care of humans.

The developer has received an in-principle approval to implement the project from the Lam Dong administration.

They have also hired consultant groups from Austria and Singapore to study the terrain, environment, and the status of rare animals in Lam Dong, as well as taking reference from major safari zoos around the world to build ideas for the Highland Safari.

The Ministry of Planning and Investment has also agreed to finance the project.

Once open, Highland Safari is expected to receive some 1.2 million visitors on an annual basis, raking in around VND300 billion ($13.39 million) in annual revenue.

Doan Van Viet, chairman of Lam Dong administration, showed support to the project at the Fridays meeting.

Safari is a new product that will appeal to tourists in many other places, and it is also suitable with the local ecosystem, he said.

Last Christmas, a safari zoo, considered the first of its kind in Vietnam, was inaugurated in the southern island of Phu Quoc.

The Vinpearl Safari phase one spans 380 hectares, and is comparable to major parks of its kind in Asia, according to its developer, Vietnamese realty conglomerate Vingroup.
Seven in 10 of the most prestigious property developers in Viet Nam are private enterprises, with the top three being property developers with headquarters in Ha Noi, the Vietnam Report has announced.--Illustrative Image vneconomy.vn

According to the report carried out by the Vietnam Report Joint Stock Company from February 2015 to February 2016, the top 10 prestigious property developers were Vingroup Joint Stock Company, FLC Group Joint Stock Company, Hoa Phat Group JSC, Viglacera Corporation, Novaland Group, Ha o Group, Urban Infrastructure Development Investment Corporation, Him Lam Corporation, Hoa Binh Company Limited, and Phu My Hung Development Corporation.

The report also listed the top five prestigious real estate consulting and brokerage firms in 2016, led by well-known brokerage at Xanh Real Estate Service and Construction JSC.

Following Vingroup on the list were Sai Gon Thuong Tin Real Estate Joint Stock Company and two FDI consulting companies CBRE Vietnam, and Savills Vietnam.

Hai Phat Investment JSC is the only Ha Noi  based company on the list.

Vietnam Report also announced polling results of property enterprises on business prospects in 2016.

All respondents said that 2016 revenue would be higher than 2015. Eighty-three per cent expected revenue to increase sharply in 2016, and the remaining 17 per cent only a little.

The Vietnam Report is an independent research report, developed based on scientific and objective principles. Companies are evaluated and ranked based on criteria of finance and media reliability.

Data on project numbers, progress, rate of successful transactions, price of sales, and others, were used as complementary elements.

Companies named on the lists all have stable financial capability, have development and business experience, and have made great contributions to general development of the entire Viet Nams real estate sector, the report said.
Photo: VGP

Deputy PM Pham Binh Minh made that statement in his speech at the 2016 Nuclear Industry Summit (NIS 2016) on April 1 in Washington, the U.S.

He appraised the efforts and achievements gained during six-year implementation of the nuclear summit process, affirming that the global nuclear security structure has been consolidated; the awareness of nuclear security has been enhanced and international conventions on nuclear security has been widespread approved by nations.

He highlighted the roles of multi-lateral organizations and initiatives, especially the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in ensuring global nuclear security.

Viet Nam advocates the Announcement and five Action Plans of the summit, he said, re-asserting the Viet Nams consistent policy to support comprehensive efforts in disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons as well as confirming the rights of nations in using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Viet Nam is making efforts in joining the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.

As the chair the Board of Governors for IAEA in the phase from 2013-2014, the nation made active and responsible contributions to the organization in terms of guaranteeing nuclear security and safety.

On the sidelines of the summit, Deputy PM Minh met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, Indian PM Narendra Modi, Australian FM Australia Julie Bishop and Rumanian FM Lazar Comanescu.

At these meetings, the sides exchanged specific measures to boost the bilateral relationship for their development and for the international and regional peace and stability.
Azerbaijan announced a unilateral cease-fire Sunday in the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh after clashes with Armenian forces left 30 soldiers dead Saturday and both sides reported more fighting overnight.

The outbreak of violence is the worst in Nagorno-Karabakh since 1994 when Armenia and Azerbaijan ended a war over the territory that is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of Armenian forces.

The two sides are separated by a demilitarized buffer zone, but each side accuses the other of numerous violations.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office quoted him Sunday saying he will support ally Azerbaijan "to the end" in its dispute with Armenia. He made the comments to an Azerbaijani reporter during his visit to the United States.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993.

The two countries have their own ongoing rift over the World War One killings of Armenians that Armenia said included 1.5 million dead in a genocide, while Turkey says the figure is inflated and was not genocide.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier all called for restraint in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Before Bangladeshi cyber security expert Tanvir Hassan Zoha was abducted by unidentified men in Dhaka last month, he had expressed fears he could be arrested for his comments to the media about an $81 million cyber heist.

Hackers had ordered the New York Fed to transfer $81 million from Bangladesh central bank funds to accounts in the Philippines. The scale of the heist created a major scandal over how the accounts had been breached.

When investigators were still piecing together what had happened, Zoha held a news conference on March 11 to raise concerns over the security standards and cybersecurity protections in place on the bank's computer servers and to fault senior bank officials.

Made claims

But Zoha also claimed that he worked for Bangladesh's department of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and advised the government on cybersecurity issues. However, soon after Zohas comments were broadcast, ICT issued a statement saying that it had never had any connection with Zoha.

The authorities also shut him out of the cyber heist case where he was a key investigator.

Zoha's family claimed that his comment criticizing the bank's senior officials might have played a role behind his disappearance.

The computer expert is now back at home after a week missing, but he is not talking about who took him, or why.

Forced disappearances

That does not surprise rights activists in Bangladesh, who say such reticence is typical for victims of forced disappearances by the state.

Hong Kong-based Bangladeshi rights activist Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman said it's a routine pattern.

In recent years, whoever returned home following such disappearances, maintained the same pattern of silence and refrained from revealing the truth in the process, Ashrafuzzaman, who works as a liaison officer of Asian Legal Resource Center (ALRC), told VOA.

I think Zoha, too, will not reveal the details about his disappearance, at least until Bangladesh sees a change in its regime," he said.

Soon after the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League (AL) took to power in Bangladesh in 2009, allegations of enforced disappearances of people began surfacing in Bangladesh.

Most of those who became victims of enforced disappearances in the country were activists and leaders of the parties which are in opposition to AL.

Keeping records

According to Bangladeshi human rights group Odhikar, between January 2009 and February 2016, at least 240 persons became victims of forced disappearances in Bangladesh.

The group counted and documented only those cases where the witnesses alleged that the victims had been taken away by men who claimed or appeared to be members of the law enforcement agencies.

Among the cases documented by Odhikar, 32 were later found dead, 101 were shown arrested or freed alive, while the whereabouts of 107 people remain unknown.

Although most cases of enforced disappearances were blamed on the law enforcement agencies, only very rarely do victims or their families press for legal remedy for their detention.

No action against perpetrators

In 2013, Sajedul Islam Suman, a local leader of opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, was abducted along with six others by unknown men in Dhaka.

Eyewitnesses reported that men wearing black uniforms of the paramilitary force Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) forced them into a van.

Soon after, we attempted to file suit against the security forces for the abduction. But police refused to register our complaint. They said, if in our complaint we mentioned of RAB or any security agency as being involved in the case, they would not accept the complaint, Sanjida Islam Tulee, Sumons sister, told VOA.

They said, We can accept your complaint if you write only that he left home, that he has not returned and that he is missing,' " Tulee said.

Nur Khan, director of rights group Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), noted that the fear of retribution remains strong in those who are disappeared and return home.

"They fear that if they reveal the details about their disappearances, they will have to disappear again or they will face serious threats to their lives. Basically for this reason they remain silent, Khan told VOA.

They believe that the people who held them in captivity were powerful and connected to high places. They also suspect, their captors enjoyed patronage by the state or could be members of the states security forces," Khan said.

Foreign rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International routinely demand Bangladesh create an independent panel to investigate forced disappearances, but there has been little progress.
The opposition in Cameroon has defied police and continued protests against efforts by the ruling party to organize early elections, with several protesters having been wounded or arrested since last Tuesday.

The opposition, which encouraged protesters to dress in black on Sunday, said Cameroon President Paul Biya, 84, is angling to be "president for life after 34 years already in office.

Kah Wallah, opposition leader of the Cameroon People's Party (CPP), said they are dressed in black as a symbol of sadness over Biya's long stay in power and persistent brutality against voices opposing his attempt to be "president for life."

Wallah said dozens of protesters have been arrested or wounded by heavily armed police in several towns, including Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, and the economic capital Douala during the protests.

"The police as you see have blocked us, they have shot us, they would not allow us to talk, they would not allow us to do our job as the political leaders of this country. They have stepped on the rights of citizens," she said.

Vows to continue protests

Wallah, who is a member of a coalition of four opposition political parties, said demonstrators will continue to protest until Biya says "no" to calls by his ruling party for him to change the constitution and organize early elections.

Cameroon government spokesperson Issa Tchiroma Bakary said the protests are illegal and will not be allowed to take place.

"The fact that you are a politician does not allow you to take the laws into your own hands. When you violate the law in such circumstances, the consequences are very well known. What they wanted to have, they had it," Bakary said.

Biya revised the constitution in 2008 to remove presidential term limits. His current mandate ends in 2018.

The opposition parties are afraid Biya wants to surprise them by changing the constitution yet again.
Tunisia has been widely touted as the only "success story" of the 2011 Arab uprisings.

But if you ask the countrys millennials, they will tell you that poverty and joblessness are as bad today as they were in December 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old vegetable vendor, set himself on fire and ignited rebellion across the region.

The situation is particularly grim in Tunisias central and south, a region that has been labeled a "hotbed" for terrorist recruitment; upwards of 7,000 Tunisian youth have set off to join the Islamic State group (IS).

But some young Tunisians are taking the problem into their own hands.

Cogite, French for think or ponder, is Tunisias first co-working space.

Located in a villa in the capital city Tunis, it gives entrepreneurs access to desks, the Internet, meeting spaces and the opportunity to network and share ideas.

'Tunisia is a startup'

In a sense, all of Tunisia is a startup, said Cogites co-founder Houssem Aoudi. Youth are moving away from decades of dependence on civil service jobs to ways to make new businesses. They understand that they are their only chance for development.

Cogite organizes workshops and cultural events and recently partnered with Mercy Corps to launch Cogite Direction Sud (South) to foster entrepreneurship in southern Tunisia, where IS has gained a foothold among disenfranchised youth.

Imagine you are 25 years old without a job, without any self esteem. There are no cinemas, there is no music in the streets. And along comes ISIS, offering everything to these youth that we are failing to provide," he said, using an acronym for the group.

IS offers youth a better dream, Aoudi said, adding, We are obliged to give them a new dream.

Its not a problem limited to Tunisia alone. Millennials everywhere are vulnerable.

It really hit me hard the day after the Paris attacks, trying to think not so much about the tactics that radical groups are using to recruit youth and why these tactics are successful, but asking myself what is the void that our society is creating that makes radicalization possible, said Ravi Hutheesing, a keynote speaker and cultural diplomat for the U.S. Department of State.

'Millennial conundrum'

Hutheesing cited what he calls the "millennial conundrum": Millennials, roughly defined as those 20 to 35 years old, have lived through 9/11,the global financial crisis and revolutions.

Because theyve been on this trajectory of broken promises, they want to put their own fate in their own hands, Hutheesing said. And this is the void that has been created that the radical groups are taking advantage of, its that loss of identity, that desire to be a change engine. Jihadist groups are providing something to be passionate about.

A scary thought occurs to Huthessing: IS itself is an entrepreneurial enterprise.

Elmira Bayrasli wears a lot of hats: She is visiting fellow at the New America Foundation and a lecturer at New York University. She co-founded Foreign Policy Interrupted, an education and media startup that amplifies the voices of women in foreign policy. And shes author of From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

Critical need

Bayrasli believes entrepreneurship is critical in the worlds trouble spots.

We often look at conflict and automatically believe the solution either has to be military or development aid. When, in fact, the people who are actually victims of these conflicts who are on the ground actually know what they need best, she said.

She cites the U.S. State Departments Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) initiative, organized after U.S. President Barack Obama delivered his 2009 A New Beginning speech in Cairo.

GIST offers training and financing for young entrepreneurs across the globe.

More programs like these are needed, Bayrasli said.

But because of all these big crises and issues that have come up, whether in Syria, Iraq, and now unfortunately in Ankara and Belgium, I think what diplomats are now focused on is putting out those fires, rather than actually looking at entrepreneurship as a long-term tool to actually prevent these types of incidents, she said.
Ahmed and Mustafa were soldiers in the Syrian Army, but they didnt want to kill their fellow countrymen.

They fled their army, their country and then, like more than a million others, survived a rubber boat across the sea to Europe.

Now they are locked inside what was once a refugee camp, terrified they will be deported back to Turkey. Its dirty and crowded here, explains Mustafa. But its better than going back.

Everyone here is afraid, says Ahmed.

The European Union-Turkey plan to slow the flow of migrants to Europe is expected to go into effect Monday, with the expulsion of hundreds of refugees and migrants to Turkey. There will be as many soldiers as refugees on the ships, according to local news.

Already Pakistani travelers are being deported to Turkey, according to aid workers and refugees. Handcuffed and surrounded by soldiers and police, they are loaded on buses and shipped to northern Greece, before leaving the country.

Doesn't support current plan

The U.N. refugee agency says its not opposed to deportations on principle, but it doesnt support the plan as-is. Well-managed expulsions of illegal immigrants is an established part of a well-functioning refugee system, according to Boris Cheshirkov the, UNHCR spokesperson on Lesbos.

Our opposition is to the lack of clear safeguards right now as we implement this deal, he says, sitting on a bench a few meters away from the port. We need to see the capacity of the Greek asylum system expanded.

To manage deportations humanely, he says, there needs to be an individual appeals process for people to argue their case to authorities.

At the detention center, refugees say no one there knows who will be taken or how they will be chosen. And for some, like Mustafa, who is traveling with his wife and two children, the idea of being turned back towards Turkey, is heartbreaking.

My brother and my sister are in Germany, he says. I am supposed to be with them.

Fear of tomorrow

On Saturday, a small group of young men and women from Morocco, Egypt, and Syria gather on the hill over the port to watch the boats depart.

First, they see a bus surrounded by at least 100 police and soldiers pull into a ship going north. It has to be Pakistani travelers, they say. Other expulsions dont start until Monday.

Then, they watch as the boat to Athens departed without them.

The young people are among the few hundred refugees or migrants that remain outside the detention center. The police know where they live, a makeshift camp by the sea not far from town.

On Monday we all have to go to Moria, says Hesham, explaining that authorities have ordered them to leave their camp, where they are free to come and go, and move to the detention center.

Authorities often call the center a closed facility or a closed camp. From Turkey to Sweden, refugees call closed camps "prisons."

It is not a camp, it is a jail, says Abdelkhader, a teenager from Syria, as the boat to Athens pulls out of view. There is no freedom in Greece.

Reception centers empty

In recent months, hundreds of thousands of dollars has been poured in to creating the infrastructure to help refugees in Lesbos.

Volunteers from all over the world have been rotating at the beaches and camps, greeting newly arrived rubber boats with emergency blankets and warm clothes or helping them keep fed and clothed, before they once again depart.

Now, volunteers wait for boats that are more often than not towed by authorities directly to the port, where police buses take the people to be detained, bypassing humanitarian workers. And when the boats land on shore, police buses often arrive soon after.

Its sad, says Margaret Woodfall, a volunteer for Lighthouse Relief, who brought her family with her from Canada so they could help refugees. Theres huge resources here that could be used, and the people are crowded into camps.

A few minutes later, her group walks to the rocky beaches of Lesbos north coast. They continue the arduous task of removing the rubber boats and life jackets that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Woodfall, like many volunteers, plans to travel to the capital Mytilini to watch when the first groups of refugees are deported. The expected presence of volunteers and aid workers from the island has been described as both a protest and a show of support for the deportees.

To bear witness, explains Woodfall.

I think it is crazy, she says. It goes against all the convention on refugees, she further explains, referring to international laws that prohibit forcibly returning refugees to the dangerous situations they fled.

Amnesty International has accused Turkey of forcing Syrians and Iraqis back to their countries, and says the European Union is in danger of ignoring and encouraging serious human rights violations by sending people to Turkey.
The first passenger flight took off from the airport in Brussels where suicide bombers carried out a deadly attack nearly two weeks ago.

The blasts there and at a nearby metro station killed 32 people and destroyed the airport's departure area.

A Brussels Airlines plane heading to the Portuguese city of Faro was the first of three flights scheduled to leave the airport Sunday evening. The airport is calling them "symbolic flights" with more to be added in the coming days.

"A restart of the operations, even only partially, as quick as this is a sign of hope that shows our shared will, and our strength to resurface and not to let our heads down," Brussels Airport Company CEO Arnaud Feist said Saturday.

Repair work

Feist also announced temporary repair work and security features that will be used at the airport as it works toward a return to full operation, which will take months.

Belgian police complained about what they said had been lax security at the airport and threatened to strike unless certain measures were taken, but have reached an agreement with the government.

Police also made several arrests Saturday following a tense confrontation between right-wing protesters and anti-racist youth in Brussels.

Demonstration planned

A far-right group had planned a demonstration in Molenbeek, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood where a number of the November 2015 Paris attackers were based.

An anti-racist group had called for a counterdemonstration.

Both groups were banned by local authorities, fearing a repeat of last Sunday's disturbance, when police fired water cannons to break up about 450 protesters.

Belgian television showed some 30 far-right marchers in a suburb of Brussels, holding a banner reading: "This is our country."
Fighting has been heavy as the Iraqi military engages in Operation Conquest, an offensive to push the Islamic State group out of Mosul.

The operation began last week and is expected to take many months.

In an undisclosed location in northern Iraq, Kurdish security forces are holding a number of captured IS fighters. One young IS member, captured last winter, spoke with VOA, offering insights into the extremist group as well as describing who some of the young fighters are.

After months working for IS, Omar (not his real name) fled and gave himself up to Kurdish security forces in the city of Kirkuk.

When IS overran his village in 2014, Omar and his friends were forced to join the group. He said the militants took advantage of their illiteracy and indoctrinated the new recruits.

"They gave us religious training. If youre illiterate theyll teach you how to read and write. If you steal theyll cut off your right hand. If a married man commits adultery we stone him to death. If hes not married he gets 100 lashes," he said.

Job with IS

Omars job was to search for contraband at checkpoints. Inside IS-held territory, in the city of Hawija, he said he witnessed an array of horrors such as beheadings, amputations, and women being bought and sold as sex slaves.

"Because Im a young guy, I didnt get a wife. There is an office inside the city. Whether youre a fighter or a civilian, you pay money, get a woman and go. They are the widows of IS fighters. If youre single, you go pay your money and take a wife," he said.

After four months, Omar tried to leave, but it was very dangerous. Two men accused of smuggling people out of IS-controlled territory were publicly executed and left hanging in the central square in Hawija as a warning.

"After four months, I stopped working with IS. But they came to my house and threatened me and told me I had to return," he said. "If you stop working with IS, they will come to your house and give you two options: either you go back to work or we kill you."

With his fathers help, Omar managed to escape into Kurdish-controlled territory, where he was arrested by security forces.

Omar now awaits his trial date in Iraqi Kurdistan. He hopes that his captors show more mercy than the militants for whom he once worked.
Hours before the scheduled start of the deportation of hundreds of migrants from the island of Lesbos, Greek officials had yet to finalize their plans under a deal between the European Union and Turkey.

Activists in Lesbos planned a protest for Monday when Greek authorities, with the help of hundreds of border police officers from EU countries, were to escort migrants from the Moria migrant detention camp outside the islands main city of Mytilini to a port where ferries were to take them back to Turkey.

The migrants of various nationalities arrived illegally on Greek shores and were detained after authorities deemed them ineligible for asylum.

Officials with the Greek government and Frontex, the EU border agency, gave few details about the operation, which has sparked outrage among human rights activists and leftists across Europe who say the deportation of people whose lives could be at risk in Turkey amounts to a humanitarian atrocity.

With fewer than 24 hours to go before the scheduled start of the migrants removal, Greek officials said they were still deciding on how to carry out the plan.

Border guards, EU specialists

Officials said many of the more than 2,000 border guards and other EU specialists had arrived in Lesbos by Sunday and are ready to start the operation.

In Mytilinis port, a cutter of Britains Border Force was moored near the dock where ferries are expected to load the refugees.

But plans appeared far from complete as officials revealed what they said was an obstacle to the implementation of the agreement: Turkeys failure to stop the influx of migrants as it committed to do in the deal.

'Turkey is not ready'

George Kyritsis, the spokesman for the Greek governments refugee and migration crisis response operations, told VOA Turkey is not ready to implement the deal. The influx (of migrants arriving from Turkey) remains very high.

Kyritsis said an average of 500 have continued to arrive in Greece daily since the agreement was announced more than two weeks ago.

These numbers are not sustainable. If we send back 500 and 500 arrive every day, then we are at zero, he said.

Turkey has rejected charges that it is not handling the crisis properly.

The number of new arrivals, although still high, has dropped considerably in the past two weeks and fewer than 4,000 migrants remain on the island.

VOA observed several camps largely deserted. At one on a hilltop near the village of Mantamados, wind blew through empty tents.

Officials with humanitarian organizations working on Lesbos said the reasons for the drop in new arrivals are unclear. While not discounting the possibility that many migrants are being deterred by news that they are no longer accepted in Greece, they said recent bad weather conditions on the Aegean could also account for the drop.

Scrambling

They said Greek authorities and the EU are scrambling to deal with pressure the deal has placed on them, as well as the need to relieve overcrowding at the largest of the detention centers at Moria, which was designed to house 2,000 migrants, but now holds about 3,000.

Michele Telaro, field coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, calls the deal between the European Union and Turkey unreasonable and said all procedures to send people back have not been put in place.

The MSF has a lot of concerns about the agreement in general, but apart from these concerns, it was obviously completely crazy to pretend to sign an agreement on Friday night and to start to implement it on Sunday. Greece was not ready, Turkey is not ready, Telaro told VOA.

'Country without borders'

As he spoke, a passerby approached and, referring to the organizations name, said in Greek, You are going to make this into a country without borders.

With tensions rising inside the camps among migrants desperate not to be returned and citizens in Greece and across Europe demanding a solution to the migrant crisis, officials are trying to handle Mondays operation carefully.

Few, if any, media will be allowed close-up access when they transfer migrants aboard buses from the Moria camp to the port.

In a VOA interview at Mytilinis old town hall, Lesbos Mayor Spyros Galinos said he believes Europes image and future are at stake on Monday.

Today, Europe is at a crossroads. One way it leads to an enlightened Europe of hope, of peace, of solidarity, one that defends human values and the other to a dark, Fascist past, he said.
Australia said it is no longer detaining asylum-seeking children on its mainland.

The move means the migrant children have been transferred to community detention on the mainland and can move about freely as their refuge applications are processed.

Asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are sent to detention camps in Papua New Guinea and the remote Pacific island of Nauru. They are blocked from being resettled in Australia, even if found to be refugees.

Doctors and whistleblowers said the conditions of the detention centers have left many migrant children struggling with mental health issues.

Asylum-seeking children and adults on the mainland have been brought there from the detention centers for medical reasons.

More than 200 asylum-seekers on the mainland were due to be deported to Nauru, but a campaign of protests has delayed the deportations.

While Australia has defended its immigration policies, human rights groups have been harshly critical of the country's policies and the conditions of its detention centers.
Niger's President Mahamadou Issoufou was sworn in for another five-year term Saturday after a controversial election boycotted by the opposition.

Issoufou took the oath of office in Niamey in front of a crowd that included a number of African leaders.

He promised Niger would remain involved in the fight against Islamist militants who have spread chaos and death across northern Africa.

"Terrorism is an absolute evil," Issoufou said in his inaugural speech. "As long as terrorism is not eradicated in northern Mali and as along as Libya is not stabilized, we will not be able to sleep in peace."

Issoufou was re-elected in a runoff with about 92 percent of the vote. The opposition boycotted the election when its candidate, Hama Amadou, was jailed on what it said were phony baby-trafficking charges.

Amadou was freed on bail late last month after falling ill in prison four days before the runoff election and was flown to Paris for treatment.

Despite its mineral wealth, Niger is one of Africa's most impoverished countries. The president has promised his new government will be one that unifies the nation and pursue economic and social development.
VOA State Department Correspondent Pam Dockins interviewed Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins, coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs, at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington on Friday.

Question: Looking ahead, at the take-aways from summit ... what is going to be the U.S. catalyst going forward to help these countries meet some of their nuclear security goals?

Bonnie Jenkins: One of things we did was working closely with countries to try and get them to move into areas of nuclear security. One of the things the summit has done has provided a catalyst for countries to move forward in terms of things needed to be done. ... Now summit ending in current format  other countries may want to do a summit, or the next president may want to do a summit, still use existing bilateral channels, working directly with countries, working with U.N., other international organizations, initiatives.  Even though (it's) over now, still feel other ways we can work with this country, including Russia, who is not here.

Q: This is broader question, looking at possible nuclear terrorism as part of broader concern.  When groups such as Islamic State ... carry out attacks in the Middle East  what particular challenges does this present to the U.S. in effort to counter nuclear terrorism?

Jenkins: Realize that we have to work very hard, and the work we have been doing  in terms of securing material, securing bio pathogens, securing precursors ... that we have to be even more diligent.  Certain groups out there who want to do harm, if get hands on weapons, materials, they would use them.  Think if nothing else, makes us realize how important situation is.  Nuclear terrorism is certainly an issue, need to concern ourselves with biological, chemical, and keeping it out of the hands of those who want to do harm.

Q: When you look at certain countries, regions, where are the weak links?

Jenkins: Prefer not to say weak link, dont want to indicate that theres  weak links. ... Prefer to ... look at all countries as strength in all countries. Certainly some will need more work than others, but overall think important thing is make sure all countries have strength in physical protection, strength to stop trafficking, able to work with other countries, work through IAEA to get work done.

Q: Overall, when looking at these types of threats, does U.S., at this point, think greatest threats are emanating from state actors or non-state actors?

Jenkins: Interesting question.  In 1990s, work was on states ... treaties, conventions.  While still issue for a few countries, are a lot more focused on non-state actors, particularly after 9/11.  Think lot of the work you are seeing now, in the Nuclear Security Summit, work I do  in my portfolio at DOS (the U.S. Department of State), which is focused on prevent weapons of mass destruction terrorism  lot more focus on non-state actors because its such a difficult threat. Have to follow people, money  what can take on plane  lot more of a challenge. Type of activities have ... gone from traditional deterrence to non-state actor focus.

Q: Going forward the 50 or so countries represented here today, whats the accountability factor for these countries? ... Goals will be reached, broad plans laid out, but whats the accountability factor to ensure countries follow through?

Jenkins: Since we dont know of future summits, discussion about whether theres a way people could meet in the future  to do the very thing you are talking about, look at how commitments being implemented  action plans being implemented, how are the gift baskets that countries are agreeing to do specific activities are being implemented  see what role the IAEA can play. ...

Q: Anything you would like to add?

Jenkins: Ive been doing this since 2009, and its been great to see how much international community has accomplished. ... Started out with, I think, 48 (countries) when South Korea hosted in 2012, added a few more countries, added Interpol, so have three international organizations, and then stayed the same. ...
Pakistans military said it killed more than 250 militants and lost eight soldiers in counterinsurgency operations near the Afghan border in the past two months.

Army officials said fighting in the remote Shawal valley of North Waziristan is the final phase of a major ground and air offensive launched in June 2014 to clear the semiautonomous tribal region of local and foreign militants.

The battle to clear the last pocket close to the Pak-Afghan border continues  in extremely hostile terrain and harsh weather conditions, the military said Sunday in a statement, which contained the latest details of the so-called Zarb-e-Azb (ZeA) operation.

The army said all areas above 2,700 meters and covered with snow have been cleared, terrorist hubs have been destroyed, and large amounts of arms and ammunition recovered.

Fighting wounded more than 160 militants and 39 soldiers, it added.

Since the beginning of the nearly two-year-long offensive, the army said more than 4,000 fighters linked to local and foreign extremist groups have been killed in the Waziristan region as well as in related intelligence-based raids elsewhere in Pakistan.

Nearly 500 soldiers have also lost their lives, it said.

Sundays statement said that 36 percent of the tens of thousands of families uprooted by the army action in North Waziristan have also returned to their homes in areas cleared of of militants.

Since start of operation ZeA in June 2014, security forces have cleared 4,304 square kilometers of area in North Waziristan Agency and restored the writ of the government, it said.

While it is not possible to independently verify official fighting details because of lack of access for aid workers and reporters, army officials cite significant reduction in terrorist attacks around Pakistan as a proof the terrorist infrastructure and communication network" in the tribal area have been uprooted.

In a statement released Sunday, a leading rights group again voiced concerns and skepticism about the military activity in the tribal region bordering Afghanistan, and called for investigations and strict oversight to prevent excesses and ensure accountability.

"The security forces are reported to have taken over private property of the locals with impunity. Reports of the use of excessive force in some villages are harrowing, where no house has been left standing and the population has had to escape the onslaught, the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said.

There was no immediate official reaction to the allegations by the group, which also acknowledged in an annual report released last week that Pakistan saw a 40 percent drop in violence in 2015.
Syria said Sunday its forces seized another town from Islamic State militants, Qaryatain, in the central part of the country, a week after retaking the historic city of Palmyra.

State media said the seizure of Qaryatain, with support of Russian airstrikes, gives the government a strategic victory, securing oil and gas routes between the Damascus area and oilfields in eastern Syria.

But the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors fighting in Syria from accounts inside the country, said the government claim was premature, even as it said Islamic State fighters "are on the verge of collapse."

The monitoring group said the jihadists still controlled the eastern and southeastern parts of Qaryatain, but that some of its fighters had started retreating to the nearby mountainous region.

Qaryatain was once the home to a sizable population of Christians, dozens of whom have been abducted by the extremists. Some were released, but others were forced to sign a pledge to pay a tax imposed on non-Muslims.

The advance on Qaryatain, held by the militants since late August, comes a week after Syria seized the ancient city of Palmyra, where Islamic State fighters destroyed centuries-old historic relics.

In Qaryatain, Islamic State fighters bulldozed the Saint Eliane Monastery.
Ugandan presidential candidate Kizza Besigye remains under house arrest despite an order to Kasangati police to withdraw security from his home, according to a spokesman for Besigye's party.

Police surrounded Besigyes home and erected roadblocks along the route leading to his house shortly after the February 18 general election. Leaders of Besigye's party, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), were initially prevented from visiting him at his home, which they said thwarted their efforts to legally challenge the disputed election. The electoral commission declared incumbent President Yoweri Museveni winner of the presidential vote.

Addressing reporters at police headquarters in Kampala's Naguru neighborhood, Inspector General Kale Kayihura, who had given the order to pull security from Besigye's home, nevertheless called on police to watch his movements.

Local media quoted Kayihura as saying, "Withdrawal of our officers from Besigye's home is an extension of a token of goodwill, but we expect him to respect the law. Dr. Besigye always goes about his business undisturbed. It's only when we sense that he's about to cause trouble that we contain him. My hope is that even after we have shown him goodwill, he will not cause problems."

Rights violation alleged

But the FDC spokesman, Wafula Oguttu, said continued detention of Besigye was illegal and a gross violation of his human and constitutional rights.

I went to Dr. Besigyes home and I found many policemen still deployed, and I found three roadblocks on his land," Oguttu said. "I stayed with Besigye until midnight, and when I came out ... there was one closer to his gate, and I was thoroughly checked. ...

"The local [police] commander was quoted as saying he had not yet received a formal order from his boss to withdraw his policemen from Dr. Besigyes compound, land or premises. ... This is not the first time the inspector general of police is saying Dr. Besigye is not under house arrest. He has done that several times. What he tells the public is different from what is on the ground.

The government has often accused Besigye and his FDC supporters of creating tension, defying orders and violently clashing with police. Oguttu said the FDC would continue to defy what he said was the continued unconstitutional violation of the rights of Ugandans.

Dr. Besigye has not broken any law," Oguttu said. "For the last 15 years they have been taking him to court, [but] they have not proven any single case against him. They simply detain him. Everything Dr. Besigye does, he does it according to the law.

To defy unlawful orders, our constitution protects that. ... If you are violating the constitution, even if you are the state, our constitution says you can defy that. The people can defy that.
The United Nations said it expects more violence with the onset of spring in Afghanistan and called for increased regional cooperation and coordination to help the war-hit nation counter the terrorism threat.

Traditionally, fighting subsides in Afghanistan during winter because heavy snow blocks the movement of insurgents through mountain passes. But Afghan officials and military commanders say because of a mild winter there was no let up in fighting in 2015.

The U.N. reports there were more than 11,000 deaths and injuries to Afhgan civilians.

Afghanistan continues to face a difficult security environment with the presence of both indigenous and foreign terrorist groups, which we can expect to become more active with the onset of the spring fighting season, warned U.N. representative to the country Nicholas Haysom while speaking at a regional counterterrorism meeting Sunday in Kabul.

Terror groups

Without naming any country, Haysom said some terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan have their origin and destination outside the country and threaten the entire region.

He acknowledged efforts the Afghan government is making by encouraging insurgents to join a peace process and by exercising military power against those refusing to quit terrorist attacks.

Apart from the fact that this problem cannot be resolved by one country by acting on its own it surely cannot be expected of Afghanistan to shoulder alone what is a regional phenomenon, Haysom noted.

Neighboring sanctuaries

Afghan officials have long maintained that leaders of the Taliban and other insurgent commanders are using sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan for directing violence across the border.

The Afghan intelligence chief told the national parliament last week that Pakistani spy agency is fully supporting the Taliban campaign, charges Islamabad denied as baseless and unfortunate.

The Taliban has refused to engage in peace talks with Kabul and there are fears that an increase in insurgent violence in Afghanistan will fuel bilateral tensions with Pakistan.

But Haysom emphasized the need for effective joint action strategies to deal with the threat of terrorism, saying the solution lies in developing regional consensus, cooperation and coordination by all countries in the region.
As many homeless shelters across the U.S. remain at or near capacity, the country faces complicated challenges.

In his fiscal 2017 budget, President Obama proposed spending $11 billion over the next 10 years to fight family homelessness.

Gregory Talley used to sleep in a park, at an airport, or under a bridge. The 50-year-old has been homeless for more than 10 years.

"It is hard. Its hard to live homeless. You filled every day trying to find out where you are going to get something to eat. If I hadnt found wonderful Fairfax County Kennedy Shelter, I wouldn't know where I would be by now.I might be dead," Talley said.

The Kennedy Shelter is one of the facilities New Hope Housing provides for homeless families and individuals in the Washington suburbs.

Pam Michell has dedicated her life to making the lives of this vulnerable population better as executive director of the nonprofit organization.

Felt epiphany in Africa

I went to Africa in 1985. And I saw an immense amount of poverty, but I saw so much hope. And I wondered what I was doing at home in my middle-class American life and decided that I should try to do something that would bring hope to people," Michell said.

"It is convenient, homelessness just happened to be what was around me. So I picked that, she added.

When Michell began working with New Hope Housing 25 years ago, its three shelters had about 80 beds. Now, it has 350 beds and serves about 1,500 homeless people every year.

Michell has expanded the program beyond just providing beds for the night.

We do outreach, we do prevention, we do permanent housing, we do transitional housing. We have an education program with all sorts of different things to move people to end their homelessness, she said.

According to 2015 government data, more than a half-million people in the United States are homeless on any given night.

While the scarcity of affordable housing can be the main reason people experience homelessness, Michell said New Hope is offering them the services they need to change their lives and succeed.

Program to transform the homeless

"Our Out of Poverty program is not just about money," Michell said. "It's about you could be spiritually poor, you could be relationship poor ... you could be educationally poor. So it is focusing on how you get out of this poverty that has brought you to being homeless and find prosperity.

The program tries to teach the shelter residents self-reliance and work values, and includes courses on planning and personal responsibility.

I learned I still have opportunity to change it and I can change it," said shelter resident Lewis Webster. "It is just about going forth in doing necessary work to do it. I mean if you really want better, you would do better and that's the frame of mind of me now.

Webster, who has spent time in jail, said he is confident he'll become a productive member of the community when he leaves the shelter and into a place of his own, in a month.
The U.S. military said Sunday one of its drones in Iraq has killed an Islamic State fighter it believes was responsible for a missile attack last month that killed a U.S. Marine.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led operations against the militants, Colonel Steve Warren, said the drone attack killed Jasim Khadijah, described as a former Iraqi officer and "a rocket expert," and five other Islamic State fighters.

Warren said Khadijah had controlled the Islamic State rocket attack that killed Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin and wounded eight other Marines at an artillery position in the Makhmur area of northern Iraq.

Cardin was the second U.S. combat death since the start of a U.S. campaign to fight Islamic State in Iraq in 2014.
Zimbabwe has described as malicious reports that President Robert Mugabe dozed off while he was sharing a stage with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last week.

In a statement signed by Information Minister Christopher Mushowe, which warns journalists to avoid circulating what the government thinks is an attack on President Mugabe, the government says the president was nodding in response to Abes remarks and not falling asleep while standing on the podium.

The statement read in part, President Mugabe was on his feet as Mr. Abe delivered his statement to the press. Watching the said video clip, even at close range, one could see the President nodding his head in response to the message being delivered by the Japanese Prime Minister. That is why we never bothered to try and dignify of the malicious innuendo that the President was dozing off with a rebuttal.

Any sane person watching that video clip would dismiss the propaganda story with the contempt it deserves. We have been forced, as Government, to react today to this malicious video story, disgusted but one of our own local tabloids which saw it fit to attack the person of his Excellency the President in this cruel fashion by publishing the spiteful story which they themselves know to be blatantly false.

Mushowe claimed that it was clear to us that, whether it was April fools prank or unintended, either way, the motive was to injure and damage the reputation of our President in a big way, which is very shameful because it flies in the face of our national values and culture. We do not expect this kind of unprofessional behavior and willful misconduct from our journalists. This type of gutter journalism resides on the social media platforms and should not be allowed in the mainstream media.

He said while government upholds freedom of expression and media freedom, we strongly believe in the derogations that our Constitution prescribes in respect of the rights.

Mushowe said Mr. Mugabe, like other Zimbabweans, is covered by some provisions of the Zimbabwe Constitution which state that freedom of expression and freedom of the media exclude incitement to violence; advocacy of hatred or hate speech; malicious injury to a persons reputation or dignity; and malicious or unwarranted breach of a persons right to privacy.

While government remains committed to an agreed cordial working relationship with the media my ministry, as the arm of government responsible for both the sector and its spokesperson, would want to appeal and caution against continuous unwanted, disrespectful and unprofessional onslaught on the person of the Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, His Excellency the President, Cde R.G. Mugabe.
H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdogan

President of the Republic of Turkey

T.C. Cumhurbaskanlg Genel Sekreterligi

06689 Cankaya, Ankara

Turkey

Dear President Erdogan,

Welcome to Washington. Your visit comes at a critical moment in U.S.-Turkish relations.

Within the past decade, many of Turkeys friends here were optimistic about your countrys potential to become a vibrant and stable democracy as well as an increasingly strong and capable U.S. ally. The salutary role Turkey can play, regionally and globally, has been demonstrated by the hospitality your country has extended to millions of refugees. Recent developments in Turkey, however, are deeply troubling. Today we would like to air the concerns of Turkeys many friends in the United States.

 Over the past year, more than a thousand people have been charged with the crime of insulting you. Hundreds of academics have been investigated or faced disciplinary proceedings for questioning your governments anti-terror policies. Last year, the offices of Hurriyet, an independent paper, were attacked and set on fire by a mob led by a member of your former Justice and Development Party (AKP), a well-known columnist was attacked by thugs outside his home, and two editors of Cumhuriyet were arrested. More recently, your government has orchestrated the takeover of the popular daily Zaman. Why shouldnt people in the European Union and the United States be concerned about the prospects for a free media in Turkey?

 Along with this erosion of freedom of speech and media, we have watched as you seek to further enhance your personal power by changing the constitution to create an executive presidency. All of Turkeys opposition parties oppose the creation of an executive presidency, and polls reveal the majority of Turkish voters do as well. Even members of your own party have voiced their reservations about excessive concentration of power in your hands. Is it worth pursuing an executive presidency if it risks dividing the nation?

 Following several years of negotiations and a stated commitment to expanding rights for all Turkish citizens, Turkeys war against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) resumed last summer. Now, your government is prosecuting this war in a manner that appears to reject a political solution. The United States has long expressed support for and aided Turkey in its war against PKK terrorism. But many in Turkey have raised concerns that, amid the serious conflicts and grave threats metastasizing along Turkeys borders, your current course risks exacerbating regional destabilizing dynamics. How do you plan to resolve this conflict without driving Turkey into a civil war?

 As part of your fight against the PKK, you have called for a more expansive definition of terrorism that would include lawmakers, academics, and journalists whose words you believe make them terrorists. An example of this approach is your stated desire to charge members of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) with constitutional crimes. In fact, you are currently seeking to lift the immunity enjoyed by members of parliament from the HDP in order to be able to prosecute them. The constitution of the Republic of Turkey states that it is a democratic, secular and social state governed by rule of law. How does the political speech of the HDP violate the constitution? Doesnt this course of action undermine rule of law and risk radicalizing the younger generation of Turkish Kurds and pushing them into the arms of the PKK?

We hope that you use the opportunity of your visit to address these troubling issues and, in the process, strengthen the U.S-Turkey relationship.

Respectfully,

 Amb. Mort Abramowitz, Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey

 Amb. Eric Edelman, Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey

 Elliot Abrams, Council on Foreign Relations

 Amb. David Birenbaum

 Max Boot

 Ellen Bork

 Amb. L. Paul Bremer, Former Ambassador to the Netherlands and Presidential Envoy to Iraq

 Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

 Susan Corke, Human Rights First

 Jack David, Hudson Institute; Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

 James S. Denton

 Amb. Paula J. Dobriansky Former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs

 Colin Dueck, George Mason University

 Charles Dunne, Middle East Institute

 Aykan Erdemir, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

 Douglas Feith

 Amb. Robert Ford, Middle East Institute

 Hillel Fradkin

 Lawrence J. Haas, American Foreign Policy Council

 John Hannah, Former Assistant for National Security Affairs to the Vice President

 Dr. William Inboden

 ADM Gregory Johnson, USN (Ret.), Former Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe

 Amb. Robert G. Joseph

 Robert Kagan

 James Kirchick, Foreign Policy Initiative

 Irina Krasovskaya

 Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University

 Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman

 Scott Lilly

 Aaron Lobel, America Abroad Media

 Frank Loy, Former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs

 Michael Makovsky, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

 Clifford D. May, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

 Stephen McInerney, Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)

 David A. Merkel, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State

 Joshua Muravchik, World Affairs Institute

 Martin Peretz, Editor-In-Chief, The New Republic, 1974-2012

 Sen. Charles S. Robb

 Carla Anne Robbins

 Amb. Dennis Ross

 Michael Rubin, American Enterprise Institute

 Jonathan Schanzer, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

 Randy Scheunemann

 Dan Senor

 Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America; Former Director of Policy Planning

 GEN Charles F. Wald, USAF (Ret.), Former Deputy Commander, United States European Command

 Kenneth R. Weinstein, Hudson Institute

 Paul Wolfowitz
Susan Orlean. Photo: Justin Baker/Getty Images

Even in a time of playwright-showrunners and poet-directors, the prospect of a movie deal remains, for the average writer, a source of fervent prayer and deep confusion. So when the roving annual conference of MFA writers known as AWP (for Association of Writers and Writing Programs) came to Los Angeles this week, organizers wanted to illuminate the folkways of the local industry. Among the fairs hundreds of panels was a generous helping of talks on the occasionally lucrative, sometimes cataclysmic, and usually ridiculous clash of civilizations known as adaptation. (Or, in the case of panelist Susan Orlean, Adaptation.)

For most of the featured writers, the journey to Hollywood began with a producers interest, but gained momentum with the benevolent attention of a star. Rachel Weiss fell in love with Jennifer Gilmores adoption novel, The Mothers; James Franco yearned to play memoirist Stephen Elliott in The Adderall Diaries; Salma Hayek took a shine to Domingo Martinezs border-town memoir The Boy Kings of Texas; Ethan Hawkes wife pushed him to make Eleanor Hendersons Ten Thousand Saints. And most famously, Reese Witherspoon snatched Cheryl Strayeds memoir Wild after starting a production company to find herself meaty roles. In Hollywood they call them complex women, said Strayed, on a panel with Elliott, Gilmore, and Henderson. In my life, I call them women.

Such A-list interest guarantees absolutely nothing. The story of adaptation is the story of failure, and the sooner you learned that, the better. A stalled project might even be the best scenario. The secret of writers is we really dont care if they make it as long as they pay us, said Jess Walter, whose Beautiful Ruins and Citizen Vince are now on their second and fourth directors, respectively. Options are usually temporary, and each new option on a stalled project means another infusion of cash. It can turn into an annuity, said Orlean, Walters fellow panelist. What I wouldnt give to have the book that everyone wants to option and no one ever makes.

The writers with the happiest stories tended to be those, like Strayed, who didnt write the script. Others, like Domingo Martinez, couldnt resist the blandishments of producers  These people are lovely! They sent for a car and paid for my drinks!  and discovered the pitfalls of screenwriting. Martinez was tasked with turning his true story into a fiction that kept drifting further from reality  sixty pages written in blood for HBO that may never see the light of day. It was basically overriding my memories, he said. He was asked to change the setting from Texas, alter silly facts like his dogs name (but not his own). What ended up happening was about a year and a half of utter humiliation.

One of his lead producers was Jerry Weintraub, whom Martinez compared to Elvis in the white suit  this absolute charismatic force of ego in Hollywood. And then he died. And so did the project. HBO still owns Martinezs script, and has the right to sell it somewhere else.

Orlean, an enthusiastic chronicler of weird subcultures in books and articles, seemed to revel in her own horror stories. Im uncomfortable with writers who complain too bitterly about how horribly theyve been treated in Hollywood, she said. Its like watching a lot of crazy people. Its nuts, its so funny, and the really good thing is that it makes the publishing world seem so sane and so linear. (Walter had a different but equally cheery take: Hollywood is a nice place where they tell you how smart you are and give you money, so its the opposite of publishing.)

Orlean has had two works successfully adapted  The Orchid Thief (which became Adaptation) and Blue Crush. She called that a remarkable batting average amid a few intellectual property snafus. A Broadway-musical version of one of her stories foundered on the question of how to share the profits of any potential action figures  not a big concern for her. A feature about racing pigeons became a casualty of the Dreamworks/Paramount crackup, after which her effort to buy back the rights failed only because they wouldnt release the Hindi television rights. When a studio outbid several others for her story about the girl group the Shaggs, one of the also-rans flew to New Hampshire and bought the characters life rights, dooming the project out of spite. Orleans has only written one screenplay: A collaboration with her husband, commissioned over a meal with a producer, about their meet-cute romance. In the months after she gave birth to a baby, they fought intense sleep deprivation to dramatize the story of their first date. The rom-com has not been greenlit.

The lucky few who make it into production get to see their often-true stories warped and reenacted ad nauseam  sometimes literally. Each of the writers panels separately invoked Nick Flynns memoir, The Reenactments, about having to watch the worst traumas of his life, including his mothers suicide, replayed over and over again as a studio developed his work. On the set of Wild, Cheryl Strayed watched her eight-year-old daughter Bobbi  named for her mother  play a version of herself in a scene where shes physically menaced by Strayeds abusive father. My daughter Bobbi is playing Cheryl and Laura was playing Bobbi and Reese was playing me and Im Cheryl it was very confusing, said Strayed. But suddenly it occurred to me in a bone-shaking way that that had been my life, and nobody had yelled cut, and my daughter was showing it to me as Id never seen it. And she didnt have that life. Her life is different because of my life, and it was really an unbelievably powerful thing.

More often, writers are haunted not by the movies accuracy, but by the opposite. Jess Walter dreads what he calls the what-if meeting. As one executive said to him of a character, This guys such a loser. What if hes a winner? You have him as an unemployed newspaper reporter, but what if hes a successful lawyer? To which, Walter remembered shooting back, What if hes a Jedi, or a shark? The exec either missed the sarcasm or pretended to, asking, But how would that work?

Orlean regards what if with her usual bemused generosity. She should know, having been through the ultimate what-if experience  the transformation of a book about a flower breeder into a postmodern satire on the adaptation process. When they bought The Orchid Thief, first of all I thought they were crazy, she said. After a very long radio silence, her producers took her out to lunch and began plying her with wine. She grew suspicious. Finally, they gingerly handed her Charlie Kaufmans screenplay. Back at home, she read the script. It opens with Susan as a five-year-old, a scene thats not in the book. In another scene, Susan goes on a porn site. Then there was Susan snorting drugs, and falling in love with her subject. When the producers finally called her, Orlean said she didnt want her name used. But then her better judgment and ego  prevailed: Certainly sitting in a movie theater and having Meryl Streep say, Hi Im Susan Orlean, its a special experience.

Stephen Elliott had a less heady time. James Franco took years to adapt The Adderall Diaries and barely spoke to him during the process. What finally emerged drastically altered the events of a harrowing memoir. I was just watching this part the other day where James Franco was giving a reading from my book, he said, and they rewrote the book I was reading from, which is so not necessary to the plot in any way, and the book he was reading was so bad!

Franco banned Elliott from the set and didnt invite him to the movie premiere. It should have been really negative in every way, Elliott said, but Im not even mad. I bought a house with the money they gave me, I sold a lot of books, and it inspired me to make a new movie about James Franco making a movie about me. Titled After Adderall, the black-and-white art film features a scene in which a man wearing a James Franco mask talks to Elliott, who plays himself. Elliott wrote it in a two-week rush of transformative resentment. That inspiration was a huge gift, he said. Nothing has come out of the movie that hasnt been positive.
Okay, maybe I overhyped the whole ninja thing.

Although Daredevils action sequences are a tremendous asset, theyre also one of its biggest liabilities. Its a simple problem of escalation: In a martial-arts movie, for example, you can almost always expect three big fights, one for each act, with maybe a smaller fight or two thrown in for good measure. Ideally, each of those fights would scale up in both ambition and narrative importance. As you get closer to the end, the stakes get higher and the choreography more elaborate.

Its harder to do that sort of thing on a show like Daredevil, however. Given budget concerns and time constraints, resources have to be allocated in such a way that no one episode handicaps the rest. This makes it really tricky to keep topping each fight scene in a sustainable way. Daredevil almost pulled it off: After introducing the Punisher, then Elektra, then the Hand, now all of them are slowly converging.

Except the vocabulary of Daredevils action is limited; every fight cant be a long-take hallway thriller. The shows dark setting and clean, straightforward style  which rewards well-staged fights like Matts first two bouts with the Punisher, or his living-room brawl with the Hand assassin  begin to buckle under the weight of ambition. Its kind of ironic, and very unfortunate: The more exciting elements Daredevil has to throw into a fight (like a small army of Hand ninjas storming a hospital), the less interesting that fight is bound to look onscreen.

So yes, the resolution to the cliffhanger at the end of The Man in the Box is a little underwhelming, as the ninja brawls start to take on a vanilla flavor. The show is still capable of some really cool stunt work, like when Claire Temple is thrown out a window and Daredevil plunges out after her, catching one of the Hands rappelling cables and crashing into a window to save her. Its all for naught, though. The Hand grab the Farm victims and Daredevil loses them in pursuit.

With the Hand out of reach, .380 then pivots its focus on the other big priority: How are our heroes going to find the Blacksmith?

For Frank Castle, nothing else matters  and for some reason, Karen thinks shes better off helping him track the drug lord down. This leads to the two of them sitting across from one another in a diner, drinking coffee and talking about guns and dating.

No, really: Since she pulled a gun on him in The Man in the Box, he wants to know if she chose the firearm, a .380 herself. Hes impressed, because most people go for something fancy or aesthetically pleasing, but a .380 shows thought.

While theyre sharing, Karen tells Frank that she believes him because hes always been honest with her. The same cant be said for everyone else. This is where Karen loses me. Daredevil has worked really hard to give Karen an assertiveness and agency that she lacked in season one  Ive been really happy with her story this season, barring a few quibbles  but her relationship with Frank Castle might compromise that. I buy why shed believe Frank, and why shed advocate for him. I dont buy her helping him.

Also, Frank gives her super-questionable advice about love and Matt and Im not sure what shes supposed to take away from it other than, Its better to be with someone bad for you than with no one at all, which is just wrong. Besides, hes not actually there to talk to her; hes there to kill a pair of the Blacksmiths goons, but not before beating a possible location for the Blacksmith out of them.

Meanwhile, Matt  whom Karen finally clued in on the fact that the Blacksmith is killing everyone, not Frank  follows a tip from Blake Tower and tracks down the Blacksmiths chief competitor, hidden in Chinatown. Turns out its Madame Gao. Remember her? While its fun to see her, she doesnt reveal much. She doesnt know who the Blacksmith is  just that his drugs come via boat.

The Punisher is already at the dock, tearing through the Blacksmiths men and holding the freighter captain at gunpoint, pressuring him to confess to being the Blacksmith so he can kill him and feel vindicated. Only hes wrong, and Daredevil shows up to tell him so. The Punisher is really damn frustrated by Daredevils interference, and theyd normally have a huge fight over it  but theyre besieged by the Blacksmiths men. Frank pushes Daredevil into the Hudson river, then sets off a powder keg of explosives to take out the goons and, seemingly, himself.

Devil in the Details:

Claires corner. Get it? Because this show puts her in a  never mind. Anyway, Claire butts heads with hospital administration when she discovers that, following a large, anonymous donation, theyre covering up The Hand attack. Furious, she storms in on the board and quits, telling Foggy on her way out that she cant be their inside man at the hospital anymore.

Speaking of Foggy. Hes visited in the hospital by Marci Stahl, who actually kind of likes him? She tells him that his performance in the Castle trial has turned some heads, and that someone big wants to meet with him. Bet that comes up again soon.

Speak softly, big Stick. Daredevils other blind martial artist catches wind that his attempt to kill Elektra failed, and that shes coming for him. Its a fight Matt will likely invite himself to, since one of Sticks men crashes his car in front of Matts apartment and tells him that Elektra is on her way to kill Stick.

Oh right, that creepy blood voodoo Hand stuff. No clue as to what its for, but whatever it is, its ready  after the Farm victims are bled once more. Only this time, theyre willing to have their wrists cut? This is all very perturbing. Bad juju all around
When Peter Dinklage showed up on Weekend Update during a Melissa McCarthyhosted SNL episode to play Peter Drunklage  that is, a soused alter ego who mimicked Bobby Moynihans popular Weekend Update character, Drunk Uncle  it was clear he had the chops to host the show himself. While best known as one of badasses on Game of Thrones, Dinklage has regularly popped up in comedy projects, e.g., the furious book publisher Miles Finch in Elf and one of Liz Lemons missed connections on 30 Rock. Dinklages SNL episode more than proves his capabilities in the sketch format.

While Dinklage is a natural, this is SNL, and the sketches will always be a little hit-and-miss. (Though one of the immediately nice things about this episode is that every sketch skips right over obvious jokes about the hosts height.) Within that pattern, and maybe because of his training as an actor, Dinklage delivers surprising emotional grounding for flimsy characters and sells his bits with more commitment and panache than most hosts are capable of mustering.

Cold Open: At This Hour

Given the week Trump had, from his comments about punishing women who obtained ostensibly illegal abortions to covering up for his violent campaign manager, a cold open on Trump was nearly inevitable. (Honestly, it might be inevitable from now until the election.) This one digs in a bit more than recent political bits by honing in on an all-too-recognizable personality: The Trump apologist. As CNN anchor Kate Bolduan (Kate McKinnon) confronts a Tea Party News Network representative (Cecily Strong) with a litany of baffling Trump deeds, the TPNN rep explains it all away. (That is your actual answer? That is what I have picked, yes.) Things reach a funny fever pitch in a cutaway to a Trump rally, where the Donald repeatedly punches a man even after finding out that man is a Trump supporter. Darrell Hammond doesnt quite get enough screen time to justify his appearance, but Strong holds it down as a daffy Trumper: You cant break me, Kate, because Im crazy and crazy dont break.

Peter Dinklage Monologue

Dinklages first appearance feels like a tossed off parcel of ideas to acknowledge obvious associations the audience has with him. George R.R. Martin (Bobby Moynihan) makes Dinklage tell jokes about Game of Thrones, while the monologue touches on some of the more obvious trappings of the HBO series  boobs, dragons, incest. Once all of these boxes are ticked, its over. Not that the monologue needs to be a great revelation, but with only a few scattered references to make it go, its not really worth doing. Okay, maybe its worth the moment of Leslie Jones dancing in a hokey dragon costume at the end.

Winnie the Pooh

Young A.A. Milne readers may have wondered how the idyllic, sweet world of Winnie the Pooh and his animal pals intersected with the real world, but none would have gone far enough to imagine this sketch. Poohs cousin from far away, Denny the Real, shows up to kick Pooh a little street knowledge. In addition to giving Pooh some pants  he shouldnt go around looking like a black guy in a porno trying to hide his gut  Denny tries to convince Pooh to eat his friends and lay off the sweets because Uncle Griers got that sugar. Some jokes are too obvious, e.g., Eeyore needs Zoloft, but Jay Pharoah gives a solid performance as the street-smart hustler bear in the stunna shades.

Naked & Afraid, Celebrity Edition

Every time SNL lets Leslie Jones loose, its a win. This filmed piece, a parody of Discoverys Naked and Afraid, features a celebrity edition of the survival show with two contestants: Dinklage and Jones. Unlike the timid Dinklage, Jones shows up naked (and unafraid). When Dinklage takes off his clothes, she barks, You are packing! Noice! Given a chance to bring one wilderness survival item, she packs hot sauce, and she squashes Dinklage at night when trying to spoon him. (This sketch is the only one with overt gags about body size in the episode, and here, the obvious disparity between them makes it feel entirely unforced.) Dinklage plays a fine, long-suffering straight man here, and wins on the premise that 21 days with Jones is a feat no man has ever achieved.

Mafia Meeting

This sketch answers that eternal question, Are those space pants youre wearing? That answer: Yer goddamn right. In the back room of a restaurant, some mobsters pull a gun on their delinquent debtors. Before things get violent, performer Jonathan Cummins  Dinklage in a blonde bob and silver vest  pops up to sing a silly song about his very starry britches. Again and again, the bargain-basement Devo tune and Dinklages robotic romping halt the gangland transaction. It would have been nice to see a sense of escalation at the gangster table, rather than a drop-in from Gwen Stefani  or better yet, another high-stakes activity the jam could interrupt. In any case, Dinklage sells it with verve, commitment and a surprising amount of polish.

Trendy Restaurant

In the grand tradition of sketches like Mr. Shows Toilet Restaurant, the writers play with whats permissible at hip eateries. Dinklage and his partner, played by Aidy Bryant, are hip New Yorkers showing their Ohio-based pals a night out in the Meatpacking District. In deference to the neighborhoods seedy past, every table in the restaurant has a glory hole through which the waiter shoves varying sorts of phallic food for patrons to scarf. If youve ever yearned to see Peter Dinklage go to town on a huge pumpernickel dong covered in butter, your sketch has arrived. (In truth, Dinklage could go a little harder at his bread wang, but I quibble.) In the words of one of the Midwesterners, I cant remember anything other than what Im looking at right now.

Game of Thrones Sneak Peek

Much like the monologue, this filmed sketch feels like something SNL has to do in order to capitalize on Dinklages GOT connection, and because the audience expects it. As Dinklage and other stars give a sneak preview of GOT season six, Bobby Moynihan steals focus while in an awkward dragon costume. There are spit-takes, pants-pissing, crotch injuries due to wire work; its all pretty canned.

Weekend Update

Trump dominates things up top before Michael Che and Colin Jost take down Hillary and Justin Trudeaus yoga photo (Why your aunt took her laptop into the bathroom.). The chipper Pete Davidson steps in to ask how the court decided to award Hulk Hogan $140 million after Gawker published his erotic video  making him the highest paid porn star by $130 million. Kenan Thompson drops in to play Red Sox star David Ortiz, but its a lame pretext to play on Ortizs accent and it goes on way too long.

While Che and Jost will never be bubbly pals like Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler, the more they work together, the more their dynamic reveals itself. Theyve both got stand-up backgrounds, so it makes sense that they want to lean into subjects and feel out the audience rather than just make a quick joke and run. Che, in particular, stretches his legs  as he does here in a bit about the end of Obamas presidency  and peppers in comments about how Josts jokes land. The Update these two are shaping may not be the rapid-fire explosion viewers have come to know, but it might be able to justify a new sort of rhythm.

Undersea Hotel

This is a single sight gag stretched out to three minutes: A couple on a honeymoon in the Bahamas get a suite with an underwater reef view and see a dead body floating outside. Eh. Seems like a fun gross-out gag on paper that doesnt execute all that well.

Vacation Nightmares

Any excuse to put Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant in drag, give them fake stubble, and let them ham it up is a good one. Unfortunately, though, this sketch never really pays off. In it, a traumatized couple describes an assault that took place during a trip to Denmark; the reenactment of the crime shows Bryant and McKinnon harassing the vacationers stand-ins while speaking with accents that can only be described as Swedish Muppet. Despite the protests of the real-life victims and the host of Vacation Nightmares, the reenactors keep chewing the scenery. Your enjoyment of the sketch will be directly proportional to how much you like hearing McKinnon and Bryant say bitch,  as in Youre about to eat a knife, bitch. My tolerance is pretty high and still, it didnt quite get there for me.

Corporate Magic Show

At the Peterson Realty Company Retreat, a magician (Taran Killam) touches a nerve when he brings the companys owner (Dinklage) onstage and pulls a string of handkerchiefs and a pair of stinky underwear from the bosss pocket. Peterson becomes obsessed with the finer points of the joke, whether the magician intended to imply that Peterson had crapped himself and had a loose log floating in his pants. The writers have fun with Dinklages standard comic persona  stern, disapproving, but just over-the-top enough to let an audience know hes having fun  and the scat logistics keep things interesting.

*

Dinklage is a great complement to the cast who plays well with others and seems game for whatever the goofy premise comes his way. The show itself starts out with stronger ideas and better follow-through in its first half, but the second half has a few nice moments. The show should earn Dinklage a return invite, if for nothing else than a rematch with a naked Jones.
Adam Neziri, a native of Macedonia who moved to the United States about 18 years ago, has opened the Greek Grill in Richland Mall.

We were busy on the day we began serving and have been busier every day since, Neziri said.

The grill serves gyro wraps, salads and baklava, with meats for the wraps that include chicken, steak and beef with lamb, he said.

Sides include steamed vegetables, potato wedges, stuffed grape leaves and more, all with a Greek twist. A salad bar is also available.

The grill is next to Subway in the malls food court, Neziri said.

His hours of business are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sundays.

Neziri said he moved to Waco from Harker Heights, where he prepared Greek food in a restaurant called The Acropolis.

Tarpley Music Co.

Tarpley Music Co., which sells a wide range of instruments and offers lessons, is moving into 1300 Lake Air Drive, the former home of Backstage Pass Music Center.

The company has locations in San Angelo, Amarillo, Lubbock, Wichita Falls and Clovis, New Mexico, and reportedly will open in a week or two, said Chuck Lambert, who will manage the establishment and said hiring has begun.

He described Tarpley as a full-line music store, with its website saying its locations offer acoustic and electric guitars, band instruments, drums and percussion instruments, pianos and keyboards, amplifiers and professional audio equipment.

Music Trades Magazine ranks Tarpley Music in the top 200 music stores in the country, out of an estimated 8,000 stores.

Five generations of the Tarpley family have been involved in the operation of the company, which started when Clara Tarpley, a piano teacher in Wellington, Texas, began selling pianos in the 1920s in a hardware store in Shamrock, later moving to Pampa, where she officially launched Tarpley Music Co.

Economist honored

Waco-based economist Ray Perryman, who frequently weighs in on issues affecting the local, state and national economies, has been named as a recipient of the 2016 Cesar E. Chavez Conscience Builder Award by the Cesar E. Chavez Legacy and Educational Foundation.

The award was presented during the foundations annual scholarship gala in San Antonio.

The citation called Perryman a champion and guardian of the conscience and human dignity and noted that his life is a testimony centered on these core values.

Foundation president Jaime Martinez, a friend and contemporary of Chavez, who was a labor and civil rights leader who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, said Perrymans life has been defined by respect for human dignity and centered on the unifying principles of God, family and serving others.

The citation discussed Perrymans career and impact as an influential economist, with emphasis on work he has provided free of charge related to hunger, child maltreatment, cultural awareness, indigent health care, immigration reform, educational opportunity, drug abuse and homelessness.

More awards for Balcones

Wacos Balcones Distillery, which has become an award-winning maker of whiskey, has received three more medals to add to its accolades.

Judges at the 2016 San Francisco World Spirits Competition awarded double-gold medals to Balcones 1 Single Malt and Baby Blue, and a bronze medal to Brimstone Corn Whisky.

The competition was held March 17-20 at the Hotel Nikko in downtown San Francisco. The organization was founded in 2000 as a way to determine and award exceptional products in the spirits industry, according to a news release by Balcones.

More than 1,850 spirits were judged this year, representing the largest number of entries in the organizations 16-year history.

Texas Farm Bureau exec

The Texas Farm Bureau, whose headquarters are located in Waco, has named Si Cook as executive director and chief operations officer, succeeding the retiring Vernie R. Glasson III. He will assume the responsibility of business manager and COO of the states largest general farm organization on May 26.

Glasson will serve in the role of adviser until his retirement July 5, the organization announced.

Our board voted unanimously today to elect Si Cook as executive director of Texas Farm Bureau, TFB President Russell Boening said. Si has extensive experience in agriculture and our organization. We are confident in his ability to lead the staff of TFB into the future.

Cook has served the farm bureau for more than 28 years, most recently as member of the senior management staff under Glasson. He heads the organization division, and in that role he is responsible for member services, education and outreach, youth programs, young farmer and rancher programs, and training.
University High School senior Alicia Martinez hopes her time serving the people of Waco is the beginning of a career as an FBI forensic accountant.

Martinez, 17, is the student director of Universitys tax service program, where about 60 students provide free tax services to the community three nights a week from January through April.

And residents love it.

Id rather get it free than pay to pay, Waco resident Wilbert London said.

The program began 12 years ago with students submitting 300 tax returns on residents behalf, said Dede Moore, one of the programs coordinators.

Its since grown by a factor of 10, with students on track to submit close to 3,000 forms this year, Moore said.

Clients start filing into Universitys hallways shortly after school ends on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Students conduct a short interview to input all the clients information and then transfer the client to another student who files the appropriate tax form.

Each student who participates in the program is enrolled in the Ron E. Smith Academy of Business and Finance and must become certified by the Internal Revenue Service to assist people through the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program.

Moore said its a wonderful program because there are so few classes available to students where they learn a concept in an afternoon class and implement the concept that evening.

Martinez has been helping people fill out their tax forms for three years and said she loves it.

Martinez said when she first started, she wasnt concerned about getting any forms or documents wrong, because math is one of her strongest subjects.

She was more concerned about talking to people she didnt know, but helping them through the process gave her more confidence.

I was scared at first, Martinez said.

University sophomore Lessitte Canales began volunteering last year and also said she hopes to make it into a career. She enjoys meeting new people and helping them through the process.

Business is kind of fascinating for me, Canales said.

London said he has been coming to the school for its tax services for the past decade.

The students are always able to answer questions he has, and the wait isnt too long, he said.

Its pretty easy once youve done it before, London said.
As rival politicians in the spotlight toss insults and accusations, some Baylor University students are learning different paths to effective political discourse.

Fourteen Baylor students participated March 19-25 in the National Model United Nations Conference, and the team was named overall Outstanding Delegation, the highest award, while representing Vietnam. Almost 5,000 students from around the world attended the conference in New York City, and more than half came from outside the United States.

While discussing international topics such as terrorism, poverty and energy, the students learned that diplomacy comes from collaboration and treating attendees like people, not only delegates.

Collaboration is almost a dirty word in Congress today, Spanish and International Studies junior Megan Rollag said. It makes you appear as if you are breaking away from values and stances, when really youre trying to accomplish something. Seeing that in our political climate is a little disheartening when students like us participate in conferences solely based on collaboration.

History senior Renie Saenz used the example of Judge Merrick Garland, President Barack Obamas choice to replace Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. He said if a Republican supported Garland, he or she could be shunned and possibly lose a re-election bid.

I think voters have to be willing to collaborate on issues as well, Saenz said. A lot of people are not willing to swallow their pride and admit when theyre wrong or admit theyve messed up.

That sort of attitude doesnt fly in Model UN, said Rebecca Flavin, political science lecturer and Model UN faculty adviser.

The way that you succeed and the way you get recognized is through excellence in collaboration and cooperation, Flavin said. So the students who are stuck on their idea and hesitant or reluctant to cooperate typically dont succeed.

Though English was the only allowed language, the barrier between international students and native speakers required clear communication.

Most of the time I felt like the minority, but I was in America, International Studies sophomore Joe Yope said. Its a present thought in your mind.

The group said students from Belgium and France, the sites of recent terrorist attacks, had unique perspectives on issues like counterterrorism and peacekeeping.

While collaboration among American politicians isnt always evident, members of Baylors Model UN delegation say theres hope.

You need to see leadership thats reaching across the aisle, International Studies junior Marc Webb said. People will follow whatever the status quo is. For that to change, there have to be major players who say, Regardless of the view, Im here to cooperate because its for the good of the whole, not just the good of my region of the state or my party. 

Rollag said the international students she met have noticed the current political climate in the United States. A Canadian student invited her to move north, and others assumed all Texans support Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, she said.

With so many students learning the value of true diplomacy, Flavin said the current state of tough politics could one day improve.

Thats the frustration theyve expressed with Congress and a lot of people in the United States have expressed with Congress, she said. So Im hopeful that even if politics today is nasty and hard to watch and hard to swallow, the next generation will learn from those mistakes and make it better.
Hes nearly 90, but Crisp Pirelo still remembers where he lived when he was a boy: 2201 Lyle Ave. in Waco. His father built their home in the 1920s, and it housed a grocery store that he operated. The family lived in the back.

When Pirelo was in the 11th grade, he quit school to join the military. His father had been a soldier in World War I and his brother was serving in the cavalry in the Pacific during World War II. Pirelo thought it only natural that he should serve, as well.

He liked the idea of the Navy, so in June 1944 he enlisted and left for basic training at the Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago. He became a gunners mate, manning a 45 mm machine gun which could fire 110 rounds per minute. In September 1944, he was sent to Boston, where he was assigned to the USS Kendrick (DD612), a heavily armed escort ship.

Because of the timing of his enlistment, he rarely had an opportunity to use his gunnery training, as German airpower had been all but wiped out. Serving with the 12th Fleet in the European Theater in the Mediterranean, Pirelo did other tasks while on board, including guard duty. He even steered the ship on occasion. It was kind of scary, he said.

Since airplanes were no longer a threat, it was the job of the Kendricks crew to be on the alert for submarines. The Kendrick escorted troop ships to various locations, including North Africa, France, Italy and Spain. Among the many places it docked was Sicily, where Pirelos parents were born. They met in Waco after his father had joined the Army to learn English. He was stationed at Camp MacArthur when he met Crisps mother, who had arrived in America about 10 years earlier.

Pirelo went on liberty occasionally, including numerous stops in France, but we were out to sea most of the time, he said.

Escorting FDR to Yalta

From time to time, something unusual from the daily grind would occur. One of the most exciting for Pirelo was when they escorted a ship carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was on his way to the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The Kendrick also served as an air-sea rescue ship.

Pirelos closest encounter with combat came off the coast of Genoa in the Ligurian Sea between Italy and the island of Corsica. The Kendrick was providing support for the U.S. Army, firing 5-inch guns that could go a long way  and you didnt have to see it to know it was heading toward the target, he said. The Germans were shooting at us. It (artillery) landed about 50 yards away.

It was during this battle that the news of Germanys surrender was received. Suddenly all firing stopped. The war in Europe had come to an end.

Pirelo said they ended up escorting the USS Texas, a New York-class battleship, as well as many other ships, back to the States. The Kendrick eventually ended up in Hawaii, where Pirelo said they prepared for the invasion in Japan, which, of course, never happened.

Pirelo came back with the ship to Charleston, South Carolina, and left the Navy after two years in June 1946. The Kendrick, decommissioned in 1947, was scuttled in the 1960s after being used for demolition testing. The old battleship now rests on the ocean floor about 10 miles off the coast of Key West, Florida.

Man of many talents

Pirelo got his pilots license, went to barber school, and then decided to re-enlist in January 1949  this time in the Air Force, because he was prone to seasickness, which made you want to jump overboard, he said. He wanted to see more of the world, but instead he wound up at James Connally Air Force Base  right at home.

Pirelo eventually became a military police officer. It was at Connally that he met Doris Bean. They married at the base chapel 65 years ago.

At Connally his duties included routine patrol, issuing speeding tickets and transporting prisoners. During his

final six months in the service, he was sent to Laredo to help organize a new base and train MPs.

He was discharged in October 1952 as a staff sergeant, and served in the Air Force Reserves until Connally was closed in 1968. Pirelo joined the Naval Reserves and wound retiring after serving a total of 33 years.

For 25 years he operated a barber shop and worked with the police service at the VA in Waco. After 11 years, he stepped down as assistant chief.

Pirelo, who went on an Honor Flight, is glad to have served. It was great, he said. I enjoyed it all.

Voices of Valor, which features stories about Central Texas veterans, runs on Sundays. To suggest a story about a Central Texas veteran, please email voicesofvalor@wacotrib.com.
If you think the cross-currents of the U.S. presidential election constitute societal madness and national decline, revelations about actual fighting between the CIA and the Pentagon through their proxies in war-torn Syria raise more concern about U.S. foreign policy, enough at least to rate comparison with Donald Trumps suggestions that the NATO alliance is obsolete or nuclear proliferation should be considered by allies such as the Japanese and South Koreans.

Want to talk crazy? Both the Pentagon and CIA support separate militias. Problem: These well-armed, well-financed militias are fighting each other on the desolate plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border. All this highlights a lack of vision and leadership over implementation of the proper foreign-policy strategy regarding Syria.

The fighting accents how little control U.S. intelligence has over various groups financed through taxpayer money and armed through our government, at least in this stretch of the Middle East. And you thought the Russians introduced chaos to this region?

The CIA-armed militia, dubbed Fursan al Haq, which translates as Knights of Righteousness, operates out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo. The Pentagon, on the other hand, backs the Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east. And one wonders why American foreign policy is seen as stagnant, stubborn and reactionary.

Add to this volatile mix Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkeys ongoing funding and arming of different rebel groups with wildly different agendas. Yet fighting between two groups armed and financed by the United States  the CIA and Pentagon  is a new phenomenon and our own bid for international insanity. Its sure evidence of the need for a major overhaul of U.S. foreign-policy strategy  and not only involving Syria but the region at large.

This disturbing news comes in the wake of the Obama administrations recent effort to restart and re-authorize the Pentagon to train rebel fighters following the United States disastrous, short-lived, multimillion-dollar training program last October. The programs failure saw recruits ultimately handing over their U.S.-issued weapons and other materials to members of the terrorist group al-Nusra, an al-Qaida offshoot. Some of our recruits even turned out to be members of al-Nusra. So much for a systematic vetting process.

Let us now review the scorecard and players: As stated earlier, the CIA supports the Knights of Righteousness group (one can almost imagine a group so-named right here in America, though involved in different sorts of mischief); the Pentagon supports the Syrian Democratic Forces. The latter group is problematic because a majority of its members are Kurdish; thus, theyre viewed by some as an invading force. This could not come at a worse time for Turkey, given already simmering tensions over U.S. backing of Kurdish armed forces. The last thing Turkey wants is any armed Kurdish elements near or in control of its southern border.

Such dynamics also threaten to put the CIA in the limelight  not really a preferred prospect for an intelligence agency that favors the shadows. The agency is arming its rebel groups with sophisticated weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles stored by our increasingly mercurial ally, the Saudis. And thus history threatens to come full circle: Didnt the agency arm the Taliban back in the 1980s in similar fashion? We saw how all that worked out.

In the past, struggles for dominance and strategy between U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon played out within the confines of the Beltway, in cocktail parties and congressional hearings and high-level, closed-door meetings. Not anymore. The ideological collision once limited to brainy ideas, arguments and different opinions is exploding in an arena with combustible and deadly consequences through guns and proxies, setting a dangerous precedent at a time when some of our presidential candidates all too readily reflect the American publics tragic ignorance of foreign affairs.

But then our foreign policy is a mess. The United States is supporting Shia Muslims in Iraq while backing their arch-enemy, Sunni Muslims, in neighboring Syria. No wonder so many are confused. Its hard enough for Americans to understand how sects of the same basic faith can be bitter enemies. By its actions, our government only makes a deeper muddle of any simple understanding of the problems.

If the United States wants to defeat ISIS, which now controls much of Syria, betting entirely on the Kurds to do most of the fighting is a questionable strategy, given that the Kurds do not represent the majority of the Syrian population. The United States needs Sunnis of all stripes to take part in the fighting. And to that end, cool heads at the Pentagon and CIA need to step back, re-evaluate conflicting strategies and find real international consensus for everyones sake.

David Oualaalou is a global affairs analyst, blogger, author and professor. A former international security analyst in Washington, D.C., he is a part-time instructor at McLennan Community College. He is author of the newly released More Than a Handshake: The Ambiguous Foreign Policy of the United States Toward the Muslim World.
Over the years, millions of retired state and local workers including teachers, police officers and firefighters  have received sharply reduced Social Security benefits, simply because they have had multiple jobs during their careers and werent allowed to pay into Social Security in all of them.

Its a case of the whole being less than the sum of the parts. Thirty-three years ago, Congress changed the Social Security benefit formula to add a Windfall Elimination Provision, which adjusted some former public employees benefits to account for the time they had not paid into Social Security while working in vital public-service jobs.

While the intent was to make the system fairer, the formula actually penalizes those who have had jobs both inside and outside the Social Security system. The formula may be complex, but whats at stake here isnt: This new bill would simply guarantee public servants receive the benefits they earned while paying into Social Security.

Congressmen Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, and Richard Neal, D-Massachusetts, have filed a bill to restore fairness in calculating Social Security benefits for these workers. It would benefit about 95 percent of all Texas public school teachers, as well as many retirees in teaching and other fields.

Those who teach our children and protect and serve us everyday deserve equal treatment when they retire, Brady says. Social Security benefits should be based on your real-life contributions, not some arbitrary formula.

HR 711, which AARP fully supports, is also backed by another prominent Texan on Capitol Hill  Congressman Sam Johnson, R-Plano, who chairs the Social Security Subcommittee. Also working to fix the problem is Texan Tim Lee, who as executive director of the Texas Retired Teachers Association (TRTA) leads the largest association for retired public and higher education employees in the country.

Lee has been working for years on a solution that will help teachers and other affected parties. He notes that retired teachers are currently losing hundreds of dollars a month in much-needed Social Security benefits and that the problem may be keeping many Texans from becoming teachers at all.

Someone who knows all this first-hand is retired Marine Lt. Col. Link Ermis. The 54-year-old paid into Social Security for more than 25 years before taking a job as a middle school teacher in Huntsville in 2007. If he teaches for another 15 years, his teacher pension and Social Security benefits combined would amount to less than if he just took Social Security based on his past contributions. He plans to roll his teacher pension earnings into an IRA and take the lower Social Security payment.

No matter what course I take, Im punished because I chose to work as a teacher after military retirement, Ermis says.

AARP President Jeannine English, who along with TRTAs Lee recently testified to Congress about this topic, says the bill represents a fair solution that will benefit the 1.6 million workers affected by the current . . . policy. This includes nearly 150,000 Texans.

Not coincidentally, AARP was founded by a retired high school principal inspired by the plight of a retired teacher living in a chicken coop. That led to the establishment of the National Retired Teachers Association, which is a part of AARP today. Much has changed for the better for educators over the years, but this Social Security provision has lingered on for more than three decades.

So how would public-sector workers be better off if the bill becomes law? Social Security benefits will increase  though were not sure how much yet  for those people who are already retired or who turn age 62 before the end of this year. Everyone else will also see increased benefits once they retire.

At a time when retirement security is increasingly becoming out of reach for millions of workers, we can ill afford to leave any hard-earned Social Security benefits on the table.

For Patricia Vorhees, a retired elementary school teacher from Conroe, it all boils down to simple fairness.

Were entitled to the money because we earned it, she says. I feel that it is wrong that I, and others like me, collect a very tiny amount of the money we earned.

Bob Jackson is director of AARP Texas, a nonprofit organization with nearly 38 million members nationally, including 2.3 million in Texas.
Its happening: The Supreme Court is getting desperate. With a 4-4 tie looming over whether religious organizations have to file a form with the government requesting an exemption from the mandatory contraceptive-care provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the justices took an extreme step last week. They issued an order that basically told the federal government and the religious entities to reach a compromise  and described what the compromise would look like.

Federal district court judges will sometimes tell the parties that theyd better compromise or else they might not like the results that follow. The Supreme Court essentially never does, both because it lacks leverage and because it gets involved in cases with the intention to bolster or forge new law  not to resolve particular disputes. But were in new territory here. The Supreme Court is trying to figure out how to do its job with eight justices  a situation that might persist not just through this Supreme Court term but through the next one as well.

The oral argument last month in the case that includes Burwell v. Little Sisters of the Poor demonstrated the near certainty of a 4-4 split. The argument clarified the core conflict in the case: The exemption sought by the religious organizations was the very thing that the Obama administration said it wanted, namely for the employees of religious organizations to get contraceptive care from the same insurer and health-care providers from which they get the rest of their coverage.

The religious organizations said that under the system created by the Department of Health and Human Services, their free exercise of religion was burdened. Under the existing system, the organizations file a form with the government explaining that they dont want to cover contraception. The government then tells their insurers to provide the coverage and to pay for it.

According to the religious organizations, this system amounts to a hijacking of their health-care plan to provide the contraceptive care that they consider immoral. At oral argument, the religious organizations embraced the analogy that this is like the government using an empty room in their buildings to provide the contraceptive care. Yet the solicitor general explained to the court that the government considered it essential for employees to receive seamless care, meaning that they would receive their contraceptive care from their usual insurer and provider. This made the case look like a conflict between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

The Supreme Courts order tries to resolve this conflict. The order was framed as a command for more briefing by all the parties  something that happens occasionally at the court, even after oral argument.

In its essence, however, the order described a potential compromise. It said first that the parties should consider a plan in which the religious organizations dont need to give the government notice that they dont want to provide contraceptive care. Instead, the organizations could just tell their insurers that they dont want to provide contraceptive care for religious reasons.

At oral argument, former solicitor general Paul Clement, representing the religious groups, said that his clients werent objecting to having to say they didnt want to provide contraceptive care. If thats true, this part of the compromise should more than satisfy the religious organizations. And the government shouldnt object, either, because it doesnt care with whom the forms are filed.

The court then clarified that under its compromise, the religious organizations would have no legal obligation to provide such contraceptive coverage [and] would not pay for such coverage. Thats already true  and should be acceptable to all. The court added that at the same time, petitioners insurance company  aware that petitioners are not providing certain contraceptive coverage on religious grounds  would separately notify petitioners employees that the insurance company will provide cost-free contraceptive coverage.

Heres where the compromise may fail. This part of the courts proposal would satisfy the government, which demands seamless contraceptive care from the same insurer and provider. But based on what was said at oral argument, it shouldnt satisfy the religious organizations, because the care would still come from the same insurer  one chosen by the organizations themselves. If the existing scheme counts as hijacking, according to the organizations religious conscience, surely this would, too.

What happens next? Because were in uncharted waters, no one really knows. What seems most likely is that the solicitor general will file a brief saying the government would have no objection to such a scheme. But realistically, there isnt time for HHS actually to propose and adopt such regulations before late June, when the courts term ends. So the government will be speaking hypothetically.

Meanwhile, the religious organizations could say that compromise wouldnt satisfy them. But even if they say it would satisfy them, theyre unlikely to concede that their challenge should fail  because no new regulations are yet in place.

The court has no practical leverage to force a compromise. And if none is reached, the result will be a mess. An evenly divided court can only affirm decisions below. But different courts of appeal have resolved this exemption issue differently, with most circuits rejecting the religious organizations claims and one upholding their claim. So the law would differ from place to place.

The courts compromise isnt likely to succeed, mostly because the court doesnt have much experience with how to propose resolutions in this way. But you cant blame justices for trying. Think of this as their cry in the wilderness. Maybe someone will be listening.

Bloomberg View columnist Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University.
Judging from Facebook posts, McLennan County Elections Administrator Kathy Van Wolfes firing of a staffer after the botched March 1 primary election clearly failed to absolve her of responsibility in the public eye. Some county residents obviously subscribe to the notion of the buck stopping with whoever is in charge.

But lets be fair. No one calls for the sheriffs resignation when a jailer allegedly alters documents to hide his or her behavior about a suicide. No one calls for the police chiefs resignation when an officer allegedly assaults a civilian unprovoked. And likely no one will call for your boss resignation if and when you bungle a particular assignment and get the boot. Van Wolfe deserves as much consideration in her favor.

Yes, Van Wolfe rates blame for failed oversight, though again, in fairness, the increasing complexities of voting protocol, aging election equipment, changing election laws and even simply anticipating who will show up where in what election demand that each staffer in the modest-sized elections office perform to the highest possible standard as well. A March 28 termination notice about election problems authored by Van Wolfe and obtained by Trib staff writer Cassie L. Smith raises the spectre of one staffers short-cuts and deception about what had been tested and what had not been tested well in advance.

In any case, a seasoned manager  Van Wolfe is certainly that  should have pressed her staff aggressively about the risks in this critical changeover to vote centers in a primary election, an enormously complicated undertaking. Good supervisors challenge their staffs  and, as Van Wolfe once remarked, every possibility for disaster must be anticipated and double-checked. In an election you get one chance to get it right.

A district judges denial of an election redo in the Precinct 1 county commissioners race, undermined by incorrectly issued ballots, would seem solid proof of this. The judges ruling, right or wrong, still leaves some voters (and at least one candidate) sure they were cheated. As Van Wolfe herself correctly notes in her memo, election problems caused major errors, additional costs, tremendous stress and a voting population that is suspect of the election offices future capability to perform competent, error-free elections.

Van Wolfe may well have erred in initially allowing much of the blame to fall on the election equipment vendor and poll workers, but she obviously has the backing of county officials in this debacle. Fair enough. We hope she uses this crisis to smartly rally her staff and impress upon them the absolute importance of expecting the worst, especially as November looms. They can begin by working to ensure we dont have a repeat of Election Day instances such as that in China Spring where voters were still casting ballots hours after polls closed.
Confirm Garland

I cant honestly say Ive ever really liked George Will, but occasionally he tries to jar his fellow Republicans into accepting obvious truth. Such is the case with his recent column on President Obamas nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court.

I began reading George Wills columns in the Washington Post while working in Washington during the Watergate era. He relentlessly attacked Richard Nixon from the right. But his best column was probably the one two years ago acknowledging the truth about the real Watergate crime, Nixons sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election (21,000 American troops, including a Medal of Honor winner I went to school with, died in Vietnam after that).

I believe Judge Garland is, by any rational measure, the most highly qualified person ever to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. He is now the chief judge of the second most important court in the land. Who could possibly match his education and experience? In his own Trib column, Pete Commander suggests Judge Garland should be rejected because he is not a right-wing ideologue and that political might makes right.

Despite pronouncements of Senate Republicans, there is probably a better-than-even chance Judge Garland will be confirmed. Odds-makers say Hillary Clinton is the most likely person to become the next president. If she wins, Republicans will be tripping over themselves to confirm Garland. It could even happen before the election in an effort to save Republican Senate seats.

But apart from the court nomination, I think Republicans need to read what the highly educated conservative George Will and the highly educated neoconservative Charles Krauthammer are saying about their apparent presidential nominee.

Charles Reed, Waco

Great ruling

I find it interesting that defeated commissioner candidate Cory Priest states on his public Facebook page that he has chosen to fight for fair and legitimate elections in McLennan County, yet to date is only fighting for the precinct he lost. At first glance, one would think he was a modern-day martyr fighting the good fight but it comes off as self-serving and disingenuous. Last I knew, there was more than one precinct in the county. What about Precinct 3 where there were hundreds of errors?

Retired Judge James Morgan used common sense in his ruling and I applaud him. More than 6,000 people showed up to vote on Election Day for the Precinct 1 race. Roughly 700 people didnt even care enough to cast a vote either way. More importantly, none of the 93 voters given incorrect ballots for Precinct 1 even called to complain. Why would you disenfranchise 6,000 voters for 93 people who didnt seem to notice or care?

Thank you, Judge Morgan. In a world of wounded pride and bruised egos, you saw the big picture.

Ceji Wesolick, Robinson
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Illustration: Matt Davidson He had a mandate for climate action, his personal popularity was still strong, and no one took Tony Abbott seriously. Had Rudd gone to an early election, there's every chance he would have won comfortably. But he hesitated. He shelved the ETS, shredding his credibility. His support plummeted and his colleagues tore him down. Illustration: Michael Mucci A Rudd victory in 2010 would have changed everything; it would have cemented his authority and he might still be in office today.

OK, maybe not  his colleagues hated him and may well have found another reason to remove him eventually. But think how different the political landscape would be: at the very least, the climate-change fight that still afflicts Australian politics would have been settled. Abbott may have gone the way of Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull before him, opposition leaders steamrolled by the Rudd juggernaut. Turnbull probably would have left Parliament, as he'd planned to. Labor may well have made an orderly transition from Rudd to Julia Gillard, who presumably would have done a much better job under more conventional circumstances. Or who knows  maybe Wyatt Roy or Clive Palmer or Ian Goodenough would be prime minister today. Or maybe the world would be a nuclear wasteland. But make no mistake, if Rudd could go back in time and make a different decision, he would  regardless of the risk of unintended consequences.

Now consider this: what if Turnbull had pulled the election trigger late last year? Because after yet another ragged week, he's probably wishing he could hop in a time machine and do just that. What if he had gone to the Australian people shortly after he replaced Abbott and said: "I don't want to govern without a mandate. I want your approval to take this government in a new direction." He surely saw Gillard's experience as a cautionary tale  a woeful campaign that resulted in a hung Parliament that drove the nation nuts. But it wouldn't have panned out like that for Turnbull. After the past three months  marked mainly by scandal, policy paralysis, the tax debate mess and the ghost of Abbott past  the PM's honeymoon feels like a distant memory. But in 2015, his approval ratings were stratospheric and it increasingly looks as if he should have capitalised and gone to the polls then.

There would have been some practical hurdles, sure; most notably, coming up with an election platform that differentiated him from Abbott without sending the right-wing attack dogs completely crazy. But think of the advantages. He could have gone to the people before his numbers  both personal and party  started to slide; before voters realised their expectations were unrealistic; before the attacks on his weak-kneed approach to same-sex marriage and climate change and republicanism started to bite; before the Mal Brough, Jamie Briggs, Stuart Robert and Arthur Sinodinos affairs; before the conservative cabal started feeling emboldened; and before Abbott started making real trouble. He could have avoided the tax debate, which seems to have done little but hand his opponents ammunition. He could also have avoided the Herculean task of crafting an election-year budget with no money. Even if October or November 2015 had proven too difficult, March this year was surely doable. Yes, the honeymoon was over by then and government had started looking wobbly, but it still would have won comfortably. And yes, despite some recent 50/50 polls, the election is still Turnbull's to lose. His personal numbers are still much stronger than Bill Shorten's and Labor just has too many seats to win to form government.
Johannesburg: South Africa's parliament is set to debate a motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete said, after a top court ruled the president had violated the constitution.

South Africa's constitutional court ruled on Thursday that Mr Zuma had failed to uphold the constitution by ignoring orders from the public protector that he repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent to renovate his private residence at Nkandla.

South Africa's embattled President Jacob Zuma. Credit:AP

Since Thursday's ruling, opposition party leaders, ordinary South Africans and even an anti-apartheid activist jailed alongside Nelson Mandela have called on Mr Zuma to step down.

Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition party Democratic Alliance (DA), tabled the motion to have Mr Zuma impeached, and Ms Mbete told reporters on Sunday "the debate on that motion has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon."
Washington: Digital privacy advocates and users of Reddit have expressed their alarm over a change in the forum's transparency report that suggests it may have been asked to give customer data to FBI investigators under a secretive government authority.

The annual report lists a variety of requests the site has received for information on users and for removal of content. On Thursday, Reddit deleted a paragraph known as a "warrant canary".

Edward Snowden is concerned about Reddit's deletion of a "warrant canary" in its transparency report.

The paragraph had said that Reddit had not been subject to national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval, or "any other classified request for user information".

Privacy advocates have long contested the letters, saying they are not subject to sufficient judicial oversight or transparency safeguards.
By West Kentucky Star & WKCTC Staff Apr. 02, 2016 | 08:44 PM | PADUCAH, KY

Eighty competitors vied for top honors at the second annual Robot Extreme Challenge (RCX) recently held at West Kentucky Community and Technical College March 19.The competition was divided into high school and middle and elementary school levels with the Calloway County SPRACx winning the high school division. In the middle school division, the McCracken Countys Circuit Smart 4-H and St. Marys Circuit Breakers teams won first and second, respectively. In the elementary division, the Lady Lyons from Lyon County took first place followed by the St. Mary Robotic Masters in second place.Other participating teams represented were from Heath, Lone Oak and Murray middle schools and McNabb Elementary.The 2016 RCX competition was built around the Avalanche Rescue theme. Students simulated saving stranded skiers, saving Pine Cone Mountain Lodge from another avalanche, and setting off explosions to create controlled avalanches.This competition honors preparation, grit, teamwork, creativity and critical thinking, said Bill Kunnecke, program director of the WKCTCs science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) initiative. The rules for building a teams robot (using LEGO pieces only) and missions are open enough such that there are multiple solutions for completing missions. Like chess, students opening moves are up to them, said Kunnecke.The Kentucky-based competition was created to help students build skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and involved participants preparing a LEGO EV3 Robot to complete as many as 15 missions. Students pre-programmed the robot to do one or more missions at a time and completed as many missions as they could in three minutes. Student teams got four tries to gather as many points from a run, and the top score from any of the runs was used to determine winners of each level.For a complete list of upcoming STEAM and summer camp opportunities including various summer camps, visit https://issuu.com/jblythe0001/docs/communityeducation/1 Summer classes at WKCTC begin in May. Call 1-(855) GO-WKCTC or visit www.westkentucky.kctcs.edu for program offerings.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 03/04/2016 (2394 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA  Muneer al Zahabi finally got tired of waiting.

For nearly three years, his family had been in Jordan, among over half a million Syrians there crammed into apartments and camps. It was safer than sleeping in the bathtub in their house in Syria for protection from missiles, but they wanted out.

The UN officially declaring them refugees ensured his two older children could go to school. But the piece of paper provided little other day-to-day benefit. Syrians cant legally work in Jordan, so even though Zahabi has picked up piecemeal graphic design work  he worked in the industry for 15 years in Syria  it wasnt stable and the pay low.

Muneer al Zahabi and his son Sami are shown in a handout photo. For nearly three years, his family had been in Jordan, among over half a million Syrians there crammed into apartments and camps. It was safer than sleeping in the bathtub in their house in Syria for protection from missiles, but they wanted out. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

They wanted a home in another country. But his family is five of 4.2 million refugees. To date, only about 180,000 resettlement spaces are available worldwide. Canada has offered over 38,000 of them since 2013. But the people most often chosen for new homes here and elsewhere arent families like his  educated, healthy, with his fluency in English and their professional backgrounds.

My wife said we needed to wait in line, wait for our turn, there were hundreds ahead of us, Zahabi, 40, said in an interview from Amman.

But the call from the UN never came. So, six months ago, Zahabi decided to take things into his own hands.

Hed heard good things about Canada. As a Muslim, he could practise his faith and in Toronto he felt hed find a community that would be welcoming.

On the Immigration Department website, he found the list of more than 80 organizations who hold agreements with the government to facilitate the private sponsorship of refugees. And he started emailing them.

Nobody believed me, he said. They didnt understand how a refugee could be contacting them directly. There was this barrier between us.

Then the Liberals were elected and promised to resettle 25,000 Syrians in a matter of months. Private groups working with the formal sponsorship agreement holders started springing up across the country. There are more than 600 such groups in Toronto alone.

So Zahabi looked them up too, posting his story on their Facebook pages and directly emailing the websites of others.

The response, if there was one, was often similar  disbelief, mistrust. It upset him, he said.

What is it exactly people think refugees are? Do I have be naked, crawling through a forest, to be a refugee? Do we have to die on a beach somewhere to be seen and respected as a human? he asked.

Then late last year, something clicked.

Patricia Chartier had helped set up the email address for her Toronto-based sponsorship group when the group of 30 relative strangers banded together to help a Syrian family.

She was shocked by how many letters came directly from Syrians. The first was from a 13-year-old girl, who claimed to still be in Syria and asked for help to escape.

I kept thinking  if this was 1944, it would be like emailing with Anne Frank, Chartier said.

Among the emails was Zahabis.

Chartiers group couldnt help him directly but something drew her in. Maybe it was the fact she was a former ad copywriter and he was a graphic designer and had common ground, she said.

They kept up a correspondence, often via Skype, and she began trying to find someone who would sponsor his family.

To date, they have a few leads, but nothing concrete. Word that the Liberals have cut off how many sponsorship applications for Syrians they will process this year means its unlikely Zahabi and his family will make it to Canada before 2017 if they are accepted.

Zahabi does not want to get his hopes up too high. But at least someone was finally willing to listen, he said, and in Chartier, he now has a Canadian friend.

We are a regular family, just like so many of yours, he said. Except we are trying to escape, to save our lives, from a war.

Follow @StephanieLevitz on Twitter
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 02/04/2016 (2395 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two separate rallies briefly clashed on the steps of the legislature Saturday when their events overlapped, before putting politics aside to enjoy an appearance by Spider-Man.

In a shift in mood one organizer compared to Manitobas mercurial weather  Wait five minutes, and itll change  the tone of the duelling rallies went from tense and confrontational to jovial and lighthearted in mere minutes.

Music turned out to be the catalyst for change between a group of parents with autistic children and another group protesting Manitobas child welfare system.

Within minutes of loudspeakers blasting out pop tunes, the microphones went silent and the crowd starting mixing at the foot of the legislative steps.

Thats how we deal with most meltdowns, said Mike Wilwand, one of the organizers for Parents with Autistic Children Everywhere (PACE), which held one of the events.

We find the easiest way to defuse an event is to redirect the kids attention. We turned up the music.

A technique designed to calm an over-stimulated autistic person apparently works equal wonders with an angry crowd.

A supporter for the rival event, Sue Caribou, who minutes earlier had been loudly denouncing protests while a person involved in the other rally was seen shouting and waving their arms at her, sounded relieved the tension was over.

When democracy goes a little wild, its good to find some common ground, Caribou agreed. Its also something you can count on in Manitoba, she suggested.

Its typical. Like the weather, said Caribou, chatting amiably with a fellow supporter about more grassroots approaches with a focus on family restoration instead of child apprehension.

We have winter, and all of a sudden its summer again, Caribou said, describing the lightning change in the crowds mood.

At noon, the not-for-profit PACE hosted a rally to draw awareness to the need for more help and better services for families with autistic children as the province heads to the polls.

About 150 people showed up, mostly families with children in tow, from toddlers in strollers to adults with autism.

The purpose of the rally is to acknowledge the government is not doing their job. In a lot of cases, they have cut funding to students who used to have educational assistants in schools, said one mother, Lou Lovrin.

Lovrin and her partner, Mike Wilwand, are co-founders of the organization. Four of their six children have autism. Together, they spearhead social events two or three times a week for approximately 600 members.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Anti-CFS protestor Susan Caribou, is outspoken towards the ills of CFS to the media in front of the Legislative Building Saturday

For families whose kids exist in a kind of neurological bubble and see reality separate from conventional perspectives, life can feel very isolating. Events such as the annual rally lend a sense of belonging. And the routine get-togethers are just as critical.

When our parents put together a birthday party for their kids, no one shows up. We do monthly get-togethers so our kids get to go to a birthday party, and theyve got kids coming to their birthday parties, Lovrin said.

An annual event that sometimes draws 500, PACE books the legislature for the rally every April 2, to coincide with World Autism Day.

This time, the party atmosphere was peppered with politics from the start. Candidates vying for votes in the April 19 provincial election were invited to speak.

The first hour went ahead as scheduled. Candidates for all but the Progressive Conservative party showed up and made election promises, placards were handed out, and the crowd organized for a march through downtown, as they do every year.

One mother in the crowd with her two teens and one 20-year old son with autism said the promises didnt really matter. The rally is what matters, said Lara Shewchuk.

You can tell its an election year, she quipped.

Hopefully we raise awareness and get the politicians to sit down with us after the election, Wilwand later told reporters.

Usually, marchers circle back to the legislature for more speeches and appearances from cartoon characters and the event wraps up on a lighthearted holiday note.

Not this year. At least not immediately.

At 1 p.m. another rally, heavy with political angst over the provinces deeply flawed child welfare system, had been organized to raise awareness, also on the steps of the legislature.

About 30 people showed up. Using a megaphone, one speaker after another denounced a system with 11,000 kids in care, 90 per cent of whom are indigenous. They touched on the tragedy of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS An argument erupts between families celebrating World Autism Awareness Day and anti-CFS protestors in front of the Legislative Building Saturday. The two events overlapped causing confusion and upset for parents of kids with autism. The annual event for World Autism Awareness Day is held yearly at the Leg and planned a year in advance, the anti-CFS event, planned 3 months ago overlapped in its times rally upsetting families.

As the autism group circled back to the legislature to continue its afternoon of events, the other group, organized through Facebook to draw attention to child welfare flaws, was just getting underway.

The overlaps appear to have been the result of confusion over bookings, and for a time, duelling rhetoric over competing loudspeakers raised tempers and set tensions on edge.

Two members of the Bear Clan Patrol stood in the crowd and watched the tensions rise, and did their best to defuse the mood.

We came to support the people here, said Fred Thomas, standing next to his partner, Norma Peters, and gesturing to the anti-CFS group talking about children lost to the system.

But we also have a niece whos autistic. So we support this too, he said, gesturing to the other group.

PACE booked its event 10 months ago with the legislature, as they have year in and year out for years.

Manitoba Stands Up to CFS (Child and Family Services) started organizing three months ago through a social-media online site called World Alternative Media. The rally was promoted on an anti-CFS Facebook site called CFS Youre Fired.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 03/04/2016 (2394 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With one new school already green-lighted, Winnipeg School Division is seeking tens of millions of dollars from the province for two more new schools.

A report going before the school boards building and transportation committee early Monday afternoon lists a new northwest high school and a French milieu school in River Heights tops on its five-year capital wish list that would be sent to the provincial public schools finance board.

The Selinger government gave approval to a new elementary school in the Waterford Green subdivision in the divisions northwest corner, the first significant housing development in WSD in decades.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Winnipeg School Division offices

Trustees will decide if their next major priority for provincial funding will be a high school in that same northwest corner.

It would be built close to Sisler High School and to Seven Oaks School Divisions Maples Collegiate, first and third largest schools in Manitoba with 1,889 and 1,720 students respectively.

Of course, its only a wish list, and no one knows which party will be in power after the April 19 provincial election.

Second on WSDs list this year, moving up from number three a year ago, is a nursery to Grade 8 French milieu school to replace the aged Sir William Osler School.

There is huge demand in south Winnipeg, as in many other parts of Manitoba, for French-language education. The division has based its case for a new school partially on students it anticipates pouring in from housing on the former Kapyong Barracks site  even though sorting out ownership of the property, let alone decisions about what will be built there, is still unknown.

Meanwhile, the committee will hear that reconfiguration of school bus routes has reduced the number of students riding a bus for 60 minutes daily each way from 44 students to five, and that only one student still rides a bus more than an hour each way.

Staff will provide an updated report on the costs of meeting provincial standards for accessibility. A handicap chair lift will run $20,000 to $60,000 per school, plus the costs of installation and possible renovations, says the report.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
Today its popular to say that political correctness is destroying America, but a recently discovered set of century-old clippings offer a cautionary reminder of what our country was like without political correctness. From Oregon to South Carolina, journalists and their editors in 1906 felt free to trumpet racial epithets and outright lies, including those they printed about my American grandmother and my Chinese grandfather.

Beginning with their engagement, my grandparents union was national news, simply because of their races. Front-page headlines ranged from the seemingly benign San Francisco Calls Charming Miss Dolly Gives Her Hand to Len Shen Yu to the Denver Posts virulent Los Angeles Heiress Elopes with a Chink Editor of San Fran.

Reporters couldnt be bothered to learn my grandfathers actual name, Liu Chengyu, instead concocting random approximations. And in true tabloid fashion, the Denver paper fabricated the notion that my grandmother was an heiress eloping with her Chinese lover.

In fact, until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake one month earlier, Dolly Trescott, then 29, had been struggling to support herself by tutoring students in English. One of them was my 30-year-old grandfather-to-be, then enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley and the editor of a newspaper in San Franciscos Chinatown. When the quake struck, Liu Chengyu helped his tutor escape her boarding house before the Great Fire engulfed it. He then protected her in the tent city for refugees. Homeless, and with no family other than her naturopath father in Los Angeles, Trescott understandably accepted when this wealthy son of a former Viceroy of Canton proposed marriage.

Liu was a protege of Sun Yatsen. In an ironic twist, his newspaper was an instrument of Suns campaign to overthrow the imperial dynasty that had employed generations of Liu ancestors. My grandfather wanted to see China remade as a Western-style republic. Its not clear that my grandmother knew any more about these revolutionist activities than did the American reporters who dubbed her fiance an embryo diplomat. Regardless, she was prepared to go the distance to marry her Celestial. That alone made her fair game for the papers.

Among its many functions, political correctness applies a brake on the impulse to lie. Its tempting, when spewing venom, to gin up ones case with sensational falsehoods, but less so if you know your audience will call you out and challenge you to justify your prejudices with reason and with facts. In 1906 the citizens who would correct the record were few, but they did exist. The Presbyterian minister who married my grandparents was one.

In the continental United States at the time, all but 17 mostly northeastern states had so-called anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriage. And even in a state where it was allowed, finding a willing preacher was no small feat. Trescott and Liu apparently thought they could find one in Mormon Utah, so they boarded a train to Ogden, where reporters gleefully documented the local ministers refusal. The determined couple proceeded to Evanston, Wyo., where the Rev. Leon C. Hills was willing not only to wed them, but also to defend them against the public outrage that followed.

In a Wyoming Press editorial, Hills made a case for racial (although, alas, not class) tolerance that could well be leveled at those issuing screeds against immigrants today:

Some very unfair and indiscret (sic) remarks have been made by those who do not know the facts of this case. Some speak of this affair as though a Chinese coolie had married some white woman of doubtful character. ... Please pause until you hear some facts. This misunderstanding comes no doubt from three causes: First, from the sensational reports in the newspapers; second, it is due to a gross prejudice in this western country toward the Chinese because of labor problems; third, because some Americans have the idea that the Chinese are an inferior race.

The good reverends appeal had little effect. In South Carolina, Charlestons News and Courier picked up on one bastardization of my grandfathers name to sneer, Miss Dolly Trescott, a white girl, of California, has married a Chinaman whose first name is Sin. This should result in something original.

All this notoriety made the Celestials Wife Wrathy, as one headline put it. After returning to California from their wedding odyssey, my grandmother quietly rented an apartment for the two of them in a swell section of Berkeley, but when three neighboring families learned my grandfathers ethnicity, they went to the press and threatened to move away. My wrathy grandmother was now ready to issue her own statement:

Certain persons have taken it upon themselves to criticise (sic) me because I married an Oriental, but I consider that is purely my own business. ... If necessary I will put the case in the hands of a lawyer. ... I will not admit that anyone can drive me out of my present domicile and will fight for my rights to the last.

As far as we know, she won the battle. In 1908, the couples first daughter was born, without fanfare. Three years later, Suns revolution toppled the Manchu empire, and Liu Chengyu hastened back to Shanghai to become a senator in the first Chinese republic. My grandmother followed in 1912, and for the next 24 years my grandparents remained in China, where they had three more children. (My father was the second born.)

Prejudice, from Europeans and Chinese alike, always marked their lives, but never again was it as wanton and widespread as the ugliness captured in those century-old American clippings. If todays campaign against political correctness succeeds, who can doubt that the nasty rhetoric aimed at my grandparents would pale against the vitriol of our times?

Reporters couldnt be bothered to learn my grandfathers actual name, Liu Chengyu, instead concocting random approximations. And in true tabloid fashion, the Denver paper fabricated the notion that my grandmother was an heiress eloping with her Chink Editor lover.




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Sam Hall, a student a Mount Saint Charles Academy, the acting liberal chairman of the Health, Education and Welfare Committee, proposes a bill for a $4 tax on cigarettes during Saturdays Rhode Island Model Legislature 69th Session in the House chambers at the Statehouse. Looking on, at right, is David Coderre, of Pawtucket and a student at St. Raphael Academy.
Patrick Ryan (left) punched Phillip Evans

By: Tanya Malhotra

Two friends of the United Kingdom, were drinking together and were having a nice time when one man asked to be punched in the face.

42-year-old Philip Evans asked his drinking buddy Patrick Ryan, 25, to hit him in the face as hard as he could because ahe had never been knocked out before, the Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.

The father-of-one child even complimented his friend on the quality of the punch before collapsing on the floor of his living room, according to court documents.

However, the drunken game had tragic consequences as Evans lost his life. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Judge James Burbidge QC said that Ryan was described aas a quiet guy who is neither aggressive nor argumentative.a

However, the judge said that he should not have agreed to punch his friend or at least he should not have done it so hard.

The court heard that the deceased was known to enjoy horseplay when drinking. aHe had asked at least one other person to try to knock him out on a previous occasion, but that person had refused to do so, and you should have done the same,a the judge told Ryan.

Ryan pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in prison.
A young man wanted to make a point about racism in the United States, but his plan backfired when he was exposed for a liar by police. 20-year-old Khalil Cavil of Texas was working at the Saltgrass Steak House in Odessa when he claimed he was discriminated against because of his Muslim name. Cavil took
Calls to Improve Rail Links to Manchester Airport For Wrexham Passengers

This article is old - Published: Sunday, Apr 3rd, 2016

The growing success of one of the regions main airports will require a public transport infrastructure fit for the 21st century.

That is the message from Wrexham MP Ian Lucas, who has been campaigning for better rail links to the airport and who met with airport staff in Manchester last week to discuss those links, the 1 billion transformation programme at the airport  and how North Wales residents can benefit from both.

During the meeting, Mr Lucas heard how a major private investment at the airport will transform the way it operates in the coming decade  and how passenger numbers are expected to grow as a result.

He discussed the proposals for new rail paths into the airport  which he raised with Prime Minister David Cameron earlier this month  and how groups such as the Mersey-Dee North Wales All Party Parliamentary group can help make the case for better links to airports such as Manchester.

Mr Lucas said: Manchester Airport is growing  fast. More than a hundred and fifty thousand flights each year already start from Wrexham alone  more than the population of the county borough. As the new investment comes online in the coming years, those numbers will grow substantially.

What Governments in both the UK and Wales need to recognise is that airports like Manchester are very important for our regions economy, and they need a strong transport infrastructure in place to help make sure we get the best possible results from their investment.

I will be writing to the Prime Minister to follow up on the specific case I raised with him about rail links between North Wales and the airport  transport links which could be put in place very soon but which, at present, his Government is holding back.

Following todays meeting, I will also be working with staff from Manchester Airport to help put them in touch with North Wales businesses and business groups so they can work together on a real growth plan which will benefit both the Airport and North Wales.
6 years, 6 months ago by QPD

Leonard D Price 42, of MO. For no valid registration.

Travis Graff 34, 1220 Vermont for no valid drivers license and uninsured vehicle.

Bosco N Semanda 40, 1108 Chestnut for driving while license suspended.

Jesse A Poor 26, of Rockport, IL for failure to yield-private drive.

Christopher J Fletcher 39, of Quincy for FTA DWLS x 2, uninsured vehicle and Fta Theft.

William Meyers of Canton Towing and Marine at 820 S Front reports that 3- 36" 3 blade solid brass propellers valued at $5,000 each were stolen from the business between 3/11 and 3/14.

Monica K. Yates, 48, Quincy for Aggravated Domestic Battery at 620 Harrison - lodged

Laura R. Kindhart, 19, Quincy for No Insuarnce - PTC -

Russell C. Miller, 51, Quincy for Disobey Traffic Control Device - PTC -
Tallahassee, Fla. (WTXL) -- Two people are dead and one is critical in condition following a car crash Saturday night.

It happened on State Road 91 between Colquitt and Newton.

According to the Georgia State Patrol, Marcus Oates ran off the road and into a flooded ditch. The car overturned and sank into the water. Troopers say they could only see the four tires when they arrived on scene.

Two passengers in that car 30-year-old Tina Butler and her One-year-old son drowned inside. The other passenger, a 7-year-old, was taken to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in critical condition.

The driver, Marcus Oates was able to escape without injury.

State troopers are urging drivers to be aware of dangerous road conditions after the recent weather.
State revenue authorities across the country are battling an upsurge in identity thieves filing false tax returns.

And they're taking new steps to combat the problem. In Kentucky, for example, state officials are telling taxpayers that refunds might take longer than usual because they need more time this year to verify returns are real.

States also are turning to outsiders for help, quizzing taxpayers more closely about their identities and tapping the experience of the IRS, which has its own problems with such fraud.

An official with the Federation of Tax Administrators says taxpayers can help, too. She recommends devising hard-to-guess passwords, changing them regularly, and using different ones for different electronic accounts.
The Gorge gets all the glory. Mount Hood steals all the cover shots. It's normal to covet what's far away, so when summer hits, you hit the highway. But there are plenty of surprisingly beautiful nature settings within the Portland metro areaoften accessible by bus, and not much hassle for people who would usually just spend their summer sucking down Montucky at White Owl. And when you're done, you're like four minutes from beer. Here are some great urban hikes that'll make you forget you're in the city at all, and then the spots to grab a pint afterward. Or before. Or both.

Sauvie Island, Warrior Rock: Beyond Nude Beaches

The hike: Easy, about 6 miles.

The trailhead: Collins Beach (38149-38155 NW Reeder Road)

To find the trailhead, drive to Collins Beach until you hit a dead-end gravel parking area. Ignore the trash bins overflowing with empty cans of light beer from city beach bums, and set out toward the sandy beach, where you'll stand out not only for being sober but also fully clothedthis isn't a clothing-optional area, but topless sunbathing isn't rare here.

You'll leave the beachgoers behind quickly. Shortly after spotting a giant bird nest on some pilings and the weathered remains of a boat, you'll head inland to a trail that will take you to the lighthouse. Much of the hike is shaded, but you'll find a few clearings and, in late summer, sections of the path nearly swallowed by thick, tall grass. The Warrior Rock lighthouse, Oregon's smallest, is at the north end of Sauvie Island and serves as a great place to snack while sitting on some logs and watching river traffic.



Post-trail ale: On the way back into town on Highway 30, head across the Fremont Bridge to Widmer Brothers Gasthaus Pub (929 N Russell St., 281-2437). The smell of grains from the nearby brewery will hit you from at least a block away. It'll then be impossible to resist. Have two beers. You've earned it. This is the only hike on the list that takes a bit more than an hour.

Sandy River Delta: One Big Dog Park

The hike: Easy, less than 3 miles.

The trailhead: Sandy River Delta Park, on Crown River Highway off I-84 Exit 18.

Every hike here's dog-friendly, but the Sandy River Deltaat the confluence of the Sandy and Columbia riversis basically a 1,000-acre off-leash dog amusement park with wide swaths of mowed green grass lining most paths, and groves of trees in the distance.

There are several trails, so if you'd like some easy cardio in about an hour, take the Meadow Trail to a bird blind, which is the turnaround. Fair warning, though: This is not a hike pinnacle with a view unless you're into mourning extinct birds. The trail leads up a sloped wooden bridge to a circular structure that's beautifully crafted out of black locust wood; the bird blind, by Maya Lin, is inscribed with all the species Lewis and Clark saw on their journey, and whether the birds still exist. For a change of setting on the way back, take the Boundary Trail.

Post-trail ale: When in Troutdale, McMenamins Edgefield (2126 SW Halsey St., 669-8610) is basically a drunken little village of beer.

Macleay Trail to Audubon Society: Fly the Coop Without Leaving Town

The hike: Easy, with a few make-you-sweat switchbacks, about 2 miles.

The trailhead: Lower Macleay Park (2960 NW Upshur St.)

Macleay Trail offers an amazing opportunity to disappear into a forest while remaining within city limits. The trailhead is in Lower Macleay Park, and you'll quickly find yourself walking along Balch Creek, named for a man who settled in the area and was publicly hanged for killing Mortimer Stump in 1859. For some reason, nobody named the creek after poor Mortimer Stump.

Anyway, continue to follow the Mortimer Stump Memorial Creek upstream on a trail crisscrossed by fallen trees and nestled among moss-covered canyon walls and the occasional man nursing a malt 40. Places worth a pause include a small waterfall and an old stone cottage that used to be a working public restroom until the 1962 Columbus Day storm took out its water line. Soon the trail will gain elevation and you'll find yourself drawn to the sight of the vibrant ravine below.

Once the route reaches Upper Macleay Park, turn right to explore the Audubon Society, where behind the building you can visit rescued birds in outdoor cages, including Julio the Great Horned Owl, who silently suffered while everyone around her assumed she was male. (They considered renaming her Julia, but it didn't stick.) Want a turnaround with a view? Continue about 2 miles on the Wildwood Trail to reach Pittock Mansion.

Post-trail ale: A 10-minute drive will get you to a brewery that's one of the area's oldest and also closest to Forest Park: Portland Brewing Company, formerly MacTarnahan's (2730 NW 31st Ave., 228-5269), which boasts ample patio seating and is rarely crowded.





Marquam Trail to Council Crest: Skyline View Without Tipping Your Server

The hike: Moderate, about 3 miles.

The trailhead: Terwilliger Trailhead, 1 mile north of Capitol Highway on Southwest Terwilliger Boulevard. Or if you don't drive, walk a mile of switchbacks down the woodsy Connor Trail from atop Pill Hill (follow the 4T trail signs from Oregon Health & Science University's space-age tram station).

The best views in town usually come with a bill at the end of a meal. But the Marquam Trail will leave you feeling just a bit more satisfied having that beer at the end of the hike, since you put in the sweat to earn it. About a minute into the Marquam Shelter Trail ascent, you'll feel like you're on a hike far from the streets of downtown. Thick vegetation provides shade all the way up the switchbacks and carpets the deep ravines. However, the sudden, jarring sight of giant homes is a reminder that you haven't left the city. It may feel as though you're sneaking through the backyards of people who make a lot more money than you do. Don't worry. You're not actually trespassing.

The summit is Council Crest, where a group of ministers believed the area's Native Americans must have held council. They didn't, but there's a nice view from the stone circle near the middle of the park. Signs direct your gaze toward four mountains, and the cityscape stretches out below. You can then look forward to the downhill return.

Post-trail ale: Walk to the Oregon Zoo MAX station and ride light rail downtown, where there are plenty of nearby breweries. Try one you've never been to, like maybe Fat Head's (131 NW 13th Ave., 820-7721), which just opened last year. The Trailhead Pale Ale seems fitting if it's on tap.

Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge: Urban Oddities Galore

The hike: Very easy, about 3 miles.

The trailhead: Sellwood Park, Southeast 7th Avenue and Miller Street.

Some Portland metro-area hikes allow you to feel as though you've abandoned civilization, at least temporarily. But Oaks Bottom offers constant reminders that this wildlife refuge is surrounded by city. The marshland was saved from development in 1969 when the city of Portland purchased it from a company that wanted a park of the industrial kind. It sits on an old construction landfill, but where else can you pass by a haven for dozens of species of birds; an old, eight-story mausoleum with a mural; and a Ferris wheel on a single outdoor excursion?

That massive structure with the bird mural on it is Wilhelm's Portland Memorial Funeral Home, a historic building that houses seemingly endless rows of urns and even a grand tomb. At night, if you circle around to where the route meets the Springwater Trail on the Willamette River, you're at the eerie confluence of a warehouse of human remains and a closed amusement park.

Post-trail ale: Given the name of the refuge, Lompoc's Oaks Bottom Public House (1621 SE Bybee Blvd., 232-1728) seems a natural fit. But if you haven't tried 13 Virtues Brewing (6410 SE Milwaukie Ave., 239-8544), it's worth a stop for its award-winning weizenbock.





Tryon Creek State Park: Suburban Sanctuary Stuffed With Nature Worshippers

The hike: Easy, with a few hills that'll get you breathing, about 3 miles.

The trailhead: Tryon Creek State Park (11321 SW Terwilliger Blvd.)

There's a stone wall at the park's Nature Center that reminds hikers what can be gained during a visit: "You'll always find something younga leaf, a thought, a new life." You'll also always find plenty of company, since the location is a couple of miles off I-5, which means the trail can get as clogged as Northwest 23rd Avenue. Regardless, the more than 650 acres allow you to shed the city and slip into nature in an eye blink.

Multiple routes await inside this thick forest of rolling hills and ravines. Among 8 miles of hiking trails and 3.5 miles of horse trails, you could take a different path every visit. And there's an abundance of wildlife, from the tapping of woodpeckers to baby owls emerging from their trees. Try the Horse Loopwhich takes you near the creek, across several bridges and through an obstacle course of horseshitand the Old Main Trail, called the Old Man Trail by some because of the uphill slog toward the end of the route.

Post-trail ale: Sasquatch Brewing Company (6440 SW Capitol Highway, 402-1999, sasquatchbrewery.com) is a mere nine minutes away. And if the brewery's namesake beast did live in Oregon, Tryon Creek wouldn't be a bad place to call home.





Twelve Radlers and Shandies, Ranked | Cliff Jumps and High Dives Near Portland

Do Something Awesome Every Day Until Labor Day | Best Hot Dogs in Portland

Six Urban Hikes (and Bars for After) | Drink, Smoke in the Park

Explore the Islands of the Willamette | Discover Your Favorite Skatepark

WWeek 2015
Wallace Van Eaton has made 340 spinning wheels since he first started more than 30 years ago in Yakima, Wash., Wednesday, March 16, 2016. Van 
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The Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and exceptional contribution to the nation of 2016 will be awarded to Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog and Rabbi Eli Sadan, the Education Ministry announced on Thursday.

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For decades, Doron Almog served the State of Israel as GOC Southern Command. However, he will receive the prestigious prize for service in another field: the enormous contribution of the village Aleh Negev - Nahalat Eran, a rehabilitation village for the brain-damaged.

Almog founded the village after his son, Eran, was born brain-damaged. Eran died shortly after the village's establishment. Aleh Negev-Nahalat Eran has become a groundbreaking setting for children and adults with mental and developmental limitations.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett informed Almog and Rabbi Eli Sadan, founder of the pre-army preparatory programs, of their selection, which was decided by the prize jury.

Eran and Doron Almog

Almog stated that the Israel Prize belongs to his son Eran. "Eran never spoke and never called me 'Dad,' but he was the greatest teacher in my life. It was he who taught me about the place of the weak in society, and it is for them that I work and will continue to work all my life," he said.

Almog related that he spoke with Bennett about the village's activities in the Negev and how much such action affects the entire State of Israel.

When Almog's brain-damaged son Eran reached adulthood, his parents sought in vain for an appropriate framework for him. Almog, who had served in the military for 35 years and had reached the rank of major general, initiated the establishment of the rehabilitation village in the Negev.

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2016 Israel Prize Laureates Doron Almog and Eli Sadan (Photos: Orot and Yuval Hen)

Eran died nine years ago, at the age of 23. "Without Eran we would not deserve the award," Almog told Yedioth Ahronoth on Thursday. "He was born brain-damaged, unable to speak, unable to do anything for himselfand yet it was he who bestowed me with enormous capabilities. This award is important in continuing to give legitimacy to all those who dont have power, to the unfortunate. They are the weakest in society, at its outermost edge.

"For years they were discriminated against. The award reflects the fact that the State of Israel has in some way grown up. Previously, no one talked about such children. They were placed in institutions and weren't talked about. There is a slow process of maturation of the society regarding the weakest. Anyone who wakes up in the morning and feels full of strength should be grateful that fortune has shine upon him and do more for them."

However, Almog pointed out that the work is not yet done. "I also see the dark corners," he said. "There is quite a way to go. Aleh Negev is a utopian model: a kindergarten with impaired children alongside healthy children; Bedouin, Muslim, Christian and Jewish children in one place that unites them in a country of great love."

The prize committee noted that the major general in reserves dedicated most of his life to the State of Israel and its citizens and led a revolution in society's caring for its special needs population.

The committee wrote, "The State of Israel's battle-hardened society has known physical defects for years, but, just like other countries, felt very uncomfortable and alienated with regards to those with mental and neurological disorders. There was a need for a change in perception with respect to this population and to implement changes to provide this population with possibilities so that they could live meaningful and proper lives."
The United Nations has decided to censor displays on the topics of Zionism Jerusalem and Israeli Arabs included in a new exhibit about Israel, deeming them "inappropriate."

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Israel's Ambassador to Israel Danny Danon, who organized the exhibit in cooperation with StandWithUs, wrote to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, demanding that the decision be revoked.

If the decision is not revoked, Danon said he will display the censored topics as part of an exhibit protesting the absurdity of the UN's decision.

The exhibit was scheduled to open on Monday.

"According to this outrageous decision, Zionism doesn't befit the United Nations and that is why I decided to protest," Danon said. "We'll work to distribute the censored content to millions across the world."

About 40 years ago, the UN passed a resolution defining Zionism as racism, which was only cancelled 16 years later. Danon asserted that the UN's decision to censor the displays is in practice exactly the same as that resolution.

"By censoring displays on Zionism, the UN undermines the very existence of the State of Israel as the home of the Jewish people," Danon said. "We won't allow the UN to censor the fact Jerusalem is Israel's eternal capital."
Police investigators have summoned Labor party activists to testify as part of its preliminary investigation into Isaac Herzog on suspicion of violating the Parties Financing Law.

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The investigation was launched amid allegations that Herzog's campaign received illegal donations during the primary race for the party leadership in 2013.

Police investigators are still gathering testimony and documents in connection with the allegations.

Among others, police investigators questioned figures with close ties to the campaign who reportedly have information on the money transfers and donations made to the campaign during the primary.

Labor leader Isaac Herzog (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

Meanwhile, Herzog wrote a Facebook post on the topic on Saturday. "We mustn't allow ghosts trying to use law enforcement authorities as part of the election campaign to contaminate us and introduce despicable politicking to our party," he wrote.

He said he has been receiving countless of calls and messages from many who are outraged and shocked by what he said were "those trying to poison us and break us apart. I won't let them achieve that."

He vowed to "have all of the answers to all of the claims, plots, insults and malice," and asserted that "I acted with integrity, as I have done my entire life."
A female attacker stabbed and lightly wounded an Israeli woman at the Rosh HaAyin industrial area on Sunday afternoon.

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The attacker, a 23-year-old resident of Kafr Qasem, was subdued by a security guard who was nearby and arrested with no shots fired. A second knife was found in the attacker's possessions.

Security camera footage reveals what happened during the attack, showing at least 10 civilians surrounding the stabber and throwing objects at her, and two drivers blocking her path with their vehicles so she could not get away.

: Biones security (israel)

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The man who subdued the attacker said that while driving his car, he noticed "two girls fighting, and then I realized one of them had a long knife in her hand." He stopped his car and overpowered the attacker. He was later questioned by police.

The attacker overpowered and arrested.

The victim, a 30-year-old woman from Kfar Saba, suffered deep stab wounds to her hand and was taken to the Beilinson Hospital at the Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva. She is expected to be discharged later in the day.

"I was leaving a work meeting on HaMelacha Street when all of a sudden the terrorist appeared in front of me," the wounded woman said. "She came close and suddenly I felt pain, like a fist to the hand. I saw she had a large knife. She looked like an Arab woman and was wearing a head covering.... the terrorist didn't yell anything, she just raised her hand in front of me and started stabbing me over and over again. I hurled my bag at her and yelled really loudly but she kept stabbing me until other people came and tried to fight her off. I fell to the floor, pushed her a few times, and then people started chasing her and I didn't see the rest."

The woman said the knife "cut through my muscle and there was a lot of blood. It was scary, and it mostly could have ended worse."

"I couldn't imagine something like this could happen to me in Rosh HaAyin. I'm still in shock that I joined the statistics" of terror victims, she added.

The attacker overpowered and arrested.

Police is investigating the motives behind the stabbing.

Sunday afternoon, a young Palestinian aroused the suspicion of Border Policemen stationed at the hitchhiking stop near Tapuach Junction in the West Bank. As he was making his way towards those at the stop, he was asked by them to stop, and he then pulled out a knife on them. The Border Policemen managed to overpower him and he was brought in for interrogation. No weapons were fired and there were no injured.
BEIRUT - A Syrian activist group said Sunday that fighting in northern Syria the previous day killed several fighters belonging to the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 12 Hezbollah fighters were killed and dozens were wounded in Saturday's attack by militants led by al-Qaeda's Syria branch - known as the Nusra Front - on the northern village of al-Ais.

In southern Lebanon, social media postings on Sunday carried photos of seven Hezbollah fighters said to be among those killed in al-Ais.
Pathologists at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute conducted an autopsy on Sunday on the body of Abed al Fatah a-Sharif, who was shot in the head by an IDF soldier in Hebron while lying wounded on the ground.

The Palestinian pathologist who participated in the autopsy said it found that the bullet shot by the IDF soldier at a-Sharif's head was what killed him.

A-Sharif was shot and seriously wounded while stabbing another IDF soldier in Tel Rumeida, but the autopsy found those bullet wounds were non-fatal.
The Israeli and Palestinian pathologists ruled that the bullet shot by the soldier documented shooting already-neutralized terrorist Abed al Fatah a-Sharif was what caused the formers death and not the bullets shot at him during the attack in Hebron, officials involved in the investigations claimed Sunday.

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The autopsy was completed at Sunday afternoon at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. The opinion of the pathologist Dr. Riad Ali was published as a statement of the Ministry of Palestinian prisoners.

Officials at the forensic institute refused to comment.

The Kfir Brigade solider involved in the Hebron shooting incident in court last Friday (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

A military judge decided on Friday to uphold a previous ruling to release the Kfir Brigade soldier to a five-day open detention, rejecting an appeal of the decision by the Military Advocate General's Office.

The soldier has been arrested, though not yet charged. The prosecution initially said it was a murder investigation, but on Thursday prosecutors told a court they were looking into manslaughter charges.

The military prosecution argued against the decision, saying that he is not cooperating with investigators.

Chief military prosecutor Col. Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas said that "the evidence present a very clear picture of what happened, which bases the suspicions against him."

Col. Zagagi-Pinhas went on to say that "the soldier claimed several times during the investigation that the terrorist tried to reach for a knife that was 'within reach' of him, while the documentation in the video presents a different situation, in which the knife was a significant distance away from the terrorist, who was in serious condition as it is."

"The videos and testimony from the incident indicate that the neutralized terrorist posed no threat. However many movements the terrorist made, none of the other people at the scene, including the commanders standing next to the terrorist, were not alarmed by it and this speaks volumes, she concluded.
The British government ended its support for the NGO War on Want, founded in 1951, and initially focused on fighting poverty around the world, for inciting to hatred and violence against Jews.

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War on Want has promoted an academic boycott of Israel since 2003 and has funded Apartheid Week on various UK university campuses. The government officially ended its funding after the Telegraph, a British newspaper, released secret recordings of the group's activities.

In one of the recordings, Max Blumenthal, the son of Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton's former adviser, praises Hamas for murdering five IDF soldiers at a Nahal Oz outpost during Operation Protective Edge.

UK NGO War on Want's website

Blumenthal also compared Israel to ISIS and nicknamed Israel, the "Jewish State of Israel and the Levant, JSIL."

At another War on Want event at London Universitys School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), a speaker claimed that Zionists shape British public policy. At the same event, another speaker discussed rumors that Israel harvests organs of Palestinians.

In the past two years, the British government has given War on Want 260,000 pounds, causing great embarrassment for the former in light of the recent revelations. The British government also made it illegal for public institutions to boycott Israel in February.

An NGO Monitor report shows that the Department for International Development (DFID) transferred 500,000 pounds from 2012-2015. The EU also transferred the organization an additional 211,000 pounds.

A DFID spokesperson said that Britain decided to end its funding for War on Want with the exception of a project in Northern Ireland. The spokesperson added the British government condemns incitement from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The director of War on Want, John Hilary, responded to the accusations against his group, "Standing up for the rights of Palestinians fits squarely with our work as a registered charity, and the Charity Commission has consistently confirmed this. For decades, Palestinians have faced systematic discrimination and abuse at the hands of the Israeli government."

Gerald Steinberg, director of NGO Monitor, which works to increase transparency of NGOs, reacted to the news: "This is an important, albeit belated, step by the British government. Other institutional donors, in particular the European Union, should follow suit and immediately end their funding for this anti-human right organization."

According to Steinberg the British government's decision to stop funding of the anti-Israel organizations points to a dire need to increase the transparency and review NGO funding.

BDS related news was not limited to the UK over the weekend. BDS activists tore down posters in a Paris metro station, calling on French citizens to visit an exhibition about Israel at the Louvre.

Advertising in the Paris metro for a an exhibition about Israel (Photo: Israel embassy in Paris)

Torn-up advertisement in the Paris metro (Photo: Israeli embassy in Paris)

The Israeli Embassy in Paris has advertised for an exhibition currently on display at the Louvre. The advertising campaign includes more than 300 points around the citys metro. On Friday, BDS activists arrived and tore billboards at the Louvre metro station and several other stations.

The embassy began preparations for the possibility of vandalism in advance: the contract with the advertising company determined that any vandalized billboard would be immediately put up again, and so it was. The Israeli Embassy said, "Our message to the BDS groups is that they will not shut our mouths.
In the wake of the recent incident in which an IDF soldier shot an already-neutralized terrorist, one that has shaken the IDF as well as the entire nation, four of Givati Brigade's commanders tell Ynet, in a special interview, of the difficulties that characterized a terror-filled six months. The interview was conducted after a six month period of operation in the West Bank, at the height of the third intifada. The meeting with the battalion commanders took place last week on the summit of Mount Kabir, which overlooks Nablus and is near the lone road leading to Elon Moreh, where the terror wave began with the murder of Eitam and Na'ama Henkin last October.

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A few hours before the interview with the commanders the shooting incident in Hebron took place in an area that was previously manned by battalion commander, Lt. Col. Kobi Barel. "It is an unethical and extremist act, and we don't train our soldiers to act that way," he says. "There were hundreds of similar cases and we did not see results like that happening. A scene like that draws fire, media and crowds. That is why the scene needs to be closed off, isolated and the body cleared away as fast as possible."





Givati's battalion commanders (Photo: IDF Spokesperson)

A day later it became clear that three of Kfir Brigade's officers delayed handling the terrorists and they were reprimanded. The Givati battalion commander had a few exceptional incidents against Palestinians in recent months, and talked about methods that were developed by brigade to successfully conclude terrorist incidents without anyone being killed. "Palestinians stand behind red lines we draw on the ground, they are checked from there in order to maintain a safe distance from the soldiers. That way a terrorist who attacks with a drawn knife has no advantage. Our soldiers took their positions after short training sessions in krav maga (Israeli hand to hand combat method- ed.) and shooting drills. We called this warming up before a mission, this strengthened and sharpened our infantrymen," he explained.

According to the testimonies of Kfir Brigade soldiers, the soldier from the Shimshon battalion fired emotionally after he told the platoon commander and his friend that "we should kill the terrorist who stabbed my friend". In Givati, probably as a preventive measures for such situations, many discussions were held about instances and dilemmas between commanders and their soldiers. "Squad and platoon leaders talk to soldiers about little incidents that happen, so that they can vent their emotions."

(Photo: IDF Spokesperson)

The discussion with the battalion commanders reveal the IDF's transformation over the past year regarding the conceptualization of managing the territories in the West Bank. The discretion used to save the Palestinian population's fabric of life of is integrated and receiving greater weight in operational activity, and in the tactical decisions that are received in the intensive assessments and those that are held after attacks.

The shooting soldier (Photo: Moti Kimchi)

In the neighboring area, west of Nablus, Lt. Col Nir Ben Hamo was in charge of the brigade's reconnaissance battalion. There the infantrymen faced the conflict between the Palestinians and settlers in the Yitzhar area. "He handled fits of rage from settlers, but we also had commanders in the area in these events, and we play a part in controlling these kind of events. We arrested people who tried to damage the other side in a way that could fan the fire. We did not allow innocents to get hurt."





Removal of the terrorist from Hebron (Photo: AFP)

Givati Brigade hammered the Palestinian terrorists day and night with hundreds of arrests. Lt. Col. Betito recalls the evacuation of the Jewish worshippers who sneaked into Joseph's Tomb in Nablus at night, during the peak of the incitement. "At 2am I got alerted because worshippers entered Joseph's tomb in a vehicle. We quickly drove over there with what we had, just four vehicles. At the entrance to Nablus we were stopped by a Palestinian police checkpoint. They refused to let us pass. After talking to them we crossed the checkpoint and proceeded to the tomb," he recounted. He said there were hundreds of Palestinians gathered around five Jews, and armed Palestinian police officers aiming their weapons at his soldiers. "I immediately recognized the senior Palestinian police officer in the area, we calmed the situation down, but it was surreal. Eventually we safely rescued the worshippers," he concluded.

The commander of Shaked battalion, Lt. Col Eyal Schwimmer, remembers the shooting attack at the checkpoint at the entrance to Ramallah where two Shaked infantrymen were wounded. "The Palestinian Authority agent drew his pistol from his vehicle, a pistol instead of his ID, and fired five bullets at them. He continued to drive towards Beit El. The event ended when soldiers who were injured in addition to another soldier at the checkpoint, fired towards him despite their injuries and killed him. We are talking about soldiers in the training platoon, they were barely nine months in the military."

It seems that the battalion commanders, who live the complex reality that exists out there, are more proficient than the top brass in the nuances that will influence the terror wave. "The less success the lone wolves have, the less copycat attacks will happen.

The easiest thing is to close off areas, but restraint is strength. We also allowed the fabric of life in Hebron to continue and no Palestinian stores were closed after the attacks. Another Defensive Shield is not relevant at this time. "

The battalion commanders rebut the claims, especially made among some on the right, of a soft hand towards firing at Palestinians. "When a terrorist comes to attack a soldier or citizen, the infantryman must immediately neutralize him. During disturbances it is different, and it should be handled with no fatalities on the other side," Lt. Ben Hamo said. Lt. Col. Barel said that "we encountered many incidents that could have ended up with dead Palestinians but it was still within the rules of engagement."
New Delhi: Old habits die hard, they say - but they do die sometimes as experience in cleanliness is showing on the capital's pride - the 'Delhi Metro'. People in the city, known for their propensity to litter, are actually restraining themselves from spitting or throwing waste and helping keep the Metro property spic and span, says a passenger, a regular on the Metro. You hardly find 'paan' (betel leaf) stains on the walls, ubiquitous plastic bags lying on platforms, on the tracks or inside the train coaches, says another passenger. But as one moves out of a metro station it is the same old story, the familiar sight of litter, just outside the Metro station! "It is a cyclic effect. If you keep an area clean it is a human tendency to maintain the cleanliness. If we keep a place dirty, people will dirty it," says Anuj Dayal, Chief Public Relation officer (CPRO), Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Limited (DMRC). "We have 'cleaning gangs' at every station. These gangs, employed by private companies and monitored by the DMRC, look after the maintenance of the Metro. It is taking a lot of manpower and resources in keeping the Metro clean and we have been reasonably successful," Dayal says. "Sometimes people do litter and dirty the platforms. But not so much as you would find outside," says a maintenance person at Patel Chowk Metro station. Deterrence has played a role in educating people. "Defaulters are booked under Operation and Maintenance Act, 2002 of the Delhi Metro. Besides, CCTVs have been mounted at all metro stations. So if someone is creating nuisance it will be recorded on the cameras and can be used as evidence while booking people", says Dayal. "Delhi has a unique set of problems. Many people do not care about cleanliness or anything," says Dr Iqbal Malik, founder and director of Vatavaran, an NGO working on socio-economic issues. "The credit for the cleanliness in the Metro Rail must go to the authorities and not the people. I wish the authorities at other places were as strict as the metro," Dr Malik says. A cleanliness survey conducted in 2007 by AC Neilsen ORG Marg ranked Delhi 9th on cleanliness among 18 state capitals surveyed. The survey, aimed at understanding perceptions of citizens on the levels of cleanliness of their cities, brought forth demands from respondents for greater availability of dustbins in public places and greater participation by municipal administrations in maintenance of cleanliness. The ranking suggests that the national capital is not half as worse as other state capitals but not half as good either. "On an average about 5000-6000 tonnes of garbage is generated everyday in the city of Delhi. Roughly 1500 people are caught for dirtying public places. Although the fine is less the humiliation of appearing before a municipal magistrate is a strong deterrent against repeating the offence," says Deep Mathur, CPRO, MCD. When a comparison between the Delhi Metro and the city is suggested in terms of cleanliness, Mathur says, " it is not right to compare the MCD and the Delhi Metro. Difficult areas, problem areas are with the MCD." "The policy of the MCD on garbage management will never result in a zero-garbage Delhi. The MCD's plan is that of centralized garbage management. I think decentralized garbage management involving public participation is a good solution," says Dr Malik. Whatever the reasons, we hope this habit, of keeping the metro premises clean, is logically practiced in the city as well and doesn't die an early death, says another regular traveller. Bureau Report
New Delhi: Taking a dig at ruling BJP over the contentious issue of excise duty on non-silver jewellery, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to "leave" Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's side if he did not want to lose the support of traders.

Gold traders, jewellers and artisans have been observing strike since March 2, demanding roll-back of the budgetary proposal that has impacted the trade.

Addressing a gathering of jewellers at Jantar Mantar here, Kejriwal warned BJP of "erosion" in its support base among traders and wondered if Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Modi had any differences at all as the ruling BJP was "implementing" the policies of the UPA dispensation.

"The notion was that BJP is a party of traders. Then what has happened now I want to tell the PM that Jaitley ji will not have to gather votes or contest elections. You need votes so please be a little careful. If jewellers are cheated, then traders will leave BJP's side," Kejriwal said.

The Aam Aadmi Party convener's address, peppered with sharp jibes at the PM and his pet projects such as 'Make in India', was lapped up by a sizeable crowd that repeatedly raised slogans against Modi and Jaitley.

Kejriwal claimed that BJP MPs and even Union Ministers are in "favour" of the jewellers' demands contrary to the PM's "adamance". "Even MPs are wondering as to what Jaitley has explained to the PM."

"BJP is on one side and PM on the other. But why? PM is under the total control of Jaitley. I am smaller in terms of age, experience than Modi ji but have a small suggestion for him. Please leave Jaitley ji's side, he will take you down," Kejriwal said.

He also read out a series of tweets made by Modi in his capacity as Gujarat Chief Minister where the latter had opposed a similar move by the erstwhile UPA government to impose one per cent excise duty on non-silver jewellery.

"What has changed? People thought the PM is with them but you have cheated them. Congress used to impose excise duty and people brought you to power thinking you won't repeat the same. But now that you have repeated the act, what difference is there between you and Sonia Gandhi?" Kejriwal said.
New Delhi: Upset over the 'feeble' protests on the Anar Patel issue, Congress high command has warned party MLAs in Gujarat that their renomination could be in jeopardy if they failed to act as "real opposition" to the Prime Minister in his home state.

Assembly elections in the state are scheduled towards the end of next year and the main opposition party is sensing an opportunity following its success in the local bodies polls four months back.

A central leader, who declined to be identified, said ahead of the just-concluded session of the state Assembly, the high command had asked the MLAs to take up the Anar Patel issue in a big way.

The issue concerns controversial land allotment to entities associated with Anar Patel, daughter of Chief Minister Anandiben Patel.

AICC has also been using the issue to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi accusing him, time and again, of "blatantly plundering" public land when he was Gujarat Chief Minister. It has been demanding a Supreme Court-monitored SIT probe.

The party also wanted Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel to resign or be sacked immediately to ensure a fair probe.

Its stand is that allotment of 250 acres of government land next to 'Gir Lion Sanctuary' "without following any procedure or valuation or price determination for a pittance" was in gross violation of all norms, procedures and regulations governing allotment of public land.

Party sources said AICC was not happy with the way party MLAs were "lukewarm" to its direction in the initial days of the Assembly session and were made it known that their working was being monitored and it could have a bearing on their renomination.

The Congress high command's direction bore a belated result towards the end of March when 55 of the party's MLAs present in the Gujarat Assembly were suspended for the rest of the session after they shouted slogans in support of Patel quota agitation and waved placards on the Anar Patel issue. The suspension on March 30 took place just a day before the session was to conclude.
Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: You've heard of personal bank accounts and also have them for times when you need emergency cash, but have you heard of people having personal blood accounts?

It sounds like something a vampire would love, but it's actually a very thoughtful innovation  one that can save many lives, in fact.

You must have heard stories or known a few people who, due to lack of blood of a specific blood group, lost their lives.

Having a personal blood account promises to change that fate. To ensure easy supply of blood during emergencies, you can now create a personal blood account. You can save blood in it at regular intervals, withdraw it when required or transfer it to someone in need. The procedure can also be monitored through an android-based app.

As per the Times of India, the initiative is backed by the Indian Red Cross Society and J Walter Thompson India. "Most of us think twice before donating blood. Studies reveal that 90% of the population has never donated blood. So we decided to change the language. We replaced the word `donation' with `bank saving' and created the world's first blood banking app which helps one store blood into a unique account," said Senthil Kumar, chief creative officer, J Walter Thompson India.

Times of India further said that, "Indian Red Cross Society has already established blood banks across the country. With the digital blood banking concept and the launch of the app, the entire process of depositing, withdrawing and transfer will be extremely useful to the internet-savvy public. Finding blood donors during emergencies is tough. This will go a long way in helping patients," said S Ashok Kumar Shetty, general secretary, Indian Red Cross Society , Karnataka branch. Karnataka branch.

How it works:

You will be required to open the account at either the The Bengalee Association or the state branch of Indian Red Cross Society. You will then receive a personal account number to monitor the individual account through the app, which will record all information, track the account and provide timely reminders about the savings.

The app will be launched today, 3rd April, at The Bengalee Association and the state branch of the Indian Red Cross Society.
New Delhi: Indian government has secured the release of four Indian from war-torn Syria, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Sunday.

"We have secured the release of four Indian nationals from Syria," Sushma tweeted today morning.

We have secured the release of four Indian nationals from Syria.  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) April 3, 2016

Adding further, she said that she had requested Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Fahd Jassem al-Freij to secure their release.

I had requested Deputy Prime Minister of Syria for their release during his visit to India in January this year. Thank you Syria.  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) April 3, 2016

The 4 Indian nationals secured from Syria are Arun Kumar Saini, Sarvjit Singh, Kuldeep Singh and Joga Singh.

According to a report by NDTV, the four Indians were arrested by the Syrian government in January this year which had thought they were on their way to joining terror outfit ISIS.

The four Indians were arrested by the Syrian government in Damascus after they crossed over from Jordan into Syria. They were suspected by the Syrian government of being ISIS sympathisers.

However, it was later revealed that they were not ISIS sympathisers but illegal migrants who were travelling without valid documents.

Earlier, on Satrday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi heaped praises on his cabinet colleague Sushma Swaraj during his visit to Saudi Arabia.

Our External Affairs Minister Sushma gives priority to any case that comes up from any part of the world concerning distress to people. If an Indian is in trouble anywhere in the World, our government makes all effort to help them, Modi said while highlighting Swarajs active response through social media to reach out out to Indians in distress abroad.

Moreover, the External Affairs Minister was praised by her political detractors as well in the just concluded Budget session of the parliament.
New Delhi: Amid growing bonhomie between India and the US, 12 IAF aircraft, including the Russian origin Su30 MKI, will fly to Alaska this month to take part in the prestigious 'Red Flag' air exercise that will see them in action alongside NATO forces during war games.

The aircraft four each of Sukhoi and deep penetration Jaguars, two C17 transport plans and two mid air refuellers IL 78 ? will travel through Bahrain, Egypt, France, Portugal and Canada before finally reaching Alaska.

The air exercise, from April 28-May 13, is seen as a complex and advanced network centric operation -- the toughest test for flying machines and men.

"The personnel have now assembled at the Jamnagar air base where they will undergo some training schedule. Advanced party will leave shortly and the rest would join them later in the US," an IAF official said.

This is the second time that India is participating in such an exercise after 2008.

Due to high costs, the IAF had decided to take part in the exercise once every five years.

It was scheduled to take part in the 2013 edition but the exercise was cancelled by the US following budget cuts.

According to an estimate, it will cost India over Rs 100 crore. It will also see over 150 IAF personnel in action.

"Crawl, walk and run" is the term used for the format of deployment for systematically increasing pace and scope of the exercise and combat maneuvers during 'Red Flag'.

The Red Flag would be the most complex aerial war game involving forces from India and US that will also see Aerial Early Warning aircraft from NATO forces in action.

Once again, India has refrained from taking its Aerial early warning aircraft for the overseas exercise.
Riyadh: India and Saudi Arabia on Sunday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) under which both nations agreed to exchange intelligence related to money laundering, terrorism financing and related crimes.

The MoU, which was signed between Financial Intelligence Units of both countries, was one of the five MoUs concluded during Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s visit to the nation.

The other MoUs include an agreement on labour cooperation between the Ministry of Labour of Saudi Arabia and Indian Ministry of External Affairs for the recruitment of general category workers. Besides, an MoU was also concluded on technical cooperation program between the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and the Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality Organisation (SASO).

Another MoU was signed in the field executive program for cooperation in the field of handicrafts between Indian Export Promotion Council for Handicraft (EPCH) and Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage.

An understanding to create a framework for Investment Promotion Cooperation between India and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) was also concluded.

Prime Minister Modi held delegation-level talks with Saudi Arabia`s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in a move to cement new momentum in bilateral ties between both sides and expand cooperation in diverse areas including trade, investment and counter-terrorism.
Riyadh: In a reflection of deepening bilateral ties, India and Saudi Arabia on Sunday agreed to further strengthen cooperation in the fight against terror and Prime Minister Narendra Modi assured Saudi and Indian businessmen that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will be rolled out soon.

PM Modi was also conferred with the Gulf kingdom's highest civilian honour, the King Abdulaziz Sash.

"The two leaders agreed to further strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism, both at the bilateral level and within the multilateral system of the UN," said a joint statement issued after delegation-level talks here led by PM Modi and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Sunday was the second and final day of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the Gulf kingdom.

"The two leaders called upon the international community to strengthen multilateral regimes to effectively address the challenges posed by terrorism," the statement said.

Both leaders totally rejected "any attempt to link this universal phenomenon to any particular race, religion or culture".

PM Modi and King Salman called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries and dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist.

The Prime Minister and King Salman discussed regional and international issues of mutual interest, including the security situation in West Asia, Middle East and South Asia.

"The two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation to strengthen maritime security in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean regions, vital for the security and prosperity of both countries," the joint statement said.

PM Narendra Modi and King Salman also agreed to promote cooperation in cyber security, including prevention of use of cyber space for terrorism, radicalisation and for disturbing social harmony.

In the field of energy cooperation, both leaders agreed to transform the current buyer-seller relationship to one of deeper partnership focusing on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries, according to the statement.

On bilateral trade, PM Modi and King Salman expressed satisfaction at the $39 billion trade in 2014-15.

King Salman also lauded the strong growth shown by the Indian economy and expressed appreciation for Modi's remarkable vision for the future of the country.

"He commended Prime Minister Modi's worthy initiatives of 'Startup India', 'Make in India', 'Smart City', and 'Clean India', noting their strong potential to provide Indian economy a positive thrust for growth," the statement said.

Earlier on Sunday, addressing the Saudi Chambers of Commerce, Modi assured Saudi and Indian business leaders that his government was working to set up a predictable long-term taxation regime and said the long-awaited Goods and Services Tax (GST) would soon be implemented in India.

"Don't worry...GST will happen, it will be a reality soon,"he said.

"Retrospective tax is a matter of the past. My government will continue to work towards establishment of a predictable long-term taxation regime," he added.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, to implement a pan-India tax for a complete overhaul of the extant indirect tax regime, has been approved by the Lok Sabha.

It is currently stalled in the Rajya Sabha, where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) doesn't enjoy a majority.

PM Modi urged the audience to move beyond the traditional bilateral trading relationship.

"Let us move beyond merely the export-import relationship. Joint investment, technology transfers are areas that we should explore," PM Modi said.

Ahead of Sunday's bilateral talks, Khalid bib Abdul Aziz Al-Falih, Saudi health minister and chairman of Saudi oil major Saudi Aramco, met PM Modi and said that India was the number one target for investmen for his company.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir also called on the prime minister.

Five agreements were also signed between the two countries, including ones on labour cooperation and sharing intelligence on terror financing and money laundering.

Modi started his second day in Saudi Arabia by visiting the Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) all-women IT centre here.

"I am meeting those professionals who are now the glory of Saudi Arabia," PM Modi said after he was welcomed with cheers by women at the centre.

"This atmosphere I am witnessing here today has the potential to give a strong message to the world."

Saudi Arabia is the third and last leg of Modi's five-day, three-nation foreign tour which also took him to Brussels and Washington, DC.

In Brussels, he attended the 13th India-European Union (EU) Summit and held a bilateral meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, and then in Washington he participated in the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by US President Barack Obama.

This is the first prime ministerial visit from India to the oil-rich Gulf kingdom since the visit of Manmohan Singh in 2010.
New Delhi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Saturday assured a Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) delegation that abducted Salesian Order priest Father Thomas Uzhunnallil is safe and all efforts are being taken to free him, a statement said.

"Sushma Swaraj has categorically assured the delegation that Fr. Tom Uzhunnallil is safe and that the government is adopting all possible means for the quick and safe release of Father Tom," said a CBCI statement.

However, she did not reveal the finer details of the negotiations and the technicalities involved in securing the release of the Indian priest, abducted by the IS in Yemen, as it may jeopardise the entire process.

"The minister also said that the wild rumours being spread about any harm done to Fr. Tom, are totally baseless," the statement said, thus quashing the rumours that Uzhunnallil was crucified by the IS terrorists on Good Friday.

The minister also told the delegation, led by CBCI deputy secretary general Joseph Chinnayyan, of the strenuous efforts being undertaken by the ministry and her personally to obtain the safe passage of the only surviving nun, sister Rema.

On March 4, the priest from Kerala was kidnapped after IS terrorists barged into a Missionaries of Charity care home in Aden for which he is the caretaker and shot dead many people, including four nuns, one of them from India.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Archbishop of Bengaluru, Father Bernard Moras, has called upon the general public in Bengaluru to join for a three-hour prayer vigil for Uzhunnalil to observe the completion of a month of his abduction.


Bijnor/New Delhi: A National Investigation Agency (NIA) officer, probing terror cases related to Indian Mujahideen, was on Sunday shot dead by two unidentified motorcycle -borne assailants who also wounded his wife when they were returning home from a wedding near UP's Bijnor town.

In a "planned attack", the killers pumped 24 bullets at 45-year-old Mohd Tanzil Ahmad and four at his wife Farzana, as their daughter, 14, and son, 12, watched the gruesome incident from the back seat of the Wagon-R car they were travelling in, police said, adding the children were not injured.

Late in the evening, NIA IG Sanjeev Kumar said Farzana was "out of danger. There is no damage to her vital organs. She is recovering".

"Ahmad was a brave officer who never hesitated in taking up any challenge. It is a big loss to NIA. We will rise to the occasion and both NIA as well as UP police has taken this as a challenge to bring the culprits before the law," he said.

Ahmad was returning home in Sahaspur village of Bijnor district with his family after attending his niece's wedding in another nearby village in the same district, which is about 150 km from Delhi.

Police termed the killing of Ahmad, posted as Inspector initially with the NIA's intelligence wing and later in its investigation department, as a "planned attack" and did not rule out the possiblity of a terror angle behind the shootout.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh told reporters in Lucknow that he had been apprised of the incident. "Whatever necessary is being done. We are talking (to NIA officials)," Singh said.

Police suspect that Ahmad's movements was being tracked by the assailants who used at least one 9mm pistol in the attack.

"Tanzil Ahmad was shot dead by two motorcycle borne persons when he was returning after attending a marriage ceremony with his wife Farzana," IG (Law and Order) of UP Police Bhagwan Swaroop said.

The incident took place at 12:45 AM when Ahmed, earlier posted as an assistant commandant in BSF and on deputation to NIA, was returning to Sahaspur from the wedding ceremony.

Ahmad, who has been with the NIA ever since the organisation was formed in February 2009, had been investigating many cases especially related to banned Indian Mujahideen terror outfit. His superiors termed him as a thorough professional in intelligence gathering as well as investigation.

According to the police, Ahmad left his home in the evening along with his family to attend a marriage ceremony at a guest house at Sohara village.

On their way back, their vehicle was stopped barely 200 metres from his home by two youths who fired at a very close range.

In New Delhi, NIA IG Kumar said, "When Ahmad was coming back from the function, a planned attack took place on him and he was fired upon. He was killed in the firing while his wife was injured. She has been admitted to Fortis Hospital, Noida."

Ahmad was taken to nearby Cosmos hospital where he was declared brought dead.

The Uttar Pradesh Police have sealed the borders of the district and launched a manhunt for the assailants.

Additional Director General of Police Daljit Chowdhry said "nothing can be ruled out," when asked whether there was a possibility of terror angle behind the attack.

"A very serious offence has taken place in the district and we have taken it very seriously. The body has been sent for post-mortem and details of what actually happened will soon come out. Borders of the state have been sealed and checking is on in the nearby villages to trace those involved in killing of the officer. We are trying to find out the accused and the motive behind the murder," he said.

"Investigations are on. Right now the UP Police, UP ATS, NIA, the DIG of NIA from Lucknow and his team all of them are there on the spot," Chowdhry said.

He said the state police was also trying to ascertain whether the 9 mm pistol used for the crime was country-made or factory-made. "It is definitely a planned attack and not a robbery," he added.

UP Director General of Police Javeed Ahmad said IG Special Task Force (STF) and IG Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) have been sent to Bijnor and the matter is being probed.

"We are also in touch with NIA officers and coordinating with them. We will go deep into it and ensure those involved are arrested", Ahmad said.

Superintendent of Police, Bijnor, Subhash Singh Baghel said Ahmad came to Bijnor on Friday to attend his niece's marriage.

At around 8.00 pm on Saturday evening, Ahmad and his family left their home for the marriage function. When they were returning home past midnight, their vehicle was stopped close to their residence by the two youths on a motorcycle.

"When Ahmad stopped his car, they fired several rounds and escaped," the SP said, adding locals rushed to the spot hearing the gunshots.


Riyadh: Seeking to inject new momentum in bilateral ties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday held wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz on ways to expand strategic cooperation in a range of areas including trade, investment and counter-terrorism.

Energy-powerhouse Saudi Arabia is India's largest crude oil supplier, accounting for about one-fifth of total imports and both sides were of the view that cooperation in this sector should expand.

Before his talks with the King, Modi, who arrived here yesterday on a two-day visit, was accorded an official welcome at the Royal Court.

In the last seven months, it is Modi's second visit to the Gulf, a strategically important region which is home to over 8 million Indians and key to India's energy security. He had visited United Arab Emirates in August last year.

India's ties with Saudi Arabia have been on an upswing over the last two decades based on burgeoning energy ties. Both sides are keen on expanding the economic ties in a range of areas besides the oil sector.

Ahead of his talks with the King, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Aljubeir called on Modi and discussed a number of issues of mutual interests.

Khalid A Al Falih, Minister of Health and Head of Saudi Arabia's national oil company Aramco also called on Modi. He told the Prime Minister that Aramco looks at India as its most preferred investment destination.

"Minister Al Falih to PM: Saudi Aramco looks to India as its No.1 target for investment," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Earlier, Modi interacted with a group of 30 Saudi and Indian businessmen and invited CEOs of top companies of the oil-rich country to invest in India's defence, energy, railway, health and agriculture sectors.

Stating that there is huge opportunity to ramp up trade ties, the Prime Minister said time has come to move from "buyer-seller relationship" to chart a new path of growth and development which will benefit people of both the countries.

"We have to look beyond the buyer-seller relationship. Because that will be an obstacle in the path of progress," he said.

Modi is the fourth Indian Prime Minister to visit Saudi Arabia after Manmohan Singh in 2010, Indira Gandhi in 1982 and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1956.

His visit here comes amid the current turmoil in the Middle East and the issue is understood to have figured in his meeting with the Saudi leadership.
Riyadh: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday left for home after wrapping up his final-leg of five-day three-nation tour of Belgium, the US and Saudi Arabia.

The Prime Minister had arrived here yesterday from Washington and today he held wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud during which they agreed to strengthen cooperation in combating terrorism.

"Thank you Saudi Arabia. Joined several programmes during my visit, which will deepen economic & people-to-people ties between our nations," Modi tweeted both in Arabic and English before departing for New Delhi.

After the talks, both the countries signed five pacts including one on having cooperation in the exchange of intelligence related to money laundering, terror financing and related crimes.

Both the sides also called on all states to reject its use against other countries and dismantle terror infrastructures where they exist after talks between Prime Minister Modi and King Salman.

Energy-powerhouse Saudi Arabia is India's largest crude oil supplier, accounting for about one-fifth of total imports and both sides also decided to expand cooperation in the sector.

The Prime Minister's first stop was Brussels where he attended the long-delayed India-EU summit and held talks with Belgium counterpart Charles Michel on March 30.

From Brussels Modi went to Washington where he attended the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31 and April 1.
New Delhi: Days after the body of a Dalit girl student was found in a water tank of the school on Tuesday, the local police have arrested the physical trainer and instructor for allegedly raping the murdering the girl in Bikaner district of Rajasthan.

The 17-year-old victim's body was recovered on Tuesday morning following which her parents lodged a complaint against trainer Vijendra Singh accusing him of raping and killing the girl.

"It was alleged that the girl was raped in the hostel room of Vijendra on Monday night and later her body was found in the tank. She was pursuing BSTC (a course to become a teacher) from the private college in Nokha," the police said.

According to a report in the Indian Express, the girl's father alleged that she was raped by the accused when she has gone to his room to clean it.

Victim's father told that there were only four girls in the hostel as most of them had gone to their homes for Holi and were yet to join back. She was asked by the hostel warden to go and clean the PTI's room.

The victim's father also claimed that she has told him about the rape on March 28 evening, a day before she was found dead.

Quoting Bikaner SP (rural) Satnam Singh, the report said that the victim's postmortem report has confirmed rape.

The girl belonged to Barmer district.

Local people, her relatives and public representatives including Leader of Opposition Rameshwar Dudi have demanded a probe into the matter.
New Delhi: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday assured that students of Srinagar's National Institute of Technology would be protected.

"Spoke to Governor J&K & DGP regarding situation in NIT Srinagar. I assure students that they should not worry about their security," Singh said in a tweet.

He further said that he has instructed Deputy General of Police K. Rajendra to send a team of officers to the institute to assure the students of their safety and security.

Dr. Rajat Gupta, the director of NIT, yesterday assured the students, faculty and parents that the present situation arising out of tensions has been overcome.

The situation in the campus and at the hostels was restored to normal and academic activities would resume on Monday.

The district administration and local authorities had extended their cooperation to bring the situation under control.

All programmes in the institution will take place as scheduled, including the 'National Research Scholar Conclave' to be held on April 2 and 3 respectively.

Earlier, tension was simmering in the NIT after India lost the World T20 semi-final to the West Indies on Thursday night.

Some engineering students from outside the state claimed Kashmiri students had chanted anti-India slogans and burst firecrackers after India lost.

To control the situation, officials closed the institute's entrance and did not allow anyone to enter.

The police had to be called in after efforts by the NIT officials to control the situation and disperse the crowd failed. The police baton charged the protestors and fired teargas to bring the situation under control.
Riyadh: Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Sunday accepted Prime Minister Narendra Modi's invitation to pay an official visit to India at a mutually convenient time.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on the final leg of his three-nation tour in Riyadh will leave for New Delhi early on Monday morning.

During their discussions on regional issues, the two sides emphasized the importance of the principle of good neighbourliness, non-interference in internal affairs, respect of independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity and resolution of dispute through peaceful means.

The two sides also expressed their hope for achieving a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in accordance with the Arab Peace Initiative and the resolutions of international legitimacy, in a way that guarantees the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the establishment of their independent, united and viable state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Prime Minister Modi expressed his sincere gratitude to His Majesty the King for the warm welcome and gracious hospitality.

Earlier in the day, he held delegation-level talks with King Al Saud in a move to cement new momentum in bilateral ties between both sides and expand cooperation in diverse areas including trade, investment and counter-terrorism.

Before his departure, the Prime Minister met the Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud.

Modi is the fourth Indian Prime Minister to visit Saudi Arabia after Manmohan Singh in 2010, Indira Gandhi in 1982 and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1956.
Kochi: Kerala Congress (Jacob) leader Johnny Nellore, who has been denied UDF ticket from Angamaly Assembly seat, on Sunday quit the post of party chairman and said he would work to "ensure defeat" of Congress in the Kerala polls.

"I feel that I am a failure as chairman of the party. I failed to ensure at least three seats which the party had contested in the 2011 elections. In such a scenario, it is very difficult for the party to move forward under my leadership", Nellore told reporters in Idukki.

He said he would work to "ensure defeat" of Congress leaders in the Assembly polls.

His decision to quit the party is seen as his virtual exit from the Kerala Congress (Jacob), a minor partner in the Congress-led UDF in the state.

In the wake of the fresh development, the high-power committee meeting of the KC (J) will meet in Kottayam tomorrow to discuss its further course of action, party sources said.

Nellore's decision came a day after he said he would opt for a seat from Ernakulam district itself if he decides to contest the Assembly elections.

"I have three constituencies in my mind -- Angamaly, Muvattupuzha or Kothamangalam. I will opt for any of the three constituencies, if I fight elections. I am planning to utilise this opportunity to give a fitting reply to those who cheated my party and me," he had said yesterday.

After being denied another seat for it in the election, the party had earlier authorised its lone representative in the Assembly and state Food Minister Anoop Jacob to convey its "strong protest" to top Congress leadership on the issue.

The UDF decision came as Nellore was preparing to contest as the front candidate from the Angamaly seat, which he had lost in the 2011 elections.

UDF convener P P Thankachan had formally informed Nellore that KC(J) should be satisfied with just one seat, Piravom, currently represented by Anoop Jacob.

Noting that the party had contested three seats, including Angamaly in the 2011 Assembly polls, Nellore had said, "It is not the chairman of the Kerala Congress (Jacob) who is in crisis. Party is in crisis because of Congress' decision."
Mukundpur (MP): Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Sunday inaugurated the world's maiden 'White Tiger Safari' at Mukundpur in Satna district in the state's Vindhya region where the feline was first discovered more than 100 years ago.

The first of its kind safari has cost Rs 50 crore and is spread over an area of 25 hectares.

Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, Steel and Mines Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, Chief Minister Chouhan and MP's Public Relations and Energy Minister Rajendra Shukla, among others, dedicated it to the public.

Inaugurating the safari amid cheers and applause from than one lakh people, Chief Minister Chouhan said it was a historic moment for the state.

"I am very happy and elated. Mukundpur in Vindhya region has got world's first white tiger safari.?

"Vindhya region gave world the first white tiger. However, it was robbed of its speciality with the death of a white tiger Virat in 1976. Since then, the region was waiting for a white tiger and today, after 40 years, people's aspirations have been fulfilled," Chouhan said.

He announced that the safari would be free for visitors for one week.

"The Safari would generate employment opportunities for the people and the state would be benefited," Chouhan said, adding, it will be named after Rewa princely state's ruler Maharaja Martand Singh.

Javadekar congratulated Chouhan on establishing the safari, which he said has fulfilled the long-nurtured dream of the people of MP to have white tigers in their zoos. The state had introduced that breed of feline to the world, he said.

"World leaders from more than 12 countries where white tigers are available in zoos would be invited to India for a conference. Prime Minister Narendra Modi would inaugurate the conference and hold talks with them," the Union Minister said.

"The sanctioned amount for establishing the safari was Rs 50 crore and so far estimates suggest that the amount has been utilised. It remains to be seen if there is a need to revise the amount in future," Shukla said.

He said the safari has put the name of Mukundpur on global level.

With its inauguration, the safari, housing three white tigers, including one male named Raghu and two females, Vindhya and Radha, is now officially open for public.

"As of now, there are three white tigers and two Royal Bengal tigers. The safari will house nine white tigers in the coming months for which talks are being held," Shukla told PTI.
Mumbai: In what could further escalate the tug-of-war over chanting of 'Bharat Mata ki Jai', Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on Sunday that those opposing the slogan have "malafide interests" and intentions.

However, clarifying his statement that those unwilling to say 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' have no right to stay in the country, Fadnavis said, We absolutely have no problem if somebody says 'Jai Hind' or 'Jai Bharat' or 'Jai Hindustan'.

He further said, All we object about is when someone says, 'I won't say Bharat Mata ki Jai'. There is a limit to appeasement.

Further adding fuel to the fire on the nationalism debate, Fadnavis said, They (those refusing to chant (Bharat Mata ki Jai) are those divisive forces who want to create a rift in our country & wish to break the unity. Why should we tolerate it?, as per ANI.

"There is still a dispute over saying 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' and those opposing to say it, should not have any right to stay here. Those living here should say 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai, Fadnavis had said while addressing a public meet yesterday night.

Recently, Darul-Uloom Deoband, the leading Islamic seminary of the Indian subcontinent, had said that Muslims love Bharat Mata (Mother India) but they cannot worship their maadre-watan (mother land).

In a fatwa issued to Muslims, the seminary had said, Muslims should not chant 'Bharat Mata ki jai' because it is against Islam and 'tauheed' (the idea of worshipping one God), which forms the core of Islam.
New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh police are working "on all angles" to find out the motive behind the killing of NIA officer Tanzil Ahmad, who was shot 21 times in an attack by unidentified assailants post-midnight on Saturday.

The shooting in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district took place when the officer was returning from a wedding with his wife and children. His wife Farzana got four bullet injuries, but his children were unharmed.

Ahmad, 48, known for undercover operations, joined the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2010.

"The assailants came on motorbikes and opened fire from a close range on Ahmad near Sahaspur town," NIA spokesperson Sanjeev Kumar told reporters here earlier Sunday. "He was inspector with NIA but back with BSF he was assistant commandant."

Tanzil Ahmad's wife is undergoing treatment at Fortis Hospital in Noida.

"Nothing can be ruled out now until and unless we get absolute concrete evidence. We have to work on all angles. We have to see it from all the sides and work out the case," Daljit Chowdhary, additional director general of police, Uttar Pradesh, said on Sunday.

He said borders have been sealed, nearby areas are being searched and senior officials from Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) have been put on the job to track the assailants and probe the attack.

"I am very hopeful that we will work out the case and arrest the accused. It looks like a planned attack. It was definitely not a robbery," Chowdhary said.

The NIA has also termed Ahmad's killing as a "planned attack".

"A planned attack took place on him when he was fired upon and killed," NIA spokesman Kumar said. "He (Tanzil) was assistant commandant with BSF and currently on deputation with NIA. He was with us for last six and half years."

The premier investigating agency is trying to find out how he was tracked by his assailants.

"The patient has been brought in a critical condition. Our doctors are providing the best medical treatment to treat the patient. As a matter of patient confidentiality we cannot comment anything further," a statement from the Fortis Noida said.

Ahmad was pronounced dead on being taken to a medical facility in Moradabad. His body is being brought to Delhi.

Before joining the NIA, Ahmad was part of the in-house team of BSF, providing vigilance cover. He also held tenures as instructor at BSF Academy at Tekanpur, near Gwalior, and training centre at Hazaribagh.
Brussels: Brussels Airport reopens on Sunday with three "symbolic" flights and strict additional security checks for passengers, marking a new era for air travel in Belgium after attacks by Islamic State suicide bombers.

The key travel hub has been closed since two men blew themselves up in the departure hall on March 22 in coordinated blasts that also struck a metro station in the Belgian capital, killing a total of 32 people.

The attacks at the heart of Europe shocked the country and many hope the airport`s reopening, albeit in a limited capacity and using a tent-like temporary check-in facility, will help turn the page on this month`s traumatic events.

Brussels Airport chief executive Arnaud Feist on Saturday said the partial resumption of services would start with three "symbolic passenger flights" to Faro, Athens and Turin.

"These flights are the first hopeful sign from an airport that is standing up straight after a cowardly attack," Feist said.

Tough new checks will be in place after police threatened to go on strike if security wasn`t improved, and travellers have been asked to come in three hours before departure time.

One of the biggest changes will be that only passengers with tickets and ID documents will be allowed into the makeshift departure hall, and their bags will be checked before entering. Once inside, passengers will also undergo the usual security checks.

The airport will initially only be accessible by car. Vehicles will be screened and subject to spot checks, while extra police and soldiers will be on patrol throughout the airport zone.

The first flight will leave for Faro at 1140 GMT, and the number taking off will increase in the coming days.

Still, the airport will be only be able to work at 20 percent capacity using the temporary facilities, handling 800 to 1,000 passengers an hour.Feist said the reconstruction of the departure hall will take months. The damage was severe, with images from the scene showing the building`s glass-fronted facade in shatters, collapsed ceilings and destroyed check-in desks.

Feist said he expected the airport to start running normally again from late June or early July "before the start of the summer holidays".

The closure of Zaventem airport has wreaked havoc on the travel industry, triggering a drop in tourist arrivals and forcing thousands of passengers to be rerouted to other airports in and around Belgium.

Brussels Airport, which claims it contributes some three billion euros ($3.4 billion) annually to the Belgian economy, has not released any figures on the economic impact of the shutdown, but top carrier Brussels Airlines has said it has been losing five million euros daily.

With 260 companies on-site employing some 20,000 staff overall, the airport is one of the country`s largest employers.

Hotel reservations in the capital have fallen by 50 percent since March 22, the Brussels Hotels Association said.

Belgium`s tourist industry was already suffering from the aftermath of Islamic State attacks in Paris last November, which killed 130 people.

Several of the Paris attackers had links to Brussels and the city went into lockdown for several days after the carnage in neighbouring France, with security forces fearing an imminent attack.

The sole surviving Paris suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in Brussels on March 18, metres from his family home, just four days before the Brussels killings.

He denies having any prior knowledge of the attacks in the Belgian capital, although investigators have uncovered links with two of the bombers.

Belgian police are still hunting for a mystery third suspect, known as "the man in the hat", who was seen in CCTV footage next to the two airport bombers.
Brussels: Brussels Airport reopened Sunday with three "symbolic" flights and strict additional checks for passengers, marking a new high-security era for air travel in Belgium after attacks by Islamic State suicide bombers.

The key travel hub has been closed since two men blew themselves up in the departure hall on March 22 in coordinated blasts that also struck a metro station in the Belgian capital, killing a total of 32 people.

A Brussels Airlines plane bound for the Portuguese city of Faro became the first to take off from the reopened airport.

Tearful employees and government officials marked the 1140 GMT departure with a minute`s silence and a round of applause, AFP reporters saw, while on the tarmac fire engines and police vehicles formed a guard of honour.

"We`re back," Brussels Airport chief executive Arnaud Feist said after watching the plane take to the skies.

Two further flights, to Athens and Turin in Italy, were also scheduled for departure in what Feist called a "symbolic" reopening of the airport. The same three planes were to return to Brussels with passengers later Sunday.

The restart of the airport has been hailed as the beginning of a return to normal for a traumatised country, but the shadow of the attacks loomed large.

Two big white tents were serving as temporary check-in facilities to replace the blast-hit departure hall, and passengers were asked to come three hours before departure to allow time for tight new security checks.

The first travellers to arrive Sunday were met by heavily armed police and soldiers on the access roads to the airport.

There was also a strong security presence inside the tents where travellers walked through metal detectors and had their bags screened before checking in and being allowed to enter the main building.Loukas Bassoukos, a 20-year-old IT student waiting for his flight to Athens, said it felt "a bit weird" to be among the first to return to the bomb-hit airport.

"So many people died here," he told AFP. "But I think we can overcome this. I think we slowly have to start trusting the security controls."

Psychologists were on hand to assist any passengers overcome with emotion, AFP reporters saw.

Under the new system, only passengers with tickets and ID documents are allowed into the makeshift departure hall, and all bags will be checked before entering. Once inside, travellers will still have to go past the usual security barriers.

Zaventem airport will initially only be accessible by car, with no access for buses and trains. Vehicles will be screened and subject to spot checks.

The number of flights will be stepped up gradually, although the airport will only be able to work at 20 percent capacity at best using the temporary facilities, handling 800 to 1,000 passengers an hour.

It will take months to repair the departure hall, according to Feist. The damage from the blasts was severe, with pictures from the scene showing the building`s glass-fronted facade in shatters, collapsed ceilings and destroyed check-in desks.

Feist said he expected the airport to start running normally again from late June or early July.The closure of Zaventem airport has wreaked havoc on the travel industry, triggering a drop in tourist arrivals and forcing thousands of passengers to be rerouted to other airports in and around Belgium.

Brussels Airport, which claims it contributes some three billion euros ($3.4 billion) annually to the Belgian economy, has not released any figures on the economic impact of the shutdown, but top carrier Brussels Airlines has said it has been losing five million euros daily.

With 260 companies on-site employing some 20,000 staff overall, the airport is one of the country`s largest employers.

Belgium`s tourist industry was already suffering from the aftermath of Islamic State attacks in Paris last November, which killed 130 people.

A number of the Paris attackers had links to Brussels and the city went into lockdown for several days after the carnage in neighbouring France, with security forces fearing an attack.

The sole surviving Paris suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in the Belgian capital on March 18, just four days before the Brussels killings.

He denies having any prior knowledge of the Brussels attacks, although investigators have uncovered links with two of the bombers.

Belgian police are still hunting for a mystery third suspect, dubbed "the man in the hat", who was seen in CCTV footage next to the two airport bombers.
Washington: US presidential candidate and Republican front-runner Donald Trump reiterated his belief that Japan should arm itself to deter a threat from North Korea rather than have the US military protect the longtime ally against the rogue nuclear nation.

"I would rather have them not arm, but I'm not going to continue to lose this tremendous amount of money. And frankly, the case could be made that let them protect themselves against North Korea. They'd probably wipe them out pretty quick," Trump said at a campaign event in Wasau, Wisconsin on Saturday.

Trump added, "If they fight, you know what, that'd be a terrible thing. Terrible. ... But if they do, they do," CNN reported.

Earlier this week, Trump startled Japan and South Korea, two of US' strongest allies, with the suggestion that the US military should be withdrawn from their shores, with nuclear weapons replacing them.

There are currently 54,000 US troops stationed in Japan and 28,500 in South Korea.

"We can't be the policeman to the world and have $19 trillion in debt, going up to $21 trillion," he said.

Trump, who appeared at three campaign events throughout Wisconsin on Saturday, reiterated his claim that many of the nations in NATO are "not paying their fair share".

"Either they pay up, including for past deficiencies, or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO," Trump said at a rally in Racine, Wisconsin.

The presidential front-runner also questioned the Washington's relationship with Saudi Arabia where he accused the oil-rich nation of not pitching in a "fair pay" for US defence.
Terter: Clashes between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces rumbled on Sunday, despite Baku announcing a ceasefire after the worst outbreak of violence in decades over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region sparked international pressure to stop fighting.

Azerbaijan said it had decided to "unilaterally cease hostilities" and pledged to "reinforce" several strategic positions it claimed to have captured inside the Armenian-controlled territory.

The Armenia-backed authorities in Karabakh -- which claims independence but is heavily backed by Yerevan -- said they were willing to discuss a ceasefire but only if it saw them regain their territory.

Both sides accused each other of continuing to fire across the volatile frontline that has divided them since a war that saw Armenian separatists seize the region from Azerbaijan ended with an inconclusive truce in 1994.

"The Armenians have continued shelling throughout the day, without interruption," Azerbaijani defence ministry spokesman Vagif Dargahly told AFP.

"Fighting with the use of tanks and artillery continues as Azerbaijan is telling lies that it halted hostilities. Azerbaijan continues shelling both Karabakh army positions and Armenian villages," Armenian defence ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan told AFP.

An AFP photographer in the Azerbaijani town of Terter -- around ten kilometres (six miles) from the frontline -- reported hearing sporadic shooting Sunday afternoon.

Men carried a coffin draped in Azerbaijan`s flag through the streets as the funeral of an Azeri soldier killed in the clashes was held. At least three houses were destroyed by shelling and women and children had been evacuated.

Fierce clashes left at least 18 Armenian and 12 Azerbaijani soldiers dead Saturday after the two sides accused each other of attacking with heavy weaponry across the volatile frontline.

The Karabakh authorities said one boy was killed in the fighting, while Azerbaijan said two civilians died and ten were wounded.

Armenia`s President Serzh Sarkisian called the clashes the "largest-scale hostilities" since a 1994 truce ended a war in which Armenian-backed fighters seized the territory from Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan said one of its helicopters was shot down as its forces took control of several strategic heights and a village in Armenian-controlled territory.

Karabakh forces on Sunday claimed they took back the strategic Lala-Tepe height in Karabakh which was captured by Azeri troops on Saturday.

Baku denied the report, saying that the height remained under its control and that rebel troops sustained "serious manpower losses".Both Russia and the West appealed to all sides to show restraint, with key regional power broker President Vladimir Putin calling Saturday for an "immediate ceasefire".

Moscow has supplied weaponry to both sides in the conflict, but has much closer military and economic ties to Armenia and Yerevan is reliant on Russia`s backing.

US Secretary of State John Kerry urged the arch foes to return to peace talks under the auspices of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), reiterating "there is no military solution to the conflict".

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meanwhile vowed to back traditional ally Azerbaijan "to the end" in the conflict.

"We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties," Erdogan said.

Ethnic Armenian separatists backed by Yerevan seized control of the mountainous Nagorny Karabakh region in an early 1990s war that claimed some 30,000 lives. The foes have never signed a peace deal despite the 1994 ceasefire.

Energy-rich Azerbaijan, whose military spending has in the past exceeded Armenia`s entire state budget, has repeatedly threatened to take back the breakaway region by force if negotiations fail to yield results.

Moscow-backed Armenia says it could crush any offensive.

The last big flare-up occurred in November 2014 when Azerbaijan shot down an Armenian military helicopter.

While the reasons for the sudden surge remain unclear, analyst Thomas de Waal of Carnegie Europe wrote that the "potential for a serious outbreak of fighting has never been greater" as both sides have bolstered their arms.

"It is more likely that one of the two parties to the conflict -- and more likely the Azerbaijani side, which has a stronger interest in the resumption of hostilities -- is trying to alter the situation in its favor with a limited military campaign," de Waal wrote in a blog posting.

"The dangerous aspect to this is that, once begun, any military operations in this conflict zone can easily escalate and get out of control."
Sanaa: The Saudi-led Arab coalition on Sunday launched fresh airstrikes against several military bases controlled by Al Qaeda militants in Yemen's southeastern province of Hadramout, a security official told Xinhua.

"More than five Saudi-led airstrikes targeted the Air Defence Base, the Coast Guards base and other military camps controlled by Al Qaeda members near the port city of Mukalla, the provincial capital of Hadramout," the local security official said on condition of anonymity.

"The fresh air bombings hit Al Qaeda positions in the eastern parts of Mukalla, leaving dozens of terrorists killed and injured and at the scene," the local source said.

Meanwhile, local residents confirmed to Xinhua that Saudi-led fighter jets struck the presidential compound held by Al Qaeda members in Mukalla.

However, a government official based in Hadramout said that there is no information yet whether the strikes were launched by warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition or by US drones.

The Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) seized the coastal city of Mukalla and used several government compounds and military bases as training centres for new recruits.

Yemen, an impoverished Arab country, has been gripped by one of the most active regional Al Qaeda insurgencies in the Middle East.

The AQAP, also known locally as Ansar al-Sharia, emerged in January 2009. It had claimed responsibility for a number of attacks on Yemen's army and government institutions.

It took advantage of the current security vacuum and the ongoing civil war to expand its influence in Yemen's southern regions.

Security in Yemen has deteriorated since March 2015, when war broke out between the Shiite Houthi group, supported by former President Ali Abdullash Saleh, and the government backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition.

More than 6,000 people have been killed in ground battles and airstrikes since then, half of them civilians.


Istanbul: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused US counterpart Barack Obama of going behind his back for criticising Turkey`s press freedom record and linked it to efforts to "divide" Turkey, media reports said on Sunday.

Obama said on Friday after meeting Erdogan on the sidelines of a nuclear summit in Washington that he was troubled by curbs on the press in Turkey and said he had urged Erdogan not to repress democratic debate in his country.

Turkey has drawn international condemnation for charging two journalists with treason for publishing footage that purportedly showed the intelligence agency shipping truckloads of weapons to opposition fighters in Syria in early 2014. Can Dundar and Erdem Gul of Cumhuriyet face life in prison.

"I was saddened to hear that statement made behind my back. During my talk with Obama, those issues did not come up," Erdogan told reporters, according to Hurriyet daily. He returned to Turkey after a five-day trip to Washington on Sunday.

"You cannot consider insults and threats press freedom or criticism," Erdogan said.

Turkey has seized control of opposition newspapers and TV channels and cut the satellite feed of a pro-Kurdish channel, accusing them of terrorism-related activities. Erdogan has personally brought more than 1,800 criminal suits against individuals, including journalists and children, for insulting him since becoming president in 2014.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said at least 13 journalists are in jail for their coverage and described a "massive crackdown" that includes self-censorship and harrassment of media-business owners.

`MASTERMIND`

Criticism of Turkey`s press record seeks to "divide, shatter and if they could, swallow up Turkey," he said. "This is what I mean by mastermind. A mastermind is playing games over Turkey.

Erdogan and his supporters occassionally refer to a shadowy foreign "mastermind" that seeks to destabilise Turkey, a NATO member that shares borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Separately, Erdogan said the US and Turkey had edged closer in their stances on Syrian Kurds, close U.S. allies in the fight against Islamic State.

Turkey sees the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia and its political arm, the PYD, as part of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against Turkey. US officials have said they distinguish between the groups.

Both Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry promised Erdogan during meetings they would not allow the formation of a PYD-run state in Syria, the Turkish leader said.

Turkey is putting forth the names of 2,400 trained Arab and Turkmen fighters to battle Islamic State, Erdogan also said, describing them as part of the moderate opposition. This was "so the US no longer has an excuse" for co-operating with the YPG and PYD, he said.
Yemen`s President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi on Sunday relieved prime minister and vice president Khaled Bahah of his duties due to what he called government "failures".

Bahah`s surprise dismissal comes just a week ahead of a UN-brokered ceasefire planned between Yemen`s warring parties, which is expected to pave the way for peace talks in Kuwait on April 18.

Hadi appointed Ahmed bin Dagher, former secretary general of the General People`s Congress party to which the president once belonged, as prime minister, according to a decision published on the official sabanew.net website.

He appointed veteran General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar as vice president, and a presidency source said that Bahah would now serve as a presidential advisor.

Hadi said the decision to replace Bahah was "due to the failures that have accompanied the performance of the government during the past period in the fields of economy, services, and security".

Bahah`s government has "failed to ease the suffering of our people, resolve their problems and provide their needs," Hadi said in a statement.

Iran-backed rebels have been in control of capital Sanaa since 2014, forcing the government to declare second-city Aden as temporary capital.

But Hadi and many government officials, including Bahah, spend most of their time in Riyadh as they struggle to secure Aden and other parts of the country where Sunni jihadists have gained ground.

Adding to the unrest, the local militiamen who fought alongside the government to retake Aden from the rebels last summer have clashed with guards protecting the presidential palace to protest unpaid wages despite Hadi`s orders to merge them with the security forces.

Hadi spoke Sunday of a "lack of a proper government administration of the unlimited support from our brothers in the Arab coalition, notably Saudi Arabia" which is leading an alliance against the rebels. Government sources have in the past spoke of differences between the president and Bahah, who had served as Yemen`s envoy to the United Nations before Hadi appointed him as foreign minister and then prime minister.

In December, Hadi reshuffled his cabinet, naming new foreign and interior ministers in a move that was understood to be aimed at smoothing his relations with Bahah.

Hadi has also recently been involving Ahmar more actively in decision-making, appointing him in February as armed forces deputy commander in a bid to rally support from tribes and troops in the rebel-held region around Yemen`s capital.

Ahmar`s troops played a prominent role in the 2011 uprising that ousted strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose loyalists are now allied with the Shiite Huthi rebels in control of Sanaa.

Hadi said his decisions aim to "achieve what our people are aspiring for and to restore the state authority, security and stability."

The United Nations says about 6,300 people have been killed in the war in Yemen since the Saudi-led coalition intervened in March last year, more than half of them civilians.

The planned truce was only agreed by the warring sides after months of shuttle diplomacy by UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed.

Previous UN-sponsored negotiations between the rebels and the government failed to make any headway, and a ceasefire announced for December 15 was repeatedly violated and abandoned by the Saudi-led Arab coalition on January 2.
The Reid Technique is the go-to method for coercing false confessions in America's police interrogation rooms, and now it's being taught to America's schoolteachers, just as schools are using "zero-tolerance" policies and on-site cops to re-characterize school discipline problems as criminal matters, creating a school-to-prison pipeline.

John E. Reid and Associates originated the technique, which involves "minimization" (the interrogator downplays the seriousness of the offense) and "maximization" (the interrogator threatens the accused with terrible, lasting punishment for failing to confess).

There's also the highly important question of how transforming school administrators into interrogators informs their view of students. A 2009 study cited by the New Yorker suggests that among police, training in the Reid Technique skewed perceptions of juveniles, making them appear more adult and less trustworthy. University of Virginia psychologists reported that "Reid-trained police were less aware of the developmental differences between adolescents and adults than police who did not receive the training." The researchers also found that officers trained in the Reid Technique "tended to believe that adolescents were just as capable as adults of withstanding psychologically coercive questioning, including deceit." That's not a particularly surprising outcome to casting every student as a potential criminal. If even well-trained law enforcement personnel have their ideas about minors shifted in this way, imagine the likely impact interrogation training has on school administrators.

If all this isn't enough to show how problematic interrogations in schools are, consider how the practice contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline, a cluster of education policies that combine to deliver studentsoverwhelmingly poor, African American, Latino, or coping with physical and mental disabilitiesdirectly from schools to jails. Zero-tolerance policies, which criminalize and disenfranchise already vulnerable students, have resulted in an unprecedented rise in suspensions and expulsions. The Vera Institute of Justice finds that around the country, the number of high school students suspended or expelled each academic year increased "from one in 13 in 1972-'73 to one in nine in 2009-'10"a nearly 40 percent rise.

From preschool throughout their years of schooling, black and Latino students are more likely to be punished in this way. Though schools have multiple options for disciplining students, under zero tolerance they often resort to the harshest available, despite evidence that interventions such as counseling yield better results for student health than criminalization.
By Greg Roumeliotis (Reuters) - Anbang Insurance Group Co's unexpected withdrawal this week of its $14 billion offer to acquire Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc is a wider blow to the unprecedented drive by Chinese companies to acquire North American and European assets. From semiconductors and industrial equipment, to financial services and real estate, China's insatiable appetite for Western companies has pushed the country's outbound cross-border M&A to $101.1 billion year-to-date, nearly surpassing the full-year record of $109.5 billion set last year. Yet Anbang's abrupt move, which came after Starwood said on Monday that the Chinese insurer's latest offer was "reasonably likely" to be superior to a cash-and-stock deal with Marriott International Inc, added fuel to concerns that many Chinese companies may not be able to deliver on their acquisition expectations. "To succeed in the U.S., Chinese companies will have to adapt to American styles of governance and transparency. It will be difficult to close mega deals without a more open style, so we may see more modest deals until China changes," said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. To be sure, the largest M&A deal of this year thus far globally is by a Chinese company: China National Chemical Corp's agreement to acquire Swiss seeds and pesticides group Syngenta for $43 billion. Several Chinese companies, however, are having trouble convincing Western peers that they are a credible M&A counterparty. Earlier this week, for example, U.S. gene-sequencing products maker Affymetrix Inc rejected an offer by some of its former executives that was financed by a Chinese investment firm, even though they offered more money than an existing deal with Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc, on the basis of financing and regulatory risks. Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc said in February it had rejected an acquisition offer from China Resources Microelectronics Ltd and Hua Capital Management Co Ltd, citing concerns over the U.S. approval process. Instead, it went ahead with a deal to sell itself to U.S. peer ON Semiconductor for $2.4 billion. Anbang's case could make corporate boards in the United States and Europe more skeptical about the ability and motives of Chinese buyers, investment bankers and lawyers said. 'THEY TOLD US WHAT THEY TOLD THE MARKET' Starwood had declared Anbang's previous $78 per share cash offer superior to Marriott's on March 18. This meant that Starwood deemed it to be fully financed, and that it expected it to clear the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel that reviews deals to ensure they do not harm national security. Marriott, however, raised its bid on March 21, and Starwood responded with a new $82.75 bid disclosed on March 28. Anbang was expected to firm up that offer in order for Starwood to deem it superior. Anbang said on Thursday that it withdrew its offer due to "market considerations", without elaborating. One of Anbang's private equity partners, Primavera Capital Ltd chairman Fred Hu, said Anbang walked away to avoid a protracted bidding war, even though Marriott had not disclosed a higher offer. "We have little independent insight into what happened, but based on what Starwood has told us, Anbang did not deliver the same kinds of undertakings or arrangements that would have allowed the Starwood board to conclude that they were credible at $82.75," Marriott Chief Executive Arne Sorenson told investors and analysts on a conference call. Anbang became concerned that Starwood had no intention of declaring its latest offer superior and was stalling for time for Marriott to come in with a new offer, according a source close to Anbang's consortium. Sources close to Starwood, however, said Anbang did not deliver the assurances on financing its latest offer it had said it would on Monday, and had since had no communication with Starwood until its withdrawal on Thursday. Chinese financial magazine Caixin reported last month that China's insurance regulator would likely reject a bid by Anbang to buy Starwood, since it would put the insurer's offshore assets above a 15-percent threshold for overseas investments. "(Anbang) told us what they told the market, (that their withdrawal was due to) the market considerations," Starwood Chief Executive Thomas Mangas told the same conference call. Defending Starwood decision to declare Anbang's first bid as superior, Mangas said he had found both Anbang and its chairman Wu Xiaohu to be "very credible". "They moved mountains to persuade our board. They moved quickly and were incredibly shrewd in how they worked with us to get a deal done quickly," Mangas said. (Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
By Alana Wise WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Friday will propose a $10 billion investment in partnerships to encourage the growth of the U.S. manufacturing sector as part of a national push to discourage outsourcing in the industry. The proposal would work with a broader campaign to encourage companies to build and expand their U.S. manufacturing operations. Clinton is slated to roll out the proposal on Friday in Syracuse, New York, ahead of the state's nominating contest on April 19. New York has long been a hub of the manufacturing industry, but suffered significant declines in the sector in recent years. From 2000-2008, upstate New York alone lost nearly 105,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the state government. Clinton maintains a lead in the state, which she represented in the U.S. Senate, over rival Bernie Sanders, a U.S. Senator from Vermont and a New York native. Sanders was born and raised in New York City's borough of Brooklyn. The Clinton campaign is headquartered there. The campaign said the proposal's multi-billion dollar price tag would largely be covered by Clinton's proposed "clawback" tax, which would rescind tax relief for companies that outsource jobs or facilities abroad. (Reporting by Alana Wise; Editing by Leslie Adler)
A mass grave has been discovered in the historical Syrian city of Palmyra, according to the military.

It is believed 42 people were executed by beheading or shooting at some time during Islamic State's 10-month occupation of the site.

A military source told AFP that those killed were officers, soldiers, members of the popular committees (pro-regime militia) and their relatives".

Twenty-four of the victims were civilians, three of them children.

Some of the bodies have been identified and all have been taken to a military hospital in Homs, the provincial capital.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says they are among at least 280 people murdered since the jihadists occupied the city in May last year.

Almost a week ago, the Syrian army, backed by Russian forces, recaptured the city and its historical UNESCO-listed ruins.
By James Odato ALBANY, New York, (Reuters) - Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislative leaders reached a deal on Thursday to raise New York state's minimum wage towards $15 per hour, but fell short of a uniform state-wide increase. The deal outlines a faster rise in New York City, but carves out a slow lane for small businesses and surrounding counties. In less prosperous areas north of the city it rises to $12.50 per hour before a state review of the law's impact. The minimum wage agreement was part of a broad budget deal that Cuomo announced late on Thursday. He said the plan included 12 weeks of paid family leave and $4.2 billion in tax cuts. The $147 billion budget caps spending growth at 2 percent. "I believe that this is the best plan the state has produced in decades," Cuomo told a news conference in the state capital, Albany. Cuomo has earmarked $100 billion in infrastructure spending in the state. The budget also increases school funding by 6.5 percent to $24.8 billion and freezes tuition at the state university system, SUNY. The minimum wage has been a controversial element in difficult budget negotiations that threatened to delay the spending plan past the start of the state's fiscal year on April 1. The agreement, including the minimum wage, still needs to get approval from lawmakers. Under the terms of the deal the minimum wage would rise from its current $9 per hour to $15 over three years in New York City starting on Dec. 31, 2016. City businesses with up to 10 employees would be given four years to implement the measure. Long Island and Westchester County around New York City would be given six years to push through the increases while the rest of the state would see the minimum wage rise to $12.50 in five years, with indexed increases to $15 possible after review. There is also a provision to suspend the increases from 2019 if economic conditions worsen. The compromise is a climb down for Cuomo and his fellow Democrats who had pushed for a $15 state-wide minimum and no carve outs for small businesses. Republicans argued that a flat statewide rate could hurt businesses in less wealthy areas. "It may not go to $15. There's no guarantee, that's the good thing," said Senator George Amedore, a Republican representing a constituency upstate, who commented on the agreement to Reuters. Phil Steck, a Democratic Party assembly member, who represents a district 165 miles (265 km) north of the city, argued that the opposite was true, and a lower minimum wage would be a blow to the upstate economy. "We have a very strapped economy in upstate New York and the surest way to ensure continued poverty is to run a low wage economy," he said. "If anything, the poorer areas of the state needed an increase in the minimum wage more." The multi-tier solution could also dampen the national drive for a $15 minimum wage that has gathered pace as Democrats mobilize their base ahead of the presidential election in November. They hailed an important victory when California Governor Jerry Brown and legislators reached an agreement on Monday to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2023. Cuomo said New York's "calibrated" path to raising the minimum wage could be an example for the rest of the county. "It is raising the minimum wage in a way that is responsible and a positive for the overall economy," he said. (Reporting by James Odato, Writing by Edward Krudy; Editing by Daniel Bases, Grant McCool and Clarence Fernandez)
Col. Steve Warren, the new spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, speaks to reporters during a news conference at the U.S. Embassy in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq, October 1, 2015. REUTERS/Khalid Mohammed/Pool (Reuters)

By Phil Stewart and Yeganeh Torbati

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Friday it has started training dozens of Syrian opposition fighters to battle the militant group Islamic State as part of a revamped program that aims to avoid mistakes that doomed its first training effort in Turkey last year.

Training for the first group of recruits includes how to identify targets for U.S.-led coalition airstrikes to allow coalition aircraft to better strike Islamic State from the air.

"That allows us to bring significantly more fires into play in any of these skirmishes, battles, and firefights that are taking place throughout Syria," said U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition.

Warren said no Syrian fighters had yet graduated from the program.

The Pentagon has declined to say where the training is being conducted, but U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told Reuters it is in Turkey.

The failure of the original program, which sought to train thousands of fighters, has been a concern for President Barack Obama, whose strategy depends on local partners combating Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.

The 2015 program was problematic from the start, with some of the first class of Syrian fighters being attacked by al Qaeda's Syria wing, Nusra Front, in their battlefield debut. At one point, a group of U.S.-trained rebels handed over ammunition and equipment to Nusra Front.

Instead of trying to pull entire units from the fight for training, as the Pentagon sought to do last year, the new program will take small groups of fighters from the front-lines for training.

"If it works we'll do more. And if it doesn't, we'll shift again," Warren said.

The U.S. strategy against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, where the Sunni militant group has carved out a self-declared caliphate, aims to force the collapse of its two major power centers of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

Story continues

Although Iraq-led operations to retake Mosul have already begun, U.S. officials have declined to say if they think the city can be recaptured this year.

The timing of any operation to capture Raqqa is less clear.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Toni Reinhold)
By Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's parliament will debate on Tuesday a motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete said, after a top court ruled the president had violated the constitution. South Africa's constitutional court ruled on Thursday that Zuma had failed to uphold the constitution by ignoring orders from the public protector that he repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent to renovate his private residence at Nkandla. Since Thursday's ruling, opposition party leaders, ordinary South Africans and even an anti-apartheid activist jailed alongside Nelson Mandela have called on Zuma to step down. Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition party Democratic Alliance (DA), tabled the motion to have Zuma impeached, and Mbete told reporters on Sunday "the debate on that motion has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon." The Africa National Congress majority in parliament will almost certainly give Zuma political cover against the attempt to impeach him. But the judicial rebuke may embolden anti-Zuma factions within the ruling party to mount a challenge. The unanimous ruling by the 11-judge constitutional court also criticised parliament for passing a resolution that purported to nullify Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's findings on the state spending on Zuma's private residence. DA Parliamentary Chief Whip John Steenhuisen said on Sunday that Mbete should also resign for her and parliament's complicity in the Nkandla matter. Mbete said she would not step down, but acknowledged the issue could have been handled differently in parliament. The scandal is arguably the biggest yet to hit Zuma, who has fended off accusations of corruption, influence peddling and rape since before he took office in 2009. On Friday, the 73-year-old president gave a televised address to the nation in which he apologised and said he would pay back some of the money, as ordered. He said that he never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution. The president travelled to his home province of Kwazulu-Natal on Sunday to launch a relief programme as part of government efforts to support areas affected by South Africa's worst drought in more than a century. He told a cheering crowd that he was still South Africa's leader and joked about how youthful he was, but made no specific mention of the Nkandla matter, the pending impeachment motion or calls for him to step down as he addressed the gathering in Zulu, his native language. (Additional reporting by Siyabonga Sishi; editing by Larry King and Susan Fenton)
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysian state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) on Sunday denied reports that it had provided funds to finance the 2013 Hollywood film The Wolf of Wall Street. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that global investigators believe much of the funds used to make the film were diverted from 1MDB, whose advisory board is chaired by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. The Journal quoted unnamed sources who it said were familiar with the work of the investigators. According to the WSJ, the funds were diverted to a small production company called Red Granite Pictures, which came up with the more than $100 million needed to finance the film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese. 1MDB said in a statement it had never invested in nor transferred funds to Red Granite Pictures, whether directly or via intermediaries. "We, therefore, deny any suggestion that 1MDB funded the production of The Wolf of Wall Street, or had any involvement with the film in any capacity, as has been alleged or implied in some recent media reports," 1MDB said. The Red Granite Pictures website names Najib's stepson, Riza Aziz, as the company co-founder and co-chairman. Investigators in two countries believe that some $155 million, originating from 1MDB, moved into Red Granite in 2012 through various offshore shell companies, the WSJ said, citing sources familiar with the probes. Najib has been buffeted by allegations of graft and mismanagement at 1MDB, and the revelation that $681 million was deposited in his bank account. He has denied any wrongdoing, maintains that he did not use the funds for personal gain and was cleared this year of any criminal offense by Malaysia's Attorney General. Investigations into 1MDB's finances are underway in Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Switzerland and Luxembourg. (Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Praveen Menon and Richard Pullin)
By Ayla Jean Yackley ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused U.S. counterpart Barack Obama of going behind his back for criticizing Turkey's press freedom record and linked it to efforts to "divide" Turkey, media reports said on Sunday. Obama said on Friday after meeting Erdogan on the sidelines of a nuclear summit in Washington that he was troubled by curbs on the press in Turkey and said he had urged Erdogan not to repress democratic debate in his country. Turkey has drawn international condemnation for charging two journalists with treason for publishing footage that purportedly showed the intelligence agency shipping truckloads of weapons to opposition fighters in Syria in early 2014. Can Dundar and Erdem Gul of Cumhuriyet face life in prison. "I was saddened to hear that statement made behind my back. During my talk with Obama, those issues did not come up," Erdogan told reporters, according to Hurriyet daily. He returned to Turkey after a five-day trip to Washington on Sunday. "You cannot consider insults and threats press freedom or criticism," Erdogan said. Turkey has seized control of opposition newspapers and TV channels and cut the satellite feed of a pro-Kurdish channel, accusing them of terrorism-related activities. Erdogan has personally brought more than 1,800 criminal suits against individuals, including journalists and children, for insulting him since becoming president in 2014. The Committee to Protect Journalists said at least 13 journalists are in jail for their coverage and described a "massive crackdown" that includes self-censorship and harassment of media-business owners. 'MASTERMIND' Criticism of Turkey's press record seeks to "divide, shatter and if they could, swallow up Turkey," he said. "This is what I mean by mastermind. A mastermind is playing games over Turkey. Erdogan and his supporters occasionally refer to a shadowy foreign "mastermind" that seeks to destabilize Turkey, a NATO member that shares borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran. Separately, Erdogan said the U.S. and Turkey had edged closer in their stances on Syrian Kurds, close U.S. allies in the fight against Islamic State. Turkey sees the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia and its political arm, the PYD, as part of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against Turkey. U.S. officials have said they distinguish between the groups. Both Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry promised Erdogan during meetings they would not allow the formation of a PYD-run state in Syria, the Turkish leader said. Turkey is putting forth the names of 2,400 trained Arab and Turkmen fighters to battle Islamic State, Erdogan also said, describing them as part of the moderate opposition. This was "so the U.S. no longer has an excuse" for co-operating with the YPG and PYD, he said. (Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Waller's Winx Simply The Best In Australia

Saturday, 02 April 2016 07:50

Chris Waller has resisted any prompting to call Winx a champion - until now.

But the mare's win in Saturday's Doncaster Mile has finally convinced the trainer to call her what she is.

"She's a champion," Waller said.

Jockey Hugh Bowman on Winx winning The Star Doncaster Mile race

"I thought today was the day she could be beaten."

The punting public thought she was a sure thing at Randwick with Winx the $1.80 favourite, the same price as the last odds-on favourite to win the famous race, Valicare in 1926.

Hugh Bowman took her back in the field from barrier 11 and she looked to be in a bit of trouble as the field straightened up for the run home.

With no clear run, Bowman had to duck and weave and finally got her into a space and she picked up the pace to stride clear by two lengths over Happy Clapper ($13).

Azkadellia ($9) made up many lengths to finish another half-neck third with leader Vergara ($151) running the race of her life to hold on for fourth.

"All I could do was help her through it," Bowman said.

"I was very mindful to get those engines going and that when I did, she'd pick herself up.

"I just had a supreme horse. I could hear the roar as I poked in I just wanted to enjoy the moment.

"I can't put it into words."

Waller also struggled, as he has in the days leading up to his sixth win in the race.

"It's been a pretty tough week, to say the least," he said.

"This is a new level for me.

"I don't know how Peter Moody did it with Black Caviar."

Waller watched the race from his usual solitary seat in the trainer's room with the addition of television cameras aimed at him from the door.

"This is the longest Doncaster I've watched," he said.

"I thought she was beaten at the half mile, let alone the 600-metre mark.

"She was going nowhere and I have never seen Hughie have to niggle her.

"She never gets right back there unless we are taking her back from wide draws but that was not really the plan.

"We took on the handicapper and she won."

Wayne Webster, foreman for his father, Happy Clapper's trainer Pat, was one of the first to congratulate Waller while at the same time ruing the presence of Winx.

Happy Clapper had been aimed at the race since he gained automatic entry by winning the Villiers Stakes in December.

"He's run out of his skin," Webster said.

"But I am genuinely happy for Chris and his team."

A big part of that team are the owners, Debbie Kepitis, Peter Tighe and Richard Treweeke, who leave the decisions to the trainer.

The next decision Waller has to make is whether Winx backs up a week later into the $4 million Queen Elizabeth Stakes.

"We'll just look at her over the next couple of days," he said.

Despite the uncertainty, the TAB has tightened Winx from $1.60 to $1.50 for Sydney's richest race.
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Maryland's Largest Health Care Provider Recovering from Hack

As of Friday morning, "we are approaching 90 percent functionality of our systems," MedStar Health reported.

Hackers who encrypted hospital data and reportedly asked for a ransom payment in Bitcoin caused MedStar Health, Maryland's largest health care provider, to shut down all of its computer systems this week. The company reported that malware affected its IT system early Monday morning and, by Friday morning, April 1, "we were approaching 90 percent functionality of our systems. Our three main clinical information systems supporting patient carethe inpatient Electronic Health Record (EHR), outpatient EHR, and our registration and scheduling systemare functioning. Numerous other systems are also back online, and we are working on the remaining clinical and administrative systems that connect to our network and are resolving unique, site-specific issues on a real-time basis."

In addition, the company said it had found no evidence that patient or associate information or data had been compromised.

MedStar Health operates 10 hospitals, has 31,000 employees and 6,000 affiliated physicians, and provides care for more than 500,000 patients each year in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region.

Patients and family members reported delays in service and confusion over treatment, and some cancer patients could not get radiation treatment for several days, The Baltimore Suns Ian Duncan and Andrea K. McDaniels reported. According to their story, the company reported it had not paid any ransom to obtain digital keys to access the encrypted data.

"The attempt to negatively impact an institution designed to save lives and care for those in need is a sad and troublesome reality of our times, not only for MedStar Health, but for our entire industry and the communities we serve," said Kenneth A. Samet, president and CEO of MedStar Health. "Fortunately, thanks to the expertise and dedication of our clinical and IT teams, we are addressing the current issue in an expeditious and thoughtful manner, never losing sight of our responsibility to our patients."
In the shadow of Kuala Lumpur's mammoth Petronas Towers lies an urban anomaly: the rustic ethnic-Malay enclave of Kampung Baru, where chickens and barefoot children dart across streets little changed in a century. Authorities hope to change all that. The last remaining large tract of undeveloped land in the capital's urban core, Kampung Baru is targeted for a historic redevelopment, part of larger plans to upgrade the metropolis of seven million people. But many residents of the languid 120-hectare (300-acre) neighbourhood, known for its unique Malay-only land-ownership and proud sense of identity, won't budge. "Do you want to live in the squalid conditions your grandparents did 50 years ago?" said an exasperated Affendi Zahari, head of a government entity tasked with spurring the redevelopment. He added: "We don't want to see this place trapped in time." British colonisers, mindful of balancing Malaysia's competing ethnicities, set aside Kampung Baru ("New Village") in 1900 for members of the typically rural Muslim ethnic Malay majority to prevent the industrious Chinese minority dominating the then fast-growing city. - It takes a village - Kampung Baru experienced some of the deadly Malay-Chinese ethnic strife the capital faced in 1969 and its residents participated in huge demonstrations for political reform in the late 1990s. But as Chinese-fuelled development raised the skyline higher, Kampung Baru remains essentially a country village, the symbolic heart of Kuala Lumpur's Malay identity. Its weathered wooden homes are packed in along narrow, maze-like, rain-puddled lanes clogged with parked cars and shaded by overgrown mango and frangipani trees. On most corners, traditional open-air eateries pile high foods like spicy fried chicken, curries and banana fritters, as grilled fish sizzles over coals and longtime neighbours discuss the news. Hashimah Yun's grandparents scraped together enough money to buy a plot well before Malaysia's independence in 1957. The modest original house gradually expanded into a sprawling, ramshackle home for a dozens-strong extended family that has priceless emotional and cultural value, she said. "My grandparents opened this land with their blood and money. We won't sell at any price," said Hashimah, a feisty 56-year-old retired bank employee, her head swaddled in a green Muslim headscarf. A government master plan, however, would jerk Kampung Baru, whose land is estimated to be worth over $1 billion, into the 21st century. The futuristic proposals include glass-and-steel developments fusing hotels, modern apartments, parks, pedestrian walkways, even a man-made lake. The scheme is part of a larger facelift for Kuala Lumpur, already one of Southeast Asia's more modern capitals, to remain attractive for investors as regional competition increases. Upcoming billion-dollar projects include a new financial district, a city-wide mass transit system, high-speed rail links to Singapore, and a 630-metre skyscraper that would outstretch the Petronas Towers by 180 metres. Last October, Prime Minister Najib Razak appealed to Kampung Baru's people to embrace change or risk being viewed as "squatters". Malay developers are offering residents around 500 ringgit per square foot for land, sharply lower than prices in nearby areas due to Kampung Baru's lack of modern infrastructure. Officials say progress has been negligible. With land prices rising rapidly in Malaysia, Hashimah fears her family would struggle to stay together elsewhere. Like others, she called instead for government investment in Kampung Baru's decrepit infrastructure to improve resident's lives, and suggested that intentional neglect was aimed at driving landowners away. They want to "grab our land, chase us out and make money," she said. - 'Tough process' - As a cautionary tale, many locals cite a 1980s debacle in which some residents lost their land when a developer's plans went bust. Chan Wai Seen of JS Valuers Research & Consultancy said Kampung Baru's unbeatable location offers tantalising potential, but unlocking it is a challenge. Hurdles include the poor infrastructure, rising costs of land and construction, a slowing economy, and the Malay-only ownership, he said. "We need to ask just how competitive Kampung Baru will really be," Chan said. The government is leaving Affendi to try to facilitate private deals rather than wade in directly, wary of angering locals. A trickle of landowners have sold in recent years, but momentum is further constrained by the fact that many of the thousands of parcels are jointly held by several owners, complicating deal-making. "It's a tough process," lamented Affendi, tacitly admitting that Kampung Baru's village-in-the-city atmosphere will survive for the time being.
AFP News

Pro-Russian authorities on Saturday urged residents in the southern Kherson region, which Moscow claims to have annexed, to leave the main city "immediately" in the face of Kyiv's advancing counter-offensive. It comes as President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had launched 36 rockets overnight in a "massive attack" on Ukraine, following reported strikes on energy infrastructure that resulted in power outages across the country. And Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida became the latest world leader to reproach Moscow for its talk of using nuclear weapons. Kyiv's forces have been advancing along the west bank of the Dnipro river, towards the Kherson region's eponymous main city. Kherson was the first major city to fall to Moscow's troops, and retaking it would be a major prize in Ukraine's counter-offensive. In recent days, Russia has been moving residents in the region -- which Moscow claims to have annexed in September -- east to Russia, in efforts Kyiv has denounced as "deportations". "Due to the tense situation on the front, the increased danger of mass shelling of the city and the threat of terrorist attacks, all civilians must immediately leave the city and cross to the left bank" of the Dnipro river, the region's pro-Russian authorities announced on social media. A Moscow-installed official in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, told Russian news agency Interfax on Saturday that around 25,000 people had made the crossing. Sergiy Khlan, the Ukrainian deputy head of the Kherson region, said Russians were removing property and documents from banks and the passport office as they withdrew. Ukraine's general staff said Moscow's forces had abandoned two more settlements in Kherson and were evacuating medical personnel from a third, accusing them of looting local civilians. - A 'serious threat' - Earlier Saturday, Japan's Kishida denounced Moscow's comments regarding the possible use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict. "Russia's act of threatening the use of nuclear weapons is a serious threat to the peace and security of the international community and absolutely unacceptable," he said. The 77-year period of no nuclear weapons use "must not be ended", said Kishida, speaking in Australia. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Putin has made several thinly veiled threats about his willingness to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Earlier this month, the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned that the Russian army would be "annihilated" if Russia launched such an attack. Washington has also warned Moscow of "catastrophic" consequences should they use such weapons. Japan is the only country ever to have been hit with nuclear weapons: the US atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which killed 140,000 people, and the second US bomb on Nagasaki, three days later, which killed 74,000 people. - 'Afraid for our lives' - At a train station in the town of Dzhankoy in the north of Crimea, a peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Kherson residents were boarding a train for southern Russia, an AFP reporter saw Friday. "We are leaving Kherson because heavy shelling started there, we are afraid for our lives," said Valentina Yelkina, a pensioner travelling with her daughter. More than a million households in Ukraine have been left without electricity following Russian strikes on energy facilities across the country, the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidency Kyrylo Tymoshenko said on Saturday. Fresh Russian strikes targeted energy infrastructure in Ukraine's west, the national operator said earlier, with officials in several regions of the war-scarred country reporting power outages as winter approaches. Russians "carried out another missile attack on energy facilities of the main networks of Ukraine's western regions", Ukraine's energy operator Ukrenergo said on social media. "These are vile strikes on critical objects," said Zelensky. "The world can and must stop this terror." Power outages were reported in other parts of the country and local officials repeated calls to reduce energy use. Some parts of Ukraine have already cut their electricity use by up to 20 percent, according to Ukrenergo. "Saturday in Ukraine starts with a barrage of Russian missiles aimed at critical civilian infrastructure," Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter. He once again urged Kyiv's allies to hasten the delivery of air defence systems. In the Russian Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, at least two civilians were killed in strikes on Saturday, according to the local governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. Nearly 15,000 people were left without electricity, he added. Russia last week reported a "considerable increase" in Ukrainian fire into its territory, saying attacks had largely concentrated on Belgorod region and neighbouring regions of Bryansk and Kursk. bur-imm/jj/ah
The violence-marred Kidapawan protest blockade was not about farmers gripes over alleged lack of government support for their losses due to El Nino, Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala said yesterday.

Rather, Alcala said it was politically motivated, and the violence was instigated by left-leaning groups backed by the New Peoples Army (NPA).

Alcala pointed to local politicians in Mindanao identified with the group of Manny Pinol who are supporting the presidential bid of Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.

According to Alcala, Pinols brother is running against reelectionist North Cotabato Gov. Emmylou Talino, who is backed by the Liberal Party.

The reality on the ground at Kidapawan is that its politically motivated by the local politicians led by Pinol, Alcala told The STAR.

Our brothers from the Left, who were observing the NPA anniversary last March 29, instigated the breakout of stone-throwing that led to the violence during the dispersal, Alcala added.

Based on field reports, Alcala noted that the militant farmers group led by Rafael Mariano of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) brought the farmers and fisherfolk to the highway with the alleged promise that they would receive sacks of rice from the governor.

Alcala said that this is an issue of misinformation. They intentionally misled the local farmers regarding the supposed distribution of rice.

Alcala was in Nueva Vizcaya when the police dispersal turned violent at Kidapawan, where two farmers reportedly died.

Its really sad that this had to happen. I think the problem was that these people made the farmers get angry at the government to stir up violence, the agriculture secretary said.

While indeed many farmers and fisherfolk were affected by the long dry spell due to El Nino, there have been bumper harvests of rice and corn in Kidapawan, Carmen and other areas in North Cotabato, and in Regions 11 and 12, Alcala pointed out.

Story continues

He said that Regions 11 and 12, including Kidapawan, are even among the best performers in rice and corn production despite the long dry period since last year.

National government agencies like the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) have been giving intervention assistance in these areas because they are still under a state of calamity due to El Nino, Alcala explained.

He said that he even visited Kidapawan City last February and March to talk to the local farmer groups regarding the issues they face.

We closely monitored the situation. And I think that not all of those involved were from Kidapawan. I believe that some of them were from other areas.

On the part of the DA, he said that one sack of hybrid rice seeds per hectare and one sack of fertilizer are given to farmers certified by the local agriculturist as having been affected by El Nino.

Fortunately, Alcala added, the dams in Mindanao have more than enough water during this period. This helped stave off the severe dry spell that was initially expected.

Thus the projected impact of crop losses amounting to 950,000 metric tons of rice did not happen because of these interventions.

As monitored by the DA, only about 200,000 metric tons of rice were lost due to El Nino.

Alcala instructed DA regional director Bing Datukan to meet the farmer and fisherfolk groups on Monday to further discuss other concerns and assistance for the affected sectors.

Meanwhile, the National Food Authority (NFA) said it will also offer assistance to the farmer groups.

We are ready to transact with the DSWD and the local government unit regarding the rice that may be needed by the beneficiaries, said NFA public affairs director Angel Imperial in a phone interview.

He added that NFA administrator Renan Dalisay is currently in Kidapawan City to oversee the help that can be offered to the farmer groups.  With Louise Maureen Simeon
The human gut is a complex and amazing system, and the more we learn about it, the more amazed we are. It turns out
By Dasha Afanasieva and Tulay Karadeniz ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey has illegally returned thousands of Syrians to their war-torn homeland in recent months, highlighting dangers for migrants sent back from Europe under a deal due to take effect next week, Amnesty International said on Friday. Turkey agreed with the EU this month to take back all migrants and refugees who cross illegally to Greece in exchange for financial aid, faster visa-free travel for Turks and slightly accelerated EU membership talks. But the legality of the deal hinges on Turkey being a safe country of asylum, which the rights group said in a report was not the case. Amnesty said it was likely that several thousand refugees had been sent back to Syria in the past seven to nine weeks, flouting Turkish, EU and international law. Turkey's foreign ministry denied Syrians were being sent back against their will, while a spokesman for the European Commission said it took the allegations seriously and would raise them with Ankara. Separately, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said it had asked for access to Syrians returned to Turkey from Greece "to ensure people can benefit from effective international protection and to prevent risk of refoulement", referring to unlawful deportations of refugees at risk of persecution. Ankara said it had maintained an open-door policy for Syrian migrants for five years and strictly abided by the "non-refoulement" principle. "None of the Syrians that have demanded protection from our country are being sent back to their country by force," a foreign ministry official told Reuters. But Amnesty said testimonies it had gathered in Turkey's southern border provinces suggested authorities had been rounding up and expelling groups of around 100 Syrian men, women and children almost daily since the middle of January. "In their desperation to seal their borders, EU leaders have wilfully ignored the simplest of facts: Turkey is not a safe country for Syrian refugees and is getting less safe by the day," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's director for Europe and Central Asia. Under the deal, Turkey is supposed to be taking in migrants returned from Greece on April 4, but uncertainty remains over how many will be sent back, how they will be processed, and where they will be housed. The aim is to close the main route by which a million migrants and refugees crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece in the last year before heading north, mainly to Germany and Sweden. (Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Nick Tattersall and John Stonestreet)
By Nailia Bagirova and Hasmik Mkrtchyan BAKU/YEREVAN (Reuters) - Azerbaijan said on Sunday it would stop fighting Armenian-backed separatists over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region after two days of clashes, but the other side denounced Baku's gesture as hollow and said violence was continuing. Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians, has run its own affairs with heavy military and financial backing from Armenia since a separatist war ended in 1994. But the situation along the tense "contact line" deteriorated in recent weeks, leading to clashes in which dozens were killed that drew international calls for an immediate ceasefire. Both sides also reported civilian casualties. "Armenia has violated all the norms of international law. We won't abandon our principal position. But at the same time we will observe the ceasefire and after that we will try to solve the conflict peacefully," President Ilham Aliyev said at a security council meeting broadcast by Azeri state TV. Aliyev also said Azeri troops had achieved a "great victory" in an apparent reference to territorial gains made on Saturday. Armenian officials, however, said the fighting had not let up and Deputy Defence Minister David Tonoyan said his country was ready to provide "direct military assistance" to Nagorno-Karabakh forces if necessary. "The statement by the Azerbaijan side is an information trap and does not amount to a unilateral ceasefire," Artsrun Hovhannisyan, spokesman for the Armenian Defence Ministry, said in a post on his Facebook page. Russian news agencies reported artillery attacks by both sides near the town of Mardakert in the north of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azeri Defence Ministry said earlier on Sunday it would "cease retaliatory military actions" against the separatist forces. The previous day it said the Azeri army had "liberated strategic heights and settlements" in the north and east of the region. The Nagorno-Karabakh military said Baku's statement on a unilateral ceasefire was "disinformation" but that it was ready to discuss a ceasefire proposal from Azerbaijan on the condition both sides returned to their positions held before the clashes erupted. "The Nagorno-Karabakh armed forces are ready to meet and discuss a ceasefire proposal in the context of restoring former positions," the Nagorno-Karabakh military said. "UNRESTRAINED FANTASIES". The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region home to around 150,000 people on the southern Armenian-Azeri border, broke out in the dying years of Soviet Union. By the time the 1994 ceasefire was brokered, some 30,000 people had been killed in the violence. Multiple efforts over the years to reach a permanent settlement led by France, Russia and the United states have failed. Baku frequently threatens to take back the mountain region by force. The Azeri Defence Ministry said its forces had destroyed 10 separatist tanks and killed multiple fighters in overnight clashes. The Nagorno-Karabakh military rejected the Azeri statements that it had suffered heavy losses as a "display of unrestrained fantasies", saying it had destroyed 14 Azeri tanks and five armored vehicles in the past 24 hours. "The enemy is trying to hide its helplessness, carrying out attacks with Grad rocket launchers and 152 millimeter artillery in the direction of the civilian population," the Armenian Defence Ministry said in a statement. STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE Crisscrossed with pipelines and sandwiched between the Caspian and Black seas, stability in the southern Caucasus is a major strategic objective for Azerbaijan and other large oil and gas producers in the region. World top oil producer Russia - which maintains a garrison of troops, jets and attack helicopters in northern Armenia - has been a key mediator in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and moved on Saturday to suppress the renewed violence. President Vladimir Putin urged the warring sides to immediately observe the ceasefire while Russia's foreign and defense ministers talked by phone with their Armenian and Azeri counterparts. Azerbaijan's presidential press service said Turkey, the other major power in the region along with Russia, had voiced support for Baku's actions, the RIA news agency reported. The United Nations has also called on the parties involved to put an immediate end to the fighting and to respect the ceasefire agreement. "The Secretary General... is particularly concerned by the reported use of heavy weapons and by the large numbers of casualties, including among the civilian population," a U.N. spokesman said in a statement late on Saturday. (Additonal reporting by Margarita Antidze in TBILISI and Jack Stubbs in Moscow; Writing by Jack Stubbs; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
By Paul Sandle and Andy Bruce LONDON/PORT TALBOT, Wales (Reuters) - - Prime Minister David Cameron said there was no guarantee a buyer could be found for Britain's biggest steel producer after Tata Steel announced it was pulling out, and a state takeover was not the answer. Cameron said he was doing all he could following the Indian company's decision to sell its British operation, a move that has put 15,000 jobs at risk and exposed the government to accusations of failing to protect the industry from cheap Chinese imports. Tata's biggest plant in Port Talbot, south Wales, is losing around $1.4 million (971,400) a day as a result of depressed steel prices and high costs. "We're going to work very hard with the company to do everything we can, but it is a difficult situation, there can be no guarantees of success because of the problems that the steel industry faces worldwide," Cameron said after chairing an emergency meeting on the crisis on Thursday. "We're not ruling anything out, (but) I don't believe nationalisation is the right answer." Cameron's government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's decision, with opposition MPs saying it was "asleep at the wheel" when the Indian group said it was pulling out after nearly a decade in Britain. The prime minister and Sajid Javid, the Secretary of State for Business, were out of the country when Tata's board met in Mumbai on Tuesday, leaving a junior colleague to respond. The opposition Labour party and Britain's media said the handling of the crisis had been "chaotic" after the government rowed back on an initial suggestion from a junior minister that it could nationalise the plants for a period. "It's absolutely extraordinary that they've been asleep at the wheel for this long," Stephen Kinnock, the local MP in south Wales, told Sky News on Thursday. "Why is it that the prime minister seems to be reacting to this as if he didn't see it coming. They're in total disarray." VITAL INDUSTRY Steelmakers in Britain pay some of the highest energy costs and green taxes in the world, but the government maintains that the fundamental problem facing the industry is the collapse in the price of steel, caused by overcapacity in China. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the International Steel Statistic bureau. Cameron's government, eager to cultivate closer ties with China, has opposed measures in Europe that could increase the tariffs paid on Chinese imports of steel, which are a fraction of the levels imposed by the United States. Nonetheless, anti-EU campaigners said Brussels was part of the problem because rules on state aid limited the steps Britain could take to save the industry. Cameron, who does not want to stoke anti-EU sentiment ahead of a referendum on Britain's EU membership in June, said half of the country's steel production went into European markets and the products could face European tariffs and taxes if Britain left. He said ministers had been working on measures to help the industry, including encouraging major infrastructure projects to use British steel and cutting energy costs. The government's intervention, he said, had helped avert an outright closure of the loss-making operations by Tata. But steel workers in Port Talbot said politicians had hindered rather than helped the industry. They pointed to the policies of Cameron's right-leaning Conservative government as well as the European Union, which has been slow to penalise China for dumping steel. "Do I blame the EU? To a certain extent, they've been very slow to act," said Dave Bowyer, 59, a steelworker for 40 years at Port Talbot and a representative of the Unite union. "But I think most of the blame has to lie with the UK government. Mr Cameron will long be remembered as the prime minister who sat on his hands as the steel industry rolled into decline." Business minister Javid said on Wednesday that there were buyers for the assets but government support might be needed, prompting speculation that the government could offer loans to any new buyer. (Additional reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Kate Holton)
PRAGUE (Reuters) - The Czech Republic will send back to Iraq a group of Iraqi Christians who tried to move on to Germany instead of staying in the country, Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said on Sunday. A group of 25 Iraqis took a bus on Saturday to Germany, where they were stopped immediately after crossing the border, CTK news agency reported. German police then asked the Czechs to take the people back and that was agreed, CTK said. The Czech Republic agreed in December to accept 153 Christian refugees from Iraq who have fled areas controlled by Islamic State. So far, only 89 have arrived. Chovanec said that the 25 Iraqis had abused Czech generosity and should go back home soon. It was not immediately clear how Chovanec meant for them to return. Police imposed a deadline of a week for them to leave. "The seven-day deadline, which the Iraqi Christians got along with their passports, is meant for them to be able to arrange the return home," Chovanec said on his Twitter account. "This time cannot be used to break laws or to move to another Schengen country. I asked the Czech police to use all legal means so that these people, who abused the good will of the Czech Republic and her citizens, are returned to Iraq." Thirty-seven Christian families are supposed to come to the Czech Republic from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and refugee camps in Lebanon, in four groups from January to April. Minister Chovanec has suspended the relocation programme, CTK said. Prague has refused to accept European Union quotas for distributing migrants. Polls show a majority of Czechs would reject even those fleeing a war zone. The Czech Republic, a country of 10.5 million, recorded 1,525 asylum applications last year, and had granted protection to 71 people, data from the Ministry of Interior showed. Several thousand people, mostly Muslims, passed through the Czech territory last year in the mass wave of migration via southeast Europe. (Reporting by Robert Muller, editing by Larry King)
By Stephen Jewkes MILAN (Reuters) - Italian utility Enel said on Wednesday it planned to invest around 2.5 billion euros ($2.8 billion) to help develop a national ultrafast broadband network. The state-controlled utility said in a statement it plans to gradually roll out a fiber-to-the-home network would be open to other investors. The development of a broadband network is a top priority of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi who aims to upgrade Italys phone infrastructure and support business. Enel, which is about to start installing a new generation of smart electricity meters into 33 million Italian homes, has proposed using its pipes to run fiber into homes and offices. Enel Open Fiber, the vehicle created to execute the utility's project, will gradually bring ultrafast broadband to 224 Italian cities, Enel said. Around 7.5 million homes will be covered in the first few years of the plan, it said. Enel, which does not intend to become a telecoms operator, has plans to duplicate similar services in countries where it runs power distribution infrastructure such as in Latin America. Italy, which lags behind other European countries covered by next-generation internet networks, has struggled to attract investors due to the large investments involved and likely to only generate small returns. Enel, which controls Spain's biggest utility Endesa, also said it had discussed a letter of intent with Vodafone and Wind to reach a strategic and commercial partnership to develop last-mile broadband across Italy. It said Enel Open Fiber remained open commercially to all retail telecom operators and their client base. Enel's proposal has caused some friction with former phone monopoly Telecom Italia which has its own plans for connecting homes to ultrafast broadband. Telecom Italia in its latest plan aims to spend 12 billion euros by 2018 on investments, including 3.6 billion to lay fiber optic cables. ($1 = 0.8935 euros) (Reporting by Stephen Jewkes; editing by Jason Neely)
By Tom Ramstack LANHAM, Maryland (Reuters) - Islamophobia is on the rise in the United States and U.S presidential candidates have targeted Muslims during the election campaign, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday. Erdogan, a pious man who has styled himself as a champion for Muslims in Turkey and beyond, spoke at the opening of a Turkish-sponsored mosque near Washington, reportedly the largest Muslim house of worship in the United States. "There are still people walking around calling Muslims terrorists. I am watching with bewilderment and astonishment that some candidates still defend this position in the current presidential election in America," Erdogan said. Republican candidates in the U.S. presidential race have sparked accusations of Islamophobia. The party's frontrunner Donald Trump has called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, while his main Republican competitor Ted Cruz has said police should patrol Muslim neighborhoods in the country. "Unfortunately, we are in a period of rising intolerance and prejudice toward Muslims in the United States and the world," Erdogan said. "It is absolutely unacceptable to make all Muslims pay the price for the pain and horror" of the attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001, he said. Erdogan also said recent the recent attacks claimed by Islamic State in Brussels and Paris paled in comparison to what Turkey had endured battling Islamist, Kurdish and left-wing extremists. "There is terrorism in Brussels and Paris now, but let's not forget it is incomparable with the level of terrorism in Turkey," he said. Erdogan also reiterated his claim that Turkey had notified the Belgian government of the identity of one of the perpetrators of the Brussels attacks last month that killed 35 people and that the authorities had dismissed Turkey's warning. Erdogan also accused Europe of refusing to extradite militants sought by Turkey. Islamic State has carried out four bomb attacks in Turkey since June that has killed about 150 people. Turkey has also fought a Kurdish insurgency that has claimed more than 40,000 lives since 1984. The Ottoman-style mosque where Erdogan spoke is part of a complex that Turkish media says is the largest campus of its kind, including a conference center, library, lodgings and a Turkish bath. (Reporting by Tom Ramstack.; Writing by Ayla Jean Yackley and Idrees Ali; Editing by Andrew Roche and Alistair Bell)
By Crispian Balmer ROME (Reuters) - Italy's main opposition parties said on Friday they would present a no-confidence motion in Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's government after his industry minister quit in a scandal over allegations of influence peddling. While Renzi should be able to ride out this latest of several political storms, it comes as Italy gears up for pivotal elections in June and the economy shows signs of flagging. Federica Guidi quit on Thursday, hours after phone-tapped conversations released by police appeared to show the minister assuring her partner the government would pass legislation that helped his energy business. She told Renzi in a letter she had done nothing wrong, but felt it necessary to resign. Renzi, who took office two years ago vowing to end the cronyism that has often marred Italian politics, told reporters that although Guidi had committed no crime, she had made an "inappropriate" phone call and had been right to quit. The anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, Italy's second largest party, dismissed his comments and said it would present its no confidence motion in the upper house Senate next week. "This matter calls into question the whole government ...It always puts people in charge who are in the pay of the lobbies or who are looking out for themselves," said Luigi Di Maio, one of the 5-Star's leading lights. The 5-Star and other opposition parties also called on a close Renzi ally, Maria Elena Boschi, the minister for parliamentary relations, to resign over allegations that she connived with Guidi. The phone taps show Guidi telling her partner that Boschi had assured her the amendment would pass. Boschi faced down resignation calls in December following a banking scandal that left thousands of savers out of pocket. Newspapers on Friday quoted her as saying she had no idea that Guidi even had a partner. Renzi on Friday defended the contested amendment, which was added to the 2015 budget law and benefited the whole oil and gas sector by streamlining permissioning for projects. "We are talking about a provision that brings jobs," he said during a trip to the United States. "It is sacrosanct." Government critics say the scandal could help swing an April 17 referendum on whether Italy should restrict offshore oil and gas drilling. Renzi has urged voters to abstain. The opposition hopes the ruckus will also damage the center-left at municipal elections in a number of cities in June, with the government already under pressure over the economy. Data on Friday showed unemployment hit 11.7 percent in February, a disappointment to Renzi whose cornerstone economic reform has been an overhaul of labor norms aimed at encouraging companies to take on staff. (Additional reporting by Gavin Jones and Isla Binnie; editing by John Stonestreet)
By Ahmed Elumami TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya's National Oil Corporation said on Saturday it was working with the U.N.-backed unity government, which arrived in Tripoli this week, to coordinate future oil sales and "put a period of divisions and rivalry behind us". NOC Chairman Mustafa Sanalla also welcomed the U.N. Security Council's renewal on Thursday of measures to prevent illicit oil exports from Libya, a reference to efforts by Libya's eastern government to sell oil independently. "Combined with the recent announcement by the Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG) that it intends to reopen export ports it has been blockading, I hope NOC and the country's oil resources can provide a solid platform on which the country's recovery can be built," Sanalla said in a statement. The new government received the endorsement of the PFG, a semi-official armed faction that controls key oil installations in the east, some of which it has shut down amid political disputes. Libya descended into political turmoil and armed conflict following an uprising that toppled long-time strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, with two pairs of rival parliament and governments operating in Tripoli and the country's east. Its oil production has been slashed by rivalry between armed factions, attacks by Islamic State militants and labour disputes, falling to less than a quarter of the 1.6 million barrels per day produced before the uprising. Hours after Sanalla's statement, two guards were killed in an attack on Bayda field, about 250 km (155 miles) south of the major oil terminals of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, a guards spokesman said. Militants loyal to Islamic State have carried out repeated attacks in the area, but have not taken control of any oil facilities, and spokesman Ali al-Hassi said Saturday's attack had been repelled. The unity government emerged from a U.N.-mediated deal signed in December that has faced continuing opposition from hardliners inside Libya. Its leaders travelled to Tripoli on Wednesday and have been operating out of a heavily secured naval base in the capital as they seek to gain control of government ministries and financial institutions. PFG spokesman Ali al-Hassi said on Thursday that the guard was prepared to reopen eastern oil terminals at Zuetina, Es Sider, and Ras Lanuf, though he could not say when this might happen. The latter two ports have been repeatedly attacked and damaged by Islamic State. Libya's eastern government issued a statement on Saturday saying that if any ports were reopened, oil should only be exported with the approval of a parallel NOC that it has tried to set up in Benghazi. The parallel NOC's efforts to export oil have so far been unsuccessful, with major oil trading firms and the international community continuing to support the NOC in Tripoli. However, boosting Libya's oil sales with the support of the east will be a challenge for the new government. It has so far failed to win approval from the parliament in the east, as required by the U.N.-mediated deal, and the eastern government has indicated that it opposes any transfer of power unless such a vote is obtained. The U.N. Security Council issued a resolution on Thursday stating that the unity government had the "primary responsibility" for preventing illicit oil sales, urging it to communicate any such attempts to the U.N. committee overseeing Libya-related sanctions. The resolution also restated a call for member states to cease contact with any "parallel institutions". (Additional reporting by Ayman al-Warfalli; writing by Aidan Lewis; editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
By Lisa Barrington BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian troops have identified 45 bodies so far in a mass grave found in the city of Palmyra after it was recaptured from Islamic State, a military source told Reuters on Saturday. Syrian government forces backed by heavy Russian air support drove Islamic State out of Palmyra last Sunday, inflicting what the army called a mortal blow to militants who had dynamited the city's ancient temples. The communal grave, on the north-eastern edge of Palmyra, is the only one found so far in the city by the Syrian forces, the source said. It held the bodies of both civilians and Syrian army members captured by Islamic State. Syrian state news agency SANA said on Friday the grave contained many women and children and some of the bodies had been beheaded. In May last year, as Islamic State took control of Palmyra, the hard-line Islamist militants were reported by Syrian state media to have killed at least 400 people in the first four days of control. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said that Islamic State had killed a number of people at an earlier time and buried them on the outskirts of the city. The Observatory reported on Saturday that fighting between Syrian forces and Islamic State around Qaryatain to the west of Palmyra. It also reported, and Russian and Syrian air strikes in the same area and to the east of Palmyra around the town of Sukhna. Attacks by government forces against Islamic State positions to the around Palmyra are aimed at moving east across the desert to Islamic State-held Deir al-Zor near the Iraqi border, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said. (Reporting by Lisa Barrington, editing by Jeremy Gaunt, Larry King)
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea fired a missile into the sea off its east coast on Friday, the South's military said, hours after the leaders of South Korea, Japan and the United States warned Pyongyang to end provocations or face more pressure. The projectile was fired from a region near the North's east coast, a South Korean military official said by telephone. It was a short-range surface to air missile, another official at the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, adding the military was trying to determine the range. The launch at around 12:45 p.m. local time comes hours after U.S. President Barack Obama joined South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowing to add pressure on the North for its recent activities. Meeting on the sidelines of a global nuclear security summit in Washington, the three leaders recommitted their countries to each others' defense and warned they could take further steps to counter threats from Pyongyang. Obama held separate talks with President Xi Jinping of China, the closest North Korea has to an ally, and said they both wanted to see "full implementation" of the latest U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang. But Xi offered no sign that Beijing was prepared to go beyond its consent to the Security Council measures imposed in early March. The North has fired a string of rockets in recent weeks including a long-range rocket in February that launched an object in space. Leader Kim Jong Un has supervised some of the launches in defiance of U.N. sanctions. North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6, leading to new Security Council sanctions in early March. South Korea and the United States have imposed separate sanctions. Earlier on Friday, South Korea said North Korea has been sending signals to disrupt GPS reception in the South, leading some shipping vessels to return to port. (Reporting by Ju-min Park; Writing by Jack Kim; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Friday bemoaned the timing of an April 6 referendum in the Netherlands on a treaty on closer ties between the European Union and Ukraine saying it comes as Europe is debating its own future. "The real purpose for the internal Dutch discussion is about the future of the European Union and internal political clashes," Poroshenko told a news conference at the end of a nuclear security summit in Washington. "I think this is very dangerous for a country ... to become the victim of this discussion. This is not a timely referendum." The referendum is not binding, but most Dutch parties have said they would respect a rejection by voters, which could plunge the European Union into crisis when tensions with Russia run higher than at any time since the Cold War. Still, Poroshenko said Ukraine represented a huge trading market for Dutch and other European producers and he was confident the Dutch would support the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement in the end. Poroshenko met with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on the sidelines of the nuclear summit in Washington where the issues was discussed. At the State Department, spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau urged Dutch voters to support the association agreement, which would help spur reforms in Ukraine. "We believe the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement is critical to ensuring that Ukraine's leaders continue to make the needed and important reforms that will contribute to a more peaceful, democratic, prosperous and stable continent," she told a briefing. "It will provide new economic opportunities for the Netherlands, for Ukraine and for Europe as a whole." European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker has warned that a rejection of the treaty by Dutch voters could lead to a "continental crisis." Anti-European campaigners have argued that an association agreement with Ukraine would lead eventually to full membership for Kiev. Maintaining unity is crucial for Europe's efforts to put pressure on Moscow to help end the conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 9,000 people since April 2014. The European Union, along with the United States, imposed economic sanctions on Russia in July 2014, targeting its energy, banking and defence sectors. Sanctions expire in July and can be extended. But countries with a closer relationship with Russia including Cyprus, Italy and Hungary could argue that if Ukraine is not abiding by the Minsk peace deal, the process no longer holds. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Tom Brown)
Greece is preparing to start deporting migrants back to Turkey despite mounting concerns about how they will be treated once returned.

It comes after MPs in Athens voted to back draft legislation, fast-tracked through parliament, to allow the returns to start as soon as Monday.

The controversial operation will apply to those who arrived on Greek islands after 20 March.

:: UN Expresses Concern Over EU Migrant Plan

Several Greek officials said deportations are likely to start from the island of Lesbos, using buses to take people from camps to chartered vessels.

They are also to take place with a heavy security escort - with one police minder for every migrant.

The imminent deportations, backed by the European Union following its recent agreement with Turkey, triggered violence at detention camps in the country.

Authorities on the island of Chios said several hundred people forced their way out of an overcrowded camp and staged a protest in the island's main town.

It followed overnight clashes between Syrian and Afghan detainees that left five people injured.

The United Nations has urged Greece and Turkey to provide further safeguards for asylum seekers before the returns begin.

It said that conditions are worsening by the day for more than 4,000 people being held on Greek islands.

It comes as residents in the Turkish town of Dikili also staged protests against setting up registration desks and building refugee camps in their town for those sent back to the country from Europe.

Human rights group Amnesty International, which has strongly opposed the EU-Turkey agreement , said in a report it had evidence of Turkish authorities rounding up Syrians and sending them back across the border to their conflict-torn country.

The group said Turkey has been expelling around 100 men, women and children nearly daily since mid-January.

Greek officials did not respond to the criticism directly, but insisted the rights of detained asylum seekers were being protected.

Story continues

The clashes on Chios were the latest in a series of violent clashes at shelters and gathering points across Greece, where more than 52,000 migrants and refugees are stranded following EU-backed Balkan border closures.

More than 11,000 of those stranded remain camped out at the Greek-Macedonian border, ignoring calls by the government to move voluntarily to organised shelters.

Many say they have heard conditions in other camps are worse, and they fear what they might find if they are forced to move.
By Lisa Barrington BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian and allied forces backed by Russian air strikes drove Islamic State militants out of the town of al-Qaryatain on Sunday after encircling it over the past few days, Syria's military command said. Surrounded by hills, al-Qaryatain is 100 km (60 miles) west of the ancient city of Palmyra, which government forces recaptured from Islamic State last Sunday. Al-Qaryatain had been held by the militant group since late August. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been trying to retake al-Qaryatain and other pockets of Islamic State control to reduce the jihadist group's ability to project military power into the heavily populated western region of Syria, where Damascus and other main cities are located. Syrian state television said the army and its allies "fully restored security and stability to al-Qaryatain after killing the last remaining groups of Daesh terrorists" in the town, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. In a statement read out on Syrian television, the military command said this was a strategic victory which secures oil and gas routes between the Damascus area and oilfields in eastern Syria. It also disrupts Islamic State supply routes within Syria. Government forces entered the town from a number of directions, Syrian media said. A Syrian military source told SANA state news agency the army had cleared areas northwest of the town of explosives planted by Islamic State. Islamic State militants retreating from Palmyra laid thousands of mines which the Syrian army is now clearing before civilians can return. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government forces had taken over half the town and that fierce fighting continued between Assad's troops and Islamic State to the north and southeast of al-Qaryatain. The Britain-based Observatory, which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said more than 40 air strikes by Russian and Syrian planes hit areas near the town on Sunday. When Islamic State took over al-Qaryatain last August it demolished a Christian monastery and took around 200 of the town's residents prisoner, transferring some of them to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group's de facto capital. Islamic State still has complete control over Raqqa and runs most of Deir al-Zor province in eastern Syria, which borders Iraq. A fragile "cessation of hostilities" truce has held in Syria for over a month as the various parties to the conflict try to negotiate an end to Syria's civil war. But the truce excludes Islamic State and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front. Air and land attacks by Syrian and allied forces continue in parts of Syria where the government says the groups are present. Fierce fighting that broke out over the weekend continues south of Aleppo near the main highway linking that city with the capital, Damascus. It began when rebels and Nusra Front mounted an offensive against government forces. (Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi; Editing by Dale Hudson and David Evans)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian opposition is not optimistic about upcoming peace talks in Geneva because there is no international will for a political transition, opposition member Riad Hijab told Al Araby Al Jadid television late on Friday. The Syrian opposition has consistently said that it wants a halt in attacks on civilians and for the Geneva talks to result in a transitional governing body for Syria that does not include President Bashar al-Assad. "There is no international will, especially from the U.S. side, and I do not expect anything to come of the negotiations," said Hijab, the coordinator for the Saudi-backed Higher Negotiation Committee (HNC), the main opposition bloc. The HNC will attend the next round of talks, scheduled to start around April 9 in Geneva, Hijab said, but "I will be clear to our people: we have no optimism concerning the negotiations process." Assad has said he thinks the Geneva talks can produce a new Syrian government that includes opposition, independents and loyalists, but has explicitly rejected the idea of a transitional authority. Russia and the United States disagree on Assad's future but have jointly pressed the Syrian government and the opposition to attend the indirect peace talks in Geneva, which are being mediated by a United Nations envoy. "We are not afraid of the U.S.-Russian rapprochement," Hijab said. "But we fear the secrecy, the lack of clarity and lack of transparency. "We do not know what has been agreed ... what is happening in Syria is a proxy war." A fragile "cessation of hostilities" truce has held in Syria for over a month between government forces and their opponents. The truce excludes Islamic State and al Qaeda's Nusra Front. Air and land attacks by Syrian and allied forces continue in parts of Syria where the government says Islamic State and Nusra Front are present. Syrian government forces with Russian air support took back the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra last weekend from Islamic State militants who captured it last May. (Reporting by Lisa Barrington in Beirut and Ali Abdelatti in Cairo, editing by Larry King.)
By Nailia Bagirova and Hasmik Mkrtchyan BAKU/YEREVAN (Reuters) - A new wave of fighting broke out in the Nagorno-Karabakh region on Saturday, killing dozens and drawing international calls for an immediate ceasefire to stop violence spreading in the South Caucasus. Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians, has run its own affairs with heavy military and financial backing from Armenia since a separatist war ended in 1994. The Azeri defence ministry said on Saturday the army had "liberated strategic heights and settlements" in the region. "Six Armenian tanks were destroyed (and) more than 100 Armenian servicemen were killed and injured," it said in a statement, saying 12 Azeri servicemen had also been killed. Armenia's government denied the Azeri report on the number of casualties. Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan told a State Security Council meeting about 18 were killed and 35 injured. It was not immediately clear if the death toll included soldiers only. Earlier on Saturday, Nagorno-Karabakh's military said Armenian anti-aircraft forces had downed an Azeri helicopter. Baku admitted that its Mi-24 helicopter was shot down. Both sides also reported civilian casualties and accused each other of violating a 1994 ceasefire, a sign that the two-decade-old conflict which has left some 30,000 people dead is far from a peaceful resolution. Similar violence was reported last month. The violence has forced Russia, a key mediator in the conflict, to step up diplomatic efforts to quench it. President Vladimir Putin urged the warring sides to immediately observe the ceasefire and "to exercise restraint so as to avert new human casualties," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu have talked by phone with their Armenian and Azeri counterparts. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, meanwhile, called on both sides "to immediately stop fighting and to fully respect the ceasefire." Azerbaijan frequently threatens to take Nagorno-Karabakh back by force. Clashes around the region have fuelled worries of a widening conflict breaking out in the region, which is crossed by oil and natural gas pipelines. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for "an ultimate resolution" of the conflict between during talks with Azeri President Ilham Aliyev at the State Department. (Writing and additional reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow and Madeline Chambers in Berlin; Editing by Larry King)
DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Thyssenkrupp's supervisory board has not yet discussed a possible tie-up of its European steel operations with those of Tata Steel, a source familiar with the situation said on Friday. Thyssenkrupp shares pared gains on the news and traded 3.7 percent higher by 0738 GMT. Germany's Rheinische Post newspaper had reported earlier that Tata Steel was planning to take a stake in the Thyssenkrupp unit, citing government sources in Berlin. Tata Steel's plans to sell its UK steelmaking business raised expectations this week of a long-awaited consolidation of Europe's battered steel sector, with a Tata-Thyssenkrupp combination excluding the UK seen as most likely. Two sources with knowledge of the matter said that all of Europe's steel producers were talking to one another but that nothing concrete was yet in sight. (Reporting by Matthias Inverardi; Additional reporting and writing by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Christoph Steitz)
This Week in Palestine, April 1st, 2015 by IMEMC

Welcome to this Week in Palestine, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, http://www.imemc.org , for March 26, to April 1, 2016.

Listen now: Copy the code below to embed this audio into a web page: <audio preload="none" src="https://www.indybay.org/uploads/2016/04/02/thisweekinpalestine_13_2016.mp3" controls="controls"></audio>

As President Abbas announced this week that there is still chance for peace, Israeli attacks targeting Palestinian communities in Gaza and the West Bank leave three injured civilians. These stories, and more, coming up, stay tuned.





The Nonviolence Report



Lets begin our weekly report as usual with the nonviolent activities organized in the West Bank. many Palestinian were treated for the effects of tear gas inhalation as Israeli soldiers attacked nonviolent protests organized in West Bank villages. IMEMCs Eman Abedraboo-Bannoura with the details :



In central West Bank, nonviolent protests were organized in the villages of Bilin, Nilin and Al Nabi Saleh. Troops used tear gas and rubber coated steel bullets against the unarmed protesters. Both Bilin and Nilin villagers, and their international and Israeli supporters, managed to reach the Israeli wall, built on local farmers lands.



In Al Nabi Saleh, the soldiers attacked the protest at the village entrance. Later troops stormed the village and fired tear gas into residents homes.



Elsewhere, Palestinian and Israeli activists from Combatants for peace movement organized a protest in Biet Jala town near Bethlehem in southern West Bank marking Land Day. Protesters marched along the settlers road 60 and ended their protest by planting olive trees near the street.



For IMEMC News this is eman abed rabbo Bannoura .





The Political Report



Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas believes that there is a chance for peace, now, if Israel has the will to. IMEMCs Rami Al Meghari has more:



In an interview with Israeli channel 2 TV, Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, maintained that peace could be observed soon, once Israel has the will. He said that he hopes to reach peace, before it is too late.



On another issue, Abbas hinted at the possibility that the Palestinian Authority could collapse at any moment.



On the internal front, Palestinian rival parties, Hamas and Fatah of Palestinian president, were reported to have reached an agreement on a number of outstanding points of difference.



In the meantime, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree to reactivate the general elections committee.



For IMEMC News, I am Rami Almeghari in Gaza.





The West Bank and Gaza Report



Israeli navy continued to attack Gaza fishermen this week, in the meantime three Palestinian civilians were injured by Israeli troops attacks in the West Bank. IMEMCs George Rishmawi Reports:



Israeli troops injured on Saturday two Palestinian youth during clashes that erupted between invading forces and local youth at the northern West Bank city of Qalqilia. Both youth were moved to hospital after sustaining moderate wounds, local Palestinian sources reported.



On Monday morning, Israeli soldiers demolished a home, a playground, electricity and water networks, in addition to uprooting farmlands, belonging to a Palestinian family near Bethlehem city in southern West Bank. the Israeli army claimed they were built without permits.



Moreover, Dozens of Israeli soldiers and police officers, accompanied with personnel of the Jerusalem City Council and the Israel Antiquities Authority, invaded on Tuesday morning the town of Silwan, in occupied Jerusalem, and demolished a playground, a room and several walls.



A Palestinian child was injured on Wednesday midday after being hit by an Israeli army jeep in Khliat Al Mayah community near the southern West Bank city of Hebron.



14-year old Numan Bassal sustained moderate wounds and was moved to a nearby hospital for treatment in Hebron city. Witnesses said that the boy was going back home riding his bicycle when a military jeep hit him.



Also this week, Israeli forces conducted at least 89 military invasions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem. During these invasions, Israeli troops kidnaped more than 76 Palestinian civilians, including 27 children.



In the Gaza Strip this week, Israeli navy attacked Palestinian fishermen off Gaza shoreline, in the meantime Israeli forces stationed at the northern and southern borders of Gaza with Israel targeted farmers working in their lands and forced them to leave.



Palestinian sources reported navy and troops attacks on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.



For IMEMC News this is George Rishmawi.





Conclusion



And thats all for today from This Week in Palestine. This was the Weekly report for March 26, to April 1, 2016. From the Occupied Palestinian Territories. For more news and updates please visit our website at www-dot-imemc-dot-org, This weeks report has been brought to you by George Rishmawi and me Ghassan Bannoura.
This Sunday morning (3 April) the Queensland Mines Minister Anthony Lynham and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk issued a joint statement for approval of mine leases for the Carmichael coal mine and rail project in Queensland's Galilee Basin. Their statement was widely condemned by environment, climate and indigenous organisations.

Sunday morning (3 April) the Queensland Mines Minister Anthony Lynham and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk issued a joint statement for approval of mine leases for the Carmichael coal mine and rail project in Queensland's Galilee Basin. Their statement was widely condemned by environment and climate organisations.

The mine lease approval comes on the tail of the worst coral bleaching event on record for the Great Barrier Reef. Researchers found that 95 per cent of the northern 1000 km of the reef system up to Torres Strait was badly bleached. We know this is a direct consequence of climate change. There is no record of extreme coral bleaching events before 1998. See the ABC 7.30 Report on the extreme bleaching event caused by climate change, or read Graham Readfearn writing in the Guardian newspaper on the Link between fossil fuels and Great Barrier Reef bleaching clear and incontrovertible.

The coal mine by Indian company Adani, if it goes ahead, will be the largest open cut coal mine in the southern hemisphere, with the three mining leases estimated to contain 11 billion tonnes of thermal coal, with a mine production capacity aiming for 60 million tonnes of coal every year.

The government statement says the project is worth $21.7 billion, although Adani's own estimate is $16.5 billion, according to Mark Ludlow from the Australian Financial Review.

This is a major step forward for this project after extensive government and community scrutiny, the Premier said. Some approvals are still required before construction can start, and ultimately committing to the project will be a decision for Adani."

The development entails building a 300 kilometre rail line from the Galilee Basin to the Abbot Point coal terminal. The port facilities at Abbot Point would also require expansion including dredging of the harbour. Dr Lynham said there no dredging would proceed at Abbot Point until Adani demonstrates financial closure.

The statement also exaggerates the number of jobs that will be created, and even the Queensland Treasurer Curtis Pitt concedes this, according to the Australia Institute media release.

We have protected the Caley Valley wetlands and the Great Barrier Reef by not allowing dredge spoil to be dumped on the wetlands or in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area," said Palaszczuk.

The approval process at both the Federal and state levels have attached 140 conditions to the mine to protect fauna and flora, groundwater and surface water resources. A further 99 conditions apply to the rail construction and port expansion of the project. The state Labor Government also promised that Queensland taxpayers will not fund the infrastructure for the mine.

Adani CEO Jeyakumar Janakaraj said he wants construction on the Carmichael Mine to start in 2017 according, to ABC News Brisbane, and assured that they had the required funding for the project to proceed.

In a statement on the Adani Facebook page they say "The granting of a mining lease helps deliver the company certainty with respect to timelines, while moving to the next phase of the project, subject to the resolution of legal challenges by politically-motivated activists. Adani has consistently said that what is required for its projects to proceed is certainty on approvals. This key approval helps provide that with respect to Carmichael....the company will continue to finalise second tier approvals, with the clear aim of commencing construction in calendar year 2017."

But it is questionable whether initial capital is available. French banks withdrew interest in April 2015. Adani and the Commonwealth Bank parted ways in August 2015. In September the NAB ruled out funding Adani. At current coal prices the development of the mine is uneconomic, with the fall of coal prices being assessed as a structural decline.

The Australasia Director of Finance Studies at the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Tim Buckley, has stated that Adani lacks major bank finance, but the project requires at least $10 billion to get it off the ground.

Condemnation from climate and environment groups

The decision was met with a quick reaction. According to ABC Brisbane journalist Jessica van Vonderen on @ABCNewsBrisbane via twitter, the Mackay Conservation Group awarded the Premier (@AnnastaciaMP) the "Coral bleaching trophy" for issuing mining lease to Adani.

It is grossly irresponsible of the Palaszczuk government to issue the paperwork for the Carmichael coal mine, which will create millions of tonnes of climate pollution for many decades to come, when we can see the Great Barrier Reef is already being savaged by climate change, said the Australian Conservation Foundations CEO Kelly OShanassy.

By granting a licence for this massive coal mine the Palaszczuk government is bowing to the demands of big polluters, not listening to the needs of the people." said OShanassy in a statement.

350 Australia were equally angy with the decision in a media statement. As global temperatures hit terrifying levels and the Reef turns a deathly white, the absurdity of Anastacia Paluszczuks Government approving this monstrous coal project cannot be understated, said Moira Williams, campaigner with 350 Australia.

Queenslanders are sick and tired of their Government putting the Reef and our future second to the mining industry. The Paluszczuk Government was elected on a mandate to protect the Reef. Instead, they are giving the coal industry a leg-up to trash it. This has got to stop, said Williams.

We know that the mining and burning of coal is destroying the Reef and we know that we must keep fossil fuels in the ground if we want to avoid dangerous global warming. Yet, the Queensland and Federal Government are intent on giving the coal industry everything they need to dig more coal out of the ground and wreck our precious Reef, said Kirsty Albion National Director of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.

There has been a lot of bluster and marketing about innovation with the Federal Government allocating $28 million on an innovation marketing campaign while the 2014 budget cuts to CSIRO results in the loss of 350 science staff, many in critical climate research areas.

If the Federal and Queensland Governments are serious about building an innovative 21st century economy that creates jobs and protects our climate, they cant keep allowing the digging up of great wads of dirty coal for export through the Great Barrier Reef. Its time for the Queensland and Federal Governments to stop pandering to the big polluters and to do what it takes to ensure a safe and sustainable future for our Reef and our climate, concluded Albion.

Protecting the reef and approving the Carmichael mining lease are diametrically opposed. You cannot do both." said Shani Tager, Greenpeace Australia Pacifics Reef Campaigner in a media statement. The Queensland Government are supposed to be taking care of our Reef, instead theyre giving coal companies the green light to keep mining and burning coal that is driving climate change and bleaching our Reef, said Ms Tager.

State member for Cairns Rob Pyne, elected as a Labor MP but now sitting as an independent MP, said on twitter, "This decision will be a Job Destroyer in my city of Cairns. What happened to ALP passion for The Great Barrier Reef?"

There are also implications here for Federal Labor both in traction on climate change and for the progressive vote for Australia's Federal election in 2016.

Wangan & Jagalingou People strongly oppose mine

The mine is actively being opposed by the Wangan & Jagalingou People. Watch this youtube video: Adani - No still means no

The announcement was condemned by Wangan & Jagalingou spokesperson and traditional owner Adrian Burragubba who said, This is a disgraceful new low in the exercise of Government power at the expense of Traditional Owners rights. Minister Lynham and Premier Palaszczuk should hang their heads in shame. History will condemn them. This is the wrong mine, at the wrong time, on the wrong side of history. Their actions are reckless and dishonourable."

For the third time, on 19 March this year, the W&J claim group met en masse and voted down the prospect of an indigenous land use agreement with Adani. We said it again, and we said it loud and clear: Wangan and Jagalingou do not consent to this mine and we never will." said Mr Burragubba in a statement.

This is a shameful day, Mr Burragubba said. This act of infamy will be challenged all the way to the High Court if necessary, and we will continue to pursue our rights under international law. The Minister may think this is the end of the matter, but for us it is just another chapter in the long struggle we have to get proper respect and protection for our rights under law, and ensure our sacred homelands are preserved for time immemorial.

Federal Court challenge over mine impact on reef and international obligations

The projects Federal approval is still under challenge by Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) in the Federal Court, represented by the Environmental Defenders office (EDO Qld). "Queensland Mining Minister Lynhams decision is disappointing given the increased environmental risks and dramatically reduced economic benefits from the mine uncovered during last years Land Court hearing", said the EDO Qld media statement.

Solicitor Jo-Anne Bragg highlighted the mass coral bleaching event caused by climate change and the disjuncture with approving the mine leases.

"We know Australian coal burnt overseas is a significant contributor to coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, so how can the State Government claim it is protecting the Great Barrier Reef and associated tourism and other jobs on one hand and do this with the other?" Bragg asks.

Australia's international obligation to protect the reef is part of the case against the mine, "The lawfulness of the federal approval of this project, which was re-issued by the Environment Minister on 14 October 2015, is currently being questioned by our client ACF in the Federal Court."

The case is expected to be heard in early May and will focus on whether the Federal Environment Minister had sufficient regard to the protection of the Great Barrier Reef required by international convention.

Benedict Coyne of law firm Boe Williams Anderson, who are acting for Mr Burragubba and the Wangan and Jagalingou people, said: The granting of these leases by the Minister is a concern given that there is a judicial review proceeding for a related matter pending before the Federal Court of Australia. It is curious as to why the Minister was unable to wait for the proper legal processes to be concluded. We will be seeking a statement of reasons for the decision from the Minister and from there we will consider our clients legal options.

Climate and marine scientists continue to warn of the damage being done by climate change to the Great Barrier Reef. Professor Justin Marshall explains the extreme coral bleaching presently underway, caused by unseasonably high water temperatures. In a short Youtube video called Losing Nemo he says, "Australia needs to decide. Do we want the Reef or do we want coal. We can't have both. We need to step up...I would be ashamed to bring my children to the reef."
Watsonville community members support the boycott against Driscolls, the world famous berry company headquartered in their town.

[ Emmanuel Ballesteros of the Watsonville Brown Berets, standing on the median of Main Street in Watsonville, California, holds a sign above his head declaring, Respect the Farmworkers. Boycott Driscolls. April 2, 2016. ]

Boycott Driscolls Outreach on Watsonvilles Main Street

Over 300 farmworker families in Burlington, Washington are currently waging a historic struggle for a union contract at Sakuma Brothers Farms. They are asking consumers to boycott Driscolls berries, which includes strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), the farmworkers independent union, is fighting to end wage theft and poverty wages, inhumane production standards, and retaliation from Sakuma from protected union activity.

Lazaro Matamoros from Oaxaca, Mexico, a farmworker at Sakuma Brothers Farms in Washington state and a rank and file union member of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, held signs on Main Street in Watsonville on Saturday, April 2 to raise awareness in the community regarding Driscolls Exploitation from Border to Border. Matamoros was joined by fellow FUJ activists who are currently on a 28-day tour of the West Coast to energize a major offensive on the boycott of Driscolls berries, including a March 31 protest outside the companys headquarters in Watsonville.

Pedestrians and passing motorists were very receptive to flyers handed out asking people to Respect the families who grow your food. Dont buy Driscolls. People went out of their way to speak with demonstrators and learn more about the world famous berry company headquartered less than a mile away.

The following information and call to action comes from the flyer being distributed titled, Dont Buy Driscolls Berries

Why Driscolls

Sakuma sells most of their berries under Driscolls label.

Driscolls is the largest berry distributor in the world and has a history of repressing union organizing.

Driscolls supplies from growers in San Quintin, Mexico where 70,000 workers went on strike, formed a union, and endorsed a boycott of Driscolls.

Support the Driscolls Boycott

Call Driscolls and let them know you are boycotting their berries: 831 763 3259

Call Costco and ask them to remove Driscolls from their shelves: 425 313 6364

Call Sakuma and let them know you support the union: 360 757 6611

For More Information: BoycottSakumaBerries.com

To Get Involved Email: BoycottCoordination@gmail.com

To donate to the union: BoycottSakumaBerries.com/Donate

Like FUJ on Facebook: Facebook.com/FamiliasUnidas

Previous coverage of the boycott Driscolls movement:

Bradley Allen is a reporter and photographer in the Monterey Bay area, and part of the Indybay collective. Follow him on Twitter: @BradleySA.
French to Address Honors Convocation

Linda French

March 25, 2016

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. Illinois Wesleyan University will hold its annual Honors Convocation on Wednesday, April 6, at 11 a.m. in Westbrook Auditorium.

Honors Convocation is dedicated to the Class of 2016 as well as IWU students who have earned activity and academic honors. The 2017 winner of the Kemp Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence, the universitys highest teaching honor, will be announced at the Honors Convocation.

Professor of Physics Linda French, the 2016 recipient of the Kemp Award, will deliver the keynote address entitled The Long and Winding Trail."

A professional astronomer for over 30 years, French is frequently a guest at prominent observatories, including the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. Asteroid 3506 French is named in her honor, in recognition of Frenchs educational and research achievements. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and she is a recipient of a Cottrell College Science Award.

French joined the IWU faculty in 2002 and has taught astronomy, astrophysics, and observational astronomy in addition to other physics courses. She worked with IWU students to improve the facilities of the Mark Evans Observatory. French has also served as chair of the physics department and led the IWU London Program twice. She has published widely and presented lectures and papers on 18th-century English astronomer John Goodricke.

A native of Hagerstown, Indiana, French earned a bachelors degree in astronomy from Indiana University before completing a masters and Ph.D. at Cornell University. She also did post-doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

By Lydia Hartlaub 16
Undefeated Nyquist Wins Florida Derby and Heads to Louisville: Reddam Racing LLCs Nyquist maintained his undefeated record with a commanding 3 -length triumph in Saturdays $1 million Xpressbet.com Florida Derby (G1) while establishing himself as the top candidate for the 2016 Triple Crown.

The Doug ONeill-trained 3-year-old colt ran his career record to 7-for-7 while sweeping to victory in Gulfstream Parks signature race, in which the son of Uncle Mo faced previously undefeated Mohaymen in the highly anticipated unprecedented West vs. East matchup.

The anxiously awaited showdown between Nyquist and Mohaymen developed at the top of Gulfstream Parks stretch, but the Southern California-based 6-5 second betting choice pulled away to a convincing score under Mario Gutierrez as the East Coast-based 4-5 favorite weakened in mid-stretch to finish fourth under Junior Alvarado.

He was pretty wide throughout, but the track is wet and we wanted to stay out in the clear, trainer Kiaran McLaughlin, who had saddled for handy victories in the Holy Bull (G2) and Fountain of Youth (G2) as preps for the Florida Derby. Congratulations to the winner. He ran big. We were awfully wide throughout and with the (wet) track you never know. Well regroup.

Nyquist, the 2015 Eclipse Award-winning juvenile, made a most lucrative return to Gulfstream Park, where he was purchased in the 2015 Fasig-Tipton Florida sale for $400,000. In addition to earning the $600,000 winners share of the $1 million purse in his first start at Gulfstream, Nyquist also earned a $1 million bonus offered by the sale company to any graduate of the 2015 sale that went on to win the 2016 Florida Derby.

Wagering on Saturdays 14-race program, which included eight stakes worth $2.4 Million in purses, produced a Florida Derby Day record handle of $32,082,270, eclipsing last years total handle of $27,255, 586. The $32.082 Million figure also represented the highest handle ever recorded at Gulfstream other than on Breeders Cup Days.

Nyquist became the first West Coast invader to capture the Florida Derby since Empire Maker (2003) and the first Eclipse Award champion to prevail in the important 1 1/8-mile Kentucky Derby prep. As he embarks on the Triple Crown campaign, he will attempt to follow in the footsteps of Ill Have Another, the 2012 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner who was owned by Paul Reddam, trained by ONeill and ridden by Gutierrez.

Its such a team effort. I had reservations a month or so agoMohaymen in his own backyard, do we really want to do something like that? But we all very quickly got on the same page and, you know, I think we just had a very lucky trip. Mario broke great and did a great job riding and everything just went right. This whole trip other than being delayed one day, everything else went right, ONeill said. Its a credit to the whole team how he came over, how he looked and how he ran.

Nyquist broke alertly from the starting gate to lead the 10-horse field into the first turn and into the backstretch under a firm hold by Gutierrez in his second start of 20016. He was rated on the lead along the backstretch, pressed on the inside by Sawyers Mickey and on the outside by Chovanes.

It was always part of the plan (to go to front). It just depends on the break; how the other horses were going to be acting, so coming out of the gate, I broke so clean and so fast so I just had to take the lead, Gutierrez said.

After putting away the longshots heading into the far turn, Nyquist was joined to his outside by a Mohaymen leaving the turn into the homestretch. As Nyquist and Mohaymen rounded the final turn extremely wide, Majesto, a 21-1 long shot ridden by Javier Castellano, cut the corner to join the fray. Mohaymen began to struggle in mid-stretch as Nyquist responded when asked by Gutierrez and scooted to a comfortable win. Majesto held second, a length ahead of a late-charging Fellowship, who was four lengths clear of Mohayman.

Nyquist ran 1 1/8 miles on a good track in 1:49.11 on fractions of 23.60 (seconds), 47.09, 1:11.39 and 1:36.38.

I saw the gray horse (Mohaymen) coming to my side. Im riding the race and I didnt want to be so confident, so if he was going to pass me, he was going to have to pass me running and wide, Gutierrez said.

Mohaymen was unable to sustain his bid.

Im a person that doesnt like to blame the track all the time. I would say the only difference is that he never took me. Hes a horse that all the time drags me and jump in the bridle right away so when we turn to the backside hes pulling me. This time he wasnt pulling me. It got me a little worried, Alvarado said of Mohaymen. I tried to stay with him and give him a chance to get it all together. By the three-eighths pole I saw Nyquist getting along in front by himself and I had to move my horse. By that point, he always drags me there and this time Im the one asking him. The track could be one little reason, but theres nothing else I really can say. Other than that we were clear on the outside.

In addition to Nyquist, who is likely to be favored in the Kentucky Derby, Majesto and Fellowship earned sufficient qualifying points to join him at Churchill Downs May 7 should his connections opt to run.

Grupo 7C Racing Stables Majesto made a giant leap forward in his first race since breaking his maiden at Gulfstream Feb. 27 in his fifth career start for trainer Gustavo Delgado.

It was a beautiful trip. He really gave a big effort. Not too many horses step up like that and gallop out like he did. It was amazing because he hooked up with the best horses in the country. The good thing about him is I was saving ground and when a hole opened, he went through and finished really well, Castellano said. I think hes going to be good going to the Derby. He has the points and hes late-developing. Hes going to start getting really good. I am looking forward to him as he gets older.

Jacks or Better Farms Fellowship came into the Florida Derby off a pair of late-running third-place finishes in the Holy Bull and Fountain of Youth for trainer Stanley Gold.

I had a good trip. We broke and I got the position I wanted. When I asked him, he gave me a kick, but the other two kept running, Lezcano said.

Mohaymen, on the strength of his Holy Bull and Fountain of Youth wins, has also earned a berth in the Kentucky Derby field.

Florida Derby starters have won 22 times in the Kentucky Derby (G1), the most recent winner being Orb, who parlayed a victory in the 2009 Florida Derby into a triumph at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. Horses that started in the Florida Derby have gone on to capture a total of 57 Triple Crown races.

Nyquist is scheduled to be shipped to Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, KY at 9 a.m. Sunday to prepare for a quest to give Reddam his second Kentucky Derby success.

I feel good. You only got the bonus if you won, so we wouldnt have come unless we thought we had certainly a decent chance. We didnt know at the end of last year that Mohaymen was going to be such a big horse on the radar. My feeling was, if youre afraid to go run against someone [now] how do you really think you have a Derby horse?, Reddam said. We just stuck to our plan and we thought if we get beat, we get beat, but we cant be afraid. If youre afraid in the business, youre not going anywhere.

Florida Derby 2016 Replay:



Source: Gulfstream Park
Toronto, ON When a woman from Ontario, Canada, launched her blockbuster $1 billion Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC 9/17/15). When a woman from Ontario, Canada, launched her blockbuster $1 billion Invokana side effects lawsuit last September, a diabetes specialist based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, weighed in, suggesting that in her view Invokana represents no threat to the kidneys of patients suffering from type 2 diabetes. We know that even if you use it in people with reduced kidney function, it does no further harm to the kidneys, said Dr. Debbie Knight, in comments published by the(CBC 9/17/15).

I think its safe, yes. If I didnt think it was safe, I dont think Id use [Invokana] in any of my patients.Dr. Knight should know, having spent 35 years in the treatment of diabetes. Thenoted that Knight also works as a consultant for Janssen, the pharmaceutical giant that manufactures Invokana and one of the defendants in the Ontario lawsuit. Thereport did not detail any further specifics of Knights relationship with the Invokana manufacturer.However, the plaintiff in the proposed class action in Canada believes headlines that suggest Invokana Linked with Cardiovascular Injuries and Kidney Failure, have merit.Rosalba Joudry should know: within several months of beginning treatment with Invokana to rein in her blood sugar levels, Joudry underwent tests that suggested the early stages of kidney failure.Needless to say, Joudry takes no comfort in the words of Dr. Knight. Joudry, having launched her Invokana side effects lawsuit in September of last year, is seeking general damages in excess of $500 million, together with special damages also in excess of $500 million.The Canadian lawsuit - which is mirrored by several similar lawsuits in both Canada and the United States - comes at an inopportune time for the pharmacare program of Nova Scotia, one of Canadas eastern provinces. Nova Scotia recently included Invokana in its pharmacare formulary on the first of September last year, following similar moves by Quebec and Ontario.Joudry, who hails from the Ontario suburb of Scarborough, claims to have had no knowledge of the potential for Invokana side effects relating to kidneys and ketoacidosis when she was prescribed the drug. According to theher first exposure to suggestions that Invokana could be harmful came from a television ad trolling for plaintiffs on a US TV station. Joudry looked into the matter further, and after her doctor took Joudry off the medication, underwent tests. Results suggested that Joudry was in the early stages of kidney failure.US-based lawsuits are alleging similar injuries. In May of last year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued its warning that SGLT2 inhibitors, such as Invokana (canagliflozin), may increase a patients risk of ketoacidosis, a dangerous condition related to high acidity in the blood.The next month, the Canadian health regulatory authority (and a counterpart to the FDA), Health Canada, launched a safety review of SGLT2 inhibitors with regard to diabetic ketoacidosis.Jennifer McCormack, spokeswoman for Janssen Inc., said in an e-mail to theWe continue to work with Health Canada in their class assessment of the potential risk of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) with SGLT2 inhibitor use.Invokana (canagliflozin) provides important benefits to patients with Type 2 diabetes and we remain confident in the overall safety profile of Invokana, she said.The lawsuit isCase No. W-15-536111, filed September 10, 2015 in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
Top Class Action Lawsuits

Facebook Data Mining for (Ad) Dollars? This is very disheartening, if the allegations are proved true. A privacy class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook and several high profile cancer institutes, alleging FB mined private health data from websites of the cancer institutes to generate advertising campaigns.

The cancer institutes named as co-defendants in the proposed class action are: the American Cancer Society Inc., American Society of Clinical Oncology Inc., Melanoma Research Foundation, Adventist Health System, BJC Healthcare, the Cleveland Clinic, and the University of Texas-MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Filed by Winston Smith, a registered Facebook user and Missouri resident, the 88-page complaint claims the medical institutes websites include a secret Facebook code that allow users data to be transmitted to Facebook, which then creates targeted advertising campaigns.

Without the knowledge, consent, or any action of the user, the entire process happens in milliseconds, the complaint states.

According to Smith, he searched for lung cancer information on the American Cancer Societys website, Cancer.org. The information he sought and any links he clicked then were sent to Facebook without his knowledge and without his consent.

Despite Cancer.orgs Privacy Policy, the Plaintiffs communications to and from Cancer.org were contemporaneously re-directed to, tracked, intercepted, and acquired by Facebook through the process described above, Smith alleges. Upon these and other communications, Plaintiffs cancer-related communications were disclosed to, tracked, and intercepted by Facebook through cookies and other identifiers.

In the complaint, Smith asserts that users of such websites trust that their personal details of their cancer-related searches and browsing with not be shared with third-parties. The complaint also notes that Facebook, itself, does not disclose in its data and privacy policies that it tracks and collects such sensitive information.

The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Gun Safety Gone Wrong? This one kind of redefines defective products. A class action lawsuit has been filed against the gun manufacturer/importer Century Arms, alleging the safety levers on certain models are defective. Terrific.

Specifically, the Century rifles lawsuit contends that numerous Century-branded AK rifles and pistols are equipped with a safety selector lever that can be pushed above the safe position. In turn, a user can then unknowingly disengage the safety mechanism and accidentally discharge the gun without pulling the trigger.

According to the complaint, the problem is linked to the firearms inadequate design, manufacturing, and testing, and adds the feature will not prevent and has not prevented accidental discharge of the guns.

Further, the plaintiffs cite a YouTube video which shows the alleged defect as being the result of Century maintaining a full-auto safety selector rather than modifying it with a semi-auto safety selector, much like its competitors.

Based in Delray Beach, Florida, Century is a known importer of Russian surplus weapons including AK-47 rifles. According to federal law, the company must modify the firearms to comply with U.S. regulations before entering them in commerce.

The plaintiffs contend that Century is aware of the defect as it changed the safety selector on current models. However, the lawsuit notes, Century has never issued a warning to the public or recalled defective models.

Century is aware that the Class AK-47 Rifles and Pistols have fired as result of the Safety Selector defect, and it is only a matter of time, if not already, before individuals are seriously injured or killed, the lawsuit states. At a loss for words here.

The class consists of plaintiffs from across the US who have experienced an unintentional discharge with their Century firearm due to the safety lever. In most of the cases, the safety lever advanced beyond the safe position to cause the gun to fire without the pull of the trigger. In one case, a round discharged inside an apartment, ripping through the wall and entering the neighboring unit. None of the instances resulted in injury or death.

The class action suit accuses Century of violating 10 counts of state and federal laws that protect consumers.

Top Settlements

Corinthian College Takes a $1.1B Hit. And justice prevailsin the form of a $1.1 billion judgment handed down against the for-profit Corinthian Colleges Inc. (CCI), for its alleged predatory and unlawful business practices. Its about time.

The lawsuit was filed by the office California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris.

The now defunct CCI allegedly misrepresented training programs and job placement rates, and pushed students into high interest loans. A lawsuit was also filed by Attorney General Martha Coakley, against the school.

According to Harris office, CCI intentionally targeted low-income, vulnerable Californians through false advertising and aggressive marketing campaigns. The organization purportedly misrepresented job placement rates and school programs. It conducted this false advertising via the Internet, telemarketing and television ad campaigns.

Ok, thats a wrap folksSee you at the bar.
The Braves have designated outfielder Michael Bourn for assignment, David OBrien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes (Twitter links). They also selected the contracts of outfielder Drew Stubbs and reliever Alexi Ogando. The Braves signed Stubbs to a minor-league deal earlier this week, adding the veteran to a crowded outfield picture, and Stubbs addition as a potential backup center fielder likely made the Braves feel Bourn (and Emilio Bonifacio, who was also cut this morning) no longer had much use for them.

As OBrien points out, the Braves two highest-paid players this year will be Bourn and Nick Swisher, both of whom are now gone. Of course, some of Bourns $14MM and Swishers $15MM will be paid by the Indians, who signed both players before sending them to Atlanta for Chris Johnson in an exchange of bad contracts. Bourn is in the last year of his deal  he has a vesting option for 2017, but almost certainly wont get enough plate appearances this season for it to vest.

Bourns decline since signing that contract in early 2013 has been swift. His hitting has declined from .274/.348/.391 in 2012 to .238/.310/.282 last year, and his once-terrific defense has declined, too  UZR, for example, rated Bourn as 23.3 runs above average in center in 2012 and 2.5 runs below last season. Perhaps that shouldnt be surprising, since outfield defense doesnt seem to age particularly well. Whatever the case, Bourn no longer served an obvious purpose on a rebuilding Braves team already featuring plenty of outfielders, including Ender Inciarte, Nick Markakis, Hector Olivera, Jeff Francoeur and Stubbs.
- The increasing calls for Nigerians to buy Made-in-Nigeria goods seem to be having an effect

- The governor of Abia state, Dr Okezie Ikpeazu already have plans for the popular Ariaria market in Aba

- Dr Ikpeazu wants the state to benefit from the Made-in-Nigeria goods campaign

In a recent press briefing he held with journalists in the state, Abia state governor, Dr Okezie Ikpeazu revealed that his administration is making efforts to ensure that Made-in-Aba products take over major Nigerian markets.

Governor Okezie Ikpeazu

Dr Ikpeazu expressed interest in the Nigerian security agencies patronising the Made-in-Aba goods even as he stated that plans are underway to make it a reality.

READ ALSO: SEE the governor who visited the Malkohi IDP camp in Adamawa (photos)

He said: ''If we can sell our Made in Aba boots to the Nigerian Military and security organizations (Army, Air force, Navy, NSCDC, etc), sell our garments (uniforms) to the same organizations and Nigerian people, then we will feel fulfilled.''

According to the governor, when that goal is achieved, his administration would then begin to market the goods beyond the shores of Nigeria.

Just recently, Senate president, Bukola Saraki was spotted at the National Assembly adorning a Made-in-Aba attire few weeks after he joined Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe to attend the Made-In-Aba Trade Fair in Abuja.

On his part, Dr Ikpeazu was recently in the news for his bold decision to boycott eating of foreign rice.

The governor, it was gathered, has refused to take foreign rice in the last six months as he has reportedly struck it out of his menu.

READ ALSO:

His reason is that he wants to demonstrate to everyone that Nigeria, with her rich agricultural potentials, has the capacity to fend for itself in food production.

Source: Legit.ng
- Easternradio.com.ng reports three two soldiers and a commander lost their lives after war ensued in 82 Division Enugu Barracks over tribal difference

- Nigerian Army reacts to the allegation

- The Nigerian Army describes report as baseless and at best, mere figment of the authors cynical imagination.

The Nigerian Army on Sunday, April 3, dismissed as untrue a reported tribal war at the 82 Division, Enugu, which allegedly claimed the lives of three soldiers.

Easternradio.com.ng had reported that following a perceived tribal deployment of troops to the Niger Delta, crisis engulfed the 82 Division, leading to the death of a military commander and two soldiers.

According to media outfit, 82 Division Nigerian Army Enugu were giving a mandate to shortlist about 54 soldiers to join hands and combat Niger Delta Militants uprising, which the GOC Brigadier Gen Ibrahim Attahiru assigned to two commanders who hails from Northern and another from South Western Nigeria respectively. These commanders will however shortlist all 54 Igbo soldiers.

READ ALSO: Abia to sell Made in Aba boots to Nigerian Army, Police?

Subsequently, one of the enlisted soldiers, saddened by the outcome of this list questioned the process, but the commander picked offense and demanded to know what gave him the audacity to question him, talk more off conceiving to disobey a military order.

The said Commander in display of anger pulled out his gun and shot this young soldier on the forehead, killing him instantly. Another soldier who is among the enlisted soldiers immediately withdrew his own gun and fired the commander thereby killing him too.

However, in a press statement made available to Legit.ng, Colonel Sani Kukasheka Usman, the acting director, Army Public Relations described the report as baseless and at best, mere figment of the authors cynical imagination.

The Nigerian Army has dismissed a reported tribal war at the 82 Division, Enugu, which allegedly claimed the lives of three soldiers.

READ ALSO: How Boko Haram condemned children to the scrap heap

The statement by the Nigerian Army reads: The attention of the Nigerian Army has been drawn to a deliberate and calculated campaign of calumny aimed at misleading the public and cause disaffection among troops, being circulated in the social media by a faceless and obviously subversive group named EASTERN RADIO. The group created and posted a story titled Tribal War at Army Barracks, 82 Division Enugu Three Soldiers Feared Dead on various social media platforms.

In the write up, they alleged that there was an altercation in an unnamed barracks in 82 Division over nomination for peacekeeping operations which led to exchange of gunfire among imaginary troops that resulted in loss of lives. Apart from obvious flaws and inconsistency in the narration, the Nigerian Army wishes to emphatically state that no such incident occurred anywhere in the Nigerian Army, let alone 82 Division. In fact, the alleged reported incident existed only in the obviously negatively skewed minds of the authors of such fabrication.

The intent and goals of this band of miscreants is to cause distrust amongst own troops and the countrys populace at large, which unknown to them is an exercise in futility because the Nigerian Army is cohesive. Their methodology is to employ such campaign of calumny and distortion of an established reign of peaceful, harmonious and esprit-de-corps culture in 82 Division and the entire Nigerian Army. However, the campaign is a failed one as the entire Nigerian Army remains indivisible, unprovoked and not gullible to such cheap and heinous insinuations.

The general public is therefore please requested to discountenance the false story of EASTERN RADIO and their affiliated secessionist groups as there is no iota of truth in the story.

We would like to inform the public that the 82 Division Nigerian Army is intact in all its locations and deployments, same goes for all the various formations, units, cantonments and barracks of the Nigerian Army.

Above all, the Nigerian Army remains committed to providing aid to civil authority as enshrined in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (As Amended) and wishes to assure the public of the Chief of Army Staffs unalloyed commitment to protect lives and property whenever called upon to do so in line with extant provisions of the law.

We wish to also reassure all well-meaning Nigerians that the Nigerian Army remains a national institution which emphasizes peace, unity and mutual co-existence devoid of any sentiments or such variables as ethnic, tribe or religious differences. Any attempt by any individual or group of persons to associate the military and indeed the Nigerian Army with such will be a total waste of time, energy and resources. We are proud professionals bound by discipline, unflinching love, loyalty, espirit-de-corps and love for our colleagues and our country. We would remain focussed and would not be distracted by irritating campaigns of calumny or fabricated lies by some unscrupulous elements.

It is therefore very imperative at this point to warn all those mischief makers to desist from these unpatriotic and obviously subversive acts in any guise.

Meanwhile, the dreaded Boko Haram sect has denied any suggestion it might surrender, saying the war will not end.

In a new video released on Friday, April 1, which had men holding AK-47s posing in front of Toyota Hilux pick-up trucks and a lorry mounted with a military cannon, the sect said it was a potent fighting force.

READ ALSO: Nigerian army recruitment  should I join the army or airforce?

Source: Legit.ng
University of Alabama at Birmingham archaeologist Sarah Parcak, Ph.D., along with a team of other leading experts, has discovered evidence of what may be North America's second Viking site.

With the use of pioneering satellite imagery analysis, excavation and investigation of archeological evidence, the team has uncovered what could be the first new Norse site to be discovered in North America in over 50 years. If confirmed by further research, the site at Point Rosee in Newfoundland will show that the Vikings traveled much farther into North America than previously known, pushing the boundary of their explorations over 300 miles to the southwest.

To date, scientists have known of only one other Viking site, found on the very northern tip of Newfoundland in Canada, at L'Anse Aux Meadows. In the 1960s, archaeologists uncovered the foundations of 1,000-year-old Viking buildings, signs of metalworking, iron nails and artifacts. The site appeared to pre-date Columbus' voyages to the New World by some 500 years, confirming that Norse explorers had reached North America as suggested in the Vinland sagas. For more than 50 years, scientists have searched for another Norse site.

Using infrared images from 400 miles in space, Parcak and her team looked at tens of thousands of square kilometers along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. Images taken in Point Rosee revealed possible human-made shapes under discolored vegetation. This intriguing evidence suggests the Vikings traveled farther south than previously known. The Newfoundland project was co-directed by Gregory Mumford, Ph.D., Parcak's husband and professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Anthropology. Preliminary excavations took place over a period of two and a half weeks in June 2015.

Parcak recently made international headlines when she was named winner of the 2016 TED Prize. She is an expert in satellite remote sensing for archaeology and wrote the first textbook in the field. Her methods have helped locate 17 potential pyramids in Egypt, in addition to 3,100 forgotten settlements and 1,000 lost tombs. She has also made major discoveries throughout the Roman Empire. She is a National Geographic Senior Fellow, TED Senior Fellow and a professor of archaeology at UAB. Parcak is also the founder and director of the UAB Laboratory for Global Observation.

The discovery is the subject of a two-hour special called "Vikings Unearthed." The program will first stream online at pbs.org/nova Monday, April 4, at 2:30 p.m. CT to coincide with the premiere of a 90-minute version of the film in the U.K. on BBC One. A two-hour U.S. broadcast will follow Wednesday, April 6, at 8 p.m. CT on PBS.
The Prime Minister is doing the big sell for more foreign students to prop up under-funded public education and private education businesses, says New Zealand First.

Unsuspecting students from overseas are being used.
When Soul, a young white fox cub, met the other foxes at his sanctuary, he didn't quite fit in with the pack. "He's very social, but none of the other foxes like him. He comes on a little strong when he meets new people. He gets way up in their face and wags his tail," Maxine Baird, director of Georgia's A New Hope: Animal Sanctuary and Educational Center, told The Dodo. "We usually keep the dogs separate from the wildlife," she explained, "but we thought maybe it would be a good idea to introduce him to the dogs."

They brought in Home Girl, one of the dogs who lives at the sanctuary, to meet Soul through the fence. "It was puppy love at first sight," Baird said.

Dodo Shows Foster Diaries Guy Falls In Love With His Little Meatball Of A Foster Dog

"Soul was so excited - wagging his tail and jumping at the bars - that we decided to let them meet in person," Baird continued.

"As far as foxes like Soul, he couldn't survive in nature. He's too friendly."
<p>Australia for Dolphins</p>

Anyone who's watched the 2010 documentary "The Cove" knows about the horrific dolphin hunts that happen in Taiji, Japan. Each year, Japanese fishermen capture hundreds - if not thousands - of wild dolphins by chasing them with boats, and hitting metal poles with hammers to create a wall of sound that traps the dolphins. Once the hunters drive the dolphins into the cove, they slaughter them for their meat. The best-looking dolphins - that is, the ones who look like Flipper - are sold for large sums of money to dolphinariums, aquariums and swim-with-dolphin programs around the world. In January 2014, the hunters spotted a rare albino baby dolphin swimming with her mother in a pod of about 150 dolphins. Knowing this dolphin would be extremely valuable as an aquarium exhibit, they drove the pod into the killing cove and caught the albino baby in a net. The baby dolphin was then motored to the nearby Taiji Whale Museum, a place notorious for keeping marine mammals in tiny, chlorinated tanks.

Dodo Shows Foster Diaries Guy Falls In Love With His Little Meatball Of A Foster Dog

Australia for Dolphins

The albino dolphin - named Angel by activist Ric O'Barry - gained international coverage when she was first captured by the Taiji Whale Museum, and caused outrage from animal lovers concerned about her well-being. Representatives from Australia for Dolphins (AFD) tried to monitor Angel's condition in the museum, but museum officials denied them entry. With the support of Ric O'Barry, Save Japan Dolphins, and the Earth Island Institute, AFD filed a lawsuit against the Taiji Whale Museum for discriminating against westerners, and not giving them the same access to the museum as Japanese nationals. Now the judge has made a ruling in the activists' favor, and AFD has announced that this decision will aid the ongoing battle to have Angel relocated to a sea pen. Sarah Lucas, CEO of Australia for Dolphins, first visited Angel shortly after the dolphin's capture. Angel was initially kept in a small outdoor swimming pool, where she could do nothing but swim in small circles. "The most heart-wrenching thing was seeing her all alone," Lucas tells The Dodo. "I think it must have been so traumatic for her to be taken from her mother, and suddenly thrown into alien conditions. I felt very sad for her." Angel was eventually placed in an indoor tank with four or five other dolphins, but, as Lucas explains, this hasn't improved her welfare. "There's very little space," Lucas says. "In the wild Angel might have swum 100 kilometers [62 miles] in a day, but she now has to swim in awkward circles trying not to hit the edge of her tank. The tank is barren, and completely devoid of stimuli." Not surprisingly, Angel and her tankmates have become extremely frustrated. Lucas says that Angel has "rake" scars on her skin, probably from dominant male dolphins attacking her.

Australia for Dolphins advocacy director Jordan Sosnowski recently visited Angel, who came right up and put her face to the glass. | Australia for Dolphins
The summer of June 2013 should have been the happiest time of Jenn Eckert's life. After all, she was about a month and half away from getting married. She had also recently adopted a new pet. Eckert brought home a Flemish giant rabbit from the Wisconsin Humane Society and named her Betsy.

Besty all dolled up. | Jenn Eckert

Little did Eckert know, however, that Betsy would be there for her just when she needed comfort the most. That summer, Eckert's mother passed away, just before the wedding. "I was devastated. She was my best friend," Eckert told The Dodo. "I just laid on the couch and cried for days. But every day, Betsy would hop up on the couch and lie next to me. I didn't have her for long, but she knew I wasn't in a good place at that point."

Betsy and Eckert | Jenn Eckert

Eckert soon came to realize that, if Betsy was able to help her get through the ordeal of losing her mother, the rabbit had the ability to help others in need of emotional support as well. The difference between therapy and support animals That was when Eckert decided to make Betsy, who is now 3 years old, a therapy animal. The volunteer department of Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin, where Eckert worked at the time, directed her to the Pet Partners volunteer therapy animal program, the largest nonprofit organization for registered therapy animals in the U.S., to help get Betsy certified, which can happen in as quickly as a month, according to Eckert. Therapy animals are known to provide numerous benefits, from decreasing mental stress to increasing positive social behaviors for autistic children. Through Pet Partners, any pet is eligible to become a registered therapy animal, as long as the animal is one of nine species: dogs, horses, cats, rabbits, birds, llamas, alpacas, pigs and rats, according to Mandy Pleshaw, a marketing, public relations and social media coordinator at Pet Partners.

Dodo Shows Faith = Restored Rescued Animals Melt Into This Woman's Arms When She Sings To Them

Jenn Eckert

Last year, 112 rabbits were registered as therapy animals with Pet Partners, compared to 12,976 dogs, the most common therapy animals in the program. Both pet and handler must go through a series of evaluations and training. A therapy animal, which is what Eckert was wanted for Betsy, is trained to interact with people on a less personal basis than support animals, who are trained to care for one specific person with special needs every day, according to Pleshaw. An example of the latter is a blind individual who owns a seeing eye dog.

Health Heelers/Jenn Eckert

On the other hand, it would be common for a therapy animal to visit hospitals and provide emotional comfort to terminally ill children in a ward. Passing the evaluations The first step to pet therapy registration was for Eckert to take an online pet handler's course, where she would learn how to approach a patient, what to say to them and how to interact with them in various situations, while still ensuring Betsy's safety, Eckert said. One can imagine how important the latter could be in certain situations - for example, if an animal had to engage with a group of children who might be loud or unpredictable. Along the way, Eckert adopted a second Flemish giant from the Humane Society in December 2013 and named him Walter. Now 2 years old, Walter had been abused prior to his arrival at Eckert's home. At first, he was fearful of people, choosing instead to hide, said Eckert.

A scared Walter, taken when Eckert first met him at the shelter in December 2013. | Jenn Eckert

Slowly, he learned to trust people again and soon flourished into a social butterfly. "I [recently] had surgery and he would actually hop up and lay on my chest because he knew I was sick," Eckert said.

Walter comforting Eckert post-surgery. | Jenn Eckert

That's when she knew Walter was ready to become a therapy rabbit alongside Betsy. Eckert helped prepare Walter for the life of a therapy rabbit by taking him outside on walks, allowing him to get used to encountering different people. Now, Walter loves hopping up to strangers and nudging their ankles for head pats.

Walter loving the attention. | Jenn Eckert

After Eckert passed her online course, she had to get both of her rabbits medically cleared by a veterinarian. A therapy animal must be in good health, up to date on shots and tested to make sure he or she is free of any diseases that could be passed from animals to humans - for example, rabies. The final step in the therapy pet certification process is a thorough in-person evaluation of both animal and handler. Eckert said it's usually conducted by Pet Partners staff or personnel from another local organization deemed appropriate by Pet Partners. During the evaluation, the animal and his or her handler is asked to respond to several real-life scenarios that might occur while on the job, in locations like a hospital or nursing home. Eckert's evaluation covered everything from how her rabbits might react to rough petting to how they would respond to loud people, wheelchairs and dogs.

Health Heelers/Jenn Eckert

Each evaluation is tailored to the animal's species, according to Pleshaw. Additionally, owners are expected to train their pets beforehand. For example, according to Pleshaw, handlers should ensure their pet understands basic obedience commands and can follow those commands perfectly upon evaluation time. Therapy animals also need to show that they're comfortable with the demands of therapy work. "If we do see fear in an animal, they're simply not comfortable and that's when we step in," Pleshaw said. "These animals are doing such good work that we want to make sure the pet wants it as much as the handler." Plewshaw said what Pet Partners staff members look for, when evaluating rabbits in particular, are their temperaments. "We need to determine if they're comfortable being handled by numerous people," she said.

Health Heelers/Jenn Eckert

Once the animal passes this final exam, paperwork and registration follow, leading to the official registration of a pet with Pet Partners. From there, handlers are able to join animal therapy programs in their area or can even start their own service. Today, Walter and Betsy both provide individuals in need with emotional support at nursing homes, universities and more. Betsy was certified through Pet Partners in 2013, while Walter was certified earlier this month. The future of therapy rabbits One frustrating reality of Ecker's volunteer work is the fact that she often has trouble taking her therapy rabbits into hospitals to visit patients. Wisconsin laws dictate that hospitals in the state only allow for therapy cats and dogs to visit - but oddly enough, not rabbits.

Ronald McDonald House/Jenn Eckert

"I visit the Ronald McDonald House here in Milwaukee, and there was a little girl who had [met] Betsy [there]," Eckert said. Eckert had posted photos of Betsy at the Ronald McDonald House on Facebook afterward and said the little girl's mother had reached out to her, saying how upset her daughter was that she could no longer see Betsy because she was at the hospital, where Betsy was barred from entering.

Health Heelers/Jenn Eckert

"My thought is, if I can get the word out there about how great therapy rabbits are, more people would consider getting rabbits and having them certified," she said. "It would become more common, hopefully allowing me to get into the doors of children's hospitals." All of Eckert's therapy work is strictly volunteer, but she said she feels incredibly grateful to do it.

Jenn and Walter | Jenn Eckert

"One of my first times going to the Ronald McDonald house, there was a little boy, he must have been 2," she said. "He had a feeding tube and his face just lit up when he saw Betsy. He started jumping up and down and clapping," she said. "It was like, this is why I do this. That moment right there." You can read more about Walter and Betsy's amazing friendship here.


Beverly Cleary in 2006. The beloved childrens author turns 100 on April 12. Although the nation will be celebrating, her plans for the day are decidedly low-key. (Copyright Christina Koci Hernandez/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis)

Beverly Cleary doesnt really want to talk about turning 100. Go ahead and fuss, she says of the big day, April 12. Everyone else is.

Across the country, people are delving into Cleary nostalgia, with celebrations and new editions of her books with introductions by the likes of Amy Poehler and Judy Blume. Kids and adults are being asked to Drop Everything and Read to commemorate Clearys contribution to childrens literature.

But the beloved childrens author has something far more low-key in mind for herself: a celebratory slice of carrot cake, she says, because I like it.

Cleary is as feisty and direct as her famously spirited character Ramona Quimby  an observation that she hears often and doesnt care for. I thought like Ramona, she says in a phone interview, but I was a very well-

behaved little girl.

Today, Cleary lives a quiet, well-behaved life in a retirement home in Northern California. She gets up at 7:30 a.m. and spends the day reading the newspaper and books (on her night stand when we talked in mid-March: Alexandra Fullers Dont Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight) and doing crossword puzzles. She watches Doc Martin and CNN and enjoys visits with her family. She doesnt have a computer, and though she enjoys writing letters, she notes dryly that when you get to be 99, there arent many people to write letters to.

[Kate DiCamillo on Ramona and reading]

Cleary is both set in her ways  I dont think I joined this century  and keenly aware of how times have changed. I think children today have a tough time, because they dont have the freedom to run around as I did  and they have so many scheduled activities.

In her youth, she points out, mothers did not work outside the home; they worked on the inside. And because all the mothers were home  99 percent of them, anyway  all mothers kept their eyes on all the children. This is part of the reason, she says, that the children in her books were so often out tromping through the neighborhood without adult chaperones.

Clearys last book was Ramonas World, published in 1999. Her plucky heroine remains frozen at age 9; her sister, Beezus, is 14 and just entering high school. Who knows what Ramona might have been like when she hit puberty. Cleary, for one, is happy to leave her before that nightmare. I think writers need to know when to retire, she says.

Yet Clearys books live on. In January, HarperCollins published new editions of three of her most popular works: Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and The Mouse and the Motorcycle, with introductions by Blume, Poehler and Kate DiCamillo, respectively. There are more than 40 Cleary titles in print, and you can even watch Selena Gomez and Joey King play her two most famous characters in the 2010 movie Beezus and Ramona.



(Courtesy of HarperCollins)

(Courtesy of HarperCollins)

Cleary has won a National Book Award, a Newbery Medal and a National Medal of Art from the National Endowment of the Arts, among other accolades. In 2000, the Library of Congress gave her a Living Legend Award.

Yet she wears her literary stardom lightly. Im just lucky, she says. Throwing zingers  People tell me I dont look a day over 80; Dont expect me to analyze my books!  shes both modest and outspoken.

Perhaps these qualities are a product of her upbringing. Born Beverly Bunn in rural Oregon, she spent much of her early life doing farm work. When her family moved to Portland, she says, city life was a shock.

Although her mother read to her regularly, she wasnt always eager to read on her own. I liked to have her read to me, she says. So I thought, whats the point in my having to do it myself?

She nearly failed first grade, she says, and didnt read on her own until third grade. Even then, it happened organically: I was looking through The Dutch Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins, she recalls, and I discovered I was reading  and enjoyed it.

[Beverly Cleary: Ramona Forever]

Cleary long yearned to be a writer  a passion she explains eloquently in her memoirs A Girl from Yamhill (1988) and My Own Two Feet (1995)  but she met resistance from her mother, who told her, You must have some other way of earning a living, Cleary recalls. So I became a childrens librarian  the next best thing.



(Courtesy of HarperCollins)

(Courtesy of HarperCollins)

During the Depression, Cleary attended Chaffey Junior College in Ontario, Calif., where tuition was free. To help pay for the rest of her education, at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Washington, she worked a variety of jobs  including as a seamstress and a chambermaid.

She struggled through her classes with poor eyesight; her mother denied her money for glasses because she feared it would spoil her daughters appearance. Eventually, her mother relented  to no ill effect on Beverlys love life. In 1940, she eloped, marrying her longtime sweetheart Clarence Cleary, who died in 2004.

Clearys first book, Henry Huggins, was published in 1950. Based loosely on a story she had overheard while working at a military hospital library, the book (originally titled Spareribs and Henry) came slowly. And it was, at first, rejected by her publisher. As Cleary reworked it, she added Beezus and Ramona  the latter a name she heard being called out by a neighbor  to the mix.

Her own children  twins Marianne and Malcolm  born five years later, inspired the book Mitch and Amy and even helped shape that story.

My son pointed out that you cannot ride a bike with a banana in your hip pocket, she says. So I did take that out. I didnt want my character to have a squashed banana in his pocket.

As she approaches 100, Cleary still talks about her characters as if they are friends. Even if she doesnt want to be compared to Ramona, she confesses that the spitfire is her favorite. The charming and better-behaved Ellen Tebbits is a close second. She would have both girls over to dinner, she says, but not at the same time.

Ramona, she says, has to some degree been misunderstood. Its not that shes naughty, Cleary says, its that things just didnt work out the way she thought they should. But for her creator, things pretty much have.

I live in a very pleasant place with a very nice room that looks out on trees and rabbits and birds, she says. She has her books, her newspaper, her family and her memories. Bring on the carrot cake.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. A new report said associates of Putin have moved as much as $2 billion through offshore accounts. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool photo via Reuters)

An international collection of journalists published a report Sunday on the financial activities of a dozen current and former world leaders that said associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin have moved as much as $2 billion through offshore accounts.

The report is based on a data leak of 11.5 million records for 214,488 entities connected to people in more than 200 countries or territories. The leak includes emails, financial spreadsheets, passport information and corporate records. It spans nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015.

The records came from a Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca & Co. The firm specializes in setting up companies that allow businesses and individuals to move money offshore and has offices in 35 cities around the world, including in Hong Kong, Miami and Zurich.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists produced the report along with the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations.

In the largest media collaboration ever undertaken, journalists working in more than 25 languages dug into Mossack Fonsecas inner workings and traced the secret dealings of the law firms customers around the world, the report said. They shared information and hunted down leads generated by the leaked files using corporate filings, property records, financial disclosures, court documents and interviews with money laundering experts and law-enforcement officials.

The "Panama Papers" consist of 11.5 million documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The papers apparently implicate a number of high-profile global figures in potentially illegal financial activities. (Deirdra O'Regan/The Washington Post)

The consortium said it will release the full list of companies and individuals identified in the data in early May.

Many people use the offshore world for legitimate purposes, to set up legal tax shelters or clear the way for international business deals. U.S. citizens are allowed to move money offshore, but they must report the account information to the Internal Revenue Service. Disclosure laws vary around the world.

The consortiums report emphasized that most of the services of the offshore industry are legal if used by the law abiding. But the documents show that banks, law firms and other offshore players have often failed to follow legal requirements that they make sure their clients are not involved in criminal enterprises, tax dodging or political corruption.

Mossack Fonseca did not respond to requests seeking comment from The Washington Post. In a statement to the consortium, Mossack Fonseca said it does not foster or promote illegal acts. The firm said allegations that we provide shareholders with structures supposedly designed to hide the identity of the real owners are completely unsupported and false.

Mossack Fonseca also said it follows both the letter and spirit of the law. Because we do, we have not once in nearly 40 years of operation been charged with criminal wrongdoing.

The firm declined to discuss individual cases to maintain client confidentiality.

The report said an analysis of the leaked documents found that more than 500 banks and their affiliates have worked with Mossack Fonseca since the 1970s to help clients manage offshore companies.

A leak of 11 million documents from the database of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca allegedly shows high profile tax evasion and money laundering among the world's elite. The photo shows the building where Mossack Fonseca is located in Panama City. (Alejandro Bolivar/EPA)

The consortium has been examining offshore accounts based on separate leaks of data for four years, publishing with media partners that have included The Post, the New York Times and 60 Minutes.

The group said the Mossack Fonseca data dramatically expand on previous leaks of offshore records. For the latest disclosures, reporters at Suddeutsche Zeitung in February 2015 obtained millions of records from a confidential source, sharing them with the consortium and its media partners.

The report said the documents uncovered a money trail that came uncomfortably close to Putin.

In February 2011, a firm in the British Virgin Islands loaned $200 million to a firm in Cyprus, according to the report. The British Virgin Island firm assigned the rights to collect payments on the loan to another British Virgin Islands company. That firm then reassigned the rights to a Panamanian company.

The report said the first British Virgin Islands firm was established by a bank in St. Petersburg whose majority owner and chairman is close to Putin. The Panamanian company involved in the transactions was controlled by one of Putins oldest friends, the report said.

The $200 million loan was one of dozens of transactions totaling at least $2 billion found in the Mossack Fonseca files involving people or companies linked to Putin, the report said.

The Kremlin did not answer questions posed by the consortium, but on March 28, it publicly accused the group of preparing a misleading information attack on Putin and people close to him.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that the government would not respond to honey-worded queries from the consortium or its partners because the questions have been asked hundreds of times and answered hundreds of times, the report said.

The consortium also said it uncovered documents that showed the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, and his wife shared ownership in an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands four years before he took office. The report said that the company held bonds worth millions of dollars in three Icelandic banks that failed in 2008. Gunnlaugsson was then a member of Parliament. He became prime minister in 2013.

Gunnlaugssons wife said in a Facebook post that the account was hers and that she had paid taxes on it; she also denied any wrongdoing. Her husband said in a recent radio interview that it is not a tax haven if all assets were declared in the home country, as my wife has done.

The report also shed light on a British gold heist that had been dubbed the Crime of the Century.

On Nov. 26, 1983, robbers stole nearly 7,000 gold bars from the Brinks-Mat warehouse at Londons Heathrow Airport, along with cash and diamonds. The gold was smelted and sold; much of the money was never recovered.

The consortium report cited an internal Mossack Fonseca memo that said one of the principals of a Panamanian company set up by Mossack Fonseca 16 months after the robbery was apparently involved in the management of the money from the famous theft from Brinks-Mat in London. The company itself has not been used illegally, but it could be that the company invested money through the bank accounts and properties that was illegitimately sourced.

A spokesman for Mossack Fonseca said that any allegations that the firm helped conceal money from the Brinks-Mat heist are entirely false.


Judges sample waters at the 26th Annual Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., on Feb. 27. From left: Marla Pisciotta, Michael Cervin, M. Carrie Allan, Andrew Springer, Whitney Pipkin. (Jeanne Mozier)

In any acquisition of knowledge, there is the acquisition of dissatisfaction.

Thats what I found myself thinking at the 26th Annual Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting in February as I stared down a line of glasses, each one filled with tap water from a different municipality. As I raised each glass to my face, occasionally detecting scents or flavors of chlorine, iron, sulfur, I knew Id never again be able to respond to a waiters Sparkling? Still? with a glib Tap is fine. Water is water, I once might have said, but not anymore: This is yet another arena where Ive learned too much.

[Trumps Towering Inferno, the Bernie Bees Knees and other cocktails inspired by the presidential candidates]

I went to West Virginia to participate in the water tasting  in which judges assess tap, purified and bottled waters from around the world  because Id been wanting to dive into the issue of water in cocktails, in part after Id heard that the Columbia Room, Derek Browns reopened cocktail haven in Shaw, would be bringing in specialty waters to pair with particular spirits.

Specialty waters? It was the sort of thing that my inner proletariat might once have pooh-poohed as the height of elitist cocktail cockamamie  if not for our former refrigerator.

That malevolent appliance polluted my cocktails for months. From the day of its installation, it made everything inside it smell a little like fish. Especially my ice. Cleaning it out, scrubbing it down: Nothing helped. Though my drinks were loaded with premium spirits and fresh juices, none of that mattered: Id get codmopolitans and tuna coladas. I took to sealing my ice trays in plastic bags before freezing, then rinsing the cubes before using them.

It made me more aware of the impact water can have on a cocktail. In my case, the fridge was at fault, but sometimes its a taint from a faulty pipe or from the chemical treatment the municipality has performed to make the water safe. (Theres a reason one of the most common complaints about tap water involves a hint of swimming pool.) Given that a properly diluted and chilled drink can be one-quarter or more water, if your water has issues, so will your cocktails.

If youre in Clearbrook, B.C., or Eldorado Springs, Colo., youre probably good with water straight from your taps; your municipal waters took top spots in our judging. But even among the waters entered in the municipal category  waters that, I assume, were submitted by cities proud of whats coming out of their taps  we tasted distinct off-notes. They were a clear signal that even those who arent stuck with a Fridge of Fishification may be having H 2 -Oh-nos; and they showed the dramatic differences possible in tap water, making me less inclined to scoff at the idea that some wonderful waters out there might have me floating off to bliss.



If you leave your ice exposed, it can pick up off-flavors in the freezer that it passes on to your cocktail. (Michael Temchine/For The Washington Post)

When we sat down for a tasting recently, the Columbia Rooms head bartender, JP Fetherston, acknowledged the guffaw that artisanal waters might induce. On occasion, he has perfected a cocktail spec (using the bars good ice) and then made it at an event later (using ice supplied by the venue), and it hasnt turned out the same. And he is experienced with spirits tastings, where water is regularly used to bring out flavors in whiskeys and other drinks. But still, he says, when it came to specialty waters, probably my first initial instinct was  he blows a raspberry  come on.

Even now we still feel quite ludicrous, though we do think theres credence to it, he said. It seems over the top at first, but then you taste the result, and there are just massive, massive differences.

After trying a Four Roses bourbon with a splash of Old Limestone Mixing Water, I was a convert: The spirit that, neat, had been all vanilla-caramels, spice, pepper and oak was suddenly bursting with fruit  over-the-top notes of apricot, cherry and even pineapple. Pairing a Glenlivet with a lower-mineral-content water from Speyside Glenlivet produced a subtler but still noticeable effect. (Both mixing waters can be ordered online.)

Old Limestone Water, which is drawn and bottled underground in Kentucky and has a velvety texture and a distinct flavor of calcium, was conceived after a tap water ruined company president Doug Keeneys bourbon. I was with a bunch of my guys at the bar, and we were having some Woodford, he says, and I added a splash and I looked at the bartender and I said, This tastes terrible. Whats going on? and he said, Yeah, its the water.

[Chocolatinis are terrible. Heres the right way to get drunk with chocolate.]

According to Keeney, Kentuckys limestone-filtered water  the qualities of which, many would argue, are why the vast majority of bourbon is made in the state  is not whats coming out of most Kentucky taps. Much of the states tap water is sourced from the Ohio River and undergoes treatments similar to those of most municipal tap waters. And although water treatments usually make tap water safe, safe is not always the same as tasty.

Adding any water to any whiskey will affect the flavor; much of the effect has to do with taking off a bit of the burn of the alcohol, letting your palate experience more of the subtleties of the spirit. Whether particular waters do particular things to particular spirits will probably depend partly on your palate but also on the water itself. Is the water low or high in mineral content? How do its flavors interact with and enhance the flavor of the spirit? The waters that the Columbia Room is bringing in, after all, came trickling out of the same geologies as the water that went into the whisk(e)ys theyre being paired with.

Even if the thought of ordering artisanal water makes you roll your eyes, you may still want to protect your drinks from water pollution. As a newly certified water taster (an advanced, prestigious certification I acquired in 30 minutes of training in Berkeley Springs), I offer some tasting tips I learned from moderator and water master Arthur von Wiesenberger, who must be the most hydrated man on the planet.

Dont smoke, drink or eat a bunch of vindaloo before you conduct a taste test. Run your tap on cold (water heaters apparently can affect flavors) for at least a minute to clear the pipes. Run the water into a clean, residue-free wineglass, then give it three short sniffs. Taste it, noting flavor, mouth feel and any aftereffects (a taste or residue left in your mouth). What do you think? Do you want more of it? Does it taste saline, chemical? Does it taste like fish have been spawning in it? (You think Im kidding, but guppy water was among the terms that we learned might apply to bad water.)



Judges at the 26th Annual Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting named Clearbrook, B.C.s water the best municipal water in the world; H2O from Eldorado Springs, Colo., was the best in the United States. (Jeanne Mozier)

Even if your tap water tastes like the dew on an angels wing, that will mean nothing if you freeze it and it picks up stale or off-notes from the food its sitting next to. Fetherston says he regularly advises home bartenders to fill their ice molds and then seal them in airtight containers to protect them from scent invasion.

In the wake of what has happened in Flint, Mich., Ive found this brief hydrological education galling. I actively resist the idea of becoming a snob over the very substance that enables existence  that makes up more than half of my own body  when people in our own country cant safely drink out of their taps and when people in other parts of the world face deadly parasites in their water supply or long journeys to acquire the water they need for their families, crops and herds.

Nonetheless, you cant un-know something, as Fetherston understands all too well. Hes getting married soon, and the venue is a restaurant on the Rappahannock River. And for some reason, the water they serve there is super salty. I assume its because its coming from the Rappahannock, and its kind of interesting because youre like, Oh, I can kind of taste the oysters in this glass of water, he says. But its very brackish. And now Im worried: Is that the water thatll be in our punches?

Thankfully, Fetherston is marrying someone in the industry who knows good drinks. So if he has to be the guy who shows up at his wedding announcing that he has brought his own ice, shell probably understand.

Allan is a Hyattsville, Md., writer and editor. Follow her on Twitter: @Carrie_the_Red.


(Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post)

Collaborations are all the rage in the beer world. In February, Devils Backbone released a 12-pack of beers brewed in conjunction with breweries from across the country. This month, DC Brau marks its fifth anniversary with five beers created in partnership with Austin Beerworks, Cigar City and other craft brewers.

Earlier this year, Baltimores Heavy Seas Beer announced it was launching a new quarterly series of collaborations called Partner Ships. The first one, available now in stores and bars, finds Heavy Seas paired with Maine Beer, the winner of this years Beer Madness competition. Wisely, and a bit predictably, the two breweries crafted a copper-colored Red IPA that shows off the best-known sides of each brewery: Maines hop-forward ales and Heavy Seas love of traditional malty, more English-style ales.

The resulting beer has plenty of grapefruit peel and orange hop notes, but those are balanced by a toasty, toffeelike body and lingering citrus in the finish.

Spring is a busy time for local breweries; find more new releases at goingoutguide.com/bars.

Heavy Seas + Maine Beer Partner Ships Red IPA. hsbeer.com. Expect to pay around $8 for a 22-ounce bottle.
Dear Amy: My dear adult son (in his 30s) recently invited me to meet his new girlfriend of two months. He seems to be over the moon about her.

We had a cordial meal, then shopped a bit. My sons girlfriend admired some glittery material on sale, and then I happened to catch her slipping a small amount of it into my sons pocket without paying for it, as we all stood together.

He did not object.

I am shocked and dismayed. It is quite obvious that she has the funds to purchase such an item. To date, he has not asked my opinion of her.

Should I discuss this with my son, or is this a minor offense to be forgotten? I know you have previously advised not giving an opinion when one is not requested, but this raises a red flag for me.

Saddened

Saddened: I dont think this is necessarily a minor offense, and, yes, if it is true that your son helped his girlfriend steal this material from a store, then hasnt your estimation of him taken a hit? If a security officer nabbed them leaving the store, surely the consequences would fall to your son, who was carrying this stolen material in his pocket.

And so, while you may not want to weigh in on your sons girlfriends character unless you are asked, perhaps you should say to your son: Did I see what I thought I saw in the store? Did you really walk out with something without paying for it? What. The. Heck. Thats not cool. Not cool at all.

Dear Amy: I am a 14-year-old girl and I have a best guy friend. He is really sweet. I am an only child, so I always thought of him as a brother.

He asked me out a month ago by text, and I politely declined. I said I like him as a friend. I also told him I think Im too young to date.

A few weeks ago, my friend and I were planning to go to the mall. He hasnt texted or called me since then, and I decided after a few unanswered texts and calls that it would be best to stop and wait for him to text me. I want him to be able to stop his feelings for me, so we can continue to be friends. He hasnt replied, even when I knew he read it from the message receipt.

Now he very rarely texts me, and if I text him first, he makes up an excuse to leave the conversation. I would really love to keep him as a friend, but is it already a lost cause?

Sad in San Diego

Sad: When you develop a crush on someone, you cant always control your feelings, and so while you would like for your friend to pivot away from his crush and dive right back into your friendship, you have basically rejected him. Even though you were super nice about it, it was still a rejection, and hes going to feel it for a while. It might be easier for him to hang with you in a group setting versus one on one.

Please dont give up on your pal. Continue to reach out in friendship, and he may drift slowly back. Friendships between boys and girls are sometimes challenging, but these friendships are incredibly valuable.

Dear Amy: About four years ago, my ex-girlfriend, knowing I read your column every day, wrote to you about me. It was a letter where she said the relationship had ended, and she had left some things at my house that were not gifts. She wrote to you and asked, What do I do?

You said, Call him, say youre sorry the relationship ended and tell him you would like to pick up your stuff. You suggested she just ask for what she wanted and be honest.

It worked great. I got a call two days later from her, saying just what you suggested.

Of course, I gave her all of her stuff and a sincere hug goodbye.

Rob, in Morgan Hill

Rob: Im often curious about how things turn out for people, and so I appreciate you writing to let me know. Honestly, the problem presented  and my advice  doesnt seem like rocket science, but Im happy to have offered this common sense solution, and further happy that she followed it.

Write to Amy Dickinson at askamy@tribune.com or Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.
Krisha Fairchild stars in Krisha, Trey Edward Shultss audacious, disquieting drama about a drug addict who has drifted in and out of recovery. (A24 Films via AP)

One of the splashiest arrivals on the art-house circuit this year has been Krisha, Trey Edward Shultss audacious, disquieting directorial debut, playing at Landmarks West End Cinema.

In the film, Shults plunges audiences into a disastrous Thanksgiving celebration, as the title character  a drug addict who has drifted in and out of recovery  returns to her Texas family and descends into a painful, protracted relapse.

Drawing inspiration from John Cassavetes and Shultss mentor, Terrence Malick, as well as real-life family members who died from substance abuse (the title character is played by the filmmakers aunt, Krisha Fairchild), Shults draws the viewers eyes and ears in and out of his heroines experience with a combination of expanding and tightening aspect ratios and a sound design that reflects her increasingly disoriented state.

As impressive as Krisha is as an example of bold, expressionistic filmmaking and a bravura lead performance, it is no doubt raising questions with some viewers who, with the films denouement in little doubt from the get-go, might wonder why theyve been privy to such a demoralizing episode in the life of a woman at her most vulnerable. Ultimately, Krisha confronts the audience with a defining tension of spectatorship: When do we cease being compassionate observers  secret sharers of a characters hidden pain and vulnerability  and when do we merely become voyeurs?

With its fictional framework and obvious cinematic flourishes, Krisha imposes enough distance that viewers can assure themselves theyre watching a performance, not literal human suffering. But two nonfiction films arriving over the next several weeks, fresh from the festival circuit, take questions of spectatorship and voyeurism to new, discomfiting levels.

Roberto Minervinis The Other Side, about a downtrodden community in rural Louisiana, presents an unnerving portrait of poverty, drug addiction and inchoate white rage. Shot through with stomach-churning imagery of cyclical self-destruction, what Minervini has called a portrait of the bastard stepchildren of the American Dream could be the feature-film adaptation of Kevin Williamsons recent essay for National Review, in which he took pitiless aim at the dysfunction and negligence  and the incomprehensible malice  of poor white America.

The Other Side made its world premiere at Cannes last May, allowing critics and cineastes there to bask in the cruel irony of beholding the artfully photographed American lumpenproletariat just steps away from the sparkling French Riviera. Such are the contradictions that animate a major subgenre of art cinema, determined to renounce reassurance and uplift in favor of making its complacent audience squirm.

There are moments in The Other Side that inspire gratitude for confronting viewers with the most unsettling truths of an American subculture largely kept out of view. There are others when the raw candor of Minervinis images feels intrusive, opportunistic and tantamount to turning over a rock simply to see whats writhing underneath. (The Other Side, which hasnt been scheduled to open in Washington, will have its U.S. premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Centers Art of the Real documentary series in May.)

Theoretically, these same issues should make Khalik Allahs Field Niggas just as problematic  even more so, considering the title. A poetic, mesmerizingly immersive documentary about a group of homeless African Americans who regularly hang out on a Harlem street corner, Field Niggas  whose title derives from Malcolm Xs 1963 speech Message to the Grassroots  can be difficult to watch, not only because Allah captures so much pain and helplessness, but because the viewer is sometimes unsure what his aims are.

More than once as the film has made its way on the international screening circuit, Allah has encountered questions about his ethics. One audience member in London decried the presentation of black bodies presented as spectacle, at their most vulnerable and denigrated. Another wondered if Field Niggas wasnt another instance of poverty porn, artfully packaged for the delectation of privileged, mostly white art-house audiences.

Those same questions will most likely arise when Field Niggas makes its local debut at George Mason University on Tuesday. And, just as likely, Allah will field them with his characteristic blend of bull-headed directness and spiritually minded compassion. As he has explained at previous screenings, he had spent three years with the subjects of Field Niggas, photographing and befriending them long before he started to film. His goal, once he turned the camera on, was to create a family photo album for the homeless, not a festival-circuit darling.

In fact, Field Niggas was intended to be seen only by Allahs family and friends until programmers at the True/False Film Festival discovered it last year.

Allah was still reeling during the question-and-answer session after the films premiere at the festival in Columbia, Mo., simultaneously abashed at his newfound success and adamant that his presentation of street life  its disorder, desperation, mental illness and drug addiction  be seen as a portrait made from the inside out, rather than mere objectification.

The fact is that Field Niggas makes a powerful claim for the dignity and visibility of its subjects, even as it travels to precincts far outside their purview. What could have been an example of ethnographic documentary at its most patronizing instead becomes an opportunity for radical engagement  thanks to Allahs reflexive eye for humor, pathos and beauty, his willingness to interact unguardedly with his subjects on-screen, and a nonsynchronized sound design that demands more of the audience than passive onlooking.

Its the accumulation of these formal choices  as well as Allahs passionate presence when he screens his film for audiences  that elevates Field Niggas from poverty porn or pity party and into the realm of bearing witness, the very definition of art. Voyeurism, after all, stops at the act of watching. To go deeper, a film needs to look, listen and maybe even love.

Field Niggas will be shown at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday at the George Mason University Johnson Center Cinema, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax. Filmmaker Khalik Allah will answer questions after the free screening.
What does political correctness mean exactly? Television news leaves the impression that the term has a negative connotation, but the commentators dont say why. When I ran into a bit of it in a third-grade textbook recently, I was left wondering.

The book is Our World Far & Wide by Joy Masoff. It is a thin, well-illustrated volume closely tied to the Virginia Standards of Learning. It introduces 8-year-olds to historys great civilizations. This is a laudable goal, but it gets tricky when its exposed to modern sensibilities.

Last month, I defended the book against Hans Bader, an Arlington parent who thought it gave a distorted view of several historical topics, including the importance of the ancient empire of Mali. I bought a copy of the textbook and wrote that Bader was wrong to say that it equated the Mali Empire with Greece and Rome.

[Is a history textbook full of sugar-coated lies because it celebrates minorities?]

On Page 5, the book said ancient Greece and Rome were two mighty civilizations that have left big marks on the way we live. The Mali Empire, dating from about 1230 to 1600, was not mentioned until Page 12. The book said it was just one of the worlds great empires, not in the same league with the two Mediterranean megacultures.

But Bader and I discovered after the column appeared that I was wrong to criticize his account. The book he had seen his daughter use was a different edition. My book was published in 2005. His daughters was published in 2010. The later textbook had unaccountably elevated Mali to Greco-Roman status.

Three mighty civilizations  ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and the empire of Mali  have each made important contributions to the way we live right now, the later version said. The next two sentences were almost the same as in my earlier edition: We live in a land of freedom and democracy because of the ideas of ancient Greeks and Romans. We build strong bridges and buildings using designs they created more than a thousand years ago.

Then came a sentence that did not appear in my edition: Many of these ideas were kept safe in the great libraries of Mali in Africa at a time when Europe was living through terrible times.

I asked Masoff, the author, what happened. I wish I could tell you definitively why the change was made, she said in an email. We were getting a lot of suggestions from various and sundry educators. I know there were new standards issued at that time, and my recollection is that we made that slight change because teachers asked us to.

The Virginia standards mandated that Mali be included in third-grade textbooks, along with Greece and Rome, because it was felt that students needed to be aware that Africa, too, had several important civilizations, Masoff said. It seems likely to me that someone was uncomfortable with Malis secondary status in the first edition, so it got bumped up in the rewrite.

The books facts appear to be accurate. Timbuktu in Mali had important libraries then. They helped preserve classical documents, as did similar institutions in other parts of the world. Yet it is hard to see a reason, other than a desire for continental balance in elementary school history, for putting that interesting African epoch on a par with two civilizations so important to our culture, politics, art and language.

This fits my definition of political correctness. Im not fretting over it. Im glad children are getting more lessons on Africa than I had at that age. I want them to get a sense of the whole world.

But the sudden promotion of Mali seems clumsy to me. History isnt a basketball tournament. Textbook writers would do better to say more about what each culture did that was important and less about who made the final four, final three, final two or whatever.
Greg and Carin Miller, shown in their kitchen in Mt. Airy, Md., have four grown children, including one who has battled an addiction to heroin and is 17 months clean. Greg has also be battling an addiction to pain killers. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and the Democratic-controlled legislature are weighing options for tackling the fast-growing heroin epidemic that has taken root across the state and throughout the country.

Many of the solutions focus on loosening criminal penalties for drug offenses and shifting more money  including the potential prison savings  to treatment and rehabilitation programs.

The efforts have drawn praise from experts, including Joshua Sharfstein, the physician who served as state health director under Hogans predecessor, Martin OMalley (D). But they are viewed with skepticism by some advocates, who want the state to immediately and significantly expand long-term residential treatment.

The debate comes as the White House and Congress are taking steps to address opioid addiction, which has also been a nagging theme on the presidential campaign trail. In March, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to create grants to expand drug-abuse treatment and awareness programs; encourage medical providers to reduce unnecessary prescriptions; and expand access to overdose-reversal drugs. President Obama said last week that he would propose $1.1 billion in his 2017 budget to boost treatment at community health centers.

There are steps that can be taken that will help people battle through addiction and get on to the other side, he said at an Atlanta summit on prescription drug and heroin abuse. And right now thats under-resourced.

Greg Miller shows the anti-withdraw medication he takes to manage his painkiller addiction. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

[Drug abuse in the spotlight this campaign season]

Heroin-related deaths in Maryland climbed to 527 through September of last year, more than triple the total from the same period in 2010, according to the latest data available from the state health department. By comparison, there were a combined 378 cocaine- and alcohol-related deaths during the first three quarters of 2015.

Unlike in the past, when heroin was largely isolated to the inner city, the drug has steadily crept into the suburbs as a cheaper and sometimes more accessible alternative to prescription painkillers that offer a similar high. Heroin-related deaths increased to 33 in Montgomery County and 27 in Prince Georges County through September 2015, roughly doubling in both cases compared with 2010.

The spikes arent limited to heroin. Fatal overdoses of the synthetic opiate fentanyl, which heroin dealers often add to increase the potency of their products, also have exploded. There were 184 fentanyl-related deaths in Maryland in the first nine months of 2015  eight times the number from the same period in 2013.

A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in October showed that nearly 3 in 10 Marylanders have a close friend or family member who was or is addicted to opioids.

The bills pending in Maryland include broad criminal-justice legislation that, among other things, would direct many nonviolent drug offenders to treatment rather than prison. Sen. Bobby A. Zirkin (D-Baltimore County), chairman of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, said the resulting savings in prison costs could help pay for an expansion of rehabilitation services  an idea that has bipartisan support.

Some advocates, however, are skeptical that the state would actually do that. Michael Gimbel, a former Baltimore County drug czar, said he thinks the government is more likely to use prison savings for other corrections programs or spread it throughout the state budget.

To think theyre going to take justice money and put it into community drug treatment is a joke, said Gimbel, a former addict himself.

Zirkin acknowledged that there are no guarantees of where the savings would be directed. Theyre correct in their concern, he said of Gimbel and other advocates. The legislature doesnt control the budget, but we can mandate spending through policy, and thats what were trying to do.

[How Md. could save money with prison reform]

Hogan, who lost a cousin to a heroin overdose, has proposed $3 million in new spending next year to support addiction treatment in prisons and $2.3 million to slightly increase the reimbursement rate for providers of substance abuse treatment, with the goal of attracting and retaining more workers in the field.

Last year, the governor released more than $2 million to increase access to treatment in Western Maryland and on the Eastern Shore, boosted police efforts to disrupt drug trafficking and launched a public awareness campaign about the dangers of addiction. The state also authorized pharmacists to dispense an overdose-reversal drug to people trained and certified through the states Overdose Response Program.

The administration is funding a lot of treatment and is going to be spending more, but it cant be the only tool in our toolbox, Hogan spokesman Doug Mayer said.

Measures pending in the legislature would create a database to track potential abuse of painkiller medications, with a requirement to alert doctors and pharmacists and notify licensing boards and police, and strengthen the states ability to prosecute drug gangs under organized crime statutes.

Sharfstein, the former health secretary, said many of Marylands proposals align with those Rhode Island rolled out last year in a plan that he said could serve as a model for the nation. Rhode Island is focused on stronger prescription tracking, expanded use of withdrawal and overdose-reversal drugs, and increased efforts to ensure that hospitals connect overdose patients with treatment services.

Its a very clear and comprehensive plan, said Sharfstein, who is now associate dean of public health at Johns Hopkins University.

Gimbel and other advocates say the state should focus more on long-term, residential treatment, which can be more expensive than short-term treatment and drugs to ease withdrawal.

Carin Miller, co-founder of Maryland Heroin Awareness Advocates, said addicts regularly reach out to her group seeking help but cant find openings at clinics.

There arent enough beds, she said. They have to wait six weeks, but when youre ready for treatment, you need it immediately. There needs to be a bill introduced, almost as an emergency measure, to allow more access.

Gimbel said he met with state lawmakers last year to propose converting vacant public buildings into regional rehabilitation centers, something he did with a former mental hospital in Owings Mills while serving as director of Baltimore Countys Office of Substance Abuse.

They loved the idea, but so far nothing has happened, Gimbel said. We have four or five mental hospitals sitting empty. We could do this all around the state.

Gimbel and Miller said the state should stop treating heroin abuse with opiate-based drugs such as methadone and suboxone, which ease withdrawal symptoms.

The treatment theyre trying to push most is another opiate, said Miller, whose husband and son are battling addiction. You cant treat an opiate addict with something opiate-based. Its going to be an epidemic of people on suboxone.

Gimbel also criticized Marylands efforts to increase access to overdose-prevention drugs and reduce incarceration for drug crimes, saying that fear of death, disease and prison can push addicts to seek help.

Its fear that makes people want to get off drugs, he said. Whats the reason to stop using heroin if there are no consequences? What message is that sending to addicts?

But many doctors  including Sharfstein  say medication and more short-term treatment are proven ways to get results.

Sharfstein compared recovering opioid addicts to Type 2 diabetics, saying that many require medication for the rest of their lives to function.

A major federal investment in medication-assisted treatment will save lives in Maryland as it will across the country, he said.

[Lawmaker calls for Md. to exit drug war, focus on treatment]

Some of the most drastic proposals have come from Del. Dan K. Morhaim (D-Baltimore County), an emergency room physician who sees patients who have overdosed.

He proposed bills to establish safe-use facilities for supervised drug consumption, decriminalize low-level possession of many common narcotics and require hospitals to develop detailed plans for guiding addicts to treatment.

The House is expected to vote on the hospital requirement this week, but the other bills died at the committee level.

Morhaim acknowledged that his proposals wouldnt pump new funding directly into rehabilitation programs but said they could free up money for the state to redirect toward addiction services.

Im just trying to develop the policies, and the policies imply money in this case, he said.
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

ASSAULTS

Chapman Ave., 1800 block, 1:09 a.m. March 17.

Maryland Ave., unit block, 2:50 p.m. March 15.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Aleutian Ave., 13200 block, 6:43 p.m. March 17.

Ardennes Ave., 13100 block, 5:22 p.m. March 17.

Avery Rd., 14500 block, 3:42 p.m. March 15.

Beatriz Ave., 19800 block, 11:01 p.m. March 20.

Frederick Rd., 15100 block, 4:15 a.m. March 19.

Park Potomac Ave., 12400 block, 11:18 a.m. March 19.

Quince Orchard Rd., 15800 block, 12:32 p.m. March 15.

Research Blvd., 1400 block, 5:03 p.m. March 16.

Research Ct., unit block, 9:16 p.m. March 20.

Sprinklewood Lane, 9200 block, 5:39 p.m. March 21. Theft from auto.

Travilah Rd., 14100 block, 4:49 p.m. March 16.

Whites Ferry Rd., 23300 block, 5:01 p.m. March 17.

District 2

Bethesda Station

Telephone: 240-773-6700

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Alta Vista Rd., 5600 block, 11:10 a.m. March 21. Theft from auto.

Auto Park Ave., 10400 block, 5:17 p.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

Bethesda Ave., 4800 block, 10:50 a.m. March 17.

Bradmoor Dr., 8500 block, 3:57 p.m. March 21.

Carriage Ct., 4300 block, 2:12 p.m. March 17. Theft from auto.

Cedar Lane, 10000 block, 12:15 p.m. March 16.

Chalon Dr., 8800 block, 11:47 a.m. March 16.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 2:56 p.m. March 15.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 7:12 a.m. March 18.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 6:20 p.m. March 18.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 12:21 p.m. March 21.

Dunnel Lane, 3900 block, 3:29 p.m. March 16.

Dunnel Lane, 4300 block, 8:45 a.m. March 17. Theft from auto.

Friendship Blvd., 5300 block, 9:28 a.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

Grey Hollow Ct., 11900 block, 12:58 p.m. March 20. Theft from auto.

Johnson Ave., 5900 block, 5:53 p.m. March 17.

Leland St., 3700 block, 2:41 p.m. March 18.

Leland St., 4300 block, 7:28 a.m. March 17. Theft from auto.

Maple Ave., 11900 block, 5:40 p.m. March 16. Theft from auto.

Montgomery Ave., 4400 block, 10:01 p.m. March 18.

Montgomery Ave., 4500 block, 1:55 p.m. March 18.

Nicholson Lane, 5100 block, 7:25 p.m. March 20.

River Rd., 5200 block, 1:25 p.m. March 15.

Rockville Pike, 10500 block, 5:16 p.m. March 18.

Split Rail Ct., 11600 block, 3:23 p.m. March 17.

Thornapple St., 3400 block, 1:01 p.m. March 21.

Thornapple St., 4300 block, 4:28 p.m. March 17. Theft from auto.

Washington Ave., 2100 block, 9:40 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Wilmett Rd., 5800 block, 9:56 a.m. March 21. Theft from auto.

Wilmett Rd., 6000 block, 9:26 a.m. March 21. Theft from auto.

Wisconsin Ave., 5400 block, 3:15 p.m. March 18.

Wisconsin Ave., 7700 block, 6:03 p.m. March 21.

FRAUD

White Post Ct., 8600 block, 11:57 a.m. March 15.

VEHICLE THEFTS

East-West Hwy., 4300 block, 11:55 a.m. March 21. Stolen vehicle.

Old Georgetown Rd., 11600 block, 1:57 a.m. March 17. Stolen vehicle.

District 3

Silver Spring Station

Telephone: 240-773-6800

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Belvedere Blvd., 2100 block, 11:12 p.m. March 18.

Bender Ct., 4400 block, 8:44 p.m. March 18.

Bristol Ave., 9600 block, 9:19 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Castle Blvd., 14100 block, 10:50 a.m. March 16.

Castle Blvd., 14100 block, 11:22 a.m. March 16.

Cherry Hill Rd., 12000 block, 3:39 p.m. March 15.

Cherry Hill Rd., 12000 block, 6:42 p.m. March 18.

Cherry Hill Rd., 12000 block, 4:47 p.m. March 21.

Columbia Pike, 11400 block, 1:52 p.m. March 21.

Croydon Ct., 100 block, 6:55 p.m. March 18.

Dallas Ave., 10000 block, 8:32 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Dallas Ave., 10100 block, 8:05 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Dallas Ave., 10100 block, 8:27 a.m. March 16. Theft from auto.

Dameron Dr., 9700 block, 5:36 p.m. March 18.

Deer Ridge Dr., 2700 block, 1:37 p.m. March 17.

East-West Hwy., 1200 block, 2:47 p.m. March 16.

East-West Hwy., 1400 block, 10:14 p.m. March 16.

Fairland Rd., 3100 block, 8:57 p.m. March 21. Theft from auto.

Georgia Ave., 7900 block, 12:52 p.m. March 16. Trespassing.

Harvey Rd., 9300 block, 8:43 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Hillmoor Dr., 300 block, 9:48 a.m. March 17. Theft from auto.

Kathryn Rd., 1100 block, 9:03 p.m. March 20. Theft from auto.

McKnew Rd., 14900 block, 1:47 p.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

Menlo Ave., 10200 block, 11:39 a.m. March 21.

Milestone Dr., 1000 block, 6:53 a.m. March 15.

Milestone Dr., 1000 block, 10:06 a.m. March 18.

New Hampshire Ave., 10200 block, 11 a.m. March 19. Theft from auto.

New Hampshire Ave., 11200 block, 12:42 p.m. March 19.

Oakview Dr., 1600 block, 5:03 p.m. March 21.

Piney Branch Rd., 9300 block, 10:01 p.m. March 17.

Providence Ave., 9100 block, 9:34 a.m. March 19. Theft from auto.

Quebec St., 1000 block, 11:46 a.m. March 19. Theft from auto.

Reddick Dr., 10000 block, 9:43 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Renfrew Rd., 10000 block, 6:53 p.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Roswell Dr., 1000 block, 9:44 a.m. March 16. Theft from auto.

Schubert Dr., 3100 block, 7:18 a.m. March 21. Theft from auto.

Sutherland Rd., 10000 block, 11:15 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Thayer Ave., 800 block, 1:49 p.m. March 19.

11th Ave., 8600 block, 10:09 a.m. March 16. Theft from auto.

VEHICLE THEFTS

Aquamarine Terr., 2000 block, 6:32 a.m. March 17.

Berleigh Hill Ct., 3800 block, 7:29 a.m. March 21.

Blair Mill Rd., 1200 block, 11:06 p.m. March 20.

Hunters Gate Ct., unit block, 10:23 p.m. March 15.

VANDALISM

Tech Rd., 12200 block, 3:16 p.m. March 17.

District 4

Wheaton Station

Telephone: 240-773-5500

SEXUAL ASSAULTS

Andrew St., 11900 block, 4:30 p.m. March 15. A sexual assault was reported.

Wickham Rd., 18200 block, 6:01 p.m. March 16. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULT

University Blvd. W., 1100 block, 5:36 p.m. March 21.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Ashlawn Dr., 200 block, 2:38 p.m. March 20.

Bantry Way, 3400 block, 10:34 p.m. March 16.

Belgrade Rd. S., 700 block, 9:59 a.m. March 20.

Belgrade Rd. S., 800 block, 9:37 p.m. March 19. Theft from auto.

Belgrade Rd. S., 900 block, 10:09 a.m. March 19. Theft from auto.

Belgrade Rd. S., 1000 block, 9:19 a.m. March 20. Theft from auto.

Bilney Dr., 18000 block, 7:17 p.m. March 19.

Blueridge Ave., 2300 block, 6:48 a.m. March 20. Theft from auto.

Caldwell St., 12700 block, 2:49 p.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Connecticut Ave., 13600 block, 9:38 a.m. March 16.

Connecticut Ave., 13600 block, 12:23 p.m. March 16.

Elm Grove Cir., 1400 block, 7:36 p.m. March 20.

Flack St., 12800 block, 12:41 p.m. March 17.

Gelding Lane, 3800 block, 2:08 p.m. March 18.

Glenallan Ave., 1400 block, 12:40 p.m. March 18.

Hermleigh Rd., 700 block, 9:41 p.m. March 19. Theft from auto.

Kilt Terr., 18500 block, 2:47 p.m. March 20.

Leisure World Blvd. S., 3000 block, 8:57 a.m. March 21.

Leisure World Blvd. N., 3300 block, 11:06 a.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

Newton St., 2600 block, 10:45 a.m. March 21.

Olney Sandy Spring Rd., 500 block, 5:29 a.m. March 16.

Rockford Rd., 500 block, 12:32 p.m. March 17.

University Blvd. W., 1100 block, 3:36 p.m. March 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 3:30 p.m. March 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 8:52 p.m. March 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 4:15 p.m. March 17.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 7:27 p.m. March 17.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 5:33 p.m. March 18.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, noon March 19. Theft from auto.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 6:13 p.m. March 20.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 6:42 p.m. March 20.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 1:06 p.m. March 21.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 2:19 p.m. March 21.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 6:53 p.m. March 21.

Viburnum Pl., 3000 block, 10:26 p.m. March 19.

Weller Rd., 3400 block, 1:25 p.m. March 18.

VEHICLE THEFTS

Auth Lane, 11800 block, 8:13 a.m. March 20.

Hewitt Ave., 3000 block, 3:47 p.m. March 20.

Middlevale Terr., 1800 block, 2:53 p.m. March 16. Stolen vehicle.

Village Center Dr., 18300 block, 6:11 p.m. March 18. Stolen vehicle.

Weisman Rd., 2500 block, 8:57 p.m. March 21.

VANDALISM

Georgia Ave., 13500 block, 5:43 p.m. March 17.

Georgia Ave. and Olney Laytonsville Rd., 2:01 a.m. March 18.

Parkland Dr., 13100 block, 3:20 p.m. March 15.

District 5

Germantown Station

Telephone: 240-773-6200

SEXUAL ASSAULTS

Public House Rd., 23600 block, 2:04 p.m. March 18. A sexual assault was reported.

Santa Anita Terr., 10700 block, 7:06 p.m. March 15. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Breezedale Lane, 19400 block, 5:11 p.m. March 15.

Germantown Rd., 19700 block, 9:34 p.m. March 15.

Germantown Rd., 19700 block, 3:50 p.m. March 17.

Majestic Elm Ct., 22600 block, 2:38 p.m. March 17.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Cottage Field Ct., unit block, 11:39 a.m. March 21.

Elderberry Terr., 19300 block, 5:56 p.m. March 19.

Frederick Rd., 20000 block, 11:28 p.m. March 15.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 12:50 p.m. March 15.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 1:30 p.m. March 15.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 5:58 p.m. March 19.

Great Park Cir., 12500 block, 3:43 a.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

Jump Dr., 14000 block, 12:15 p.m. March 17.

Milestone Center Dr., 12400 block, 8:02 p.m. March 19.

Ridge Rd., 23300 block, 2 p.m. March 17. Theft from auto.

Seneca Meadows Pkwy., 20600 block, 3:39 p.m. March 21.

Vaughn Landing Dr., 19700 block, 11 a.m. March 17.

Wims Rd., 22500 block, 3:38 p.m. March 16.

VEHICLE THEFT

Shawnee Lane, 12800 block, 5:45 p.m. March 16.

District 6

Gaithersburg Station

Telephone: 240-773-5700

SEXUAL ASSAULT

Teachers Way, unit block, 10:58 a.m. March 16. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Muncaster Mill Rd., 6000 block, 1:22 a.m. March 17.

Park Ave., 200 block, 7:37 p.m. March 16.

Watkins Mill Rd., 600 block, 9:37 p.m. March 19.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Anniversary Cir., 8500 block, 10:30 a.m. March 15.

Apple Ridge Rd., 10300 block, 11:50 a.m. March 21. Trespassing.

Boysenberry Dr., 18500 block, 1:15 a.m. March 15.

Boysenberry Dr., 18500 block, 11:49 p.m. March 21.

Bureau Dr., unit block, 1:43 p.m. March 18.

Clopper Rd., 1100 block, 3:06 a.m. March 15.

Crabbs Branch Way, 16700 block, 2:52 p.m. March 20.

Fairbanks Dr., 200 block, 1:21 p.m. March 16.

Fontana Lane, 18500 block, 4:16 p.m. March 20.

Fulks Corner Ave., unit block, 1:59 p.m. March 18.

Gatestone Square St., 600 block, 1:28 p.m. March 18.

Goshen Rd., 20000 block, 3:17 p.m. March 20.

Ivy Oak Dr., 7700 block, 8:16 p.m. March 18.

Kentlands Blvd., 300 block, 2:19 p.m. March 19.

Kilcreggan Terr., 7400 block, 5:55 p.m. March 17. Theft from auto.

McCausland Pl., unit block, 12:53 a.m. March 16.

Montgomery Village Ave., 18300 block, 6:07 p.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

Oak Shade Rd., unit block, 8:28 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Oak Shade Rd., unit block, 11:03 a.m. March 15. Theft from auto.

Olde Towne Ave., 100 block, 3:53 p.m. March 16. Theft from auto.

Royal Bonnet Cir., 18100 block, 9:36 p.m. March 17.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 2:22 p.m. March 16.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 2:57 p.m. March 17.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 2:22 p.m. March 18.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 1:06 p.m. March 20.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 7:16 p.m. March 20.

Shady Spring Terr., 17600 block, 12:08 p.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

Shelburne Terr., 9900 block, 8:47 p.m. March 20.

Shremor Dr., 18700 block, 11:49 a.m. March 16.

Swan Stream Dr., 18300 block, 9:35 a.m. March 18. Theft from auto.

VANDALISM

Wheelwright Dr., 19800 block, 7:01 a.m. March 15.

Because of a technical problem, the incident reports from District 6 and Takoma Park may be incomplete.
Establishment Republicans can barely contain their excitement after the events of the past seven days.

Donald Trumps campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was charged with battery in Florida for an incident in which he grabbed a reporter  and then denied doing so. Then Trump spent 48 hours defending Lewandowski and insisting the reporter had made up her story. Trump followed that political car wreck with another one  telling MSNBCs Chris Matthews that if abortion were ever banned, women who had the procedure should be punished. He spent the next 72 hours trying to get out from under that mistake, taking a series of confusing positions in the process.

Amid all of Trumps problems came even more good news for the establishment: Two polls in advance of Tuesdays Wisconsin primary showed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with a double-digit lead over Trump in the state. And Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker even endorsed Cruz.

For the #neverTrump movement, it was a banner week. But what will it get them?

Almost certainly Cruz, the man who began this campaign as the candidate the Republican establishment would do anything to keep from the nomination. And not just that: Someone who even the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican would be hard-pressed to argue could win 64 more electoral votes than Mitt Romney did when he lost the 2012 presidential race. (Romney got 206 electoral votes; you need 270 to be president.)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sat down with The Post's Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Here are five surprising statements he made during their meeting. (The Washington Post)

Asked to dream up a best-case scenario for the broader Republican Party coming out of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in mid-July, longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy offered this one up: Somebody other than Trump, Cruz or [conservative radio talk show host] Mark Levin as the nominee. But Murphy quickly added: I dont see a path.

Murphy is in what I would describe as the realistic wing of the Republican Party when it comes to Trump, Cruz and the national convention. That wing acknowledges that their best-case scenario is a bad scenario  nominating a too-conservative Cruz and beginning the general election at a clear disadvantage to Hillary Clinton in the electoral college. Murphy and his brethren believe the only hope for the GOP in 2016 is to preserve majorities in the Senate and the House, something they believe Cruz might allow them to do whereas Trump would not.

But Murphy and his realism wing are not the dominant force in the GOP establishment at the moment. That position is held by a group I call the magical realism crowd  with apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The belief in that group is that even if Trump and Cruz go into the Cleveland convention with the most and second-most delegates, respectively, magically a more electable and establishment-friendly alternative will emerge and save the party from itself.

The names floated by the magical realism crowd  John Kasich, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan  all would likely, on paper at least, be stronger general election candidates than Trump or Cruz. But so would, on paper again, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie  all of whom wound up having more support among donors and establishment types than actual voters.

The idea that delegates on the convention floor  people who are, by and large, quite conservative and are accurately described as the base of the party  would throw over not only the top delegate getter (Trump) but also the candidate who got the second most delegates (Cruz) is decidedly implausible given what we know about the state of the GOP today.

Peter Hart, a veteran Democratic pollster, recently conducted a focus group in St. Louis comprised of Republican voters  with the aim of understanding the Trump phenomenon and its durability. One of his big take-aways? A brokered convention would likely backfire.

1 of 12 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Who is Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski? View Photos Corey Lewandowski, 42, has turned himself in after being charged with a misdemeanor count of battery for allegedly yanking a Breitbart News reporter out of Donald Trumps path. Heres a look at his background. Caption The presidential candidate has fired Lewandowski, who was connected to several controversies during his tenure. Corey Lewandowski, an unknown political operative before signing on with Trump, saw his star rise with his candidates. Charlie Neibergall/AP Wait 1 second to continue.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents remain willing to join together in support of whoever receives the most votes, Hart concluded in a memo reflecting on the results of the focus group. If Trump is that person, yet fails to receive the nomination through a brokered convention, then these voters predict that their reaction would be hostile and harsh. This is true not only for Trump voters but also many Cruz supporters.

In an election wholly defined by the Republican bases dislike and distrust for the partys leaders, how can you realistically expect that same base to capitulate to an establishment-favorite candidate who may not have even competed in the primary and caucus process?

You cant. Or, at least, you shouldnt. Magical realism in politics is a dangerous thing  it has just enough truth in it to be recognizable but not enough to make it actually doable.
Wisconsin has become an unexpected battleground for Donald Trump and the conglomeration of forces desperately aligning against him, with Tuesdays primary emerging as a key moment that could reshape the Republican nominating contest both mathematically and psychologically.

Ted Cruz  who has tried to unite conservative activists, talk-radio personalities and the party establishment  stands poised to take some air out of the Trump balloon.

Bleeding from two weeks of self-inflicted wounds and behind in the polls here, Trump scrambled over the weekend to make up ground he has lost to the senator from Texas.

On Sunday, the New York billionaire predicted he would surprise critics. He drew a parallel to his New Hampshire victory in February following a disappointing defeat the week before in the Iowa caucuses  although he was never behind in New Hampshire as he is here.

Were having unbelievable response in Wisconsin, Trump said during a visit to a Milwaukee diner. And it feels very much like New Hampshire to me, where we started off where, you know, Trump wasnt going to win New Hampshire, and then all of a sudden, we win in a landslide.

The Fix's Aaron Blake breaks down what's at stake for the GOP candidates in the April 5 Wisconsin primary. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

A defeat for Trump would be an embarrassing setback for the front-runner  not just because of the 42 delegates at stake, but because it would demonstrate weakness in a place where he should be strong. The states blue-collar demographics, along with party rules allowing independent voters to cast ballots in the primary, have been expected to work in his favor.

A decisive loss also would lessen his chance of amassing the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination outright. Failure to do so would force an open convention in Cleveland in July.

Wisconsin has always been a barometer state, said former governor Tommy Thompson, a supporter of Ohio Gov. John Kasich. What youre seeing is that The Donald, who has been moving ahead all across the country, has hit a logjam or a brick wall in Wisconsin.

A fish fry for nearly 1,000 Republican activists inside Milwaukees timeworn American Serb Hall on Friday night told the story.

The real estate mogul who has been bulldozing the field did not show up. In his place, Trump sent Sarah Palin, once a deity on the right who on this night was exposed as a mere mortal. As she testified to the awesome awakening brought by the Trump Train, Republicans in the crowd rolled their eyes. They checked their phones. There were plenty of murmurs, even some laughs.

Palin got it. Wrapping up her speech, she thanked the Wisconsinites for allowing me to kind of crash your fish fry.

When Cruz took the stage a few minutes later, the reception was dramatically different. He declared, Nominating Donald Trump is a train wreck  and, pausing for effect, added, Thats actually not fair to train wrecks. The crowd responded with roaring adulation.

Republican presidential candidate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, accompanied by his wife Heidi, left, and Carly Fiorina, speaks at a campaign stop last Wednesday in Madison, Wis. (Andy Manis/AP)

Cruz has sought to exploit Trumps vulnerabilities with female voters following a string of controversies. The senator staged an event in Madison last week that he called a celebration of strong women. Cruz sat in a plush armchair and listened as wife Heidi, mother Eleanor and supporter Carly Fiorina shared stories about him as a loving father, loyal husband and champion for women everywhere.

Campaigning Sunday in Green Bay with a parade of endorsers, Cruz said, Wisconsin is a battleground. . . . The entire country is looking to this state Tuesday night.

[Stop-Trump forces see an opportunity in Scott Walkers Wisconsin]

Recent polls in Wisconsin show Trump trailing Cruz  in two polls by 10 points, others by single digits  with Kasich running third. The senator has drawn energy, and crucial grass-roots support, after winning the endorsement of Gov. Scott Walker, who is deeply popular among Wisconsin Republicans.

Trump redrew his schedule to devote the final days to barnstorming the state  even missing his new grandsons bris  in an apparent effort to catch Cruz.

Trumps campaign has been frustrated in recent weeks as Cruz has seemed to outmaneuver him in some aspects of the delegate race. Cruzs campaign has begun leveraging arcane party rules to squeeze additional delegates, even in states won by Trump. The front-runner sees a win in Wisconsin as a way to avert a contested convention.

I really want to win Wisconsin because if we can win Wisconsin were going to put all this stupidity away, Trump said at a rally last week in Janesville.

Charlie Black, a veteran Republican strategist who is now part of Kasichs team, said of a possible Trump loss in Wisconsin: I think its a big deal because the whole question is can he get to the 1,237. At the rate hes going, he wont. I think hes going to lose Wisconsin and not get very many delegates there.

What makes Tuesdays balloting important is that Wisconsins electorate plays more to Trumps strength than to Cruzs. The percentages of evangelical Christians or Republicans who call themselves very conservative are smaller here than in states where Cruz has done best.

Beyond that, Wisconsins economy long has had a strong manufacturing base, and Trump has drawn significant support from white, working-class voters with forceful denunciations of free-trade deals that have led corporations to shift jobs overseas.

Cruzs allies hope a win in Wisconsin could transform the way the Texans candidacy is viewed nationally.

This is a signature win in a blue-collar state . . . thats outside of the South and the West, said Keith Gilkes, a longtime Walker adviser. It demonstrates his ability to coalesce a bigger, broader coalition. Thats the first time hes done that.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich offers a dissenting view about the potential significance of Tuesdays results, in part because Cruzs victory is now assumed. I dont think much unless the result turns out very, very different than we think it will be, said Gingrich, who has informally advised Trump. Cruz should win statewide and half the congressional districts. If he were to sweep as Trump did in South Carolina or Arizona, that would be a bigger thing.

What also makes Wisconsin important is that it is the only contest on Tuesday. That guarantees outsize attention to the results and to the analysis that follows  the sort of singular focus usually reserved for early-voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

Trump will have to live with the loss longer than in the past, with no opportunity to recuperate until the New York primary April 19. Trump is the heavy favorite in his home state. A CBS News poll released Sunday showed Trump leading in New York with 52 percent, followed by Cruz at 21 percent and Kasich at 20 percent.

[In a revealing interview, Trump predicts a massive recession]

He will have to show what all winning candidates show, which is resiliency in the face of adversity, GOP strategist Steve Schmidt said.

Gingrich said that Wisconsin could be a wake-up call for Trump that was badly needed. It might be good that theyve had to worry about Wisconsin, he said.

Cruzs campaign sees Wisconsin as potential validation that he has emerged as the clear and perhaps only alternative to Trump. I think that can have a dramatic impact on the race, Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe said.

Cruzs team thinks the candidate could absorb a loss in New York and recover elsewhere in upcoming contests, with a final June showdown in delegate-rich California.

But he will have to fend with Kasich as well as with Trump. Kasichs team sees the upcoming calendar as more favorable to the Ohio governor than to Cruz. His advisers expect to win a decent number of delegates in New York and are putting significant effort into Pennsylvania, where Kasich grew up. They see opportunities as well in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware.

The elongated calendar works to our benefit, said John Weaver, Kasichs chief strategist. It doesnt seem to do so much for Mr. Trump. Probably his advisers would like to go on a cruise with no WiFi.

Jose A. DelReal in Milwaukee and Sean Sullivan in Green Bay, Wis., contributed to this report.
Hank Ickes of Arlington, Va., and other activists gather at a 2014 news conference on Capitol Hill to discuss a proposal to overturn Citizens United. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

The three Republican appointees on the divided Federal Election Commission have indicated that political donors who give through private companies solely to shield their identities can be sanctioned, signaling that the agency may scrutinize a rash of pop-up corporations giving large sums to super PACs.

Their stance suggests the potential for movement by the polarized six-person panel, where a sense of stasis has been the norm. Democratic commissioners, however, reacted with skepticism, saying that their GOP colleagues have until now delayed and actively blocked examination of such cases.

But Lee Goodman, one of the Republican commissioners, said in an interview that contributors seeking to mask themselves through a privately held company or limited liability corporation (LLC) should think twice.

Six commissioners have now taken the position that closely held LLCs can violate the law under certain circumstances when they make contributions to super PACs, he said. Now everyone should be on notice.

If you funnel money through an LLC entity for the purpose of making a political contribution and avoiding disclosure of yourself, that is an abuse of the LLC vehicle, Goodman added.

The 2016 elections have seen a proliferation of mysterious corporate donations, with super PACs collecting millions of dollars from opaque and hard-to-trace entities, as The Washington Post reported last month.

[How ghost corporations are funding the 2016 election]

Advocates for stricter enforcement of campaign finance rules have complained that the FEC is failing to check the use of such vehicles, a complaint echoed by the Democrats on the panel.

Earlier this year, the three GOP members denied a recommendation by the FECs general counsel to investigate several donations made during the 2012 elections in which contributors allegedly hid behind ghost corporations.

The Republican commissioners explained their reasoning in a 15-page statement released Friday evening. Chairman Matthew Petersen, Commissioner Caroline Hunter and Goodman wrote that pursuing the cases would have been manifestly unfair because the FEC had not provided adequate notice of how it planned to apply to corporations a longtime federal law banning a donor from giving money in the name of another person or entity.

Direct corporate political spending was not permissible until the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision. More than six years later, the agency has yet to issue new rules regarding the decision.

While the commissioners have not agreed to pursue new regulations, Goodman said he and the other Republicans purposefully made it clear in their statement how they will interpret the law going forward.

The proper focus will be on whether funds were intentionally funneled through a closely held corporation or corporate LLC for the purpose of making a contribution that evades the Acts reporting requirements, the three commissioners wrote. If they were, then the true source of the funds is the person who funneled them through the corporate entity for this purpose.

Republican election law lawyer Jason Torchinsky said the language was striking.

The FEC made clear that pop-up LLCs can no longer be used for super PAC contributions, he said. Going forward, any such pop-up LLCs run a real risk of civil enforcement.

Democratic campaign finance lawyer Marc Elias agreed.

I dont think the law was as uncertain as they suggested, but it is good news that it appears all six commissioners will now enforce this law going forward, he said.

It remains to be seen whether the panel will authorize an investigation into one of the complaints lodged this cycle against mystery corporate donors  and if it does, whether the commissioners can agree on a circumstance in which a corporate donation violated the straw-donor ban.

In their separate statements filed in response to the 2012 cases, the Republicans and Democrats laid out very different views of when such a contribution would evade disclosure, with the GOP offering a much narrower interpretation.

Commissioner Ann Ravel, one of the Democrats on the panel, said she is not convinced that the Republicans will ultimately support investigations of donations by ghost corporations. Among the 2012 matters that they refused to pursue, she noted, was one in which a donor acknowledged that he gave through a newly formed LLC solely to hide his identity.

[More mystery corporate donations flow to presidential super PACs ]

The case involved Edward Conard, a friend and former business partner of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Conard admitted that he set up an LLC in Delaware so he could use it to make a $1 million donation to a pro-Romney super PAC without revealing his identity, saying he was worried that being linked to such a large contribution could jeopardize the safety of his family. In a statement to the FEC, an attorney for Conard described the Delaware LLC as a vehicle for one mans one-time political donation.

I dont see any other circumstance that would be quite as clear, Ravel said. I think they are just trying to give some explanation for their failure to act. If they wouldnt act in these cases, I think its highly unlikely they would in any case.

Ravel disagreed with the assertion by the GOP commissioners that before the FEC could pursue such cases, it had to first provide notice that the straw-donor ban applies to corporate contributions.

The law is really clear that you cannot use an entity, whatever it is, solely for the purpose of hiding your identity, she said.

Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said the fact that it took more than three years for the FEC to address the complaints filed in 2012 sends a message that the agency is not on the job.

When the law is plainly violated and the commission just sits on it, then people assume there is not going to be any consequence for violating the law, she said.


Halima, 15, holds Hauwa, the baby of her friend Hamsatu, 25, who is sewing a prayer cap in their tent in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Both women were abducted, held captive and forced into marriage by Boko Haram. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

For months, they were kept in tiny thatched huts in the middle of the forest, waiting with dread each evening for their rapists to return. During the almost intolerable violence, the young womens minds drifted to escape or death. The victims were as young as 8.

At the heart of Boko Harams self-proclaimed caliphate in northeastern Nigeria was a savage campaign of rape and sexual slavery that has only recently been uncovered. Thousands of girls and women were held against their will, subject to forced marriages and relentless indoctrination. Those who resisted were often shot.

Now, many of the women are suddenly free  rescued in a series of Nigerian military operations over the past year that dislodged the extremist Islamist group from most of the territory it controlled. But there have been few joyous family reunions for the victims.

Most of the surviving women no longer have homes. Their cities were burned to the ground. The military has quietly deposited them in displacement camps or abandoned buildings, where they are monitored by armed men suspicious of their loyalties. They are still labeled Boko Haram wives.

Few could have imagined such an outcome two years ago, when 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram and the world responded with the Bring Back Our Girls campaign. While most of those schoolgirls from Chibok are still missing, many people assumed the other kidnapped women would be warmly welcomed back.

Instead, they are shunned.

[War-torn Nigerian town shows devastating legacy of Boko Haram ]

For seven months, Hamsatu, now 25, and Halima, 15, were among Boko Harams sex slaves, raped almost every day by the same unit of fighters in the remote Sambisa Forest. Now, they live in a narrow, white tent in a displacement camp, with empty cement bags sewn together to create a curtain. The women spoke on the condition that their full names were not used in order to freely describe their experiences.

When Halima leaves the tent to get food for the two of them, the other people living in the camp scowl at her or cautiously move away.

Youre the one who was married to Boko Haram, one older woman spat at her recently.

We cant trust any of them, said one guard.

Women who escaped from forced marriage and sexual slavery at the hands of Boko Haram talk about their abductions, and the hard transition back to life in Nigeria after they found freedom. (Human Rights Watch)

Authorities say there are good reasons for their wariness. Last year, 39 of 89 Boko Haram suicide bombings were carried out by women, according to UNICEF. Twenty-one of those female attackers were under the age of 18, many of them girls apparently abducted from villages and cities and converted into assassins. Since January, female attackers have killed hundreds of people across northeastern Nigeria, in mosques, markets and even displacement camps.

No one knows exactly why some women who were captured and abused became killers. Maybe it was the indoctrination. Maybe it was the militants threats.

Either way, the job of reintegrating the displaced has become vastly more complicated for Nigerian authorities.

And for survivors trying to move on from a horrific chapter of their lives, there is now a new agony.

There is no trust here, said Hamsatu, crouching in her tent and wearing the same pink, flowery dress she had on when she was kidnapped 18 months ago. In her arms, she held the baby of her captor.



Hamsatu plays with daughter Hauwa at the Dalori displacement camp. She says she was forced to travel on foot and on the backs of motorcycles to the Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram had set up camps for its sex slaves. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

[Boko Haram stoned women to death so they couldnt be rescued]

I dont know if hes alive

It was September 2014 when Boko Haram fighters took over Hamsatus and Halimas home city of Bama, near the Cameroonian border. Many of the 350,000 residents managed to flee. But the fighters immediately started killing the male civilians who couldnt escape. Some were shot in their homes. Others were beheaded and thrown in mass graves.

With a group of about 25 other women, Hamsatu and Halima say, they were moved by the militants from home to home and then forced to travel on foot and on the backs of motorcycles to the Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram had set up camps for its sex slaves.

The women were each assigned to a sliver of a hut, barely big enough to lie down. Hamsatu said that days later, one fighter, whose name she never learned, entered the hut and said a prayer in what sounded to her like Arabic.

Now they were married, he told her. She thought of her real husband, who had been missing since the day Boko Haram stormed Bama.

I dont know if hes alive, she said.

From then on, the days were uniformly violent. Different men would come into her hut each evening, in addition to the one who called himself her husband, Hamsatu said. Sometimes they screamed at her for not praying enough. Even the Chibok girls are better Muslims than you, a man yelled at her once.

Sometimes the men said nothing at all, tearing off her headscarf and raping her on the floor of the hut, she recalled. After about two months, she became pregnant.

Publicly, Boko Haram members decry the tyranny of Nigerias federal government, which is mostly Christian in a nation where Muslims, nearly half of the population, have long complained about being marginalized. The militants rail against secular education and demand strict Islamic observance. The group has declared allegiance to the Islamic State.

But to their prisoners, the fighters campaign didnt seem driven by ideology so much as a wild appetite for sex and violence. It would take the rest of the world some time to learn about Boko Harams institutionalized sexual abuse. Rape wasnt just a byproduct of the chaos of war in Nigeria, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would say in 2015. It was a calculated tactic of terror.

These people have a certain spiritual conviction that any child they father will grow to inherit their ideology, Kashim Shettima, the governor of Borno state  where Bama is located  told reporters last year.

[Report: Boko Haram has forced nearly a million kids from their homes]

At night, Hamsatu heard helicopters and gunshots. Several times, she attempted to escape, but she was caught and returned by guards. After a while, the pregnancy slowed her and she stopped trying.

When the Nigerian military came, it hardly felt to the women like a rescue operation. Soldiers burned the huts while women were still inside and shot wildly at everyone, they said. Several women were killed or disappeared during the operation, according to accounts from several former captives. Halima is now raising a 3-year-old orphan whose mother vanished during the rescue operation.

The women were loaded in pickup trucks and dumped on a desert road about 50 miles away, they said. Military interrogators arrived.

The women were searched for weapons. After months of being held by one of the worlds deadliest terror groups, the women realized: They were now suspects.



Hundreds of schoolgirls leave the Womens Teachers College Secondary School in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Thousands of girls in the north have been abducted and forced into marriage by Boko Haram. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

Fearing the liberated

Sambisa woman  thats what they called Hamsatu and Halima when the women arrived at the Dalori displacement camp on the outskirts of the city of Maiduguri in April of last year. It was the name of the forest where they had been enslaved.

Hamsatu and Halima were taken to a tent they shared with two other women and the 3-year-old orphan  all of whom had been liberated from Boko Haram, as the military said. The women who had been forcibly married to fighters were kept apart from other people displaced by the war.

Unlike most of the worlds refugee or displacement camps, which are run by the United Nations and international aid groups, the camps where Boko Harams victims live are administered by the Nigerian military. Outside Dalori, an army captain stands by the front gate. Visitors are patted down. A poster of high-level Boko Haram suspects hangs on the perimeter wall of the camp. Aid workers need military permission to enter the camps.

Some women who lived under Boko Haram are occasionally hauled off to a military base for questioning, and then returned.

The fear is that theyve been converted to Boko Harams ideology, said Mohammed Ali Guja, the chairman of the city of Bama. They are now a different person.

The countrys displaced population has ballooned. As of March, there were 2.6 million internally displaced people, or IDPs, in northeastern Nigeria, according to the International Organization for Migration. Even local relief workers worry that the women they have been sent to help might be concealing loyalties to their Boko Haram abductors.

The simple truth is they pose a serious threat to the general public, said Ann Darman, of the Gender Equality, Peace and Development Center, a Nigerian aid group that often works with the United Nations.



A woman prepares food at the children's kitchen at the Dalori camp. It holds close to 20,000 people and is administered by the Nigerian military, which regularly questions the refugees about their loyalties. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

[Kids rescued from Boko Haram were so traumatized they forgot their names]

Last year, just as the liberated women were pouring into displacement camps and local communities, there was a surge in female suicide bombers. In June, one killed 20 people at a bus station in Maiduguri. A day later, two bombers killed 30 at a market in the city. In July, two more killed 13 people near a military checkpoint. In October, four girls and a boy targeted a mosque, killing 15. Witnesses said some of the attackers appeared to be no older than 9.

We think they have more or less brainwashed these children, said Maj. Gen. Lucky Irabor, the top Nigerian military official in the northeast. They have become useful tools for Boko Haram.

Amid the attacks, Hamsatu gave birth last June to the child of her rapist in the camps rundown clinic.

Her daughter made her an even greater target of scorn. In many Nigerian communities, people believe that the fathers blood courses through the veins of his child, so that at some point in the future they will be likely to turn against their own community, said Rachel Harvey, UNICEFs head of child protection in Nigeria.



Children play by the river in Maiduguri, Nigeria. In many Nigerian communities, people believe that the fathers blood profoundly influences his offspring, so the children conceived through rapes by Boko Haram fighters face rejection. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

A subtle shunning

One morning in mid-March, the women in the narrow white tent woke up on thin mats, each with one pair of clothes to wear. At 10, Halima walked across the scorching-hot sand to get breakfast: rice and beans donated by Nigerias government aid agency.

At the food-collection point, sometimes people inch away from her, she said, as if it would be dangerous to get too close.

It didnt seem to matter that she had been vetted by the Nigerian military. Or that she actually never wanted children and was now struggling to raise a 3-year-old and blamed Boko Haram each time the girl cried or soiled herself or asked where her real mom was.

Just a few weeks before, three female suicide bombers had blown themselves up in the nearby village of Dalori, part of an attack that killed 86 people, including children. The suspicion of Boko Harams victims only grew. In late March, a Nigerian girl was apprehended with explosives strapped to her body in Cameroon, near the Nigerian border. She set off a brief scandal when she said she was one of the Chibok girls, but Nigerian officials denied her claim.

Some worry that in a part of Nigeria that was once torn apart by a homegrown insurgency, another cleavage is forming, this one in the wake of war.

Subjecting [the victims] to further discrimination and ill treatment due to their status as victims of Boko Haram violence is certain to undermine the entire response to the situation in the northeast, said Martin Ejidike, a prominent human rights adviser to the United Nations in Nigeria.



A woman feeds children who take shelter from the midday sun under a bare tree at the Dalori camp. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

There are few signs the situation will improve. Many international aid organizations wont work in the north because of the continued insecurity.

The government had opened a deradicalization center to help re-integrate the former victims, but it closed late last year, after admitting only 311 people. Officials at the national security advisers office did not return phone calls seeking an explanation for the closure.

In the camps, some of the women victimized by Boko Haram down bottles of homemade cough syrup to get deliriously high alone.

Once a week, Halima and Hamsatu attend group therapy sessions in a tent that says Safe Place for Women and Girls.

There they are known as the sisters because of how close theyve become. They gather in a circle on the floor with about a dozen other women. The counselor repeats a few lines during each meeting. Hamsatu and Halima wait quietly for them, wishing they were true.

What has gone has gone.

You are safe now.

You are secure now.



Hamsatu peeks through a tear in her tent while holding daughter Hauwa on her back as she sits next to Fatima, the 3-year-old foster daughter of Halima. Fatima was separated from her mother as they were trying to escape Boko Haram. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

Read more

The growing scandal over rape by U.N. peacekeepers in Central African Republic

The Nigerian military is so broken, its soldiers are refusing to fight

Ive seen the Talibans brutality in Afghanistan. Boko Haram might be worse
An Armenian volunteer waits in the town of Askeran in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region. (Hrayr Badalyan/PAN via AP)

Even as Azerbaijan announced a unilateral cease-fire Sunday, reports of sporadic fighting between Azerbaijani and ethnic Armenian forces over the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh continued. Regional and world leaders called for an end to the worst violence in the region since a cease-fire halted a war over the territory in 1994.

Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, fought a bloody ethnic war over the territory as the Soviet Union fell apart. About 20,000 people died. Formally a part of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh is de facto controlled by a separatist government backed by Armenia and has increasingly been the site of sporadic border conflicts in recent years. Today, nearly all of its population is ethnically Armenian.

This weekends violence has been on a previously unseen scale, analysts said, with reports of the use of helicopters, drones, tanks and artillery along the line of conflict that separates the two sides. Thirty soldiers and a boy were killed in fighting Saturday, as Azerbaijan claimed to have seized several strategic heights and several villages from the Nagorno-Karabakh government. Both sides blamed the other for the violence.

[Why the U.S. wont break with Azerbaijan over human rights violations]

The United States and Russia have called for an immediate end to the fighting. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday said that he will stand with Azerbaijan to the end and that we pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes, his office reported.

On Sunday, paramilitary forces from Nagorno-Karabakh said they launched a counteroffensive, which Azerbaijan claimed it had repelled, destroying 10 tanks in the process. It was not possible to confirm reports of casualties on Sunday from either side.

The Azerbaijani government said in a statement that it would implement a unilateral cease-fire Sunday afternoon, but it also said it would reinforce the territories it liberated. But representatives for the de facto government in Karabakh claimed fighting was continuing along the front lines, Radio Free Europes Armenian service reported. The news agency has also published video of ethnic Armenian reserve fighters mobilizing.

[Dogged reporting in Azerbaijan landed a U.S.-trained journalist in prison]

The violence came at the conclusion of a nuclear summit in Washington, which both Armenian President Serge Sarkisian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attended. The two did not meet. U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry condemned the cease-fire violations, urging the sides to show restraint, avoid further escalation and strictly adhere to the cease-fire.

Thomas de Waal, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on the conflict, wrote that this weekends violence was much more serious than the customary violence that resumes each spring, as soldiers take potshots at one another across the border.

It is more likely that one of the two parties to the conflict  and more likely the Azerbaijani side, which has a stronger interest in the resumption of hostilities  is trying to alter the situation in its favor with a limited military campaign, he wrote.

Azerbaijan is openly exasperated with a decades-long process of negotiations under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and led by diplomats from the United States, Russia and France, to broker a resolution to the territorial dispute.

[Armenia picks Russian economic ties but tries to keep foot in the West]

There have been 22 years of attempts to find a peaceful solution to this conflict, said Polad Bulbuloglu, the Azerbaijani ambassador to Moscow, during an interview Saturday on the radio station Govorit Moskva. How long can it go on? We are ready for a peaceful solution to the question. But if this wont be solved by peaceful means, then it will be solved by military means.

Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Center, an independent think tank in Armenia, said in an interview that the West had little leverage over Azerbaijan in the conflict but that it did offer an opening for Russian unilateral diplomacy, possibly allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin the chance to assert his role as a peacemaker in the region.

On Saturday, Putin called for both sides to immediately stop firing and exercise restraint, his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists.
Inmates stand next to a police vehicle while being transferred to the Quezaltepeque prison in El Salvador on March 29. (Fred Ramos/For The Washington Post)

One of the gangsters, a black bandanna over his mouth and two rosaries around his neck, tapped his clawlike fingernail on the table.

Next to him was a sworn enemy, a man with a black fishermans hat pulled down over rainbow-tinted sunglasses.

The two rivals, and their tens of thousands of followers in El Salvadors dominant gangs, have called a halt, for the moment, to their street war with each other and the government. On March 25, Mara Salvatrucha and two factions of the 18th Street gang announced a cease-fire, a respite from the fighting that has made El Salvador one of the worlds deadliest countries.

Were not friends, one of the gangsters, a spokesman for the 18th Street gang, said in a rare interview last week, alongside a Mara Salvatrucha representative. But the three gangs are united in this effort to come together to stop the violence thats assaulting our country.

[Two Salvadoran gangsters walk into a church]

Gang leaders representing MS-13 and Barrio 18 sat down with The Washington Post to discuss a cease-fired announced March 25. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

Many, though, expect the cease-fire will be temporary, a lull in an ever more chaotic battle, a moment that simply shows the enormous gap that separates these gangs from the government. El Salvadors ferocious pace of violence, with more than 2,000 murders in the past three months, has exhausted all sides. Dozens of police and their relatives have been hunted down and killed by gangsters, provoking defections from the ranks. The gangsters complain about police running death squads, their friends being driven off in pickup trucks and disappearing.

But despite the enormous toll on both sides, the administration of President Salvador Sanchez Ceren has remained defiant, vowing to tighten security at prisons and relentlessly pursue gang members.

The government has said theres no chance of dialogue with the gangs, Mauricio Ramirez Landaverde, the minister of security and justice, said in an interview.

The Salvadoran gangs are descendants of gangs formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by immigrants who fled this countrys civil war. Many of their leaders were eventually deported back to El Salvador. The country is now a patchwork of gang-controlled neighborhoods. Their members extort residents, kill, kidnap, rape and serve as sentries against rival cliques. The gangs and experts who study them estimate their active ranks at 70,000 people, not including the tens of thousands behind bars.

After Sanchez Ceren was elected in 2014, he criticized his predecessors decision to negotiate with the gangs, and vowed to punish them with the full force of the law. The conflict has steadily escalated.

I think there is really a fatigue with the war, said Juan Jose Martinez, an anthropologist who studies Salvadoran gangs.

This is not like the violence weve always had, he added. This is a crisis of violence.

But Sanchez Ceren, a former leftist guerrilla leader during El Salvadors 12-year civil war, has vowed to intensify the crackdown on the gangs. Following months of police raids, his government plans to transfer hundreds of jailed gang leaders to solitary confinement, and has proposed what it calls extraordinary measures to further disrupt gang communications. With these cruel criminals, it is not possible to have an attitude of tolerance, Sanchez Ceren said last week.

Ramirez Landaverde dismissed the possibility that the current pause could stretch into a more durable peace, saying the gang landscape is fragmented with hundreds of small cells and cliques.

Often it turns out they [gang leaders] dont have the backing of all the groups, or all of the members, he said. Many of them dont participate, and you can see proof in the streets. Theyre killing like nothing happened.

This is kicking the hornets nest

The streets, however, do seem to have calmed. Over the first six days of the gang cease-fire, initially set for 72 hours but now with no official endpoint, an average of 10 people were slain each day, less than half the rate of killing in the first two months this year.

The representatives from Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street agreed to an interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss their self-imposed cease-fire. They met with a reporter in the top-floor office of a Lutheran church in an industrial part of San Salvador, where they have come repeatedly to see religious and community leaders in recent months.

They said they have agreed, for now, to respect each others territorial limits.

They have their territory, we have ours, the Mara Salvatrucha spokesman said. We are demonstrating to the Salvadoran people, the international community, that we are capable of coming here, stopping this whole wave of violence. We can stop everything.

The gang members said, however, that they had lost faith in the possibility of negotiating directly with the government, and asked for the international community  the United Nations, the European Union, Pope Francis  to step in as a mediator.

Past attempts at ending the gang war have failed. A 2012 truce, negotiated by former guerrillas and religious leaders, with the support of former president Mauricio Funes, lasted for two years and then fell apart after the government imposed tighter conditions on jailed gang members. Critics say that the gangs used the time to rearm and grow stronger.

The current one-sided truce could quickly be followed by more violence, as the gangs seem determined to fight back if the police do not ease up.

This is kicking the hornets nest, Raul Mijango, a politician and former guerrilla who helped negotiate the previous gang truce, said of the governments current approach. These iron-fisted actions  today its total war declared against the gangs  have not been effective against these types of problems. On the contrary, what theyve always done is increase them.

Some of the gang members statements had a political flavor: They described the government as corrupt and exploitative and labeled members of the administration as hypocrites, former guerrillas who betrayed the poor people of El Salvador once they got into power. The gang members cast themselves as benefactors, offering survival in a poor job market.

If there isnt work, how are you going to survive? You cant eat air, the Mara Salvatrucha spokesman said.

They also said they were frustrated that the government has not invested more in programs to reintegrate gang members into society, or provide jobs for them. They seemed particularly outraged about the conditions inside prisons, where they said gang members are sick and dying and receive insufficient medical care. In their neighborhoods, they complained, there were indiscriminate arrests and killings.

The police arrive in a community and grab everyone in sight, the Mara Salvatrucha spokesman said. They show up, push the kids against the wall, beat them, put them in the cop car, and drive them to a rival territory, where they know theyll be killed.

But the gangs have also murdered police at an ever-increasing rate  at least 12 this year, plus dozens of their relatives. The growing danger has devastated police morale. Over the past year, a movement has surged within police ranks, led by lower-ranking officers who complain about poor pay, insufficient equipment and the risk of dying. Hundreds have quit, police said, many of them heading north to try to cross illegally into the United States.

In response to the rising gang violence, authorities have cut off family visits to inmates and deployed soldiers to guard prisons. The legislature approved Sanchez Cerens request for more power to transfer inmates to higher-security facilities, where they would have less access to phones, visitors and weapons. His government has already moved some 300 mid-level gang leaders to more secure facilities in an attempt to block imprisoned leaders from running their gangs. The president has also called for building three jails for people awaiting trial in an effort to ease the crowded conditions.

Some doubt that the governments defiance is as strong as it seems. Throughout the conflict, governments have often denounced the gangs publicly while reaching out to them privately. The existence of the 2012 truce, revealed by the El Faro newspaper, was never supposed to have been public knowledge. Some experts suspect a new covert deal is already in the works between the gangs and the government. Religious leaders are among the only people openly working toward that outcome now.

The whole world is opposed to dialogue, said Rafael Menjivar Saavedra, a Lutheran pastor who has met with the gang members. My response to them is, So whats your alternative? 

Read more:

El Salvador is on pace to become the hemispheres most deadly nation

Why El Salvador became the hemispheres murder capital

Could kids fleeing Central America be sent back to face more gang violence?

Peace Corps suspends El Salvador program as violence surges
From Esquire

Back in December, the staff here at the shebeen pointed out that The New York Times had a serious source-pollution problem when it came to the ongoing nothingburger flap about Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails, which is itself the ugly stepchild of the nothingburger known as Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! This involved someone who peddled bad information to the Times on the San Bernardino shooters, which followed hard upon the episode in which someone peddled bad information to the Times about how the FBI "has launched a criminal inquiry" into HRC's alleged mishandling of classified material. (That is true now, but it wasn't last July, when the story ran.) It was the opinion hereabouts that whoever these sources were, their intentions were far from honorable, and that it was the responsibility of the reporters to out them in order that the public might better judge the motives of the people investigating a former Secretary of State and the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president.

Alas for us all, it seems to be happening again, this time at another pillar of the journalism establishment. After this bombshell-147 agents! Holy Efrem Zimbalist, Junior!-got thrown across the entire media landscape, the Post dropped a My Bad that everyone may or may not have seen.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Clinton used two different email addresses, sometimes interchangeably, as secretary of state. She used only hdr22@clintonemail.com as secretary of state. Also, an earlier version of this article reported that 147 FBI agents had been detailed to the investigation, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. Two U.S. law enforcement officials have since told The Washington Post that figure is too high. The FBI will not provide an exact figure, but the officials say the number of FBI personnel involved is fewer than 50.

(Ari Melber of MSNBC has a source that says it might be as few as 12. Obviously, this is the Rosenbergs all over again.)

Look, folks. That "lawmaker briefed by FBI director James Comey" is obviously a ratfcker with an agenda that has nothing to do with anything except political sabotage. That, by the way, is a helluva story.
As President Barack Obama wraps up his first full day in Cuba with an historic meeting with President Raul Castro, U.S. businesses are considering new opportunities as relations between the two countries continue to improve.

On Monday, the President said he was confident that the U.S. embargo on Cuba would end, a move that would go a long way to normalizing ties between the two nations. The president is expected to meet with U.S. business leaders and Cuban entrepreneurs later in the day at beer brewery along Havana Bay. A group of U.S. business executives traveled with the president to the island nation, underscoring the interest in building economic ties with the island nation.

Here are 10 companies that are already in Cuba doing business or paving the way for future operations.

Airbnb: The San Francisco-based company that matches travelers with home rentals began offering Cuban accommodations to authorized U.S. visitors almost a year ago after the president eased travel restrictions at the beginning of 2015. On Sunday, the company said it will be able to provide accommodations in Cuba to travelers from around the world starting April 2 after receiving special authorizations from the U.S. Treasury. Airbnb has accommodations in nearly 40 cities and towns in Cuba.

AT&T: AT&T is in discussions with Cubas state telecom monopoly, Etesca, to make a deal, according to a Reuters report. The company declined to comment on the report.

Related: USDA Chief Says Farmers Looking Ahead To Possible Cuba Markets

Google: President Obama said that Google has a deal to set up Wi-Fi access and broadband access in Cuba. Only 5 percent of the residents of the island nation have access to the Internet.

Marriott International: The hotel operator said Sunday that the U.S. government has approved its application to pursue business deals in Cuba. The company didnt announce any deals, but said its discussing opportunities with potential partners in the island nation.

Story continues

Paypal: The Companys CEO traveled to Havana as one of the business leaders asked to join President Obama on his historic trip. Chief Executive Dan Shulman said PayPals natural first step would be to bring its global money transfer service, Xoom, to the country, given the recent loosening of commercial and financial regulations between the two countries. He further noted that $2 billion is sent from the U.S. to Cuba each year.

Priceline: Priceline struck a deal with Cuba on Monday to offer hotel rooms on the island to U.S. travelers through its subsidiary Booking.com. Priceline is the first U.S. online travel agency to make such a deal and the report said Booking.com will begin taking hotel reservations in Cuba in several weeks. Reuters said that Priceline began working on the deal shortly after President Obama said the U.S. would restore diplomatic relations with Cuba in December 2014.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide: Starwood on Saturday inked three hotel deals in Cuba, marking the first U.S. hospitality company to enter the countrys market in almost 60 years. The Hotel Inglaterra in Havana will join the companys luxury collection while the Hotel Quinta Avenida will become a Four Points by Sheraton. Starwood also plans to include Hotel Santa Isabel into its luxury collection.

Stripe: On Friday, the company announced that its Stripe Atlas product for budding businesses will be available to entrepreneurs in Cuba. Stripe Atlas allows a start-up internet business to incorporate in the U.S., open a U.S. bank account with a tax ID number, set up a Stripe account to accept payments from anywhere and access informational guidance and web tools.

United Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest and JetBlue: These four, among other airlines, are urging the Department of Transportation to award them a share of 20 daily round-trip flights to Cuba. The agency is expected to award the routes this summer.

Western Union: On Monday, the global payments services company said it will offer remittance services from across the world into Cuba. The initiative comes after U.S. regulatory and policy changes have allowed Cubans and non-Cubans to send remittances to the island nation.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Oxygen

A Tampa-area family's long wait for answers about the disappearance of their husband and father has come to an end. The Tallahassee Police Department announced this week that skeletal remains had been found in a wooded area off Apalachee Parkway, a commercial road dotted with strip malls and hotels on the east side of the city. Shortly thereafter, they announced that, with information received from the local medical examiner's office, they had identified the deceased as Jason Winoker, 52, of Lan
By Luke Mintz LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Humanitarian agencies demanded unconditional access to all communities in Syria as Russia continued on Wednesday to withdraw its military forces from the country. In a joint statement signed by 102 humanitarian organizations to mark the fifth anniversary of the conflict's beginning, aid agencies urged all warring parties that humanitarian access must "include access to all people in need by whatever routes necessary". The statement, signed by the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, Oxfam and others, noted "encouraging signs of progress" in Syria, with the cessation of hostilities, allowing humanitarian agencies to "rush more food and other relief to communities desperate for help". But access has to go beyond a temporary lifting of sieges and checkpoints, they said. "Humanitarian access and freedom of movement of civilians in Syria has to be sustained. It has to be unconditional. And it should include access to all people in need by whatever routes necessary," the signatories wrote. All humanitarian aid, including medical supplies, medical staff and aid workers should be given full access to all civilians in need. There was also an urgent need for a national immunization campaign for children, the agencies said. "These are practical actions that would mean the difference between life and death," the agencies said. "All parties to the conflict can agree on them, now. And in doing so, they can take another step to peace," they said. More than 11 million Syrians from a population of nearly 23 million have been forced from their homes during the five-year conflict, including 4.8 million who have fled the country. Kevin Jenkins, president of World Vision International, said there are 13.5 million people in Syria in need of assistance including six million children and many in hard to reach areas. Benedict Dempsey, director of policy and advocacy for Mercy Corps Europe, said the call for unfettered humanitarian access to Syria is "not new", adding that four U.N. Security Council resolutions called for this. "It is imperative that aid organizations, including Syrian organizations, have unfettered and sustained access to reach civilians in need throughout all of Syria swiftly, without restrictions and through the safest, most direct routes, be they across lines or across borders," he said. (Reporting by Luke Mintz; Editing by Belinda Goldsmith; 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 http://news.trust.org)
ADEN, Yemen (Reuters) - Warplanes attacked an al Qaeda camp in southern Yemen on Sunday, killing and wounding a number of militants, a local official said. The aircraft launched four air strikes on militants of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) near the port city of Mukalla on Yemen's south coast, he said. The official said the planes were from a Saudi-led coalition which over the past year has tried to stop the Iran-allied Houthi group from completing its takeover of the country. It was no immediately possible to confirm the affiliation of the aircraft. A spokesman for the Saudi-led alliance could not be contacted for immediate comment. U.S. aircraft have staged attacks on AQAP fighters in Yemen in recent weeks. AQAP has exploited the Yemeni war to expand its control, seizing Mukalla, the capital of Hadramout province, last year and recruiting more followers. The Houthis have been battling forces loyal to Yemen's Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi since March 2015 in a conflict that has cost more than 6,200 lives. (Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashaf; writing by Reem Shamseddine; editing by William Maclean and Jason Neely)
By Alex Dobuzinskis LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Nine months into a minimum wage hike at some Los Angeles hotels, city leaders and other backers of the move are claiming victory, saying doomsday forecasts from hoteliers have proven unfounded. Confined to about 15 of the city's largest non-union hotels and accounting for more than a fifth of all its hotel rooms, the increase was aimed at the segment of the service economy that city leaders saw as best equipped to absorb the extra cost. Hoteliers say full data are not yet in and some layoffs have taken place, but champions of the raise say that the naysayers' concerns appear to have been overblown. "There have not been the wholesale layoffs or cutbacks that we were told would occur," said Los Angeles City Councilman Curren Price, who co-authored the wage hike ordinance. The pay rise for a small slice of an industry gives an early if limited glimpse into the drive for a $15 minimum wage, gathering pace in states from New York to the West Coast. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25/hour since 2009. A phased statewide raise to $15, ultimately affecting 5.6 million workers, was approved by the California legislature last week and Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, is expected to sign it into law on Monday. Pushing wages to just over $15 from as low as $9 an hour for an estimated 3,000 hotel workers began last summer as the first phase of a hike for the second-largest U.S. city, largely run by Democrats. It affects about 8,000 rooms, or half of Los Angeles' large-hotel room inventory. Hotel operators had warned the hike would force them to cut staff and services, put the brakes on new hotel projects and would drive away customers. Because of the increase, Julie Robey, a general manager at the Holiday Inn Los Angeles Gateway, south of downtown, said she had to lay off seven employees, cutting her staff to 95 full and part-time workers. Robert Amano, executive director of the Hotel Association of Los Angeles, which opposed the increase, said the hike has led to some job cuts, but that an overall tally is not available. Many hotels have chosen to absorb the increase by upping restaurant food prices by 15 to 30 percent, he said. And he warned that smaller hotels, which do not have the same profit cushion, could face bigger challenges when they have to implement the increase this summer. ELECTION ISSUE Raising the minimum wage is a key issue for contenders in the November U.S. presidential election, addressing a movement led by labor unions to provide better living standards for the working poor. Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are avid supporters. Republican front-runner and businessman Donald Trump, who owns hotels, has said U.S. wages in general are too low - but also that it is not necessarily bad to have a low minimum wage in order to compete in a global marketplace. L.A. city leaders appear to have picked the right moment for their experiment. An improving economy has helped buoy L.A. hotel occupancy rates to an all-time high, blunting the effect of the wage rise on the bottom line, hotel industry officials said. "When demand is high and you're running busy, you don't want to cut staff," Amano said. More than two dozen new hotel projects are in the works, the biggest hotel development boom in Los Angeles since the 1980s, said Bruce Baltin, senior vice president at PKF Consulting, which provides analysis to the hotel industry. "Fortunately, the industry in Los Angeles is very healthy right now," Baltin said. For workers who received the sharp wage hike, the payoff can go beyond a bigger paycheck. Jacob Loera, a bellman at a downtown Los Angeles hotel, was able to quit a second job that sometimes made his working day go from before dawn until midnight. Now, with one full-time job at the higher minimum wage, the 39-year-old father of three still earns about the same $2,100 a month, but said he has gained something more valuable. "I get to spend quality time with my kids," Loera said. Minimum wage in the United States (GRAPHIC) - http://tmsnrt.rs/1O2agQN (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis, Editing Sara Catania, Daniel Wallis and Mary Milliken)
By Dan Kelley

CHESTER, Pa. (Reuters) - A locomotive on an Amtrak train carrying about 330 passengers derailed when it hit a backhoe south of Philadelphia on Sunday, killing two people and injuring about 35 in what passengers described as a jolt followed by a fireball.

The accident in Chester, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles (25 km) southwest of Philadelphia, was the latest in a series involving the U.S. passenger rail carrier and occurred a few miles south of the site of a 2015 derailment in which eight people were killed.

Amtrak Train 89 bound for Savannah, Georgia, from New York struck a vehicle on the tracks, Chester Fire Commissioner Travis Thomas said. Amtrak said the vehicle was a backhoe.

The two people killed were Amtrak employees, officials said.

Thomas said 35 people on board the train were taken to hospitals and none of the injuries were life-threatening. About half of the injured had been released from hospitals as of Sunday afternoon, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

"We are still gathering the facts," National Transportation Safety Board investigator Ryan Frigo told a news conference.

Frigo said there were seven crew members on board the train, adding that the locomotive engineer was hospitalized.

The NTSB has recovered the event data recorder, which may be able to tell the speed of the train at the time of the crash, as well as video recordings from the train. The material has been sent to an NTSB lab in Washington for analysis, he said.

Amtrak said it would operate its normal schedule of train service along the busy Northeast rail corridor on Monday.

Television images showed the lead engine with its front end partially off the rails and its windshields smashed.

Kim Goldman of Washington, who was among hundreds of passengers taken to a nearby church, said she felt a bump, followed by skidding similar to airplane turbulence that lasted five to 10 seconds.

"We knew we hit something. We were just holding on, hoping we would stop," said Goldman, who was in the second car. Crew told passengers to move to the back of the train.

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Passenger Terri Dixon, of Washington, said: "There was a big bump, and a fireball. Everything happened so fast."

The accident took place about 20 miles (30 km) south of one of Amtrak's deadliest recent accidents, where eight people were killed and 43 hurt last May.

That train was traveling at more than twice the speed limit, but a federal investigation could not determine the cause of the crash.

(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington and Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Peter Cooney)
By Steve Barnes

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Reuters) - The Arkansas attorney general said on Wednesday her office will appeal a judge's decision that upheld a city of Fayetteville ordinance forbidding discrimination against members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, a Republican, said her office will ask the state's Supreme Court to strike down the decision because the ordinance runs counter to a state law barring localities from broadening their own non-discrimination measures beyond the state's measures.

The state does not bar discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

"I disagreed with the lower court's decision," Rutledge said in a statement. "Given my duty to fully defend state law, I am seeking to appeal the ruling to the Arkansas Supreme Court."

A circuit judge in Fayetteville, about 150 miles northwest of Little Rock, ruled in March the city's ordinance did not conflict with state law restricting protected status to only the criteria the state specified.

The Fayetteville ordinance, approved by voters at a referendum election last year, is similar to those enacted by several Arkansas cities and counties in recent months including Little Rock, the state capitol, and Eureka Springs, an Ozarks community with a substantial gay population.

Efforts to advance or, conversely, limit legal protections for the LGBT community have sparked political tumult in several southern states in recent weeks.

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, under heavy pressure from the states business community, on Monday said he would veto a so-called religious freedom bill widely viewed as allowing discrimination against gays.

North Carolina last week became the first state to enact a law requiring transgender people to choose restrooms that match the gender on their birth certificate rather than the one with which they identify.

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat who is running for governor, said this week his office will not defend the law, calling the measure shameful and unconstitutional.

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After coming under intense pressure from business and rights groups, Indiana and Arkansas last year revised religious freedom acts approved by their Republican-controlled legislatures, offering fixes to language that critics said would have allowed people to invoke the laws to deny services to gay and lesbian customers.

(Corrects spelling of Fayetteville in headline, advisory.)

(Reporting by Steve Barnes in Little Rock; Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by David Gregorio)
The Daily Beast

Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via ReutersWith dozens of newly drafted troops already dead and Russian troops laying the groundwork for a retreat from a key Ukrainian city, the Kremlin has now revealed it is hoping to give its war a second wind by making ordinary Russians feel it as much as possible.Sergei Kirienko, the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration, said as much Saturday in a speech to a national conference of teachers, declaring that the war the Kremlin has unti
Damascus (AFP) - Syrian troops on Sunday seized the key Islamic State group bastion of Al-Qaryatain, dealing the jihadists a new blow in the country's centre a week after expelling them from Palmyra, state television said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group however said fighting was still raging in the east and southeast of the town, which is located in the desert in Homs province.

"The army with backing from supporting forces (pro-regime militia) brings back complete security and stability to the town of Al-Qaryatain, after crushing Daesh terrorists' last remaining positions there," state television said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

But the Britain-based Observatory said the army was still fighting the jihadists in the town.

"Clashes are still ongoing in the east and southeast of the town," it said.

The advance came after the Russian-backed Syrian army dealt IS a major blow on March 27 by seizing the ancient city of Palmyra, known as the "Pearl of the desert", from the jihadists.

Al-Qaryatain is located some 120 kilometres (75 miles) southwest of Palmyra.

Its recapture will allow the army to secure its grip over the ancient city, where jihadists destroyed ancient temples and executed around 280 people during their 10-month rule.

Once Al-Qaryatain returns to government control, "of the whole of Homs province, IS will only hold its bastion in Sukhna" northeast of Palmyra, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

"The recapture of Al-Qaryatain will also allow the army to reclaim the whole of the Syrian desert" spreading all the way south to the Iraqi border, Abdel Rahman added.

A ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia but which does not apply to the fight against jihadists has enabled the Syrian army to focus its efforts on IS.

- IS executions -

The group has also lost a string of high-ranking commanders in recent weeks to strikes by the US-led coalition which launched an air campaign against the jihadists in Iraq and Syria in 2014.

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A drone strike on Wednesday, likely by the coalition, killed Abu al-Haija, a Tunisian commander summoned by IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from Iraq.

Fifteen IS commanders accused of revealing Abu al-Haija's position have since been executed by the jihadist group, the Observatory said Sunday.

The fate of another 20 men accused of collaborating with the US-led coalition remains unknown, it added.

"This is the highest number of executions of security officials by IS," Abdel Rahman said.

The Observatory said on Sunday that 12 fighters from Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah were killed fighting the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front and allied rebels in the northern province of Aleppo.

They died "in shelling and fighting in the south of Aleppo province, during the fierce offensive by Al-Nusra... and rebels the day before yesterday (Friday)," the group said.

Hezbollah has since 2013 been openly fighting in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Spain gasped when the rumor spread that Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco had been killed in an explosion the morning of Dec. 20, 1973. It wasnt until midnight that government-controlled media confirmed what many feared: The hand-picked heir to replace Gen. Francisco Franco had been assassinated.

The bombing changed Spains history and contributed to a more rapid transition to democracy after over three decades of fascist dictatorship and hundreds of thousands of deaths, says Mikel Buesa, a terrorism expert and professor of economics at Complutense University of Madrid. Carrero Blanco was the countrys first prime minister after the Spanish Civil War, a Navy admiral, head of the secret police to control dissent, and a longtime friend and confidant of the all-powerful caudillo. He was Francos dauphin and was called upon to pilot the transition once Franco died, Buesa says, referring to the French term for the next in line to the throne.

Carrero Blanco symbolized better than anyone else the figure of pure Francoism. ETA militant

After tightened security made kidnapping unlikely to succeed, the Basque Country and Freedom group, aka ETA, decided to kill Carrero Blanco. From a rented basement, the terrorists dug a tunnel for five months and placed a bomb under a street where Carrero Blancos car routinely drove after Mass. When his car drove past a line the bombers had painted on a wall, one of the three militants disguised as gas company workers remotely detonated the device.

The vehicle was propelled into the air, clearing a five-story building and also killing Carrero Blancos chauffeur and his bodyguard, before falling to a terrace on the other side. Hours later, an ETA militant would explain to journalists that the groups intention was to destabilize the regime. Carrero Blanco symbolized better than anyone else the figure of pure Francoism, the terrorist said, noting how nobody managed as he did to maintain the internal equilibrium of Francoism.

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Gettyimages 151356971

On the rue Caello in Madrid, a huge gaping hole formed, following the bomb explosion which claimed the life of the Spanish Prime Minister, the Admiral Carrero Blanco.

Source: Getty

Everyone expected a crackdown in response. There was a real fear the murder would trigger a hard-line reaction and unleash a repressive movement, says Buesa. Instead, it was as if the regime capitulated, allowing for its demise, much like ETA wanted. Even the 80-year-old Franco appeared to give up. They have cut the last thread that tied me to this world, he was quoted as saying about Carrero Blancos assassination. Franco would later cry in front of his ministers and during the funeral.

Oddly, Carrero Blancos death proved to be a blessing for democracy, says Tom Burns, a former Reuters journalist who has written numerous books about Spains political history. If he had taken over in 1975 [when Franco died], the movement toward democracy would have been much slower, Burns adds. To ensure the regime post-Franco, Carrero Blanco had been slowly leading a timid political and economic reform to placate prodemocratic camps. He was instrumental in introducing a backward Spain to Europes competitive economy and in persuading Franco in 1969 to name Prince Juan Carlos as the future puppet head of state when he died, to add a semblance of reform.

For two years after the bombing, the regime weakened along with Francos health, in no small part because new Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro failed to unify Francoists: They were split between those who wanted more economic and political opening and those who preferred hard-line repression. Arias Navarros new cabinet was hostile toward the prince and to hints of reform within the regime.

As Francoism wobbled, the democratic movement grew bolder, and exiled leaders and political forces started aligning in preparation for an inevitable transition, Buesa says. Outside pressure also increased, namely from the U.S., which was at odds with Francos regime over Spains reluctance to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a strategic handicap for a U.S. trying to broaden its presence in the Mediterranean.

Prince Juan Carlos read the writing on the wall: Francoism was dying and Spains future depended on the ability of the monarchy to distance itself from the regime and build ties with reformers. The prince actively meets anti-Francoists and realizes that when Franco dies, he must move quickly to push for democracy or risk the recalcitrant regime taking over and delaying the process, Burns says.

When Franco died, on Nov. 20, 1975, Arias Navarro succumbed to pressure from all sides and, unable to lead a transition, resigned a year later. The future King Juan Carlos filled the power vacuum, finally launching Spains democratic transition.

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The last asylum-seeker children in Australian mainland detention have been freed, the government said on Sunday, although dozens of others are still being held on the remote Pacific island of Nauru.

Under Canberra's harsh immigration policy, asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are turned back or sent to Pacific camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea where they are held indefinitely while their refugee applications are processed.

They are blocked from resettling in Australia even if found to be refugees.

Canberra has been under pressure from rights groups to release children from the centres, with doctors and whistleblowers saying the detention of asylum-seekers has left some struggling with mental health problems.

"We've succeeded since the change of government (in September 2013) not only in stopping the boats but we've also succeeded... that there are now no children who'd arrived unlawfully by boat in detention," Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told Sky News.

"It's always been a goal of the immigration minister... to get kids out of detention."

The announcement means the children have been moved to community detention, where asylum-seekers waiting for their refugee applications to be processed live within the community. They are usually allowed to move around freely.

Detention levels for asylum-seeker children in immigration centres have fallen from a record number of almost 2,000 in June 2013.

Meanwhile, another 50 children were still being held at the Nauru camp, according to the latest figures from Australia's immigration department, although the Pacific government said in October the asylum-seekers there are free to roam around the tiny nation.

The announcement came as refugee advocates said the 267 asylum-seekers due to be deported to Nauru following a court ruling in February were still in Australia in what they claim as a success for their #LetThemStay campaign.

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The asylum-seekers, including children, had been brought to Australia from Nauru for medical treatment.

There have been numerous protests against the deportations under the #LetThemStay campaign, with Australian church leaders also vowing to defy the government's immigration rules, offering sanctuary to the asylum-seekers.

Turnbull said the government's policy of not allowing asylum-seekers who arrived by boat to settle in Australia had not changed.

"That is why as part of our exercise we are working with other countries in the region who are on Nauru or indeed (PNG's) Manus so that they settle somewhere else," the prime minister said.

Australia has struck an agreement with Cambodia to accept refugees in exchange for millions of dollars in aid, but so far only five have taken up the offer, with three -- two from Iran and one ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar -- later choosing to return home.
Sydney (AFP) - Australia's transport minister on Sunday said new debris found on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius would be examined to see if it belonged to MH370, just weeks after two Mozambique fragments were linked to the missing flight.

The debris was found on the Mauritius island of Rodrigues by a vacationing couple, news.com.au reported citing Reunion island website Clicanoo.

"The Malaysian government is working with officials from Mauritius to seek to take custody of the debris and arrange for its examination," Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester said.

"This debris is an item of interest however until the debris has been examined by experts it is not possible to ascertain its origin."

However, it remains unclear which country would examine the debris.

Aviation expert Don Thompson told the Australian news website the fragment could be the internal bulkhead from the Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 business or economy class cabin.

The latest discovery came less than two weeks after Australian and Malaysian authorities said two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were "almost certainly from MH370".

Another fragment picked up near Mossel Bay, a small town in Western Cape province in South Africa, would also be analysed to see if it came from MH370, South African officials said last month.

Before the latest discoveries, only a wing part recovered from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, which lies east of Mozambique and neighbours Mauritius, had been confirmed as coming from the jet that disappeared two years ago.

Australia is leading the search for MH370 in the remote Indian Ocean, where the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight is believed to have diverted when it disappeared on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

Chester added that authorities "remain hopeful the aircraft will be found". More than 95,000 square kilometres (36,700 square miles) of the target zone of 120,000 square kilometres has been scoured so far, but no crash site has been found.

The governments of Australia, China and Malaysia have said they will end the hunt when the target area is fully searched unless new, credible information emerges.
Jerusalem (AFP) - An autopsy on a Palestinian assailant showed Sunday that he was killed by a bullet to the head, backing a manslaughter case against an Israeli soldier caught on video shooting him, a doctor said.

The soldier shot Abdul Fatah al-Sharif in the head on March 24 as he lay on the ground while apparently seriously wounded from earlier gunshot wounds.

Video of the incident in Hebron in the occupied West Bank spread widely online and the soldier was arrested, with rights groups labelling it a summary execution.

Prosecutors have said they are investigating the 19-year-old soldier for manslaughter, though he has not yet been charged. His identity has remained secret under a gag order.

Israel's supreme court allowed the Palestinian's family to have a doctor of their choice observe the autopsy.

"After a full autopsy, the fatal wound was in the head," the Palestinian doctor, Rayan al-Ali, told AFP.

"There were several gunshot wounds. All those wounds were in the muscles, the lower limbs, and there was a wound in his right lung, but it was not fatal and did not lead to his death."

An Israeli forensic team that conducted the autopsy came to the same conclusion, a source close to the investigation told local media.

An Israeli military spokeswoman could not confirm the autopsy findings when contacted by AFP.

A finding that Sharif was already dead when the soldier shot him in the head could have complicated the investigation.

Israeli authorities had not yet commented on the autopsy.

Video showed the 21-year-old Palestinian lying on the ground, shot along with another man after stabbing and moderately wounding a soldier minutes earlier, according to the army.

The soldier then shoots him again, in the head, without any apparent provocation.

His lawyers have argued that the soldier may have thought the Palestinian was wearing explosives, but he was reportedly already checked for a suicide belt and no one in the video appears to be acting with caution toward him.

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The case has threatened to exacerbate Israeli-Palestinian tensions amid a wave of violence that began in October.

It has also led to major controversy in Israel and sparked political tensions, with far-right supporters calling for the soldier's release.

Violence since October has left 200 Palestinians and 28 Israelis dead.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.

But Israeli forces have also been accused of using excessive force in some cases, charges which they have firmly denied.
Paris (AFP) - Belgium's approach to immigration and security has again come under fire after the Brussels bombings, but some say the country is being unfairly singled out and the timing of the criticism is crass.

Among the more bizarre statements was that of Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz.

"If in Belgium they continue to eat chocolate, enjoy life and parade as great liberals and democrats while not taking account of the fact that some of the Muslims who are there are organising acts of terror, they will not be able to fight against them," Katz told Israeli radio.

But it was criticism closer to home that triggered particular outrage, after French Finance Minister Michel Sapin accused Brussels of "naivety" over the spread of Islamist extremism in their country.

"I think there was... a lack of will, on the part of some (Belgian) authorities... perhaps also a kind of naivety," Sapin said on Tuesday, suggesting they "thought that to encourage good integration, communities should be left to develop on their own".

Speaking to French TV station LCI, he added: "We know... that this is not the right answer. When a neighbourhood is in danger of becoming sectarian, we should (implement) a policy of integration."

Belgium has faced much criticism over its security failings, particularly in the wake of November's Paris attacks that were largely planned in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, considered a hotbed of Islamist radicalism.

Some criticisms have been hard to refute, such as revelations from Turkey on Wednesday that Brussels attacker Ibrahim El Bakraoui was detained and deported back to Europe last year.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Belgian authorities had failed to confirm the suspect's jihadist links "despite our warnings".

- 'Solidarity not lectures' -

But the timing of Sapin's comments, just hours after the bombings at the Brussels airport and metro station, was considered highly inappropriate.

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"It is indecent when people are suffering, are in shock. We need solidarity, not lectures," said Belgian Socialist politician Laurette Onkelinx.

A member of Sapin's own French Socialist party, Francois Lamy, described the finance minister's statement as "just shameful".

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls also sought to distance himself from his colleague's words, saying he did not want "to lecture our Belgian friends".

"We closed our eyes, everywhere in Europe and including France, to the rise of extremist Salafist ideas in neighbourhoods where a mix of drug trafficking and radical Islam have led astray... some of the youth," Valls told Europe 1 radio.

Nonetheless, Belgium has spawned more jihadists per capita than any other EU country, with some 500 leaving for Syria and Iraq from a population of only 11 million, officials say.

Its political divisions have prevented effective coordination between security services, and have also been blamed for allowing radicalisation to fester.

A brief moment of elation followed the arrest of Paris suspect Salah Abdeslam last week in Brussels, but that was quickly snuffed out by Tuesday's carnage.

- 'Could happen anywhere' -

Despite all this, experts have warned against singling out Belgium for criticism.

"I'd caution against focusing too much on Belgium and blaming them," said Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism expert at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

"This is about networks and where they are strong. Today, it happens to be in Belgium, but a similar situation could be replicated elsewhere," he said.

Hegghammer noted that savvy militants were increasingly skilled at flying under the radar by using encrypted communications -- and that this could happen in other countries.

Belgium's ambassador to Britain, Guy Trouveroy, said it was "not entirely right" to suggest some areas of his country had been abandoned by the authorities.

"It is always easy afterwards to say 'We should have, we should have'," Trouveroy told the BBC.

"At the time, the threats were not there and this Syria issue is relatively new. We had to move up to the challenge and we went maybe pace-by-pace, haphazardly. It is not easy.

"These are professionals and they know how to put up commando operations."

Meanwhile, an aide to Sapin told AFP the minister had not wanted to single out Belgium and was talking more generally about the terrorist threat.

The aide said Sapin had sent a message to his Belgian counterpart, Johan Van Overtveldt, apologising for the "controversy".
Washington (AFP) - American space firm Blue Origin successfully completed the third launch and vertical landing of its reusable New Shepard rocket on Saturday, company founder and Internet entrepreneur Jeff Bezos said.

"Flawless BE-3 restart and perfect booster landing," tweeted Bezos, referring to the BE-3 engine used to land the rocket back at the company's testing site in Texas.

The unmanned crew capsule also landed safely, using parachutes, said the executive, who founded online giant Amazon and also owns The Washington Post newspaper.

The breakthroughs by Blue Origin and parallel efforts by rival Internet mogul Elon Musk's SpaceX open up the potential for cutting costs for space travel and making rockets as reusable as airplanes.

In November, Bezos called the accomplishment a "game-changer" which opens the door to lower costs in space travel and his vision of people living and working in space.

Bezos said in a tweet on Friday that the rocket's engines would be restarting just 3,600 feet (1.1 kilometers) from the ground during the vertical landing attempt on Saturday, with the rocket hitting the ground in six seconds if they failed to work properly.

The New Shepard can reach an altitude of 333,000 feet, considered the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.

Previous test flights for the New Shepard were in January and November.
Brasilia (AFP) - The top attorney for Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's government made his last stand Monday against the effort to impeach her, lambasting the case and warning of a stain on democracy.

Attorney General Jose Eduardo Cardozo made his final arguments before a congressional impeachment committee, a clutch moment in a political crisis that has brought the government of Latin America's biggest economy to the brink of collapse as it battles a deep recession and corruption allegations.

Cardozo denied Rousseff took out unauthorized government loans to hide the depth of the recession, and said the accusation was in any case not an impeachable offense.

"As such, impeaching her would be a coup, a violation of the constitution, an affront to the rule of law, without any need to resort to bayonets," he told the 65-member committee.

The hearing kicked off two crucial weeks that could decide Rousseff's political fate.

The commission's recommendation on whether to try Rousseff, expected on April 11, will set the tone for a vote soon after in the lower house.

Two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies, or 342 votes, are needed to send the case for trial in the Senate. The lower house vote is expected to take place on April 17, newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo reported.

As the impeachment battle played out, Rousseff scrambled to cement new alliances after her main coalition partner, the PMDB party, went over to the opposition last week.

The PMDB, a political juggernaut, is the party of house speaker Eduardo Cunha, the man leading the impeachment push, and Vice President Michel Temer, who will become president if it succeeds.

The attorney general called the case an "act of revenge" by Cunha, a scandal-plagued but powerful politician.

He accused Cunha of unleashing the impeachment storm because he was furious the Rousseff administration "didn't support him" when the house ethics committee opened an investigation into allegations the speaker was involved in a huge embezzlement and bribery scandal at state oil company Petrobras.

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"A new government must not be born with this stain of illegitimacy," Cardozo warned.

"Brazil's democracy is at stake... Removing a head of state elected by the people is an exceptionally grave measure that cannot be based on her unpopularity."

- Brazil's Panama Papers -

Rousseff's approval rating has plunged to 10 percent, according to polls.

But those working to oust her themselves face serious allegations.

Temer has been linked to the Petrobras scandal, though he has not been charged. And Cunha was charged last year with taking millions of dollars in bribes in the scandal.

Cunha was also among scores of Brazilians caught up in the 'Panama Papers' scandal that erupted Sunday when media published documents revealing offshore accounts held by public figures worldwide.

His name does not appear on the list, but it included one firm owned by him, according to three Brazilian news organizations that joined in publishing the leaks.

The house speaker denied the allegation in a statement.

The PMDB was long an awkward partner for Rousseff and her Workers' Party (PT).

Now that their divorce is official, Rousseff, 68, is jettisoning PMDB appointees from prized government posts and giving them to parties that could bring her the congressional votes needed to avoid impeachment.

The latest casualty was the head of state tourism agency Embratur, a Temer appointee.

Rousseff could also find out this week if the Supreme Court agrees to let heavy-hitting but controversial ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva join her cabinet.

He has been barred because he is accused in a case connected to the Petrobras scandal.

Huge opposition rallies and smaller pro-Rousseff rallies in recent weeks have highlighted sharp divisions in Brazil that some fear could turn violent even as the Rio de Janeiro Olympics hover just four months away.

The political tensions have only exacerbated the country's economic mess.

The market is now betting the economy will shrink by 3.73 percent this year, a central bank survey found -- even worse than the International Monetary Fund's forecast of a 3.5 percent recession.

Brazil's economy contracted 3.8 percent last year, and a second year of recession would be the worst slump since the Great Depression.
Beirut (AFP) - Britain will provide nearly $30 million to the Lebanese army, mostly to boost security along the country's volatile border with Syria, the UK's top diplomat said on Thursday.

In his first visit to Beirut as foreign secretary, Philip Hammond announced Britain would provide Lebanon with an additional 4.5 million pounds ($6.5 million, 5.7 million euros) to help train more than 5,000 soldiers.

Another 15.3 million pounds would be allocated "for the training and mentoring of the Lebanese Armed Forces' Land Border Regiments, over the next three years," according to a statement from the embassy.

Hammond said the "aim is for Lebanon to have secured 100 percent of its border with Syria, and for the UK to have trained over 11,000 Lebanese soldiers in the specialist techniques of urban counterterrorism by 2019".

"Lebanon is an important part of the front line against terrorism," he told journalists after meeting Lebanese Prime Minister Tammam Salam.

Since Syria's conflict erupted in 2011, Lebanon's army has fought off armed groups and jihadist factions along the country's eastern border.

In August 2014, the army clashed with the Islamic State group and Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, in the border town of Arsal.

As they withdrew, IS and Al-Nusra kidnapped 30 Lebanese soldiers and policemen, 16 of whom were released after nearly 18 months of negotiations.

The Lebanese army and Internal Security Forces receive significant military support from outside countries including the United States and France.

Since 2011, Britain has spent more than $59 million on supporting Lebanon's security forces, according to the Foreign Office.

Last month, Saudi Arabia halted a $3 billion programme funding military supplies to Lebanon's security forces in protest against Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite movement allied with Saudi's main regional rival, Iran.

Riyadh said it would keep the weapons, which had been provided by France.
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Sunday that UK steel producers must be considered for infrastructure and other government contracts involving steel supplies, as part of plans to find a long-term solution to a crisis in the industry. The government is looking for ways to support domestic steel producers after India's Tata Steel put its loss-making British plant up for sale on Wednesday, putting thousands of jobs at risk. Prime Minister David Cameron has said there was no guarantee of a buyer for Britain's biggest steel producer, which has been hit by high costs and Chinese competition, and a state takeover was not the answer. Under its support measures, the government will create an approved supplier list for steel companies wanting to bid for public sector projects, such as Britain's 55 million-pound ($78.25 million) high-speed rail link, which will need two million tonnes of steel. "By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," Business Secretary Sajid Javid said in a statement. The introduction of measures to ensure British steelmakers are considered for government contracts could take six to nine months, a spokeswoman for Javid's department said. The government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's decision to sell its UK plant in south Wales, which employs 15,000, with opposition politicians saying it was "asleep at the wheel." The government has said it is working to broker a deal with potential buyers after Tata's decision to pull out of its almost decade-long venture in Britain. Investment firm Greybull Capital is interested in buying Tata's Scunthorpe steelworks and could announce a deal as early as Wednesday, a source familiar with the deal told Reuters. The deal is expected to be for 400 million pounds, with about half of the investment coming from Greybull and the other half from a consortium and maybe a government loan of up to 100 million pounds, the source told Reuters. A Greybull spokesman said talks were continuing constructively. British newspaper the Telegraph first reported on Sunday that the Meyohas brothers are set to buy the Scunthorpe plant from Tata. [http://bit.ly/1qhju51] Liberty House Group, which produces steel in Britain, has begun talks with the government over a potential partnership but does not want to buy all of Tata's UK operations, its executive Chairman Sanjeev Gupta was quoted as saying by the Sunday Telegraph. Javid told the BBC he would not talk about specific offers but said he wanted to find a buyer for the whole business and the government would engage with any willing and serious buyer. He said the government was looking at how it could help with issues such as Tata's pension burden and costly energy supplies. "These are the kind of things we have already thought of, we have already started working on and what I hope is that you will have the offer document from Tata, overlay on top of that the help the British government can provide and then you have the makings of a successful deal," he said. Cheap Chinese imports have hit Britain's steel industry. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the International Steel Statistic bureau. Cameron has said he wants Britain and China to work together to tackle overcapacity in steel. Last week, however, China imposed anti-dumping duties of up to 46 percent on specialist steel products from Japan, South Korea and the European Union. (Reporting by Li-mei Hoang and Kylie MacLellan; Vishal Sridhar in Bengaluru and Freya Berry in London, Editing by Susan Fenton and Alan Crosby)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Sunday that UK steel producers must be considered for infrastructure and other government contracts involving steel supplies, as part of plans to find a long-term solution to a crisis in the industry. The government is looking for ways to support domestic steel producers after India's Tata Steel put its loss-making British plant up for sale on Wednesday, putting thousands of jobs at risk. Prime Minister David Cameron has said there was no guarantee of a buyer for Britain's biggest steel producer, which has been hit by high costs and Chinese competition, and a state takeover was not the answer. Under its support measures, the government will create an approved supplier list for steel companies wanting to bid for public sector projects, such as Britain's 55 million-pound ($78.25 million) high-speed rail link, which will need two million tonnes of steel. "By changing the procurement rules on these major infrastructure projects we are backing the future of UK steel - opening up significant opportunities for UK suppliers and allowing them to compete more effectively with international companies," Business Secretary Sajid Javid said in a statement. The introduction of measures to ensure British steelmakers are considered for government contracts could take six to nine months, a spokeswoman for Javid's department said. The government has faced criticism over its response to Tata's decision to sell its UK plant in south Wales, which employs 15,000, with opposition politicians saying it was "asleep at the wheel." The government has said it is working to broker a deal with potential buyers after Tata's decision to pull out of its almost decade-long venture in Britain. Investment firm Greybull Capital is interested in buying Tata's Scunthorpe steelworks and could announce a deal as early as Wednesday, a source familiar with the deal told Reuters. The deal is expected to be for 400 million pounds, with about half of the investment coming from Greybull and the other half from a consortium and maybe a government loan of up to 100 million pounds, the source told Reuters. A Greybull spokesman said talks were continuing constructively. British newspaper the Telegraph first reported on Sunday that the Meyohas brothers are set to buy the Scunthorpe plant from Tata. [http://bit.ly/1qhju51] Liberty House Group, which produces steel in Britain, has begun talks with the government over a potential partnership but does not want to buy all of Tata's UK operations, its executive Chairman Sanjeev Gupta was quoted as saying by the Sunday Telegraph. Javid told the BBC he would not talk about specific offers but said he wanted to find a buyer for the whole business and the government would engage with any willing and serious buyer. He said the government was looking at how it could help with issues such as Tata's pension burden and costly energy supplies. "These are the kind of things we have already thought of, we have already started working on and what I hope is that you will have the offer document from Tata, overlay on top of that the help the British government can provide and then you have the makings of a successful deal," he said. Cheap Chinese imports have hit Britain's steel industry. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to the International Steel Statistic bureau. Cameron has said he wants Britain and China to work together to tackle overcapacity in steel. Last week, however, China imposed anti-dumping duties of up to 46 percent on specialist steel products from Japan, South Korea and the European Union. ($1 = 0.7028 pounds) (Reporting by Li-mei Hoang and Kylie MacLellan; Vishal Sridhar in Bengaluru and Freya Berry in London, Editing by Susan Fenton and Alan Crosby)
London (AFP) - The government will do all it can to keep Britain's biggest steelworks running, Business Secretary Sajid Javid said Sunday, in the face of a crisis threatening the country's steel industry.

Indian steel giant Tata Steel announced Tuesday it was putting its loss-making British business up for sale, including the Port Talbot plant on the south Wales coast.

Javid said he thought there was time to find a buyer for the plant and Tata Steel's other UK assets.

"Tata will issue an offer document very soon," he told BBC television.

The government is "also going to have to offer support to clinch that buyer and give that steel plant a long-term, viable future".

Tata Steel employs around 15,000 staff in Britain.

However, Port Talbot is reportedly losing 1 million (1.3 million euros, $1.4 million) a day in the face of high energy costs and plunging prices caused by a chronic global oversupply of steel and a glut of cheap imports, particularly from China.

The facility is Wales's biggest single employer.

"It wouldn't be prudent to rule anything out at this stage, but I think that nationalisation is rarely an answer in these situations," said Javid.

"I do feel, though... that there will be enough time to find the right buyer working with the government and being able to take this forward.

"We will look at everything we can do to allow a sale going ahead."

Metal processing company Liberty House is looking at some of Tata's British assets.

The group's president, Sanjeev Gupta, was quoted by The Sunday Telegraph newspaper as saying he was not interested in all of Tata's British assets but was prepared to enter negotiations.

"We would need a proper partnership with the government. I don't know what that would entail at this stage," he said, adding that he was heading to Britain on Monday.

"We are in the process of starting a discussion with Tata.

"If the company, its people, its workers and the government would be willing to consider my suggestions, then I'm willing to engage in a discussion about what role we will play in that."
By Philip Blenkinsop BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Brussels Airport reopened to a thin stream of passengers on Sunday, 12 days after suicide bombers destroyed its departure hall and killed 16 people. Belgium's main airport says it aims to return to maximum capacity before the start of summer holidays at the end of June or early July. The airport had not handled passenger flights since two suspected Islamist militants carried out the suicide attacks. Those bombs and a separate one on a metro train in the capital killed 32 people, excluding the three bombers. On Sunday, the airport handled just three flights, the first bound for Faro in Portugal with only about 80 passengers. The plane bore a surrealist design of clouds and birds in homage to Belgian painter Rene Magritte and had only been unveiled the day before the bombings. It taxied toward the runway flanked by an honor guard of staff and, after a minute's silence, took off. Flights were also scheduled to Turin and Athens later in the day, with three return flights set for the evening. The first passengers for nearly two weeks fed into a vast temporary marquee housing security controls and check-in facilities. Arnaud Feist, the airport's chief executive, described Sunday's reopening as a sign of hope and an emotional moment for all airport staff. "We've worked day and night, literally day and night, over the last 12 days to make this moment possible," he said. On Monday, the airport will serve a wider range of destinations, including one plane due out to New York and two more to cities in Cameroon, Gambia and Senegal. Many flights have been re-routed to Belgium's regional airports or other nearby hubs such as Amsterdam and Paris, with high-speed trains to and from Brussels packed. Brussels Airport has warned passengers to arrive three hours before their flights due to the increased security and to come by car. The normal train and bus services are not running. Special cameras will be set up to read number plates, there will be random checks of vehicles and the drop-off zone will not be accessible. Passengers and their baggage will be checked on arrival and there will be increased patrols of armed police and military. The airport, which provides work for some 20,000 people, is among the busiest in Europe, handling 23.5 million passengers per year. It links the Belgian capital, headquarters city of the European Union and NATO, with 226 destinations worldwide, through 77 airlines. With its temporary check-in zone, it will only be able to handle some 800 departing passengers or about five to six flights per hour, around 20 percent of previous capacity. Brussels Airlines, Belgium's largest carrier which is 45 percent owned by Germany's Lufthansa, has estimated the closure of its Brussels hub is costing it 5 million euros ($5.7 million) per day. The city's association of hotel operators pointed to the closed airport as one of the main reasons for a more than 50 percent drop in overnight stays in the week following the bombings. (Additional reporting by Johnny Cotton; Editing by Andrew Bolton)
Brussels (AFP) - Brussels Airport partially reopened Sunday, 12 days after it was hit by Islamic State attacks, with tearful staff applauding the first departure and an initial trickle of passengers undergoing strict new security checks.

The key travel hub has been closed since two men blew themselves up in the departure hall on March 22 in coordinated blasts that also struck a metro station in the Belgian capital, killing a total of 32 people.

A Brussels Airlines plane bound for the Portuguese city of Faro became the first plane to take off around 1140 GMT.

Emotional employees and government officials marked the moment with a minute's silence followed by hugs and a round of applause, AFP reporters saw. On the tarmac, fire engines and police vehicles formed a guard of honour for the Airbus A320.

"We're back," Brussels Airport chief executive Arnaud Feist said after watching the plane, decked out with Belgian artist Magritte's trademark birds and clouds, take to the skies.

The departure was followed by two later flights to Athens and Turin, in what Feist called a "symbolic" reopening of the airport. The same three planes were to return to Brussels with passengers later Sunday.

The restart of the airport has been hailed as the beginning of a return to normal for a traumatised country, but the shadow of the attacks loomed large.

Two big white tents were serving as temporary check-in facilities to replace the blast-hit departure hall, and passengers were asked to come three hours before departure to allow time for tight new security checks.

The first several dozen travellers to arrive Sunday were met by heavily armed police and soldiers on the access roads to the airport.

There was also a strong security presence inside the tents where passengers walked through metal detectors and had their bags screened before checking in and being allowed to enter the main building.

A father dropping off his son and a group of friends for the Faro flight was positive about the changes. "This is the safest airport in the world right no, isn't it?" he told reporters.

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- 'We can overcome this' -

Loukas Bassoukos, a 20-year-old IT student waiting for his flight to Athens, said it felt "a bit weird" to be among the first to return to the bomb-hit airport.

"So many people died here," he told AFP. "But I think we can overcome this. I think we slowly have to start trusting the security controls."

Psychologists were on hand to assist any passengers overcome with emotion.

Under the new system, only passengers with travel and ID documents are allowed into the makeshift departure hall, and all bags will be checked before entering. Once inside, travellers will still have to go past the usual security barriers.

The airport will initially only be accessible by car, with no access for buses and trains. Vehicles will be screened and subject to spot checks.

The number of flights will be stepped up quickly in coming days. Still, the airport will only be able to work at 20 percent capacity at best using the temporary facilities, handling 800 to 1,000 passengers an hour.

It will take months to repair the departure hall, according to Feist. The damage from the blasts was severe, with pictures from the scene showing the building's glass-fronted facade in shatters, collapsed ceilings and destroyed check-in desks.

Feist said he expected the airport to start running normally again from late June or early July.

- Sing-along -

The closure of Zaventem airport has wreaked havoc on the travel industry, triggering a drop in tourist arrivals and forcing thousands of passengers to be rerouted to other airports in and around Belgium.

Brussels Airport, which claims to contribute some three billion euros ($3.4 billion) annually to the Belgian economy, has not released any figures on the economic impact of the shutdown, but top carrier Brussels Airlines has said it was losing five million euros daily.

In a setback for the airport, Delta Air Lines at the weekend said it was suspending services between Brussels and Atlanta until March 2017 due to the "uncertainty surrounding the re-opening of Brussels airport and weakening demand".

With 260 companies on-site employing some 20,000 staff overall, the airport is one of the country's largest employers.

In the still-grieving capital meanwhile, one thousand people took part in a sing-along in a central square that has become a shrine to the attack victims. In celebration of all things Belgian, they sang "Moules frites" by Stromae and "Bruxelles" by Jacques Brel.

Belgian police are still hunting for a mystery third suspect in the Brussels attacks, dubbed "the man in the hat", who was seen in CCTV footage next to the two airport bombers.
SDP chairman Chee Soon Juan and his wife, Huang Chi Mei, seen during the partys walkabout on Sunday (3 April). Photo: Dhany Osman/Yahoo Newsroom



By Dhany Osman



Chee Soon Juan, secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) and the partys candidate for the Bukit Batok by-election, highlighted on Sunday (3 April) how his party would tackle the poverty issue differently from the Peoples Action Party (PAP).



Speaking at a doorstop interview in Bukit Batok, Chee was told that his by-election opponent, Murali Pillai, would focus on needy residents and was asked how his approach to the matter would be different.

Chee, 53, responded by asking how Murali could bring value add to residents, when he had been with the ruling party all this time.



When you have MP after MP after MP in Parliament and still these poverty issues continue how does he (Murali) bring this issue to his superiors in Parliament? If he was really interested, he would have brought it up a long time ago.

We (the SDP) dont want residents to be dependent on handouts, said Chee. We want to empower them. Thats the difference. The more they are dependent on handouts, the more the power can be used as an overlord to them.

Chee said he had seen many pockets of poverty while on his walkabouts and said the party would soon be announcing the details of its social programmes.


By Sharon Bernstein

SACRAMENTO (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown announced a deal with legislators and labor leaders on Monday to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2023, saying the nation's most-populous state would lead the way toward higher pay for the working poor.

The proposal, which still must win approval from moderate lawmakers, would make California the first to raise the statewide minimum wage to $15 an hour - the highest in the nation - while giving the governor the right to opt out if the economy falters.

Raising the minimum wage has cropped up on many Democratic Party candidates' agendas ahead of the November elections and the issue could help mobilize Democratic voters to the polls.

According to the governor's office, 2.2 million Californians currently earn the state minimum wage of $10 an hour.

The idea of raising the federal minimum wage, which has remained at $7.25 an hour for more than six years, has been opposed by Republicans and some business groups, who say a higher minimum wage would harm small businesses and strain government budgets.

"You've got a Congress that doesn't get it, so out to lunch. I'm hoping that what happens in California will not just stay in California but will be exported to the rest of the country," Brown said at a press conference in Sacramento.

The deal would commit the state, home to one of the world's biggest economies, to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022 for large businesses and 2023 for smaller firms.

It would also head off a pair of competing ballot initiatives championed by labor leaders that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021.

But passage of the proposal was not guaranteed without support from more moderate members of the Democrat-controlled legislature. Absent from the press conference was Anthony Rendon, speaker of the state Assembly, where the bill was expected to face opposition.

Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has called for raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020.

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Christopher Thornberg, founding partner at Beacon Economics, said increasing the minimum wage was not effective in reducing poverty because the poorest workers were most at risk of losing their jobs when employers cut positions.

"This is not costless," Thornberg said. These are the people that businesses will say, "If Im going to pay $15 bucks an hour, Im not going to hire them.'"

Fourteen states and several cities began 2016 with minimum wage increases, typically phasing in raises that will ultimately take them to between $10 and $15 an hour.

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein, Robin Respaut and Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Sara Catania, Grant McCool and Alan Crosby)
Shanghai (AFP) - China's insurance regulator is opposed to multi-billion dollar bids by financial conglomerate Anbang for Starwood Hotels and a stable of properties owned by hedge fund Blackstone, according to respected business magazine Caixin.

Anbang has offered nearly $13 billion for Starwood, owner of the Sheraton and Westin brands, as well as $6.5 billion for the purchase of 16 luxury hotels from Blackstone.

But another US hotel giant Marriott International, which had already agreed to take over rival Starwood before the Anbang move, now looks likely to win that deal after hiking its offer by more than $1 billion this week to $13.6 billion.

The China Insurance Regulatory Commission is against both of Anbang's proposed acquisitions under rules which reportedly ban insurers from investing more than 15 percent of their assets overseas, Caixin quoted a source as saying.

The regulator also had a "disapproving attitude" towards the deals, the magazine said in a report on its website late Tuesday, but gave no other reasons.

The government agency and Anbang could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Anbang, which started as a property insurance firm before expanding into other financial services, has assets of 1.65 trillion yuan ($254 billion), according to its website.

The company has aggressively invested overseas through a string of deals. In November, Anbang bought US insurer Fidelity & Guaranty Life for $1.6 billion, after snapping up Korean insurer Tong Yang Life for around $950 million and Dutch insurer Vivat for about $167 million earlier in the year.

It bought New York's historic Waldorf Astoria hotel in 2014, but analysts question why a Chinese insurance company wants to become an international hotelier.
A major international study Saturday suggested that healthy people may reduce their risk of developing heart problems before they start by taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, known as statins.

The findings came from three trials, which included more than 12,000 people in 21 countries, and were released at the American College of Cardiology conference in Chicago.

Until now, statins have mainly been recommended for people at high-risk of heart disease, which kills 18 million people around the world each year and causes some 50 million heart attacks and strokes.

"The implications for practice are huge," said senior researcher Salim Yusuf, professor of medicine at McMaster University.

"I think we certainly should consider using statins much more widely than we have used them thus far."

The trials, called Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation-3 (HOPE-3), were the first of their kind to examine the impact of using statins, sometimes in combination with blood-pressure lowering drugs and other times with a placebo, in a large, globally diverse population.

Those enrolled in the trial were considered at "intermediate risk for developing cardiovascular disease" because they had at least one risk factor, such as smoking, a large waist to hip ratio, or a family history of heart disease.

However, none had been diagnosed with heart disease at the start of the trial.

- Randomly assigned -

For the study, people were randomly assigned to either a cholesterol-lowering drug (rosuvastatin, which is also known as Crestor) or a placebo pill daily.

Some were also given a blood pressure lowering drug -- a combination pill with candesartan (Atacand) and hydrocholothiazide (Microzide) -- or a placebo.

They were followed for a median of 5.6 years as researchers noted how many people died or suffered heart attack or stroke.

Statin therapy was able to "significantly and safely reduce cardiovascular events by 25 percent," said the findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Drugs to lower blood pressure did not reduce major cardiovascular events like heart attack or stroke in the overall population, including those who did not have elevated blood pressure.

"There was no benefit in those with lower blood pressure and even a tendency towards harm in those in the lowest third of the blood pressure distribution," said Eva Lonn, professor of cardiology at McMaster University.

"These data suggest blood pressure lowering medications are appropriate for people with hypertension but that people with lower blood pressure who have no other reasons to use blood pressure reducing drugs should avoid taking these drugs."

Anti-hypertensives did help people with high blood pressure, and those who took statins in addition to anti-hypertensive drugs reduced cardiovascular events by 40 percent.

"The take-home message is that statins are safe and effective, and that because benefits were similar irrespective of pretreatment cholesterol levels or levels of inflammatory markers, no baseline blood tests are required to identify the patients who will derive benefits from this treatment," said Jackie Bosch, associate professor of rehabilitation science at McMaster University.

"Our results were remarkably consistent across all subgroups."

The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and AstraZeneca, the manufacturer of the drugs tested.

The study was independently designed and conducted by the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences in Canada.

Researchers said the subjects in the study will be followed for another three to five years for additional analysis of the effects of the treatments on cognitive decline, erectile dysfunction and vision.










By Ransdell Pierson (Reuters) - New ways of controlling cholesterol, including possibly directly injecting "good" HDL cholesterol into patients, need to be studied following the failure of promising treatments from Eli Lilly, Pfizer Inc and Roche Holding AG, according to top heart researchers. Lilly in October halted a 12,000-patient study of its experimental drug evacetrapib, an oral medication that in smaller earlier studies slashed "bad" LDL cholesterol and doubled levels of HDL. But improved cholesterol levels did not prevent heart attacks and strokes, diminishing hopes for the approach to treating heart disease - by raising HDL through blockage of a protein called CETP. Roche in 2012 scrapped its own CETP inhibitor after it also failed to help patients. Pfizer's similar drug was discontinued in 2006 after being linked to deaths in trials. Although Merck & Co continues to develop its own CETP inhibitor in a 30,000-patient study expected to be completed next year, researchers on Sunday said the failures of the Lilly, Roche and Pfizer drugs bode poorly for it. "Merck's drug is the fourth shot on goal for CETP inhibitors, but with disappointment or lack of success for the other agents you have to be increasingly pessimistic" about the class of drugs, said Dr. Stephen Nicholls, deputy director of the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute in Adelaide, Australia. He was a lead investigator for the failed trial of Lilly's drug. Nicholls and Dr. Steve Nissen, the head of cardiology for the Cleveland Clinic, who co-lead the evacetrapib study, on Sunday reviewed the baffling evacetrapib data in a presentation at the annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago. "This drug lowered LDL by 37 percent and raised HDL by 130 percent and had absolutely no effect" on preventing deaths and heart attacks, Nissen said in an interview. Although other ways of raising HDL cholesterol might eventually prove protective, Nissen said all attempts so far have been fruitless. Nicholls said he remains hopeful of future HDL therapies and is testing whether artificial HDL can be made in the laboratory and injected directly into high-risk heart patients. "There is enthusiasm it may be able to shrink plaque" in heart arteries, he said. He said he is studying variations of that approach with French drugmaker Cerenis Therapeutics and the Medicines Company. Nicholls said another possible approach would be to instruct the liver to make more HDL. (Reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Caracas (AFP) - Colombia's government launched peace negotiations with the country's second-biggest guerrilla group, setting its sights on a total end to a bloody half-century conflict.

Bogota hopes the talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN) will bring it on board alongside Colombia's biggest rebel force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in a bid to end what is seen as the last major armed confrontation in the West.

"If we achieve peace, it will be the end of the guerrillas in Colombia and therefore in Latin America," said President Juan Manuel Santos.

His chief negotiator Frank Pearl and ELN commander Antonio Garcia announced the decision in a joint statement earlier after meeting in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.

The government and ELN "have agreed to set up public talks... in order to sign a final accord to end the armed conflict and agree on changes in search of peace and equity," they said.

The ELN is a leftist group like the FARC, but they have fought as rivals for territory in a many-sided conflict that started as a peasant uprising in 1964.

While the FARC has observed a ceasefire since last year as its own peace talks have advanced, the ELN has continued attacks. Indeed, government data show the ELN alone has been to blame for 28 percent of recent attacks on civilians in Colombia.

Accords bringing in the government and the FARC and ELN would establish peace between the main remaining players in the conflict, which over the decades has drawn in right- and left-wing guerrillas, government troops and drug trafficking gangs.

"A peace process with the ELN means that Colombia now has the opportunity to end completely the 52 years of armed conflict with both guerrilla groups," said Kyle Johnson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

The government and ELN said six other countries will act as guarantors of the peace process: Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Norway and Venezuela.

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In a Twitter message the FARC's chief negotiator Ivan Marquez called it "a historic moment for Colombia."

South American regional bloc UNASUR said in a statement the new negotiations were the "missing piece" of the peace drive. Cuba and Venezuela were among countries that hailed the breakthrough.

- Complex peace process -

Santos's government has been holding talks in Havana with the FARC since 2012.

They had aimed to sign a peace agreement on March 23 but that deadline passed with no deal as key issues have not yet been resolved, including disarmament.

The negotiations with the ELN "are of a very different nature from the Havana process because the ELN and the FARC are very different organizations," Santos said in a speech in Colombia after Wednesday's announcement.

"But the end of the conflict is one and the same," he added.

He said any deal with the ELN would be subject to the same measures due to be approved under any agreement with the FARC.

Those include ceasefire procedures and the setting up of a special tribunal for hearing cases linked to the conflict.

The grinding territorial standoff has killed more than 260,000 people, uprooted 6.6 million people and left a further 45,000 missing.

Inspired by the Cuban revolution, the ELN was founded in 1964, the same year as the FARC.

Officials estimate the ELN currently has some 1,500 members and the FARC about 7,000.

One Colombian government source who asked not to be named said the ELN's lack of a top-down command structure "has made negotiations for a roadmap more complex."

As the talks with the FARC have advanced, tensions have remained high with the ELN, which unlike the FARC has not declared a ceasefire.

The ELN recently released two hostages, a Colombian soldier and a politician.
Bogota (AFP) - Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), freed an ex-governor on Sunday held captive since 2013, in a new boost to peace efforts.

"Pleased by the release of (Choco department) ex governor Patrocinio Sanchez Montes de Oca. Much support to him and family. #welcometofreedom," the Choco governor's office said on Twitter.

The government launched peace negotiations on Wednesday with the ELN, setting its sights on a total end to a bloody half-century conflict.

Bogota hopes the talks with the ELN will bring it on board alongside Colombia's biggest rebel force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in a bid to end what is seen as the last major armed confrontation in the West.

The ELN is a leftist group like the FARC, but they have fought as rivals for territory in a many-sided conflict that started as a peasant uprising in 1964.

While the FARC has observed a ceasefire since last year as its own peace talks have advanced, the ELN has continued attacks.

Accords bringing in the government and the FARC and ELN would establish peace between the main remaining players in a conflict which over the decades has drawn in right- and left-wing guerrillas, government troops and drug trafficking gangs.

The conflict has killed more than 260,000 people, uprooted 6.6 million people and left a further 45,000 missing.

The ELN on Saturday also freed a police patrolman it kidnapped on March 20.
PRAGUE (Reuters) - The Czech Republic will send back to Iraq a group of Iraqi Christians who tried to move on to Germany instead of staying in the country, Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said on Sunday. A group of 25 Iraqis took a bus on Saturday to Germany, where they were stopped immediately after crossing the border, CTK news agency reported. German police then asked the Czechs to take the people back and that was agreed, CTK said. The Czech Republic agreed in December to accept 153 Christian refugees from Iraq who have fled areas controlled by Islamic State. So far, only 89 have arrived. Chovanec said that the 25 Iraqis had abused Czech generosity and should go back home soon. It was not immediately clear how Chovanec meant for them to return. Police imposed a deadline of a week for them to leave. "The seven-day deadline, which the Iraqi Christians got along with their passports, is meant for them to be able to arrange the return home," Chovanec said on his Twitter account. "This time cannot be used to break laws or to move to another Schengen country. I asked the Czech police to use all legal means so that these people, who abused the good will of the Czech Republic and her citizens, are returned to Iraq." Thirty-seven Christian families are supposed to come to the Czech Republic from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and refugee camps in Lebanon, in four groups from January to April. Minister Chovanec has suspended the relocation program, CTK said. Prague has refused to accept European Union quotas for distributing migrants. Polls show a majority of Czechs would reject even those fleeing a war zone. The Czech Republic, a country of 10.5 million, recorded 1,525 asylum applications last year, and had granted protection to 71 people, data from the Ministry of Interior showed. Several thousand people, mostly Muslims, passed through the Czech territory last year in the mass wave of migration via southeast Europe. (Reporting by Robert Muller, editing by Larry King)
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia said that a piece of suspected aeroplane debris found east of Africa on a Mauritian island will be examined to see if it is part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went missing two years ago in one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. Australia has led the search for the plane, which went missing in March 2014 with 239 people on board on a flight from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing, and Transport Minister Darren Chester said the debris, found last week, was an "item of interest". "The Malaysian government is working with officials from Mauritius to seek to take custody of the debris and arrange for its examination," Chester said in a statement. He did not say from what part of the missing Boeing 777 the debris was suspected to have come. "...Until the debris has been examined by experts, it is not possible to ascertain its origin." The Malaysian government could not be immediately reached for comment. William Auguste, who owns the Mourouk Ebony Hotel on Rodrigues Island, about 560 km (350 miles) east of the main island of Mauritius, said the wreckage was found by guests. "For sure it looked like part of an aeroplane - it looks like it's from the inside part of it," Auguste said. "I don't know how to say it but there was wallpaper inside of the plane, you can see this design and part of it is still there." Auguste said the wreckage was taken to police. Last month, Australia said debris found in Mozambique was "almost certainly from MH370" and in 2015 French authorities said a wing part found on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion was part of the plane. Australia said that more than 95,000 square kilometers of a 120,000 square kilometer target zone had been searched and that the entire zone would be covered by June, when the search is scheduled to end. (Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Paris (AFP) - The spectre of high debt is raising its head again in Africa, analysts say, as sub-Saharan nations that borrowed cheaply on global markets are now squeezed by a commodities crash.

The return of debt troubles in Africa has caught some by surprise, they say, 20 years after a global campaign was mounted to offer debt relief to the world's most impoverished nations.

"It is clearly a source of concern. People did not see it coming," said Julien Marcilly, chief economist at French group Coface, which offers worldwide insurance to protect firms from the risk of clients defaulting.

An IMF-World Bank programme launched in 1996 has to date approved $76 billion (68 billion euros) in external debt relief for 36 of the world's heavily indebted poor nations, of which 30 are in Africa.

For some of those countries, however, debt levels are rising again to worrying levels.

Relieved of their debt burdens by the international programme, countries enjoyed the budgetary freedom to boost economic growth, which was further propelled by soaring commodity prices.

"Over the past few years, sub-Saharan African sovereigns have enjoyed unusually favourable financing conditions," Standard & Poor's said in a recent report.

Many of them issued bonds for the first time to raise money on financial markets as borrowing costs slumped to record lows in mid-2014, the New York-based credit rating agency said.

"The tide has turned," it warned, however, predicting that most of these countries would have to spend more and more over the next three years to service their debt.

Many of those sub-Saharan countries will face a difficult choice between cutting spending or being obliged to pay higher debt and interest payments in the future, Standard & Poor's said.

And this time, a large part of the debt is held by private creditors, rather than institutions such as the IMF or World Bank.

"The depreciation of local currencies, often related to the recent commodity price decline, has inflated foreign currency debt for several sub-Saharan African sovereigns," Standard & Poor's added.

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- 'Debt trap' -

A study by the French Treasury said the IMF-World Bank initiative had slashed the average external public debt of the 30 African countries from the equivalent of 119 percent of annual economic output to just 33 percent between 2000 and 2014.

Yet some are now sliding deeper into debt at a "very sustained pace", the Treasury said.

Of the 30 African countries that had previously secured international debt relief, 13 have pushed up their debt levels by the equivalent of 10 percentage points of annual gross domestic product (GDP) in the past five years, it said.

The Republic of Congo led the list, with its external debt rising by 25 percentage points as a proportion of annual GDP, followed by Niger, up 23 percentage points, and Malawi, up 19 percentage points.

There is no short-term risk of a new debt crisis for the great majority of African countries, the French Treasury said.

But "a small number of them have seen a period of very sustained debt growth", it said, warning that they could soon return close to the levels of external debt that reigned before the global debt relief initiative.

Seven countries faced the risk of elevated debt levels at the end of 2015, the Treasury said: Burundi; Cameroon; Central African Republic; Chad; Ghana; Mauritania; and Sao Tome and Principe.

"We must ensure we do not fall again into the debt trap," African Development Bank president Akinwumi Adesina warned at a conference of business leaders in Abidjan this month.

Despite a recent rise in debt levels, African countries remain less indebted than many advanced economies.

"The total public debt of Africa amounted to 38 percent of continental GDP in 2014 compared with 111 percent for OECD nations," said Carlos Lopes, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

"Debt levels will deteriorate in countries with a weak level of budgetary discipline and those that have borrowed excessively," Lopes said.

He urged countries to strengthen debt management capacity and to report on how they are using their borrowed funds.
Smara refugee camp (Algeria) (AFP) - Ergueibi Abdelahi was just nine months old when his aunt scooped him up and fled fighting in Western Sahara after Morocco sent troops into the former Spanish colony, leaving his parents and brother behind.

Until he was 10, he thought his aunt was his mother.

"She (my mother) was at the market on the day we ran," Abdelahi says of their escape in 1978 across the border into Algeria.

"From what I was told, people fled the bombing barefoot. We arrived in the refugee camp and never left."

Abdelahi's family is just one of thousands split up in the war that broke out after Morocco annexed the vast desert territory in 1975 in a move that was not recognised by the international community.

Tens of thousands of Sahrawis live as refugees in the west of Algeria, while some of their relatives remained hundreds of kilometres away in Western Sahara.

Their future today looks even more uncertain after a diplomatic row broke out last month when UN chief Ban Ki-moon referred to Western Sahara's "occupation" during a visit to a refugee camp.

A furious Morocco expelled dozens of UN personnel and demanded the United Nations close its military liaison office in Western Sahara.

The incident has stalled UN efforts to broker a settlement for the area that have dragged on for a quarter century.

A 1991 ceasefire ended one and a half decades of fighting between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front backed by Algeria.

But Rabat remains unwavering in its insistence that Western Sahara is an integral part of its kingdom.

Larger than Britain but with a population of under one million people, Western Sahara has lucrative phosphate reserves, rich fishing grounds and potentially oil.

Sahrawis are campaigning for the right to self-determination, but Morocco insists its sovereignty cannot be challenged.

- 'Mother, father and brother' -

Abdelahi is now almost 40 years old and heads the editorial team at Radio Smara, a small radio station that broadcasts for three hours a day out of the Smara refugee camp near the Moroccan border.

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His wife and three children were all born in the same camp, near Tinouf around 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) west of Algiers. It is named after a town in Western Sahara.

At least 90,000 Sahrawi refugees live off international aid in five camps in the Tinouf area, according to the UN. The Algerian government says the number is closer to 165,000.

For decades, the two sides of Abdelahi's family -- one in Western Sahara, the other in the refugee camp -- were unsure of each other's existence, he says.

"Those who had fled thought those who stayed had been jailed or had died, and those who stayed under the occupation thought the same about those who had escaped."

The Polisario Front provided Abdelahi with a second family, he says.

"I've always thought the Polisario was my mother, father and brother."

In 2011, he was finally able to see his family again in Western Sahara, thanks to a family visit programme run by the UN refugee agency with agreement from Morocco and the Polisario.

"It was very moving," he says. "But we had to go straight to the hospital to see my mother who had not been sleeping for a week."

- Boys turned 'old men' -

Others have not been so lucky.

Mohammed Cheikh Kentaoui was 19 years old when Morocco annexed Western Sahara.

He fled with a pair of military boots, determined to fight the Moroccan army. But instead the Polisario assigned him a teaching job in a refugee camp.

Two decades later, he was in the Algerian capital when he heard his mother had died.

Kentaoui, now an accountant with three daughters, leafs through a family photo album in the Smara camp, telling his story as his wife prepares tea.

In 2008, through the same UN scheme, he was able to visit some relatives in Western Sahara.

"They welcomed us with a massive party that lasted five days," he says. "It wasn't long, but at least we saw the family."

Another Smara resident, Khadija Metkhari, says she cried with joy when she saw her brothers for the first time in 2004 after decades apart.

"When I left, they were still going to school," she says. "When I returned, I found old men I barely recognised."

Her father had died of old age and another brother had died in the war.

But Metkhari is quick to brush aside any nostalgia.

"I couldn't stay with them," she says, referring to her brothers.

"I promised the Polisario I would fight with it until independence, and I won't go back on that."
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Police in Denmark, Sweden and Finland have stepped up security at airports and public places following the explosions in Brussels on Tuesday. Danish police said they had increased patrols at Copenhagen airport and other key points in the city following the deadly explosions at Brussels airport and a metro station in the city. "We are aware of what has happened in Brussels. Therefore you will see more police in the airport and at key points in Copenhagen," Danish police said on its official Twitter page. Danish authorities have been on high alert since two people were killed in shooting attacks on a free speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen in February last year. In Norway, police officers in Oslo will carry weapons again for a temporary period, a police spokeswoman said. Officers were armed between November 2014 and February of this year due to a risk of attacks by Islamist militants. More police would also patrol the streets of the capital. Police in Sweden said they had reinforced their presence at airports and taken increased security measures at other public places. Finnish Interior Minister Petteri Orpo said on Twitter "Finnish security officials have increased monitoring at Helsinki-Vantaa airport". (Reporting by Teis Jensen, Tuomas Forsell, Johan Ahlander, Stine Jacobsen and Simon Johnson, editing by Alistair Scrutton)
By Philip Pullella ROME (Reuters) - Denmark overtook Switzerland as the world's happiest place, according to a report on Wednesday that urged nations regardless of wealth to tackle inequality and protect the environment. The report, prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, showed Syria, Afghanistan and eight sub-Saharan countries as the 10 least happy places on earth to live. The top 10 this year were Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden. Denmark was in third place last year, behind Switzerland and Iceland. The bottom 10 were Madagascar, Tanzania, Liberia, Guinea, Rwanda, Benin, Afghanistan, Togo, Syria and Burundi. The United States came in at 13, the United Kingdom at 23, France at 32, and Italy at 50. "There is a very strong message for my country, the United States, which is very rich, has gotten a lot richer over the last 50 years, but has gotten no happier," said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the SDSN and special advisor to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. While the differences between countries where people are happy and those where they are not could be scientifically measured, "we can understand why and do something about it," Sachs, one of the report's authors, told Reuters in an interview in Rome. "The message for the United States is clear. For a society that just chases money, we are chasing the wrong things. Our social fabric is deteriorating, social trust is deteriorating, faith in government is deteriorating," he said. Aiming to "survey the scientific underpinnings of measuring and understanding subjective well-being," the report, now in its fourth edition, ranks 157 countries by happiness levels using factors such as per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and healthy years of life expectancy. It also rates "having someone to count on in times of trouble" and freedom from corruption in government and business. "When countries single-mindedly pursue individual objectives, such as economic development to the neglect of social and environmental objectives, the results can be highly adverse for human wellbeing, even dangerous for survival," it said. "Many countries in recent years have achieved economic growth at the cost of sharply rising inequality, entrenched social exclusion, and grave damage to the natural environment." YARDSTICK FOR HAPPINESS The first report was issued in 2012 to support a U.N. meeting on happiness and well-being. Five countries - Bhutan, Ecuador, Scotland, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela - now have appointed Ministers of Happiness charged with promoting it as a goal of public policy. The 2016 survey showed that three countries in particular, Ireland, Iceland and Japan, were able to maintain their happiness levels despite external shocks such as the post-2007 economic crisis and the 2011 earthquake because of social support and solidarity. Sachs pointed to Costa Rica, which came in 14th and ahead of many wealthier countries, as an example of a healthy, happy society although it is not an economic powerhouse. (Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
Washington (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the West on Thursday of ignoring his calls for a common stance against jihadist extremism and not sharing intelligence on the threat they pose.

"We were left alone by Western countries. Our intelligence-sharing expectations were never met," Erdogan said in an interview with CNN, which aired excerpts.

"We have been calling the nations for a common stance against terrorism, and many of the European member states seem to have failed to attach the significance that this call for action deserves," he added.

Erdogan, who is in Washington for a nuclear security summit, was particularly critical of Belgium for not acting on information Ankara had provided about one of the bombers in last week's attacks in Brussels, Ibrahim El Bakraoui.

Turkey arrested the Belgian national near the Syrian border last June and deported him to the Netherlands.

Bakrouai managed to make it back to Brussels, where he blew himself up at the airport during the March 22 attacks. His brother Khalid blew himself up at a Brussels metro station.

"The Netherlands nor the Belgians seem to have understood what the jihadis stand for," Erdogan said.

On Tuesday, Dutch Justice Minister Ard van der Steur said the Netherlands had notified Belgium a week before the Brussels attacks of an FBI report on the Bakraoui brothers' radical backgrounds.

Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been on a US terror watch list since September 25, 2015, he said.

The United States has long seen Turkey as a key Muslim ally and a moderating force in the Middle East.

But the two have been at odds over Syria in recent months, with Washington calling on Ankara to do more to fight Islamic State group jihadists.

Turkey, for its part, has been upset by US support for Kurdish fighters in Syria, fearing it will strengthen Kurdish separatists in Turkey.
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday said he took offence at US President Barack Obama slamming eroding press freedoms in Turkey, expressing sadness that the comments were made behind his back.

"I am saddened that these kinds of comments have been made in my absence," Erdogan told Turkish reporters in Washington as he rounded off a trip to the United States. "These issues did not come onto the agenda in our talks with Mr Obama."

"He did not talk to me about this kind of thing. In our previous telephone conversations we talked about other more useful things than press freedom," the Hurriyet daily and other newspapers quoted him as saying.

Obama -- who met Erdogan in Washington for closed door talks on Thursday -- said on Friday it was "no secret" he was troubled by "some trends" within Turkey.

"I think the approach they have been taking toward the press is one that could lead Turkey down a path that would be very troubling," said Obama.

The US leader said he had expressed these sentiments to Erdogan "directly".

Erdogan said he had pointed out in other meetings on his trip in Washington that there was press freedom in Turkey, saying that Turkish publications were calling him things like "thief" and "killer" without being shut down.

"Those publications that make these insults still exist," he said. "If it was true that Turkey was a dictatorship, then how could such publications come out?" he asked. "Such insults and threats are not permitted in the West."

"Had Obama put these issues (about press freedom) on the agenda in the talks, then I would have told him that," he added.

There has been growing concern about press freedoms in Turkey under Erdogan, with thousands of people prosecuted for insulting the president and two top journalists from the opposition Cumhuriyet daily on trial for revealing state secrets.

Before the meeting with Obama, there were also ugly scenes when Erdogan gave a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, with Turkish security officials clashing with protesters.
Berlin (AFP) - Germany's interior minister voiced optimism Sunday that Europe's refugee influx had peaked but said agreements with North African countries may be needed to prevent mass arrivals in future.

A controversial EU-Turkey deal goes into effect on Monday under which Ankara has pledged to take back migrants from EU member Greece, while it plans to launch orderly transports of Syrian asylum-seekers to the 28-member bloc.

Germany -- which took in more than one million refugees and migrants last year -- has already seen arrivals drop sharply to an average of 140 a day on its Austrian border, said Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere.

"I can say with a great deal of caution that the peak of the refugee crisis is behind us," de Maiziere was quoted as telling the Tagesspiegel am Sonntag newspaper, speaking weeks after Balkan countries closed their borders to the wave of migrants.

The German minister added however that "there are still some questions that we must answer".

"This includes the implementation of the negotiated agreement achieved with Turkey, but also a search for solutions in case of possible alternative routes, such as via Libya and Italy," he said.

"If, once more, more people come via this route, we will need to search for similar solutions as we did with Turkey and also enter into negotiations with North African countries," he added.

"I could imagine reception centres in North Africa for refugees who are returned from Italy, and in turn a humanitarian admission programme with the North African country in question," he said.

He cautioned however that much "hard work" would lie ahead before any such programmes may be agreed.
Berlin (AFP) - European Parliament President Martin Schulz said Sunday the EU must make no concessions to Turkey over human rights but voiced confidence in a deal with Ankara to manage the refugee crisis.

Under the controversial agreement, Turkey is due to take back illegal migrants from EU member Greece from Monday, when it will also start an orderly resettlement programme of Syrian asylum-seekers to the 28-member bloc.

Turkey has received EU financial aid and other concessions, but Schulz, speaking to Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper, said Europe must give no ground to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when it comes to fundamental freedoms.

Schulz said Erdogan "went one step too far" when his government called in Germany's ambassador last month over a satirical TV programme that mocked the leader, demanding it be pulled off the air.

"It is unacceptable that the president of another country demands that we restrict democratic rights in Germany because he feels he was caricatured," said Schulz, a German citizen.

"We must not be silent on violations of fundamental rights in Turkey just because we are cooperating on the refugee question," he said.

"On the contrary, we must denounce these violations and permanently stay in discussions with Turkey on freedom of expression and human rights issues."

However, speaking of the refugee deal, he said "I am optimistic that the distribution will work.

"All EU countries have agreed to this scheme. Germany alone is ready to accept 40,000 refugees, France 30,000 and Portugal 10,000.

"And once we have managed to distribute a first group in the EU, I am confident that it will work from then onwards."

Schulz predicted that "in 2016, we will not feel the same pressure as last year", when more than one million asylum seekers arrived in Germany alone.

"The ceasefire in Syria has now held for more than two weeks already. This is a record," he said.

"The IS (Islamic State group) terrorists are being driven back," he said, adding that new aid money had also improved conditions in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon.
Brussels (AFP) - The EU will unveil plans to overhaul its asylum system this week following a controversial migrant deal with Turkey, but the proposals look set to trigger fresh rows in a bloc already deeply divided by the refugee crisis.

The current "Dublin rules" place a huge burden on the main migrant entry points like Greece as they say refugees must claim asylum from the first country they arrive in, and should be returned there if they move on somewhere else.

The system has been rendered effectively obsolete by the huge flow of humanity drawn to wealthy Germany by Chancellor Angela Merkel's open door policy for Syrian refugees.

But introducing a more centralised system for sharing out refugees around the European Union is likely to be tough, with many states too worried about immigration to show much solidarity with those on the front line.

Having pushed back the announcement from last month, the European Commission will on Wednesday lay out a series of "possible options" before setting out a formal proposition to reform the asylum system later in the year.

"Dublin was not designed as a solidarity instrument for ensuring an equitable responsibility sharing among member states," EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said in December.

"This dimension must be added, as the current uneven distribution is clearly unsustainable."

The vast majority of the record 1.25 million asylum-seekers arriving in Europe last year entered Greece after taking the dangerous sea route from Turkey, the gateway for people fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

More than 4,000 migrants have drowned since the start of last year.

Under an aid-for-cooperation deal clinched last month with the EU, Greece is due to start sending back to Turkey all migrants on Monday, including Syrians who crossed the Aegean Sea illegally.

In return, EU countries will start resettling one Syrian refugee from Turkey for each one Ankara takes back from Greece, and European leaders hope it will ease the bloc's biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II.

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- 'Dublin process obsolete' -

Amnesty International has accused Turkey of illegally forcing groups of Syrians to return to their war-torn country, denouncing "the fatal flaws" in the EU-Turkey deal. Ankara rejected the claims on Saturday, saying they "do not reflect reality in any way".

So far European countries have struggled to carry out even the most modest plans tackle the crisis.

EU diplomats said they feared plans to reform the Dublin rules could face the same fate that has befallen a widely resisted plan eventually adopted last September to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy around the EU.

Just 1,100 have been relocated so far out of that number, making a mockery of the principles of European solidarity that Avramopoulos and other European officials have invoked.

European sources blame the delays on a series of factors: governments trying to screen jihadists in the wake of the Paris and Brussels attacks, a lack of housing and education for asylum seekers, and logistical problems over chartering planes.

They say some countries are setting unacceptable conditions by refusing Muslims, black people or large families, with Eastern European states the worst for discriminating on religious or racial grounds.

Under Dublin rules, member states can send asylum-seekers back to the country of first entry and Brussels called on Athens in February to improve conditions to host them.

A ruling by the EU's top court in 2011 at the height of Greece's debt crisis said conditions for asylum seekers in Greece were degrading, meaning that other countries could not send them back.

Impetus for reform of the EU asylum rules grew in October when German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "let's be frank. The Dublin process, in its current form, is obsolete."

Migrant numbers had surged since Germany weeks earlier declared it would admit Syrians, even if they technically should have applied for refugee status in the first EU country they set foot in on their way to Germany.
By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The FBI's method for breaking into a locked iPhone 5c is unlikely to stay secret for long, according to senior Apple Inc engineers and outside experts. Once it is exposed, Apple should be able to plug the encryption hole, comforting iPhone users worried that losing physical possession of their devices will leave them vulnerable to hackers. When Apple does fix the flaw, it is expected to announce it to customers and thereby extend the rare public battle over security holes, a debate that typically rages out of public view. The Federal Bureau of Investigation last week dropped its courtroom quest to force Apple to hack into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, saying an unidentified party provided a method for getting around the deceased killer's unknown passcode. If the government pursues a similar case seeking Apples help in New York, the court could make the FBI disclose its new trick. But even if the government walks away from that battle, the growing number of state and local authorities seeking the FBIs help with locked phones in criminal probes increases the likelihood that the FBI will have to provide it. When that happens, defense attorneys will cross-examine the experts involved. Although each lawyer would mainly be interested in whether evidence-tampering may have occurred, the process would likely reveal enough about the method for Apple to block it in future versions of its phones, an Apple employee said. "The FBI would need to resign itself to the fact that such an exploit would only be viable for a few months, if released to other departments," said Jonathan Zdziarski, an independent forensics expert who has helped police get into many devices. "It would be a temporary Vegas jackpot that would quickly get squandered on the case backlog." In a memo to police obtained by Reuters on Friday, the FBI said it would share the tool "consistent with our legal and policy constraints." Even if the FBI hoards the information - despite a White House policy that tilts towards disclosure to manufacturers - if it is not revealed to Apple, there are other ways the method could come to light or be rendered ineffective over time, according to Zdziarski and senior Apple engineers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI may use the same method on phones in cases in which the suspects are still alive, presenting the same opportunity for defense lawyers to pry. In addition, the contractor who sold the FBI the technique might sell it to another agency or country. The more widely it circulates, the more likely it will be leaked. Flaws of this nature have a pretty short life cycle, one senior Apple engineer said. Most of these things do come to light. The temporary nature of flaws is borne out in the pricing of tools for exploiting security holes in the government-dominated market for zero-days, called that because the companies whose products are targets have had zero days warning of the flaw. Many of the attack programs that are sold to defense and intelligence contractors and then to government buyers are purchased over six months, with payments spaced apart in case the flaw is discovered or the hole is patched incidentally with an update from the manufacturer, market participants told Reuters. Although Apple is concerned about consumer perception, employees said the company had made no major recent changes in policy. Instead, its engineers take pride in the fact that a program for breaking into an iPhone via the web was recently purchased by a defense contractor for $1 million, and that even that program is likely to be short-lived. They said most iPhone users have more to fear from criminals than from countries, and few crooks can afford anything like what it costs to break into a fully up-to-date iPhone. (Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Dan Grebler)
By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The FBI's method for breaking into a locked iPhone 5c is unlikely to stay secret for long, according to senior Apple Inc engineers and outside experts. Once it is exposed, Apple should be able to plug the encryption hole, comforting iPhone users worried that losing physical possession of their devices will leave them vulnerable to hackers. When Apple does fix the flaw, it is expected to announce it to customers and thereby extend the rare public battle over security holes, a debate that typically rages out of public view. The Federal Bureau of Investigation last week dropped its courtroom quest to force Apple to hack into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, saying an unidentified party provided a method for getting around the deceased killer's unknown passcode. If the government pursues a similar case seeking Apples help in New York, the court could make the FBI disclose its new trick. But even if the government walks away from that battle, the growing number of state and local authorities seeking the FBIs help with locked phones in criminal probes increases the likelihood that the FBI will have to provide it. When that happens, defense attorneys will cross-examine the experts involved. Although each lawyer would mainly be interested in whether evidence-tampering may have occurred, the process would likely reveal enough about the method for Apple to block it in future versions of its phones, an Apple employee said. "The FBI would need to resign itself to the fact that such an exploit would only be viable for a few months, if released to other departments," said Jonathan Zdziarski, an independent forensics expert who has helped police get into many devices. "It would be a temporary Vegas jackpot that would quickly get squandered on the case backlog." In a memo to police obtained by Reuters on Friday, the FBI said it would share the tool "consistent with our legal and policy constraints." Even if the FBI hoards the information - despite a White House policy that tilts toward disclosure to manufacturers - if it is not revealed to Apple, there are other ways the method could come to light or be rendered ineffective over time, according to Zdziarski and senior Apple engineers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI may use the same method on phones in cases in which the suspects are still alive, presenting the same opportunity for defense lawyers to pry. In addition, the contractor who sold the FBI the technique might sell it to another agency or country. The more widely it circulates, the more likely it will be leaked. Flaws of this nature have a pretty short life cycle, one senior Apple engineer said. Most of these things do come to light. The temporary nature of flaws is borne out in the pricing of tools for exploiting security holes in the government-dominated market for zero-days, called that because the companies whose products are targets have had zero days warning of the flaw. Many of the attack programs that are sold to defense and intelligence contractors and then to government buyers are purchased over six months, with payments spaced apart in case the flaw is discovered or the hole is patched incidentally with an update from the manufacturer, market participants told Reuters. Although Apple is concerned about consumer perception, employees said the company had made no major recent changes in policy. Instead, its engineers take pride in the fact that a program for breaking into an iPhone via the web was recently purchased by a defense contractor for $1 million, and that even that program is likely to be short-lived. They said most iPhone users have more to fear from criminals than from countries, and few crooks can afford anything like what it costs to break into a fully up-to-date iPhone. (Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Dan Grebler)
HELSINKI (Reuters) - After weeks of growing criticism from the right wing of his National Coalition Party, Finnish Finance Minister Alexander Stubb faces a challenge for the party's leadership. Elina Lepomaki, a second-term parliamentarian, said on Saturday in a post on her website that she will run for the party's chair at its congress in June. Lepomaki and other right-wing members of the party have criticized Stubb for failing to force through tougher labor- market reforms in negotiations with trade unions and for making too many compromises in the ruling center coalition. The government wants to persuade the unions to cut labor costs by 5 percent to make the Finnish economy more competitive after three years of recession. Lepomaki, 34, joined parliament in 2014 after working 10 years in banking and finance. "I am also qualified to become a finance minister, unlike some of my predecessors", Lepomaki told newspaper Iltalehti, in an apparent jab at Stubb, who holds degrees in political science and international relations but not finance or economics. In Finland, a party chair who loses that position generally steps down from a minister's position as well. On his Twitter account, Stubb welcomed the challenge from Lepomaki. Other candidates are expected to join the race for the party leadership before summer. An opinion poll last week showed party members who approved of the job he had done as party chair had dropped to 47 percent from 69 percent a year ago. Lepomaki is not given much chance of unseating Stubb, analysts say, but her candidacy might encourage candidates like Jan Vapaavuori, a vice-president of the European Investment Bank and a former economy minister, to make his own bid. Finnish media have speculated that Vapaavuori would repeat his challenge for Stubb. He lost a vote for leadership in 2014. (Reporting by Tuomas Forsell, editing by Larry King)
LIMA (Reuters) - Support for Keiko Fujimori, the front-runner in Peru's presidential election next week, firmed as leftist lawmaker Veronika Mendoza made a late surge in a vote likely to head to a second round, an Ipsos survey showed. Fujimori, the 40-year-old center-right daughter of imprisoned ex-president Alberto Fujimori, has long enjoyed a double-digit lead over her nine rivals. But she has struggled to distance herself from the dark legacy of her father, who is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses and corruption in his 1990-2000 government and is not expected to win outright on April 10. Support for her in a mock voting exercise rose 2.1 percentage points to 40.8 percent of valid votes, according to the poll published on Sunday in the daily El Comercio. The Ipsos survey of some 1,800 people from March 30 to April 1 had a margin of error of 2.3 points. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the 77-year-old investor favorite, had 19.9 percent, while Mendoza, who wants a new constitution to weaken the business elite, was at 18.4 percent, up 3.8 points thanks to growing support from rural and poor voters. The sudden rise of the 35-year-old Mendoza - statistically tied with Kuczynski in three recent opinion polls - appears to have helped blunt a recent spike in opposition to Fujimori. The share of voters who said they would "definitely not" vote for Fujimori fell to 45 percent from 49 percent in the Ipsos poll. Forty percent opposed Mendoza, down from 41 percent before. Hostility from Peruvians who loathe Fujimori's father and blame her for the disqualification of two of her rivals mean she is vulnerable in a second-round vote if she fails to get at least 50 percent of all valid ballots in the first round. While Mendoza has shaken up a race that had been seen as a shoo-in for a fifth straight conservative government, she also faces stiff opposition from some Peruvians wary of upsetting the country's robust economy with unorthodox policies. In a second-round scenario, Mendoza would lose to Fujimori by six percentage points, whereas Kuczynski would beat Fujimori by two percentage points, according to Ipsos. Peru has never had a woman president or seen two female candidates compete in a run-off. About 58 percent of Peruvians polled told Ipsos they had made their minds on who they would vote for. (Reporting By Mitra Taj; Editing by Alan Crosby)
BERLIN/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Germany and the European Union rejected protests by Turkey over a satirical German television show that mocked President Tayyip Erdogan, saying press freedom was sacrosanct, just as the EU is banking on Ankara's help in solving its migrant crisis. Turkey's foreign ministry last week called in Germany's envoy to explain an NDR broadcast including a two-minute song that poked fun at Erdogan, who is known for his sensitivity to criticism. German newspapers have poured scorn on Erdogan for trying to muzzle media and some have also questioned whether Germany and the EU have gone soft on Turkish human rights because they need Ankara's co-operation to stem the influx of migrants. The incident is particularly awkward for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has led efforts to forge the migrant deal between the EU and Turkey, a candidate for EU membership. That deal is designed to stop illegal migrants entering Europe in exchange for financial and political rewards for Ankara, prompting some of Merkel's critics to warn that the EU must not lower its standards on human rights and basic freedoms. A spokeswoman for Germany's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday Berlin had made clear to Ankara that basic freedoms were "non-negotiable". "(It has been) made clear that despite all the interests Germany and Turkey share, the view on press freedom, freedom of expression is non-negotiable for us," she said, adding, however, that Turkey was an important partner. "We are cooperating with Turkey on various issues, not just the migrant issue but also on Syria," she said. "MOVING AWAY" FROM EU The EU was more forthright in its criticism, saying that summoning the German envoy did not seem to be in line with the EU's cherished freedoms of the press and of expression. "(European Commission President Jean-Claude) Juncker believes this moves Turkey further (away) from the EU rather than closer to us," said a spokeswoman, adding that the EU expected Turkey to uphold the highest standards on democracy, rule of law and freedoms. German newspapers took a tough line against Erdogan. "Dear Turkish President Erdogan ... Germany is not Turkey. In Germany you cannot muzzle the press," wrote a columnist in top-selling Bild daily. The center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung also warned that the EU might be becoming over-dependent on Turkey. "Many politicians in the European Union are soft on Erdogan because they need him in the migrant crisis," it wrote. France's foreign ministry said freedom of expression was a fundamental tenet of democracy and "even more so for a member of the Council of Europe and a candidate for the European Union." Erdogan, 62, has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade, first as prime minister and since 2014 as president. He remains popular at home, but his critics accuse him of becoming increasingly authoritarian and intolerant. Turkish state prosecutors have opened nearly 2,000 cases against people for insulting Erdogan since 2014, the country's justice ministry said this month. The defendants include cartoonists, academics, journalists and even schoolchildren. (Reporting by Madeline Chambers, Gabriela Baczynka and John Irish in Paris; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Lesbos (Greece) (AFP) - Greece was on Sunday making final preparations to return hundreds of migrants to Turkey, the first to be sent back under a landmark EU deal that has been slammed by rights watchdogs.

The operation is set to begin Monday on the Greek island of Lesbos, which has served as a gateway for hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants arriving in Europe from Turkey in the past year.

Details of how the operation will proceed are sketchy, with Greek officials tight-lipped Sunday over who and how many migrants will be sent back across the Aegean Sea.

Turkish Interior Minister Efkan Ala said his country had made preparations to receive 500 people on Monday, and that the Greeks had given the names of 400.

"We have been in touch with the Greek authorities and said we could take 500 people and they have given us 400 names. Tomorrow it's possible that this figure could change," Ala was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.

The European Union signed the controversial deal with Turkey in March as it wrestles with the continent's worst migration crisis since World War II, with more than a million people arriving from the Middle East and elsewhere last year.

Under the agreement, designed to discourage people from making the risky Aegean crossing, all "irregular migrants" arriving since March 20 face being sent back, although the deal calls for each case to be examined individually.

In addition, for every Syrian refugee returned, another Syrian refugee will be resettled from Turkey to the EU, with numbers capped at 72,000.

The deal has faced heavy criticism from human rights groups, who have questioned whether it is legal and ethical.

"We don't know what is going to actually happen," senior UN migration official Peter Sutherland said Saturday. "But if there is any question of collective deportations without individuals being given the right to claim asylum, that is illegal."

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Yiorgos Kyritsis, spokesman for Greece's refugee coordination unit, insisted Monday's operation "involves people who have not requested asylum."

- Focus on South Asian migrants -

But on the Aegean islands themselves, many migrants have complained of not being given sufficient time and access to the asylum procedure.

Anas al-Bakhr, a Syrian engineer from Homs who is among those stuck on Chios island, said police marked his arrival date as March 20 -- the day the deal entered force -- even though he arrived on the 19th.

"They said the computers were broken that day," Bakhr told AFP.

As well as Lesbos, migrants may also be sent back from other Greek islands where many migrants have arrived, such as Chios, where members of EU border agency Frontex were seen arriving Sunday.

Greek state news agency ANA reported that some 250 migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and African nations would be sent back daily between Monday and Wednesday, and that some 350 Frontex officers had arrived over the weekend for the operation.

The migrants would be taken from Lesbos to the Turkish port of Dikili, ANA said, adding that Frontex had chartered two Turkish tourist ferries. A third Turkish vessel has been hired to take some 250 mainly Pakistani migrants from Chios, the agency added.

Police sources on Lesbos on Sunday said there had been a flurry of last-minute asylum applications amongst the 3,300 migrants there.

"We... have over two thousand people that have stated their wish to seek asylum and we need to see a credible process go ahead with the Greek asylum service for those that wish to express their protection concerns," said Boris Cheshirkov, the UN refugee agency spokesman on Lesbos.

- Turkish preparations -

On the other side of the Aegean, work is underway on a centre to host those sent back to the Turkish tourist resort of Cesme, with another being created in Dikili opposite Lesbos.

Turkish media reports say the Turkish Red Crescent is also preparing to open a refugee camp with capacity for 5,000 people further inland in Manisa.

The operation to resettle Syrians to Europe under the one-for-one arrangement also starts Monday.

Germany expects to take in a first group of about 35 Syrians from Turkey on Monday, the German interior ministry said. Several dozen others are expected to arrive in France, Finland and Portugal, according to German government sources.

Campaigners have criticised the deal, with Amnesty International accusing Turkey of illegally forcing Syrians to return to their war-torn homeland -- proof that Turkey is not a safe country for refugees, it says.

Turkey rejects the charge, insisting it has not changed its open-door policy for Syrian refugees.

Greece, meanwhile, is struggling to accommodate a massive bottleneck of 52,000 migrants stuck on its territory after Balkan countries closed their borders to stop the influx.

Sporadic violence has broken out between different nationalities in overcrowded camps.

"It is evident that the longer this situation drags out, we will have such incidents by desperate people," Kyritsis told AFP.

Several hundred Italians and Austrians, meanwhile, demonstrated against what they called "fortress Europe", at the Brenner Pass crossing point between the two countries.
By Lefteris Papadimas and David Lawder

ATHENS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde denied on Sunday that IMF staff would push Greece closer to default as a negotiating tactic on a new Greek bailout deal, which she said was "still a good distance away."

Lagarde said in a letter to Greece's prime minister that the debt talks should continue despite damage from reports of a leaked transcript suggesting that IMF staff may threaten to leave the bailout to force European lenders to offer more debt relief.

"Any speculation that IMF staff would consider using a credit event as a negotiating tactic is simply nonsense," Lagarde wrote to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

"My view of the ongoing negotiations is that we are still a good distance away from having a coherent program that I can present to our Executive Board," Lagarde wrote, adding that such a deal must put Greece on a path of robust growth and gradually restore debt sustainability.

Tsipras' office said on Sunday that he had demanded that Lagarde clarify the IMF's stance after Internet whistleblowing site WikiLeaks published what it said was the transcript of a March 19 conference call of three senior IMF officials.

The officials were discussing tactics to apply pressure on Greece, Germany and the EU to reach a deal in April. They were quoted as discussing a threat that the fund might not participate in Greece's third bailout program as a way to force EU creditors, especially Germany, to reach a deal on debt relief before Britain's June referendum on whether to stay in the European Union.

EU/IMF lenders are due to resume talks on Greece's fiscal and reform progress in Athens on Monday, aiming to conclude a bailout review that will unlock further loans and pave the way for negotiations on long-desired debt restructuring.

The review has been adjourned twice since January due to a rift among the lenders over the estimated size of Greece's fiscal gap by 2018, as well as disagreements with Athens on pension reforms and the management of bad loans.

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The Greek government interpreted the leak as revealing an IMF effort to blackmail Athens with a possible credit event to force it to give in on pension cuts which it has rejected.

In his letter to Lagarde, Tsipras "expressed his concern about the credibility of the negotiations after the leaks," an official at his office told Reuters.

Lagarde said in her response that "the IMF conducts its negotiations in good faith, not by way of threats, and we do not communicate through leaks."

She reiterated her view that if fiscal surplus targets were lowered for Greece, then more debt relief would be needed.

German government and finance ministry representatives declined to comment on the leaked transcript.

Germany has in the past said the IMF is an important player in the Greek rescue but it does not support the debt relief demanded by the IMF. Some German officials also say that they believe there are different views on Greece within the IMF.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to meet Lagarde in Berlin on Tuesday.

The purported conversation on the conference call involved Poul Thomsen, head of the IMF's Europe department, Delia Velculescu, leader of the IMF team in Greece, and IMF official Iva Petrova.

They discussed whether Greece could apply more austerity as a condition for receiving more aid ahead of big debt repayments in July and voiced frustration at the European Commission's reluctance to side with IMF pressure on Athens.

If genuine, the transcripts suggest that Brussels is sticking to unrealistic assumptions about Greece's budget shortfall to minimize the need for debt relief, which is unpopular with Germany and other northern euro zone hawks.

If concluded, the review will unlock a fresh tranche of about 5 billion euros ($5.7 bln), which Greece needs to pay off state arrears and European Central Bank and IMF maturing debt. Greece has no major debt redemptions due until July.

Commenting on the leak, Tsipras told weekly newspaper Ethnos: "It seems that some people are playing games with an aim to destabilize us. We will not allow (IMF's) Thomsen to destroy Europe."

(Additional reporting by David Lawder in Washington, Madeline Chambers and Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Editing by Paul Taylor, Susan Fenton and Jonathan Oatis)
MANILA (Reuters) - Gunmen seized four Malaysian crew of a tugboat off the coast of the eastern state of Sabah, a week after a similar attack on a Taiwanese tugboat in the southern Philippines, media reported on Sunday. The four were taken at gunpoint on Friday evening and brought by speed boat to the southern Philippines, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said, quoting an unnamed military official. Three other crew were left behind. The gunmen, suspected to be Abu Sayyaf militants, also took laptops, mobile phones and unspecified amounts of cash. The tugboat returned to Sabah when the gunmen left. "We confirm receiving reports of this incident," military spokesman Major Filemon Tan told reporters. "We have coordinated with our Malaysian counterparts." It was the second attack in a week on tugboats in the waters that border of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Ten Indonesians were abducted when a Taiwanese tugboat was intercepted in the southern Philippines. The Abu Sayyaf, known for kidnappings, beheadings, bombings and extortion, has demanded 50 million pesos ($1.09 million) for the freedom of the Indonesian crew. The al Qaeda-linked group is one of the most hardline Islamist militant groups in the Muslim south of the largely Christian Philippines. (Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Nick Macfie)
In the movie, "The Martian," Matt Damon was a fictional astronaut stranded on Mars. In reality, the head of NASA says astronauts could set foot on the Red Planet within the next twenty years.



"We think we're on the right trajectory to get humans to Mars in the 2030's," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told CNBC's "On the Money" in an interview this week.



He should know: Prior to assuming NASA's top job in 2009, Bolden was himself an astronaut for 14 years, commanding two space shuttle missions during that time. The U.S.'s top space official says he's confident the agency's "Journey to Mars" goal can be accomplished, building on years of space exploration.



"If we were just starting out, I would have doubts," Bolden explained. "But we've been sending precursor missions to Mars for almost 50 years now."



Now in his seventh year as leader of the space agency, Bolden told "On The Money" that a big part of his legacy will involve "making sure we're on a steady path to Mars and that we can get there in the 2030's. We're a lot closer than ever before."

Read More NASA, Mars, and dodging an asteroid apocalypse

This year marks the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's 58th birthday. It was in 1961 that President John F. Kennedy pledged Americans would land astronauts on the moon. That ambitious goal was ultimately accomplished in 1969, as millions of Americans watched Apollo 11's moon landing live from their living rooms.



Decades later, Bolden believes a mission to Mars has become the modern day equivalent of a trip to the moon. Reaching the Red Planet is "critically important," he said.



Mars "is similar to Earth, we think, and its history will help us understand our own planet better," Bolden added.



According to NASA, Mars is a cold desert world that's half the diameter of Earth. However, it has nearly the same amount of dry land as our planet, with seasons, weather, volcanoes and canyons.



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Although no liquid water is believed to exist on the planet's surface, the agency says "evidence for water now exists mainly in icy soil and thin clouds." The atmosphere, however, could be a nightmare for the weather sensitive: Temperatures range from 70 degrees Fahrenheit to 225 degrees below zero.



There's one more box that a Mars mission needs to check. "The ultimate reason ... is the fact that we want to know whether there is life elsewhere in the universe."



Unlike the original space race against Russia with Cold War implications, the agency hopes this space race will foster global cooperation in space exploration, not competition.



"That's one of the things most important to get people to understand," Bolden said to CNBC. "This is truly an international venture. It will be absolutely essential to have international partners with us."

The International Space Station (ISS) is an example of that partnership. Since 2000, people from 18 countries have visited the microgravity laboratory. Last month, NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly returned from a record-breaking 342 days in orbit on the ISS.

"Scott's mission was critical," Bolden said. "It's not the longest humans have ever been in space, but it's the longest an American has been there over a sustained period of time."



The lessons learned from Kelly's nearly year-long mission will help scientists figure out what challenges astronauts could face on further space journey.



"It's going to help us in our never-ending quest to understand how the human body will function for long periods of time in the microgravity environment of space," Bolden said.



Kelly actually arrived back on Earth about two inches taller, but the height increase was temporary.



Bolden explained that's because "gravity is taken out of equation. You're going around Earth so rapidly that centrifugal force overcomes gravity and you have this sensation you call floating. So everybody grows by fractions of inches and unfortunately for short people like me, you go back to normal, within days after you come back to Earth."

NASA is getting help in building the new spacecraft and systems to get astronauts further in space. As part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, the agency has already partnered with Boeing (NYSE: BA)and Tesla founder Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch astronauts to the ISS.



"The commercial partners that we have [are] absolutely incredibly important to NASA," Bolden says. "They're good for NASA and the nation, primarily because they help us to bring launches back to American soil, whether it's for cargo or people. "



For the mission to Mars, those commercial partnerships will continue. NASA is working to build the next generation rocket to take astronauts to deep space. Called SLS for Space Launch System, the program will include a core rocket being built by Boeing.



The Orion crew exploration spacecraft is being built by Lockheed Martin.



Bolden says those two systems are crucial to the Mars mission. "The SLS and Orion, that's going to be our deep space vehicle to carry our astronauts back into the area around the moon and eventually on to Mars."







On the Money airs on CNBC Saturday at 5:30 am ET, or check listings for air times in local markets.







More From CNBC


By Dave McKinney CHICAGO (Reuters) - Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner vowed to pursue a legal challenge against union dues the state collects from non-unionized, rank-and-file government workers despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday that upheld the practice. In a victory for labor, a 4-4 deadlock by the nations high court allowed a federal appeals court opinion to stand against 10 non-unionized California public school teachers who contended so-called fair-share dues should not be withheld from their paychecks if they chose against union membership. But the court move likely does not settle the issue, because nearly identical federal litigation in Illinois that Rauner helped launch last year remains viable. Our case is winding its way through the courts, and it will get to the Supreme Court probably at some point in the future, Rauner said during a stop in rural Illinois on Tuesday. And we will just continue the fight for the freedom of political expression and the right of free speech for government employees. Its a fundamental issue. Since taking office in 2015, the first-term Republican governor has waged war with public-sector unions in a bid to weaken their longstanding influence over state politics. During his first month in office, the governor signed an executive order to bar state agencies from withholding fair-share dues, which non-unionized employees must pay under Illinois law and collective-bargaining agreements to support non-political union activities that benefit all workers. Public-sector unions sued in Illinois state court to block Rauner's executive order from being implemented and persuaded a judge to allow the fees to continue to be collected while the case, which is still pending, was litigated. Simultaneously, Rauner sued in federal court to challenge the fees, but last May he was dismissed from the case by a judge, who ruled the governor lacked legal standing. Three non-unionized Illinois workers forced to pay between $19.75 and $60.86 in union dues per paycheck were allowed to proceed with their own complaint. A spokesman for the union representing the largest bloc of state workers called Tuesdays Supreme Court ruling a win but acknowledged the Illinois case may become the next fair-share battlefront. These attacks are political, and theyre ideological. Theyre brought by people who want to rig the economy and our democracy in their favor. Theyre not going to stop because they lost this particular challenge. Theyll bring another one, said Anders Lindall, a spokesman for AFSCME Council 31. (Editing by Dan Grebler)
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi King Salman agreed in Riyadh on Sunday to strengthen their cooperation in fighting "terrorism" and to facilitate investments.

"The two leaders expressed strong condemnation of the phenomenon of terrorism in all its forms," said an Indian foreign ministry statement after their talks.

They "agreed to enhance cooperation in counter-terrorism operations" and cyber-security, "including prevention of use of cyber space for terrorism, radicalisation and for disturbing social harmony," it added.

The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in intelligence-sharing on money laundry and terrorism financing, said a statement on the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

Just days ahead of Modi's two-day visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and the US Treasury announced joint sanctions on four individuals and two organisations with alleged links to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) -- which India blames for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

Among those sanctioned was Saudi-based Muhammad Ijaz Safarash, who allegedly provided financial, material or technological support for the Pakistan-based militant group LeT.

"We affirm the importance of continued cooperation and coordination with your country's government in the field of fighting terrorism," King Salman told Modi, according to SPA.

Modi arrived in the world's largest crude exporter on Saturday and has held talks with top Saudi officials, his country's community in the Muslim kingdom, as well as Indian workers and local businessmen.

India, which imports around 80 percent of its oil needs, is keen to take advantage of low crude prices by signing overseas deals that will help secure supplies to meet its growing demand.

Indian foreign ministry official Shri Mridul Kumar has said ahead of the visit that almost 20 percent of the South Asian country's crude supplies come from Saudi Arabia and that New Delhi wants to ensure this supply continues.

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The Indian foreign ministry statement on Sunday said that "the two leaders expressed satisfaction at their growing bilateral trade in the energy sector."

They agreed "to transform the buyer-seller relationship in the energy sector" to focus "on investment and joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, and cooperation in joint exploration in India, Saudi Arabia and in third countries," it added.

They also discussed regional and international developments, including the security situation in West Asia, the Middle East and South Asia, and agreed to bolster defence cooperation and diversify trade.

Their investment authorities meanwhile signed a framework agreement to facilitate investments by the private sectors in the two countries.

Saudi Arabia is home to 2.96 million Indian expatriates who send home over $10 billion in remittances every year, according to India's foreign ministry.

Modi's right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power in 2014 promising to revive India's economy and create much-needed jobs.
Tehran (AFP) - Iran's oil exports have surpassed two million barrels per day following the lifting of sanctions under its nuclear deal with world powers, Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said on Sunday.

"Iran's oil and gas condensate exports are now at more than 2 million barrels per day" after rising by 250,000 bpd since March 1, the ministry's Shana news service quoted Zanganeh as saying.

Iran has doubled exports since its nuclear accord took effect on January 16.

Iran, an OPEC member, has the world's fourth-largest oil reserves but its exports were long hampered by sanctions over its nuclear programme.

It has moved ahead with an increase in exports despite global concerns over a supply glut that has pushed oil prices below $40 a barrel, from more than $100 a barrel in mid-2014.

Top exporter Saudi Arabia has said it is willing to consider an output freeze to help shore up prices.

But in an interview published Friday, Saudi deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman reiterated Riyadh's position that other major producers, including Iran, would need to do the same.

His remarks drove down oil prices, with US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for delivery in May sliding $1.55 (4.0 percent) to $36.79 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Major oil producers led by Russia and Saudi Arabia are to meet in Doha on April 17 to discuss measures to stabilise prices, including a proposal not to pump out oil above a certain level.

But Tehran rejects any output freeze -- first mooted by Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in February -- until it regains its pre-sanctions market share.

Zanganeh described the proposal in late February as a "very funny joke", as production levels vary widely among oil producers.

Under more than a decade of sanctions, Iran witnessed crucial global ties cut from its economy, including its lifeblood oil markets.

In January 2012, under hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, the European Union stopped buying oil from Iran and global banking networks blocked the Islamic republic from the SWIFT system.

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Hope only returned after president Hassan Rouhani's election in 2013 that culminated in ending the nuclear standoff after two years of negotiations.

Since the nuclear deal's implementation, Tehran has resumed exporting to the European market.

But Asian countries China, India, Japan and South Korea remain the main customers of Iranian oil.
By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran will pursue its development of ballistic missiles despite the U.S. blacklisting of more Iranian companies linked to the program, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander said on Monday. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) test-fired several ballistic missiles this month, drawing condemnation from Western leaders who believe the tests violate a United Nations resolution. The U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted on Thursday two Iranian companies, cutting them off from international finance over their connection to the missile program. Washington had imposed similar sanctions on 11 businesses and individuals in January over a missile test carried out by the IRGC in October 2015. "Even if they build a wall around Iran, our missile program will not stop," Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the IRGC's aerospace arm, was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency. "They are trying to frighten our officials with sanctions and invasion. This fear is our biggest threat." U.S. officials said Iran's missile test would violate U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which calls on Iran not to conduct "any activity" related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. However, Washington said that a fresh missile test would not violate a July 2015 accord under which Iran has restricted its disputed nuclear program and won relief from U.N. and Western financial sanctions in return. That agreement between Iran and six world powers was endorsed in Resolution 2231. The Revolutionary Guards, Iran's elite fighting and security force, maintains dozens of short and medium-range ballistic missiles, the largest stock in the Middle East. It says the missiles are solely for defensive use with conventional, non-nuclear warheads. President Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatic conservative, said on Sunday that boosting Iran's defense capabilities is a "strategic policy" though Iran should take care not to provoke its enemies. "We will pursue any measure to boost our defense might and this is a strategic policy," Rouhani was quoted as saying by Press TV in the first cabinet meeting in the new Persian year. "But at the same time we should remain vigilant so that Iran's enemies do not find any excuse to take advantage of the situation." Iran has denied U.S. accusations that it is acting "provocatively" with the missile tests, citing a long history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East - including a U.S.-engineered coup in Tehran in 1953 - and a right to self-defense. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Baghdad (AFP) - Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called Saturday for legal action over allegations that senior officials took millions of dollars in bribes to help major firms secure lucrative oil sector contracts.

Abadi instructed the country's anti-corruption commission to take "legal measures" and called for the judiciary to pursue prosecutions connected to the scandal, a statement from his office said.

The allegations of corruption came to light in an investigation by The Huffington Post and Fairfax Media, which reviewed thousands of internal documents from Monaco-based firm Unaoil.

The report "revealed the involvement of senior Iraqi officials... in corrupt deals and bribes related to oil contracts during the period of previous governments", the premier's statement said.

The investigation found that Unaoil agreed to pay millions of dollars to influence Iraqi officials including oil ministers Hussein al-Shahristani and Abdul Karim Luaibi, the former of whom also served as deputy premier for energy affairs, to help secure contracts for its clients.

Unaoil clients in the Middle East included Rolls-Royce, Weatherford, Petrofac, Clyde Pumps, Cameron/Natco, FMC Technologies, Saipem, SBM Offshore, MAN Turbo and Leighton Offshore, according to the report.

At a news conference on Saturday, Shahristani, who is currently minister of higher education, denied having had contact with Unaoil.

He also said in a statement that if the evidence on which the investigation was based is not turned over to the Iraqi government, it should file a defamation suit.

The report on oil sector corruption has already sparked action in Europe.

Authorities in Monaco searched Unaoil's headquarters and the homes of company officials and also questioned leaders of the firm, the principality said in a statement.

This was done at the request of Britain's Serious Fraud Office as part of "a major corruption case with international ramifications," the statement said.

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On its website, Unaoil says that it "invests locally in frontier markets to provide local capabilities at international standards using leading technology".

"This has made us as the local partner of choice for larger international companies," it says.

Iraq is plagued by endemic corruption that has robbed the country of huge sums of money that could otherwise have been spent on development and services.

Abadi has announced a series of reform measures aimed at reducing government waste and curbing corruption.

But the powerful parties and politicians who benefit from the existing system have opposed the changes behind the scenes, and little in the way of lasting change has been achieved.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The displaced population of Ramadi has started to return to the western Iraqi city that was recaptured from Islamic State militants in December, a provincial official said on Sunday. About 3,000 families have returned since Saturday to districts of Ramadi that have been cleared of mines and explosives, city governor Hameed Dulaymi told Reuters. Families are relying on electricity generators as the public grid has not been repaired, he said. Water for domestic use is being pumped from the nearby Euphrates river, he added. Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Baghdad, is the first major success for Iraq's army since it collapsed in the face of Islamic State's lightning advance across the country's north and west about two years ago. Most of the city's population of nearly half a million fled before the battle, taking shelter in camps west of Baghdad. (Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli; editing by Jason Neely)
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's state-run electricity company has restored full power supply to the Palestinian city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank after reducing it over an outstanding debt, officials said Sunday.

The cut on Thursday led to blackouts, but full supply was restored later the same day, according to Mansour Nassar of the Palestinian Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JDECO).

The Israel Electric Corporation had reduced supply to Jericho over a debt of 1.7 billion shekels ($450 million, 397 million euros) owed by the private JDECO and Palestinian Authority.

An Israeli official said supply was reduced by half, while JDECO said it had been cut by two-thirds.

The Israeli official said the IEC could at any point renew the cut. It was not clear why Israel decided to restore power after the brief cut.

Thursday's cut had affected up to 30,000 people of a total population of around 50,000 in the city and surrounding area, according to Jericho governor Majed al-Fityani.

The Palestinian Authority is struggling financially and depends largely on foreign aid. It relies heavily on Israel for electricity supplies, which also provides electricity to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Ongoing talks with the IEC and PA have so far not resolved the debt problem.

In January 2015, the IEC cut power to Palestinian cities for a number of hours every day over a similar debt, only to renew it a few weeks later.

Under an economic agreement signed with the PA in 1994, Israel collects around 600-700 million shekels each month in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports.

It transfers the mony after deducting approximately 100 million shekels for expenses such as Palestinian hospitalisations in Israel, sewage treatment and covering part of the electricity debt, which has remained largely stable in recent months.

Tensions are running high after six months of violence which has left 200 Palestinians and 28 Israelis dead.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, while Israeli forces have been accused of using excessive force in some cases, charges which they have firmly denied.
By Dan Williams TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israels neighbors are buying arms on a scale that threatens its regional military superiority, the deputy Israeli air force chief said on Sunday, in remarks that appeared aimed at helping secure more defense aid from a reluctant Washington. U.S. military payouts to Israel, currently around $3 billion annually, expire in 2018, and Israeli officials have spoken of needing around $4.5 billion. U.S. officials have balked at such an increase. At the heart of the dispute is how to perpetuate Israels qualitative military edge - a guarantee that it gets more advanced U.S. weapons than Arab states get. Israel says it needs to bulk up its armed forces, not just upgrade their technologies, to keep ahead of potential foes. "There are countries here which have plans that are being actualized for arms deals in the hundreds of billions of dollars, for the most advanced Western weaponry and the most advanced Eastern weaponry," Brigadier-General Tal Kelman told a conference to promote Israels purchase of the advanced U.S. fighter jet the F-35. Kelman did not specify countries other than Iran, which the Israelis fear will use sanctions relief from last years nuclear agreement to build up its ballistic missile program and arm Islamist guerillas like Lebanons Hezbollah militia. Some Israeli officials have privately voiced concern about U.S. weapons systems being supplied to Western-aligned Gulf Arabs, as well as Egyptian interest in advanced Russian arms, though in neither case are the countries openly hostile toward Israel. "There is a very great danger here, because todays enemy can be tomorrows friend, and todays friend could be tomorrows enemy," Kelman told the forum, hosted by Israel Defense magazine and Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies. "There is a potential here for the erosion of the IDFs (Israel Defence Force) qualitative edge and the IAFs (Israel air force) qualitative edge." Russia's military intervention last year in Syrias civil war has also worried Israel, given Moscows dispatch of S-300 and S-400 air defense systems capable of seeing deep into its territory. A slide projected at the conference by Gary North, a retired U.S. air force general now with F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin , showed Russian radars in Syria covering much of Israel as well as its Mediterranean training areas. The F-35 has stealth capabilities. (Editing by Jeffrey Heller, Larry King)
Italy on Wednesday launched a legal battle at an international tribunal to bring home an Italian marine, barred from leaving India after the 2012 killing of two Indian fishermen who Rome says were mistaken for pirates.

Marine Salvatore Girone has been living in Italy's embassy in New Delhi for several years and is banned from leaving the city pending resolution of a dispute which has soured bilateral ties.

Girone and fellow marine Massimiliano Latorre were arrested by Indian police in 2012, days after they shot at an Indian fishing boat, killing two fishermen, while protecting an Italian oil tanker as part of an anti-piracy mission off India's southern Kerala coast.

The so-called "Enrica Lexie incident", named after the oil tanker, is now subject to international arbitration in a bitter fight between the two countries.

Ties soured even further after the two marines overstayed a return trip to Italy they were allowed to make in early 2013 to vote in general elections.

Both marines were barred from leaving India again pending a trial, although they have not yet been officially charged according to Italian officials, a claim disputed by New Delhi's representatives.

Latorre however was allowed to travel back to Italy in 2014 for medical treatment after he suffered a stroke, and Indian courts in January extended his permission to stay in Italy until April 30.

Girone however "is obliged to live thousands of kilometres (miles) away from his country and family, with two children still at a tender age" and is deprived of "his liberty", Italian ambassador Francesco Azzarello told the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA).

"He has not been subjected to any charge... his rights are seriously suffering," said Azzarello at the Hague-based arbitration body, set up in 1899 to rule in disputes between states and private entities.

Girone should be allowed to come home "pending the final determination of this tribunal," Azzarello insisted at a rare public hearing at the court based in The Hague.

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- 'Double murder at sea' -

Italy initiated arbitration proceedings last year and, in August a UN body, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), ordered India to suspend court proceedings against the pair.

Italy insists the Enrica Lexie was in international waters at the time of the incident and that Indian courts did not have the jurisdiction to put the men on trial as they were "state officials".

India argues the case is not a maritime dispute but "a double murder at sea" in which one fisherman was shot in the head and the other in the chest.

India's representative Neeru Chadha told the five-member arbitration panel that the two marines were in fact facing charges before Indian courts.

"As a matter of fact, as soon as Sergeant Girone was arrested he was informed of the charges against him," added another Indian representative, J.S. Mukul, who said Italy is "now unfairly alleging that no charges have been brought".

The dragging case has become a political hot-button issue in Italy with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi regularly flayed by opposition leaders for failing to secure the release of both men.

Azzarello said Thursday that Italy "gives the solemn undertaking" the marines will be returned to India if the PCA orders Rome to do so.

However "a human being cannot be used as a guarantee for the conduct of a state," Azzarello said.

Chadha said Girone was living "under relaxed bail conditions at the Italian ambassador's residence" in New Delhi.

"The pattern is clear that Italy did not want the case to proceed in an Indian court and used various tactics to stall the process, Chadha said.

A final ruling on the matter may still take several months.
MILAN (Reuters) - Italy's prime minister on Sunday claimed full ownership of a measure to free up long delayed oil deliveries from a southern field that has prompted a minister to resign over allegations of influence peddling. Matteo Renzi told state television RAI that he himself had proposed the amendment to help production at the Tempa Rossa field by putting the government in charge of decisions over transport and storage infrastructure, bypassing regional governments. Industry Minister Federica Guidi resigned on Thursday after the publication of phone-tapped conversations in which she told her partner the government would pass legislation that would help his energy business. Renzi said the phone call had clearly been a mistake but the government had to act to make up for Italy's slow bureaucracy. "I chose that amendment, it's mine," Renzi said. "I'm fully behind it ... the government has the power and, I'd say, the duty to unblock public works." The scandal hit the 41-year-old premier at a time when Italy's economic recovery is looking wobbly and local elections are looming, including in key Italian cities such as Rome and Milan. The Tempa Rossa field in Basilicata, run by France's Total, was discovered in 1989 but production has been hampered by a lack of infrastructure needed to get the oil to the port city of Taranto in the neighboring Puglia region. Prosecutors in Basilicata investigating the case said last week they were probing charges Guidi's partner used his position to build commercial ties with Total. Renzi said he was ready to talk to the prosecutors. "We're changing this country so much that if magistrates want to question me about what we're doing, not just Tempa Rossa, but all the other things that we got moving, here I am." According to the press, prosecutors plan to question both Guidi and Maria Elena Boschi, the minister for parliamentary relations and one of Renzi's closest allies. Neither Guidi nor Boschi are under investigation. Boschi, whose name has also come up in the phone-tapped conversations, said in an interview with Sunday's La Stampa newspaper the government was under attack because it was not close to Italy's vested interests. But Renzi, who took office two years ago vowing to end the cronyism that has often marred Italian politics, said he did not believe in conspiracies when asked about Boschi's comments. "There is a legitimate political battle against us ... though I lose my temper when my honesty is questioned," he said. Renzi said he greatly admired Admiral Giuseppe De Giorgi, the head of the navy, who is also under investigation in a separate strand of the probe. "He is a person Italy can be proud of," he said. (Reporting by Valentina Za; Editing by Clelia Oziel)
Two Japanese destroyers and a submarine docked at a Philippine port on Sunday near disputed South China Sea waters, where Beijing's increasingly assertive behaviour has sparked global concern.

Manila is seeking to strengthen ties with Tokyo as tensions mount over the disputed waterway, almost all of which is claimed by China.

Japanese submarine Oyashio and destroyers JS Ariake and JS Setogiri docked in the Subic port Sunday for a routine visit at a sprawling former US naval base just 200 kilometres (125 miles) from a Chinese-held shoal.

"The visit is a manifestation of a sustained promotion of regional peace and stability and enhancement of maritime cooperation between neighbouring navies," Philippine Navy spokesman Commander Lued Lincuna said.

The Ariake was equipped with an anti-submarine helicopter, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

The port call came on the eve of war games between the United States and Filipino soldiers in the Philippines, which is seen as a showcase of a long-standing military alliance that the Philippines is counting on to deter China.

Seriously outgunned by its much larger rival China, the Philippines has turned to allies like the United States and Japan to upgrade its armed forces in recent years.

In February, Japan agreed to supply the Philippines with military hardware, which may include anti-submarine reconnaissance aircraft and radar technology.

Tensions in the South China Sea -- through which one-third of the world's oil passes -- have mounted in recent months since China transformed contested reefs into artificial islands capable of supporting military facilities.

Aside from the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have overlapping claims.

Japan and China are locked in a separate dispute over an uninhabited island chain in the East Sea.

The Philippines has asked a United Nations-backed tribunal to declare China's sea claims as illegal and the government expects a decision this year.
Bamako (AFP) - A key Islamist suspect believed to head Mali's southern jihadist fighters was in detention in the capital Bamako on Thursday following his capture by special forces, security sources told AFP.

"Souleymane Keita, the top jihadist leader in the south of the country, was arrested a few days ago on the Mauritanian border, and transferred to Bamako on Wednesday," a security source said.

Keita's arrest comes as west African nations scramble to tighten security following a string of attacks against hotels and restaurants popular with foreigners that have highlighted the growing reach of jihadist groups in the region.

Keita is one of two suspected leaders of extremists operating in southern and central Mali that have been linked to the Ansar Dine group, which was one of three Islamist factions that conquered vast swathes of the country's north in 2012 before being repulsed by French troops.

A second security source told AFP that Keita's arrest near the town of Sokolo followed the capture of one of his allies a few months ago in the centre of the country.

"He was about to head to Timbuktu, probably to meet up with his mentor Iyad Ag Ghaly in the Kidal region" in north-east Mali, the source said, referring to the Tuareg leader of Ansar Dine.

Malian intelligence officials say Keita and Ag Ghaly fought side by side in 2012 in northern Mali.

When French troops stepped in to help Mali's government reconquer the area in January 2013, Keita moved south to his native region to set up a new group, the Khaled Ibn al-Walid "katiba" or combattant unit.

The group, also known as the "Ansar Dine of the South", has some 200 fighters, a Malian security source said.

- Two new jihadi groups in Mali -

Heading the Islamist push into central Mali is another jihadist commander who cut his teeth in the country's northern conflict, radical preacher Amadou Koufa, say security sources.

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He leads the Macina Liberation Front (FLM), a new group that emerged in 2015 and has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks, some targeting security forces in central Mali.

Long focused on targets in northern Mali, jihadist attacks have spread since the beginning of the year to the centre and the south.

In March 2015, Keita was accused by security services of heading a jihadist military training camp discovered outside Bamako.

He was also accused of attacks in Fakola and Misseni near the border with neighbouring Ivory Coast in 2015 as well as in Bamako.

Seven Malian jihadists arrested in August in Ivory Coast and extradited to Bamako admitted to being members of Khalid Ibn al-Walid and to taking part in several jihadist attacks, according to a source close to the case.

In the first attack of its kind in the Ivory Coast, 19 people were killed earlier this month in a gun and grenade assault on three hotels and a beach in the southeastern town of Grand-Bassam. Two Malians were arrested this week in northern Mali over the attack.

It was the third such strike in West Africa in recent months, following a November assault on a top hotel in Mali's capital which killed 20 people, most of them foreigners, and another in a Burkina Faso hotel in January which killed 30 people.
DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladesh's former Prime Minister and main opposition leader Khaleda Zia is expected to appear in court and seek bail after she was issued with an arrest warrant over a deadly firebombing attack, her lawyer said on Sunday. A court in Dhaka issued arrest warrants on Wednesday for Zia, 70, and 27 leaders and activists of her Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in connection with a petrol bomb attack on a bus in January last year during a deadly anti-government campaign. "Most likely, Madam will appear before the court on April 5 and will seek bail," Khaleda's lawyer Sanaullah Miah told reporters. The BNP called for a countrywide protest on Monday against the arrest warrant, saying it was politically motivated. More than 120 people were killed and hundreds injured early last year in political violence during transport blockades and strikes aimed at toppling the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Bangladeshi politics has been mired for years in rivalry between Hasina and Khaleda. Both women are related to former national leaders, and they have alternated as prime minister for most of the past two decades. Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation of 160 million, has also seen a surge in Islamist violence in which liberal activists, members of minority Muslim sects and other religious groups have been targeted. Prime Minister Hasina has blamed the rising tide of violence on the opposition BNP and its key ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, many of whose leaders are being prosecuted for war crimes during the 1971 war of independence. The opposition denies any involvement. (Reporting by Ruma Paul; Editing by Richard Pullin)
By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran's top leader on Wednesday said missiles were key to the Islamic Republic's future, offering support to the hardline Revolutionary Guards that have drawn criticism from the West for testing ballistic missiles. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supported last year's nuclear deal with world powers but has since called for Iran to avoid further rapprochement with the United States and its allies, and maintain its economic and military strength. "Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors," Khamenei, who has the final say on all matters of state, was quoted as saying by his website. "If the Islamic Republic seeks negotiations but has no defensive power, it would have to back down against threats from any weak country." His comments may have been directed at former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the de facto leader of a more moderate political alliance, who last week tweeted "the future is in dialogue, not missiles". Iran's Revolutionary Guards conducted ballistic missile tests earlier this month, in what they said was a demonstration of Iran's non-nuclear deterrent power. AMBIGUOUS RESOLUTION The United States and several European powers said the tests defied a U.N. Security Council Resolution that calls on Iran not to test nuclear-capable missiles, in a joint letter seen by Reuters on Tuesday. However, Washington has said that a fresh missile test would not violate a July 2015 accord under which Iran has restricted its disputed nuclear program and won relief from U.N. and Western financial sanctions in return. That agreement between Iran and six world powers was endorsed in Resolution 2231. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that Iran's ballistic missile had caused "alarm" and it would be up to the major powers in Security Council to decide whether fresh sanctions should be applied. But Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, said the tests did not violate Resolution 2231. "You may like it or not that Iran launches ballistic missiles  but that is a different story. The truth is that in the 2231 resolution there are no such bans," Interfax cited Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the ministry's department for non-proliferation and arms control, as saying. Iran has consistently denied its missiles are designed to carry nuclear weapons. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, additional reporting by Lidia Kelly in Moscow and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Sam Wilkin; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
By Sylvia Westall KUWAIT (Reuters) - Kuwait is not a "free-rider" in U.S.-led campaigns against terrorism and other threats, a senior Kuwaiti security official said on Thursday, rejecting comments by President Barack Obama critical of some U.S. allies. Sheikh Thamer al-Sabah, President of Kuwait's National Security Bureau, was referring to Obama's remarks to The Atlantic magazine last week in which he said some states in the Gulf and Europe were "free-riders" who called for U.S. action without getting involved themselves. In an interview, Sheikh Thamer said Kuwait, like fellow Gulf state Qatar, had opened up air bases and airspace for the U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Aircraft from other Gulf countries had carried out sorties, said Sheikh Thamer, a member of Kuwait's ruling family. "I am just wondering what a free ride is when we do all of these things," he said, referring to Kuwait's role. "When we share intelligence, when we open our air, land and sea, when we spend billions of dollars in trying to combat terrorism and trying to help the Syrian refugees, how is it free?" he added. "I actually looked up 'free ride' in the dictionary and I would like other people to know what a free ride is and see what we are doing here in this part of the world, especially when he mentioned the Gulf." Sheikh Thamer's comments were unusually critical of the United States for a Kuwaiti official. They echo those on Monday by Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former intelligence chief, who said the American leader had "thrown us a curve ball" in criticizing Riyadh's regional role. When asked about what Sheikh Thamer said, the White House referred to comments it made on Monday. Spokesman Josh Earnest said the United States viewed Saudi Arabia and the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) "as effective national security partners who can and should do more." "Were encouraging them to do more to contribute to the security situation in their region of the world." HOT SPOT Kuwait, which borders Iraq and Saudi Arabia and lies across the Gulf from Iran, is working to combat the threat of attacks by Sunni Islamist militants like Islamic State on its own soil, Sheikh Thamer said, as well as Iranian-backed operatives. In June last year a Saudi suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shi'ite mosque in Kuwait, killing 27, in an attack claimed by Islamic State. The bomber was previously unknown to authorities in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, where he had been in transit, Sheikh Thamer said. "He wasn't under their radar, they didn't know him. He was radicalized, to our understanding, through either the Internet or through people he might have known," he said. "This is something that is very serious for us, if you don't know the person, how can you defend yourself or how can you protect yourself?" He said countries from the six-nation GCC had been compiling blacklists of suspected militants and shared them with Western allies. He said Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers had not diminished Kuwait's concerns over Iran. These included militant sleeper cells and spies, involvement in regional conflicts and the safety of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Kuwait is the closest major population center to it. "The security issue from Iran was always there and I think will always continue. It is not something new," he said. "I salute you for trying your best to work with Iran only on their nuclear program despite knowing what Iran is doing for Hezbollah in Lebanon, for other places in the world, for bombings, for hijacking of aircraft, for assassinations of people," he added. "I salute them on how they can actually sit down and talk about only the nuclear program with the knowledge they have of how Iran is capable of doing all of these things. I can't do it." He voiced concern about Iraq, where Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias are fighting alongside government forces against Islamic State. "We are living in a very hot spot in the world," he said. (Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington, Editing by Andrew Roche and Grant McCool)
Having clean clothes shouldnt be a luxury, but for homeless people who dont have access to free laundry services, that often ends up being the case. In Australia, though, people with dirty clothes can simply take them to an orange-colored van, where their clothes are washed and dried for them for free.

The project, called Orange Sky Laundry, is the brainchild of two millennials from Brisbane, Nicholas Marchesi and Lucas Patchett, who launched Australias first free laundry-on-wheels operation in October 2014.

From an early age, both Marchesi and Patchett were exposed to the widespread issue of homelessness in Australia, where some 105,000 people are considered homeless. This helped them come up with the concept for Orange Sky Laundry after they discussed sticking a washer and dryer in the back of a van and decided the idea quite literally had wheels.

A lot of people thought we were crazy, that it was impossible, Marchesi told The Guardian. We were told that putting a washing machine in the back of a van would never work.

The now 21-year-old cofounders have since expanded their operation from a single van named Sudsy to a six-van fleet thats backed by more than 450 volunteers. Patchett said the vans handle hundreds of loads of laundry each week.

While the laundry is free for those in need, each van comes with an expensive price tag, costing about $100,000 in renovations. Private and corporate donors as well as a grant from the state government help pay these costs.

Homeless people face a number of barriers, but one of the most important challenges they face is hygiene. Many homeless shelters and charities dont have showers or laundry machines, and people living on the streets often cant afford to do their laundry at laundromats. Without access to public showers, bathrooms, or laundry services, homeless people often shy away from seeking out jobs or going to appointments out of fear of being judged for wearing dirty clothes or smelling.

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People dont really understand that there arent efficient places for people to go to shower and do their laundry, Doniece Sandoval, founder of San Francisco mobile shower and bathroom service Lava Mae, told TakePart. This is a first-world country, so you dont think access to sanitation is something thats a problem, but it is, and its happening right here in the U.S.

Before Orange Sky Laundry launched its operation in Australia, the cofounders had reached out to Lava Mae as a source of inspiration for their project. Since its launch in June 2014, Sandoval and her team have been taking retired diesel buses and converting them into mobile showers for the citys homeless. The buses are equipped with two full bathrooms, which are powered by a plumbing system that sources water from fire hydrants. An on-board water heater provides hot water for the showers, and wastewater drains into the city sewers.

The mobile food truck movement also inspired Sandoval to start Lava Mae, a name that loosely translates to wash me in Spanish.

I thought, if there are food trucks that can go around serving meals to people around the city, why cant there be mobile showers and bathrooms? she said.

As for the future, Sandoval says she sees Australias mobile laundry service working well in San Francisco alongside her program.

Its definitely challenging to keep clothes cleanmost homeless people have one or two undergarments, she said. Im hoping Orange Sky Laundry will come here and partner with us.

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Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - The leader of Nigeria's Ansaru jihadist group, a Boko Haram splinter group ideologically aligned to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has been arrested, an army spokesman said on Sunday.

Khalid al-Barnawi is one of three Nigerians listed by Washington in 2012 as "specially designated global terrorists".

The US Department of State in June 2012 named Barnawi alongside Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau and Ansaru founder Abubakar Adam Kambar as terrorists.

"Security agents made a breakthrough on Friday in the fight against terrorism by arresting Khalid al-Barnawi, the leader of Ansaru terrorist group in Lokoja," military spokesman Brigadier General Rabe Abubakar said.

"He is among those on top of the list of our wanted terrorists," he added.

Lokoja is the capital of Nigeria's central Kogi state.

"Shekau is the most visible leader of the Nigeria-based militant group Jamaatu Ahlis Sunna Liddaawati Wal-Jihad, commonly referred to as Boko Haram," the US state department said 2012.

"Khalid al-Barnawi and Abubakar Adam Kambar have ties to Boko Haram and have close links to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," it said in a statement.

Al-Barnawi assumed the leadership of Ansaru following the death of Kambar in a military raid on his hideout in Kano in March 2012.

"We are very happy about this development (arrest). It is a great breakthrough in our fight against insurgency in the country," Information Minister Lai Mohammed told AFP.

A serving army officer added that his arrest was "a huge succees and will have a profound effect on counter-terrorism operations in Nigeria and beyond".

"He is a known transnational terrorist and the backbone of all Al-Qaeda affiliate groups in west Africa," the officer, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

Ansaru, a splinter group of Boko Haram, specialising in high profile killings and attacks on global interests, is also linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

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Barnawi, 47, whose real name is Usman Umar Abubakar, hailed from Biu town in restive northeast Borno state.

He and his group have been involved in a string of kidnappings of mostly foreigners.

The group comprises mostly western-educated Boko Haram members who were trained in AQIM camps in the Algerian desert.

They disapproved of Boko Haram's indiscriminate bombing and shooting campaign, preferring instead high profile killings and attacks on western interests.

Kamber and al-Barnawi were both former close allies of the late Boko Haram sect leader Mohammed Yusuf.

Al-Barnawi was the alleged mastermind of the 2011 kidnap of a Briton and an Italian, both construction engineers, in northern Kebbi state.

The two hostages were killed in a failed rescue bid by British and Nigerian Special Forces in the northern city of Sokoto in 2012.

Trained in Afghanistan and Algeria, he was also behind the 2012 kidnap of a German construction engineer - Edgar Raupach -- in the northern city of Kano.

The German was killed along with four captors in a botched rescue operation by Nigerian troops the same year at a hideout on the outskirts of Kano, where the group is mostly based.

Ansaru also claimed a 2012 attack on a maximum security facility in Abuja where detained Islamists were being held, killing two policemen and freeing 40 inmates.

With the emergence of Ansaru, Barnawi's faction became independent of Boko Haram but still maintained ties.

The group also claimed responsibility for the kidnap of a French engineer, Francis Collomp, in northern Katsina state in 2012. He escaped later escaped.

Ansaru claimed the December 26, 2012 attack on a maximum security facility in Abuja where captured Islamists were being held, killing two policemen and freeing 40 detainees.

The group said it was responsible for a 2013 attack on a convoy of Mali-bound Nigerian troops in Kogi state, killing two soldiers and seriously wounding five others.

It issued a statement condemning Nigerias participation in the war against the Islamic state of northern Mali".
Tripoli (AFP) - Libya's National Oil Corporation and Central Bank, backbones of its wealth, have thrown their support behind a UN-backed unity government in a blow to a rival administration refusing to cede power.

The two institutions, which have struggled to remain neutral since Libya's 2011 armed revolt and subsequent turbulence, said they welcomed the Government of National Accord, in separate statements.

Prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj and members of the GNA arrived Wednesday in Tripoli where a rival government, unrecognised by the international community, has ruled since mid-2014.

The Tripoli administration, established after the powerful Libya Dawn militia alliance overrun the capital that year, has demanded that Sarraj leave or surrender, branding the GNA "illegal".

Founded in 1970, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) is based in Tripoli where Libya's Central Bank -- the depositor of the country's oil wealth -- also has its headquarters.

They have continued to operate independently despite the chaos that engulfed Libya after the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

"We have been working with Prime Minister Sarraj and the Presidency Council to put this period of divisions and rivalry behind us," NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla.

"We have been looking to the future, and now we have a clear international legal framework in place," he added in a statement published Saturday on the NOC website.

The Central Bank of Libya also "welcomed" the GNA and wished them "all the success in carrying out the difficult tasks ahead of them".

It urged Libyans to "now more than ever to unite and collaborate by working together to ensure that security and safety prevail in Libya, to stop fighting and bloodshed, to empower the judicial system and to embrace the rule of law".

A Libyan financial expert said the NOC and Central Bank support amounted to "a resounding vote of confidence" in the GNA.

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"The two institutions are the basis of Libyan livelihood and without them the GNA would not be able to function," he said, asking not to be named.

- Battered economy -

Oil is Libya's main natural resource, with reserves estimated at 48 billion barrels, the largest in Africa.

The North African nation had an output capacity of about 1.6 million barrels per day before the uprising, accounting for more than 95 percent of exports and 75 percent of the budget.

But production has slumped amid violence as rival forces battled for control of oil terminals.

Control of the oil industry is key for the GNA, which not only needs to unite the country but also shore up an economy weakened by the drop of oil prices on the international market.

Since the revolt, and the emergence of two rival administrations, the central bank struggled to keep the country afloat, urging tough spending cuts and hinting that it dipped into foreign reserves.

On Thursday, Sarraj met the head of the Central Bank to discuss measures to safeguard banks and tackle the country's "cash flow problem", his office said.

"Difficult times lie ahead. The immediate challenge is to end the cash crisis," Mattia Toaldo, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said earlier in the week.

Following Sarraj's arrival in Tripoli, pledges of loyalty began pouring in and supporters rallied in the city although his government still needs the formal approval of the house of representatives (HoR).

"The HoR remains the legitimate body to endorse the GNA. I urge the HoR to hold a comprehensive session to vote on GNA in free will," UN envoy to Libya Martin Kobler said in a tweet Sunday.

On Thursday, the mayors of 10 coastal cities that were under the control of the Tripoli authorities called on Libyans to "support the national unity government".

The following day, guards in charge of securing installations in Libya's so-called eastern "oil crescent" also offered their support and said they would hand over to the unity government three oil terminal.

The UN Security Council has passed Resolution 2278 stating that oil exports from Libya must be placed under the authority of the GNA.
Colmar-Berg (Luxembourg) (AFP) - She fled Cuba with her bourgeois family as revolution brewed, and later married into one of Europe's royal dynasties.

Today, as the Communist-ruled island emerges from long economic isolation, Luxembourg's Grand Duchess Maria Teresa says she hopes to return home to pitch the cause of micro-credit to help the country's poor.

A Unesco goodwill ambassador, Maria Teresa, 59, has long championed collateral-free seed loans to help families set up businesses to haul themselves out of poverty -- the system famously set up by Bangladeshi Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.

She has backed projects in countries as diverse as Nepal, Mali, Thailand, Laos and Bosnia, and hopes that Cuba, too, can benefit.

"From an economic point of view, there is an enormous amount to be done for (Cuba)," the wife of Grand Duke Henri, the monarch of the tiny but wealthy EU nation, said in an interview with AFP. "(...) The Cuban population has suffered greatly for very many years."

She added: "One thing that would give me enormous pleasure would be to travel to Cuba with Professor Yunus to launch microfinance.

"It's something I feel very passionate about. I don't know if the situation economically is right or if the political opening is sufficient and ready to do it now, but it's a dream I have."

- Castro 'neither friend nor enemy' -

In 1959, Maria Teresa's family, a banking dynasty of Spanish descent called the Mestres, fled Cuba, leaving behind a business empire that would be confiscated by Fidel Castro's revolution.

The Havana-born duchess admitted it would not be easy going back to a country where Castro, 89, is still living and which is still run by his brother Raul following Castro's retirement due to ill health.

"He is neither a friend nor an enemy. He is someone because of whom my whole family had to leave the island of Cuba. This is not an easy situation," she said.

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However when Maria Teresa became engaged to marry Henri, then the heir to the Luxembourg throne, on November 7 1980, Fidel Castro was the first to congratulate her.

"The first bouquet that arrived at the palace was a huge bunch of roses with a card from Fidel Castro, with all his congratulations," she recalled.

Following her marriage in February 1981, and her husband's accession to the throne in October 2000, she met Castro in Havana through the efforts of a first cousin who was close to the Castro regime.

She said the opening up of Cuba and the end of the US trade embargo made her "very happy" for the Cuban population. US President Barack Obama is due to make a historic trip to Cuba on March 21-22.

"Cubans are geographically close to the United States but their heads and their hearts are turned towards Europe," the duchess said.

"They have a lot of affection for France and, I hope, a little bit for Luxembourg these days. I hope Europe will be there for Cuba at this moment of change."

- Luxembourg royals reforming -

At home, Maria Teresa said Luxembourg's famously discreet royals are undergoing a "profound reorganisation" to become more "transparent" and "authentic."

She said her husband had been through a "difficult test" when in 2008 he gave up his power to sanction laws so that he did not have to pass a law on euthanasia that he did not agree with.

But she said the monarchy still had a "very concrete role", citing Grand Duke Henri's intervention in a political crisis in 2013 after Jean-Claude Juncker -- now head of the European Commission -- was voted out of office after 19 years as Luxembourg prime minister.
By Ognen Teofilovski and Michele Kambas IDOMENI, Greece/NICOSIA (Reuters) - Macedonia trucked about 1,500 migrants and refugees back to Greece after they forced their way across the border on Monday, as European nations continued to pass the buck in a migration crisis that risks tearing the European Union apart. The police action was part of a drive by Western Balkans states to shut down a migration route from Greece to Germany. Nearly a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond used that route over the last year, forming biggest influx of refugees since World War Two. But EU efforts to conclude a deal with Turkey to halt the human tide in return for political and economic rewards hit a setback on Tuesday. Cyprus, an EU member, vowed to block efforts to speed up Ankara's EU accession talks unless Turkey meets its obligations to recognize its nationhood. European Council President Donald Tusk, who will chair a summit of EU leaders on Thursday and one with Turkey on Friday, flew on to Ankara to discuss the pact after talks with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades. "Today we established a catalog of issues that we need to address together if we are to reach an agreement by Friday," Tusk said after the talks in Ankara, adding that convincing all 28 EU states to sign on to the agreement was "not an easy task". Tusk has acknowledged that the tentative deal put together last week by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu raised legal problems and needed to be "rebalanced". Davutoglu said the aim was to reduce illegal migration and make passage to Europe safe. The European Commission meanwhile postponed proposals to reform the bloc's asylum system, which puts the onus on the state where migrants first arrive, in an attempt to avoid further controversy before the Turkey deal is done. Some 43,000 migrants are bottled up in Greece, overstraining the economically shattered country's capacity to cope, and more continue to cross the Aegean daily from Turkey despite new NATO sea patrols. On Monday, an estimated 1,500 people marched out of a squalid transit camp near the northern Greek town of Idomeni, hiked for hours along muddy paths and forded a rain-swollen river to get around the border fence. Most were picked up by Macedonian security forces, put into trucks and driven back over the border into Greece late Monday or overnight, a Macedonian police official said. "It's a long way from the camp to the mountains. It took me six hours of walking," said 60-year-old Mohammad Kattan, who slept rough in the mountains and trekked back on foot. "At my age it was very difficult. I would walk and rest often. "My hope was to get to Macedonia, and get my papers stamped so that I could continue on to another country, to Serbia." Another man forced back to Greece said the security forces with harsh with the group they had rounded up. Greek authorities said there had been no official contact from Macedonia, so they could not confirm the return. Ties between the two neighbors are fraught because of Greece's long-standing refusal to recognize Macedonia's name, which is the same as that of a northern Greek province. CONDITIONS DETERIORATING A second group of about 600 migrants was prevented from crossing into Macedonia and many of them spent the night camping in the Greek mountains, according to a Reuters photographer. At least 12,000 people, including thousands of children, have been stranded in the Idomeni camp, where sanitary conditions have deteriorated after days of heavy rain. Scuffles have broken out in recent days as destitute people scrambled for food and firewood. Many have been sleeping in the open. Concern about the spread of infection grew after one person was diagnosed with Hepatitis A. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Tuesday there was "no chance" that border shutdowns throughout the Balkans would be lifted and urged refugees to move to reception centers set up by the state. Jan van't Land, an official with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres at Idomeni, said around 400 migrants had returned to the camp. "There are still many hundreds of people on both the Greek and the Macedonian side of the border," he told Reuters. Greek officials say leaflets that circulated at the Idomeni camp before Monday's march showed it was a planned breakout. "We are in possession of leaflets that show this was an organized incident, a very dangerous one, endangering people's lives," government spokesman George Kyritsis told reporters. Babar Baloch, regional spokesman for U.N. refugee agency UNHCR who is at Idomeni, said the migrants' breakout and return "hasn't solved anything". "It just increased sufferings of refugees. It started raining again. The sense of support for refugees in the region is missing," he said. Turkey wants its citizens to have visa-free access to Europe by June and to open new "chapters" of its stalled negotiations to join the EU. In return, it will take back all migrants and refugees who cross to Greece or are fished out of its territorial waters. PUSHING TURKEY DEAL U.N. and EU officials doubt the legality of any blanket returns, and the U.N. human rights chief on Tuesday warned the EU risked compromising its human rights credentials with the Turkey deal. Several EU countries, including France, also have misgivings about the more relaxed visa rules for Turkey, saying Ankara must first meet 72 criteria. But as the EU pushes to seal the deal, an EU official told Reuters on Tuesday Ankara would only be asked to meet a "critical mass" of them. The European Parliament's foreign affairs committee on Tuesday called to keep the migration deal and Ankara's EU membership talks separate, citing concern with human rights in Turkey. And Cyprus is demanding that Turkey open its ports and airports to Cypriot traffic and recognize the island. "I conveyed to President Tusk our position that the Republic of Cyprus does not intend to consent to the opening of any chapters if Turkey does not fulfill its obligations as described in the negotiating framework," Anastasiades told reporters after meeting with Tusk in Nicosia. Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, whose country holds the EU's six-month rotating presidency, said the aim was to find an "intelligent synchronization" between the diplomatic process to re-unify Cyprus and the EU-Turkey agreement. (Additional reporting by Karolina Tagaris and Renee Maltezou in Athens, Bushra Shakhshir in Idomeni, Benet Koleka in Skopje, Francesco Guarascio and Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels, Ayla Jean Yackley in Ankara, Writing by Paul Taylor, Editing by Larry King)
Maldives police arrested 16 independent journalists on Sunday while breaking up a demonstration against an alleged crackdown on freedom of speech in the politically troubled nation, private media outlets reported.

Police used pepper spray and roughed-up reporters who were staging a sit-in protest outside President Abdulla Yameen's office in the capital Male, according to several outlets including the Maldives Independent website.

The protest was aimed at forcing the government to withdraw its draft criminal defamation bill, which protesters fear will be used against private media as well as political opponents of the government.

Demonstrators were also attempting to pressure authorities to investigate the whereabouts of a reporter who disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and were denouncing a court decision to temporarily close a newspaper over an ownership dispute.

Ongoing political unrest in the Maldives, a nation of 1,192 tiny coral islands, has dented its image as a peaceful paradise for well-heeled honeymooners and upmarket tourists.

"The latest protest follows a series of moves by the government and the judiciary to restrict free speech and media freedom in the archipelago," a journalist from the Haveeru newspaper told AFP on condition of anonymity, adding that six of his colleagues had been detained.

The Maldives Independent said five of its journalists were arrested, while three taking part in the protest were pepper-sprayed at close range and had to be taken to hospital. Private TV stations also said five of their reporters had been arrested.

The state controls the main radio and TV stations but not the newspapers. There was no immediate comment from the Maldivian police.

Western leaders have said there are worrying questions about freedom of speech, rule of law and the government's commitment to democracy in the nation of 340,000 Sunni Muslims.

Many opposition political leaders have either been jailed or forced into exile by Yameen's government, which faces mounting international criticism over its treatment of dissidents.

Political unrest has escalated since the toppling four years ago of the country's first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed, in what he claimed was a coup.

Nasheed, whose conviction and jailing last year on terror-related charges has been widely criticised, is now in the UK for urgent medical treatment after being given prison leave.
Stockholm (AFP) - Four years after celebrating her centenary, a woman in a town in western Sweden has been offered a place in the local kindergarten.

"It's fantastic! I must be the only 104-year-old in Hylte to be offered a place in a creche," local paper Hallands Nyheter quoted Maja Bergstrom as saying.

Her amused response came after the local authorities wrote to her daughter Birgitta, 78, who was wrongly thought to be the mother of a tot rather than the daughter of a centenarian.

Stigert Pettersson, the official in charge of local school registrations, explained that letters should have gone out offering places in the local creche for children born in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

"Apparently, the computer made a mistake and people born 100 years earlier were contacted. It's embarrassing -- but also a little charming," said Pettersson.

Swedish nursery schools admit children aged between the ages of one and six prior to the entry to elementary school.
By Jean Paul Arouff PORT LOUIS (Reuters) - Mauritius' Finance Minister Seetanah Lutchmeenaraidoo has asked to be relieved of his post and his position will now be taken by the prime minister, the premier told reporters on Monday. Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth made the announcement at his office after days of speculation in local newspapers about the fate of the finance minister, who had not returned to work for several weeks after a visit to the United States. Some media cited health issues related to the finance minister. Others reported differences in the cabinet over plans for construction of a new "smart" city and over how to handle negotiations with India on reviewing a double taxation avoidance treaty. They did not go into details about the rival positions. The prime minister said Lutchmeenaraidoo had been offered the position of foreign minister in a minor cabinet reshuffle, in line with his wishes. Jugnauth did not say if Lutchmeenaraidoo had accepted. India has long sought changes to a treaty which it says some Indian investors abuse by using Mauritius to funnel cash into India masked as foreign investment, which benefits from tax breaks. The practice has been called "round tripping". Lutchmeenaraidoo told Reuters in an interview last year that Mauritius was clamping down on firms using "loopholes" to avoid taxes and said the island's regulator was "ensuring to the maximum that round tripping be stopped." The offshore financial business generates a valuable source of income for Mauritius, which wants to expand its role as a financial hub. But it also draws scrutiny from regulators around the world seeking to clamp down on so-called "tax havens". Under other cabinet changes outlined by the prime minister, Marie Joseph Noel Etienne Ghislain Sinatambou moves foreign affairs to the ministry of technology, communication and innovation. (Reporting by Jean Paul Arrouf; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by George Obulutsa and Toby Chopra)
Its always something, writes Ethan Harris.

Harris, co-head of global economics for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was talking about risk in the markets and how they currently seem to be occurring on a rotation. In other words, theres never no risk out there. Rather, when the risks at the forefront rotate out, new risks rotate in.

That really is the underlying truth that drives financial markets. Investors and speculators assume risk, and then they are rewarded for it. And there's always risk.



For a hundred years, it's always something

Theres always a reason to be nervous about the state of the economy and the markets. But in the long-run, it has paid off to be long and patient because the world seems to want to move past those uncertainties and grow.

During the scariest moments of the financial crisis in October 2008, Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed for the New York Times communicating this ever-presence of risk.

Over the long term, the stock market news will be good, Buffett wrote. "In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

Check out this annotated chart (GSPC) from JPMorgan Asset Managements Guide to the Markets. As you can see, history is peppered with scary events. But ultimately, things paid off for investors who stayed long and stayed strong.

Despite a long history of uncertainty and geopolitical risk events, the market has rallied. (Image: JPMorgan Asset Management)

The "doom and gloomers" of the market always have something to point to when it comes to investing. Historically, however, the market has gotten by.

What the "doom and gloomers" point to today

The risk factors around the market are changing, but seem to be neither building nor fading, Harris said on Friday. Doom and gloomers like to combine both recent risk factors (that show signs of fading) and new factors (that are growing) into one toxic cocktail of negativity.

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Harris identified three big risks that were fading: 1) Chinese data show signs of a stabilizing economy; 2) fears of a further collapse in oil prices are abating; and 3) price corrections have taken some of the froth out of risk assets like junk bonds.

Offsetting those fading risks were three Harris said were looming: 1) Europe is becoming an area of concern with its refugee crisis and terrorism; 2) Britain is contemplating an exit from the European Union, which could be quite disruptive; and 3) the US presidential campaign has come with anti-trade rhetoric from both parties.

Harris closed his note by saying: Its always something.

--

Sam Ro is managing editor at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

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This $10 trillion stat destroys a popular myth about the stock market

WARREN BUFFETT: The foundation of every market bubble is a 'sound premise'

Gutsy Wall Street analyst dares to debunk a sacred truism about the stock market
New York (AFP) - Donald Trump says he regrets retweeting an unflattering picture of the wife of arch-rival Ted Cruz, in a rare act of contrition from the Republican presidential frontrunner.

Trump is in pole position to seize the Republican nomination but is doing poorly nationwide among women voters, polls show, and faced stern criticism from all sides in recent days after saying women who have illegal abortions should be "punished," before he backtracked.

The billionaire real-estate mogul has been engaged in an increasingly personal war of words with Cruz, his nearest challenger in the Republican race for the White House, that even drew in their wives.

An anti-Trump political group unveiled a controversial campaign ad ahead of votes in Arizona and Utah last month that used a GQ magazine photograph of Trump's wife Melania lying naked and handcuffed to a briefcase.

Cruz denied being behind the ad, which was accompanied by the words: "Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady."

Trump then retweeted a photo compilation of an unflattering photo of Cruz's wife Heidi next to Melania, a Slovenian-American jewelry designer and former model.

"Yeah, it was a mistake," Trump said of the retweet, talking to The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in a column published Saturday.

"If I had to do it again, I wouldnt have sent it."
By Elias Biryabarema KAMPALA (Reuters) - MTN Uganda, the country's largest telecoms firm, sees strong data sales helping 2016 revenue rise 7 to 10 percent and expects to seek a syndicated loan soon, its chief executive said on Tuesday. The division of South Africa's MTN Group, Africa's largest mobile networks operator, has a subscriber base of 8.9 million, the biggest in Uganda and ahead of second place rival India's Bharti Airtel. "The biggest reason for the (revenue) growth will be around our data," MTN Uganda's chief executive officer, Brian Gouldie, told Reuters. Voice still remains the main cash generator, accounting for about 56 percent of the 1.3 trillion shillings ($385.8 million) in revenue last year. But data is the fastest growing revenue stream, expanding 17 percent last year from 2014. Mobile penetration in Uganda stands at about 44 percent, offering room for mobile providers to expand. But competition has eroded margins since 2010 and encouraged some players to sell. Bharti Airtel bought Warid Uganda in 2013 and, in 2014, French telecoms firm Orange sold its Uganda unit to Africell. MTN Uganda has about 5.4 million data customers but only 9 percent of those are covered by 3G and 4G broadband networks. Gouldie said he aimed to boost that to 15 to 20 percent in 2016. "As our 3G and 4G penetration grows, so will our mobile data and ICT (information and communications technology) revenue grow," Gouldie said in an interview. MTN has also been investing in internet infrastructure. It has laid 3,500 km of fibre optic cables so far and plans to add 400 km this year, he said. He added the company aimed to secure a loan in the coming weeks to help to support its investment, although he did not give a value. In 2009, MTN Uganda raised $100 million from a syndicated loan. "We'll probably do something very similar in order to again generate liquidity ... so that we do have enough cash for both investments and operations," Gouldie said. ($1 = 3,370.0000 Ugandan shillings) (Editing by Edmund Blair and David Evans)
Dubai (AFP) - "Daddy, where are you now? In Turkey or Sweden?" a Syrian girl asks her father in her first voice message to him since he joined hundreds of thousands fleeing the war.

The recording, sent by smartphone, is one of many messages between Syrians that Jordanian photographer Tanya Habjouqa has compiled into her short film "Syria Via WhatsApp".

The film is showing at an exhibition in Dubai focused on the plight of refugees and migrants, including Syrians, as Europe struggles with its biggest migration crisis since World War II.

The show, "If I leave, where will I go?", also displays images by Syrian director Omar Imam and late French-Moroccan photographer Leila Alaoui.

Habjouqa's film features voice recordings and images exchanged by Syrian family members separated by a five-year conflict that has killed more than 270,000 people and pushed nearly five million into exile.

The messages are sometimes sentimental and full of longing, but also include everyday questions: "How's the weather?", "What did you eat today?"

A father tells his daughter he has sent her flowers and a kiss by way of WhatsApp emojis, while one girl asks her father for "a white dress, as well as grey and pink".

One refugee in Europe tells his wife: "I want to get you out of the Arab world where there is only humiliation. I swear I will bring you here to live the best life... you'll live with dignity."

"I miss you a lot," he says. "I miss sitting with you and making you coffee in the morning."

The film also shows selfies sent by those who have managed to reach Europe.

- First messages -

The messages are often the first contact between family members after "long periods of time when they don't have Internet and there's no word" from those who departed, says Habjouqa.

"For most of the mothers and children, the most terrifying part is the... silence" from the minute migrants leave Turkey towards Greece.

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In 2015, more than a million migrants entered Europe, about half of them Syrians fleeing war, with Germany shouldering most of the burden.

Of these, around 850,000 people made the dangerous Aegean sea crossing to Greece from Turkey -- a route that also claimed more than 300 lives.

"Sometimes it takes quite a while before they (migrants) can send a message that they're okay," says Habjouqa.

"It was through these WhatsApp messages that for the first time... (I) felt the story and understood fully what was happening. I understood on a deeper level what this migration meant."

Imam's black and white surrealistic images at the same exhibition further explore how Syrians have been affected by the conflict.

- Plate of grass -

In one photograph, a woman sits at a neatly set table as a waiter serves her a plate of grass picked from a nearby field.

A caption under the image reads: "There was nothing but grass. I was unable to swallow it but forced myself to do this in front of my children to convince them to accept it as food."

At least 250,000 Syrian children are living under siege across Syria, with many forced to eat animal feed or grass to survive, Save the Children said last month.

Syria's hunger crisis triggered global outrage when images of emaciated children emerged earlier this year from the besieged town of Madaya near Damascus.

Residents said they had been surviving on soup made from boiled grass.

In a short film, Imam portrays a little girl left with nothing but a photograph of herself with her parents.

"I wanted to portray real people trying to survive and overcome the mental problems," said Imam, who fled Syria in 2012.

"My characters are not the refugees you see in the news," he told AFP via email, after he was denied a visa to attend the Dubai exhibition.

The show also pays tribute to photographer Leila Alaoui, who was among dozens killed in a January attack claimed by Al-Qaeda on a hotel in Burkina Faso.

In her video installation "Crossings", she shows migrants speaking about making the perilous journey from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe.

One woman says she left her country because there was no work.

"I have four kids, and grandsons too. I abandoned them over there with my mother and I hit the road."

One man says he was left with no option as Muslims and Christians fought in his country.

Another migrant is more desperate.

"I feel like going back. But where do I go to if I go back? I feel like staying here. But where will I stay if I stay here?

"I feel like dying."
By Aziz El Yaakoubi RABAT (Reuters) - Morocco said on Tuesday that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's description of its annexation of Western Sahara as an "occupation" was not a misunderstanding but a "premeditated act to alter the nature of the dispute". The foreign ministry statement came a day after a U.N. spokesman said Ban regretted the "misunderstanding" over his use of the word, which led to Morocco expelling dozens of United Nations staff from its mission in the disputed territory. The standoff over Ban's comment is Morocco's worst disagreement with the United Nations since 1991, when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire to end a war over Western Sahara and established a peacekeeping mission there known as MINURSO. "In the eyes of Morocco, these are premeditated acts to alter the nature of the dispute," Morocco's foreign ministry said in a statement. "At this level of responsibility, words have meaning, political and legal consequences, and personal opinions have no place." Morocco took over most of the territory in 1975 from colonial Spain. That started a guerrilla war with the Sahrawi people's Polisario Front, which says the desert territory in the northwest of Africa belongs to it. The United Nations brokered a ceasefire in 1991 and sent in its MINURSO mission to help organize a referendum on the future of the territory. But the sides have been deadlocked since then. Morocco, which accused Ban of losing his neutrality in the dispute, said it also had differences with the U.N. chief over his reference to the referendum during his visit to the Western Saharan refugee camps in Tindouf in southern Algeria. Morocco also criticized Ban for visiting Bir Lahlou town, which it considers part of the buffer zone with the Polisario front. It said he had also signaled acknowledgement of the flag of the Polisario's self-declared Arab Sahrawi Republic (SADR). SADR has been recognized by some countries, mainly from the African Union, but no Western powers recognize it. Since the dispute erupted earlier this month, U.N. officials have repeatedly urged the U.N. Security Council to publicly voice its support for Ban and MINURSO, which the 15-nation body did late last Thursday in New York. But the council has not explicitly ordered Morocco to reverse its decisions or address Ban's use of the word "occupation." Some U.N. diplomats blamed the council's silence on Morocco's ally France, along with Spain, Egypt and Senegal. Algeria, Polisario's biggest ally and Morocco's regional rival, said on Tuesday the dispute was the main area of disagreement with France in foreign policy. "We keep good hope that France will help the region to resolve this Sahrawi question according to international law," Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra said in a joint conference with French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in Algiers. Morocco says that it will keep supporting the military part of MINURSO and that contacts with the ceasefire-monitoring units have not been disrupted. Polisario wants to hold the vote promised in the ceasefire deal on the region's fate, while Morocco says it will not offer more than autonomy for the region, rich in phosphates and possibly offshore oil and gas. (Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Rabat (AFP) - Morocco on Tuesday rejected an explanation from the office of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that a row over disputed Western Sahara was because of a "misunderstanding".

Ban infuriated Morocco this month when he referred to the "occupation" of Western Sahara, a disputed territory, during his visit to a refugee camp in neighbouring Algeria.

"We regret the misunderstandings and consequences that this personal expression of solicitude provoked," his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Monday.

"His use of the word was not planned, nor was it deliberate, it was a spontaneous, personal reaction."

Morocco again lashed out at the UN chief on Tuesday, however, with a foreign ministry spokesman saying his "unacceptable" words were of "unprecedented gravity" and "neither justifiable nor erasable".

"The situation... cannot be reduced to a simple misunderstanding," said the spokesman, quoted by the MAP state news agency

But he reiterated that Morocco was ready to engage in "responsible, comprehensive and constructive dialogue".

Ban declined to respond to the remarks at a news conference in Tunis on Tuesday.

"My spokesperson yesterday explained in length... I'm not going to repeat. Because every single word is now being analysed and watched," said the UN chief.

Morocco considers Western Sahara, the former Spanish territory which it annexed in 1975, as an integral part of the country, proposing self-government for the region under its sovereignty.

In retaliation for Ban's remark, Morocco expelled most of the civilian experts attached to the UN mission in Western Sahara and closed a military liaison office.
By Aziz El Yaakoubi RABAT (Reuters) - Morocco said on Tuesday that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's description of its annexation of Western Sahara as an "occupation" was not a misunderstanding but a "premeditated act to alter the nature of the dispute". The foreign ministry statement came a day after a U.N. spokesman said Ban regretted the "misunderstanding" over his use of the word, which led to Morocco expelling dozens of United Nations staff from its mission in the disputed territory. The standoff over Ban's comment is Morocco's worst disagreement with the United Nations since 1991, when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire to end a war over Western Sahara and established a peacekeeping mission there known as MINURSO. "In the eyes of Morocco, these are premeditated acts to alter the nature of the dispute," Morocco's foreign ministry said in a statement. "At this level of responsibility, words have meaning, political and legal consequences, and personal opinions have no place." Morocco took over most of the territory in 1975 from colonial Spain. That started a guerrilla war with the Sahrawi people's Polisario Front, which says the desert territory in the northwest of Africa belongs to it. The United Nations brokered a ceasefire in 1991 and sent in its MINURSO mission to help organize a referendum on the future of the territory. But the sides have been deadlocked since then. Morocco, which accused Ban of losing his neutrality in the dispute, said it also had differences with the U.N. chief over his reference to the referendum during his visit to the Western Saharan refugee camps in Tindouf in southern Algeria. Morocco also criticised Ban for visiting Bir Lahlou town, which it considers part of the buffer zone with the Polisario front. It said he had also signalled acknowledgement of the flag of the Polisario's self-declared Arab Sahrawi Republic (SADR). SADR has been recognized by some countries, mainly from the African Union, but no Western powers recognize it. Since the dispute erupted earlier this month, U.N. officials have repeatedly urged the U.N. Security Council to publicly voice its support for Ban and MINURSO, which the 15-nation body did late last Thursday in New York. But the council has not explicitly ordered Morocco to reverse its decisions or address Ban's use of the word "occupation." Some U.N. diplomats blamed the council's silence on Morocco's ally France, along with Spain, Egypt and Senegal. Algeria, Polisario's biggest ally and Morocco's regional rival, said on Tuesday the dispute was the main area of disagreement with France in foreign policy. "We keep good hope that France will help the region to resolve this Sahrawi question according to international law," Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra said in a joint conference with French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in Algiers. Morocco says that it will keep supporting the military part of MINURSO and that contacts with the ceasefire-monitoring units have not been disrupted. Polisario wants to hold the vote promised in the ceasefire deal on the region's fate, while Morocco says it will not offer more than autonomy for the region, rich in phosphates and possibly offshore oil and gas. (Editing by Hugh Lawson)
By Patrick Markey ALGIERS (Reuters) - Morocco is putting a ceasefire over disputed Western Sahara at risk by expelling United Nations staffers there and trying to scuttle a long-delayed referendum over the future of the territory, an independence movement official said on Tuesday. Dozens of U.N. staffers pulled out of the Western Sahara mission, known as MINURSO, on Sunday after Morocco demanded they leave because U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon used the term "occupation" during a visit to the region. It is Rabat's worst dispute with the U.N. since 1991, when it brokered a ceasefire. Morocco took over most of Western Sahara in 1975 from colonial Spain, starting a guerilla war with the Sahrawi people's Polisario Front who say the desert territory on Africa's northwest belongs to them. "Morocco wants to clear the table, erase it all and have nothing to do with the mission. They want to show the question of the referendum is done and doesn't exist," Mohamed Said Ould Salek, foreign minister to the movement's Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, told Reuters. "When Morocco expels civilian staff it puts the ceasefire at risk, because the ceasefire and the referendum are two inseparable twins. You kill one and you kill the other." Morocco complained Ban lost his neutrality when he used the word occupation to describe Morocco's annexation during his visit to Sahrawi refugee camps in southern Algeria earlier this month. Rabat called it an insult to the Moroccan people. U.N. spokesman dismissed suggestions the UN was partial in the dispute, saying Ban referred to occupation related to the Sahrawi refugees being unable to return home under satisfactory governance conditions. MINURSO established the mission for peacekeeping and organizing the referendum including on the question of independence, but negotiations between Rabat and Polisario over how to hold the vote have been deadlocked. On Monday, Morocco took a step further, asking the United Nations to close a military liaison office in Dakla. Ban had planned to raise the decision with the U.N. Security Council, and U.N. spokesman warned it risked a return to conflict. Salek said Polisario has called on the U.N. Security Council to guarantee the U.N. mission is returned and get Morocco to respect its mandate rather than returning to the same situation that started the confrontation. "Morocco has to assume its responsibility for the risk. If the U.N. does not force Morocco to accept MINURSO in its proper composition and mandate, there is no other option but war," the minister said. "We are waiting to see the reaction of the Security Council." Rabat accused Ban earlier this month of no longer being neutral in the Western Sahara dispute after the terms he used to describe its annexation of the region in 1975. Ban had also visited refugee camps in southern Algeria for the Sahrawi people calling for a restart to negotiations for them to return to the Western Sahara. Morocco's King Mohammed has offered a plan for autonomy for the region and invested heavily in the territory as a way to ease tensions and defuse independence claims. Polisario says the referendum must be held on self-determination for the Sahrawis. (Reporting by Patrick Markey; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
Niamey (AFP) - Niger's President Mahamadou Issoufou, re-elected for a second term in a controversial weekend poll, on Wednesday proposed forming a unity government with the opposition which boycotted the vote.

"I am ready to put in place a government of national unity with the opposition in order to face the threats facing the people of Niger," he said in an interview with AFP.

"There is not just a security challenge, there are other challenges including economic and social development. All these challenges need a sacred union."

Issoufou won 92 percent of the vote in Sunday's run-off election in the impoverished but uranium-rich West African country, which was marred by low turnout in the face of the opposition boycott.

His sole challenger Hama Amadou, imprisoned since November on shadowy baby trafficking charges, was flown to France for medical treatment just days before the second round.

The electoral commission said Amadou won just seven percent of the ballots cast.

- 'Jolt of energy' -

Issoufou, who took office in 2011, campaigned on pledges to bring prosperity to the country and vowed to prevent further attacks by jihadists in its vast remote north, and Nigeria's Boko Haram Islamists to the south.

"The security challenge requires a national jolt of energy and needs all Nigeriens to pull together, including those from the opposition," Issoufou told AFP.

"We need a broad front so we can respond to the concerns and aspirations of our people," he said.

"I am prepared to discuss and debate with everyone, with political parties -- from the majority or the opposition -- and with civil society."

Issoufou, who is due to be sworn in early next month, warned that nations such as Niger were "fragile" and faced serious threats to their security.

"It's an historic moment. We must not underestimate the grave threat against our country's very existence as a nation.

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"We are determined to organise ourselves, to unite, to equip our security forces, to pool our resources with neighbouring countries and beyond.... This is a global threat that requires a global response."

He said there was nothing "contradictory" about pursuing security at the same time as development in a country where 76 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

"Experience has proved that the three things are linked -- security, development and democracy."

- 'Nothing without security' -

Issoufou said it had been a mistake to "disengage" from security issues as part of structural programmes by organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"That was an mistake. The proof today -- our countries are too weak to defend themselves, any development is impossible.

"Because if there is no security, there is no agriculture, no infrastructure. Nothing can be achieved without security. Investing in security is not throwing money out of the window as one might have thought in the 1980s and 1990s."

Referring to Niger's latest ranking in the Human Development Index, he also pledged to continue efforts to improve agriculture, food, education, health and access to water.

Niger holds the lowest place on the comprehensive Human Development Index drawn up each year by the UN Development Programme.

"We are making progress with a six percent average growth rate over the past five years. My goal is to reach seven percent during my term in office.

And he pledged to double from five to 10 years the average time Nigeriens attend school, ensuring that the "maximum number of Nigeriens go to school and stay there for the maximum length of time".
NIAMEY (Reuters) - Niger's government has formally resigned to make way for a new cabinet after the re-election of President Mahamadou Issoufou, according to a statement from the government's secretary-general read on public radio on Saturday. Issoufou was re-elected to a second five-year term in March polls boycotted by the opposition and was sworn into office on Saturday, vowing in a speech to continue the West African nation's fight against terrorism. The former French colony has deployed troops against the Nigeria-based extremist group Boko Haram and has also contributed to a regional offensive against the militants. The president named Brigi Raffini, his current prime minister, to serve again in office. The prime minister submitted the cabinet's resignation to Issoufou after his inauguration ceremony. "The resignation was accepted," the statement read. "While waiting for the nomination of ministers, the secretaries-general of the ministers are responsible for current affairs." The prime minister is responsible for nominating a cabinet, which the president must approve. (Reporting by Abdoulaye Massalaki; Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Andrew Roche)
By Abdoulaye Massalaki NIAMEY (Reuters) - Voting ended in Niger on Sunday in a presidential run-off which President Mahamadou Issoufou looks more than likely to win after the opposition called a boycott and its jailed leader was flown out of the country for medical reasons last week. Issoufou, an ally of the West in its fight against Islamist insurgents in West Africa, won the first round comfortably last month with 48 percent of votes but failed to clinch the outright majority required to avoid a second round. "I am against any boycott. I've just voted," said Sadou Ide, who cast his vote soon after polling stations opened at the Nogare school in Niamey. Southern Niger, which borders Nigeria, has been the target of frequent deadly raids by Islamist Boko Haram militants. It also shares borders with Burkina Faso and Mali to the west, where al Qaeda-linked groups are active. Libya, home to Islamic State affiliates, lies on its northern border. Speaking after casting his vote on Sunday, Issoufou appealed to Nigeriens to stay the course amid the growing menace from regional militants. "A single term in office is not enough to overcome all the challenges, in particular I am thinking of the security challenges," he said. "We need a sacred union ... We must remained united." Late on Saturday, the regional governor of Niamey, Hamidou Garda issued a ban on gathering outside polling stations, citing security reasons. "All gathering is forbidden. Voters come, vote and then leave," he said on state-owned television. Security forces were posted at polling stations. They also patrolled the streets of Niamey and monitored the city's main intersections. Issoufou's main opponent Hama Amadou, who came in second with 18 percent of the vote in the first round, was jailed in November in connection with a baby-trafficking scandal. Amadou, who has not been convicted, says he is innocent and claims the charges are politically motivated. He was flown to Paris just days before the second-round vote for treatment of a chronic health issue, a government spokesman said. The Coalition for an Alternative (COPA), which unites about 20 political parties including Amadou's MODEN, called for a boycott of the polls on Friday, claiming the process had been tainted by fraud. Issoufou's supporters called the boycott "absurd" and urged all Nigeriens to go out and vote. As polling stations closed in the early evening and elections workers began counting ballots, observers said no major incidents had been reported though turnout had been low. "There weren't crowds like we saw during the Feb. 21 first round, and that's down to the respect for the boycott order," said Moustache Kak, an elections observer with the West African Network for Peacebuilding. Provisional results are due in the next few days. Having taken office in April 2011, a year after a popular coup overthrew his predecessor Mamadou Tandja, Issoufou is seeking a second five-year term. (Writing by Joe Bavier; Editing by Louise Ireland)
By Garba Muhammad KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigeria's 110,000 barrel per day refinery in the northern city of Kaduna is expected to restart by mid-April, the head of the upstream division at the state oil company said on Saturday. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) halted crude flows to its refineries around mid-January after the key pipelines feeding the plants were attacked. The refineries - in Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Warri - were then shut down a few days later. "By the end of next week we will be ready to start receiving the crude oil," said Bello Rabiu, group executive director of upstream, during a tour of the Kaduna refinery. "If crude comes and we actually get everything ready, we believe by the middle of this month everything will be running in the refinery," he said. He did not mention operations at the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries. NNPC has said crude flows have started at the other refineries but there has been no word of them reopening. Despite being Africa's largest crude exporter, Nigeria imports almost all of its gasoline. On Tuesday, Minister of state for Petroleum Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said Nigeria was in talks with oil majors Chevron, France's Total and Italy's ENI to get help revamping the ailing refineries. (Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
MANAMA, April 3 (Reuters) - Formula One stakeholders failed to agree a fix for the sport's failed new qualifying format at the Bahrain Grand Prix on Sunday and agreed to talk again next Thursday to try and reach a deal. "No decision has been made, we haven't reached the conclusions on how we want to continue yet," said Mercedes motorsport head Toto Wolff after an hour and a half long meeting at the Sakhir circuit. Team bosses said various new formats were discussed, as well as staying with the current one, but there would be no going back to 2015 qualifying because both the governing FIA and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone were opposed. "It's not on the table," Wolff said of going back to the 2015 format. (Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Toby Davis)
Tornio (Finland) (AFP) - The skimmer is lowered from the rear of the icebreaker, its weight pushing massive pieces of ice under the water and forcing the spilt oil up to the surface, where the sticky black goo can be sucked up.

Luckily, this is just a test: as the world's superpowers eye the lucrative Arctic region with growing interest, unprecedented oil spill clean-up tests in icy Finnish conditions reveal just how hazardous and challenging an accident in the Arctic's pristine sea ice could be.

Emergency crews could face total darkness, extreme storms and shifting pack ice, racing against time as the oil puts endangered polar bears, seals and other wildlife at risk.

With countries and companies increasingly venturing into the polar region -- the melting ice caused by global warming has opened up new shipping routes and potential oil, gas and mineral deposits -- the risk of an environmental catastrophe has skyrocketed, worrying ecologists and authorities.

"If oil is spilt into the Arctic Ocean, recovering it will be a difficult, if not impossible, task," the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank, said in a recent report.

"The challenges go beyond extreme cold, freezing spray, snow, extended periods of low light, strong winds, dense fog, sea ice, strong currents, and dangerous sea conditions to include the limited infrastructure that could support an emergency response," it said.

Fearing an oil spill in its own heavily-trafficked, ice-covered Baltic Sea, Finnish authorities are racing against the clock to develop an efficient response to an oil spill in icy conditions.

On any other day, Antti Rajaniemi, the 37-year-old captain of Finnish icebreaker "Ahto", would be clearing the way in the country's northern ports, where even the largest vessels can get trapped within hours.

But now he's on a special mission.

A thick layer of solid ice groans and crunches before giving in and breaking into pieces, as the bow of the small but forceful icebreaker forges a path.

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Finland's state-owned icebreaking operator Arctia has set itself the goal of being able to recover oil in the harshest of conditions: when a lid of thick ice covers the sea.

"We have to separate the oil from the ice out on the sea since all this ice can't be taken ashore," Rune Hogstrom of Finnish oil spill response company Lamor explained to AFP, invited aboard the icebreaker in the northern Baltic Sea on a recent numbingly cold day.

"An oil spill here is a real challenge, when you think we've got half a metre (1.6 feet) of ice, and if you break the ice up then the oil just gets mixed in even more," he said.

The shallow waters here provide unique conditions for the tests, with brackish water and thick ice, Arctia said.

While Finland is not an oil producing country, it fears a leaking oil tanker could cause irreparable damage to the Baltic Sea's fragile ecosystem.

There are around 350,000 ship crossings a year in the Baltic, even though 45 percent of its surface is covered by ice an average winter.

- Hindered by ice -

A typical oil spill in water is usually skimmed, dispersed with chemicals, contained with booms or even burnt off.

Similar methods could be used in frozen waters, but recovering the oil is severely complicated by the black goo floating under the ice -- hidden from sight -- which risks mixing with the crushed ice around an icebreaker trying to locate it.

"When you recover oil mixed with ice, only one percent of it is oil and 99 percent is ice. You need to be able to sort out the ice," Rune Hogstrom explains.

As he speaks, engineers brave the mercury at minus 15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) to descend onto the ice, drilling holes to inject harmless red test liquid to mimic oil.

Hogstrom said the skimmer deployed from the rear of the vessel was capable of separating oil from ice, but more tests were needed to figure out how to use the icebreaker's propeller flows to suction the oil toward the skimmer.

Finland has been developing this technology for 20 years, and a 2015 study by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers found the method being tested now to be one of the most suitable methods for mechanical recovery.

Other technologies being developed elsewhere involve different types of skimmers to collect the oil.

In the US and Canada, research has focused on burning off the oil in open water, but that can be difficult in densely packed ice.

Environmental organisations like Greenpeace have expressed concerns about the elevated risks of Arctic ventures.

"The ice has melted so fast that oil drilling and industrial fishing are now spreading to regions where they weren't possible before and where there aren't any rules yet," head of Greenpeace Finland Sini Harkki said.

Anglo-Dutch oil group Shell abandoned its test drills in Alaska last September and Russia's Rosneft has put its own project in the Kara Sea on hold due to the plunging oil price, but Russian Gazprom Neft and Lukoil continue to drill in Russia's Arctic regions.
RIYADH (Reuters) - An improvised explosive device planted next to a police station south of the Saudi capital Riyadh killed one person, the Saudi Interior Ministry said in a statement carried on state news agency SPA on Sunday. The ministry said at least three police cars were damaged in the explosion at a parking lot on Saturday night that killed an expatriate man, but gave no further details on who was behind the attack. An Islamic State affiliate, calling itself the Nejd Province branch of the organization, claimed responsibility for the blast, which took place in al-Dilam, a small city located about 100 km (62 miles) south of Riyadh. The group said in a statement earlier on Sunday it had set off two explosive devices in front of the police station and caused damage to vehicles, but did not specify casualties. Saudi Arabia has been hit by a spate of deadly shootings and bomb attacks since last year, many of them laid at the door of Islamic State. The group is bitterly opposed to Gulf Arab rulers and is seen as trying to stir up sectarian confrontation on the Arabian peninsula to bring about the overthrow of the ruling dynasties. (Reporting by Ali Abdelatti,; Writing by Katie Paul,; Editing by Sami Aboudi and Andrew Bolton)
Nonthaburi (Thailand) (AFP) - Thailand has long served as one of the globe's main rice bowls, but chronic water shortages are pushing the country to move away from a grain that dominates its fields and has defined a way of life for generations.

Laddawan Kamsong has spent the past forty years coaxing rice from her plot in central Thailand, but she is tired of watching her farmland squeezed dry by increasingly severe droughts.

"I plan to replace some rice paddies with limes," she told AFP after attending a government-run workshop urging farmers to diversify their crops.

Thailand is one of the world's top rice exporters.

But four consecutive years of below-average rainfall have drained water reserves and strangled production, pushing many farmers into debt.

The current drought, the worst the country has seen in decades, has hit nearly a third of Thailand's 76 provinces, particularly in the rice-heavy central and northeast.

Reservoirs are also dropping to historically low levels.

The kingdom's military government is now organising training sessions to encourage millions of rice farmers to diversify into crops that require less irrigation.

Unlike nearly all other crops, rice grows best in a flooded field, with the stalk's base completely submerged for most of the growing season.

At an army-run workshop held in patch of shade in a field in Nonthaburi province near Bangkok, Laddawan was sold the merits of cultivating fruit trees.

In other regions, they are suggesting sugarcane or peas.

These alternatives will drastically reduce water consumption but also break the monoculture that has deteriorated Thai soil for decades.

"We have no choice, we need to adapt," Laddawan said, explaining that she used to plant three rice crops annually, but next year will only have enough water for one.

- Rivers run dry -

As the drought bites, some 2,000 Thai villages are surviving off water delivered by the government, while 'rainmaking' airplanes are flying over parched plains, sending an iodine solution into the air in an effort to seed clouds.

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After last year's especially weak rainy season -- which falls between June and October -- the ruling military junta asked farmers to abandon their winter rice crop, which is normally cultivated through irrigation and not rainfall.

"The amount of water in storage is low and now we expect that this year's rainy season will be delayed because of El Nino," said Suphot Tovichakchaikul, who leads the country's water management department.

The El Nino weather phenomenon tends to weaken the annual monsoon, which is a lifeline to farmers across the region.

According to a study from the University of the Chamber of Commerce, the drought could shave between 0.5 and 0.8 percent off Thailand's GDP growth, with its annual rice production predicted to drop almost 30 percent to 25 million tonnes.

Thailand is also facing increasing competition from Vietnam and India, who have been jockeying for the top exporter spot and at times surpassed Thailand's output in recent years.

The junta says Thai rice is no longer sustainable on its current scale.

"We must find a way to motivate rice producers to switch to other crops," junta chief Prayut Chan-o-Cha said in a recent speech.

His military government, which grabbed power in a 2014 coup, has struggled to revive Thailand's flat economy, which is beset by falling exports, high household debt and low consumer confidence.

- Rice politics -

Yet convincing the country's rice growers to change their crops is no easy task.

"It is difficult because it is their career, it is their way of life for decades conceded Somnuk Srithiengtrong, head of the Ministry of Agriculture for Nonthaburi.

In recent years rice farming has become entwined with a strong political identity too.

Many rice farmers support the family of Thaksin Shinawatra, a controversial ex-premier who injected money into villages in the kingdom's long-neglected rural north and northeast.

The former telecoms tycoon was ousted in a 2006 coup.

But parties linked to him have won all Thai elections since.

His sister Yingluck, who became prime minister in 2011, also poured subsidy into the rice sector, winning the devotion of the so-called grassroots "Red Shirt" pro-democracy movement.

She was also ousted in a 2014 coup, and faces up to a decade in jail over negligence charges linked to her rice subsidy scheme.

That policy saw the government purchase paddies from farmers at nearly twice the market rate, pumping cash into the Shinawatra heartlands.

But it led to massive rice stockpiles after global traders turned away from the Thai grain, whose price had been inflated by government hoarding.

The ruling junta has shot down the Shinawatra's policies as "populist".

But it too recently resorted to massive rural subsidies to prop up the country's floundering rice and rubber industries.

And while a reliance on rice looks increasingly perilous, farmers like Prateep Jinpracha, 46, say that cannot be swayed to change crops.

"Growing rice, that's what my parents and grandparents did before me," she said. "This is my life."
By Andy Bruce and Costas Pitas PORT TALBOT, Wales/LONDON (Reuters) - The closure of Tata Steel's operations in Britain would leave a hole in manufacturers' supply chains, dealing a blow to thousands of smaller firms across the country and creating a logistical headache for the car industry. India's Tata Steel, Britain's biggest producer, put all of its operations up for sale, including the country's largest steelworks at Port Talbot which is losing $1.4 million a day due to depressed steel prices and high costs. As the government searches for a new buyer, some of Tata's customers are already looking for new sources of steel which is used in everything from car roofs to Heinz baked bean cans, cladding on Ikea buildings and some of the country's coins. While bigger names have the luxury of a global supply chain to fall back on, smaller companies - which account for around 95 percent of British manufacturing firms - face a tougher task if Port Talbot in south Wales closes. Tata sells around half of its products into the domestic market, the firm said in 2014. "It would be entirely undesirable from my point of view," said Tony Mullins, executive chairman of QRL Radiators Group, a Tata Steel customer that makes heating radiators near the Welsh town of Newport, employing around 150 staff. Looking abroad for steel would leave firms like QRL that use British steel exposed to swings in the currency exchange rate and higher transportation costs. It might also need to hold more stock if it is buying from the other side of the world, having an impact on working capital. "We have to be competitive, we have to produce quality products, and historically with Tata that has been possible for us," Mullins said. DRIVING FORCE Britain, the birthplace of the modern steel industry, has been struggling to compete since its post-war heyday and has shed thousands of jobs in recent years. Since 2001 imported supplies have met more than half of its domestic demand, according to the International Steel Statistics Bureau (ISSB), as local producers struggled with high energy costs, green taxes and fierce competition. Germany is the biggest foreign supplier of steel to British manufacturers and construction firms, followed by China, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, the ISSB said. The government maintains that the main problem is the collapse in the price of steel. China has flooded European markets with relatively cheap steel as a result of its own falling demand. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years earlier, according to industry data. According to the ISSB, China has produced more steel in the last three years than Britain has since the industrial revolution. Those British steelmakers that remain have been kept going by local manufacturers, a resurgent car industry and foreign demand. "Hot-rolled coil is produced (at Port Talbot) and that predominately goes into the automotive sector ... that's the bodywork," Dominic King, head of policy and representation at industry group UK Steel, told Reuters. Five carmakers built almost 99 percent of Britain's 1.6 million cars last year and all source steel from Port Talbot, with some already looking for alternatives should the site shut. The country's biggest carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) , which made just under a third of national output last year, gets around 30 percent of its steel from the site while Nissan, which operates Britain's biggest single car plant in northern England, buys 45 percent from there. Showing the cost constraints within the industry, John Leech, who heads up the automotive team at KPMG and works with some of the country's biggest carmakers, said JLR could not afford to give preferential treatment to a more expensive product even though it is owned by Tata Motors - part of the same family of companies as Tata Steel. "To compete against BMW and Mercedes, Jaguar Land Rover needs to makes sure its cars are cost-competitive and that means using materials that are sourced cheaply and competitively." JLR said: "Like all other independent businesses, we make our own purchasing decisions based on the right commercial reasons." The firm said it continued to use Tata Steel and did not see any short term impact on its business. A spokesman at General Motors-owned Vauxhall, which uses Tata's high-strength lightweight steel in its Astra hatchback model said it was "considering the scenario of UK steel plant closures on supply sources". "There are a number of sources of steel in Europe that are used by our plants in Spain, Germany and Poland," the spokesman said, when asked whether the firm was looking elsewhere. Leech said timing could be key, with Tata Steel saying it wants to exit Britain as soon as possible. "It will mean a lot of fast footwork behind the scenes but... the ability to get the same steel from other European or Chinese plants in (a one to three-month) time frame is a possibility," he said. BUY BRITISH For many of the workers leaving the Port Talbot plant at the end of their shift this week the news has come as a shock, given the investment made under Tata's ownership. "Tata certainly have influenced training more than the old regime..." said Dave Bowyer, 59, a steelworker for 40 years and Unite union representative, whose ancestors were steelworkers. "The workforce itself has become far more technical. Our craftsman and production guys, even the guys on the shop floor - a number of them have got degrees." UK Steel's King said there were many advantages to the British product which continue to attract buyers. "One is customer service, that you have that close link with the manufacturer... you know in the UK that they are going to be meeting the energy targets, the environmental targets that are out there (and) that engineering skill," he said. The industry is also known for its highly-skilled flexible workforce with no strike action in 30 years. Rollo Reid, technical director and grandson of the founder of REIDsteel, one of Britain's largest steel construction companies which sources almost 90 percent of its steel from Tata, worries that if Port Talbot closes, prices will rise. "There will be one less competitor and when the other European ones go out of business, there will be less competitors and then the price will go up and we'll be completely within the hands of the Chinese." (Editing by Kate Holton and Janet McBride)
A rare power outage plunged a major section of the Philippine capital's main airport into darkness overnight, forcing flight cancellations that stranded thousands on Sunday.

As many as 78 flights by the country's largest carrier Cebu Pacific were cancelled, affecting nearly 14,000 passengers, the company said in a statement.

Flag carrier Philippine Airlines also said some of its flights were cancelled or delayed but could not immediately say how many.

The blackout hit Terminal 3, which services mostly domestic flights, late on Saturday and power was not restored until before dawn on Sunday.

Exhausted passengers sprawled on the floor as check-in counters and luggage carousels shut down. Long queues formed outside the terminal as entrances were closed until power was restored.

Terminal 3 of Ninoy Aquino International Airport, named after the assassinated father of incumbent President Benigno Aquino, handles an average of 350 domestic and international flights daily, according to data from the transportation ministry.

It is one of four terminals in a complex that was once dubbed by the travel website Guide to Sleeping in Airports as the world's worst due to leaking toilets and creaking facilities.

"We are looking into the root cause of this problem," Terminal 3 general manager Octavio Lina told DZMM radio.

Manila power retailer Meralco said a transmission line tripped briefly but was restored in minutes, suggesting that the problem could be with the airport's systems.

The four Manila airport terminals were designed for 17 million passengers annually, but overuse has made the airport notorious for flight delays.

Plans to build a new airport outside Manila have not materialised under Aquino. An excruciatingly slow infrastructure overhaul has led to chronic commuter train breakdowns and traffic jams.
Sydney (AFP) - A powerful 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck off Vanuatu Sunday, but a tsunami threat passed with no immediate reports of major damage along the coasts of the Pacific archipelago.

The quake, initially reported as 7.2 magnitude, struck at a depth of 35 kilometres (22 miles), 81 kilometres north-northwest of the town of Port Olry on Espiritu Santo island in Vanuatu at 0823 GMT, the United States Geological Survey said.

It was 407 kilometres from the capital Port Vila. The USGS said there was a "low likelihood of casualties and damage".

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre initially cautioned that "hazardous tsunami waves" were possible along the coasts of Vanuatu, but later updated its advice to say the threat had "mostly passed".

Jonathan Bathgate, senior seismologist at government agency Geoscience Australia, said that while Port Olry residents were likely to have felt "very intense shaking", "the likelihood is relatively low in terms of serious damage".

"I haven't had confirmation of anything (tsunami) impacting the northern coast of that (Espiritu Santo) island at this stage, so that's probably a good sign," Bathgate told AFP.

He added that Port Vila residents would have "felt a shake but it probably wouldn't be damaging at that distance".

"Earthquakes such as this occur quite often in the area, so Vanuatu experiences these earthquakes of similar magnitudes probably fairly regularly," Bathgate said.

Vanuatu is part of the "Ring of Fire", a zone of tectonic activity around the Pacific that is subject to frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Kuwait City (AFP) - Kuwait said Sunday that an agreement on coordination between major OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers at a meeting in Doha in mid-April would help stabilise crude prices.

"When there is coordination between major producers in OPEC and non-OPEC countries, it will certainly help to stabilise prices," acting oil minister Anas al-Saleh told reporters.

"We believe that a common agreement on a positive stand will serve (oil) market stability," the minister said.

Saleh said Kuwait, OPEC's fourth-largest producer, would attend the highly anticipated meeting in Qatar, where major producers are to discuss freezing oil production to address a supply glut that has driven down prices.

Qatar has said that 12 countries have so far agreed to attend the April 17 meeting, including the world's top crude producers Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The United Arab Emirates, non-OPEC Oman and Bahrain, Nigeria, Algeria, Venezuela, Indonesia and Ecuador will also attend.

The Kuwaiti minister said last month that Kuwait would not agree to a freeze in production unless all major producers, including Iran, accept the output cap.

Kuwait, which sits on around 7.0 percent of global crude reserves, is currently pumping 3.0 million barrels per day.

Iran has so far rejected attempts to freeze production and demanded an exemption to allow it to boost exports after the lifting of sanctions under its nuclear deal with world powers.

Oil prices tumbled Friday after Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince Mohamed bin Salman said the kingdom, the world's top exporter, would only freeze output if Iran and other major producers did the same.

US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for delivery in May slid $1.55 (4.0 percent) to $36.79 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Brent North Sea crude for June delivery, the global benchmark, finished at $38.67 a barrel in London, down $1.66 (4.1 percent).

All 13 OPEC members in addition to major non-OPEC producers have been invited to the talks.

Oil prices have plummeted more than 60 percent since mid-2014 partly because of oversupply.
Aden (AFP) - Three civilians were killed in east Yemen on Sunday when rockets fired by Iran-backed rebels hit a government hospital, the facility's director and a local official said.

The attack wounded 17 other people, said the director of the Marib General Hospital Authority, Shawqi al-Sharjabi.

Pro-government forces, backed by a Saudi-led coalition battling the rebels for more than a year, have retaken most of the eastern Marib province from the Shiite Huthi insurgents and their allies.

However, the rebels still control northern and western parts of the oil-rich province east of the capital Sanaa, which has been held by the Huthis since September 2014.

A government official in Marib city told AFP that rockets were fired by rebels from the Haylan mountains overlooking the provincial capital.

He said the attack, which killed a doctor, took place during a visit to the city by a government delegation.

The rebel advance on Sanaa forced Yemen's internationally-recognised government last year to declare main southern city Aden a temporary capital.

But President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and many government officials spend most of their time in Riyadh as they struggle to secure Aden and other parts of the country where Sunni jihadists have gained ground.

Sunday's attack comes as the warring parties prepare for a UN-brokered ceasefire on April 10 intended to pave the way for peace talks in Kuwait a week later.

The planned truce was only agreed by the two sides after months of shuttle diplomacy by UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed.

Previous UN-sponsored negotiations between the rebels and the government failed to make any headway, and a ceasefire announced for December 15 was repeatedly violated and abandoned by the Saudi-led Arab coalition on January 2.

The United Nations says about 6,300 people have been killed in the war, more than half of them civilians.
By Benet Koleka TIRANA (Reuters) - The European Union urged the Albanian government and opposition on Wednesday to set aside their differences and quickly pass a sweeping reform of the judiciary to secure the start of EU membership talks. A candidate to join the EU since June 2014, NATO member Albania still needs to do more about crime and corruption, the public administration and human and property rights, but reforming a tainted judiciary is the EU's top priority. While the government and opposition both back judicial reform, the opposition first wants to see implementation of a new law to kick anyone with a criminal record out of politics. EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn said the Commission not only wanted the judiciary reform to pass soon but also see it heading in the right direction before the EU's executive body gave its opinion to EU member states on starting accession talks with Albania. "Therefore we need now decisions very soon...this is decisive. Definitely my aim is to present to the European member states a positive report in the course of this year, to give them something on their hands to take a decision," Hahn said. "Because I believe the next step should be the opening of negotiations in order to start this process," he told a news conference with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. Hahn urged opposition and government to work together to serve the interest of citizens, saying EU accession must be a national effort. With EU and U.S. expertise contributing, the reform aims to remove corrupt judges after vetting them and then to create an independent judiciary. Rama, who had hoped parliament would pass the reform before Hahn's visit, appealed to the opposition to sit down to discuss the issue without conditions. (Reporting by Benet Koleka; Editing by Adrian Croft/Mark Heinrich)
By Patrick Markey and Lamine Chikhi ALGIERS (Reuters) - When ex-oil minister Chakib Khelil left Algeria in 2013 caught up in a corruption scandal, his fall from grace was seen by many as the political end for a staunch ally of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and architect of pro-market economic reforms. Three years on, the U.S.-educated former World Bank technocrat and OPEC president has returned from exile, welcomed with open arms by the ruling FLN party, which barely mentions the past scandal other than to dismiss it as a smear. His return has infuriated critics who see impunity at work. But Algerians are now speculating whether reformers in the Bouteflika camp are back in the ascendancy, given the task of trying to protect an economy battered by falling oil prices. It is the latest manifestation of a shift in power back towards civilian allies of Bouteflika since the veteran ruler dissolved a powerful military intelligence body last year that had long exerted political influence behind the scenes. Algeria's leadership -- once dominated by backroom power struggles between Bouteflika's civilian loyalists and generals -- has come under more scrutiny than usual since Bouteflika suffered a stroke in 2013. He has rarely been seen in public since, despite winning re-election a year later. So far, Khelil has avoided giving a direct explanation for why he picked this time to return to the country. "Let's focus on the future. There is so much to do in these times of crisis in Algeria. Looking back is useless," Khelil told Reuters on a trip to a religious ceremony outside Algiers, without mentioning any future plans. In 2013, he and two of his sons were among nine people Algeria sought with international arrest warrants in a bribery investigation involving state oil and gas firm Sonatrach and an affiliate of Italian company Saipem. At the time, officials said Khelil and the others were accused of corruption, peddling influence, abuse of office, money laundering and illegal procurement. Some private media began to portray him as a public enemy. But Khelil was never arrested, and the attorney general who issued the warrant against him has since left the office. He always denied the accusations against him and his family, and said he would return home to face trial if the judicial process was fair. The attorney general's office did not answer repeated calls for comment on the status of the investigation. The ruling Front de Liberation National party signaled Khelil's rehabilitation weeks before his arrival in Algeria last month. Party chief Amar Saadani cast Khelil as a victim smeared though judicial manipulation by the DRS military intelligence service shut down last year. "Chakib Khelil is a highly competent executive, who was unjustly wronged," Saadani told local radio. "His return to Algeria does not violate the law and everything that is said about him is a lie." "SYSTEM OF THE STATE" For years, the DRS chief Mohamed Mediene had a reputation for acting behind-the-scenes, influencing newspapers, ministries, judges and political leaders competing for influence with Bouteflika and his supporters. Since Bouteflika's 2014 re-election, the president steadily squeezed the intelligence agency out of politics by retiring generals and reforming the military. Late last year the presidency announced Mediene would step down and the DRS would be dissolved. Since then, Khelil has not been the only exiled leader to return. Abdelhamid Brahimi, a former prime minister, has come back, as did several former conservative Islamist leaders. But despite the FLN's defense of Khelil, opposition parties are outraged that he has returned without any investigation into the past. That, they say, stains Algerian justice and illustrates the clientelism of its politics. "It just shows how the system of the state is run through personal patronage," opposition party lawmaker Karim Tabbou told Reuters. "Obviously, he is part of the presidential clan that doesn't accept any dissent or opposition." OPENING UP DEBATE Khelil's journey through Algeria's political system has been closely tied to Bouteflika, the independence-era veteran who has been in power for more than 15 years and who many Algerians credit for helping bring their country out of the 1990s decade of war with Islamist fighters. Before the scandal broke, Khelil had been Bouteflika's advisor and then energy minister for almost ten years until 2010, during some of which time he also served as president of OPEC. He was ousted from the minister's position in a cabinet reshuffle in 2010 just as the corruption scandal surfaced. Italian prosecutors said the "Sonatrach II" case involved millions of euros in bribes paid for Saipem to Algerian officials. Eni, which owns most of Saipem, Europe's biggest oil services group, denied any wrongdoing. Khelil's return may signal the rise of proponents of market reform at a trying time for Algeria's leadership as it struggles with low oil prices and tries to attract the foreign investment. Insecurity is also a worry, with neighboring Libya in chaos. With its energy revenues almost halved and foreign reserves depleted by more than $35 billion last year, the government has already trimmed budgets, cut some subsidies in the vast welfare system and suspended infrastructure projects. Analysts and diplomats say the oil price fall has triggered debate among Algerian leaders between those tied to past resource nationalism and technocrats keen on opening an economy that scares off some investors with an arcane banking system, currency controls, red tape and a law demanding 51 percent state ownership of businesses with foreign partners. For now, Sonatrach is focused on trying to maintain the energy production that makes Algeria a major European gas supplier. Recent energy bid rounds failed to pull in the kind of foreign investment the company needs to broadly increase production that has stagnated for a decade. "Khelil's return is indicative of the gradual resolution of some of the intractable political infighting in Algiers and the very small pool of qualified technocrats in Algeria's hydrocarbons sector," said Geoff Porter at North Africa Risk Advisory. In oil industry circles, there is already speculation about what a position for Khelil could mean to negotiations over future contracts. Khelil helped bring in a 2005 hydrocarbons law to open up Algeria's oil sector, only to have some of the more liberal terms reversed in 2006 by the presidency, in what Khelil himself described as a political decision at the time. "They may say, why not use him, he is an asset they can't afford to miss," one Western diplomat said on the ex-minister's return. "He could be a help in making them more of an international partner." (Additional reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; editing by Peter Graff)
By Patrick Markey and Lamine Chikhi ALGIERS (Reuters) - When ex-oil minister Chakib Khelil left Algeria in 2013 caught up in a corruption scandal, his fall from grace was seen by many as the political end for a staunch ally of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and architect of pro-market economic reforms. Three years on, the U.S.-educated former World Bank technocrat and OPEC president has returned from exile, welcomed with open arms by the ruling FLN party, which barely mentions the past scandal other than to dismiss it as a smear. His return has infuriated critics who see impunity at work. But Algerians are now speculating whether reformers in the Bouteflika camp are back in the ascendancy, given the task of trying to protect an economy battered by falling oil prices. It is the latest manifestation of a shift in power back towards civilian allies of Bouteflika since the veteran ruler dissolved a powerful military intelligence body last year that had long exerted political influence behind the scenes. Algeria's leadership -- once dominated by backroom power struggles between Bouteflika's civilian loyalists and generals -- has come under more scrutiny than usual since Bouteflika suffered a stroke in 2013. He has rarely been seen in public since, despite winning re-election a year later. So far, Khelil has avoided giving a direct explanation for why he picked this time to return to the country. "Let's focus on the future. There is so much to do in these times of crisis in Algeria. Looking back is useless," Khelil told Reuters on a trip to a religious ceremony outside Algiers, without mentioning any future plans. In 2013, he and two of his sons were among nine people Algeria sought with international arrest warrants in a bribery investigation involving state oil and gas firm Sonatrach and an affiliate of Italian company Saipem. At the time, officials said Khelil and the others were accused of corruption, peddling influence, abuse of office, money laundering and illegal procurement. Some private media began to portray him as a public enemy. But Khelil was never arrested, and the attorney general who issued the warrant against him has since left the office. He always denied the accusations against him and his family, and said he would return home to face trial if the judicial process was fair. The attorney general's office did not answer repeated calls for comment on the status of the investigation. The ruling Front de Liberation National party signalled Khelil's rehabilitation weeks before his arrival in Algeria last month. Party chief Amar Saadani cast Khelil as a victim smeared though judicial manipulation by the DRS military intelligence service shut down last year. "Chakib Khelil is a highly competent executive, who was unjustly wronged," Saadani told local radio. "His return to Algeria does not violate the law and everything that is said about him is a lie." "SYSTEM OF THE STATE" For years, the DRS chief Mohamed Mediene had a reputation for acting behind-the-scenes, influencing newspapers, ministries, judges and political leaders competing for influence with Bouteflika and his supporters. Since Bouteflika's 2014 re-election, the president steadily squeezed the intelligence agency out of politics by retiring generals and reforming the military. Late last year the presidency announced Mediene would step down and the DRS would be dissolved. Since then, Khelil has not been the only exiled leader to return. Abdelhamid Brahimi, a former prime minister, has come back, as did several former conservative Islamist leaders. But despite the FLN's defence of Khelil, opposition parties are outraged that he has returned without any investigation into the past. That, they say, stains Algerian justice and illustrates the clientelism of its politics. "It just shows how the system of the state is run through personal patronage," opposition party lawmaker Karim Tabbou told Reuters. "Obviously, he is part of the presidential clan that doesn't accept any dissent or opposition." OPENING UP DEBATE Khelil's journey through Algeria's political system has been closely tied to Bouteflika, the independence-era veteran who has been in power for more than 15 years and who many Algerians credit for helping bring their country out of the 1990s decade of war with Islamist fighters. Before the scandal broke, Khelil had been Bouteflika's advisor and then energy minister for almost ten years until 2010, during some of which time he also served as president of OPEC. He was ousted from the minister's position in a cabinet reshuffle in 2010 just as the corruption scandal surfaced. Italian prosecutors said the "Sonatrach II" case involved millions of euros in bribes paid for Saipem to Algerian officials. Eni, which owns most of Saipem, Europe's biggest oil services group, denied any wrongdoing. Khelil's return may signal the rise of proponents of market reform at a trying time for Algeria's leadership as it struggles with low oil prices and tries to attract the foreign investment. Insecurity is also a worry, with neighbouring Libya in chaos. With its energy revenues almost halved and foreign reserves depleted by more than $35 billion last year, the government has already trimmed budgets, cut some subsidies in the vast welfare system and suspended infrastructure projects. Analysts and diplomats say the oil price fall has triggered debate among Algerian leaders between those tied to past resource nationalism and technocrats keen on opening an economy that scares off some investors with an arcane banking system, currency controls, red tape and a law demanding 51 percent state ownership of businesses with foreign partners. For now, Sonatrach is focussed on trying to maintain the energy production that makes Algeria a major European gas supplier. Recent energy bid rounds failed to pull in the kind of foreign investment the company needs to broadly increase production that has stagnated for a decade. "Khelil's return is indicative of the gradual resolution of some of the intractable political infighting in Algiers and the very small pool of qualified technocrats in Algeria's hydrocarbons sector," said Geoff Porter at North Africa Risk Advisory. In oil industry circles, there is already speculation about what a position for Khelil could mean to negotiations over future contracts. Khelil helped bring in a 2005 hydrocarbons law to open up Algeria's oil sector, only to have some of the more liberal terms reversed in 2006 by the presidency, in what Khelil himself described as a political decision at the time. "They may say, why not use him, he is an asset they can't afford to miss," one Western diplomat said on the ex-minister's return. "He could be a help in making them more of an international partner." (Additional reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; editing by Peter Graff)
MOSCOW (Reuters) - An increase in Russian oil production toward a record high in March will not be an obstacle to an expected agreement on a production freeze, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Saturday, local news agencies reported.

Novak said that it was important that Russia's average production over a prolonged period would not exceed its output level in January, as previously agreed.

Russia's oil production rose 0.3 percent to 10.91 million barrels per day in March, its highest level in nearly 30 years, raising questions over Moscow's commitment to freeze output ahead of the producers' meeting in Doha later in April.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin. Editing by Jane Merriman)
Moscow (AFP) - The Russian unmanned cargo ship Progress successfully docked with the International Space Station on Saturday, resupplying the crew with food and fuel, Russia's mission control centre said.

The docking procedure "took place at the scheduled time," the Russian TASS news agency quoted mission control as saying.

The Progress-63 brought with it around three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies to Russian cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko, Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin, NASA's Tim Kopra and Jeff Williams and British astronaut Tim Peake.

It was the second successful docking for a Progress cargo ships, from Russia's Baikonur space base in Kazakhstan, since one of the craft failed in April 2015 and was lost as it burnt up upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

Russia is currently solely responsible for manned flights to the International Space Station, but resupply missions are also carried out by the United States.

A previous cargo vessel was disconnected from the station on Wednesday and will slowly descend to Earth before plunging into the Pacific Ocean on April 8.

On March 26, the Cygnus cargo ship packed with science and research equipment plus food, water and clothes successfully docked at the International Space Station after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
By Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council must act to ensure Morocco's decision to expel personnel from a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the disputed territory of Western Sahara does not set a bad precedent for other missions, a U.N. official said on Wednesday. The controversy over U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's use of the word "occupation" during a recent visit to the region is Morocco's worst dispute with the U.N. since 1991, when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire to end a war over Western Sahara and established a peacekeeping mission, known as MINURSO. The United Nations has shut its military liaison office and withdrawn dozens of international staffers from MINURSO as demanded by Morocco in retaliation for Ban's remarks, which Rabat has described as "unacceptable." U.N. officials have said the reduction of staff has severely affected the mission in the Moroccan-annexed Western Sahara region. So far the 15-country Security Council, which ordered the deployment of MINURSO decades ago and renews its mandate every year, has said nothing on the Moroccan dispute with the U.N. despite near daily discussions on the subject. Ban wants swift council action to back him and MINURSO with a strong statement of support. "The Secretary-General very much wants the Security Council to act, and not only to preserve MINURSO's operations but also to prevent similar actions in other peacekeeping operations around the world," a U.N. official familiar with the Western Sahara dossier told reporters on condition of anonymity. The leaders of Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan have demanded the departure of U.N. peacekeepers from conflict-torn parts of their countries. The U.N. official said the presence of MINURSO was necessary to prevent a "security vacuum", adding that "there is the potential for escalation" into renewed conflict. Diplomats have blamed the council's silence on Morocco's traditional ally France, along with Spain, Egypt and Senegal. Rabat accused Ban earlier this month of no longer being neutral in the Western Sahara dispute when he used the word "occupation" to describe its 1975 annexation of the region, when Morocco took over from colonial power Spain. Ban had visited refugee camps in southern Algeria for the Sahrawi people, who say Western Sahara belongs to them. They fought a war against Morocco until the 1991 ceasefire. The Polisario Front wants a referendum on independence, but Morocco says it will only grant autonomy. Polisario says Rabat's moves against the U.N. jeopardize the ceasefire and could lead to renewed conflict. (Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Toni Reinhold)
DAKAR (Reuters) - A recent flare-up of Ebola in Sierra Leone is over after no new transmissions of the disease were detected in the West African country, although the virus could resurface at any time, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday. Sierra Leone has had no new cases of the virus for 42 days, the WHO said, twice the length of the virus's incubation period - the time that elapses between transmission of the disease and the appearance of symptoms. The WHO said it marked a milestone in the fight against Ebola, which has cost the lives of more than 11,300 people since 2013 in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, in the world's worst recorded outbreak of the disease. But it said that more flare-ups are possible because the virus can persist in the eyes, central nervous system and bodily fluids of some survivors. "Strong surveillance and emergency response capacity need to be maintained, along with rigorous hygiene practices at home and in health facilities and active community participation," WHO said in a statement. Sierra Leone was first declared free of Ebola transmissions in November before tests revealed one woman had died of the disease in January, the same week that the WHO had declared the region free of new transmissions of the virus. The case of Mariatu Jalloh, a female student, displayed how easily Ebola can return if precautions are not taken and patients do not seek quick medical attention. Jalloh had travelled across the country and come into contact with dozens of people after contracting the illness. Family members washed her corpse after she died, considered dangerous since the virus is contagious for days after death. Residents and authorities remain on edge across the region, though in many areas procedures to combat Ebola remain lax, experts say. At least three people from the same family have died in recent weeks from diarrhea and vomiting in a remote village in southeast Guinea, raising further concern about the disease spreading again. "There is in the same family a woman who died on 29 February and husband a week later. Their child died yesterday," said Fode Tass Sylla, spokesman for the National Coordination of the fight against Ebola in Guinea. Sylla said that it was unlikely that Ebola had caused the deaths because otherwise more would probably have been infected. He is waiting for test results from the child. Still, he was concerned that the bodies were not buried safely and the alert was not raised soon enough. "In principle, we should not have two deaths in a family without the alert is given," Sylla said. "This is why everyone is mobilized to clear up this matter." (Reporting by Edward McAllister; Additional reporting by Saliou Samb in CONAKRY; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Berezove (Ukraine) (AFP) - "Danger! Mines! Do not leave the road!", warns a billboard painted with an ominous skull and crossbones on a blood-red background that stands on a roadside in war-torn eastern Ukraine.

Though fighting between Kiev's forces and pro-Russian rebels has dwindled after nearly two years, mines scattered across the vital industrial region that is home to some three million people continue claiming lives at an alarming rate.

A March report prepared by the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said explosive devices had killed 21 people and injured 57 in the preceding three months.

In the absence of massive artillery shelling, landmines remain the main cause of civilian casualties, the report said.

Ukraine's emergency services report clearing the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces that are partially run by the rebels of more than 44,000 mines and booby traps by the start of December.

But the warring sides and foreign monitors struggle to estimate how many such devices remain.

To reduce the number of victims, the International Committee of the Red Cross began installing huge billboards along a seven-kilometre (four-mile) stretch of a road that juts through the no-man's land splitting the two sides' fighters and their respective checkpoints.

It has only put up 15 of them for the moment, but locals appear grateful nonetheless. Until now, the only visible warnings appeared on small handmade boards set up mostly by soldiers.

"These signs are needed," says Olga, a 28-year-old nurse who refused to give her last name for security reasons.

"They will make this area safer", she said while watching the first billboard being put up in Berezove, a so-called "grey zone" village about 10 kilometres south of the separatists' de facto capital of Donetsk.

- Invisible danger -

Once a month, Olga picks up a heavy suitcase and crosses the demarcation line to visit relatives who live in a pro-Western government controlled part of the impoverished east European state.

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On each journey, says Olga, she fears being maimed or worse by the invisible threat.

"It can happen at any moment: a bus can hit a mine or some pedestrian will try to walk along the side of the road" in a field where most of mines are scattered, she says.

"I live in (rebel-run) Olenivka, near the checkpoint, and it also happens that people hit booby traps and mines. They are completely invisible, and there are absolutely no warnings," the young woman says.

Nearly 9,200 people have been killed and more than 21,000 injured since fighting that Kiev and its Western allies accuse Russia of instigating erupted in April 2014.

Moscow denies sponsoring the war in reprisal for Ukraine's February 2014 ousting of its Russian-backed president and subsequent decision to forge an alliance with the European Union and possibly even seek NATO membership.

One of Europe's bloodiest and most diplomatically-damaging crises since the Balkans wars of the 1990s prompted Germany and France to help Russia and Ukraine sign up to a truce and political reconciliation agreement in February 2015.

That deal has calmed the worst violence but has done little to settle the political future of rebel-controlled lands that run near the Russian border, which militias control.

Ukraine says it must deploy its forces along the porous frontier before any political resolution is reached -- a seemingly distant goal.

In this latest in a series of conflicts to plague other contested regions of the former Soviet Union, groups like the Red Cross do what they can to help stranded civilians survive.

- Lacking de-mining efforts -

The Red Cross installed its first sign at the end of March in Berezove, where the global humanitarian organisation pinpointed 15 mine blasts in the past six months, killing one civilian.

"This is very dangerous territory," Red Cross member Anna Cheptunova says.

Cheptunova explains that most casualties occur when buses packed with civilians veer off roads to avoid checkpoints at which vehicles are sometimes forced to wait for hours, forming kilometres (miles)-long queues.

The most recent such reported incident killed three people when their minibus tried to get past the checkpoint by driving off into a mine-studded field on February 10.

The Red Cross intends to put up more billboards in the future south of Donetsk. But some residents say the effort was insufficient and that the two foes should focus on de-mining efforts to make the region safer.

"These preventive billboards are a necessity," says 55-year-old Georgy, waiting for his bus near a checkpoint.

"But what is even more necessary is for the guys with the guns on both side to start clearing" the war zone, he says.
Bratislava (AFP) - Slovakia's leftist Premier Robert Fico came a step closer to securing a governing coalition Saturday, after a right-wing party that emerged as kingmaker from last weekend's general election vowed its support.

Andrej Danko, whose conservative, eurosceptic Slovak National Party (SNS) controls 15 crucial seats and is in talks with Fico, on Saturday ruled out a coalition with election runner-up, the liberal Freedom and Solidarity SaS party.

SaS leader "Richard Sulik cannot guarantee a functional and stable government", Danko told journalists in Bratislava.

"Should this first round of negotiations fail, I prefer a government of independent experts. We are also willing to go to early elections," Danko added.

"The SNS has gradually become king-maker in the process of creating the next Slovak government," Jan Baranek, an analyst with the Polis Slovakia think tank told AFP, adding that the SNS "has transformed itself from a nationalist party into a traditional conservative one."

Despite having differing political stripes, Fico's leftist Smer-Social Democracy (Smer-SD) and the right-wing SNS forged a coalition government in 2006-10.

Both campaigned on a strident anti-migrant platform ahead of the March 5 election.

With his Smer-SD commanding 49 of the 150-seats in parliament, Fico has until March 18 to secure at least 26 others for a majority.

Analysts believe that aside from SNS, Fico could woo Most-Hid (Bridge) representing the Hungarian minority with 11 seats, and the liberal Siet (The Net), which debuted in parliament with 10 seats.

"The new government will be created with the cooperation of Smer, Most-Hid, SNS and Siet," Baranek said.

Should Fico fail, centrist President Andrej Kiska will ask the runner-up, SaS leader Sulik, to form a majority government.

But without Danko's SNS, analysts insist Sulik does not stand a chance.

If coalition talks fail, the president can appoint a caretaker government of independent experts.

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Should it fail to obtain a 90-member vote of confidence, the president must dissolve parliament and call early elections.

The political horse-trading comes as Slovakia is gearing up to take the EU's rotating presidency from July -- a role that will put the health of its democracy under the spotlight.

Last Saturday's election yielded a fragmented result, with a record eight parties entering parliament including the debut of the extreme right-wing LS-Nase Slovensko (Our Slovakia) led by Marian Kotleba with 14 seats.

Kotleba is known for harsh anti-Roma and anti-migrant rhetoric and for leading street marches with party member dressed in black neo-Nazi black uniforms. All parties have ruled out cooperating with him.
Johannesburg (AFP) - The South African parliament will next week discuss an opposition motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma after the highest court ruled that he flouted the constitution, an official said Sunday.

The speaker of parliament Baleka Mbete told journalists that the move by the Democratic Alliance (DA) would be considered on April 5.

The DA is pushing for Zuma to be impeached after the Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that he had "failed to uphold, defend and respect the constitution" in ignoring the ombudswoman's directives to repay a portion of public funds used to upgrade his private residence.

"The national assembly will on Tuesday, 5 April, consider a motion by the Democratic Alliance for the removal of the president in terms of section 89 of the constitution," said Mbete.

Zuma, whose ruling African National Congress (ANC) commands a strong grip on parliament, is likely to survive any bid to have him removed.

A previous impeachment attempt in 2015 over a failure to arrest Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir fell flat when parliament voted overwhelmingly against it.

The violation of the constitution verdict stems from the controversial 2009 security upgrades on Zuma's home at Nkandla village, in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province.

The project, which cost the taxpayers 216 million rand (then $24 million) in 2014, included a swimming pool, chicken run, cattle enclosure and an amphitheatre.

A 2014 report by the country's Public Protector found that Zuma and his family "unduly benefited" from the improvements, ordering him to pay back some of the money.

The ANC has rallied behind Zuma since the damning Constitutional Court ruling, but some party veterans including Ahmed Kathrada, an anti-apartheid stalwart jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, have called for him to step down.

Zuma, 73, is set to complete his second term in office in 2019.
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's parliament will debate on Tuesday a motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete said on Sunday, after a top court ruled the president had violated the constitution. South Africa's constitutional court ruled on Thursday that Zuma had failed to uphold the constitution by ignoring orders from the public protector that he repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent to renovate his residence at Nkandla. Since Thursday's ruling, opposition party leaders, ordinary South Africans and even an anti-apartheid activist jailed alongside Nelson Mandela have called on Zuma to step down. Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition party Democratic Alliance, tabled the motion to have Zuma impeached, and Mbete told reporters "the debate on that motion has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon." The Africa National Congress majority in parliament will almost certainly give Zuma political cover against the attempt to impeach him. But the judicial rebuke may embolden anti-Zuma factions within the ruling party to mount a challenge. The unanimous ruling by the 11-judge constitutional court also criticised parliament for passing a resolution that purported to nullify Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's findings on Zuma's private residence. On Friday, 73-year-old Zuma apologised and said he would pay back some of the money, as ordered. He said that he never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution. The scandal is arguably the biggest yet to hit Zuma, who has fended off accusations of corruption, influence peddling and rape since before he took office in 2009. (Reporting by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo; editing by Jason Neely, Larry King)
By Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's parliament will debate on Tuesday a motion to impeach President Jacob Zuma, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete said, after a top court ruled the president had violated the constitution. South Africa's constitutional court ruled on Thursday that Zuma had failed to uphold the constitution by ignoring orders from the public protector that he repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent to renovate his private residence at Nkandla. Since Thursday's ruling, opposition party leaders, ordinary South Africans and even an anti-apartheid activist jailed alongside Nelson Mandela have called on Zuma to step down. Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition party Democratic Alliance (DA), tabled the motion to have Zuma impeached, and Mbete told reporters on Sunday "the debate on that motion has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon." The Africa National Congress majority in parliament will almost certainly give Zuma political cover against the attempt to impeach him. But the judicial rebuke may embolden anti-Zuma factions within the ruling party to mount a challenge. The unanimous ruling by the 11-judge constitutional court also criticized parliament for passing a resolution that purported to nullify Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's findings on the state spending on Zuma's private residence. DA Parliamentary Chief Whip John Steenhuisen said on Sunday that Mbete should also resign for her and parliament's complicity in the Nkandla matter. Mbete said she would not step down, but acknowledged the issue could have been handled differently in parliament. The scandal is arguably the biggest yet to hit Zuma, who has fended off accusations of corruption, influence peddling and rape since before he took office in 2009. On Friday, the 73-year-old president gave a televised address to the nation in which he apologized and said he would pay back some of the money, as ordered. He said that he never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution. The president traveled to his home province of Kwazulu-Natal on Sunday to launch a relief program as part of government efforts to support areas affected by South Africa's worst drought in more than a century. He told a cheering crowd that he was still South Africa's leader and joked about how youthful he was, but made no specific mention of the Nkandla matter, the pending impeachment motion or calls for him to step down as he addressed the gathering in Zulu, his native language. (Additional reporting by Siyabonga Sishi; editing by Larry King and Susan Fenton)
Sri Lanka has detained 14 foreigners after seizing 110 kilograms of heroin worth $7.5 million from an Iranian fishing trawler in the country's biggest drug bust for nearly three years, police said Sunday.

Ten Iranians, two Pakistanis, one Indian and one Singaporean were remanded in custody after appearing in a magistrate's court in Colombo on Saturday, national police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekera said.

"They have had Sri Lankans involved in this smuggling," Gunasekera said. "We are hopeful of arresting them (Sri Lankans) very soon."

Acting on a tip-off, police and the navy boarded the trawler off the south coast on Wednesday. They arrested the crew -- the 10 Iranians and one of the Pakistanis -- after discovering the 110 kilograms (242 pounds) of heroin that authorities estimate was worth 1.1 billion rupees ($7.5 million).

"A Singapore national and an Indian were (also) arrested following a car chase on Saturday," he said adding that the other Pakistani was detained at a house in Sri Lanka that was allegedly used as a base for drug-smuggling.

The seizure is the biggest since August 2013 when police found 260 kilograms of heroin hidden in a shipping container that had come from Pakistan.

Sri Lankan authorities have said that such large quantities of heroin suggest that Colombo is being used as a transit centre. Narcotics could be reshipped to the Far East, according to authorities.
KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudan will close its recently reopened border with South Sudan once again if that country persists in its support for armed rebel groups, presidential aide Ibrahim Mahmoud said on Thursday. Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir ordered the opening of his country's border with South Sudan in January for the first time since the south's secession in 2011, paving the way for better economic links between the two nations. The threat to shut the border again comes just one day before peace talks are set to begin in Addis Ababa between the Sudanese government, the country's largest opposition party and several major armed rebel groups. Khartoum accuses Juba, the capital of South Sudan, of backing a rebellion in its Darfur region and a separate but linked insurgency in Blue Nile and South Kordofan. South Sudan denies the allegations. "If the South Sudan government does not refrain from supporting the rebels, we will be forced to close the border with the south once again," Mahmoud said on Thursday. The border was closed in 2011 after the south seceded following a long civil war, taking with it three quarters of Sudan's oil, estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration at 5 billion barrels of proven reserves. Bilateral relations have remained tense since 2011 as they failed to agree on borders and the status of several regions that both sides claim sovereignty over. (Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Eric Knecht; Editing by Gareth Jones)
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - An Austin police officer trying to subdue a suspect seen breaking into cars in an affluent downtown neighborhood of the Texas capital on Sunday was shot by the man and then returned fire, killing him, police said.

The officer, a nearly 10-year veteran of the force who was not named, was in stable condition after surgery to remove the bullet. The suspect, also not named, was pronounced dead at the scene, Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo told a news conference.

"Everything is on video and everything is on audio," Acevedo said of the incident, adding the material would show the officer acted quickly, professionally and responsibly.

A security guard chased the suspect, identified as a man in his mid-30s, into a parking lot and brought him to the ground. The officer arrived on the scene and tried to take the suspected thief into custody.

"The suspect, then without any warning, takes out a semi-automatic pistol and fires one shot at our officer," Acevedo said. The officer was hit below his vest in his abdomen and then returned fire.

Acevedo said the officer was conscious and alert, and added: "He is very fortunate."

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Marseille (AFP) - Three men were killed in a suspected gang shooting in southern France, sources said, taking to eight the number who have died in gang violence in the city of Marseilles this year.

Three others were also injured in the gunfight, which broke out around 10:30 pm (2030 GMT).

The police commissioner and several investigators were on the scene at the foot of a four-storey building where the killings took place.

At least eight people have been shot dead on the streets of Marseilles since the beginning of the year, part of a growing number of gang-related murders in the city.

"It's dramatic and desperate," Samia Ghali, the mayor of the eighth district of the city, told AFP.

"It does not give much hope for future generations. There is real work that needs to be done."

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said an investigation had been opened, reiterating "the government's absolute determination to eradicate organised crime".

At least 19 people were murdered in and around Marseilles last year, compared to 18 in 2014 and 17 in 2014, many of which authorities believe were carried out by gangs linked with drug trafficking.

On March 17, a 35-year-old man was killed by two men armed with Kalashnikovs, who ambushed him while driving then gunned him down as he tried to flee.
Washington (AFP) - US presidential primaries spark back to life Tuesday after an eventful 10-day break with clear frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both facing the real possibility of losing in Wisconsin.

Defeat in the north-central state isn't likely to immediately change the course of the overall nominating contest, but it could serve as an indicator of the race's current status ahead of the New York primary on April 19, where polls show both in the lead.

It's been a bumpy period for Trump, the Republican billionaire from New York.

Although his campaign has seemed bulletproof up until now, his latest controversies -- including abortion, opponent Ted Cruz's wife and a journalist who said she was roughed up by Trump's campaign manager -- have alienated women voters further, polls indicate.

His divisive style is also under scrutiny, and the real estate magnate had a surprise meeting with Republican party chief Reince Priebus in Washington on Thursday amid rumblings that the party would fracture if he were to win the nomination.

With polls for the Wisconsin Republican primary showing the ultraconservative Cruz holding a 10-point lead, Trump has launched a series of events in the heartland state to rally support. Moderate John Kasich, the Ohio governor, is polling third and last.

Campaigning in Wisconsin on Saturday accompanied by Sarah Palin, Trump attacked Cruz for failing to report a loan from Goldman Sachs, his wife's employer.

And on Sunday, Trump doubled down on some of his more controversial assertions in recent days -- that the United States should consider leaving NATO and that Japan should be responsible for its own nuclear defense.

"Sometime you're better off saying, wait a minute. We're defending Japan. I mean what we're doing is costing us a fortune," he told the Fox News Sunday program.

"And not only Japan, (but) South Korea. We have 28,000 soldiers on the line," said Trump, who said that rather than fully reimbursing the US for their defense "they pay us peanuts."

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He added: "Maybe they would, in fact, be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea... including with nukes."

The winner of Tuesday's Republican primary will take most of the 42 delegates on offer. If Cruz wins, he will certainly claim it as a turning point in the race, but mathematically speaking he will struggle to overcome his overall delegate deficit.

Currently, Trump has 739, Cruz 460 and Kasich 145. To win the Republican nomination outright, a candidate needs 1,237.

In North Dakota, Republican activists gather this weekend at a state convention to select 25 of 28 delegates, but unlike those from most other states, they won't be bound to a particular candidate at the party's convention in July.

The other three are RNC members who are automatic delegates.

- Angry Clinton -

For Clinton, a loss in Wisconsin would be more symbolic than anything else, as the state distributes delegates proportionally according to the primary results.

But she comes into the contest having lost five of the last six states to Bernie Sanders, and polls show him finishing on top in Wisconsin.

The Vermont senator has already notched victories in two neighboring states, Minnesota and Michigan, and his popularity is undeniable in Wisconsin cities like Madison, which have a high concentration of university students.

Sanders, who has energized young Democrats, is trying to dispel the notion that Clinton is a better candidate for defeating Trump in the general election in November.

"In the last national CNN poll we beat Trump by 20 points and that's before we really begin to expose what a nutcase he really is," Sanders told supporters Friday in Sheboygan.

With the momentum in Sanders' camp, tensions are starting to rise between him and Clinton.

The former US top diplomat showed a rare flash of anger on Thursday when a Greenpeace activist asked her if she would reject campaign contributions linked to the oil and gas industries.

Clinton, who was shaking hands along a rope line, responded sharply: "I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me, I'm sick of it," jabbing her finger at the young woman in a video that went viral.

While Clinton acknowledged receiving donations from people who work for such companies, the oil and gas companies themselves are not permitted to contribute to candidates.

Spotting an opening, Sanders said in Eau Claire, another Wisconsin city, on Saturday: "When you have a handful of billionaires trying to buy elections, that's not called democracy, that's called oligarchy."

Despite his recent successes Sanders is still trailing in the race for delegates.

Clinton has 1,259 compared to his 1,020, according to a CNN tally. The former first lady benefits from the critical support of nearly 500 "superdelegates," elected officials and Democratic Party leaders who cast votes at the party's convention in July.

To win the Democratic nomination, a candidate needs 2,383 delegates.
By Steve Holland MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump predicted that the United States is on course for a "very massive recession," warning that a combination of high unemployment and an overvalued stock market had set the stage for another economic slump. "I think were sitting on an economic bubble. A financial bubble," the billionaire businessman said in an interview with The Washington Post published on Saturday. Coming off a tough week on the campaign trail in which he made a series of missteps, Trump's latest comments bring him back into the limelight ahead of Tuesday's important primary in Wisconsin where he trails in the polls. The former reality TV star said that the real U.S. jobless figure is much higher than five percent number released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Were not at 5 percent unemployment," Trump said. "Were at a number thats probably into the twenties if you look at the real number, he said, adding that the official jobless figure is "statistically devised to make politicians  and in particular presidents  look good." Trump said its a terrible time right now to invest in the stock market, offering a more bleak view of the U.S. economy than that held by many mainstream economists. The interview was bylined by the Post's Robert Costa and famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. A real estate magnate, Trump has made appealing to blue-collar workers a hallmark of his bid for the Republican nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election, often blaming unemployment on the outsourcing of U.S. jobs and facilities to countries such as China and Mexico. Trump vowed in the interview to wipe out the more than $19 trillion national debt "over a period of eight years," helped by a renegotiation of trade deals. "Im renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that were doing so badly on," he said. NATO AGAIN After making controversial statements about abortion last week, Trump has shown little sign of heeding calls from fellow Republicans to adopt a more presidential tone so as to avoid alienating voters in the November general election if he wins the nomination. On Saturday, he questioned close U. S. ties to Saudi Arabia and again accused U.S. allies of not pulling their weight in the NATO military alliance. Trump told a campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin that partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization "are not paying their fair share" and called the 28-nation alliance "obsolete." "Either they pay up, including for past deficiencies, or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO," Trump said. Tuesday's Wisconsin nominating contest could be a turning point in the Republican race. Trump, 69, trails his leading rival, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, 45, of Texas in the state. A Cruz win would make it harder for Trump to reach the number of 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination before the Republican national convention in July. The winner will get to claim all of Wisconsin's 42 delegates. (Writing by Alana Wise; Editing by James Dalgleish; and Alistair Bell)
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to back Ankara's ally Azerbaijan "to the end" in its conflict with Armenia over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region, after fierce clashes left 30 soldiers dead on both sides.

"We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties," the presidency on Sunday quoted Erdogan telling an Azerbaijani reporter while on a visit to the United States.

"We will support Azerbaijan to the end," he added.

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian said 18 Armenian troops were killed and some 35 wounded in the "largest-scale hostilities" since a 1994 truce ended a war in which Armenian-backed fighters seized the territory from Azerbaijan.

Earlier Azerbaijan's defence ministry said that 12 of its soldiers were killed and a military helicopter shot down.

Erdogan also blasted the longstanding failure of the Minsk Group -- which spearheads efforts by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to find peace under the chairmanship of France, Russia and the United States -- to resolve the conflict.

"We are faced with such incidents because the Minsk Group underestimated the situation," Erdogan said.

"If the Minsk Group had taken fair and decisive steps over this, such incidents would not have happened. However, the weaknesses of the Minsk Group unfortunately led the situation to this point."

Turkey, which has close cultural and linguistic ties with Azerbaijan, is a key ally of Baku.

Ankara has no diplomatic relations with Armenia due to the dispute over the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire which Yerevan regards as genocide.
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday blamed an alliance of Kurdish, Turkish and Armenian groups proscribed by Turkey for noisy protests in Washington which led to scuffles with his security guards.

The protests took place as Erdogan was due to speak last week at the Brookings Institution in Washington, with the intervention of Erdogan's security detail on foreign soil causing new concerns about freedom in speech in Turkey.

Speaking at the airport on his return to Istanbul after the almost week-long trip to the US, Erdogan blamed a collection of groups banned by Turkey for the protests.

He said he saw at the protest "representatives" of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, and the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey accuses of being the Syrian arm of the PKK.

Erdogan said that there were also representatives of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), which carried out a string of deadly attacks in the 1970s and 1980s purportedly aimed at avenging the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 in World War I.

He said the PKK, YPG and ASALA representatives were all working in cahoots in the protests with allies of Erdogan's arch enemy, the US-based exiled Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of running the Parallel State Structure group (PDY) and plotting to oust the government.

"The situation that took place ahead of the conference was really, really significant," Erdogan said.

"I saw myself representatives from the Parallel State Structure who have fled our country side-by-side and right next to those from" the PKK, YPG and ASALA, he said.

"This is the proof, this is the evidence," he added.

Just ahead of Erdogan's arrival at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Turkish security officials clashed with the crowd -- both sides exchanging insults and scuffling -- before local police were able to separate them.

The incident amplified concerns about the heavy-handed treatment of journalists and campaigners inside Turkey. But Turkish officials insist there is no restriction on freedom of speech in the country, so long as the law is obeyed.
(Reuters) - The National Labor Relations Board filed an official complaint against a California warehouse serving some of the largest U.S. retailers after finding evidence it violated workers' rights to organize, according to a filing by the agency.

The complaint against California Cartage Company, LLC, and an affiliated firm means allegations of wrongdoing submitted by a worker group last year will move forward and be heard by an NLRB administrative law judge in June, the filing showed.

According to the complaint, which consolidated two cases, managers at the Long Beach facility discouraged employees from organizing and threatened them with dismissal in violation of labor law.

The filing says that the California Cartage and its affiliated company must file an answer to the agency's consolidated complaint by the first week of April.

The case is the latest sign that labor activists are making headway in their efforts to shine a light on what they say are consistently poor working conditions at the ports and warehouses vital to the retail industry's sprawling supply chain.

The California Cartage facility serves Amazon.com Inc, Lowe's Companies Inc, New Balance, and Sears Holdings Corp, according to Warehouse Workers Resource Center, or WWRC, the Ontario, California-based labor group that submitted claims of wrongdoing to the NLRB last year.

Sears declined to comment. New Balance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Al Latham, a lawyer representing California Cartage and Orient Tally Company Inc, the affiliated firm named in the complaint, said the companies could not comment on ongoing litigation. Amazon and Lowe's did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.

None of the retailers were named in the NLRB complaint.

Celene Perez, co-director of WWRC, said the decision by the NLRB to issue an official complaint was significant because it showed that the company had violated the workers' rights to join their co-workers in improving their working conditions.

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"What is also significant is that it applies to temp workers as well as direct employers. The complaint made very clear that California Cartage and Orient Tally violated the rights of both workers," said Perez.

Workers can file labor complaints with regional directors of the NLRB, an independent federal agency, and it is up to the director to issue a complaint and post a hearing after an investigation. The NLRB filing on the California Cartage case was signed by Olivia Garcia, the regional director of the agency in Los Angeles.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Chicago and Mari Saito in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Nandita Bose in Chicago; Editing by Peter Cooney and Bernard Orr)
By Michelle Nichols UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon regrets a "misunderstanding" over his use of the word "occupation" to describe Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara, which led to Morocco expelling dozens of United Nations staff, his spokesman said on Monday. Earlier this month Ban used the word "occupation" to describe Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara in 1975, when it took over the arid territory along the Atlantic Ocean from colonial power Spain. "His use of the word was not planned, nor was it deliberate, it was a spontaneous, personal reaction. We regret the misunderstandings and consequences that this personal expression of solicitude provoked," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. The controversy over Ban's comments is Morocco's worst dispute with the United Nations since 1991, when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire to end a war over Western Sahara and established a peacekeeping mission, known as MINURSO. Ban said the word during a visit to refugee camps in southern Algeria for the Sahrawi people, who contend Western Sahara belongs to them. Morocco then ordered the United Nations to pull out dozens of civilian staffers and close a military liaison office for the MINURSO peacekeeping mission. It said its decision was irreversible, but that the government was committed to military cooperation to guarantee a ceasefire. "Nothing (Ban) said or did in the course of that trip was meant to offend or express hostility toward the Kingdom of Morocco, which is a valued member of the United Nations," Dujarric said. Rabat has accused Ban of dropping the United Nations' neutral stance on the Western Sahara dispute. "The position of the United Nations has not changed," Dujarric said. "He has not and will not take sides on the issue of Western Sahara." U.N. officials had repeatedly urged the U.N. Security Council to publicly voice its support for Ban and MINURSO, which the 15-nation body did late last Thursday in New York. However, the council did not explicitly order Morocco to reverse its decisions or address Ban's use of the word "occupation." Some U.N. diplomats had blamed the council's days of silence on Morocco's ally France, along with Spain, Egypt and Senegal. The U.N. MINURSO mission, which consists of military and civilian staff, monitors the Western Sahara ceasefire and is charged with organizing a referendum over the region's future. But deadlock has delayed the vote for years. (Editing by Fiona Ortiz)
By Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Nigeria on Wednesday agreed to establish working groups focused on strengthening security cooperation, the economy and tackling corruption after day-long talks at the State Department. In a joint statement, the countries said the groups would come up with a paper within a month finalizing goals. Kerry meets Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday on the sidelines of a two-day nuclear security summit in Washington involving leaders from more than 50 countries. The meetings on Wednesday were launched by Kerry and Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama, who both acknowledged security challenges posed by Boko Haram militants in the northeast and neighboring countries, as well as tough economic times caused by a drop in oil prices. Kerry said the United States was committed to helping Nigeria tackle the Boko Haram insurgency, although he cautioned that security forces had to avoid human rights abuses even as they stepped up the fight against the jihadi group, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State. "Under President Buhari, Nigeria has been taking the fight to Boko Haram and it has reduced Boko Harams capacity to launch full-scale attacks," Kerry said, "however, the group still remains a threat, a serious threat, to the entire region." He said in recent months U.S. military trainers were helping Nigeria's security forces improve information sharing tactics, and train and equip two infantry battalions. "Now, I want to be clear, this aid is predicated on the understanding that, even when countering a group as ruthless as Boko Haram, security forces have a duty to set the standard with respect to human rights," he cautioned, adding: "One abuse does not excuse another." U.S. cooperation with Buharis predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, had virtually ground to a halt because of his refusal to investigate corruption and human rights abuses by the Nigerian military. On the economy, Kerry said the United States was "encouraged" by Buhari's commitment to diversify Nigeria's economy to make it less dependent on oil. But Nigeria needed to create an environment that was welcoming to investment, Kerry added. The joint statement made no mention Nigeria's foreign exchange rate, which the United States complains is too rigid and discourages investors. Senior U.S. diplomats said the issue would be raised during Wednesday's talks. Africa's top oil exporter is in the middle of an economic crisis as a slump in global oil prices has eroded public finances, hit the currency and dried up commercial banks' dollar supplies needed for basic imports. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States supports Morocco's autonomy plan for the disputed territory of Western Sahara, considering it both credible and realistic, the U.S. mission to the United Nations said on Saturday. The announcement on Twitter comes amid an escalating spat between Rabat and the United Nations. Morocco accused U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week of no longer being neutral in the conflict, criticizing his use of the word "occupation" to describe Morocco's annexation of the region at the center of a struggle since 1975, when it took over from colonial power Spain. This week Morocco ordered the United Nations to withdraw 84 international civilian personnel from its peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara, MINURSO. It said this was a response to Ban's "unacceptable" remarks. "We consider Morocco autonomy plan serious, realistic, credible," U.S. mission spokesman Kurtis Cooper said on his Twitter feed. "It represents a potential approach that could satisfy the aspirations of Western Sahara." He added that the United States continues to support the work of MINURSO in Western Sahara as well as the U.N.-led peace process. The controversy over Ban's comments is Morocco's worst dispute with the United Nations since 1991, when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire to end a war over the Western Sahara and established the mission. Earlier this month, Ban visited refugee camps in southern Algeria for the Sahrawi people, who say Western Sahara belongs to them and fought a war against Morocco until the 1991 ceasefire. Their Polisario Front wants a referendum, including over the question of independence, but Rabat says it will only grant semi-autonomy. Ban's spokesman said on Friday that he was disappointed by the U.N. Security Council's failure to take a strong stand in the dispute between him and Morocco over Western Sahara and would raise it with council members soon. Diplomats said the council members that argued against a strong statement of support of Ban and in favor of countries dealing with the issue bilaterally included Morocco's traditional ally France along with Spain, Egypt and Senegal. Council statements need to be unanimous. France has offered to mediate between Ban and Morocco. The Polisario's U.N. representative Ahmed Boukhari told reporters on Thursday that Morocco's goal was to shut down MINURSO, which he said "would mean the shortest way to the resumption of war." Ban has said he wants to restart stalled negotiations between Morocco and Polisario Front. (Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Tom Heneghan and Michael Perry)
By Lisa Lambert and Tariro Mzezewa WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Obama administration will release a long-awaited proposal on retirement advice on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter. At an event at the Center for American Progress think tank, the U.S. government will unveil its proposed rule requiring brokers who provide retirement advice to follow a "fiduciary" standard of putting clients' interests before their own. The proposal aims to end potential conflicts of interest by brokers who advise on individual retirement accounts and to protect consumers from buying unnecessary investment products. Required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, the rule has followed a tortuous path toward fruition. Financial companies and lawmakers have worried that the rule's requirements could drive up costs and keep middle- and low-income people from being able to afford retirement services. The Labor Department, which regulates retirement plan advice, withdrew its initial proposal in 2011 after criticism from the financial services and insurance industries and leaders in both political parties. A new version was proposed a year ago after a nudge from President Barack Obama and discussions with the industry and lawmakers, who considered blocking funds needed for a standard. In January, the Labor Department finished work on the rule and sent it to the White House's Office of Management and Budget for review. Even though the text was not released, both Washington and Wall Street have been preparing for a possible fight over the latest version. Last month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it is prepared to sue the federal government if it finds the rule unworkable. "The DOL has been very prudent about how theyve gone about this in trying to make their rule litigation-proof, but opponents will sue in court, said Scott Puritz, managing director of retirement services firm Rebalance IRA. Despite publicly opposing the rule, many money managers have privately been preparing for its release for several months. Firms including LPL Financial Holdings have been cutting fees and reducing the amounts clients can hold in their brokerage accounts, all in preparation for the rule. "The advice I've been giving broker-dealers and advisers is to get in front of the rule and explain it to clients now because after the rule is out, they'll sound defensive," said John Anderson who works with financial advisers at SEI Advisor Network, part of at SEI Investments Co.. The Labor Department and Center for American Progress did not respond to requests for comment.
Beirut (AFP) - UN chief Ban Ki-moon Thursday started a two-day visit to Lebanon aimed at improving conditions for Syrian refugees whose number is more than a quarter of the country's own population.

"We are here to find ways to improve conditions for refugees, to support the communities hosting them, and to help mitigate the impact on Lebanon's economy," he said.

Ban spoke at a news conference in Beirut beside Lebanon's Prime Minister Tammam Salam, World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim and Islamic Development Bank head Ahmad al-Madani.

Syria's five-year conflict has killed more than 270,000 people and forced millions to flee their homes, with neighbouring countries bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis.

Lebanon alone hosts nearly 1.2 million refugees.

"Few countries have demonstrated the generosity that the government and people of Lebanon have shown towards Syrian refugees," Ban said.

"Syria's neighbours are a model for other countries and regions that have far more resources than they do," he added.

The UN chief, who is on Friday to visit a poor neighbourhood hosting Syrian refugees in the northern city of Tripoli, said he was "concerned by the vulnerability of Lebanese host communities, especially in the most impoverished areas."

He also said he was "concerned about the political situation in Lebanon", referring to a crisis exacerbated by the Syrian conflict that has left the country without a president for 21 months.

For his part, the World Bank chief said $100 million (89.5 million euros) had been earmarked to support the education of refugees.

"We have taken $100 million from a fund that we use only for the poorest countries... and provided today a very concessional loan for the education sector, again to show our appreciation to what Lebanon has done in educating the refugees here," Kim said.

The World Bank last month said the devastating economic impact of the war in Syria and its spillover into five nearby countries -- including Lebanon -- stood at $35 billion.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN Security Council could vote as early as Friday on a French-drafted resolution that would lay the groundwork for a UN police presence to help quell violence in Burundi, diplomats said.

The draft resolution requests that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hold talks with the Burundian government and the African Union on the proposed international presence and present options to the Security Council within 15 days.

The text, obtained by AFP on Thursday, provides for the "deployment of a United Nations police contribution to increase the United Nations capacity to monitor the security situation, promote the respect of human rights and advance rule of law" in Burundi.

Burundi has been in turmoil since President Pierre Nkurunziza announced plans in April to run for a third term, which he went on to win.

The violence has left more than 400 dead, driven over 240,000 people across the border and fueled fears of mass atrocities in the country.

At a council meeting last week, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said reports of torture were on the rise since the beginning of the year and that people there "live in terror."

A recent visit by UN rights officials to detention centers in the capital Bujumbura found that almost half of detainees had been tortured or ill-treated, some seriously, he said.

After days of negotiations on the draft resolution, France late Thursday reached agreement on a final text and asked for a Security Council vote on the measure for Friday, diplomats said.

Russian Deputy Ambassador Petr Iliichev told reporters that he was ready to support the text, if it contained clear provisions on consulting the Burundian government.

Iliichev said he envisaged a small deployment of fewer than 100 police officers who could help Burundi ensure its security forces respect human rights standards.

The draft resolution also calls on the United Nations to strengthen its efforts in Burundi by beefing up the team of envoy Jamal Benomar.

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It urges the government of Burundi and all parties to "reject any kind of violence and condemn any public statement inciting violence or hatred".

During a visit by Security Council ambassadors to Burundi in January, Nkurunziza dismissed concerns that his country could slide into ethnic killings, similar to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Burundi has the same Hutu-Tutsi mix as Rwanda.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN Security Council should keep its military liaison office open in Dakhla, Western Sahara, to avoid setting a dangerous precedent, a UN official said.

The world body said Tuesday it had closed the office at Morocco's request and withdrew three military observers posted there.

It was the latest twist in a running dispute between the world body and Morocco, which was angered when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently referred to the "occupation" of the disputed territory.

The UN mission, which has about 500 civilian and military personnel, was established in 1991 to monitor a ceasefire and prepare for elections in Western Sahara.

But Morocco, which annexed Western Sahara in 1975, has resisted an election and instead proposes self-government under Moroccan sovereignty.

Ban "very much wants the Security Council to act, and not only to preserve MINUSRO's operations but to prevent similar actions in other peacekeeping operations around the world," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

He did not specify which other operation he was referring to, but the United Nations has had difficulties with its staff in places including Sudan, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The United Nations has been trying to broker a Western Sahara settlement since a 1991 ceasefire ending a war that broke out when Morocco deployed its military in the former Spanish territory in 1975.

Morocco, which considers the territory to be part of its kingdom and insists that its sovereignty cannot be challenged, has also decided to cut $3 million in funding for the UN mission.

The UN official called Morocco's moves an "extreme overreaction."

"We see Morocco's unilateral actions as an unprecedented violation of the UN charter... and a direct challenge to the Security Council," he said.

As per Ban's use of the term "occupation" to describe the territory's status, "it certainly was not deliberate," the official said.

"Nothing the secretary general said or did during his visit was meant to take sides, to express hostility to Morocco or signal any change in the UN approach to the Western Sahara conflict."
By Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations has closed its military liaison office in the disputed territory of Western Sahara as demanded by Morocco amid an escalating dispute over remarks by the U.N. chief, a U.N. spokesman said on Tuesday. Dozens of U.N. international staffers pulled out of the Western Sahara mission, known as MINURSO, after Morocco demanded they leave because Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon used the term "occupation" during a recent visit. U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said Morocco demanded the closure of the U.N. Dakhla military liaison office. It was Rabat's latest retaliatory step. "This was completed yesterday," Haq said. "The three military observers based there were relocated to the Asward team site, on the western part of the territory, controlled by Morocco. Morocco's request to close the liaison office in Dakhla is the first request directly targeting the military component." He said the liaison office was the U.N.'s "face-to-face counterpart to the Royal Moroccan Army" and handled all discussions on the ceasefire. Haq said the relocation made direct dialogue with the army "more difficult." U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric chided the Security Council on Friday for not issuing a strong statement of support for him and MINURSO in the dispute, something council diplomats blamed on Morocco's traditional ally France, along with Spain, Egypt and Senegal. Ban and the 15-nation council had their monthly lunch meeting on Monday. Several diplomats told Reuters that Ban left with the impression that a statement of support for him was imminent. But no such statement was issued. Haq repeated Ban's desire for a statement of support from the council. "In enough time, a lack of a statement can indeed be interpreted as a statement of its very own," he said. The controversy over Ban's comments is Morocco's worst dispute with the U.N. since 1991, when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire to end a war over the Western Sahara and established the mission. Rabat accused Ban earlier this month of no longer being neutral in the Western Sahara dispute when he used the word "occupation" to describe its 1975 annexation of the region, when Morocco took over from colonial power Spain. Ban had visited refugee camps in southern Algeria for the Sahrawi people, who say Western Sahara belongs to them. They fought a war against Morocco until the 1991 ceasefire. The Polisario Front wants a referendum on independence, but Morocco says it will only grant autonomy. Polisario says Rabat's moves against the U.N. jeopardize the ceasefire. (Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Dan Grebler)
By Karolina Tagaris and Dasha Afanasieva LESBOS, Greece/CESME, Turkey (Reuters) - There was little sign of preparation on either side of the Aegean less than 24 hours before Greece was due to begin returning migrants to Turkey, and Greek and Turkish officials gave conflicting information on the logistics of the plan. The returns are a key part of an agreement between the European Union and Turkey aimed at ending the uncontrollable influx into Europe of refugees and migrants fleeing war and misery in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Under the deal, those who cross into Greece illegally will be held and sent back once their asylum applications are processed. For every Syrian returned, one Syrian will be resettled to Europe directly from Turkey. So far, more than 6,000 migrants and refugees have been registered on Greek islands since March 20, the date on which the agreement came into force. Where they will depart from, to where they will be sent, and even how many people will be taken back to Turkey under this deal on Monday, remains unclear. On Sunday, there were few signs that Lesbos, the island hundreds of thousands of people passed through on their way to northern Europe, was getting ready to send back migrants. A police spokesman said the force was still awaiting instructions. Across the Aegean in the coastal town of Dikili, which a Turkish official said would receive refugees sent back from Greece, just two room-size tents were set up on the pier of its cramped port on Saturday. Two portable toilets were installed nearby. Further south, four small blue tents were set upon the town of Cesme for those sent back from the Greek island of Chios. Turkey's interior minister, Efkan Ala, was quoted by the pro-government newspaper Aksam as saying 500 people were expected in Turkey from Greece on Monday. Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis would be deported to their countries, he said. The Athens News Agency reported over the weekend that the returns would begin on Monday morning on two Turkish passenger ships chartered by Frontex, the EU border agency. Some 250 people would be returned each day through Wednesday, the report said, without citing sources. "Planning is in progress," George Kyritsis, a Greek government spokesman for the migration crisis told Reuters. "I will not confirm any report." Kyritsis said returns would take place on Monday, "barring any massive hurdle which cannot be overcome" but they would not be of people who have applied for asylum. The numbers being floated "had come out of thin air," he said. "CHALLENGING AND VOLATILE" More than 51,000 migrants and refugees remain in Greece since border closures along the Balkans last month. Hundreds of migrants who on Friday broke out of the Chios holding facility in protest at the deal are at the island's port. Hundreds of migrants in mainland Greece are also protesting to demand the borders open. Arrivals to the islands remained steady on Sunday, two weeks since March 20, with 514 migrants, including many Syrians and Iraqis, crossing from Turkey through Sunday morning. Of those, 364 arrived on Lesbos, authorities said. Many of those rescued by the Greek coast guard off Lesbos were unaware they would be sent back to Turkey. Greece's parliament passed an asylum amendment bill on Friday needed to implement the agreement. The legislation does not explicitly designate Turkey as a "safe third country" - a formula to make any mass returns legally sound. The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and human rights groups have denounced the agreement as lacking legal safeguards. Amnesty International called it "a historic blow to human rights" and said it would send a delegation to Lesbos and Chios on Monday to monitor the situation. UNHCR's spokesman on Lesbos, Boris Cheshirkov said there were still gaps in both Greece and Turkey that need to be addressed. "We're not opposed to returns as long as people are not in need of international protection, they have not applied for asylum," he said. More than 3,300 migrants and refugees are on Lesbos, an island of mainly Greek refugees who fled Turkey in the 1920s. About 2,800 people are held at the Moria center, a sprawling complex of prefabricated containers, 800 more than its stated capacity. Of those, 2,000 have made asylum claims, UNHCR said. Aid agencies have pulled out of Moria since it became a closed facility last month and in protest at conditions there. Journalists have been barred from entering the site and holding centers on four other islands. Condition on Lesbos were "challenging and volatile," UNHCR said, with insufficient food and pregnant women and children among those held. Families have been separated since the deal, with some members inside Moria and others elsewhere in Europe. "Many of those who have arrived here have experienced horrendous wars," Cheshirkov said. "To be put in a closed environment feels like punishment whereas seeking asylum is not a crime, it's a fundamental human right." (Additional reporting by Murad Sezer in CESME and Lefteris Papadimas in ATHENS; Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Washington (AFP) - The United States appears to be laying the groundwork to let Iran begin trading in dollars, experts believe, after a landmark accord with the West last year saw the country limit its nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said in Washington Wednesday that US sanctions should not be used lightly, though a Republican-controlled Congress remains dead set against easing restraints on Tehran.

"We must be conscious of the risk that overuse of sanctions could undermine our leadership position within the global economy, and the effectiveness of our sanctions themselves," he told The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Lew said Washington must be willing to ease sanctions when they have actually worked, even if this is delicate in the case of Iran.

After the historic accord of July 2015 among Iran and major western powers to lift sanctions previously imposed because of Iran's nuclear program -- which the West feared was aimed at building a bomb -- Tehran has kept its word, Lew said.

And now it is up to the United States to keep its word, he added.

However, non-nuclear-related sanctions against Iran that were imposed because of what the US says is its support for terrorism and regional destabilization, remained in force, Lew said.

He added that the US administration had explained to the foreign business community what it now can and cannot do in Iran, making implicit reference to the worries of European banks.

Mark Dubowitz, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Lew's remarks signaled that the administration of President Barack Obama is preparing to make "a major concession to Iran" by giving it access to the US dollar. He said this change would be adamantly opposed by the US Congress.

"It seems clear to me that the administration is seriously considering giving Iran access to the use of the US dollar for business transactions," Dubowitz told AFP.

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- A battle with Congress -

At issue are operations called U-Turn transfers, which would allow Iranian and foreign banks to engage in financial transactions in dollars by having access to offshore clearing houses.

The United States banned these transfers -- which involved US financial institutions as intermediaries -- in 2008.

Last week, Ed Royce, chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, wrote a letter to Obama expressing concern that licenses might be granted that would allow such dollar transactions.

Dubowitz said Lew's tone suggests that the US Treasury is paving the way for a future easing of sanctions, as Iran is complaining that the United States has only stopped punishing Iran on paper, not in actual fact.

Iran's Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused the United States last week of not fulfilling its commitments in the nuclear deal. He said Europe is wary of doing business with Iran, out of fear of the United States.

But Patrick Clawson, research director at the Washington Institute, which specializes in the Middle East, said the US treasury secretarys comments speak more than anything to the domestic battle with the US Congress.

Clawson said opening the way for an easing of sanctions would be very difficult for the Obama administration.

He said Lew's comments were directed rather at dissuading Congress from approving new sanctions against Iran.
Cairo (AFP) - A US Republican delegation visiting Cairo on Sunday said President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was the "right man at the right time" for Egypt even as Washington criticises alleged rights abuses in the country.

The six-member delegation led by hawkish senator Lindsey Graham backed Sisi in the fight against the jihadist Islamic State group, but was cautious when asked to respond to growing accusations of human rights violations committed by Egyptian security forces.

Graham said Sisi was "the right man at the right time" to lead Egypt as the Islamic State group had become a "nightmare" for the entire region.

"There is a desire that Daesh be destroyed in Sinai... the president has expressed his desire to destroy Daesh," Graham said using the Arabic acronym for the IS, which is spearheading an insurgency in the restive peninsula.

When asked about the human rights situation in Egypt, Graham offered a response in stark contrast to the present US administration, which has regularly criticised reported human rights abuses in Egypt.

"I understand that the country is a new democracy and coming out of chaos," told reporters in Cairo.

"He (Sisi) has to balance security with the rule of law... there are elements that come to Egypt to disrupt the nation and there are many people coming here to help you. Don't treat them all in the same way," the senator added.

Rights groups have accused Egypt's security services of carrying out illegal detentions, forced disappearances of activists and torture of detainees since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

After his removal, a police crackdown targeting Morsi's supporters has left hundreds dead and tens of thousands jailed. Hundreds more have been sentenced to death including Morsi himself.

In March, US Secretary of State John Kerry said there was a "deterioration in the human rights situation in Egypt in recent weeks and months".

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Ties between Washington and Cairo deteriorated after Morsi's ouster.

The US froze its annual $1.3 billion of military aid to Egypt, which led Cairo to warm up to Russia and France to meet its arms requirements.

But the aid was later released even as Washington remains critical of the government's rights record.
A study involving people with diabetes has shown that belly size is a stronger predictor of a dangerous kind of heart disease than body mass index, researchers said Saturday.

The study released at the American College of Cardiology conference in Chicago was based on 200 people with diabetes who had not shown any symptoms of heart disease.

Researchers found that those with larger waist circumferences were more likely than smaller-bellied people to have problems with the heart's left ventricle, which pumps oxygen-rich blood to the brain and the rest of the body.

"We specifically found that waist circumference appears to be a stronger predictor for left ventricle dysfunction than total body weight or body mass index," said principal investigator Boaz Rosen, a doctor at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

Previous research has shown that the higher a person's body mass index (BMI) -- a measure of a person's height and weight -- the greater their risk of heart disease.

Having excess belly fat, or having an apple-shaped figure, has already been linked to high blood pressure, high sugar levels, elevated cholesterol, coronary artery disease and heart failure.

"Our research examined patients with diabetes, who are considered high risk for developing heart disease already, and found that the shape of your body determined if you were at a greater risk to develop left ventricular dysfunction," said Brent Muhlestein, co-director of research at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City.

"This study confirms that having an apple-shaped body -- or a high waist circumference -- can lead to heart disease, and that reducing your waist size can reduce your risks."

Problems with the left ventricle can lead to congestive heart failure.

Researchers said more study is needed to see if diabetic patients with large waists and signs of heart problems go on to develop heart failure or artery disease in the future.










News / Africa

by Staff reporter

Johannesburg - A taxi driver who allegedly raped one of his passengers inside his taxi earlier this year has been arrested after his victim spotted him drinking in a tavern at the weekend, Diepsloot police said. News24.com reported that the 26-year-old woman was allegedly raped in January after she had boarded the man's taxi along Old Pretoria road, Warrant Officer Daniel Mavimbela said.After other occupants of the taxi had disembarked, the 35-year-old driver allegedly drove to a spot near the Lion Park Informal Settlement, which is near Lanseria, and raped the woman."After the incident, the woman escaped by throwing herself out of the taxi while it was in motion," Mavimbela said.The woman spotted the man, almost three months later, in a tavern in Muldersdrift on Saturday night and alerted the police. The man was arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning.He is due to appear in the Randburg Magistrate's Court soon on a rape charge.
News / Local

by Staff Reporter

A RICH diamond belt has been discovered at Mutare Show Grounds and lands overlooking the Murahwa Hills in Chikanga.manica Post reported that the discovery is a confirmation of a recent geographical survey which showed that a rich diamond belt stretched from Mutare down to the Save Valley in the Lowveld.News of the discovery was filtering in Mutare at the time of going to Press and law enforcement agents had been deployed to cordon off the area for fear of a diamond rush due to the area's proximity to Chikanga and Sakubva high-density suburbs.When the news crew visited the area, some excited residents who had heard of the Eureka' were milling around ready to pounce, but law enforcement agent kept a hawk's eye on their movements. There were also reports that members of the Zimbabwe National Army's Headquarters 3 Brigade were put on standby to beef up security in the event that some daring panners trespass to the new diamond fields.Although no official comment could be obtained from officials from the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development in Mutare, illegal panners who had managed to sneak it said the gems they were collecting were similar to those found in Chiadzwa.Manicaland provincial police spokesperson, Inspector Tavhiringwa Kakohwa, could not be reached for comment."This is a rare opportunity which we know will end soon with the deployment of the police. I have to sweat and ensure I get as many pieces as possible. I think my prayers have been answered," said one of the panners who only identified himself as John.Judging with the direction the panners have taken, the belt likely passes through the Zimbabwe National Army 3 Infantry Headquarters.Considering that most law enforcements agents were deployed to Chiadzwa following the closure of the mines, authorities have to mobilize reinforcements to protect the area from the illegal panners.
News / Local

by Tendai Gukutikwa

A METHODIST Church in Zimbabwe reverend who is alleged to have raped a female congregant has denied the charges, saying he never met her on the day in question.Manica Post reported that Gladman Chauya (33) is accused of raping a congregant on January 10, 2015 after he had allegedly lured her to his house.Testifying in court last Tuesday, Chauya alleged that he had spent the said day indoors.He further claimed that he had spent the previous night at an all-night prayer and was tired. He said he had rested that whole day at his home."I did not even have the power to leave the house as I was tired from the all-night prayer that I had attended the previous night. She called me at around 4pm telling me about her painful leg and arm. About 30 minutes later she arrived at my place to collect the medicine that I had. Your Worship, my nephew was with me at the house and he was the one who opened the gate and door for her. I wonder why she would claim that I raped her when I was not even home alone," he claimed.Responding to the recordings that were played in court as evidence, Chauya said he was not a voice expert and therefore could not determine if indeed the two voices that spoke were a female and a male voice.He denied ever calling the complainant persuading to marry her secretly as a way of stopping her from reporting the rape to the police as had been alleged in the call recordings.Chauya went on to tell the court that the rape matter was a fabrication and that the complainant and her witnesses had a plan to ouster him from his position as their reverend since they had at one time promised to deal with him.Chauya appeared before Rusape regional magistrate, Livingstone Chipadza.Representing the man of cloth were Mutare lawyers, Justin Fusire and Mr Innocent Mandikate as Malvern Musarurwa prosecuted.Allegations were that on January 10, 2015, Chauya visited the complainant who was not feeling well at her place of residence and advised her to accompany him to his residence so that his wife would give her medicine to ease the pain."Upon arrival, the complainant discovered that Chauya's wife was not at home. Chauya took the medicine and tried to massage the complainant with it, but she refused and asked for a toilet," said Musarurwa.It is alleged that as the complainant was on her way to the toilet, Chauya dragged her into his bedroom and fondled her breasts and private parts before raping her.The complainant is alleged to have cried for help, but no-one came to her rescue.The court heard that after the rape, Chauya took her back to her house.Musarurwa went on to tell the court that the matter was initially reported to church elders, but was later reported to the police after the elders failed to take any action against Chauya.Chauya was remanded in custody to April 8 for the court's ruling.
News / Local

by Staff Reporter

The government has made a passionate appeal to Zimbabweans, especially women, to shun imports and buy local products as a way of supporting the revival of local industries.The call was made by Industry and Commerce Deputy Minister Chiratidzo Mabuwa while addressing people at the Large City Hall in Bulawayo.Zimbabweans can play a major role in reviving the country's industries by deliberately choosing to buy local products.Mabuwa says consuming imports amounts to exporting jobs to other countries while buying local products creates employment in the country, adding that the cooking oil sector is a success story of buying local."The strategy has worked on the cooking oil and this has promoted the soya and cotton to the cooking oil value chain production with companies such as United Refineries now able to support the country's needs," she said.On the Cold Storage Company (CSC), Mabuwa says her ministry has endorsed its turn-around strategy and is confident if implemented the company will mobilise enough resources to fully revive its operations.Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development Deputy Minister Paddy Zhanda says the CSC has proposed to dispose some of its assets to raise at least US$40 million and recapitalise itself.Most local companies are experiencing challenges in mobilising capital while some of those operating are complaining they are being put out of business by cheap imports some of which are smuggled into the country.
News / Local

by Tatenda Gapare

A BULAWAYO man has been hauled before the courts for allegedly licking his maid's private parts and raping her twice after asking her to accompany him to the shops to buy condoms.The married man raped the maid once without protection before asking her to accompany him to the shops to buy condoms.After buying the condoms he raped her for the second time and licked her private parts.The 38-year-old man from Mpopoma suburb appeared before West Commonage provincial magistrate Mr Abednico Ndebele facing rape charges. He was granted $300 bail and remanded to 4 April for trial. The maid is 21 years old and resides in Cowdray Park.Prosecuting, Mr Mufaro Mageza said on 26 March at around 7pm the maid was left alone in the house by the man's wife."After a few minutes he arrived home without his wife. The maid opened the door for him and returned back to sit on the sofa. He sat next to the woman and started caressing and kissing her. She told him to stop what he was doing but he did not listen so she shifted and sat on another sofa. He followed her again," he said.The court heard that Makhuyana pushed the maid and raped her without protection."After raping her, he asked the maid to accompany him to the shops to buy some condoms but she refused."He went to buy condoms alone and left the maid sitting on the sofa. The girl then told her boyfriend that she had been raped, she did this over a WhatsApp message but the guy advised her to go and report the matter at the police station," said Mr Mufaro.The court heard that after a few minutes the accused returned from the shops with the condoms and dragged the maid to his bedroom."He then removed the maid's skin tight and pants before starting to lick her private parts for a long period of time. After that he wore a condom and had sexual intercourse with her without her consent. After the act, the maid called her sister and informed her that she was coming over to her place the following morning," said Mr Mufaro. The following day, the maid visited her sister who accompanied her to report to the police. She was also referred to Mpilo hospital for medical examination.
News / Local

by Staff Reporter

Flamboyant businessman Wicknell Chivayo has said he is not bothered about people who are envying his wealth he is splashing.The 35-year-old Chivayo said he has been in business since the age of ten."No one can please everyone all the time. My hard hitting posts on social media actually inspires my legion of fans to focus, work hard and enjoy their success."The same people who criticise me are my most avid followers on social media, and I am sure deep down they are motivated by my cash talk."It is alleged that Chivayo was involved in illegal deals but somehow managed to evade the law and is now cleaning up his money. But the businessman denied this, saying that he horned his skills as an entrepreneur at a young age."The untimely death of my father in a tragic car accident in 1990 was a traumatic life changing event. I was 10 at the time, the only son, and overnight I became a father and breadwinner for the family."Through the efforts of well-wishers and close family members, I managed to continue with my education but by the time I was an O' level student, the pressure of poverty was too much so I had no option but to be successful."When life gives you lemons, you have to make lemonade. I immediately became an entrepreneur because my siblings and my mother needed assistance to make ends meet."I was among the pioneers of cell phones and sim-cards trading from a little partitioned office at Ximex mall between 1998 and 2000 with some of my friends."The rest as they say, is history. I managed to navigate the dynamic business environment in Zimbabwe, made a few mistakes along the way, picked myself up and kept improving my footprint in the business environment."Chivayo said his extravagant spending is inspired by his generosity."When I am overwhelmed with joy, my generosity knows no bounds."According to the gospel of St. Luke 'to whomever much is given, of him will much be required; and to whom much was entrusted, of him more will be asked'."Those who know me well will testify that I am generous by nature and as they say charity begins at home. I am giving back to the nation by providing precious memories that will forever live in their hearts."That's why I was overwhelmed with joy to see the warriors in front of their long suffering fans dealing a crushing blow to Swaziland. When I am overwhelmed with joy, my generosity knows no bounds."Chivayo said he is not yet married and does not have any children.
News / National

by Staff Reporter

Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Minister Patrick Zhuwao has said his ministry is moving with speed to create two million jobs countrywide.He said public consultations on the implementation of the National Financial Inclusion Strategy are soon to be held.Each House of Assembly constituency in the country will be allocated $1 million worth of credit to harness its resources.He said there was over $200 million worth of loans from local banks which his ministry has decided should be extended to constituencies to capacitate them to exploit the respective resources that they have and in turn create employment for locals.According to policy measures for banks to comply with the indigenisation and economic empowerment policy, contained in the January monetary policy statement, affected banks are expected to allocate five percent of their total lending towards funding youth programmes.With the total lending capacity for local banks standing at $4,3 billion, $215 million worth of credit will be made available to the 210 constituencies in the country."Our officials will soon go on the ground to meet people and get views on how the strategy can best be implemented. People of Zimbabwe should start engaging our ministry officials now in their districts to give them ideas on how best we can fulfil the objectives of the programme.""We would want to implement the national financial inclusion strategy in a manner that will allow first, the development of bankable projects. The funds must be administered taking into account all the necessary legislative requirements in a manner that will ensure these won't become non-performing loans."The workshop with the RBZ has been postponed to a date we are yet to set because we are still dealing with this directive from Cabinet on compliance to the indigenous law by companies. Once we are done with this issue we will certainly continue with our programme," he said."Each constituency will be eligible to $1 million worth of credit from banks for projects that are based on the resources found in that particular area. Zimbabwe is blessed with diverse resources and each area has its own resources."Some of the resources are lying idle because there is lack of capital to start exploiting them. Now that the funding is there we want to see communities coming up with bankable projects towards exploiting these resources," he said.Zhuwao added: "President Mugabe pledged to create 2,2 million jobs and this is part of efforts to fulfill that commitment. We are looking at companies being created in the various constituencies, companies that will create employment as well as spur development in those respective areas."
News / National

by Thobekile Zhou

President Robert Mugabe has warned that he would soon expel more weevils in Zanu PF who are destroying the party from within.Mugabe (92) said some members have been belittling him."There are people who are not following party procedure, they are coming from the side or from beneath, these weevils we have to fire them from Zanu PF."We cannot desire to have a party member who does not want to follow laid-down procedure and come from behind and destroy the party."There are those who have been belittling us, suing derogatory words against us. Are these people still members of the party" he asked soon after arriving from Japan on Saturday.
News / National

by Staff Reporter

Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa has severely damaged his presidential ambitions by seeking to deny his key role in Gukurahundi atrocities, politician David Coltart has said.According to human rights activists, the Zimbabwe army allegedly killed at least 20 000 innocent civilians.The massacres - commonly referred to as Gukurahundi or "washing away dirt" - have reportedly unsettled the vice-president, who is believed to be harbouring presidential ambitions.Last week, Mnangagwa denied his involvement in the atrocities.In his new book, Coltart published several remarks he says were made by Mnangagwa 33 years ago as head of the Central Intelligence Organisation.Coltart and others interpreted the remarks as a contributory factor in the slaughter of about 20,000 people in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces from 1983 to 1987.Mnangagwa claims he did not make the statements published in Bulawayo's Chronicle newspaper at the time.Said Coltart : "I have no doubt that Vice-President Mnangagwa, in his capacity as the minister in charge of the CIO at the time, played a key role in Gukurahundi."Vice-President Mnangagwa is in an awkward position. He is trying to convey to Zimbabweans and the international community that he is someone worthy of holding presidential office in Zimbabwe. The revelations made in my book, alongside those contained in older publications, affect this goal. Had he said nothing about the revelations contained in my book, some would have assumed that he agreed with what was written."Accordingly, he had no choice but to deny what he is alleged to have said and done in the past. It does appear, however, that he did not anticipate that Chronicle would reveal the source material which confirms that my book accurately reflects what Chronicle reported him saying in 1983".Mnangagwa is tipped to succeed President Robert Mugabe, 92, when he retires or dies.
News / National

by Vusumuzi Dube

EMBATTLED Milton High School head Mr William Ncube and his deputy Mrs Nosizi Muleya are set to be demoted and transferred after a disciplinary hearing instituted by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education recommended that the two leave the Bulawayo school.The two were suspended in October last year after an audit exposed alleged financial rot at the school. They allegedly swindled the institution of more than $10 000 and routinely flouted sound governance procedures.The two's disciplinary hearings were held on 18 January and they were suspended for three months which, however, expired by 25 January resulting in the duo returning to work.However, in an interview on Friday, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry, Dr Sylvia Utete-Masango confirmed that the recommendation was that the two be demoted and transferred from the school. She said they were working with the Civil Service Commission to implement the recommendations since the commission was the employer."That matter is one of my top most priorities currently. I can tell you that already there was a delegation from head office in the city to see to it that the recommendations are implemented. As you might know we are not the employer so what we have done is we have informed the Civil Service Commission and our hope is that by the time schools open for the second term, these two would have been transferred to their new bases."Further as a ministry we had our own structures to exhaust, which explains the period that the completion of the investigation and implementation of the verdict has taken," said Dr Utete-Masango.She said on the ground they had tasked the Bulawayo provincial education director, Mr Dan Moyo to work with officials from CSC to implement the recommendations."We appeal to parents at the school and those affected to be patient but I should assure them that we are on top of the matter," she said.Efforts to get a comment from Mr Moyo were fruitless as his mobile phone went unanswered.Last month it was reported that the embattled headmaster was now allegedly targeting the two teachers  Mr Thokozani Sigola and Mr Lovemore Mangwiro  who allegedly exposed his transgressions by compiling a dossier of the alleged offences which they submitted to the provincial education offices leading to a forensic audit which resulted in Mr Ncube's suspension.It is alleged within a week of being back in office from suspension, Mr Ncube stripped the two of their positions as divisional heads for Forms Three and Upper Sixth respectively and also demoted Mr Sigola from being the Ndebele subject head of department.According to a letter dated 23 October outlining the charges against Mr Ncube and signed by the district education officer, Mrs Jane Ndebele, the ministry charged him with misconduct.Mr Ncube was accused of authorising the construction of a boom gate, guardroom and painting of a classroom at a total cost of $2 912 without holding finance committee meetings or following procurement procedures.He was also alleged to have authorised the installation of blinds and curtains at the school hall at a total cost of $3 245 without following procurement procedures.He was also accused of sending an unreasonable number of people, seven, to collect a kombi in Beitbridge thereby unnecessarily prejudicing the school of $310. The school head was also accused of receiving management incentives of $350 after incentives had been banned.Mr Ncube was further alleged to have also asked for an interest free loan of $2 150 from the SDA account for a chess competition in Durban in November 2014 and re-imbursed the money in February this year although terms and conditions for the loan were not spelt out.The charge sheet shows that Mr Ncube, on top of the loan, also asked for an additional $300 pocket money and $73 for health insurance from the same account to do Nash business which was an unfair charge to the school. Charges against his deputy Mrs Muleya were not clear but sources said she was suspended by Mr Ncube prior to receiving his own suspension letter from the ministry.
News / Religion

by Linda Mzapi

ZIMBABWE has been likened to a pregnant woman who is about to give birth and must first endure pain before bringing something new and significant to the world.In an interview with The Sunday Mail Religion, Apostolic Faith Mission in Zimbabwe general secretary Reverend Amos Madawo said the country's recent economic hardships were the dawn of a new era."Zimbabwe is like a pregnant woman about to give birth, she goes through pain to give birth to something new. God has not rejected or forsaken Zimbabwe, people should keep praying for the Government and our leaders and very soon God will intervene with divine solutions," he said.AFM in Zimbabwe, which celebrated its centenary last year, will soon host its international conference at Rufaro Mission in Masvingo where more than 150 000 people from 30 countries will be present."Member countries which are going to attend are Britain, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi and Swaziland to mention only a few," Rev Madawo said.The celebrations will start at the Harare International Conference Centre from April 18 to 21, and then proceed to Masvingo from April 21 to 24.The celebrations are themed "A missional church in a globalised world" as propounded by the international president, Professor Frank Chikane.The conference is held every three years, the last one being in South Africa in 2013.Prof Chikane and his committee decided on Zimbabwe as the host because of AFM's centennial celebrations here last year which saw thousands of people making their way to Masvingo.Rev Madawo spoke of the church's solid foundation."AFM was laid upon Christ which is a solid foundation not on a person unlike some churches which are personality cults."The church has also a strong history of servant leaders who served the church not with their personal agendas and not serving people's interests" he said.
News / Religion

by Sharon Kavhu

American televangelist, pastor and founder of the non-denominational World Changers Church International, Dr Creflo Dollar, is expected to make his debut visit to Zimbabwe next month.The head of Creflo Dollar Ministerial Association is visiting Zimbabwe at the behest of Heartfelt International Ministries founder Apostle Tavonga Vutabwashe and his wife Pastor Chipo.Dr Dollar, whose prosperity gospel has won him many followers, will headline a single-night session dubbed "Night of Supernatural Advancement" on May 16 at HIM's International Overflow Centre in Ashdown Park, Harare.Dr Dollar  who oversees his ministry with his wife Taffi  has built a multi-million dollar ministry on the message, "It is the will of God for you to prosper in every way".Apostle Vutabwashe's announcement of the intended visit by one of the richest preachers in the world has raised adrenalin among followers."We are hosting Dr Creflo Dollar and his delegation here at IOC in May. How many are excited about this event? Ok, you need not to miss such a great experience, so you have to be here on May 16," said Apostle Vutabwashe at a "Super Sunday" service at HIM's premises in Ashdown Park.Apostle Vutabwashe said he had wished for a partnership with Dr Dollar from the time he was an adolescent."I used to be a subscriber to Dr Dollar's magazines which were distributed internationally. In Zimbabwe they were only given to individuals who would have subscribed. Unfortunately the magazines are no longer available locally."However, I remember back then I used to read them persistently and I also admired the type of dressing that people in the magazines wore. Every time I read the books, I would tell my wife Chipo that, 'when God blesses me, one day I will partner with this great man'," said Apostle Vutabwashe of the man who heads the group formerly called International Covenant Ministries based in College Park, Georgia.He added: "It was only last year when I sent him an invitation and the man of God said he had a very tight schedule so he could not make it to Zimbabwe. Dr Dollar told me that he had several tours in other African countries such as South Africa and he could not make it."Later on, he asked me to send him a write-up on why I really wanted him to come to Zimbabwe and visit Heartfelt. So I sent him the write up and it was so convincing that he ended up changing his schedule to accommodate us and he confirmed his visit in Zimbabwe."Dr Dollar's sermon at IOC will be from 6 to 9pm and themed "2016 is My Year of Supernatural Advancement". His visit to Zimbabwe will be his first visit to Africa this year.Apostle Vutabwashe said: "When God wants to bless and elevate his people he uses a person; thus people in businesses and leaders should take this opportunity seriously. Such opportunities give room for development especially considering the fact that Dr Dollar is a successful man worth millions of dollars."Estimated to have a net worth of US$27 million, Dr Dollar's visit could boost religious tourism in Zimbabwe.His church has nearly 30 000 members with the New York assembly estimated to host over 6 000 worshippers weekly.The auditorium, the World Dome, was built at a cost of US$18 million without any loans. Dr Dollar is the publisher of Change Magazine, which has more than 100 000 readers in the United States alone.The American pastor is also expected to take his tour to South Africa where he will preach at two conferences.In 2014, Dr Dollar visited Nairobi, Kenya for a three-day engagement with the Deliverance Church headed by Bishop Mark Kariuki.
Opinion / Columnist

"Thulani bantwabami ngob'unyoko wabaleka; Musan'ungikhalela selilhuph'amaDlozi; musanukung'khalela selihluph'uJesu."This is an extract from one of the late Vusi Xmba songs. Here is a man who questioned a lot of things like Christianity and despised women and marriage so much he had nothing good to say about both. His collaborator too, Ntombinkulu , also questioned everything western, including culture and Christianity. In some of his songs, he asks how Christianity came to dominate African religions as it has done over the years. He asks also if the stories in the bible are still relevant to our generations, and how come not even one bible chapter was written by a black person or is about a black people in good light.In Zulu culture, anyone who has amadlozi kuthiwa ulobizo, or calling in English. It is the whites that coined phrases like 'he has troublesome spirits' whenever a black person was possessed by amadlozi. And, like the conquered parrots that we are, we just followed, 'uhlutshwa ngama dlozi'. But Ximba here briefly suggests that if amadlozi ehlupha umuntu, then Jesu should also considered in this light because both these are religious beliefs.We used to have so many boys at school ababehlutshwa ngamadlozi. One boy's ancestors stayed with him on the school grounds, for over a week after he had lost a fierce fist fight over a banana with a class mate. Until his parents came to school and did some rituals to appease the spirits and apologize on behalf of weakling. The ancestors went away but would still come and check upon the child once in a while. I understand the boy is now a very good sangoma in his home area in Gwanda. At times a girl would collapse after a race and shout and scream hysterically and speak in tongues until after school. For the whole month, she would stay away until she comes back esegqize ubuhlalu lama ngqongqo lamathambo amagundwane lembankwa la gcigciyane labongcethe. In short, most of those abahlutshwa ngamadlozi show signs of being physically or mentally unhealthy. Until they are sent to thwasa some place else. And they come back to help their communities and beyond.Jesu also had a fair share of boys he troubled. There were many such young souls in the scripture union. These would stare at their small Gideon's Bibles twenty four seven  during lessons, meals, sports, assembly, tests, exams, at night, and at times be heard praying with voices so full of agony and pleading, on the local kopje. The boys were mostly those sleep walkers who saw little hope in anything and no hope in their causes at all.In later years we saw grown up men walking the streets erenkini, ebhoreni, emabhawa, along taxi or fuel or food queues, preaching to everyone there gathered. There was this particular one who had just lost his job at the post office and had taken one pair of his uniform as part of his severance package. He would walk from the main post office via egodini to erenkini, shouting to no one in particular, telling it to the wind that god's mbuso was around the corner. And wayelenhlamba, calling a spade a spade, claiming that for people to leave sin, it must be called by its embarrassing, despicable name.I also had the misfortune of being confronted by one such man in a queue at Cabs. "Uyathandaza ku nkos'ujesu?" I had been in the queue since four in the morning, with no hope of ever getting cash from the bank. The last thing I wanted was for someone to tell me kuzoba right. It was not alright and it wasn't promising to be, as far as I could see. But I didn't have the energy to fight either. 'Abathandazayo babhalisa kuwe?' I teased, pointing at the note book he cuddled jealously to his chest. He did not find this amusing. 'Unkosujesu uthe ngikutshele uthandaze.' He said with chilling finality. Still, I was not fazed "Man! What a lucky man you are. Thina abanye simfuna phansi laphezulu asimtholi. Wena umbonephi?' He walked away in peace. I looked at him and cursed after him for making me blaspheme.Since then, I have seen more people who can be said to be 'troubled by Jesu'. Look at the miracles done in the Church today. See how multitudes are fed with snakes, frogs, grass, and petrol, instead of just fish and bread and wine! All this the pastors do for money  pledge, and it seems the pastors are in competition to make as much money as possible from the all credulous and desperate flock; and, for as long as Christianity can still generate money, this will never stop. They know these are desperate times and most people seek help not 'from the mountain' but from other clever and brave mortals like them.But the Incredible happenings pastor, Mr. Mboro, takes the cake. Most people, including some of his flock, actually think it's not Jesu troubling him; they think he takes the best grade of every illegal drug available on the black market. On Easter, he went to heaven and came back with photographs for proof. Well, no one has seen those photos yet but they are available on the church's face book page and on Whatsapp, so long as one will pledge (a term used to camouflage payment in church) five thousand rands only. For only five thousand rands, one will get to preview heaven and its residents, including may God or Jesu himself. This is the same pastor who will ask for five thousand rands pledges if he prays for you.I usually watch this pastor's TV program. Two come to mind; on the one he was praying for this woman who had a distended abdomen as if she had over grown twins in her tummy. Mboro placed his foot on the woman's big tummy and clutched vigorously as he prayed with eyes opened. He let his foot skid and down the screaming woman's tummy, clutching irregularly all the time, until his foot was settled on the woman's private parts. There it stayed and clutched even more powerfully, with the heel pivoting on the floor for balance. The woman's attempt to wriggle writhe away from the pain and embarrassment was fruitless as her husband and daughter pinned her down in trepidation.Another one was when he spoke to the devil over his cell-phone. 'Yah, wena Satan, ufuna ukungibulala! And the devil answered in Zulu too; 'Yebo, wena uxoshelani ingelosi zami?' 'Ingilosi zakho lezi ngo moyomubi. Zihlukumeza ingane zika Nkulunkulu.' And it went on and on, with the congregation so petrified. Towards the end of the conversation, the devil was calling Mboro the chosen one, the son of God, the Man of Mod, the holly man of Mod and such elite heavenly terms.Now, he has been to heaven and back, practically and literally! I can imagine him taking photos of angels celebrating his triumphal ascension into heaven  flapping wings, ululating, singing, shouting, whistling blowing vuvuzelas, and singing their tonsil swollen. I can see him taking boastful selfies with the angels, or Jesu or God himself. I can see him walking around his room, next to Moses' one. I can see him pompously inspecting the golden streets and gates and chatting to the guards nodding at the domestics and shepherds and flicking his long fingers at admiring dogs. I can see him viewing the New Jerusalem from above, or visiting his permanently departed congregants, relatives and friends. I can see him taking the picture of the distraught devil on the other side of the boundary, fueling the Hades and frying his followers and drooling at the prospect of fried sinners' meat.But then he wasn't there for long. He might just have had time to receive new instructions or road map and energizers from God or Jesu. For, so much has changed in the past two thousand years and one expects that heaven has moved with times too. Meanwhile, those who have been wondering how umz'ozayo looks like, here is your chance to have a glimpse of it before you depart. A workmate says Mboro says his 'Last Seen" on Whatsapp reads, 'Heaven'. However, he says he himself will only see heaven proper, not these fake pictures, when he gets there, for free! Ngiyabonga mina!
TEMPE, Ariz.Eric Paul Leue made the most of his platform at The Phoenix Forum, summarizing the direction of the Free Speech Coalition in no uncertain terms.

As an industry I want us to play offense, not defense, Leue said Saturday during a seminar titled 2016: Make or Break of the Adult Industry at the Tempe Mission Palms.

Wearing a white shirt and black tie on a warm afternoon in the desert, the new FSC executive director gave an overview of several pressing matters facing the adult industry as the three-day conference neared its conclusion.

We want to be directing the wave rather than being crushed by it, added Leue, who took the reins of the FSC on Feb. 1.

He was joined on the panel by attorneys Karen Tynan and Corey Silverstein, who along with Leue conveyed their passion about helping the adult industry overcome its ongoing challenges through diligent activism.

Among those challenges are various health policy issues, data privacy concerns and censorship battles.

Leue noted that FSC recently joined the National Coalition Against Censorship and is now one of 56 organizations representing the artistic, educational, religious and labor communities that all share the same interest of protecting First Amendment rights.

The former director of sexual health and advocacy for Kink.com stepped into the job previously held by Diane Duke on Feb. 1, but he was far from a newbie on the lobbying scene. Leue had been a fixture at Cal-OSHA hearings, legislative events, rallies and producer meetings during the past two years, working closely with Duke, whom he lauded for her service.

The Detroit-based Silverstein noted that FSC, the non-profit industry trade group in its 25th year, has withstood the test of time.

He urged audience members and everyone in the industry to become members of the FSCannual dues are tax deductible as a business expenseand to get involved.

Silverstein called Tynan an employment law warrior who does a lot of pro bono work for FSC in the areas of regulatory compliance. She estimated 60-70 percent of her work is adult-oriented, while she also has clients in the construction and winery industries.

The panel brought up the importance of preparing for potential visits from Cal-OSHA inspectors looking for areas of non-compliance.

Its a bad idea to ignore Cal-OSHA. Its a bad idea to give Cal-OSHA the finger, Tynan said, suggesting producers retain an attorney and keep a letter from that attorney easily accessible should a visit ever come about. Be prepared. Be nice

If you get a call from Cal-OSHA let us know, Leue added. Let us help. Let us guide you through the process.

On Feb. 18, Leue led an adult industry contingent to Oakland, Calif., where the states Occupational Safety & Health Standards Board voted against proposed new rules for adult film production. The proposed regulation known as  5193.1 would have mandated condom use in sex scenes as well as barrier protection such as goggles and dental dams to protect against potential infection, which could have been devastating to the future of adult productions in California.

The vote marked a huge victory for adult in a six-year fight, but doesnt mean it will never come up again. Tynan likened the breakthrough to kicking the can down the road.

Meanwhile, Silverstein pointed to the privacy policies on websites being a target for the Federal Trade Commission.

If you misrepresent things in your privacy policies they can be criminal offenses, Silverstein said.

The panel also discussed FSCs announcement Friday that it is forming several industry sector-specific committees to monitor, address and recommend action on multiple issues, including retail zoning laws, lubricant manufacture, piracy, counterfeit products, and adult film regulation.

The day started with a presentation by Joey Gabra, the managing director of Affil4you, and the CEO Laurent Baquiast, about their new optimization tool, Khepri.

We decided some time ago that we needed a better way to optimize, a better way to A/B test and we took it upon ourself to get out there to see what options we had, Gabra explained. We needed something that was a bit more state-of-the-art in terms of algorithms and used with tools that are on the market today, those algorithms were not state-of-the-art.

We consider ourselves more of a performance network and that relies on so many different variables of performance that were beyond the capabilities of the majority of the programs and tools that are out there today. So with Khepri, we fixed it.

Designed by Baquiast to help companies make better decisions with data, Khepri originally was meant for in-house use but the company decided to share it with the world. Gabra said hed even arrange for companies to try out Khepri at no charge.

It can apply to every single company here, every business. We encourage everyone to try it, challenge it, Gabra said.

But the last day was mostly about leisure and social activities, such as Beer Pong by the Pool and a Wet Underwear Contest hosted by Flirt4Free and Mr. Skin/Mr. Man; the return of JuicyDodgeBall, which featured all-girl teams repping JuicyAds and Affil4you squaring off in a friendly game that involved public nudity; and the closing party, "Casino Secrets," presented by ImLive and CCBill.

For additional coverage of TPF, click here.
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The China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) on Saturday called on tourists to show good manners at attractions nationwide during the three-day break for Tomb-sweeping Day on Monday.

The CNTA asked tourists to behave themselves in order to make tourism "civilized, safe, green and harmonious."

The administration also urged its local branches to properly address tourist complaints, saying that it will make public typical cases after the holiday.

Citizens can choose to provide tips on violations of relevant rules or laws via the "12301" hotline or other platforms.

China's booming domestic tourism market saw over 4 billion trips in 2015, generating tourism revenue of more than 4 trillion yuan (about 620 billion U.S. dollars).
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The two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were consistent with parts on a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, hence almost certainly were from the missing flight MH370, Malaysian officials said Thursday.

The MH370 investigation team found that "the dimensions, materials and construction of both parts conform to the specifications of a Boeing 777 aircraft," the same model as flight MH370, said Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai.

"The paint and stenciling on both parts match those used by Malaysia Airlines (MAS)," Liow said in a statement.

"As such, both parts are consistent with panels form a MAS Boeing 777 aircraft, and almost certainly are from MH370," he said, echoing an earlier announcement by his Australian counterpart Darren Chester.

The examination and analysis by the international team, as well as the experts from Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the Department of Civil Aviation Malaysia and Boeing, was completed in Canberra on Wednesday.

Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, most of them being Chinese nationals. A joint search in southern Indian Ocean, where the flight presumably had ended its journey, has yet to found its wreckage.
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City lights turn blue to mark the World Autism Awareness Day in Moscow, Russia, on April 2, 2016. (Xinhua/Evgeny Sinitsyn)

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday stressed "equal participation and active involvement" of those with autism, saying it is "essential for achieving the inclusive societies."

In his message to mark World Autism Awareness Day, Ban said autism is a lifelong condition that affects millions of people worldwide.

"It (autism) is not well-understood in many countries, and too many societies shun people with autism," he said, adding "This is a violation of human rights and a waste of human potential."

While people with autism naturally have a wide range of abilities and different areas of interest, he said, they all share the capacity for making our world a better place.

Underlining that the transition to adulthood by persons with autism is especially sensitive, Ban called for "societies to invest more funds in enabling young persons with autism to be part of their generation's historic push for progress."

The UN chief also called for advancing the rights of individuals with autism and ensuring their full participation and inclusion as valued members of our diverse human family who can contribute to a future of dignity and opportunity for all.

On Friday, the UN General Assembly held a special event called "Autism and the 2030 Agenda: Inclusion and Neurodiversity." This year also marks the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
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A day after an Indian court ordered women have rights to freely enter temples in the western state of Maharashtra, villagers and a temple committee Saturday prevented a group of women activists from entering a Hindu shrine.

The protesters including women defied the Bombay high court order in a bid to uphold their centuries-old tradition.

More than two dozens of activists of Bhumata Ranragini Brigade (Women Warriors of Mother Earth) led by Trupti Desai were stopped by locals and temple committee officials from entering the inner sanctum of Shani Shingnapur temple in the state's Ahmednagar district.

Villagers at Shingnapur and the temple committee said they would challenge the high court order in the Supreme Court of India.

"The role of police is in contravention to yesterday's court order," visibly upset Desai told media. "Instead of giving us protection and ensuring our entry inside the temple, they are taking us away."

The activists were detained by police and taken out of the temple premises.

On Friday the court directed the Maharashtra government to ensure women were allowed to enter and pray inside the temple.

The court's directive came in a public interest litigation filed by Desai to challenge the "gender inequality" in temples.

The police said they whisked away activists to avoid a possible clash between the two sides at the temple.

Analysts said the activists were testing whether the local government would really implement Friday's court order.

Earlier this year, hundreds of women in the state led by Desai were stopped by police from marching to a temple in a bid to end gender discrimination at places of worship.

Last year, a woman breaching age-old practice offered prayers in defiance at the temple. The temple committee later suspended seven security men for the breach and gathered villagers to perform purification rituals.

Several temples in India have put restrictions on the entry of women.
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Russia expressed grave concern on Saturday over the recent military conflict along the Azerbaijan-Armenia border, calling on all parties involved to stop fighting and exercise restrains.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Saturday held talks with the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, said Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry.

She said that Russia would maintain constant contact with Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Meanwhile, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also held emergency phone talks with his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts, according to the Russian Defense Ministry said.

Earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged both conflicting parties to cease fire immediately and exercise restraint.

Heavy fighting broke out on Saturday between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Azerbaijan claimed that 12 Azerbaijani soldiers were killed and a helicopter downed by the Armenian forces.

Each side blamed the other for the escalation, the worst since 1994.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a bitter dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh seized by Armenia-backed forces from Azerbaijan in 1991. Peace talks have been held since 1994 when a cease-fire agreement was reached.

Small clashes have been reported recently between the two ex-Soviet republics along their border and across Karabakh's volatile front line.
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Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester confirmed on Sunday that another piece of debris, found in Mauritius, will be examined in connection to the disappearance of MH370.

In a statement released on Sunday, Chester said the Malaysian government is working with officials from Mauritius "to seek to take custody of the debris and arrange for its examination."

"This debris is an item of interest. However, until the debris has been examined by experts, it is not possible to ascertain its origin."

He did not mention whether or when the debris of doubt would be sent to Australia for examination.

Since the beginning of the year, a number of debris pieces were found along the western coast of the African continent, including along the coasts in Mozambique and South Africa.

Experts in Australia had confirmed that the two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were "consistent" with panels from a Boeing 777 jetliner therefore are "almost certainly" from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Last year, a flaperon washed up on a beach on La Reunion in Africa has also been confirmed to be from the aircraft.

"That such debris has been found on the east coast of Africa is consistent with drift modelling performed by CSIRO (the Commonwealth of Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) and further affirms our search efforts in the southern Indian Ocean," Chester said last month when talking about the two Mozambique pieces.

The governments of Malaysia, Australia and China have been conducting a joint search operation in the southern Indian Ocean, where the flight presumably had ended its journey.

So far, more than 95,000 square km of the 120,000 square km search zone have been completed.

"As we continue the search in the days and months ahead, we remain hopeful the aircraft will be found," Chester said.

Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 enroute from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board, most of them being Chinese nationals.
Lori McIlquham of Chippewa Falls is still on the fence about who shes going to vote for in Tuesdays primary, but her granddaughter  though not yet able to vote  is not.

So when 17-year-old Julia Baxter asked McIlquham to take her to the Hillary Clinton rally Saturday at The Lismore in Eau Claire, she had to say yes. What better way to make an informed decision than to hear a candidate in person?

A lot of young kids arent interested in politics, or they lean on what theyre parents believe in, McIlquham said. You just need to get out and hear it for yourself.

She was more than willing to give her granddaughter that chance, and they both cheerfully stood in line on a chilly Saturday morning.

Baxter said she supports Clinton because, like her, Clinton supports Planned Parenthood. She also thinks it would be inspiring to see a woman as president.

McIlquham said shes proud of her granddaughter and was glad they had the opportunity to hear Clinton in person.

Im curious, it might help me sway one way or the other, she said.

She wasnt the only one in line on the fence. Jason and Theresa Curtis of Eau Claire wanted to take advantage of seeing two of the three candidates in Eau Claire on the same day, hoping hearing them in person would help them decide.

You never know what theyre going to say in front of you for 45 minutes, Jason Curtis said. You see bits and pieces here and there.

Theresa Curtis said she felt the same way, and she hoped to be inspired.

I want her to convince me to vote for her, she said.

After Clinton, they said they were heading over to the Donald Trump rally at Eau Claire Memorial High School to see the other side of things.

The entertaining businessman draws his own unique crowd, but they wanted to take advantage of his visit.

You kind of want to hear what he has to say too, Jason Curtis said. He brings a lot of grief but he has a lot of good things to say as well. You never know what to expect.

For others in line, their decision has been set in stone long before the candidates planes landed in Eau Claire.

Nancy Wesenberg of Eau Claire said shes been a long-time supporter of Clinton, and thinks her experience in politics, especially foreign policy, gives her a clear lead over other candidates.

People forget she was fighting for childrens rights and peoples rights long before she was in the political arena, Wesenberg said. I wanted to be here to show support and show her there are people behind her.

After a slight delay due to wind and the large crowd  they filled an overflow room and still had to turn some supporters away  Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) introduced Clinton as a clear supporter for everything Wisconsin stands for  unmatched natural resources, economic growth and the importance of K-12 and higher education.

As the only state with a primary on Tuesday, Baldwin reminded the several hundred supporters how important this moment is for Wisconsin.

It is time, folks, it is time. The whole country, the whole world, is going to be watching Wisconsin, Baldwin said. We would have no better ally in the White House as we rebuild and reverse some of the damage thats been done than Hillary.

Clinton spoke in depth of her plans to create more jobs by investing in the countrys infrastructure and supporting small businesses. She suggested changing the tax code for businesses to create incentives for bringing jobs back into the country and penalizing companies who export them, investing in renewable energy resources as opposed to fossil fuels and creating a more eco-friendly country complete with solar-powered homes.

These things combined will help bring more jobs back to the U.S., especially small businesses and entrepreneurs, which are a huge portion of the job force. She also plans to fight for womens equal pay, based on not some kind of special favor, but on fundamental fairness.

Of course, this requires money. She laid out a plan for finding this money, which she said starts with taxing the wealthy.

Its time they pay for their share of supporting our economy, which theyve benefited so greatly from, she said.

Another major goal is to focus on education, starting at the preschool level up to making college more affordable.

Both Sen. (Bernie) Sanders and I share this goal, Clinton said. I believe what I have proposed for debt-free tuition is more feasible, more realistic.

She will work for making it more affordable for the working, middle and lower classes by offering incentives for free college. In exchange, to help keep those costs down, she asks they work at least 10 hours per week while in school.

I want to give any kid willing to work for it the chance to go as far as he or she can in their education, she said.

Finally, she talked of her plans to defend the Affordable Care Act, making it more affordable, defending womens reproductive rights, those of minorities, unions and voting rights, as well as enforcing comprehensive gun safety measures to ensure all Americans buying weapons undergo a comprehensive background check and making gun sellers liable.

She also talked about her specific plan to keep America safe in the fight against terrorism, especially ISIS, by working with security advisers, and her hope to unify the country once again.

I would be deeply honored to earn your support and I promise you I will be there for you, Clinton said. Folks have called me a lot of things, but never a quitter, and if I tell you Ill fight for you, stand with you, work with you, thats exactly what Ill do if you give me the chance.
23 May 2022

- Understand the French healthcare system, how you access it and how you are reimbursed - Useful if you are new to the French healthcare system or want a more in-depth understanding - Reader question and answer section Aimed at non-French nationals living here, the guide gives an overview of what you are (and are not) covered for. There is also information for second-home owners and regular visitors.
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The Nick Layton Foundation, named in honor of the late Nick Layton from Bismarck, is again offering a scholarship to a graduating senior at Bismarck High School this May.

In order to be eligible for this scholarship students are identified and nominated by their teachers who exhibit high academic performance, have all-around leadership qualities for future employment, and are entering into the construction or engineering field through junior college, university or vocational school. These criteria match that of the Layton, graduating valedictorian of his class in 1996 and going on to college for a career in the construction field as a journeyman carpenter and pipefitter.

The 2016 scholarship marks the 5th annual presentation at Bismarck High. Counselor Lindsey Taylor, stated, The Nick Layton Memorial Scholarship is a scholarship our seniors have depended on for a few years now. The Nick Layton Memorial Scholarship has gone towards students going in to the construction field. It is great to see community members support our seniors.

Past scholarship recipients are 2012: Alex Kuttin who went to Linn Technical College to be a heavy equipment operator; 2013: Wyatt Boyer who graduated valedictorian of his class and went on to study to be an engineer; 2014: Robert Renshaw who went to MAC for an associates degree in construction with a GPA of 3.65; and 2015: Jordan Freeman went to Linn Tech for Industrial Electricity.

In order to provide these scholarships to such deserving students, the Nick Layton Foundation turns to fundraising throughout the year. This year they are excited to announce the second annual 2016 Miss Springtime Pageant as a fundraising event for this scholarship. This pageant is a great way for young girls ages 1-12 to gain confidence in front of others and make a lot of new friends!

This is a natural pageant (meaning no make-up and no glitz dresses). The categories are: Teeny Miss (1-3 years), Tiny Miss (4-6 years), Little Miss (7-9 years) and Junior Miss (10-12 years). The contestants will compete in a springtime casual wear competition and a formal wear competition for a cost of $55. Each age division will have one runner up and one queen, the rest will be crowned princesses so that all contestants will receive a crown on stage. Additional side awards available at an additional cost include Most Photogenic, Best Smile, Best Springtime Wear, and Best Hair. This year we are happy to add three ultimate supreme queen titles as well to the three highest scored individuals.

The pageant will be held at Bismarck High School on April 23 at 6:30 p.m. Registration is open until April 18 and no late registrations will be accepted. You can register online at www.eventbrite.com and search for 2016 Miss Springtime Pageant.

Event organizer and president of the Nick Layton Foundation, Shelley Layton, states, I am so excited to be able to offer this pageant a second time to this wonderful community and, more importantly, be able to raise money for a scholarship that allows an aspiring student of Bismarck High School see his/her dream of college come true in memory of my late husband.

Find out more about the 2016 Miss Springtime Pageant by visiting their Facebook page or emailing Shelley Layton directly at: slayton188@gmail.com.
A Park Hills man recalls the special bond between two men killed in the Korean War and how their ultimate sacrifice became a lesson in living a life of bravery and honor.

I never knew Don, said Mark Bunch, holding an old photo of his uncle, Donald M. Thornton, in his hands. I was born in 1954. I would be running through Grandmas and Grandpas house and I would see two pictures of men in uniforms and I would ask who are these guys? Thats your Uncle Don and your Uncle Gene, I was always told.

While Bunch admits that Eugene Gene Paul Welker was not technically an uncle, he was engaged to marry his Aunt Nellie  the third of Dons four sisters  when he died at the age of 23 in North Korea on Feb. 15, 1952.

Nellie lost her only living brother and her fiance before she turned 20, Bunch said. Gene lived across the street from the Thornton family home in Leadwood for years. His father had died when Gene was young, making him the man of the house, as well.

Don and Gene attended the same church  Leadwoods First Church of God  and sang in a popular gospel quartet called the Gospel Melody Boys that performed at singing conventions and had a weekly radio program on KFMO until both men were eventually shipped out to Korea.

Don joined the Army in 1945 while a senior in high school, Bunch said. He was only 17 years of age, so his parents had to sign for him. He studied engineering and drafting and surveying while in the Army and graduated from the Armys Specialized Training Program at the University of Wyoming. After nearly two years of service during World War II, he was released from active duty, but chose to stay in the Army Reserves.

In April 1947, Don returned home and went to work as an engineer for the St. Joe Lead Company in Bonne Terre. He was called back into active duty on Nov. 10, 1950, after hostilities in Korea had flared up in the spring.

On Jan. 17, 1951, Don sent home a telegram from Tokyo, Japan saying All well and safe. Wish I could be with you. Love to all the family. Don, Bunch said. That was the last they ever heard from him.

The Thornton family received a telegram the following month informing them that their son had been killed in action in Korea on Jan. 29  less than 10 days after he had contacted them from Tokyo.

Don was sent to Korea in the worst of times, arriving at the front lines on Jan. 25, 1951, Bunch said. Half-a-million Chinese had crossed the North Korean border in December 1950, and were marching south to join with 150,000 North Koreans.

By late December, the outnumbered U.N. forces  85 percent of whom were Americans  were told to retreat as quickly as possible, fearing annihilation. In what was called Operation Round-Up, the 8th Army, 24th Infantry and the 23rd Infantry, 2nd Infantry, which was Dons unit for only four short days, headed for the Han River in the southwestern part of South Korea.

They crossed it, set up camp and waited, Bunch said. They had retreated so fast that they had outdistanced their pursuing enemy armies. The weather was horrible  zero degrees during the day, falling to 30 degrees below zero at night in the windy, hilly terrain.

Don was one of about 45 men sent out Jan. 29 on a motorized feeler patrol, heading northward to find the enemy when Chinese forces spotted the men 15 miles into enemy territory. From high ground the Chinese fired down on them.

According to U.S. Army General Order 119, this is what happened next  PFC Donald M. Thornton displayed gallantry in action against an armed enemy on 29 January 1951 in the vicinity of Chipyong-ni, Korea. The patrol was ambushed by a large enemy force and, subjected to intense fire from commanding ground, was compelled to abandon vehicles and withdraw to high ground.

Private Thornton, fully exposed to withering enemy fire, remained behind manning a.50 caliber machine gun mounted on a vehicle. Fearlessly engaging the attacking enemy he kept them pinned down while the patrol, under his screen of fire, maneuvered to high ground and formed a defensive perimeter. His machine gun was destroyed by a direct hit.

He then made his way toward the patrol, engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand combat, killing at least two of them. Before he reached the perimeter he was struck by enemy grenade fire and fell mortally wounded.

Don, like his friend Gene who was killed in battle just a little over a year later, was only 23 years old.

Dons family was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action, along with the Purple Heart at the family home Feb. 8, 1952  but there was at least one man who was in that same battle who believed that the young soldiers actions were deserving of a higher commendation.

Following Dons funeral, Bunch said his grandparents received a handwritten letter from a man who identified himself as Sgt. Baisden.

The sergeant said in the letter that what Don did was the bravest act he had ever witnessed while in combat, Bunch said. According to the sergeant, he was told by his superiors that since he was so young  barely 21 years old  and at that time had seen little action, that if he turned Don in for a higher medal he would most likely be turned down and that it could possibly jeopardize Dons family from receiving any medal at all. So, he instead turned Don in for the Silver Star. Later on, however, after being in a lot of combat he regretted not doing what he had originally wanted to do.

It was in August 2014 that Bunch contacted State Rep. Elaine Gannon, R-115 District, and told her of his desire that his Uncle Don be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in lieu of the Silver Star, as well as receive the Medal of Honor. While Gannon served on the Veterans Committee, she admitted that she was unsure of how this could be done, but promised to look into it. Several weeks later the representative contacted Bunch telling him it was a federal issue and put him in contact with U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, R-8th District.

In mid-December 2014, Bunch was contacted by Smiths office manager, Donna Hickman, who passed along a letter from Lt. Col. Wil B. Smith who said that new and substantive information would have to be furnished, along with eyewitness accounts and signed testimonies by those involved.

This action took place 62 years ago! Bunch said. How would you find anyone alive to talk to? Don was there only four days  who would have known him? Only Sgt. Baisden would, if by chance he was still living.

With the assistance of high school friend Don Kernan  a Vietnam veteran and a member of Bismarcks VFW Post 6947  along with Post Commander Joseph Cerchi, a letter was sent to Congressman Smith on behalf of the familys request. Meanwhile, after performing extensive research on the Internet, Bunch learned that Sgt. Lewis Baisden had died suddenly on Oct. 10, 2010, at the age of 80 years old. Bunch contacted Baisdens widow and sister, but was unable to glean any information he could use to verify his uncles story. Sending what information he had gathered back to Lt. Col. Smith, Bunch hoped for the best. Unfortunately, in April of last year the familys request was once again denied.

Several people encouraged Bunch to contact Brig. Gen. Glen VanHerck, formerly of Bismarck, to see if he could offer any assistance. It was suggested that Bunch contact U.S. Sen. Blunts office. Once again he hit a dead end. Without proof and documentation there was nothing the senator could do.

While Bunch is disappointed that it appears hes reached a dead end in his quest to honor his uncle, he said his research has only increased his respect for the ultimate sacrifice made by both his Uncle Don and Uncle Gene.

Gene was killed in North Korea by a mortar shell or artillery round as the outnumbered U.N. forces regained all the ground they had lost in December of 1950, and then some, he said. I have been told that since Gene was killed in North Korea, the U.S. Government will not release any information about how far they had gotten into enemy territory. His family was awarded the 'Purple Heart' and the 'Bronze Star' for combat.

It was many years after I noticed those pictures of Don and Gene in their uniforms that I understood what it meant to lose two young men from the same street, the same family, the same church and the same small town where both of their fiancees lived, Bunch said. Im sure that doesnt happen every day.
Kerrville, TX (78028)

Today

Cloudy early with partial sunshine expected late. High near 85F. Winds S at 15 to 25 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early. Scattered thunderstorms developing later at night. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
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New Delhi: Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) will be able to invest an additional Rs 14,000 crore from tomorrow in various government securities, including those of the states. The cap has been now raised to Rs 2,00,500 crore from the current Rs 1,86,500 crore.

The limits would be enhanced further by another Rs 13,500 crore from July 5 onwards. This follows decisions by RBI and Sebi late last month to allow greater foreign fund flows into the government securities, which are generally favoured by FPIs over the corporate bonds in India.

FPIs can invest up to Rs 1,40,000 crore in central government debt from Rs 1,35,400 crore now, limits for long term FPIs (sovereign wealth funds, multilateral agencies, insurance funds, pension funds and foreign central banks) will be increased to Rs 50,000 crore from the existing Rs 44,100 crore. They can also invest up to Rs 10,500 crore in state development loans from current amount of Rs 7,000 crore.

The incremental limit of Rs 5,900 crore for Long Term FPIs will be available for investment on tap with effect from April 4, while the separate additional limit of Rs 3,500 crore for State Development Loans (SDL) will also be available on tap. Any limit remaining unutilised by the long-term investors at the end of a half-year would be made available as additional limit to the investors in the open category for the following half-year.

Earlier, the limit for overseas investors in securities was hiked to Rs 1,29,900 crore from October 12 last year, and it was further increased to Rs 1,35,400 crore from January 1, 2016. Prior to the October limit, they were allowed to invest up to Rs 1,24,432 crore in government debt securities through auction.
Riyadh: Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended a round table conference with top business leaders at the Saudi Chambers of Commerce in Riyadh on Sunday.

The conference was attended by around 30 top-notch Saudi CEOs and Indian business leaders, along with Saudi minister of commerce and industry Tawfiq bin Fawzan Al Rabiah.

Also Read: Saudi Arabia visit: Modi visits TCS' all-women IT centre in Riyadh

Speaking at the event, Prime Minister Modi said his government has taken several policy initiatives to spur growth and progress in India, and assured the business leaders that Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill would be passed soon.

"GST will happen. Retrospective tax is a matter of the past," he said.

In a bid to woo the investors, Prime Minister Modi said that India's thriving economy and availability of skilled workforce can help the businesses gain a competitive edge in the global market.

"India's health sector which is globally extremely cost competitive can emerge as a bright spot in health tourism...Indian nurses, present in large numbers in the Gulf, are a testament to our well trained man power...In a sector driven by tech changes, India's low cost tech devices have gained global renown," he said.

Further describing the meeting as an 'important' one, he said that 3Ds - Demographic dividend, Demand and Democracy - set Indian economic scenario apart from the rest of the world.

"From Petroleum to renewable energy, infrastructure, defence and agriculture, there is a tremendous opportunity for expanding our cooperation... India and Saudi Arabia should look at working together for building a dynamic global management sector for the cyber world," he said

Concluding his speech, the Prime Minister said, "India and Saudi Arabia are old friends and we are ready to take bold new steps into a golden future."

The Prime Minster is on a two-day official visit to Saudi Arabia. He will be meeting Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud's son, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who many feel could be the future monarch, later on April 3.

Modi will also be accorded a ceremonial reception at the Royal Palace where a Luncheon will also be held in his honour later on Sunday.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the Stand up India scheme on Tuesday to promote entrepreneurship among scheduled caste/schedule tribe and women. Under the scheme SC/ST and women entrepreneur will be provided loans between Rs 10 lakh to Rs 1 crore. It is expected to benefit large number of such entrepreneurs, as it is intended to facilitate at least two such projects per bank branch on an average one for each category of entrepreneur.

The overall intent of the proposal is to leverage the institutional credit structure to reach out to these underserved sectors of the population by facilitating bank loans in the non-farm sector set up by such SC, ST and women borrowers. The initiative will also develop synergies with ongoing schemes of other departments. The process would be led by Sidbi with involvement of DICCI and other institutions across the country.
New Delhi: Traders body CAIT has strongly criticised Chinas move to block Indias bid at United Nations for a ban on Jaish-e-Mohamed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar and threatened to boycott products from the neighbouring nation. The body said that it has taken a strong exception to the behaviour of China, which supported Pakistan openly. We dont see how would China make up for its stand and continue to work on bilateral talks to promote stability within the region, it added.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) at its Governing Council meeting held on Saturday decided to boycott Chinese made goods with immediate effect and this decision will be ratified at the National Traders Conclave, to be held from April 4 to April 6, 2016. CAIT would strongly agitate against Chinese goods and pledge to burn holy of Chinese goods made in China, the bodys national president B.C. Bhartia and secretary-general Praveen Khandelwal said in a joint statement.

On Thursday, China had requested United Nations committee, which is considering a ban on Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, to keep on hold the designation. After the terror attack on Pathankot airbase on January 2, India in February wrote to the UN calling for immediate action to list Azhar under the Al-Qaeda Sanctions committee.

Small merchandise makes up a significant part of Chinese imports. If the trade bodys materialises, it could significantly impact the Chinese imports to India.

According to an estimate, China imports China's exports to India amounted to $61.5 billion worth goods to India  the 15.8 per cent of the countrys overall imp-orts. Electronic items , especially mobile phones and computers, etc, make up a significant part of it at $19.3 billion.

It is followed by mach-inery at $10.6 billion, organic chemicals $6.2 billion, fertilizers: $3.5 billion, iron and steel: $2.4 billion, plastics: $1.6 billion, medical equipment $1.3 billion, etc.
A day after model-actor Pratyusha Banerjee of television series Balika Vadhu fame was found dead in her house, her boyfriend, Rahul Raj Singh, was detained by the Bangur Nagar police at around 5 pm. He was let off at the time of going to press.

Speaking to The Asian Age, Rahuls father Harshavardhan Singh alias Pandit Singh, who came from Ranchi after learning that Pratyusha had died, said that around two months ago when the family was celebrating the birth of Rahul's younger brothers daughter, Rahul and Pratyusha visited the family. Rahul introduced her to our family. Later, we matched their kundalis and gave a go-ahead for their marriage, said Mr Singh.

Rahuls father also asked Pratyusha why she had come by herself and not with her parents to talk about their marriage plans. She said that her parents had taken away her money and that she was not going to inform them for the time being, said Mr Singh. He added that Rahul was helping her financially and was in deep trauma since her death.

Immediately after the actress post-mortem on Saturday, Bangur Nagar police detained Rahul for questioning while also recording statements of Pratyushas mother, father and other relatives. According to police sources, as many as seven statements were recorded. Pratyushas parents did not say anything against Rahul, and refused any possibility of foul play in their daughters death.

Also read: Police questions Pratyushas boyfriend, says too early to ascertain cause of death

A police source, on condition of anonymity, told The Asian Age that Pratyushas HP samples were sent to JJ Hospital while her viscera and other samples were sent to FSL, Kalina, for testing. There were no injuries or wounds on her; we just found ligature marks on both sides of her neck, the source said, adding that the actress had a tattoo on her back with Rahuls name inscribed.

According to police sources, provisional cause of the actress death is asphyxia as indicated by the ligature marks on her neck, but the final cause of her death will be known only after getting all test reports. A senior police officer told this newspaper that no financial transaction papers were found. We are trying to find out the reason why she took such an extreme step, he said.

Rahuls lawyer, Niraj Gupta, said, I had a word with Rahul and he is innocent. He never had any big fight with Pratyusha, so he should not be declared the culprit. Let the police investigate and see if any evidence is found against Rahul. He has nothing to do with Pratyushas suicide.

Pratyusha suicide: Police probing domestic violence angle, friends grilled

While Pratyushas parents did not make any allegations against Rahul in their statement to the police, neighbours and friends of the couple said they used to have regular fights. When this newspaper visited the couples housing society, her neighbour and television actor Anuj Sachdev said, At about 12pm when I was standing next to her flat, waiting for the lift, I heard her crying. However, as I am not very familiar with her, I felt it was not right to interfere in their personal matter. I dont know about any fight but they never looked like a happy couple. Other residents said that the couple used to fight often and just two days ago, they had a big fight when Rahul banged Pratyushas head on the mirror. Earlier, about two months ago, the couple had one of their worst fights when Rahuls ex-girlfriend barged into their house. Sources told this newspaper that even the society guards knew about the couples fights that often inconvenienced other residents to the extent that the society secretary had directed the landlord to order the couple to vacate the house. One of the security guards, requesting anonymity, said that Pratyusha used to often appear upset while Rahul appeared angry..

At the time of Pratyushas autopsy, Rahul told the media, We never had any serious fight. We were happy and planning to get married soon. I used to love her so much and I don't know why she took such a step. She was upset about her career but I tried to calm her down every time. This time too, I tried to save her but in vain

Pratyusha Banerjee death: It's not suicide but a planned murder, claims Ajaz Khan

Recalling the chain of events, a police official told this newspaper that Rahul first stepped out of the couples house at around 1.30pm on Friday and returned at about 2pm. Upon knocking on the door of the house, Pratyusha did not open it. A worried Rahul stepped out again to get a duplicate key maker and re-entered the building at 2.30pm along with the chabi-wallah who then made the duplicate key but did not succeed in opening the door. In the meantime, a cook of the neighbouring flat reached there and told Rahul that he would enter the couples house from behind. Upon entering their house, the cook found Pratyusha hanging. In his statement to the police, the cook said that when Rahul tried to pull down Pratyusha, he failed, after which, he took the chabi-wallahs help to cut the rope from which she was hanging.

Later, when the police entered the couples house, they found liquor bottles, cigarette stains on the couch, food packets and two mobiles  one black and one white. Meanwhile, another source said that Pratyusha used to drink a lot and Rahul was upset about it which led to repeated fights between them. It is learnt that Rahul was a divorcee but Pratyusha never had any problem with that.

Asked why Rahul has been detained, a police official said that he ran away after taking Pratyusha to the hospital and on the advice of his lawyer kept his phone switched off.
When television actors received messages enquiring about Pratyusha Banerjees rumoured demise on April 1, most of them thought or hoped, that it was an April Fools prank  albeit in poor taste. Except that it wasnt. As the day progressed, more details of the incident surfaced and by late in the evening, Pratyusha Bannerjee or Balika Vadhu as she was known to her fans was declared dead at Mumbais Kokilaben Hospital. The industry since, has been trying to come to terms with the blow.

While some are surprised, saying she was a strong girl who never wouldve taken such a drastic step, there are others who were privy to her tumultuous personal affairs. A close friend of the actress from the industry said on the condition of anonymity that her rocky relationship with Rahul Raj Singh was a major cause of stress in her life.

Also read- Pratyusha Banerjee suicide probe: Injury marks on nose and under eyes spotted

Narrating the sequence of events, the friend said, Pratyusha was very upset ever since Rahul broke up with her apparently for another television actress. She was just not able to accept the fact that Rahul had moved on and left her for another woman. Her last whatsapp status Mar kar bhi tujhe nahi chodna too explained her fragile state of mind. On April 1st, the couple had met at a mall close to Pratyushas house and had an ugly spat over there. Pratyusha kept asking him Why did you cheat on me? This escalated the fight and led to Rahul slapping her a couple of times. The two then went separate ways. When Rahul (also her live-in partner) went to check on her around 4 pm, he found her hanging from the ceiling fan. With the neighbours help he rushed her to the hospital and left from there after informing her parents about her death.

What added to the stress was the mounting debt, informs the friend. The couple was in debt running over a crore. They werent able to repay the loan, adding further stress to the relationship.

With many fingers pointing at boyfriend Rahul Raj, Pratyushas Balika Vadhu co-star, Vikrant Massey, is urging people to hold their comments until more details come to light. He said, It is very fashionable to put the boyfriend in the dock, blame him for her death just because it was the case previously with other actresses. But nobody knows the truth. I agree Pratyushas boyfriends conduct is not above suspicion. But I still maintain that we dont know the truth. So please don't put him on a trial yet.
Bollywood heartthrob Hrihtik Roshan, who found himself a number of legal soups, is talking them head on, one case at a time. Hrithik, who recently had a criminal law suit slapped against him for his comment on dating the Pope has issued a public apology.

Hrithik took to his Twitter handle last evening to apologise and state that his comment was unintentional'. He said, Seems my tweet about His Holiness has led 2misunderstanding. My apologies 4 hurt caused 2religious or other sentiments. Was unintentional.

Seems my tweet about His Holiness has led 2misunderstanding. My apologies 4 hurt caused 2religious or other sentiments. Was unintentional.  Hrithik Roshan (@iHrithik) April 2, 2016

Also read: Hrithik Roshans tweet affair with Pope lands him in legal trouble

Hrithik had been slapped with a criminal notice for hurting religious sentiments for his tweet on the Pope. The actor made the comment on his social networking handle, after Kangana Ranauts silly ex comment.

In January, the actor tweeted, "Ther r more chances of me having had an affair with d Pope dan any of d (Im sure wonderful) women d media hs ben naming (sic)."

Abraham Mathai, All India President of the Indian Christian Voice, an organisation representing the larger interests of the Christian community, including Roman Cathorlics, slapped Hrithik with the notice on Monday.

The notice also said that by making such a statement on a public platform Hrithik has not only willfully challenged the chastity of the respected Pope but has also shown him in poor light.

Hrithik also posted another tweet, taking about a 'pope fish'. While some say it was another joke, others say it was the actor taking about a particular fresh water fish.
Rahul, a TV producer, was taken to Shree Sai Hospital in suburban Kandivali after he complained of chest pain, low blood pressure and a bout of depression.

Mumbai: Two days after TV actress Pratyusha Banerjee was found dead at her residence, her boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh was on Sunday hospitalised after he complained of breathing problems before he was to face a second day of questioning by police over her death.

Rahul, a TV producer, was taken to Shree Sai Hospital in suburban Kandivali after he complained of chest pain, low blood pressure and a bout of depression. "Rahul has been admitted to ICU. His condition is very fragile. He hasnt eaten. He is in a state of depression after Pratyushas death. The doctors say if this continues, he will have brain haemorrhage," his lawyer Neeraj Gupta said.

Pratyusha, 24, who shot to fame with the portrayal of Anandi in hit TV series Balika Vadhu, was found hanging from a ceiling fan at her home on April 1, in what appeared to be a case of suicide. Speculation was rife that Pratyusha was two months pregnant at the time of her death. This was, however, scotched by the investigating officer.
Kate will take 12-15 outfits for the six days of official visits. (Photo: AP)

London: Fashion conscious Kate Middleton will reportedly be packing 12-15 outfits for her six-day visit to India and Bhutan after an advance team completed a recce of locations, including the iconic Taj Mahal.

Kate, 34, and Prince William, 33, will fly into Mumbai next Sunday for the trip and the Duchess of Cambridge will be packing alongside her daytime dresses and evening gowns, a surprise addition a pair of hiking boots.

Kate will take 12-15 outfits for the six days of official visits, the Telegraph reported. Whilst the Royal couple are in Bhutan they will go on a six-hour trek to Tiger's Nest monastery said to require peak physical fitness and hiking gear, likely to be the 106 pounds Hillmaster boots the Duchess last wore when she visited Borneo's jungle.

The official tour starts in Mumbai on April 10, and the Duke and Duchess will travel to New Delhi, the Kaziranga National Park and Thimphu, capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, apart from their visit to the Taj Mahal.

A small team have made a rehearsal trip to India and Bhutan, on which Kate's private secretary Rebecca Deacon made notes on factors to consider about the locations the Duchess will visit, so that she has an idea of what outfits will and

won't work, the daily said.

The team took a photograph of every place the Duchess will visit, so that she can use these images as a guide to determine how formal she needs to dress and what colours will look best against the backdrops.

"She is in charge of it herself and takes an interest in paying tribute to the host country with nods to their culture and local style on at least a few of the engagements," a royal source was quoted as saying.

"The important factor on this tour is the heat, so that's an issue that plays a big part in the choice of outfits," the source said.

On previous royal tours Kate has made a point of dressing diplomatically wearing a dress by Canadian born designer Erdem Moralioglu to touch down in Montreal, for example.

She wore a dress by Australian label Zimmermann whilst on Australia's Manley Beach, and on her three-day trip to New York in 2014 she wore two pieces from American designers, a Tory Burch coat and J Crew jeans.

Just a few days after it was announced the Duke and Duchess would be travelling to India, Kate wore a dress by Indian designer Saloni for a function in London, hinting perhaps that she will also rely on the designer's print and colour filled collection for the upcoming tour.

The Duchess' personal assistant, Natasha Archer, will accompany her on the royal tour, as will her hairdresser Amanda Cook Tucker.
Washington: People, who live in activity-friendly neighbourhoods, take up to 90 minutes more exercise per week, a new study suggests.

With physical inactivity responsible for over 5 million deaths per year, the University of California authors say that creating healthier cities is an important part of the public health response to the global disease burden of physical inactivity.

The study included 6822 adults aged 18-66 from 14 cities in 10 countries from the International Physical activity and Environment Network (IPEN). The cities or regions included were Ghent (Belgium), Curitiba (Brazil), Bogota (Colombia), Olomouc (Czech Republic), Aarhus (Denmark), Hong Kong (China), Cuernavaca (Mexico), North Shore, Waitakere, Wellington and Christchurch (New Zealand), Stoke-on-Trent (UK), Seattle and Baltimore (USA).

The research team mapped out the neighbourhood features from the areas around the participants' homes, such as residential density, number of street intersections, public transport stops, number of parks, mixed land use, and nearest public transport points. Physical activity was measured by using accelerometers worn around participants' waists for a minimum of four days, recording movement every minute.

On average, participants across all 14 cities did 37 minutes per day moderate to vigorous physical activity - equivalent to brisk walking or more. Baltimore had the lowest average rate of activity (29.2 min per day) and Wellington had the highest (50.1 min per day).

The four neighbourhood features which were most strongly associated with increased physical activity were high residential density, number of intersections, number of public transport stops, and number of parks within walking distance. The researchers controlled for factors including age, sex, education, marital and employment status and whether neighbourhoods were classed as high or low income. The activity-friendly characteristics applied across cities, suggesting they are important design principles that can be applied internationally.

The difference in physical activity between participants living in the most and least activity-friendly neighbourhoods ranged from 68-89 minutes per week, representing 45-59 percent of the recommended 150 minutes per week.

Lead author James Sallis explained that neighbourhoods with high residential density tend to have connected streets, shops and services meaning people will be more likely to walk to their local shops. Interestingly, distance to nearest transport stop was not associated with higher levels of physical activity, whereas the number of nearby transport stops was.

Sallis added that this might mean that with more options, people are more likely to walk further to get to a transport stop that best meets their needs. The number of local parks was also important since parks not only provide places for sport, but also a pleasant environment to walk in.

The study appears in The Lancet.
Kakanakote forest, summer of 1873. Hundreds of men surround a herd of wild elephants, beating drums so loudly that the pachyderms panic and begin to run. It's exactly as British Army officer G.P. Sanderson had planned. He had had dug dozens of ditches  khedda  into which the elephants would fall and be confined, until mahouts and domesticated elephants arrived to calm the injured, panicky giants, and eventually tamed them. His catch: 55 jumbos.

The Sanderson method  now called 'Khedda operation  quickly became a spectator sport during the colonial era, with operations being regularly launched to coincide with the visits of British royalty and dignitaries. The British even invited Russian royalty, perhaps to make an impression on their rivals in the Great Game!

Some 37 khedda operations have been carried out since. In the days of the Mysore kingdom, they were meant to provide elephants for use in the Maharajas army and in temples. Post Independence, as development spread, it was to keep rising elephant numbers in check and reduce human elephant conflicts as the pachyderms became a menace to farms.

Each time, a few dozen elephants would be captured and tamed. Until exactly a hundred years later, in 1973, the government had to declare elephants an endangered species, ban khedda operations and begin conservation efforts.

Circa 2016, even as the states forests have shrunk, Karnataka is home to the largest elephant population in the country  some 6,088 as per a 2012 census.

Inevitably, humans and elephants are coming into conflict even more frequently than in the 19th century. And inevitably, in human-elephant conflict, its not the worlds largest land mammal that has the upper hand, but the wily human. The Forest ministrys solution to the problem of elephants is now not Sanderson-style khedda operations  no, those wouldnt suffice for the scale of the problem it is faced with today  but to banish hundreds of jumbos to other states.

"Karnataka has been facing the wild elephant menace in Hassan and Madikeri. Due to man-elephant conflicts, many people have been killed. To prevent this, the government is thinking of handing over elephants to other states, Karnataka Forest minister Ramanath Rai said last week. He even met his Chhattisgarh counterpart Mahesh Gagda to strike an agreement with the latter to send over the jumbos to the heavily forested, but much smaller, central Indian state.

And predictably, wildlife activists are critical of what they say is a solution that has been tried before, but nearly always to disastrous effect. In 2007, for instance, one elephant died soon after being relocated from its home in Odishas Lakhari Sanctuary to the forests of Andhra Pradesh. Nearer home, 13 elephants were relocated from Hassan district in the 1980s, but their fate remains unknown even today.

Citing many such instances, the activists argue that the state should learn the lessons of earlier failures: Relocating elephants out of habitats which they are used to and into unfamiliar forests is harmful not only to the animals themselves but to the larger ecosystem as well in both the sending and receiving states. Says Green Oscar-winning wildlife film maker Krupakar, The intention behind the proposal may be good, but it is scientifically infeasible.

It will lead to ecological disaster, and the problem they are trying to solve - man-elephant conflict - will only intensify. Asiatic Elephants are social animals, he explains. Like tigers have their territory, elephants, too, have their own home range, extending hundreds of square kilometres. Elephants move to different places during different seasons, covering their entire home range in the course of a year. But moving them out of their home range upsets them.

City-based environmentalist Ullash Kumar says, Relocating Karnataka elephants to Chhattisgarh will not work. There is no comparison between the continuous forest cover in Karnataka and the forests of Chhattisgarh. Also, elephants need plenty of food every day. Where will they get it from in Chhattisgarh?

A wildlife biologist who did not want to be named revealed that in the past, there have been instances when elephants that were being relocated have died either due to the effects of tranquilisers or during transportation. Many such incidents have happened in the past, and they will continue to happen if the government goes ahead with such unscientific solutions.

Wildlife experts suggest, instead, that the government reclaim - even buy out, perhaps  elephant corridors and other forest lands from private owners and encroachers using elephant conservation project funds. They also suggest that the governments of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala work together to ensure seamless elephant corridors between the Western and Eastern Ghats, a move that will involve relocating villages and clearing coffee plantations between patches of forests. Easier said than done, given the commercial interests involved.
The advertisment also read: "Let me get it once before I die." (Photo: Twitter)

We often come across various hilarious advertisements on matrimony sites and newspaper pages. However, what this woman did will blow your mind out.

TV actress Aranya Pui Pathumthong recently rented a huge advertisement space in Bangkok and advertised that she was looking for a husband to have sex.

The actress advertised herself on a huge billboard after she failed to find a partner through various apps and agencies.

The advertisement featured her cleavage-revealing photograph with a caption: I want you.

The advertisement also included her other details that read: "40 and a virgin. Pui Aranya is looking for a husband!"

"Let me get it once before I die."

According to the reports, the actress is actually 45 and told local media that she was very serious about this advertisement.

However, the police fined the advertisers for public obscenity and ordered them to take down the poster.

"We also want to question the woman on the poster about her motives, a police spokesperson told the local media.
The accused was arrested on Wednesday and under police custody, the police said. (Photo: File)

Bikaner: A physical trainer and instructor was arrested for allegedly raping and killing a Dalit girl in the hostel of their college in Bikaner district.

The body of the 17-year-old girl was found in a water tank on Tuesday morning following which her parents lodged a complaint against trainer Vijendra Singh accusing him of raping and killing the girl, police said.

The accused was arrested on Wednesday and under police custody, the police said.

It was alleged that the girl was raped in the hostel room of Vijendra on Monday night and later her body was found in the tank. She was pursuing BSTC (a course to become teacher) from the private college in Nokha, the police said.

The Dalit girl belonged to Barmer district. Local people, her relatives and public representatives including Leader of Opposition Rameshwar Dudi have demanded a probe into the matter.
Abdul Majid managed to obtain their nude photos and threatened them that he would upload these photos and extort money from them.

Hyderabad: A city engineering student who harassed girls using fake Facebook accounts and blackmailed them by threatening to upload their nude pictures was arrested by the cybercrime police on Saturday.

The student, Abdul Majid, who was earlier arrested by the Cyberabad police for allegedly collecting the nude pictures of around 200 schoolgirls by threatening them, started blackmailing girls again after coming out on bail, said joint police commissioner T. Prabhakar.

Abdul Majid, 21, a resident of Banjara Hills, was studying BTech III year. He created fake FB accounts of a girl and targeted schoolgirls from international schools and sent them friend requests.

Some girls used to accept the request thinking that it was from a girl and later their chats would become personal. After gaining their confidence he used to ask them to send their nude pictures and if they refused he would threaten to post their private conversations on Facebook.

He managed to obtain their nude photos and threatened them that he would upload these photos and extort money from them, Mr Prabhaker said, adding that proposals are being made to invoke the PD Act against him.

He was arrested by the Cyberabad police for harassing around 200 girls. He collected the nude photos of around 80 girls. Majid, who is an accused in six cases in Cyberabad, started harassing girls after coming out on bail.

In another case, K. Babu Rao, a 51-year-old teacher from Guntur, harassed a student from Hyderabad by sending vulgar messages on Facebook and extorted Rs 20,000 from her. He asked her to pay another Rs 20,000 to keep the matter a secret.

In another case, two persons including a woman were arrested for cheating software firms by floating a fake firm named Skill Development Mentoring Services, inviting quotations and asking them to pay one per cent of the project cost as EMD.

Three more persons who were involved in a credit card fraud and five others involved in an insurance fraud were also nabbed. All the accused were remanded by court.
Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Police on Sunday said that they would soon nab the killers of National Investigation Agency (NIA) Deputy Superintendent of Police Mohammad Tanzil, who was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Bijnore on Saturday.

"The incident took place around 2 am Saturday night when the NIA officer was returning to his residence after attending a wedding party. On his way back, he slowed his car down at a spot where the road was in a bad condition and the attackers attacked and killed him. His wife is injured. However, both of his children are fine," said Additional Director General (ADG) of police (Law and Order) Daljeet Chowdhary. He also added that the post-mortem of Tanzil is underway.

"We have not yet identified the attackers. Both had covered their faces and were on a speeding bike. The inquest report has been filed and post-mortem is underway, after which things will become clear. The forensic scientists are inspecting all aspects carefully and collecting all evidences. Senior officers of Special Task Force (STF) and Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) will reach the crime spot soon. We are hopeful that we will find the culprit soon," he said.
Lucknow/New Delhi: A senior officer posted with the NIA was shot dead and his wife was seriously injured when two unidentified motorcycle-borne assailants sprayed bullets on the couple in the early hours of Sunday in Bijnore district of Uttar Pradesh.

The killers pumped bullets into Mohammed Tanzil Ahmad, the NIA officer, and his wife Farzana, as their 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son watched the gruesome incident from the back seat of the Wagon-R car they were travelling in, the police said. The children were not injured. Ahmad was returning home to Sahaspur village of Bijnor district with his family after attending his niece's wedding in a nearby village in the same district, which is about 150 km from New Delhi.

Union home minister Rajnath Singh said that he had been apprised about the incident. The UP police has sealed the borders of the district and launched a manhunt. We are also in touch with NIA officers and coordinating with them. We will go deep into it and ensure that those involved are arrested, UP DGP Javed Ahmad told reporters in Lucknow.

Talking to the media in Lucknow, IGP (Law and Order) Bhagwan Swaroop said Tanzil Ahmad was shot dead by two motorcycle-borne persons while he was returning after attending a marriage ceremony with his wife Farzana. Police sources said automatic weapons and 9 mm pistols were used in the incident. Reports claimed that Ahmad was part of the team investigating the Pathankot airbase attack. However, NIA sources refused to comment on that. The state police termed Ahmads killing as a planned attack and did not rule out the possibility of a terror angle behind the shooting.
New Delhi: JNU is believed to be seeking legal opinion over punishment to a few students in connection with an event against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised.



According to sources, the Chief Proctor's office is seeking legal opinion on the quantum of punishment to the students in connection with the controversial February 9 event. If the authorities decide to press ahead with penal action against the students, it is likely to kick off a fresh round of protests.



While the university panel probing the issue had submitted its report on March 11, the varsity is yet to take a final call on the issue.



"It is a sensitive issue and the university doesn't intend to be unfair to anybody. Keeping the discipline norms in mind the quantum of punishment will be decided but it has to be made sure first that the penalty should be legally justified," sources said.



After a high-level committee of the university found them "guilty" of "violating university norms and discipline rules", show-cause notices were issued to 21 students on March 14, asking them to explain why disciplinary action should not be initiated against them.



The students had earlier refused to depose before the probe committee, demanding that the enquiry be started afresh.



The varsity, however, turned down the demand and maintained that the students will be given three chances to appear before the disciplinary committee and, if they fail to do so, the panel will finalise its recommendations on the basis of evidence available, eyewitness accounts, students' deposition, if any, and other material available on hand.



The students, who had refused to accept the findings of the probe panel, had sent "token" replies to the administration saying they cannot respond to "undefined" charges.



The administration had also communicated to the students that if they do not reply to the show-cause notice, "it will be assumed that they did not have anything to say in the matter and the office will proceed further in the matter".



The report of the five-member panel has pointed at lapses on part of the students as well as the administration.



However, no explanation has been sought from any of the administrative officials.
133 candidates will try their luck from the constituencies falling under the districts of West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura. (Representational image)

Kolkata: Eighteen seats in Maoist-affected areas in West Bengal will go to Assembly polls on Monday in the first of the six-phase elections.

133 candidates will try their luck from the constituencies falling under the districts of West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura. Out of these, 13 have been roughly classified as Left Wing Extremism-affected areas by the Election Commission where voting will end early by 4 pm due to security reasons.

In the remaining five constituencies of Purulia, Manbazar, Kashipur, Para and Raghunathpur voting will go on for two hours extra till 6 pm. The ruling Trinamool Congress has been highlighting how peace has returned in the Maoist-hotbed Junglemahal area.

It finds a mention even in the 'Trinamool anthem' song in Bengali which is being played across TV channels, radio stations and even through social media. The last 2011 assembly polls, which ended the 34-year-long rule of the Left, had Trinamool and Congress on the same side.

The Congress, which broke its alliance later on, has forged alliance with the Left. The Left-Congress alliance has been a subject of mockery for both the BJP and the Trinamool.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has called this alliance an "unholy" one while Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who attended an election rally in Kharagpur town, mocked at it saying "dosti (friendship) in Bengal and kushti (wrestling) in Kerala".
New Delhi: India has "secured" the release of four Indians from Syria, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Sunday.

The four Indians were arrested by the Syrian government in January reportedly when they were on their way to join Islamic state ISIS.

"We have secured the release of four Indian nationals from Syria," Swaraj said in a tweet.

In a series of tweets regarding the development, the External Affairs Minister said, "Welcome home Arun Kumar Saini, Sarvjit Singh, Kuldeep Singh and Joga Singh. I appreciate the officers who facilitated their journey from Syria to India."

She said, "I had requested (the) Deputy Prime Minister of Syria for their release during his visit to India in January this year. Thank you Syria."
Out of the total 2,085 claims received, 1,847 were from urban areas and 238 from rural areas. (Photo: PTI)

Chandigarh: Haryana government Sunday said it has so far received 2,085 claims for compensation from those whose properties were damaged during Jat agitation in the state in February.

The state government has so far released a compensation of Rs 49.47 crore while full payment to the tune of Rs 27.20 crore has been made to 1,698 claimants, an official spokesman said.

The payment for remaining claims would be made soon, he added. According to the claims received, 1,789 properties - 1,500 in urban areas and 289 in rural areas - were damaged during the stir by the community which was demanding reservation in jobs and education.

Out of the total 2,085 claims received, 1,847 were from urban areas and 238 from rural areas, he said. An interim compensation of Rs 22.27 crore has been given to 1,835 claimants - Rs 20.73 crore to 1,633 claimants in urban areas and Rs 1.54 crore to 202 claimants in rural areas.

He said Rs 24.34 crore was paid as final compensation to 1,508 claimants in urban areas and Rs 2.86 crore to 190 claimants in rural areas.

The spokesman said private and government insurance companies have so far made payments of Rs 8,14,22,096 to the persons whose insured properties had been damaged. The incident was one of many bomb attacks that Bangladesh witnessed in the three months since early January last year when the BNP-led 20-party alliance started an indefinite blockade.

The arrest order was another blow to the embattled two-time former premier, who has described previous cases, including corruption-related, against her as politically motivated and aimed at keeping her out of the country's politics.
Riyadh: Terming terrorism as the enemy of humanity, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Sunday said there was a need to "delink" religion from it and asserted that "segmented and partial" approaches to counter the menace will not be effective.

Pressing for united global efforts to deal with the scourge, Modi said there can be no distinction between "good" or "bad" terrorism and that it has "no caste, colour, creed or religion".

Appreciating Saudi Arabia's leadership role in fighting terrorism in the Middle East, Modi said India was committed to working with Riyadh as well as with its partners in the region to ensure that the world is a better and safer place to live in.

Read: GST will be reality soon: Modi assures Saudi business leaders

The Prime Minister said India has sought to challenge and repudiate the terror narrative that global counter-terrorism efforts are directed against any particular religion or ethnic group.

Examining the full spread of a Strategic Partnership. PM and the King lead delegation levels talks pic.twitter.com/Fxu5dhIghg  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 3, 2016

"In this context, we deeply appreciate the leadership role being played by Saudi Arabia in the region to fight this menace," he told leading daily Arab News in an interview during his two-day visit to the Kingdom.

Saudi Arabia, a country known as the spiritual home of Islam, recently formed a major coalition of 34 Muslim nations to fight terror, particularly the ISIS. Saudi Arabia and India have a counter-terror mechanism as well.

Also Read: Saudi Arabia visit: Modi visits TCS' all-women IT centre in Riyadh

"To defeat terrorism, all those who believe in humanity have to be united. We need to delink religion from terrorism.

Terrorism should be dealt in a comprehensive manner. Segmented and partial approaches have historically proven to be at best suboptimal," Modi said.

#5Forward: The leaders witness the signing of multi-sectoral agreements to strengthen the Strategic Partnership pic.twitter.com/L738wCHl0G  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 3, 2016

"There can be no distinction between 'good' or 'bad' terrorism," he said in a veiled reference to Pakistan, a close ally of Saudi Arabia.

Modi said both India and Saudi Arabia recognise that no cause can justify an act of terror.

Read: Modi, Saudi King talk terrorism, trade; seek to develop bilateral ties

He noted that India and Saudi Arabia have come together to cooperate in eradicating the scourge of terrorism.

Hailing the role of King Salman bin Abdulaziz in nurturing the Indo-Saudi partnership, Modi said building further on the strategic partnership with the powerful nation was one of the foreign policy priorities of his government.

PM @narendramodi gifted His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud a gold-plated replica of the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kerala.  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 3, 2016

To defeat terror, the Prime Minister said governments across the world should enhance cooperation in intelligence sharing, law enforcement, developing best practices and technologies as well as in extradition arrangements and capacity-building.

"India has adopted a comprehensive approach through dealing with its individual elements, including controlling the spread of extremist ideology, plugging financing routes, building a counter narrative to radicalisation through efforts to stem training and recruitment by terrorists," Modi said.

Read: India, Saudi vow to boost trade ties, invest in oil drilling

Modi also listed other counter-terrorism steps taken by India like "strengthening our laws to prosecute terrorists and their associates, forging a network of international partnerships on threat assessment and operational cooperation."

A truly Royal welcome. PM @narendramodi is welcomed by His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at the Palace pic.twitter.com/uVmuJNVxWk  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 3, 2016

Seeking concerted global action against terror infrastructure, he said a strong collective action is required by the global community and that there was a need for increasing the effectiveness of UNSC Resolution 1267.

"States must cooperate toward early finalisation of the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism under the UN umbrella mooted by India way back in 1996," Modi asserted.

Read: Narendra Modi gifts replica of ancient Kerala mosque to Saudi King

The Prime Minister heaped praise on the King, saying "King Salman has led Saudi Arabia with great maturity and foresightedness during one of the most challenging times."

Asked about Palestine issue, Modi said India supports a negotiated solution, resulting in a sovereign independent, viable and united state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital.

"India's continued commitment to the Palestinian cause has been reiterated during the first ever state visit of the President of India to the state of Palestine in October last year," he said.

Cheraman Juma Masjid is symbolic of active trade relations between India and Saudi Arabia since ancient times. pic.twitter.com/SoypfTUVlS  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 3, 2016

Asked about prospects in India for Saudi companies to invest in energy projects, Modi said both sides are committed to elevate "our buyer-seller relationship into a strategic partnership in the energy sector based on mutual complementarities and interdependence".

"We have to explore significant areas of cooperation matching India's traditional strengths and the availability of the resources in Saudi Arabia -- considerable potential exists for establishing joint ventures in petrochemical complexes, refineries and fertilizer plants," Modi said.

Also read: India, Saudi Arabia ask states to dismantle terror infrastructures

"We are in the process of a major expansion of our refining capacity to become a regional hub for refined products and we look forward to Saudi investments in joint ventures with Indian public sector units (PSUs) in upstream and downstream sectors in India, Saudi Arabia or in third countries," he said.

The Prime Minister also invited invite Saudi companies -- both public and private sectors -- to come and invest in Indian infrastructure, including smart cities, power, refrigeration, supply chains, ports, highways and warehousing.

"We would also welcome the participation of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) in the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF)," he said.
The JAC said those in support of the protests should visit University of Hyderabad.

Hyderabad: The Joint Action Committee for Social Justice which is spearheading protests at University of Hyderabad on the Rohith Vemula issue on Saturday called for a Chalo HCU protest on April 6.

The JAC said those in support of the protests should visit UoH and raise their voice against the ban on entry of outsiders, including media personnel, politicians, members of civil society and student organisations, into the campus. On Sunday, well-known social activist Medha Patkar is scheduled to visit the university.
Sivagangai: Sivagangai, the political cradle of prominent Congress leader P. Chidambaram, is unlikely to return even one Congress representative in the May 16 Assembly election from any of the four Assembly constituencies falling within it. Once a strong Congress bastion, the Sivagangai Lok Sabha constituency had chosen a son of the soil, Palaniappan Chidambaram, to represent it seven times between 1984 and 2009. But today, the people of the constituency are disillusioned, not just with Chidambaram but also the Congress, mainly because they feel that their celebrity representative did nothing much for them.

Chidambarams election from the constituency enabled him to hold powerful positions like minister of state for personnel, public grievance and pensions; minister of state for internal security; minister of state (independent charge) for commerce; minister of finance and minister of home affairs, besides working closely with former Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh.

Yet the constituency did not benefit, says Durai Karunanidhi, 58, former lieutenant of Chidambaram, who points out that Karti Chidambaram lost his deposit in the 2014 election and also how the Congress vote bank has declined over the years. In 1980, RV Swaminathan won by a margin of three lakh votes and in 2009 Chidambarams lead was a mere 3,354 votes, he said.

Traditionally, people of Sivagangai and adjacent Ramanathapuram districts had emotional attachment to the Congress as it had given rise to generations of freedom fighters since the days of Queen Velu Nachiyar and the Maruthu Pandiyar brothers. Congress had nearly 20 lakh votes from five assembly constituencies - Sivagangai, Karaikudi, Manamadurai, Ilayangudi and Tiruppattur - till the late 80s, but now you will find just a few thousand cadres in each constituency, said 92-year-old Sethuraman, a freedom fighter from Sivagangai.

Chidambaram used the Congress supporters only for his personal growth, but did nothing for the welfare of party functionaries, charged the freedom fighter, who had once petitioned the powerful Union minister for a freedom fighters pension in vain. Karunanidhi, who stood by Chidambaram even when he launched his own Congress Jananayaka Peravai in 2001, said that when an impoverished Congress orator Jayachandran from Tirupattur approached Chidambaram for financial assistance of Rs 2,500 from the district Congress trust to pay the school fees of his daughter, he bluntly refused.

Why should we give you money from the trust, was his reply, recalls Karunanidhi, who was then president of the trust, but couldnt overrule the senior leaders decision. Jayachandran, who had campaigned enthusiastically for Chidambaram, was heartbroken, Karunanidhi said. In another incident, he sanctioned a paltry amount of Rs 2,500 to Sebastian from Panipuzanvayal village, whose house was gutted in a fire accident a day before his sons marriage, much to chagrin of the Dalit party worker who had cycled to the interior villages canvassing votes for Chidambaram.

To party functionaries approaching Chidambaram for college admission or jobs for children, he had a stock reply: Your children should have merit; should score good marks in the entrance exam; and should do well in the interview. If they perform well, they will get admission on their own, said M Ramanathan from Sivagangai district. Chidambaram was well aware that most of the children of party cadres were first generation graduates lacking command over English. Yet he would not help us, he added.

As a young man, Chidambaram caught the attention of Congress cadres when he first visited the district along with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 70s, translating her speeches into Tamil. They saw in his clearly modulated Tamil a counter to the DMK leaders pure Tamil (Senthamil) orations. Then, he endeared himself to the local Congress unit so much - by visiting Sivagangai on party work and to address political and literary meetings regularly  that when the party high command did not give him the ticket to contest from Sivagangai Lok Sabha constituency, the district committee put pressure on the party to nominate him for the seat, though it didnt finally happen. It is a different matter that he had lost the Karaikudi Assembly seat in the 1977 elections by a margin of 240 votes.

The loyalty of the local Congress members was so blind that they walked away with him when he went to the Tamil Maanila Congress in 1996, even though Chidambaram has been showing his real face since 1984. Notwithstanding the verse from Tirukkural that he quotes, King Chidambaram never takes criticism from Congress functionaries. If one dares to question his political action, it would be the end of his political career, said Ayothi, a former Congress functionary.

Many prominent senior Congress leaders like late O. Subramanian from Sivagangai, ARP Murugesan from Manamadurai, former MP Udayappan from Paganeri, K.K. Balasubramanian from Thirupuvanam, K.K. Kasilingam from Ilayangudi and Mangudi from Sankarapuram were sidelined because they questioned Chidambarams nepotism, Karunanidhi said.

After he emerged powerful, Chidambaram used his political clout to deny a seat to Subramanians son Udayappan for Sivaganga Assembly constituency 1989 only because Subramanian asked the party to allocate Sivaganga Lok Sabha seat to him in the 1984 election, claimed Ayothi. Sharing a personal experience, Ayothi said that when his family member Buvaneshwari contested for the Thirupuvanam town panchayat chairman in 2011, Chidambaram refused to give party symbol for her.

When I approached the party office at Sivagangai to get the letter for allocation of party symbol, Chidambarams son Karti asked me to shift my loyalty to their side to allocate the symbol, but I refused, said Ayothi, a Vasan loyalist. In an attempt to safeguard his power in the district, he never allowed Congress functionaries to organise meetings when other senior leaders visited the districts, he said. Then his move to make his son as successor that led to party workers losing their faith in him completely, said Ramanthan.

The people also lost faith in Chidambaram because he didnt bring any industrial developments in this backward district. He might have opened many banks, but how will that help poor to meet their livelihood, asked Karunanidhi.

The world famous economist who brought various developments to the nation, failed to develop either the party or the economy of the district. He used his brain only for his personal growth, charged Karunanidhi. Most of the senior Congress leaders including Karunanidhi and Ayothi have joined the TMC recently, weakening the hold of the Congress in what was once its bastion.
Rangaragini Bhumata Brigade (RBB) leader Trupti Desai, who was leading a march towards the Shani Shinganapur temple in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra was stopped by private security guards from entering the core area of the temple. (Photo: PTI)

Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Saturday vowed to follow the Bombay High Courts order that women will not be discriminated from entering places of worship; hours after activists of the Bhumata Ranragini Brigade were stopped from praying at the Shani Shinganapur temple in Ahmednagar.

On Saturday, women activists led by Trupti Desai stormed into the temples complex but were prevented from entering the inner sanctum by locals and temple authorities. The activists launched a scathing attack on Fadnavis, asking him why was Bombay High Courts order that women not be discriminated at places of worship being defied.

Read: Honour HC order or face FIR, women evicted from Shani temple warn CM

Fadnavis in response said he would follow Court orders but at the same time made a veiled criticism of the activists for their actions. He said no one must disturb the law and order situation for mere publicity but also added that there was no place for discrimination in Hindu culture.

"There is no place for discrimination in Hindu culture. Our government has taken a clear stand before the Honorable High Court and we will implement their decision in true spirit," Fadnavis said in a statement.

"But it is my sincere request to everyone not to disturb the law and order situation for mere publicity," he added.

Meanwhile, Desai, who was on her way after a medical check-up, lashed out at Fadnavis for saying that the purpose of their movement was to gain attention.

"Yes the Chief Minister did express his support for us, but that support has clearly fallen short somewhere. You can see our condition since morning. He should have ensured that the police establish the court order. He should let go off the Home Ministry, if he is not able to perform his functions," Desai told the media.

She added that she along with the other activists, who were assaulted, will identify their attackers once they are shown the footage by the police.

Meanwhile, the Maharashtra Police stated that the move was taken to prevent a possible stampede outside the Shani Shingnapur temple and ensure that the law and order situation remains under control.

"Tension was brewing here, which might have led to stampede and that is why we took her out from the temple. We had given a notice to Trupti Desai and Bhanu Dash Murkute under Section 149 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and had verbally told them that they shouldn't create a law and order situation in Shani Shinghnapur temple," Additional Superintendent of Police Pankaj Deshmukh said.

Earlier on Saturday, the activists clashed with local villagers, who were staunchly opposing the entry of women inside the sanctum sanctorum.

Nearly 100 volunteers of Bhumata Brigade marched towards Shani Shinganapur temple, a day after the Bombay High Court stated that prohibiting women from entering places of worship is against the fundamental rights bestowed upon them by the Constitution.

The temple drew attention in November 2015 after a lady offered prayers in "breach" of the age-old practice of prohibiting entry of women.
New Delhi: In what appears to be a result of the strengthening of ties between New Delhi and the Assad regime in Damascus, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Sunday that India had secured the release of four Indians from Syria, adding that she thanked the Syrian Government for this.

The four Indians were reportedly arrested by the Syrian government in January on suspicion of being ISIS sympathisers but the suspicion apparently turned out to be unfounded.

We have secured the release of four Indian nationals from Syria, Ms Swaraj said in a tweet. In a series of tweets, the minister said, Welcome home Arun Kumar Saini, Sarvjit Singh, Kuldeep Singh and Joga Singh. I appreciate the officers who facilitated their journey from Syria to India.

She further said, I had requested (the) Deputy PM of Syria for their release during his visit to India in January this year. Thank you Syria.
Sources said the ministry has drafted a Cabinet note to amend the 1869 Divorce Act in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling and demands by the community. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: The law and justice ministry has proposed a change in the law to reduce the separation period for Christian couples seeking to file for divorce by mutual consent.

Sources said the ministry has drafted a Cabinet note to amend the 1869 Divorce Act in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling and demands by the community. It proposes to halve the separation period for couples from two years to one year before a petition can be filed for divorce by mutual consent, bringing it in line with the laws for other communities.

The separation period under the Hindu Marriage Act, Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act and Special Marriage Act is one year. Section 10A(1) of the Divorce Act, added by a 2001 amendment, says a couple seeking divorce should be living separately for two years or more.

A Supreme Court ruling last April questioned the existing law, asking: "Should Christians stay separated for two years when the period for others is one year? It doesn't make sense to us. It is a pure question of law and you (government) should have acted on your own," a bench of Justices Vikramjit Sen and A.M. Sapre had observed.
The state government will pay the Centre Rs 1,357 crore for the land, instead of giving an equivalent extent of land elsewhere.

Vijayawada: The AP Cabinet on Saturday unanimously decided to fill 20,000 vacancies in various government departments. Notification will be issued immediately and the vacancies would be filled in a phased manner within one year. The decision was taken during the 4.5-hour-long Cabinet meeting held at CMs camp office here.

The Cabinet also expressed its displeasure over the delay in allocation of funds by the Centre and it was decided to write to the Centre registering its protest over the poor allocations. The Cabinet also decided to request the Centre to allot 13,223.66 hectares of forest lands to the AP Capital Regional Development Authority. The state government will pay the Centre Rs 1,357 crore for the land, instead of giving an equivalent extent of land elsewhere.

It was also resolved to request the High Court to set up a fast track court for trying finance-related crimes following exposure of cheating the public by companies like Agri Gold, Abhaya Gold, Akshaya Gold and others. The AP government would begin phase-I of the auction of Agri Gold assets on April 20 and April 21.

Accordingly, investors in the company would have to submit their details online. A website which would be launched specifically for this purpose, said IT minister Palle Raghunath Reddy who briefed the media. The entire auction process would be conducted under the supervision of the Sithapathi Committee, appointed by the High Court, Mr Reddy said.

The Cabinet also decided that the present system of land registration would be changed. The AP Registrations Act-22 B would replace the existing Acts to stop duplicate and double registrations. As per the new system, the sub-registrar should have to personally visit the lands and verify the records. The new Act gives the registrar authority to cancel registrations if they find anything amiss during their field visits.

The government will officially celebrate Ugadi, the Telugu New Year at the N-Convention Centre in Vijayawada on April 8. Officials celebrations would also be held in all the 13 districts in the state. Apart from this, the birthday of B.R. Ambedkar would be celebrated in a big way on April 14.

The call-centres would be set up under the control of APNMDC to monitor the implementation of the free sand scheme. Consumers could contact the call centre and stating their requirement of sand. The decision was taken to effectively implement the free sand policy, Mr Reddy said.

The Cabinet also approved the construction of six lakh houses for the poor in the state. Beside Rs 40 crore was allotted to tackle drinking water scarcity. The Cabinet approved allotment of land for various private wind power projects in Anantapur, Kurnool and Kadapa districts.

The Cabinet also approved the allotment of 600 acres to Hero Honda company on which it will invest Rs 1,600 crore for building a factory with the capacity to produce 18 lakh motorcycles annually.
BENGALURU: Chief Minister Siddaramaiah endured stiff opposition, even from within the ruling party while setting up the Anti Corruption Bureau, but ironically his luxe wristwatch could be the first case to be investigated by the local unit of ACB.

Mr Nataraj Sharma S., a city-based advocate who had earlier filed a petition in Lokayukta on Arkavathy denotification scam, on Saturday filed a complaint in the Director General of Police (DGP)s office here seeking an investigation into the Hublot wristwatch episode which triggered a major controversy much to the embarrassment of Mr Siddaramaiah and senior Central leaders of Congress.

He filed the complaint at DGP's office due to non-availability of ACB officers.

In March, Mr Sharma had filed a petition in the high court, seeking a direction to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to consider his plea for a probe into acquisition of the wristwatch by Mr Siddaramaiah.

The court, however, dismissed his petition on the grounds that the ED could require 90 days to take up the investigation. Mr Sharma said though Mr Siddaramaiah declared the wristwatch as state asset, investigation must focus on the person who gifted it to the Chief Minister. I will wait for three days (for FIR) and move the court again if the ACB fails to take up the case, he told Deccan Chronicle.

SMK, Kharge must have roles in Karnataka: senior Congress leader

Stressing the need for a change in the style of functioning of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, a senior Congress leader said a new-look cabinet would be possible only if veteran leaders are consulted by the Kuruba strongman.

The leader told Deccan Chronicle that Mr Siddaramaiah should factor in the views of leaders like M. Mallikarjun Kharge and S.M. Krishna before embarking on a reshuffle of ministers.

In case he does not take these leaders into confidence, he would find it difficult to execute his plan of axing ministers with poor performance records and replace them with new faces, the leader added.
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The deadlock over finalising the list of Congress candidates to five Assembly seats remained unsolved on Saturday even as Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and PCC president V.M. Sudheeran refused to budge from their known positions.

The conciliatory talks led by Congress president Sonia Gandhi in the presence of senior Congress leader A.K. Antony were also were not fruitful. Congress sources told this that a final announcement of Congress candidates is not likely to take place soon. Mr Chandy is expected to leave New Delhi by Sunday afternoon.

However, Mr Sudheeran and home minister Mr Ramesh Chennithala will stay back there for unofficial level talks. Mr Sudheeran told reporters in New Delhi after the talks that those who are in a hurry have left for Kerala, pointing to Mr Chandy.

However, Mr Chandy left the decision to the Congress high command saying they are free to take a decision on those seats which are in dispute. Sources close to Mr Mukul Wasnik, AICC general secretary in charge of the state, feels that the two warring leaders have started to soften from their stand.

Mr Sudheeran was firm that sitting Konni MLA and Tripunnithara MLA Adoor Prakash and K. Babu should not contest. This was vehemently opposed by Mr Chandy.

Sources said Mr Sudheeran has agreed to be lenient on the other three seats from Kollam, Irikoor and Thrikkakara. However, Mr Chandy left the meeting by then along with Mr Mallikarjun Kharge, AICCs screening committee chairman.

Sources told this newspaper that even Mrs Sonia Gandhi was keen to see two changes as suggested by Mr Sudheeran.

AICC leadership is in a quandary as to how to solve the crisis which is expected to snowball in to a major controversy in the party with the two senior leaders not in a mood to relent. Another round of unofficial talks would resume on Sunday morning in New Delhi.
Chennai: Overcoming their differences, the DMK and Congress are understood to have reached an agreement on sharing of seats for the Assembly elections.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad is expected to arrive here this week to seal the deal with top DMK leadership.

The Congress could settle for 32 seats as the DMK is adamant in contesting more than 180 seats for the first time in the past one decade. The national party, sources said, demanded nearly 60 seats from DMK, which after hard bargaining offered a little more than 30 seats to it. The seat sharing arrangement has almost been finalised and it will be formally announced in a couple of days. The Congress could get around 32 seats in the alliance and the process of identifying the constituencies is underway. This process would end in a couple of days time after which the agreement would be made public, DMK and Congress sources told Deccan Chronicle.

DMK and Congress revived their alliance for contesting the assembly polls in February this year and the parties held their first round of alliance talks on March 25 which was inconclusive. After the talks, TNCC chief E.V.K.S. Elangovan and other senior leaders were summoned to New Delhi by Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi where the issue was discussed.

After discussions, it was decided to accept less number of seats as the alliance has already been finalised. Another reason being less options available before the party. The Congress high command is likely to send its key trouble-shooter Ghulam Nabi Azad for announcing the seat sharing agreement.

Congress sources said he is likely to come to Chennai early this week to meet DMK president M. Karunanidhi. In 2011, Congress contested 63 seats in alliance with DMK, but this time the Dravidian party engaged in hard bargaining with the national party citing its reduced vote share in 2014 LS polls and also revival of Tamil Maanila Congress by former Union minister G.K. Vasan.

Meanwhile, Elangovan told reporters in Coimbatore there was no possibility of TMC joining DMK- Congress alliance. He also said talks with DMK was progressing and the deal would be announced in a couple of days.
There are similarities in the killing of Kuttappa, Pujari and Raju which indicate that there is a deep rooted network at work, says Pratap Simha, Mysuru-Kodagu MP

Bengaluru: The recent killings of BJP and RSS workers in Madikeri, Kodagu district, Moodabidri, Dakshina Kannada district and in Mysuru City are being seen as evidence of a terror corridor flourishing in the state by the saffron parties, which are now demanding action to put a stop to its activities.

The parties claim the corridor runs through Mysuru, Kodagu, Bhatkal and Mangaluru and has deep roots in neighbouring Kerala. Senior police officers, however, dismiss the theory saying the killing of Hindu activists in Karnataka cannot be compared to similar incidents in Kerala as the political situations in both states are quite different.

Officers both retired and serving say the murders of saffron party workers, Kuttappa in Kodagu district, Prashanth Poojari in Dakshina Kannada and Raju in Mysuru district were all for different reasons and had nothing do with a so-called anti-national corridor.

They believe flawed investigation into all three deaths has led to the right wing activists claim that they are being targeted to check the saffron surge.

"We too have an intelligence network at the local level to keep an eye on such activities. But we haven't come across anything like a terror corridor in the state. We are ready to investigate if the BJP has any evidence of it," said a serving officer, noting that the magisterial inquiry report into Kuttappa's death blamed miscreants from a neighbouring state for creating trouble during the Tipu Jayanthi celebrations.

But BJP leaders insist that the arrest of a few terror suspects is evidence enough of such a corridor in the state . Mysuru-Kodagu Lok Sabha member, Pratap Simha strongly feels the corridor is working to create communal disharmony in Karnataka.

"Isnt the arrest of terror suspects in Bhatkal, Chikmagalur, Mysuru and other places not indicative of the underground activities of anti-national forces? The Intelligence Bureau has collected a lot of information on such forces taking refuge in smaller towns. While the crime is committed by trained men, the logistics are looked after by local people. There are a lot of similarities in the killing of Kuttappa, Pujari and Raju which indicates that there is a deep rooted network at work," he argues.

But a senior Congress leader claims the saffron party, which has flexed its muscles in Kodagu and Dakshina Kannada districts, is making up this theory to spread its influence further.  It is now looking to regain its lost base in Mysuru and Uttara Kannada and so any stray incident is being given political colour. But Karnataka will never go the way of West Bengal or Kerala way in finishing off political opponents," he maintains.
Hyderabad: The ruling TRS on Saturday hit back at the critics of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Raos PowerPoint presentation in the Assembly on the status of irrigation projects in the state, saying that the critics were making such statements since they were worried about the fate of their parties.

Irrigation minister T. Harish Rao said that the Congress and TD leaders were worried their parties would be washed away once the irrigation projects were completed in TS.

The Opposition is unable to digest the fact that there has been appreciation from across the country on the CMs presentation, and is levelling baseless allegations. If they continue with their false statements, the day is not far when they will lose even the Leader of Opposition status, Mr Harish Rao said in Medak.

Congress and TD legislators boycotted KCRs PowerPoint presentation, but criticised him on TV. They could have done so in Assembly, which was the ideal forum. They should stop indulging in petty politics and think about public welfare, he said.

Government Chief Whip Koppula Eshwar too flayed the Opposition parties for their uncalled for criticism of the PowerPoint presentation.

Everyone appreciated the presentation which is based on facts and ground reality. Why should the Opposition shy away from debating it in the House? If they have any query, they could have raised it and provided constructive suggestions. Criticism for criticisms sake will not help them. People are with government, he said.
Noted social activist Medha Patkar was stopped from entering the University of Hyderabad. She spoke to the students at the gate. (Photo: DC)

Hyderabad: Well known social activist Medha Patkar was barred from entering the University of Hyderabad on Sunday evening.

She was visiting the university to express solidarity with students protesting over the Rohith Vemula issue and to speak with them. The university had issued prohibitory orders after the violence and police crackdown of March 22.

The university has barred the entry of outsiders including media, politicians, civil society members and student organisation members. The activist spoke with students near the main gate where the protesting students had gathered.

She said that immediate action must be taken against university vice-chancellor Prof Appa Rao Podile and others who have been named in police cases filed in connection with Rohith Vemulas suicide.

She appealed to the students to keep protesting and raising their voice against the blockade at the university. Earlier the same day, Ms Patkar spoke at Lamakaan where she condemned the police crackdown in UoH and subsequent arrests of students and two faculty members.

On Monday, the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice, which is spearheading the protests at UoH on the Rohith Vemula issue will be conducting 'Chalo Raj Bhavan.'

The march will start from Khairatabad station to reach Raj Bhavan where they will demand the resignation of Prof. Appa Rao.
Nearly one hundred years ago, Jamsetji Tata was planning his iron and steel mill. The British, then ruling India, were sceptical that an Indian could build a steel mill. He persisted and built the Tata Iron and Steel Company. The irony is that in the last few years, the leading names in steel here in the UK have been Indian. But the bottom has fallen out of the steel market, thanks to the Chinese dumping steel. The prospect that the Tata Steel in Port Talbot, Wales, would shut down has created a crisis here. Tata Steel used to be British Steel, then it became a British-Dutch company Corus. Ratan Tata bought it nine years ago.

British Prime Minister David Cameron had to rush back from his Easter holidays. The possibility of 15,000 workers becoming unemployed will have an impact on the community and affect 30,000 jobs. Mr Cameron has been travelling to India in the quest for investment and trade. For his five visits, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has only responded with one. The UK government would like Tata to reconsider its decision, but considering Tata is losing a million and more each day, it is unlikely the decision will change. As it is the Tatas are one of the largest employers of manufacturing workers in the UK. But then Mr Cameron and British chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne also need China for trade and investment.

As they say troubles never come singly. One reason Mr Cameron is keen to find a steely solution is that we are engaged in the debate over the referendum about staying in or leaving the European Union  Brexit. There is much noise and little light, but Mr Cameron has a lot to lose if people feel he has failed. He would like the UK to stay and reject Brexit. His Cabinet minister for business is Sajid Javid, the son of a Pakistani immigrant. Mr Javid has a banking background. (Mr Javid was the culture minister when we were planning the Gandhi statue in Parliament Square, which is when I learnt his family is originally from Jullundur.)

He is a high flyer and obviously wants to get to the top some day. He is with Mr Cameron and against Brexit. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, with his cuddly sheepdog looks is on the opposite side. Priti Patel, Mr Camerons choice as the diaspora minister is with Mr Johnson and for Brexit. Undoubtedly, Ms Patel too could be a fine Prime Minister. But lets see how the referendum goes!

Mr Johnson is retiring as the mayor of London, and the election comes up in May. The candidates could not be more disparate: Sadiq Khan, Labour candidate, son of an immigrant and Zac Goldsmith whose father was a multi-millionaire. The contest will be a keen one. Normally Labour does better in the inner city, while Conservatives thrive in the suburbs. For both, the Asian diaspora holds the key.

Yet, imagine our surprise when in the post came an election letter from

Mr Goldsmith! Behind a photograph of Mr Goldsmith was the picture of Mr Cameron with Narendra Modi... The message is that Tories are with the Indians and so Indians should vote for them. Many have complained about this racial profiling, but could this be clever marketing? Does NaMo magic work everywhere?

The young Royals, Kate and William will embark on their charm India tour on April 10 and they will kickstart it with a fundraiser in Mumbai with the glitterati, including actors Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan to raise money for their favourite charities. (Some may quibble that the Royals have got their pile from India already, so how come they are back so soon for more?) The grand red carpet function will have dance and fashion. It puzzles me who planned this itinerary. There must be something else that Indians could do better than just Bollywood dancing!

Anyway, then the Royals are going to behave like the rest of us and do ordinary stuff which includes visiting slums and meeting deprived children. (Perhaps, as someone remarked reading the list of activities, next time Mr Modi should go to the poorer areas in Brixton, and East London! A slum exchange programme will be good.)

After the thoughtful gesture of laying a wreath at the Taj Mahal hotel, remembering all those who died in the 2009 Mumbai terror attacks, they will arrive in Delhi for a party at the residence of the British high commissioner to mark the 90th birthday of Williams grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II. They will also drop in for a photoshoot at Taj Mahal and then have a jolly adventure at Kaziranga National Park.

As the Indian media prepares to go wild during this carefully choreographed event  designed to make them look like any normal couple out on a summer holiday without the kids  the British press will have a field day too. I am already cringing at the thought of the photographs of Will and Kate cuddling poor little slum babies and all that Bollywood dancing in which no doubt the two will gracefully join Shah Rukh Khan... you know what I mean?
Seoul: LG Display will supply information displays for Tesla Motors' new Model 3 sedans, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said, grabbing a key contract for centre consoles from another supplier.

Tesla said on Thursday over 130,000 people had ordered the electric car in a couple of hours although it is more than a year away from production. With a $35,000 starting price - less than half Tesla's Model X - the vehicle is critical to the Silicon Valley automaker's growth plans.

The order is a feather in LG Display's cap as it seeks to expand further into auto electronics, which offer higher margins and more stable earnings prospects than consumer products.

The Model 3 prototype features a huge, tablet-like information screen on the center console, reflecting the trend towards bigger in-car displays that offer more features.

"LG Display is a sole supplier for the 15-plus inch centre display of Model 3," said the source, declining to be identified as he was not authorised to speak on the matter.

Another company currently provides centre information displays for Tesla's Model S and Model X, he added.

An LG Display spokeswoman declined to comment. A Tesla spokeswoman did not have immediate comment.

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Brussels Airport, in Zaventem, after two explosions rocked the main hall of the airport, killing at least one person and wounding several others. (Photo: AFP)

Brussels: Brussels Airport was to reopen on Sunday with three "symbolic" flights and strict additional checks for passengers, marking a new high-security era for air travel in Belgium after attacks by Islamic State suicide bombers.

The key travel hub has been closed since two men blew themselves up in the departure hall on March 22 in coordinated blasts that also struck a metro station in the Belgian capital, killing a total of 32 people.

The departure hall was badly damaged, and a tent-like check-in facility is being used as a temporary substitute.

The attacks at the heart of Europe shocked the country and many hope the airport's reopening, even on a limited scale, will help turn the page on the traumatic events.

Brussels Airport chief executive Arnaud Feist on Saturday said the partial resumption of services would start with three "symbolic passenger flights" to the southern Portuguese city of Faro, Athens and Turin, northern Italy.

"These flights are the first hopeful sign from an airport that is standing up straight after a cowardly attack," Feist said.

Tough new checks will be in place after police threatened to go on strike if security were not improved, and travellers have been asked to arrive three hours before departure time.

'Passengers happy'

One of the biggest changes will be that only passengers with tickets and ID documents will be allowed into the makeshift departure hall, and their bags will be checked before entering. Once inside, passengers will also undergo the usual security checks.

The airport will initially only be accessible by car. Vehicles will be screened and subject to spot checks, while extra police and soldiers will be on patrol throughout the airport zone.

The first flight was to leave for Faro at 1140 GMT.

Drew Descheemaeker, a travel agent for Thomas Cook who has a family of 11 booked on the flight, said customers appeared to be taking the new security measures in their stride.

"The clients seemed happy," he said, after calling the holidaymakers to confirm their departure. As for the new checks, "everybody is aware of it... there are no concerns there".

"People have been rather impatient for Brussels to reopen," he added.

The number of flights will be stepped up gradually, although the airport will be only be able to work at 20 percent capacity using the temporary facilities, handling 800 to 1,000 passengers an hour.

The reconstruction of the departure hall will take months, according to Feist. The damage was severe, with images from the scene showing the building's glass-fronted facade in shatters, collapsed ceilings and destroyed check-in desks.

Feist said he expected the airport to start running normally again from late June or early July "before the start of the summer holidays".

Economic ripple effects

The closure of Zaventem airport has wreaked havoc on the travel industry, triggering a drop in tourist arrivals and forcing thousands of passengers to be rerouted to other airports in and around Belgium.

Brussels Airport, which claims it contributes some three billion euros ($3.4 billion) annually to the Belgian economy, has not released any figures on the economic impact of the shutdown, but top carrier Brussels Airlines has said it has been losing five million euros daily.

With 260 companies on-site employing some 20,000 staff overall, the airport is one of the country's largest employers.

Hotel reservations in the capital have fallen by 50 percent since March 22, the Brussels Hotels Association said.

Belgium's tourist industry was already suffering from the aftermath of Islamic State attacks in Paris last November, which killed 130 people.

Several of the Paris attackers had links to Brussels and the city went into lockdown for several days after the carnage in neighbouring France, with security forces fearing an imminent attack.

The sole surviving Paris suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in Brussels on March 18, metres from his family home, just four days before the Brussels killings.

He denies having any prior knowledge of the attacks in the Belgian capital, although investigators have uncovered links with two of the bombers.

Belgian police are still hunting for a mystery third suspect, dubbed "the man in the hat", who was seen in CCTV footage next to the two airport bombers.
Air France said that all aircrew were obliged like other foreign visitors to respect the laws of the countries to which they travelled. (Photo: Facebook)

Paris, France: A number of female Air France cabin crew are resisting an airline ruling that they should wear a headscarf while in Tehran, when flights to the Iranian capital resume on April 17, a union representative said on Saturday.

"Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the headscarf," said Christophe Pillet of the SNPNC union, which is asking Air France management to make it a voluntary measure.

Company chiefs had sent staff a memo informing that female staff would be required "to wear trousers during the flight with a loose fitting jacket and a scarf covering their hair on leaving he plane", Pillet said.

According to Pillet, management has raised he possibility of "penalties" against anyone not observing the dress code.

Air France said that all aircrew were "obliged like other foreign visitors to respect the laws of the countries to which they traveled".

"Iranian law requires that a veil covering the hair be worn in public places by all women on its territory."

"This obligation, which does not apply during the flight, is respected by all international airlines which fly to Iran," the airline said.

Air France added that the headscarf rule when flying to certain destinations was "not new" since it had applied before flights to Tehran were stopped and also to crew flying to Saudi Arabia.

Air France announced in December the resumption of Paris-Tehran flights after they were suspended in 2008 when Iran was hit with international sanctions over its nuclear ambitions.
The Saudi King gave an official welcome to Narendra Modi at the Royal Court (Photo: Twitter)

Riyadh: Seeking to inject new momentum in bilateral ties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held wide-ranging talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz on Sunday, discussing ways to expand strategic cooperation in a range of areas including trade, investment and counter-terrorism.

Energy-powerhouse Saudi Arabia is India's largest crude oil supplier, accounting for about one-fifth of total imports and both sides were of the view that cooperation in this sector should expand.

Before his talks with the King, Modi, who arrived here yesterday on a two-day visit, was accorded an official welcome at the Royal Court.

PM begins speech, says King Salman always tells him that he was taught by an Indian teacher, indic'g depth of r ties pic.twitter.com/vwyTWENonf  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 3, 2016

In the last seven months, it is Modi's second visit to the Gulf, a strategically important region which is home to over 8 million Indians and key to India's energy security. He had visited United Arab Emirates in August last year.

India's ties with Saudi Arabia have been on an upswing over the last two decades based on burgeoning energy ties.

Read: GST will be reality soon: Modi assures Saudi business leaders

Both sides are keen on expanding the economic ties in a range of areas besides the oil sector.

Ahead of his talks with the King, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Aljubeir called on Modi and discussed a number of issues of mutual interests.

Also Read: Saudi Arabia visit: Modi visits TCS' all-women IT centre in Riyadh

Khalid A Al Falih, Minister of Health and Head of Saudi Arabia's national oil company Aramco also called on Modi. He told the Prime Minister that Aramco looks at India as its most preferred investment destination.

"Minister Al Falih to PM: Saudi Aramco looks to India as its No.1 target for investment," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Minister Al Falih to PM: @Saudi_Aramco looks to India as its No. 1 target for investment pic.twitter.com/rL1HERP9Wa  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 3, 2016

Earlier, Modi interacted with a group of 30 Saudi and Indian businessmen and invited CEOs of top companies of the oil-rich country to invest in India's defence, energy,

railway, health and agriculture sectors.

Stating that there is huge opportunity to ramp up trade ties, the Prime Minister said time has come to move from "buyer-seller relationship" to chart a new path of growth and development which will benefit people of both the countries.

A truly Royal welcome. PM @narendramodi is welcomed by His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at the Palace pic.twitter.com/uVmuJNVxWk  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 3, 2016

"We have to look beyond the buyer-seller relationship.

Because that will be an obstacle in the path of progress," he said.

Modi is the fourth Indian Prime Minister to visit Saudi Arabia after Manmohan Singh in 2010, Indira Gandhi in 1982 and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1956.

His visit here comes amid the current turmoil in the Middle East and the issue is understood to have figured in his meeting with the Saudi leadership.
Yemeni security forces gather outside an elderly care home after it was attacked by gunmen in the port city of Aden. (Photo: AP)

Aden: An Indian priest missing after an attack on a care home run in Yemen is being held by the assailants, likely militants from the ISIS, officials said Sunday.

Yemeni authorities have blamed ISIS for the Friday attack on the refuge for the elderly operated by Mother Teresas Missionaries of Charity in main southern city Aden.

According to our information, the extremists who attacked the elderly care home in Aden have kidnapped priest Tom Uzhunnalil, a 56-year-old Indian, who was taken to an unknown location, a Yemeni security official said. We are aware that no group has yet claimed the criminal attack... But information points to the involvement of Daesh, said the source, who asked to remain anonymous, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

New Delhi said it will spare no efforts to rescue Indian priest Father Uzhunnalil. Sources said Father Uzhunnalil is a priest at a church in Aden and was visiting the care-home when the militants struck and subsequently abducted him. Yemen is a conflict zone. We do not have an embassy there. But we will spare no efforts to rescue Father Tom Uzhunnalil, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted.

The minister noted that though there was no Indian embassy in Yemen, there was a camp office in Djibouti. She also said it was confirmed that one Indian had been killed in the attack and not four as was initially believed.

Gunmen stormed the refuge killing a Yemeni guard before tying up and shooting 15 other employees, officials said. Four foreign nuns working as nurses were among those killed.

The Vatican missionary news agency Fides identified the nuns as two Rwandans, a Kenyan and an Indian, adding that the mother superior managed to hide and survive while an Indian priest was missing. The internationally recognised government in war-torn Yemen is grappling with both an Iran-backed rebellion and a growing jihadist presence.

The Vaticans secretary of state Pietro Parolin has said Pope Francis was shocked and profoundly saddened to learn of this act of senseless and diabolical violence.

Al Qaeda and ISIS have stepped up attacks in Aden, targeting mainly loyalists and members of a Saudi-led coalition battling Houthi rebels and their allies since March 2015. Al Qaeda distanced itself from the mass shooting Friday, saying it was not responsible.

President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi has declared Aden to be Yemens temporary capital as Sanaa has been in the hands of rebels since September 2014.
Dhaka: Bangladesh Supreme Court on Sunday deferred the review of petition of Motiur Rahman Nizami, chief of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, against his death sentence for committing war crimes during the 1971 independence war against Pakistan.

After Nizami's counsels pleaded for more time, the Appellate Division bench-led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha of the Supreme Court deferred the hearing by a week.

"We pleaded for six weeks; the court gave us one week. The matter will be heard after that," Nizami's lawyer said. On March 29, the 72-year-old Jamaat-e-Islami chief filed the petition seeking review of the Supreme Court verdict, which confirmed his death penalty for 1971 war crimes.

The next day, the State moved the Supreme Court's chamber judge to expedite the hearing, when it forwarded the matter to a regular appeals bench and fixed Sunday for the hearing.

In January this year, the top court rejected Nizami's appeal to overturn the International Crimes Tribunal's 2014 verdict.

Nizami admitted in to have committed war crimes during the 1971 independence war against Pakistan but sought commutation of his death penalty to life imprisonment because of his old age.

The ICT had sentenced Nizami in October, 2014 to death after he was found guilty in eight of the 16 charges brought against him, and had noted in its verdict that the crimes he had committed intended to "demean the human civilisation."

According to official figures, three million people were killed during the nine-month-long independence war against Pakistan.
Pakistan and Iran are tied through decades long religious, social, cultural and political bonds, and nothing can come in way of our relations said Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan. (Photo: Twitter)

Islamabad: Pakistan asked its media to avoid linking the arrest of an alleged Indian 'spy' with Iran, days after Tehran warned it that this could have "negative implications" on its bilateral ties.

"Iran has nothing to do with the activities of Indian intelligence network. Pakistan and Iran are tied through decades long religious, social, cultural and political bonds, and nothing can come in way of our relations," Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan told media.

Mr Khan said media should be cautious while reporting on Pakistan-Iran "brotherly" relations.

"Our ties with Iran are by no means linked with the arrest of an Indian spy," he said.

He said the recent visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Pakistan was quite "productive but an impression was being given that Iran was involved in certain activities against Pakistan."

The Iranian authorities, he said, had expressed their concern over news proliferating in a certain section of the media portraying Iran in a negative manner despite the very positive visit of the Iranian President.

The minister also mentioned his meeting with Iranian ambassador Mehdi Honardoost, saying the two sides expressed satisfaction over President Rouhani's visit.

"Honardoost assured that Iran would extend full cooperation on all issues that ensured security and development in the two countries," Mr Khan said.

He said "some vested interests" wanted to harm positive and historic ties between Pakistan and Iran.

The Iranian embassy here had issued a terse statement after several media outlets hinted that Tehran might have knowledge about Kulbhushan Yadhav, who was reportedly arrested by Pakistani authorities in Balochistan after he entered from Iran.

"During past days some section of Pakistani media has spread contents regarding detention of an Indian agent and the matter related to it, which could have negatives implications on the fraternal and friendly atmosphere of Iran and Pakistan," the embassy had warned.

Kulbhushan, who was reportedly arrested in Balochistan after he entered from Iran, has been accused by Pakistan of planning "subversive activities" in the country.

Pakistan Army had also released a "confessional video" of Yadav, who said he was the serving Indian Navy officer. In the video, Yadav said that he arrived in Iran in 2003 and started a small business in Chahbahar.

India has acknowledged Yadav as a retired Indian Navy officer, but denied the allegation that he was in any way connected to the government.
1039. Hurricane as a tool (9/16/2018)



Since Autumn is coming, I'm renovating the garden. Fear the Feds may plant drug trace in garbage, I used to burn off the yard trash. I think the Feds activated wildfire in California to justify interference me from burning the yard trash. (see last message)



I also noticed the news about Hurricane Florence. The extraordinary propaganda on this Hurricane caught my eyes. It reminds me of Hurricane Katrina 13 years ago. I think Hurricane Florance could be prepared as a distract on my case. They could have developed it to a bigger disaster if I burned off leaves again.



Here is what I wrote 13 years ago. It describes how the Feds set up traps in my case with climate war technique.



(1) H.A. mailed me a letter, required a clean up of garden.

Coincidentally San Jose City offered a free dumping on 9/24. Later I knew 9/24 was the landing date of Hurricane Rita. So 9/24 was their action date. Hurricane Rita played as a distract.



(2) My relatives (sisters and brother) were arranged a trip in East Coast.(9/10 to 9/17) Hurricane Ophelia went parallel along the Coast at that time. The Feds intended to eliminate my family members by arranged trips.



Reference:



342. Homeowner Association again (9/12/05)



To collaborate the September plot, Feds activates H.A. again. Ten days ago, I received a new notice which said,



"Enclosed you will find new procedures adopted by the Northvale Board of Directors for Dispute Resolution and Architectural Alterations....."



It announced new "Minimum landscaping requirements" which covers "All grounds visible to the public" and "Enclosed yards". It means now they will interfere the privacy of the backyards.



Of course, it came with intimidation: "Effective 60 days from the date of this letter (November 1, 2005), the Board of Directors will strictly enforce these guidelines. Owners found in violation will be subject to fines up to $50 per day until the Board of Directors is notified in writing that the violation has been corrected. In addition, the City of San Jose Code Enforcement Division may be notified in order to assist the Association in bringing a property into compliance."



The notice was from: Brad Fox, Association Manager

PML Management Corporation, 655 Mariners Island Blvd. #301, San Mateo, Ca. 94404



Three years ago, H.A. had played same trick on me. I had called that man Brad Fox several times and even wrote a certified letter to him, but never got a reply. (see "95. A notice for a meeting") Now when Feds exhausted everything, they create new procedure and requirement to persecute.



I view that PML Management Corporation as a support group work for the Feds.



What is their purpose this time? Here is another notice from City Council member Chuck Reed I received about same time. It was a free offer. "The City of San Jose is providing free Rubbish & Metal bins at each dump site for household use to dump things you would normally pay to take to the dump." The date: Saturday, September 24, 2005.(Rain or shine)



Why on 9/24? Because I don't dump the rubbish. I am afraid Feds will plant in garbage to frame a case. It used to be done by my wife.



But she will leave on 9/22 for a trip. (see "339. The September plot (9/2/05)")

A notice from H.A. forced a new requirement to clean the back yard before 11/1.

City offers a free dumping in time on 9/24.



I don't think it was a coincidence. Feds arranged me to do the dumping work on 9/24. I believe they plan a framed case on that day.





345. Hurricane, a tool to distract (9/27/05)



I allege the recent hurricanes were practice of climate war. It was part of framed case plotted by D.O.J..



1. Motive: As I have said, the September plot planned to kill two birds by one stone. Hurricanes were developed to help this purpose. (The main action was terror attack)



(1) To distract the peace movement, New Orleans was drowned by flood caused by Katrina on 8/29. The tragic scene thereafter occupied the whole page and screen of media for weeks which at same time drowned the news of Cindy Sheehan's anti war bus trip that started one day later.



The national emergency rescue was deliberately delayed. Military waited three days for orders. The slow re-action is not only incompetent but a crime when a city was drowned. But this was what inside group needed. The delay of rescue could create more stories of death, loot to draw public's attention. The media even activated an accusation war of who should be responsible for the slow action All these aimed at one purpose, to divert public's attention from peace movement.



Of course for the big demonstration of 9/24, Inside Group prepared a big hurricane. Media blew the trumpet to propaganda that Hurricane Rita was shaping up to be one of the strongest Storms ever to hit the USA, exceeding even Katrina. And the landing date of Rita was exactly the same day - 9/24.



As a project to distract, hurricane Katrina and Rita was a success. There is little report about anti-war gathering. They checked up the momentum of Peace movement at the loss of thousand lives and hundred billions worth of properties.



(2) To cover up the framed case, Katrina also played an important role. My case is a big one. Feds has accumulated large quantity of real estates property in the case. To keep the value of these properties, they abuse the power to keep the long term interest rate low. Feds creates a strange phenomenon: all other merchandise were in low price which include automobile, computer, food, clothes .... except the house. To maintain a booming real estate market, they almost make the long term interest rate equal to the short term one. But all these are artificial. Once I was eliminated and they released their properties, all the restriction on other merchandise will be released too. There will be a big inflation in US then. Long term interest rate will go sky rocket. For this economic crisis, Inside Group even prepared to squeeze more from American people. They passed a new bankruptcy law for those potential victims of the coming economic tsunami. And Feds also prepared a justification for that crisis. When despaired people get angry, government will attribute the failure to the hurricanes. It damaged oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico and caused high gas price. Everybody will believe so because they feel the bite when they pump the gas. The real cause of the crisis will be neglected. Hurricanes would be the excuse of an economy depression if the 9/24 frame case has been carried out.



Ophelia was another storm developed around 9/10 in East Coast. The newspaper said "It loitered in the Atlantic for days, and is trudging so slowly that it should spend two days on North Carolina.", "It's been very difficult to get a feeling of what Ophelia is going to do." The strange thing is here. For Rita and Katrina, the media seemed knew what they were going to do and even draw a timing route for their future movement. Why they couldn't tell Ophelia's?



I know why. Ophelia was a work of operation team of climate war. The team worked it out after they finished Katrina and then after Ophelia, they went for Rita. The task for Ophelia was to distract, (or even play a role) in a trip accident. My relatives were then in a trip in East Coast and Canada.(From 9/10 to 9/17). On 9/2 and 9/7, I continued to warn that Feds would create a travel accident to eliminate my family members. (#339, #340). To justify it, they even produced several air crash within a month. Ophelia wandered along East Coast, it was waiting for the decision of Feds. Its movement puzzled FEMA team.



On 9/15, news said Ophelia left East Coast for ocean. I knew Feds had postponed the plan of travel accident



Feds had planned the Rita even stronger than Katrina. They even put the landing date on 9/24 the action date. But it was too evident a plot after my revelation. When in final days, news changed the tones said that Rita wouldn't develop to category 5, I knew the 9/24 frame case and bombing plot went sour.



But the persecution won't stop. It goes on. (to be continued)
In this story, the CEO of Pepsi is against the North Carolina law that requires people to use the bathroom according to their birth gender. Why is this thing is totally beyond me of all things of all problems on Earth and all these people are focused on dudes wearing dresses and lipstick using the ladies room!Why does the CEO of Pepsi give a damn about this? Why would they care? Why does a company need to make a stand on anything? Their focus should be selling me poisonous sweet soda. It seems by taking a stand, they alienate people where they do not need too. What is the point here?I'm sorry, but I am so SICK of tranny stories! I never knew there were so many trannies until about five years ago, except for San Francisco and Thailand.
Twisted Sister said: There is no life after death, we are born from ashes and ashes is where we go after death. Thus, I say carpe diem meaning in ancient Latin take the day or win the day for tomorrow may never come. Live life to the fullest while you can breathe the fresh sweet air, etc.



edit: you can rage at the darkness or accept it Click to expand...

i disagree about the life after death part. i've been in the room at the moment of death with many many patients and i've seen some mighty strange things. i've also talked to many patients who were clinically dead for several minutes and the stories they tell are amazing. they could tell us who was in the room, who said and did what etc., all while they had no pulse or respirations. they all speak of watching it from above, seeing their body being worked on etc., all very similar stories. a few people didn't see the bright light and what you might call heaven. what they saw scared them so bad they drastically changed their lives after they recovered, one i knew even became a minister.
A mega-hit Korean army drama craze has sparked an online controversy on Vietnamese coming to terms with tragedies of war.

South Korean entertainment has won the hearts of Asian audience and Vietnam is no exception. Their celebrities have a huge fanbase in Vietnam. In the last few weeks, the Korean drama "Descendants of the Sun" swept through Vietnam like a storm.

Set during a modern day peacekeeping operation in the fictional country of Urk, "Descendants of the Sun" tells a love story between South Korean special forces captain, Yoo Si Jin, played by Song Joong Ki, and an army surgeon, Kang Mo Yeon, played by Song Hye Kyo.

Thailand's Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha - an army general who took power in a military coup - is a fan of Descendants of the Sun, urging his countrymen last week to watch it as it promotes "patriotism, sacrifice, obeying orders and being a dutiful citizen". Chinese authorities have warned of the dangers of watching Korean dramas, which it said could lead to marital trouble and criminal behaviour, the BBC reports.

However, some Vietnamese refuse to watch movie star Song Joong Ki in the Korean army uniform out of their painful memories of Korean troops in Vietnam war. Others don't want a boycott of South Korean dramas but sensitivity and respect for the Vietnam war victims' suffering.

Bao Anh, Vietnamese famous singer, poses as Korean special force Captain Yoo Si Jin, played by Song Joong Ki

The debate on how to coming to terms with war tragedies is heated online as Vietnamese Facebook fanpages of "Descendants of the Sun" have attracted around a million of users. Many Vietnamese youth are presently pasting their faces over an image of Captain Yoo Si Jin's army uniform using a popular new app. Vietnamese celebrities like Tran Thanh, Bao Anh and Dong Nhi have posted photos of themselves in Korean army uniform on social media.

The trend sparked some bitter recalls of South Korean troops' presence in Vietnam in the 60s.

"During the Vietnam War, Korean troops spread terror in Phu Yen, Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, not among the army, but among innocent civilians. All it took was one dead Korean soldier for the Korean troops to massacre an entire suspected village. [...] Some villages were completely wiped out by Korean troops. [...] I believe that if the victims' souls are still around and haven't been reincarnated, they'd watch South Korean shows. But if they spot a South Korean soldier on TV, that would no doubt break their hearts." - Tran Quang Thi (Facebook user)

The above Facebook post has been shared over 87,000 times.

From 1964 to 1973, 300 thousand Korean troops served as U.S. mercenaries and killed thousands of unarmed civilians, according to a paper by Hyun Sook Lee Kim.

Massacre memorials scattered throughout Central Vietnam serve as the few historical records that remain. One such memorial in Dien An commune, Quang Nam province, reads: 74 civilians were massacred by South Korean troops [] on February 12 1968.

"Martyr journalist Duong Thi Xuan Quy  my husbands aunt - was also killed by South Korean troops. I remember that clearly and will not watch Descendants of the Sun. I dont mean to spread hatred towards South Koreans but I also cannot uphold anything that praises and applauds our old enemy." - Nguyen Anh Dang (Facebook user)

"I have personally witnessed the tears and heard the painful stories of the people of Quang Nam province. I once consoled an old lady who had begun shivering at the mere sight of a group of South Korean tourists. Some tried to rush them away, even though these tourists had no idea what was going on. I still watch South Korean dramas and their cool shows. However, people shouldnt create a politically related craze out of them. There are still many people out there who suffer and are afraid." - Nguyen Ngoc An (Facebook user)

Defenders of the Song Joong Ki craze argued that the drama represented a personal choice that's no more politically fraught than watching any foreign film.

"Don't people still watch American and French movies?" - Chi Nguyen T (Facebook user)

Others, stressed the need to move on without forgetting the past.

"We can't re-live the atrocities committed by Korean troops every time we sit down to eat a bibimbap. [...] Patriotism and knowledge of history do not require one to live in hatred and teach that hatred to the next generation; or that we need to be compensated for our loss. We don't need an apology from the other side of the battlefield to begin seeking reconciliation or peace of mind. Nearly every country bears scars of war and those scars must not be forgotten. But they should serve as a reminder to live with civility and compassion." - Thuan Vu (VTC)

Last month, in the 50th commemoration of Go Dai massacre, where 380 civilians were killed by Korean troops in 1966, chairman of Korea-Vietnam Peace Fund Roh Hwa Wook said: I am sorry, I am really sorry. This happened such a long time ago and only today I came here with flowers to apologize. Nguyen Tan Lan, a Vietnamese massacre survivor, replied: "I recall the old memories not to call for hatred. Recalling the past is a way to learn how to live with forgiveness. Because forgiveness is not about forgetting it all."

After pirated online versions of "Descendants of the Sun" received massive views, state-owned television channel HTV2 purchased the copyright and will air the drama at the beginning of April. The channel announced its plan to have Song Joong Ki and Song Hye-kyo speak Vietnamese in their introduction clip.

South Korea has a strong relationship with Vietnam. It is the number one foreign direct investor with over $40 billion committed so far.
Fresh water released from reservoirs in China and Laos has reached the Mekong Delta bringing much-needed relief to local provinces that are combating severe drought and saline intrusion.

A number of western provinces in the South have started to enjoy the benefits of the water discharged from China and Laos, enabling local farmers to start the cropping for new rice season.

Water levels in Dong Thap and An Giang have risen and farmers have started sowing the summer-autumn rice crop.

My 15 hectares of rice is two weeks old, I was worried because there was not much water in the canal. But in the last three days, the water had risen to more than 30cm. Farmers are very happy here. If the water level remains like this for more than a month, once the rains come, we wont have to worry about water shortages anymore, farmer Le Van Lam from Dong Thap said.

Since March 27, water inflow in Hau river has started to increase. Photo: A.X

In An Giang, people are preparing to sow 18,000 hectares of summer-autumn rice. Local authorities have instructed people to dredge their irrigation channels and save fresh water for daily life and production.

According to Luu Van Ninh, director of Radio Hydrometeorology in An Giang, the flow of water from upstream at present will satisfy the irrigation needs of the Long Xuyen quadrangle in the Mekong Delta. Salinity in An Giang and the surrounding areas of Kien Giang province has been pushed back, Ninh added.

"With the incoming flood tide and Chinas stable discharge of water from its dams, the current water flow will increase until the end of April 6, Ninh forecast.

The water levels in the rivers in Can Tho province have increased in the past few days. Salinity has fallen sharply, ranging between 0.09 to 0.19 percent (compared to 1.5-2.5 percent in March).

In Soc Trang, the salinity level measured from the Hau River, the major river flowing through the province, has falled to 0.6 percent in comparison to 8.5 to 24.5 percent in March, according to Huynh Ngoc Van, deputy director of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Ha Tan Viet, head of the Department of Soc Trang Irrigation, said authorities have ordered all irrigation systems to open in anticipation of the fresh water from China, and informed locals of the situation.

"The fresh water has prevented stemmed the damaged area to less than 30 percent in some wards, saving about 2,000 hectares of rice that are in the flowering stage," Viet said.

In Ben Tre province at the end of the river, where drought and salinity has hit hardest, people are still waiting for fresh water to arrive. Nguyen Thanh Liem , head of the Agriculture Department in Ben Tre, said they expect the water to reach the province in the next 2 days.

The Southern Institute of Water Resources Research has announced an emergency status on saline intrusion and its intake on water in the Mekong Delta. According to the institute, coastal provinces, located within 25-40 km from the sea will receive fresh water in April.

The institute said locals should focus on storing fresh water by opening culverts to make it easier for the water to flow in.

Nine of the 12 western provinces have announced a disaster situation, and hundreds of thousands of hectares of rice, sugarcane, fruit, vegetables and aquatic farming areas have been affected. More than a million people are suffering from freshwater shortages, and in many places, people are having to buy river water and well water at unreasonably high prices.

China said it will release water from its reservoir in Yunnan province from mid-March until April 10 to save Southeast Asian countries from prolonged drought. Laos had also decided to drain a reservoir by the end of May in order to increase the flow of water in the Mekong River, helping Vietnam to solve the severe drought and saline intrusion in the Mekong Delta.
Rain stones up to 4  8 cm in diameter may cause serious damage. Photo: Tuyen Quang Radio and TV.

The northwestern province of Tuyen Quang, Vietnam, has recorded its biggest hailstone in 30 years that lasted for near 10 minutes on April 3, causing property damages and panics among the locals.

The hail was reported to occur in several communes, with some stones have diameter of 4 to 8 centimeters, which punctured through the rooftops and broke vehicles mirrors. Many people were panicked and had to quickly rush to find shelter.

Tran Quoc Hiep , head of Chiem Hoa hydrological stations in Tuyen Quang Province, said that the hailstorm unexpectedly fell in the area from 6:45 to 6:55am in the Sunday morning.

The sky suddenly turned dark. There were strong winds accompanied by big hisses, then all of a sudden the roaring hail fell down, Hiep said.

He said that the weather seems normal before the hail and no special warning had been issued for this area. Hiep claimed that this is the first time he witnessed such huge hailstorm over more than 30 years of work.

Hailstone punctured rooftops in Tuyen Quang Province, Vietnam. Photo: Hoai An

On the hails cause, Meteorological stations in Tuyen Quang said that the influence of weakened high pressure in combination with elevated tropical wind has caused rainfalls over the whole province, with showers, strong thunderstorms and winds in some places.

The authority is determining the damages and losses from the hailstone.
Chinese vessel no.13056 was towed to Hai Phong city for further investigation. Photo: Vietnam Border Defense

A Chinese oil tanker carrying more than 100,000 liters of smuggled fuel to resupply vessels fishing illegally in Vietnams waters has been pursued and seized by Vietnamese border guard near the Tonkin Gulf on Thursday.

The Border Defense Force of Hai Phong City announced that they have arrested a Chinese vessel carrying 100,000 liters of oil with three people onboard for trespassing on Vietnams territorial waters.

The Chinese oil tanker, numbered 13056, was discovered near Bach Long Vi Island in the Tonkin Gulf by a Vietnamese marine surveillance squad, which quickly pursuit and seized the ship as it was considered trespassing into Vietnams territory.

After seizing the oil tanker, the force towed it to the city.

Captain Dam Thuy Duong of Chinese vessel No. 13056 told Vietnamese authorities the vessel was carrying 100,000 liters of fuel from Hainan island, China to Chinese ships fishing illegally in Hai Phong sea.

Through inspection, Vietnamese authorities discovered the oil tanker were carrying unregistered 100,000 liters of fuel and two crew members do not have job certificate.

The captain of the Chinese ship has admitted to the infringement of the sovereignty and the territorial waters of Vietnam, telling Vietnamese officials the ship was carrying fuel for Chinese fishing boats operating in Vietnamese waters.

On April 1, the vessel and its three Chinese crew members have been brought to stay in Bach Dang estuary while the Border Guard Force of Hai Phong City continues to investigate the incident.
In March, U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, accompanied by senior officials from the Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration, (known as the NNSA), the Department of Defense, and a host of international VIPs, participated with the China Atomic Energy Authority, the CAEA, to commission Chinas new nuclear security Center of Excellence, the COE. The commissioning was held in Beijing, China on March 18th.

The COE will address Chinas domestic nuclear security training requirements, provide a forum for bilateral and regional best practices exchanges, and serve as a venue for demonstrating advanced technologies related to nuclear security. The COE opening is a major achievement for both countries, occurring as it did in advance of the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit.

This Center of Excellence is a world-class facility for Chinese, regional, and international nuclear security training and technical exchanges. The Department of Energy partnership with China on this effort has been exemplary, and we look forward to continued engagement on nuclear security best practices, said Secretary Moniz.

The United States works bilaterally with partner countries and international organizations to enhance the security of nuclear materials worldwide. Protection of nuclear materials is a key pillar of President Obamas nuclear security agenda.

The NNSA Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, or DNN, supports this strategy by working with international partners to improve their capacity to secure nuclear material. This is achieved through support for: regulations and oversight; enhanced nuclear security culture; best practices training, training centers and technical exchanges; and select upgrades to facility security and accounting systems.

The two countries nuclear security agencies have a long-term collaboration that has supported more than 50 training and technical exchanges on nuclear security best practices. These trainings form the basis for continued collaboration on developing indigenous Chinese curriculum for the COE. Beyond China, DNN is actively engaged with current and planned COEs in Japan, Republic of Korea, and Kazakhstan. DNN works closely with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as bilaterally with over 21 partner countries across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

The United States is proud to work with China and other nations to ensure that commercial nuclear power and radiation sources are safe and secure.
There are tremendous opportunities for the United States and Argentina to work together on a range of issues, including climate change, renewable energy, nuclear nonproliferation, counterterrorism, peacekeeping, and, of course, strengthening the economy in both countries, said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.

Speaking at the signing, on March 28th, of a new Memorandum of Intent, or MOI, between the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Argentine Ministry of Production as part of President Obamas trip to Argentina, Secretary Pritzker noted our presence here this week is a testament to the potential we see for a stronger U.S.-Argentine commercial relationship.

Signed by Secretary Pritzker and Argentine Minister of Economic Development Francisco Cabrera, this MOI establishes the U.S.-Argentina Commercial Dialogue. The Dialogue aims to strengthen the economic and commercial ties between the two countries by fostering communication across our respective public and private sectors.

In less than 100 days, President Macri has demonstrated a remarkable and courageous commitment to policies that will strengthen Argentinas investment climate and take full advantage of the countrys tremendous human and natural resources, said Secretary Pritzker.

Reigniting Argentinas economy will be a challenging and lengthy process, she said, but President Macri and his team are off to an impressive start. Given time, this difficult path will yield investments  both foreign and domestic  which means new jobs and opportunity for the people of Argentina.

The U.S.-Argentina Commercial Dialogue, announced by Minister Cabrera and Secretary Pritzker will focus on removing barriers to trade and identifying new commercial opportunities. It will help the U.S. deepen our understanding of Argentinas priorities and focus on identifying pragmatic steps the two governments can take to promote economic prosperity and build brighter futures for our peoples.

Our goals are to support President Macris efforts to open up Argentinas economy, strengthen the commercial ties between our two countries, and create opportunity for both our peoples, said Secretary Pritzker. I feel confident saying that the burgeoning relationship between President Macri and President Obama is setting us on a path of cooperation and prosperity.